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2AC A/T: FRAMEWORK.......................................................................................................................................132AC A/T: CAPITALISM K......................................................................................................................................142AC A/T: PERFORMANCE CO-OPTED...............................................................................................................15

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Framing of Appropriate Methodology/Limits Link..................................................................................................17Realism Link.............................................................................................................................................................19Form Key Yo............................................................................................................................................................20Poetry Solvency........................................................................................................................................................22A2: Linguistic Resistance Fails................................................................................................................................24Forgetting Alt............................................................................................................................................................25IR Theories Link.......................................................................................................................................................27A2: Realism good.....................................................................................................................................................28A2: Perm/CP No Solve: Mimetic v Aesthetic Reps of IR........................................................................................29Realism Link.............................................................................................................................................................31A2: Perm-Mimesis v. Aesthetic Approach=Mut Excl..............................................................................................32Solvency/A2: Cedes political....................................................................................................................................34Framework................................................................................................................................................................35Debate as newscast/reps K internal...........................................................................................................................36security rhetoric bad..................................................................................................................................................37questioning reps = good............................................................................................................................................38security discourse bad...............................................................................................................................................40security discourse = bad............................................................................................................................................42AT: s’quo security discourse....................................................................................................................................44

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Soon after Liberation,Seoulbegan to teem with 370 different political parties and civic groups.Every morning when you woke upseveral more had hung out their signboards.Parties with just five members appeared, lacking even a signboard.

The commander of the occupying forces, General Hodge,detested the Koreans, calling them cats or worse.All the Koreans working in Hodge's headquartersand the Koreans in the streetsoutside his headquarterswere liberally doused with DDT.Smothered in that poisonous powderthe Koreans would giggle helplesslywhile they boiled with seething shame.

Thanks to the Americans who came for the warin 1950 Korea again became a land of DDT,fleas, bugs, and the plentiful lice and nits about their bodies,even invisible microbes,were uncivilized Koreansso the Americans drenched the Koreansin plentiful quantities of DDT.

All the orphans likewisewere baptized in Hallelujahs and DDT.Offspring with neither dad nor mom became the offspring of DDT.

Ch'oe Johan, a war orphan,his family name was that of the director of his orphanage, Zion

Home,his given namethe John of St. John's gospel.His original name, Pak Sun-Sik, was completely forgotten.

Since his room happened to be next to a stinking cesspool,Ch'oe Johan's blanketalways smelt of a mixture of DDT and sewage.

Ah, home, sweet home.

Ko UnFive Poems from Maninbo (Ten Thousand Lives)


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The tumultuous history of the Korean peninsula cannot be isolated from the security-driven policies and practices of global powers. Specifically, perceptions of North Korean hostility have a direct effect on the U.S. foreign relations. Our identification of threatening rogue nations justifies a continued military presence overseas and solidifies America’s hegemonic position in the world.

Bleiker, co-director of U of Queensland’s Rotary Center for International Studies & Humboldt Fellow @ U of Berlin, 2005(Roland, Divided Korea, pgs. 35-8)

Constituting a natural link between the Asian mainland and Japan, the Korean peninsula has always been an important factor in the security policy of the surrounding powers . In the 19th century two major wars were fought for control of the peninsula, one between Japan and China (1894-1895) and the other between Japan and Russia (1904-1905). With the development of military technology and the increased globalization of the confrontation between the great powers in the 20 th century, the geopolitical importance of Korea

increased. The arbitrary partition of Korea in 1945, and the subsequent transformation of this supposedly provisional settlement into a permanent division of the peninsula, must be attributed largely to the strategic and symbolic importance of Korea in the emerging Cold War power struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. Initially, the competition was largely a rivalry between these two hegemons, but the struggle for influence in Korea did not remain a Soviet-American affair. With the Sino-Soviet split in the early

1960s and the reemergence of Japan as an economic power, the situation in Korea became directly linked to the security and economic interests of the four great powers, the United States, the Soviet Union, China, and Japan. Acknowledging the importance of geopolitical factors is not as obvious as it seems at first sight. Many studies of Korean politics and society, especially those conducted under the broad influence of the modernization paradigm, paid relatively little attention to geopolitical issues. Consider, for instance, how Gregory Henderson, in one of the most influential early texts on

Korean politics, argues that “external factors are for Korea and her internal courses of secondary importance. If this judgment is wrong, I stand most ready to have it proven so. By scrutinizing the geopolitical context of Korea’s security dilemmas, I bring the

earlier discussions of individual and national identity back to the locus classicus of security studies, to its object and subject: the state. States have identities just as individual people do. They struggle with a variety of internal dilemmas, which are then projected onto the outside world. Military doctrine, for instance, is just as much about the allocation of power within society as it is about warding off an external threat . This is why Elizabeth

Kier believes that it is “counterintuitive to assume that military doctrines respond only to objective conditions in the international arena.”Now I would like to examine how Korea’s security dilemmas became intertwined with Cold War international relations and how the ensuing identity constructs continue to shape politics on and toward the peninsula long after the collapse of the Soviet Union. I will give special attention to the two nuclear crises that have haunted the Korean peninsula since the early 1990s. In each case, in 1993-1994 and in 2002-2003, the events were strikingly similar: North Korea made public its ambition to acquire nuclear weapons and withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Then the situation rapidly deteriorated until the peninsula was literally at the brink of war. The dangers of North Korea’s actions, often interpreted as nuclear brinkmanship, are evident and much discussed but not so some of the interactive dynamics that have led to the standoff in the first place. In this chapter I seek to shed light on at least some of them. I will pay particular attention to the role of the United States, for nothing about the past and present dilemmas on the peninsula can be addressed or even understood without recourse to the United States. This is why China repeatedly stressed that the latest nuclear crisis was primarily an issue between North Korea and the United States. Kim Dae-Jung, in his final speech as South Korea’s president, reiterated the same theme: “more than anything, dialogue between North Korea and the United States is the importance key to a solution.” A solution is, however, far from imminent. Both the United States and North Korea see each as a threat. And each has good reason for doing so. But each is also implicated in the production of this threat. The problem is that these interactive dynamics are hard to see, for the West tends to project a very one-sided image of North Korea, one that sees it solely as a rogue and this a source of danger and instability. Nicholas Eberstadt, for instance, stresses that “North Korean policies

and practices have accounted for most of the volatility within the Northeast Asian region since the end of the Cold War.” The deeply entrenched image of North Korea as a rogue state is part of an identity-driven political attitude that severely hinders both an adequate understanding and potential resolution of the crisis.The rhetoric of rogue states is indicative of how U.S. foreign policy continues to be dominated by dualistic and militaristic Cold War thinking patters. The “evil empire” may be gone but not the


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[Bleiker Continues…]

underlying need to define safety and security with reference to an external threat. Rogues are among the new threat perceptions that serve to demarcate the line between good and evil, identity and difference. As during the Cold War, building up a strong military arsenal is viewed as the key means through which this line is to be defended. In the absence of a global power that matches the United States, this militaristic attitude has, if anything, intensified. Look at Washington’s recent promulgation of a preemptive strike policy against rogue states.

The consequences of this posture are particularly fateful in Korea, for it reinforces half a century of explicit and repeated nuclear threats against the government in Pyongyang. The effect of these threats has been largely obscured, in part because the highly specialized discourse of security analysis has managed to attribute responsibility for the crisis solely to North Korea’s actions, even if the situation is in reality far more complex and interactive. Drawing attention to the interactive dimension of security dynamics, and the role of the United States in it, is not to absolve North Korea of responsibility. Pyongyang bears perhaps the lion’s share for much of the culture of insecurity that still persists on the peninsula. Over fifty years it has committed at least a dozen terrorist acts, from bombings of civilian airliners to tunnel and submarine infiltrations across the DMZ, not to speak of countless other provocations and verbal

aggressions. The production of crises has become a hallmark of North Korean politics, designed both fortify its authoritarian rule and to win concessions from the international community. But this does not mean developments take place in a vacuum. Indeed, in an almost mirror image of North Korea’s vilified brinkmanship tactic, the U.S. administration under President George W. Bush has embarked on a form of crisis diplomacy that explicitly generates threats in order to improve its negotiation position and force its opponent into submission.


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Despite our continued presence and influence, East Asia has remained a region of constant war. The status quo’s emphasis on security does not provide stability - it only increases tensions to the point where accidents and miscalculations could risk further escalation into all-out war. This makes security a self-fulfilling prophesy. Any attempt to resolve hostilities must first begin with a fundamental rethinking of these paradigms.

Bleiker, co-director of U of Queensland’s Rotary Center for International Studies & Humboldt Fellow @ U of Berlin, 2005(Roland, Divided Korea, pgs. ix-xi)

Few conflicts are as protracted as the one in Korea, where deeply hostile and anachronistic Cold War attitudes have

posed major security problems for half a century. To be more precise, two specters haunt the peninsula: a military escalation, even outright war, and a North Korean collapse, which could easily destabilize the northeast Asian region.Dealing with North Korea is perhaps one of the most difficult security challenges in global politics today. Totalitarian and reclusive, ideologically isolated and economically ruined, it is the inherent “other” in a globalized and neoliberal world order. Yet North Korea survives, not least because its leaders periodically rely on threats, such as nuclear brinkmanship, to gain concessions from the international community. The latest such attempt occurred in the autumn of 2002, when Pyongyang admitted to a secret nuclear weapons program and subsequently withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. From then on,

the situation rapidly deteriorated. By early 2003 both the United States and North Korea were threatening each other with outright war. Even Japan, in its most militaristic posture in decades, publicly contemplated the possibility of a preemptive strike against North Korea. The dangers of North Korea’s nuclear brinkmanship are evident and much discussed.

Miscalculations or a sudden escalation could precipitate a human disaster at any moment. Equally dangerous, although less evident, are the confrontational and militaristic attitudes with which some of the key regional and global players seek to contain the volatile situation. Particularly

problematic is the approach of the most influential external actor on the peninsula, the United States. Washington’s inability to see North Korea as anything but a threatening “rogue state” seriously hinders both an adequate understanding and potential resolution of the conflict. Few policy makers, security analysts, and journalists

ever try to imagine how North Korean decision makers perceive these threats and how these perceptions are part of an interactive security dilemma in which the West is implicated as much as is the vilified regime in Pyongyang. Particularly significant is the current policy of preemptive strikes against rogue states, for it reinforces half a century of American nuclear threats toward North Korea. The problematic role of these threats has been largely obscured, not least because the highly technical discourse of security analysis has managed to present the strategic situation on the peninsula in a manner that attributes responsibility for the crisis solely to North Korea’s actions, even if the situation is in reality far more complex and interactive.A fundamental rethinking of security is required if the current culture of insecurity is to give way to a more stable and peaceful environment. Contributing to this task is my main objective of this book. I do so by exploring insights and options broader than those articulated by most security studies specialists. While pursuing this objective I offer neither a comprehensive take on the Korean security situation nor a detailed update on the latest events. Various excellent books have

already done so. I seek not new facts and data but new perspectives. I identify broad patters of conflict and embark on a

conceptual engagement with some of the ensuing dilemmas. I aspire to what Gertrude Stein sought to capture through a poetic metaphor: the political and moral obligation to question the immutability of the status quo; the need to replace old and highly problematic Cold War thinking patterns with new and more sensitive attempts to address the dilemmas of Korean security.


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Aesthetic approaches to world politics can reveal new ways of revealing the security dilemmas of the status quo. These insights cannot be directly translatable to policy prescriptions – rather they open space for excluded or marginalized voices that remain hidden in traditional IR scholarship. Language provides us with the means of carving out thinking space and affecting social change. It embodies the potential of transversal dissent and gives an alternative to the quick-fix solutions that only further the problem instead of understanding its complexity.

Bleiker, co-director of U of Queensland’s Rotary Center for International Studies & Humboldt Fellow @ U of Berlin, 2009(Roland, Aesthetics and World Politics, 171-2)

How, indeed is it possible to speak critically in the prevailing scholarly language of international relations? Many commentators are skeptical and correspondingly frustrated. Consider the Indian public intellectual AshisNandy and the Australian aboriginal scholar and activist Marcia Langton. The former laments that important voices from around the world cannot be heard because they do not speak in the language of the Western academy. The latter stresses that there is a major gap between scholarly discussion and

the actual lives of indigenous people. How then, is it possible to speak critically in scholarly language? How, in a more general sense, is it possible to speak critically, in English – a language that has historically evolved from the centre of the world, first from the British colonial empire, then from the vantage point of American hegemony, and now as

the new lingua franca of international political, economic and cultural interactions? How to express those silenced voices,

those worlds that lie beyond the linguistic zone of exclusion that the global dominance of English has established?

How to decentre the centre through the language of the centre? Poetry can show us ways of dealing with these important and difficult issues, with the ‘reconstruction of the world through words’. This is why – as demonstrated in several case

studies through this book – literature plays a particularly important role in authoritarian contexts, where aesthetic engagements might be able to open up spaces for dissent and promote social change. But

the importance of aesthetics goes much further, touching upon the very essence of political life. This is so even though the radically different viewpoints that a poetic image illuminates may not always be directly translatable into clear-cut policy recommendations. The poetic imagination can show us – in the form of a micro-experiment that reveals much larger implications – how to bring into view many of the repressed perspectives, voices and emotion that otherwise may never reach the eyes and ears of those who theorize or practice world politics. By focusing my case studies on the poetic imagination I have, in some ways, gone against the trend of recent contributions to the aesthetic turn. Many scholars have begun to focus on the role of images and on popular, rather than high culture. My focus on the poetic is not meant to question and counter this trend: visual culture is one of the most important and largely under-studied aspects of international relations. Likewise, popular culture offers a range of important ventures to understand world politics. My decision to engage the links between poetics and politics is in part a result of personal interests and of the need to focus a scholarly inquiry in order to provide meaningful insights and sustain an argument in a systematic manner. But

there is a more substantial issue as well: no matter how much our age revolves around visual images, we can never escape words, for language is far more than a means of communication: it is the very basis of how we make sense of the world and, ultimately, of who we are. Our individual and cultural values are inevitably intertwined with the manner in which we speak and write about ourselves and our surroundings. There is no escape from the prism of language, from the manner in which words represent the world in culturally specific manners. But what we can do – both as scholars and as politics beings – is to engage this process: to be aware of how language frames the world and how a linguistic reframing might also allow us to rethink and reshape the real world. A successful

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rethinking of world politics, a search for a more peaceful and just international order, must deal with representation. It must engage the languages through which we have come to distinguish the safe from the threatening, the rational from the irrational, the possible from the impossible. What is needed is a critique of language that opens up possibility to gaze beyond the giveness of world politics, that can problematize political dilemmas which have been rendered unproblematic, even invisible, through years of normalizing speech and corresponding political practices.


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We believe that a critical approach to world politics is necessary to explore the linkages and complex systems that actually comprise the subject matter of international relations. Problem-solving approaches are doomed not only to fail to recognize the complexity of transversal struggles, but also replicate and sustain modes of domination that exist. Transversal struggles provide the alternative framework for examining agency and dissent that challenges state-centric modes of violence in Tibet. Instead of focusing on large scale forms of resistance, transversal dissent focuses on the more urgent task of resisting at the non-heroic level.

We therefore affirm the resolution (the United States Federal Government should substantially reduce its military presence in South Korea) through the use of poetry. Signing the ballot is an affirmation of the potential for dissent contained within poetry.

Discontent! What a powerful thing it is.We all should havemore discontents that ought to bethan discontents that are.The discontent that I feel for myselfwhen at midnight I inspect myselfunder direct light from a lamp.Half-written textsbooks as yet unreada watch gone deadthese are surely my strength.Outside the windowI see cars rushing down Route 38 by night.Even theyare my discontent.What a powerful thing!

-----“Discontent,” in Songs of Tomorrow by Ko Un


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Judging the political effects of poetry is impossible. However, poetry does illustrate the potential of dissent. Only by taking individual stands against dominant readings of linguistic conventions can viable dissent occur. The world will not be changed immediately, but that does not mean the effects of voting for a poetic dissent are any less real.

Bleiker, co-director of U of Queensland’s Rotary Center for International Studies & Humboldt Fellow @ U of Berlin, 2000(Roland, Popular Dissent, Human Agency, and Global Governance, pgs. 270-2)

Poetry is one of the dissident practices that become visible through this reframing of global politics. Poetic engagements with the linguistic constitution of political practices testify to the transversal and transformative potential that is contained in everyday forms of resistance. But poetry is, of course, only one of many linguistic and discursive sites of dissent. At a time when the local and the global become ever-more intertwined, a great variety of activities, often of a daily and mundane nature, have the potential to acquire significant transversal dimensions. An analysis of poetic dissent provides insight into the processes through which these sites of struggle operate. In doing so, poetry draws attention to a multitude of increasingly important transversal spheres that have all too often been ignored by

international relations scholars, whose purview has tended to be confined to the domain of high politics. The poetic imagination not only illustrates why global politics cannot be separated from the manner in which it has been constituted and objectified, but also reveals how linguistic interferences with these objectifications can exert human agency and engender processes of social change. Rather than attacking direct manifestations of power, poetic dissent seeks to undermine the linguistic and discursive foundations that have already normalized political practices. The potential of such interferences can only be unleashed through a long process. This is true of critique of language in general, whatever

form it takes. There are no quick and miraculous forms of resistance to discursive domination. Dissent works by digging, slowly, underneath the foundations of authority. It unfolds its power through a gradual and largely inaudible transversal transformation of values. But how can something as inaudible as transversal poetic dissent possibly be evaluated? How can a form of resistance that engages linguistic and discursive practices be judged, or merely be understood, by the very nexus of power and knowledge it seeks to distance itself from? These difficult questions beg for complex answers. I do not claim to have solved them

here, nor do I believe that they can actually be solved, at least not in an absolute and definitive way. The impact of discursive dissent on transversal social and political dynamics is mediated through tactical and temporal processes. A poem, for instance, does not directly cause particular events, it does not visualize an opponent in space and time. A linguistic expression of dissent works by insinuating itself into its target – the population at large – without taking it over, but also without being separated from it. Even the agent becomes gradually blurred. The effect of a poem cannot be reduced to its author or even to the poem itself. Those who have read it may have passed altered knowledge on to other people, and thus influenced the transversal constitution of societal values. Discursive forms of transversal dissent will always remain elusive. But this does not render their effects any less potent or real. Neither does this recognition invalidate efforts to assess the role of language in interfering with the constitution of global politics. It does, however, call for a more sensitive and modest approach to the question of evidence and human agency. The East German poetry scene at Prenzlauer Berg, particularly its attempt to challenge the political, spatial and linguistic constitution of Cold War international politics, has served to illustrate the complexities that are entailed in transversal

struggles. In some ways the young writers of the 1980s have shown that poetic dissent can be politically relevant even though, or, rather, precisely because it refuses to be drawn into narrow political debates. Their works were transgressions, attempts to stretch language such that a more critical view of daily life in East Germany could be expressed. While having succeeded in subverting various linguistic aspects of the existing


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order, the poetry scene at Prenzlauer Berg also epitomises some of the difficulties that are entailed in discursive forms of transversal dissent. The fact that the underground poetry scene was penetrated by the State Security Service has challenged both the credibility of the poets and their attempt to carve out an autonomous aesthetic space. But rather than undermining the validity of their activities altogether, the Stasi revelations highlight the need to come to terms with the complex and transversal elements that are entailed in breaking out of existing webs of power and discourse. It is in this sense that the Prenzlauer Berg poetry scene – precisely because of its mixed success, precisely because of its controversies and failures – has contributed a great deal to our understanding of the transversal struggles that make up contemporary global politics.


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Framing of Appropriate Methodology/Limits Link

They are the doorkeepers of IR-they strive for “real world education” by limiting the spectrum of acceptable IR scholarship to objective, state-centric discourse. This model depoliticizes issues of perspective and framing, thereby circumscribing possible solutions to conflicts.

Bleiker, co-director of U of Queensland’s Rotary Center for International Studies & Humboldt Fellow @ U of Berlin, 1997 (Roland, “Forget IR Theory,” Alternatives 22:1, 57-86)

The doorkeepers of IR are those who, knowingly or unknowingly, make sure that the discipline’s discursive boundaries remain intact. Discourses, in a Foucaultian sense, are subtle mechanisms that frame our thinking process . They determine the limits of what can be thought , talked, and written of in a normal and rational way . In every society the production of discourses is controlled, selected, organized and diffused by certain procedures. They create systems of exclusion that elevate one group of discourses to a hegemonic status while condemning others to exile. Although the boundaries of discourses change , at times gradually, at times abruptly, theymaintain a certain unity across time , a unity that dominates and transgresses individual authors, texts or social practices. They explain, to come back to Nietzsche, why “all things that live long are gradually so saturated with reason that their

origin in unreason thereby becomes improbable.” Academic disciplines are powerful mechanisms to direct and control the production and diffusion of discourses. They establish the rules of intellectual exchange and define the methods, techniques, and instruments that are considered proper for the pursuit of knowledge. Within these margins each discipline recognizes true and false propositions based on the standards of evaluation it established to assess them. It is not my intention here to provide a coherent account or historical survey of the exclusionary academic conventions that have been established by the discipline of IR. Instead, I want to illustrate the process of disciplining thought by focusing on a recent publication by three well placed academics, Gary King, Robert O. Keohane,

and Sidney Verba. Byoutlining the methodological rules about how to conduct good scholarly research, they fulfill important and powerful doorkeeping functions . These functions emerge as soon as the authors present their main argument, that “qualitative” and “quantitative” research approaches do not differ in substance for both can (and must be) systematic and scientific. One does not need to be endowed with the investigating genius of a Sherlock Holmes to detect positivist traits in

these pages. One easily recognizes an (anti)philosophical stance that attempts to separate subject and object, that believes the social scientist, as detached observer, can produce value-free knowledge. Such a positivist position assumes only that which is manifested in experience, which emerges from observing ‘reality’ deserves the name knowledge. All other utterances have no cognitive and empirical merit, they are mere value statements, normative claims, unprovable speculations . Indeed, if the doorkeepers did not inform us that their methodological suggestions emerged from years of teaching a coregraduate course at one of North America’s foremost research institution, one could easily mistake their claims as parodies of positivism. We are told that the goal of research is “to learn facts about the real world” and that all hypotheses “need to be evaluated empirically before they can make a contribution to knowledge”. Which facts? Whose ‘real’ world? What form of knowledge ? The discursive power of academic disciplines, George Canguilhem argues, works such that a statement has to be “within the true” before one can even start to judge whether it is true or false, legitimate or illegitimate. Hence, the doorkeepers inform us that what distinguishes serious research about the “facts” of the “real world” from casual observation is the search for “valid inferences by the systematic use of well-established procedures of inquiry”. Such procedures not only suggest on what grounds

things can be studied legitimately, but also decide what issues are worthwhile to be assessed in the first place. In

other words, a topic has to fulfill a number of preliminary criteria before it can even be evaluated as a


legitimate IR concern. The criterion of admittance , the doorkeepers notify us, are twofold. A research topic

must “pose a question that is ‘important’ in the real world” and it must contribute to the scholarly literature by “increasing our collective ability to construct verified scientific explanation of some aspect of the world”. The doorkeepers of IR remind the women and men from the country who pray for admittance to the temple of IR that

only those who abide by the established rules will gain access. Admittance cannot be granted at the moment to those who are eager to investigate the process of knowing, to those who intend to redraw the boundaries of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ research, or to those

who even have the audacity of questioning what this ‘real world’ really is. The warning is loud and clear: “A proposed topic that cannot be refined into a specific research project permitting valid descriptive or causal inference should be modified along the way or abandoned”. And if you are drawn to the temple of IR after all, the doorkeepers laugh, then just try to go in despite our veto. But take note, we are powerful and we are only the least of the doorkeepers, for ultimately all research topics that have no “real-world importance” will run “the risk of descending to politically insignificant questions”. Or could it be that

these allegedly unimportant research topics need to be silenced precisely because they run the risk of turning into politically significant questions? The systems of exclusion that doorkeeping functions uphold is sustained by a whole range of discipline related procedures, linked to such aspects as university admittance standards, teaching curricula, examination topics, policies of hiring and promoting teaching staff, or publishing criteria determined by the major journals in the field. At least the doorkeepers of IR have not lost a sense of (unintended) irony. They readily admit that “we seek not dogma, but

disciplined thought”. Academic disciplines discipline the production of discourses. They force the creation and exchange of knowledge into preconceived spaces, called debates. Even if one is to engage the orthodox position in a critical manner, the outcome of the discussion is already circumscribed by the parameters that had been established through the initial framing of debates . Thus, as soon as one addresses academic disciplines on their own terms, one has to play according to rules of a discursive ‘police’ which is reactivated each time one speaks.


Realism Link

Realism is the lingua franca of today’s securitized IR theory-it distances us from the reality of war and the pursuit of national interests by camouflaging systems of exclusion and violence as inevitable facets of human experience.


Languages, in Nietzsche’s view, are built upon a set of prejudices that are expressed via metaphors; selectively filtered images of objects and impressions that surround us. Languages are more than just mediums of communication. They represent the relationship between people and their environment. They are part of a larger discursive struggle over meaning and interpretation, an integral element of politics. Yet, the process of neglecting that we are all conditioned by decades of linguistically entrenched values largely camouflages the system of exclusion that is operative in all speech forms. We become accustomed to our distorting metaphors until we “lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all.” The following passage illustrates well the extent to which language and social practice are intertwined. Without using

the actual term reification (Verdinglichung), Nietzsche provides an astonishing account of its dynamics: This has given me the greatest trouble and still does: to realize that what things are called is incomparably more important than what they are. The reputation, name, and appearance, the usual measure and weight of a thing, what it counts for - originally almost always wrong and arbitrary, thrown over things like a dress and altogether foreign to their nature and even to their skin - all this grows from generation unto generation, merely because people believe in it, until it gradually grows to be part of the thing and turns into its very body. What at first was appearance becomes in the end, almost

invariably, the essence and is effective as such. Ideas become reified because reality and dominant discursive practices merge to the point that the links between them vanish from our collective memories . George Orwell’s fictional world provides a perfect illustration for this subjugating power of languages. Consider how Oceania introduced Newspeak to accommodate its official ideology, Ingsoc. New words were invented and undesirable ones either eliminated or striped of unorthodox meanings. The objective of this exercise was that “when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought - that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc - should be literally unthinkable.” By then history would be rewritten to the point that even if fragments of documents from the past were still to surface, they simply

would be unintelligible and untranslatable. We find similar dynamics at work in the more ‘real’ (but equally Orwellian) IR world of defense intellectuals . Carol Cohn demonstrates how the particular language that they employ not only removes them from the ‘reality’ of nuclear war , but also constructs a new world of abstraction that makes it impossible to think or express certain concerns related to feelings, morality, or simply ‘peace’. The consequences, Cohn rightly stresses, are fateful because the language of defense intellectuals has been elevated to virtually the only legitimate medium of debating security issues. Noam Chomsky provides another example of the links between language and politics. He argues that mainstream discourses linguistically presented the “involvement” in Vietnam such that the actual thought of an American “aggression” or “invasion” was unthinkable, and this despite plenty of readily available evidence in support of such an interpretation. The same linguistic dynamic of exclusion is at work in IR theory, where the dominant realist language renders discussions of epistemology virtually impossible.Consider how Robert Gilpin criticizes the post-structuralist language of Richard Ashley by declaring entirely unintelligible his claim that “...the objective truth of the discourse lies within and is produced by the discourse itself”. The concepts used in this sentence not only

make perfect sense to any critical social theorist, but also are essential for the articulation of an epistemological critique. Yet, read through the Newspeak of scientific realism, the very idea of epistemological critique is a heretic thought and the sentence thus becomes simply untranslatable. Not surprisingly, Gilpin admits that he frequently was unable to

follow Ashley’s argument. The language of realism has rendered any challenge to its own political foundations unthinkable.


Form Key Yo


I focus my attempt to forget IR language on Theodor W. Adorno’s reading of Nietzsche. I have chosen Adorno because he epitomized both the

strengths and dangers of this approach. Adorno recognizes that even before dealing with specific speech contents, languages mold a thought such that it gets drawn into subordination even where it appears to resist this tendency .

Hence, if challenges to orthodoxy and attempts to open up thinking space are to avoid being absorbed by the dominant discourse, then they must engage in a struggle with conventionally recognized linguistic practices , or at least with the manner in which these practices have been constituted. The form of writing becomes as important as its content . Critique of society cannot be

separated from Sprachkritik, critique of language. In making this assumption, Adorno follows a well carved out path. The linguist Fritz

Mauthner already considered Sprachkritik as “the most important task of thinking humanity” and the poet Paul Valéry probably captured its

objective best when claiming that “the secret of well founded thinking is based on suspicion towards language.” From this perspective the first step in any process that tries to escape the controlling power of orthodox IR theory entails paying close attention to its linguistic practices. The usage of concepts is Adorno’s starting point. To talk of IR,

or of anything for that matter, we need to employ concepts to express our ideas. Yet, concepts can never entirely capture ththeire objects that they are trying to describe. A concept is always a violation, an imposition of static subjectivity upon complex, interconnected, and continuously changing phenomena . Nietzsche was already aware that “all concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated elude definition: only that which has no history can be defined”. What Nietzsche emphasized in a historical manner, Adorno illustrates through a contemporary example. He shows how the judgment that one is free depends on the concept of freedom. But this concept is both less and more than the object or subject it refers to. It is less because it cannot adequately assess the complexities of the individual’s expectations and the contexts within which s/he seeks freedom. It is more because it imposes a particular interpretation of freedom upon and beyond the conditions of freedom sought after at a particular time and place. Thus, Adorno argues that “the concept of freedom always lags behind itself. As soon as it is applied empirically it ceases to be what it claims it is.” Here, again, we hear the echo of Nietzsche, who already claimed that liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are established, that, as a result, “there is nothing more wicked and harmful to freedom than liberal institutions”.

Acknowledging and dealing with the political dimensions of concepts is essential in the effort to defy the doorkeeping power of orthodox IR. There are at least two ways through which one can subvert the delineation of thinking space imposed by orthodox definitions of IR concepts . First, one can appropriate and open up the meaning of existing concepts. This strategy was demonstrated in political practice by

German and English speaking gay/lesbian activists, who transformed the terms ‘schwul’ and ‘queer’ from derogative and discriminatory expressions to positively imbued assertions of identity that create possibilities for more inclusive ways of thinking and acting. Even closer to the

‘reality’ of IR, we can observe struggles over the meaning of such concepts as ‘state’, ‘anarchy’, ‘hegemony’, ‘diplomacy’, ‘security’, and ‘ethics’. Consider, for instance, the concept of ‘power’.

Some traditional realists view(ed) it, to simplify things a bit, as “man’s control over the minds and actions of other men”. In this phallocentric definition, power is the capacity to act, something someone (a man!) has and others don’t. But diverging opinions pressed for a more broad conceptualization, one that is also linked to functions of consent and legitimacy. Others again view power as a complex structure of actions that permeate every aspect of society, not

simply a subjugating force, but at least as much an enabling opportunity. Besides appropriating the constituted meaning of

existing concepts one can open up possibilities for more inclusive ways of theorizing and acting by resorting to an all together new way of conceptualizing. Orthodox IR concepts are then simply left behind, filed ad acta asrelics of a past way of thinking that is no longer adequate to deal with an increasingly complex and intertwined sphere of contemporary life . But how do we prevent new concepts from imposing their own

subjectivities? No concept will ever be sufficient, will ever do justice to the object it is trying to capture. The objective then becomes to conceptualize thoughts such that they do not silence other voices, but co-exist and interact with them. Various authors have suggested methods for this purpose, methods that will always remain attempts without ever reaching the ideal state that they aspire to. We know of Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism, a theory of


knowledge and language that tries to avoid the excluding tendencies of monological thought forms. Instead, he accepts the existence of multiple meanings, draws connections between differences, and searches for possibilities to establish conceptual and linguistic dialogues among competing ideas, values, speech forms, texts, validity claims and the like. Jürgen Habermas attempts to theorize the preconditions for ideal speech situations. Communication, in this case, should be as unrestrained as possible, such that “claims to truth and rightness can be discursively redeemed”, albeit, one should add, through a rationalism and universalism that is violently anti-Bakhtinian and anti-Adornian. Closer to the familiar terrain of IR we find Christine Sylvester’s feminist method of empathetic cooperation, which aims at opening up questions of gender by a “process of positional slippage that occurs when one listens seriously to the concerns, fears, and agendas of those one is unaccustomed to

heeding when building social theory.” But how does one conceptualize such attempts if concepts can never do justice to the objects they are trying to capture? The daring task is, as we know from Adorno, to open up with concepts what does not fit into concepts, to resist the distorting power of reification and return the conceptual to the non-conceptual. This disenchantment of the concept is the antidote of critical philosophy, it impedes the concept from developing its own dynamics and from becoming an absolute in itself. The first step towards disenchanting the concept is simply refusing to define it monologically. Concepts should achieve meaning only gradually, in relation to each other. Adorno even intentionally uses the same concept in different ways in order to liberate it from the narrow definition that language itself had already imposed on it. That contradictions could arise out of this practice does not bother Adorno. Indeed, he considers them essential.


Poetry Solvency


Poetry has the potential of subverting and unsettling the encroachment of dominant IR practices ,

for it arguably is the most radical way of stretching, even violating the stylistic, syntactic, and grammatical rules of linguistic conventions. Poetry revolves, much like Adorno’sSprachkritik, around the substance of form. Or so at least claims the influential voice of Paul Valéry. He separates poetry from prose and stresses that in the latter form is not preserved. It disappears as soon as it has fulfilled its purpose. Once you have understood the content of my speech, Valéry

illustrates, the form of my speech becomes meaningless, it vanishes from your memory. The form of the poem, by contrast, does not vanish after its usage. It is an integral part of speech, designed to rise from its ashes . The poem is not able to escape the constraints of language, but it makes these constraints its raison d’être.Poetry isSprachkritikat its most self-conscious existence. Indeed, the attempt to stretch language games isprobablythe single most important definingcharacteristic of poetry.A poem is a conscious transgression of existing linguistic conventions, a protest against an established language game and the system of exclusion that are embedded in it . In this sense poetry sets itself apart from prose because it negates, not by chance or as a side effect, but because it cannot do otherwise, because that is what poetry is all about.A poet renders strange that which is familiar and thus forces the reader to confront that which s/he habitually has refused to confront. For Kristeva, poetic language disturbs, transgresses rules, fractures meaning. In doing so it “breaks up the inertia of language habits” and “liberates the subject from a number of linguistic, psychic, and social networks.”

Illlustrating the power of poetry to rediscribe reality is no easy task, for poetry is not about this or that argument, this or that idea. It is about searching for a language that provides us with different eyes, different ways of perceiving what we already know, it is about unsettling, making strange that which is familiar,

about opening up thinking space and creating possibilities to act in more inclusive ways . No isolated citation will ever do justice to this objective. Only an extended lecture of poetry can succeed in stretching the boundaries of our mind. But for the more limited purpose of this paper, an example will have to

suffice. “The Pupil,” a poem written by Jayne-Ann Igel, expresses aspects of the transition from the Cold War to a new international order. Igel is one of thek East German poets who, during the 1980s, actively engaged in a critique of the dominant language in order to create thinking

space in a suffocating society. Her poem deals not so much with the obvious forms of repression that existed at

the time, but with more subtle and far more powerful aspects of discursive domination:was i caught forever, as i learned their language, myvoice a bird-squeak, keeping me under their spell; they heldme near the house like a vine, whose shoots they clipped, so that they do not darken the roomsand close to the wall of the house i played, under the lightof drying sheets, the fingers pierced through the plaster, idid not want to miss the personified sound of my name, whichsmelled like urine; those who carried my name in their mouth,held me by the neck with their teeth

Needed, Sprachkritik, a radical critique of language that pierces through the plaster of the ruling philosophy, breaks its spell, slips away from the linguistic teeth drilled into one’s neck. Needed, a language that is not a vine, confined to the wall of the house and constantly trimmed, but a free-standing and freely growing tree, pushing its branches up into the open sky. Igel’s poem not only captures this objective in content,

but also in form. In a societal context (East Germany of the 1980s) of strong ideological dogmatism and strict behavioral rules, her poem purposely violates a number of existing linguistic conventions. For example, she starts off with a question (‘was I caught forever, as I learned their language’) but refuses to close this question with an appropriate question mark. One is inevitably thrown into a continuous questioning mood, a permanent state of suspense that lasts until the end of the poem. This sense of suspense is accentuated by the fact that Igel fuses sentences with commas, semi-columns or a simple ‘and’ where they normally would be terminated with a period. Indeed, the suspense of the initial question even goes beyond the end of the poem for Igel refuses to close it with any sort of punctuation. The question ‘was i caught forever, as i learned their language’ echoes long after the last word is read. Moreover, her poem entirely disregards the German linguistic convention of capitalizing nouns - a subversive act my English translation is unable to convey, except maybe through the refusal to capitalize ‘I’ and the first word of the poem. The breaking fee, the forgetting that a poem like “The Pupil” does, is a form of remembering. It illustrates how poetry can be a way of coming to terms with history, a searching more inclusive ways of looking at the constitution of things present and past. Poetry, then, fulfills the task of a critical memory, it assures a presence beyond death and


beyond the current, historically delineated moment. Poetry remains the most underrated and unexplored approach to reconceptualizingwor(l)d politics. We know of some attempts that successfully stretched the boundaries of IR

language. The work of Christine Sylvester and James Der Derian comes to mind. But such attempts remain rare. We need more of them, not to search for beauty or a more perfect representation of reality, but simply to be able to speak again, to walk through the silence that orthodox IR language has imposed on its community of scholars. Poetry addresses this difficult issue.How to speak in a language that has structurally excluded women, the Other, anybody and anything that cannot be identified with the speaking (realist/liberal) subject? How to speak in a language that has historically evolved from the center of the world, first from the British Colonial Empire, then from the vantage point of American hegemony , and now as the new lingua franca of international political, economic and cultural interactions? How to express those silenced voices, those worlds that lie beyond the linguistic zone of exclusion that the global dominance of English has established? How to decenter the center through the language of the center? Poetry can show us ways of dealing with these important and difficult issues, with the “reconstruction of the world through words,” with how “the mortal ones can learn, once more, how to live in language.” The radically different viewpoints that a poetic image illuminates may not always be directly translatable into clear-cut policy recommendations, but they have the potential to contribute immensely by bringing into a dialogical realm many of the repressed voices, perspectives and emotions that otherwise may never reach the prose oriented theorists and practitioners of contemporary wor(l)d politics. Poetry can bring about a slow transformation of discursive and linguistic practices that gradually open up spaces for more inclusive ways of perceiving and practicing IR. Forget. Listen. Feel.For(to)get a new angle on IR. Derek Walcott:

It was in winter. Steeples, spirescongealed like holy candles. Rotting snowflaked from Europe’s ceiling. A compact man,I crossed the canal in a gray overcoat,on one lapel a crimson buttonholefor the cold ecstasy of the assassin.In the square coffin manacled to my wrist:small countries pleaded through the mesh of graphs,in treble-spaced, Xeroxed forms to the World Bankon which I had scrawled the one word, MERCY.


A2: Linguistic Resistance Fails


A topic that deals with the struggle over meaning and interpretation does not easily lend itself to a conclusion. There is no essence that crystallizes, that can be wrapped up in a few succinct points or classified neatly into existing categories. Language is never adequate to express social dynamics, especially if they touch upon the very issue of language. Conclusions are illusions, for debates about language will never come

to an end. They will always constitute sites of contestation that an author cannot, or at least should not circumvent. A critical author must, on the one hand, defy the language of the dominant discourse in order not to get drawn into its powerful linguistic vortex and, on the other hand, articulate alternative thoughts such that they are accessible enough to constitute viable tools to open up dialogical interactions . This can, of course,

only be achieved if alternative knowledge can break out of intellectual obscurity, if it can reach and change the minds of most people. However, a text that breaks with established practices of communication to escape their discursive power has, by definition, great difficulties in doing this. Nietzsche was well aware of this inevitable dilemma. Zarathustra is constantly torn back and forth between engaging with people and withdrawing from them. The masses fail to comprehend his attempts to defy herd instincts and problematize the unproblematic. “They do not understand me; I am not the mouth for these ears”, he hails. “Must one smash their ears before they learn to listen with their eyes?” At times he appears without hope: “what matters a time that “has not time” for Zarathustra?...why do I speak where nobody has my ears? It is still an hour too early for me here”. Succumbing to the power of language, Zarathustra returns to the mountains, withdraws in the solitude of his cave. But thoughts of engaging with humanity never leave him. He repeatedly climbs down from his cave to the depths of life, regains hope that monological discourses will give way to dialogue, that the herds will understand him one day. “But their hour will come! And mine will come too! Hourly they are becoming smaller, poorer, more sterile - poor herbs! poor soil! and soon they shall stand there like dry grass and prairie - and verily, weary of themselves and languish even more than for

water - for fire.” Dissident scholarship will not immediately incineratethe dry grass of orthodox IRprairies.

Fire-fighters are holding off the blaze. Discourses live on and appear reasonable long after their premises have turned into anachronistic relics. More inclusive ways of theorizing and living world(s) politics cannot surface over night.

There are no quick solutions, no new paradigms or miraculous political settlements that one could hope for. Changing the practice of IR is a long process, saturated with obstacles and contradictions. Zarathustra knows that. It is inour daily practices of speaking, of forgetting and remembering that slow transformative potentials are hidden. The great events in history , he claims, “are not our loudest but our stillest hours. Not around the inventors of new noise, but around the inventors of new values does the world revolve; it revolves inaudibly.” The inaudible character of these transformative potentials does not make them any less real. The systems of domination and the possibilities for change that are embedded in language are as real as the practices of Realpolitik. They effect the daily lives of people as much as the so-called “real-world issues” of orthodox IR. Language is politics disguised. Taking this dynamic seriously means that one can no longer simply “sidestep many issues in the philosophy of social science as well as controversies about the role of postmodernism, the nature and existence of truth, relativism, and related subjects.” One can no longer avoid questions of ethics and responsibility by hiding behind the language of realism and the inevitability of power politics.One can no longer blow the trumpet of anti-positivism while advising at the same time to focus only on “questions of fact”, without being “goaded into taking seriously

problems about words and their meanings.” Any scholar who is concerned with the inevitable impact of theorizing on daily practices of wor(l)d politics must take seriously questions about words and their meanings. Rhetoric and dialogue is needed, not scientific rigidity . While acknowledging the continuous importance of genealogical critique, of deconstructing IR, I suggested that efforts should not stop at this point. Critique must be supplemented with a process that forgets the object of critique. The above presented conceptual and stylistic strategies for undermining dominant and

monological discursive practices constitute only illustrative examples. Doorkeeping functions emerge everywhere, and so do potentials to avoid them. Hence, my suggestions should not be read as ready-made solutions or endorsements of particular writing styles and forms of conceptualizing. They are, above all, meant to demonstrate the crucial and unavoidable political function that language plays in the theory and practice of wor(l)d(s) politics.


Forgetting Alt

Bleiker, co-director of U of Queensland’s Rotary Center for International Studies & Humboldt Fellow @ U of Berlin, 1997(Roland, “Forget IR Theory,” Alternatives 22:1, 57-86)

To forget orthodox IR theory is not to ignore the IR practices that have framed our realities. Countless events of the past, such as the Holocaust, cannot and should not be simply chased out of our collective memory. Neither does forgetting amount to turning a blind eye towards the violent nature that characterizes present world politics. Forgetting is not only a negative process, a neglecting and overlooking, but also a necessary part of our existence , something we often do without being aware of it. Jeanette Winterson: They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could we go on? How could we ever get up and off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it? By forgetting. We cannot keep in mind too many things. There is only

the present and nothing to remember. The task, then, becomes one of turning forgetting from a selective, arbitrary and unconscious constitution of things past into an active, conscious and more inclusive process. Instead of perpetuating IR nostalgia, seeking comfort and security in the familiar interpretation of long gone epochs , even if they are characterized by violence and insecurity, conscious forgetting opens up possibilities for a dialogical understanding of our present and past. It refuses to tie future possibilities to established forms of life . Rather than further entrenching current IR security dilemmas by engaging with the orthodox discourse that continuously gives meaning to them, forgetting tries to escape the vicious circle by which these social practices serve to legitimize and objectivize the very discourses that have given rise to them. Forgetting becomes an instrument of dialogue and inclusion, it reorients our memories, becomes active by turning into forge(t)

and for(to)get. From this vantage point forgetting is a process or remembering, or, seen from Milan Kundera’s reversed perspective, “remembering is a form of forgetting.” I will draw primarily upon the work of Friedrich Nietzsche to explore the process of forgetting orthodox IR theory. This is not to essentialize Nietzsche or render him heroic, but to employ his work as a stepping stone, a source to provoke thought

before it too has to be forgotten in order not to turn into a new orthodoxy. The process of forgetting, for Nietzsche, is a process of healing: Only now do I believe you healed for healed is who forgot. Nietzsche ended up with this position by dealing with a

set of methodological dilemmas similar to those I am trying to address in this paper. The need to forget emerges from recognizing the problematic links that are commonly drawn between cause and effect. Such a

duality,Nietzsche claims, probably never existed. We merely establish arbitrary links between things that we consider important, isolate a couple of pieces out of a continuum of complex and intertwinedevents. This is why it is futile to search for a causal origin in this web of human life and to think we could somehow ground a better world on this form of flawed insight. “How foolish it would be,” Nietzsche claims, “to suppose that one only needs to point out this origin and this misty shroud of delusion in order to destroy the

world that counts for real, so-called “reality.” Nietzsche’s skepticism towards grounding critique in an investigation of the origins of things is important. It is one of the reasons why some consider his work as the conceptual turning point from modernity to postmodernity. Nietzsche’s own words may explain best the importance of forgetting for a critique of orthodox IR: Why is it that this thought comes back to me again and again and in ever more varied colours? - that formerly, when investigators of knowledge sought out the origin of things they always believed they would discover something of incalculable significance for all later action and judgment, that they always presupposed, indeed, that the salvation of man must depend on insight into the origins of things, but ... [t]he more insight we possess into an origin the less significant does the origin appear: while what is nearest to us, what is around us and in us, gradually begins to display colors and beauties and enigmas and riches of significance of which earlier mankind had not an inkling. By observing why Nietzsche ended up with this

position I will explore the ‘riches of significanc e ’ that could emerge once we liberate IR theory from the compulsion to link the search for peace with exploring the origins of present dilemmas in world politics. I will then retrace Nietzsche’s next step, an engagement with what he calls “active forgetfulness,” a way of thinking that enables “a tabula rasa of the consciousness,” makes room for new things, new thoughts, new possibilities.My approach to forgetting IR theory will revolve primarily around issues of language, how they constrain and enable, how they are part of a discursive form of domination and, at the same time, offer powerful opportunities to think and act beyond the narrow confines of our present world. In that sense my paper deals with methodological concerns, with what conventionally is considered form rather than


substance. Yet, the manner in which we approach, think, conceptualize, and formulate IR has a significant impact on how is practiced. Language frames politics. Form turns into substance .


IR Theories Link


In an attempt to open up what Jim George called “thinking space”, alternative approaches to IR reread and rewrite the discipline’s present and past. They deconstruct orthodox IR, listen to repressed voices and scrutinize why we have ended up where we are today. It is not my task here to summarize these

diverse and highly complex attempts. A few examples, however, reveal a common theme. James Der Derian rereads the history of diplomacy, for, as he argues, its contemporary practices cannot be understood without knowledge of its

origins. Jim George surveys the evolution of classical approaches to IR, trying to demonstrate how they have

transformed one particular and subjective view of reality (the realist / positivist one) into reality per se. David Campbell scrutinizes

how United States foreign policy produced and reproduced a specific form of political identity. Jean Elshtain goes back in IR

time and observes how patriarchal discourses have assigned women the task of life givers, and men the one of life takers, despite empirical cases that confound these assignments. Christine Sylvester revisits the three discipline-defining IR debates and ruminates about the consequences that are entailed in their failure to take gender issues and feminist theorizing into account. R.B.J. Walker challenges the ways in which centuries of modern political discourses have entrenched a state-centric dichotomy between the domestic and the international spheres. Cynthia Weber, pursuing this theme, further deconstructs the history of sovereignty and intervention. Bradley Klein analyzes how strategic studies have continuously narrowed down discussions of security issues. Various scholars also drawn attention to aspects of culture, to the

ethnocentric dimensions of IR theory. These examples , presented here in an oversimplified and selective way, reveal a common theme in critical IR scholarship: the quest to find out where the ideas and underlying principles that influence our life emanated from, the desire to reveal how the dilemmas of contemporary world politics are not immutable, but part of a historically constructed system of exclusion . Many of these attempts to scrutinize the historical origins of the present take the form of genealogies, a method of critique that is associated with Nietzsche. But did he not throw up his hands and warn of searching for the origin of things? An interpretative essay by Michel Foucault sheds light on this seemingly

paradoxical issue. Drawing attention to terminological subtleties of the German language, Foucault illustrates that the key issue revolves around what sort of origins one searches for, how one embarks upon and presents this task. Nietzsche strongly condemns the quest to discover an Ursprung , the term he uses in the above quoted

passages. Such a quest is futile and dangerous for it attempts to uncover an authentic essence in things, some form of original meaning, a site of truth. By doing so, this quest excludes everything that does not fit into the particular interpretation that is imposed upon a complex set of past and present events. The task of genealogies is radically different and much better captured by the terms Herkunft

and Entstehung, which are also translated as “origin” into French (and English). These terms do not indicate a search for a telos in history, an authentic starting point, a source to which everything can be traced back. Genealogies , by contrast, focus on the process by which we construct origins and give meaning to our past. They read multiplicity into history, disturb what was taken as immobile, fragment what was considered unified. Genealogies focus on revealing subtle systems of subjection, plays of power. Nietzsche demonstrates this approach when, searching for the origin (Herkunft) of moral prejudices, he argues that we need a critique of moral values, the value of these values themselves must first be called in question - and for that there is needed a knowledge of the

conditions and circumstances in which they grew, under which they evolved and changed. Genealogies will always remain necessary. To reach a critical understanding of IR, we need to known how we have arbitrarily constructed the present - what and who was left out on the way.We need to scrutinize the stories that have been told about the past, and those many others which were silenced.


A2: Realism good

We control uniqueness-orthodox IR is predominant mode of analysis today—squo isn’t all that peaceful. Only a risk that alternative theoretical approaches can yield peace.

Bleiker, co-director of U of Queensland’s Rotary Center for International Studies & Humboldt Fellow @ U of Berlin, 2001(Roland, “The Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 30:3, 509-533)

We have all grown accustomedto familiar representations of the international and its conflicts . Wars, famines and diplomatic summits are shown to us in their usual guise: as short-lived media events that blend info rmation and entertainment . The numbing regularity with which these images and sound-bites are communicated soon erases their highly arbitrary nature.We gradually forget that we have become so accustomed to these politically charged and distorting metaphors that we take them for real and begin to ‘lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all’.2 Those who make the analysis of these political events their professional purview— the students of international relations (ir)—

adhere to representational habits that have become equally objectified and problematic . Many of them are social scientists for whom knowledge about the ‘facts’ of the ‘real world’ emerges from the search for ‘valid inferences by the systematic use

of well-established procedures of inquiry’.3 But relatively little practical knowledge has emerged from these efforts, even after successive generations of social scientists have refined their models and methods.Our insights into the international have not grown substantially, nor have our abilities to prevent deadly conflicts . From Kosovo to Afghanistan violence remains the modus operandi of world politics . Even proponents of scientific research lament that ‘students of international conflict are left wrestling with their data to eke out something they can label a finding’ .4 This essay argues for the need to validate an entirely different approach to the study of world politics: aesthetics. More specifically, it contrasts aesthetic

with mimetic forms of representation. The latter, whichhave dominate d ir scholarship , seek to represent politics as realistically and authentically as possible, aiming to capture world politics as-it-really- is . An aesthetic approach , by contrast, assumes that there is always a gap between a form of representation and what is represented therewith. Rather than ignoring or seeking to narrow this gap, as mimetic

approaches do, aesthetic insight recognises that the inevitable difference between the represented and its representation is the very location of politics. Some of the most significant theoretical and practical insight into world politics emerges not from endeavours that ignore representation , but from those that explore how representative practices themselves have come to constitute and shape political practices. Although most approaches to international political theory remain wedded to mimetic principles, an increasing number of scholars are confronting the question of representation.


A2: Perm/CP No Solve: Mimetic v Aesthetic Reps of IR

-realism aims for neutral knowledge of real world= “mimetic”-realism can’t solve K mpx-no theory of reps/erases study of effects of reps-reps do matter-framing of political event


Before exploring the significance of aesthetic insights it is necessary to juxtapose them, if only briefly, to the prevailing wisdom of ir scholarship. One perhaps could, with Jacques Derrida, speak of two fundamentally different approaches. Thefirst seeks to discover a truth or an originthat somehow escapes the necessity ofinterpretation.The second accepts or even affirms that representing the political is a form of interpretation that is, by its very nature, incomplete and bound up withthe values of the perceiver . 7

Much of ir scholarship has, undoubtedly, been conducted in the former, mimeticmode of representation. The

most influential contributions to the discipline,particularly in North America, continue to adhere almost exclusively to socialscientific conventions. They uphold the notion of a neutral observer and acorresponding separation of object and subject. J. David Singer proudly announced during the behavioural revolution that ‘there is no longer much doubt that we can make the study of international politics into a scientific discipline worthy of the name’. 8 Much

has changed since then, of course, but representation is still widelyseen as process of coping which , ideally,

erases all traces of human interference sothat the ‘artistic’ end-product looks just like the original. Realism has made ‘the real’ into an object of desire , Hayden White would say.9 Or, as one of the most

influential contemporary methodology textbooks in political sciences states: ‘the goal is to learn facts about the real world’.10 Mimetic approaches do not pay enough attention to the relationship between therepresented and its representation . Indeed, they are not really theories ofrepresentation.11 They are theories against representation. But political reality doesnot exist in an a priori way. It comes into being only through the process of representation. A political event , for instance, cannot determine from whatperspective and in what context it is seen. Our effort to make sense of this eventcan, thus, never be reduced to the event itself. This is why representation ‘always raises the question of what set of true statements we might prefer to other sets of true statements’ .12 It is a process through which we

organise our understanding of reality. Note as well that even if the ideal of mimesis—a perfect resemblancebetween signifier and signified—was possible, it could offer us little political insight. It would merely replicate what is, and thus be as useless as ‘as a facsimile of a text that is handed to us in answer to our question of how to interpret thattext’. 13 Aesthetic approaches , by contrast, embark on a direct political encounter, for they engage the

gap that inevitably opens up between a form of representation and the object it seeks to represent. Rather than constituting this gap as a threat toknowledge and political stability, aesthetic approaches accept its inevitability. Indeed, they recognise

that the difference between represented and representation is the very location of politics. What is at stake, then, is ‘the knowability of theworld’, as Elaine Scarry puts it, and the fact that ‘knowability depends on its susceptibility to representation’.14

Consider, by way of illustration, the similarities between the work of a painterand a social scientist. Both portray their objects through particular modes ofrepresentation. Even a naturalistic painting is still a form of

representation. It cannot capture the essence of its object. It is painted from a certain angle, at a certain time of the day, and in a certain light. The materials are those chosen by the artist, as are the colours and size of the painting, even its frame. Recall for a minute the famous painting by the surrealist René Magritte: the one that features a carefully drawn pipe placed above an equally carefully hand-written line that reads ‘Cecin’est pas une pipe’ (‘This is not a pipe’). What becomes obvious fairly soon—that the painting is not a pipe itself, but only an artistic representation thereof—challenges the very notion of mimesis. It draws attention to what, in Saussurian language, is called the arbitrariness of the sign: the fact that the relationship between signifier (the drawing of the pipe) and the signified (the pipe) is contingent on a

range of interpretative steps.15 A photograph is no different, even though its seemingly authentic reproduction of external realities may deceive us initially. It too is taken at a certain time of the day, with a certain focus and from a certain angle. Indeed, these choices make up

the very essence of the photograph: its aesthetic quality. But, of course, they result from artistic and inevitablysubjective decisions on form taken by the photographer; decisions that havenothing to do with the essence


of the actual object that is photographed. The very same principles engulf our attempts to analyse and understand therealities of world politics. No social scientist can ever represent a political event or

issue independently of the form chosen for this task. Even the most thorough empirical analysis cannot depict its object of inquiry in an authentic way. It too reflects colour choices, brushstrokes, angles, framing. It too remains a form of interpretation, and with that an inherently political exercise. It too says just as much, if not more, about the artistic choices of the interpreter than the object of interpretation.


Realism Link

-normalizes itself by negating analysis of framing by parading as objective science-still has an aesthetic meaning-that of western heritage-masculine ptx internal link


Nothing is harder than to notice the obvious that was not noticed before.24 The task of critically analysing world politics is to make fuller use of various faculties and to challenge the mimetic and exclusive conventions of Realist international politics, just as Magritte’s painting of a pipe was aimed at undermining ‘the mimetic conventions of realistic painting’.25 But few tasks are more daunting than that. We all have an intuitive longing for the hope that what we represent is what we see and think, and that what we see and think must, really, be real. The belief in resemblance and recognition is part of our desire to order the world. We know, of course, that Cold War spy films are not real, yet it is much more difficult to accept, for instance, that a scientific analysis of Cold War intelligence, based on quantitative archival research, can contain equally subjective representational dimensions. This is because we are wedded to conventions of language; conventions that tell us, to appropriate Michel Foucault’s words, that the entire purpose of a scholarly analysis ‘is to elicit recognition, to allow the object it represents to appear without hesitation and equivocation’.26 Representation is always an act of power. This power is at its peak if a form of representation is able to disguise its subjective origins and values. Realism has been unusually successful in this endeavour: it has turned one of many credible interpretations into

a form of representation that is not only widely accepted as ‘realistic’, but also appears and functions as essence. Realism has been able to take historically contingent and political motivated commentaries—say by E.H. Carr and Hans Morgenthau about how to deal with the spread of Nazi Germany, or by Kenneth Waltz about how to interpret the ‘logic’ of ‘anarchy’ during the

Cold War—and then turn them into universal and a-historic explanations that allegedly capture the ‘essence’ of human nature and international politics.27 Expressed in other words, Realism has managed to suppress what Kant would have called the ‘aesthetic quality’ of politics, that is, the elements which are ‘purely subjective in the representation of an object, i.e., what constitutes its reference to the subject, not to the

object’.28 The power to raise subjective interpretations to a level of objectivity is rooted in a variety of factors other than the mere persuasiveness of the respective perspective . Time is one of these factors: a simple but important one. Realist theories of (anti)representation have been around for so long that the metaphors through which they legitimise their political view of the world (from the primacy of the ‘national interest’ to the dictates of ‘Realpolitik’) no longer appear as metaphors.

Through decades of dominance in academic scholarship, policy formation and public discourse, the anti-representational values of Realism have shaped how we perceive the boundaries between the rational and the irrational. As a result, we have forgotten whether we understand Realist interpretations by noticing resemblances to the world or whether we notice resemblances as a result of having internalised such interpretations.29 Before examining attempts to challenge mimetic representation it is necessary to draw attention to some of the blurred boundaries between the aesthetic and the mimetic.

First, one must note that existing social scientific approaches to ir already have an aesthetic. Notwithstanding their mimetic objectives , dominant Realist and Liberal views of the international rely on a particular set of representations .

The exact nature of this aesthetic is debatable, and its form varies from author to author, but it undoubtedly contains elements of the Western intellectual heritage, particularly the Enlightenment and Romanticism. What has been retained from the romantic ideal is the autonomy of the Self, the quest for independence and selfdetermination, the belief that people can shape history.30 In the world of ir scholarship this translates into a masculine preoccupation with big and heroic events: wars, revolutions, diplomatic summits and other state actions that are imbued with international significance. This very selective romantic aesthetic is supplemented with the scientific heritage of the Enlightenment, with the desire to systematise, to search for rational foundations and certainty in a world of turmoil and constant flux. Ensuing attempts to ‘extract the eternal out of the transient’ are manifest in the strong social scientific dominance of ir scholarship.31


A2: Perm-Mimesis v. Aesthetic Approach=MutExcl

A2: PERM!!!!!-2 reasons


Some of these tensions between the mimetic and the aesthetic have insinuatedthemselves into prevalent ir scholarship. Kenneth Waltz, in one of his relativelyfrequent escapes from mimetic conventions, stresses that theories

result from aprocess of abstraction and are, thus, distinct from the realities they seek to explain.He goes as far as arguing that ‘explanatory

power is gained by moving away fromreality, not by staying close to it’.35 In some passages, Morgenthau tooacknowledges that representation is an imperfect process, that mimesis is bydefinition impossible. He does so by likening the difference between the practiceof international politics and the attempt to derive a rational theory from it to thedifference between a photograph and a painting. The photograph, Morgenthauargues, ‘shows everything that can be seen by the naked eye’. The painting, bycontrast, does more. ‘[I]t shows, or it seeks to show, one thing that the naked eyecannot see: the human essence of the person portrayed’.36 The most explicitcontemporary extension

of this approach is perhaps found in Alexander Wendt’sattempt to theoriseunobservables through scientific realism.37 Why, then, are there significant problems with the mimetic conventions ofprevalent approaches to international political theory? Two points are particularlycrucial here. First, most of the prevailing approaches fail to recognise and deal withtheir own aesthetic. Mimesis in Realist scholarship contains few if any elements ofirony or self-reflection. Social science, as a result, is not presented as a form ofinterpretation . Instead, the main objective remains to elicit recognition and to closeor ignore the gap between a representation and what is represented therewith. Thecomplexities mentioned above fade when it comes to affirming the core

values andpurpose of ir research. While acknowledging limits to what ‘the naked eye’ canobserve about the political, Morgenthau nevertheless is convinced that it is possibleto capture the ‘essence’ of politics and society, namely the ‘objective laws thathave their roots in human nature’ .38 Wendt, likewise, believes that ‘epistemologicalissues are relatively uninteresting’ because ‘the point is to explain the world, not toargue how we can know it’.39 Second, and far more consequential: a relatively narrow, positivist and

exclusiveunderstanding of social science has come to dominate much of ir scholarship . Inthe extreme

version, this approach holds that all hypotheses ‘need to be evaluatedempirically before they can make a contribution to knowledge’.40 Or so at leastargue three prominent political science and ir scholars. The consequences of suchpositions are far-reaching. They have dramatically narrowed the scope of inquiriesinto world politics and the tools available to pursue them. They have elevated afew select faculties, reason in particular, and given

them the power to order allothers. The result is the erasure of a crucial location of political struggles, thedomain of representation, from our purview. This is why Waltz’s otherwisecommendable attempt to move away from resemblance and recognition ends up ina science-driven process of abstraction that isolates a few select features andproduces generalities from them .The problem here is not with abstraction per se,for abstraction is an inevitable component of any process of representation. ‘Weend up with abstraction whether we want

“it” or not’, Christine Sylvester stresses.41ButWaltzian abstraction is obsessed with deduction, categorisation and scientificlegitimacy. Rather

than celebrating the diversity of life and drawing from itssensual potentials, as abstraction in art seeks to do, the neorealist version ‘blocksthe construction of people in international relations and hinders our view of statesas more than the proverbial empty boxes’.42 The result is a narrow and problematicform of common sense. This is why even the more

moderate constructivist scholarsrely on analytical tools that are largely confined to mimetic principles. ConsiderWendt’s highly indicative position that knowledge needs to be both systematic andscientific to be of any value. He stresses that ‘[p]oetry, literature and otherhumanistic disciplines…are not designed to explain global war or Third Worldpoverty, and as such if

we want to solve those problems our best hope, slim as itmaybe, is social science’.43 Hope for a better world will , indeed,

remain slim if we put all our efforts intosearching for a mimetic understanding of the international. Issues of global warand Third World poverty are far too serious and urgent to be left to only one formof inquiry, especially if this mode of thought suppresses important faculties


andfails to understand and engage the crucial problem of representation . We need toemploy the full register of human perception and intelligence to understand thephenomena of world politics and to address the dilemmas that emanate from them. One of the key challenges , thus, consists of legitimising a greater variety ofapproaches and insights to world politics. Aesthetics is a n important

and necessary addition to our interpretative repertoire. It helps us understand why the emergence,meaning and significance of a political event can be appreciated only once wescrutinise the representational practices that have constituted the very nature of thisevent.


Solvency/A2: Cedes political


To broaden our knowledge of the international does, however, require more than simply adding a few additional layers of interpretation. What is needed is a more fundamental reorientation of thought and action: a shift away from harmonious common sense imposed by a few dominant faculties towards a model of thought that enables productive flows across a variety of discordant faculties. For Deleuze, this difference amounts to a move from recognition to a direct political encounter, from approaches that affirm appearances without disturbing thought towards approaches that add to our understanding and, indeed, force us to think.44 An illustration from the world of art may help: consider how the significance of Picasso’s Guernica as a form of insight into and historical memory of the Spanish Civil War is located precisely in the fact that the painter aesthetically engaged the difference between the represented and its representation. Guernica allows us to move back and forth between imagination and reason, thought and sensibility, memory and understanding, without imposing one faculty upon another. Abstraction here seeks to free our senses from the compulsion to equate knowledge with the rational recognition of external appearances. This sensual transgression of mimetic conventions is perhaps at its most extreme in those visual instances where figuration is given up altogether. Abstraction then draws attention to the fact that a figurative painting runs the risk of leading the eye to the temptation of recognition. Abstraction, by contrast, projects an immediacy of sensation that is not linked to direct representational tasks. To preserve political relevance in such a process is, of course, far from self-evident. And yet, abstraction has taken on very explicit political dimensions, as the close association of Abstract Expressionism with Cold- War politics amply demonstrated.45 This is why the Australian painter David Rankin, whose abstract canvasses engage political themes from the Holocaust to the Tienanmen massacre, stresses that the paintings of Paul Klee and other seemingly non-political artists ‘were political in an exciting way because they were leading to shifts of sensibility within society’.46 How, then, is one to legitimise approaches to thought, knowledge and evidence that contradict virtually every central principle that has guided ir scholarship since its inception as an academic discipline? Knowledge communicated through artistic, philosophical and historical insights cannot always be verified by methodological means proper to science. Indeed, the significance of aesthetic insight is located precisely in the fact that it ‘cannot be attained in any other way’.47 It produces what can be called an ‘excess’ experience; that is, an experience, sensuous at times, which cannot be apprehended or codified by non-aesthetic forms of knowledge. Indeed, aesthetic understanding is based on the very acknowledgement that signification is an inherently incomplete and problematic process.48 And this is why aesthetic truth claims need to be validated by means other than empirical evidence and scientific falsification procedures. They require productive and respectful interactions among different faculties or, as Hans Georg Gadamer puts it, an investigation into the very phenomenon of understanding.49 The remaining parts of this essay now explore efforts at such forms of legitimisation in the context of ir scholarship.


Framework


For many commentators the key feature that unites all these diverse approaches has to do with the need to come to terms with ‘the death of God’, the disappearance, at the end of the medieval period, of a generally accepted world view that provided a stable ground from which it was possible

to assess nature, knowledge, common values, truth, politics, in short, life itself.52 Rather thancontinuing a long modern tradition of finding replacements for the fallen God, postmodern scholarship accepts the ultimately contingent nature of political life . A slightly different way of conceptualising postmodern approaches would be to

draw attention to their aesthetic qualities. From such a perspective postmodernscholarship has started an important engagement with what David Campbell called ‘the manifest consequences of [choosing] one mode of representation overanother’.53 What is significant here is the recognition that language is the precondition for representation and, by extension, all meaningful knowledge of the world . It is in this sense that postmodern scholarship has taken the ‘linguistic turn’and recognised that our understanding of the world is intrinsically linked to the languages we employ to do so; languages that express histories of human interaction; languages that have successfully established and masked a range of arbitrary viewpoints and power relations.54 Linked to this insight into representation is a more broadly conceived discussion of positivism and its relationship to

the theory and practice. Contrary to prevalent social sciencewisdom, aesthetic approaches stressed that our comprehension of facts cannot be separated from our relationship with them , that thinking always expresses a will totruth, a desire to control and impose order upon events that are often random andidiosyncratic. Positivism , whether based in science or not, is, thus, presented as anapproach that ignores the process of representation and holds the problematic belief that the social scientist, as detached observer, can produce value-free knowledge . 55 Postmodern contributions moved from a process of

recognition towards apolitical encounter. Instead of simply adding an extra layer of interpretation, theysought to challenge, sometimes passionately, the very nature of world politics byquestioning the notion of common sense that had established itself at the heart ofthe discipline . The reaction, as is often the case in a fundamental political encounter, was unusually hostile. There was widespread and dismissive talk of nihilism and relativism, of an ‘anything goes’ ideology, but often with very little understanding of the actual theoretical and practical issue that postmodern authors had tried to grapple with. As a result, the so-called Third Debate never actually took place and orthodox ir scholarship has remained by and large unaffected by the postmodern challenge.The process of forgetting the restraining boundaries of conventional ir scholarship is well on its way. One could, indeed,

speak of a second aesthetic turn. This more recent shift in knowledge-production is characterised by various scholarly

attempts to understand or depict world politics in ways other than through the languages and concepts of social theory. By moving away from established forms of representation, scholars seek to explore, as Costas Constantinou puts it, ‘theoretically playful—but plausible—narrative[s] through which to reread and revise the picture of world politics’.59 The purpose, then, is not primarily, or at least not only, one of critique.

Rather, the key objective revolves around finding new ways to understand the dilemmas of world politics. Being aware of the problematic dimensions of representation, aesthetic approaches view academic disciplines as powerful mechanisms that direct and control the production and diffusion of knowledge. Disciplines establish the rules of intellectual exchange and define the methods, techniques, and instruments that are considered proper for the pursuit of knowledge . While providing meaning, coherence and

stability, these rules also delineate the limits of what can be thought, talked, and written of in a normal way. Innovative solutions to existing problems cannot be found if our efforts at understanding the international remain confined to a set of rigid and well-entrenched disciplinary rules.


Debate as newscast/reps K internal

debate has been reduced to spray and pray newscast, throwing biggest wars and nuclear firestorms out hoping to impress the judge-this practice distances us from the reality of the violence we speak of-never question framing in this context-this is a form of calculated omission


An aesthetic move beyond the comfort of academic disciplines inevitably highlights the problematic dimensions of representation. Indeed, the closer one observes political struggles on the ground the more one realises the manipulationsof realities that are part of the very essence of politics. Look at how Michael Ignatieff has learned not from academic ruminating, but from extensive on-theground- experiences that ‘all exercises in political judgement depend on the creation of “virtual realities”, abstractions that simplify causes and consequences’.61 Indeed, the unproblematised understanding of reality-as-it-is, which permeates all mimetic approaches, can make sense only as long as it stays within the detached and neatly delineated boundaries of academic disciplines. As soon as one confronts the actual realities of conflict zones, it becomes evident that ‘war is the easiest of realities to abstract’, and that this abstraction process is intrinsically linked to whatever representational practices prevail at the time.62 Nowhere are the representational dimensions of politics, and our mimeticattempts to conceal them, more evident

than in the domain of television; perhaps the most crucial source of collective consciousness today. Abstractions about war are intertwined with representational practices that are increasingly shaped by the dictates of the entertainment-oriented media industry. Consider the fact that ‘the entire script content of the CBS nightly half-hour news would fit on three-quarters of the front page of the New York Times’.63 Or note how in the period from 1968 to 1988 the average sound-bite

during televised coverage of US elections decreased from 43 to 9 seconds.64 Figures are probably even lower today, and whatever substance can still be packed into what remains is likely to get further blurred when presented in the context of other news and no-news, fromdrive-by shootings to touch-downs, famines, home-runs and

laundry detergent adds. The numbing regularity and the mimetic conventions with which these images and sound-bites are communicated to great masses soon erases their highly subjective and problematic representational form . We all distance ourselves , in one way or another, from the often highly disturbing realities that are communicated to us. We create a moral shield from wars and famines that are not our own. 65 Aesthetic insight is one of the tools we can employ against such forms ofnumbing regularity and complacency . Confronting the massive tragedy of theBosnian War, Ignatieff looks for help in the example of Goya’s Horrors of Warand Picasso’s Guernica, ‘which confront [the] desire to evade the testimony of our own eyes by grounding horror in aesthetic forms that force the spectator to see if as for the first time’.66 Furthermore, high art is not the only location of such aesthetic encounters with the political. John Docker, for instance, suggests that significant critical potential is hidden in the seemingly homogenising and suffocating forces of

popular culture, where he detects, carnivalesque challenges to the narrow and single representation of reason in the pubic sphere.67 Direct aesthetic encounters with the political can contribute to a more inclusiveand just world order, for

they challenge our very notion of common sense byallowing us to see what may be obvious but has not been noted before. This is why we have a responsibility, both as numbed spectators of televised realities and as scholars wedded to social scientific conventions, to engage our representational habits and search for ways of heeding to forms of thought that can reassess the realities of world politics.


security rhetoric bad

before we can engage in diplomatic solutions, we need to first reconcile present grievances and differences so as to move beyond the distrust and hatred we have in the status quo. however, security discourse/policy analysis would rather have us continually secure ourselves, continually maintain a ‘friend/enemy’ distinction, which means thatin order to begin to understand this conflict in its entirety and to look at the entrenched structural issues, we have to step outside the realm of policy making and traditional security analysis.

Bleiker, co-director of U of Queensland’s Rotary Center for International Studies & Humboldt Fellow @ U of Berlin, 2005(Roland, Divided Korea, xxix-xxx)

One can argue about who is to blame for the renewed tensions in korea. to engage these debates is not the purpose of this book, at least not in the conventional sense. instead, i seek to understand and deal with the more fundamental question of why such standoffs keep emerging and

reemerging in the first place.the persistently recurring patterns of conflict suggests a more deeply entrenched structural problem, one that goes far beyond short-term tactical maneuverings of policy makers. T he key actors, issues, and policy perspectives change constantly, but the nature of the problem remains the same. This is why fundamentally new forms of thinking and acting are required, for it is hardly possible to find a way out of the current security

dilemmas through the political mind-sets that have created them in the first place. Without dealing with questions of reconciliation and forgiveness,the present culture of insecurity is unlikely to give way to a more peaceful order. But the task of constructing a nonviolent future out of a violent past is, of course, not easy. How is one to facilitate non violent coexistence among people divided by the memory of pain and death? What are they to remember? And how? What are they to forget? And why? These difficult but fundamental questions are hardly ever posed in Korea, where antagonistic Cold War rhetoric and a general climate of fear and distrust continue to drive interac tions between the key actors. A sustained diplomatic breakthrough cannot occur without first promoting a cult of reconciliation. to start this is, of course, not necessarily new or radical. Many security experts would readily agree. Jang Si Young and AhnPyong-Seong, for instance, stress that genuine peace is unlikely in the immediate future because "it will require considerable time for the two Koreas to promote exchanges and confidence building" before any progress can be made. 3 But in the logic of prevailing realist security thinking, the absence of a culture of reconciliation calls for a reinforcement of conventional defense postures. This is why Jang and Ahn argue that a "sustained build-up of its military strength is essential [to South Korea's] se curity." A similar logic underlies the U.S. position toward North Korea: It is based on the assumption that the only "genuine alterna tive to war with North Korea is now, and always has been, credible deterrence." But militaristic and state centric approaches to security (which continue to guide policy making,

media coverage, and many influential academic analyses) reproduce the very dangers that they wish to ward off. A

detailed study by Moon Chung-in, for instance, has shown how various attempts to manage the Korean conflict through the conventional logic of military deterrence have turned out disastrously. They have "driven North and South Korea into the trapping structure of a vicious cycle of actions and reactions."


questioning reps = good

north and south korea don’t exist in a vacuum, but-like any other nation- they respond to international and domestic influences. funny enough, when the US has adopted harsher policies towards north korea, Pyongyang would be less cooperative. and when the US was more wiling to negotiate, Pyongyang was more willing to make concessions. However, for the most part the US is unwilling to publicly recognize these political trends because they contradict prevailing representations of north korea. therefore, a analysis of representations that departs from prevalent discourse is crucial to solving the conflict between the koreas

Bleiker, co-director of U of Queensland’s Rotary Center for International Studies & Humboldt Fellow @ U of Berlin, 2005(Roland, Divided Korea, xxxiii-xxxiv)

But even rouge states change. and not just in bearing to thosestates that constitute them as rogue. North Korea does not exist in a vacuum. It reacts to both internal and external factors. Look at how Pyongyang introduced various

significant policy changes during the late J99OS. In response to the near collapse of the official economy, farmers' markets emerged in many parts of the country. The government further reinforced this trend through incentive- based agricultural principles. Similar patterns of action and reaction can be seen in foreign policy. Consider the result of an extensive study by Leon Sigal of U.S. nuclear diplomacy toward North Korea between 1988 and 1995. He reveals a consistent and rather striking pattern: whenever the United States resorted to an aggressive politic, Pyongyang responded in kind. By contrast, a more tolerant attitude led to significant North Korean concessions. As a result the security situation on the peninsula improved only when the United States embarked on a "give-and-take" diplomacy that recognized that Pyongyang's seemingly erratic behavior is in face a rather consistent bargaining tactic designed to gain specific benefits in exchange for giving up the nuclear option. The inability to see political trends that contradict prevailing stereotypical images is linked to the overall representational practices that

prevail in much of the Western world.Sigal demonstrates, forinstance, that the United States often did not hear signs of compro mise emanating from Pyongyang because the prevalent story line about North Korea, the one that revolves around an image of an aggressive Communist state incapable of compromising, was simply too strong and too deeply entrenched. North Korea's own views and policy statements, he stresses, were rarely reported in the Western press. This is why key parts of the "story" did not actually appear in the news and could thus never enter the realm of dialogue. Bruce Cumings goes so far as to argue that the state of American media coverage of Korean security affairs was so inadequate that "often one had to read North Korea's tightly controlled press to figure out what was going on between

Washington and Pyongyang." Look at U.S. media representations of the North Korean famine. According to

YuhJi-Yeon, the coverage says far more about US preconceptions and strategic interests than it does about the actual events that took place in the wake of the devastating 1995 floods. Thus the in ability to prevent a widespread famine could be attributed only to flawed (Communist) economic policies, even though plenty of evi dence showed that a series of other factors, including the dramatic loss of historic trading partners, exacerbated the problem. The dangers of a militarized foreign policy and public discourse have intensified during Bush's tenure. His policies signal a strong desire to return to the familiarity of dualistic Cold War thinking patterns, except that "evil rogue states" replaced communism as the ultimate threat in world politics. such an ideological stance cannot sufficiently recognize and react to the interactive dynamic of security relations. For one, the very term evil prevents serious investigation into security dilemmas and, more important, into innovative solutions to them. Various authors stress that evil is a term of condemnation for an inherently irrational and


perhaps even in comprehensible phenomenon. 14 The consequences of such attitudes go far beyond the domain of military policy, for the dominant ap proach to security also provides, as Hazel Smith stresses, the frame work through which social, economic, and humanitarian issues are perceived in Korea. The result is not only paralysis—the belief that when a crisis occurs nothing can be done except reinforce military-based defense—but also, and more important, an inability to appreciate nuances and detect changes when they occur.


security discourse bad

current policy discourse involving north korea involves academics and strategists who don’t actually have access to north korea make security decisions or policy predictions about it. on top of that, these representations are then claimed to be ‘objective’, which-given the paradigm of the korean state, given the antagonistic nature of discourse on north korea- is almost impossible to verify. Bleiker, co-director of U of Queensland’s Rotary Center for International Studies & Humboldt Fellow @ U of Berlin, 2005(Roland, Divided Korea, xxxv-xxxvii)

Journalists, academics, and policy makers tend to stress that the so-called hermit kingdom of North Korea is so secretive that it is virtually impossible to obtain objective information about how it makes policy. " We are completely ignorant of what is happeningin that part of Korea," summarizes .one observer."'

Economists emphasize similar theme, stressing, for instance, that the North is a "statistical wasteland." The refrain of an unknowable hermit kingdom is equally central to newspaper representations of North Korea, which tend to emphasize, or at least imply, how rare it is.,fora journalist to be allowed to report from this reclusive country.North

Korea is, indeed, one of the world's most secluded states. Much about the decision making that occurs is impossible to retrace. But more details about North Korea are becoming known to the outside world. There are increasingly numerous and detailed studies on society and politics, including Pyongyang's foreign policy and negotiating behavior. 19 Moreover, as a result of the famines that followed the floods of 1995, various populations of foreign humanitarian organizations took up residence in North Korea. They were given more and more access to the country , something that had hitherto been inconceivable.

Some say they have access to 75 percent of the country or 80 percent of the population.-" Clearly, the hermit kingdom is no longer quite as reclusive as its reputation has it. Hazel Smith goes

so far as to speak of a "de facto opening up of the country to the outside world." She stresses that many or the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) active in the North have been able to get access to significant information about the country, often with the assistance ofx government authorities. Hut the reports that document these experiences and insights seem to have little influence in the West. Cunnings, likewise, argues that a wealth of information is now available about many crucial aspects of North Korea's history, but Western policy analysts hardly ever consult this data." Even as they perpetuate the image of an unknowable hermit kingdom, many influential academic and policy approaches toward North Korea advance strong claims to objectivity. This practice is as widespread as it is paradoxical. Consider a South Korean report on human rights in North Korea. The authors readily admit that there is a "lack of verifiable or corroborating evidence." But that does not prevent them from stressing that their study is "based on facts." this tendency is particularly fateful in the domain of foreign and security policy.Look at how the otherwise nuanced Perry report, commissioned by President Bill Clinton, insisted that the United Spatesshould deal

with North Korea "as it is, not as we might wish it to be." It advocated a "realist view, a hard-headed understanding of military realities." There is no such thing as an "objective reality," especially not in the domain of security policy, which revolves not only around fac tual occurrences but also, and above all, around the projection and evaluation of threats. The latter are inevitably matters of

perception and judgment. This is particularly the case in Korea, where there has been far too much destruction and antagonistic rhetoric to allow for observations that are even remotely objective. Several prominent authors have indeed acknowledged that it is impossible to advance value-free judgments on Korean politics and history.An extensive empirical survey of newspaper articles in South Korea confirms this impression. It demonstrated that explicit "value-oriented" reporting is much more frequent in coverage of North Korea than any other topic. Basing their analyses on-a survey of two "conservative" (Donga llboand Seoul Sinmun) and one "progressive" (HankyoraeSinmun) newspaper, the researchers categorized stories as being "factual," "value-oriented," or "normative." They considered the vast majority of reports to be factual, but value-oriented and normativeattitudes were

most common in stories relating to north koreanpolitics. The authors also stress how much this form of reporting, which is


mostly negative, has influenced public perceptions over the past decades. Strategic "reality" in Korea is the reality seen through the lenses of the strategic studies paradigm. This paradigm filters or

selects information in a way that sets limits on what can and cannot be recognized as "real" and "realistic." The policy perspectives that are based on realist ideology can thus be presented as "hard-headed" understandings of "military realities," even though (or, precisely because) next to nothing is known (or being acknowledged) about the actual realities of North Korea. But because the realist ideology is articulated from the privileged position of the state, any oppos ing perspective can relatively easily be dismissed as unreasonable or unrealistic. A more adequate understanding of the nature and function of security policy in Korea must thus problematize approaches that seek to legitimize themselves through an uncritical reference to "reality." One must ask: whose reality? For what purpose?In whose interest?With what

consequences?Needed, then, are not only policy approaches based on an understanding of North Korea "as it is" but also, and above all, attempts to understand how the current security dilemmas "have become what they are."


security discourse = bad

US nuclear threats have intensified since the bush administration, and simultaneously, north korea has escalated its pursuit of nuclear weapons; ie, north korea’s desire for nuclear weapons as a deterrent mirrors the attitude and behavior of the US. like any country, north korea’s government feels vulnerable to outside attacks, but this isn’t taken into account in western security policy analysis that looks to intimidate north korea with nuclear threats, and therefore the nuclear ambitions of the nation are due largely to poor US/North Korean interactions.

Bleiker, co-director of U of Queensland’s Rotary Center for International Studies & Humboldt Fellow @ U of Berlin, 2005(Roland, Divided Korea, 48-51)

U.S. nuclear threats toward Pyongyang intensified again when Wash ington's Korea policy became more hawkish with the inauguration of President George W. Bush. In his State of the Union Address

ofFebruary 2002.Bush singled out North Korea as one of three na tions belonging to an "axis of evil," citing as evidence Pyongyang's export of ballistic missile technology and its lingering ambition to become a nuclear power. This sudden turnaround in U.S. foreign policy, which sharply

reversed the more conciliatory approach pursued during the Clinton administration, can just as easily be seen as the origin of the present nuclear crisis in Korea. In June 2002 details of a "Nuclear Posture Review" became public, according to which the new U.S. strategic doctrine relied on the possibility of preemp tive nuclear strikes against terrorists and rogue states. T he review explicitly cited North Korea with regard to two scenarios: countering an attack on the South, and halting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, it mentioned, for instance,

'using tactical nuclear weapons to neutralize hardened artillery positions aimed at Seoul, the South Korean capital." A few months later Washington made its threats official. The new "National Security Strategy," released in September 2002, outlined in detail when preemptive strikes are legitimate and would be used as a way to "stop rogue states and their terrorist clients before they are able to threaten or use weapons of mass destruction against the United States.". Faced with a sudden intensification of U.S. nuclear threats, it is hardly surprising that Pyongyang reacted angrily and called Washing ton officials "nuclear lunatics." Nor is it surprising that Pyongyang is reluctant to give up its nuclear option, for it could serve as a-credi ble deterrent against a U.S. attack. Indeed, the desire for such a de terrent only mirrors the attitude and behavior of the United States. Some even go so far as to suggest that "when the U.S. insists that nuclear weapons are vital to its own security but harmful to the security of others, it becomes

hopelessly lacking in credibility." Be thatas it may, declassified intelligence documents, which became avail able after the collapse of Communist regimes in eastern Europe, do i ndeed reveal that from the 19805 on North Korea perceived itself as increasingly weak and vulnerable to external attacks. While the first nuclear crisis unfolded, Kim II Sung talked about this dilemma to Cambodia's head of state, Norodom Sihanouk. Kim stressed that "they

want to take off our shirt, our coat and now our trousers, and after that we will be nude, absolutely naked." As a result of this increasing

vulnerability, the prime objective of the government in Pyongyang has moved, as many commentators now recognize, fromforcefully unifying the peninsula to the simple task of regime survival. but very few western decision makers have the sensitivity to recognize these factors and take them into account when formulat ing their policies. Donald Gregg is one of the rare senior American diplomats who acknowledges that "the U.S. scares North Korea."But even he could make such an admission in public only after he had retired from the

State Department.In view of the reinterpretation of events that I have 'presented here, the question of responsibility for the recurring nuclear crises in Korea becomes a very blurred affair. One could point out, as several commentators

have, that before October 2002. North Korea had by and large complied with the terms of the 1994 agreement . This wasconfirmed not only by the Korean peninsula energy development Organization but also by CIA Director George J. Tenet, who testified on this matter to Congress on March 19, 2001. The "mother of all confessions" does, of course, put this interpretation in

perspective. But the United States also did not live up to the Agreed Framework. Construction of the two light-water reactors promised to North Korea was five years behind schedule. Long before the most recent crisis unfolded, the promised


annual fuel deliveries became increasingly threatened because of high oil prices and opposition from influential conservative elements within

Congress.'1" Perhaps most important, the very existence of long-standing Ameri can nuclear threats against North Korea is not only contrary to the i(?94 agreement but also a direct violation of the international non-proliferation regime, which foresees that "countries without nuclear weapons must not be threatened by those who possess them. The point is not to attribute responsibility for the reemergence of a

nuclear crisis on the peninsula. Both the United States and North K orea have contributed a great deal to fuel each other's fears. But decision makers in Washington have clearly not been sufficiently aware of their own role in generating fears and counter-reactions. Nor have they learned much from the lesson of the first nuclear crisis. Consider, for instance, how the United States has quickly forgotten, or ignored, a number of rather striking concessions that Pyongyang made in the period leading up to the second crisis. North Korea started to open up its borders: it accommodated several hundred representatives of foreign aid organizations, increased cooperation with (capitalist) Russia, sought to normalize talks with Japan, and entered into diplomatic relations with a dozen Western countries. There were steps toward domestic reform, such as the introduction of quasi-market

principles and the opening of special economic zones. There was also progress toward a rapprochement with the South, most notably in domains such as family exchanges, busi ness contacts, and cultural exchanges. Pyongyang started to clear mines in the DMZ and worked toward establishing road and, rail way links with the South. North Korea's leader, Kim Jong II, even publicly acknowledged the importance of a continuous deployment of US troops in south korea. he stresses that their presence is a threat only so long as the relationship between North Korea and the United States remains hostile.62 This in itself could be seen as the "mother of all concessions," for the removal of U.S. troops had been one of North Korea's key

demands for decades.Instead of appreciating and building on these concessions, U.S. foreign policy toward North Korea focused on Pyongyang's linger ing nuclear ambition. But not everyone believed Pyongyang when it declared in October 2002. that it had never ceased its nuclear program. The Russian foreign minister, for instance, called it a North Korean tactical maneuver.Neither claim could at this stage be empirically verified; but that is not the main point anyway. More important is that the United

States failed to pay attention to a series of rather obvious North Korean gestures long before the crisis came to be seen as a crisis in October. North Korea's worry began to grow with Bush's "axis of evil" speech earlier that year, in February. At that time an unofficial North Korean representative, Kim Myong Choi, told a New York Times journalist, Nicholas Kristof, that he foresaw "a crisis

beginning in the latter half of this year." North Korea, Kim mentioned, "will respond to the break down of the nuclear deal . . . by starting its nuclear program and resuming its missiles tests."That is, of course, precisely what hap pened eight months later. It is striking how North Korea's approach in 2002- 2003 paral leled its behavior during the crisis of 1993-1994. Pyongyang most likely assumed, as it did a decade earlier, that a hard-line U.S. ad ministration would not engage in serious dialogue until North Korea threatened to withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Scott Snyder, in an extensive study of Pyongyang's approach during the first crisis, speaks of a "crisis-oriented negotiation style" that is rooted in North Korea's particular historical experience, most notably its partisan guerrilla legacy. Snyder writes of a remarkably rational and entirely consistent approach, one that relies on "threats, bluff, and forms of blackmail to extract maximal concession from a negotiating counterpart." Even the dramatic language that shocked the world media in early 1003 was entirely predictable. The apocalyptic threat of turning Seoul into a "sea of fire," for instance, was literally a rehearsed metaphor from the first crisis. It is parr of an all-too-predictable emotional vocabulary that has prevailed in

NorthfcHfM'* W$W FHt HN*«M»>«! &»¥* irninmfMH HUH SWUMnNi?n«li»!i, it i* not much different from the more rationally expressed U.S. threat of preemptive nuclear strikes.


AT: s’quo security discourse

security and defense analysis is so technical and objectified that doesn’t let us see the interactive dimensions of security problems. abstract acronyms, jargon, and technical language all work to move an understanding of security further and further away from the realities of conflict and war, while simultaneously perpetuating itself as the most credible and rational way of security. this analysis exists only from the privileged vantage point of the state, and this is what we must change in order to address security from a social or political standpoint.

Bleiker, co-director of U of Queensland’s Rotary Center for International Studies & Humboldt Fellow @ U of Berlin, 2005(Roland, Divided Korea, 56-8)

Why is it so difficult to deal with, or even recognize, the interactive dynamics of security dilemmas ? Why is it still possible to present as rational and credible the view that North Korea alone is responsible for yet another nuclear

crisis on the peninsula?And why have militaristic approaches to security come to be seen, particularly by decision makers, as the only realistic way of warding off the respective threat, even though they are quite obviously implicated in the very dynamic that has led to its emergence in the first place?Answers to these complex questions are, of course, not easy to find. I certainly do not pretend to offer them here. But at least some aspects can be understood by observing the central role that defense analysis plays in the articulation of security policy. Such analyses have in essence been reduced to discussions about military issues that, in turn, are presented in a highly technical manner. Consider a random example from one of many recent "expert" treatises on North Korea's missile program: "If North Korea launches a ballistic missile attack on South Korean airfields and harbors, it could seriously impede Flexible Deterrence Options (FDO) operations by U.S. forces. The argument has been made that even if the North uses ballistic missiles, the accuracy or circular error probable (CEP) of the Rodong-1 (about 1 km) is such that it would not be able to undertake airstrike missions." A fundamental paradox emerges: on the one hand an array of abstract acronyms and metaphors has moved our understanding of security issues further and further away from the realities of conflict and war. On the other hand we have become used to these distorting metaphors to the point that the language of defense analysis has become the most accepted—and by definition most credible and rational—way of assessing issues of security. The ensuing construction of common sense provides experts (those fluent in techno-strategic language of abstraction not only with the knowledge but also with the moral authority to comment on issues of defense. Experts on military technologies have been essential in constructing North Korea as a threat and in reducing or eliminating from our purview the threat that emanates from the United States and South Korea toward the North. The political debate about each side's weapons potential, for instance, is articulated in

highly technical terms.Even if non-experts manage to decipher the jargon-packed languagewith which defense

issues are presented, they often lack the technical expertise to verify the claims advanced, even though the claims are used to legitimize important political decisions. As a result the techno-strategic language of defense analysis has managed to place many important security issues beyond the point of political and moral discussion. Consider how, for decades, the United States and South Korea have argued that the balance in the peninsula represents one or the most severe imbalances in military power anywhere in the world. During the late 19805, for instance, North Korean troops were said to outnumber South Koreans by 840,000 to 650,000, with the North enjoying an even greater advantage in tanks, aircraft, and naval forces. The South Korean Defense White Paper at the time argued that its military

power is only 65 percent of North Korea's and that a military balance would not be reached until after 2000. Bu t in 2,000 the refrain remained exactly the same. The Defense White Paper still insisted that "North Korea has the quantitative upper hand in troops and

weaponry, and it possesses strong capabilities of conducting mobile warfare designed to succeed in a short-term blitzkrieg. Virtually all official defense statistics present a seemingly alarming North Korean presence. They juxtapose,


for instance, North Korea's 1.17 million standing forces against the 690,000 of the South, the North's 78 brigades against the South's 19, the North's 23,001 armored vehicles against the Smith's 2,4OO, its 50 submarines against 6, and so on and so forth. Articulated from the privileged vantage point of the stare, the strategic studies discourse acquires a degree of political and moral authority that goes far beyond its empirically sustainable claims. For years scholars have questioned the accuracy

of the calculations and the political conclusions derived from them. In the 1980’s, critics were already pointing out that the official statistics quantity, not quality, and that in terms of the latter the South enjoys a clear strategic advantage over the North, even without including U.S. nuclear and other weapons stationed in or (possibly) directed toward the Korean peninsula.95 These critiques have intensified in recent years.In a detailed study of the subject Moon Chung-in argues that even without U.S. nuclear support, "South Korea is far superior to the North in military capacity" and cites major quality differences in such realms as

communications, intelligence, electronic warfare, and cutting-edge offensive weapons systems.96Sigal, likewise, points out that the much-feared million-man North Korean army is largely a fiction. about half, he estimates, are either untrained or soldier-workers engaged in civil construction. Many of North Korea's tanks and aircraft are obsolete, leaving its "ground forces and lines of supply vulnerable to attack from the air." Humanitarian workers, who have gained access to much of North Korea's territory in the last few years, paint a similar picture. They stress, for instance, that "the few tanks seen on the road cannot get from one village to the next without breaking down or running out of fuel."The political manipulation of statistics for defense expenditures perfectly illustrates how technical data are used to project threats in a particular manner. Policy makers and security experts keep drawing attention to North Korea's excessive military expenditures. And excessive they are, indeed, averaging an estimated 27.5 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) over the last few years, even reaching a staggering 37.9 percent in 1998, at a time when the country was being

devastated by a famine. Seoul's defensive needs seem much more modest in comparison, located at a mere 3.5 percent of the GDP. But when one compares the expenditures of the two Koreas in absolute terms, which is hardly ever done in official

statistics, the picture suddenly looks very different. Given its superior economy, the 3.5 percent that Seoul spends on its military amounts to more than twice as much as the North Koreans spend, no matter how excessive the North's expenditures appear to be in terms of percentage of the GDR. One does not need to be fluent in techno-strategic language of security

analysis to realize that over the years this unequal pattern of defense spending has created a qualitative imbalance of military capacities on the peninsula. And yet the myth of the strong North Korean army, of "the world's third largest military capability," is as prevalent and as hyped as ever.


***LD***


1. security and defense analysis is so technical and objectified that doesn’t let us see the interactive dimensions of security problems. abstract acronyms, jargon, and technical language all work to move an understanding of security further and further away from the realities of conflict and war, while simultaneously perpetuating itself as the most credible and rational way of security.

bleiker 2k5 [roland, super smarty pants, divided korea, p 56-8], “Why is it so difficult to deal with, or even recognize, the interactive dynamics of security dilemmas ? Why is it still possible to present as rational and credible the view that North Korea alone is responsible for yet another nuclear crisis on the

peninsula?And why have militaristic approaches to security come to be seen, particularly by decision makers, as the only realistic way of warding off the respective threat, even though they are quite obviously implicated in the very dynamic that has led to its emergence in the first place? Answers to

these complex questions are, of course, not easy to find. I certainly do not pretend to offer them here. But at least some aspects can be understood by observing the central role that defense analysis plays in the articulation of security policy. Such analyses have in essence been reduced to discussions about military issues that, in turn, are presented in a highly technical manner. Consider a random example from one of many recent "expert" treatises on North Korea's missile program: "If North Korea launches a ballistic missile attack on South Korean airfields and harbors, it could seriously impede Flexible Deterrence Options (FDO) operations by U.S. forces. The argument has been made that even if the North uses ballistic missiles, the accuracy or circular error probable (CEP) of the Rodong-1 (about 1 km) is such that it would not be able to undertake airstrike missions." A fundamental paradox emerges: on the one hand an array of abstract acronyms and metaphors has moved our understanding of security issues further and further away from the realities of conflict and war. On the other hand we have become used to these distorting metaphors to the point that the language of defense analysis has become the most accepted—and by definition most credible and rational—way of assessing issues of security. The ensuing construction of common sense provides experts (those fluent in techno-

strategic language of abstraction not only with the knowledge but also with the moral authority to comment on issues of defense. Experts on military technologies have been essential in constructing North Korea as a threat and in reducing or eliminating from our purview the threat that emanates from the United States and South Korea toward the North. The political debate about each side's weapons potential, for instance, is articulated in highly

technical terms.Even if non-experts manage to decipher the jargon-packed language with which defense issues are presented, they often lack the technical expertise to verify the claims advanced, even though the claims are used to legitimize important political decisions. As a result the techno-strategic language of defense analysis has managed to place many important security issues beyond the point of political and moral discussion. Consider how, for decades, the United States and South Korea have argued that the balance in the peninsula represents one or the most severe imbalances in military power anywhere in the world. During the late 19805, for instance, North Korean troops were said to outnumber South Koreans by 840,000 to 650,000, with the North enjoying an even greater advantage in tanks, aircraft, and naval forces. The South Korean Defense White Paper at the time argued that its military power is only 65 percent of North Korea's and that a military balance would not be reached until after 2000. But in 2,000 the refrain remained exactly the same. The Defense White Paper still insisted that "North Korea has the quantitative upper hand in troops and weaponry, and it possesses strong capabilities of conducting mobile warfare designed to succeed in a short-term blitzkrieg. Virtually all official defense statistics present a seemingly alarming North Korean presence. They juxtapose, for instance, North Korea's 1.17 million standing forces against the 690,000 of the South, the North's 78 brigades against the South's 19, the North's 23,001 armored vehicles against the Smith's 2,4OO, its 50 submarines against 6, and so on and so forth. Articulated from the privileged vantage point of the stare, the strategic studies discourse acquires a degree of political and moral authority that goes far beyond its empirically sustainable claims. For years scholars have questioned the accuracy of the calculations and the political conclusions derived from them. In the 1980’s, critics were already pointing out that the official statistics quantity, not quality, and that in terms of the latter the South enjoys a clear strategic advantage over the North, even without including U.S. nuclear and other weapons stationed in or (possibly) directed toward the Korean peninsula. 95 These critiques have intensified in recent years. In a detailed study of the subject Moon Chung-in argues that even without U.S. nuclear support, "South Korea is far superior to the North in military capacity" and cites major quality differences in such realms as communications, intelligence, electronic warfare, and


cutting-edge offensive weapons systems.96Sigal, likewise, points out that the much-feared million-man North Korean army is largely a fiction. about half, he estimates, are either untrained or soldier-workers engaged in civil construction. Many of North Korea's tanks and aircraft are obsolete, leaving its "ground forces and lines of supply vulnerable to attack from the air." Humanitarian workers, who have gained access to much of North Korea's territory in the last few years, paint a similar picture. They stress, for instance, that "the few

tanks seen on the road cannot get from one village to the next without breaking down or running out of fuel." The political manipulation of statistics for defense expenditures perfectly illustrates how technical data are used to project threats in a particular manner. Policy makers and security experts keep drawing attention to North Korea's excessive military expenditures. And excessive they are, indeed, averaging an estimated 27.5 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) over the last few years, even reaching a staggering 37.9 percent in 1998, at a time when the country was being devastated by a famine. Seoul's defensive needs seem much more modest in comparison, located at a mere 3.5 percent of the GDP. But when one compares the expenditures of the two Koreas in absolute terms, which is hardly ever done in official statistics, the picture suddenly looks very different. Given its superior economy, the 3.5 percent that Seoul spends on its military amounts to more than twice as much as the North Koreans spend, no matter how excessive the North's expenditures appear to be in terms of percentage of the GDR. One does not need to be fluent in techno-strategic language of security analysis to realize that over the years this unequal pattern of defense spending has created a qualitative imbalance of military capacities on the peninsula. And yet the myth of the strong North Korean army, of "the world's third largest military capability," is as prevalent and as hyped as ever.

this card says that security rhetoric is very technical, and it is problematic in that it removes realities of conflict from war, which desensitizes us to the violence or consequences of our military endeavors. this concept of security also allows experts moral authority to do whatever it is they feel is best, without being responsible to anyone who doesn’t adopt their same demeanor and ‘expertise’, jargon, language, etc. this causes three main problems in the status quo;the close-mindedness of security rhetoric makes its own claims unverifiable, yet these claims and projections of threats. are the founding basis of our national defense policies. therefore, the current attitude of security is problematic for the defense of our nation or others.the status quo of security politics wold remove questions of security from debate, which means that a pre-requisite to discussing the resolution would be a way of re-viewing security so as to see it as being accessible to the general public. 3. the way we see other nations through our securitzedlense leads to greater threat constructions that ultimately fuel xenophobia, paranoia, and military hostilities.

2. rather than blindly replicating this security jargon in a slew of cost/benefit analysis and numbers games, the aff departs from the traditional security analysis in order to look at the ways security is constructed, and the way it impacts society on whole. Bleiker 2k9 [roland, super smarty pants, aesthetics and world politics, 25-6],

“Look at andywarhollooking atcampbell soup cans. his famous series of paintings seem perfectly mimetic at first sight: they seek nothing but a naturalistic representation of a common consumer object, soup cans: total correspondence between signifier and

signified. how can a useful, let alone critical understanding emerge from such an attempt at perfect mimetic resemblance? ‘if art adapts to [the] mot superficial element of the commodity society’, peter

burger warns, ‘it is difficult to see how it is through such such adaptation that is can resist it’. for some, though, such undistorted representation of external realities can be subversive insofar as it draws attention to to what is taken for granted and would otherwise go unnoticed. the challenge to commodification and consumerism thus works through ironic mimesis. but this is not to say this it is mimetic, at least not in the sense described above. the very nature of irony is located in the tension between representation and represented. irony is a process of metaphorical distinction-and this distinction is of an inherently aesthetic nature. just as magritte’s

painting of a pipe that is not an actually pipe, warhol’s paintings of soup cans are not soup cans per se. they are representations thereof.the fact that warhol’s naturalistic style deceives us only initially highlights the problematic objectives of mimesis; the impossibility of perfect resemblance. ironic mimesis, then, is not mimesis in the conventional sense of the word; it does not aim for an authentic representation. it becomes a metaphor that problematizes the link between the representation and that which is represented, for irony always refers to something else that is what literally expressed. it refuses to identify an object by its name or face value. ironic art does

not anticipate that all of our observations neatly fit into preconceived and clearly delineates conceptual boxes.rather, complex


occurrences and even inconsistencies and contradictions are accepted as inevitable aspects of out effort to make sense of social phenomena. ‘irony irritates’, milankundera says. it does so because it exposes the world in all its ambiguities and this denies us the certainties we are craving for. irony draws attention to the fact that representation is an inevitably political issue, that there is always a gap between what is observed and how this observation is represented in and through language. the ironist, richardporty says, is a person who has doubts

about the vocabulary that is currently used, but is also aware of two additional insights: that no argument phrased in the present language can sustain or dissolve these doubts, and that the is no other, alternative vocabulary that can ever be final in the sense that it would be able to grasp the essence of things.”The resolution pits national security against civil liberties, which is why the aff takes up an ironic discursive strategy that reinterprets prevalent security rhetoric by looking at representations of security in the status quo. the ballot is the way in which you ironically affirm the resolution in hopes of frustrating and further questioning the link between my representation of security and how security is represented as per the status quo of the resolution.

therefore, i whole-heartedly affirm; Resolved: when in conflict, a nations security ought to take precedence over the civil liberties of its populationnation’s security is defined as america, see also america, see also the US, see also all land located between canada and mexicothe value for the round is security. this is the most important value because without security, we have no way of being secure. this is also essential to answering the resolutional question of security, because my value deals directly with the physical and psychological state of secured security.the criteria is being secure, as this is essential to maintaining security which is my value. to meet the criteria, we should try to maximize security. contention 1; maintaining our WMD’s and increasing supplies of A-4’s and AG’s for strategic ACMI via ACMMP from the DODWe have used this building-block approach to operational availability assessments for the maximization of the resolutions security questions to investigate how an alternative mix of active and reserve forces and their capabilities can be aligned to a range of missions, including homeland defense, and to begin developing the mid to long-term scenarios being developed alongside emerging war-fighting concepts (see the discussion of the “Joint Operations Concepts” and “Analytic Baseline,”. During FY 2004 and the first part of FY 2005, its seems that our AFCMC’s were compromised by a 17% increase of GTB’s in the middle eastern region. the implication of this increase has 3 implications for the instrumental implementation of the resolution, in that it meanstheaff is ahead in terms of the AFPT that compromises the AFP of our air-force, so as to encourage neighboring units to surrender.when it comes down to looking at the consequences of a future detonation of BWO’s in this area, we can see the residual effects far outweigh the probability of successful deterrence of any counter-strike operatives that we might see from guerrilla fighters on the periphery of the regions bordersit maximizes security. trust me.

contention 2; we dont use our civil liberties anywaysTo be fair....if it isnt on a bumper sticker, we probably wont even notice that we’ve lost anything.


***A/T: PERFORMANCE***


BOREDOM/HEIDEGGER K

Debate as aesthetics is problematic because it would affirm violence for the sake of aesthetic experiences or in the name of a sublime encounter; this allows for things like murder to be possible,as long as they’re aesthetically pleasing.

Svendsen, PhD Philo @ Univ of Bergen, Norway, 2008(Lars, A Philosophy of Fear , pgs. 81-85)

De Quincey takes Burke's and Kant's reflections one step further. If the violence in nature can be a source of aesthetic experience - why should not human violence - which per haps is even more terrifying - also be a source of aesthetic experience? Violence has its own power of attraction. It can be claimed that violence is repulsive, but we can just as eas ily claim that violence is sublime. There

is nothing that prevents either of these judgements from being legitimate. In Both cases we are dealing with judgements of taste -_and' aesthetic taste does not necessarily conform to our moral judgements. This does not mean that moral considerations are necessarily irrelevant in relation to the aesthetic assess ment of an

object or an event, but they are not necessary relevant, either.It is difficult to imagine any human act that distinguish es itself as sublime more than murder, precisely because of its excessive and dread- inspiring nature. Burke's example of the public execution shows that he was open to the possibility, even though he did not develop it. Kant, on the other hand, took the Sublime in a different direction.He admittedly highlights war as something sublime, but it is tamed, controlled warfare: 'war itself, provided it is conducted with order and a sacred respect for the rights of civilians, has something sublime about

it.' This can be questioned. Can then a war that is conducted without respect for individual rights not be considered as more sublime? Let us take a remark by an american soldier in Vietnam, who talks about the thoughts that struck him when he was standing looking at the bodies of North Vietnamese soldiers: That was another of the times I stood on the edge of my own humanity, looked into a pit and loved what I saw there. 1 had surrendered to an aesthetic that was divorced from that crucial quality of empathy that lets us to feel the sufferings of others. And 1 saw a terrible beauty here. War is not simply the spirit of ugliness . . . it is also an affair of great and seductive beauty.''' Kant would not recognize this as sublime. but rather relegate it to the_category of 'the monstrous'. Burke, though,

would claim without hesitation that this American solider was having a sublime experience Broadly speaking, Kant restricted the experience of the Sublime to encounters with nature. even though he also included certain man-made phenomena , such as the Pyramids, St Peter's in Rome and war. Possibly as an ironic comment on Kant, an enormous toxic cloud is a sublime phenomenon in Don DeLillo's novel White Noise:The enormous black mass move like some death ship in a Norse legend, escorted across the night by armored creatures with spiral wings. We weren't sure how to react. It was a terrible thing to see, so close, so low, packed with chlorides, benzines, phenols, hydrocarbons, or whatever the precise toxic content. But it was also spectacular, part of the grandness of a sweeping event, like the vivid scene in the switching yard or the people trudging across the snowy overpass with children, food, belonging, a tragic army of the dispossessed. Our fear was accompanied by a sense of awe that bordered on the religious. It is surely possible to be awed by the thing that threatens your life, to see it as a cosmic force, so much larger than yourself, more powerful, created by elemental and willful rhythms. This was a death made in the laboratory, defined and measurable, but we thought of it at the time it in a simple and primitive way, as some seasonal perversity of the earth like a flood or tornado, something not subject to control. Our helplessness

did not seem compatible with the idea of a man-made event.'Kant would also probably have consigned this toxic cloud to the category of 'the

monstrous', on a par with murder. Nietzsche's mention of pleasure and the Sublime at a world perishing would have been completely alien to him.32 Kant thus debars himself from examining the seam uncovered byBurke and that De Quincey took to its extreme by showing human

destructiveness to be a source of aesthetic delight. De Quincey allows aesthetics to outdo ethics by letting the Sublime outdo the beautiful. Crimes are fascinating. Adam and Eve disobey God's command by eating from the Tree of Knowledge, and their sons, Cain and Abel,; become the first murderer and the first victim respectively. Accounts of various types of crime are as old as literature itself, and they often took their motifs from real figures. Well-known examples of this are John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728), Stendhal's Le Rouge et le noir (1830) and several of Dostoevsky's novels. Even so, it must tie stressed that all of these were

[Continued…]


BOREDOM/HEIDEGGER K

[Svendsen Continues…]

fictionalized presentations. Michel Foucault remarks that a new kind of crime literature had sprung up at the time of De Quincey: A literature in which crime is extolled because it belongs to the fine arts, because it can only be the work of people who are exceptions, because it shows what monsters the strong and mighty are, because being a scoundrel is despite everything a kind of nobility. From the shocker novel to Quincey, or from Chateau d'Otrante toBaudelaire a complete revision of the ethical norms of crime literature takes place - the claim is actually also made that great people have the right to commit crimes, yes, that really great people are exclusively entitled to commit them, . Beautiful murders are not something for people who commit crimes for profit. An aestheticizing of crime in general had taken place. Already in John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, later refashioned by Brecht into his Dreigroschenoper, ('The Threepenny

Opera') Peachum says: 'Murder is as fashionable a Crime as a Person can be guilty of.' 3'' This aestheticizing, however, remained within the realm of fiction. De_Quincey takes everything one step further. What is radical about him is that he

considers reality as art and elevates the most extreme of human acts, murder, to supreme art. The work of art is not, then, the narrating of the murder, but the murder itself. T.he artist is not the author who depicts the murder, but the actual murderer. Here, De Quincey went far beyond, for example, Friedrich von Schiller, who wrote that murder was aesthetically higher than theft, since Schiller was mainly operating within a fictional horizon.35 There is nothing to indicate that Schiller

would consider a real murder as a work of art.Why did De Quincev consider murder a work of art and the murderer as an artist?Becatfse murder creates an aes thetic response in the observer, and everything that arouses such a response is, as De Quincey saw it, by definition, art - and someone who creates art is an artist. As Burke had already shown in the example of the public execution, reali ty is greater than fiction and the real murder creates a stronger aesthetic response than the fictional one. Therefore, the murderer becomes the supreme artist. What De Quincevdelights in about murder is not the suffering of the victim but the sight of an artist who uses somebody else's body as raw material to create his work. This also means that the perspective from which the murder is considered cannot be that of the victim but has to be the murderer's own - or that of an observer. The distance is thereby created that is required for the experiencing of the Sublime. If one really had to manage to assume the stance of the victim, the fear would be so overwhelming that the aesthetic experience would be impossible. In can be objected here that De Quincey inserted too great a distance, and that the absence of identification with the victim deprives the observer of the fear that is crucial for a sublime experience.


BOREDOM/HEIDEGGER KWhen we use aesthetics as the decision calculus in debate, this culminates in an ‘anything goes’ sort of approach that cannot condemn anything, so long as it is aesthetically pleasing. When everything is simply a matter of taste and shock there is no limit to what is justifiable.

Svendsen, PhD Philo @ Univ of Bergen, Norway, 2008(Lars, A Philosophy of Fear , pgs77-79 ]

That which rouses an aesthetic reaction, where we take pleasure in something we fear at the same time, is often something evil. Jean Genet introduces his autobiographical The Thief s Journal (1949) by writing that

he has been driven 'by a love of what we call evil'. He waits to 'seek a new paradise' bv 'enforcing a pure vision of evil'. The crucial thing is whether or not an act is beautiful; the ethical is subordinate to the aesthetic. 7 Every act, even treachery, can be beautiful. And every objection that an act is immoral will be completely futile, because an ethical objection will_not 1 .as a matter of course, outdo an aesthetical one. Genet writes: Mnralists with their good will come a cropper against my dishonesty. Even if they are actually able to prove that an act is despicable because of the harm it causes, I am the only one who can decide if it is beautiful or elegant, and I do so solely on the basis of the song it awakens in me; that is what decides whether I will reject or accept it. Therefore no outside person can bring me back onto the right path.Genet is here influenced by the ideas of, among others, Charles Baudelaire. In a draft of the preface to Les Fleurs du mal (1857), Baudelaire notes

that he is seeking 'to extract beauty out of evil'.9Everything can be made beautiful, but Baudelaire seems mainly to link the beautiful to evil, claiming for example that murder is the most precious of beauty's jewels.Morality is subordinate to aesthetics, and good and evil become, first and foremost, aesthetic categories: 'we can find pleasure in the vilest of things'." In his diaries, Baudelaire writes, "the most perfect ideal image of masculine beauty is Satan" Prior to Baudelaire, similar thoughts were also discussed by

Thomas De_Quincey in his essay of 1827, 'Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts'. The shocking thing about De Quincey's text is that he advocates looking at a murder not from a moral standpoint but rather from an aesthetic perspective, that is, in relation to taste. The fact that 'Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts' is also satirical does not really make it any less offensive. De Quincey is not starting from scratch here, either, but b developing ideas expressed by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant In his study of the Beautiful and the Sublime. Burke writes that one could announce one's intention to stage the most sub lime, gripping tragedy, with the most, .brilliant of actors, without sparing anything when it came to scenography, and to add the most exquisite music - and then let it be known that a high-ranking criminal was to be executed on the square outside. The result would be that the theatre would be empty in no time, he claims. He is probably right about that. It is conceivable that all these people flocked to the public execution out of a strong moral feeling, and that they quite simply wanted to witness justice being done in full, although this explanation is not particularly convincing. It would be something other than moral considerations that attracted them to the place of execution. Burke points out that we find it satisfying to watch things that not only would we be unable to get ourselves to carry out but would rather not

have seen carried out. He points out, in other words, that there is a contradiction between the aesthetic and the moral reactions to certain events. The crucial thing about the above example, however, is the emphasis on sublime reality outdoing sublime art. Burke points out a source of aesthetic pleasure that is essentially different from the delight of experiencing the beautiful, an enjoyment that was dark, amoral and asocial. He stresses that the strongest emotional experiences we have are linked to the feeling of being-threatened. And this feeling is raised to the Sublime.' 7 There is, however, a difference between feeling real fear and having

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a sublime experience, if we believe that life and limb are in danger, we will be unable to feel any pleasure - it feels quite simply dreadful. A tornado, for example, can be a sublime sight, but only if you are at distance and not in immediate ganger of being sucked up into it. when an element of distance is added, so that we feel more secure, everything changes and the experience of the Sublime opens up for us. but there must be fear involved, since fear is the basic principle of the sublime. Burkes fundamental premise, then, is that fear creates pleasure when it does not get too close.


BOREDOM/HEIDEGGER K

Boredom creates a need to be erased and fear presents itself as a desirable emotional experience through which we alleviate our boredom. In order to release ourselves from the boredom that culminates from our culture of fear, we engage in aesthetic activities to break the monotony of everyday existence.

Svendsen, PhD Philo @ Univ of Bergen, Norway, 2008(Lars, A Philosophy of Fear , pgs. 73-6)

Nietzsche complains that the world has lost much of its charm because we no longer fear it enough.' This diagnosis hardly seems to apply to our age. The emergence of the cul ture of fear can scarcely be said to have made.the world more charming, either. There is, however, an interesting point here in Nietzsche, for fear is linked to charm — at least, in the original meaning of the word. 'Charm* comes from the Latin carmen, which means 'incantation' and designates an attraction. A_ world from which all fear has been eliminated would seem to be very unattractive. It is reminiscent of the society Nick Cave describes in the song 'God is in the House' (2001): “Well-meaning little therapists Goose-stepping twelve-stepping Teetotalitarianists The tipsy, the reeling and the drop down pissed We got no time for that stuff here.

Zero crime and no fear We've bred all our kittens white So you can see them in the night”.Fear lends color to the world. A world without fear would be deadly boring. Biochemically speaking, fear is related to curiosity, something that can be an important reason why exciting films and experiences are so entertaining. Novels, films and tv series designed to fill people with tension and fear are among the most popular, the author Stephen King is said to have sold about 250 million copies of his novels. Such a fascination with the frightening is of course no new phenomenon. We find examples ot this in the art and literature of both antiquity and the Middle Ages. It was not, however, until the mid-eighteenth century that the frightful became a central aesthetic category- not least with the emergence

of the Gothic novel. There is without a doubt something delightful about being terrified almost out of one's wits by a novel, film, or computer game. You think you have become hardened after having read and seen so many, and that nothing will ever have quite the same effect again, but then something new comes along that takes you to a domain of terror previously unknown to you. Reading tales by Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft was a great strain on my nerves as a child - I thought it was so sinister that I hardly dared read another page, yet I could not stop myself from reading on even so. I can remember when the film The Silence of the Lambs (1991) came, and how I sat on tenterhooks on my cinema seat. I was even more petrified when, when far too young, I saw Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), where a not insignificant part of my horror came from the artist H. R. Giger's monster being only hinted at for most of the film. At best, computer games can be even more sinister than both novels and films, because you yourself are taking part in the fictional universe in a more direct way, and during games in the Silent Hill series, for example, I had hairs standing out on my arms continuously for so many hours

that it seemed possible they would stay that way permanently. There are few aesthetic experi ences that can rival feeling such terror so profoundly and intensely. One can wonder what it is about such films and the like that is so attractive, considering the fact that we otherwise tend to shun everything that scares us. As mentioned earlier, the typical response to fear is to try and create the greatest distance between ourselves and what it is that scares us - but here we have sought it of our own free will. Our reason

for doing; so is that these experiences somehow give us a positive feeling and fulfill an emotional need. To be strongly affected by something gives our lives a kind of presence. And it can be irksome to feel that

life is emotionally just ticking over, that one's inner life lacks zest. It is then that emotions that' are basically negative can appear to be positive alternatives to this inertia. Warren Zevon captures this well in the song

'Ain't that Pretty at All' (1982): “I'm going to hurl myself against .the wall 'Cause I'd rather feel bad than not feel anything at all” But why should we covet a negative emotion when, despite everything, there are a host of positive emotions available? Why should the emotion of fear be so attractive when our emotional register contains so many other emotions

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that, on the face of it, one would think were many times more attractive? Perhaps part of the answer is that we have a need to experience our whole emotional register, and that the fear we experience in forms of fiction, extreme sport and so on breaks with a humdrum 'everydayness'. This might, however, seem to clash with the assertion that we are living in a culture of fear. If we are living in a culture where most things are seen from the perspective of fear, these voluntary fear experiences ought surely to be superfluous. Earlier, though, I emphasized that the fear that primarily surrounds us in this culture is a 'low-intensity fear'. I t is not a fear that gives us the great, mind-shaking experiences "that set the whole body on alert. It is

more a fear that can be described as a "constant, weak 'grumbling', yet one that even so results in our protecting ourselves, cocooning ourselves and isolating ourselves from the world around us. In that case, the increasing commonness of boredom can partly be said to be result of the culture of fear. And a more intense experiencing of fear would seem to be a cure - or at least a partial

alleviation- of boredom. The fearful appears to be something else and thus something that can counteract a boring everyday life. Boredom forces a move towards!what goes beyond. To see a horror film or play some terrifying computer game are safe ways of experiencing dangers. Oscar

Wilde writes about how art expresses reality, that is, life, but in a tamed form._so_that we are not injured. That is why art is to be preferred to life:” Because Art does not hurt us. The tears that we shed at a play are a type of the exquisite sterile emotions that it is the function of Art to awaken. We weep, but we are not wounded. We grieve, but our grief is not bitter . . . It is through Art, and through Art only, that we can realize our perfection; through Art, and through Art only, that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.” . Art, for Wilde, becomes a privileged space where we can experience all the emotions that life can offer us, without having to pay the price that these emotions are often linked to in real life. Violent and frightening fictions can be good media for the processing of our emotions. Children too can benefit from this, so as to learn to master their fear. 4 The reason why we seek out these experiences is, nevertheless, not that we believe they will help us master life but guile simply because they are productive in themselves,


AESTH OF PTX/BENJAMIN K

The art of the affirmative cannot be dissociated from the technological processes which enabled its ability to be reproduced. This reproduction, however, can exist only by undermining the authenticity of the original object, and therefore the entire historical context in which the original object was produced. This produces a change in perception which allows for the masses to be controlled by the spectacle of the dominant culture.

Benjamin 36 [Walter.Critical theorist.The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm]

Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence. This includes the changes which it may have suffered in physical condition over the years as well as the various changes in its ownership. The traces of the first can be revealed only by chemical or physical analyses which it is impossible to perform on a reproduction; changes of ownership are subject to a tradition which must be traced from the situation of the original.The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity. Chemical analyses of the patina of a bronze can help to establish this, as does the proof that a given manuscript of the Middle Ages stems from an archive of the fifteenth century. The whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical – and, of course, not only technical – reproducibility. Confronted with its manual reproduction, which was usually branded as a forgery, the original preserved all its authority; not so vis-à-vis technical reproduction. The reason is twofold. First, process reproduction is more independent of the original than manual reproduction. For example, in photography, process reproduction can bring out those aspects of the original that are unattainable to the naked eye yet accessible to the lens, which is adjustable and chooses its angle at will. And photographic reproduction, with the aid of certain processes, such as enlargement or slow motion, can capture images which escape natural vision. Secondly, technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph record. The cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room.The situations into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated. This holds not only for the art work but also, for instance, for a landscape which passes in review before the spectator in a movie. In the case of the art object, a most sensitive nucleus – namely, its authenticity – is interfered with whereas no natural object is vulnerable on that score. The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object.One might subsume the eliminated element in the term “aura” and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. This is a symptomatic process whose significance points beyond the realm of art. One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind. Both processes are intimately connected with the contemporary mass movements. Their most powerful agent is the film. Its social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage. This phenomenon is most palpable in the great historical films. It extends to ever new positions. In 1927 Abel Gance exclaimed enthusiastically:“Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven will make films... all legends, all mythologies and all myths, all founders of religion, and the very religions... await their exposed resurrection, and the heroes crowd each other at the gate.”Presumably without intending it, he issued an invitation to a far-reaching liquidation.During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well. The fifth century, with its great shifts of


population, saw the birth of the late Roman art industry and the Vienna Genesis, and there developed not only an art different from that of antiquity but also a new kind of perception. The scholars of the Viennese school, Riegl and Wickhoff, who resisted the weight of classical tradition under which these later art forms had been buried, were the first to draw conclusions from them concerning the organization of perception at the time. However far-reaching their insight, these scholars limited themselves to showing the significant, formal hallmark which characterized perception in late Roman times. They did not attempt – and, perhaps, saw no way – to show the social transformations expressed by these changes of perception. The conditions for an analogous insight are more favorable in the present. And if changes in the medium of contemporary perception can be comprehended as decay of the aura, it is possible to show its social causes.The concept of aura which was proposed above with reference to historical objects may usefully be illustrated with reference to the aura of natural ones. We define the aura of the latter as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch. This image makes it easy to comprehend the social bases of the contemporary decay of the aura. It rests on two circumstances, both of which are related to the increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life. Namely, the desire of contemporary masses to bring things “closer” spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction. Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction. Unmistakably, reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels differs from the image seen by the unarmed eye. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness and reproducibility in the former. To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose “sense of the universal equality of things” has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction. Thus is manifested in the field of perception what in the theoretical sphere is noticeable in the increasing importance of statistics. The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.



The aestheticization of politics, by undermining the authenticity of the work of art, makes everything equal by eliminating all boundaries. This allows for systems of domination to eliminate social tensions which would undermine the mobilization of the masses for war.

Koepnick 99 [Lutz. Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis.Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power.Pg 77-9]

Whether or not Welsch’s reconstruction does full justice to Adorno’sAesthetic Theory, the revaluation of the sublime can be essential to our understanding of Benjamin’s critique of fascism and its simultaneous practices of seduction and terror. For what Benjamin emphasizes with regard to the fascist spectacle is precisely that to which Adorno’s modernist construction of sublime art is opposed. According to Benjamin, the fascist spectacle propagates a totalization of appearance and thus tries to erase all difference, to remake the modern state into an expression of unified and resolute action, and to integrate the masses into a symbolic synthesis. In addition, fascist mass aesthetics also debases the semantic wealth of nature: projecting its reactionary modernism on the features of the modern world, fascism dreams the megalomaniac dream of unlimited reality control and technological domination over nature.In order to prolong the experience of war into the civilian life of Weimar Germany, theories of fascism, in an exemplary fashion, subject the category of nature to the imperatives of modern warfare, and thus strip nature of its transcending power; that is, its utopian appeal to reconciliation. In these visions of a landscape of total mobilization, the notorious poetic German fascination with nature celebrates an unprecedented, albeit totally perverted reoccurrence:The pioneers of peace, those senuous settlers, were evacuated from these landscapes, and as far as anyone could see over the edge of the trench, the surroundings become a problem, every wire entanglement an antinomy, every barb a definition, every explosion a synthesis; and by day the sky was the cosmic interior of the steel helmet and at night the moral law above. Etching the landscape with flaming banners and trenches technology wanted to create the heroic feature of German Idealism. It went astray. What it considered heroic were the features of Hippocrates, the features of death. Deeply imbued with its own depravity, technology gave shape to the apocalyptic face of nature and reduced nature to silence – even though this technology had the power to give nature its voice. (TGF 126; GS 3:247)In the aestheticizing view of modern warfare, and under the hallmark of fascism’s mythologizing use of technology, nature loses its otherness, its force to generate images out of which humanity may create powerful utopias. Fascist ideologies of war render technology as an aesthetic myth that effaces all boundaries and correspondences between the realm of nature and social life. Contrary to Adorno’s construction of the sublime, then, Junger’s art of war declares the boundlessness of the will to power and the human systems of representation. Not the discontinuous, decentering promise of subliminity, but references to the synthesizing force of the beautiful appearance – piped through the tubes of a nationalistic mass culture – are primarily at work in the fascist attack on political modernity, according to Benjamin. Instead of reconciling humanity with the forgotten forces of nature, and instead of preserving the utopian dream of such a reconciliation, fascist theories of war silence nature through aesthetic myths of technological omnipotence. Although the landscapes of total mobilization must suggest some sort of intimacy and reciprocity between technology and nature, humanity and the other at its fringes, they in fact only testify to the utter erosion of nature under the false totality of fascism’s aesthetic excess.For Benjamin, as for Adorno, legitimate modernist art cannot be anything but an art of discontinuity, rupture, and self-limitation. Whether referring to the aesthetic modernism of Charles Baudelaire, Franz Kafka, and Bertolt Brecht, the functionalistic appropriation of art in the Soviet Union during the 1920s, or any progressive utilization of the new medium, film, Benjamin valorizes modern aesthetic practices whenever they succeed in subverting traditional claims to continuity, totality and closure. Allegorical fragmentation and instability rather than metaphorical harmony establish the modes of address and aesthetic exchange that Benjamin believes emancipatory according to his leftist political agenda. The fascist aestheticization of politics, on the other hand, relies on a bewitching hypostatization of appearance and the beautiful, one that eliminates social tensions, polyphony, and difference in bogus imagery of equality and coherence. Reformulating eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetic concepts within the terrain of industrial culture, the fascist spectacle corrupts nature and uopian wish-energies and, thereby, also obliterates the foundations


of sober judgment and moral autonomy. Fascism renders the beautiful appearance and social masquerade a practical expression of the will to power and, thus, drives society into the “abyss of aestheticism” (OTD 103; GS 1:281).



The aestheticization of politics uses the self-justifying nature of political action to undermine the social tensions which make resistance against oppression possible.


But the fascist war not only violates nature, it also represses technology itself as it enslaves its own full potential. Warfare epitomizes the systematic castigation of nature and technology in a modern age that fails to live up to its potential. Any future war, Benjamin contends as early as 1930, will therefore also describe a “slave revolt of technology” (TGF 120; GS 3:238), a revolt of modern technology against its bondage through reactionary politics and the suspension of historical dialectics. Yet with cunning, fascism anticipates such counterforces of revenge and directs them against the other objects of repression, the masses, rather than the actual agents of slavery. Analogous to what motivates the public spectacles of pseudo-emancipation, fascist warfare instrumentalizes the powers of revolt only in order to quell their potency. Through war, the fascist state stages an insurrection against itself in order to gain control over all potential forces of subversion: “The horrible features of imperialistic warfare are attributable to the discrepancy between the tremendous means of production and their inadequate utilization in the process of production – in other words, to unemployment and the lack of markets. Imperialistic war is a rebellion of technology which collects, in the form of ‘human material,’ the claims to which society has denied its natural material” (ILL 242; GS 1:507-8). Presenting war as a self-referential event demanding veneration, submission, and ritual sacrifice, fascism exempts technology from any processes of discursive legitimation.In his essay on Ernst Junger et al., Benjamin borrows the concept of “das Geistige” from his own early metaphysical vocabulary to describe this repression of discourse. Capitalist societies, her argues, appropriate the Cartesian split between spirit and materiality so as to bar any critical debate about the use of technology and the equality of progress. “Indeed, according to its economic nature, bourgeois society cannot help insulating everything technological from the so-called spiritual, and it cannot help but resolutely excluding technology’s right of co-determination in the social order” (TGF 120; GS 3:238). Fascism’s ideology of war perfects this tendency. Just as the stage management of politics replaces rational participation with emotional synchronization, fascist theories of warfare immunize technological modernity against democratic discourses of legitimation and emphasize the ontological abyss between the universe of ideas and the world of technical means. To reject any legitimacy claim, fascism claims technology does not serve any human purpose. Shaped by great politicians as are statues out of clay, war serves only itself. Technological progress, fascist ideologues of war argue, adheres to an autonomous logic of evolution and renewal, one to which society ought to respond with astonishment rather than critical discussion.Benjamin quickly denounces what he understands as the cultic legitimation of warfare in fascism as “an uninhibited translation of the principles of l’art pour l’art [art for art] to war itself” (TGH 122; GS 3:240). This figure of thought, though highly intriguing and influential, no doubt requires further explanation. Against the background of comprehensive social changes during the nineteenth century, the l’art pour l’art [art for art] movement articulated the most radical response to the gradual commercialization and decentering of nineteenth-century art – that is to say, the expulsion of the aesthetic from the heavens of uncontested meaning and the exile of artists from the Olympus of social representation. Though anything but unified, European aestheticism sought to redefine this social decline of art as its inner virtue, calling for a total emancipation of art from moral commitment and mimetic veracity. Poised at the threshold of the twentieth century, aestheticism desired, at least theoretically, to transform art into a self-referntial system. It conceived of form as the sole content of the artwork and revolted against any attempt to render moral correctness a principle of aesthetic judgment. Aiming at a “theology of art” (ILL 224; GS 1:481), l’art pour l’art [art for art] epitomized the romantic quest for aesthetic absolutes. While it rejected the subjugation of art under the bourgeois principle of utility, aestheticism tried to enshrine art in a hermetic cage. Vis-à-vis the ever expanding commodification of art and the emergence of mass cultural practices, aestheticism believed it could secure the autonomy of art within bourgeois society by transforming the work of art into an object of cultic stature, a luxury object.



Our alternative is to reject the aestheticization of politics by affirming the politicization of art. This entails the rejection of the way in which we disavow the uses of art that serve the purposes of oppression and violence. Our politicization of artistic expression thus allows for us to channel the forces of industrial culture to ethical, democratic ends, creating the conditions which make true emancipation possible.


What Benjamin defines as aesthetic politics, then, does not address the role of bourgeois art in twentieth-century society but, on the contrary, renders problematic the way in which political dictates drape modern mass culture as art and thus transform the popular into a tool of domination and manipulation. Benjamin’s avant-garde alternative, on the other hand – that which he calls, confusingly, the politicization of art – designates nothing other than forms of mass cultural practice that take themselves seriously and, therefore, reject the tactics of disavowal inherent to aesthetic politics. Modern industrial culture, Benjamin implies, undoes the very categories according to which Groys and others today continuously evaluate the validity of certain aesthetic and political agendas. For Benjamin, the twentieth century signifies a historical moment at which cultural production emerges as largely integrated into economic production and the political. This integration, on the one hand, makes possible the aestheticization of politics a la fascism, but it also, and as importantly, opens up the possibility of a cultural politics that may progressively intervene in the course of economic and political development. Opposing fascism, Benjamin’s avant-gardism hopes to channel the potentially democratizing force of industrial culture, not into spectacles of ideological incorporation but into principally open and heteroglossic scenes of emancipation. To follow Groys’s suggestion and historicize this endorsement of the modern popular – Benjamin’s popular modernism – as an essentially Stalinist project not only at once belittles the atrocities of Stalinism and misses the complexity of Benjamin’s program; it also silences the many ways in which Benjamin’s work could still inform a critical analysis of our own age, an age marked by the ever more global incorporation of culture, economy, and politics.

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