ASU RaCh Cards CEDA Round 41NC1A. Our interpretation is that the affirmative should have to instrumentally defend the institutional implementation of a topical plan.Most predictablethe agent and verb indicate a debate about hypothetical government actionJon M Ericson 3, Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts California Polytechnic U., et al., The Debaters Guide, Third Edition, p. 4The Proposition of Policy: Urging Future Action In policy propositions, each topic contains certain key elements, although they have slightly different functions from comparable elements of value-oriented propositions. 1. An agent doing the acting ---The United States in The United States should adopt a policy of free trade. Like the object of evaluation in a proposition of value, the agent is the subject of the sentence. 2. The verb shouldthe first part of a verb phrase that urges action. 3. An action verb to follow should in the should-verb combination. For example, should adopt here means to put a program or policy into action through governmental means. 4. A specification of directions or a limitation of the action desired. The phrase free trade, for example, gives direction and limits to the topic, which would, for example, eliminate consideration of increasing tariffs, discussing diplomatic recognition, or discussing interstate commerce. Propositions of policy deal with future action. Nothing has yet occurred. The entire debate is about whether something ought to occur. What you agree to do, then, when you accept the affirmative side in such a debate is to offer sufficient and compelling reasons for an audience to perform the future action that you propose. Legalize is to make an illegal act lawful Blacks Law Dictionary 95 What is LEGALIZE? [http://thelawdictionary.org/legalize/] To make legal or lawful; to confirm or validate what was before void or unlawful; to add the sanction and authority of law to that which before was without or against law.B. Violation the aff doesnt defend a topical plan. C. Reasons to Prefer1. Vote neg on presumption because they have not offered a reason why you should accept some parametric of the topic. 2. Topical fairness requirements are key to effective dialoguemonopolizing strategy and prep makes the discussion one-sided and subverts any meaningful neg roleGalloway 7Samford Comm prof (Ryan, Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, Vol. 28, 2007)Debate as a dialogue sets an argumentative table, where all parties receive a relatively fair opportunity to voice their position. Anything that fails to allow participants to have their position articulated denies one side of the argumentative table a fair hearing. The affirmative side is set by the topic and fairness requirements. While affirmative teams have recently resisted affirming the topic, in fact, the topic selection process is rigorous, taking the relative ground of each topic as its central point of departure. Setting the affirmative reciprocally sets the negative. The negative crafts approaches to the topic consistent with affirmative demands. The negative crafts disadvantages, counter-plans, and critical arguments premised on the arguments that the topic allows for the affirmative team. According to fairness norms, each side sits at a relatively balanced argumentative table.s When one side takes more than its share, competitive equity suffers. However, it also undermines the respect due to the other involved in the dialogue. When one side excludes the other, it fundamentally denies the personhood of the other participant (Ehninger, 1970, p. 110). A pedagogy of debate as dialogue takes this respect as a fundamental component. A desire to be fair is a fundamental condition of a dialogue that takes the form of a demand for equality of voice. Far from being a banal request for links to a disadvantage, fairness is a demand for respect, a demand to be heard, a demand that a voice backed by literally months upon months of preparation, research, and critical thinking not be silenced. Affirmative cases that suspend basic fairness norms operate to exclude particular negative strategies. Unprepared, one side comes to the argumentative table unable to meaningfully participate in a dialogue. They are unable to understand what went on and are left to the whims of time and power (Farrell, 1985, p. 114). Hugh Duncan furthers this line of reasoning: Opponents not only tolerate but honor and respect each other because in doing so they enhance their own chances of thinking better and reaching sound decisions. Opposition is necessary because it sharpens thought in action. We assume that argument, discussion, and talk, among free an informed people who subordinate decisions of any kind, because it is only through such discussion that we reach agreement which binds us to a common causeIf we are to be equalrelationships among equals must find expression in many formal and informal institutions (Duncan, 1993, p. 196-197). Debate compensates for the exigencies of the world by offering a framework that maintains equality for the sake of the conversation (Farrell, 1985, p. 114). For example, an affirmative case on the 2007-2008 college topic might defend neither state nor international action in the Middle East, and yet claim to be germane to the topic in some way. The case essentially denies the arguments that state action is oppressive or that actions in the international arena are philosophically or pragmatically suspect. Instead of allowing for the dialogue to be modified by the interchange of the affirmative case and the negative response, the affirmative subverts any meaningful role to the negative team, preventing them from offering effective counter-word and undermining the value of a meaningful exchange of speech acts. Germaneness and other substitutes for topical action do not accrue the dialogical benefits of topical advocacy.3. Policy debate is good for education, engagement, and empathy. Clear rules, a stable topic, institutional role-playing and simulation are integral to the process. Lantis 8 (Jeffrey S. Lantis is Professor in the Department of Political Science and Chair of the International Relations Program at The College of Wooster, The State of the Active Teaching and Learning Literature, http://www.isacompss.com/info/samples/thestateoftheactiveteachingandlearningliterature_sample.pdf)Simulations, games, and role-play represent a third important set of active teaching and learning approaches. Educational objectives include deepening conceptual understandings of a particular phenomenon, sets of interactions, or socio-political processes by using student interaction to bring abstract concepts to life. They provide students with a real or imaginary environment within which to act out a given situation (Crookall 1995; Kaarbo and Lantis 1997; Kaufman 1998; Jefferson 1999; Flynn 2000; Newmann and Twigg 2000; Thomas 2002; Shellman and Turan 2003; Hobbs and Moreno 2004; Wheeler 2006; Kanner 2007; Raymond and Sorensen 2008). The aim is to enable students to actively experience, rather than read or hear about, the constraints and motivations for action (or inaction) experienced by real players (Smith and Boyer 1996:691), or to think about what they might do in a particular situation that the instructor has dramatized for them. As Sutcliffe (2002:3) emphasizes, Remote theoretical concepts can be given life by placing them in a situation with which students are familiar. Such exercises capitalize on the strengths of active learning techniques: creating memorable experiential learning events that tap into multiple senses and emotions by utilizing visual and verbal stimuli. Early examples of simulations scholarship include works by Harold Guetzkow and colleagues, who created the Inter-Nation Simulation (INS) in the 1950s. This work sparked wider interest in political simulations as teaching and research tools. By the 1980s, scholars had accumulated a number of sophisticated simulations of international politics, with names like Crisis, Grand Strategy, ICONS, and SALT III. More recent literature on simulations stresses opportunities to reflect dynamics faced in the real world by individual decision makers, by small groups like the US National Security Council, or even global summits organized around international issues, and provides for a focus on contemporary global problems (Lantis et al. 2000; Boyer 2000). Some of the most popular simulations involve modeling international organizations, in particular United Nations and European Union simulations (Van Dyke et al. 2000; McIntosh 2001; Dunn 2002; Zeff 2003; Switky 2004; Chasek 2005). Simulations may be employed in one class meeting, through one week, or even over an entire semester. Alternatively, they may be designed to take place outside of the classroom in local, national, or international competitions. The scholarship on the use of games in international studies sets these approaches apart slightly from simulations. For example, Van Ments (1989:14) argues that games are structured systems of competitive play with specific defined endpoints or solutions that incorporate the material to be learnt. They are similar to simulations, but contain specific structures or rules that dictate what it means to win the simulated interactions. Games place the participants in positions to make choices that 10 affect outcomes, but do not require that they take on the persona of a real world actor. Examples range from interactive prisoner dilemma exercises to the use of board games in international studies classes (Hart and Simon 1988; Marks 1998; Brauer and Delemeester 2001; Ender 2004; Asal 2005; Ehrhardt 2008) A final subset of this type of approach is the role-play. Like simulations, roleplay places students within a structured environment and asks them to take on a specific role. Role-plays differ from simulations in that rather than having their actions prescribed by a set of well-defined preferences or objectives, role-plays provide more leeway for students to think about how they might act when placed in the position of their slightly less well-defined persona (Sutcliffe 2002). Role-play allows students to create their own interpretation of the roles because of role-plays less goal oriented focus. The primary aim of the role-play is to dramatize for the students the relative positions of the actors involved and/or the challenges facing them (Andrianoff and Levine 2002). This dramatization can be very simple (such as roleplaying a two-person conversation) or complex (such as role-playing numerous actors interconnected within a network). The reality of the scenario and its proximity to a students personal experience is also flexible. While few examples of effective roleplay that are clearly distinguished from simulations or games have been published, some recent work has laid out some very useful role-play exercises with clear procedures for use in the international studies classroom (Syler et al. 1997; Alden 1999; Johnston 2003; Krain and Shadle 2006; Williams 2006; Belloni 2008). Taken as a whole, the applications and procedures for simulations, games, and role-play are well detailed in the active teaching and learning literature. Experts recommend a set of core considerations that should be taken into account when designing effective simulations (Winham 1991; Smith and Boyer 1996; Lantis 1998; Shaw 2004; 2006; Asal and Blake 2006; Ellington et al. 2006). These include building the simulation design around specific educational objectives, carefully selecting the situation or topic to be addressed, establishing the needed roles to be played by both students and instructor, providing clear rules, specific instructions and background material, and having debriefing and assessment plans in place in advance. There are also an increasing number of simulation designs published and disseminated in the discipline, whose procedures can be adopted (or adapted for use) depending upon an instructors educational objectives (Beriker and Druckman 1996; Lantis 1996; 1998; Lowry 1999; Boyer 2000; Kille 2002; Shaw 2004; Switky and Aviles 2007; Tessman 2007; Kelle 2008). Finally, there is growing attention in this literature to assessment. Scholars have found that these methods are particularly effective in bridging the gap between academic knowledge and everyday life. Such exercises also lead to enhanced student interest in the topic, the development of empathy, and acquisition and retention of knowledge.4. Through discussing paths of government action, debate teaches us to be better organizational decision makers. Learning about the uniquely different considerations of organizations is necessary to affecting change in a world overwhelmingly dominated by institutions. Algoso 2011 Masters in Public Administration (May 31, Dave, Why I got an MPA: Because organizations matter http://findwhatworks.wordpress.com/2011/05/31/why-i-got-an-mpa-because-organizations-matter/)Because organizations matter. Forget the stories of heroic individuals written in your middle school civics textbook. Nothing of great importance is ever accomplished by a single person. Thomas Edison had lab assistants, George Washingtons army had thousands of troops, and Mother Teresas Missionaries of Charity had over a million staff and volunteers when she passed away. Even Jesus had a 12-man posse. In different ways and in vastly different contexts, these were all organizations. Pick your favorite historical figure or contemporary hero, and I can almost guarantee that their greatest successes occurred as part of an organization. Even the most charismatic, visionary and inspiring leaders have to be able to manage people, or find someone who can do it for them. International development work is no different. Regardless of your issue of interest whether private sector investment, rural development, basic health care, government capacity, girls education, or democracy promotion your work will almost always involve operating within an organization. How well or poorly that organization functions will have dramatic implications for the results of your work. A well-run organization makes better decisions about staffing and operations; learns more from its mistakes; generates resources and commitment from external stakeholders; and structures itself to better promote its goals. None of this is easy or straightforward. We screw it up fairly often. Complaints about NGO management and government bureaucracy are not new. We all recognize the need for improvement. In my mind, the greatest challenges and constraints facing international development are managerial and organizational, rather than technical. Put another way: the greatest opportunities and leverage points lie in how we run our organizations. Yet our discourse about the international development industry focuses largely on how much money donors should commit to development and what technical solutions (e.g. deworming, elections, roads, whatever) deserve the funds. We give short shrift to the questions around how organizations can actually turn those funds into the technical solutions. The closest we come is to discuss the incentives facing organizations due to donor or political requirements. I think we can go deeper in addressing the management and organizational issues mentioned above. This thinking led me to an MPA degree because it straddles that space between organizations and issues. A degree in economics or international affairs could teach you all about the problems in the world, and you may even learn how to address them. But if you dont learn how to operate in an organization, you may not be able to channel the resources needed to implement solutions. On the flip side, a typical degree in management offers relevant skills, but without the content knowledge necessary to understand the context and the issues. I think the MPA, if you choose the right program for you and use your time well, can do both.The aff cannot access this - meta-consensus is key to actualize pluralism John Dryzek 6, Professor of Social and Political Theory, The Australian National University, Reconciling Pluralism and Consensus as Political Ideals, American Journal of Political Science,Vol. 50, No. 3, July 2006, Pp. 634649Epistemic meta-consensus for its part could be desirable on the grounds of deliberative economy. That is, to the extent a set of beliefs is accepted as credible and relevant, there is an understanding of what the main issues are, and so no need to debate fundamentals each time a claim is made. A parallel with paradigms in scientific communities can be drawn here. A paradigm by definition features strong epistemic meta-consensus, releasing practitioners from the sheer amount of time and effort it takes to get beyond debating basic assumptions and first principles. Of course, nothing as strong as a paradigm will normally be available (or necessarily desirable) in a political context. Epistemic meta-consensus permits the pluralism at the simple level required for complex issues to be scrutinized from a number of directions in the search for creative solutions that respond to different facets of issues (see our earlier discussion of Poppers argument for the rationality of simple pluralism in policy making). In effect, epistemic meta-consensus creates a problem-solving public in the sense of pragmatist philosophers such as John Dewey (1927). To return to our toxic pollution example, government officials wielding epidemiological studies and local residents reporting particular experiences would not be stuck in ridiculing the methodological basis of each others claims, but instead devote energy to joint problem solving. This effort might, for example, involve deploying some version of the precautionary principle in environmental policy, which is designed to inform policy making in situations of substantial uncertainty about the content and magnitude of risks. Such an outcome would not be in any sense a mere compromise between the epistemic positions of the two sides that would involve an assessment of risks somewhere between that of the epidemiologists and local residents, but rather a wholly new way of looking at decision in the context of risk.The impact outweighsdeliberative debate models impart skills vital to respond to existential threatsChristian O. Lundberg 10 Professor of Communications @ University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Tradition of Debate in North Carolina in Navigating Opportunity: Policy Debate in the 21st Century By Allan D. Louden, p. 311The second major problem with the critique that identifies a naivety in articulating debate and democracy is that it presumes that the primary pedagogical outcome of debate is speech capacities. But the democratic capacities built by debate are not limited to speechas indicated earlier, debate builds capacity for critical thinking, analysis of public claims, informed decision making, and better public judgment. If the picture of modem political life that underwrites this critique of debate is a pessimistic view of increasingly labyrinthine and bureaucratic administrative politics, rapid scientific and technological change outpacing the capacities of the citizenry to comprehend them, and ever-expanding insular special-interest- and money-driven politics, it is a puzzling solution, at best, to argue that these conditions warrant giving up on debate. If democracy is open to rearticulation, it is open to rearticulation precisely because as the challenges of modern political life proliferate, the citizenry's capacities can change, which is one of the primary reasons that theorists of democracy such as Ocwey in The Public awl Its Problems place such a high premium on education (Dewey 1988,63, 154). Debate provides an indispensible form of education in the modem articulation of democracy because it builds precisely the skills that allow the citizenry to research and be informed about policy decisions that impact them, to sort through and evaluate the evidence for and relative merits of arguments for and against a policy in an increasingly information-rich environment, and to prioritize their time and political energies toward policies that matter the most to them. The merits of debate as a tool for building democratic capacity-building take on a special significance in the context of information literacy. John Larkin (2005, HO) argues that one of the primary failings of modern colleges and universities is that they have not changed curriculum to match with the challenges of a new information environment. This is a problem for the course of academic study in our current context, but perhaps more important, argues Larkin, for the future of a citizenry that will need to make evaluative choices against an increasingly complex and multimediated information environment (ibid-). Larkin's study tested the benefits of debate participation on information-literacy skills and concluded that in-class debate participants reported significantly higher self-efficacy ratings of their ability to navigate academic search databases and to effectively search and use other Web resources: To analyze the self-report ratings of the instructional and control group students, we first conducted a multivariate analysis of variance on all of the ratings, looking jointly at the effect of instmction/no instruction and debate topic . . . that it did not matter which topic students had been assigned . . . students in the Instnictional [debate) group were significantly more confident in their ability to access information and less likely to feel that they needed help to do so----These findings clearly indicate greater self-efficacy for online searching among students who participated in (debate).... These results constitute strong support for the effectiveness of the project on students' self-efficacy for online searching in the academic databases. There was an unintended effect, however: After doing ... the project, instructional group students also felt more confident than the other students in their ability to get good information from Yahoo and Google. It may be that the library research experience increased self-efficacy for any searching, not just in academic databases. (Larkin 2005, 144) Larkin's study substantiates Thomas Worthcn and Gaylcn Pack's (1992, 3) claim that debate in the college classroom plays a critical role in fostering the kind of problem-solving skills demanded by the increasingly rich media and information environment of modernity. Though their essay was written in 1992 on the cusp of the eventual explosion of the Internet as a medium, Worthcn and Pack's framing of the issue was prescient: the primary question facing today's student has changed from how to best research a topic to the crucial question of learning how to best evaluate which arguments to cite and rely upon from an easily accessible and veritable cornucopia of materials. There are, without a doubt, a number of important criticisms of employing debate as a model for democratic deliberation. But cumulatively, the evidence presented here warrants strong support for expanding debate practice in the classroom as a technology for enhancing democratic deliberative capacities. The unique combination of critical thinking skills, research and information processing skills, oral communication skills, and capacities for listening and thoughtful, open engagement with hotly contested issues argues for debate as a crucial component of a rich and vital democratic life. In-class debate practice both aids students in achieving the best goals of college and university education, and serves as an unmatched practice for creating thoughtful, engaged, open-minded and self-critical students who are open to the possibilities of meaningful political engagement and new articulations of democratic life. Expanding this practice is crucial, if only because the more we produce citizens that can actively and effectively engage the political process, the more likely we are to produce revisions of democratic life that are necessary if democracy is not only to survive, but to thrive. Democracy faces a myriad of challenges, including: domestic and international issues of class, gender, and racial justice; wholesale environmental destruction and the potential for rapid climate change; emerging threats to international stability in the form of terrorism, intervention and new possibilities for great power conflict; and increasing challenges of rapid globalization including an increasingly volatile global economic structure. More than any specific policy or proposal, an informed and active citizenry that deliberates with greater skill and sensitivity provides one of the best hopes for responsive and effective democratic governance, and by extension, one of the last best hopes for dealing with the existential challenges to democracy [in an] increasingly complex world. 5. Refusal to engage in institutional reform reduces inquiry to narcissism. There is a direct tradeoff with productive discussion and research.Chandler 9 (David Chandler is Professor of International Relations at the University of Westminster, Questioning Global Political Activism, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, pp. 81-2)Today more and more people are doing politics in their academic work. This is the reason for the boom in International Relations (IR) study and the attraction of other social sciences to the global sphere. I would argue that the attraction of IR for many people has not been IR theory but the desire to practise global ethics. The boom in the IR discipline has coincided with a rejection of Realist theoretical frameworks of power and interests and the sovereignty/anarchy problematic. However, I would argue that this rejection has not been a product of theoretical engagement with Realism but an ethical act of rejection of Realisms ontological focus. It seems that our ideas and our theories say much more about us than the world we live in. Normative theorists and Constructivists tend to support the global ethical turn arguing that we should not be as concerned with what is as with the potential for the emergence of a global ethical community. Constructivists, in particular, focus upon the ethical language which political elites espouse rather than the practices of power. But the most dangerous trends in the discipline today are those frameworks which have taken up Critical Theory and argue that focusing on the world as it exists is conservative problem-solving while the task for critical theorists is to focus on emancipatory alternative forms of living or of thinking about the world. Critical thought then becomes a process of wishful thinking rather than one of engagement, with its advocates arguing that we need to focus on clarifying our own ethical frameworks and biases and positionality, before thinking about or teaching on world affairs. This becomes me-search rather than research. We have moved a long way from Hedley Bulls (1995) perspective that, for academic research to be truly radical, we had to put our values to the side to follow where the question or inquiry might lead. The inward-looking and narcissistic trends in academia, where we are more concerned with our reflectivity the awareness of our own ethics and values than with engaging with the world, was brought home to me when I asked my IR students which theoretical frameworks they agreed with most. They mostly replied Critical Theory and Constructivism. This is despite the fact that the students thought that states operated on the basis of power and self-interest in a world of anarchy. Their theoretical preferences were based more on what their choices said about them as ethical individuals, than about how theory might be used to understand and engage with the world. Conclusion I have attempted to argue that there is a lot at stake in the radical understanding of engagement in global politics. Politics has become a religious activity, an activity which is no longer socially mediated; it is less and less an activity based on social engagement and the testing of ideas in public debate or in the academy. Doing politics today, whether in radical activism, government policy-making or in academia, seems to bring people into a one-to-one relationship with global issues in the same way religious people have a one-to-one relationship with their God. Politics is increasingly like religion because when we look for meaning we find it inside ourselves rather than in the external consequences of our political acts. What matters is the conviction or the act in itself: its connection to the global sphere is one that we increasingly tend to provide idealistically. Another way of expressing this limited sense of our subjectivity is in the popularity of globalisation theory the idea that instrumentality is no longer possible today because the world is such a complex and interconnected place and therefore there is no way of knowing the consequences of our actions. The more we engage in the new politics where there is an unmediated relationship between us as individuals and global issues, the less we engage instrumentally with the outside world, and the less we engage with our peers and colleagues at the level of political or intellectual debate and organisation. 6. Topic education detailed debate on government policy regarding crime is key to liberalizing the penal system the impact is sustained inequality Barker 9 Vanessa, Assistant Professor of Criminology Florida State University, The Politics of Imprisonment How the Democratic Process Shapes the Way America Punishes Offenders,pp 182-188This study has some important and potentially unpopular policy implications. First, I think the public needs to be more not less involved in crime control policy. Second, I think it is a mistake for penal policy makers to retreat behind bureaucratic insulation or expert commissions. The public is not stupid, cultural dupes, nor a uniform source of vengeance and irrationality. That relationship is dependent on specific historical conditions and political configurations, none of which are universal across the American states. Given the opportunity for deliberative discussion, ordinary people can support more rational and pragmatic responses to crime. Given the opportunity to interact with one another, debate a range of policy proposals, learn from experts, and hold state lawmakers and policy makers accountable, citizens can make informed decisions about crime control policy. Deliberative forums can promote compromise. Consider, for example, that Jason Barabas has shown how deliberative forums can alter a person's deeply held views even on such sensitive policy issues as Social Security.4 David Green found that citizens' participation led to more liberalizing views on crime and punishment and decreased their demands for vengeance and custodial sanctions.5 Likewise, Gerry Johnstone has argued that public participation can (p.182) expose more people to the negative effects of penal sanctioning and expand their views of the public interest.6 Moreover, public support is necessary for state legitimacy. Public support is especially critical in policy areas fraught with emotional and moral dilemmas. Crime and punishment raise unresolved moral questions about pain, suffering, the value of human life, the limits of freedom, justice, and the principles of safety and security in highly complex democracies that value personal liberty. How these problems are temporarily resolved depends on the nature and character of collective agency. This means that attempts to block public access to crime control policy can backfire, creating legitimacy problems for the state. Purely technocratic responses to crime, generated by bureaucratic insulation, may provoke more populist and punitive responses. The public may feel that their concerns, insecurities, and anxieties about their own safety and security are either taken for granted or deemed irrelevant by policy makers. When people feel excluded, they may withdraw their trust and confidence in government, intensifying their moral outrage and redirecting it against more vulnerable and less integrated social groups. This is what happened in California. By contrast, in Washington, state officials consistently incorporated citizen input into policy making. Washington created its Sentencing Commission through a highprofile and highly public process and included citizen representatives on the commission itself. The findings of this study are limited. It would be useful to be clear about their generalizability. The small number of cases raises doubts about whether we can extend the findings to other times and places. It is entirely possible the findings may only account for the penal regime variation in California, Washington, and New York and may not explain the full range of penal sanctioning in the United States. There is good reason, however, to think that the findings may be applicable to other cases. First, these three cases are certainly not the same thing as three observations. Comparing the policymaking process spatially and temporally in cases that represent common patterns rather than extreme cases substantially increases the number of observations and improves analytical leverage. Because the findings are grounded in empirical detail, prior research, and comparative methodology, the core theoretical framework developed here may provide some insight into other contexts within the United States and beyond. To be sure, more research is necessary to (p.183) assess these claims, but the point here is to highlight implications for future thinking about penal sanctioning. The selected cases represent major democratic traditions in the United States: populism, pragmatism, and deliberative democracy. The arguments developed here have relevance for other American states steeped in those traditions. Texas and many other western states grew up with populist politics and retributive penal policies; Pennsylvania and Illinois may provide further examples of pragmatic politics and its associated managerial penal regime; whereas Maine and Vermont may provide examples of deliberative democracy with its associated less coercive penal sanctioning. Minnesota may represent the corporatist type (illustrated in Table 6.1) with a high degree of civic engagement, high social trust, and relatively high degree of centralization and associated low imprisonment rates. States that fall along the top tier in Table 6.1 with higher rates of civic engagement tend to have less coercive penal regimes; state that fall along the bottom dimensions with lower rates of civic engagement, more social polarization, or more elite dominated politics tend to have more coercive penal regimes. To get a preliminary look at how this study might help explain differences across the fifty states, we can graph the relationship between the democratic process and penal regimes. Figure 6.1 maps the relationship between social capital (as a composite measure of social trust and civic engagement taken from Putnam) and imprisonment rates across the nation. Of course, this is only a crude illustration and reduction of a much more complicated process, but the figure provides a visual reference point to an intriguing finding. In states with a high degree of social capital, like Vermont and Minnesota, we tend to see lower rates of imprisonment. In states with low degrees of social capital, like Alabama, Texas, and Louisiana, we tend to see higher imprisonment rates. More research is needed to assess the degree to which this is a significant relationship across the states given varying degrees of crime, economic inequality, and ethnic diversity. I suspect that this relationship will be important because social trust underpins more general social processes of inclusion and exclusion. From this configuration, I suggest a further argument about the general upward trend in American punishment. Despite the important differences we continue to see across the states, the United States as a whole has increased its reliance on imprisonment. If we extend the findings from the case studies, (p.184) it may be dedemocratization, the retrenchment of American democracy, that partially accounts for high rates of imprisonment in the United States. Americans by and large have retreated into the private sphere, becoming detached from a sense of mutual obligation and civic responsibility, instead experiencing social isolation and social polarization. They have weakened the emotional and political support necessary to sustain inclusive public policies, policies that are responsive to public welfare and not just private interest. Concomitantly, they have failed to restrain the repressive powers of the state, especially as they have been directed at the most vulnerable social groupsthe poor and racial and ethnic minorities. Of course, more research is needed to confirm this claim. It is nevertheless a provocative claim worth exploring in further detail. What about the South? Some readers may argue that the South has high imprisonment rates because southern states continue to maintain racial hierarchies and rely on the criminal law to repress African Americans. The racial dynamics in the cases were much more complicated and perhaps more insidious than a strict racial social control perspective allows. This book does (p.185) not dispute the importance of race, but it tries to connect racial dynamics to the democratic process. To fully account for penal regime variation in the South, this study suggests that we trace out the effects of black incorporation and black exclusion. In the aftermath of the civil rights movement, some southern states did incorporate African Americans politically and economically, whereas others continued to resist with force. Where we see higher rates of civic engagement, white and black, we might see greater social trust across diverse social groups, increasing norms of mutual obligation and reciprocity, forces that undermine punitiveness and may support more lenient penal regimes. Southern states as a whole tend to have lower rates of civic engagement and social capital, but where we see variation, we may see variation in imprisonment rates. On a related point, we would want to further investigate the extent to which racial diversity can generate or limit social trust, especially across social groups. This study also suggests that the structure of political power plays an important role in shaping penal outcomes. It suggests that we take a look at how modes of governance facilitate the provision of public welfare or private selfinterest. In the southern states, I expect that some are more or less centralized and more or less open to public participation. Unlike the western states, the southern states, except Florida, do not allow for the initiative or direct democracy measures. But neither are the southern states especially centralized like their northeastern counterparts. At the same time, many southern states have historical roots in more feudallike political orders in which a group of power elites (landowners, planters) dominate governing, using public office for private gains rather than the general welfare. In these types of underdemocratized polities, state officials are more likely to reaffirm their political authority and legitimacy through the criminal law and penal sanctioning. Here penal sanctioning is visible, forceful, and a brutal reminder of unequal power relations. It is also one of the few policy mechanisms available to states that fail to invest in public goods and public welfare. According to this perspective, it is not all that surprising that many of these underdemocratized southern states have relatively high imprisonment rates. Most American criminological research has been focused on the United States. However, since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, many researchers have been forced to take a look at crime control, policing, and other security (p.186) concerns beyond the U.S. border. Those tragic and bloody events may spark some muchneeded comparative criminology, opening up the field to global trends, international justice, and nationspecific particularities of criminal justice. This book may provide some groundwork for future comparative research, despite its focus on American states. European governance is being transformed in real time. Governments there are facing increased immigration and ethnic diversity, rising crime, economic restructuring, and changing political borders. These postcold war developments have raised questions about the nature and character of national sovereignty and citizenship. They have raised questions about group membership and social classification, pushing nationstates into a rapid process of social incorporation and exclusion. An understanding of the criminal law and penal sanctioning will be key to explaining the remaking of European nationstates. Take the case of Sweden, for example. This is a country with one of the highest levels of social trust, intensive civic engagement, a corporatist or powersharing political structure. This is also a country with a historically lenient approach to crime and punishment. Yet it also has a long history of social engineers, a moralizing civil society, and strict prohibitions against alcohol. Sweden now has one of the largest foreignborn populations in Europe. Swedish criminologists have tied the country's zerotolerance approach to drugs to fear of outsiders, especially those coming from former Soviet satellites and the Balkans.7 Given the country's historically generous social welfare state and inclusive notions of citizenship, it is an interesting and pressing empirical question as to how or to what degree Swedes will mobilize the criminal law and penal sanctioning to resolve new questions of social order. Sweden is not alone in this dilemma. France and Germany, among many others, have experienced rapidly changing social orders, particularly the confluence of crime and immigration. France recently watched its suburbs burned by second and thirdgeneration North African immigrants frustrated by their social exclusion and conflicts over policing. France provides an interesting counterpoint to Sweden because it has a highly centralized government but weak civil society, weak ties between civil society and the state, and relatively low social trust. So far, France has responded to these changing social conditions with much more stringent police regulation and state coercion. Germany may provide another contrasting case; it has a decentralized government, much more local input, and midlevel social trust, but it has created exclusionary conditions (p.187) of citizenship, especially for its Turkish guest workers and other immigrant groups. Its period of imprisonment liberalization may be under threat. Given these historical conditions, some democracies more than others will come to rely on the criminal law and penal sanctioning to reestablish social order, redefining group membership and collective identity through coercive means. These responses most likely will be filtered and made meaningful through culturally distinct legal traditions, political institutions, and forms of collective agency as well as by global trends. By focusing on the diversity of democratic processes across Europe, researchers may be better able to explain crossnational penal regime variation.8 By focusing on the nature of collective agency and the intensity of social trust, researchers may gain some insight into the way criminal law and penal sanctioning bring societies together and tear them apart. A comparative focus on other Western democracies may also illustrate that there is nothing inevitable about democratization and punitiveness. This book has pointed to the longterm institutional and cultural differences in American democracy as the explanation for the longterm differences in American penal sanctioning. This kind of argument raises some troubling questions about the nature and possibility of change. If current patterns of punishment are inextricably tied to past policies, how can we change them? Can California become more like Washington or New York? Or vice versa? Can the United States as a whole reverse its prison boom? The response is both yes and no. From a pessimistic view, penal reformers, social activists, and state officials cannot just shake off past policies, cultural legacies, or entrenched political structures because these are overriding causal forces that continue to shape penal sanctioning today. It is difficult to undo enduring political traditions and years of harsh punishment. Even under the best conditions, reformers cannot focus exclusively on revising the criminal law, lessening or abolishing penal sanctions, because they also need to consider broader social support. In policy areas such as crime and punishmentareas that generate moral and emotional struggles about life and death, justice, and group membershippublic engagement and public support are necessary to develop and sustain legitimate public (p.188) policies. Prison populations are dependent on both immediate events like legislative reform and longterm processes like cultural values and democratic institutions. Both aspects are hard to change but necessary for meaningful reform. To reverse the U.S. case, we would need to see serious legislative activity coupled with significant increases in social trust across diverse social groups and sustained efforts at social integration, including efforts to reincorporate the most marginalized people, like exoffenders, the poor, the undereducated, and racial and ethnic minorities. On the more optimistic side, reformers can take advantage of this particular political moment, which offers a rare opportunity for change. State governments are indeed faced with tough budget choices, and many have been forced to rethink their approaches to crime control. Many state officials are coming to realize that imprisonment has tended to generate more social problems than its resolves, creating a revolving door of social exclusion that brings with it tremendous economic and social costs. Plus, crime rates are down. Reformers can try to leverage the institutional and cultural tools available at this moment and in particular places to bring about change. By being cognizant of how institutional environments frame policy debates and policy problems, reformers can better develop proposals that resonate rather than repel state officials and the public. Taking examples from the case studies, in New York reforms that highlight crime and punishment as a public health issue with pragmatic solutions may be more effective than mobilizing moral outrage. In California, reformers could channel populist fervor against the prison itself as a failed institution and graphic reminder of the excesses of state power. In Washington, reforms that come from below may be more effective than reforms from above. In other words, reformers can use the institutional environment to change existing policies. Moreover, the history of American social movements tells us that sustained collective action that is strategic and morally pressing has successfully brought about radical social change in American public life, as it could be with American penal sanctioning.7. Only debates about engaging institutions can produce social change. Disengagement from politics fractures coalitions and reinforces conservatism.Mouffe 2009 (Chantal Mouffe is Professor of Political Theory at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster, The Importance of Engaging the State, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, pp. 233-7)In both Hardt and Negri, and Virno, there is therefore emphasis upon critique as withdrawal. They all call for the development of a non-state public sphere. They call for self-organisation, experimentation, non-representative and extra-parliamentary politics. They see forms of traditional representative politics as inherently oppressive. So they do not seek to engage with them, in order to challenge them. They seek to get rid of them altogether. This disengagement is, for such influential personalities in radical politics today, the key to every political position in the world. The Multitude must recognise imperial sovereignty itself as the enemy and discover adequate means of subverting its power. Whereas in the disciplinary era I spoke about earlier, sabotage was the fundamental form of political resistance, these authors claim that, today, it should be desertion. It is indeed through desertion, through the evacuation of the places of power, that they think that battles against Empire might be won. Desertion and exodus are, for these important thinkers, a powerful form of class struggle against imperial postmodernity. According to Hardt and Negri, and Virno, radical politics in the past was dominated by the notion of the people. This was, according to them, a unity, acting with one will. And this unity is linked to the existence of the state. The Multitude, on the contrary, shuns political unity. It is not representable because it is an active self-organising agent that can never achieve the status of a juridical personage. It can never converge in a general will, because the present globalisation of capital and workers struggles will not permit this. It is anti-state and anti-popular. Hardt and Negri claim that the Multitude cannot be conceived any more in terms of a sovereign authority that is representative of the people. They therefore argue that new forms of politics, which are non-representative, are needed. They advocate a withdrawal from existing institutions. This is something which characterises much of radical politics today. The emphasis is not upon challenging the state. Radical politics today is often characterised by a mood, a sense and a feeling, that the state itself is inherently the problem. Critique as engagement I will now turn to presenting the way I envisage the form of social criticism best suited to radical politics today. I agree with Hardt and Negri that it is important to understand the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. But I consider that the dynamics of this transition is better apprehended within the framework of the approach outlined in the book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001). What I want to stress is that many factors have contributed to this transition from Fordism to post-Fordism, and that it is necessary to recognise its complex nature. My problem with Hardt and Negris view is that, by putting so much emphasis on the workers struggles, they tend to see this transition as if it was driven by one single logic: the workers resistance to the forces of capitalism in the post-Fordist era. They put too much emphasis upon immaterial labour. In their view, capitalism can only be reactive and they refuse to accept the creative role played both by capital and by labour. To put it another way, they deny the positive role of political struggle. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics we use the word hegemony to describe the way in which meaning is given to institutions or practices: for example, the way in which a given institution or practice is defined as oppressive to women, racist or environmentally destructive. We also point out that every hegemonic order is therefore susceptible to being challenged by counter-hegemonic practices feminist, anti-racist, environmentalist, for example. This is illustrated by the plethora of new social movements which presently exist in radical politics today (Christian, anti-war, counter-globalisation, Muslim, and so on). Clearly not all of these are workers struggles. In their various ways they have nevertheless attempted to influence and have influenced a new hegemonic order. This means that when we talk about the political, we do not lose sight of the ever present possibility of heterogeneity and antagonism within society. There are many different ways of being antagonistic to a dominant order in a heterogeneous society it need not only refer to the workers struggles. I submit that it is necessary to introduce this hegemonic dimension when one envisages the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. This means abandoning the view that a single logic (workers struggles) is at work in the evolution of the work process; as well as acknowledging the pro-active role played by capital. In order to do this we can find interesting insights in the work of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello who, in their book The New Spirit of Capitalism (2005), bring to light the way in which capitalists manage to use the demands for autonomy of the new movements that developed in the 1960s, harnessing them in the development of the post-Fordist networked economy and transforming them into new forms of control. They use the term artistic critique to refer to how the strategies of the counter-culture (the search for authenticity, the ideal of selfmanagement and the anti-hierarchical exigency) were used to promote the conditions required by the new mode of capitalist regulation, replacing the disciplinary framework characteristic of the Fordist period. From my point of view, what is interesting in this approach is that it shows how an important dimension of the transition from Fordism to post- Fordism involves rearticulating existing discourses and practices in new ways. It allows us to visualise the transition from Fordism to post- Fordism in terms of a hegemonic intervention. To be sure, Boltanski and Chiapello never use this vocabulary, but their analysis is a clear example of what Gramsci called hegemony through neutralisation or passive revolution. This refers to a situation where demands which challenge the hegemonic order are recuperated by the existing system, which is achieved by satisfying them in a way that neutralises their subversive potential. When we apprehend the transition from Fordism to post- Fordism within such a framework, we can understand it as a hegemonic move by capital to re-establish its leading role and restore its challenged legitimacy. We did not witness a revolution, in Marxs sense of the term. Rather, there have been many different interventions, challenging dominant hegemonic practices. It is clear that, once we envisage social reality in terms of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic practices, radical politics is not about withdrawing completely from existing institutions. Rather, we have no other choice but to engage with hegemonic practices, in order to challenge them. This is crucial; otherwise we will be faced with a chaotic situation. Moreover, if we do not engage with and challenge the existing order, if we instead choose to simply escape the state completely, we leave the door open for others to take control of systems of authority and regulation. Indeed there are many historical (and not so historical) examples of this. When the Left shows little interest, Right-wing and authoritarian groups are only too happy to take over the state. The strategy of exodus could be seen as the reformulation of the idea of communism, as it was found in Marx. There are many points in common between the two perspectives. To be sure, for Hardt and Negri it is no longer the proletariat, but the Multitude which is the privileged political subject. But in both cases the state is seen as a monolithic apparatus of domination that cannot be transformed. It has to wither away in order to leave room for a reconciled society beyond law, power and sovereignty. In reality, as Ive already noted, others are often perfectly willing to take control. If my approach supporting new social movements and counterhegemonic practices has been called post-Marxist by many, it is precisely because I have challenged the very possibility of such a reconciled society. To acknowledge the ever present possibility of antagonism to the existing order implies recognising that heterogeneity cannot be eliminated. As far as politics is concerned, this means the need to envisage it in terms of a hegemonic struggle between conflicting hegemonic projects attempting to incarnate the universal and to define the symbolic parameters of social life. A successful hegemony fixes the meaning of institutions and social practices and defines the common sense through which a given conception of reality is established. However, such a result is always contingent, precarious and susceptible to being challenged by counter-hegemonic interventions. Politics always takes place in a field criss-crossed by antagonisms. A properly political intervention is always one that engages with a certain aspect of the existing hegemony. It can never be merely oppositional or conceived as desertion, because it aims to challenge the existing order, so that it may reidentify and feel more comfortable with that order. Another important aspect of a hegemonic politics lies in establishing linkages between various demands (such as environmentalists, feminists, anti-racist groups), so as to transform them into claims that will challenge the existing structure of power relations. This is a further reason why critique involves engagement, rather than disengagement. It is clear that the different demands that exist in our societies are often in conflict with each other. This is why they need to be articulated politically, which obviously involves the creation of a collective will, a we. This, in turn, requires the determination of a them. This obvious and simple point is missed by the various advocates of the Multitude. For they seem to believe that the Multitude possesses a natural unity which does not need political articulation. Hardt and Negri see the People as homogeneous and expressed in a unitary general will, rather than divided by different political conflicts. Counter-hegemonic practices, by contrast, do not eliminate differences. Rather, they are what could be called an ensemble of differences, all coming together, only at a given moment, against a common adversary. Such as when different groups from many backgrounds come together to protest against a war perpetuated by a state, or when environmentalists, feminists, anti-racists and others come together to challenge dominant models of development and progress. In these cases, the adversary cannot be defined in broad general terms like Empire, or for that matter Capitalism. It is instead contingent upon the particular circumstances in question the specific states, international institutions or governmental practices that are to be challenged. Put another way, the construction of political demands is dependent upon the specific relations of power that need to be targeted and transformed, in order to create the conditions for a new hegemony. This is clearly not an exodus from politics. It is not critique as withdrawal, but critique as engagement. It is a war of position that needs to be launched, often across a range of sites, involving the coming together of a range of interests. This can only be done by establishing links between social movements, political parties and trade unions, for example. The aim is to create a common bond and collective will, engaging with a wide range of sites, and often institutions, with the aim of transforming them. This, in my view, is how we should conceive the nature of radical politics.CaseAttaching their affect to the ballot replicates the politics of liberalism. This means the 1AC is not a reason to vote aff. Berlant, George M. Pullman Professor, Department of English, University of Chicago, 11[Lauren, Cruel Optimism, Duke University Press, pg. 223-228, 2011, RSR]Intensely political seasons spawn reveries of a different immediacy. People imagine alternative environments where authenticity trumps ideology, truths cannot be concealed, and communication feels intimate, face-to face. In these times, even politicians imagine occupying a postpublic sphere public where they might just somehow make an unmediated transmission to the body politic. Somehow you just got to go over the heads of the filter and speak directly to the people, then- President George W. Bush commented in October 2003, echoing a long tradition of sentimental political fantasies and soon followed by condemnations of the filter by the Republican National Committee and the presidential campaign of John McCain and Sarah Palin.1 What is the filter that demands circumnavigation? Bush seems to be inverting the meaning of his own, mixed, metaphor. A filter, after all, separates out noise from communication and, in so doing, makes communication possible. Jacques Attali and Michel Serres have both argued that there is no communication without noise, as noise interferes from within any utterance, threatening its tractability.2 The performance of distortion that constitutes communication therefore demands discernment, or filtering. However steadfast ones commitment to truth, there is no avoiding the noise. Yet Bushs wish to skirt the filter points to something profound in the desire for the political. He wants to transmit not the message but the noise. He wants the public to feel the funk, the live intensities and desires that make messages affectively immediate, seductive, and binding.3 In his head a publics binding to the political is best achieved neither by policy nor ideology but the affect of feeling political together, an effect of having communicated true feeling without the distancing mediation of speech.4 The transmission of noise performs political attachment as a sustaining intimate relation, without which great dramas of betrayal are felt and staged. In The Ethical Soundscape, Charles Hirschkind talks about the role of maieutic listening in constructing the intimate political publics of Egypt.5 There, the feeling tones of the affective soundscape produce attachments to and investments in a sense of political and social mutuality that is performed in moments of collective audition. This process involves taking on listening together as itself an object/scene of desire. The attainment of that attunement produces a sense of shared worldness, apart from whatever aim or claim the listening public might later bring to a particular political world because of what they have heard. From Hirschkinds perspective the social circulation of noise, of affective binding, converts the world to a space of moral action that seems juxtapolitical proximate to, without being compromised by, the instrumentalities of power that govern social life.6 Speaking above the filter would confirm to Bushs whole listening audience that they already share an affective environment; mobilizing the ethical and therapeutic virtues of the ear7 would accomplish the visceral transmission of his assurance not only that he has made a better good life possible for Americans and humans around the globe, but that, affectively speaking, there is already a better sensorial world right here, right now, more intimate and secure and just as real as the world made by the medias anxiogenic sensationalist analysis. This vision locates the desire for the political in an alternative commons in the present that the senses confirm and circulate as though without mediation. What exactly is the problem with the filter? The contemporary filtered or mediated political sphere in the United States transmits news 24/7 from a new ordinary created by crisis, in which life seems reduced to discussions about tactics for survival and who is to blame. The filter tells you that the public has entered a historical situation whose contours it does not know. It impresses itself upon mass consciousness as an epochal crisis, unfolding like a disaster film made up of human- interest stories and stories about institutions that have lost their way.8 It is a moment on the verge of a postnormative phase, in which fantasmatic clarities about the conditions for enduring collectivity, historical continuity, and infrastructural stability have melted away, along with predictable relations between event and effect. Living amidst war and environmental disaster, people are shown constantly being surprised at what does and does not seem to have a transformative impact. Living amid economic crisis, people are shown constantly being surprised at the amount, location, and enormity of moral and affective irregulation that come from fading rules of accountability and recognition. What will govern the terms and relations of reliable reciprocity among governments, intimates, workers, owners, churches, citizens, political parties, or strangers? What forms of life will secure the sense of affective democracy that people have been educated to expect from their publics? Nobody knows. The news about the recent past and the pressures of the near future demand constant emergency cleanup and hyperspeculation about what it means to live in the ongoing present among piles of cases where things didnt work out or seem to make sense, at least not yet. There are vigils; there is witnessing, testimony, and yelling. But there is not yet a consensual rubric that would shape these matters into an event. The affective structure of the situation is therefore anxious and the political emotions attached to it veer wildly from recognition of the enigma that is clearly there to explanations that make sense, the kind of satisfying sense that enables enduring. Uncertainty is the material that Bush wished to bracket. His desire for a politics of ambient noise, prepropositional transmission, and intuitive reciprocity sought to displace the filtered story of instability and contradiction from the center of sociality. He also wishfully banished self- reflexive, cultivated opinion and judgment from their central public- sphere function. In short, as Jacques Rancire would put it, Bushs wishful feeling was to separate the political from politics as such.9 In so doing he would cast the ongoing activity of social antagonism to the realm of the epiphenomenal, in contrast to which the affective feedback loop of the political would make stronger the true soul- to- soul continuity between politicians and their public. Foucault used to call sexuality that noisy affectivity that Bush wanted to transmit from mouth to ear, heart to heart, gut to gut.10 From his perspective, at least, the political is best lodged in the appetites. These are not politically tendentious observations. Perhaps when Bush uttered his desire for affective communication to be the medium of the political, he was trying cynically to distract the public gaze from some of his particular actions. But the wish to inhabit a vaguely warm sense of alreadyestablished, autonomic, and atmospheric solidarity with the body politic is hardly his special desire. Indeed, in his preference for the noise of immediacy, he has many bedfellows in the body politic with whom he shares little else politically, namely, the ones who prefer political meetings in town halls, caucuses, demonstrations, and other intimate assemblies to the pleasure of disembodied migratory identification that constitutes mass publics. He also joins his antagonists in the nondominant classes who have long produced intimate publics to provide the feeling of immediacy and solidarity by establishing in the public sphere an affective register of belonging to inhabit when there are few adequate normative institutions to fall back on, rest in, or return to. Public spheres are always affect worlds, worlds to which people are bound, when they are, by affective projections of a constantly negotiated common interestedness. But an intimate public is more specific. In an intimate public one senses that matters of survival are at stake and that collective mediation through narration and audition might provide some routes out of the impasse and the struggle of the present, or at least some sense that there would be recognition were the participants in the room together.11 An intimate public promises the sense of being held in its penumbra. You do not need to audition for membership in it. Minimally, you need just to perform audition, to listen and to be interested in the scenes visceral impact.12 You might have been drawn to it because of a curiosity about something minor, unassociated with catastrophe, like knitting or collecting something, or having a certain kind of sexuality, only after which it became a community of support, offering tones of suffering, humor, and cheerleading. Perhaps an illness led to seeking out a community of survival tacticians. In either case, any person can contribute to an intimate public a personal story about not being defeated by what is overwhelming. More likely, though, participants take things in and sometimes circulate what they hear, captioning them with opinion or wonder. But they do not have to do anything to belong. They can be passive and lurk, deciding when to appear and disappear, and consider the freedom to come and go the exercise of sovereign freedom. Indeed, in liberal societies, freedom includes freedom from the obligation to pay attention to much, whether personal or politicalno- one is obliged to be conscious or socially active in their modes and scenes of belonging. For many this means that political attention is usually something delegated and politics is something overheard, encountered indirectly and unsystematically, through a kind of communication more akin to gossip than to cultivated rationality.13 But there is nothing fundamentally passive or superficial in overhearing the political. What hits a person encountering the dissemination of news about power has nothing to do with how thorough or cultivated their knowledge is or how they integrate the impact into living. Amidst all of the chaos, crisis, and injustice in front of us, the desire for alternative filters that produce the senseif not the sceneof a more livable and intimate sociality is another name for the desire for the political. This is why an intimate attachment to the political can amount to a relation of cruel optimism. I have argued throughout this book that an optimistic attachment is cruel when the object/scene of desire is itself an obstacle to fulfilling the very wants that bring people to it: but its life- organizing status can trump interfering with the damage it provokes. It may be a relation of cruel optimism, when, despite an awareness that the normative political sphere appears as a shrunken, broken, or distant place of activity among elites, members of the body politic return periodically to its recommitment ceremonies and scenes. Voting is one thing; collective caring, listening, and scanning the airwaves, are others. All of these modes of orientation and having a feeling about it confirm our attachment to the system and thereby confirm the system and the legitimacy of the affects that make one feel bound to it, even if the manifest content of the binding has the negative force of cynicism or the dark attenuation of political depression. How and why does this attachment persist? Is it out of habit? Is it in hopes of the potentiality embedded in the political as such? Or, from a stance of critical engagement, an investment in the possibility of its repair? The exhausting repetition of the politically depressed position that seeks repair of what may be constitutively broken can eventually split the activity of optimism from expectation and demand.14 Maintaining this split enables one to sustain ones attachment to the political as such and to ones sense of membership in the idea of the polity, which is a virtualbut sensual, not abstractspace of the commons. And so, detaching from it could induce many potential losses along with new freedoms. Grant Farred calls fidelity to the political without expectation of recognition, representation, or return a profoundly ethical act.15 His exemplary case derives from voting patterns of African Americans in the 2004 presidential election, but the anxiety about the costs of this ethical commitment has only increased with the election of Barack Obama as the President of the emotional infrastructure of the United States as well as of its governing and administrative ones.16 What is the relation between the Yes We Can! optimism for the political and how politics actually works? What is the effect of Obamas optimization of political optimism against the political depression of the historically disappointed, especially given any Presidents limited sovereignty as a transformative agent in ordinary life? How can we track the divergences between politically orchestrated emotions and their affective environments? Traditionally, political solidarity is a more of a structure than a feelingan identification with other people who are similarly committed to a project that does not require affective continuity or warm personal feeling to sustain itself. But maintaining solidarity requires skills for adjudicating incommensurate visions of the better good life. The atrophy of these skills is at risk when politics is reduced to the demand for affective attunement, insofar as the sense of belonging is threatened by the inconvenience of antagonistic aims. Add to this the possibility that the political as we know it in mass democracy requires such a splitting of attachment and expectation. Splitting off political optimism from the way things are can sustain many kinds of the cruelest optimism.Claiming there is a truth or meaning to their comedic performance replicates epistemological authoritarianism of the status quo. Hemmings, Professor of Feminist Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science, 5 [Claire, Invoking affect: cultural theory and the ontological turn, Cultural Studies Vol. 19, No. 5 September 2005, pp. 548 -567, RSR]In terms of our relations with others, Tomkins asked us to think of the contagious nature of a yawn, smile or blush. It is transferred to others and doubles back, increasing its original intensity. Affect can thus be said to place the individual in a circuit of feeling and response, rather than opposition to others. Further, Tomkins argues that we all develop complex affect theories as a way of negotiating the social world as unique individuals. An affect theory is all of our affective experiences to date that are remembered (or better, perhaps, registered) in the moment of responding to a new situation, such that we keep a trace, within [our] constitution of those experiences (Al-Saji 2000, p. 56). For Tomkins, then, affect connects us to others, and provides the individual with a way of narrating their own inner life (likes, dislikes, desires and revulsions) to themselves and others. Thus one of the main reasons affect has been taken up as the hopeful alternative to social determinism is its positioning of the individual as possessing a degree of control over their future, rather than as raw material responding rather passively to cognitive or learned phenomena. Tomkins is joined by Gilles Deleuze to form an unlikely couple dominating the contemporary affective imaginary of cultural theory. Deleuze (1997) proposes affect as distinct from emotion, as bodily meaning that pierces social interpretation, confounding its logic, and scrambling its expectations. In contrast to Tomkins, who breaks down affect into a topography of myriad, distinct parts, Deleuze understands affect as describing the passage from one state to another, as an intensity characterized by an increase or decrease in power (1997, p. 181). Deleuze takes two examples from his reading of T. E. Lawrences experiences in the desert to illustrate the bodys capacity to interrupt social logic. In both examples, he paraphrases Lawrences description of violent events in the desert. The first is the grisly spectacle of the gestures of the dying, that attempt at raising their hands that makes all the agonizing Turks ripple together, as if they had practiced the same theatrical gesture, provoking Lawrences mad laughter (1997, p. 123). The second is Deleuzes account of Lawrences experience of being gang raped: in the midst of his tortures, an erection; even in the state of sludge, there are convulsions that jolt the body (1997: 123). For Deleuze, both instances index the unpredictable autonomy of the bodys encounter with the event, its shattering ability to go its own way. In Deleuzes account, Lawrence does experience shame, but not in alignment with social prohibition, rather as a judgement on his bodys response to rape: it is his erection that gives rise to shame. For Deleuze, one cannot do justice to Lawrences unruly body by reducing it to its social organization. To do so would be to miss the dramatic significance of the bodys own asocial trace. Instead, Deleuze proposes a cartographic approach to the body and its affects where the critical focus is on bodily displacement, the movement between bodily states that is its intensity (1997, p. 63), its refrain. For many theorists of affect Deleuzes approach provides insight into thinking through the body in a non-essentialist way that remains faithful to many different levels and modes of bodily experience (e.g. Spinks 2001). As inheritors of this affective legacy, contemporary critical theorists tend to prefer either Tomkins pragmatism or Deleuzes imaginative flights. Eve Sedgwicks new work takes up Tomkins suggestion that a focus on affect sidesteps a myopic attention to structural prohibition. While Tomkins is concerned with differentiating affect from drives, however, Sedgwick is interested in using affect theory to challenge what Probyn calls the twinned problematics of discipline or transgression (2000, p. 13), which anchor poststructuralist critical inquiry. Sedgwick believes that the central problem facing Theory today is its own critical paranoia, where the project of a poststructuralist critical imaginary has become reduced to the search for, and deadening (re)discovery of, prohibition everywhere: prohibition where it appeared there was freedom, prohibition in a space we had not, until now, thought to look. Sedgwick argues that such paranoia makes cultural investigation protectionist instead of expansive, as theorists ward off other critical imaginaries as duped unless they too come to the same conspiratorial conclusions, unless they too find violence where there had appeared to be possibility (2003, pp. 123/51). For Sedgwick such a hermeneutics of suspicion and exposure that is at once smug and sour, is not merely an unattractive trait in a critical theorist, it also makes her or him ill equipped for analysing contemporary social formations in which visibility itself constitutes much of the violence (2003, p. 140). In current global contexts where violence is anything but hidden, is disconcertingly proud rather than covert, Sedgwick asks what use is paranoid theory? Part of what makes

critical theory so uninventive for Sedgwick is its privileging of the epistemological, since a relentless attention to the structures of truth and knowledge obscures our experience of those structures. She advocates instead a reparative return to the ontological and intersubjective, to the surprising and enlivening texture of individuality and community (2003, p. 17). Again following Tomkins, Sedgwick rather provocatively invites us to consider affect as the key to that texture, because of its capacity to link us creatively to others. I say provocatively, because throughout her text, Sedgwick acknowledges that our learned instinct as cultural theorists is to reject Tomkins for his insistence on affect as innate. Indeed, this is precisely Sedgwicks challenge / do cultural theorists shy away from affect a` la Tomkins for any other reasons than its essentialism? For Sedgwick, if the answer is no, as she assumes it is, the rejection of Tomkins model is itself evidence of paranoid cultural theorists characteristic disposal of both baby and bathwater. Brian Massumi similarly intervenes in the contemporary terrain of cultural theory to propose affect as a new way out of the pernicious reign of signification that dominates the field. Mirroring Sedgwick, Massumis irritation is chiefly reserved for the cultural theorist whose ability for critical thinking has become reduced to identifying points on a stable map of the always already known (Massumi 2002, p. 12). Interpretation through the overlaying of this map can only capture certain moments and certain experiences, which will invariably reflect the framework they are interpreted through. For Massumi, such critical impoverishment means that cultural theorists consistently miss both the matter of bodies and, since his framework is Deleuzian rather than Tomkinsian, the unceasing movement that constitutes the process of becoming. And without this investment in movement between states and bodies, Massumi asks, how do we account for let alone encourage, change (2002, p. 3)? Affect attracts Massumi, then, since it is part of a different order of experience to the epistemological (as defined by Sedgwick): it is the unassimilable (2002, p. 3). His point is that in order to study the unknowable, cultural theorists will have to abandon the certainty that has come to characterize the field. What is clear then, is that Sedgwick and Massumi emerge as champions of affect in a more general context of the critique of what is usually understood as the cultural turn. The particular form of these arguments is often disciplinespecific, but what all critiques share is a lamenting of the turn to language represented by poststructuralism. Within the context I am most familiar with, of feminist debate, this turn to language is usually critiqued for one of two reasons that are somewhat at odds with one another. The first laments the increasing theoretical abstraction of feminist writing, associating it with an increase in professionalization and a concomitant decrease in political accountability (Gubar 1998, Stanley and Wise 2000, Jackson 2001). Poststructuralist feminist writing is often aggressively damned for its inaccessibility, and for its perceived lack of attention to what is often invoked as the material. These arguments have been raging within feminist academic and political contexts for a long time, but cross over into more mainstream critical terrain through the debates between Judith Butler and Nancy Fraser in the late 1990s (Butler 1997b, Fraser 1997). In the second critique of the cultural turn within feminism, poststructuralism is understood in contrast to have over-emphasized power-relations and their framing of both what we do and who we are, to the extent that there appears to be no hope of liberation. We are effectively caught in culture. Critics viewing poststructuralism in this way advocate not a material return but an ontological one, a revaluing of individual difference and capacity for change over time (Prosser 1998, Mitchell 2000). A number of theorists / most notably, perhaps, Rosi Braidotti (2002) combine these two critiques in their focus on the lived materiality of bodies. Sedgwick and Massumis interest in affect must therefore be seen within the context of broader challenges to poststructuralist approaches to language, power and subjectivity, and particularly in line with the second trajectory detailed here. 2NC Round 4 CEDAFWThe T version of the aff is participatory satire they could tie their aff to an advocacy for political progressivism like Colbert does. They could have satirized the ban on marijuana as a way to spur citizenry participation and advocate for The United States should legalize marihuana in the United States, including the establishment of a minority-owned business set-aside licensing system as reparations for those disproportionately affected by the war on drugs. Gilkerson, PhD in Philosophy, 12 [Nathan, Participatory Satire? Political Humor, the Colbert Super PAC Project, and the Colliding Worlds of Late Night Comedy and Modern American Politics, September 2012, http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/142345/Gilkerson_umn_0130E_13192.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y, RSR]The last set of research questions more broadly considered whether the Colbert Super PAC phenomenon has served to influence the debate about money and politics, and whether it can be considered to represent a new form of advocacy based political satire. Through consideration of twenty individual interviews with journalists, campaign finance advocates, and election law experts as well as analysis of significant media coverage on the topic it is clearly evident that the Colberts Super PAC initiative has influenced the perspectives of many involved within the political debate over campaign finance regulation. With recent news articles reporting that campaign spending in the upcoming 2012 presidential election season is expected to smash all previous records of political contribution levels (Wilson, 2012), it also seems clear that the debate over the influence of money within election campaigns is only likely to grow louder. Over the past year and a half, Stephen Colbert has used his satirical persona to play a significant role in shaping the debate and influencing the perspectives not only his own viewers, but also of political experts and many within the news media. Comments made about Colberts initiative from the interview conducted with Charles McGrath from the New York Times were especially useful to this research, since McGraths profile of the comedian allowed him to spend significant time getting to know Colbert and exploring his motivations for spearheading the Super PAC project. As discussed earlier, McGraths quote below conveys his view that Colberts satire is indeed something new and different: its a new kind of satire because I mean, traditional satire seems to be merely poking fun at things really from the outside. I mean, the satirist is just by definition a kind of outsider. And this thing as he is doing it from within, he is not just making fun of Super PACs, he has one. And he has one that is a real Super PAC. It has real money. Real people have given to it, have contributed to it. And hes actively trying to insert his PAC into the process. The very process that hes extensively making fun of, he is also a part of. And so, its like its participatory satire. Or its satire raised to the point of performance art. I think it is something different. Charles McGrath, New York Times Through the Super PAC project, Colbert has created a new model for political participation a kind of political activism which employs messages of ironic support, and sarcastic dissent, as well as real world participation, for voicing strong opposition to a political issue. As became clear this past spring, when he successfully recruited hundreds of college students to join him in creating their own spin-off Super PAC entities, Colbert sees a future in political activism through what could be considered earnest sarcasm. There are many potential avenues for continued research into the dynamics and effects of this particular form of political satire. Topping the list may be further exploration of citizens actual understanding of the messages embedded within complex and nuanced political humor such as Colberts. Opportunities for more in-depth exploration of the publics perceptions of Colberts satirical activities exist through focus group studies and open-ended interviews, as well as more quantitative methodologies such as online surveys. Experimental research could examine partisan effects related to individuals appreciation of political satire and variables such as perceived fairness and accuracy in experiencing certain types of political humor. Monitoring of the political environment could examine whether the notion of participatory satire is proliferating as a model for political activism, especially online through user generated videos and social media initiatives, and whether new examples show that this strategy is becoming embraced as a technique for voicing dissent. Finally an opportunity exists to examine the continued progression of the Colbert Super PAC initiative, especially focusing on the efforts of college students who have been motivated to political activism through Colberts satire. Research could seek to better understanding what inspired these students to political advocacy, and whether there might be something uniquely appealing, especially to young people, related to political activity through satire. Considering Colberts motivation in creating his own Super PAC organization, it is clear that much of his inspiration for taking action came from watching the, arguably drastic, transformation of our nations political environment with recent changes in how money is regulated in elections. During brief moments throughout the progression of the Super PAC effort, Colbert has frequently hinted at his own perspective on the state of American political speech, often with a variation of one simple and distilled, yet powerful quip: Because money equals speech, the more money you have, the more speech you should have. Stephen Colbert Employing his trademark sarcasm, Colberts undying support for the recent explosion of unbridled political campaign spending helps to drive home his essential, populist message that our system has become undemocratic, and that ultimately, progressive change is needed. The strategic use of satire to not only call for that change, but to also help in leading the movement, is a