Tournament: Many | Round: 1 | Opponent: Many | Judge: Many
The affirmative is only interested in the technical artificiality that the images of
catastrophe and suffering provide them in the 1ac – this destroys the distance and
ambiguity necessary for reflection and understanding of catastrophe – this mentality
extends itself from this debate round and into everyday life where we then become
complicit to suffering we see everyday  
Taylor  06
 Jean Baudrillard has compared the West’s relationship to images in terms of obscenity. In the light of events in Iraq, frequent accusations that his work is willfully abstruse should be reconsidered. Baudrillard takes the notion of the obscene literally. An etymological analysis of the word gives us “ob” – a prefix meaning hindering – and “scene” – from the Latin and Greek words for “stage”. Ignoring its conventional connotation of depravity, his re-reading of the term obscene gives us the notion that Western media-dominated society is ob-scene because its proliferation of images has imploded the traditional, symbolically coded distance between the image and viewer that is implied with a stage. Baudrillard’s writing contains the repeated theme that in the West we suffer from a virus-like proliferation of immediate images that replace the distance needed for either considered reflection or a developed sensitivity to the ambiguities of cultural meanings. Baudrillard’s analysis illuminates the present mediascape. For example, he argues: “… we shouldn’t underestimate the power of the obscene, its power to exterminate all ambiguity and all seduction and deliver to us the definitive fascination of bodies without faces, faces without eyes, and eyes that don’t look”. This has chilling pertinence to the dehumanized images of Iraqi prisoners in which their faces are hooded, deliberately pixilated, or only appear as minor details within a broader tableau (e.g., the naked man cowering in front of snarling guard dogs). Originally used in a different context, Baudrillard also provides an unwittingly prescient description of the furor over the Daily Mirror pictures’ authenticity:…we don’t look for definition or richness of imagination in these images; we look for the giddiness of their superficiality, for the artifice of detail, the intimacy of their technique. What we truly desire is their technical artificiality, and nothing more. Beyond the manifest obscenity of the Pornography of the Abu Ghraib photographs, Baudrillard’s broader theoretical point relates to how their staging paradoxically relies upon the actual absence of a stage. A surfeit of images is presented to us so that: ”Obscenity takes on all the semblances of modernity. We are used to seeing it, first of all, in the perpetration of sex, but it extends to everything that can be perpetrated in the visible – it becomes the perpetration of the visible itself”. In a form of semiotic potlatch, images become their own justification for the decontextualized consumption for its own sake of such formats as MTV Cribs and Bumfights. Everything becomes a potential image for the voyeuristic gaze and less and less is ruled out on grounds of taste or any other consideration. The pornography of the image lies here in its explicitness. Nothing is left to the imagination and all is revealed to the passive viewer. An apparently overwhelming sexual will-to-reveal that Welsh identified in the rise of gonzo porn may at least partially explain the sexual aspect of the Abu Ghraib pictures. As Sontag recently argued, we live in a world where, increasingly:  An erotic life is for more and more people what can be captured on video. To live is to be photographed, to have a record of one’s life, oblivious or claiming to be oblivious to the camera’s non-stop attentions ...Ours is a society in which secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamour to get on a television show to reveal.  
Scholars Lab Disaster Porn
Additionally- The “efforts to alleviate” catastrophe posed by the aff is entrenched in a self-serving mentality- they will inevitably result in perpetuation and recreation of the harms they try to solve Baudrillard  94
We have long denounced the capitalistic, economic exploitation of the poverty of the 'other half of the
world' 'autre monde. We must today denounce the moral and sentimental exploitation of that poverty
- charity cannibalism being worse than oppressive violence. The extraction and humanitarian reprocessing of a destitution which has become the equivalent of oil deposits and gold mines. The extortion of the spectacle of poverty and, at the same time, of our charitable condescension: a worldwide appreciated surplus of fine sentiments and bad conscience. We should, in fact, see this not as the extraction of raw materials, but as a waste-reprocessing enterprise. Their destitution and our bad conscience are, in effect, all part of the waste-products of history- the main thing is to recycle them to produce a new energy source. We have here an escalation in the psychological balance of terror. World capitalist oppression is now merely the vehicle and alibi for this other, much more ferocious, form of moral predation. One might almost say, contrary to the Marxist analysis, that material exploitation is only there to extract that spiritual raw material that is the misery of peoples, which serves as psychological nourishment for the rich countries and media nourishment for our daily lives. The 'Fourth World' (we are no longer dealing with a 'developing' Third World) is once again beleaguered, this time as a catastrophe-bearing stratum. The West is whitewashed in the reprocessing of the rest of the world as waste and residue. And the white world repents and seeks absolution - it, too, the waste-product of its own history. The South is a natural producer of raw materials, the latest of which is catastrophe. The North, for its part, specializes in the reprocessing of raw materials and hence also in the reprocessing of catastrophe. Bloodsucking protection, humanitarian interference, Medecins sans frontieres, international solidarity, etc. The last phase of colonialism: the New Sentimental Order is merely the latest form of the New World Order. Other people's destitution becomes our adventure playground. Thus, the humanitarian offensive aimed at the Kurds - a show of repentance on the part of the Western powers after allowing Saddam Hussein to crush them - is in reality merely the second phase of the war, a phase in which charitable intervention finishes off the work of extermination. We are the consumers of the ever delightful spectacle of poverty and catastrophe, and of the moving spectacle of our own efforts to alleviate it (which, in fact, merely function to secure the conditions of reproduction of the catastrophe market); there, at least, in the order of moral profits, the Marxist analysis is wholly applicable: we see to it that extreme poverty is reproduced as a symbolic deposit, as a fuel essential to the moral and sentimental equilibrium of the West. In our defence, it might be said that this extreme poverty was largely of our own making and it is therefore normal that we should profit by it. 

Scholars Lab Disaster Porn
We need to critically examine the justifications for policies or we risk reproducing the very
harms that well-meaning political decisions are meant to alleviate. Reject the aff’s
discursive constructions
Doty  96
North-South relations have been constituted as a structure of deferral. The center of the structure (alternatively white man, modern man, the United States, the West, real states) has never been absolutely present outside a system of differences. It has itself been constituted as trace—the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates itself, displaces itself, refers itself (ibid.). Because the center is not a fixed locus but a function in which an infinite number of sign substitutions come into play the domain and play of signification is extended indefinitely (Derrida 1978: 280). This both opens up and limits possibilities, generates alternative sites of meanings and political resistances that give rise to practices of reinscription that seek to reaffirm identities and relationships. The inherently incomplete and open nature of discourse makes this reaffirmation an ongoing and never finally completed project. In this study I have sought, through an engagement with various discourses in which claims to truth have been staked, to challenge the validity of the structures of meaning and to make visible their complicity with practices of power and domination. By examining the ways in which structures of meaning have been associated with imperial practices, I have suggested that the construction of meaning and the construction of social, political, and economic power are inextricably linked. This suggests an ethical dimension to making meaning and an ethical imperative that is incumbent upon those who toil in the construction of structures of meaning. This is especially urgent in North-South relations today: one does not have to search very far to find a continuing complicity with colonial representations that ranges from a politics of silence and neglect to constructions of terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism, and international drug trafficking, and Southern immigration to the North as new threats to global stability and peace. The political stakes raised by this analysis revolve around the question of being able to "get beyond" the representations or speak outside of the discourses that historically have constructed the North and the South.
Scholars Lab Disaster Porn
Finally- Rhetorical analysis is a necessary precursor to policy making- representations always come first Dauber  01
The impact the Mogadishu images have had on American foreign policy is clear. But their impact is not inescapable or inevitable. It is based on the incorrect assumption that people can only read images unidirectionally. No matter how similar, no matter how powerfully one text evokes another, every image is unique. Each comes from a different historical situation, is placed within a different story, and offers an ambiguous text that can be exploited by astute commentators. Images matter profoundly, but so do their contexts and the words that accompany them. The implications of this shift in interpretation are potentially profound. Mogadishu, or the mention of a potential parallel with Mogadishu, need not be a straightjacket or a deterrent to the use of American power. Rhetoric, whether discursive or visual, has real power in the way events play out. What this article makes clear is that rhetoric (and therefore rhetorical analysis) also has power in the way policy is shaped and defined. In a recent book on the conflict in Kosovo, the authors note that when the president spoke to the nation on the night the air war began, he immediately ruled out the use of ground forces. This was done, they argue, due to fears that leaving open the possibility of ground force participation would sacrifice domestic public and congressional (and allied) support for the air war. But "publicly ruling out their use only helped to reduce Milosevic's uncertainty regarding the likely scope of NATO's military actions," 109 and possibly to lengthen the air war as a result. Yet, they report, National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, "who authored the critical passage in the president's speech, maintains that 'we would not have won the war without this sentence.'" 110 It would be difficult to find more direct evidence for the profound impact and influence public rhetoric and debate have--and are understood to have--on policy, policymaking, and policymakers at the highest level. That means that rhetorical analysis can have a role to play and a voice at the table before policies are determined. Academic rhetoricians, through their choice of projects and the formats in which they publish, can stake a claim to having an important voice at the table--and they should do so. 

  Paul, Professor of Communication Studies, “The Pornographic barbarism of the Self-reflecting sign”,
IJBS, Volume 4 Number 1, published 2006
  (Jean, Professor of Media;“The Illusion of the End” p. 66-71)
  Assistant Professor Of Political Science at ASU, 1996 Roxanne Lynn, Imperial Encounters: The Politics
of Representation in North-South Relations, p. 170-171
  North Caroline Chapel Hill, “the shot seen round the world: the impact of the images of Mogadishu on american military operations”;
http://muse.uq.edu.au.ts.isil.westga.edu/journals/rhetoric_and_public_affairs/v004/4.4dauber.html)  Cori Elizabeth, Associate professor of communications at the university of

Tournament: Berkeley | Round: 2 | Opponent: idk | Judge: idk
A is the links - Accidents are the inevitable and usually unexpected result of the call for progress or change. Virilio 07
Faced with this state of affairs in an accelerated temporality that affects customs and moral standards and art every bit as much as the politics of nations, one thing stands out as being of the utmost urgency: to expose the accident in Time. Turning on its head the threat of the unexpected, the surprise, becomes a subject for a thesis and the natural disaster, the subject of an exhibition within the framework of instantaneous telecommunications. As Paul Valery explained in 1935: 'In the past, when it came to novelty, we had hardly ever seen anything but solutions to problems or answers to questions that were very old, if not age-old ... But novelty for us now consists in the unprecedented nature of the questions themselves, and not the solutions, in the way these questions are asked, and not the answers.  Whence the general impression of powerlessness and incoherence that rules our minds.   This admission of powerlessness in the face of the surging up of unexpected and catastrophic events forces us to try to reverse the usual trend that exposes us to the accident in order to establish a new kind of museology or museography: one that would now entail exposing the accident, all accidents from the most banal to the most tragic, from natural catastrophes to industrial and scientific disasters, without avoiding the too often neglected category of the happy accident, the stroke of luck, the coup of foudre or even the goup de grace! Apart from the historic terrorist attack of 11 September 2001 and its broadcasting on a continuous loop on the television screens of the entire world, two recent events deserve to come in for some harsh analysis on this score.  On the one hand, we have the revelation, sixteen years too late, of the damage done to eastern France through contamination from Chernobyl, about which those running the services tasked with sounding the alert in France through contamination from Chernobyl declared in April, 1986: ‘If we do detect anything, it will just be a purely scientific problem.’  On the other hand, we have the very recent decision of the Caen Memorial Peace Museum to import from the United States, as a symbolic object, an atomic bomb – an H-bomb – emblematic of the balance of terror during the Cold War between the East and West. Apropos, and reworking the dismissive remart of the French experts who covered up the damage done by the Chernobyl accident, we might say: ‘If we exhibit an atom bomb it will just be a purely cultural problem,’ and on that note, throwing open the doors of the first Museum of Accidents. They say invention is merely a way of seeing, of reading accidents as signs and as opportunities. If so, then it is merely high time we opened the museum to what crops up impromptu, to that 'indirect production' of science and the technosciences constituted by disasters, by industrial or other catastrophes. According to Aristotle, 'the accident reveals the substance.' If so, then invention of the 'substance' is equally invention of the 'accident'. The shipwreck is consequently the 'futurist' invention of the ship, and the air crash the invention of the supersonic airliner, just as the Chernobyl meltdown is the invention of the nuclear power station. Let's take a look now at recent history. While the twentieth century was the century of great exploits- such as the moon landing- and great discoveries in physics and chemistry, to say nothing of computer science and genetics, it would seem, alas, only logical that the twenty-first century, in turn, reap the harvest of this hidden production constituted by the most diverse disasters, to the very extent that their repetition has become a clearly recognizable historical phenomenon. On this score, let's hear it again from Paul Valery: 'The tool is tending to vanish frorn consciousness. We commonly say that its function has become automatic. What we should make of this is the new equation: consciousness only survives now as awareness of accidents.' 3 This admission of failure then leads to a clear and defmitive conclusion: 'All that is capable of being resumed and repeated is fading away, falls silent. Function only exists outside consciousness. Given that the declared objective of the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century was precisely the repetition of standardized objects (machines, tools, vehicles, etc.), in other words, famously incriminated substances, it is only logical today to note that the tw·entieth century did in fact swamp us with rnass-produced accidents one after the other, from the sinking of the Titauic in 1912 up to the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986 to say nothing of the Seveso chemical plant disaster of 1976 or of the Toulouse fertilizer factory disaster of 2001.  And so serial reproduction of the most diverse catastrophes has have dogged the great discoveries and the great technical inventions like a shadow, and, unless we accept the unacceptable meaning or allow the accident in turn to become automatic, the urgent need for an ‘intelligence of the crisis in intelligence’ is making itself felt, at the very beginning of the twenty-first centry – an intelligence which ecology is the clincal symptom of, anticipating the imminent emergence of a philosophy of post-industrial eschatology.

Progress is always symmetrical. For every development there is one accident and for every person saved, someone dies. Virilio 5
LD: You keep saying that the greater the speed, the greater the effect of the accident. Do you mean that the more phenomena the more catastrophes? PV: What is new is the serial type of the catastrophe. In the past, there were two types of accidents: the natural cataclysm and the artificial accidents, like a fatal fall from a horse. However, in the last century, this became continual. On top of the natural and artificial accidents, including the worst like Chernobyl, Minamata or Seveso, we have the voluntary accident like the massive attack of the World Trade Center. We bypass the big battle of the past for big attacks that cause more harm than an entire battalion does. Pearl Harbor killed 2500 soldiers but 3000 died in the Twin Towers, because of twenty suicidal men. LD: Do we have to fight more against fear? PV: We have to fight more and more against panic. The Cold War period, which was the equilibrium of terror, gave way to the Cold Panic period, which is the disequilibria of terror happening from natural accident or one inflicted by humans. Panic is the big question of the politic of tomorrow. Every body knows that fear is a poor adviser. We could pass from a substantial politic based on a common interest to an accidental politic based on emotional community. In this regard, the 21st century and the recent tsunami catastrophe have started a new public, globally synchronized and ephemeral emotion. We cannot trust it. Public and global emotion is already a form of tyranny. The manipulator, especially the political one, will not forget the tsunami effect neither will the terrorists forget about the Twin Towers effect. LD: What do you recommend? PV: Face it. In history, humans had to confront the hostility of the natural world, the great invasions, the tyrants and different type of terrors. Today, we have to face the terror of our own progress. The other day, I was very sorry to see the expressionist spectacle at the launch of the new Airbus A380. We celebrated that the airplane, a marvel as a cult object. However, nobody said that inventing an 800 seats airplane would create 800 dead, when it crashes. I will call upon a political intelligence about the end, a philosophy of the industrial eschatology. Eschatology is the science of the end, of the world end, which is actually not at all the end of the world. The problem is that nobody dare face that finitude. LD: How did you, as a specialist of human catastrophe, take the horrendous Asian tidal wave? PV: This tsunami will have the same importance to ecology than the WTC attacks had on the politic. Those two events frame, in my mind, the beginning of our 21st century: On one hand, the terrorist accident, on the other, the horrifying ecological drama. Each of them is in fact a revelation. We are passing from the revolution to the revelation era. The revolution era was of ideology. It lasted two or three centuries. However, it is over. We are entering now in the catastrophic revelation, which should encourage us to a better knowledge of accidents, natural or artificial. Without this effort, we will not understand the complexity of the accidental phenomena that are happening more and more under our eyes.

B is the impacts - The continual occurrence of accidents threatens extinction. Virilio 5
But, let's get back to this technoanalysis revelatory of 'substance’ – in other words, what lies beneath technicians' knowledge. Techniques are always streets ahead of the mentalities of competent personnel in the area of innovation, as the essayist, John Berger likes to claim, in any case (‘In every creation, whether it involves an original idea, a painting or a poem, error always sits alongside skill. Skill is never presented on its own; there is no skill, no creative talent, without error’). But this is because the accident is inseparable from the speed with which it unexpectedly surges up. And so this 'virtual speed' of the catastrophic surprise really should be studied instead of merely the 'actual speed' of objects and engines fresh off the drawing board. Just as we need to protect ourselves (at any cost) from excess in real speed by means of breaks and automated safety systems, we have to try and protect ourselves from excess in virtual speed, from what unexpectedly happens to 'substance', meamng to what lies bmeath the engineer's awareness as producer. This is the 'archaeotechnological' invention itself, the discovery evoked above. In his Physics, Aristotle remarks at the outset that it IS not Time as such that corrupts and destroys, but what crops up (accidens). So it is indeed the passage of Time, in other words the speed with which they crop up that achieves the sum of all things, every 'substance' being, in the end, a victim of the accident in the traffic circulation of time. That being the case, it's all too easy to imagine the havoc wreaked by the accident in Time, with the instantaneity of the ternporal compression of data in the course of globalization, and the unimaginable dangers of the synchronization of knowledge. And so, the 'imperative of responsibility' evoked by Hans Jonas really ought to be applied, in the first place, to the need for a new intelliuence or understanding of the production of accidents, this reckless industry that the ‘military-industrial complex’ refuses to think about, even though the 'military-industrial complex' bombarded us, throughout the entire past century, with the sudden militarization of the sciences, most notably, the fatal invention of weapons of mass destruction and a thermonuclear bomb capable of extinguishing all life on the planet. In fact, the visible speed of the substance – that of the means of transport, of computing, of information - is only ever the tip of the iceberg of the invisible speed of the accident. This holds true just as much for road traffic as for the trafhc of values. If you need convincing, all you have to do is look at the very latest stock exchange crashes, the successive burstings of the speculative bubbles of the single market in a financial system that is now interconnected or has gone on-line. Faced with this state of affairs, very largely catastrophic for the very future of humanity, we have no choice but to take stock of the urgent need for nuking perceptible, if not visible, the speed with which accidents surge up, plunging history into mourning. To do this, apart from searching in vain for some black box capable of revealing the parameters of the contemporary disaster, we have to try as fast as possible to define the flagrant nature of disasters peculiar to new technologies. And we have to do this using scientific expertise, of course, but also a philosophical and cultural approach that would wash its hands of the promotional expressionism of the promoters of materials, since, as Malraux said, 'culture is what made man sornething more than an accident in the Universe.' 

The cult of progress results in totalitarianism, precluding ethics by blurring the line between what is moral and immoral. Adams 03
As many have noted, Merleau-Ponty's recovery of the body can be characterized as a sort of 'phenomenological humanism' - a humanism that has little in common with the Renaissance, which is usually cited as its origin. One of the most incisive phenomenological humanists in this regard is found in the figure of Arendt, a thinker of Jewish extraction who was forced into exile during WWII. In her reflections on the origins of totalitarianism, Arendt concluded that is the uprooting and fragmentation of the political body was the primary factor that allowed it to occur, arguing that it would never have been possible had it not been for the or replacement of the conviviality of 'common sense' with the instrumental science of Darwin and the terrorist method of Hitler. Thus, it is of little surprise that in later work she referred to the launch of the first satellite into space was the contemporary manifestation of the Platonic escape of the soul from its bodily prison" except that in this case it was in reference to the body's escape from what had come to be seen as its terrestrial prison - an enduring tendency in Western civilization that resonates to a disturbing extent with the totalitarian strategy of alienating the animal, social and territorial bodies from their political ecology in order to control them directly. As she elaborates, this strategy "substitutes for the boundaries and channels of communication between individual men a band of iron which holds them so tightly together that it is as though their plurality had disappeared into One Man of gigantic dimension. To abolish the fences of laws between me - as tyranny does - means to take away man's liberties and destroy freedom as a living political reality".37But it does not stop there, for, as she points out, it also installs a motor into the ideology of natural or historical 'evolution' such that the acceleration of 'progress' becomes the essence of politics, and the iron band of terror, through disrupting the ecology in which bodies come to know themselves, prepares each body equally for the role of victims and executioners at one and the same time. As she explains, "the compulsion of total terror on one side, which, with its iron band, presses masses of isolated men together and supports them in a world which has become a wilderness for them, and the self-coercive force of logical deduction on the other, which prepares each individual in his lonely isolation against all others, correspond to each other and need each other in order to set the terror-ruled movement into motion and keep it moving''.38 Thus totalitarianism conquers by dividing and uniting at the same time, by reconstructing the disassembled political body as an 'organized loneliness' which, although it thrives on creating an individual experience as such, is not truly solitary in its effects, but paradoxically becomes a totality of all previously subjective bodies into a single totalitarian body, a 'shrunken head' suddenly miniaturized to a dimension at once more discernible and pliable from the perspective of power. Indeed, it is a similar 'shrinking down to size' of the plurality of cultures that has come as a result of the pollution of distances concomitant with the mass deployment of communications technologies39that Arendt cites as the basis for the American ascendancy to global hegemony, a transformation that makes the great plurality of the world manageable by a select few, in that every relationship between beings that had once formed the convivial basis for the political body has now been suddenly uprooted and liquidated, thus destroying destroys the capacity of individuals and groups to discern between the true and the false, the real and the virtually real, the just and the unjust.

C is - The alternative is to reject the negative’s discourse and critically analyze their politics. Critique itself is an effective alternative—since power can only operate through structures of knowledge, exposing the foundations of systems of control disrupts them Li 07 

Critique, writes Nikolas Rose, has the potential to can "reshape and expand the terms of political debate, enabling different questions to be asked, enlarging spaces of legitimate contestation, thus modifying the relations of the different participants to the truths in the name of which they govern or are governed."72 The critic I picture,' from Rose's account, is the academic whose primary medium for learning about and changing the world is text. In contrast, the critic conjured by Gramsci is an activist, interested both in studying and in helping to produce conjunctures at which social groups come to see themselves as collectivities, develop critical insight, and mobilize to confront their adversaries. There are also the "prickly subjects" I mentioned earlier—the targets of improvement schemes, who occupy an important place in my account.¶ A follower of Marx, Gramsci considered the fundamental groups driving social transformation to be classes differentiated by their access to the means of production. Yet he understood that the actual social groups engaged in situated struggles are far more diverse, reflections of their fragmentary experiences, attachments, and embedded cultural ideas. Thus for him, the question of how a collective, critical practice emerges could not be answered with reference to abstract concepts such as capital and labor. It had to be addressed concretely, taking into account the multiple positions that people occupy, and the diverse powers they encountern Building on Gramsci's worlc, Stuart Hall proposes an understanding of identity as the product of articulation. Rather than view identity as the fixed ground from which insights and actions follow, he argues that new interests, new positionings of self and others, and new meanings emerge contingently in the course of struggle. Thus a Gramscian approach yields an understanding of the practice of politics and the critical insights on which it depends as specific, situated, and embodied. An example may help to illustrate the kind of analysis this approach enables¶ In 2001, Freddy, a young man from Lake Lindu in Centra Sulawesi, recounted to me how he had "learned to practice politics" (belajar berpolitik). What this meant, for him, was learning to figure out for himself what was wrong and right in the world, and how to carry that assessment forward to bring about change. His epiphany occurred a few years earlier, when an NGO based in the provincial capital Palu began helping the people of his village organize to contest the construction of a hydroelectric dam that would flood their land and forcibly evict them. Home from Java, where he had worked and studied for some years, he was sent by the village Headman to observe the activities of this NGO, and report back on what kinds of trouble they were fomenting. So he started to attend their meetings, listening from the back, and came to the gradual realization that much of what they said about the importance of livelihoods, conservation, and the legitimacy of customary land rights made perfect sense. In contrast, the more he listened to officials promoting the dam as a step toward "development" in the province as well as a better future for the villagers, the less credible he found them.¶ The campaign against the dam occurred under the New Order regime, when individuals who had critical insights shared them frequently in the form of cynical jokes and asides but did not articulate them in public forums or engage in collective action. NGOS such as the ones assisting Freddy's village were threatened by the authorities and accused of being communist. But seeing the dedication of the NGO'S young staff, and absorbing some of their intellectual energy, he became convinced that learning to practice politics was a positive step. He described his feeling as one of awakening from a long and lazy sleep. He began to look with new eyes at the people around him in his village and in the State apparatus who were too afraid to engage in political debate. When I met him in zocii, after the fall of Suharto, he felt the possibilities for practicing politics had opened up, but people were slow to grasp them. They had to unlearn habits of quiescence cultivated through three decades of New Order doublethink and doubletalk and start to think of politics positively, as an entitlement.¶ Throughout the struggle for independence and especially in the period 1945 to 1965, until the army-led coup that ushered in the massacre of half a million people labeled communists, many Indonesians had been active in conducting politics and vigorous in debating the shape of the nation. There were mass mobilizations of workers, peasants, women, youth, regional, and religious communities, all engaged in struggles over the distribution of resources and the recognition of differences (cultural, historical, regional, religious) that supplied points of distinction and alliance. But Sukarno, the first president, retreated into the paternalism of "Guided Democracy," paving the way for his successor, Suharto, to declare politics an unhelpful distraction to the work of development. Politics became a dirty word. The goal of Suharto's regime was to secure a stable state of nonpolitics in which nothing "untoward" or "excessive" would happen—the condition of eerie stillness memorably described in John Pemberton's ethnography about Java.74¶ In the hostile conditions of the New Order, reclaiming politics and giving it a positive inflection was no mean feat. To understand how it was achieved by a young man in a highland village in Sulawesi, we must examine both the process through which his political positioning emerged and the particular shape it took. Together with his covillagers, Freddy came to see himself as a member of an indigenous group defending its territory against the state—an identity he did not carry with him when he left the village to pursue his studies years before. That identity emerged when a set of ideas to which he was exposed by the NGOS supporting his village helped him to make sense of his situation, locate allies and opponents, and organize.” Identities, as Stuart Hall argues, "are subject to the continuous 'play' of history, culture and power." They are "unstable points of identification or suture . . . Not an essence but a positioning."76¶ In this book, I explore the positionings that enable people to practice a critical politics. I also explore positionings formed through the will to improve: the position of trustee, and the position of deficient subject whose conduct is to be conducted. Gramsci did not examine the position of trustee, which stands in an awkward relation to that of the "organic intellectual" whose job is to help subalterns to understand their oppression and mobilize to challenge it. Yet the work of the intellectual and the trustee are not entirely distinct. As I will show, Indonesian activists engaged in a critical politics find numerous deficiencies in the population they aim to support. Their support becomes technical, a matter of instructing people in the proper practice of politics. They too are programmers. They share in the will to improve, and more specifically, the will to empower. Their vision of improvement involves people actively claiming the rights and taking on the duties of democratic citizenship.77¶ The value of a Gramscian approach, for my purposes, is the focus on how and why particular, situated subjects mobilize to contest their oppression. This was not a question elaborated by Foucault. Conversely, Foucault has the edge on explicit theorization of how power shapes the conditions in which lives are lived. Although Gramscians turn to the concept of hegemony for this purpose, Gramsci's formulations were notoriously enigmatic and fragmented. In her critical review of the use of Gramsci by anthropologists, Kate Crehan argues that the term hegemony for Gramsci "simply names the problem—that of how the power relations underpinning various forms of inequality are produced and reproduced."78 He used it not to describe a fixed condition, but rather as a way of talking about "how power is lived in particular times and places," always, he thought, an amalgam of coercion ¶ and consent.”¶ Foucault shared the concern to examine how power is lived but approached it differently. Gramsci understood consent to be linked to consciousness. Foucault understood subjects to be formed by practices of which they might be unaware, and to which their consent is neither given nor withheld. Further, Foucault highlighted the ways in which power enables as much as it constrains or coerces. It works through practices that are, for the most part, mundane and routine. Thus the binary that is compatible with a Gramscian analytic—people either consent to the exercise of power or they resist it—was not useful to Foucault.80 I do not find it necessary to choose between Gramsci and Foucault on this point. Some these practices render power visible; they trigger conscious reactions adequately described in terms such as resistance, accommodation, or consent. Other modes of power are more diffuse, as are peoples' responses to them. John Allen put this point eloquently when he observed that power "often makes its presence felt through a variety of modes playing across one another. The erosion of choice, the closure of possibilities, the manipulation of outcomes, the threat of force, the assent of authority or the inviting gestures of a seductive presence, and the combinations thereof."81¶ Powers that are multiple cannot be totalizing and seamless. For me this is a crucial observation. "The multiplicity of ¶ power, the many ways that practices position people, the various modes "playing across one another" produces gaps and contradictions. Subjects formed in these matrices—subjects like Freddy—encounter inconsistencies that provide grist for critical insights. Further, powers once experienced as diffuse, or indeed not experienced as powers at all, can become the subject of a critical consciousness. Indeed, exposing how power works, unsettling truths so that they could be scrutinized and contested was as central to the political agenda of Foucault as it was for Gramsci.82 Foucault did not elaborate on how such insights might become collective, although the connection is easily made. To the extent that practices of government form groups rather than isolated individuals, thus critical insight is potentially shared. One of the inadvertent effects of programs of improvement—the dam at Lake Lindu, for example—is to produce social groups capable of identifying common interests and mobilizing to change their situation.83 Such collectivities have their own internal class, ethnic, and gender fractures. Their encounter with attempts to improve them forms the basis of their political ideas and actions. Scholars working in a Foucauldian mode have often observed the "strategic reversibility" of power relations, as diagnoses of deficiencies imposed from above become "repossessed" as demands from below, backed by a sense of entitlement.84 Bringing insights from Foucault and Gramsci together enables me to extend this observation, and to put the point more starkly: improvement programs may inadvertently stimulate a political challenge The way they do this, moreover, is situated and contingent Floods and diseases, topography, the variable fertility of the soil, prices on world markets, the location of a road—any of these may stimulate critical analysis by tincturing expert schemes and exposing their flaws.
D is the role of the ballot - Voting affirmation is an affirmation of freedom—You should use your ballot as a signal of individual revolt, not for abstract collective decisionmaking. This form of freedom is a priori and is neccesary to create widespread resistance to domination Prozorov 07
Moreover, it is precisely the divorce of freedom from the discourse of the perfect order that renders freedom a political concept par excellence. Our focus on political freedom in this book is the very opposite of a reduction of freedom to the circumscribed domain of politics, be it defined in terms of the state, community, ideology or institutions. On the contrary, what renders freedom political is its a priori antagonistic nature with regard to every positive form of order. Never content with its confinement to the private realm, freedom always engages with order in its totality, transcending its internal demarcation of the public and the private. If we approach 'the political' as a name for the problem of constitution of order in the absence of first principles (i.e. as a constitutive act of power that has no ground beyond itself), then freedom serves as a counterpart, or in Derridean terms, a supplement of the political, insofar as it consists in the de constructive engagement with order that disrupts the hold of its foundational principles on the lives of the subjects governed by it. Moreover, as we shall discuss in detail in Part 2, such practices of freedom are intricately linked to the elementary act of the foundation of order, being nothing more than a subversive repetition, by individuals captured within a political order, of the sovereign act of the foundation of the latter. In terms of this parallel, political freedom refers to the problem of the constitution of the subject in the absence of any first principles that would govern this constitution. Simply put, political freedom consists in the confrontation with any circumscribed domain of politics in the name for the potentialities of existence that are curtailed by it. By the same token, we might speak of artistic freedom in terms of confrontation with the regime of 'what counts for art' or of sexual freedom as confronting the existing conventions regulating sexual behaviour. In this sense, when divorced from the normative question of the perfect order, freedom becomes political by contesting whatever counts for politics in any given situation. It would thus be entirely wrong to suggest that freedom is anti-political- on the contrary, what practices of freedom do is liberate the political from its confinement within sedimented and stratified forms of order that are in a strict sense made possible by a fundamental depoliticisation (see Ranciere 2001; Prozorov 2005). ¶ If freedom is political in this sense, then it must logically precede any positive order of politics, which invites the question of its ontological status in relation to this positivity. This book will deal with this question extensively in an attempt to elaborate a Foucauldian ontology of freedom that posits freedom as both anterior and exterior to any form of positive order, functioning as its singularly paradoxical 'slippery foundation' that simultaneously makes possible both its establishment and its transgression. The task of this book is to liberate a concrete experience of freedom from the weight of abductive governmental projects through an engagement with Foucault's philosophy that asserts, pace innumerable critics, that Foucault's critical project unfolds on the basis of a certain ontology of freedom and is therefore affirmative (though in an idiosyncratic way) rather than purely negative or even nihilist (Fraser 1995; Walzer 1986). ¶ Moreover, reconceptualising freedom as an ontological condition of human being rather than as an attribute of social order will introduce into a discourse on freedom a certain kind of universalism that is absent in both ideological and multiculturalist accounts, for which freedom is only meaningful as an internal attribute of a certain particularistic order. To speak of universalism in relation to Foucault's thought is certainly controversial, given the prevalent reading of Foucault as a radical pluralist in both synchronic and diachronic aspects, emphasising the irreducible particularism of all forms of power, knowledge and ethics. However, the universalism we shall affirm is a necessary consequence ofthinking freedom onto logically as a potentiality for being otherwise that is inherent in and available to all human beings. This element of universality should be distinguished from any distinction between individualism and communitarianism. Countless critics have charged Foucault with opting for a hyperbolically individualistic mode of practicing freedom that aesthetises one's own existence (Wolin 1994; Habermas 1985). While these charges have been convincingly dismissed by pointing both to textual evidence and Foucault's own political and social commitments (Bennett 1996; Simons 1995), the answer to the question of whether a Foucauldian freedom is a solely individual experience or lends itself to collective action requires the displacement of the very opposition between the collective and the individual. ¶ It is certainly true that no collective 'project' could ever be inferred from a Foucauldian ontological affirmation of freedom, both because it opposes the reduction of existence to a normative project and because it must logically presuppose taking exception from any such project as the very substance offreedom. At the same time, Foucault's standpoint recalls Albert Camus's understanding of revolt as an individual affirmation of common existence: 'I revolt, therefore we are' (Camus 2006, part 1). For Camus, the act of revolt actualises the universal solidarity of human beings by manifesting, beyond the limits that it transgresses, the infinite possibilities of freedom that do not depend on one's particular identities, attributes or circumstances. In his discussion of the Iranian revolution of 1979, Foucault appears to echo Camus in asserting that revolt, although always arising out of particular circumstances of subjection or oppression, affirms nothing particular but rather the possibility available to us all: 'It is through revolt that subjectivity (not that of great men but of whomever) introduces itself into history and gives it the breath of life.' (Foucault cited in Bernauer 1990, 180) As a potentiality, freedom is not only available to all without any possibility for discrimination, but it is also available to all equally: in asserting one's freedom one is always already wholly free, irrespectively of the positive degree of autonomy that one thereby achieves. In such a sense, a practice of freedom functions as an affirmation of human universality and is therefore unthinkable in terms of a narcissistic individualism. ¶ This is not to say that freedom cannot be abused by its deployment against the freedom of the other. Indeed, the possibility of abuse or perversion is inherent in the very notion of freedom as radically heterogeneous to any form of normative prescription. To be worthy of the name, freedom must necessarily presuppose the permanent risk of its own abrogation or, in Derrida's terms, of a 'radical evil' that would destroy freedom from within: 'without the possibility of radical evil, of perjury, and of absolute crime, there is no responsibility, no freedom, no decision.' (Derrida 1996,219) We must therefore accept the infinite risk of freedom: if freedom is not to be viewed as an epiphenomenon of a particular order, we must presuppose the ever-present possibility of its abuse. 'Freedom is freedom for both good and evil.' (Agamben 1999, 183) Thus, a discourse on freedom must refuse the conventional blackmail gesture, whereby an act that most of us would consider outright evil is demonstrated to be manifestly free so that a moralising critic could ceaselessly pontificate about the inappropriateness of 'that sort of freedom'. This blackmail is ironically less widespread in the domain of empirical politics than in political theory: the formal freedoms of contemporary liberal-democratic societies surely allow for infinite abuse that can never be adequately insured against other than through the _ installation of a dystopian police state. Yet, none of this appears to disqualify these actually existing freedoms on the grounds of the absence of adequate insurance against abuse - a charge regularly levelled against Foucault (Rorty 1992; Walzer 1986; Wolin 1994). Freedom in the sense of potentiality for being otherwise is an ontological condition of possibility of practices, whose effects are entirely contingent and may well consist in abrogating their own conditions of possibility in e.g. the assumption of 'voluntary servitude' or the negation of the freedom of the Other. However, taking this risk of infinite abuse is essential to any concept of freedom worthy of name, since the only alternative would be a restrictive specification of freedom in positive terms that would return us to the normative discourse on the perfect order. The abuse of freedom cannot be insured against precisely because of its universality that proscribes any endowment of freedom with rational or moral foundations and positive identitarian predicates. 'In the end, there is no explanation for the man who revolts. His action is necessarily a tearing that breaks the thread of history and its long chains of reasons.' (Foucault cited in Bernauer 1990, 175) 

The modern approach to policy is necessarily problematic – it entrenches the ideology of domination Burke
What I take from Heid\egger's argument -- one that I have sought to extend by analysing the militaristic power of modern ontologies of political existence and security -- is a view that the challenge is posed not merely by a few varieties of weapon, government, technology or policy, but by an overarching system of thinking and understanding that lays claim to our entire space of truth and existence. Many of the most destructive features of contemporary modernity -- militarism, repression, coercive diplomacy, covert intervention, geopolitics, economic exploitation and ecological destruction -- derive not merely from particular choices by policymakers based on their particular interests, but from calculative, 'empirical' discourses of scientific and political truth rooted in powerful enlightenment images of being. Confined within such an epistemological and cultural universe, policymakers' choices become necessities, their actions become inevitabilities, and humans suffer and die. Viewed in this light, 'rationality' is the name we give the chain of reasoning which builds one structure of truth on another until a course of action, however violent or dangerous, becomes preordained through that reasoning's very operation and existence. It creates both discursive constraints -- available choices may simply not be seen as credible or legitimate -- and material constraints that derive from the mutually reinforcing cascade of discourses and events which then preordain militarism and violence as necessary policy responses, however ineffective, dysfunctional or chaotic.

  Paul, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, “The original accident,” trans. by Julie Rose, Polity, available online. 2007
  Paul, “L'Accident original,” Jan. 29, 2005, http://frenchphilo.tribe.net/thread/f09709c8-1c47-4c83-a9d8-67c6f77fc168
  Paul, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, “The original accident,” trans. by Julie Rose, Polity, available online
  Jason, Masters Political Science, Popular Defense in the Empire of Speed: Paul Virilio and the Phenomenology of the Political Body,” November 2003

 professor of anthropology and senior cananda research chair in political economy and culture in Asia-Pacific at the Univ of Toronto.  Tania Murray, The Will to Improve, pp. 22-26
  Collegium Research Fellow, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland, Sergei, Foucault, Freedom and Sovereignty, p . 9-12
  Burke, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at UNSW, Sydney, in ‘7 |Anthony, “Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason”, Back to Theory and Event, 10.2|

Tournament: VBT | Round: 1 | Opponent: Bower | Judge: Millman
The term “”Africa” is a western construct – it is embodied in specific ideals that cast Africa as the dark continent that is engulfed in savagery – it divides Africa into a “black” and “white” Africa that marginalizes populations. Austin 

The notion, within the narrative, of the immoral city must be considered within the larger context of discourse on the continent of Africa. The invocation of Africa in discussions on AIDS is embedded in a history of white Western discourse which attaches meaning and characteristics to specific segments of the African continent. The term Africa, as a Western construct, does not simply refer to an absolute and fixed geographical region. Africa is infused with Western notions of mystery and "darkness," savagery and unnameable barbarism.28 On one level, the totality of the African continent is subsumed and homogenized within the construct "Africa," but, simultaneously, certain regions, particularly in the contemporary era, are excluded from the classification. "Africa" and the "African" are tagged for a specific region and specific peoples-all other regions and peoples being nonrepresentative of the "true Africa." In the 1983 work the Sickness Cease': Disease in the History of Black Africa, Oliver Ransford delineates precisely what "black Africa" does and does not entail.29 Ransford explains that "Africa” may be divided into four separate parts, three of which are not authentically "African." One section, the "Mediterranean littoral," owing to its Christian and Islamic influences, is exempted from "Africa." Another region, South Africa, "is also separate from the mass of the continent" because "it has long lain under white rule and today . . . is still part of the western world." The "Ethiopian plateau," the third area, is exempted because "its people possess a high proportion of Caucasian blood." "Africa" thus does not include the African continent as a whole, but rather is composed of only select regions: "Divided from these three orphaned regions lies the real Africa, Black Africa, that part of the continent which stretches from about 15° N to the Limpopo valley in the south, and it is with this area that we are concerned.... Until the nineteenth century, Black Africa was little more than an outline on maps drawn by speculative cartographers." Ransford's description of "Africa" characterizes many of the assumptions involved in media presentations of AIDS in Africa. Documented cases of AIDS have been concentrated mostly in a grouping of nations in central and eastern areas of the African continent. Some of the African countries with the highest re-ported number of AIDS cases are Zaire, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, and, in southern Africa, Zambia----a group of nations that largely overlap with Ransford's definition of "the real Africa, Black Africa." Yet, the media's references to Africa portray AIDS as if it uniformly affects the entire continent, leaving no nation "unravaged." These generalized references are tied to particular constructs of Africa. One construct entails an Africa that is undifferentiated and homogeneous. There are no specificities to various nations, cultures, and peoples. They are all African. To the white, Western observer, the term African is assumed to relay all the meaningful information necessary to have a "total" under-standing of the subject. AIDS in Africa is understood by the white reader to be a complete package of information, requiring no further detail. Furthermore, the media's use of the term Africa to designate a grouping of nations that are concentrated in the central and eastern regions of the African continent recreates and intensifies Western notions of those regions as the "real Africa," the essential "Africa". A message that emerges from discourse on AIDS is that the disease is infiltrating Africa-that is, "black Africa." "Quasi-African" regions that are amalgamated by "white rule," "Western" religion, or "Caucasian blood" are not the areas with which "we are concerned"-"we" meaning the white observer operating within a white fantasy of "diseased black Africa." The contemporary Western notion of AIDS in Africa stacked upon the previously established concept of black Africa sharpens constructions, in the Western imagination, of AIDS as the disease of the Other.

Comes first.

a. Racism is an a priori issue - It makes forms of violence inevitable. It must be rejected in every issue.  Memmi
The struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission, without remission, probably never achieved, yet for this very reason, it racism is a struggle to be undertaken without surcease and without concessions. One cannot be indulgent toward racism. One cannot even let the monster in the house, especially not in a mask. To give it merely a foothold means to augment the bestial part in us and in other people which is to diminish what is human. To accept the racist universe to the slightest degree is to endorse fear, injustice, and violence. It is to accept the persistence of the dark history in which we still largely live. It is to agree that the outsider will always be a possible victim (and which person man is not themself himself an outsider relative to someone else?). Racism illustrates in sum, the inevitable negativity of the condition of the dominated; that is it illuminates in a certain sense the entire human condition. The anti-racist struggle, difficult though it is, and always in question, is nevertheless one of the prologues to the ultimate passage from animality to humanity. In that sense, we cannot fail to rise to the racist challenge. However, it remains true that one’s moral conduct only emerges from a choice: one has to want it. It is a choice among other choices, and always debatable in its foundations and its consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking, that the choice to conduct oneself morally is the condition for the establishment of a human order for which racism is the very negation. This is almost a redundancy. One cannot found a moral order, let alone a legislative order, on racism because racism signifies the exclusion of the other and his or her subjection to violence and domination. From an ethical point of view, if one can deploy a little religious language, racism is “the truly capital sin.”fn22 … , we have an interest in banishing injustice, because injustice engenders violence and death. Of course, this is debatable. There are those who think that if one is strong enough, the assault on and oppression of others is permissible. But no one is ever sure of remaining the strongest. One day, perhaps, the roles will be reversed. All unjust society contains within itself the seeds of its own death. It is probably smarter to treat others with respect so that they treat you with respect. “Recall,” says the bible, “that you were once a stranger in Egypt,” which means both that you ought to respect the stranger because you were a stranger yourself and that you risk becoming once again someday. It is an ethical and a practical appeal – indeed, it is a contract, however implicit it might be. In short, the refusal of racism is the condition for all theoretical and practical morality. Because, in the end, the ethical choice commands the political choice. A just society must be a society accepted by all. If this contractual principle is not accepted, then only conflict, violence, and destruction will be our lot. If it is accepted, we can hope someday to live in peace. True, it is a wager, but the stakes are irresistible.

b. Equality defined as having equal concern for others is a prerequisite to moral theories
Gosepath 11
This fundamental idea of equal respect for all persons and of the equal worth or equal dignity of all human beings (Vlastos 1962) is accepted as a minimal standard by all leading schools of modern Western political and moral culture. Any political theory abandoning this notion of equality will not be found plausible today. In a period in which metaphysical, religious and traditional views have lost their general plausibility (Habermas 1983, p. 53, 1992, pp. 39-44), it appears impossible to peacefully reach a general agreement on common political aims without accepting that persons must be treated as equals. As a result, moral equality constitutes the ‘egalitarian plateau’ for all contemporary political theories (Kymlicka 1990, p.5).

The alternative is to reject the affirmative’s discourse—only through linguistic deconstruction can we promote real change. Kobayashi 94 

What we can hope, for the moment, is to become more adept at the practice of unnatural discourse, as a means of exposing the conditions under which naturalizing tendencies have worked, so that we not only come to terms with the unsettling implications of post-modernism, but also disrupt the discourses set in motion by Enlightenment thought. This disruption involves two general goals:  ( 1) A continuing analysis and critique of the processes of social construction, as (almost universally) processes of naturalization, in order to understand the concepts, meanings, representations, practices and political forms through which 'race' and gender are constructed as normal, that is, viewed as part of a fundamental and unchanging (or slowly changing) order that is 'second nature.' Such understanding comes about not especially through sophisticated theorizing, but through patient and determined empirical work that investigates the details of people's lives, their taken-for-granted worlds, and that asks questions that no one had previously thought to ask.  (2) The development of ways of initiating 'unnatural discourse', using both language (as concept) and political practice in such a way that natural categories are challenged. A method of deconstruction, or disassembly, is needed to allow us to understand not just the explicit statements of belief about what is 'natural', but also those values that are so naturalized that they have not previously come under question. This project requires, in part, a recovery of the significant past, and of the mnemonic qualities that are invoked in every use of language to give it its naturalizing power. As geographers, we need to invoke ideology to uncover the terrain that is uncontested because it is deemed to be ruled by common sense.  These challenges are huge, and no pretence will be made to outline here all that is involved. Perhaps imagination is our greatest asset, since most of what is involved is not even on the academic agenda. We can begin to speculate, however, about some of the elements of the unnatural, and upon how the political strategies might be conceptualized if not put in place.  The appeal of unnatural discourses lies in their use of practices that would in the past have been designated as (if you will) witchcraft or voodoo, practices associated with the unnatural, and therefore evil because threatening, powers of women or people of colour. The unnatural, in other words, is anything that falls outside the parameters of the naturalized, safe and known world of rational man. Included within those parameters are all practices that involve the imposition of social order based on a notion of a 'natural state of man.' Such a position could exclude, for example, violence (viewed by some as a natural tendency of man) as a means of bringing about social change. More radical are possibilities that instead project social actions that are beyond the realm of current imagination, so far, perhaps, that they may even be construed as 'supernatural'.  'The unnaturalization of everyday language is an important aspect of this project. In language is codified the normative categories through which human relations are constructed, and communication provides the only means through which the conditions of change are expressed. The creation of 'race' is one such example of an effective means of unnaturalizing deeply held convictions; if that particular linguistic tool is now losing its efficacy so much the better, for it is an indication not that the term was inadequate, but that it provoked some of the changes that were sought. Linguistic strategies rely upon the imposition of conceptual disorder and ideological confounding against the power of naming as one of the most important means of imposing order and dominion. Using language as a force of the unnatural to deconstruct the power of words to create oppression is not to destroy the power of words to have meaning, and so create lives that are truly meaningless in a nihilistic void. Rather, we need to gain control of language in order to understand the ways in which discourses are constructed as ideological traditions that gain efficacy through repetition, inscription, and representation (Goodrich, 1990, Ch. 4). Such processes will go on, but hopefully at a higher level of competence.  

  austin – prof.in the dept. Of society, human develop. and health at harvard -- 1990 sydney bryn, cultural critique, no. 14, the construction of gender and modes of social division ii. (winter, 1989-1990), pp. 129-152
  2000 MEMMI Professor Emeritus of Sociology @ Unv. Of Paris Albert-; RACISM, translated by Steve Martinot, pp.163-165
  Gosepath, Stefan, "Equality", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2011/entries/equality/.
  Kobayashi 94 (Audrey, Direct. Institute of Women’s Studies @ Queen’s, Gender, Place, and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 1, 2, p. 225, JM)

Tournament: Berkeley | Round: 1 | Opponent: Neel Yerneni | Judge: Babb
The aff’s call for environmental protection is undermined by the weakness of our internal psychology. Eco-anxiety makes extinction inevitable and turns the environment. Psychoanalysis is a prior question to the aff. Dodds 12 writes
Why psychoanalysis? On the face of it, it seems frankly irrelevant. Surely it is the basic sciences of geology, ecology, biology, and climatology that we need, combined with various hi-tech engineering? Yes and no. The science informing us of the risks and possible technical solutions has run far ahead of our psychological state. We are not yet at the point emotionally of being able to clearly grasp the threat, and act accordingly. We need to ask why this issue, despite its current prominence, fails to ignite people's motivation for the major changes science tells us is necessary. This concerns not only the 'public' but the academy and the psychoanalytic community. In spite of the fact that Harold Searles was already writing in 1960 that psychoanalysts need to acknowledge the psychological importance of the non-human environment, until very recently his colleagues have almost entirely ignored him. In this section we explore some of the theories with which we may be able to construct a psychoanalysis of ecology. Fuller elaboration will involve incorporating approaches from the sciences of complexity and ecology, and Deleuze and Guattari's 'geophilosophy' or 'ecosophy', which itself emerged in critical dialogue with psychoanalysis and complexity theory. However, we first need to explore the ecological potential within psychoanalysis itself, as without the latter's methods and theories for unmasking hidden motivations and phantasies, this investigation will not be able to proceed. Renee Lertzman (2008), one of the first psychoanalytically informed social scientists to engage with the ecological crisis, describes a common surreal aspect of our everyday responses to 'eco-anxiety', the experience of flipping through a newspaper and being suddenly confronted with: the stop-dead-in-your-tracks, bone-chilling kind of ecological travesties taking place around our planet today ... declining honey bees, melting glaciers, plastics in the sea, or the rate of coal plants being built in China each second. But how many of us actually do stop dead in our tracks? Have we become numb? ... if so, how can we become more awake and engaged to what is happening? Environmental campaigners have become increasingly frustrated and pessimistic. Even as their messages spread further and further, and as scientists unite around their core concerns, there is an alarming gap between increasingly firm evidence and public response. The fact that oil companies donate millions to climate 'sceptic' groups doesn't help (Vidal 2010). Nor does the fact that eight European companies which are together responsible for 5-10 per cent of the emissions covered in the EU emissions trading system (Bayet, BASF, BP, GDF Suez, ArcelorMittal, Lafarge, E.ON, and Solvay) gave $306,100 to senatorial candidates in the 2010 United States midterm elections who either outright deny climate change ($107,200) or pledge they will block all climate change legislation ($240,200), with the most flagrant deniers getting the most funds (Goldenberg 2010; Climate Action Network 2010). These are the same companies that campaign against EU targets of 30 per cent reductions in emissions using current inaction in the United States as a justification, while claiming their official policy is that climate change is a major threat and they are committed to doing all they can to help in the common cause of dealing with the danger (for the full report see Climate Action Network 2010). Recent opinion polls show climate scepticism is on the rise in the UK as well. In February 2010 a BBC-commissioned poll by Populus (BBC 2010a, 2010b) of 1,001 adults found that 25 per cent didn't think global warming was happening, a rise of 8 per cent since a similar poll in November 2009. Belief that climate change was real fell from 83 per cent to 75 per cent, while only 26 per cent believed climate change was established as largely man-made compared with 41 per cent in November. A third of those agreeing climate change was real felt consequences had been exaggerated (up from a fifth) while the number of those who felt risks had been understated fell from 38 per cent to 25 per cent (see Figure 3). According to Populus director M. Simmonds, 'it is very unusual ... to see such a dramatic shift in opinion in such a short period ... The British public are sceptical about man's contribution to climate change and becoming more so' (BBC 2010a). Most remarkable here is the discrepancy between public and expert opinion. According to the chief scientific advisor at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Professor Robert Watson: 'Action is urgently needed ... We need the public to understand that climate change is serious so they will change their habits and help us move towards a low-carbon economy.' Why this shift? Whilst the poll took place with the background of heavy snow and blizzards in the UK, always a convenient backdrop to climate sceptic jokes, the BBC (2010a) article focused on a high-profile story concerning stolen emails alleging scientific malpractice at the University of East Anglia (UEA). While this was a very serious accusation, no mainstream scientific body seriously imagines it changes in any real way the overall science, and yet this is not how the public perceived it. Subsequently, the UK Parliament's Commons Science and Technology Committee completed its investigation into the case (BBC 2010c). The MPs' committee concluded there was no evidence that UEA's Professor Phil Jones had manipulated data, or tried 'to subvert the peer review process' and that 'his reputation, and that of his climate research unit, remained intact' (BBC 2010c). The report noted that 'it is not standard practice in climate science to publish the raw data and the computer code in academic papers' and that 'much of the data that critics claimed Prof Jones has hidden, was in fact already publicly available' (BBC 2010c) but called strongly for a greater culture of transparency in science. The report concluded that it 'found no reason in this unfortunate episode to challenge the scientific consensus that global warming is happening and is induced by human activity' (BBC 2010c). This story was followed closely by another in January 2010 when the IPCC admitted a mistake concerning the timetable of Himalayan glacial melting. In such a lengthy report of over 3 000 pages, produced from the combined efforts of the world scientific community on a topic with as many variables as climate change, it is unsurprising some estimates need revising. Undoubtably there will be more revisions in the future, some major. It is important to emphasize that for the world's scientists the overall picture has not been affected, but public perception is completely different, with triumphant claims of proof 'it is all made up'. No doubt many sceptics will use the Parliamentary committee's report as further evidence of an institutional cover-up. The important psychological point is that people are ready for such events, indeed eager for it - the psychosocial equivalent of a sandpile in a state of self-organized criticality (Palombo 1999; Bak 1994), when a single grain can cause a major avalanche cascading through the whole system. Understanding such subtle shifts, and the often unconscious motivations behind them, is where psychoanalysis perhaps more than any other discipline has a lot to offer. As Lertzman (2008) writes: What if the core issue is more about how humans respond to anxiety? ... Environmental problems ... conjure up anxieties that ... we are done for, and nothing can really be done ... To help me understand more, I turn to Freud ... because I have found few others who speak as eloquently, and sensitively about what humans do when faced with anxiety or anxiety-provoking news. Freud, civilization, nature and the dialectic of the Enlightenment Is Freud really relevant to understanding our current crisis? While he was very much engaged in relating psychology to social issues, from war to racism, group psychology and the discontents of civilization (Freud 1913a, 1915, 1921, 1927, 1930), he was writing during a period when the possibility that human activities could bring the Earth's ecosystems to the brink of collapse would have been hard to contemplate. Romanticism may have complained about 'unweaving rainbows' and industry's 'dark satanic mills', but by Freud's day this could be seen as Luddite anti-progress talk, especially for those working within the Weltangschung of science and the Enlightenment to which Freud (1933) pinned his psychoanalytic flag. However, much of our current bewildering situation can be understood as rooted in part in a world view that was at its zenith during Freud's day and, as Lertzman (2008) suggests, in our responses to anxiety. In addition, Freud did offer us some crucial reflections on our relationship with nature: The principle task of civilization, its actual raison d'etre, is to defend us against nature. We all know that in many ways civilization does this fairly well already, and clearly as time goes on it will do it much better. But no one is under the illusion that nature has already been vanquished; and few dare hope that she will ever be entirely subdued to man. (Freud 1927: 51) Here we can see an interesting ambivalence in Freud's rhetorical style, which perhaps unwittingly captures two crucial aspects of our civilization's relationship to 'Nature' and thus begins to open up a psychoanalytic approach to ecology. First, he depicts a series of binary oppositions typical for his era, and not so different in our own: human versus nature, man versus woman and (more implicitly) order versus chaos. Here we find the classic tropes of the Enlightenment, modernity, patriarchy, industrialism and capitalism, which Jungian ecopsychologist Mary-Jane Rust (2008) calls the myths we live by. The myths she is referring to in particular are the 'myth of progress' and the 'myth of the Fall'. She argues that in order to create a sustainable future, or indeed any future, we need to find other stories, other myths, through which to live our lives, to rethink how we have fallen and what it means to progress. Freud's work suggests that Western culture views civilization as a defence against nature, and against wildness, inner and outer, but as Rust (2008: 5) writes, at 'this critical point in human history we most urgently need a myth to live by which is about living with nature, rather than fighting it.' Thus, according to Rust, we find ourselves ... between stories (Berry 1999), in a transitional space ... of great turbulence, with little to hold onto save the ground of our own experience. Our therapeutic task ... is to understand how these myths still shape our internal worlds, our language, and our defences ... Somewhere in the midst of 'sustainability' ... lies an inspiring vision of transformation ... We need to dig deep, to re-read our own myths as well as find inspiration from the stories of others. (ibid.) The myth of progress enters the climate change debate in calls for geo-engineering and Utopian techno-fixes such as putting thousands of mirrors in space, and in the dismissal of even gentle questioning of current economic models of unlimited growth. We will later look at Harold Searles' (1972) approach to our fascination with technology and its role in the current crisis. Returning to Freud, however, there is, as always, another side, an implicit awareness that the feeling of mastery civilization gives us is in many ways a dangerous illusion. Behind our need for mastery lies our fear and trembling in the face of the awesome power of mother nature. There are the elements which seem to mock at all human control: the earth, which quakes and is torn apart and buries all human life and its works; water, which deluges and drowns everything in turmoil; storms, which blow everything before them ... With these forces nature rises up against us, majestic, cruel and inexorable; she brings to our mind once more our weakness and helplessness, which we thought to escape through the work of civilization. (Freud 1927: 15-16) Here is the other side of Freud's writing on the relation between 'Nature' and 'Civilization', with humanity portrayed as a weak and helpless infant in awe and fear of a mighty and terrible mother. The lure and horror of matriarchy lie behind the defensive constructs of patriarchal civilization, just as Klein's paranoid-schizoid fears of fragmentation, engulfment, and annihilation lie behind later castration threats (Hinshelwood 1991). With each new earthquake or flood, nature erupts into culture -similar to Kristeva's (1982) description of the eruption of the 'semiotic' into the 'symbolic' - and we are thrown back into a state of terror. The 'illusion' in the title of Freud's 1927 essay The Future of an Illusion was meant to refer to how religion arose to deal with these anxieties. However, the structural function of the myth of progress, while undoubtably more successful in terms of practical benefits, can also be included here. In these words of Freud we have already a deep understanding, albeit largely implicit, of our own current crisis: a relationship to nature based on a master-slave system of absolute binaries, and an attempt to maintain an illusory autonomy and control in the face of chaos. There is often a tension in Freud, between the celebration of Enlightenment values found in works such as The Future of an Illusion (1927) and the more Romantic Freud who won the Goethe prize and constantly emphasized the elements Enlightenment rationality leaves out such as jokes, dreams, slips and psychological symptoms. Thus, as well as being a perfect example of the Enlightenment with its call to make the unconscious conscious and give the 'rational' ego greater power over the wilds of the id, psychoanalysis also provides a serious challenge to this way of thinking. There will always be something beyond our control. We are not, and never can be, masters in our own house, and the core of who we are is irrational, and often frightening. Marcuse (1998) touched on a similar tension when declaring Freud's (1930) Civilization and Its Discontents both the most radical critique of Western culture and its most trenchant defence. Psychoanalysis, as always, is exquisitely ambivalent. Ultimately, for Freud, both the natural world and our inner nature are untamable and the most we can hope for are temporary, fragile, anxious compromises between competing forces (Winter and Koger 2004). The chaos of nature we defend against is also the chaos of our inner nature, the wildness in the depths of our psyche. Civilization does not only domesticate livestock but also humanity itself (Freud and Einstein 1933: 214). However, attempts to eliminate the risk have in many ways dangerously backfired, comparable to the ways that the historical programmes aiming to eliminate forest fires in the United States have led to far bigger and more uncontrollable fires taking the place of previously smaller and more manageable ones (Diamond 2006: 43-47). The control promised by the Enlightenment, the power of the intellect to overcome chaos (environmental and emotional), is therefore at least partly a defensive and at times dangerous illusion. In our age of anxiety, with the destruction of civilization threatened by nuclear holocaust, ecosystemic collapse, bioweapons and dirty bombs, Freud's warning is more relevant than ever: Humens* have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man ... hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety. (Freud 1930: 135) Freud's binaries 'masculine/Enlightenment/control/autonomy' versus 'feminine/nature/chaos/dependency' also lead us to consider what Gregory Bateson (2000: 95) called the 'bipolar characteristic' of Western thought, which even tries 'to impose a binary pattern upon phenomena which are not dual in nature: youth versus age, labor versus capital, mind versus matter - and, in general, lacks the organizational devices for handling triangular systems/ In such a culture, as with the child struggling to come to terms with the Oedipal situation, 'any "third" party is always regarded ... as a threat' (ibid.). Deleuze and Guattari describe such dualistic forms of thinking using the ecological metaphor of the tree with its fork-branch patterns (although they would not use the term metaphor): 'Arborescent systems are hierarchical systems with centers of signifiance and subjectification ... an element only receives information from a higher unit, and only receives a subjective affection along preestablished paths' (Deleuze and Guattari 2003a: 16). However, Freud's 'arborescent' system of binaries can also show us the way out, capturing the psychological bind we are now in. As Deleuze and Guattari (2003a: 277) write: 'The only way to get outside the dualisms is ... to pass between, the intermezzo.' Deconstructing these dualisms allows us to think about how our destructive urge to dominate and control is connected to our fear of acknowledging dependency on this largest of 'holding environments', the ultimate 'environment mother' (Winnicott 1999,1987). 

Technological management is a manifestation of the death drive which turns and outweighs environmental harm, and makes extinction inevitable.
Dodds 12 writes
Here there are echoes of Freud's (1916) idea of 'anticipatory mourning' and the associated attacks and spoiling that we will study below (see p. 72). However, for Searles the natural world is not just a space for externalizing our conflicts. Rather, a healthy relationship to the non-human environment is essential for human psychological well-being. Furthermore, one consequence of our alienation from nature is an omnipotent longing for fusion with our technology, and a powerful anxiety should this fully occur. Over recent decades we have come from dwelling in an outer world in which the living works of nature either predominated or were near at hand, to dwelling in an environment dominated by a technology which is wondrously powerful and yet nonetheless dead ... This technology-dominated world is so alien, so complex, so awesome, and so overwhelming that we have been able to cope with it only by regressing, in our unconscious experience ... to a degraded state of nondifferentiation from it ... This 'outer' reality is psychologically as much a part of us as its poisonous waste products are part of our physical selves. (Searles 1972: 368) The further we are alienated from nature, the more we are driven into primitive regressive identification and omnipotent fascination with our technology, a powerful positive feedback loop. The inner conflict between our human and non-human selves, and our animal and technological natures, is projected onto the environment, further rupturing the relationship and leading to a spiral of destructiveness as we 'project this conflict upon, and thus unconsciously foster, the war in external reality between the beleaguered remnants of ecologically balanced nature and *(hu)man's technology which is ravaging them' (ibid.). Here we are in Klein's paranoid-schizoid world, with a primitive ego unable to differentiate between good and bad mother. While ecologists portray a good eco-mummy doing battle with bad techno-mummy, things are not so simple. As we have seen, civilization (and its technology) is a defence, a 'good mother' to protect us from capricious and uncaring mother nature (Freud 1930), but, as Searles suggests, we are supposed to accept that 'our good mother is poisoning us' (Searles 1972: 369). For Searles (1972), behind both nuclear danger and ecological catastrophe lies the raw destructiveness Kleinians link to Thanatos, or what Erich Fromm (1992) understands in terms of necrophilia. Searles (1972: 370) argues that at this level of functioning we project 'our own pervasive, poorly differentiated and poorly integrated murderousness, bora of our terror and deprivation and frustration, upon the hydrogen bomb, the military-industrial complex, technology.' We may find the slow, more controllable death from pollution preferable to 'sudden death from nuclear warfare' or we might yearn for the quick relief of a nuclear blast to the 'slow strangulation' of environmental devastation (Searles 1972: 370). Living with such apocalyptic threats leads to a kind of ultimate version of the defence Anna Freud (1936) described as identification with the aggressor. At an unconscious level we powerfully identify with what we perceive as omnipotent and immortal technology, as a defense against intolerable feelings of insignificance, of deprivation, of guilt, of fear of death ... Since the constructive goal of saving the world can be achieved only by one's working, as but one largely anonymous individual among uncounted millions ... it is more alluring to give oneself over to secret fantasies of omnipotent destructiveness, in identification with the forces that threaten to destroy the world. This serves to shield one from the recognition of one's own guilt-laden murderous urges, experienced as being within oneself, to destroy one's own intrapersonal and interpersonal world. (Searles 1972: 370) In this view, we are seeing a kind of repetition on a planetary level of an early intrapsychic anxiety situation. In childhood 'a fantasied omnipotence protected us against the full intensity of our feelings of deprivation, and now it is dangerously easy to identify with seemingly limitless technology and to fail to cope with the life-threatening scarcity of usable air, food, and water on our planet' (ibid.). Unfortunately our technological powers have outstripped our emotional maturity, and the omnipotent phantasies of infancy now have a frightening objectivity. In place of a religion we no longer believe in, or hopes for future generations we no longer have meaningful contact with, we identify with our immortal, inanimate technology. In this realm of omnipotent fantasy ... mother earth is equivalent to all of reality ... a drag ... to our yearnings for unfettered omnipotence ... It may be not at all coincidental that our world today is threatened with extinction through environmental pollution, to which we are so strikingly apathetic, just when we seem on the threshold of technologically breaking the chains that have always bound our race to this planet of our origin. I suspect that we collectively quake lest our infantile omnipotent fantasies become fully actualized through man's becoming interplanetary and ceasing thereby to be man ... We are powerfully drawn to suicidally polluting our planet so as to ensure our dying upon it as men, rather than existing elsewhere as ... gods or robots ... The greatest danger lies neither in the hydrogen bomb ... nor in the more slowly lethal effect of pollution ... but in the fact that the world is in such a state as to evoke our very earliest anxieties and at the same time to offer the delusional 'promise' ... of assuaging these anxieties, effacing them, by fully externalizing and reifying our most primitive conflicts ... In the pull upon us to become omnipotently free of human conflict, we are in danger of bringing about our extinction. (Searles 1972: 371-372) 

The alternative is to challenge the psychological drives of the aff that underlie their rationale for environmental protection. Eco-psychoanalysis is not only key to recognizing that tech fixes are illusory since the world is chaotic, but changing how we view ourselves.
Dodds 12 writes
The metaphor of an acrobat on a high wire referred to by Bateson (2000: 506) is particularly apt for us now. The acrobat, in order not to fall, requires maximum freedom to 'move from one position of instability to another.' This is the paradox of order and disorder that we discussed in Chapter 11. In our current ecological crisis we must face the possibility that achieving the freedom and flexibility that we need to survive requires a fundamental re-examination of many of the basic coordinates of our lives, and some of our most cherished theories. In analyzing the rise and fall of past civilizations, we find that a 'new technology for the exploitation of nature or a new technique for the exploitation of other men ... gives elbow room or flexibility' but that 'the using up of that flexibility is death' (Bateson 2000: 503). Like the patient stuck on a local optima that we discussed in Chapter 12, unable or unwilling to cross the threshold to a more adaptive peak, entire species, and civilizations, have in the past found themselves in dangerous dead ends and unable to change. These dead ends include those within the ecology of mind, ways of thinking and being that become pathological if they fail to evolve along with the constantly shifting relations in the constitution of natural and social ecosystems. Ecopsychoanalysis, which draws on the tools and ideas of nonlinear science, understands that our world is governed by nonlinear dynamics, to the extent that the prediction and control promised by Enlightenment rationality will always remain to some degree illusory. Instead, we need to engage with the creativity of the Earth, and follow the lines of flight we uncover, exploring 'the potential for self-organization inherent in even the humblest forms of matter-energy' (DeLanda 2005:273). Our species has experienced such severe existential threats before. One of the most extreme examples was an evolutionary bottleneck which molecular biology shows us occurred approximately 70,000 years ago, when the human species was down to the last few thousand individuals or even less. Geological evidence suggests that this near extinction may have been linked to the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia, whose eruption triggered sudden climate change with major environmental impacts (Dawkins 2004). We do not know how we emerged from that particular crisis, or how close we may have come to extinction at various other times in our history. We might reflect on these experiences as applying to the whole species an idea that Winnicott (1974: 104) once discussed in terms of the fear of breakdown in individual psychoanalysis. For Winnicott, this fear refers to a breakdown that has already occurred, but it was a catastrophe which took place before there was yet a subject to folly experience it with a reflective consciousness. At the risk of anthropocentrism, we might do well to consider Dennett's (2003: 267) point that in many ways we do occupy a unique position in the history of the Earth, as 'wherever lineages found themselves on local peaks of the adaptive landscape, their members had no way of so much as wondering whether or not there might be higher, better summits on the far side of this valley or that.' Despite all the defensive reasons to not know which we explored in Chapters 4-7. we are, to some extent at least, becoming conscious of the enormity of the danger which confronts us. Today we are forced to think in these complex terms, to wonder about other valleys and other peaks on the plane of immanence, our virtual realm of possibility, to find a path through the current deadlock. As we saw in Part I of this book, these are difficult times. As Bateson (2000: 495) writes, the 'massive aggregation of threats to (hu)man(kind) and his ecological systems arises out of errors in our habits of thought at deep and partly unconscious levels.' The contribution of psychoanalysis is precisely to help us to overcome such errors through investigating their unconscious roots. Ecopsychoanalysis recognizes the need for a radical questioning of our theories, whether psychoanalytic, philosophical, scientific or political, and the corresponding ways of living individually and collectively that they make possible and reflect. However, it does so through a respectful engagement with the best that our various traditions have to offer, entering into uncanny new symbioses, making these disciplines strange to themselves not in order to destroy them but to make them more vital and alive. Despite the gravity of our situation, there are 'patches of sanity still surviving in the world' (Bateson 2000: 495), ideas in the ecology of mind worth exploring, helping us to construct a new alpha function we can only hope is capable of dreaming at the precipice. This book has sought to uncover what some of the components of this might be, focusing in particular on the constructive synergy between psychoanalysis, complexity theory,  ecology,  and the philosophy of Deleuze  and  Guattari. Ecopsychoanalysis wonders whether it is precisely in the very severity of the desperate ecological situation we face that a great opportunity lies for re-imagining the human, our societies, and our place in the world. It is in the ecopsychological spirit of nurturing hope while facing despair that this book was written. However, there is no 'big Other' (Zizek 2007) to guarantee our success, or even our future existence. In a chaotic world without certainty, ecopsychoanalysis can turn to the experimental pragmatics of Deleuze and Guattari (2003a: 161): 'Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers ... find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times.' Assumptions according to which we have long lived our lives collapse as we begin to feel the disturbing effects of the hyperobject of climate change on the ecology of mind. Ecopsychoanalysis itself can be viewed as a hyperobject in that it does not yet fully exist. It should not be seen as an end state but a process of becoming, a work in progress, a meshwork emerging at the interstices of the three ecologies, and the elaboration of an alpha function that is able to think and dwell in our new uncanny home. As Bateson (2000: 512) writes, 'we are not outside the ecology for which we plan - we are always and inevitably a part of it. Herein lies the charm and the terror of ecology.' Ecopsychoanalysis can never occupy an outside from which to explore and engage with the new strange ecology(s), but is always already extimate with it (Lacan 1992: 139). For all its chaos, because of all its chaos, the world is still a place of wonder, and we can only hope that we find ways of staying in it at least a little while longer. The nonlinearity and chaos of nature, and the forms of thinking required to sustain our relationship to it beyond the limited horizons of our experience, are both frightening and liberating. Yet, despite the anxiety, guilt and terror that climate change forces us to face, this moment of crisis can also offer us an opportunity for a more open vision of ourselves, as subjects, as societies, and as a species among the interconnected life systems of the Earth. 

The K comes first. “Sustainability” assumes an idealized notion of nature that implicitly pursues a maintenance of the status quo order. Questioning what we mean by nature comes prior to focus on the aff’s environmental threats.
Swyngedouw 6 writes
This chapter seeks to destabilise some of the most persistent myths about nature, sustainability and environmental politics. First, I shall argue that there is no such thing as a singular Nature around which a policy of ‘sustainability’ can be constructed. Rather, there are a multitude of natures and a multitude of existing or possible socio-natural relations. Second, the obsession with a singular nature that requires ‘sustaining’ is sustained by an apocalyptic imaginary that forecloses asking serious political questions about possible socio-environmental trajectories, particularly in the context of a neo-liberal hegemony. Third, and most importantly, I shall argue that environmental issues and their political ‘framing’ contribute to the making and consolidation of a post-political and post-democratic condition, one that actually forecloses the possibility of a real politics of the environment. I conclude with a call of a politicization of the environment, one that is predicated upon the recognition of radically different possible socio-environmental futures and the proliferation of new socio-environmental imaginaries.  1. The Question of Natures “Nature does not exist” … or …When vegetarians will eat meat! The Guardian International reported recently (13th August 2005) how a University of Maryland scientist had succeeded in producing “cultured meat”. Soon, he said, “it will be possible to substitute reared beef or chicken with artificially grown meat tissue. It will not be any longer necessary to kill an animal in order to get access to its meat. We can just rear it in industrialised labs”. A magical solution, so it seems, that might tempt vegetarians to return to the flock of animal protein devotees, while promising yet again (after the failed earlier promises made by the pundits of pesticides, the green revolution and now genetic engineering and GM products) the final solution for world hunger and a more sustainable life for the millions of people who go hungry now. Meanwhile, NASA is spending circa US$ 40 million a year on how to recycle wastewater and return it to potable conditions, something that would of course be necessary to permit space missions of long duration, but which would be of significant importance on earth as well. At the same time, sophisticated new technologies are developed for sustainable water harvesting, for a more rational use of water, or a better recycling of residual waters, efforts defended on the basis of the need to reach the Millennium Development Goals that promise, among others, a reduction by half of the 2.5 billion people that do not have adequate access to safe water and sanitation. In the mean time, other ‘natures’ keep wrecking havoc around the world. The Tsunami disaster comes readily to mind, as do the endless forest fires that blazed through Spain in the summer of 2005 during the country’s driest summer since records started, killing dozens of people and scorching the land; HIV continues its genocidal march through Sub-Saharan Africa, summer heat waves killed thousands of people prematurely in 2004 in France. In 2006, Europeans watched anxiously the nomadic wanderings of the avian flue virus and waits, almost stoically, for the moment it will pass more easily from birds to humans. While all this is going on, South Korea’s leading bio-tech scientist, Hwang Woo Suk proudly presented, in August 2005, the Seoul National University Puppy (SNUPPY) to the global press as the first cloned dog (a Labrador) while a few months later, in December 2005, this science hero was forced to withdraw a paper on human stem cells from Science after accusations of intellectual fraud (later confirmed, prompting his resignation and wounding South-Korea’s great biotech dream). In the UK, male life expectancy between the ‘best’ and ‘worst’ areas is now more than 11 years and the gap is widening with life expectancy actually falling (for the first time since the second world war) in some areas . Tuberculosis is endemic again in East London, obesity is rapidly becoming the most seriously lethal socio-ecological condition in our fat cities (Marvin and Medd, 2006), and, as the ultimate cynical gesture, nuclear energy is again celebrated and iconized by many elites, among whom Tony Blair, as the world’s saviour, the ultimate response to the climatic calamities promised by continuing carbon accumulation in our atmosphere while satisfying our insatiable taste for energy. This great variety of examples all testify to the blurring of boundaries between the human and the artificial, the technological and the natural, the non-human and the cyborg-human; they certainly also suggest that there are all manner of ‘natures’ out there. While some of the above examples promise ‘sustainable’ forms of development, others seem to stray further away from what might be labelled as sustainable. At first glance, Frankenstein meat, cyborg waters and stem cell research are exemplary cases of possibly ‘sustainable’ ways of dealing with apparently important socio-environmental problems while solving significant social problems (animal ethics and food supply on the one hand, dwindling freshwater resources or unsustainable body metabolisms on the other). Sustainable processes are sought for around the world and solutions for our precarious environmental condition are feverishly developed. Sustainability, so it seems, is in the making, even for vegetarians. Meanwhile, as some of the other examples attest, socio-environmental processes keep on wrecking havoc in many places around the world. ‘Responsible’ scientists, environmentalists of a variety of ideological stripes and colours, together with a growing number of world leaders and politicians, keep on spreading apocalyptic and dystopian messages about the clear and present danger of pending environmental catastrophes that will be unleashed if we refrain from immediate and determined action. Particularly the threat of global warming is framed in apocalyptic terms if the atmospheric accumulation of CO2 (which is of course the classic ‘side effect’ of the accumulation of capital in the troposphere) continues unheeded. Table 1 collects a sample of some of the most graphic recent doomsday media headlines on the theme. The world as we know it will come to a premature end (or be seriously mangled) unless we urgently reverse, stop, or at least slow down global warming and return the climate to its status quo ante. Political and regulatory technologies (such as the Kyoto Protocol) and CO2 reducing techno-machinery (like hybrid cars) are developed that would, so the hope goes, stop the threatening evolution and return the earth’s temperature to its benevolent earlier condition. From this perspective, sustainability is predicated upon a return, if we can, to a perceived global climatologic equilibrium situation that would permit a sustainable continuation of the present world’s way of life. So, while one sort of sustainability seems to be predicated upon feverishly developing new natures (like artificial meat, cloned stem cells, or manufactured clean water), forcing nature to act in a way we deem sustainable or socially necessary, the other type is predicated upon limiting or redressing our intervention in nature, returning it to a presumably more benign condition, so that human and non-human sustainability in the medium and long term can be assured. Despite the apparent contradictions of these two ways of ‘becoming sustainable’ (one predicated upon preserving nature’s status quo, the other predicated upon producing new natures), they share the same basic vision that techno-natural and socio-metabolic interventions are urgently needed if we wish to secure the survival of the planet and much of what it contains. But these examples also show that ‘nature’ is not always what it seems to be. Frankenstein meat, dirty water, bird - flue virus symbiosis, stem cells, fat bodies, heat waves, tsunamis, hurricanes, genetic diversity, CO2, to name just a few, are radically different things, expressing radically different natures, pushing in radically different directions, with radically different consequences and outcomes, and with radically different human/non-human connectivities. If anything, before we can even begin to unpack ‘sustainability’, the above examples certainly suggest that we urgently need to interpolate our understandings of ‘nature’, revisit what we mean by nature, and, what we assume ‘nature’ to be. Surrendering Nature – Indeterminate natures Slavoj Žižek suggests in Looking Awry that the current ecological crisis is indeed a radical condition that not only constitutes a real and present danger, but, equally importantly, “questions our most unquestionable presuppositions, the very horizon of our meaning, our everyday understanding of ‘nature’ as a regular, rhythmic process” (Zizek, (1992) 2002: 34). It raises serious questions about what were long considered self-evident certainties. He argues that this fundamental threat to our deepest convictions of what we always thought we knew for certain about nature is co-constitutive of our general unwillingness to take the ecological crisis completely serious. It is this destabilising effect that explains “the fact that the typical, predominant reaction to it still consists in a variation of the famous disavowal, “I know very well (that things are deadly serious, that what is at stake is our very survival), but just the same I don’t really believe, … and that is why I continue to act as if ecology is of no lasting consequence for my everyday life” (page 35). The same unwillingness to question our very assumptions about what nature is (and even more so what natures might ‘become’) also leads to the typical obsessive reactions of those who DO take the ecological crisis seriously. Žižek considers both the case of the environmental activist, who in his or her relentless and obsessive activism to achieve a transformation of society in more ecologically sustainable ways expresses a fear that to stop acting would lead to catastrophic consequences. In his words, obsessive acting becomes a tactic to stave off the ultimate catastrophe, i.e. “if I stop doing what I am doing, the world will come to an end in an ecological Armageddon”. Others, of course, see all manner of transcendental signs in the ‘revenge of nature’, read it as a message that signals our destructive intervention in nature and urge us to change our relationship with nature. In other words, we have to listen to nature’s call, as expressed by the pending environmental catastrophe, and respond to its message that pleas for a more benign, associational relation with nature, a post-human affective connectivity, as a cosmopolitical “partner in dialogue”. While the first attitude radically ignores the reality of possible ecological disaster, the other two, which are usually associated with actors defending ‘sustainable’ solutions for our current predicament, are equally problematic in that they both ignore, or are blind to the inseparable gap between our symbolic representation (our understanding) of Nature and the actual acting of a wide range of radically different and, often contingent, natures. In other words, there is – of necessity – an unbridgeable gap, a void, between our dominant view of Nature (as a predictable and determined set of processes that tends towards a (dynamic) equilibrium – but one that is disturbed by our human actions and can be ‘rectified’ with proper sustainable practices) and the acting of natures as an (often) unpredictable, differentiated, incoherent, open-ended, complex, chaotic (although by no means unordered or un-patterned) set of processes. The latter implies the existence not only of many natures, but, more importantly, it also assumes the possibility of all sorts of possible future natures, all manner of imaginable different human-non human assemblages and articulations, and all kinds of different possible socio-environmental becomings. The inability to take ‘natures’ seriously is dramatically illustrated by the controversy over the degree to which disturbing environmental change is actually taking place and the risks or dangers associated with it. Lomborg’s The Sceptical Environmentalist captures one side of this controversy in all its phantasmagorical perversity (Lomborg, 1998), while climate change doomsday pundits represent the other. Both sides of the debate argue from an imaginary position of the presumed existence of a dynamic balance and equilibrium, the point of ‘good’ nature, but one side claims that the world is veering off the correct path, while the other side (Lomborg and other sceptics) argues that we are still pretty much on nature’s course. With our gaze firmly fixed on capturing an imaginary ‘idealised’ Nature, the controversy further solidifies our conviction of the possibility of a harmonious, balanced, and fundamentally benign ONE Nature if we would just get our interaction with it right, an argument blindly (and stubbornly) fixed on the question of where Nature’s rightful point of benign existence resides. This futile debate, circling around an assumedly centred, known, and singular Nature, certainly permits -- in fact invites --  imagining ecological catastrophe at some distant point (global burning (or freezing) through climate change, resource depletion, death by overpopulation). Indeed, imagining catastrophe and fantasising about the final ecological Armageddon seems considerably easier for most environmentalists than envisaging relatively small changes in the socio-political and cultural-economic organisation of local and global life here and now. Or put differently, the world’s premature ending in a climatic Armageddon seems easier to imagine (and sell to the public) than a transformation of (or end to) the neo-liberal capitalist order that keeps on practicing expanding energy use and widening and deepening its ecological footprint. 

Thus the Role of the Ballot

The role of the ballot is to orient ourselves toward the aff like the analyst. This means your job is to confuse and frustrate their position via a refusal to participate in their politics. Dean 6 writes  
Žižek emphasizes that Lacan conceptualized this excessive place, this place without guarantees, in his formula for “the discourse of the analyst” (which I set out in Chapter Two). In psychoanalysis, the analyst just sits there, asking questions from time to time. She is some kind of object or cipher onto which the analysand transfers love, desire, aggression, and knowledge. The analysand, in other words, proceeds through analysis by positing the analyst as someone who knows exactly what is wrong with him and exactly what he should do to get rid of his symptom and get better. But, really, the analyst does not know. Moreover, the analyst steadfastly refuses to provide the analysand with any answers whatsoever. No ideals, no moral certainty, no goals, no choices. Nothing. This is what makes the analyst so traumatic, Žižek explains, the fact that she refuses to establish a law or set a limit, that she does not function as some kind of new master.7 Analysis is over when the analysand accepts that the analyst does not know, that there is not any secret meaning or explanation, and then takes responsibility for getting on with his life. The challenge for the analysand, then, is freedom, autonomously determining his own limits, directly assuming his own enjoyment. So, again, the position of the analyst is in this excessive place as an object through which the analysand works through the analytical process. Why is the analyst necessary in the first place? If she is not going to tell the analysand what to do, how he should be living, then why does he not save his money, skip the whole process, and figure out things for himself? There are two basic answers. First, the analysand is not self-transparent. He is a stranger to himself, a decentered agent “struggling with a foreign kernel.”8 What is more likely than self-understanding, is self-misunderstanding, that is, one’s fundamental misperception of one’s own condition. Becoming aware of this misperception, grappling with it, is the work of analysis. Accordingly, second, the analyst is that external agent or position that gives a new form to our activity. Saying things out loud, presenting them to another, and confronting them in front of this external position concretizes and arranges our thoughts and activities in a different way, a way that is more difficult to escape or avoid. The analyst then provides a form through which we acquire a perspective on and a relation to our selves. Paul’s Christian collectives and Lenin’s revolutionary Party are, for Žižek, similarly formal arrangements, forms “for a new type of knowledge linked to a collective political subject.”9 Each provides an external perspective on our activities, a way to concretize and organize our spontaneous experiences. More strongly put, a political Party is necessary precisely because politics is not given; it does not arise naturally or organically out of the multiplicity of immanent flows and affects but has to be produced, arranged, and constructed out of these flows in light of something larger. In my view, when Žižek draws on popular culture and inserts himself into this culture, he is taking the position of an object of enjoyment, an excessive object that cannot easily be recuperated or assimilated. This excessive position is that of the analyst as well as that of the Party. Reading Žižek as occupying the position of the analyst tells us that it is wrong to expect Žižek to tell us what to do, to provide an ultimate solution or direction through which to solve all the world’s problems. The analyst does not provide the analysand with ideals and goals; instead, he occupies the place of an object in relation to which we work these out for ourselves. In adopting the position of the analyst, Žižek is also practicing what he refers to as “Bartleby politics,” a politics rooted in a kind of refusal wherein the subject turns itself into a disruptive (of our peace of mind!) violently passive object who says, “I would prefer not to.”10 Thus, to my mind, becoming preoccupied with Žižek’s style is like becoming preoccupied with what one’s analyst is wearing. Why such a preoccupation? How is this preoccupation enabling us to avoid confronting the truth of our desire, our own investments in enjoyment? How is complaining that Žižek (or the analyst) will not tell us what to do a way that we avoid trying to figure this out for ourselves?11 Reading Žižek in terms of an excessive object also means seeing his position as analogous to the formal position of the Party. Here it tells us that rather than a set of answers or dictates, Žižek is providing an intervention that cuts through the multiplicity of affects and experiences in which we find ourselves and organizes them from a specific perspective. As we shall see, for Žižek, this perspective is anchored in class struggle as the fundamental antagonism rupturing and constituting the social. So again, he does not give us an answer; he does not know what we should do, but his thought provides an external point in relation to which we can organize, consider, and formalize our experiences as ideological subjects.

Extra Cards

The doctrine of continued re-engineering of nature results in more insidious destructive practices that make their impacts inevitable. Unforeseen non-linearities ensure serial policy failure and extinction. Backhaus 9 writes
Many environmental thinkers have questioned the presupposed tenets, e.g., the doctrine of linear progress, on which Gore bases his belief in the success of a scientific/technological solution to global warming and environmental problems in general. "Professional ecologists such as Frank Egler have countered that 'Nature is not only more complex than we think, it is more complex than we can think 6'". I believe that a commitment to sustainability must recognize limits to human cognition and thus must take a radically different approach. This does not mean that science and technology have reduced roles, but that their roles must be based on a new attitude of respectful humility 7. The manipulation and appropriation of nature must no longer be our technological goals. Rather, we should be modifying our own societal/cultural forms, which include science and technology, to live in greater harmony within the context of natural conditions and agencies. Sciences and technologies that apprehend those conditions can serve to help us become much more respectful of natural conditions. Neither science nor technology needs to challenge natural processes; it rather needs to challenge us to live more responsibly. The chauvinist worldview with its doctrine of reactive reparation when it comes to environmental degradation, no longer can be promoted as a viable behavioral process. We can no longer appropriate nature and then deal with the so called "unintended side-effects"—a dealing that amounts to a continual re-engineering of nature, which leads to consequences that dangerously exceed our powers of forecasting. But a new pro-activity conducive to sustainability should be more focused on changing our relation to nature, not so much on changing nature. Gore's critical analysis merely focuses on wiser uses of technology; he does not call into question radically enough the doctrine of forcing nature to serve us and does not clearly advocate a science and technology that serves nature as first priority. This can be accomplished only by fundamental transformations in human interpretative praxes. In practical language the transformation advocated here means that we dramatically minimize our ecological footprints, which entails new geo- economic/political/social spatial productions, concerning which science and technology play a vital role. Cultural transformation for sustainability requires a new epistemological basis that recognizes the ontological structure of sustainable ecology as having priority over human intentions such that we eliminate certain of our expressivities and objectivations, rather than continuing with the manipulation of nature to accommodate our intentions— a move away from anthropocentric hegemony to a model of human contextualization that leads away from a worldview that presupposes the culture/nature dualism. Bio-regionalists have called for new and radical political changes such as the re-construction of political boundaries to be correlative with biospheric boundaries so that the political domain becomes interfused with the natural domain in an organic development pattern 8. Forms of human life then are organized in context with natural ecologies—an interrelation for mutual benefit. This ecological rootedness to a place, to its place-character or genius loci as the key to ecological bounded praxes, must be accomplished without the fascist tendencies of race/nation imperialisms of the past, which are avoidable through the political tactics of decentralization and networking and the value of diversity within local-bounds. Gore champions the democratic process but really offers no proposals that would restructure political bodies in a way that would support the implementation of sustainability. A society that culturally and politically does not attune its practices to place-bound ecologies and their interrelations does not merit the accolade of supporting sustainability. As I will show, to call into question the geography of automobility requires thinking about how the task to de-structure automobility might show us how to re-structure life toward the goal of sustainability. There is still another point germane to the issue of automobility which shows the non-viability of Gore's shallow ecology. Peak oil theorists are issuing very serious warnings concerning non-renewable energy consumption 9. Hypothetically, if we could immediately solve the global warming (climate change) problem in Gore's shallow, technological sense, then we would nevertheless still be in the most utterly grave circumstances concerning energy. Even if it were possible to solve the problem of global warming with the use of alternative energy sources, there still would remain an energy crisis both in terms of shortages and implementations that carry many unwanted so-called side-effects. A policy of sustainability would entail tackling the energy crisis directly, not because of its link to the global warming problem; sustainability entails more dramatic measures, necessary curbs on modern excesses promoted by neo-liberal economic globalization and the social structures that it constructs, concerning which Gore's sanguine liberal-based ideology is not prepared to face. My fundamental criticism, however, is that Gore sees global warming as the problem rather than as a symptom of a much deeper flaw/problematic in culture, and this delimits his thinking to remain within a shallow ecological viewpoint, foiling an analysis that would develop toward a viable sustainability. His focus on global warming limits his solution to the environmental crisis to a shallow technological fix. Sure he advocates a change in forms of life, but these are merely a function of, or the requirement for, the implementation of technologies that will save us and the planet. In this way his thinking remains within the modern scientistic attitude that in a deep or foundational sense has led to the predicament in which we find ourselves 10. The efforts to dominate nature, dominations implemented through modern technological praxes, have led to drastic changes to the planet as a whole in an extremely short time. We now see that those changes, based on considering our needs only (the mentality of natural resources to be ordered about on our terms), are destroying the life of, and on, the planet. 

Warming crisis discourse trades off with solving other environmental crises by circumscribing the frame of environmental policy
Crist 7 writes
While the dangers of climate change are real, I argue that there are even greater dangers in representing it as the most urgent problem we face. Framing climate change in such a manner deserves to be challenged for two reasons: it encourages the restriction of proposed solutions to the technical realm, by powerfully insinuating that the needed approaches are those that directly address the problem; and it detracts attention from the planet’s ecological predicament as a whole, by virtue of claiming the limelight for the one issue that trumps all others. Identifying climate change as the biggest threat to civilization, and ushering it into center stage as the highest priority problem, has bolstered the proliferation of technical proposals that address the specific challenge. The race is on for figuring out what technologies, or portfolio thereof, will solve “the problem.” Whether the call is for reviving nuclear power, boosting the installation of wind turbines, using a variety of renewable energy sources, increasing the efficiency of fossil-fuel use, developing carbon-sequestering technologies, or placing mirrors in space to deflect the sun’s rays, the narrow character of such proposals is evident: confront the problem of greenhouse gas emissions by technologically phasing them out, superseding them, capturing them, or mitigating their heating effects. In his The Revenge of Gaia, for example, Lovelock briefly mentions the need to face climate change by “changing our whole style of living.”?6 But the thrust of this work, what readers and policy-makers come away with, is his repeated and strident call for investing in nuclear energy as, in his words, “the one lifeline we can use immediately.”?7 In the policy realm, the first step toward the technological fix for global warming is often identified with implementing the Kyoto protocol. Biologist Tim Flannery agitates for the treaty, comparing the need for its successful endorsement to that of the Montreal protocol that phased out the ozone-depleting CFCs. “The Montreal protocol,” he submits, “marks a signal moment in human societal development, representing the first ever victory by humanity over a global pollution problem.”?8 He hopes for a similar victory for the global climate-change problem. Yet the deepening realization of the threat of climate change, virtually in the wake of stratospheric ozone depletion, also suggests that dealing with global problems treaty-by-treaty is no solution to the planet’s predicament. Just as the risks of unanticipated ozone depletion have been followed by the dangers of a long underappreciated climate crisis, so it would be naïve not to anticipate another (perhaps even entirely unforeseeable) catastrophe arising after the (hoped-for) resolution of the above two. Furthermore, if greenhouse gases were restricted successfully by means of technological shifts and innovations, the root cause of the ecological crisis as a whole would remain unaddressed. The destructive patterns of production, trade, extraction, land-use, waste proliferation, and consumption, coupled with population growth, would go unchallenged, continuing to run down the integrity, beauty, and biological richness of the Earth. Industrial-consumer civilization has entrenched a form of life that admits virtually no limits to its expansiveness within, and perceived entitlement to, the entire planet.?9 But questioning this civilization is by and large sidestepped in climate-change discourse, with its single-minded quest for a global-warming techno-fix.20 Instead of confronting the forms of social organization that are causing the climate crisis—among numerous other catastrophes—climate-change literature often focuses on how global warming is endangering the culprit, and agonizes over what technological means can save it from impending tipping points.2? The dominant frame of climate change funnels cognitive and pragmatic work toward specifically addressing global warming, while muting a host of equally monumental issues. Climate change looms so huge on the environmental and political agenda today that it has contributed to downplaying other facets of the ecological crisis: mass extinction of species, the devastation of the oceans by industrial fishing, continued old-growth deforestation, topsoil lossesand desertification, endocrine disruption, incessant development, and so on, are made to appear secondary  and more forgiving by comparison with “dangerous anthropogenic interference” with the climate system. In what follows, I will focus specifically on how climate-change discourse encourages the continued marginalization of the biodiversity crisis—a crisis that has been soberly described as a holocaust,22 and which despite decades of scientific and environmentalist pleas remains a virtual non-topic in society, the mass media, and humanistic and other academic literatures. Several works on climate change (though by no means all) extensively examine the consequences of global warming for biodiversity, 23 but rarely is it mentioned that biodepletion predates dangerous greenhouse-gas buildup by decades, centuries, or longer, and will not be stopped by a technological resolution of global warming. Climate change is poised to exacerbate species and ecosystem losses—indeed, is doing so already. But while technologically preempting the worst of climate change may temporarily avert some of those losses, such a resolution of the climate quandary will not put an end to—will barely address—the ongoing destruction of life on Earth. 

  Joseph, MPhil, Psychoanalytic Studies, Sheffield University, UK, MA, Psychoanalytic Studies, Sheffield University, UK BSc, Psychology and Neuroscience, Manchester University, UK, Chartered Psychologist (CPsychol) of the British Psychological Society (BPS), and a member of several other professional organizations such as the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society, Psychoanalysis and Ecology at the Edge of Chaos p 27 *gender mod
  Joseph, MPhil, Psychoanalytic Studies, Sheffield University, UK, MA, Psychoanalytic Studies, Sheffield University, UK BSc, Psychology and Neuroscience, Manchester University, UK, Chartered Psychologist (CPsychol) of the British Psychological Society (BPS), and a member of several other professional organizations such as the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society, Psychoanalysis and Ecology at the Edge of Chaos p 70  *gender mod
  Joseph, MPhil, Psychoanalytic Studies, Sheffield University, UK, MA, Psychoanalytic Studies, Sheffield University, UK BSc, Psychology and Neuroscience, Manchester University, UK, Chartered Psychologist (CPsychol) of the British Psychological Society (BPS), and a member of several other professional organizations such as the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society, Psychoanalysis and Ecology at the Edge of Chaos p 198  *gender mod
  Erik, Dept of Geography, School of Environment and Development, Manchester University “Impossible “Sustainability” and the Post-Political Condition,”  Forthcoming in: David Gibbs and Rob Krueger (Eds.) Sustainable Development, http://www.liv.ac.uk/geography/seminars/Sustainabilitypaper.doc
  Jodi, Prof of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, 2006, Zizek’s Politics.  Xviii-xx
  Gary Backhaus 9 Phil @ Loyola Maryland, "Automobility: Global Warming as Symptomatology" April 2009, www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/1/2/187
  Eileen, Assistant Professor at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Winter, “Beyond the Climate Crisis: A Critique of Climate Change Discourse,” Telos 141, Winter 2007, www.sts.vt.edu/faculty/crist/Beyond_the_Climate_Crisis.pdf

Tournament: cps | Round: 2 | Opponent: fer | Judge: rewr
A is the link - Environmentally friendly regulations are a trap – they are just a guise for manipulation and open the door for politics that pretend to solve problems Driessen 1 

However, the real root of the environmental problem is far different from what activists allege. The awkward truth is that corporate social responsibility doctrines - as currently defined, interpreted and applied by activist stakeholders, regulators, courts, foundations, and international bodies - create significant problems. And not just for corporations. Families, communities, and nations, especially in the Third World, are is particularly hard-hit. In too many instances, it is the activists who insist on defining "society's expectation," the "well-being of society," and what it is that must be "given back" to society. Year after year, the demands ratchet upward. And year after year, and instead of challenging the activists and their doctrines, many companies attempt to "go along to get along," assuming they can simply pass on to consumers and taxpayers the costs of kowtowing to radicals. As the economist has put it, they neglect to take issue with even the "nonsensical claims" made and against them. They "fall all over themselves to compete for an ethical oscar." They lumber into the trap of implicitly agreeing with their critics "that companies are inherently immoral unless they demonstrate that they are the opposite - in effect, guilty until proven innocent. In short they attempt to play the CSR game so as to placate their implacable foes, forgetting Winston Churchill's famous admonition: "An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last." Competing for top honours on various social responsibility honour rolls, continues The Economist, "may keep activists off a company's back," at least for a time. "But although sucking up to politically correct lobbyists might seem a small price to pay to keep them quiet, in reality it can reinforce the conviction that companies have a case to answer - escalating criticism, and perhaps helping to create a climate in which heavy regulation becomes politically acceptable.

Indeed, these activists groups are protected from the watchful eye leaving the door for abuse and they are always up to no good Driessen 2

Certain activist groups in particular have become amazingly ingenious in promoting their agenda, by cloaking them in the mantle of "the public interest" or "social responsibility." In doing so, many take advantage of the fact that they are not held to the same ethical standards, or covered by the same laws and regulations, that apply to for-profit companies. They behave as though they should not be held accountable for breaches of trust or for the consequences of their actions because they are guardians of the public interest or are too vital to their local (or even the world) community to be “restricted” by rules that govern for-profit organizations…What all this reveals is a profound and disturbing convergence of ideology, activism, marketing, politics, and financial gain, to further radical political agendas. Indeed, a strong case can be made that this is now a constitutive feature the modus operandi for the huge multinational "ethical" investment groups, foundations, and NGOs that increasingly dominate the global political scene. Many of these pressure groups frequently work hand-in-globe with companies - condemning and shaking them down one day, then accepting secretive contributions or devising joint legislative, regulatory, and public relations strategies with them the next.

This environmentally unfriendly biotech is key to stopping starvation on Third World Nations Driessen 2

Biotech experts Gregory Conko and Dr. Henry Miller, MD are blunt in their denunciation of the EU, UN and radical green actions. This “self-serving involvement in excessive, unscientific biotechnology regulation,” they argue, “will slow agricultural research and development, promote environmental damage, and bring famine to millions in developing countries.” The UN-sponsored “biosafety protocol,” regulating the international movement of gene-spliced organisms, is based on a “bogus precautionary principle,” which falsely assumes there are risk-free alternatives, and imposes an impossible standard on innovation: guilty until proven innocent beyond a shadow of a doubt. No longer must regulators demonstrate that a new technology is likely to cause harm. Instead, the innovator must now prove the technology will not cause any harm. Worse, “regulatory bodies are free to arbitrarily require any amount and kind of testing they wish…. The biosafety protocol establishes an ill-defined global regulatory process that permits overly risk-averse, incompetent, and corrupt regulators to hide behind the precautionary principle in delaying or deferring approvals,” they charge, as in the case of a years-long moratorium on EU approvals of gene-spliced plants. The principle imposes the ideologies and unfounded phobias of affluent First World activists, to justify severe restrictions on the use of chemicals, pesticides, fossil fuels and biotechnology by Third World people who can least afford them. Opposition to biotechnology is “a northern luxury,” says Kenyan agronomist Dr. Florence Wambugu. “I appreciate ethical concerns, but anything that doesn’t help feed our children is unethical.” Greenpeace co-founder and ecologist Dr. Patrick Moore echoes her sentiments. Now an outspoken critic of the group he once led, he underscores the “huge and realistically potential benefits” that GM crops could bring “for the environment and human health and nutrition.” He calls the war on biotechnology and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) “perhaps the most classic case of misguided environmentalism” in memory…None of this is to suggest that biotechnology is a magic bullet that will transform Third World agriculture. It isn’t. However, it is a vital weapon in the war against malnutrition, starvation and disease. In conjunction with modern equipment, fertilizers and pesticides, improved transportation infrastructures, integrated crop protection programs, better training in handling chemicals and running farms as businesses, and stronger organizations that give farmers a greater voice in policy decisions – biotechnology and GM crops could play a crucial role in developing countries. In short, even if the absurd worst-case anti-biotech (or anti-pesticide) scenarios propagated by activists are accepted as valid – and even if a case can somehow be made that these technologies should not be used in the United States or Europe – developing nations should still be permitted to use them. In fact, they should be encouraged to do so. The lives of their people, and their wildlife, hang in the balance.

Biotech is especially key in the developing nations Prakash
Biotechnology holds tremendous promise for the developing world. In the words of Dr. John Wafula, the head of biotechnology research at the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (Kari): "The need for biotechnology in Africa is very clear. The use of high-yielding, disease-resistant and pest-resistant crops would have a direct bearing on improved food security, poverty alleviation and environmental conservation in Africa. " Likewise, as Nigeria's minister of agricultural and rural development Hassan Adamu recently wrote in an opinion editorial to the Washington Post: "To deny desperate, hungry people the means to control their futures by presuming to know what is best for them is not only paternalistic but morally wrong we want to have the opportunity to save the lives of millions of people and change to course of history in many nations." Failing that, Adamu warns, "The harsh reality is that, without the help of agricultural biotechnology, many will not live."

  Specific Links Page 59-60 Eco-Imperialism Green Power, Black Death By Paul Driessen 2003 http://books.google.com/books?hl=enandlr=andid=kN4ve5awCmwCandoi=fndandpg=PA7anddq=eco+imperialismandots=mQ6aU_N1PRandsig=faVopSy3Zkp5ytUB8HQi5eGeYAs#v=onepageandq=eco20imperialismandf=false
  Benefits of Biotechnology for Developing Countries By C. S. Prakash Professor, College of Agriculture Tuskegee University Tuskegee, AL 36088 (prakash@tuskegee.edu)

Tournament: Golden Desert | Round: 2 | Opponent: Chorches | Judge: Torson
The affirmative burden is to prove the resolution more likely true than false.
Truth testing is the simplest framework. Alternatives introduce vagueness which kills predictability, pre-round prep, and judging objectivity. Baldwin 09 writes
Even granting that ...  the resolution itself. 

Epistemology First: Two analytics

This means that if the if the aff doesn’t read a counter-epistemology in the 1AR you default to my epistemological perspective for the two reasons above.

First, I defend an evolutional perspective of epistemology. In other words, what we know is what has survived over the course of evolution and a perfect understanding is impossible. Ruse :
I will not go ... the production of science.
And, morality is heavily grounded in evolution. Ruse :
This is all very ... biological adaptive value.
Thus the standard is consistency with adaptive value.
Additionally prefer this standard because evolutionary psychology best explains why humans develop moral intuitions. Hales 09
There is an enormous ... range of virtues.
Contention One is that humans are invasive species and evolution has made us the ultimate resource seeker. But evolution has made us this way, so this is our adaptive value. Hopkins
Even though plant ... species on Earth.
Contention Two is that resource extraction is key to reproduction. Gorelik :
Not so obvious ... in our species.  

  Baldwin, Jason (PhD candidate in philosophy at Notre Dame). “Truth or Consequences: A Response to Nelson’s World Comparison LD Paradigm.” December 2009. https://www.nflonline.org/uploads/Rostrum/1209_021_026.pdf
  Michael Ruse, Evolutionary Naturalism, Routledge, London, 1995. SM
  Michael Ruse, University of Guelph, Ontario, “Evolutionary Ethics: A Phoenix Arisen,” Joint Publication Board of Zygon, 1986. SM
  Steven D. Hales (Department of Philosophy, Bloomsburg University). “Moral relativism and evolutionary psychology.” Synthese, volume 66, number 2, 2009. Pp. 431-448. http://departments.bloomu.edu/philosophy/pages/content/hales/articlepdf/moralrelativism.pdf
  Humans: Earth’s Most Invasive Species  Ruth Hopkins8/14/11 Indian country

  Gregory Gorelik Florida Atlantic University  Todd K. Shackelford and Viviana A. Weekes-Shackelford Oakland University

Tournament: Meadows | Round: 4 | Opponent: Aananndnd | Judge:
Part 1 is the Functional Ought Framework: Anscombe  defines the functional ought
The terms “should” ... be required by law.

analytics about purpose of cjs

Part 2 is that normativity doesn't exist

1. It is subjective Leeuwnea  et al

Based on the ... Moral Foundations Theory.

This takes out the AC framework as well. The rational agents would have their moral decision making skills altered according to the pathogens in their area so there is no objective right or wrong – all we have is the function of something.

2. Morality cannot fit within a modern, scientific picture of the world. Even if morality did exist, we would have no reliable faculty to know about it. J. L. Mackie 

Even more important, ... is compelled to resort.

Part 3 is the reason to vote negative under the functional ought interp

Tattrie  explains the attorney’s purpose

A lawyer is a ... every available legal defense.

ACP preserves necessary info to attorney’s Chud 

Although one generally... the attorney-client privilege. 

Further, attorneys wouldn’t look for all evidence because of a risk of it being incriminating not fulfilling his fundamental obligation Walfish 

Another response to ... tell half-truths to the court.

  Modern Moral Philosophy.” G. E. M. Anscombe. Originally published in Philosophy 33, No. 124 (January 1958). http://www.philosophy.uncc.edu/mleldrid/cmt/mmp.html.
  2011 Regional Variation in Pathogen Prevalence Predicts Endorsement of Group-Focused Moral Concerns Florian van Leeuwena,*, Justin H. Parka , Bryan L. Koenigb,c, Jesse Grahamd aUniversity of Bristol b Institute of High Performance Computing A*STAR, Singapore cNational University of Singapore University of Southern California
  J. L. Mackie, “The Subjectivity of Values,” Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977)
  What does a lawyer do? By Jon Tattrie Career Bear
  Chud, Adam M. "In Defense of the Government Attorney-Client Privilege," 84 Cornell L. Rev. 1682, p. 1689-90. 1999.
  Daniel Walfish, Law Clerk for Southern District of NY, "Making Lawyers Responsible for the Truth," 35 Seton Hall L. Rev. 613, p. 624-5, 2005.
  Other Voices: It's time to let tribes manage their own lands December 29, 2012 Rapid City Jounral
  Other Voices: It's time to let tribes manage their own lands December 29, 2012 Rapid City Jounral
  Despite Mutations, Chernobyl Wildlife Is Thriving Kate Ravilious for National Geographic News April 26, 2006

Tournament: Meadows | Round: 8 | Opponent: dun remember | Judge: someone
First, For the state to be a legitimate power structure, it must allow for the communicative action of it’s citizens. Flynn : 

Habermas argues that... moment they disperse’.

This means it comes logically prior to the AC framework – there is no such thinking as the CJS if it doesn't allow for communicative action because it gets its meaning from communication.

Second, Denying the right to communicate is a performative contradiction. Hoppe :

Let me start with ... person who would try to dispute the property right in one's own body would become caught up in a contradiction.

This comes logically prior to the AC because morality is a guide to action but if it prescribes contradictory action we would be at a loss as to what we should do.

Thus, the standard is maintaining a free system of communication. 

I contend that the truth seeking to breach attorney-client privilege does not maintain a free system of communication. Garman 

Where legal advice... being fully informed by the client.’ ” Fischel and Kahn, 189 Ill. 2d at 585 (quoting Upjohn Co. v. United States, 449 U.S. 383, 389 (1981)). 

  Communicative Power in Habermas’s Theory of Democracy Jeffrey Flynn Middlebury College, Vermont
  From the Economics of Laissez Faire to The Ethics of Libertarianism, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, in Man, Economy, and Liberty: Essays in Honor of Murray N. Rothbard, The Ludwig von Mises Institute Auburn University
  JUSTICE GARMAN delivered the judgment of the court, with opinion. 2012 IL 113107 IN THE SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS

Tournament: Alta | Round: 6 | Opponent: idk | Judge: idk
Part 1 is the Links – Absolute truth is a lie.

(a) The aff’s ethical prescriptions are meaningless fantasies constructed in a world of the non-existent self. The idea that we are rational beings who are the masters of truth is the point where the ego becomes egotistical – moral norms are a ruse for narcissism, making ethics self-defeating since we lack genuine concern for others. Gamel  01
In his paper “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” published in his book Écrits, Jacques Lacan attempts to understand the experience of an infant looking in the mirror and how it relates to the child’s concepts of “self,” moving, as Dr. Tamise van Pelt, retired professor of English from Idaho State University, says, in “a development sequence through a mirror ‘stage’ into a symbolic order …” (van Pelt).  Lacan believes that the experience is helpful in understanding more specifically the construction of self, which Lacan refers to as “I.”  Because of this, he also believes that it completely invalidates the Descartian concept of cogito ergo sum, the belief that the ability to think proves and, by derivation, forms a unified self (1285).  According to John Zuern, associate professor of English at the University of Hawaii, in Lacan’s view, “any self-knowledge is to some degree an illusion” (“Lacan”). Lacan was fascinated by how young children between the ages of six and 18 months engage in a kind of self-discovery play by looking in a mirror.  He gives an archetypal example of a child in a walker to help him (and the child is always “him”) learn to walk, which also restrains the child’s movements and holds him upright, giving him the best possible view of the mirror.  The child notices his movements in the mirror, and in so doing, realizes that he is seeing a reflection of himself.  As a result, he forms his first impressions of himself, both in terms of his appearance and his physically mastery over the world around him.  Lacan calls this stage of child development the “Mirror Stage” (1285). Lacan believes that this stage is a part of a machine-like process of our psychological growth that reinforces his belief in “paranoiac knowledge” (1286), which is to say that he believes the formation of self that we experience while looking in a mirror is part of our drive to make sense of our world, creating a rational view of the world which, in Lacan’s opinion, isn’t so easily ordered. For Lacan, when we look in the mirror, we “assume an image” – namely, a way of picturing ourselves (1286).  Yet, because we have not yet learned language or learned to take on the images that the rest of society has for us, it is the very first such image that we take on and is a unique experience.  All other self-images occur after we have learned language and started interacting with others, and so all other self-images are constructs of the other. The I that we are experiencing, because it is untainted, is, Lacan believes, what Freud would call the “Ideal-I” (or “Ideal-Ich” or “Ideal-Ego”) (1286).  But because this I is formed in a mirror, it is a fantasy, an unreal image that only seems real.  As Dr. Allen Thiher, Professor of French Literature at the University of Wisconsin, explains, “the ego exists for us only in the illusory identifications the imaginary offers, while our ‘authentic being’ is found in the absent world of signifiers, constituted by the Other, over which we have no control.  In a sense we live in fictions …” (Thiher).  The result is that, as we strive for paranoiac knowledge, for completion of our self-image, we have partially constructed ourselves it with a fantasy and thus it will always remain a fantasy.  The irony of human development, then, is that we will forever remain broken, be unable to fulfill our desire for rational order. The case is further compounded by the fact that our self-image is one of incompletion, thanks to the fact that we see ourselves in the mirror and attempt to move, but our movements are awkward, jerky, and untrained.  This, Lacan believes, is a result of “specific prematurity of birth” (1288).  While other animals are born and can walk and run within hours, humans must be carefully tended by their parents for years, thus showing that when we come from the womb we are not fully developed as other animals are and, thus, are premature.  Since we’re already forming ideas of self while in this premature stage, we must also adopt our awkwardness into our I.  Lacan believes this is the source of dreams involving such things as “disjointed limbs” and “growing wings,” the idea that our own body is in some way broken or “fragmented” (1288).  The I, however, is represented in dreams by images of strength and security and, at the same time, images of waste (1288).  This, he believes, shows that while our I always seeks paranoiac knowledge, it also knows that this perfect self is a future possibility, and not the present reality, which is imperfect. Zuern says that this understanding of the mirror stage gives us a way to diagnose patients, as the moment of moving out of the mirror stage, which involves the taking on of external images (the “social I”) onto what had previously been an entirely self-formed I (the “specular I”) (“Lacan”).  After this point, Lacan says, thus the human desire is no longer for things of the self, but for input from other people (1289).  We further begin to take on the social norms that make requirements against our desires, thus creating danger for ourselves (1289).  Zuern says that the classic example of this, and the one Lacan uses, is the Oedipal Complex, for the general social norm that creates “the prohibition of incest …” (“Lacan”).  Lacan says that understanding this problem for the I helps us to understand the power struggle between the “libido and the sexual libido” (1289) which means, basically, our attempts to grow and improve versus our desires toward self-gratification.  Even things such as “Samaritan” ideals, which appear altruistic, are not.  Zuern says these acts help create a “gratifying vision of ourselves, for example, as saintly, self-sacrificing people” (“Lacan”).  This concept is very similar to the Nietzschean belief that altruism is merely a disguise for an attempt to gain power over others, although Lacan would instead see this as a response to the influence of others.  Taking on such images from others causes “a speaking subject” to be “decentered from an ideal ego whose unattainable image of perfection the child narcissistically wishes to find reflected by others, especially the mother” (van Pelt). The entire problem creates an existential image – that we are identified by otherness and not self.  Because of this, it’s easy to fall into what Lacan sees as the trap of existentialist philosophy.  However, according to Zuern, this creates the problem that the consciousness must be “self-aware,” but Zuern also says that Lacan does not believe in self-awareness; instead, the I is formed from “méconnaissances” – misunderstandings that cause us to have an image of ourselves that is an illusion, and that we do not really know the real us because of this illusion. (“Lacan”).   

(b) The aff’s attempt to create a harmonious criminal justice system which gives out punishment perfectly necessitates the exclusion and alienation of those who don’t conform, meaning our “knowledge” of the world is just an imposition Stavrakakis  1
Mac Arthur, Odum and Clements,  Scientists like Isaac Newton, ‘had tried to make nature into a single, coherent picture where all the pieces fitted firmly together’. All of them tried to reduce the disorderliness or the unknown qualities of nature to a single all-encompassing metaphysical idea (Worster, 1994:400). Even conceptions of nature stressing the element of conflict, such as the Darwinian one, sometimes feel the need to subject this non-perfect image to some discernible goal of nature (for example the ‘constantly increasing diversity of organic types in one area’—Worster, 1994:161) which introduces a certain harmony through the back door. What constantly emerges from this exposition is that when harmony is not present it has to be somehow introduced in order for our reality to be coherent. It has to be introduced through a fantasmatic social construction. 19 One should not get the impression though that this is a mere philosophical discussion. In so far as our constructions of reality influence our behaviour—and this is what they basically do—thus our fixation on harmony has direct social and political consequences. Reality construction does not take place on a superstructural level. Reality is forced to conform to our constructions of it not only at the spiritual or the intellectual, but also at and the material level. But why does it have to be forced to conform? This is due, for instance, to the gap between our harmonious fantasmatic constructions of nature and nature itself, between reality and the real. Our constructions of reality are so strong that nature has to conform to them and not they to nature; reality is conceived as mastering the real. But there is always a certain leftover, a disturbing element destabilising our constructions of nature. This has to be stigmatised, made into a scapegoat and exterminated. The more beatific and harmonious is a social fantasy the more this repressed destabilising element will be excluded from its symbolisation—without, however, ever disappearing. In this regard, a vignette from the history of nature conservation can be revealing. As is well known nature conservation was developed first in the United States; what is not so well known is that ‘a major feature of the crusade for resource conservation was a deliberate campaign to destroy wild animals—one of the most efficient, well-organized, and well-financed such efforts in all of man’s history’ (Worster, 1994:261). All this, although not solely attributable to it, was part of a ‘progressive’ moralistic ideology which conceived of nature together with society as harbouring ruthless exploiters and criminals who should be banished from the land (Worster, 1994:265). The driving force behind this enterprise was clearly a particular ethically distinctive construction of nature articulated within the framework of a conservation ideology. According to this construction what ‘was’ had to conform to what ‘should be’ and what ‘should be’, that is to say nature without vermin (coyotes and other wild predators), was accepted as more natural—more harmonious—than what ‘was’: ‘These conservationists were dedicated to reorganizing the natural economy in a way that would fulfil their own ideal vision of what nature should be like’ (Worster, 1994:266). This construction was accepted by the Roosevelt administration in the USA (1901-9) and led to the formation of an official programme to exterminate vermin. The job was given to a government agency, the Bureau of the Biological Survey (BBS) in the Department of Agriculture, and a ruthless war started (in 1907 alone, 1,700 wolves and 23,000 coyotes were killed in the National Parks and this policy continued and expanded for years) (Worster, 1994:263). What is this dialectic between the beatific fantasy of nature and the demonised vermin doing if not illustrating the Lacanian dialectic between the two sides of fantasy or between fantasy and symptom? Since we will explore the first of these two Lacanian approaches to fantasy in Chapter 4, we will concentrate here on the fantasy/symptom axis. 20 As far as the promise of filling the lack in the Other is concerned, fantasy can be better understood in its relation to the Lacanian conception of the symptom; according to one possible reading, fantasy and symptom are two inter-implicated terms. It is the symptom that interrupts the consistency of the field of our constructions of reality, of the object of identification, by embodying the repressed jouissance, the destabilising part of nature excluded from its harmonious symbolisation. The symptom here is a real kernel of enjoyment; it is the repressed jouissance that returns and does not ever ‘stop in imposing itself on us’ (Soler, 1991:214). If fantasy is ‘the support that gives consistency to what we call reality’ (Žižek, 1989:49) on the other hand reality is always a symptom (Žižek, 1992). Here we are insisting on the late Lacanian conception of the symptom as sinthome. In this conception, a signifier is married to jouissance, a signifier is instituted in the real, outside the signifying chain but at the same time internal to it. This paradoxical role of the symptom can help us understand the paradoxical role of fantasy. Fantasy gives discourse its consistency because it opposes the symptom (Ragland-Sullivan, 1991:16). Hence, if the symptom is an encounter with the real, with a traumatic point that resists symbolisation, and if the discursive has to arrest the real and repress jouissance in order to produce reality, then the negation of the real within fantasy can only be thought in terms of opposing, of stigmatising the symptom. This is then the relation between symptom and fantasy. The self-consistency of a symbolic construction of reality depends on the harmony instituted by fantasy. This fantasmatic harmony can only be sustained by the neutralisation of the symptom and of the real, by a negation of the generalised lack that crosses the field of the social. But how is this done? If social fantasy produces the self-consistency of a certain construction it can do so only by presenting the symptom as ‘an alien, disturbing intrusion, and not as the point of eruption of the otherwise hidden truth of the existing social order’ (Žižek, 1991a:40). The social fantasy of a harmonious social or natural order can only be sustained if all the persisting disorders can be attributed to an alien intruder. To return to our example, the illusory character of our harmonious construction of nature is shown in the fact that there is a part of the real which escapes its schema and assumes a symptomatic form (vermin, etc.); in order for this fantasy to remain coherent, this real symptom has to be stigmatised and eliminated. It cannot be accepted as the excluded truth of nature; such a recognition would lead to a dislocation of the fantasy in question. When, however, the dependence of fantasy on the symptom is revealed, then the play—the relation—between the symptom and fantasy reveals itself as another mode of the play between the real and the symbolic/imaginary nexus producing reality. 

Part 2 is the Impact – This lie creates a vision of utopia which leads to more violence.

The aff pursuit of perfect politics and governance is delusional, because others control the vision of the system, I.E. if it’s “perfect”. The reality is that this pursuit just gives us a way to eliminate one who deviates from the order we try to create. Indeed, utopia has violence built into its foundation Stavrakakis  2

Our age is clearly an age of social fragmentation, and political disenchantment and open cynicism characterised by the decline of the political mutations of modern universalism—a universalism that, by replacing God with Reason, reoccupied the ground of a pre-modern aspiration to fully represent and master the essence and the totality of the real. On the political level this universalist fantasy took the form of a series of utopian constructions of a reconciled future society. The fragmentation of our present social terrain and cultural milieu entails the collapse of such grandiose fantasies.1 Today, talk about utopia is usually characterized by a certain ambiguity. For some, of course, utopian constructions are still seen as positive results of human creativity in the socio- political sphere: ‘utopia is the expression of a desire for a better way of being’ (Levitas, 1990:8). Other, more suspicious views, such as the one expressed in Marie Berneri’s book Journey through Utopia, warn—taking into account experiences like the Second World War— remind us of the dangers entailed in trusting the idea of a perfect, ordered and regimented world. For some, instead of being ‘how can we realise our utopias?’, the crucial question has become ‘how can we prevent their final realisation?.... How can we return to a non-utopian society, less perfect and more free’ (Berdiaev in Berneri, 1971:309).2 It is particularly the political experience of these last decades that led to the dislocation of utopian sensibilities and brought to the fore a novel appreciation of human finitude, together with a growing suspicion of all grandiose political projects and the meta-narratives traditionally associated with them (Whitebook, 1995:75). All these developments, that is to say the crisis of the utopian imaginary, seem however to leave politics without its prime motivating force: the politics of today is a politics of aporia. In our current political terrain, hope seems to be replaced by pessimism or even resignation. This is a result of the crisis in the dominant modality of our political imagination (meaning utopianism in its various forms) and of our inability to resolve this crisis in a productive way.3 In this chapter, I will try to show that Lacanian theory provides new angles through which we can reflect on our historical experience of utopia and reorient our political imagination beyond its suffocating strait-jacket. Let’s start our exploration with the most elementary of questions: what is the meaning of the current crisis of utopia? And is this crisis a development to be regretted or cherished? In order to answer these questions it is crucial to enumerate the conditions of possibility and the basic characteristics of utopian thinking. First of all it seems that the need for utopian meaning arises in periods of increased uncertainty, social instability and conflict, when the element of the political subverts the fantasmatic stability of our political reality. Utopias are generated by the surfacing of grave antagonisms and dislocations in the social field. As Tillich has put it ‘all utopias strive to negate the negative...in human existence; it is the negative in that existence which makes the idea of utopia necessary’ (Tillich in Levitas, 1990:103). Utopia then is one of the possible responses to the ever-present negativity, to the real antagonism which is constitutive of human experience. Furthermore, from the time of More’s Utopia (1516) it is conceived as an answer to the negativity inherent in concrete political antagonism. What is, however, the exact nature of this response? Utopias and are images of future human communities in which these antagonisms and the dislocations fuelling them (the element of the political) will be forever resolved, leading to a reconciled and harmonious world—it is not a coincidence that, among others, Fourier names his utopian community ‘Harmony’ and that the name of the Owenite utopian community in the New World was ‘New Harmony’. As Marin has put it, utopia sets in view an imaginary resolution to social contradiction; it is a simulacrum of  it is a synthesis which dissimulates social antagonism by projects it onto a screen representing a harmonious and immobile equilibrium (Marin, 1984:61). This final resolution is the essence of the utopian promise. What I will try to do in this chapter is, first of all, to demonstrate the deeply problematic nature of utopian politics. Simply put, my argument will be that every utopian fantasy construction needs a ‘scapegoat’ in order to constitute itself—the Nazi utopian fantasy and the production of the ‘Jew’ is a good example, especially as pointed out in Žižek’s analysis.4 Every utopian fantasy produces its reverse and calls for its elimination. Put another way, the beatific side of utopian fantasy is coupled with in utopian constructions with a horrific side, a paranoid need for a stigmatised scapegoat. The naivety—and also the danger—of utopian structures is revealed when the realisation of this fantasy is attempted. It is then that we are brought close to the frightening kernel of the real: stigmatisation is followed by extermination. This is not an accident. It is inscribed in the structure of utopian constructions; it seems to be the way all fantasy constructions work. If in almost all utopian visions, violence and antagonism are eliminated, if utopia is based on the expulsion and repression of violence (this is its beatific side) this is only because it owes its own creation to violence; it is sustained and fed by violence (this is its horrific side). This repressed moment of violence resurfaces, as Marin points out, in the difference inscribed in the name utopia itself(Marin, 1984:110). What we shall argue is that it also resurfaces in the production of the figure of an enemy. To use a phrase enunciated by the utopianist Fourier, what is ‘driven out through the door comes back through the window’ (is not this a ‘precursor’ of Lacan’s dictum that ‘what is foreclosed in the symbolic reappears in the real’?—VII:131).5 The work of Norman Cohn and other historians permits the articulation of a genealogy of this manichean, equivalential way of understanding the world, from the great witch-hunt up to modern anti-Semitism, and Lacanian theory can provide valuable insights into any attempt to understand the logic behind this utopian operation—here the approach to fantasy developed in Chapter 2 will further demonstrate its potential in analysing our political experience. In fact, from the time of his unpublished seminar on The Formations of the Unconscious, Lacan identified the utopian dream of a perfectly functioning society as a highly problematic area (seminar of 18 June 1958).

Part 3 is the Alternative and Framework – We should reject truth as an absolute reality and question the framework for policy making

The alt is to orient the political toward embracing what Lacan calls the "Lack", recognizing that satisfying some objective conception of Being is impossible. Rational mastery is a myth, so attempting to create utopia by infusing their ethical prescriptions with the state is meaningless. This is a prerequisite for alternative sites of political decision-making. Psychoanalytic political theory is an essential starting point, so the question of the kritik should be prioritized over the advocacy of the affirmative. Stavrakakis  3
According to my reading, Bellamy, Butler and Lane are questioning the value of recognising the effects and the structural causality of the real in society; instead of the political they prioritise politics, in fact traditional fantasmatic politics. This seems to be the kernel of their argument: Even if this move is possible— encircling the unavoidable political modality of the real—is it really desirable, is it ethically and politically satisfactory? The fear behind all these statements is common; it is that the stress on the political qua encounter with the real that precludes the possibility of presenting a more or less stable (present or future) ground for ethics and democracy, that it undermines their universal character and the possibility of any final reconciliation at either the subjective or the social level. Frosh is summarising this fear à propos of the issue of human rights: ‘if humanism is a fraud as Lacan insists and there is no fundamental human entity that is to be valued in each person an essence of the psyche maybe?, one is left with no way of defending the “basic rights” of the individual’ (Frosh, 1987:137). In the two final chapters of this book I shall argue that the reason behind all these fears is the continuing hegemony of an ethics of harmony. Against such a position the ethics of the real entails a recognition of the irreducibility of the real and an attempt to institutionalize social lack. Thus it is might be possible to achieve an ethically and politically satisfactory institution of the social field beyond the fantasy of closure which has proved so problematic, if not catastrophic. In other words, the best way to organise the social might be is one which recognises the ultimate impossibility around which it is always structured. What could be some of the parameters of this new organisation of the social in our late modern terrain? Ulrich Beck’s theory seems to be relevant in this respect. According to our reading of Beck’s schema, contemporary societies are faced with the return of uncertainty, a return of the repressed without doubt, and the inability of mastering the totality of the real. We are forced thus to recognise the ambiguity of our experience and to articulate an auto-critical position towards our ability to master the real. It is now revealed that although repressing doubt and uncertainty can provide a temporary safety of meaning, it is nevertheless a dangerous strategy, a strategy that depends on a fantasmatic illusion. This realisation, contrary to any nihilistic reaction, is nothing but the starting point for a new form of society which is emerging around us, together of course with the reactionary attempts to reinstate an ageing modernity: 96 ENCIRCLING THE POLITICAL Perhaps the decline of the lodestars of primary Enlightenment, the individual, identity, truth, reality, science, technology, and so on, and is the prerequisite for the start of an alternative Enlightenment, one which does not fear doubt, but instead makes it the element of its life and survival. (Beck, 1997:161) Is it not striking that Lacanian theory stands at the forefront of the struggle to make us change our minds about all these grandiose fantasies? Beck argues that such an openness towards doubt can be learned from Socrates, Montaigne, and others; it might be possible to add Lacan to this list. In other words, doubt, which threatens our false certainties, can become the nodal point for another modernity that will respect the right to err. Scepticism contrary to a widespread error, makes everything possible again: questions and dialogue of course, as well as faith, science, knowledge, criticism, morality, society, only differently...things unsuspected and incongruous, with the tolerance based and rooted in the ultimate certainty of error. (Beck, 1997:163) In that sense, what is at stake in our current theoretico-political terrain is not the central categories or projects of modernity per se (the idea of critique, science, democracy, etc.), but their ontological status, their foundation. The crisis of their current foundations, weakens their absolutist character and creates the opportunity to ground them in much more appropriate foundations (Laclau, 1988a). Doubts liberate; they make things possible. First of all and create the possibility of a new vision for society. An anti- utopian vision founded on the principle ‘Dubio ergo sum’ (Beck, 1997:162) closer to the subversive doubtfulness of Montaigne than to the deceptive scepticism of Descartes. Although Lacan thought that in Montaigne scepticism had not acquired the form of an ethic, he nevertheless pointed out that Montaigne is truly the one who has centred himself, not around scepticism but around the living moment of the aphanisis of the subject. And it is in this that he is fruitful, that he is an eternal guide, who goes beyond whatever may be represented of the moment to be defined as a historical turning-point. (XI:223–4) This is a standpoint which is both critical and self-critical: there is no foundation ‘of such a scope and elasticity for a critical theory of society 97 ENCIRCLING THE POLITICAL (which would then automatically be a self-critical theory) as doubt’ (Beck, 1997:173). Doubt, the invigorating champagne of thinking, points to a new modernity ‘more modern than the old, industrial modernity that we know. The latter after all, is based on certainty, on repelling and suppressing doubt’ (ibid.: 173). Beck asks us to fight for ‘a modernity which is beginning to doubt itself, which, if things go well, will make doubt the measure and architect of its self-limitation and self-modification’ (ibid.: 163). He It asks us, to use Paul Celan’s phrase, to ‘build on inconsistencies’. This will be a modernity instituting a new politics, a politics recognising the uncertainty of the moment of the political. It will be a modernity recognising the constitutivity of the real in the social. A truly political modernity (ibid.: 5). In the next two chapters I will try to show the way in which Lacanian political theory can act as a catalyst for this change. The current crisis of utopian politics, instead of generating pessimism, can become the starting point for a renewal of democratic politics within a radically transformed ethical framework.

Part 4 is more reasons K comes first –
Recognizing the lack comes necessarily prior to the question of ethics – if we can’t have utopias then the alternative is to have ethics that realize this and discourse that confronts the real Stavrakakis  4
In Lacan’s view, ?the sphere of the good erects a strong wall across the path of our desire the first barrier that we have to deal with? (VII:230). Lacan?s central question is: what lies beyond this barrier, beyond the historical frontier of the good? This is the central question that guides the argumentation in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. What lies beyond the successive conceptions of the good, beyond the ways of traditional ethical thinking, is their ultimate failure, their inability to master the central impossibility, and the constitutive lack around which human experience is organised. In fact, this impossibility exercises a structural causality over the history of ethical thought. Its intolerable character causes the attempts of ethical thought to eliminate it. But this elimination entails the danger of turning good to evil, utopia to dystopia: ?the world of the good is historically revealed to be the world of evil?as epitomized not only by the famous reversibility of ?Kant with Sade? but also by the unending murders under the reign of the politics of happiness? (Lacoue-Labarthe, 1997:58). On the other hand, the irreducible character of  this impossibility shows the limits of all these attempts. The name of this impossibility in Lacan is, of course, the real. The real stands at the heart of the Lacanian ethics of psychoanalysis: As odd as it may seem to that superficial opinion which assures any inquiry into ethics must concern the field of the ideal, if not of the unreal, I, on the contrary, will proceed instead from the other direction by going deeply into the notion of the real. The question of ethics is instead to be articulated from the point of view of the location of man in relation to the real. (VII:11) As we have repeatedly mentioned in this book, the real here is the impossible, that is to say, impossible to represent in any imaginary way or inscribe in any symbolic system. It is the impossible jouissance?an enjoyment beyond any limit, any barrier?the link between death and the libido. It is this same Thing that escapes from the mediation of discourse; it escapes its representation and symbolisation and returns always to its place to show ethics their limits. It is the constitutivity of the real that reveals the subject as a subject of lack. It is the constitutivity of the real that creates the lack in the Other; it is the constitutivity and irreducibility of the impossible real that splits the social field. The erection of the good or the ideal of traditional ethics is aimed at mastering this structural impossibility of the real. Its failure opens the road to a different strategy, that of recognising its centrality and irreducibility. The ethics of psychoanalysis is an ethics without an ideal (Miller, 1987:9). The possibility of such a discourse is based on the psychoanalytic idea that there can be an ethically satisfactory (though not necessarily ?satisfying?) position to be achieved in encircling the real, the lack, the béance as such (Lee, 1990:98). Although the real in itself cannot be touched there are two strategies in confronting its structural causality. The first one is to defensively by-pass it?as traditional ethical discourse does?while the second is to encircle it (Lipowatz, 1995b:139). This later strategy entails a symbolic recognition of the irreducibility of the real and an attempt to institutionalise social lack. 4 This attitude is what Zizek has called the ethics of the real. The ethics of the real calls us to remember the past dislocation, the past trauma: ?All we have to do is to mark repeatedly the trauma as such, in its very ?impossibility?, in its non-integrated horror, by means of some ?empty? symbolic gesture? (Zizek, 1991b:272). Of course we cannot touch the real but we can encircle it again and again, we can touch the tombstone which just marks the site of the dead. ?i?ek calls us not to give way: We ?must preserve the traces of all historical traumas, dreams and catastrophes which the ruling ideology would prefer to obliterate?. We ourselves must become the marks of these traumas. ?Such an attitude is the only possibility for attaining a distance on the ideological present, a distance which will enable us to discern signs of the New? (?i?ek, 1991b: 273). The ethics of the real breaks the vicious cycle of traditional ?ideological? or utopian ethics. The ultimate failure of the successive conceptions of the good cannot be resolved by identifying with a new conception of the good. Our focus must be on the dislocation of these conceptions itself. This is the moment when the real (through its political modality) makes its presence felt and we have to recognise the ethical status of this presence.
And, the nature of societies means that pursuing ideals in a democracy are meaningless, rather we should be creating unity on the recognition that the world is inherently ambiguous unit Stavrakakis  5
Understanding this radical character of the democratic invention presupposes accepting the fact that ?society does not exist?, in the sense that its unity?and consequently its existence in any particular form?is not guaranteed in advance. The dislocation of traditional societies clearly shows that there is no essential organic unity that can define society once and for all. This is also shown by the historical, cultural relativity of different forms of social unity, different forms (constructions) of society. Consequently, thus any discussion on democracy cannot proceed from identifying a privileged essentialist point of reference (I.E. an ideal that would guarantee unity) to erecting it in the heart of society in order to resolve its ambiguity. Following from this, Thus democracy should not be viewed as a form of institutional arrangements that are applied in a given society in order to meet its essential needs. Modern democracies instead, they are constructed when it is realised that there are no essential needs and no unity founded on an a priori positive point of reference. The primary terrain on which democracy emerges is the terrain of social dislocation. The great innovation of democracy is that it recognises this fact and attempts to build a new sense of unity on this recognition. As Laclau and Zac have pointed out, with the emergence of democratic discourse in modernity ?what is at stake is more than mere procedures: it is the institution of signifiers of a social lack resulting from the absence of God as fullness of being? (Laclau and Zac, 1994:36). But that means that the ambiguity of democracy is not an ambiguity caused by democracy. Obviously, ambiguity and division, the dislocation of organic social unity, precede the democratic invention. Democracy does not produce the ambiguity and the lack characterising the human condition; it does not produce the irreducible division and disharmony characterising every social form. It only attempts to come to terms with them by recognising them in their irreducibility, thus producing a new post-fantasmatic form of social unity. The uniqueness of democracy will be more clearly shown in its opposition to two trends

  Summary of Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” Terry Gamel Northeastern State University Academia.edu 2001
  (Yannis, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex, Lacan and the Political, “The Lacanian Object” p.63-5)MH
  99 (Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex, pages 99-100).
  99 (Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex, pages p 96-98).
  99 (Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex, pages p 96-98).
  99 (Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex, pages p 96-98).

Tournament: VBT | Round: 6 | Opponent: TGamb | Judge: Amestoy
I negate and value morality.

Morality must be founded upon systems of respect for the other. The face to face encounter with the other is the starting point from which we derive our ethical obligations. Grob 

This face-to-face encounter is thus no cognitive event. As we have seen, I cannot know the Other as Other without diminishing his or her otherness. I can, however, encounter that Other in what Levinas terms an ethical event. Indeed, it is only with the rending of the ontological schema that ethics first becomes possible. Prior to my meeting with the Other, there is no ethics as such. Within the totality of being, I am limited in my egoist ambition only by a lack of power. The Other who meets me face-to-face challenges my very right to exercise power. In so doing, ethics is born. Cognition no longer represents the highest activity of which a human is capable; it is replaced by "revelation" of the Other as an ethical event in which, for the first time, I come to realize the arbitrariness of my egoist ambitions. The thematizing of the cognitive subject is replaced by nothing short of an act of witness on the part of a being who now becomes an ethical subject. The Other who contests me is an Other truly independent of my appropriative powers and thus one to whom I can have, for the first time, ethical obligations. As Levinas puts it, this Other is the first being whom I can wish to murder. Before the totality is rent by the manifestation of the face, there can be no will to act immorally, as there can be no will to act morally, in any ultimate sense of that word. If one begins with the "imperial I" appropriating its world, ethics as such can never be founded. The other with whom I interact is simply a datum, an aspect of my universe. Morality makes its first appearance when I confront the Other who is truly Other.

And, a proper engagement with the other must be built upon an empathetic respect for the cultural and interreligious precepts of the other. Forcing one side to accept one solution alienates people from one another. Syeed 

It is a sign of maturity and security in one’s own selfhood that allows for building empathy. Perspective taking skills are vital to that. Michelle Winner says they allow us “to interpret meaning that is critical for academic work and personal problem solving skills critical for living independently as an adult.” The success of interreligious, or intergroup, experiences hinges on the ability of those in charge to forge empathic bonds between participants – but too often the goal in such encounters is to get people to agree upon a single experience or expression. This is not perspective taking because it seeks to meld the individual identities of people into one superimposed metanarrative.  Forcing people to accept one solution will actually alienate them from each other. What if we, instead, asked people to first explore their own beliefs, traditions and perspectives and then move towards the space where they learn to hear the other? What if we gave them the chance to better understand themselves before asking them to try engaging across difference? It takes a great amount of self discipline to engage narratives that oppose one’s own. The most important skill I hope students learn in my classes is the ability to hear and honor the story of someone with whom they disagree. They need not agree or come to the same conclusion, but they do need to listen. Any useful educational experience that includes diverse perspectives must give students access to new sets of information and approaches; to new ways of thinking. This may also help them decide how they relate to their own traditions. Many people I’ve worked with tell me they have a deeper appreciation of their own histories once they’ve had the opportunity to view their beliefs from a different perspective. Fresh eyes refresh our commitments and enable us to reestablish connections both with our selves and with others. This is the challenge we all face. Do we merely hear the other stories that differ from our own? Or do we push ourselves to truly listen? To build our moral and ethical character by engaging perspectives that challenge us to a higher level of understanding of our hearts and the hearts of others?  

And, I argue that the indigenous tribes are the other. Cofán :
The otherization of indigenous peoples is not unique to Ecuador. Generalized concepts of “natives” are inextricably woven into western society’s idea of indigenous peoples. But when the “contact zone” (“social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power”) is injected with power, money, and resources, the concept of the Other becomes more subjugated.
Given this, the standard is resisting cultural imperialism. And, negate because environmental practices are culturally imperialist.
First, environmentalism is a western ideal to be imposed on native cultures by its very principles so you negate on definition. Conway :
There are also more general issues involved. environmentalism, and the ecological principles on which its values are, after all to be understood as an ethnocentric product of Western culture, or can common ground be found between even widely different cultures in the struggle to protect their environments from the newly intensified threats brought on by the expansion of global capitalismThe tendency of all sides in the debate to conduct it purely on ideological or cultural grounds raises a second basic issue. For both the contemporary West and simple indigenous societies like the Ikayapo, ecological views, values, and practices assume their cultural forms, change, and exercise their effects through social processes subject to political and economic factors. Scholarly research directed at understanding ecological notions and activist attempts to organize collaborative projects and alliances alike must take such pragmatic dynamics and interdependencies into account if misunderstandings, ineffective policies, and project failures are to be avoided.
Second, the ability to use their land and extract resources is vital to preserving indigenous culture. Mackay
For Indigenous peoples, secure and effective collective property rights are fundamental to their economic and social development, to their physical and cultural integrity, and to their livelihoods and sustenance. Secure land and resource rights are also essential for the maintenance of their worldviews and spirituality and, in short, to their very survival as viable territorial and distinct cultural collectivities … the close ties of Indigenous people with the land must be recognized and understood as the fundamental basis of their cultures, their spiritual life, their integrity, and their economic survival. For Indigenous communities, relations to the land are not merely a matter of possession and production but a material and spiritual element that they must fully enjoy, even to preserve their cultural legacy and transmit it to future generations

Finally, opposition to native hunting practices as resource extraction is based in cultural imperialism Miller  .
In  situations  like  the Makah  whaling,  however,  some  animal  rights  groups  have  tried  to  tell  indigenous  peoples  what  their  culture  should  be  and  how  to  practice  their  traditions.  These  protestors  are  trying  to  impose  their  "culture,"  a  belief  or  value  system  that  humans  should  not  kill  animals,  onto  ancient  cultures  whose  values,  customs  and  traditions  rely  on  utilizing  whales  and  other  animals.  It  appears  to be  the  height  of  ethnocentric  presumption  for  a  relatively  modern  value  system,  the  animal  rights  movement,  to  tell  the  Makah  and  other  hunting  cultures  how  they  should  live.  Some  groups  have  gone  even  farther  and  have  denigrated  the  cultural  beliefs  of  native  peoples.  Unintentionally  perhaps,  some  groups  have  resorted  to  tactics  which  could  be  defined  as  racism.427  Some  commentators  have  called  the  conduct  of  these  groups  "Cultural  Imperialism"  and  have  chastised  them  for  attacking  native  subsistence  users  and  not  working  on  the  real  problems  facing  marine  mammals  from  modern  day  commercial  activities  and  pollution.428 

  Leonard Grob, Professor of Philosophy at Farleigh Dickinson University, , Ethics After the Holocaust, p. 8-11
  Najeeba Syeed-Miller J.D. Professor of Interreligious Education at Claremont School of Thelogy. The Virtues of Engaging the Other: Perspective Taking. Sept 22, 2010.

  Nacion Cofán del Ecuador, Who Are We, http://www.cofan.org/quienes/quienes.html  Hereinafter Who We Are.
  Earth, Air, Fire, Water: Humanistic Studies of the Environment (Google eBook) Jill K. Conway, Kenneth Keniston, Leo Mar Univ of Massachusetts Press, 1999
  Indigenous Peoples’ Right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent  and the World Bank’s Extractive Industries Review   Fergus MacKay  Coordinator, Legal and Human Rights Programme Article published in Volume IV, Issue 2, Summer 2004 of
Sustainable Development Law and Policy

   Exercising Cultural Self-Determination: The Makah Indian Tribe Goes Whaling. Robert J. Miller. American Indian Law Review, Vol. 25, No. 2 (2000/2001), pp. 165-27

Tournament: Stanford | Round: 1 | Opponent: All | Judge: All
Text: Developing countries should engage in prior and binding consultation with Ashtar on whether they environmental protection should be prioritized over resource extraction when the two conflict.

It’s mutually exclusive. If we were consulting we wouldn’t be firmly determined, and “Resolved” implies a firm determination.
Random House 10 writes
Definition of re•solved (r??z?lvd)  adj. firm in purpose or intent; determined. 1490–1500 re•solv?ed•ly, adv. re•solv?ed•ness, n. 

Ashtar can solve the Aff better. Lord Ashtar 4  
I salute you in the sacred name of I AM and in representation of the Intergalactic Command!   My name is Ashtar Sheran, I am a space Commander, and I am in charge of the Star Ship.  The Ashtar Command is a branch of the Intergalactic Command with the specific mission of assisting this planet in crisis.  It is under the direct supervision, the loving care and the attention of Beloved Master Sananda (known by you as Jesus); who, among other positions, is the Supreme Commander of the Holy Alliance.   The Ashtar Command is present everywhere.  In and over the Earth’s atmosphere, there are thousands and thousands of space ships, of course, the majority at an invisible level.  Its function is to watch over the planet and its inhabitants, to be attentive to any fault or danger and if we are invoked, to intervene quickly in an impersonal manner, since our mission of Love is to help.   Due to our great scientific-technological level, we can control matter, energy, counteract and annul the Law of Gravity.  To make our ships visible (which we do now exceptionally), we retard the vibratory frequency and this makes possible densification.  We do not live in a physical body but in etheric level, but our bodies are the same as yours in form and aspect, albeit finer and subtle.  We are the authority that controls the space program to be fulfilled for the Planet Earth. 

Ashtar cannot interfere with our wishes. He will agree to the consultation.
Lord Ashtar 4 writes
We cannot interfere with your wishes. This is a planet of freedom of choice and free will. This is the kind of energy that God has allowed. We cannot step beyond the parameters, although we wish.

Consulting Ashtar solves every impact. Vrillion 77 writes
This is the voice of Vrillon, a representative of the Ashtar Galactic Command, speaking to you. For many years you have seen us as lights in the skies. We speak to you now in peace and wisdom as we have done to your brothers and sisters all over this, your planet Earth. We come to warn you of the destiny of your race and your world so that you may communicate to your fellow beings the course you must take to avoid the disaster which threatens your world, and the beings on our worlds around you. This is in order that you may share in the great awakening, as the planet passes into the New Age of Aquarius. The New Age can be a time of great peace and evolution for your race, but only if your rulers are made aware of the evil forces that can overshadow their judgments. Be still now and listen, for your chance may not come again. All your weapons of evil must be removed. The time for conflict is now past and the race of which you are a part may proceed to the higher stages of its evolution if you show yourselves worthy to do this. You have but a short time to learn to live together in peace and goodwill. Small groups all over the planet are learning this, and exist to pass on the light of the dawning New Age to you all. You are free to accept or reject their teachings, but only those who learn to live in peace will pass to the higher realms of spiritual evolution. Hear now the voice of Vrillon, a representative of the Ashtar Galactic Command, speaking to you. Be aware also that there are many false prophets and guides operating in your world. They will suck your energy from you - the energy you call money and will put it to evil ends and give you worthless dross in return. Your inner divine self will protect you from this. You must learn to be sensitive to the voice within that can tell you what is truth, and what is confusion, chaos and untruth. Learn to listen to the voice of truth which is within you and you will lead yourselves onto the path of evolution. This is our message to our dear friends. We have watched you growing for many years as you too have watched our lights in your skies. You know now that we are here, and that there are more beings on and around your Earth than your scientists admit. We are deeply concerned about you and your path towards the light and will do all we can to help you. Have no fear, seek only to know yourselves, and live in harmony with the ways of your planet Earth. We of the Ashtar Galactic Command thank you for your attention. We are now leaving the plane of your existence. May you be blessed by the supreme love and truth of the cosmos.

2

Text: Developing countries should engage in prior consultation with Earth over whether they should prioritize environmental protection over resource extraction.

It’s mutually exclusive. If we were consulting we wouldn’t be firmly determined, and “Resolved” implies a firm determination.
Random House 10 writes
Definition of re•solved (r??z?lvd)  adj. firm in purpose or intent; determined. 1490–1500 re•solv?ed•ly, adv. re•solv?ed•ness, n. 

There is a gap between knowledge of environmental harm and educational responses to the crisis. The counter-plan solves because it bridges the mind, heart, body, and spirit divide in our academic discussions.
Barrett 9 writes
This doctoral research is a deliberate response to what Berry and Tucker (2006) refer to as a “deep cultural pathology” that enables continuing devastation of the planet (p. 17). Poised at the cusp of what many call “the great turning” (e.g. Korten, 2006; Macy, 1998), it both calls for and provides beginning tools to support the ‘shifts in consciousness’ long called for by those working in the environmental field. It is a reconstructive text in that it both engages and talks about a different form of consciousness many (e.g. Stirling, 2007) claim is required to respond to the ongoing and persistent gap between what is known about anthropogenic environmental degradation, and what appears to be the limited effectiveness of educational and other responses to prompt significant or lasting change (Stevenson, 2007a, 2007b). This does not mean a rejection of Western scientific or rational conceptual knowing, but rather a creation of more opportunities for both/and texts: research texts which demand different forms of consciousness from both 'writer' and 'reader,' and texts that enable 'reading' and researching through an integrated mind, heart, body and spirit. Paraphrasing the oft-cited quotation from Einstein, we cannot solve the human-created environmental and social problems with the same kind of thinking, (and I would add, consciousness, and knowledge-making processes) which created them. The dissertation emerged as an effect of my own de-colonizing journey as an academic working in the field of education where most conversations are based on assumptions of reality as material or discursively produced. It is also contextualized within continued and increasing calls for different ways of thinking (e.g. Stirling, 2007; Hart, 2005; Haraway, 2004a), a different paradigm (e.g. Capra, 1982), and different languages through which to conceptualize and engage with the more-than-human (Abram, 1996; Cole, 2002; Dunlop, 2002; Haraway, 2004b; Harvey, 2006a, 2006b). Yet to engage in such difference, as Harvey (2006b) suggests, may require “a reconfiguration of academic protocols" (p. 9). It may also involve a reconsideration of who we can be as individuals, and academics (see Dillard, 20006a, 2006b).

The aff’s current communication scholarship assumes the dominant narrative of reasons, further separating us from nature. The method of the counter-plan solves extinction.
Plumwood 2 writes
The ecological crisis requires from us a new kind of culture because a major factor in its development has been the rationalist culture and the associated human/nature dualism characteristic of the west. Human/nature dualism, as I argued in Feminism and the Mastery of Nature , is a system of ideas that takes a radically separated reason to be the essential characteristic of humans and situates human life outside and above an inferiorised and manipulable nature. Rationalism and human/nature dualism are linked through the narrative which maps the supremacy of reason onto human supremacy via the identification of humanity with active mind and reason and of non-humans with passive, tradeable bodies. We should not mistake rationalism for reason – rather it is a cult of reason that elevates to extreme supremacy a particular narrow form of reason and correspondingly devalues the contrasted and reduced sphere of nature and embodiment. Feminist thinker Elizabeth Gross puts her finger on the basic denial mechanism involved in the irrationality of rationalist forms of reason when she writes that the crisis of reason ‘is a consequence of the historical privileging of the purely conceptual or mental over the corporeal; that is, it is a consequence of the inability of western knowledges to conceive their own processes of (material) production, processes that simultaneously rely on and disavow the role of the body’. 1 The ecological crisis can be thought of as involving a centric and self-enclosed form of reason that simultaneously relies on and disavows its material base, as ‘externality’, and a similar failure of the rationalised world it has made to acknowledge and to adapt itself adequately to its larger ‘body’, the material and ecological support base it draws on in the long-denied counter-sphere of ‘nature’. Rationalism and human/nature dualism have helped create ideals of culture and human identity that promote human distance from, control of and ruthlessness towards the sphere of nature as the Other, while minimising non-human claims to the earth and to elements of mind, reason and ethical consideration. Its monological logic leads to denials of dependency on the Other in the name of an hyperbolised autonomy, and to relationships that cannot be sustained in real world contexts of radical dependency on the Other. That the Other is an independent being on whom one is dependent is the child’s first and hardest lesson, even before the lesson that the nurturing Other must in turn be nurtured. It is a lesson that some children never properly learn, and neither do some cultures of denial. Rationalist culture has distorted many spheres of human life; its remaking is a major but essential cultural enterprise. The old reason-centred culture of the west which has allowed the ecological crisis to deepen to the current dangerous point may at one time have facilitated the dominant culture’s comparative advantage over and conquest of other more modest and ecologically-adapted cultures on this planet. This is speculation, but what is not speculation is that in an era when we are reaching the biophysical limits of the planet, this reason-centred culture has become a liability to survival. Its ‘success-making’ characteristics, including its ruthlessness in dealing with the sphere it counts as ‘nature’, have allowed it to dominate both non-human nature and other peoples and cultures. But these characteristics, and the resulting successes in commodifying the world (or producing ‘cargo’), are only too clearly related to our longer-term ecological and ethical failures. We must change this culture or face extinction. The ecological crisis we face then is both a crisis of the dominant culture and a crisis of reason, or rather, a crisis of the culture of reason or of what the dominant global culture has made of reason. Some might be tempted to suggest that reason is an experiment on the part of evolution, and that its hubris and inability to acknowledge its own dependency on the ecological order show that reason itself is ultimately a hazard to survival. But we would not need to deliver the sweeping and pessimistic judgement that reason itself is dysfunctional if we recognised reason as plural, and understood its political character as part of its social context. It is not reason itself that is the problem, I believe, but rather arrogant and insensitive forms of it that have evolved in the framework of rationalism and its dominant narrative of reason’s mastery of the opposing sphere of nature and disengagement from nature’s contaminating elements of emotion, attachment and embodiment. Increasingly these forms of reason treat the material and ecological world as dispensable. The revision of our concepts of rationality to make them more ecologically aware and accountable is one of the main themes of this book. Reason has been made a vehicle for domination and death; it can and must become a vehicle for liberation and life. 

?
3

Santa is a key customer of coal. He buys it from mining companies.
Lam 12 writes
Depending on who you ask, the first thing that often occurs to a person when the subject of coal is brought up is the Industrial Revolution, or perhaps what Santa Claus leaves for naughty boys and girls. Either way, the popular perception of coal is that it’s a backward energy source consigned to the days of steam locomotives and sooty London factories. But the commodity remains a key component of electricity generation and a useful economic indicator because of its role in steel manufacturing. “It’s not on my top list of indicators, but it is a very important indicator for the steel industry and as an alternate source of energy,” said Marco Lettieri, an economist at National Bank Financial. “It can also be used as a relative indicator for historical ratios between energy prices.” Coal has a long and colourful history, but these days it is primarily used for two purposes and primarily sold through contracts between coal mining companies and their customers. 

Coal is uniquely key to Santa’s punishment of bad kids.
Soniak 12 writes
Obviously, because they’ve been naughty, and not nice. But why coal, specifically? The tradition of giving misbehaving children lumps of fossil fuel predates the Santa we know, and is also associated with St. Nicholas, Sinterklaas and Italy’s la Befana. Nothing that I can find in the legends or history about any of these figures gives a concrete reason for doling out coal, but the common thread between all of them seems to be convenience. Santa and la Befana both get into people’s homes via the fireplace chimney and leave gifts in stockings hung from the mantel. Sinterklaas’ assistant, Black Pete, also comes down the chimney and places gifts in shoes left out near the fireplace. St. Nick used to come in the window, and then switched to the chimney when they became common in Europe. Like Sinterklaas, his presents are traditionally slipped into shoes sitting by the fire. So, let’s step into the speculation zone. All these characters are tied to the fireplace. When filling the stockings or the shoes, the holiday gift givers sometimes run into a kid who doesn’t deserve a present. So to send a message and encourage better behavior next year, they leave something less desirable than the usual toys/money/candy. It seems to me that the fireplace makes an easy and obvious source of non-presents. All they would need to do is reach down into it and grab a lump of coal. (While many people think of fireplaces burning wood logs, coal-fired ones were very common during the 19th and early 20th centuries, the same time that the American Santa mythos was being established.) That said, none of these characters, except Santa, limit themselves to coal when it comes to bad kids. They’ve also been said to leave bundles of twigs, bags of salt, garlic and onions, which suggests that they’re less reluctant than Claus to haul their bad kid gifts around all night in addition to the good presents. You guys got any other ideas? 

Santa exists and is key to morality.
Landley 7 writes   
Yes, Santa's an omniscient enforcer of morality. He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake, he knows if you've been bad or good... Although he's more a positive reinforcement type rather than fire or brimstone, so he'll just give you coal in your stocking if you've been bad rather than condemning you to eternal fiery torment. And when you're a kid there's plenty of evidence for Santa. You see Santa in the mall, in the thanksgiving parade, on television and in movies. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. The history goes back hundreds of years, and you even get real presents, under your tree, showing up on Christmas morning saying they come from Santa! The whole society, from major institutions to your own parents, conspires to perpetuate the Santa Mythos. Everywhere you turn, people tell you about Santa! And how good he is, and generous, and kind. Your classmates may doubt, but they have no _proof_ he doesn't exist, and if you don't believe will you still get the presents? The reindeer have names!
Case

AT Aff Speaking

You have no right to speak. You have failed to investigate the topic adequately.
Tse Tung 30 writes  
Unless you have investigated a problem, you will be deprived of the right to speak on it. Isn't that too harsh? Not in the least. When you have not probed into a problem, into the present facts and its past history, and know nothing of its essentials, whatever you say about it will undoubtedly be nonsense. Talking nonsense solves no problems, as everyone knows, so why is it unjust to deprive you of the right to speak? Quite a few comrades always keep their eyes shut and talk nonsense, and for a Communist that is disgraceful. How can a Communist keep his eyes shut and talk nonsense?   It won' t do!  It won't do!  You must investigate!  You must not talk nonsense! You can't solve a problem? Well, get down and investigate the present facts and its past history! When you have investigated the problem thoroughly, you will know how to solve it. Conclusions invariably come after investigation, and not before. Only a blockhead cudgels his brains on his own, or together with a group, to "find solution" or "evolve an idea" without making any investigation. It must be stressed that this cannot possibly lead to any effective solution or any good idea. In other words, he is bound to arrive at a wrong solution and a wrong idea.

  Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary. “Resolved.” 2010. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/resolved
  August 19, 2004, “Our Fleets Are In Position, Ready Yourselves” Brother Veritus, http://www.luisprada.com/Protected/ashtar_command_mission.htm
  August 19, 2004, “Our Fleets Are In Position, Ready Yourselves” Brother Veritus, http://www.luisprada.com/Protected/ashtar_command_mission.htm
  Radio Transcript. Abovetopsecret.com. 1977. http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread416209/pg1
  Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary. “Resolved.” 2010. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/resolved
  M.J. Barrett. Taking Representation Seriously: Epistemological and Ontological Congruence in Hypertexual Research/Representation. Beyond Human-Nautre-Spirit Boundaries: Research with Animate EARTH.
  Val Plumwood. Environmental Culture: The Ecological crisis of reason. Routlege: New York. 2002.
  Eric Lam (“reporter with the Financial Post covering stories in investing, economics, personal finance, small business, and everything in between. Still hasn't lost his sense of optimism, but is working on it.
Eric also writes the weekly Tool Kit investing series helping investors find "tools" that would fit in their investing "kit." Funny how that works, with the title there and everything.”). “Put a few lumps of coal into your portfolio.” Financial Post. May 24th, 2012. http://business.financialpost.com/2012/05/24/put-a-few-lumps-of-coal-into-your-portfolio/?__lsa=f1c4-66a4
  Matt Soniak (“long-time mental_floss regular and writes about science, history, etymology and Bruce Springsteen for both the website and the print magazine. His work has also appeared in print and online for Men’s Health, Scientific American, The Atlantic, Philly.com and others. He tweets as @mattsoniak and blogs about animal behavior at mattsoniak.com. He lives in Philadelphia with his girlfriend, two cats and a large collection of bourbon whiskeys”). “Why Does Santa Give Coal to Bad Kids?” Mental_Floss. December 14th, 2012. http://mentalfloss.com/article/31910/why-does-santa-give-coal-bad-kids
  Rob Lanley 12/23/07 “Which religion is Santa Clause the god of” http://landley.livejournal.com/39925.html
  Mao Tse-tung (Chairman of the Communist party of China 1943–1974, Revolutionary). “Oppose Book Worship.” May 1930. http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-6/mswv6_11.htm

Tournament: Meadows | Round: 1 | Opponent: peopel | Judge: people
First, Since humans are cooperative beings, human society inevitably collapses without a system of desert Rachels 

First, acknowledging deserts ... they might receive.

This is logically prior to the AC framework because the existence of a functioning human society is a prerequisite to the development of moral norms.

Second, It is unfair to expect victims of criminal aggression to bear the cost of their victimization. Bedau and Kelly:
We can begin with... harmful acts as crimes.

Third, Punishment is necessary to enforce the law-the alternative is to allow citizens to be randomly mugged and ax-murdered. Bedau and Kelly  2:
Even in a just ... to criminal sanctions for certain law violations.

This effect is empirically proved. Fehr and Fischbacher  describe a study that looked at:
Fehr and Gachter studied.... Redrawn from 23 with permission.
 

C1 is disclosure

ACP preserves necessary info to attorney’s this is key to ensuring an effective pursuit of truth. This means that I co-opt all AC offense stemming from the pursuit of truth. Regardless of the AC implication that truth pursuit and ACP are mutually exclusive, ACP controls the internal link to fairness pursuit. Chud 

Although one generally ... attorney-client privilege. 

Absent ACP, clients would not disclose all details about the case to their attorneys meaning it’s more likely that innocents are prosecuted because they don't have access to all of the info.

Further, attorneys wouldn’t look for all evidence because of a risk of it being incriminating not fulfilling their fundamental obligation Walfish
Another response to ...half-truths to the court.

  James Rachels “Punishment and Desert” Ethics in Practice (Oxford: 1997) pp. 470-479 http://www.jamesrachels.org/punanddes.pdf
  Bedau, Hugo Adam and Kelly, Erin, "Punishment", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2010/entries/punishment/.
  Bedau, Hugo Adam and Kelly, Erin, "Punishment", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2010 Edition), xEdward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2010/entries/punishment/.

  Ernest Fehr and Urs Fischbacher (University of Zurich, Institute for Empirical Research in Economics) “Social norms and human cooperation,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol 8 No 4 April 2004, accessed via Elsevier

  Chud, Adam M. "In Defense of the Government Attorney-Client Privilege," 84 Cornell L. Rev. 1682, p. 1689-90. 1999.
  Daniel Walfish, Law Clerk for Southern District of NY, "Making Lawyers Responsible for the Truth," 35 Seton Hall L. Rev. 613, p. 624-5, 2005.
  Evaluating the Veil Michael Meadon School of Philosophy and Ethics University of KwaZulu-Natal Durban, 4041

Tournament: Meadows | Round: 1 | Opponent: peopel | Judge: people
First, Since humans are cooperative beings, human society inevitably collapses without a system of desert Rachels 

First, acknowledging deserts ... they might receive.

This is logically prior to the AC framework because the existence of a functioning human society is a prerequisite to the development of moral norms.

Second, It is unfair to expect victims of criminal aggression to bear the cost of their victimization. Bedau and Kelly:
We can begin with... harmful acts as crimes.

Third, Punishment is necessary to enforce the law-the alternative is to allow citizens to be randomly mugged and ax-murdered. Bedau and Kelly  2:
Even in a just ... to criminal sanctions for certain law violations.

This effect is empirically proved. Fehr and Fischbacher  describe a study that looked at:
Fehr and Gachter studied.... Redrawn from 23 with permission.
 

C1 is disclosure

ACP preserves necessary info to attorney’s this is key to ensuring an effective pursuit of truth. This means that I co-opt all AC offense stemming from the pursuit of truth. Regardless of the AC implication that truth pursuit and ACP are mutually exclusive, ACP controls the internal link to fairness pursuit. Chud 

Although one generally ... attorney-client privilege. 

Absent ACP, clients would not disclose all details about the case to their attorneys meaning it’s more likely that innocents are prosecuted because they don't have access to all of the info.

Further, attorneys wouldn’t look for all evidence because of a risk of it being incriminating not fulfilling their fundamental obligation Walfish
Another response to ...half-truths to the court.

  James Rachels “Punishment and Desert” Ethics in Practice (Oxford: 1997) pp. 470-479 http://www.jamesrachels.org/punanddes.pdf
  Bedau, Hugo Adam and Kelly, Erin, "Punishment", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2010/entries/punishment/.
  Bedau, Hugo Adam and Kelly, Erin, "Punishment", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2010 Edition), xEdward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2010/entries/punishment/.

  Ernest Fehr and Urs Fischbacher (University of Zurich, Institute for Empirical Research in Economics) “Social norms and human cooperation,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol 8 No 4 April 2004, accessed via Elsevier

  Chud, Adam M. "In Defense of the Government Attorney-Client Privilege," 84 Cornell L. Rev. 1682, p. 1689-90. 1999.
  Daniel Walfish, Law Clerk for Southern District of NY, "Making Lawyers Responsible for the Truth," 35 Seton Hall L. Rev. 613, p. 624-5, 2005.
  Evaluating the Veil Michael Meadon School of Philosophy and Ethics University of KwaZulu-Natal Durban, 4041

Tournament: Glenbrook | Round: 5 | Opponent: all | Judge: all
A is the interpretation – Debaters must disclose all case arguments read, that cited a different source for argumentation, on the NDCA wiki with first three and last three words of the card and the tag that were read at a tournament before the Glenbrook on the national forensics league November/December 2013 topic in LD debate before the start of the Glenbrook tournament. 

C is the standards

Argument integrity
2. Clash and Argument Quality

D voter - Fairness and Education

Drop the debater