protest aff

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PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE LEONARDI PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE........................................................ 1 STRATEGY PAGE AND INTRODUCTION.................................................. 7 *** CASE ***.................................................................... 8 PROTEST 1AC..................................................................... 9 AT: “D&G BAD”.................................................................. 22 AT: “AFF ROMANTICIZES NOMADS”.................................................. 23 AT: JAMESON.................................................................... 24 AT: BARBROOK................................................................... 25 AT: IRAGARAY/BRAIDOTTI......................................................... 26 AT: BECOMING-MONSTER (BRAIDOTTI)............................................... 27 IMPACT: MICROFASCISM........................................................... 28 IMPACT: MOLECULAR POPULATION................................................... 29 IMPACT: SADNESS................................................................ 30 IMPACT: ORGANISM CARD.......................................................... 31 IMPACT: WAR MACHINE/EXTINCTION................................................. 32 IMPACT: ETHER.................................................................. 34 IMPACT FRAMING: DESIRE FIRST................................................... 35 SOLVENCY: ACT NOW.............................................................. 36 SOLVENCY: REFRAME THE DEBATE................................................... 37 SOLVENCY: MADNESS.............................................................. 38 SOLVENCY: AFFIRMATION.......................................................... 39 SOLVENCY: SCHIZOPHRENIA........................................................ 40 SOLVENCY: WAR MACHINE.......................................................... 41 SOLVENCY: PRECONCIOUS LIBIDINAL INVESTMENTS....................................42 SOLVENCY: CONLEY............................................................... 44 CONLEY 1: ORDER WORDS/HYBRIDS.................................................. 46 1 “And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

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PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE LEONARDI

PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE

PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE......................................................................................................................................................... 1

STRATEGY PAGE AND INTRODUCTION..................................................................................................................................... 7

*** CASE ***......................................................................................................................................................................................... 8

PROTEST 1AC..................................................................................................................................................................................... 9

AT: “D&G BAD”................................................................................................................................................................................ 22

AT: “AFF ROMANTICIZES NOMADS”......................................................................................................................................... 23

AT: JAMESON.................................................................................................................................................................................... 24

AT: BARBROOK............................................................................................................................................................................... 25

AT: IRAGARAY/BRAIDOTTI........................................................................................................................................................ 26

AT: BECOMING-MONSTER (BRAIDOTTI)................................................................................................................................ 27

IMPACT: MICROFASCISM............................................................................................................................................................. 28

IMPACT: MOLECULAR POPULATION....................................................................................................................................... 29

IMPACT: SADNESS.......................................................................................................................................................................... 30

IMPACT: ORGANISM CARD.......................................................................................................................................................... 31

IMPACT: WAR MACHINE/EXTINCTION................................................................................................................................... 32

IMPACT: ETHER.............................................................................................................................................................................. 34

IMPACT FRAMING: DESIRE FIRST............................................................................................................................................. 35

SOLVENCY: ACT NOW.................................................................................................................................................................... 36

SOLVENCY: REFRAME THE DEBATE......................................................................................................................................... 37

SOLVENCY: MADNESS.................................................................................................................................................................... 38

SOLVENCY: AFFIRMATION.......................................................................................................................................................... 39

SOLVENCY: SCHIZOPHRENIA...................................................................................................................................................... 40

SOLVENCY: WAR MACHINE......................................................................................................................................................... 41

SOLVENCY: PRECONCIOUS LIBIDINAL INVESTMENTS.......................................................................................................42

SOLVENCY: CONLEY....................................................................................................................................................................... 44

CONLEY 1: ORDER WORDS/HYBRIDS...................................................................................................................................... 46

CONLEY 2: HOW TO CATCH A WAR MACHINE…................................................................................................................... 47

CONLEY 3: BECOMING-MINORITARIAN.................................................................................................................................. 48

AT: UTOPIANISM............................................................................................................................................................................ 49

AT: IDENTITY GOOD...................................................................................................................................................................... 50

1“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE LEONARDI*** FRAMEWORK ***..................................................................................................................................................................... 51

2AC: FRAMEWORK CORE............................................................................................................................................................. 52

GODDARD......................................................................................................................................................................................... 53

CLAUDE.............................................................................................................................................................................................. 54

GREENE AND HICKS....................................................................................................................................................................... 55

AT: CURRENT EVENTS.................................................................................................................................................................. 56

AT: RORTY/WALT/SHIVLEY....................................................................................................................................................... 57

AT: PRAGMATISM........................................................................................................................................................................... 58

AT: SECURITY STUDIES................................................................................................................................................................ 59

AT: GRAMMAR/INTERPRETATION.......................................................................................................................................... 60

FOUCAULT........................................................................................................................................................................................ 61

KAPPELER......................................................................................................................................................................................... 62

SPANOS.............................................................................................................................................................................................. 63

1AR: W/M.......................................................................................................................................................................................... 64

1AR: FWK = EXTRA-T/NOT A VOTER...................................................................................................................................... 65

1AR: REASONABILITY................................................................................................................................................................... 66

1AR: PREDICTABILITY/LIMITS................................................................................................................................................. 67

1AR: EDUCATION O/W FAIRNESS............................................................................................................................................. 68

2AR: EDUCATION O/W FAIRNESS............................................................................................................................................. 69

1AR: C/I............................................................................................................................................................................................. 70

1AR: GILBERT.................................................................................................................................................................................. 71

1AR: CHURCHILL............................................................................................................................................................................ 72

1AR: PATTON................................................................................................................................................................................... 73

1AR: GODDARD............................................................................................................................................................................... 74

1AR: GRAMMAR.............................................................................................................................................................................. 75

2AR: GRAMMAR.............................................................................................................................................................................. 76

1AR: YOU KILL DEBATE!.............................................................................................................................................................. 77

2AR: OVERVIEW.............................................................................................................................................................................. 78

2AC: EXTRA-T.................................................................................................................................................................................. 79

1AR: EXTRA-T (WE MEET).......................................................................................................................................................... 80

1AR: EXTRA-T (MECH SPEC GOOD).......................................................................................................................................... 81

1AR: EXTRA-T (IMPACT TURN)................................................................................................................................................. 82

MISC. T INTERPRETATIONS + STANDARDS........................................................................................................................... 83

2“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE LEONARDI*** GENERIC KRITIK TOOLBOX ***........................................................................................................................................... 84

K FRONTLINE................................................................................................................................................................................... 85

1AR: ALT =/= SOLVE...................................................................................................................................................................... 86

1AR: ALT => FASCISM................................................................................................................................................................... 87

1AR: AFF SOLVES ALT................................................................................................................................................................... 88

2AC: PERM........................................................................................................................................................................................ 89

1AR: PERM SOLVES........................................................................................................................................................................ 90

1AR: NOT EXCLUSIVE (PERM).................................................................................................................................................... 91

1AR: DOUBLE BIND (PERM)........................................................................................................................................................ 92

2AC: FLOATING PIKS/NO ALT TEXT BAD............................................................................................................................... 93

1AR: FLOATING PIKS/NO ALT TEXT BAD............................................................................................................................... 94

AT: REALISM.................................................................................................................................................................................... 95

AT: IVORY TOWER......................................................................................................................................................................... 97

AT: COSMOPOLITANISM............................................................................................................................................................... 98

*** KRITIKS ***................................................................................................................................................................................ 99

AT: LACAN...................................................................................................................................................................................... 100

EXT: LACK....................................................................................................................................................................................... 102

EXT: OEDIPUS................................................................................................................................................................................ 103

EXT: THE SUBJECT....................................................................................................................................................................... 104

1AR: PERM..................................................................................................................................................................................... 105

2AR: PERM..................................................................................................................................................................................... 106

1AR: COLEBROOK/HOENISCH................................................................................................................................................. 107

1AR: BRAIDOTTI.......................................................................................................................................................................... 108

1AR: CONSERVATISM T/............................................................................................................................................................ 109

AT: IDENTITY POLITICS/REPS................................................................................................................................................ 110

EXT: REPS DEAD/THEORY+PRACTICE................................................................................................................................. 112

EXT: IMMANENT POWER........................................................................................................................................................... 113

EXT: K/2 SOLVE FASCISM.......................................................................................................................................................... 114

1AR: LET’S TALK BUSINESS…................................................................................................................................................... 115

1AR: COLEBROOK/BALLANTYNE........................................................................................................................................... 116

1AR: ZALLOUA.............................................................................................................................................................................. 117

AT: BIOPOWER/AGAMBEN....................................................................................................................................................... 118

EXT: DELEUZE 92......................................................................................................................................................................... 121

1AR: DELEUZE 92......................................................................................................................................................................... 122

1AR: LINK DEBATE...................................................................................................................................................................... 123

3“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE LEONARDIAT: FEMINISM............................................................................................................................................................................... 124

1AR: ‘N’ SEXES/HOLLAND......................................................................................................................................................... 126

1AR: TRANSCENDENCE T/........................................................................................................................................................ 127

AT: LEVINAS................................................................................................................................................................................... 128

AT: STATISM.................................................................................................................................................................................. 130

1AR: BALLANTYNE...................................................................................................................................................................... 132

AT: HILLMAN................................................................................................................................................................................. 133

1AR: DESIRE.................................................................................................................................................................................. 136

1AR: NO LINK................................................................................................................................................................................ 137

1AR: BUCHANAN.......................................................................................................................................................................... 138

1AR: ALT =/= SOLVE................................................................................................................................................................... 139

AT: NORMATIVITY....................................................................................................................................................................... 140

1AR: PATTON................................................................................................................................................................................ 142

1AR: CHURCHILL.......................................................................................................................................................................... 143

1AR: DEFENSE............................................................................................................................................................................... 144

1AR: PERM..................................................................................................................................................................................... 145

AT: BATAILLE................................................................................................................................................................................ 146

1AR: DA TO ALT............................................................................................................................................................................ 151

1AR: LINK DEBATE...................................................................................................................................................................... 152

1AR: PERM..................................................................................................................................................................................... 153

1AR: I/L TO FASCISM.................................................................................................................................................................. 154

1AR: WOLIN................................................................................................................................................................................... 155

AT: SPANOS.................................................................................................................................................................................... 156

AT: MARXISM................................................................................................................................................................................ 157

1AR: PERM..................................................................................................................................................................................... 160

1AR: ALT GENERIC....................................................................................................................................................................... 161

1AR: ZALLOUA/UNIQUENESS................................................................................................................................................... 162

1AR: LAMBERT 1.......................................................................................................................................................................... 163

1AR: LAMBERT 2.......................................................................................................................................................................... 164

4“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE LEONARDI*** COUNTERPLANS ***............................................................................................................................................................. 165

AT: AFGHANISTAN CP................................................................................................................................................................. 166

1AR: DOUBLE BIND (AFGHAN CP).......................................................................................................................................... 168

1AR: BAD STARTING POINT (AFGHAN CP).......................................................................................................................... 169

1AR: NO SOLVENCY (AFGHAN CP).......................................................................................................................................... 170

1AR: MILITARISM DA (AFGHAN CP)...................................................................................................................................... 171

1AR: PERM (AFGHAN CP).......................................................................................................................................................... 172

AT: WORD PICS............................................................................................................................................................................. 173

1AR: NO SOLVENCY (WORD PICS).......................................................................................................................................... 175

1AR: PERM: DO BOTH (WORD PICS)..................................................................................................................................... 176

2AR: FLUID LANGUAGE (WORD PICS)................................................................................................................................... 177

1AR: BRADBURY DA (WORD PICS)........................................................................................................................................ 178

1AR: PERM: DO THE CP (WORD PICS)................................................................................................................................... 179

AT: AGENT/CONSULT CP........................................................................................................................................................... 180

5“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE LEONARDI*** DISADS ***............................................................................................................................................................................... 181

GENERIC FRONTLINE.................................................................................................................................................................. 182

AT: POLITICS................................................................................................................................................................................. 183

1AR: POLITICS............................................................................................................................................................................... 184

AT: PULLOUT BAD....................................................................................................................................................................... 185

1AR: PULLOUT BAD.................................................................................................................................................................... 187

AT: MIDDLE EAST STABILITY.................................................................................................................................................. 188

AT: MILITARY TECH GOOD....................................................................................................................................................... 191

AT: NUCLEAR WAR...................................................................................................................................................................... 193

AT: HEGEMONY............................................................................................................................................................................. 194

*** DEATH ***................................................................................................................................................................................ 197

AT: DEATH (LONG)...................................................................................................................................................................... 198

AT: DEATH (SHORT)................................................................................................................................................................... 201

2AR: DEATH OVERVIEW............................................................................................................................................................ 203

AT: VTL SUBJECTIVE................................................................................................................................................................... 204

AT: INHERENT VTL...................................................................................................................................................................... 205

AT: VTL INEVITABLE.................................................................................................................................................................. 206

AT: <3 LIFE/VIDEO GAMES + DEBATE + PORN + BIEBS = VTL......................................................................................207

AT: INTRINSIC VTL/LIFE IS GOOD.......................................................................................................................................... 208

1AR: THE COSMOS....................................................................................................................................................................... 209

1AR: UTIL BAD.............................................................................................................................................................................. 210

DEATH =/= EXIST – QUANTUM PHYSICS.............................................................................................................................. 211

DEATH =/= EXIST – LINEARITY.............................................................................................................................................. 212

DEATH =/= EXIST – ENERGY.................................................................................................................................................... 213

DEATH =/= EXIST – NON-EXISTENCE.................................................................................................................................... 214

AT: EMPATHY/ETHICS............................................................................................................................................................... 215

Extinction Inevitable............................................................................................................................................................................................ 216

6“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE LEONARDI

STRATEGY PAGE AND INTRODUCTION

Thank you for purchasing the Protest Affirmative. I hope it works well for you throughout the season.

An explanation of the argument:To run this aff well you need to know some history. If you don’t already know, in 2003 there was a week or so of protests before Colin Powell spoke at the UN all around the world: millions of people from Rome to New York to London to DC. They demonstrated, they told the State they didn’t want a war, and then after Colin Powell spoke, they all went home and nothing happened. The aff investigates why these protests failed, and presents a better strategy for resisting the State and the imperial methods it uses to wage war, centering the locus for this re-invention of protest and activism around the war in Iraq. The methodology we present to oppose imperialism is a micropolitical movement: what Deleuze and Guattari call a politics of desire where we focus on how the individual can attempt to physically or materially impede State affairs: whereas current political strategies are captured within capitalism and the State (vendors at protests, sound and walking permits for marches, protesters policing themselves, etc… Churchill talks about this a lot, read the whole card), we offer a method of thinking that is outside of the State. The advocacy engages this sort of micropolitics of desire to spur bottom-up movements against the State that would result in a withdrawal from Iraq. That probably solves things like the way we create fascism (the Bell evidence) and for imperialist desires that fuel war and genocide (Churchill).

This file is divided into 5 major sections:1. Case – This section includes the 1AC and answers to the most common “AT: Deleuze” arguments as well as some solvency and impact extensions. Note that you should read these solvency/impact extensions carefully, because they’ll often be useful on off-case flows.

2. Framework – The way the aff answers framework is rather tricky (in a good way). You have to remember that the core strategy for the aff is to over-cover framework in the 2ac enough to get the block to concede it and go for a K. If they don’t win the framework debate, they lose the alternative. If they concede framework, bludgeon them with it like a baby seal: the trick is to leverage the “cede the political” arguments made in the 2AC against the alt by forcing the negative to defend SOME method of engaging the State. Other than tricks like this, you don’t need to worry. Teams will want to go for framework because “lulzD&G” but really they have an extra-T argument at best. Just always remember to frame the debate not as “what’s best for debate in terms of exclusion of arguments” but as “who creates the best model for real political engagement.” The file includes blocks through the 2AR.

3. The K/Toolbox – This part of the file includes a generic K frontline for the alt and a perm block. The 2AC/1AR blocks to the K are rather extensive, because this is one of the biggest pieces of off-case you have to worry about. The main offense this aff has is against the alt – the negative has to come up with SOME method of engaging the State. The Churchill evidence does a lot of this work on terminal uniqueness: someone has to determine the rules of engagement, and the status quo says the State does that. There’s a good chance their method of engaging the political can be combined with yours because your politics is about evolution and being adaptive, so boil the debate down to a question of perm v. alt and determine what those political strategies look like.

4. CP’s – Lol. These aren’t a problem for this aff. The best CP to read against it is “engage a micropolitical movement starting with Afghanistan”, which solves none of the Gilbert card. These are blocked pretty well.

5. Disad/Death – This aff plain doesn’t link to most disads. To keep framework clean, you probably link to structural disads like “withdrawal bad.” The key is to read add-ons from the ”AT: impacts” section from disads and to read death stuff. People will go for politics: you don’t link. The plan happens at the apex of a micropolitical movement. Just don’t let them trick you into a framework violation with this.

Any further questions can be directed here: [email protected] Good hunting, Chris Leonardi

7“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE LEONARDI

*** CASE ***

PROTEST 1AC

On February 15th, 2003, millions protested in over 800 cities worldwide against the immanent US invasion of Iraq. But when the war machine continued with business as usual, the vocal majority turned silent and disbanded—the resistance vanished overnight, and Operation Iraqi Freedom began. Rorty, Walt, and Shively have failed us - knowing about government policies isn’t enough to challenge the political. Now the resolution gives us an invitation for protest, but this begs the question of what form our protest takes. In the face of the failures of status quo political engagment, we prefer a molecular politics of experimentation. Gilbert et. al 8 (February 2008, Jeremy Gilbert, organizer and chair of the roundtable, “Deleuzian politics? A roundtable discussion.” Participants include Claire Colebrook, Eric Alliez, Peter Hallward, and Nicholas Thoburn, pgs. 165-175, [CL])

Jeremy: Peter - Éric has raised the question, which is of course the urgent one, of how we can fight against capitalism, neoliberalism, etc, in the current conjuncture. I would say that one of the reasons for the popularity of Deleuze and Guattari, at least insofar as they offer analytical resources for a lot of us in the West, is this: in a country like Britain today, the problem with the tradition that you identify and identify with, is that it simply doesn’t work. This is always my final argument against people who appeal to the Leninist tradition of proletarian struggle:

it just isn’t working. It’s been decades since any significant numbers of people could be mobilised by appeal to that tradition and its rhetorics. Appealing to people in terms of those identities and those forms of organisation hasn’t really achieved anything in this country since the 1930s. So I wonder what you think the purchase of that tradition is in a context like, say, Britain or France today. Peter: I think it’s far too early to tell! In my opinion the implication of what you’re saying, Éric, and the implication of the way that certain people use Deleuze, is to try to make a virtue of defeat. It’s largely a philosophical attempt to appropriate and revalue the last thirty-plus years of counterrevolution. We’ve lived through this extremely reactionary period which is described in

broadly similar ways by people from, say, Chomsky across to Badiou, or whoever you want. The fact is that (as a result of a very aggressive set of measures taken by the ruling class in this country and others) the kinds of political responses that did achieve certain things in the 1930s or back in the nineteenth century, around issues of labour and so on, aren’t there, and we can’t reproduce that sort of political situation now - that’s true. But think about the period in between, the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Soviet revolution. At the beginning of 1917 the situation was hardly very encouraging. Yet you would have been foolish simply to abandon the tradition that to some extent did enable certain things to happen, for example during the Paris Commune. Lenin was obsessed with that example and what its limits were, but also with what it made possible. Personally I wouldn’t want to abandon the Cuban experiment, with all its limitations. As to your precise question as to how we can engage with capitalism, how we can engage with questions of work, and justice and race and various

8“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE LEONARDIother things: I would say that I think Cuba gives you a set of limited but nevertheless innovative and inspiring answers to that question. I think, likewise, of the mobilisations that people are undertaking, with extraordinary courage, in certain parts of the world. The example that’s in my head right now is Haiti but there are certainly other examples: Bolivia is perhaps especially interesting, in terms of forms of organisation. What’s happening in Venezuela, again with limitations, is a point of reference which opens up certain possibilities, but it also establishes continuities with the past as well: it’s not called the ‘Bolivarian’ revolution for nothing … In the case of Britain, and France, one thing that will have to happen is that the forms of isolation which lock us into, for example, a completely vacuous notion like ‘the West’ - which is a term which should be erased from political vocabulary - need to be overcome. That’ll happen in part through issues around immigration and globalisation, but it also has to happen much more forcefully and, I would say, deliberately, and ultimately through deliberate acts of self-determination, such that we actively rethink our relationship with the countries that we currently exploit and dominate. We have to rethink the relation that the EU has with Africa, which is obscene, and which is something that we could start to change through a deliberate series of decisions about trade and immigration and ‘aid’, and so on, if we chose to do it. We have to rethink our

relationship to these wars that we are fighting, as we speak, in different parts of the world, and that we’ve effectively decided that we cannot change. That’s ridiculous. We could decide collectively to change it. It doesn’t mean that you just snap your fingers and things change, but we could initiate a process of organisation and mobilisation - which would be laborious and slow and inventive - that would bring these criminal wars to an end . Claire: You use the word ‘we’, but that ‘we’ doesn’t exist, does it? Peter: No it doesn’t, just like the general will doesn’t, before we constitute ourselves as the subject of this decision that we have to arrive at . But we have enough to go on: we know that this is the right thing to do; a principled collective ‘hunch’ is good enough as a point of departure. Claire: That’s true. But then the problem is

exactly that expressed by Deleuze and Guattari’s call for ‘a people to come’ and their remark that ‘the people are missing’: these thoughts express precisely the problem that the ‘we’ doesn’t exist. So the problem then becomes: what forms of analysis would allow you to get there? One would be affirmatory, saying ‘we have the means to make the decision already there’. Another would be to face up to political reality, which I think is what the analytic tools of the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia make possible, by asking: ‘ why is it that the “we” doesn’t exist? And what is it about life that makes the “we” difficult to find?’ I mean, the discussion of deterritorialisation isn’t necessarily an affirmation: deterritorialisation isn’t a moral good per se because there are also processes of the dissolution of desire and its capture in which deterritorialisation can play a part. Jeremy: It’s very interesting that you say that Claire, because that does seem to be a slight revision of your answer to my earlier question about normativity. I think there is a bit of a tension here, insofar as the strongest defence of Deleuze that has

been made - and it was being made by Éric right from the start - is around the value of the analysis, around the analytic strength of the work, as offering a way of understanding the mutations of contemporary capitalism, and of the things which limit the possibilities for effective struggle. Whereas what Peter has reacted to most strongly has been a certain normativity which seems to valorise a kind of politics of disillusionment and an aesthetic of disorganisation, above everything else. I’d like us to speak to that, and I’d like to know, Peter, if you dispute the analytic power of Deleuze and Guattari’s work as well as its normative value. Peter: Well, yes I do - although I have more sympathy for the analytical side of things because of course I do think that Deleuze and Guattari help to illuminate some important issues. For example, the question of why it is that people desire their own repression; they pose that question, and they weren’t the first to pose it, but they posed that question in ways that I admit are productive and useful. However, I think that for me the question - and it’s more like a standard Chomsky-type question - is: if you ask why it is that - for lack of a better phrase -’the will of the people’, or our capacity for collective self-determination, or whatever you want to call it, has been weakened, then you would answer it better by, for example, analysing some of the things that Naomi Klein talks about very usefully in her Shock Doctrine book. Klein is able to show - and I think it’s convincing - that some of the political strategies, such as ‘shock therapy’, are designed precisely to weaken this form of collective will, and it is in fact easy to see how: you isolate people, you break them up, you demoralise them, you deprive them of information or you overload them with information. All these techniques are designed essentially to soften up people, make them passive, make them willing to go along with what happens and abandon things that they might otherwise have defended. Foucault made a similar point, with reference to the development of ‘psychiatric power’ in the wake of the French Revolution. Claire: But then it’s a question

about desire. I mean if you look at ‘the West’ - and I agree with you that that’s a disastrous collective notion - you don’t even have to be Naomi Klein. You just have to look at the mass-production of anti-depressants and artificial stimulants, at the drugs that are coursing through and deadening the population: and you’ve got to look at this at the level of bodies, which is why I think that notions of ‘the Subject’, ‘the decision’, ‘will’ and ‘collective self-formation’ are of limited use. What you need analytically is a philosophical apparatus which will show you why these thresholds or moments of decisions occur or don’t occur, which is precisely the question asked by a molecular politics: what weakens individual bodies to the point where they don’t act? STOP THE war NICK: MOLECULAR POLITICS IS ALSO INTERESTED IN THE CRUCIAL QUESTION CONCERNING WHY IT IS THAT EVEN WHEN SUCH COLLECTIVE ACTS OF SELF- DETERMINATION DO OCCUR, THE ACT OF DECISION IN ITSELF ISN’T ENOUGH. TAKE THE EXAMPLE OF THE MASSIVE DEMONSTRATION AGAINST THE LAST INVASION OF IRAQ. IN FEBRUARY 2003: CLEARLY THERE WAS A DECISION BY A HELL OF A LOT OF PEOPLE TO SHOW UP, TO VENT THEIR OPPOSITION , TO DEFY THE MEDIA, BUSH AND TONY BLAIR: A VERY CLEAR DECISION . BUT THEN IT WAS COMPLETELY INEFFECTUAL AND ACTUALLY RATHER APOLITICAL . I PERSONALLY FELT RATHER DISEMPOWERED, COMPARED TO HAVING BEEN AT MANY MUCH SMALLER, MORE DYNAMIC

DIRECT-ACTION EVENTS - THIS ACT OF DECISION JUST WASN’T ENOUGH. Claire: Because it was pious - it was ‘not in my name’. PETER: BECAUSE

IT WASN’T A CLEAR DECISION! IN MY OPINION THIS WAS THE PERFECT PARADIGM OF A DECISION THAT WAS UNCLEAR AND THUS INDECISIVE - NO DECISION AT ALL. ‘NOT IN MY NAME’ IS A DISASTROUS SLOGAN, WHICH SAYS ‘GO AHEAD WITH YOUR STUPID UGLY WAR IF YOU MUST, BUT I’D PREFER TO KEEP MY HANDS CLEAN’. A CLEAR DECISION WOULD HAVE BEEN ‘NO - WE WILL STOP THE WAR, AND WE WILL DO WHATEVER IT TAKES TO STOP IT.’ WHICH MEANS INVENTING SOMETHING , I AGREE. THE VOLUNTARIST TRADITION I’M REFERRING TO WOULD FOCUS ON WHAT WE CAN DO, AND ALTHOUGH THE DOING IS NOT REDUCIBLE TO WILLING, I WOULD SAY THAT IT’S A MISTAKE TO THINK YOU CAN OR SHOULD GET RID OF THE DELIBERATE ELEMENT: WHAT CAN WE DO, TO ENGAGE WITH THIS OR THAT INJUSTICE OR THIS OR THAT PROJECT OR CAUSE OR WHATEVER IT IS? DELEUZE AND GUATTARI GIVE YOU SOME INSTRUMENTS, I ADMIT. I’M NOT CLAIMING THAT THE ISSUE OF DESIRE OR THE BODY IS IRRELEVANT BUT I AM QUESTIONING THE VALUE OF WHAT I THINK IS MOST DISTINCTIVE ABOUT THEM, GIVEN THAT EVEN SOMEONE LIKE ROUSSEAU WOULD SAY THAT THOSE THINGS AREN’T IRRELEVANT (DON’T FORGET THE EMPHASIS HE PUTS ON THE CULTIVATION OF SYMPATHIES, ON VIRTUE, WHICH IS NOT JUST SOME ABSTRACT MORAL CATEGORY - THERE’S A WHOLE INVESTIGATION OF TECHNOLOGIES OF POLITICAL WILL IN THE BROAD SENSE IN ROUSSEAU). I DON’T THINK DELEUZE AND GUATTARI DO MUCH TO HELP ILLUMINATE THESE PROBLEMS OR HELP THINK ABOUT WHY THESE FORMS OF COLLECTIVE AGENCY DON’T EMERGE; THEY EFFECTIVELY DISSOLVE THEM. THERE’S REALLY NO PLACE FOR EFFECTIVE COLLECTIVE ACTION IN THEIR THOUGHT. NICK: I’M SORRY BUT I STILL DON’T GET THIS AT ALL: BOOKS LIKE KAFKA: TOWARD A MINOR LITERATURE AND A THOUSAND PLATEAUS ARE

INTIMATELY CONCERNED WITH TECHNIQUES OF COMPOSITION. CLAIRE: BUT THE PROCESS OF COMPOSITION AND RECOMPOSITION - OF

9“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE LEONARDI

SINGULARISATION, IN OTHER WORDS - HAS TO KEEP GOING, AND AVOID BECOMING FIXED. THAT’S THE NORMATIVE VALUE OF DETERRITORIALISATION ; IT’S NOT JUST SOME ATTEMPT TO DISSOLVE PERCEPTION INTO NOTHING . ÉRIC: I DON’T FEEL VERY COMFORTABLE WITH THE ‘NORMATIVE’ VOCABULARY PROPOSED BY CLAIRE, BUT I THINK IT WOULD BE A SIMPLE QUESTION OF SEMANTICS. THIS IS OBVIOUSLY NOT THE CASE WITH MY DISAGREEMENT WITH PETER. FIRST, NOBODY IS DENYING THE POST-68 COUNTERREVOLUTION. I ALREADY MENTIONED IT,

GUATTARI USED TO REFER TO IT AS THE ‘YEARS OF WINTER’ , AND DELEUZE CONTEXTUALISED IN THIS WAY THE POLITICAL MEANING OF THE NOUVEAUX

PHILOSOPHES. BUT COUNTERREVOLUTION MEANS THAT THERE HAS BEEN AN ON-GOING REVOLUTION, THAT 68 EXISTED AS AN OPENING OF NEW RADICAL POSSIBILITIES (WHICH DON’T EXACTLY FIT WITH YOUR ANALYSIS) - AND WE KNOW THAT IN ITALY

‘68 LASTED TEN YEARS, UNTIL THE UPRISINGS OF ’77 … IT MAY HAVE BEEN AN EVENT (NOBODY PLANNED IT) BUT IT DID NOT EXACTLY COME FROM NOWHERE, AND THE SOCIAL MUTATIONS IT EMBODIED HAVE BEEN REPRESSED AS MUCH AS DEPOTENTIALISED IN THE PROCESS OF THEIR CAPTURE BY AN EXTENDED CAPITALISTIC VALORISATION THAT DID NOT PUT AN END TO THE CRISIS . AND THE FACT IS THAT HIGH AND MASSIVE CONFLICTUALITY REMERGES IN EUROPE IN THE MID-1990S, BEFORE INVENTING THIS NEW GLOBAL POLITICAL DYNAMIC THAT CRYSTALLISED AT SEATTLE, AND WITH THE MULTIPLICATION OF WORLD SOCIAL FORUMS THAT DIRECTLY ADDRESSED THE REALITIES OF TRANS-NATIONAL CAPITALISM AND THE POST-68 ORGANISATIONAL QUESTION OF THE ‘MOVEMENT OF THE MOVEMENTS’ … YOU CAN CRITICISE, SHOW

THAT THIS ANTI-MODEL REACHED ITS LIMITS TO EXPLAIN ITS REFLUX, ETC - BUT, FIRST, IT REVEALS THAT ‘68 NEVER COMPLETELY ENDED ; AND, SECOND, THE FACT REMAINS THAT IT EXISTED IN A WAY, DEAR PETER, GLOBALLY: A CLEAR ALTERNATIVE TO YOUR OWN NEO-CUBAN MODEL. I’M BEING DELIBERATELY PROVOCATIVE, OF COURSE, BUT IT IS ONLY SO AS TO, MORE SERIOUSLY, MARK MY DISTANCE FROM PETER’S COMMENTS ABOUT CUBA, ETC, IN NEW DIRECTIONS. I THINK THAT ONCE YOU HAVE ADMITTED - THANK GOD! - THE LIMITS OF THAT MODEL (BUT I SUSPECT THEY ARE FOR YOU ONLY ‘HISTORICAL’ LIMITS), THEN THERE IS STILL SOMETHING THAT WE HAVE TO ANALYSE NOT ONLY GEOPOLITICALLY - WHICH IS, YOU’RE RIGHT, EXTREMELY IMPORTANT - BUT BIOPOLITICALLY TOO, AT LEAST WITH REGARD TO THE ‘SOUTH’. IN SOUTH AMERICA TODAY, IN THE GLOBALISED SOUTH AMERICA OF TODAY, PERHAPS FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME, THERE IS A DYNAMIC AND CONFLICTUAL CONTINENTAL AUTONOMISATION AGAINST AMERICAN POWER IN THIS AREA. THIS CANNOT BE UNDERESTIMATED ON ANY TERMS, BUT IT MUST BE COMPLETED FOR EXAMPLE BY A RACIAL ANALYSIS OF THE SOCIAL STRATIFICATION OF THESE COUNTRIES THAT LARGELY CONTRADICTS THE LONG-TERM TRADITION OF THEIR LEFTIST NATIONALISM (GILBERTO FREYRE’S RACIAL DEMOCRACY IS STILL THE REFERENCE FOR A LARGE PART OF THE BRAZILIAN LEFT!) - LEFTIST NATIONALISM WHICH, MOREOVER, IS NOT EXACTLY ‘NATURALLY’ SUPPORTIVE OF ENVIRONMENTALIST

FIGHTS, WOMEN’S MOVEMENTS, HOMOSEXUALS’ RIGHTS, ETC … BUT THESE BIOPOLITICAL QUESTIONS ARE THE PRIVILEGED GROUND FOR THE REVOLUTIONARY CROSSBREEDING (METISSAGE) OF A RADICAL DEMOCRACY IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH. IT DOES NOT OBEY/CONCEDE TO THE DEFEATED EUROPEAN (POST-)ROBESPIERRIST-LENINIST TRADITION OF THE ‘PEOPLE’ AND ITS UNITARIAN

MODEL OF ‘GENERAL WILL’, BUT IT PARTICIPATES IN THE GENERAL CONTEMPORARY HUMAN CONDITION WHERE RESISTANCE IS NOT ONLY A STRUGGLE-FORM BUT A FIGURE OF EXISTENCE, A DISPOSITIF OF LIFE-POWER (POTENTIA), RE-QUALIFYING LIFE AS WHOLE IN THIS WORLD … PETER: WHAT DOES THAT MEAN, THOUGH? I MEAN, TAKE A CASE LIKE BOLIVIA, THE SITE OF SOME OF THE MOST INTERESTING AND INVENTIVE FORMS OF POLITICAL ORGANISATION IN SOUTH AMERICA. THE MOBILISATIONS IN COCHOBAMBA IN 2000 AND THE VARIOUS OTHER REALLY QUITE EXTRAORDINARY AND REMARKABLE POPULAR MOBILISATIONS WERE GROUNDED (OFTEN IN KEEPING WITH THE TRADITION OF THE AYLLU) IN FORMS OF FORCEFUL COLLECTIVE DELIBERATION, WHICH THEN APPLY TO THEIR MEMBERS, SO THAT ONCE A DECISION HAS BEEN TAKEN - AND OFTEN SUCH DECISIONS MIGHT TAKE WEEKS TO FORMULATE - THERE IS A FORM OF COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THAT DECISION WHICH IS IMPLEMENTED AND ENFORCED IN A WAY THAT SOMEONE LIKE ROBESPIERRE MIGHT HAVE ADMIRED. SO WHAT DOES THE DELEUZEAN APPROACH HAVE TO ADD ABOUT THIS? THESE ARE PEOPLE WHO ARE WORKING IN THE WORLD AS IT IS: IT’S TRUE THAT THEY’RE NOT CALLING FOR THE ABOLITION OF PRIVATE PROPERTY, AND THEY’RE NOT CALLING FOR A KIND OF ABSOLUTE UTOPIAN VISION; THEY’RE CALLING FOR SPECIFIC, FORCEFUL, VERY SIGNIFICANT CHANGE THAT WOULD TURN THEIR COUNTRY UPSIDE DOWN. WHAT DOES YOUR DELEUZIAN ANALYSIS ADD TO THIS? ALL RIGHT, SO WE ANALYSE IT IN DEPTH: WHAT DO WE GET? ÉRIC: WELL,

AT LEAST IN SOUTH AMERICA, WE SHOULD NEVER FORGET THAT THE QUESTION OF THE STATE - AND ITS POWER TO ENABLE SOCIAL INCLUSION IN THE MARKET AS THE REALITY CONDITION OF ECONOMIC ‘DEVELOPMENT’ - CLASHES WITH THE QUESTION OF THE RELATIONS OF POWER , WHICH ARE CONSTANTLY AT STAKE AMONGST THE STRUGGLES AS SOON AS THEY BREAK WITH THE CLASSIC-MODERN EQUATION OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT QUA POLITICAL DEMOCRATISATION: BECAUSE THEY INVOLVE DE FACTO THE TOTALITY OF THE

MATERIAL BASES FOR A REAL-ALTERNATIVE CITIZENSHIP. I DON’T KNOW ABOUT BOLIVIA AS WELL AS YOU DO, BUT I COULD MENTION THE MOVEMENTS OF YOUNG BLACK PEOPLE IN THE BRAZILIAN PERIPHERIES AND FAVELAS , WHICH, AFTER ALL, REVEAL NON-STANDARD AND QUITE ‘WILD’ PROCESSES OF COLLECTIVE SUBJECTIVATION AND CULTURAL RADICALISATION; OR THE SELF- ORGANISATION OF THE BAIRROS AFTER THE ARGENTINEAN COLLAPSE , WHICH LARGELY ESCAPED FROM THE DELIBERATIVE ASSEMBLEIAS BECAUSE OF THEIR INFILTRATION BY THE ‘PROFESSIONAL’ MILITANTS, AND THEIR SUPERIOR ‘GENERAL WILL’- WITHOUT FALLING INTO ANY UTOPIAN SPONTANEISM!;

OR THE ZAPATISTA INDIAN INSURRECTION WHICH DEVELOPED MOVEMENTS OF GLOBAL ACTION BASED ON THE REACTUALISATION OF PRE-COLONIAL COMMONS … BUT I COULD MENTION ALSO THE QUESTION OF THE STATUS OF WOMEN IN VENEZUELAN SOCIETY. THIS QUESTION TODAY IS REALLY SOMETHING WHICH IS PRODUCING SOME KIND OF MOLECULAR DESTABILISATION OF MANY FEATURES OF THAT SOCIETY (AGAINST A GENDERED BOLIVARIAN JUSTICE …).2 BEYOND YOUR INSISTENCE ON AN EXCLUSIVE AND CONSTITUENT ‘DECISION’, WHICH IS SUPPOSED TO REINTRODUCE ROUSSEAU-ROBESPIERRE CONTRA DELEUZE AS THE POLITICO-PHILOSOPHICAL FRAME OF ANY DELIBERATIVE MOMENT, I THINK IT’S QUITE SYMPTOMATIC THAT ALL YOUR EXAMPLES SEEM, ON THE ONE HAND, CUT OFF FROM ANY MICROPOLITICAL ANALYSIS OF POWER (TO SPEAK FOUCAULDIAN AND NOT DELEUZIAN …), AND, ON THE OTHER HAND, ABSOLUTELY NON DETERMINED BY THE SEQUENCE 1968-1989 … SORRY, PETER, BUT AFTER 1989, THE CUBAN FORM OF ISLAND-SOCIALISM IS DEFINITIVELY PRE- AND POST-HISTORICAL! CLAIRE: PETER YOU MADE THAT POINT EARLIER ABOUT ‘THE WEST’, AND SAID ‘LOOK AT ALL THIS STUFF THAT’S GOING ON THAT WE SHOULD OBJECT TO’. BUT THE POINT IS THAT THERE PROBABLY IS A WIDESPREAD OBJECTION AND SENSE OF OUTRAGE WHICH REMAINS COMPLETELY DORMANT. THESE ARE INDEED THE BIGGER GLOBAL POLITICAL ISSUES, STRUGGLE AROUND WHICH COULD REALLY

MAKE AN IMPACT. AND YET SO FAR, SUCH STRUGGLES HAVE PROVED INEFFECTIVE. IN A SENSE THIS COMES TO THE QUESTION OF WHAT COUNTS AS A DECISION, BECAUSE THE DECISION WAS THAT NOBODY WANTS THIS WAR, AND YET IT WENT AHEAD ANYWAY . I MEAN, YOU SAID THAT THAT’S NOT REALLY A DECISION, BUT THEN THAT JUST SEEMS TO ME THAT YOU’RE SAYING THAT WHEN IT WORKS IT’S A DECISION, WHEN IT DOESN’T WORK IT’S NOT A DECISION. SO THEN YOU NEED THE ANALYTICAL TOOLS TO UNDERSTAND THE DIFFERENCE, TO UNDERSTAND WHY THIS DEMONSTRATION BECAME COMPLETELY PIOUS AND SANCTIMONIOUS. PETER: THE ANSWER TO THAT IS THAT YOU NEED TO HAVE A STRONGER POLITICS OF THE DECISION - NOT A WEAKER ONE! IT TOOK A VERY LONG TIME FOR PARTS OF THE UNITED STATES TO DECIDE TO ABOLISH SLAVERY - SIXTY YEARS LONGER THAN IT TOOK IN HAITI - AND IT TOOK PEOPLE LIKE JOHN BROWN AND OTHERS TO MAKE IT HAPPEN. CLAIRE: BUT DOESN’T IT HAVE TO DO WITH AFFECTIVE INVESTMENTS OF THE BODY? PETER: WHY? CLAIRE: WELL, FOR EXAMPLE YOU CAN LOOK AT THE EXAMPLES OF THINGS LIKE RACISM AND SEXISM - THEY OFTEN TODAY TAKE THE FORM OF PEOPLE SAYING EXPLICITLY: ‘I COMPLETELY ACKNOWLEDGE EQUALITY, I COMPLETELY ACKNOWLEDGE THE RIGHTS OF ALL THESE PEOPLE’, BUT ON A DAY-TO-DAY LEVEL AND AT THE LEVEL OF POLITICAL MOBILISATION, THERE’S STILL A KIND OF AFFECTIVE REPULSION WHICH IS RACIST IN CHARACTER. RACISM IS A NON-COGNITIVE ISSUE, WHICH MEANS IT HAS TO BE DEALT WITH NOT AT THE LEVEL

10“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE LEONARDIOF DECISION, BUT AT THE LEVEL OF AFFECTIVE INVESTMENTS. THESE ARE MOBILISED IN REALLY POLITICALLY CLEAR WAYS IN ELECTION CAMPAIGNS, WHERE YOU CAN SEE THE WAY THAT HATRED IS STIRRED UP AT AN AFFECTIVE LEVEL. PETER: THAT’S ONE APPROACH; BUT THE APPROACH TAKEN BY TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE, BY ROBESPIERRE AND BY JOHN BROWN IS EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE, WHICH IS TO SAY THAT THIS IS A MATTER OF SELF-EVIDENT JUSTICE: IT HAS TO DO WITH EQUALITY AND JUSTICE, IT HAS NOTHING DO WITH COLOUR, IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH AFFECT. JEREMY: WELL PETER YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT THE LEVEL AT WHICH ONE MAKES THE DECISION THAT SOMETHING IS WRONG. BUT

THEN ONE HAS TO LOOK AT THE LEVEL AT WHICH THIS DECISION CAN BE POLITICALLY EFFECTUATED , THE LEVEL OF POLITICAL STRATEGY . THIS FOR ME IS THE VALUE OF THE DELEUZIAN APPROACH - IT FORCES ATTENTION TO DIMENSIONS OF POLITICS WHICH HAVE TO BE THOUGHT THROUGH IF ONE IS GOING TO UNDERSTAND WHY , FOR EXAMPLE, THE STOP THE WAR CAMPAIGN DIDN’T GET ANYWHERE. NOW I KNOW THAT YOU WOULDN’T DISAGREE WITH A LOT OF THIS: THE PROBLEM WITH THE STOP THE WAR CAMPAIGN WAS THAT IT WAS PREDICATED ON THE ASSUMPTION THAT WE ARE STILL OPERATING WITHIN THIS MID- TWENTIETH-CENTURY MODE OF REPRESENTATIVE POLITICS, ACCORDING TO WHICH IF YOU HAVE A MILLION PEOPLE DEMONSTRATING AGAINST A WAR, A GOVERNMENT HAS TO LISTEN , BECAUSE YOU JUST CAN’T PURSUE A

WAR UNDER THOSE CONDITIONS. PERSONALLY I THINK - AND THIS IS JUST MY ANALYSIS - THAT WHAT GOES WRONG WITH THE CAMPAIGN AFTER THE WAR IS THAT IT REMAINS A MORALISTIC CAMPAIGN ABOUT THE WAR RATHER THAN ONE WHICH TRIES TO ADDRESS THE BROADER QUESTION OF THE INABILITY OF PEOPLE COLLECTIVELY TO EXERCISE THEIR DESIRE IN SUCH A WAY AS TO PREVENT IT . BUT THAT PRECISELY WAS THE TACTIC OF THE LENINIST SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY, AND THE STOP THE WAR COALITION WHICH THEY DOMINATED. THEY REFUSED ANY CALL TO BROADEN THE CAMPAIGN OUT TO ADDRESS QUESTIONS OF DEMOCRACY AND PARTICIPATION ; THIS WAS PRECISELY THE MOMENT IN 2003 WHEN THE SWP WAS ACTIVELY

TRYING TO PREVENT THE FORMATION OF LOCAL SOCIAL FORUMS IN THE UK, INSISTING THAT THE ONLY FOCUS FOR RADICAL ACTIVITY HAD TO BE THE WAR. THE RESULT WAS A FAILURE . NOW, TO SOME EXTENT, THE DELEUZIAN APPROACH ALLOWS ME TO THINK , PRECISELY, ABOUT THE BROADER PROCESSES OF AFFECTIVITY THAT WOULD BE INVOLVED IN THE CREATION OF WHAT YOU, PETER, CALL A GENERAL WILL: WHICH IS EXACTLY WHAT THE POLITICS OF THE SWP WAS PREDICATED ON NOT THINKING ABOUT. NOT IN MY NAME? ÉRIC: IT WOULD HAVE BEEN POSSIBLE TO MAKE AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT ANALYSIS OF THAT FAMOUS SLOGAN ‘NOT IN MY NAME’, IN TERMS OF A POLITICS OF COLLECTIVE SECESSION IN RELATION TO THIS IMPERIAL WAR MADE IN THE NAME OF DEMOCRACY; IN RELATION TO THE ABSOLUTE REDUCTION OF DEMOCRACY (OUR SUPPOSED COMMON NAME) INTO THIS GLOBAL CAPITALISTIC EARTH WHICH INTERNALISES (SECURITY SOCIETY) AND EXTERNALISES (POST-MODERN IMPERIALISM) WAR AS AFFIRMATION OF A GLOBAL SOVEREIGNTY. NOW, EFFECTIVELY, AFTER THE DEMONSTRATION, THERE HAS BEEN THOROUGH RHETORICISATION OF THE MOST MORALISTIC

DIMENSIONS BECAUSE OF A NON COLLECTIVE PROBLEMATISATION AND APPROPRIATION OF THESE QUESTIONS. BUT LET’S NOT FORGET THAT IN THE UK, THIS WAS THE BIGGEST DEMONSTRATION EVER . THIS IN ITSELF IS SOMETHING EXTRAORDINARILY INTERESTING, AND HAS TO SOME EXTENT GIVEN RISE TO AN

UNEXPECTED PROCESS OF EMOTIONAL INTERACTION THROUGH THE WHOLE SOCIETY: JUST BECAUSE IT EXISTED IN IMMEDIATE OPPOSITION TO THE WAR FIGURE OF NEOLIBERALISM FROM A DEEP ‘ETHICAL’ ENGAGEMENT THAT EXCEEDS THE ‘POLITICO-POLITICAL’ SPHERE . THAT’S WHY IT’S AN EXTREMELY DIFFICULT PHENOMENON TO ANALYSE, BEFORE AND BEYOND ITS SUPPOSED POLITICAL FAILURE. THE EASIEST, BEING TO CRITICISE, FROM A NARROW POLITICAL POINT OF VIEW, THE CLEAN SLOGAN ‘NOT IN MY NAME’. BUT I REALLY THINK THAT THERE ARE OTHER POTENTIALITIES INHERENT TO THIS GESTURE OF ETHICAL REFUSAL; AND IN THE WORLD THAT WE LIVE IN, WE HAVE TO BE EXTRAORDINARILY ATTENTIVE TO SUCH POTENTIALITIES,

BECAUSE THEY CAN PRODUCE STRONG AND UNPREDICTABLE EFFECTS. CLAIRE: SO THE DECLARATION ‘NOT IN MY NAME’ COULD BE A GESTURE OF NON-INCLUSION - ‘DON’T INCLUDE ME’ - OR ONE OF REFUSAL. ÉRIC: GLOBAL REFUSAL, IMMEDIATE SECESSION, WHATEVER, AT LEAST ON THIS WAR QUESTION, WHICH IS NOT MARGINAL … JEREMY: I DON’T THINK WE SHOULD FETISHISE THAT SLOGAN - IT’S BEEN MUCH CRITICISED, AND ON THE DEMONSTRATION MOST PEOPLE WERE CARRYING BANNERS WHICH READ ‘DON’T ATTACK IRAQ’ - IT WASN’T ALL ‘NOT IN MY NAME’. PETER: I THINK IT’S ALSO POSSIBLE THAT WE CAN IMAGINE A HISTORY IN WHICH THAT MOMENT WILL FIGURE MORE POSITIVELY THAN IT DOES NOW, AND THAT IT WILL HAVE CONTRIBUTED TO SOMETHING WHICH WENT BEYOND

IT AND EXCEEDED IT. BUT THE QUESTION NOW CERTAINLY IS: WHY WAS IT SO INEFFECTUAL SO FAR? AND ALL I WOULD SAY IS

THAT IF YOU COMPARE IT TO SOMETHING LIKE THE ANTI-APARTHEID MOVEMENT, WHICH WAS EXTREMELY LABORIOUS, AS I’M SURE YOU ALL REMEMBER,

AND TOOK PLACE YEAR AFTER YEAR IN THE FACE OF VERY STRONG OPPOSITION FROM MUCH OF THE ESTABLISHMENT: IT HAPPENED BECAUSE, LABORIOUSLY, GROUPS OF PEOPLE IN SCHOOLS AND ON CAMPUSES AND IN WORKPLACES AND SO ON MADE IT STICK AND FORCED IT THROUGH. AND ALL I WOULD SAY IS THAT THAT’S WHAT HAS TO HAPPEN WITH THE STOP THE WAR CAMPAIGN. ÉRIC: FINE, WE AGREE ON THIS LAST POINT. BUT, PETER, SORRY TO COME BACK TO MY DISSATISFACTION WITH ALL OF YOUR EXAMPLES WHICH ARE, IN MY TERMS, QUITE GENERIC IN THEIR INTENTION - THE GENERIC AFFIRMATION OF THE EGALITARIAN IDEA YOU EMBODY SUBJECTIVELY IN YOUR CONSTITUENT DECISION USED AS THE MARKER FOR A NO LESS GENERIC POLITICAL ORGANISATION. REGARDING THE SOUTH AFRICAN EXAMPLE, IF IT IS SUPPOSED TO BE PARADIGMATIC OF YOUR GENERAL STATEMENT, YOU WOULD HAVE TO CONFRONT YOURSELF WITH THE MORAL STRATEGY OF THE ‘TRUTH AND JUSTICE’ COMMISSION THAT EXTENDED THE EQUALITY PARAMETER TO PRODUCE A KIND OF TABULA RASA OF THE PAST, TOTALLY DISCONNECTED FROM THE NEXT FORESEEABLE STEP: A PRIVATE/PUBLIC MODERNISATION OF CAPITALISM UNDER THE FORMAL-REAL LEADERSHIP OF A NEW BLACK BOURGEOISIE WHICH DOES NOT CONSIDER THE REDISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH AS A NATIONAL PRIORITY. WE DON’T NEED TO BE HEGELIAN TO KNOW THAT SLAVERY, APARTHEID, ETC, ARE QUITE COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE FROM AN EFFECTIVE CAPITALISTIC POINT OF VIEW: THEY INHIBIT CAPITALIST DEVELOPMENT AND ARE CONTRADICTORY WITH ITS MODERN ARTICULATION WITH THE ‘DEMOCRATIC STATE’. WHAT IS ACTUALLY GOING ON IN SOUTH AFRICA, WITH THE TERRIBLE SITUATION IN THE TOWNSHIPS, CONFIRMS, IF NECESSARY, THIS STATEMENT. BUT THE ACTUAL VIOLENT STRUGGLES IN-BETWEEN FACTORIES AND TOWNSHIPS ARE PROJECTING THE QUESTION OF THE REALISATION OF EQUALITY ONTO A TOTALLY NEW TERRAIN, INVOLVING A SOCIAL BREAK WITH THE POLITICAL SPACE AND A PATCHWORK OF NON-TOTALISING EXPERIENCES OF STRUGGLES AND EVERYDAY LIFE THAT MAY EMPOWER A BLACK POST-APARTHEID MULTITUDE. NOW, COMING BACK ONCE MORE, AND FOR THE LAST TIME, TO THE IMPORTANCE THAT YOU STILL ATTRIBUTE TO CUBA: IT’S HARDLY REPRESENTATIVE OF THE POST-68 AND POST-SOCIALIST MOVEMENTS WE LIVE IN (AND NOT ONLY IN THE ‘WEST’) … PETER: THE CUBAN REVOLUTION TOOK PLACE IN THE 1950S AND IT’S LIMITED IN CERTAIN SENSES BY ITS CONTEXT AND THE CONSTRAINTS OF ITS SITUATION, LIKE ANYTHING IS. BUT I WOULD NOT AT ALL BE PREPARED TO CONSIGN IT TO THE PAST OR TO SAY THAT THERE’S NOTHING THAT CAN BE LEARNED FROM IT; OR THAT THE MODEL, FOR EXAMPLE, OF CUBAN INTERVENTION OVER ISSUES OF HEALTH IN VARIOUS PARTS OF THE WORLD ISN’T A FAR MORE USEFUL MODEL THAN THE ONE WE TEND TO USE HERE OF INTERVENTION THROUGH NGOS LIKE MEDECINS SANS FRONTIÈRES OR OXFAM OR WHATEVER. PART OF THE REASON, IF YOU ASK ME, WHY THIS DEMONSTRATION AGAINST THE WAR WAS NOT SUCCESSFUL - ONE OF THE MANY FACTORS - WAS THAT WE HAVE BECOME USED TO DELEGATING OUR POLITICAL COMMITMENTS TO IDEOLOGICAL STATE APPARATUSES LIKE NGOS OR THEIR EQUIVALENTS. AND

11“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE LEONARDICUBA IS AN INTERESTING EXAMPLE OF A REFUSAL OF THAT LOGIC FROM TOP TO BOTTOM. WHEN CUBA HELPS A COUNTRY LIKE HAITI THEY SEND DIRECT SUPPORT TO ITS GOVERNMENT IN THE FORM OF THE IMMEDIATE PROVISION OF SERVICES, AND THEY KEEP RELATIVELY QUIET ABOUT IT. THE CONTRIBUTION THAT THEY MAKE COMPARES EXTREMELY WELL WITH THINGS LIKE NGOS OR MORE NETWORKFRIENDLY TYPE INITIATIVES WHICH ARE OFTEN TRUMPETED IN THE LANGUAGE THAT WE’RE USING HERE, AS IN ‘THIS IS MORE ADAPTED TO CONTEMPORARY SITUATIONS, MORE FLUID’. ADVOCATES OF THESE LATTER MODELS COULD WELL DRAW UPON A BIT OF LATOUR, THEY MIGHT QUOTE A BIT OF

DELEUZE FOR THAT MATTER, AND THEY’LL SAY ‘THIS MODEL OF INTERVENTION IS MORE ADAPTED TO A MOBILE CONTEMPORARY CAPITALISM’. CLAIRE: BUT SURELY THE POLITICAL PROBLEM HERE IS THE MOBILISATION OF DESIRE . YOU SAY THAT WE PALM THESE THINGS OFF ONTO MSF OR OXFAM, BUT THEN

THE QUESTION IS - HOW WOULD YOU HAVE IT OTHERWISE? AND THEN YOU NEED TO GO BACK AND ANALYSE FORMATIONS OF DESIRE AND THE ABSENCE OF DECISIONS. WE ALL AGREE THAT A DECISION WOULD BE A GOOD THING, THAT AN EVENT OR A CHANGE WOULD BE A GOOD THING , THAT IF WHAT YOU SEE AS GOOD IN CUBA COULD OCCUR ELSEWHERE THEN THAT WOULD BE A GOOD THING.

BUT THEN YOU HAVE TO ASK WHY IT DOESN’T OCCUR ELSEWHERE. IT DOESN’T OCCUR BECAUSE DECISIONS DON’T OCCUR ELSEWHERE, AND THOSE DECISIONS DON’T OCCUR BECAUSE THE DESIRE ISN’T THERE. IT’S NOT

THAT WE’RE MISTAKEN, OR DELUDED. YOU CAN’T JUST REFER TO ‘WILL’: YOU HAVE TO HAVE SOME CONDITION FOR ANALYSING IT. AND ISN’T THAT WHAT MICROPOLITICS IS ABOUT?

This is a fundamental retaliation—the debate community only gives us an invitation to protest so that this activism can be re-funneled into acceptable channels in the face of Emporia State’s victories last year—we police ourselves to abide by traditional politics even as we champion their same causes because we believe that good is good enough. This mirrors a larger political trend—Leftists in America are leaning toward a symbolic politics of comfort that does nothing—the impact to this method is empirically endless global wars and genocide under militarism.Churchill 7 (Ward Churchill, American-Indian activist with AIM, former professor for University of Colorado at Boulder, “Pacifism as Pathology: reflections of the role of armed struggle in North America”, pgs. 48-62, [CL])

The question central to the emergence and maintenance of nonviolence as the oppositional foundation of American activism has not been the truly pacifist formulation, “How can we forge a revolutionary politics within which we can avoid inflicting violence on others?” On the

contrary, a more accurate guiding question has been, “What sort of politics might I engage in which will both allow me to posture as a progressive and allow me to avoid incurring harm to myself?” Hence, the trappings of pacifism have been subverted to establish a sort of “politics of the comfort zone ,” not only akin to what Bettelheim termed “the philosophy of business as usual” and

devoid of perceived risk to its advocates, but minus any conceivable revolutionary impetus as well. The intended revolutionary content of true pacifist activism – the sort practiced by the Gandhian movement, the Berrigans, and Norman Morrison – is thus isolated and subsumed in the United States, even among the ranks of self-professing participants.

Such a situation must abort whatever limited utility pacifist tactics might have, absent other and concurrent forms of struggle, as a socially transformative method. Yet the history of the American Left over the past decade shows too clearly that the more diluted the substance embodied in “pacifist practice,” the louder the insistence of its subscribers that nonviolence is the only mode of action “appropriate and acceptable within the context of North America,” and the greater the effort to ostracize, or even stifle divergent types of actions. Such strategic hegemony exerted by proponents of this truncated range of tactical options has done much to foreclose on whatever revolutionary potential may be said to exist in modern America. Is such an assessment too

harsh? One need only attend a mass demonstration (ostensibly directed against the policies of the state) in any U.S. city to discover the answer. One will find hundreds, sometimes thousands, assembled in orderly fashion , listening to selected speakers calling for an end to this or that aspect of lethal state activity, carrying signs “demanding” the same thing, welcoming singers who enunciate lyrically on the worthiness of the demonstrators’ agenda as well as the plight of the various victims they are there to “defend,” and – typically – the whole thing is quietly disbanded with exhortations to the assembled to “keep working” on the matter and to please sign a petition and/ or write letters to congresspeople requesting that they alter or abandon offending undertakings. Throughout the whole charade it will be noticed that the state is represented by a uniformed police presence keeping a discreet distance and not interfering with the activities . And why should they? The organizers of the demonstration will have gone through “proper channels” to obtain permits required by the state and instructions as to where they will be allowed to stay and, should a march be involved in the demonstration, along which routes they will be allowed to walk. Surrounding the larger mass of demonstrators can be seen others – an elite. Adorned with green (or white, or powder blue) armbands, their function is to ensure that demonstrators remain “responsible,” not deviating from the state-sanctioned plan of protest . Individuals or small groups who attempt to spin off from the main body, entering into areas to which the state has denied access (or some other unapproved activity) are headed off by these armbanded “marshals” who argue – pointing to the nearby police – that “troublemaking” will only

12“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE LEONARDI

“exacerbate an already tense situation” and “provoke violence,” thereby “alienating those we are attempting to reach.” In some ways, the voice of the “good Jews” can be heard to echo plainly over the years. At this juncture, the confluence of interests between the state and the mass nonviolent movement could not be clearer. The role of the police, whose function is to support state policy by minimizing disruption of its procedures, should be in natural conflict with that of a movement purporting to challenge these same policies, and, indeed to transform the state itself.

However, with apparent perverseness, the police find themselves serving as mere backups (or props) to self- policing (now euphemistically termed “peace-keeping” rather than the more accurate “marshalling”) efforts of the alleged opposition’s own membership. Both sides of the “contestation” concur that the smooth functioning of state processes must not be physically disturbed , at least not in any significant way. All of this within the letter and spirit of cooptive forms of sophisticate self-preservation appearing as an integral aspect of the later phases of bourgeois democracy. It dovetails well with more shopworn methods such as the electoral process and has been used by the state as an innovative means of conducting public opinion polls, which better hide rather than eliminate controversial policies. Even the movement’s own sloganeering tends to bear this out from time to

time, as when Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) coined the catch-phrase of its alternative to the polling place: “Vote with your feet, vote in the street.” Of course, any movement seeking to project a credible self-image as something other than just one more variation of accommodation to state power must ultimately establish its “militant” oppositional credentials through the media in a manner more compelling than rhetorical speechifying and the holding of impolite placards (“Fuck the War” was always a good one) at rallies.

Here, the time-honored pacifist notion of “civil disobedience” is given a new twist by the adherents of nonviolence in America. Rather than pursuing Gandhi’s (or, to a

much lesser extent, King’s) method of using passive bodies to literally clog the functioning of the state apparatus – regardless of the

cost to those doing the clogging – the American nonviolent movement has increasingly opted for “symbolic actions.” The centerpiece of such activity usually involves an arrest , either of a token figurehead of the movement (or a small, selected group of them) or a mass arrest

of some sort. In the latter event, “arrest training” is generally provided – and lately has become “required” by movement organizers – by the same marshals who will later ensure that crowd control police units will be left with little or nothing to do. This is to ensure that “no one gets hurt” in the process of being arrested, and that the police are not inconvenienced by disorganized arrest procedures. The event which activates the arrests is typically preplanned, well-publicized in advance, and, more often than not, literally coordinated with the police – often including estimates by organizers concerning how many arrestees will likely be involved. Generally speaking, such “extreme statements” will be scheduled to coincide with larger-scale peaceful demonstrations so that a considerable audience of “committed” bystanders (and, hopefully, NBC/CBS/ABC/CNN) will be on hand to applaud the bravery and sacrifice of those arrested: most of the bystanders will, of course, have considered reasons why they themselves are unprepared to “go so far” as to be arrested. The specific sort of action designed to precipitate the arrests themselves usually involves one of the following: (a) sitting down in a restricted area and refusing to leave when ordered; (b) stepping across an imaginary line drawn on the ground by a police representative; (c) refusing to disperse at the appointed time; or (d) chaining or padlocking the doors to a public building. When things really get heavy, those seeking to be arrested may pour blood (real or ersatz) on something of “symbolic value.” [/page

53, p. 3… Churchill resumes on pg. 56] The trivial nature of this level of activity does not come fully into focus until it is juxtaposed to the sorts of state activity which the nonviolent movement claims to be “working on.” A brief sampling of prominent issues addressed by the American opposition since 1965 will suffice for purposes of illustration: the U.S. escalation of the ground war in Southeast Asia to a level where more than a million lives were lost, the saturation bombing of Vietnam (another one or two million killed), the expansion of the Vietnam war into all of Indochina (costing perhaps another two or three million lives when the intentional destruction of Cambodia’s farmland and resultant mass starvation are considered), U.S. sponsorship of the Pinochet coup in Chile (at least another 10,000 dead), U.S. underwriting of the Salvadoran oligarchy (50,000 lives at a minimum), U.S. support of the Guatemalan junta (at least 20,000 dead). A far broader sample of comparable lethal

activities has gone unopposed altogether. While the human costs of continuing American business as usual have registered well into the seven-digit range (and possibly higher), the nonviolent “opposition” in the United States has not only restricted its tactics almost exclusively to the symbolic arena denoted above, but has actively endeavored to prevent others from going further. The methods employed to this end have generally been restricted to the deliberate stigmatizing, isolation, and minimization of other potentials – as a means

of neutralizing, or at least containing them – although at times it seems to have crossed over into collaboration with state efforts to bring about their outright liquidation. The usual approach has been a consistent a priori dismissal of any one person or group attempting to move beyond the level of symbolic action as “abandoning the original spirit [of North American oppositional politics ] and taking the

counterproductive path of small-scale violence now and organizing for serious armed struggle later.” This is persistently coupled with attempts to diminish the importance of actions aimed at concrete rather than symbolic effects , epitomized in the question framed by Sam Brown,

a primary organizer of the November 1969 Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam (when perhaps 5,000 broke free of a carefully orchestrated schedule of passive activities): “ What’s more important, that a bunch of scruffy people charged the Justice Department or that [500,000 people] were in the same place at one time to sing?” Not only was such “violence” as destroying property and scuffling with police proscribed in the view of the Moratorium organizers, but also any tendency to utilize the incredible mass of assembled humanity in any way which might tangibly interfere with the smooth physical functioning of the

governing apparatus in the nation’s capital (e.g. nonviolent civil disobedience on the order of, say, systematic traffic blockages and huge sit-ins). Unsurprisingly, this same mentality manifested itself even more clearly a year and a half later with the open boycott by pacifism’s “responsible

leadership” (and most of their committed followers) of the Indochina Peace Campaign’s planned “May Day Demonstration” in Washington. Despite the fact that in some ways the war had escalated (e.g., increasingly heavy bombing) since the largest symbolic protest in American history – the Moratorium fielded approximately one million passive demonstrators, nationwide – it was still held that May Day organizer Rennie Davis’ intent to “show the government that it will no longer be able to control its own society

unless it ends the war NOW!” was “going too far.” It was opined that although the May Day plan did not itself call for violent acts,

13“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

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its disruption of business as usual was likely to “provoke a violent response from officials.” Even more predictably, advocates of nonviolence felt compelled to counter such emergent trends as the SDS Revolutionary Youth Movement, Youth Against War and Fascism , and Weatherman . Calling for non-attendance at the demonstrations of “irresponsible” organizations attempting to build a “fighting movement among white radicals,” and wittily coining derogatory phrases to describe them, the oppositional mainstream did its utmost to thwart

possible positive developments coming from such unpacifist quarters. In the end, the stigmatized organizations themselves institutionalized this imposed isolation, their frustration with attempting to break the inertia of symbolic opposition to the status quo converted into a “politics of despair” relying solely on violent actions undertaken by a network of tiny underground cells. The real anathema to the nonviolent mass, however, turned out not to be white splinter groups such as Weatherman. Rather, it came from a militant black nationalism embodied in the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. After nearly a decade of proclaiming its “absolute solidarity” with the liberatory efforts of American blacks, pacifism found itself confronted during the late ‘60s with the appearance of a cohesive organization that consciously linked the oppression of the black community to the exploitation of people the world over, and programmatically asserted the same right to armed self-defense

acknowledged as the due of liberation movements abroad. As the Panthers evidenced signs of making significant headway, organizing first in their home community of Oakland and then nationally , the state perceived something more threatening than yet another series of candlelight

vigils. It reacted accordingly, targeting the Panthers for physical elimination. When Party cadres responded (as promised) by meeting the violence of repression with armed resistance, the bulk of their “principled” white support evaporated . This horrifying retreat rapidly isolated the Party from any possible mediating or buffering from the full force of state terror and left its members nakedly exposed to “surgical termination” by special police units. To cover this default

on true pacifist principles – which call upon adherents not to run for safety but, in the manner of Witness for Peace, to interpose their bodies as a means of alleviating violence – it became fashionable to observe that the Panthers were “as bad as the cops” in that they had resorted to arms (a view which should give pause when one recalls the twelfth Sonderkommando); they had “brought this on themselves” when they “provoked violence” by refusing the state an uncontested right to maintain the lethal business as usual it had visited upon black America since the inception of the Republic. In deciphering the meaning of this pattern of response to groups such as the Panthers, Weatherman, and others who have attempted to go beyond a more symbolic protest of, say, genocide, it is important to look beyond the clichés customarily used to explain the American pacifist posture (however revealing these may be in themselves). More to the point than concerns that the groups such as the Panthers “bring this [violent repression] on themselves” is the sentiment voiced by Irv Kurki, a prominent Illinois anti-draft organizer during the winter of 1969-70: “This idea of armed struggle or armed self-defense or whatever you want to call it… practiced by the Black Panther Party, the Weathermen and a few other groups is a very bad scene, a really dangerous thing for all of us. This isn’t Algeria or Vietnam, it’s the United States… these tactics are not only counterproductive in that they alienate people who are otherwise very sympathetic to us… and lead to the sort of thing which just happened in Chicago… but they run the very real risk of bringing the same sort of violent repression down on all of us (emphasis added).” Precisely.

The preoccupation with avoiding actions which might “provoke violence ” is thus not based on a sincere belief that violence will, or even can , truly be avoided . Pacifists, no less than their unpacifist counterparts, are quite aware that violence already exists as an integral component in the execution of state policies and requires no provocation; this is a formative basis of their doctrine. What is at issue then cannot be a valid attempt to stave off or even minimize

violence per se. Instead, it can only be a conscious effort not to refocus state violence in such a way that it would directly impact American pacifists themselves . This is true even when it can be shown that the tactics which could trigger such a refocusing might in themselves alleviate a real measure of the much more massive state-inflicted violence occurring elsewhere; better that another 100,000 Indochinese peasants perish under a hail of cluster

bombs and napalm than America’s principled progressives suffer real physical pain while rendering their government’s actions impracticable. Such conscientious avoidance of personal sacrifice (i.e., dodging the experience of being on the receiving end of violence, not the inflicting of it) has nothing to do with the lofty ideals and

integrity by which American pacifists claim to inform their practice. But it does explain the real nature of such curious phenomena as movement

marshals, steadfast refusals to attempt to bring the seat of government to a standstill even when a million people are on hand to accomplish the task, and the consistently convoluted victim-blaming engaged in with regard to domestic groups such as the Black Panther Party. Massive and unremitting violence in the colonies is appalling to right-thinking people but ultimately acceptable when compared with the unthinkable alternative that any degree of real violence might be redirected against “mother country radicals.”

Ultimately, the politics of comfort presented by the “acceptable rebellion” of the resolution recreates liberalism, which makes life itself into a battlefield. War has become immanent, a specter casting its shadow over all of society but nowhere to be found—this causes a constant state of emergency, turning us into cannibals feeding on our own freedom and rights. Death isn’t the worst that can happen—choose to challenge the politics of fear with a new form of politics. Bell 7 (Daniel M., Associate Professor of Theological Ethics, Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary, Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, JCRT 8.2 SPRING 2007 55,d http://www.jcrt.org/archives/08.2/)

Like Hobbes and Foucault, Deleuze holds that life is constituted by motion; specifically by the active power that is desire. Moreover, this desire in a “state of nature” if you will, is not reactive; it is not fearful. Rather, it is anarchic, creative, harmonic. This active, playful power that is desire only becomes reactive, fearful, or in Deleuze’s terms, paranoid, as it is acted upon, as it is captured or seduced by

reactive and fearful forces, which is precisely what the state-form attempts to do. The state-form assembles desire, forms and shapes it so that it is paranoid and fearful, and in so doing, the state promotes the promise of its own existence: Surrender and be safe . Deleuze’s focus, however, broadens beyond the state-form to consider the contemporary political horizon as it is constituted by global capitalism. He positions his account of desire and the state-form within a universal history of capitalism. According to this genealogy, the history of capitalism’s advent is the story of the state-form’s slow subsumption by or becoming immanent to economy. Hobbes’ absolutist state of sovereignty was able to channel all desire through

the bottle-neck of the state and its mercantile economy. Yet, as Foucault noted, eventually desire exceeded the ability of the sovereign to control and contain it, and as a result the state-form

14“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

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mutated into liberal state. What is novel about the liberal state is that its art of government neither requires all desire be funneled through the state (civil society is fine, as per Foucault’s

governmentality) nor demands that desire be subordinated to the ends of sovereignty. In this sense, liberal government is distinctly economic government; it is government that strives to

further not its own ends, what an earlier political tradition called reason of state, but the ends of capitalist economy. The liberal state is immanent to the larger economic field, and its task is

primarily that of minimizing intervention and interference in the workings of that field. Yet, we might ask, have we not crossed a new threshold in recent decades as capitalism has

increasingly undermined the governing authority of even the liberal, economic, state? Does not global capitalism mark a crisis of the liberal state? After all, it would appear that capital’s

ability to eclipse national sovereignty is approaching the point of rendering the liberal state unnecessary, a point where passports can be replaced by credit cards and citizenship replaced by

membership in trade alliances and associations. According to Deleuze, we have entered a new era, but the state-form has not been rendered obsolete. Rather, it is undergoing another mutation, a shift toward a much more active or aggressive advocacy of capital. No longer is the state satisfied with merely minimizing intervention in economy; now it actively pursues the extension of economy into every fiber and cell of human life. The state has become a model of realization for capital. More specifically, and more immediately relevant to the matter of the culture and politics of fear, the state has become a war machine. Whereas it was once the case that states appropriated war machines; today states constitute a war machine. Specifically, they are capitalism’s war machine. The capitalist state is the “small state, strong state” that we see evolving all around us

in response to the dictates of the global capitalist order – states long on disciplinary power and short on welfare capacity. Furthermore, the object of this machine is no longer, as it once was, war in the traditional sense of the term. Here we might recall the ways the “war of terrorism” was described at its initiation. It is a “ghost war,” occurring not at the frontiers of society but, like a fog and in a manner synonymous with governmentality, permeating or blanketing society . And it is waged against a spectral

enemy – be it terrorists with dirty bombs, microbes, or superpredator youths16 – by means equally spectral – stealth forces, renditions, disappearances, electronic eavesdropping, invisible

break-ins, snooping librarians, truck driver informants and so forth. This war machine, moreover, does not simply fight in society, but rather it has society, peace, politics, the world order as

its object. As Deleuze observes, with this latest permutation of the state-form, Clausewitz’s famous formula has been inverted: War is no longer the continuation of politics; politics is now the

continuation of war. 17 We are already living in the midst of the Third World War , Deleuze wrote almost thirty years ago. Politics, culture, peace, civil society are the object of this war. Thus we are submerged in a state of permanent war; permanent emergency, a permanent state of exception where the laws and civic political associations that once offered some degree of liberty are suspended indefinitely and foreclosed . 18 Moreover, in waging this war against peace and

politics, the state-form, in a move reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984, promotes and installs a very special kind of peace: a terrifying peace, the peace of absolute terror, a culture and politics of fear. Security is now conceived as war, as organized insecurity, as distributed and programmed universal catastrophe . War is peace and freedom is preserved only by

sacrificing it and we all have a stake in this as we desire the goods that this fear makes possible. And what goods are those? According to Deleuze, this state of permanent war, this culture of fear has as its goal the deterritorialization of desire, the separation of the productive force of desire from anything that would stand between it and the capitalist market and the concomitant rendering available of this desire to this market. Thus, the culture of fear is not in service to the state per se, but the market. The threat of terror paves the way for capital and

the goods it promises to provide. So, after 9/11 the president instructs us, not to seek out our neighbors and embrace them, but to shop, to seek out commodities and purchase them. Shortly thereafter, the US trade representative to Latin America wielded the threat of terrorism to cajole reluctant nations to fall in line with trade pacts . Likewise, homeland

security and terrorism have been invoked to crush domestic labor actions, as well as popular movements against the expansion of the capitalist market. The invasion of Iraq, while falling far

short of its lofty rhetoric with regard to the welfare of the Iraqi people, has gone a long way toward privatizing oil resources, abolishing unions, lowering wages, etc – in short, furthering

capital’s extension in the region. Likewise, Katrina was used to repeal a host of labor and environmental laws that stood in way of the market and talk persists of rebuilding the New Orleans

in a manner that is decidedly market friendly. The list of examples of how fear and terror are used to promote the capitalist order could go on and on. With Deleuze, we reach the end of our survey of liberalism and fear. The politics and culture of fear that envelop us is not the intrusion of an extra-political force kept a bay by the liberal political order. To the contrary, liberalism needs fear and so it produces it, and it does so not simply by the imposition of the heavy, disciplinary hand of the state and its apparatuses, but by the velvet touch (one that we even desire!) of the vast array of technologies of the self that constitute the complex space of civil society . Moreover, by means of this liberal governmentality, we come to desire our own domination and participate in a kind of political cannibalism whereby we want the very things that undercut the liberties liberalism purports to secure . Thus, as we examine the culture of fear, we are looking as if into a mirror and glimpsing the truth of our liberal soul. Liberalism is founded on fear. As Judith Shklar has said so

well, liberalism does not offer a summum bonum toward which all should strive; nor does it rest upon a theory of moral pluralism as many are wont to proclaim. Rather, its foundation is much

more barren. Liberalism is erected on the sheer negative, the fear of a summum malum. As she says, “to be alive is to be afraid.” 19 But in

this way the contradiction at the empty heart of liberalism is exposed: The promise of liberalism – recall Montesquieu et. al. – was freedom from terror and fear; yet this it cannot and it dare not deliver. For without fear, liberalism’s raison d’etre , even the very barren

15“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

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surface into which it sinks its sickly roots, erodes as if into nothing. Therefore, under liberalism, there can be no end to fear. Even death is not its terminus, but only its culmination and even its return, for death does not relieve our fears. Rather, as Hobbes’s insightfully discerned, face to face with death we are reminded that whatever meager goods we seek out in the midst of this vale of tears – career,

family, friends, etc. – are contingent upon actually surviving to pursue them. For an end to fear, for a politics that finally is not cannibalistic of either liberty or life and so holds forth the hope of nurturing human communion/community (the root meaning of politics), for a more generous politics beyond the (anti)politics of color-coded insecurity and perpetual war with our neighbors, both foreign and domestic, we will have to look elsewhere. To this alternative we now turn.

Therefore we are resolved: that the United States federal government should substantially increase statutory and/or judicial limits on the war powers of the President of the United States in one or more of the topic areas.

We are a rearticulation of the resolution and of debate itself that affirms a politics of continuation and flux - a constantly shifting and moving political hydra that can never be located or contained in one place, never killed in one fell swoop. This means we, as people in a room and not as policymakers, need to change our relationship with war and the State—instead of grand revolutions, our methodology is one of experimentation with the forms protest and activism can take.Massumi 83 (Brian, Professor of something at a place of respectable respectedness; A Thousand Plateaus, Introduction)

" State philosophy " is another word for the representational thinking that has characterized Western metaphysics since Plato, but has suffered an at least momentary setback during

the last quarter century at the hands of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and poststructuralist theory generally. As described by Deleuze,16 it reposes on a double identity: of the thinking subject, and of the concepts it creates and to which it lends its own presumed attributes of sameness and constancy. The subject, its concepts, and also the objects in the world to which the concepts are applied have a shared, internal essence: the self-

resemblance at the basis of identity. Representational thought is analogical; its concern is to establish a correspondence between these symmetrically structured domains. The faculty of judgment is the policeman of analogy, assuring that each of the three terms is honestly itself, and that the proper correspondences obtain. In thought its end is truth, in

action justice. The weapons it wields in their pursuit are limitative distribution (the determination of the exclusive set of properties possessed by

each term in contradistinction to the others: logos, law) and hierarchical ranking (the measurement of the degree of perfection of a term's self-resemblance in relation to a supreme standard , man, god, or gold: value, morality). The m odus o perandi is negation : x = x = not y. Identity, resemblance, truth, justice, and negation. The rational foundation for order. The established order, of course: philosophers have traditionally been employees of the State. The collusion between philosophy and the State was most explicitly enacted in the first decade of the nineteenth century with the foundation of the University of Berlin, which was to become the model for higher learning throughout Europe and in the United States. The goal laid out for it by Wilhelm von Humboldt (based on proposals by Fichte and Schleiermacher) was the "spiritual and moral training of the nation," to be achieved by "deriving everything from an original principle" (truth), by "relating everything to an ideal" (justice), and by "unifying this

principle and this ideal in a single Idea" (the State). The end product would be "a fully legitimated subject of knowledge and society"17—each mind an analogously organized mini-State morally unified in the supermind of the State . Prussian mind-meld.18 More insidious than the well-known practical cooperation between university and government (the burgeoning military funding of research) is its philosophical role in the propagation of the form of representational thinking itself, that "properly spiritual absolute State" endlessly reproduced and disseminated at every level of the social fabric. Deconstruction-influenced feminists such as Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray have attacked it under the name "phallogocentrism" (what the most privileged model of rocklike identity is goes without saying). In the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus,

Deleuze and Guattari describe it as the "arborescent model" of thought (the proudly erect tree under whose spreading boughs latter-day Platos conduct their class). " Nomad thought" does not immure itself in the edifice of an ordered interiority; it moves freely in an element of exteriority. It does not repose on identity; it rides difference. It does not respect the artificial division between the three domains of representation, subject, concept, and being; it replaces restrictive analogy with a conductivity that knows no bounds. The concepts it creates do not merely reflect the eternal form of a legislating subject, but are defined by a communicable force in relation to which their subject, to the

extent that they can be said to have one, is only secondary. They do not reflect upon the world but are immersed in a changing state of things. A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window . What is the subject of the brick? The arm that throws it? The body connected to the arm? The brain encased in the body? The situation that brought brain and body to such a juncture? All and none of the above. What is its object? The window? The edifice? The laws the edifice shelters? The class and other power relations encrusted in the laws? All and none of the above. "What interests us are the circumstances."19 Because

the concept in its unrestrained usage is a set of circumstances, at a volatile juncture. It is a vector: the point of application of a force moving through a space at a given velocity in a given direction. The concept has no subject or object other than itself. It is an act. Nomad thought replaces the closed equation of representation , x = x = noty (I = I = not you) with an open equation:.. . + y + z + a + ...(...+ arm + brick + window + . . .). Rather than analyzing the world into discrete components, reducing their manyness to the One of identity, and ordering them by rank, it sums up a set of disparate circumstances in a shattering blow. It synthesizes a multiplicity of elements without effacing their heterogeneity or hindering their potential

for future rearranging (to the contrary). The m odus o perandi of nomad thought is affirmation , even when its apparent object is negative. Force is not to be confused with power. Force arrives from outside to break constraints and open new vistas. Power builds walls. The space of nomad thought is qualitatively different from State space. Air against earth. State space is "striated," or gridded. Movement in it is confined as by gravity to a horizontal plane, and limited by the order of that plane to preset paths between fixed and

identifiable points. Nomad space is "smooth," or open-ended. One can rise up at any point and move to any other . Its mode of distribution is the nomos: arraying oneself in an open space (hold the street), as opposed to the logos of entrenching oneself in a closed space (hold the fort). A Thousand Plateaus is an effort to

16“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE LEONARDIconstruct a smooth space of thought. It is not the first such attempt. Like State philosophy, nomad thought goes by many names. Spinoza called it "ethics." Nietzsche called it the "gay science."

Artaud called it "crowned anarchy." To Maurice Blanchot, it is the "space of literature." To Foucault, "outside thought."20 In this book, Deleuze and Guattari employ the terms "pragmatics" and "schizoanalysis," and in the introduction describe a rhizome network strangling the roots of the infamous tree. One of the points of the book is that nomad thought is not confined to philosophy. Or that the kind of philosophy it is comes in many forms. Filmmakers and painters are philosophical thinkers to the extent that they explore the potentials of their respective mediums and break away from the beaten paths.21 On a strictly formal level, it is mathematics and music that create the smoothest of the smooth

spaces.22 In fact, Deleuze and Guattari would probably be more inclined to call philosophy music with content than music a rarefied form of philosophy. Which returns to our opening question. How should A Thousand Plateaus be played ? When you buy a record there are always cuts that leave you cold. You skip them. You don't approach a record as a closed book that you have to take or leave. Other cuts you may listen to over and over again . They follow you. You find yourself humming them under your breath as you go about your daily business.

We’re starting over—if the resolution is a wedding invite, we show up in a clown costume. We accept the rez’s impetus for a new politics, but refuse to fall into the traps of traditional activism by beginning at the level of preconscious desire, which allows us to take hold of the political in a pragmatic way. Ultimately, our politics is a reinventive one—a reconceptualization of the resolution’s call to action that allows for a new and creative politicsPatton 7 (Paul, “Political Normativity and Post-structuralism: the case of Gilles Deleuze”, Vortrag ins Institutscolloquium des Philosophischen Instituts der Freien Universität, Berlin, am Donnerstag, den 15. November 2007, pgs. 5-12 [CL])

The normativity of Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts provides a framework within which to evaluate the character of particular events and processes. They enable us to pose question s such as: is this negative or positive reterritorialization? Is this a genuine line of flight? Will it lead to a revolutionary new assemblage in which there is an increase of freedom or will it lead to a new form of capture or worse ? (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 143-144). However, there are two important features of this normativity which distinguish it from the kind of normativity more commonly found in political philosophy. First, it only provides criteria of evaluation that are ambivalent and contextual. Consider the lines of flight along which individual or collective assemblages break down or become transformed. On the one hand, in so far as we are interested in bringing about change we cannot avoid experimentation with such lines because ‘it is always on a line of flight that we create’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 135). In this

sense, lines of flight are potential pathways of mutation in an individual or social fabric and sources of the affect

associated with the passage from a lower to a higher state of power, namely joy. On the other hand, lines of flight have their own dangers. Once having broken out of the limits imposed by the molar forms of segmentarity and subjectivity, a line of flight may fail to connect with the necessary conditions of creative development or be incapable of so connecting and turn instead into a line of destruction, death and despair (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 229). In the same manner, none of the deterritorialising processes described in A Thousand Plateaus provides grounds for unambiguous practical political orientation. In the evaluative schema outlined, nothing is good or bad in itself : ‘it all depends on a careful systematic use … we’re trying to say you can never guarantee a good outcome (its not enough just to have a smooth space, for example, to overcome striations and coercion, or a body without organs to overcome organizations)’ (Deleuze 1995: 32). Second, while Deleuze and Guattari’s political orientation was broadly Marxist in the sense that it was anti-capitalist and envisaged the emergence of new and better forms of social and political life,

they did not engage directly with the political norms embedded in existing political institutions and ways of life. In the course of outlining the inherently political vocation of philosophy, they suggest that philosophical concepts are critical of the present to the extent that they ‘connect up with what is real here and now in the struggle against capitalism’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 100). However, they do not directly address the normative principles that inform their critical perspective on the present, much less the question how these might be articulated with those principles that are supposed to govern political life in late capitalist societies. So, for example, while they insist on the importance of political struggles in relation to welfare and unemployment benefits, they offer no normative theory in support of the redistribution of wealth or any principles of a just distribution. While they point to the importance of struggles for regional and national autonomy, they offer no normative grounds for the establishment of differential rights for cultural or national minorities (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 471). In this sense, their political philosophy does not engage with the political values and normative concepts which are supposed to inform the basic institutions of modern liberal democracies, such as the equal moral worth of individuals, freedom of conscience, the rule of law, fairness in the distribution of material goods produced by social cooperation and so on. The principled differences between liberal democratic, totalitarian and fascist States are mentioned only in passing in the course of their analysis of capitalism and present day politics as a process of axiomatisation of the social and economic field (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 454 – 466 ; 1994 : 106). As a consequence, their machinic social ontology remains formal in relation to actual societies and forms of political organisation. Deleuze’s turn towards Political Normativity Read in the context of Western Marxism during the 1960s and 1970s, Deleuze and Guattari’s failure to engage directly with the political values and normative concepts that are supposed to inform the basic institutions of modern liberal democracies is not surprising. Their political philosophy predates widespread understanding and acceptance of the ways in which Marx’s critique of capitalist society is bound up with concepts of distributive justice, as it does the efforts to identify the relevant principles of justice that occurred under the impact of so-called analytic Marxism in the course of the 1980s. Since then, the English speaking world has seen numerous attempts to combine Marxist social theory with the normative

principles informing varieties of left-liberal political theory.2 While these developments had little impact elsewhere, there was a similar rediscovery of ethical and political normativity in France during this period, expressed in a renewed interest in human rights, subjectivity, justice, equality and freedom. We can see evidence

of this, for example, in the shift in Derrida’s concerns that led him to engage directly with concepts of democracy, law and justice during the course of the 1980s (Patton 2007b). In the case of Deleuze, his comments in interviews and other occasional writing during the 1980s and then What is Philosophy? amount to a significant step towards positive engagement with the institutions and implicit political values of modern liberal democracy. Two issues in particular signal this turn towards political normativity in his later writings: first, his comments about rights and jurisprudence, and second, in the context of his definition of philosophy, his remarks about democracy and ‘becoming-democratic.’ Given that the term ‘becoming-democratic’ occurs only once in What is Philosophy? it would be an exaggeration to include it among the list of concepts created by Deleuze and Guattari. Nevertheless, I will try to show that some of the elements of their earlier ‘political philosophy’ provide the resources needed to develop such a concept. (1) In a series of interviews during the 1980s, Deleuze responds to the renewed interest in human rights during this period by criticising the manner in which these are represented as ‘eternal values’ and ‘new forms of transcendence.’3 At the same time, he makes it clear that he is not opposed to rights as such but only to the idea

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that there is a definitive and a-historical list of supposed universal rights. He argues that rights are not the creation of codes or declarations but of jurisprudence, where this implies working with the ‘singularities’ of a particular situation (Deleuze 1995: 153). He returns to the question of rights and jurisprudence in his Abécédaire interviews with Claire Parnet recorded in 1988, where he affirms the importance of jurisprudence understood as the invention of new rights, along with his own fascination for the law. 4 In his 1990 interview with Negri, ‘Control and Becoming,’ he reaffirms the importance of jurisprudence as a source of law with reference to the question what rights should be established in relation to new forms of biotechnology (Deleuze 1995: 169). The very concept of rights implies a rule of law. It implies that certain kinds of action on the part of all citizens will be protected by law and, conversely, the enforcement of limits to the degree to which citizens can interfere with the actions of others.5 (2) Already in 1979 Deleuze’s ‘Open Letter to Negri’s Judges’ adopted the speaking position of one ‘committed to democracy’ (Deleuze 2006: 169). This theme becomes more pronounced in What is Philosophy? where we find a series of highly critical remarks about actually existing democracies.6 Far from dismissing the democratic ideal, these comments imply that other actualisations of the concept

or ‘pure event’ of democracy are possible. Throughout this book, Deleuze’s marxian support for becoming-revolutionary as the path towards a new earth and a people to come is modulated by the call for resistance to existing forms of democracy in the name of a ‘becoming-democratic that is not to be confused with present constitutional states’ (Deleuze and Guattari

1994: 113 translation modified).7 In these terms, we can say that the normativity of Deleuze (and Guattari’s) later political philosophy is defined by the relation between becoming-revolutionary and becoming-democratic . In order to reconstruct what Deleuze means by ‘becoming-

democratic’ we need to approach this concept by way of the overtly political conception of philosophy outlined in What is Philosophy? Philosophy is defined as the creation of concepts, where the creation of concepts ‘in itself calls for a future form, for a new earth and people that do not yet exist’

(Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 108). Clearly, this is a stipulative definition that applies to some but not all historical and existing forms of philosophy. On this account, philosophy is a specific kind of thought, defined in terms of its affinity with absolute as opposed to relative deterritorialization. As we saw earlier, relative deterritorialization concerns the historical relationship of things to the territories into which they are organised, including the manner in which these territories break down and are transformed or reconstituted into new forms. Absolute deterritorialization concerns the a-historical relationship of things and states of affairs to the virtual realm of becoming or

pure events that is imperfectly or partially expressed in what happens. It is because it creates concepts that express such pure events - to become, to capture, to deterritorialise, but also to govern democratically, to revolt etc. - that philosophy is inherently critical of the present in which it takes place. To characterise existing bodies and states of affairs in terms of such philosophical concepts is to re-present them in thought as the expression of ‘pure events’ or ‘becomings.’

This is what Deleuze calls the ‘counteractualization’ of phenomena: such philosophical redescription enables us to see things differently or to see them as they might become rather than as they currently are . In this manner, the invention of new concepts can assist the deterritorialization of existing structures and the emergence of new ones without, however, being tied to any positive political program. In this respect, Deleuze’s conception of the political task of philosophy is close to that of Foucault, who describes the aim of his genealogical criticism as the identification of limits to present ways of thinking, acting and speaking in order to find points of difference or exit from the past (Foucault 1997: 315). Deleuze appears to go further than Foucault in suggesting that there is a utopian dimension to philosophy as he understands it. Etymologically, he writes, utopia means ‘absolute deterritorialization but always at the critical point at which it is connected with the present relative milieu’

(Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 100). In other words, when there is a connection between the absolute deterritorialization expressed in concepts and forms of relative deterritorialization already at work in the social field, philosophy becomes utopian and achieves its political vocation, taking the criticism of its own time ‘to its highest point’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 99). Deleuzian philosophy is utopian, not in the sense that it posits an ideal society or sets out principles of justice in the light of which we might identify the shortcomings of existing societies, but in the sense that it creates concepts that can link up with processes of deterritorialization present in a given historical milieu, informing the perceptions and therefore the actions of those involved. This is an immanent utopianism that can be compared in some respects to Rawls’s ‘realistic utopianism’ (see below).8 Becoming-democratic This brief account of Deleuze’s immanent utopianism helps us to see

how the concept of ‘becoming-democratic’ might serve the political function of philosophy as he defines it. Different forms of democratic political society amount to determinate actualizations of the concept or ‘pure event’ of democracy. If we suppose that existing processes of

deterritorialization or ‘lines of flight’ in modern societies include the ideals or opinions that motivate or inform particular forms of resistance, it follows that this kind of immanent utopianism will draw upon elements of existing political normativity to suggest ways in which the injustice or intolerability of present institutional forms of social life might be removed. ‘ Becoming-democratic’ therefore points to ways of criticising the workings of actually existing democracies in the name of the egalitarian principles that are

supposed to inform their institutions and political practices. In Deleuzean terms, the philosophical concept of democracy is a means to counter-actualize what passes for democratic society in the present, while becoming-democratic allows us to counter-actualize

movements or processes of democratization. Philosophy pursues or supports such processes of becoming-democratic, for example, when it challenges existing opinions about what is acceptable, right or just with the aim of extending the actualization of democracy within contemporary societies. The complex concept of democracy ties together a number of the political norms at the heart of modern political thought. In principle, there will be as many ways of becoming-democratic as there are elements of the concept of democracy. In practice, philosophy can only effectively advance the becoming-democratic of a given political society when it engages with deterritorializing movements that rely upon actualized or actualizable elements of democratic political normativity. Deleuze offers no detailed account of just what

he understands by ‘becoming-democratic’ and it is not difficult to imagine forms of populism that go against the grain of his political sensibility. Like all forms of deterritorialization, this one is not without its dangers. The comments on Heidegger in What is Philosophy? remind us that it is not enough to put one’s

faith in the people: it depends on what people and how they are constituted as a political community (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 108-109). At the same time, it is not difficult to find elements in his work with Guattari that enable us to fill out the concept of becoming-democratic. For example: (1) One of the sources of conflict that has been present ever since the introduction of modern democratic government has been the coexistence of formally equal rights alongside enormous disparities of material condition. The history of modern democracies has been in part a history of struggle to reduce material inequality and to ensure that the basic rights of citizens have at least approximately equal value for all. Deleuze alludes to this ongoing problem when he contrasts the universality of the market with the manner in which it unequally distributes poverty as well as enormous wealth. He is critical of

the way in which modern democratic states fail to live up to their egalitarian promise: ‘There is no democratic state that is not compromised to the very core by its part in generating human misery’ (Deleuze 1995: 173).9 Given that the benefits of market economies are not universally shared and inequalities of condition are handed down from generation to generation in direct contravention of the principle that all are born equal, then we can say that achieving a more just distribution of material social goods is one vector of ‘becoming-democratic.’ (2) Another constant source of conflict in democratic nation states ever since their inception has been the struggle

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to broaden the base of those who count as citizens and thus enjoy full access to the entire range of basic legal and political rights. Democracy has always relied upon the principle of majority rule, but the prior question ‘majority of whom’ has always been settled in advance and usually not by democratic means. This exposes a fault in one of the key components of the concept of democracy, namely the concept of majority. This can mean either the quantitative majority of those counted or the qualitative majority of those among the population at large who are considered fit to be counted. Deleuze and Guattari rely upon the latter, qualitative sense of majority in A Thousand Plateaus when they point to the existence of a majoritarian ‘fact’ in contemporary European derived societies, namely the priority of ‘the average

adult-white-heterosexual- European-male-speaking a standard language’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 105). The adult, white et cetera male is majoritarian not because he is numerically in the majority but because he forms the standard against which the rights and duties of all citizens are measured. They define minoritarian becomings as the variety of ways in which individuals and groups fail to conform to this standard. The social movements corresponding to these becomings have given rise to a succession of measures to extend the scope of the standard and thereby broaden the subject of democracy: first, by extending the vote to women and other minorities; second, by changing the nature of political institutions and procedures to enable these newly enfranchised members to participate on equal terms. Efforts to change the nature of public institutions in ways that both acknowledge and accommodate many kinds of difference are ongoing in democratic societies, for example in relation to sexual difference, sexual preference, different physical and mental abilities, cultural and religious affiliations. Deleuze and Guattari affirm the importance of efforts to enlarge the character of the majority, even as they insist that the power of minorities ‘is not measured by their capacity to enter into and make themselves felt within the majority system’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 471). By their nature, processes of minoritarian-becoming will always exceed or escape from the confines of any given majority. They carry the potential to transform the affects, beliefs and political sensibilities of a population in ways that amount to the advent of a new people. In turn, to the extent that a people is constituted as a political community, the transformations it undergoes will affect its conceptions of what is fair and just and

therefore the nature of the rights and duties attributed to the new majority.10 Minoritarian becomings therefore provide another vector of ‘becoming-democratic.’ (3) A third struggle concerns the principle of legitimacy that governs decisions in a democratic polity. In his ‘Control and Becoming’ interview with Negri, Deleuze comments on the importance of jurisprudence as a source of law and new rights with reference to the question of rights in relation to new forms of

biotechnology. He goes on to add that we mustn’t leave decisions on such matters to judges or experts. What is required is not more committees of supposedly well qualified wise men to determine rights but rather ‘user groups’ (Deleuze 1995: 169-170). The implicit principle in this recommendation is the democratic idea that decisions ought to be taken in consultation with those most affected by them. This is one of the founding principles of modern democratic governance and many theorists recommend its extension and

application to new contexts such as the workplace (Peffer 1990: 419-420). Ian Shapiro argues that whether or not someone is entitled to a say in a particular decision depends upon whether or not their interests are likely to be affected by the outcome and upon the nature of

those interests: the more fundamental the interest the greater their entitlement to a voice in the decision-making process (Shapiro 2003: 52). Deleuze’s proposed application of the principle in the realm of biotechnologies gives reason to think that the opening-up of decision making procedures throughout society constitutes a further vector of ‘becoming-democratic.’

This is fundamentally incompatible with the ideology of the resolution—debate tells us that words can only ever mean one thing, that language is fixed and not to be played with—this view of language turns speech into monuments to fascismDeleuze and Guattari 80 (Gilles and Felix, philosophers and rhizomes, A Thousand Plateaus pg 376-378, dml)

But noology is confronted by counterthoughts, which are violent in their acts and discontinuous in their appearances, and whose existence is mobile in history. These are the acts of a "private thinker," as opposed to the public professor: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, or even Shestov. Wherever they dwell, it is the steppe or

the desert. They destroy images. Nietzsche's Schopenhauer as Educator is perhaps the greatest critique ever directed against the image of thought and its relation to the State. "Private thinker," however, is not a satisfactory expression, because it exaggerates interiority, when it is a question of outside thought.44 To place

thought in an immediate relation with the outside, with the forces of the outside, in short to make thought a war machine, is a strange undertaking whose precise procedures can be studied in Nietzsche (the aphorism, for example, is very different from the maxim, for a maxim, in the republic of

letters, is like an organic State act or sovereign judgment, whereas an aphorism always awaits its meaning from a new external force , a final force that must conquer or subjugate it, utilize it). There is another reason why "private thinker" is not a good expression.Although it is true that this counterthought attests to an absolute solitude, it is an extremely populous solitude, like the desert itself, a solitude already intertwined with a people to come, one that invokes and awaits that people, existing only through it, though it is not yet here. "We are lacking that final force, in the absence of a people to

bear us. We are looking for that popular support." Every thought is already a tribe, the opposite of a State . And this form of exteriority of

thought is not at all symmetrical to the form of Anteriority. Strictly speaking, symmetry exists only between different poles or focal points of interiority. But the form of exteriority of thought—the force that is always external to itself, or the final force, the «th power— is not at all another image in opposition to the image inspired by the State apparatus. It is , rather, a force that destroys both the image and its copies, the model and its reproductions, every possibility of subordinating thought to a model of the True , the Just, or the Right (Cartesian truth, Kantian just, Hegelian right, etc.). A "method" is the striated space of the cogitatio universalis and draws a path that must be followed from one point

to another. But the form of exteriority situates thought in a smooth space that it must occupy without counting, and for which there is no possible method, no conceivable reproduction, but only relays, intermezzos, resurgences. Thought is like the

Vampire; it has no image, either to constitute a model of or to copy. In the smooth space of Zen, the arrow does not go from one point to another but is taken up at any point , to be sent to any other point, and tends to permute with the archer and the target. The problem of the war machine is that of relaying, even with modest means, not that of the architectonic model or the monument. An ambulant people of relayers, rather than a model society. "Nature propels the philosopher into mankind like an arrow; it takes no aim but hopes the arrow will stick somewhere. But countless times it misses and is

depressed at the fact The artist and the philosopher are evidence against the purposiveness of nature as regards the means it employs, though they are also first-rate evidence as to the wisdom of its purpose. They strike home at only a few, while they ought to strike home at

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PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE LEONARDIeverybody—and even these few are not struck with the force with which the philosopher and artist launch their shot." 45 We have in mind in particular two pathetic texts, in the sense that in them thought is truly a pathos (an antilogos and an antimythos). One is a text by Artaud, in his letters to Jacques Riviere, explaining that thought operates on the basis of a central breakdown, that it lives solely by its own incapacity to take on form, bringing into relief only traits of expression in a material, developing peripherally, in a pure milieu of exteriority, as a function of singularities impossible to universalize, of circumstances impossible to interiorize. The other is the text by Kleist, "On the Gradual Formation of Ideas in Speech" ("Uber die allmachliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden"), in which Kleist denounces the central interiority of the concept as a means of control—the control of speech, of language, but also of affects, circumstances and even chance. He distinguishes this from thought as a proceeding and a process, a bizarre anti-Platonic dialogue, an antidialogue between brother and sister where one speaks before knowing while the other relays before having understood: this, Kleist says, is the thought of the Gemut, which proceeds like a general in a war machine should, or like a body charged with electricity, with pure intensity. "I mix inarticulate sounds, lengthen transitional terms, as well as using appositions when they are unnecessary." Gain some time, and

then perhaps renounce, or wait. The necessity of not having control over language , of being a foreigner in one's own tongue, in order to draw speech to oneself and " bring something incomprehensible into the world." Such is the form of exteriority, the relation between brother and sister, the becomingwoman of the thinker, the becoming-thought of the woman: the Gemut that refuses to

be controlled, that forms a war machine . A thought grappling with exterior forces instead of being gathered up in an interior form, operating by relays instead of forming an image; an event-thought, a haecceity, instead of a subject-thought, a problem-thought instead of an

essencethought or theorem; a thought that appeals to a people instead of taking itself for a government ministry. Is it by chance that whenever a "thinker" shoots an arrow, there is a man of the State, a shadow or an image of a man of the State, that counsels and admonishes him, and

wants to assign him a targe t or "aim"? Jacques Riviere does not hesitate to respond to Artaud: work at it, keep on working, things will come out all right, you will succeed in finding a method and in learning to express clearly what you think in essence (cogitatio universalis). Riviere is not a head of State, but he would not be the last in the Nouvelle Revue Francaise to mistake himself for the secret prince in a republic of letters or the gray eminence in a State of right. Lenz and Kleist

confronted Goethe, that grandiose genius, of all men of letters a veritable man of the State. But that is not the worst of it: the worst is the way the texts of

Kleist and Artaud themselves have ended up becoming monuments, inspiring a model to be copied—a model far more insidious than

the others—for the artificial stammerings and innumerable tracings that claim to be their equal.

Ultimately, this view of language results in discourse becoming death by denying the ability to disobey or to be critical of the institutions at play in the politicalDeleuze and Guattari 80 [Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “November 20, 1923—Postulates of Linguistics” from A Thousand Plateaus, pgs 75-76 UoR-NW]

When the schoolmistress instructs her students on a rule of grammar or arithmetic, she is not informing them, any more than she is informing

herself when she questions a student. She does not so much instruct as "insign," give orders or commands. A teacher's commands are not external or additional to what he or she teaches us. They do not flow from primary significations or result from information: an order always and already concerns prior orders, which is why ordering is redundancy. The compulsory education machine does not communicate information; it imposes upon the child semiotic coordinates possessing all of the dual foundations of grammar (masculine-feminine, singular-plural, noun-verb, subject of the statement-

subject of enunciation, etc.). The elementary unit of language— the statement—is the order-word.1 Rather than common sense, a

faculty for the centralization of information, we must define an abominable faculty consisting in emitting, receiving, and transmitting order-words. Language is made not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience. "The baroness has not the slightest intention of convincing me of her sincerity; she is simply indicating that she prefers to see me pretend to agree."2

We see this in police or government announcements, which often have little plausibility or truthfulness, but say very clearly what should be observed and retained . The indifference to any kind of credibility exhibited by these announcements often verges on provocation. This is proof that the issue lies elsewhere. Let people say...: that is all language demands. Spengler notes that the fundamental forms of speech are not the statement of a judgment or the expression of a feeling, but "the command, the expression of obedience, the assertion, the question, the affirmation or negation," very short phrases that command life and are inseparable from enterprises and large-scale projects:

"Ready?" "Yes." "Go ahead."3 Words are not tools, but we give children language, pens, and notebooks as we give workers shovels and pickaxes. A rule of grammar is a power marker before it is a syntactical marker. The order does not refer to prior significations or to a prior organization of distinctive units. Quite the opposite. Information is only the strict minimum necessary for the emission, transmission, and observation of orders as commands. One must be just informed enough not to confuse "Fire!" with "Fore!" or to avoid the unfortunate situation of the teacher and the student as described by Lewis Carroll (the teacher, at the top of the stairs, asks a question that is passed on by servants, who distort it at each step of the way, and the student, below in the

courtyard, returns an answer that is also distorted at each stage of the trip back). Language is not life; it gives life orders. Life does not speak; it listens and waits.4 Every order-word, even a father's to his son, carries a little death sentence - —a Judgment, as Kafka put it.

AT: “D&G BAD”

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Their authors have failed to understand Deleuze - while their author may be correct in their criticism of specific lines, texts, or metaphors displayed in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, they ignore the revolutionary potential of our philosophical concepts as formed beyond the limitations of textLambert 6 (Greg, "Who's Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari?" 3-4)

The above points of impasse are obvious to anyone who is familiar with the debates that have surrounded the early reception of the Capitalism and Schizophrenia

volumes. It will not come as any great surprise to learn that part of my answer to the question will be because these works were misunderstood or so badly represented . Even though this sounds like the occasion for offering a fresh commentary as a corrective to previous interpretations of these works, interpretations that were badly botched or misplaced in their major conclusions, in fact, I feel just the opposite: that most interpretations so far have been

right on the money and their conclusions have been sound. Perhaps, where they have led us astray – and this is partly the responsibility of a certain marketing rationale that dominates academic publishing these days with a preference for commentaries on ‘major figures’ and classroom textbooks – is that they remain at the level of interpretation, if not explication de texte . They don’t seem to take into their account that Deleuze and Guattari didn’t write ‘books’ together, but rather attempted to trace intensities in the process of ‘becoming revolutionary’. The former is a fairly static process , and already poses that the end of the process occurs when the object of interpretation is explained and fairly well understood; however, ’understanding’ has never been a goal of Deleuze and Guattari’s writings, but rather something that they have called by different names, all of which amounts to an active process of ‘becoming -x’ and is involved with the fundamental issue of desire. But what is desire? Here we begin the process of real learning that their writings aim to address. After all, Deleuze and Guattari say that a book isn’t produced in order to be understood, but is rather a machine for producing desires . (I will argue that Jameson was alone in understanding this, even better than most ‘Deleuzians’, and, therefore, also knew what kind of threat this book might pose for his own programme of

‘political interpretation’.) We can find all kinds of desires expressed around and in response to their works – revolutionary and reactionary alike – but the real question doesn’t concern the interpretation of these books but what kind of desires they are associated with and what they can be plugged into . As Deleuze himself once remarked

concerning the status of Anti-Oedipus as a book: It’s not as a book that it could respond to desire , but only in relation to what surrounds it. A book is not worth much on its own. It’s always a question of flow: there are many people doing work in similar fields. I doubt they will buy the current type of discourse, at once epistemological, psychoanalytic, ideological, which is beginning to wear thin with everyone . . . In any case, a book responds to a desire only because there are many people fed up with the current type of discourse. So, it’s only because a book participates in a larger re-shuffling, a resonance between research and desire. A book can respond to desire only in a political way, outside the book. (Deleuze and Guattari [hereafter DG] 2004: 220)

AT: “AFF ROMANTICIZES NOMADS”

1. No link – the aff doesn’t romanticize nomadism, it just discusses political strategies using a metaphor. Mann’s criticism is based on avante garde applications of D&G, which the aff is not.

2. No impact – the link doesn’t take out aff solvency, extend Patton, becoming-democratic is a viral process of subjectivation based on desire. And, no reason to vote neg, the status quo is worse. Only a risk nomad politics is good.

3. Turn – it’s worse to stay within Oedipus. Love of power and fascism has led to the worst atrocities and history and creates a depressing tone of existence: case outweighs.

___ Make them apply this argument specifically to the politics of the 1AC. No reason our engagement with protest leads to stupid undergrounds.

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AT: JAMESON

Jameson's understanding of totality limits political expression to the goal of centralized parties, preventing the possibility of a politics of desireLambert 6 (Greg, "Who's Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari?")

Here, one might think that I am accusing Jameson of knavery and this might be true if not for the realization that it is not a question of ‘correct interpretation’ as the logical deduction truth of the other system that is at issue, but rather the political usefulness of this system in the national and cultural situation of the United States. Above all, we must not forget the maxim that Jameson clearly announces in the conclusion of the footnote cited earlier that ‘alliance politics is the strict practical equivalent of the concept of totalization on a theoretical level’, which means that any attack on the concept of ‘totality’ in the American framework poses the serious threat of undermining the only realistic prospect that a genuine Left could come into being in this country. In other words, for Jameson, theory is equal (‘the

strict equivalent’) to practice – again, it is only in the ideological field of consciousness that they ‘appear’ to belong to separate spheres – and for this reason any attack on ‘totality’ as a theoretical notion is to be treated on a practical level as an attempt to forestall or to repress the formation of an alliance politics that would reunite the already molecular collective forms of social and political interests that define the situation in the United States. Therefore, all attacks on ‘totality’ must either be theoretically contained or must be adjusted to fit within a systematic political strategy that serves the practical goals of alliance and reunification of the Left in the United States.

AT: EBERTGroup Ebert—

1. No revolution coming—her call for totalizing class struggle is doomed to failure because no concentrated efforts toward change are coming in the status quo—1AC Gilbert indicates that even when counterhegemonic mass movements were at their biggest, everyone went home and did nothing the next day—Occupy Wall Street is another example—only our methodology of small and localized resistance solves

2. Misreads DnG—of course there are material needs, like the need for food and shelter—DnG are writing about when we want something so bad we convince ourselves it is a need, like a new PS4 or laptop

3. Churchill impact turns their activism—enacting the revolution as described by Ebert means self-regulation and control—this means we lose sight of what it means to truly struggle which turns their internal link—only rhizomatic action solves

4. Not our Deleuze—even if they’re right about aspects of Deleuze, this isn’t offense to our methodology—we give the psychiatric models legs and take pragmatic action toward revolutionary goals—that’s Patton

AT: SHATZShatz is wrong—some level of cooption is inevitable but our processes cannot be fully reclaimed—there is no such thing as being radically outside a system, but we can use the dispersal of images and information sharing that capitalism allows to destroy it from the inside

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AT: BARBROOK

Make them explain this argument in context of our affirmative. Our politics doesn’t promote elitism, it causes the masses to question the desire for domination. We’ll answer this argument when it’s specific.The burden of proof is on them: make them prove our aff causes elitism in the context of military policyWark 97 (McKenze, Associtate prof of media and Cultural Studies @ The New School, Delezue Contra Barbrook)

It seems singularly futile to try to claim that there is some necessary 'virus' that passes from Deleuze to his followers . Anyone who apes the vocabulary and style of this thinker betrays him in that moment of homage. Only that which differs from it can be thought of

as honouring it. It also seems to me to be inappropriate to see a very restricted adoption of some Deleuzian themes in England as somehow central expressions of of a Deleuzian legacy . I see very little common ground between the

English, American, Canadian and Australian expressions of Deleuzian thought in English, and quite frankly, the English stuff is not necessarily the most interesting. There is a much more diverse and distributed network of work that you would imagine from Richard's presentation, which is strikingly Eurocentric . There is also a lack of appreciation of the differences in local conditions.

AT: IRAGARAY/BRAIDOTTI

Their critique fails by ignoring that women are also the majority, but this ignorance prevents their voices from being heard—their ontology worsens oppression but becoming solvesManzurual, 3. [Syed Islam, Prof of philosophy @ Cheltenhan & Gloucester College, Nomads and Minorities]

Thus, Rosi Braidotti, following Lucy Irigaray, points out that, 'o ne cannot deconstruct a subjectivity one has never been fully granted . '37 This 'feminist' critique of Deleuze-Guattarian nomadism is legitimate, only if it is understood within patriarchal territoriality, and only insofar as it concerns gender relationships . Since women are located in a diverse set of relationships - where they may find themselves in a number of majoritarian positions , such as colonial women in relation to the colonised, white women in relation to black subjects in a racially structured society, and bourgeois women in relation to the working classes in a class-based society - minoritarian destratifications are still needed by women subject s. However, the voiceless must have a voice; the subaltern , no matter how inaudible their voices are, must be heard ; and the homeless must have a home. Our critique of Hegelianism must not throw the

baby out with the bath water.  

The aff creates a new totality--Sexual reproduction is NOT necessarily the primary force in the emergence of lifeGilbert, ‘9 (JEREMY, READER IN CULTURAL STUDIES, U OF E. LONDON “DELEUZIAN POLITICS?”, NEW FORMATIONS)

In this context, Deleuzian feminist and queer theory have developed very fruitful lines of research , alongside the continued popularity of poststructuralist approaches.54 Luciana Parisi’s Abstract Sex,55 for example, develops the schizoanalytic critique of familialism and of the sexualisation of desire in the light of the work of the radical biologist Lynn Margulis, arguing for a position which recognises the constitutive role of endosymbiositic processes (whereby new modes of interdependence emerge between previously distinct organisms) in the emergence of cellular life. Parisi thus problematises both ordinary biological assumptions about the primacy of sexual reproduction to the formation of life, and the ordinary assumption that ‘sex’ as such is merely functional to such reproductive processes. Closer to the traditional concerns of Anglophone cultural theory, there clearly remains a great deal of potential for feminist cultural analysis in the deployment of a Deleuzian perspective . For example, the debate over the status of young women as creative agents of the consumer economy or as victims of an hyper-sexualised culture of competition and insecurity56 could surely derive a great deal from the schizoanalytic perspective, capable as it is of appreciating both the radical force of that positive desire which might find expression in

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activities as mundane as shopping or dancing, and the insidiousness of those mechanisms of ‘capture’ and ‘territorialisation’ which would limit such desire to only such limited forms of expression . More than anything,

however, the potential fecundity of post-Deleuzian feminism is indicated by the rich and varied work which it has already begun to produce: arguably the most successful and welldeveloped branch of Anglophone post-Deleuzian theory, we are delighted to include in this volume several contributions from both leading and emerging figures in this field: Rosi Braidotti, Claire Colebrook, Chrysanthi Nigianni and Patricia MacCormack.

AT: BECOMING-MONSTER (BRAIDOTTI)

1) Our strategy does not create the monster because in order to become a monster one must desire to be one – our plan only focuses on mapping out desires in the context of the resolution.

2) Plan does not create the monster that Braidotti discusses – we instead redefine the term monster as a refusal of the current forms of desire within the current system – thus creating effective resistance by not participating within it.Maccormack 4 [Patricia, thirdspace philosophical monthly author, Canada, Ph.D in philosophy, Master’s in Rhetoric and Feminist Studies, Perversion: Transgressing Sexuality, vol. 3, March]

The monster is that which abjectly pushes us outside symbolic integrity , either back, in psychoanalytic terms to the primary monster,

the mother, or in a more Deleuzio-Guattarian sense that which pushes us away from what we think we are . In order to accept Braidotti's suggestion to become monster we must desire monsters. One cannot want to become what one does not desire. This kind of desire positions the self differently to heterosexual (i.e., implicitly oppositional) desire where one can only desire what is other to and othered from self. If we read desire as abundance, the desire for a monster changes both the subject

desiring and the monster of desire. The monster is not necessarily any longer the antithesis of self; rather monster simply becomes a category that wilfully refuses desire within a system of normal versus monster . To become monster is necessarily to begin at a point in repudiation of any anxiety about a loss through monstrosity (loss of subject, loss of power aligned with subjectivity).

DnG’s concept of becoming-woman is not tied to feminism intrinsically—their critique of “the real woman” doesn’t answer our arguments because men and women are not separated in a rhizomatic spaceManzurual, 3. [Syed Islam, Prof of philosophy @ Cheltenhan & Gloucester College, Nomads and Minorities]

However, it remains within the reach of negative operations connected with a traditional metaphysic of the subject, because it continues to search , however disguised that search might be, for something essential to women , an exclusive definition which characterizes them as a unified group, as “ real women ” . As has been remarked, above, Deleuze and Guattari are not claiming either to be feminists , or to be providing a theory of women ; as for appropriation, the

phantom of the victim is buried in this term. Braidotti’s criticisms might be filled out by examining the economic systems which produce women as consumers /subjects ; by exploring the different empirical relations which generate their various and diverse situations.

However, it is, as it stands, unsatisfying as a response to becoming-woman . This implies that despite her recognition of the

intensive/extensive disjunction, she continues to conceive of this as exclusive, in order to retain a bilateral distinction between man and woman which is as a consequence only extensively legitimate - which is to say, illegitimate in Deleuze’s terms . Matter remains outside.

IMPACT: MICROFASCISM

Even if their understanding of social groups is correct it’s ultimately irrelevant to the 1AC. It is insufficient to talk about group hierarchy – instead we must begin from the self and how we desire our own repression.Deleuze and Guattari 80 (A Thousand Plateaus 214-215)

24“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

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It is not sufficient to define bureaucracy by a rigid segmentarity with compartmentalization of contiguous offices, an office manager in each segment, and the corresponding centralization at the end of the hall or on top of the tower. For at the same time there is a whole bureaucratic segmentation, a suppleness of and communication between offices, a bureaucratic perversion, a permanent inventiveness or creativity practiced even against administrative regulations. If Kafka is the greatest theorist of bureaucracy, it is because he shows how, at a certain level (but which

one? it is not localizable), the barriers between offices cease to be "a definite dividing line" and are immersed in a molecular medium (milieu) that dissolves them and simultaneously makes the office manager proliferate into microfigures impossible to recognize or identify, discernible only when they are centralizable: another regime, coexistent with the separation and totalization of the rigid segments.I0 We would even say that fascism implies a molecular regime that is distinct both from molar segments and their centralization. Doubtless, fascism invented the concept of the totalitarian State, but there is no reason to define fascism by a concept of its own devising: there are totalitarian States, of the Stalinist or military dictatorship type, that are not fascist. The concept of the totalitarian State applies only at the macropolitical level, to a rigid segmentarity and a particular mode of totalization and centralization. But fascism is inseparable from a proliferation of molecular focuses in interaction, which skip from point to point, before beginning to resonate together in the National Socialist State. Rural fascism and city or neighborhood fascism, youth fascism and war veteran's fascism, fascism of the Left and fascism of the Right, fascism

of the couple, family, school, and office: every fascism is defined by a micro-black hole that stands on its own and communicates with the others, before resonating in a great, generalized central black hole.1' There is fascism when a war machine is installed in each hole, in every niche. Even after the National Socialist State had been established, microfascisms persisted that gave it unequaled ability to

act upon the "masses." Daniel Guerin is correct to say that if Hitler took power, rather then taking over the German State administration, it was because from the beginning he had at his disposal microorganizations giving him "an unequaled, irreplaceable ability to penetrate every cell of society," in other words, a molecular and supple segmentarity, flows capable of suffusing every kind of cell. Conversely, if capitalism came to consider the fascist experience as catastrophic, if it preferred to ally itself with Stalinist totalitarianism, which from its point of view was much more sensible and manageable, it was because the segmentarity and centralization of the latter was more classical and less fluid. What makes fascism dangerous is its molecular or micropolitical power, for it is a mass movement: a cancerous body rather than a totalitarian organism. American film has often depicted these

molecular focal points; band, gang, sect, family, town, neighborhood, vehicle fascisms spare no one. Only microfascism provides an answer to the global question: Why does desire desire its own repression, how can it desire its own repression? The masses certainly do not passively submit to power; nor do they "want" to be repressed, in a kind of masochistic hysteria; nor are they tricked by an ideological lure. Desire is never separable from complex assemblages that necessarily tie into molecular levels, from microformations already shaping postures, attitudes, perceptions,

expectations, semiotic systems, etc. Desire is never an undifferentiated instinctual energy, but itself results from a highly developed, engineered setup rich in interactions: a whole supple segmentarity that processes molecular energies and potentially

gives desire a fascist determination. Leftist organizations will not be the last to secrete microfascisms. It's too easy to be antifascist on the molar level, and not even see the fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both personal and collective.

IMPACT: MOLECULAR POPULATION

The status quo is divided into pre-established political parties which denies the revolutionary potential of the masses. Failure to challenge the confines of party identity ensures extinction – only the aff can solveDeleuze and Guattari 80 (A thousand Plateaus, p. 345-346)

Material thus has three principal characteristics: it is Molecularized matter; it has a relation to forces to be harnessed; and it is defined by the operations of consistency applied to it. Finally, it is clear that the relation to the earth and the people has changed and is no longer of the romance type. The earth is not at its most deterritorialized: not only a point in a galaxy, but one galaxy among others. The people is not at its most Molecularized: a molecular population, a people of oscillators as so many forces of interaction. The artist discards romantic figures, relinquishes both the forces of the earth and those of the people. The combat, if

combat there is, has moved. The established powers have occupied the earth; they have built people’s organizations.

25“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

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The mass media, the great people’s organizations of the party or union type, are machines for reproduction, fuzzification machines that effectively scramble all the terrestrial forces of the people. The established powers have placed us in the situation long ago, even before it had been installed (Nietzsche, for example). They became away of it because the same vector was traveling their own domain: a molecularization, an atomization of the material, coupled with a cosmicization of the forces taken up by that material. The question then became whether the molecular or atomic “populations” of all natures (mass media, monitoring procedures, computers, space weapons) would continued to bombard the existing people in order to train it or control it or annihilate it – or if other molecular populations were possible, could slip into the first and give rise to a people yet to come . As Virilio

say in his very rigorous analysis of the depopulation of the people and the deterritorialization of the earth, the question has become: “to dwell as a poet of as an assassin?” The assassin is one who bombards the existing people with molecular populations that are forever closing all of the assemblages, hurling them into an even wider and deeper black hole. The poet on the other hand is one who lets loose molecular populations in hopes that this will sow the seeds of, or even engender, the people to come, that these populations will pass into a people to come, open a cosmos. Once again, we must not make it seem as though the poet gorged on metaphors: it may be that the sound of molecules to pop music are at this very moment implanting here and there a people of a new type, singularly indifferent to the orders of the radio, to computer safeguards, to the threat of the atomic bomb

IMPACT: SADNESS

Our affirmation of desire is necessary to understand the nature of evil. Our framing of the individual believes desire motivates our actions and informs moral choices – our answer is to affirm the opacity of life, the special muchness, the excesses of life that make an individual unique. Operating at the level of desire is necessary for a joyous affirmation of existence which crowds out a depressive tone of life. Colebrook 2 (Claire Colebrook, Prof. Of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, “Gilles Deleuze” pg. 131-132)

Everyday moral narratives, such as fables, parables and soap-operas, operate with the fixed terms of good and evil, and do so from a shared point of view of

common sense and human recognition. Literature destroys this border between perceiver and perceived. We are no longer placed in a position of ordering judgment but become other through a confrontation with the forces that compose us. This is freedom: not a freedom to judge which comes from knowing who we are, but a liberation from our finite self-images, an opening to life. At its simplest level we can see how ethical becoming or freedom is limited by a fixed image of thought. If we accept who we are and what we should do, then we can simply exclude those who are ‘evil’; we can remain good, holy and ‘pure’ from the forces that supposedly work against life. Alternatively, we can demand a perception of impersonal joy and sadness. Here we affirm what increases our power to become (joy) and only say ‘no’ to what limits us (sadness). The power we affirm through joy is the power of a life beyond our specific self. (If I affirm my actions as part of the women’s movement then I expand the power of the whole of life;

this is because such affirmations aim to include, expand and create relations. If, by contrast, I assert my power as a killer, rapist or judgmental moralist, then I diminish the forces of the life and lives that lie beyond me; this is because I do not recognize those powers beyond me; I reinforce, rather, than expand, my perceptual boundaries.) Against good and evil, as moral opposites, Deleuze follows Spinoza in arguing for an ethical relation between joy and sadness. Sad perceptions are those which diminish my power, and the power of all life; in joy I perceive what is not myself and in so doing expand who I am and what I might become. There would be sadness, of course, in the image of the serial killer, in American Psycho, the sadness of a being who can only devour other bodies and who cannot respond to all the perceptions or worlds opened by other persons. But there would also be a sadness in the moralizing observer or reader who saw the evil of another as simply ‘evil’, as simply opposed to one’s own innocent life. Far from moralizing condemnation, Deleuze suggests that we gain an adequate idea of the inhuman forces that produce sadness. This means not seeing evil as located within characters but recognizing the desires and investments that turn life against itself. In the case of American Psycho we see the serial killer figure of Bateman as composed of images and investments which are never simply his and never entirely other than ourselves. His violence and frenzied self-investment comes from an investment in the hardened American individual. His gym-cultivated body, his desperate attempt to experience a highly individualized intensity, and his language of self-

26“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE LEONARDIpromotion are not so much personal features added on to his character as they are impersonal forces from which his character is effected. American Psycho is the diagnosing or ‘symptomology’ of a collection of investments. In reading we ‘become imperceptible’, not by judging characters, but by experiencing the forces of life from which judgments of good and evil are derived. Becoming-imperceptible is not something that can be achieved once and for all; it is a becoming, not a

being. It is the challenge of freedom and perception: of opening ourselves to the life that passes through us, rather than objectifying that life in advance through a system of good and evil.

IMPACT: ORGANISM CARD

Disconnect yourself from the state, from collectives, from everything bigger than ourselves. To be stratified is to be judged by God – the act of creating the organism from entropy is a fascist act, to be nailed down and ossified into a hierarchy: to experience the recoil of the Body without Organs is to experience psychic death. Our politics is nomadic, a disarticulation that never lets us stay nailed down in one place. We are an assemblage, watch us rise from the sediment of the State and the organism. Deleuze and Guattari 87 [A Thousand Plateaus pg 158-159]

We have come to the gradual realization that the BwO is not at all opposite to the organs . The organs are not its enemies. The enemy is the organism. The BwO is opposed not to the organs but to that organization of the organs called the organism . It is true that Artaud wages a struggle against the organs, but at the same time what he is going after, what he has it in for, is the organism:

The body is the body. Alone it stands . And in no need of organs. Organism it never is. Organisms are the enemies of the body . The BwO is not opposed to the organs; rather, the BwO and its “true organs,” which must be composed and positioned, are opposed to the organism, the organic organization of the organs . The judgment of God , the system of the judgment of God , the theological system, is precisely the operation of He who makes an organism, an organization of organs called the organism, because He cannot bear the BwO, because He pursues it and rips it apart so He can be first, and have the organism be first . The organism is already that, the judgment of God, from which medical doctors benefit and on

which they base their power. The organism is not at all the body, the BwO; rather, it is a stratum on the BwO, in other words, a phenomenon of accumulation, coagulation, and sedimentation that, in order to extract useful labor from the BwO, imposes upon it forms, functions, bonds, dominant and hierarchized organizations, organized transcendences . The strata are bonds, pincers. “Tie me up if you wish.” We are continually stratified. But who is this we that is not me, for the subject no less than the organism belongs to and depends on a stratum? Now we have

the answer: the BwO is that glacial reality where the allusions, sedimentations, coagulations, foldings, and recoilings that compose an organism—and also a signification and a subject—occur . For the judgment of God weighs upon and is exercised against

the BwO; I is the BwO that undergoes it. It is the BwO that the organs enter into the relations of composition called the organism. T he BwO howls: “They’ve made me an organism! They’ve wrongfully folded me! They’ve stolen my body!” The judgment of God uproots it from its immanence and makes it an organism , a signification, a subject. It is the BwO that is stratified. It swings between two poles, the surfaces of stratification into which it is recoiled, on which it submits to the judgment, and the plane of consistency in which it unfurls and opens to experimentation. If the BwO is a limit, if one is forever attaining it, it is because behind each stratum, encased in it, there is always another stratum . For many a stratum, and not only an organism, is necessary to make the judgment of God. A perpetual and violent combat between the plane of consistency, that which frees the BwO, cutting across and dismantling all of the strata, and the surfaces of stratification that block or make it recoil. Let us consider the three great strata concerning us, in other words, the ones that most directly bind us: the organism, signifiance, and subjectifications. The surface of the organism, the angle of significance and interpretation, and the point of subjectifications or subjection.

You will be organized, you will be an organism, you will articulate your body — otherwise you’re just depraved . You will be signifier and signified, interpreter and interpreted—otherwise you’re just a deviant. You will be a subject, nailed down as one, a subject of the enunciation recoiled into a subject of the statement—otherwise you’re just a tramp . To the strata as a whole, the BwO opposes disarticulation (or n articulations) as the property of the plane of consistency, experimentation as the operation on that plane (no signifier, never interpret!), and nomadism as the movement ( keep moving , even in place, never stop moving, motionless voyage, desubjectification ). What does it mean to disarticulate, to cease to be an organism? How can we convey how easy it is, and the extent to which we do it every day? And how necessary caution is, the art of dosages, since overdose is a danger. You don’t do it with a sledgehammer, you use a very fine file. You invent self-destructions that have nothing to do with the

death drive. Dismantling the organism has never meant killing yourself, but rather opening the body to connections that presuppose an entire assemblage, circuits, conjunctions, levels and thresholds , passages and distributions of intensity, and territories and deterritoritorializations measured with the craft of a surveyor . Actually, dismantling the organism is no more

difficult than dismantling two other strata, significant and subjectification. Significance clings to the soul just as the organism clings to the body, and it is not easy to get rid of either. And how can we unhook ourselves from the points of subjectification that secure us, nail us down to a dominant reality? Tearing the conscious away from the subject in order to make it a means of exploration, tearing the unconscious away from significance and interpretation in order to make it a veritable production: this is assuredly no more or less

27“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE LEONARDIdifficult than tearing the body away from the organism. Caution is the art common to all three; if in dismantling the organism there are times one courts death, in slipping away from significance and subjection one court s falsehood, illusion and hallucination and psychic death. Artaud weighs and measures every word: the conscious “knows what is good for it and what is of no value to it: it knows which thoughts and feelings it can receive without danger and with profit, and which are harmful to the exercise of its freedom. Above all, it knows just how far its own being goes, and just how far it has yet gone or does not have the right to go without sinking into the unreal, the illusory, the unmade, the prepared…a Plane which normal consciousness does not reach but which Ciguri allows us to reach, and which is the very mystery of all poetry. But there is in human existence another plane, obscure and formless, which consciousness has not entered, and which surrounds it like an unilluminated extension or a menace, as the case may be. And which itself gives off adventurous sensations, perceptions. These are those shameless fantasies which affect an unhealthy consciousness…I too have had false sensations and perceptions and I have believed in them.”

IMPACT: WAR MACHINE/EXTINCTION

When the nomadic war machine becomes appropriated by the State, total war becomes the object of the State. Beyond total war is a terrifying peace – the same desires of the masses to go to war in Vietnam have been replicated in Iraq, transforming the State into a militarist war machine. The impact is total war, fascism, and eventually nuclear catastrophe. Buchanan 5 (Ian holds the foundation Chair of Communication and Cultural Studies at Charles Darwin University, “War in the age of intelligent machines and unintelligent government,” Australian Humanities Review Issue 36, July 2005, dml)

This, according to Deleuze and Guattari, “is the point at which Clausewitz's formula is effectively reversed”. When total war - i.e., war which not only places the annihilation of the enemy's army at its centre but its entire population and economy too - becomes the object of the State-appropriated war machine, “then at this level in the set of all possible conditions, the object and the

aim enter into new relations that can reach the point of contradiction.” In the first instance, the war machine unleashed by the State in pursuit of its object, total war,

remains subordinate to the State and “merely realises the   maximal conditions ” 22   of its aims . Paradoxically, though, the more successful it is in realising the State's aims, the less controllable by the State it becomes . As the State's aims grow on the

back of the success of its war machine, so the restrictions on the war machine's object shrink until - scorpion like - it effectively subsumes the State , making it just one of its many moving parts. In Vietnam, the State was blamed for the failure of the war machine precisely because it attempted to set limits on its object. Its inability to adequately impose these limits not only cost it the war, but in effect its sovereignty too. Since then the State has been a puppet of a war machine global in scope and ambition. This is the status of militarism today and no-one has

described its characteristics more chillingly than Deleuze and Guattari: This worldwide war machine , which in a way 'reissues' from the States, displays two successive figures: first, that of fascism, which makes war an unlimited movement with no other aim than itself ; but

fascism is only a rough sketch, and the second, postfascist, figure is that of a war machine that takes peace as its object directly, as the peace of Terror or Survival. The war machine reforms a smooth space that now claims to control, to

surround the entire earth. Total war is surpassed, toward a form of peace more terrifying still. 23 It is undoubtedly Chalmers

Johnson who has done the most to bring to our attention the specific make-up of what Deleuze and Guattari call here the worldwide war machine.24

 His description of a global 'empire of bases' is consistent with Deleuze and Guattari's uptake of Paul Virilio's concept of the 'fleet in being'. This is the paradoxical transformation of the striated space of organisation into a new kind of 'reimparted' smooth space “which outflanks all gridding and invents a neonomadism in the service of a war machine still more disturbing than the States”.

25 Bases do not by themselves secure territory, but as is the case with a battle fleet their mobility and their firepower mean they can exert an uncontestable

claim over territory that amounts to control. This smooth space surrounding the earth is, to put it back into Baudrillard's terms,

the space of simulation. The empire of bases is a virtual construct with real capability. Fittingly enough, it was Jean Baudrillard

who first detected that a structural change in post-WWII militarism had taken place. In Simulacra and Simulation he argues that the Vietnam War was a demonstration of a new kind of will to war, one that no longer thought in terms of winning or losing, but defined itself instead in terms of perseverance . 26  It demonstrated to the US's enemies, clients and allies alike its willingness to continue the fight even when defeat was certain, or had in a sense already been acknowledged (the US strategy of 'Vietnamising' the war which commenced shortly after the Tet offensive in 1968, and become official policy under Nixon, was patently an admission that the war couldn't be won - in the short term it was Johnson's way of putting off admitting defeat until after the election so as to give Hubert Humphrey some chance of victory; in the longer term it was a way of buying time for a diplomatic

solution).27

 It was a demonstration of the US's reach, of its ability to inflict destruction even when its troops were withdrawing and peace talks (however futile) were under way. It also demonstrated to the American people that the fight   could   be continued as the troops were withdrawn, a factor that as I've already pointed out would become decisive in re-shaping militarism as an incorporeal system. It was also a demonstration to the American domestic population that the country's leaders were willing to continue to sacrifice lives to prove this point.28 The contrary view, that Nixon wanted to end the war sooner but was unable to do so because domestic politics didn't allow it, in no way contradicts this thesis. If anything it confirms it because if true it would mean, as Deleuze and Guattari

have said of fascism, “at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions”, the American people   wanted   Vietnam , and, as they add, “ it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for.”

29 While there can be no doubt Vietnam

was an unpopular war that was eventually brought to a halt by popular pressure, it is a sobering thought to remind oneself that it was a war that lasted some 10 years. If one takes 1967 as the decisive turning point in popular opinion, the moment when protest against the war became the prevailing view and support for it dwindled into a minority murmur, then one still has to take stock of the fact that it took a further 6 years for US troops to be fully withdrawn. 30   The kind of sustained

28“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

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popular pressure that brought the Vietnam War to a close has not yet even begun to build in the US in spite of the fact that the death toll has passed 1500 (as of March 2005). Wars are spectacles in the traditional sense of being events staged to convey a specific message, but also in the more radical or postmodern sense that spectacle is the final form of war, the form war takes when it takes peace as its object. Hence the military's facilitation of the media (this backfired to a large degree in Vietnam, but the lessons learned then are put to good use today). Ultimately, though, as Baudrillard rightly argues, the “media and official news services are only there to maintain the illusion of an actuality, of the reality of the stakes, of the objectivity of the facts.”31 Chomsky's analyses of current trends in US imperialism confirm this thesis. As he argues, 'preventive' wars are only fought against the basically defenceless.32 Chomsky adds two further conditions that chime with what we have already adduced: there must be something in it for the aggressor, i.e., a fungible return not an intangible moral reward, and the opponent must be susceptible to a portrayal of them as 'evil', allowing the victory to be claimed in the name of a higher moral purpose and the actual venal purpose to be obscured.33 At first glance, waging war to prevent war appears to be as farcical as fucking for virginity, but that is only if we assume that the aim of the war is to

prevent one potential aggressor from striking first. Or, rather, given that it is alleged that the putative enemy, Al Qaeda and its supposed supporters, took first blood (the Rambo reference is of course deliberate), we are asked to believe the current war is being fought to prevent a second, more damaging strike. The obsessive and suitably grave references to Weapons of Mass Destruction by the various mouthpieces of the Bush regime (Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, but also Blair and Howard) is plainly calculated to compel us to accept that any such second strike will be of biblical, or worse, Hollywood proportions. As one joke put it, the Americans could be certain that Iraq had at least some Weapons of Mass Destruction because they had the receipts to prove it. The grain of truth in this joke reveals the true purpose of the war - it was a demonstration to all of America's clients that it wouldn't tolerate 'price-gouging'. Obviously I am speaking metaphorically here, but the fact is that Iraq is a client of the US, it purchases arms and consumer goods and sells oil at a carefully controlled price. Why this arrangement suddenly became so unsatisfactory is subject to a great deal of speculation which centre on two basic theories: (1) when Iraq switched from the dollar to the euro it posed an intolerable threat to the stability of the US currency; (2) the US is positioning itself to monopolise oil ahead of growing Chinese demand.

Either way, if one wants a metaphor to describe US imperialism it wouldn't it wouldn't be MacDonald's, a comparatively benign operator, but the predatory retail giant Wal-Mart.34

 In other

words, today's wars are fought to demonstrate will. The age of gunboat diplomacy has given way to the age of gunboat commerce.35 When war changed its object it was able to change its aim

too and it is this more than anything that has saved 'real' war from itself. Baudrillard's later work on the spectacle of war misses this point: through becoming spectacles the fact that real wars

(i.e., territorial wars) are no longer possible has not diminished their utility - the US isn't strong enough to take and hold Iraq, but it can use its force to demonstrate to other small nations that it can inflict massive damage and lasting pain on anyone who would dare defy it. Baudrillard's lament that the real Gulf War never took place can only be understood from this viewpoint - although he doesn't put it in these words, his insight is essentially that war in its Idealised form is much more terrifying than peace. Again, although Baudrillard himself doesn't put it this way, the conclusion one might draw from the paradigm shift in war's rationalisation enumerated above - from pragmatic object (defeating North Vietnam) to symbolic object (defending the credibility of the fight forces) -is that war has become

'postmodern'.36 This shift is what enables the US to ideologically justify war in the absence of a proper object and

indeed in the absence of a known enemy. T he Bush regime's 'War on Terror' is the apotheosis of this change: the symbolic (terror) has been made to appear instrumental (terrorism ), or more precisely the symbolic is now able to generate the

instrumental according to its own needs. This is the moment when the war machine becomes militarism , the moment when doxa becomes doctrine.

What is a war machine? The answer to this question must always be, it is a concept. But because of the way Deleuze and Guattari create their concepts, by abstracting from the historical, there is always a temptation to treat the war machine as primarily descriptive. More importantly, the war machine is only one element in a complex treatise which is ultimately a

mordant critique of the present. Deleuze and Guattari's analysis proceeds via a threefold hypothesis: (1) the war machine is a nomad invention that does not have war as its primary object, war is rather a second-order objective; (2) the war machine is exterior to the State apparatus, but when the State appropriates the war machine its nature and function changes, its polarity is effectively reversed so that it is directed at the nomads themselves; (3) it is only when the war machine has been appropriated by the State that war becomes its primary object . 37  Deleuze and Guattari are careful to clarify that their main purpose in assigning the invention of the war machine to the nomads is to assert its historical or 'invented' character. Their implication is that the nomadic people of the steppes and deserts do not hold the secret to understanding the war machine. We need to look past the concrete historical

and geographical character of the war machine to see its eidetic core.38

 Clearly, it is not “the nomad who defines this constellation of characteristics”; on the contrary, “it is this constellation

that defines the nomad, and at the same time the essence of the war machine.”39 In its nomad origins, the war machine does not have war as its primary objective. Deleuze and Guattari arrive at this conclusion by way of three questions. First of all they ask, is battle the object of war? Then they ask if war is the object of the war machine. And finally they ask if the war machine is the object of the State. The first question requires further and immediate clarification, they say, between when a battle is sought and when it is avoided. The difference between these two states of affairs is not the difference between an offensive and defensive posture. And while it is true that at first glance war does seem to have battle as its object whereas the guerrilla has nonbattle his

object, this view is deceiving. Dropping bombs from 10 000 metres above the earth, firing missiles from a distance of hundreds of kilometres, using unpiloted drones to scout for targets, using satellite controlled and guided weapons, are the actions of a war-machine that has no interest at all in engaging in battle. The truism that the Viet Cong frustrated the US Army in Vietnam by failing to engage them in battle should not be taken to mean the US Army sought battle and the enemy did not. The Viet Cong frustrated the US Army by failing to succumb to its nonbattle strategies and forced them into seeking battles with an elusive army with a better understanding of the terrain. If operation “Rolling Thunder”, or any of the

many other battle-avoiding stratagems the US attempted had worked, they would not have sought battle at all.40

 Ironically, too, as Gabriel Kolko points out, the more strategic the US tried to make its offensive operations, i.e., the more it tried to disengage from face-to-face encounters on the battlefield, the more passive its posture became because of its escalating logistical support

requirements and increasing reliance on high maintenance technology.41 By the same token, it is clear that the guerilla armies of the Viet Cong did in fact seek

battle, but did so on their own terms. As Mao said, the guerrilla strikes where the other is weak and retreats whenever the stronger power attacks, the point being that the guerrilla is constantly on the look out for an opportunity to engage the enemy.

42Battle and nonbattle “are the double object of

war, according to a criterion that does not coincide with the offensive and the defensive, or even with war proper and guerrilla warfare.”43

 For this reason the question has to be pushed further back to ask if war is even the object of the war machine? Too often the answer to this question is automatically 'yes', but this reflects a precise set of historical circumstances and not an essential condition. It is true, throughout history, the nomads are regularly to be found in conflict situations, but this is because history is studded with collisions between war machines and the states and cities which would grind them into the dust. War is thrust upon the war machine, but its actual occupation is quite different. It could even be said to be peaceful were we not

suspicious of that term. And as I have already argued, it is when the war machine takes peace itself as its object that it enters its most terrifying phase.

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IMPACT: ETHER

Debate key—imperialism has suffused itself into discourse—prevents new forms of politics before they can be developed—aff methodology is key to challenge sovereignty and reclaim agencyHardt and Negri in 2k (Terrorists, awesome dudes, profs at places of respectable respectedness; Empire)

Ether is the third and final fundamental medium of imperial control. The management of communication, the structuring of the education system, and the regulation of culture appear today more than ever as sovereign prerogatives. All of this, however, dissolves in the ether . The contemporary systems of communication are not subordinated to sovereignty; on the contrary, sovereignty seems to be subordinated to communication-or actually, sovereignty is articulated through communications systems . In the field of communication, the paradoxes that bring about the

dissolution of territorial and/or national sovereignty are more clear than ever. The deterritorializing capacities of communication are unique: communication is not satisfied by limiting or weakening modern territorial sovereignty; rather it attacks the very possibility of linking an order to a space . It imposes a continuous and complete circulation of signs. Deterritorialization is the primary force and

circulation the form through which social communication manifests itself. In this way and in this ether, languages become functional to circulation and dissolve every sovereign relationship. Education and culture too cannot help submitting to the circulating society of the spectacle. Here we reach an extreme limit

of the process of the dissolution of the relationship between order and space. At this point we cannot conceive this relationship except in another space, an elsewhere that cannot in principle be contained in the articulation of sovereign acts. The space of communication is completely deterritorialized. It is absolutely other with respect to the residual spaces that we have been analyzing in terms of the monopoly of physical force and the definition of monetary measure. Here it is a question not of residue but of metamorphosis : a metamorphosis of all the elements of political economy and state theory. Communication is the form of capitalist production in which capital has succeeded in submitting society entirely and globally to its regime, suppressing all alternative paths. If ever an alternative is to be proposed, it will have to arise from within the society of the real subsumption and demonstrate all the contradictions at the heart of it . These three means of control refer us again to the three tiers of the imperial pyramid of power. The bomb is a monarchic power, money

aristocratic, and ether democratic. It might appear in each of these cases as though the reins of these mechanisms were held by the United States. It might appear as if the United States were the new Rome, or a cluster of new Romes: Washington (the bomb), New York (money), and Los Angeles (ether). Any such territorial conception of imperial space, however, is continually destabilized by the fundamental flexibility, mobility, and deterritorialization at the core of the imperial apparatus. Perhaps the monopoly off force and the regulation of money can be given partial territorial determinations, but communication cannot. Communication has become the central element that establishes the relations of production, guiding capitalist development and also transforming productive forces. This dynamic produces an extremely open situation: here the centralized locus of power has to confront the power of productive subjectivities, the power of all those who contribute to the interactive production of communication. Here in this circulating domain of imperial domination over the new forms of production, communication is most widely disseminated in capillary forms.

IMPACT FRAMING: DESIRE FIRST

Desire manifests itself at the local level – the unconscious – and resonates into a group order, powering politics. Failure to investigate motivations at the level of desire abandons any possibility of understanding how political formations come to be and ensures serial policy failureBallantyne 7 (Andrew, Tectonic Cultures Research Group at Newcastle University , "Deleuze and Guattari for Architects" 27-28)

So these habits of thought , once they are planted in us, take over and refract our view of the world and all our dealings with it. It is probably becoming clear by now how the ‘capitalism and schizophrenia’ project, across the two volumes Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, was caught up in every aspect of life. It is set up not as a set of dogmas or even of questions, but as a set of values. It is a work of ethics, and the link with

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Spinoza’s Ethics is strong. It too is a project based around immanence rather than transcendence. The ‘ desiring-machines’ that figure so prominently at the opening of Anti-Oedipus, are the machines that operate without our noticing them to produce the desires that we do notice, and that we would like to act upon. But as mechanisms that operate to produce consciousness, the machines can be pulling in different directions and producing incompatible desires, which might be resolved at a preconscious level , or might surface as conflicted conscious desires . There are thousands upon thousands of these mechanisms, of which we become aware only as they produce effects that approach the level of consciousness, and what goes on amongst them is a micropolitics – thousands upon thousands of rhizomatic connections,

without any clear limit on where the connections would stop, and without any necessity to pass through a centralized arborescent hub.

The scale of operations builds up from a preconscious sub-’individual’, who is already a swarm of desiring-machines, to a social group, or a crowd, where certain aspects of the people involved connect together to produce a crowd-identity that is unlike that of any of the individuals in the crowd. Crowds will do things that individual people would not

(Canetti, 1973). The individuals are to the crowd what desiring-machines are to the individual. Except that one could alternatively say that it is certain of the mass of individuals’ desiring-machines that, upon being brought together in the crowd, they are found to be able to act together

to produce the group identity. The crowd is a body. Some of the mechanisms that would come into play in the individual acting alone are somehow switched out of the circuit, and become irrelevant to the crowd , and having been switched off cannot inhibit the crowd’s actions. So the sense of the ‘individual’ is even further problematized, and we see it to be highly divisible. But nevertheless the idea of the individual is deeply ingrained in our language, and if we’re trying to explain ourselves, we might find that it’s the most direct word to be using. If we’re trying to connect with others then we need to be able to allow ourselves, from time to time, to speak like everyone else. As we follow Deleuze and Guattari further into their world, it becomes increasingly difficult to do that, as each ‘straightforward’ utterance seems, from an alternate view, to have an inaccurate aspect.

SOLVENCY: ACT NOW

Now is the essential time to embrace the politics of nomadism – the oppressions of the global capitalist paradigm are becoming even more elusive and oppressive. We must not question the future of the revolution just affirm this politics.Deleuze and Parnet 87 (Gilles and Claire, profs of philosophy: Dialogues II: p. 146-147)

What characterizes our current situation is both beyond and on this side of the State. Beyond nation States, the

development of a world market, the power of the multinational companies, the outline of a planetary organization, the extension of capitalism to the whole social body, clearly forms a great abstract machine which overcodes the monetary, industrial and technological fluxes. At the same time, the means of exploitation, control and surveillance become more and more subtle and diffuse, in a certain sense molecular (the workers of the rich countries necessarily take part in the plundering of the Third World, men take part in the over-exploitation of womyn, etc.). But the abstract machine, with its dysfunctions, is no more infallible than the nation States which are not able to regulate them on their own territory and from one territory to

another. The State no longer has at its disposal the political , institutional or even financial means which would enable it to fend of the social repercussions of the machine: it is doubtful whether it can eternally rely on the old forms like the police , armies, bureaucracies, even trade union bureaucracies, collective installations, schools, families. Enormous land slides are happening on this side of the State, following the lines of gradient or of flight affecting principally: (1) the marking out of territories; (2) the mechanisms of economic subjugation (new characteristics of unemployment, of inflation); (3) the basic regulatory frameworks (crisis of the school, of free trade unions, of the army, of womyn…); (4) the nature of the demands which become qualitative as much as quantitative (‘quality of life’ rather than the ‘standard of living’) All this constitutes what can be called a right to desire. It is not surprising that all kinds of minority questions – linguistic, ethnic, regional, about sex, or youth – resurge not only as archaisms, but in up-to-date revolutionary forms which

call once more into question an entirely immanent manner both the global economy of the machine and the assemblages of national States. Instead of gambling on the eternal impossibility of the revolution and on the fascist return of a war machine in general, why not thing that a new type of revolution is in the course of becoming possible, and that all kinds of mutating, living machines conduct wars, are combined and trace out a plane of consistence which undermines the plane of organization of the World and the States ? For, once again, the world and its states are no more masters of

their plane than revolutionaries are condemned to the deformation of theirs. Everything is played in uncertain games , ‘front to front, back to

back, back to front…’. The question of the future of the revolution is a bad question because, in so far as it is asked,

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there are so many people who do not become revolutionaries, and this is exactly why it is done, to impede the question of the revolutionary-becoming of people, at every level, in every place.

SOLVENCY: REFRAME THE DEBATE

Before action can take place we must reframe the way debates are carried out under the current political conditions. Debates in the west have spiraled into simple dichotomies of good and bad, codifying the potential for debate to create effective change. Instead, we should affirm problematization – a constant auto-critique, the new enlightenment which questions moral clarity and seeks to challenge what we are powerless to changeZalloua, 2008 (Zahi, Assistant Professor of French at Whitman College , "The Future of an Ethics of Difference After Hardt and Negri’s Empire" MUSE)

With his concept of altermondialisation (or “alterglobalization,” the French word for globalization being derived from “world” [monde], a term that evokes the globe’s

inhabitants more so than its geography), Derrida similarly foregrounds the continued need to think globalization in terms of alterity and its preservation—the need to think globalization otherwise (altermondialisation) than its current manifestation as a homogenizing capitalism that domesticates difference. In a brief essay entitled “Une Europe de l’espoir [A Europe of Hope],” Derrida challenges the terms of the debate imposed by a hegemonic and arrogant American power, who frames global struggle as a battle of good and evil. To this model Derrida opposes an engaged Europe, a “Europe that is more social and less mercantile” (2004, 3) and that realizes

the promises of the Enlightenment.20 Here, the term Europe does not refer to—or rather, is not limited to—a geographical space with fixed [End Page

141] boundaries, but rather a critical ethos based on the ideals of democracy, human rights, and freedom of thought21: It is once again a question of the Enlightenment, that is, of access to Reason in a certain public space, though this time in conditions that technoscience and economic or telemedia globalization have thoroughly transformed: in time and as space, in rhythms and proportions. If intellectuals, writers, scholars, professors, artists, and journalists do not, before all else, stand up together against [the violence of intolerance], their abdication will be at once irresponsible and suicidal. (2003, 125) Like Glissant’s archipelagoes, which serve as a productive model for rhizomatic thought, Derrida’s Europe becomes a trope for a deconstructive mode of reading, “an example of what a politics, a reflection, and an ethics might be, the inheritors of a past Enlightenment that bear an Enlightenment to come, a Europe capable of non-binary forms of discernment” (2004, 3). To read like a “Europeand” (a

subject position open to all—to Americans, for example, who draw their hope from the civil rights movement) is to contest what passes for moral clarity today. Against post-9/11 doxa and its resurrected rhetoric of good and evil, Derrida calls for a productive skepticism—a skepticism that does not entail paralysis and nihilism in the face of our “powerlessness to comprehend, recognize, cognize, identify, name, describe, foresee” (2003, 94), but vigilance and self-critique, a more rigorous mode of analysis, one that resists the lure of moral absolutes and bears witness to the specificity and complexity of sociopolitical reality. Just as Foucault had before him defiantly refused the “blackmail of the Enlightenment” (the notion that one is either “for” it or “against” it [1984, 42]), Derrida’s valorization of a European Enlightenment, on one hand, may have surprised if not shocked some of his readers, especially those for whom “the father of deconstruction” is a nihilist, obscurantist, textual idealist, or more generally, an enemy of Reason. On the other hand, this “turn” to the Enlightenment does not really represent a deviation in Derrida’s philosophical path. It is quite consistent with his demystifying critique of the yearning for

purity, absolute (that is, ahistorical) meanings or transcendental signifieds (ousia, eidos, consciousness, etc.). For Derrida, this critique takes place first and foremost at the level of language. As Iain Chambers puts it, “If what [End Page 142] passes for knowledge emerges within language, then, critical knowledge involves an exploration of language itself” (32).22 As such, Derrida recognizes that his genealogical investigations—his denaturalization of key normative concepts (nature, culture, democracy, etc.)—never constitute a transgression in the pure sense of the term, as a stepping outside of metaphysics: There is not a transgression, if one understands by that a pure and simple landing into a beyond metaphysics, at a point which would be, let us not forget, first of all a point of language or writing. Now, even in aggressions or transgressions, we are consorting with a code to which metaphysics is tied irreducibly, such that every transgressive gesture reencloses us—precisely by giving us a hold on the closure of metaphysics—within this closure .

(1981, 12) Nevertheless, despite (or because of) the impossibility of transcending the “closure of metaphysics,” Derrida tirelessly works to forestall what

post-Marxists Laclau and Mouffe call the desire for an “ultimate fixity of meaning” (112), rethinking creatively and critically

(under erasure) the inherited concepts of metaphysics within that very tradition: “‘a mutation will have to take place’ in our entire way of thinking about justice, democracy, sovereignty, globalization, military power, the relations of nation-states, the politics of friendship and enmity in order to address terrorism with any hope of an effective cure” (Derrida 2003, 106; emphasis added). While calling for an “effective cure”—that is, for a critique that will have a positive impact on the world—Derrida is careful to frame his observation in tentative terms as a “hope,” cognizant that he is not proposing a blueprint for rational political action. Along these lines, Derrida’s appeal to the Enlightenment, then, is not to be understood as a wholesale acceptance of its Reason, but as a tactical use of its tools in an effort to reframe the terms of current debates (about globalization, democracy, cosmopolitanism, hospitality, hybridity, difference,

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etc.), to prepare if not provide an urgent opening, “to see the present as holding some ability to become-other” (Nealon 2006, 79). [End Page 143]

SOLVENCY: MADNESS

Political strategy can look any way at all – not necessarily a pragmatic change in doctrine or charter, but a strategy to re-determine intensity, desire, and our understanding of the world. Our affirmation is a journey through madness – a halting of our fear of the uncontained and uncontrollable. There is potential in the process of madness – madness as breakthrough, madness as undoing of our own self-inflicted castration. We should abandon a search for certainty and stability, and instead affirm the mixing and confusing of the concepts we hold sacred, and affirm the free space which emerges when the sanity we have taken for granted disintegrates into the nothingness it always was. Deleuze and Guattari 1972 (Gilles and Felix; Anti-Oedipus) 131-132

The schizo knows how to leave: he has made departure into something as simple as being born or dying. But at the same time his journey is strangely stationary, in place. He does not speak of another world, he is not from another world: even when he

is displacing himself in space, his is a journey in intensity, around the desiring-machine that is erected here and remains here. For here is the desert propagated by our world, and also the new earth, and the machine that hums, around which the schizos revolve, planets for a new sun.

These men of desire-or do they not yet exist? -are like Zarathustra. They know incredible sufferings, vertigos, and sicknesses. They have their specters. They must reinvent each gesture. But such a man produces himself as a free man, irresponsible, solitary, and joyous, finally able to say and do something simple in his own name, without asking permission; a desire lacking nothing, a flux that overcomes barriers and codes, a name that no longer designates any ego whatever. He has simply ceased being afraid of becoming mad. He experiences and lives himself as the sublime sickness that will no longer affect him. Here, what is, what would a psychiatrist be worth? In the whole of psychiatry only Jaspers, then Laing have

grasped what process signified, and its fulfillment-and so escaped the familialism that is the ordinary bed and board of psychoanalysis and psychiatry. "If the human race survives, future men will, I suspect, look back on our enlightened epoch as a veritable age of Darkness. They will presumably be able to savor the irony of this situation with more amusement than we can extract from it. The laugh's on us. They will see that what we call 'schizophrenia' was one of the forms in which, often through quite ordinary people, the light began to break through the cracks in our all-too-closed minds…. Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be breakthrough…. The person going through ego-loss or transcendental experiences may or may not become in different ways confused. Then he might legitimately be regarded as mad. But to be mad is not necessarily to be ill, notwithstanding that in our culture the two categories have become confused.... From the alienated starting point of our pseudo-sanity, everything is equivocal. Our sanity is not 'true' sanity. Their madness is not 'true' madness. The madness of our patients is an artifact of the destruction wreaked on them by us and by them on themselves. Let no one suppose

that we meet 'true' madness any more than that we are truly sane. The madness that we encounter in 'patients' is a gross travesty, a mockery, a grotesque caricature of what the natural healing of that estranged integration we call sanity might be. True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego."* The visit to London is our visit to Pythia. Turner is there. Looking at his paintings, one understands what it means to scale the wall, and yet to remain behind; to cause flows to

pass through, without knowing any longer whether they are carrying us elsewhere or flowing back over us already. The paintings range over three periods. If the psychiatrist were allowed to speak here, he could talk about the first two, although they are in fact the most reasonable. The first canvases are of end-of-the-world catastrophes, avalanches, and storms. That's where Turner begins. The paintings of the second period are somewhat like the delirious reconstruction, where the delirium hides, or rather where it is on a par with a lofty technique inherited from Poussin, Lorrain, or the Dutch tradition: the world is reconstructed through archaisms having a modern function. But something incomparable happens at the level of the paintings of the third period, in the series Turner does not exhibit, but keeps secret. It cannot even be said that he is far ahead of his time: there is here something ageless, and that comes to us from an eternal future, or flees toward it. The canvas turns in on itself, it is pierced by a hole, a lake, a flame, a tornado, an explosion. The

themes of the preceding paintings are to be found again here, their meaning changed. The canvas is truly broken, sundered by what penetrates it. All that

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remains is a background of gold and fog, intense, intensive, traversed in depth by what has just sundered its breadth: the schizo. Everything becomes mixed and confused, and it is here that the breakthrough-not the breakdown-occurs.

SOLVENCY: AFFIRMATION

Affirming the free space created with the 1AC is not a neutral act – we should learn from disconnected figures. The political strategy of the 1AC understands that we should never reach a point of full separation, rather we should understand the possibility of complete freedom, and use those lessons to inform individual empowermentBallantyne 7 (Andrew, Tectonic Cultures Research Group at Newcastle University , "Deleuze and Guattari for Architects" 34-37)

In its most elemental state it is the ‘body without organs’ – a term which Deleuze and Guattari adapt into an abstract concept, reterritorializing it in many contexts – but its origin is in a concrete example. It emerged in the last work by the dramaturge of the Theatre of Cruelty, Antonin Artaud (1895–1948). To Have Done With the Judgement of God was a rant against America

and God, that carries the scars of Artaud’s tormented years in lunatic asylums. It was intended for radio broadcast on November 28, 1947, but was suppressed.6 ‘. . . there is nothing more useless than an organ. When you will have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom’ (Artaud, 1947, 571). So the body without organs is presented here as an idealized state, in which anything becomes possible. (Under a more common-sense description such a body is comatose and has severe psychiatric disorders.) It is the condition of the lost sheep, away from the flock, deterritorialized and desocialized, without politics or a self. At this moment of confusion, it has lost the habits that have been there as part of its ancestral inheritance and its upbringing. But in Artaud’s case it goes further. He remembered having found himself during a mental breakdown, with no shape or form, right there where he was at that moment (Deleuze and Guattari, 1972, 8). He was away from the flock of other socialized people, who structured his sense of who he was in the world, and away from the flock of desiring machines that normally structured his sense of who he was in himself. His identity had gone.

This sense of the body without organs, a catatonic body that is not structured by interactions, responses or concepts, is taken up by Deleuze and Guattari and is itself deterritorialized, so that it becomes a mobile concept, signalling in general the removal of all acquired habits and identity. We make ourselves bodies without organs by flirting with catatonia, by suspending our identity. We step out of the world of the actual, the world of common-sense stability, where we function well by repeating the habits of the day before, into the world of the virtual, where anything can happen. It was what Hume described himself as doing when he was thinking philosophically about himself, and consequently losing his sense of his self. Judge Schreber also had problems conceptualizing his body and what was happening to it. ‘He lived for a long time without a stomach, without intestines, almost without lungs, with a torn esophagus, without a bladder, and with shattered ribs, he used sometimes to swallow parts of his larynx with his food, etc. but divine miracles (“rays”) always restored what had been destroyed’ (Freud, 1911, 147;

quoted by Deleuze and Guattari, 1980, 150). The body without organs is virtually all the things we could be, but when we’re in that state we’re actually none of them. In order to actualize a virtuality, we need to conceptualize some step towards it as a possibility, and as a body without organs we have no concepts, so we are trapped in a catatonic state for as long as it lasts. The virtual is the realm of the pre-possible, where there is no conception of what the alternative possibilities could be, so if anything happens, it happens without having those possibilities to guide or inform it. It is the soup from which the emergent properties will in due course emerge, but with no sense as yet of what those emerging properties are going to be. Schreber’s non-standard actualization was an oddity that tells us something about the range of possibilities, and different cultures at different times have

conceptualized the body in multifarious ways (see e.g. Feher, 1989). The body without organs lies before and beyond all the actual alternatives: The body without organs is what remains when you take everything away. What you take away is precisely the phantasy, and significances and subjectifications as a whole. Psychoanalysis does the opposite: it translates everything into phantasies, it converts everything into phantasy, it retains the

phantasy. It royally botches the real, because it botches the body without organs. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980, 151) The body without organs is pure immanence (‘the plane of immanence’) having in it no conceptual apparatus that has been imposed from outside – nothing transcendental about it. ‘After all, isn’t Spinoza’s Ethics the great book of the body without organs?’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980, 153). ‘All bodies without organs pay homage

to Spinoza’ (154). The body without organs is a state of creativity, where preconceptions are set aside. It is the state before a design takes shape, where all possibilities are immanent, and one holds at bay the common-sense expectations of what the design should be. When a stimulus or an internal pain prompts a line of flight, then formations assemble, giving the

beginnings of a form – a structure, a detail, a leitmotif. The aim could be that the design would be entirely immanent in its initial conditions, and would emerge as a product of the various forces in play in the milieu. It would not be imposed from outside as a specified form, but would work with the grain of its matter, from within, but also seamlessly with the milieu and networks extending to its horizons . It can crystallize in various ways, at a molecular level, to aggregate and produce different surface effects when it becomes apparent to the senses in a wider world. It is clearest in the sort of house that is a continuation of the person who lives in it, as a mollusc lives in its shell.

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SOLVENCY: SCHIZOPHRENIA

The act of the 1AC is a political gesture towards the schizophrenic – never becoming a schizo, but learning from the potential provided by the freedom of insanity. Considering the possibility of being completely unfettered to reality, always reimagining concepts, is enough to make a change in reality Deleuze and Guattari 72 (Anti-Oedipus, 366-8)

The fourth and final thesis of schizoanalysis is therefore the distinction between two poles of social libidinal investment: the paranoiac, reactionary, and fascisizing pole, and the schizoid revolutionary pole. Once again, we see no objection to the use of terms inherited from psychiatry for characterizing social investments of the unconscious, insofar as these terms cease to have a familial connotation that would make them into simple projections, and from the

moment delirium is recognized as having a primary social content that is immediately adequate. The two poles are defined, the one by the enslavement of production and the desiring-machines to the gregarious aggregates that they constitute on a large scale under a given form of power or selective sovereignty; the other by the inverse subordination and the overthrow of power. The one by these molar structured aggregates that crush singularities, select them, and regularize those that they retain in codes or axiomatics: the other by the molecular multiplicities of singularities that on the contrary treat the large aggregates as so many useful materials for their own elaborations. The one by the lines of integration and territorialization that arrest the flows, constrict them, turn them back, break them again according to the limits interior to the system, in such a way as to produce the images that come to fiIl the field of immanence peculiar to this system or this aggregate. the other by lines of escape that follow the decoded and deterritorialized flows, inventing their own nonfigurative breaks or schizzes that produce new flows, always breaching the coded wall or the territorialized limit that separates them from desiring-production. And to summarize all the preceding determinations: the one is defined by subjugated groups, the other by subject-groups. It is true that we still run up against all kinds of problems concerning these distinctions. In what sense does the schizoid investment constitute, to the same extent as the other one, a real investment of the socio-historical field, and not a simple utopia? In what sense are the lines of escape collective, positive, and creative? What is the relationship between the two unconscious poles, and what is their relationship with the preconscious investments of interest? We have seen that the unconscious paranoiac investment was grounded in the socius itself as a full body without organs, beyond the preconscious aims and interests that it assigns and distributes. The fact remains that such an investment does not endure the light of day: it must always hide under assignable aims or interests presented as the general aims and interests, even though in reality the latter represent only the members of the dominant

class or a fraction of this class. How could a formation of sovereignty, a fixed and determinate gregarious aggregate, endure being invested for their brute force, their violence, and their absurdity? They would not survive such an investment. Even the most overt fascism speaks the language of goals, of law, order, and reason. Even the most insane capitalism speaks in the name of economic rationality. And this is necessarily the case, since it is in the irrationality of the full body that the order of reasons is inextricably fixed, under a code, under an axiomatic that determines

it. What is more, the bringing to light of the unconscious reactionary investment as if devoid of an aim, would be enough to transform it completely, to make it pass to the other pole of the libido, i.e., to the schizorevolutionary pole, since this action could not be accomplished without overthrowing power, without reversing subordination, without returning production itself to desire: for it is only desire that lives from having no aim. Molecular desiring-production would regain its liberty to master in its turn the molar aggregate under an overturned form of power or sovereignty. That is why Klossowski, who has taken the theory of the two poles of investment the furthest, but still within the category of an active utopia, is able to write: "Every sovereign formation would thus have to foresee the destined moment of its disintegration.... No formation of sovereignty, in order to crystalize, will ever endure this prise de conscience: for as soon as this formation becomes conscious of its immanent disintegration in the individuals who compose it,

these same individuals decompose it. ... By way of the circuitous route of science and art, human beings have many times revolted against this fixity; this capacity notwithstanding, the gregarious impulse in and by science caused this rupture to fail. The day humans are able to behave as intentionless phenomena-for every intention at the level of the human being always obeys the laws of its conservation, its continued existence-on that day a new creature will declare the integrity of existence.... Science demonstrates by its very method that the means that it constantly elaborates do no more than reproduce, on the outside, an interplay of forces by themselves without aim or end whose combinations obtain such and such a result. ... However, no science can develop outside a constituted

social grouping. In order to prevent science from calling social groups back in question, these groups take science back in hand ... [integrate it] into the diverse industrial schemes; its autonomy appears strictly inconceivable. A conspiracy joining together art and science presupposes a rupture of all our institutions and a total upheaval of the means of production.... If some conspiracy, according to Nietzsche's wish, were to use science and art in a plot whose

ends were no less suspect, industrial society would seem to foil this conspiracy in advance by the kind of mise en scene it offers for it, under pain of effectively suffering what this conspiracy reserves for this society: i.e., the breakup of the institutional structures that mask the society into a plurality of experimental spheres finally revealing the true face of modernity-an ultimate phase that Nietzsche saw as the end result of the evolution of societies. In this perspective, art and science would then emerge as sovereign formations that Nietzsche said constituted the object of his

countersociology-art and science establishing themselves as dominant powers, on the ruins of institutions”

SOLVENCY: WAR MACHINE

The war machine is representative of the power at large. The war machine, like power, has no initial objective and no final goals until it is ascribed positive or negative purpose. The state uses violent final goals, striations, containments, etc, on the war machine turning it into a negative force capable only of

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inflicting pain. Instead, the forces of war and power should be turned free – we should engage in our inner lust for war and express power in positive ways to counter negative forces.Deleuze and Guattari 87 (A Thousand Plateaus, pg 230-231)

There are many reasons to believe that the war machine is of a different origin, is a different assemblage, than the State apparatus. It is of nomadic origin and is directed against the State apparatus. One of the fundamental problems of the State is to appropriate this war machine that is foreign to it and make it a piece in its apparatus, in the form of a stable military institution; and the State has always encountered major difficulties in this. It is precisely when the war machine has reached the point that it has no other object but war, it is when it substitutes destruction for mutation, that it frees the most catastrophic charge. Mutation is in no way a transformation of war; on the contrary, war is like the fall or failure of mutation, the only object left for the war machine after it has lost its power to change. War, it must be said, is only the abominable residue of the war machine, either after it has allowed itself to be appropriated by the State

apparatus, or even worse, has constructed itself a State apparatus capable only of destruction. When this happens, the war machine no longer draws mutant lines of flight, but a pure, cold line of abolition. (Later, we will propose a theory of the complex relation between the war machine and war.)31 This brings us back to the paradox of

fascism, and the way in which fascism differs from totalitarianism. For totalitarianism is a State affair: it essentially concerns the relation between the State as a localized assemblage and the abstract machine of overcoding it effectuates. Even in the case of a military dictatorship, it is a State army, not a war machine, that takes power and elevates the State to the totalitarian stage. Totalitarianism is quintessentially conservative. Fascism, on the other hand, involves a war machine. When fascism builds itself a totalitarian State, it is not in the sense of a State army taking power, but of a war machine taking over the State. A bizarre remark by Virilio puts us on the trail: in fascism, the State is far less totalitarian than it is suicidal. There is in

fascism a realized nihilism. Unlike the totalitarian State, which does its utmost to seal all possible lines of flight, fascism is constructed on an intense line of flight, which it transforms into a line of pure destruction and abolition. It is curious that from the very beginning the Nazis announced to Germany what they were bringing: at once wedding bells and death, including their own death, and the death of the Germans. They thought they would perish but that their undertaking would be resumed , all across Europe, all over the world, throughout the solar system. And the people cheered, not because they did not understand, but because they wanted that death through the death of others. Like a

will to wager everything you have every hand, to stake your own death against the death of others, and measure everything by "deleometers." Klaus Mann's novel, Mephisto, gives samplings of entirely ordinary Nazi speeches and conversations: "Heroism was something that was being ruled out of our lives. . . . In reality, we are not marching forward, we are reeling, staggering. Our beloved Fiihrer is dragging us toward the shades of darkness and everlasting nothingness. How can we poets, we who have a special affinity for darkness and lower depths, not admire him? . . . Fires blazing on the horizon; rivers of blood in all the streets; and the frenzied dancing of the survivors, of those who are still spared, around the bodies of the dead!"32 Suicide is presented not as a punishment but as the crowning glory of the death of others. One can always say that it is just a matter of foggy talk and ideology, nothing but ideology. But that is not true. The insufficiency of economic and political definitions of fascism does not simply imply a need to tack on vague, so-called ideological determinations. We prefer to follow Faye's inquiry into the precise formation of Nazi statements, which are just as much in evidence in politics and economics as in the most absurd of conversations. They always contain the "stupid and repugnant" cry, Long

live death!, even at the economic level, where the arms expansion replaces growth in consumption and where investment veers from the means of production toward the means of pure destruction. Paul Virilio's analysis strikes us as entirely

correct in defining fascism not by the notion of the totalitarian State but by the notion of the suicidal State: so-called total war seems less a State undertaking than an undertaking of a war machine that appropriates the State and channels into it a flow of absolute war whose only possible outcome is the suicide of the State itself. "The triggering of a hitherto unknown material process, one that is limitless and aimless. . . . Once triggered, its mechanism cannot stop at peace, for the indirect strategy effectively places the dominant powers outside the usual categories of space and time. . . . It was in the horror of daily life and its environment that Hitler finally found his surest means of governing, the legitimation of his policies and military strategy; and it lasted right up to the end, for the ruins and horrors and crimes and chaos of total war, far from discharging the repulsive nature of its power, normally only increase its scope. Telegram 71 is the normal outcome: If the war is lost, may the nation perish. Here, Hitler decides to join forces with his enemies in order to complete the destruction of his

own people, by obliterating the last remaining resources of its life-support system, civil reserves of every kind (potable water, fuel, provisions, etc.)."33 It was this reversion of the line of flight into a line of destruction that already animated the molecular focuses of fascism, and made them interact in a war machine instead of resonating in a State apparatus. A war machine that no longer had anything but war as its object and would rather annihilate its own servants than stop the destruction. All the dangers of the other lines pale by comparison.

SOLVENCY: PRECONCIOUS LIBIDINAL INVESTMENTS

We begin with the preconscious—groups form around signifiers that foreclose possibilities—without our methodology, political change is impossible and immaculate joy cannot be attainedDeleuze and Guattari 72 (Anti-Oedipus 345-349)

Libidinal investment does not bear upon the regime of the social syntheses, but upon the degree of development of the forces or the energies on which these syntheses depend. It does not bear upon the selections, detachments, and remainders effected by these syntheses, but upon the nature of the codes and the flows that condition them. It does not

bear upon the social means and ends, but upon the full body as socius, the formation of sovereignty, or the form of power for itself, devoid of meaning and purpose, since the meanings and the purposes derive from it, and not the contrary. It is doubtless true that interests predispose us to a given libidinal investment, but they are not identical with this investment. Moreover, the unconscious libidinal investment is what causes us to look for our interest in one place rather than another, to fix our aims on

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a given path, convinced that this is where our chances lie-since love drives us on. The manifest syntheses are merely the preconscious indicators of a

degree of development; the apparent interests and aims are merely the preconscious exponents of a social full body. As Klossowski says in his profound commentary on Nietzsche, a form of power is identical with the violence it exerts by its very absurdity, but it can exert this violence only by assigning itself aims and meanings in which even the most enslaved elements participate: "The sovereign formations will have no other purpose than that of masking the absence of a purpose or a meaning of their sovereignty by means of the organic purpose of their creation," and the purpose of thereby converting the absurdity into spirituality. That is why it

is so futile to attempt to distinguish what is rational and what is irrational in a society. To be sure, the role, the place, and the part one has in a society, and

from which one inherits in terms of the laws of social reproduction, impel the libido to invest a given socius as a full body-a given absurd power in which we participate, or have the chance to participate, under the cover of aims and interests. The fact remains that there exists a disinterested love of the social machine, of the form of power, and of the degree of development in and for themselves. Even in the person who has an interest-and loves them besides with a form of love other than that of his interest. This is also the case for the person who has no interest, and who substitutes the force of a strange love for this counterinvestment. Flows that run on the porous full body of a socius-these are the object of desire, higher than all the aims. It will never flow too much, it will never break or code enough-and in that very way! Oh how beautiful the machine is! The officer of "In the Penal Colony" demonstrates what an intense libidinal investment of a machine can be, a machine that is not only technical but social,

and through which desire desires its own repression. We have seen how the capitalist machine constituted a system of immanence bordered by a great mutant flow, nonpossessive and nonpossessed, flowing over the full body of capital and forming an absurd power. Everyone in his class and his person receives something from this power, or is excluded from it, insofar as the great flow is converted into incomes, incomes of wages or of enterprises that define aims or spheres of interest, selections, detachments, and

portions. But the investment of the flow itself and its axiomatic, which to be sure requires no precise knowledge of political economy, is the business of the unconscious libido, inasmuch as it is presupposed by the aims. We see the most disadvantaged, the most excluded members of society invest with passion the system that oppresses them, and where they always find an interest, since it is here that they search for and measure it. Interest always comes after. Antiproduction effuses in the system:

antiproduction is loved for itself, as is the way in which desire represses itself in the great capitalist aggregate. Repressing desire, not only for others but in oneself, being the cop for others and for oneself-that is what arouses, and it is not ideology, it is economy. Capitalism garners and possesses the force of the aim and the interest (power), but it feels a disinterested love for the absurd and nonpossessed force of the machine. Oh, to be sure, it is not for himself or

his children that the capitalist works, but for the immortality of the system. A violence without purpose, a joy, a pure joy in feeling oneself a wheel in the machine, traversed by flows, broken by schizzes. Placing oneself in a position where one is thus traversed, broken, fucked by the socius, looking for the right place where, according to the aims and the interests assigned to us, one feels something moving that has neither an interest nor a purpose. A sort of art for art's sake in the libido, a taste for a job well done, each one in his own place, the banker, the cop, the soldier, the technocrat, the bureaucrat, and

why not the worker, the trade-unionist. Desire is agape. Not only can the libidinal investment of the social field interfere with the investment of interest, and constrain the most disadvantaged, the most exploited, to seek their ends in an oppressive machine, but what is reactionary or revolutionary in the preconscious investment of interest does not necessarily coincide with what is reactionary or revolutionary in the unconscious libidinal investment. A revolutionary preconscious investment bears upon new aims, new social syntheses, a new power. But it could be that a part

at least of the unconscious libido continues to invest the former body, the old form of power, its codes, and its flows. It is all the easier, and the contradiction is all the better masked, as a state of forces does not prevail over the former state without preserving or reviving the old full body as a residual and subordinated territoriality (witness how the capitalist machine revives the despotic Urstaat, or how the socialist machine preserves a State and market monopoly capitalism). But there is something more serious: even when the libido embraces the new body-the new force that corresponds to the effectively revolutionary goals and syntheses from the viewpoint of the preconscious-it is not certain that the unconscious libidinal investment is itself revolutionary. For the same breaks do not pass at the level of the unconscious desires and the preconscious

interests. The preconscious revolutionary break is sufficiently well defined by the promotion of a socius as a full body carrying new aims, as a form of power or a formation of sovereignty that subordinates desiring-production under new conditions. But even though the unconscious libido is charged with investing this socius, its investment is not necessarily revolutionary in the same sense as the preconscious investment. In fact, the unconscious revolutionary break implies for its part the body without organs as the limit of the socius that desiring-production subordinates in its turn, under the condition of an overthrown power, an overthrown subordination. The preconscious revolution refers to a new regime of social production that creates, distributes, and satisfies new aims and interests. But the unconscious revolution does not merely refer to the socius that conditions this change as a form of power: it refers within this socius to the regime of desiring-production as an overthrown power on the

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body without organs, It is not the same state of flows and schizzes: in one case the break is between two forms of socius, the second of which is measured according to its

capacity to introduce the flows of desire into a new code or a new axiomatic of interest; in the other case the break is within the socius itself, in that it has the capacity for causing the flows of desire to circulate following their positive lines of escape, and for breaking them again following breaks of productive breaks, The most general principle of schizoanalysis is that desire is always constitutive of a social field. In any case desire belongs to the infrastructure, not to ideology: desire is in production as social production, just as production is in desire as desiring-production. But these forms can be understood in two ways, depending on whether desire is enslaved to a structured molar aggregate that it constitutes under a given form of power and gregariousness, or whether it subjugates the large aggregate to the functional multiplicities that it

itself forms on the molecular scale (it is no more a case of persons or individuals in this instance than in the other). If the preconscious revolutionary break appears at the first level, and is defined by the characteristics of a new aggregate, the unconscious or libidinal break belongs to the second level and is defined by the driving role of desiring-production and the position of its multiplicities. It is understandable, therefore, that a group can be revolutionary from the standpoint of class interest and its preconscious investments, but not be so-and even remain fascist and police-like-from the standpoint of its libidinal investments, Truly revolutionary preconscious interests do not necessarily imply unconscious investments of the same nature; an apparatus of interest never takes the place of a machine of desire. A revolutionary group at the preconscious level remains a subjugated group, even in seizing power, as long as this power itself refers to a form of force that continues to enslave and crush desiring-production. The moment it is preconsciously revolutionary, such a group already presents all the unconscious characteristics of a subjugated group: the subordination to a socius as a fixed support that attributes to itself the productive forces, extracting and absorbing the surplus value therefrom; the effusion of antiproduction and death-carrying elements within the system, which feels and pretends to

be all the more immortal; the phenomena of group "superegoization ," narcissism, and hierarchy-the mechanisms for the repression of desire, A subject-group, on the contrary, is a group whose libidinal investments are themselves revolutionary; it causes desire to penetrate into the social field, and subordinates the socius or the form of power to desiring-production; productive of desire and a desire that produces, the subject-group invents always mortal formations that exorcise the effusion in it of a death instinct; it opposes real coefficients of transversality to the symbolic determinations of subjugation, coefficients without a hierarchy or a group superego. What complicates everything, it is true, is that the same individuals can

participate in both kinds of groups in diverse ways (Saint-Juste, Lenin). Or the same group can present both characteristics at the same time, in diverse situations that are nevertheless coexistent. A revolutionary group can already have reassumed the form of a subjugated group, yet be determined under certain conditions to continue to play the role of a subject-group. One is continually passing from one type of group to the other. Subject-groups are continually deriving from subjugated groups through a rupture of the latter: they mobilize desire, and always cut its flows again further on, overcoming the limit, bringing the social machines back to the elementary forces of desire that form them.

SOLVENCY: CONLEY

Our affirmative is about thinking across boundaries – spaces are constantly divided with nodes and barriers, the logic of the State is the tree, hierarchy, control of everything with borderlines and territory. We are a theory of politics and movements, spreading outwards creating new offshoots and branches and subsets that all act independently. We are not the start of a larger movement, instead we affirm our particular challenge to state politics as another instance of becoming – a becoming revolutionary act that resonates with already existing micropolitics. In order to succeed we must break free of the State, both in our head and in our hearts: do not become enamored of power. Resistance has become codified: we ask you to try a new path. Conley in 6 (Verena Andermatt, professor of literature at Harvard, “Borderlines; Deleuze and the Contemporary World, 95-100)

In their dialogues and collaborations, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari enquire of the nature of borders. They summon principles of inclusion and exclusion associated

with borderlines. They eschew expressions built on the polarities of ‘either…or’ and in their own diction replace binary constructions with the conjunctive ‘and’ . Furthermore, in ‘Rhizome,’ the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, they argue for rhizomatic connections – fostered in language and by ‘and…and…and’ – to replace what they call the arborescent model of the ubiquitous Western tree (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). In constant movement, the tissues and tendrils of rhizomes call

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attention to the horizontal surfaces of the world in which they proliferate. They bring to their observer a new sense of space that is seen not as a background but a shape that, with the rhizome, moves and forever changes. In the field of play Deleuze and Guattari often produce

hybrid, even viral connections and downplay the presence of genealogies conveyed in the figure of the tree bearing a stock-like trunk. Rhizomatic connections form open territories that are not constricted by the enclosing frame of a rigid borderline . In the same breath the two philosophers

argue for ‘smooth’ spaces of circulation. They take a critical view of ‘striated’ spaces, replete with barriers and borders that are part of an ‘arborescent’ mentality. Striated spaces cross-hatched by psychic or real borderlines drawn by the state (social class, race, ethnicities) or by institutions (family, school), prevent the emergence of new ways of thinking. Crucial, Deleuze and Guattari declare, is the mental and social construction of new territories and the undoing of inherited barriers. Institutional, familial and even psychoanalytical striations that impede a person’s mobility in mental and physical spheres need to be erased or, at least, drawn with broken lines. When guilt is at the basis of the unconscious, productivity and creativity are diminished. Movement is also arrested wherever the state erects barriers between social classes, races and sexes. To facilitate connections and erase mental or physical borders, Deleuze and Guattari want to do away with the state as well as its institutions. It is as anarchists of sorts and with an insistence on aesthetic paradigms that Deleuze and Guattari argue for making connections and for an ongoing smoothing of striated spaces. In the pages to follow, I will argue that today the problem of borders and barriers is as acute as ever. I will probe how Deleuze and Guattari’s findings on rhizomes and smooth spaces elaborated in a post-1968, European, context might work today in a changed world-space. Is the struggle still between a paternal, bourgeois state and its subjects? Are the state and its institutions still targeted in the same way? Is the undoing of the subject – often through aesthetics – still valid, or is there a need for a more situated subject? We will first rehash the Deleuzian concepts of rhizome and smooth space before investigating whether and how these concepts are operative in the contemporary world. Since 1968, the world has undergone many changes. Over the last few decades, decolonisation, transportation, and electronic revolutions have transformed

the world. They have led to financial and population flows. Financial flows seem to be part of a borderless world. Today, human migrations occur on all continents. They are producing multiple crossings of external borders that in many places have resulted in local resistance and, in reaction, to the erection of more internal borders that inflect new striated spaces in the form of racism and immigration policy. The ultimate goal for the utopian thinker espousing the cause of rhizomatic thinking is smooth space that would entail the erasure of all borders and the advent of a global citizenry living in ease and without the slightest conflict over religion or ideology. In the transitional moment in which we find ourselves arguing for smooth space can easily lead to a non-distinction between alternative spaces in which goods and currencies circulate to the detriment of the world at large. To account for the transformation specifically of the state and its subjects in a global world, I will argue by way of recent writings by Etienne Balibar for the continued importance of rhizomatic connectivity and also for a qualified notion of smooth

space. Striated spaces will have to be continually smoothed so that national borders would not simply encircle a territory. Borders would have to be made more porous and nationality disconnected from citizenship so as to undo striated space inside the state by inventing new ways of being in common. Such a rethinking of borders would lead to further transformations by decoupling the nation from the state. It would open possibilities of – rhizomatic – connections and new spaces. It would produce new hybrids everywhere without simply a ‘withering away of the state’ as advocated by Deleuze and Guattari. Currently, subjects (defined as humans who are asseuttis [subjected] to paternal state power) also want to be citizens (who can individually and collectively define the qualities of their habitus or environment). Yet, the latter are still part of the state. They

are not yet entirely global, transnational citizens or cyber-citizens. While information networks seem to operate like rhizomes, it is of continued importance to retain the notion of state but to define it with more porous, connective borderlines so as ultimately to disconnect citizens from nationality. Deleuze and Guattari figure with other philosophers, anthropologists or sociologists who, following 1968, pay renewed attention to space. Their focus on space reappears at the very time Cartesian philosophies undergo radical changes due to the acceleration of new technologies and rapid globalisation. Many thinkers – Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio – condemn what they perceive as the increasing encroachment of technologies that quickly replace more traditional ways of being in the world. People who find themselves out of synch with their environment urge recourse to the body and new ways of using language. Deleuze and Guattari insert themselves into that line of thinking. Their criticism of the static order is twofold. They criticise an inherited spatial model defined by vertical orderings that has dominated the West. In that model, space was considered to be pre-existing. It became a simple décor for human action. Deleuze and Guattari propose not only a criticism of the static model but also invent an entirely new way of thinking space. They propose a more horizontal – and, paradoxically, if seemingly two-dimensional, even more spatial – thinking of the world in terms of rhizomatic lines and networks. In accordance with Deleuze and Guattari’s way of thinking through connections, the two regimes always coexist in an asymmetrical relation. They can never be entirely separated or opposed. In ‘Rhizome’, first published in French in 1976 and translated into English as ‘On the Line’, Deleuze and Guattari claim that for several hundred years it was believed that the world was developing vertically in the shape of a tree (Deleuze and Guattari 1983). The choice of a tree limits possibilities. The mature tree is already contained in the seed.

There is some leeway as to form and size, but the seed will become nothing more than the tree that it is destined to be. In lieu of the tree, Deleuze and Guattari propose an adventitious network, a mobile structure that can be likened to underground filaments of grass or the mycelia of fungi. A rhizome moves horizontally and produces offshoots from multiple bifurcations at its meristems. It changes its form by connecting and reconnecting. It does not have a finite or ultimate shape. Space does not pre-exist the rhizome; rather,

it is created through and between the proliferating lines. Rhizomes connect and open spaces in-between which, in the rooted world of the tree, an inside (the earth) is separated from an outside (the atmosphere). Unlike the tree, the rhizome can never be fixed or reduced to a single point or radical core. Its movement is contrasted with the stasis of the arborescent

model. In ‘Rhizome’ the vertical, arborescent model contributes to the creation of striated spaces. In the ebullient imagination of the two authors it appears that the latter slow down and even prevent movement of the kind they associate with emancipation and creativity. Instead of imitating a tree, Deleuze and Guattari exhort their readers to make connections by following multiple itineraries of investigation, much as a rhizome moves about the surface it creates as it goes. Rhizomes form a territory that is neither fixed nor bears any clearly delimited borders. In addition to this novel way of thinking, rhizomatically, the philosophers make further

distinctions between smooth and striated spaces. Smooth spaces allow optimal circulation and favour connections. Over time, however, smooth spaces tend to become striated. They lose their flexibility. Nodes and barriers appear that

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slow down circulation and reduce the number of possible connections. Writing Anti-Oedipus in a post-1968 climate, Deleuze and Guattari propose rhizomatic connections that continually rearticulate smooth space in order not only to criticise bourgeois capitalism with its

institutions – the family, school, church, the medical establishment (especially psychiatry) – but also to avoid what they see as a deadened or zombified state of things. They criticise the state for erecting mental and social barriers and for creating oppositions instead of furthering connections. Institutions and the state are seen as the villains that control and immobilize people from the top down. They argue that when the family, the church or the ‘psy’ instill guilt in a child, mental barriers and borders are erected. The child’s creativity, indeed its mental and physical mobility are diminished in the process. Such a condition cripples many adults who have trees growing in their heads. Deleuze and Guattari cite the example of Little Hans, a child analysed by Freud and whose creativity, they declare, was blocked by adults who wrongly interpreted his attempts to trace lines of flight within and through the structure of the family into which he

had been born (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 14). The state, too, functions by ordering, organizing and arresting movement, by creating relations of inclusion and exclusion. The state facilitates the creation of rigid and often ossified institutions. It enacts laws of inclusion and exclusion that order the family and the social in general. It tries to immobilize and dominate the social world. Yet the social cannot be entirely dominated. The organising régime of the order-word is never stable. It is constantly being transformed. Lines detach themselves from fuzzy borders and introduce variations in the constant of the dominant order. These variations can lead to a break and produce lines of flight that bring about entirely new configurations. Of importance in the late 1960s and 1970s is the doing away with institutions and the state that represses subjects. In Anti-Oedipus, the philosophers show how institutions like the family and psychiatry repress sexuality and desire in order to maximize their revenue. They argue for the creation of smooth spaces where desire can circulate freely. In A Thousand Plateaus, the bourgeois state ordered by the rules of capitalism is criticised. Deleuze and Guattari rarely contexualise the ‘state’ in any specific historical or political terms. Constructing a universal history of sorts, the philosophers note that the state apparatus appears at different times and in different places. This apparatus is always one of capture. It appropriates what they call a ‘nomadic war machine’ that never entirely disappears. The nomadic war machine eludes capture and traces its own

lines of flight. It makes its own smooth spaces. Here Deleuze and Guattari have faith in ‘ subjects’ who undermine control by creating new lines of flight. These subjects deviate from the dominant order that uses ‘order-words’ to obtain control. Order-words produce repetitions and reduce differences. They produce molar structures and aggregates that make it more difficult for new lines to take flight. Yet something stirs, something affects a person enough to make her or him deviate from the prescriptive meanings of these words. Deleuze and Guattari would say that the subject molecularises the molar

structures imposed by the state. People continually trace new maps and invent lines of flight that open smooth spaces. Deleuze and Guattari call it a ‘becoming-revolutionary’ of the people. In 1980, the philosophers also claim that humans inaugurate an age of becoming-minoritarian. The majority, symbolized by the 35-year-old, white, working male, they declare, no longer prevails. A new world is opening, a world of becoming-minoritarian in which women, Afro-American, post-colonial and queer subjects of all kinds put the

dominant order into variation. Changes of this nature occur at the limit of mental and social territories, from unstable borders without any clearly defined division between inside and outside. They occur in and through affects, desire and language. For Deleuze and Guattari, becoming-minoritarian must be accompanied by a withering of the state and its institutions without which any generalized transformation would be impossible. Thought they make clear in ‘Rhizome’ that the connections they advocate are different from those of computers that function according to binary oppositions, the philosophers keep open the

possibilities of transformations of subjectivities by means of technologies (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 475).Deleuze and Guattari are keenly aware both of the ways

that technologies transform subjectivities and of writing in a postcolonial, geopolitical context. Nonetheless, they write about the state in a rather general and even monolithic way without specifically addressing a given ‘nation-state’. It is as if the real villain were a general European concept of state inherited from the romantic age. The institutional apparatus of the state dominates and orders its subjects, preventing them from being creative or pursuing their desires. It keeps them from making revolutionary connections (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 473). To construct rhizomes and create smooth spaces for an optimal circulation of desire, the state, armed with its ‘order-words’, has to be fought until , finally, it withers away and, in accord with any and every utopian scenario, all identity is undone.

CONLEY 1: ORDER WORDS/HYBRIDS

Placing State authority in signifiers produces the Order Word, a fascist binary that commands the obedience of the masses. Their striation of language prevents new methods of thinking and ties language to nationality – vote aff to disconnect yourself from larger assemblages. Conley in 6 (Verena Andermatt, professor of literature at Harvard, “Borderlines; Deleuze and the Contemporary World, 95-100)

In their dialogues and collaborations, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari enquire of the nature of borders. They summon principles of inclusion and exclusion associated with

borderlines. They eschew expressions built on the polarities of ‘either…or’ and in their own diction replace binary constructions with the conjunctive ‘and’ . Furthermore, in ‘Rhizome,’ the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, they argue for rhizomatic connections – fostered in language and by ‘and…and…and’ – to replace what they call the arborescent model of the ubiquitous Western tree (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). In constant movement, the tissues and tendrils of rhizomes call attention to the horizontal surfaces of

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the world in which they proliferate. They bring to their observer a new sense of space that is seen not as a background but a shape that, with the rhizome, moves and forever changes. In the field of play Deleuze and Guattari often produce hybrid, even viral connections and downplay the

presence of genealogies conveyed in the figure of the tree bearing a stock-like trunk. Rhizomatic connections form open territories that are not constricted by the enclosing frame of a rigid borderline . In the same breath the two philosophers argue for ‘smooth’ spaces of circulation. They take a

critical view of ‘striated’ spaces, replete with barriers and borders that are part of an ‘arborescent’ mentality . Striated spaces cross-hatched by psychic or real borderlines drawn by the state (social class, race, ethnicities) or by institutions (family , school), prevent the emergence of new ways of thinking. Crucial, Deleuze and Guattari declare, is the mental and social construction of new territories and the undoing of inherited barriers. Institutional, familial and even psychoanalytical striations that impede a person’s mobility in mental and physical spheres need to be erased or, at least, drawn with broken lines. When guilt is at the basis of the unconscious, productivity and creativity are diminished. Movement is also arrested wherever the state erects barriers between social classes, races and sexes. To facilitate connections and erase mental or physical borders, Deleuze and Guattari want to do away with the state as well as its institutions. It is as anarchists of sorts and with an insistence on aesthetic paradigms that Deleuze and Guattari argue for making connections and for an ongoing smoothing of striated spaces. In the pages to follow, I will argue that today the problem of borders and barriers is as acute as ever. I will probe how Deleuze and Guattari’s findings on rhizomes and smooth spaces elaborated in a post-1968, European, context might work today in a changed world-space. Is the struggle still between a paternal, bourgeois state and its subjects? Are the state and its institutions still targeted in the same way? Is the undoing of the subject – often through aesthetics – still valid, or is there a need for a more situated subject? We will first rehash the Deleuzian concepts of rhizome and smooth space before investigating whether and how these concepts are operative in the contemporary world. Since 1968, the world has

undergone many changes. Over the last few decades, decolonisation, transportation, and electronic revolutions have transformed the world. They have led to financial and population flows. Financial flows seem to be part of a borderless world. Today, human migrations occur on all continents. They are producing multiple crossings of external borders that in many places have resulted in local resistance and, in reaction, to the erection of more internal borders that inflect new striated spaces in the form of racism and immigration policy. The ultimate goal for the utopian thinker espousing the cause of rhizomatic thinking is smooth space that would entail the erasure of all borders and the advent of a global citizenry living in ease and without the slightest conflict over religion or ideology. In the transitional moment in which we find ourselves arguing for smooth space can easily lead to a non-distinction between alternative spaces in which goods and currencies circulate to the detriment of the world at large. To account for the transformation specifically of the state and its subjects in a global world, I will argue by way of recent writings by Etienne Balibar for the continued

importance of rhizomatic connectivity and also for a qualified notion of smooth space. Striated spaces will have to be continually smoothed so that national borders would not simply encircle a territory. Borders would have to be made more porous and nationality disconnected from citizenship so as to undo striated space inside the state by inventing new ways of being in common. Such a rethinking of borders would lead to further transformations by decoupling the nation from the state. It would open possibilities of – rhizomatic – connections and new spaces. It would produce new hybrids everywhere without simply a ‘withering away of the state’ as advocated by Deleuze and Guattari. Currently, subjects (defined as humans who

are asseuttis [subjected] to paternal state power) also want to be citizens (who can individually and collectively define the qualities of their habitus or environment). Yet, the latter are still part of the state. They are not yet entirely global, transnational citizens or cyber-citizens. While information networks seem to operate like rhizomes,

it is of continued importance to retain the notion of state but to define it with more porous, connective borderlines so as ultimately to disconnect citizens from nationality.

CONLEY 2: HOW TO CATCH A WAR MACHINE…

Our politics is of the nomadic war machine – everywhere we go we create smooth spaces; places of invention and experimentation and immanence. Protest movements are trapped in an apparatus of capture: the war machine has been appropriated by the State and used to ossify fascism in the heads of the masses. Vote aff to uproot yourself from institutions and become mobile. Conley in 6 (Verena Andermatt, professor of literature at Harvard, “Borderlines; Deleuze and the Contemporary World, 95-100)

Deleuze and Guattari propose an adventitious network, a mobile structure that can be likened to underground filaments of grass or the mycelia of

fungi. A rhizome moves horizontally and produces offshoots from multiple bifurcations at its meristems. It changes its form by connecting and reconnecting. It does not have a finite or ultimate shape. Space does not pre-exist the rhizome; rather, it is created through and between the proliferating lines. Rhizomes connect and open spaces in-between which, in the rooted world of the tree, an inside (the earth) is separated from an outside (the atmosphere). Unlike the tree, the rhizome can

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never be fixed or reduced to a single point or radical core. Its movement is contrasted with the stasis of the arborescent model. In ‘Rhizome’ the vertical, arborescent model contributes to the creation of striated spaces. In the ebullient imagination of the two authors it appears that the latter slow down and even prevent movement of the kind they associate with emancipation and creativity . Instead of imitating a tree, Deleuze and Guattari exhort their readers to make connections by following multiple itineraries of investigation, much as a rhizome moves about the surface it creates as it

goes. Rhizomes form a territory that is neither fixed nor bears any clearly delimited borders. In addition to this novel way of

thinking, rhizomatically, the philosophers make further distinctions between smooth and striated spaces. Smooth spaces allow optimal circulation and favour connections. Over time, however, smooth spaces tend to become striated. They lose their flexibility. Nodes and barriers appear that slow down circulation and reduce the number of possible connections. Writing Anti-Oedipus in a post-1968 climate,

Deleuze and Guattari propose rhizomatic connections that continually rearticulate smooth space in order not only to criticise bourgeois capitalism with its institutions – the family, school, church, the medical establishment (especially psychiatry) – but also to avoid what they see as a deadened or zombified state of things. They criticise the state for erecting mental and social barriers and for creating oppositions instead of furthering connections. Institutions and the state are seen as the villains that control and immobilize people from the top down. They argue that when the family, the church or the ‘psy’ instill guilt in a child, mental barriers and borders are erected. The child’s creativity, indeed its mental and physical mobility are diminished in the process .

Such a condition cripples many adults who have trees growing in their heads . Deleuze and Guattari cite the example of Little Hans, a child analysed by Freud and whose creativity, they declare, was blocked by adults who wrongly interpreted his attempts to trace lines of flight within and through the structure of the family

into which he had been born (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 14). The state, too, functions by ordering, organizing and arresting movement, by creating relations of inclusion and exclusion. The state facilitates the creation of rigid and often ossified institutions. It enacts laws of inclusion and exclusion that order the family and the social in general. It tries to immobilize and dominate the social world. Yet the social cannot be entirely dominated. The organising régime of the order- word is never stable. It is constantly being transformed. Lines detach themselves from fuzzy borders and introduce variations in the constant of the dominant order. These variations can lead to a break and produce lines of flight that bring about entirely new configurations. Of importance in the late 1960s and 1970s is the doing away with institutions and the state

that represses subjects. In Anti-Oedipus, the philosophers show how institutions like the family and psychiatry repress sexuality and desire in order to maximize their revenue. They argue for the creation of smooth spaces where desire can circulate freely. In A Thousand Plateaus, the bourgeois state ordered by the rules of capitalism is criticised. Deleuze and Guattari rarely contexualise the ‘state’ in any specific historical or political terms. Constructing a universal history of sorts, the philosophers note that

the state apparatus appears at different times and in different places. This apparatus is always one of capture. It appropriates what they call a ‘nomadic war machine’ that never entirely disappears. The nomadic war machine eludes capture and traces its own lines of flight. It makes its own smooth spaces.

CONLEY 3: BECOMING-MINORITARIAN

Our politics resists codification by the State through a becoming-revolutionary that embraces a minoriatrian identity. Our project destabilizes order-words and withers away the borders of identity, blurring all of ontology into one immanent plane. Vote aff to engage a becoming-minoritarian as a strategy against State fascism. Conley in 6 (Verena Andermatt, professor of literature at Harvard, “Borderlines; Deleuze and the Contemporary World, 95-100)

Here Deleuze and Guattari have faith in ‘ subjects’ who undermine control by creating new lines of flight. These subjects deviate from the dominant order that uses ‘order-words’ to obtain control. Order-words produce repetitions and reduce differences. They produce molar structures and aggregates that make it more difficult for new lines to take flight. Yet something stirs, something affects a person enough to make her or him deviate from the prescriptive meanings of these words. Deleuze and Guattari would say that the subject molecularises the molar structures imposed by the state. People continually trace new maps and invent lines of flight that open smooth spaces. Deleuze and Guattari call it a ‘becoming-revolutionary’ of the people. In 1980, the philosophers also claim that humans inaugurate an age of becoming-minoritarian. The majority, symbolized by the 35-year-old, white, working male, they declare, no longer prevails. A new world is opening, a world of becoming-minoritarian in which women, Afro-American, post-colonial and queer subjects of all kinds put the dominant order into variation. Changes of this nature occur at the limit of mental and social

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territories, from unstable borders without any clearly defined division between inside and outside. They occur in and through affects, desire and language. For Deleuze and Guattari, becoming-minoritarian must be accompanied by a withering of the state and its institutions without which any generalized transformation would be impossible. Thought they make clear in ‘Rhizome’ that the connections they advocate are different from those of computers that function according to binary oppositions, the

philosophers keep open the possibilities of transformations of subjectivities by means of technologies (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 475).Deleuze and Guattari are keenly

aware both of the ways that technologies transform subjectivities and of writing in a postcolonial, geopolitical context. Nonetheless, they write about the state in a rather general and even monolithic way without specifically addressing a given ‘nation-state’. It is as if the real villain were a general European concept of state inherited from the romantic age. The institutional apparatus of the state dominates and orders its subjects, preventing them from being creative or pursuing their desires. It keeps them from making revolutionary connections (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 473). To construct rhizomes and create smooth spaces for an optimal circulation of desire, the state, armed with its ‘order-words’, has to be fought until , finally, it withers away and, in accord with any and every utopian scenario, all identity is undone.

AT: UTOPIANISM

Our aff is not about “in-round solvency” or some arbitrary pre/post-fiat distinction. We do not believe reading the 1AC will change the world. Rather, we present a political strategy and defend that an agent, when given the choice, should affirm our methodology.

No link – this isn’t anti-realist theory; it’s a philosophical connection to the world at large that allows our movement to have real implications.Colebrook 2 (Claire, Understanding Deleuze, p.69)

This is not an anti-realist theory. Deleuze is not arguing that reality is ‘just an image’ or is constructed by mind. On the contrary, reality in all its difference and complexity cannot be reduced to the extended images ‘we’ have formed of it. Nor can the mind be seen as the author or origin of all images. Reality itself is an infinite and inhuman plane of imaging: when one cell responds to another, or when a plant grows toward the sun, or when a virus mutates, we can refer to each of these as imaging. One event of life has apprehended a different event, creating two points, and each point of imaging has its own world. There are not subjects who then perceive; there is an impersonal plane of perceptions from which subjects are folded . It is from the specific manner of perception, its style or inflection, that the point of view of the soul or subject is effected: … the whole world is only a virtuality that currently exists only in the folds of the soul which convey it, the soul implementing inner pleats through which it

endows itself with a representation of the enclosed world. We are moving from inflection to inclusion in a subject , as if from the virtual to the real, inflection defining the fold, but inclusion defining the soul or the subject, that is, what envelops the fold , its final cause and its completed act (Deleuze 1993, p. 23). Human life or thought is just one type of imaging or perception among others; the error has been to think that the world is simply there, or transcendent, only to be viewed by the human knower. If we begin from immanence then there is no privileged point — such as mind, thinking or representation— that can adopt such an external point of view .

AT: IDENTITY GOODOur argument moves beyond identity: it’s not a question of European or rich or female: it’s about organizing struggles around desire and recognizing that all identity is immanent. Gilbert et al. 8 (Jeremy Gilbert, Éric Alliez, Claire Colebrook, Peter Hallward, Nicholas Thoburn - all have PhDs and whatever; "Deleuzian Politics? A Roundtable Discussion"; New Formations)

Claire: If you think about contemporary politics: all we have to do is move from talking about national liberation movements and workers’ movements to looking at some of the most tortured and vexed political situations, such as the relationship between indigenous Australian communities and European settled communities, and we can see that as long as we have a notion of collectivity that’s founded on the traditional notion of labour and its organisation, then we will always be necessarily disenfranchising and robbing those people of a potential

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form of individuation. This is what this is all about. The key question is how you can take part in some form of collective action without necessarily being identified as or

appealing to ‘classes’ in the old sense. So the ‘molecularisation’ of politics which Deleuze and Guattari propose is about how to get beyond a situation in which, within a given context of communication, there are things that can’t be heard. The question is: how can you have some maximum degree of inclusion with a minimal degree of identification? This is a crucial question if you want a global politics which can allow for notions of contamination, and which can get beyond the limitations of models of politics modelled on opposed pairs of identities: workers vs. capitalists, national liberation struggles vs globalist struggles. You can’t have that anymore: you can only have these extremely molecular, local, individuating political gestures. Peter: Well it depends on

the situation. There are contexts where something like an indigenous mobilisation verging on identity politics , grounded in an indigenous tradition - as in parts of Bolivia and parts of Guatemala , and other places - has been politically significant and is today politically significant . The same applies to contemporary forms of class struggle. Of course things are changing all the time, but the basic logic of class struggle hasn’t changed that much over time: the dynamics of exploitation and domination at issue today are all too familiar, and remain a

major factor in most if not all contemporary political situations. Claire: That’s why the model of political engagement needs to be re-thought, why in a Deleuzian register one always refers to a ‘becoming-x’. Because yes, there is a strategic need for molar or identifiable movements. But if they start to think ‘OK - this is our movement, this is what we are identified as, and this is the only way it’s going to work’, then apart from the philosophical problems of identity that run there, such a movement is also going to destroy itself precisely by being identified and stable. The only way a transformatory political project is going to work is if it has a notion of redefinition that is inbuilt.

*** FRAMEWORK ***2AC: FRAMEWORK CORE

1. The 1AC is offense to their interpretation:a) Gilbert Desire DA—reusing the same channels fails—politics isn’t like it was in the 30s, the masses are now a silent majority. They get it backwards—resolving struggle at the level of desire is key to effective movements. Extend Bell—liberalism represses desire means a politics of fear is inevitable which makes catastrophes inevitable, we solve

b) Churchill State DA—terminal defense—their form of political engagement fails—protests are designed and coordinated with the State to not interfere with its functionings—this means case is a disad to framework: if politics is flux then why do they desire structure? This allows protests to be recaptured by the State and prevents the attainment of revolutionary goals and forecloses revolutionary methods

c) Patton Engagement DA—our interrogation is key to determine a genuine line of flight, which means the neg framework produces assemblages of capture that cuts off the escapes. Their politics only results in despair and death that’s Bell. All of their evidence about creating democratic consensus and discussion codes resistance into fascist violence of determining the majority and the norm. Becoming-democratic accesses their internal links to the political through our re-mapping of revolutions.

d) Group DnGOvercoding DA— their conception of language as having a single use and definition is bad—they overcode other possibilities for language in the name of fairness—this makes discourse into death as discourse becomes a thing not to communicate with but to order people with and for others to

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unquestioningly obey—we stop being able to question the reasoning behind an order which turns their offense and means case is a DA

2. We meet – we defend the advocacy as presented in the 1AC—we think it would be a good idea if the president had their war powers restricted

3. Perm – we should have critical and policy affs.

4. Education outweighs fairness—what we learn from this debate is more portable than whether or not the neg got to read their ptix scenario—imperialism has suffused itself into discourse—prevents new forms of politics before they can be developed—aff methodology is key to challenge sovereignty and reclaim agencyHardt and Negri in 2k (Terrorists, awesome dudes, profs at places of respectable respectedness; Empire)

Ether is the third and final fundamental medium of imperial control. The management of communication, the structuring of the education system, and the regulation of culture appear today more than ever as sovereign prerogatives. All of this, however, dissolves in the ether . The contemporary systems of communication are not subordinated to sovereignty; on the contrary, sovereignty seems to be subordinated to communication-or actually, sovereignty is articulated through communications systems . In the field of communication, the paradoxes that bring about the

dissolution of territorial and/or national sovereignty are more clear than ever. The deterritorializing capacities of communication are unique: communication is not satisfied by limiting or weakening modern territorial sovereignty; rather it attacks the very possibility of linking an order to a space . It imposes a continuous and complete circulation of signs. Deterritorialization is the primary force and

circulation the form through which social communication manifests itself. In this way and in this ether, languages become functional to circulation and dissolve every sovereign relationship. Education and culture too cannot help submitting to the circulating society of the spectacle. Here we reach an extreme limit

of the process of the dissolution of the relationship between order and space. At this point we cannot conceive this relationship except in another space, an elsewhere that cannot in principle be contained in the articulation of sovereign acts. The space of communication is completely deterritorialized. It is absolutely other with respect to the residual spaces that we have been analyzing in terms of the monopoly of physical force and the definition of monetary measure. Here it is a question not of residue but of metamorphosis : a metamorphosis of all the elements of political economy and state theory. Communication is the form of capitalist production in which capital has succeeded in submitting society entirely and globally to its regime, suppressing all alternative paths. If ever an alternative is to be proposed, it will have to arise from within the society of the real subsumption and demonstrate all the contradictions at the heart of it . These three means of control refer us again to the three tiers of the imperial pyramid of power. The bomb is a monarchic power, money

aristocratic, and ether democratic. It might appear in each of these cases as though the reins of these mechanisms were held by the United States. It might appear as if the United States were the new Rome, or a cluster of new Romes: Washington (the bomb), New York (money), and Los Angeles (ether). Any such territorial conception of imperial space, however, is continually destabilized by the fundamental flexibility, mobility, and deterritorialization at the core of the imperial apparatus. Perhaps the monopoly off force and the regulation of money can be given partial territorial determinations, but communication cannot. Communication has become the central element that establishes the relations of production, guiding capitalist development and also transforming productive forces. This dynamic produces an extremely open situation: here the centralized locus of power has to confront the power of productive subjectivities, the power of all those who contribute to the interactive production of communication. Here in this circulating domain of imperial domination over the new forms of production, communication is most widely disseminated in capillary forms.

5. No abuse – no link spikes, we’ll give them structural disads, CP’s, Ks, and case

6. C/I – the affirmative should defend the methodology of their policy option

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Solves their offense – includes disads to the reduction of presidential war powers, but doesn’t arbitrarily exclude topical critical affs—they get terror DAs, strong exec good DAs, heg good DAs, etc. Ground solves the impact to limits because they always get a neg strat

7. Abuse inevitable—small, tricky affs and creative teams with a huge lit base and minimal agreement on core resolutional terms

GODDARD

Uncritical affirmation of the rez is endorsed by managerialism whose goal is oppressive predictability—we engage a language of desire that creates new forms of the politicalGoddard in 2k6 (July 6th, 2006: The Encounter between Guattari and Berandi and the Post – Modern Era “Felix and Alice in Wonderland”; http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpbifo1.htm)What this type of radio achieved most of all was the short-circuiting of representation in both the aesthetic sense of representing the social realities they dealt with and in the political sense of the delegate or the authorised spokesperson, in favour of generating a space of direct communication in which, as Guattari put it, “it is as if, in some immense, permanent meeting place—given the size of the potential audience—anyone, even the most hesitant, even those with the weakest voices, suddenly have the possibility of expressing themselves whenever they wanted. In these conditions, one can expect certain truths to find a new matter of expression.” In this sense,

Radio Alice was also an intervention into the language of media; the transformation from what Guattari calls the police languages of the managerial milieu and the University to a direct language of desire: “direct speech , living speech, full of confidence , but also hesitation, contradiction , indeed even absurdity, is charged with desire . And it is always this aspect of desire that spokespeople, commentators and beaureaucrats of every stamp tend to reduce, to filter. [...] Languages of desire invent new means and tend to lead straight to action; they begin by ‘touching,’ by provoking laughter, by moving people, and then they make people want to ‘move out,’ towards those who speak and toward those stakes of

concern to them.” It is this activating dimension of popular free radio that most distinguishes it from the usual pacifying operations of the mass media and that also posed the greatest threat to the authorities ; if people were just sitting at home listening to strange political broadcasts, or being urged to participate in conventional, organised political actions such as demonstrations that would be tolerable but

once you start mobilising a massive and unpredictable political affectivity and subjectivation that is autonomous, self-referential and self-reinforcing, then this is a cause for panic on the part of the forces of social order, as was amply demonstrated in Bologna in 1977. Finally, in the much more poetic and manifesto-like preface with which Guattari introduces the translation of texts and documents form Radio Alice, he comes to a conclusion which can perhaps stand as an embryonic formula for the emergence of the post-media era as anticipated by Radio Alice and the Autonomia movement more generally: In Bologna and Rome, the thresholds of a revolution without any relation to the ones that have overturned history up until today have been illuminated, a revolution that will throw out not only capitalist regimes but also the bastions of beaureaucratic socialism [...] , a revolution, the fronts of which will perhaps embrace entire continents but which will also be concentrated sometimes on a specific neighbourhood, a factory, a school. Its wagers concern just as much the great economic and technological choices as attitudes, relations to the world and singularities of desire. Bosses, police officers, politicians, beuareaucrats, professors and psycho-analysts will in vain conjugate their efforts to stop it, channel it, recuperate it, they will in vain sophisticate, diversify and miniaturise their weapons to the infinite, they will no longer succede in gathering up the immense movement of flight and the multitude of molecular mutations of desire that it has already unleashed. The police have liquidated Alice—its animators are hunted, condemned, imprisoned, their sites are pillaged

—but its work of revolutionary deterritorialisation is pursued ineluctably right up to the nervous fibres of its persecutors.” This is because the revolution unleashed by Alice was not reducible to a political or media form but was rather an explosion of mutant desire capable of infecting the entire social field because of its slippery ungraspability and irreducibility to existing sociopolitical categories. It leaves the forces of order scratching their heads because they don’t know where the crack-up is coming from since it doesn’t rely on pre-existing identities or even express a future programme but rather only expresses immanently its own movement of auto-referential self-constitution, the proliferation of desires capable of resonating even with the forces of order themselves which now have to police not only these dangerous outsiders but also their own desires. This shift from fixed political subjectivities and a specified programme is the key to the transformation to a post-political politics and indeed to a post-media era in that politics becomes an unpredictable, immanent process of becoming rather than the fulfilment of a transcendental narrative. In today’s political language one could say that what counts is the pure potential that another world is possible and the movement towards it rather than speculation as to how that world will be organised. As Guattari concludes: “ The point of view of the Alicians on this question is the following: they consider that the movement that arrives at destroying the gigantic capitalist-beaureaucratic machine will be, a fortiori, completely capable of constructing an other world—the collective competence in the matter will come to it in the course of the journey, without it being necessary, at the present stage to outline projections of societal change.”

CLAUDE

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The State isn’t a monolith, it’s a plurality—our theory of desire is key to true political educationClaude 88 (Prof. of Gov. and Foreign Affairs, U of VA, States and the Global System, p. 18)This view of the state as an institutional monolith is fostered by the notion of sovereignty, which calls up the image of the monarch, presiding majestically over his kingdom.

Sovereignty emphasizes the singularity of the state, its monopoly of authority, its unity of command and its capacity to speak with one voice. Thus, France wills, Iran demands, China intends, New Zealand promises and the Soviet Union insists. One all too easily conjures up the picture of a single-minded and purposeful state that decides exactly what it wants to achieve, adopts coherent policies intelligently adapted to its objectives, knows what it is doing, does what it intends and always has its act together . This view of the state is reinforced by political scientists’ emphasis upon the concept of

policy and upon the thesis that governments derive policy from calculations of national interest. We thus take it for granted that states act internationally in accordance with rationality conceived and consciously constructed schemes of action, and we implicitly refuse to consider the possibility that alternatives to policy-directed behavior may have importance – alternatives such as random, reactive, instinctual, habitual and conformist behaviour. Our rationalistic assumption that states do what they have planned to do tends to inhibit the discovery that states sometimes do what they feel compelled to do, or what they have the opportunity to do, or what they have usually done, or what other states are doing, or whatever the line of least resistance would seem to suggest.

Academic preoccupation with the making of policy is accompanied by academic neglect of the execution of policy. We seem to assume that once the state has calculated its interest and contrived a policy to further that interest, the carrying out of policy is the virtually automatic result of the routine functioning of the bureaucratic mechanism of the state. I am inclined to call this the Genesis theory of public administration , taking as my text the passage: ‘And God said, Let there be light; and there was light’. I suspect that in the realm of government, policy execution rarely follows so promptly and inexorably from policy statement .

GREENE AND HICKS

Switch-side bad—creates a bad form of education that undermines political change by leaving people disengaged from advocacy—our interpretation of debate as an activity where people should be responsible for their convictions solvesGreene and Hicks 5 (Ronald Walter and Darrin; debate legends, LOST CONVICTIONS Debating both sides and the ethical self-fashioning of liberal citizens, Cultural Studies Vol. 19, No. 1 January 2005)Murphy’s case against the ethics of debating both sides rested on what he thought to be a simple and irrefutable rhetorical principle: A public utterance is a public commitment. In

Murphy’s opinion, debate was best imagined as a species of public speaking akin to public advocacy on the affairs of the day. If debate is a form of public speaking , Murphy reasoned, and a public utterance entails a public commitment, then speakers have an ethical obligation to study the question, discuss it with others until they know their position, take a stand and then / and only then / engage in public advocacy in favour of their viewpoint . Murphy had no doubt that intercollegiate debate was a form of public advocacy and was, hence, rhetorical, although this point would be severely attacked by proponents of switch-side debating. Modern debating, Murphy claimed, ‘is geared to the public platform and to rhetorical, rather than dialectical principles’ (p. 7). Intercollegiate debate was rhetorical, not dialectical, because

its propositions were specific and timely rather than speculative and universal. Debaters evidenced their claims by appeals to authority and opinion rather than formal logic, and debaters appealed to an audience, even if that audience was a single person sitting in the back of a room at a relatively isolated debate tournament. As such, debate as a species of public argument should be held to the ethics of the platform. We would surely hold in contempt any public actor who spoke with equal force, and without genuine conviction, for both sides of a public policy question. Why, asked Murphy, would we exempt students from the same ethical obligation? Murphy’s master ethic / that a public utterance entails a public commitment / rested on a classical rhetorical theory that refuses the modern distinctions between cognitive claims of truth (referring to the objective world), normative claims of right (referring to the intersubjective world), and expressive claims of sincerity (referring to the subjective state of the speaker), although this distinction, and Murphy’s refusal to make it, would surface as a major point of contention in the 1960s for the proponents of debating both sides.7 Murphy is avoiding the idea that the words spoken by a debater can be divorced from

what the speaker actually believes to be true, right, or good (expressive claims of sincerity). For Murphy, to stand and publicly proclaim that one affirmed the resolution entailed both a claim that the policy being advocated was indeed the best possible choice, given extant social conditions, and that one sincerely believed that her or his arguments were true and right. In other words, a judge should not make a distinction between the merits of the case presented and the sincerity of the advocates presenting it; rather, the reasons supporting a policy and the ethos of the speakers are mutually constitutive forms of proof. The interdependency of logos and ethos was not only a matter of rhetorical principle for Murphy but also a foundational premise of public reason in a democratic society. Although he never explicitly states why this is true, most likely because he assumed it to be self-evident, a charitable interpretation of Murphy’s position, certainly a more generous interpretation than his

detractors were willing to give, would show that his axiom rests on the following argument: If public reason is to have any legitimate force,

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auditors must believe that advocates are arguing from conviction and not from greed, desire or naked self-interest. If auditors believe that advocates are insincere, they will not afford legitimacy to their claims and will opt to settle disputes through force or some seemingly neutral modus vivendi such as voting or arbitration. Hence, sincerity is a necessary element of public reason and, therefore, a necessary condition of critical deliberation in a democratic society . For Murphy, the assumption of sincerity is intimately articulated to the notion of ethical argumentation in a

democratic political culture. If a speaker were to repudiate this assumption by advocating contradictory positions in a public forum, it would completely undermine her or his ethos and result in the loss of the means of identification with an audience. The real danger of undermining the assumption of sincerity was not that individual speakers would be rendered ineffective /

although this certainly did make training students to debate both sides bad rhetorical pedagogy. The ultimate danger of switch-side debating was that it would engender a distrust of public advocates. The public would come to see the debaters who would come to occupy public offices as ‘public liars’ more interested in politics as vocation than as a calling. Debate would be seen as a game of power rather than the method of democracy .

AT: CURRENT EVENTS

Our theories may be old but they’re still relevant—prefer the longevity of our criticism to current events that have no meaningBrown 5 (Wendy, Professor of Poli Sci, UC Berkeley, “Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics”, p.56)

The rebuff of critical theory as untimely provides the core matter of the affirmative case for it . Critical theory is essential in dark times not for the sake of sustaining utopian hopes, making flamboyant interventions, or staging irreverent protests, but rather to contest the very senses of time invoked to declare critique untimely . If

the charge of untimeliness inevitably also fixes time, then disrupting this fixity is crucial to keeping the times from closing in on us. It is a way of reclaiming the present from the conservative hold on it that is borne by the charge of untimeliness. To insist on the value of untimely political critique is not, then, to refuse the problem of time or timing in politics but rather to contest settled accounts of what time it is, what the times are, and what political tempo and temporality we should hew to in political life. Untimeliness deployed as an effective intellectual and political strategy, far from being a gesture of indifference to time, is a bid to reset time.

Intellectual and political strategies of successful untimeliness therefore depend on a close engagement with time in every sense of the word. They are concerned

with timing and tempo. They involve efforts to grasp the times by thinking against the times. They attempt, as Nietzsche put it, to "overcome the present" by puncturing the present's "overvaluation of itself," an overcoming whose aim is to breathe new possibility into the age. If our times are dark, what could be more important?

AT: RORTY/WALT/SHIVLEY

Seeking macropolitical order is the squo—desire is inclined towards order and against unpredictability—our method is key to political changeBallantyne 2007 (Andrew, Tectonic Cultures Research Group at Newcastle University , "Deleuze and Guattari for Architects" 49-50)The importance of pattern recognition in music and nature are further explored in connection with emergent phenomena in Douglas Hofstadter’s book Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979) ‘a metaphorical fugue on minds and machines’ and one of the foundational works on artificial intelligence. Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) is – of course – the pre-eminent emblem for the idea of counterpoint, and Hofstadter’s influence has been such that perhaps we are no longer surprised to find Bach drawn into the analysis of what it is to think. Uexküll’s vision of nature, as endorsed by Deleuze and Guattari, infers an immanent and pervasive Bach-like sensibility in nature, or at least in nature’s score; and we should not separate the human from the natural: Proust infers it in bourgeois society. The Baron de Charlus emboldens himself by humming a tune to himself as he sets off in pursuit of his next sexual encounter (with the tailor Jupien) though at this point in the text his purpose is not fully explicit. It becomes clearer in the next sentence, by turning the chase into a little fugue: ‘At the same instant as M. de Charlus disappeared through the gate humming like a great bumble-bee, another, a real one this time, flew into the courtyard. For all I knew this might be the one so long awaited by the orchid, coming to bring it that rare pollen without which it must remain a virgin’. And then the metaphorical orchid reappears: ‘I was distracted from following the gyrations of the insect, for, a few minutes later, engaging my attention afresh, Jupien [. . .] returned, followed by the Baron’ (Proust, 1913–27, 4, 7). The refrain, ritournelle, returns repeatedly in a poignant ‘little phrase’ composed by the fictional character Vinteuil. As it is a fictional little tune, we have never actually heard it, but in the novel we come to recognize it in precisely a musical way

when it returns and brings with it a trailing cloud of memories, which are, by the time it happens, our own as well as those of the books’ characters. ‘We require just a little order to protect us from chaos’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, 201). We are highly predisposed to recognize order and attach significance to it. We feel secure when there is some order of a kind that we recognize, and at the same time we discount everything else as being somehow beside the point. We are surprisingly susceptible to ‘conspiracy theories’, which see an underlying order in unconnected events, and the paranoid sees order

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everywhere, organized so as to persecute him. There are times when chaos might seem to be on the point of overwhelming us, but if we have managed to regulate our lives in such a way that we have habits that help us to do the things we’re trying to do, then these eruptions of chaos will be rare, and will be experienced as crises. If I miss my usual train, then I feel disappointed and inconvenienced; I might need to make a phone call, but I don’t feel that chaos is upon us. But when, on my way to the station, I start to feel my body changing into a wolf’s, then – whether I panic or not – I experience something much more like chaos; at least until I have worked out what is going on.

Chaos in the Deleuze and Guattari world is a body without organs, the schizophrenic body, the plane of immanence, where things are forming and being taken apart as fast as they form. Emergent order is held at bay, and never emerges. A little order – a tune, a heartbeat – and the chaos recedes; a possibility emerges from a plateau of stability. Deleuze and Guattari’s image of chaos is far from inert. It is continually making and unmaking: Chaos is defined not so much by its disorder as by the infinite speed with which every form taking shape in it vanishes. It is a void that is not a nothingness but a virtual, containing all possible particles and drawing out all possible forms , which spring up only to disappear immediately, without consistency or reference, without consequence. Chaos is an infinite speed of birth and disappearance. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1991, 118)

AT: PRAGMATISM

The aff is the most pragmatic action—we’re just a change in the way pragmatism looks—prevents apathyWeissberg 2004 (Robert Weissberg is Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University of Illinois-Urbana., Society “Abandoning Politics,” May/June, http://transactionpub.metapress.com/app/home/content.asp)

The conventional wisdom tells us that Americans are generally politically   apathetic   and,   judging   by   re- cent voting trends this situation may be deteriorating. Self-appointed civic guardians predictably express pro- found unease about this disengagement and offer up a plethora  of  remedies,  everything  from  user-friendly ballots  to  electronic  versions  of  democracy  to  reenergize political life. Academics seem especially alarmed

t hat apathy will impede impoverished minorities from climbing up the socio-economic ladder while allowing “special interest” to ride roughshod over the common good. Alas, these discussions are quite superficial and misdirected. At most, those damning apathy glibly offer unproven clichés about “rising alienation” and similar banalities as if Americans were suddenly paralyzed to shape the world around them. Laments about lethargy fail to grasp that this disengagement only reflects a shift in choice of weapons , not laziness. Those grumbling about idle parents reluctant to   pressure   government   for   better   schools   incorrectly assume that rejecting politics will necessarily guarantee shoddy education. Ditto for those who seem “indifferent” about crime, the environment, high taxes and just about all other maladies —misery awaits those who sit on the sidelines. Reality

is more nuanced and, critically, this reflexive bewailing of apathy reflects a state centered  view  of  progress  so,  ipso   facto,   political   disengagement preordains   failure.  Fortunately, the  United States is not a totalitarian system in which the government is the only game in town. This myopic focus on state-centered solutions  also  obscures  an  important emerging fact. To the extent that abandoning politically directed remedies is not ideologically uniform, the civic landscape  will  soon  be profoundly  altered.  In  a  nut- shell,  the  Left  with  its  deep  commitment  to  political solutions will continue to dominate policy-making while the nation as a whole quietly moves rightward.

AT: SECURITY STUDIES

The state already controls the information sphere surrounding war – we control uniqueness, their strategy for understanding war is informed by the very actors which have incentive to perpetrate war. Only our affirmation of a politics outside the resonant force of the state can create effective changeLucas Walsh and Julien Barbara 2006, Speed, International Security, and ‘‘NewWar’’ Coverage in Cyberspace, Journal of Computer-Media Communication, JStorThe ways that Western governments represent war to domestic populations and seek to establish the frame of discourse in which war is understood continues to be a central preoccupation of media theorists and commentators. The work of theorist Paul Virilio provides a useful starting point for critiquing the relationship between contemporary technology, politics, and war

coverage in cyberspace. His critique highlights how the acceleration and intensification of war coverage in cyberspace produces political effects of disorientation, which, as will be explored below, have been utilized by states to justify new

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foreign policy directions. Virilio raises some important questions about the political implications of speed that arise from intensive use of ICTs. Virilio does not present a systematic theory of technology per se (Wark, 1988), but rather a dystopian vision in which cyberspace and instantaneous globalized information flows effect a collapse of territorial distance and compromise state sovereignty (Virilio, 1995a). Arguing that cyberspace is a new form of perspective free of any previous spatial reference, Virilio (1995b) suggests that the sheer speed of information flows arising from mass ICTs impact how people engage with the world around them in profoundly political ways. Virilio evokes the geometric idea of a vector—a line of fixed length and direction but with no fixed position—to convey the notion of a trajectory along which bodies or information, with the potential to traverse a given

territory, pass (Wark, 1988). Manuel Castells describes a similar view of the information society, wherein the spaces in which humans interact are increasingly shifting according to the ‘‘variable geometry’’ created by electronic networks, ‘‘where the meaning of each locale escapes its history, culture or institutions, to be constantly redefined by an abstract network of information strategies and decisions’’

(Castells, 1985, pp. 15, 23). By collapsing territorial distance, Virilio argues, ICTs compromise political sovereignty by enabling ‘‘a parallel information market’’ of propaganda and illusion. According to Virilio (1995a, p. 57) ‘‘[t]erritorial distance and media proximity make an explosive cocktail’’ with important political consequences. Rather than engendering proximity, these information vectors have the potential to transform political relations entirely. In Virilio’s terms, ICTs are transforming social and political relations by facilitating vectors with increasing

acceleration in which the boundaries between entertainment, information, communication, and human/computer interaction are eroded and reconstituted by technological change. For Virilio, the speed and intensity of instantaneous information and communication flows promotes an overwhelming loss of orientation that influences political formation. ‘‘With acceleration there is no more here and there, only the mental confusion of near and far, present and future, real

and unreal—a mix of history, stories, and the hallucinatory utopia of communication technologies’’ (Virilio, 1995a, p. 35). The convergence of news and entertainment media conjures a seamless integration of communication, entertainment, commerce, and politics, through which the viewer is visually bombarded by a disorienting array of choice between news, fiction, ‘‘edutainment,’’ and ‘‘infotainment’’—all of which are delivered instantaneously in the ‘‘here and now.’’ As news, ‘‘reality television,’’ fictions, and various levels of human and computer-mediated interaction take place through this electronic portal, the social and political impacts of the proliferation of virtual environments and multiple realities intensify.

AT: GRAMMAR/INTERPRETATION

Their arguments overcode language and organize it into a State war machine. Their language of politics is the language of the despot: voting negative turns our text into a monument to fascism. Deleuze and Guattari 80 (Gilles and Felix, philosophers and rhizomes, A Thousand Plateaus pg 376-378, dml)

But noology is confronted by counterthoughts, which are violent in their acts and discontinuous in their appearances, and whose existence is mobile in history. These are the acts of a "private thinker," as opposed to the public professor: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, or even Shestov. Wherever they dwell, it is the steppe or

the desert. They destroy images. Nietzsche's Schopenhauer as Educator is perhaps the greatest critique ever directed against the image of thought and its relation to the State. "Private thinker," however, is not a satisfactory expression, because it exaggerates interiority, when it is a question of outside thought.44 To place

thought in an immediate relation with the outside, with the forces of the outside, in short to make thought a war machine, is a strange undertaking whose precise procedures can be studied in Nietzsche (the aphorism, for example, is very different from the maxim, for a maxim, in the republic of

letters, is like an organic State act or sovereign judgment, whereas an aphorism always awaits its meaning from a new external force , a final force that must conquer or subjugate it, utilize it). There is another reason why "private thinker" is not a good expression.Although it is true that this counterthought attests to an absolute solitude, it is an extremely populous solitude, like the desert itself, a solitude already intertwined with a people to come, one that invokes and awaits that people, existing only through it, though it is not yet here. "We are lacking that final force, in the absence of a people to

bear us. We are looking for that popular support." Every thought is already a tribe, the opposite of a State . And this form of exteriority of

thought is not at all symmetrical to the form of Anteriority. Strictly speaking, symmetry exists only between different poles or focal points of interiority. But the form of exteriority of thought—the force that is always external to itself, or the final force, the «th power— is not at all another image in opposition to the image inspired by the State apparatus. It is , rather, a force that destroys both the image and its copies, the model and its reproductions, every possibility of subordinating thought to a model of the True , the Just, or the Right (Cartesian truth, Kantian just, Hegelian right, etc.). A "method" is the striated space of the cogitatio universalis and draws a path that must be followed from one point

to another. But the form of exteriority situates thought in a smooth space that it must occupy without counting, and for which there is no possible method, no conceivable reproduction, but only relays, intermezzos, resurgences. Thought is like the

Vampire; it has no image, either to constitute a model of or to copy. In the smooth space of Zen, the arrow does not go from one point to another but is taken up at any point , to be sent to any other point, and tends to permute with the archer and the target. The problem of the war machine is that of relaying, even with modest means, not that of the architectonic model or the monument. An ambulant people of relayers, rather than a model society. "Nature propels the philosopher into mankind like an arrow; it takes no aim but hopes the arrow will stick somewhere. But countless times it misses and is

depressed at the fact The artist and the philosopher are evidence against the purposiveness of nature as regards the

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means it employs, though they are also first-rate evidence as to the wisdom of its purpose. They strike home at only a few, while they ought to strike home at everybody—and even these few are not struck with the force with which the philosopher and artist launch their shot."45We have in mind in particular two pathetic texts, in the sense that in them thought is truly a pathos (an antilogos and an antimythos). One is a text by Artaud, in his letters to Jacques Riviere, explaining that thought operates on the basis of a central breakdown, that it lives solely by its own incapacity to take on form, bringing into relief only traits of expression in a material, developing peripherally, in a pure milieu of exteriority, as a function of singularities impossible to universalize, of circumstances impossible to interiorize. The other is the text by Kleist, "On the Gradual Formation of Ideas in Speech" ("Uber die allmachliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden"), in which Kleist denounces the central interiority of the concept as a means of control—the control of speech, of language, but also of affects, circumstances and even chance. He distinguishes this from thought as a proceeding and a process, a bizarre anti-Platonic dialogue, an antidialogue between brother and sister where one speaks before knowing while the other relays before having understood: this, Kleist says, is the thought of the Gemut, which proceeds like a general in a war machine should, or like a body charged with electricity, with pure intensity. "I mix inarticulate sounds, lengthen transitional terms, as well as using appositions

when they are unnecessary." Gain some time, and then perhaps renounce, or wait. The necessity of not having control over language , of being a foreigner in one's own tongue, in order to draw speech to oneself and " bring something incomprehensible into the world." Such is the form of exteriority, the relation between brother and sister, the becomingwoman of the

thinker, the becoming-thought of the woman: the Gemut that refuses to be controlled, that forms a war machine . A thought grappling with exterior forces instead of being gathered up in an interior form, operating by relays instead of forming an image; an event-thought, a haecceity, instead of a subject-thought, a problem-thought instead of an essencethought or theorem; a thought that appeals to a people instead of taking itself for a

government ministry. Is it by chance that whenever a "thinker" shoots an arrow, there is a man of the State , a shadow or an

image of a man of the State, that counsels and admonishes him, and wants to assign him a targe t or "aim"? Jacques Riviere does not hesitate to respond to Artaud: work at it, keep on working, things will come out all right, you will succeed in finding a method and in learning to express clearly what you think in essence (cogitatio universalis). Riviere is not a head of State, but he would not be the last in the Nouvelle Revue Francaise to mistake himself for the secret prince in a republic of letters or the gray eminence in a State of right. Lenz and Kleist confronted Goethe, that grandiose genius, of all men of letters a veritable man of the State. But that is

not the worst of it: the worst is the way the texts of Kleist and Artaud themselves have ended up becoming monuments, inspiring a model to be copied—a model far more insidious than the others—for the artificial stammerings and innumerable tracings that claim to be their equal.

FOUCAULT

The desire for control at the core of their framework is the problem with squo politics—our methodology solves engagement and joyFoucault 72 [Anti-Oedipus pg. xiii-iv]

During the years 1945-1965 (I am referring to Europe), there was a certain way of thinking correctly, a certain style of political discourse , a certain ethics of the intellectual. One had to be on familiar terms with Marx, not let one's dreams stray too far from Freud . And one had to treat sign-systems-the signifier-with the greatest respect. These were the three requirements that made the

strange occupation of writing and speaking a measure of truth about oneself and one's time acceptable. Then came the five brief, impassioned, jubilant, enigmatic years. At the gates of our world, there was Vietnam, of course, and the first major blow to the powers that be. But here, inside our walls, what exactly was taking place? An amalgam of revolutionary and anti-repressive politics ? A war fought on two fronts: against social exploitation and psychic repression? A surge of libido modulated by the class struggle? Perhaps. At any rate, it is this familiar, dualistic interpretation that has laid claim to the events of those years. The dream that cast its spell, between the First World War and fascism, over the dreamiest parts of Europe-the Germany of Wilhelm Reich, and the France of the surrealists-had returned and set fire to reality itself: Marx and Freud in the same incandescent light. But is that really what happened? Had the utopian project of the thirties been resumed, this time on the scale of historical practice? Or was there, on the contrary, a movement toward political struggles that no longer conformed to the model that Marxist tradition had prescribed? Toward an experience and a technology of desire that were no longer Freudian. It is true that the old banners were raised, but the combat shifted and spread into new zones. Anti-Oedipus shows first of all how much ground has been covered. But it does much more than that. It wastes no time in discrediting the old idols, even though it does have a great deal of fun with Freud. Most important, it motivates us to go further. It would be a mistake to read Anti-Oedipus as the new theoretical reference (you know, that much-heralded theory that

finally encompasses everything, that finally totalizes and reassures, the one we are told we "need so badly" in our age of dispersion and specialization where "hope" is lacking). One must not look for a "philosophy" amid the extraordinary profusion of new notions and surprise concepts: Anti-Oedipus is not a flashy Hegel. I think that Anti-Oedipus can best be read as an "art ," in the sense that is conveyed by the term "erotic art," for example. Informed by the seemingly abstract notions of multiplicities, flows, arrangements, and connections, the analysis of

the relationship of desire to reality and to the capitalist "machine" yields answers to concrete questions. Questions that are less concerned with why this or that than with how to proceed. How does one introduce desire into thought, into discourse, into action ? How can and must desire deploy its forces within the political domain and grow more intense in the process of overturning the established order? Ars erotica, ars theoretica, ars politica. Whence the three adversaries confronted by Anti-Oedipus. Three adversaries who do not have the same strength, who represent varying degrees of danger, and whom the book combats in different ways: 1. The political ascetics, the sad militants, the terrorists of theory, those who would preserve the pure order of politics and political discourse. Bureaucrats of the revolution and civil servants of Truth. 2. The poor technicians of desire-psychoanalysts and

semiologists of every sign and symptom-who would subjugate the multiplicity of desire to the twofold law of structure and lack. 3. Last but not least, the major enemy, the

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strategic adversary is fascism (whereas Anti-Oedipus' opposition to the others is more of a tactical engagement). And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini - which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively - but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us . I would say that Anti-Oedipus (may its authors forgive me) is a book of ethics, the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a long time (perhaps that explains why its success was not limited to a particular "readership" : being anti-oedipul has become a life style, a way of thinking and living). How does one keep from being fascist, even (especially) when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant? How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism? How do we ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our behavior? The Christian moralists sought out the traces of the flesh lodged deep within the soul. Deleuze and Guattari, for their part, pursue the slightest traces of fascism in the body. Paying a modest tribute to Saint Francis de Sales, * {*A seventeenth-century priest and Bishop of

Geneva, known for his Introduction to the Devout Life} one might say that Anti-Oedipus is an Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life. This art of living counter to all forms of fascism , whether already present or impending, carries with it a certain number of essential principles which I would summarize as follows if I were to make this great book into a manual or guide to everyday life: Free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia. Develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction , and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization. Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an

access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic . Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is

abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force. Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action. Do not demand of politics that it restore the "rights" of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to "de-

individualize" by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generator of de-individualization . Do not become enamored of power..

SPANOS

The conditional nature of their advocacy is independently bad. Debate should not be a training ground for unethical convictions – the arguments we present have real effects on our life worlds and the way we develop our relationship towards the state. Their interpretation of arguments as conditional ensures neoconervatism and divorces ethics from the politicalSpanos 2k4 (William Spanos in Joe Millers’ book Cross-ex (pg. 467) 2004; google it)

Dear Joe MIller, Yes, the statement about the American debate circuit you refer to was made by me, though some years ago. I strongly believed then –and still do, even though a certain

uneasiness about “objectivity” has crept into the “philosophy of debate” — that debate in both the high schools and colleges in this country is assumed to take place nowhere, even though the issues that are debated are profoundly historical, which means that positions are always represented from the perspective of power , and a matter of life and death. I find it grotesque that in the debate world,

it doesn’t matter which position you take on an issue — say, the United States’ unilateral wars of preemption — as long as you “score points”. The world we live in is a world entirely dominated by an “exceptionalist” America which has perennially claimed that it has been chosen by God or History to fulfill his/its “errand in the wilderness.” That claim is powerful because American economic and military power lies behind it. And any alternative position in such a world is virtually powerless. Given this inexorable historical reality, to assume, as the protocols of debate do, that all positions are equal is to efface the imbalances of power that are the fundamental condition of history and to annul the Moral authority inhering in the position of the oppressed. This is why I have said that the appropriation of my interested work on education and empire to this transcendental debate world constitute a travesty of my intentions. My scholarship is not “disinterested.” It is militant and intended to ameliorate as much as possible the pain and suffering of those who have been oppressed by the “democratic” institutions that have power precisely by way of showing that their language if “truth,” far from being “disinterested” or “objective” as it is always claimed, is informed by the will to power over all manner of “others.” This is also why I told my interlocutor that he and those in the debate world who felt like him should call into question the traditional

“objective” debate protocols and the instrumentalist language they privilege in favor of a concept of debate and of language in which life and death mattered. I am very much aware that the arrogant neocons who now saturate the government of the Bush administration — judges, pentagon planners, state department officials, etc. learned their “disinterested” argumentative skills in the high school and college debate societies and that, accordingly, they have become masters at disarming the just causes of the oppressed. This kind leadership will reproduce itself (along with the invisible oppression it perpetrates) as long as the training ground and the debate protocols from which it emerges remains in tact. A revolution in the debate world must occur. It must force that unworldly world down into the historical arena where positions make a difference . To invoke the late Edward Said, only such a revolution will be capable of “deterring democracy”

52“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE LEONARDI(in Noam Chomsky’s ironic phrase), of instigating the secular critical consciousness that is, in my mind, the sine qua non for avoiding the immanent global disaster towards which the blind arrogance of Bush Administration and his neocon policy makers is leading.

1AR: W/M

___ Extend 2AC-1, we meet. We defend our topical advocacy statement. They can read structural disads to the reduction of presidential powers and we won’t dispute the link.

___ We create a middle ground between Loyola’s death aff and Harvard’s heg debates – our aff criticizes prez powers without straying from the topic.

1AR: FWK = EXTRA-T/NOT A VOTER

___ Extend 2AC-2 – Framework isn’t an offensive reason to vote neg, it just means they get to weigh their disad against the case.

___ Extend 2AC-4 – They difference between the aff and their violation is so marginal that you shouldn’t vote us down on the 1% of offense alone they might win. We don’t exclude fiat, which means there’s no impact to voting neg.

___ Extend 2AC-6 – Framework is an extra-T construct, it isn’t mandated by “should.” No resolutional reason to vote neg. If we win the content of the 1ac we win a reason talking about the plan is good, means framework isn’t a voter.

1AR: REASONABILITY

___ Our interpretation of reasonability is that if there isn’t a clear instance of in round abuse you should vote aff. The neg has the burden to prove in-round abuse beyond a reasonable doubt.Prefer our interpretation:

1) Education – prevents the aff from going for theory every aff round against the CP—our interp solves your form of education2) Fairness – it’s reciprocal, make them prove abuse or theory becomes another arbitrary tool to abuse the neg for being strategic

1AR: PREDICTABILITY/LIMITS

___ Extend 2AC-5 – We turn their limits arguments, engaging in political calculations makes predictability impossible. 3 arguments:

1) Uniqueness - There are hundreds of things Obama could do tomorrow that would change the politics disad, but philosophy is never revolutionized all at once. There are less philosophies than there are potential political scenarios.

2) No impact – even if the topic gets a little bigger, our education outweighs the few specific case arguments they might lose.

3) Education – their obsession with education about current political events distract you from real routes to engage the political and destroys real education. The case is a disad to their limits arg: you should break down their conception of limits because it’s the only way to fight fascism.

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4) Brown 5 (Wendy, Professor of Poli Sci, UC Berkeley, “Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics”, p.56)

5) The rebuff of critical theory as untimely provides the core matter of the affirmative case for it . Critical

theory is essential in dark times not for the sake of sustaining utopian hopes, making flamboyant interventions, or staging irreverent protests, but rather to contest the very senses of time invoked to declare critique untimely. If the charge of untimeliness inevitably also fixes time, then disrupting this fixity is crucial to keeping the times from closing in on us.

It is a way of reclaiming the present from the conservative hold on it that is borne by the charge of untimeliness. To insist on the value of untimely political critique is not, then, to refuse the problem of time or timing in politics but rather to contest settled accounts of what time it is, what the times are, and what political tempo and temporality we should hew to in political life. Untimeliness deployed as an effective intellectual and

political strategy, far from being a gesture of indifference to time, is a bid to reset time. Intellectual and political strategies of successful untimeliness therefore depend on a close engagement with time in every sense of the word. They are concerned with timing and tempo. They involve efforts to grasp the times by thinking

against the times. They attempt, as Nietzsche put it, to "overcome the present" by puncturing the present's "overvaluation of itself," an overcoming whose aim is to breathe new possibility into the age. If our times are dark, what could be more important?

1AR: EDUCATION O/W FAIRNESS

Extend 2AC-8 – education outweighs fairness, 4 args – 1) Clash checks – it solves the terminal impact independent of fairness 2) Stale ground is no ground – fairness doesn’t solve quality ground—they run generics constantly

and learn nothing—no terminal impact to their form of debate3) Education is the terminal impact to fairness – fairness only matters as a route to education—if we

win our education is good, vote aff4) Impact turn – if everyone quits, that would be good if debate remains fascist—our 1AC is an

impact turn to their form of engagement

2AR: EDUCATION O/W FAIRNESS

Extend fairness outweighs education from the 1AR - at the end of the round the only thing we really need to win to get an aff ballot is that fairness outweighs education. As long as there’s a risk of ANY of our evidence on standards you vote aff because we have the only risk of an alternative form of education that doesn’t promote imperialism. There’s 4 reasons from the 1AR that education outweighs fairness:

First, extend clash checks – even if the debate isn’t fair, clash solves their terminal impact to fairness, which is a stable educational debate. Fairness only matters if it’s key to preserve clash. If we debate about something substantive, and both sides are able to clash there’s no reason that kind of debate round is bad. That means there’s only a risk of aff offense – there was obviously clash in this round, and there always will be against this aff: it’s biopolitics, every team has biopolitics answers. If we can change our educational practices to activist models that oppose oppression AND preserve clash you vote aff.

Second, extend stale ground – fairness doesn’t solve quality ground, which means none of their offense comes through. Even if the neg preserves SOME ground they keep the stupid shit that we hear every year like politics and the states CP. Stale debates don’t increase education, which means we have terminal defense on their education impact to fairness.

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Third, extend that education is the terminal impact to fairness – even if they preserve a fair debate they only do so to learn things. If education happens and there was clash on a substantive issue, you vote aff.

Finally, extend our Goddard 6 evidence – education outweighs fairness because a fair round can still train us to be bureaucratic elites who disarm movements of the oppressed through disinterested argumentation and persuasion. Uncritical affirmation of the topic fails to challenge imperial fascist desires within OURSELVES, members of the masses. Our re-education is key. And, that’s functionally an impact turn to fairness – fairness is BAD if it causes us to orchestrators of genocide and imperial wars.

1AR: C/I

___ Extend 2AC-10 – the counter-interpretation. It solves all of their offense because the aff still has to defend the passage of a topical plan, meaning there’s always a locus for stable ground. We don’t exclude fiat, which means heg affs could still exist, but so can criticisms of US policy.

___ We solve limits – as long as the aff defends a topical plan text there’s no limits issue. Double bind: either:

a) they don’t solve limits because critical advantages are inevitable, orb) we solve limits because we maintain topical critical aff ground

1AR: GILBERT

Extend the Gilbert evidence – terminal defense, politics are dead: even when the masses engage the political nothing happen. Struggle at the level of desire is key to escape coding by the State. Even if their evidence indicates they increase participation, without analyzing desire of the masses struggle will always be triangulated within the State. we solve their internal links to engagement by escaping a state-based ontology that crushes movements. We can engage the political, they have no game on our micropolitics.

1AR: CHURCHILL

Extend the Churchill evidence – terminal non-unique to their mode of politics, they’re trapped in a symbolic comfort zone where activism means writing a letter and distancing ourselves from the government. The impact is fascism, if we win the content of the 1AC we win an impact turn to framework: they police desire preventing micropolitics from evolving. Two reasons they don’t solve – 1. Their politics starts and ends in the State. The State only ever provides the illusion of change by adjusting policy. The reduction of troops in Iraq is the best example: the war machine didn’t end the occupation, it re-labeled imperialism. 2. Their framework deters other movements from engaging in non-symbolic protest by ostracizing public acceptance.

1AR: PATTON

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Extend the Patton evidence – the neg precludes questioning of genuine lines of flight. Absent the aff liberatory strategies become apparatuses of capture that reproduce fascism and the politics of fear. They affirm a pre-existing model of democratic governance which codes resistance inside methods of determining norms and majorities. The only way to engage in becoming-democratic is through philosophically re-describing democracy through a lens of desire. We re-map struggles from the bottom up, solves their engagement arguments.

1AR: GODDARD

Extend Goddard 6 – it’s a straight turn, even if their model of debate could lead to activism it would be immanently visible and rubber-stamped by the state. This prevents transformative politics because we are always already beholden to the state. Means case is a DA.Desire is key. Inventing new tropes of politics through a process of desire breaks through their predictable strategies into a mobilization of the nomadic war machine. Our political strategy of non-fixidity creates a fluid struggle against forms of oppression which catalyzes action in the present

1AR: GRAMMAR

Extend the D&G 80 from the 2ac on grammar – They see grammar as confined to a singular point, revolving around a certain figure of the State. That means we get to weigh our politics of immanence as an impact turn to topicality. Case is a DA – their grammar argument produces artificial complicity with the masses in fascism.

[___]The precedent-setting nature of their interpretation is dangerous – setting limitations on thought and freedom accumulates to strangle all forms of divergence from the status quo. Their use of order-words to constrain intellectual freedom is psychic death.Deleuze and Guattari 80 (A Thousand Plateaus, p.107)

Following Canetti's suggestions, we may begin from the following pragmatic situation: the order-word is a death sentence; it always implies a death sentence, even if it has been considerably softened, becoming symbolic, initiatory, temporary, etc. Order-words bring immediate death to those who receive the order, or potential death if they do not obey, or a death they must themselves inflict, take elsewhere. A father's orders to his son, "You will do this," "You will not do that," cannot be separated from the little death sentence the son experiences on a point of his person. Death, death; it is the only judgment, and it is what makes judgment a system. The verdict. But the order-word is also something else, inseparably connected: it is like a warning cry or a message to flee. It would be oversimplifying to say that flight is a reaction against the order-word; rather, it is included in it, as its other face in a complex assemblage, its other component. Canetti is right to invoke the lion's roar, which enunciates flight and death simultaneously. The order-word has two tones. the prophet receives order-words just as much in taking flight as in longing for death: Jewish prophetism fused the wish to be dead and the flight impulse with the divine order-word. Now if we consider the first aspect of the order-word, in other words, death as the expressed of the statement, it clearly meets the preceding requirements: even though death essentially concerns bodies, is attributed to bodies, its immediacy, its instantaneousness, lends it the authentic character of an incorporeal transformation. What precedes and follows it be an extensive system of actions and passions, a slow labor of bodies; in itself, it is neither action nor passion, but a pure act, a pure transformation that enunciation fuses with the statement, the sentence. That man is dead . . . You are already dead when you receive the order-word . . . In effect, death is everywhere, as that ideal, uncrossable boundary separating bodies, their forms, and states, and as the condition, even initiatory, even symbolic, through which a subject must pass in order to change its form or state.

This is the sense in which Canetti speaks of "enantiomorphosis": a regime that involves a hieratic and immutable Master who at every moment legislates by constants , prohibiting or strictly limiting metamorphoses, giving figures clear and stable contours, setting forms in opposition two by two and requiring subjects to die in order to pass from one form to the other. It is always by means of something incorporeal that a body separates and distinguishes itself from another. The figure, insofar as it is the extremity of a body, is the noncorporeal attribute that limits and completes that body: death is the Figure. It is through death that a body reaches completion not only in time but in

space, and it is through death that its lines form or outline a shape. There are dead spaces just as there are dead times . "If

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[enantiomorphosis is] practiced often the whole world shrivels. . . . Social prohibitions against metamorphosis are perhaps the most important of all. . . . Death itself, the strictest of all boundaries, is what is interposed between classes ." In a regime of this kind, any new body requires the erection of an opposable form, as well as the formation of distinct subjects; death

is the general incorporeal transformation attributed to all bodies from the standpoint of their forms and substances (for example, the body of the Party cannot come into its own without an operation of enantiomorphosis, and without the formation of new activists, which assumes the elimination of the first generation).

2AR: GRAMMAR

The status quo of language is manipulation through the capitalist confines of singularity that prevent us from bearing witness against the despotism implicit in the world of arborescence. Their embodiment of the linguist requires following the assumptions of the despot – using the arbitrary nature of language to create boundaries that legitimized slavery upon the masses by establishing the sovereignty of the despot. When the creator of the harms we indict is able to limit us out of the debate by the usage of grammar and spin on definitions we can never create the movement and dissent necessary to rid the world of the call for our own destruction.

The field of language is marked by a transcendence that opposes our ethic of immanence. Transcendence is the view of a singular point, here grammar, overreaching all other machines on the plane and prevents our ideology of the immanent body without organs where every point can freely connect with the other – we get to weigh the advantages of the case against T because giving their position legitimacy through the ballot is an affirmation of singularity and our aff is an indictment of this singularity.

1AR: YOU KILL DEBATE!

If we win the content of our 1AC we win an impact turn to this argument – their form of debate encourages a political strategy which dooms us to fascism. Even if we make everyone quit it would be a good thing.

2AR: OVERVIEW

The only thing we have to win to win the framework debate is that the difference between the aff and neg interpretations is so marginal that there isn’t enough room for them to win offense. The 2NR doesn’t do nearly enough work on this argument: fairness isn’t an issue if they can only win a non-unique linear impact. They lose most of the internal link to abuse here, especially when there isn’t a clear in-round abuse story because we gave them links in cross-x and defend the implications of presidential war power reduction.

Now you extend the counter-interpretation: this sucks up any of the offense the 2NR might have had left because we don’t exclude fiat from our framing of the topic. The only thing the negative can leverage at this point is extra-T, which will be farther down, but all of their other standards claims are absorbed by our interpretation. We don’t even need to win our standards to suck up their offense, which is why you vote aff right now in an offense/defense framework – we’re winning a risk of multiple UNIQUE disads to excluding critical discussion by the affirmative while they can’t win a single piece of offense outside Extra-T.

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At this point the 2NR only has Extra-T – our 1AC cards are disads that outweigh Extra-T, 3 reasons we outweigh:

1. Fascism – extend Goddard and all of the 1AC cards, the aff is a disad to Extra-T, they affirm a fascist technicality used to exclude evolutions of movements. They’re no different from arm-banded protesters who police their own crowds.

2. Language – language is fluid, they use it as a despotic tool. We’re the only risk of liberating language, their use of framework is only to limit the use of critical advantages.

3. Terminal defense – we’re winning too much defense, debate is already a stale, dead body absent any form of real activism or policy-making. Only a risk we re-invigorate the debate space with a change in desire and breath life and fresh education into the system.

You should have voted aff already, but if you didn’t you do now: any risk of education outweighing fairness means you pull the trigger aff. We have WAY too much dropped offense and solid defense to lose framework.

Go to the line-by-line…

2AC: EXTRA-T

1. We meet – there isn’t a word in the plan text that’s extra-topical, we defend an action of the United States federal government.

2. Mech Spec is good – There’s inevitably a process for the plan to happen, we’re impact turning their top-down model of instantaneous fiat. We have to defend how the plan comes into being, 4 arguments:

A) Disad ground – they get specific disads to our mechanism. B) Counterplans – specifying the mechanism is good for specific CP’s that PIC out of our mechanism. Makes debates more germane to the 1AC. C) Education – we control 90% of it

Elmore 80 (Prof. Public Affaires at University of Washington, PolySci Quarterly 79-80, p. 605)

The emergence of implementation as a subject for policy analysis coincides closely with the discovery by policy analysts that decisions are self executing.

Analysis of policy choices matter very little if the mechanism for implementing those choices is poorly understood in answering the question, “What percentage of the work of achieving a desired governmental action is done when the preferred analytical alternative has been identified ? ” Allison estimated that in the normal case, it was about 10 percent, leaving the remaining 90 percent in the realm of implementation.

D) Aff ground - specification is key to prevent the neg from procuring random normal means cards to artificially create bad ground.

Defense mitigates abuse: err Aff on Specification Questions: We live in an era of process Counterplans, floating PICs, ridiculous Ks, and the agent CP with politics and all of that happens before the neg even knows the plan.

3. Impact turn – your justification for T is that we don’t fall into the traps with the political system isolated in the 1AC means that only our vision of T can lead to effective politics turns the standards

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4. We could sever – if there are extra-topical planks in the plan we won’t go for them, but the neg has to explicitly prove which planks are extra-T. That solves their offense – there’s no abuse if we don’t get unfair advantages from extra-t planks. That’s why you reject the argument not the team. Evaluate the plan text in a vacuum – if they can’t point to the plan text and say which words are extra-t, don’t vote neg. Vacuum test is key to prevent advantages from being included in T debates.

5. Extend Reasonability – make them prove an instance of in-round abuse.

1AR: EXTRA-T (WE MEET)

Extra topicality presumes the negative has already won a narrow interpretation of the topic that makes the implementation specification beyond the resolution. They don’t have an interp, which means specification is inevitable: takes out their offense.

___ Extend 2AC-1 and 4, that’s the “We Meet” – you have to evaluate the plan text in a vacuum. They want to call our advantage extra-t: call for the plan text. Ignoring the vacuum mixes burdens.

___ Specifically, extend that severing extra-t planks solves their offense. No abuse if we don’t go for it.

___ Reject the arg not the team – you should still evaluate our plan text with the mechanism we provide. They just want to exclude ontology from the aff.

___ Extend Reasonability solves – in-round abuse standards prevent abuse of plan mechanisms.

1AR: EXTRA-T (MECH SPEC GOOD)

___ Extend 2AC-2, that’s mech spec good – defense mitigates any abuse claim, the negative has a fluid negative strategy before they even see our aff. Floating PICs to agent CP’s to the K make debate inevitably unpredictable. Specification resolves that unpredictability. --- Ground DA ---___ Specifically, extend the ground disad. We solve 3 internal links:

1) Disads – they get disads to our mechanism, means specific links for the neg. 2) CPs – helps neg CP competition, vague plans kill things like the pitt stuffing CP on the nukes

topic. It gives the neg ground to PIC out of our mechanism, making debates more germane to the aff.

3) Aff ground – spec is key to check random normal means cards that give the neg artifical competition on PICs, decimates clash.

--- Education ---___ Extend Elmore 80, implementation debates are important. Without questioning our mechanism we lose touch with real world policy-making, that internal link turns their education args. ___ And, The State isn’t a monolith, it’s a plurality—our theory of desire is key to true political educationClaude 88 (Prof. of Gov. and Foreign Affairs, U of VA, States and the Global System, p. 18)This view of the state as an institutional monolith is fostered by the notion of sovereignty, which calls up the image of the monarch, presiding majestically over his kingdom.

Sovereignty emphasizes the singularity of the state, its monopoly of authority, its unity of command and its capacity to speak with one voice. Thus, France wills, Iran demands, China intends, New Zealand promises and the Soviet Union insists. One all too easily conjures up the picture of a single-minded and purposeful state that decides

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exactly what it wants to achieve, adopts coherent policies intelligently adapted to its objectives, knows what it is doing, does what it intends and always has its act together . This view of the state is reinforced by political scientists’ emphasis upon the concept of

policy and upon the thesis that governments derive policy from calculations of national interest. We thus take it for granted that states act internationally in accordance with rationality conceived and consciously constructed schemes of action, and we implicitly refuse to consider the possibility that alternatives to policy-directed behavior may have importance – alternatives such as random, reactive, instinctual, habitual and conformist behaviour. Our rationalistic assumption that states do what they have planned to do tends to inhibit the discovery that states sometimes do what they feel compelled to do, or what they have the opportunity to do, or what they have usually done, or what other states are doing, or whatever the line of least resistance would seem to suggest.

Academic preoccupation with the making of policy is accompanied by academic neglect of the execution of policy. We seem to assume that once the state has calculated its interest and contrived a policy to further that interest, the carrying out of policy is the virtually automatic result of the routine functioning of the bureaucratic mechanism of the state. I am inclined to call this the Genesis theory of public administration , taking as my text the passage: ‘And God said, Let there be light; and there was light’. I suspect that in the realm of government, policy execution rarely follows so promptly and inexorably from policy statement .

1AR: EXTRA-T (IMPACT TURN)

___ Extend 2AC-3, that’s the impact turn – the 1AC straight turns the impact. Learning about how movements organize in the social field is the only way to engage the political.

___ That means we have terminal defense on their education and fairness impacts: extend the Gilbert and the Churchill evidence, even if we become better policy makers in their form of debate, that doesn’t do jack shit in the real world.

___ We outweigh fairness – microfascism negates joy, making life a depressing experience of alarmist crises. Voting aff resolves individual ontological anxiety through immanent politics.

___ They cause microfascism – extend Goddard 6, they contain our argumentation within a particular frame of reference, making State domination inevitable. Only a risk we solve. <Can read “AT: Limits”>

*** GENERIC KRITIK TOOLBOX ***

K FRONTLINE

Case is a disad—desire is key to change that’s Patton—only our methodology provides a true path of resistance by locating lines of flight—their static advocacy doesn’t engage desire and ensures the replication of their impacts—more evDeleuze and Guattari 1972, Anti-Oedipus, 347-8

Not only can the libidinal investment of the social field interfere with the investment of interest, and constrain the most disadvantaged, the most exploited, to seek their ends in an oppressive machine, but what is reactionary or revolutionary in the preconscious investment of interest does not necessarily coincide with what is reactionary or revolutionary in the unconscious libidinal investment. A revolutionary preconscious investment bears upon new aims , new social syntheses, a new power . But it could be that a part at least of the unconscious libido

continues to invest the former body, the old form of power, its codes, and its flows. It is all the easier, and the contradiction is all the better masked, as a state of forces does not prevail over the former state without preserving or reviving the old full body as a residual and subordinated territoriality (witness how the capitalist machine revives the despotic Urstaat, or how the socialist machine preserves a State and market monopoly capitalism). But there is something more serious: even when the libido embraces the new body -the new force that corresponds to the

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effectively revolutionary goals and syntheses from the viewpoint of the preconscious- it is not certain that the unconscious libidinal investment is itself revolutionary. For the same breaks do not pass at the level of the unconscious desires and the preconscious

interests. The preconscious revolutionary break is sufficiently well defined by the promotion of a socius as a full body carrying new aims, as a form of power or a formation of sovereignty that subordinates desiring-production under new conditions. But even though the unconscious libido is charged with investing this socius, its investment is not necessarily revolutionary in the same sense as the preconscious investment. In fact, the unconscious revolutionary break implies for its part the body without organs as the limit of the socius that

desiring-production subordinates in its turn, under the condition of an overthrown power, an overthrown subordination. The preconscious revolution refers to a new regime of social production that creates, distributes, and satisfies new aims and interests. But the unconscious revolution does not merely refer to the socius

that conditions this change as a form of power: it refers within this socius to the regime of desiring-production as an overthrown power on the body without organs, It is not the same state of flows and schizzes: in one case the break is between two forms of socius, the second of which is measured according to its capacity to introduce the flows of desire into a new code or a new axiomatic of interest; in the other case the break is within the socius itself, in that it has the capacity for causing the flows of desire to circulate following their positive lines of escape, and for breaking them again following breaks of productive breaks, The most general principle

of schizoanalysis is that desire is always constitutive of a social field . In any case desire belongs to the infrastructure, not to ideology: desire is in production as social production, just as production is in desire as desiring-production. But these forms can be understood in two ways, depending on whether desire is enslaved to a structured molar aggregate that it constitutes under a given form of power and gregariousness, or whether it subjugates the large aggregate to the functional multiplicities that it itself forms on the molecular scale (it is no more a case of persons or individuals in this instance than in the other). If the preconscious revolutionary break appears at the first level, and is defined by the characteristics of a new aggregate, the unconscious or libidinal break belongs to the second level and is defined by the

driving role of desiring-production and the position of its multiplicities. It is understandable, therefore, that a group can be revolutionary from the standpoint of class interest and its preconscious investments, but not be so-and even remain fascist and police-like- from the standpoint of its libidinal investments, Truly revolutionary preconscious interests do not necessarily imply unconscious investments of the same nature; an apparatus of interest never takes the place of a machine of desire.

1AR: ALT =/= SOLVE

Extend the D&G 72 on the alternative, alt doesn’t solve, they concede desire produces the social, which means conditions for revolution won’t occur without a micropolitical movement. We’re the only risk of solving the links, embracing revolutionary goals without questioning the role of the force within the coding of the preconscious by the State means their alternative produces Oedipal desire, retrenching oppression.

1AR: ALT => FASCISM

The D&G 72 on the alternative is a disad to the alt – 2 reasons:1) Oedipus – ignoring investments of desire leaves behind a desire to be dominated. The revolution,

even if it succeeds materially, perpetuates fascism by never looking outside the channels of power. The impact is endless war and oppression.

2) Value to Life – extend Bell, their cannibalistic fear politics creates life as a project of fear. This is a trick by liberalism designed to keep the masses in line: it strangles the danger out of life and prevents the pursuit of joyous lines of flight in the name of security.

1AR: AFF SOLVES ALT

We solve the alt, that’s D&G 72, schizoanalysis is a pre-requisite to the success of other movements. Material or other gains are only possible outside of a striated channel of desire. A liberated libidinal investment is necessarily revolutionary. No offense for the neg, only a risk the alt causes fascist retrenchment.

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2AC: PERM

Perm: do the aff and all non-competitive parts of the alt. There is no such thing as a mutually exclusive advocacy against our politics of affirmation because the point is to play with the content and ethos of the K to create new and inventive politicsMassumi 83 (Brian, Professor of something at a place of respectable respectedness; A Thousand Plateaus, Introduction)

" State philosophy " is another word for the representational thinking that has characterized Western metaphysics since Plato, but has suffered an at least momentary setback during

the last quarter century at the hands of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and poststructuralist theory generally. As described by Deleuze,16 it reposes on a double identity: of the thinking subject, and of the concepts it creates and to which it lends its own presumed attributes of sameness and constancy. The subject, its concepts, and also the objects in the world to which the concepts are applied have a shared, internal essence: the self-

resemblance at the basis of identity. Representational thought is analogical; its concern is to establish a correspondence between these symmetrically structured domains. The faculty of judgment is the policeman of analogy, assuring that each of the three terms is honestly itself, and that the proper correspondences obtain. In thought its end is truth, in

action justice. The weapons it wields in their pursuit are limitative distribution (the determination of the exclusive set of properties possessed by

each term in contradistinction to the others: logos, law) and hierarchical ranking (the measurement of the degree of perfection of a term's self-resemblance in relation to a supreme standard , man, god, or gold: value, morality). The m odus o perandi is negation : x = x = not y. Identity, resemblance, truth, justice, and negation. The rational foundation for order. The established order, of course: philosophers have traditionally been employees of the State. The collusion between philosophy and the State was most explicitly enacted in the first decade of the nineteenth century with the foundation of the University of Berlin, which was to become the model for higher learning throughout Europe and in the United States. The goal laid out for it by Wilhelm von Humboldt (based on proposals by Fichte and Schleiermacher) was the "spiritual and moral training of the nation," to be achieved by "deriving everything from an original principle" (truth), by "relating everything to an ideal" (justice), and by "unifying this

principle and this ideal in a single Idea" (the State). The end product would be "a fully legitimated subject of knowledge and society"17—each mind an analogously organized mini-State morally unified in the supermind of the State . Prussian mind-meld.18 More insidious than the well-known practical cooperation between university and government (the burgeoning military funding of research) is its philosophical role in the propagation of the form of representational thinking itself, that "properly spiritual absolute State" endlessly reproduced and disseminated at every level of the social fabric. Deconstruction-influenced feminists such as Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray have attacked it under the name "phallogocentrism" (what the most privileged model of rocklike identity is goes without saying). In the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus,

Deleuze and Guattari describe it as the "arborescent model" of thought (the proudly erect tree under whose spreading boughs latter-day Platos conduct their class). " Nomad thought" does not immure itself in the edifice of an ordered interiority; it moves freely in an element of exteriority. It does not repose on identity; it rides difference. It does not respect the artificial division between the three domains of representation, subject, concept, and being; it replaces restrictive analogy with a conductivity that knows no bounds. The concepts it creates do not merely reflect the eternal form of a legislating subject, but are defined by a communicable force in relation to which their subject, to the

extent that they can be said to have one, is only secondary. They do not reflect upon the world but are immersed in a changing state of things. A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window . What is the subject of the brick? The arm that throws it? The body connected to the arm? The brain encased in the body? The situation that brought brain and body to such a juncture? All and none of the above. What is its object? The window? The edifice? The laws the edifice shelters? The class and other power relations encrusted in the laws? All and none of the above. "What interests us are the circumstances."19 Because

the concept in its unrestrained usage is a set of circumstances, at a volatile juncture. It is a vector: the point of application of a force moving through a space at a given velocity in a given direction. The concept has no subject or object other than itself. It is an act. Nomad thought replaces the closed equation of representation , x = x = noty (I = I = not you) with an open equation:.. . + y + z + a + ...(...+ arm + brick + window + . . .). Rather than analyzing the world into discrete components, reducing their manyness to the One of identity, and ordering them by rank, it sums up a set of disparate circumstances in a shattering blow. It synthesizes a multiplicity of elements without effacing their heterogeneity or hindering their potential

for future rearranging (to the contrary). The m odus o perandi of nomad thought is affirmation , even when its apparent object is negative. Force is not to be confused with power. Force arrives from outside to break constraints and open new vistas. Power builds walls. The space of nomad thought is qualitatively different from State space. Air against earth. State space is "striated," or gridded. Movement in it is confined as by gravity to a horizontal plane, and limited by the order of that plane to preset paths between fixed and

identifiable points. Nomad space is "smooth," or open-ended. One can rise up at any point and move to any other . Its mode of distribution is the nomos: arraying oneself in an open space (hold the street), as opposed to the logos of entrenching oneself in a closed space (hold the fort). A Thousand Plateaus is an effort to construct a smooth space of thought. It is not the first such attempt. Like State philosophy, nomad thought goes by many names. Spinoza called it "ethics." Nietzsche called it the "gay science."

Artaud called it "crowned anarchy." To Maurice Blanchot, it is the "space of literature." To Foucault, "outside thought."20 In this book, Deleuze and Guattari employ the terms "pragmatics" and "schizoanalysis," and in the introduction describe a rhizome network strangling the roots of the infamous tree. One of the points of the book is that nomad thought is not confined to philosophy. Or that the kind of philosophy it is comes in many forms. Filmmakers and painters are philosophical thinkers to the extent that they explore the potentials of their respective mediums and break away from the beaten paths.21 On a strictly formal level, it is mathematics and music that create the smoothest of the smooth

spaces.22 In fact, Deleuze and Guattari would probably be more inclined to call philosophy music with content than music a rarefied form of philosophy. Which returns to our opening question. How should A Thousand Plateaus be played ? When you buy a record there are always cuts that leave you cold. You skip them. You don't approach a record as a closed book that you have to take or leave. Other cuts you may listen to over and over again . They follow you. You find yourself humming them under your breath as you go about your daily business.

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1AR: PERM SOLVES

Extend Massumi 83 – the perm solves the K. Our movement incorporates the alternative into a micropolitical resistance to fascism. The affirmative re-invents activism, and turns resistance into fascism into anything. They won’t win a disad to the perm – our politics is evolutionary, like a hydra. Even if they win a disad, cutting off our head only creates 2 more. Nomad politics is rhizomic, always changing.

<Specific answers to disads to the perm>

1AR: NOT EXCLUSIVE (PERM)

The perm solves the entirety of the link. The idea of our immanent politics is that our micropolitics incorporates the alternative into a new form of politics. Even if they win a link, you should only focus on what the alternative does, not how it’s produced. Play the perm like a record: if there’s parts they critique, skip them. The aff is a brick: throw it at their alternative until it creates a new vector.

<Specific explanation>

1AR: DOUBLE BIND (PERM)

They’re in a double bind: eithera) the perm solves the alt and the disads to the perm because their alt isn’t too radical to be

incorporated into our micropolitics; or, b) their alternative is too radical, and we have a disad to the alt that the perm solves. Extend

Churchill, the reason the Panthers were crushed is because their overly violent reaction to fascism pushed others away. Vote aff to do the plan as a turning point to the alternative. The plan is ideologically aligned with the pragmatic effects of the alternative, and even if it’s a little striated, it’s better because their alternative blows apart the strata, creating fascist crackdowns. Only a risk we solve. Deleuze and Guattari 80 [Gilles and Felix, professors at the University of Paris VIII at Vincennes, ATP, p160-1] 159

You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn; and you have to keep small supplies of significance and subjectification, if only to turn them against their own systems when the circumstances demand it, when things, persons, even situations force you to; and you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to

the dominant reality. Mimic the strata. You don't reach the BwO, and its plane of consistency, by wildly destratifying. That is why we encountered the paradox of those emptied and dreary bodies at the very beginning: they had emptied themselves of their organs instead of looking for the point which they could patiently and momentarily dismantle the organization of organs we call the organism. There are, in fact, several ways of botching the BwO: either one fails to produce it, or one produces it more or less, but nothing is produced on it, intensities do not pass or are blocked. This is because the BwO is always swinging between the surfaces that stratify it and the plane that

sets it free. If you free it with too violent an action , if you blow apart the strata without taking precautions, then instead

of drawing the plane you will be killed, plunged into a black hole, or even dragged toward catastrophe. Staying stratified - organized,

signified, subjected - is not the worst that can happen ; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever . This is

how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new

63“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE LEONARDIland at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and

escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO. Connect, conjugate, continue: a whole "diagram," as opposed to still

signifying and subjective programs. We are in a social formation; first see how it is stratified for us and in us and at the place where we are; then descend from the strata to the deeper assemblage within which we are held; gently tip the assemblage , making it pass over to the side of the plane of consistency. It is only there that the BwO reveals itself for

what it is: connection of desires, conjunction of flows, continuum of intensities. You have constructed your own little machine , ready when needed to be plugged into other collective machines.

1AR: ROOT CAUSEExtend DnG 72 and cross-apply Patton—we have an impact turn—their conception of root cause as a macro-level event that organizes the micro has it backwards—DnG says the macro is the result of a resonance in the micro on the level of desire—their ideology is flawed and counterproductive because it fails to address the ways in which systems constantly change and rearticulate—Patton means only we have a risk of solving their impact because our methodology is one that can roll with the punches and avoids totalizing systems like the neg’s K—some parts of [system they critique] are inevitable and sometimes can be beneficial like [insert example]—proves that their blanket rejection is worse than the perm

2AC: FLOATING PIKS/NO ALT TEXT BAD

No alt text is a voting issue:A) Turns activism – no statement of action means cooption is inevitable B) Kills fairness – makes it a floating PIK, moots the 1AC, kills depth, skews the 2AC because we can

only get offense on the alt after the block clarifies what it isC) Aff ground – no perms without an alt text—they can change their stance based on the 2AC D) Kills reciprocity – we can change our plan text in the 1ar if they can’t provide an alt text

Evaluate theory with competing interpretations since looking at what we justify is key to checking against arbitrary self-serving interpretations.

1AR: FLOATING PIKS/NO ALT TEXT BAD

Extend floating PIKs from the 2AC:1) Activism turn – they don’t have a communicable alternative, meaning their politics gets co-opted and re-interpreted by right-wingers.

2) Kills fairness – their K becomes a floating PIK in the 2NC when we can’t tell what their alternative does. Uniquely abuses the aff because they can moot our entire 2AC. ___ Specifically, extend they kill depth. We can’t actually debate their K if it changes every speech. ___ Extend 2AC strategy skew, we can’t generate offense until after the block when they change the alt. That outweighs, the 2AC is our last chance to read offense. ___ Extend reciprocity: we can change our plan text to spike the link in the 1AR if they don’t provide an alt text to compensate for lost 2AC offense.

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3) Aff ground – we lose all perm ground if they don’t have a text because they can re-explain the K in the 2NC so that the perm doesn’t solve. Uniquely abusive, means they always have a competitive K that morphs every speech.

___ And if you don’t buy in-round abuse vote on potential abuse – they justify arbitrary self-serving interpretations that make debate unfair.

___ They concede theory gets judged in competing interpretations. Means if we win their interp justifies abuse you vote aff.

___ Err aff on theory since neg has already forced us into an abusive situation designed to skew our strat.

AT: REALISM

We have a discourse critique that operates independent of the alternative –A. The negative constitutes a reality of inevitable conflict which effaces human agency.Burke 7 (anthony, prof @ jhu “ontologies of war: violence existence and reason” theory and event 10:2 proj muse)

This closed circle of existential and strategic reason generates a number of dangers. Firstly, the emergence of conflict can generate military action almost automatically simply because the world is conceived in terms of the distinction between friend and enemy ; because the very existence of the other constitutes an unacceptable threat ,

rather than a chain of actions, judgements and decisions. (As the Israelis insisted of Hezbollah, they 'deny our right to exist'.) This effaces agency, causality and responsibility from policy and political discourse : our actions can be conceived as independent of the conflict or quarantined from critical enquiry, as necessities that achieve an instrumental purpose but do not contribute to a new and unpredictable causal chain. Similarly the Clausewitzian idea

of force -- which, by transporting a Newtonian category from the natural into the social sciences, assumes the very effect it seeks -- further encourages the resort to military violence. We ignore the complex history of a conflict , and thus the alternative paths to its resolution that such historical analysis might provide, by portraying conflict as fundamental and existential in nature; as possibly containable or exploitable, but always irresolvable. Dominant portrayals of the war on terror, and the Israeli-Arab conflict, are arguably examples of such ontologies in action. Secondly, the militaristic force of such an ontology is visible , in Schmitt, in the absolute sense of vulnerability whereby a people can judge whether their 'adversary intends to negate his opponent's way of life'.38 Evoking the kind of thinking that would become controversial in the Bush doctrine, Hegel similarly argues that: ...a state may regard its infinity and honour as at stake in each of its concerns, however minute, and it is all the more inclined to susceptibility to injury the more its strong individuality is impelled as a result of long domestic peace to seek and create a sphere of activity abroad. ....the state is in essence mind and therefore cannot be prepared to

stop at just taking notice of an injury after it has actually occurred. On the contrary, there arises in addition as a cause of strife the idea of such an injury...39 Identity , even more than physical security or autonomy, is put at stake in such thinking and can be defended and redeemed through warfare (or, when taken to a further extreme of an absolute demonisation and dehumanisation of the other, by mass killing , 'ethnic cleansing' or genocide ) . However anathema to a classical realist like Morgenthau, for whom prudence was a core political virtue, these have been influential ways of defining national security and defence during the twentieth century and persists into the twenty-first. They infused Cold War strategy in the United States  (with the key policy document NSC68 stating that 'the Soviet-led assault on free institutions is worldwide now, and ... a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere')40 and frames dominant Western responses to the threat posed by Al Qaeda and like groups (as Tony Blair admitted in 2006, 'We could have chosen security as the battleground. But we didn't. We chose values.')41 It has also become influential, in a particularly tragic and destructive way, in Israel, where memories of the Holocaust and (all too common) statements by Muslim and Arab leaders rejecting Israel's existence are mobilised by conservatives to justify military adventurism and a rejectionist policy towards the Palestinians.

B. The violent quest to overcome uncertainty in the international arena is doubly dangerous: It has both created the implements that make human extinction possible and the political context that renders it necessary and inevitable. Bell is a Disad to the alt. Dillon and Campbell 93 (Michael, Professor of Politics and International Relations at Lancaster University, and David, Professor of Cultural and Political Geography at Durham University, The Political Subject of Violence, pg 163-165)

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PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE LEONARDIThis interpretation of violence as constitutive of identity might, paradoxically, offer the only hope of some amelioration of the worst excesses of violence exhibited by the formation of

(political) identity. The orthodox rendering of such violence as pre-modern abdicates its responsibility to a predetermined historical fatalism. For if these ethnic and nationalist conflicts are understood as no more than settled history rearing its ugly head, then there is nothing that can be done in the present to resolve the tension except to repress them again. In this view, the historical drama has to be enacted according to its script, with human agency in suspension while nature violently plays itself out. The only alternative is for nature to be overcome as the result of an idealistic transformation at the hands of reason. Either way, this fatalistic interpretation of the relationship between violence and the political is rooted in a hypostated conception of man/nature

as determinative of the social/political: the latter is made possible only once the former runs its course, or if it is overturned. It might have once been the case that the prospect of a transformation of nature by reason seemed both likely and hopeful - indeed, many of the most venerable of the debates in the political theory of

international relations revolved around this very point. But, having reached what Foucault has called society's 'threshold of modernity', 'we' now face a prospect that radically re-figures the parameters of politics: the real prospect of extinction. As Foucault argues, we have reached this threshold because 'the life of the species is wagered on its own political strategies. For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal

with the additional capacity of a political existence: modern man is an animal whose politics place his existence as a living being in question.' How the prospect of extinction might materialise itself is an open question. That increasingly it can be materialised, militarily, ecologically, and politically, is not. The double bind of this prospect is that modernity's alternative of transformation through reason is not only untenable, it is deeply complicit in the form of (inter)national life that has been responsible for bringing about the real prospect of extinction in the first place. The capacity of violence to eradicate being was

engendered by reason's success; not merely, or perhaps even most importantly, by furnishing the technological means, but more insidiously in setting the parameters of the political (la politique, to use the useful terms of debate in which Simon Critchley engages) while fuelling the violence practices of politics (la

politique). The reliance on reason as that which could contain violence and reduce the real prospect of extinction may prove nothing less than a fatal misapprehension. In support of this proposition, consider the interpretive bases of the Holocaust. For

all that politics in the last fifty years has sought to exceptionalise the Nazis' genocide as an aberrant moment induced by evil personalities, there is no escaping the recognition that modern political life lies heavily implicated in the instigation and conduct of this horror. In so far as

modernity can be characterised as the promotion of rationality and efficiency to the exclusion of alternative criteria for action, the Holocaust is one outcome of the 'civilising process'. With its plan rationally to order Europe through the elimination of an internal order, its bureaucratised administration of death, and its employment of the

technology of a modern state, the Holocaust 'was not an irrational outflow of the not-yet-fully-eradicated residence of pre-modern barbarity. It was a legitimate resident in the house of modernity; indeed, one who would not be at home in any other house. The paradoxical nature of modernity is suggested by the emergency of a Holocaust from within its bosom. And there can be no better indication in contradistinction to those 'modernists' who would like to brand so-called 'postmodernists' with the responsibility for all and future Holocausts - that a reliance on established traditions of reason for ethical succour and the progressive amelioration of the global human condition may be seriously misplaced. The comfort we have derived from the etiological myth of modern politics has occluded the way in which the 'civilising process' of which that myth speaks has disengaged ethics from politics. As Bauman concludes: 'We need to take stock of the evidence that the civilizing process is, among other things, a process of divesting the use and deployment of violence from moral calculus, and of emancipating the desiderata of rationality from interference of ethical norms and moral inhibitions.'

What is your link? “The aff read critical theory” isn’t enough to read realism, our aff engages a logic of the way the State is composed on a macro-level. The link is an FYI at best, they just argue what the State is, there’s no impact to the K, it’s all defense.

Their alternative makes no sense: double bind, either:1) the aff still works within realism and there’s no K, OR2) the alt has a different idea of the State, and can never engage fascism on a micro level because of

an over-focus on molar aggregates.

AT: IVORY TOWER

Like it or not the intellectual elites control popular opinion. Becoming intellectuals increases our ability to influence policy and ideologyFarer 8 (Tom,former President of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States, is Dean of the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver; "Un-Just War Against Terrorism and the Struggle to Appropriate Human Rights": Human Rights Quarterly, Volume 30, Number 2; MUSE)

Iraq's gory shambles has by no means halted the competition between liberals and neo-cons to appropriate "human rights." Like all ideologues, that is people such as old-time

Marxists so intoxicated by their visions of noble ends as to scruple little (if they think in quotidian terms at all) about means, hardcore neo-cons like the irrepressible Richard

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Perle are thoroughly unchastened by events in Iraq.43 As I suggest above, not entirely without reason they attribute the terrible effects on human rights of the

adventure they helped to launch to tactical failures fathered by the president and the secretary of defense or other previously eulogized actors.44 A democracy, they argue (undeterred by the prominent positions members of their sect like the Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz occupied in the principal war-planning institution, the

Department of Defense) could have been built if only the occupation had been conducted effectively. In any event, their narrative continues , however ugly things may look, however great the incidental violations of the right to life, the right not to be tortured, the right not to be punished without

due process, on balance human rights has been furthered by Saddam's overthrow.45 Those scholars and publicists , like Francis Fukuyama,46 who disagree with this diagnosis, or who believe that whatever the effect on human rights the effect on the US national interest is deplorable, have simply dissociated themselves from the sect, at least in Fukuyama's case by decrying the second generation betrayal of neo-conservatism's founding distrust of ambitious social projects like the war on poverty.47 What makes close study of the competition both fascinating and important is the light it casts on two deeply incompatible ways of seeing the world and, more specifically, two clashing ways of conceptualizing the ferocious engagement between, on the one hand, the governments and [End Page 364] the great majority of peoples in the West and, on the other, networks of mega-terrorists. I suppose one might regard the contending diagnoses and prescriptions stemming from the agents of these different ways of seeing the contemporary world as hardly more than a struggle in a

puddle of tiny but very complex creatures. But that view would be entirely wrong. Intellectual elites give coherent form to the deeply held values and causal assumptions of great numbers of people; and through the mass media they also reinforce, modulate, or undermine popular explanations and nostrums . In other words, intellectual elites are both agents and architects of popular opinion, registering views already formed and helping to form the views that they then register . So in studying and critically assessing the views of the few, we understand better the premises of the many and thus a key dimension of the opportunities for and limits on change in public policy.

AT: COSMOPOLITANISM

Uncritical acceptance of cosmopolitanism destroys change, our politics solves and provides a challenge to the forces that would coopt their movementZalloua 8 (Zahi,Assistant Professor of French at Whitman College , "The Future of an Ethics of Difference After Hardt and Negri’s Empire" MUSE) Is Derrida, as well as Glissant, vulnerable to these same indictments against the viability of an ethics of difference? In Derrida’s case, the validity of this objection hinges on the meaning of

wholly other. To put it as a question, what exactly does Derrida intend by tout autre est tout autre? When he affirms the radical alterity of the other, is he following Lévinas in assert ing the transcendence of the other ? In an earlier essay on Totality and Infinity, Derrida challenges precisely this aspect of [End Page 145] Lévinas’ philosophy, “the dream of a purely heterological thought,” “a pure thought of pure difference” (1978, 151), arguing that one’s exposure to the other always entails a degree of relationality; the other is not “infinitely other” but is always perceived as “ other than my self ” (126). Yet Derrida seems to have reversed his earlier

position, insisting that “the structure of my relation to the other is of a ‘relation without relation.’ It is a relation in which the other remains absolutely transcendent. I cannot reach the other. I cannot know the other from the inside and so on” (1997c, 14; emphasis added). This “relationless relation” (rapport sans rapport) is nevertheless a relation of some kind, a paradoxical one involving both a relation and a non-relation

to the other: it joins and disjoins. Thus, while joining Habermas in his urgent plea for Europe “to defend and promote a cosmopolitan order on the basis of international law against competing visions ” (294), Derrida can still legitimately warn against an uncritical investment in the idea of cosmopolitanism . For Derrida, the cosmopolitan spirit is not immune from critique, but something that must be perpetually scrutinized and endlessly perfected: If we must in fact cultivate the spirit of this tradition (as I believe most international institutions have done since World War I), we must also try to adjust the limits of this tradition to our own time by question ing the ways in which they have been defined and determined by the ontotheological, philosophical, and religious discourses in which this cosmopolitical ideal was formulated . . . . What I call “democracy to come” would go beyond the limits of cosmopolitanism, that is, of a world

citizenship. It would be more in line with what lets singular beings (anyone) “live together,” there where they are not yet defined by citizenship, that is, by their condition as lawful “subjects” in a state or legitimate members of a nation-state or even of a confederation or world state.”

*** KRITIKS ***67

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AT: LACAN

No link—their ev at best draws a distinction between clinical approaches, ignoring the context of our writings—psychoanalysis was concerned with the power of the signifier and didn’t care about the political—DnG paved the way for the form of psychoanalysis enacted by their alt—our aff takes the patient out for a walk and provides legs to their models

Perm: do the alternative through the lens of the affirmative. <Perm 2AC>

Their K is about interpretation—our aff is about implementation which is superior by creating pragmatic changeColebrook 8 (Claire, U of Edinburgh "Review: Who's Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari?" http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=12605)

Deleuze and Guattari do not, Lambert insists, want us to read, interpret, diagnose or even see as symptomatic, the unconscious; and so the error of all errors would be to see politics as encapsulated in a sexual scene. If we have turned the sexual relation into the scene whereby my being is fulfilled through some other body that must actualise my fantasies, then the revolutionary plane of the virtual has been reduced to some private scene, and we produce the unconscious as nothing more

than a relation among bodies. What we need to do then is not interpret the unconscious in Deleuzian rather than Lacanian terms, but see the ways in which institutions (from literature departments to Oprah Winfrey and heterosexual pornography) present desire as fantasy instead of seeing the positive power of desire that produced the social and political scene (with a reduced and institutionalised sexuality) in the first place. So language is important, and the reading of literary language especially so, because it is through order words and the incorporeal transformations that crystallise events -- such as 'September 11' --

that bodies are organised in relation and, most importantly, an unconscious is produced. This is Lambert's critical bet: we failed to read Lacan because instead of seeing the analytic scene as one in which mastery was produced through readings that claimed to 'interpret' an unconscious, we turned the analytic scene into an industry. Žižek now 'reads' any number of texts, events and phenomena as symptoms of an unconscious topology that can be readily unveiled by a hermeneutic master. D eleuze and G uattari, Lambert insists, were not anti-Lacanian, for they wanted to save Lacan from such religious and ready-made interpretation machines . The same needs to be done for Deleuze and Guattari.

The Lacanian alternative results in conservatism by refusing action in favor of thinking really hard—[X thing that is bad] is okay with them as long as we feel guiltyRobinson 5 (Andrew, PhD in political theory at the University of Nottingham, “The Political Theory of Constitutive Lack,” Johns Hopkins University Press)

It is in this pragmatism that the ambiguity of Lacanian political theory resides, for, while on a theoretical level it is based on an almost sectarian "radicalism", denouncing everything that exists for its complicity in illusions and guilt for the present, its "alternative" is little different from what it condemns (the assumption apparently being that the "symbolic" change in the psychological coordinates of attachments in reality is directly effective, a claim assumed – wrongly – to follow from the claim that social reality is

constructed discursively).   Just like in the process of psychoanalytic cure, nothing actually changes on the level of specific characteristics.   The only change is in how one relates to the characteristics, a process Žižek terms 'dotting the "i's"' in reality, recognizing and thereby installing necessity 32 .   All that changes , in other words, is the interpretation: as long as they are reconceived as expressions of constitutive lack, the old politics are acceptable .   Thus, Žižek claims that de Gaulle's "Act" succeeded by allowing him 'effectively to realize the necessary pragmatic measures' which others pursued unsuccessfully 33 .  More recent examples of Žižek's pragmatism include that

his alternative to the U.S. war in Afghanistan is only that 'the punishment of those responsible' should be done in a spirit of 'sad duty', not 'exhilarating retaliation ' 34 , and his "solution" to the Palestine-Israel crisis, which is NATO control of the occupied territories 35 .   If this is the case for Žižek, the ultra-"radical" "Marxist- Leninist" Lacanian, it is so much the more so for his more moderate adversaries.   Jason Glynos, for instance, offers an uncompromizing critique of the construction of guilt and innocence in anti-"crime" rhetoric, demanding that demonization of deviants be abandoned, only to insist as an afterthought that,

'of course, this... does not mean that their offences should go unpunished'36.  Lacanian theory tends, therefore, to produce an "anything goes" attitude to state action: because everything else is contingent, nothing is to limit the practical consideration of tactics by dominant elites.

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<K Frontline>

Doesn’t solve the aff—chaos is not a precursor to structure, it is a boundless expanse of liberatory potentialBraidotti 9 (Rosi, "On Putting the Active back in Activism," New Formations, doi:10.3898/newf.68.03.2009)

Psychoanalysis, of course, has been here before.38 The notion of the return of the repressed is the key to the logic of unconscious

remembrance, but it is a secret and somewhat invisible key which condenses space into the spasm of the symptom and time into a short-circuit that mines the very thinkability of the present. Kristeva’s notion of the abject expresses clearly the temporality involved in psychoanalysis - by stressing the structural function played by the negative, by the incomprehensible, the un-thinkable, the other - of understandable knowledge. Later Kristeva40 describes this as a form of structural dissociation within the self that makes us strangers to ourselves. Deleuze calls this alterity ‘ Chaos’ and defines it positively as the virtual formation of all possible form. Lacan , on the other hand - and Derrida with him,

I would argue - defines Chaos epistemologically as that which precedes form, structure , language. This makes for two radically divergent conceptions of time, and - more importantly for me today - of negativity. That which is incomprehensible for Lacan - following Hegel - is the virtual for Deleuze, following Spinoza, Bergson and Leibnitz. This produces a number of significant shifts: from negative to affirmative affects; from entropic to generative desire; from

incomprehensible to virtual events to be actualised; from constitutive outsides to a geometry of affects that require mutual actualisation and synchronisation; from a melancholy and split to an openended web-like subject; from the epistemological to the ontological turn in poststructuralist philosophy. Nietzsche has also been here before, of course. The eternal return in Nietzsche is the repetition, not in the compulsive mode of neurosis, nor in the negative erasure that marks the traumatic event. It

is the eternal return of and as positivity. In a nomadic, Deleuzian-Nietzschean perspective, ethics is essentially about transformation of negative into positive passions, i.e. moving beyond the pain. This does not mean denying the pain, but rather activating it, working it through . Again, the positivity here is not supposed to indicate a facile optimism, or a careless dismissal of human suffering. It involves compassionate witnessing of the pain of others, as Zygmunt Bauman41 and Susan Sontag42 point out - in the mode of empathic co-presence.

EXT: LACK

The constitutive lack is self referential – it is only justified because it is assumed and any arguments to the contrary are disregarded for not accepting it. The Lack is just a photo negative of desire. Robinson 2005 (Andrew, PhD in political theory at the University of Nottingham, “The Political Theory of Constitutive Lack,” Johns Hopkins University Press)

More precisely, I would maintain that "constitutive lack" is an instance of a Barthesian myth.  It is, after all, the function of myth to do exactly what this concept does: to assert the empty facticity of a particular ideological schema while rejecting any need to argue for its assumptions.   'Myth does not deny things; on the contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it is a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact' 37 .  This is precisely the status of

"constitutive lack": a supposed fact which is supposed to operate above and beyond explanation, on an ontological level instantly accessible to those with the courage to accept it.   Myths operate to construct euphoric enjoyment for those who use them, but their operation is in conflict with the social context with which they interact.  This is because their operation is connotative: they are "received" rather than "read"38, and open only to a "readerly" and not a "writerly" interpretation.  A myth is a second-order signification attached to an already-constructed denotative sign, and the ideological message projected into this sign is constructed outside the context of the signified.  A myth is therefore, in Alfred Korzybski's sense, intensional: its

meaning derives from a prior linguistic schema, not from interaction with the world in its complexity39.  Furthermore, myths have a repressive social function, carrying in Barthes's words an 'order not to think'40.  They are necessarily projected onto or imposed on actual people and events, under the cover of this order.   The "triumph of literature" in the Dominici trial 41 consists

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precisely in this projection of an externally-constructed mythical schema as a way of avoiding engagement with something one does not understand.      Lacanian theory, like Barthesian myths, involves a prior idea of a structural matrix which is not open to change in the light of the instances to which it is applied.   Žižek's writes of a 'pre- ontological dimension which precedes and eludes the construction of reality'42, while Laclau suggests there is a formal structure of any

chain of equivalences which necessitates the logic of hegemony43.  Specific analyses are referred back to this underlying structure as its necessary expressions, without apparently being able to alter it; for instance, 'those who triggered the process of democratization in eastern

Europe... are not those who today enjoy its fruits, not because of a simple usurpation... but because of a deeper structural logic'44.  In most instances, the mythical operation of the idea of "constitutive lack" is implicit, revealed only by a rhetoric of denunciation. For instance, Mouffe accuses liberalism of an 'incapacity... to grasp... the irreducible character of antagonism '45, while Žižek claims that a 'dimension' is 'lost' in Butler's work because of her failure to conceive of "trouble" as constitutive of "gender"46.   This language of "denial" which is invoked to silence critics is a clear example of Barthes's "order not to think": one is not to think about the idea of "constitutive lack", one is simply to "accept" it, under pain of invalidation.   If someone else disagrees, s/he can simply be told that there is something crucial missing from her/his theory.   Indeed, critics are as likely to be accused of being "dangerous" as to be accused of being wrong. 

EXT: OEDIPUS

Their alt creates moral self-mutilation that is repressive and glorifies the doctor as the core of all powerDeleuze and Guattari 72 (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. “The Conjunctive Sythesis of Consumption-Consummation”. Anti-Oedipus. University of Minnesota Press. 1972. ISBN: 978-0-8166-1225-3. Pg. 92 – M.E.)

There we have it-the incurable familialism of psychoanalysis, enclosing the unconscious within Oedipus, cutting off all vital flows, crushing desiring-production, conditioning the patient to respond daddy-mommy, and to always consume daddy-mommy. Thus Foucault was entirely right in saying that, in a certain sense, the psychoanalyst completed and perfected what the psychiatry of nineteenth-century asylums, with Pinel and Tuke, had set out to do: to fuse madness with a parental complex , to link it to "the half-real, half-imaginary dialectic of the Family "; to constitute for the madman a microcosm symbolizing "the massive structures of bourgeois society and its values," relations of Family-Child, Transgression-Punishment, Madness-Disorder; to arrange things so that disalienation goes the same route as alienation, with Oedipus at both ends; to establish the moral authority of the doctor as Father and Judge, Family and Law; and finally to culminate in the following paradox: "While the victim of mental illness is entirely alienated in the real person of his doctor, the doctor dissipates the reality of the mental illness in the critical concept of madness."*

Their political engagement through the lens of the analyst infinitely recreates Oedipal fascismGuattari 70 (Felix Guattari. “The Anti-Oedipus Papers.” 1970. Semiotexte, 2006, Pg.147-148)

A pervert can take pleasure [jouir] in a metonymy: a shoe, a rib bon, a butterfly, a little girl. .. The normal oedipal-pervert , though, takes pleasure in [jouit] the "mommy-daddy-me" conglomerate. The "little family." These conglomerates overdetermine all other jouissance (imperialism of the significative conjunction). Making love for mommy-daddy. Making politics for mommy-daddy. Everything has to go through this second internal-binary operation: taking pleasure in taking pleasure [jouir de jouir]. And so a field of exclusion is delimited. Outside the territoriality of this inter section there is: the remainder, the waste-the refuge of the taking pleasure in [jouir des] non-castrated desiring machines . What does classical analysis do in this situation: it plays the card of intersection; the analyst interprets all the possible roles in the oedipal triangle. For the sake of the neurotic's misery, the terms of the triangle still have traces of residual polyvocality : there is

never access to the pure perverted jouissance of oedipal geneticism. The hysteric wants to attain it from the outside; the obsessive wants to seize it from the inside. The analyst, first, deterritorializes the Oedipus and, second, reconstitutes it , invents and re-invents it over and over again ! Freud says this explicitly: he replaces neurosis with transfer neurosis. So a certain symptomatic lifting [levee] can be obtained with the assumption of a more and more twisted and reactionary Oedipus. It's the work of desiring anti-production. It's the work that the Church used to do successfully on a massive scale bUt that it is powerless in doing on the scale of today's technocratic

society. With classical analysis it's double or nothing on the (n) intersection. With schizo-analysis it's the failure, the elimination of the intersection or its inclusion in a general field of desire-the union of desiring connections ( U ).

70“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

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EXT: THE SUBJECT

Lacan’s understanding of the Subject is backward – there is no “A”, their signification effaces immanence and assigns the unconscious a label that doesn’t apply. The Body without Organs unearths signs and restores desire – we control uniqueness with schizo-subjectivityGuattari 70 (Felix Guattari. “The Anti-Oedipus Papers.” 1970. Semiotexte, 2006, Pg.185-186)

So Lacan created a theory of the subject of the second articula tion, the subject that talks under the constraint of writing, economies of flow, the despotic referent (resonant double articulation-the Oedipus-and reasoning-signification). But not of the subject of the unconscious: for the very good reason that there is no subject of the unconscious (return to Descartes? Freud? Husserl?), and the unconscious doesn't speak, or discuss things. It works in its own way, it fools around, doodles. It doesn't give a shit! The unconscious is not "structured like a language." It's annoying, but it's true!'"**20

The unconscious doubly doesn't give a shit about structure or lan guage (except for the "language of flowers" when it's a question of jokes about wasps!

But whatever!). No unconscious subjectivity! No reference structures! No "code treasury." Codes aren't hoarded, they aren't orga nized. There is no ''A.' ' What a mess! It's very nice to try to straighten this all up, but it's useless! The sign assigns itself singular chains, singular territories. The further you go, from the dwarf star, to life, to modern forms of*** representation, the worse it gets! Things are made for being seen. This has nothing to do with

anything. But it always works. It's on the condition that you reduce re-presentation that man, through science, can find some efficiency in producing the producing (either scientific reduction or schizo reduction).

Ritual representation among "primitives" systematically lacks" objects ("subjectivizes" them, "confuses sign and signifier," as a certain Jean Poirier

writes in his Problems of Economic Ethnology). ** It lacks them to locate, situate, territorialize and inscribe its own jouissance ranges, the site of its collective organic .investment. Collective investment was planetanzed with science. The emergence of a schizo subjectivity-that levels the signifier, "unearths" signs-restores desire, why not!

1AR: PERM

Extend the perm, a combination of the aff and the alt is the most realistic approach. Deleuze and Guattari use their rhizomic method to create a revolutionary lens that THEIR ALT AFFIRMS – we just give their model of psychopolitics legs. 3 impacts:

1) No disads to the perm - their evidence at best makes a clinical distinction between types of analysis, means none of their links are disads to the perm because their authors ignore the context that Deleuze and Guattari apply schizoanalysis to.

2) We solve the links – perm embeds their analysis into the nomadic war machine. We take Lacan and run with it, turning it into an evolutionary politics that challenges fascism.

3) DA to the Alt – we’ve got them in a double bind, either they engage in the role of the Analyst, and they’re too radically left to leave the analysts’ chair meaning the case is a DA because they pose as Oedipus, or the Analyst can turn to the practices of Guattari without triggering the link. We advocate problematizing the State and the way protest movements are appropriated through the role of the analyst-gone-schizo.

___ Guattari 70 (Felix Guattari. “The Anti-Oedipus Papers.” 1970. Semiotexte, 2006, Pg.153)

So Lacan’s formula has to be understood as follows: has to be divided into: the subject of the statement and the subject of enunciation. There is no broken, castrated subject. There are series that produce different subjectivities:- the subject of my ass- the subject of my “internal regulations,” etc.

71“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

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These subjectivities are stuck together to form a truly disgusting urn to replace desiring machines. They molarize the desiring machines , and represent them. Collective agents of enunciation can avoid this impasse because they aren't going from a tangential reduction to 2 terms, they "transcursivize" things into "n" terms. On the

one hand, because the deterritorialization of their transcur sion connects them onto real transductions, and on the other

because they don't need machines for their representation in the same way anymore = ass, mouth, eye, etc. They liberate them like

you fire a housekeeper, or like the Indian tribes that were enslaved, in Venezuela, who made rubber until the capitalists fucked off and they were left to fend for themselves.

No need for these things to represent: technical machines do it better! "We're returning your organs to you , you can do what you want with them! Why don't you get high on them ... " Technical machines liberate the potential schizo use of desir ing machines. Group fantasy in the audio-visual realm is produced from

Hertzian waves, not shit or milk flows. You don't need repressive or phallic castration to overcome the separation of planes.*

2AR: PERM

We’re the alt-turned-Guattari, radical schizoanalysis clinics where there isn’t a transcendent Father-Judge-God figure commanding the schizo. We give their politics legs, 2 DA’s to the alt –

1. Fascism - The alt takes the role of the analyst, our Guattari evidence is very conclusive: the role of the analyst is the top of the Oedipal triangle, a father and judge rolled into a God-like façade that encourages the subject to repress desire. The analyst molarizes the subject, summing up desiring machines and subjectivities into one shattering blow: one term, one enunciation, one name, one label.

2. Cede the political – Robinson is a net benefit, they allow molar fascism because they never engage a politics of desire.

We present a different vision of the subject: the neg does NO work on this core uniqueness question, the subject is not broken and castrated, the subject is produced by coalescing subjectivities: the subject of the mouth, the brain, and the political. What is the alternative analyzing? The alternative turns subjectivities into technical machines – there’s no subject to analyze, the molecular level of politics is key to accessing their analysis, that’s Gilbert. There is no subject of the protester: he is composed of flows of capital, hot dog vendors at protests, fox news broadcasts and other political subjectivities that compose the protester. Behind every Tea Party protester is a figure of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck.

They’re a clinical distinction at best – make them explain the difference between how the aff and alt operate politically. 2 reasons this is important:

1. None of their links are disads to the perm – their authors don’t take into context the way that Deleuze and Guattari apply their analysis. The aff is a political roadmap for the evolution of protest activism, the alt doesn’t translate politically, meaning their links aren’t in context to political translations.

2. We’ll win the clinical distinction – Guattari’s practices as a schizoanalyst were far more successful than psychological practices that tell you to take a pill and cry about your childhood. A walk in the outdoors and fresh air is more useful than the musty air of the analyst’s room. Our solvency evidence smokes their alt – that’s Gilbert and Patton.

We solve the links – nomadism solves the alt, we can incorporate their analysis into the nomadic war machine. They don’t have a reason that their mode of analysis can be integrated into the political.

They’re in a double bind – extend 1AR-3: either they engage in the role of the Analyst, and they’re too radically left to leave the analysts’ chair meaning the case is a DA because they pose as Oedipus, or the Analyst can turn to the practices of Guattari without triggering the link. If they win a link, we’re an impact turn to the K, AND a net benefit to the perm: they can’t win a reason that the analyst shouldn’t schizoanalyze subjectivity.

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Guattari 70 is a net benefit, they can’t access our solvency because they turn organs into technical machines. We solve, the alternative can become a road map beginning with analytic subjectivity by passing it through the schizophrenic barrier.

1AR: COLEBROOK/HOENISCH

___ Extend Colebrook 8 – psychoanalysis is nothing but another industry: Zizek can produce an analytic scene through his monthly book sales and nothing ever happens to the political. The alternative is basically just Zizek selling another book: we’re a change in protest, in the literal flow of power and policy. Their politics is mass-produced religion: ours is interpretation with legs.

___ Extend Hoenisch 6 – the alt doesn’t actually do something political, they just alter the way we see events. That means they can’t access any impacts beyond the way we interpret reality – this super charges our Conservatism arguments: they cede the political. They’d rather talk about why Palin got elected in 2012 then actually do something about it. Don’t worry, Zizek will write another book.

1AR: BRAIDOTTI

Extend Braidotti 9 – the K sees a very different lens of reality: we make a key differentiation. They see chaos as epistemological, as a precursor to understanding the Real and as coming before structure and order. We see chaos as nature, the Body without Organs, a liberatory plane resisting codification. They see the schizo as a dangerous precursor to order; we see them as a liberatory conjunction of desiring machines. That means the alt never solves the aff.

___ That also means that you vote aff now, we’re winning that the only link they have is that they see the Lack and we see Desire. These are flip-sides of each other: the Lack is only a repression of desire or a desire beyond repression. The solution isn’t quiet analysis, it’s liberation: liberate flows of desire. We solve the alt AND there isn’t a link because they only make a semantic argument about the nature of desire: no impact because they’re functionally similar.

1AR: CONSERVATISM T/

Extend Robinson 5 – they cede the political. The Iraq war is acceptable in Lacanian politics as long as we do it with a “sad duty” of de Gaulle’s “Act”. They only change our relationship to material events that they never effect – make them explain how they map onto politics, we’re winning that they don’t event protest movements, which means we have a fascism DA to the alt: they never liberate Oedipal repression, they just think about it.

___ External imperialism DA – fascism results in endless war like the invasion of Iraq, conservative takeover turns the K. People like Glenn Beck aren’t the biggest fans of Zizek, psychoanalysis and free thought doesn’t prevail in literal molar fascism.

73“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

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AT: IDENTITY POLITICS/REPS

They’ve got it wrong—they ignore immanence in favor of negative difference, turns the K and means our method solvesColebrook 2 (Claire Colebrook 2002 (Understanding Deleuze) Pg 29-30)

According to Deleuze the structuralist and common-sense location of difference within a system renders difference both negative and extensive. In the common-sense view difference is negative because it depends on being the relation between things that are in themselves self-present

and identical. So difference is secondary. And Structuralist difference is also negative; it is the differentiation within some undifferentiated being— again making difference dependent on some structure which differentiates. Structural difference is given only through its effects, and the effect is that of the system—and thus difference is ultimately traced back to an identity (such as language, structure or culture) which we can never grasp in itself. For structuralism, there is supposedly some single medium or agent of difference, even if this is signification, culture or language in general. All difference has been reduced to one governing system or form of difference,

and so what is primary is not difference at all, but some thing that differentiates. In the structuralist picture, difference is what divides, ‘cuts up’ or organises some supposedly pre-linguistic or pre-differential real. The ‘real’ is therefore out of reach , other, lost, lacking. Reality is now constructed or ‘synthesized’. Against this negative understanding of difference, Deleuze insists that difference is positive. It is not that there is some

undifferentiated real that we then differentiate through language. There are real differences and becomings that are far greater (or smaller) than the differences we mark in language . We cannot enclose difference or synthesis within human or even organic life. Life itself is difference and synthesis . We cannot even say that each ‘point’ of life differentiates itself in its own way, because life is not a collection of different or distinct points. It is continuous difference, and between any two points that we might locate on this continuum of difference there is an infinity of further difference, each different in ‘its’ own way. Rather than understanding the world as a totality of equivalent points, each relating to each other across some unified space, Deleuze refers to curves and inflections (Deleuze 1993). So what we have is not a world which is then differentiated, but curves or inflections: a life of distinct and infinite variations or deviations, while no curve or event of difference and becoming is the same as any other. The ‘atoms’ or smallest units that make up life are not things but events of difference: Inflection is the ideal genetic element

of the variable curve or fold. Inflection is the authentic atom, the elastic point … Bernard Cache defines inflection—or the point of inflection—

as an intrinsic singularity. Contrary to ‘extrema’ (extrinsic singularities, maximum and minimum), it does not refer to coordinates: it is neither high nor low, neither right nor left, neither regression nor progression … Thus inflection is the pure Event of the line or of the point, the Virtual, ideality par excellence (Deleuze 1993, pp. 14–15). We could imagine

one point of life as apprehending or perceiving another, such that points preceded perception, relation and becoming (mind perceiving world, for example). Or, with Deleuze, we could regard life as a series of curves or inflections. A’s relation to, or perception of, B would not be a straight line or direct picture, it would be inflected

by the specific manner of what A is. And the same would apply to B’s relation to A. Relations and differences would be neither uniform nor symmetrical — and this would be because the style or manner of difference would depend on each specific event of difference. (A and B are what they are only because they have their own forms of becoming, or their own tendencies for difference.)

Link turn – The body is a sight for the production of an unfettered being – their understanding of identity ossifies being and prevents its creative journey through the infinite. We should not seek to understand identity, we should seek to reach the point where identity itself is meaninglessBallantyne 7 (Andrew, Tectonic Cultures Research Group at Newcastle University , "Deleuze and Guattari for Architects" 78-79)

Landscape reappears with another role in imaging the schizoanalytic ‘subject’, if a subject remains. Just as Lenz found himself in machinic engagement with his surroundings, so that there was no sense of separateness between his ‘self’ and the snowflakes, stars and mountain peaks, so Deleuze and Guattari describe themselves as deserts, inhabited by concepts that wander across

them and move on their way, so they are being continually reconstituted and remade. ‘We are deserts,’ said Deleuze but populated by tribes, flora and fauna. We pass our time in ordering these tribes, arranging them in other ways, getting rid of some and encouraging others to prosper. And all these clans, all these crowds, do not undermine the desert, which is our very ascesis; on the contrary they inhabit it, they pass through it, over it. In Guattari there has always been a sort of wild rodeo, in part

directed against himself. The desert, experimentation on oneself, is our only identity, our single chance for all the combinations which inhabit us. (Deleuze and Parnet, 1977, 11) The ‘individual’ here is explicitly seen as multiple and political, and the process of subjectification is presented as dynamic and continuing, never as something that has reached or could reach a satisfactory conclusion. For Deleuze and Guattari living is always a process of becoming, never of contemplating an achieved ‘being’. Deleuze describes Guattari as ‘a man of the group, of bands or tribes, and yet he is a man alone, a desert populated by all these groups and all his friends, all his

74“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE LEONARDIbecomings’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 1977, 16). There is something of the fluidity of identity of ‘the man of the crowd’ in Edgar Allen Poe’s story, where the man participates in the identities of the various tribes and crowds that swarm through the city (Ballantyne, 2005, 204–9). He takes to an extreme, and embodies a principle in a way that only a fictional character can: the principle

that we are not formed in isolation, but socially, and we are constituted by way of ideas and practices that do not originate in us but which pass through us and inhabit us and influence the things we do, occasionally perhaps consciously, but for the most part without our having any particular awareness of it happening. So the individual is seen as not so much a political entity as a politics (a micropolitics) populated and engaged, harmonious or conflicted. The image is always of lines and intensities, intersecting planes and multiple colours, atmospheres, flows – never hard dry objects, bounded forms or clear contours. And the face, this white screen/black hole assemblage, is a means of engaging with others, a way of putting into circulation certain sorts of signification that our little parliament, our pandaemonium, feels will help it on its way.

Turn – GlobalizationThe worst perversions of capitalism rely on the production of difference to sell units – the affirmation of a specific minority identity is not liberating, it just creates a new target market. We are already responsible for the creation and maintenance of global fascist capitalism – only challenging the formulations of desire can effectively redirect the forces of globalizationZalloua 8 (Zahi, Assistant Professor of French at Whitman College , "The Future of an Ethics of Difference After Hardt and Negri’s Empire" MUSE)

The merits of Empire lie in its desire to reconfigure the center/periphery model of analysis, and, more importantly, to complicate the identification by postcolonial theorists of globalization with neo-imperialism (or the U.S.) by examining more closely how repressive power currently functions. At the heart of Hardt and Negri’s critique is their contention that the nation-state is an outdated notion, belonging to a prior era of “modern,” imperialist sovereignty that has been superseded by the new,

imperial sovereignty of an “Empire” structured by the flow of capital. Any critique of globalization based on the assumption that nation-states are the primary locus of power is misguided: “We insist on asserting that the construction of Empire is a step forward in order to do away with any nostalgia for the power structures that preceded it and refuse any political strategy that involves returning to that old arrangement, such as trying to resurrect the nation-state to protect against global capital” (43). No one is immune from the logic of global capital. Inside/outside and local/global dichotomies are,

strictly speaking, illusory, since we all “feed into and support the development of the capitalist imperial machine” (45). It is therefore not [End Page 128] only false, but counterproductive and damaging, “to claim that we can (re)establish local identities that are in some sense outside and protected against the global flows of capital and Empire,” that is, to think difference in terms of a particular locale resisting a general global trend (45). As a corrective to this misguided vision of the nation or the local’s capacity for resistance, Hardt and Negri argue for a reconceptualization of globalization as a “regime of the production of identity and difference, or really of homogenization and heterogenization” (45). This understanding of globalization relies more specifically on Foucault’s notion of biopower, which manifests itself through “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations” (1978, 140). Contrary to prior models of power, Foucault’s conception underscores power’s productive or

positive nature. As he writes in Discipline and Punish, “We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact, power produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth” (194). Under what they call the “society of control” (23), a formulation they borrow from

Deleuze, Hardt and Negri uphold power’s productive principle (“[Empire] produce[s] not only commodities but also subjectivities” [32]), and extend the scope of Foucault’s analysis of the normalizing effects of power beyond disciplinary institutions (such as the prison and the asylum). In the “society of control,” along with its unprecedented “flexible and fluctuating networks,” the “normalizing apparatuses of disciplinarity” intensify, becoming more general, “more ‘democratic,’ ever more immanent to the social field, distributed through the brains and bodies of the citizens” (23). Given the nature and dominance of global power, described again in Deleuzian terms as an “imperial machine,” Hardt and Negri deny the possibility of transcendence, that is, of adopting a critical position from nowhere, a subject position uncontaminated by ideology; such an “external standpoint no longer exists” (34). A critique of Empire must remain immanent and resist the temptation of transcendence. It is this failure to recognize that modern sovereignty has given way to Empire that typically gives social critics the transcendental urge to posit a form of discourse that “could oppose the informational colonization of being” (34), the assimilative, instrumental rationality prevalent in American capitalism (Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communication would be one example). The appeal to difference common to postmodernist and postcolonial circles seems to suffer from precisely such a sense of transcendence, a desire to embrace difference—the margin, the excluded other—en-soi, outside of Western hegemony. One of the refrains of Empire is the need to know our “true enemy” [End Page 129] (137). With the end of colonialism and the disappearing powers of the nation-state, the new enemy is Empire, an enemy which nevertheless holds the promise of a

better, more democratic future: The passage to Empire and its processes of globalization offer new possibilities to the forces of liberation . . . . Our political task . . . is not simply to resist these processes but to reorganize them and redirect them toward new ends. The creative forces of the multitude that sustain Empire are also capable of autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative

political organization of global flows and exchanges. (xv) Globalization . . . is really a condition for the liberation of the multitude. (52) In other words, globalization is not an obstacle to overcome but a system to struggle with and transform (re-invent) on the plane of immanence.

Rather than arguing for a politics of difference, for the “truth” of the other’s difference, postmodernist and postcolonial theorists would do better to recognize that they are playing into the hands of their enemies and perpetuating Empire, which gladly celebrates difference: “This new enemy not only is resistant to the old weapons but actually thrives on them, and thus joins its would-be antagonists in applying them to the fullest.

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Long live difference! Down with essentialist binaries!” (138). Hybridity, then, the once cherished strategy for combating identitarian boundaries and antagonisms, has become the new norm of globalization; as a result, hybridity as a concept has lost its critical edge. It can no longer serve as an effective means of resistance to the homogenizing force of Empire, since it is neutralized and absorbed by the very system it purports to contest.

EXT: REPS DEAD/THEORY+PRACTICE

Representation is dead and multiplicity remains—situating the movement within discourse is key to struggle against power—key to political changeDeleuze and Foucault 72 (Gilles and Michel, two awesome French dudes, invented the unicorn, discussion recorded March 4, 1972, published in a special issue of L’Arc No. 49, pp. 3-10, “Intellectuals & Power: A conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze”, http://kasamaproject.org/2010/05/10/foucault-and-deleuze-on-intellectuals-and-power/, [CL])

This is a struggle against power , a struggle aimed at revealing and undermining power where it is most invisible and insidious. It is not to “awaken consciousness” that we struggle (the masses have been aware for some time that consciousness is a form of

knowledge; and consciousness as the basis of subjectivity is a prerogative of the bourgeoisie), but to sap power , to take power; it is an activity conducted alongside those who

struggle for power, and not their illumination from a safe distance. A “theory ” is the regional system of this struggle. MICHEL FOUCAULT: A Maoist once said to me: “I

can easily understand Sartre’s purpose in siding with us; I can understand his goals and his involvement in politics; I can partially under- stand your position, since you’ve always been concerned with the problem of confinement. But Deleuze is an enigma.” I was shocked by this

statement because your position has always seemed particularly clear to me. GILLES DELEUZE: Possibly we’re in the process of experiencing a new relationship between theory and practice. At one time, practice was considered an application of theory, a consequence; at other times, it bad an opposite sense and it was thought to inspire theory, to be indispensable for the creation of future theoretical forms. In any event, their relationship was understood in terms of a process of totalisation. For us,

however, the question is seen in a different light. The relationships between theory and practice are far more partial and fragmentary. On one side, a theory is always local and related to a limited field, and it is applied in another sphere, more or less distant from it. The relationship which holds in the application of a theory is never one of resemblance. Moreover, from the moment a theory moves into its proper domain, it begins to encounter obstacles, walls, and blockages which require its relay by another type of discourse (it is through this other discourse that it eventually passes to a different domain). Practice is a set of relays from one theoretical point to another, and theory is a relay from one practice to another. No theory can develop without eventually encountering a wall, and practice is necessary for piercing this wall. For example, your work began in the theoretical analysis of the context of confinement, specifically with respect to the psychiatric asylum within a capitalist society in the nineteenth century. Then you became aware of the necessity for confined individuals to speak for themselves, to create a relay (it’s possible, on the contrary, that your function was already that of a relay in relation to them); and this group is found in prisons — these individuals are imprisoned. It was on this basis that you organised the information group for prisons (G.I.P.)(1), the object being to create conditions that permit the prisoners themselves to speak. It would be

absolutely false to say, as the Maoist implied, that in moving to this practice you were applying your theories. This was not an application; nor was it a project for initiating reforms or an enquiry in the traditional sense. The emphasis was altogether different: a system of relays within a larger sphere, within a multiplicity of parts that are both theoretical and practical. A theorising intellectual, for us, is no longer a subject, a representing or representative consciousness. Those who act and struggle are no longer represented, either by a group or a union that appropriates the right to stand as their conscience. Who speaks and acts? It is always a multiplicity , even within the person who speaks and acts. All of us are “groupuscules.”(2) Representation no longer exists; there’s only action-theoretical action and practical action which serve as relays and form networks . FOUCAULT: It seems to me that the political involvement of the intellectual was traditionally the product of two different aspects of his activity: his position as an intellectual in bourgeois society, in the system of capitalist production and within the ideology it produces or imposes (his exploitation, poverty, rejection, persecution,

the accusations of subversive activity, immorality, etc); and his proper discourse to the extent that it revealed a particular truth, that it disclosed political relationships where they were unsuspected. These two forms of politicisation did not exclude each other, but, being of a different order, neither did they coincide. Some were classed as “outcasts” and others as “socialists.” During moments of violent reaction on the part of the authorities, these two positions were readily fused: after 1848, after the Commune, after 1940. The intellectual was rejected and persecuted at the precise moment when the facts became incontrovertible, when it was forbidden to say that the emperor had no clothes. The intellectual spoke the truth to those who had yet to see it, in the name of those who were forbidden to speak the truth: he was conscience, consciousness, and eloquence. In the most recent upheaval (3) the intellectual discovered that the masses no longer need him to gain knowledge: they know perfectly well, without illusion; they know far better than he and they are certainly capable of expressing themselves. But there exists a system of power which blocks, prohibits, and invalidates this discourse and this knowledge, a power not only found in the manifest authority of

censorship, but one that profoundly and subtly penetrates an entire societal network. Intellectuals are themselves agents of this system of power - the idea of their responsibility for “consciousness” and discourse forms part of the system. The intellectual’s role is no longer to place himself “somewhat ahead and to the side” in order to express the stifled truth of the collectivity; rather, it is to struggle against the forms of power that transform him into its object and instrument in the sphere of “knowledge ,” “truth,” “consciousness,” and “discourse. “(4) In this sense theory does not express, translate, or serve to apply practice: it is practice. But it is local and regional, as you said, and not

totalising. This is a struggle against power, a struggle aimed at revealing and undermining power where it is most invisible and insidious. It is not to “awaken consciousness” that we struggle (the masses have been aware for some time that consciousness is a form of knowledge; and consciousness as the basis of subjectivity is a prerogative of the bourgeoisie), but to sap power, to take power; it is an activity conducted alongside those who struggle for power, and not their illumination from a safe distance. A “theory ” is the regional system of this struggle.

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EXT: IMMANENT POWER

Totalizing criticism just inverts power and restores hierarchy: our intellectual revolution should focus on the local establishment of flash-points for struggle against the State. Every resistance begins at a locus of power: ours starts with Iraq and spreads outward, linking to every resistance. Deleuze and Foucault 72 (Gilles and Michel, two awesome French dudes, invented the unicorn, discussion recorded March 4, 1972, published in a special issue of L’Arc No. 49, pp. 3-10, “Intellectuals & Power: A conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze”, http://kasamaproject.org/2010/05/10/foucault-and-deleuze-on-intellectuals-and-power/, [CL])

DELEUZE: On the basis of our actual situation, power emphatically develops a total or global vision. That is, all the current forms of repression (the racist repression of immigrant workers, repression in the factories, in the educational system, and the general repression of youth) are easily totalised from the point of view of power. We should not only seek the unity of these forms in the reaction to May ’68 , but more appropriately, in the concerted preparation and organisation of the near future, French capitalism now relies on a “margin” of unemployment and has abandoned the liberal and paternal mask that promised full employment. In this perspective, we begin to see the unity of the forms of repression: restrictions on immigration, once it is acknowledged that the most difficult and thankless jobs go to immigrant workers-repression in the factories, because the French must reacquire the “taste” for increasingly harder work; the struggle against youth and the repression of the educational system, because police repression is more active when there is less need for young people in the work force. A wide range of professionals (teachers, psychiatrists, educators of all kinds, etc.) will be called upon to exercise functions that have traditionally belonged to the police. This is something you predicted long

ago, and it was thought impossible at the time: the reinforcement of all the structures of confinement. Against this global policy of power, we initiate localised counter-responses, skirmishes , active and occasionally preventive defences. We have no need to totalise that which is invariably totalised on the side of power; if we were to move in this direction, it would mean restoring the representative forms of centralism and a hierarchical structure . We must set up lateral affiliations and an entire system of net- works and popular bases; and this is especially difficult. In any case, we no longer define reality as a continuation of politics in the traditional sense of competition and the distribution of power, through the so-called representative

agencies of the Communist Party or the General Workers Union(6). Reality is what actually happens in factories, in schools, in barracks, in prisons , in police stations. And this action carries a type of information which is altogether different from that found in newspapers (this explains the kind of information carried by the Agence de Press Liberation (7).’FOUCAULT: Isn’t this difficulty of finding adequate forms of struggle a result of the fact that we continue to ignore the problem of power? After all, we had to wait until the nineteenth century before we began to understand the nature of exploitation, and to this day, we have yet to fully comprehend the nature of power. It may be that Marx and Freud cannot satisfy our desire for understanding this enigmatic thing which we call power, which is at once visible and invisible, present and hidden, ubiquitous. Theories of government and the traditional analyses of their mechanisms certainly don’t exhaust the field where power is exercised and where it functions.

The question of power re- mains a total enigma. Who exercises power? And in what sphere? We now know with reasonable certainty who exploits others, who receives the profits, which people are involved, and we know how these funds are reinvested. But as for power . . . We know that it is not in the hands of those who govern. But, of course, the idea of the “ruling class” has never received an adequate formulation, and neither have other

terms, such as “to dominate … .. to rule … .. to govern,” etc. These notions are far too fluid and require analysis. We should also investigate the limits imposed on the exercise of power-t he relays through which it operates and the extent of its influence on the often insignificant aspects of the hierarchy and the forms of control , surveillance, prohibition, and constraint. Everywhere that power exists, it is being exercised. No one, strictly speaking, has an official right to power; and yet it is always excited in a particular direction, with some people on one side and some on the other. It is often difficult to say who holds power in a precise sense, but it is easy to see who lacks power. If the reading of your books (from Nietzsche to what I anticipate in Capitalism and Schisophrenia (8) has been essential for me, it is because they seem to go

very far in exploring this problem: under the ancient theme of meaning, of the signifier and the signified , etc., you have

developed the question of power, of the inequality of powers and their struggles. Each struggle develops around a particular source of power (any of the countless, tiny sources- a small-time boss, the manager of “H.L.M.,”‘ a prison warden, a judge, a union

representative, the editor-in-chief of a newspaper). And if pointing out these sources-denouncing and speaking out-is to be a part of the struggle , it is not because they were previously unknown. Rather, it is because to speak on this subject, to force the institutionalised networks of information to listen, to produce names, to point the finger of accusation, to find targets, is the first step in the reversal of power and the initiation of new struggles against existing forms of power. if the discourse of inmates or prison doctors constitutes a form of struggle, it is because they confiscate, at least temporarily, the power to speak on prison conditions-at present, the exclusive property of prison administrators and their cronies in reform groups. The discourse of struggle is not opposed to the unconscious, but to the secretive. It may not seem like much; but what if it turned out to be more than we expected? A whole series of misunderstandings relates to things that are “bidden,” “repressed,” and “unsaid”; and they permit the cheap “psychoanalysis” of the proper objects of struggle. It is perhaps more difficult to unearth a secret than the unconscious. The two themes frequently encountered in the recent past, that “writing gives rise to repressed elements” and that “writing is necessarily a subversive activity,” seem to betray a number of operations that deserve to be severely denounced.

77“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

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EXT: K/2 SOLVE FASCISM

The central question of our advocacy is one of desire: we must center our struggle around power and our desire for domination of ourselves and others in order to reveal the logic of fascism and the death of the masses. Our nomad politics does away with identity politics altogether. Deleuze and Foucault 72 (Gilles and Michel, two awesome French dudes, invented the unicorn, discussion recorded March 4, 1972, published in a special issue of L’Arc No. 49, pp. 3-10, “Intellectuals & Power: A conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze”, http://kasamaproject.org/2010/05/10/foucault-and-deleuze-on-intellectuals-and-power/, [CL])DELEUZE: With respect to the problem you posed: it is clear who exploits, who profits, and who governs, but power nevertheless remains something more diffuse. I would venture the following hypothesis: the thrust of Marxism was to define the problem essentially in terms of interests (power is held by a ruling class defined by its

interests). The question immediately arises: how is it that people whose interests are not being served can strictly support the existing power structure by demanding a piece of the action? Perhaps, this is because in terms of investments, whether

economic or unconscious, interest is not the final answer; there are investments of desire that function in a more profound and diffuse manner than our interests dictate. But of course, we never desire against our interests, because interest always follows and finds itself where

desire has placed it. We cannot shut out the scream of Reich: the masses were not deceived; at a particular time, they actually wanted a fascist regime! There are investments of desire that mould and distribute power , that make it the property of the policeman as much as of the prime minister; in this context, there is no qualitative difference between the power wielded by the policeman and the prime minister. The nature of these investments of desire in a social group explains why political parties or unions, which might have or should have revolutionary investments in the name of class interests, are so often reform oriented or absolutely reactionary on the level of desire.

FOUCAULT: As you say, the relationship between desire, power, and interest are more complex than we ordinarily think, and it is not necessarily those who exercise power who have an interest in its execution; nor is it always possible for those with vested interests to exercise

power. Moreover, the desire for power establishes a singular relationship between power and interest. It may happen that the

masses, during fascist periods, desire that certain people assume power, people with whom they are unable to identify since these individuals exert power against the masses and at their expense, to the extreme of their death, their sacrifice, their massacre. Nevertheless, they desire this particular power; they want it to be exercised. This play of desire, power, and interest has received very little attention. It was a long time before we began to

understand exploitation; and desire has had and continues to have a long history. It is possible that the struggles now taking place and the local, regional, and discontinuous theories that derive from these struggles and that are indissociable from them stand at the threshold of our discovery of the manner in which power is exercised.

DELEUZE: In this context, I must return to the question: the present revolutionary movement has created multiple centres, and not as the result of weakness or insufficiency, since a certain kind of totalisation pertains to power and the forces of reaction. (Vietnam, for instance, is an impressive example

of localised counter-tactics). But how are we to define the networks , the transversal links between these active and discontinuous points, from one country to another or within a single country?

FOUCAULT: The question of geographical discontinuity which you raise might mean the following: as soon as we struggle against exploitation, the proletariat not only leads the struggle but also defines its targets, its methods, and the places and instruments for confrontation; and to ally oneself with the proletariat is to accept its positions, its ideology, and its motives for combat. This means total identification. But if the fight is directed against power , then all those on whom power is exercised to their detriment, all who find it intolerable, can begin the struggle on their own terrain and on the basis of their proper activity (or passivity). In engaging in a struggle that concerns their own interests, whose objectives they clearly understand and whose methods only they can determine, they enter into a revolutionary process. They naturally enter as allies of the proletariat, because power is exercised the way it is in order to maintain capitalist exploitation. They genuinely serve the cause of the proletariat by fighting in those places they find themselves oppressed. Women,

prisoners, conscripted soldiers, hospital patients, and homosexuals have now begun a specific struggle against the particularised power, the constraints and controls, that are exerted over them. Such struggles are actually involved in the revolutionary movement to the degree that they are radical, uncompromising and nonreformist, and refuse any attempt at arriving at a new disposition of the same power with, at best, a change of masters . And these movements are linked to the revolutionary movement of the proletariat to the extent that they fight against the controls and constraints which serve the same system of power.In this sense, the overall picture presented by the struggle is certainly not that of the totalisation you mentioned earlier, this theoretical totalisation under the guise of “truth.” The generality of the struggle specifically derives from the system of power itself, from all the forms in which power is exercised and applied.DELEUZE: And which we are unable to approach in any of its applications without revealing its diffuse character, so that we are necessarily led–on the basis of the most insignificant demand to the desire to blow it up completely. Every revolutionary attack or defence, however partial, is linked in this way to the workers’ struggle.

1AR: LET’S TALK BUSINESS…

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___ We turn the alt – they don’t solve for identity stratification because they only reproduce new oppressed populations, that’s D&G 72. Even if their revolution changes material conditions, it doesn’t challenge desire which is key to change the way politics evolves from the molecular level. We solve the root of the K.

___ The alt accesses NONE of the aff if there’s a link – our rhizome politics is immanent. If they win a link, that means the political strategy of the alternative is stratified, so you weigh the aff directly against the links. We outweigh their link cards, extend Bell – fear politics is the root cause of discriminatory policy: the masses desired the PATRIOT act, Arizona immigration laws and segregation.

1AR: COLEBROOK/BALLANTYNE

___ Extend Colebrook 2 – our aff is a rhizomic movement that engages a radical understanding of identity: our politics is a becoming-minoritarian where we smooth over the space of ontology. What it means to “be” is a question of immanent connections and not negative definitions. The 1AC has a specific notion of the Subject that terminally non-uniques their links and is an independent ontology disad to the alt: they see blackness as not-whiteness, female as not-male, human as not-animal. This is negative difference. We see the subject as a collection of desiring-machines, not an organism. We see identity as infinite and radial, spreading outward. They retrench fascism and ressentiment through their lens of negativity, we’re the only risk of solving. Can read: <Conley 3 – Becoming-Minoritarian>

___ Extend Ballantyne 7 – bodies are deserts, populated by tribes. Our notion of the Subject is nomadic, not calcified in one shattering blow. They sediment Being into a pre-made form, the Organism: this denies becoming. We should use the body to produce a point of chaos where identity is meaningless. Our politics of desire is key. Can read: <Organism card>

1AR: ZALLOUA

___ Extend Zalloua 8 – capitalism uses flows of negative difference to produce new axiomatics. Affirming specific minority identities isn’t liberating, it creates new spaces for capitalism to reterritorialize: a new target market. In the way Che t-shirts are sold in stores the aff takes minorities and makes them into profit for rich white men. Only a politics of desire can challenge the forces of global fascist capital because the masses desired capitalism. Can read: <Masses desire capitalism below>___Deleuze and Guattari 1995 ("Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium", ["Chaosophy", ed. Sylvere Lothringer, Autonomedia/Semiotexte 1995], retreived from textz.com in 2002)

GD: Of course, capitalism was and remains a formidable desiring machine. The monary flux, the means of production, of manpower, of new markets, all that is the flow of desire. It's enough to consider the sum of contingencies at the origin of capitalism to see to what degree it has been a crossroads of

desires, and that its infrastructure, even its economy, was inseparable from the phenomnea of desire. And fascism too--one must say that it has "assumed the social desires", including the desires of repression and death.

People got hard-ons for Hitler, for the beautiful fascist machine. But if your question means: was capitalism revolutionary in its

beginnings, has the industrial revolution ever coincided with a social revolution? No, I don't thing so. Capitalism has been tied from its birth to a savage

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repressiveness; it had it's organization of power and its state apparatus from the start. Did capitalism imply a dissolution of the

previous social codes and powers? Certainly. But it had already established its wheels of power, including its power of state, in the fissures of previous regimes. It is always like that: things are not so progressive; even before a social formation is established, its instruments of exploitation and repression are already there, still turning in the vaccuum, but

ready to work at full capacity. The first capitalists are like waiting birds of prey. They wait for their meeting with the worker, the one who drops through the cracks of the preceding system. It is even, in every sense, what one calls primitive accumulation.

___ Identity is irrelevant in the world of capitalism: the market homogenizes all identity in flows of capital. Politics of desire is key to solve.Ballantyne 7 (Andrew, Tectonic Cultures Research Group at Newcastle University , "Deleuze and Guattari for Architects" 85)

The ideas need a milieu, made up of other ideas and practices, and a given milieu will allow some ideas to flourish while others do not stand a chance. The particular milieu for ideas that Guattari sees threatening diversity is that of

‘Integrated World Capitalism’, which we would now normally call ‘globalization’. It has a tendency to make us all want the same things, wherever we are in the world, and whatever our cultural differences would have been in the past. This homogenizing of the subject by the mass media

presents the same sort of danger as threats to biodiversity. We are educated all to swoon at the sight of the same film stars, to order the same carbonated drinks and wear the same perfumes. At one level it is pleasurable and innocuous, and too anodyne to look as if it could possibly do any harm. On the other hand whole species of ideas and cultures of behaviour are eliminated from the planet, never to be seen again, driven out for want of attention because we were thinking about football scores, or celebrity gossip.

AT: ABLEISMPerm—read the 1AC through a lens of anti-ableism. Deleuzian thought provides a fresh and productive way to view impairment and disability that solves their criticism bestKuppers 9 [Petra, disabled Deleuzoguattarian, “Toward a Rhizomatic Model of Disability: Poetry, Performance, and Touch” from the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies vol. 3 no. 3 of 2009, pgs. 225-228 or 6-9 of the Project MUSE PDF, UoR-NW]

Disability is the realm I traverse with a strong sense of the haptic, the touching of concepts and bodies. Disability is a slippery word that holds nightshade and sunlight, a concept that grows above ground, in our disability culture politics, and below, in the privacy of the disarticulation of pain, of isolation, of the lived reality of social and physical oppression: Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order. … [N]ot every trait in a rhizome is necessarily linked to a linguistic feature: semiotic chains of every nature are connected to very diverse modes of coding (biological, political, economic, etc.) that bring into play not only different regimes of signs but also states of things of differing status. (Deleuze and Guattari, Plateaus, 7)

One of the central struggle s in Disability Studies concerns models of disability , a somewhat fixed

generic form by now, and much discussed in the Social Science and Humanities literature on disability. In these models, disability activism and, later, Disability Studies , plumb the meaning of the word disability, and put it into play with the way that disability is culturally and socially grasped. In the social model , disability is a category that is extrinsic to specific bodily being : a wheelchair user becomes disabled when she encounters a stairwell. And she can embrace the label as a sign of shared oppression, identification across a social position.6 In the medical model , disability is intrinsic: this body is disabled , faulty, in need of being (and potentially able to be) cured, managed, rehabilitated. I propose a rhizomatic model of disability, already a model, slanted, quotationed, rather than a mode of experience. This is a model in which the extrinsic and intrinsic mix and merge, as they do in my own physical and psychical being when I am in pain, and cannot walk up the stairs, and wish for a painkiller, and take pride in my difference (what other choice do I have?), and feel unable to speak of the nature of my discomfort, cannot find the words, but find comfort in the company of others whose pain might be different, but who somehow feel sympatico . The rhizomes in A

80“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE LEONARDIThousand Plateaus connect at any point of their surface, assemble into new life forms, run along the surface of the earth, and just beneath it, mixing below and above, refusing fixed differentiation (and of course, the schizoanalytic rhizome is not the biological rhizome, but neither is it ‘not it’: the two,

concrete and abstract, are in productive tension). To me, in my life reality, thinking about my disability as a rhizomatic formation is useful and productive . And of course Deleuzoguattarian politics are specific, momentary, individual, and not-reproduceable. And yet I feel that there is currency in this rhizomatic model for more than just me and my personal imaginary. Without knowing what specific assemblages will emerge for any one reader-operator, a rhizomatic model allows the co-existence of “not only different regimes of signs but also states of things of differing status” (Deleuze and Guattari, Plateaus, 7)— and that last part of the quote, things of differing status, resonates with my lived experience of disability as one that lives in a simultaneity of codes, devalued and valued at the same time. The rhizomatic model of disability produces an abundance of meanings that do not juxtapose pain and pleasure or pride and shame, but allow for an immanent transformation, a coming into being of a state of life in this world, one that is constantly shifting and productive of new subject/individual positions.

But, like all Deleuzoguattarian concepts, this rhizomatic model of disability is only useful when used. It cannot have truth status, for it is empty of specific meaning. It is a movement rather than a definition. Thus, the rhizomatic model of disability is not a new model. If it were, we would be back at a recipe, a fixed state. Instead, it is radically singular, flexing its membranes to touch words (disabled, pain), experiences (pain, joy) and other concrete objects in the world (stairs, pills, people, the ground, a table around which we are sharing our libations). To give an example: the conceptual character of pain is filled with markers of reality, with existence on multiple levels, with background/foreground shifts, with mobility that “can be connected to anything other, and must be” (Deleuze and Guattari, Plateaus, 7). This is not the same as saying “pain shades the world,” as if pain was a paint wash over a person’s experience. I posit that the experience of pain can resonate with a rhizomatic conception of multiple simultaneous gazes intertwining . In one of Karen Fiser’s poems, a painwash does extend over the world, but its monochrome is undone quickly.

Pain is here not the solidly negative experience it so often is in a lot of work by non-disabled (and

disabled) people. Pain, a halt in speech, instead becomes a moment where attention can be focused , where a single moment opens up, blooms, and sensations fill a space. Here is one of the stanzas of “Still Life with Open Window”: Time spent in pain exists absolutely, without structure, demarcation or relief, it is all one color, like winter’s rainy sfumato inscriptions on gray. Meanwhile, the other, inner life goes on, unwitnessed, the shadow a tree makes on the wall, rippling like water. (Fiser 36) There are many colors in the words, different shapes the words make in my mind, and they all echo with and rewrite the meaning of sfumato, smoky, layered: there is a richness here, in nuance, not mono-colored, but delicately smeared, “rippling like water.” The poem moves precisely from ‘all one color’ to the specific, small instances of change that are all held within the moment of pain. The word meanwhile speaks to me of this rhizomatic simultaneity, not a balance so much as a productive tension. The last lines of the poem are: They will have to be connected by what flowers within the moments themselves. Each moment must expand to hold this infinite, unexpected joy. (Fiser 36) In this poem, formal qualities such as the rhythm of the words mitigate gently against a dissolve, a static absence of sensation, and calmly negates the singularity that many people think of

as ‘constant pain,’ but without a facile celebration of richness. Pain is unspeakable, maybe, but very much communicable in disability culture poetry, where it can open up nuances and surfaces, clasp meanings together, and allow different textures to co-exist. In this way of thinking pain with a Deleuzoguattarian toolbox, a thought , a movement or a state can code-switch, move simultaneously on different tracks, one ‘with pain’ (as in, ‘ in pain’), the other ‘with Pain,’ as a companion , an observer onto the self. Tactility governs my sense of the word disabled. In disability culture, we fit the label to ourselves like a velvet glove, like smooth plastic handles, like a ripped

battle flag, like a gaping hospital gown that transforms into white lace when we shimmy. What I am doing here is exploring the affective registers of disability metaphors, their haptic potential. We can find distance between the word and ourselves. Like many body theorists, Maurice Merleau-Ponty uses disabled people as case studies to unravel how humans inhabit their bodies and minds. He writes about the blind tailor to whom needle and scissors are natural extensions, integrated into a bodily schema. Is the lived experience denying the word disability? Surely not, for as soon as that same blind tailor engages in another life activity, goes to a party, for instance, he will find the word lopped back at him in its multiple forms: cripple,

invalid, blind beggar, helpless… Instead of opposing the real-life experience of fully adapted disabled people and the (negative) connotations of disability as a social experience, a rhizomatic approach can let these tensions build, can touch one to the other, can see the multiplicity of experience and thought that opens up in the touching . Rhizomatic disability emerges in the

81“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE LEONARDIperspectival, in a fluid realm: “nomads entertaining tactile relations among themselves” (Deleuze and Guattari, Plateaus, 493).

AT: PERFORMATIVE ABLEISM1. Perm do both—our speech acts are two different critiques of debate practices,

makes it non-competitive:a. Cross-apply the Massumi evidence—we can incorporate their criticism into

our own as an evolution of our mode of thoughtb. [If they read Shelton] Solves the internal to Shelton—only we provide an

overarching methodology for future discussions means their alt looks like our aff—we’re one step closer to a more inclusive and less dogmatic form of debate

c. Think of our rejections of hegemonic debate practices in two cracks in the ice of oppression—they run alongside each other and may or may not eventually meet, but both are equally valid—vote aff to affirm bothHolloway 2010 (John, Professor at the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla,Mexico, “Crack Capitalism”, pg. 17-20)

Imagine a sheet of ice covering a dark lake of possibility. We scream 'NO' so loud that the ice begins to crack. What is it that is uncovered? What is that dark liquid that (sometimes, not always) slowly or quickly bubbles up through the crack? We shall call it dignity. The crack in the ice moves, unpredictable, sometimes racing, sometimes slowing, sometimes widening, sometime narrowing, sometimes freezing over again and disappearing, sometimes reappearing . All around the lake there are people doing the same thing as we are, screaming 'NO' as loud as they can, creating cracks that move just as cracks in ice do, unpredictably , spreading, racing to join up with other cracks , some

being frozen over again. The stronger the flow of dignity within them, the greater the force of the cracks. Serve no more, La Boetie tells us, and we shall at once be free. The break begins with refusal, with No. No, we shall not tend your sheep, plough your fields, make your car, do your examinations. The truth of the relation of power is revealed: the powerful depend on the powerless . The lord depends on his serfs, the capitalist depends on the workers who create his capital. But the real force of the serve no more comes when we do something else instead. Serve no more, and then what? If we just fold our arms and do nothing at all, we soon face the problem of

starvation. The serve no more, if it does not lead to an other-doing, an alternative activity, can easily become converted into a negotiation of the terms of servitude. The workers who say 'no' and cross their arms, or go on strike, are implicitly saying 'no, we shall not carry out this command', or 'we shall not carry on working under these conditions. ' This does not exclude the continuation of servitude (of the relationship of employment) under other conditions. The 'serve no more' becomes a step in the negotiation of new conditions of servitude. It is a different matter when the negation becomes a negation-and-creation. This is a more serious challenge. The workers say “no” and they take over the factory. They declare that they do not need a boss and begin to call for a world without bosses.2 Think of the sad story of Mr Peel, who, Marx tells us . . . took with him to Swan River, West Australia, means of su bsistence and of production to the amount of 5 0,000 pounds. M r. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 3,000 persons of the working-class, men, women and children. Once arrived at his destination, 'Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.' Unhappy Mr. Peel who provided for everything except the export of English modes of production to Swan River. (1867/1965: 766; 1867/1 990: 933) What happened was that land was still freely available in Swan River, so that the 3 ,000 persons of the working class went off and cultivated their own land. One can imagine the scene as the unhappy Mr. Peel's initial anger, when the workers refused to carry out his orders, turned to despair when he saw them going off to develop an alternative life free of masters. The availability of land made it possible for them to convert their refusal into a

decisive rupture and to develop an activity quite different from that planned for them by Mr. Peel. Think of the exciting story of the teachers in Puebla.3 When the government announced in 2008 the creation of a new scheme to improve the quality of education by imposing

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greater individualism, stronger competition between students, stricter measurement of

the output of teachers, and so on, the teachers said 'No, we will not accept it . ' When the government refused to listen, the dissident teachers moved beyond mere refusal and, in consultation with thousands of students and parents, elaborated their own proposal for improving the quality of education by promoting greater cooperation between students, more emphasis on critical thinking, preparation for cooperative work not directly subordinate to capital, and began to explore ways of implementing their scheme in opposition to the state guidelines, by taking control of the schools,4 Here too

the initial refusal begins to open towards something else, towards an educational activity that not only resists but breaks with the logic of capital . In both of these cases,

the No is backed by an other-doing. This is the dignity that can fill the cracks created by the refusal. The original No is then not a closure, but an opening to a different activity , the threshold of a counter-world with a different logic and a different language. The No

opens to a time-space in which we try to live as subjects rather than objects. These are time or spaces in which we assert our capacity to decide for ourselves what we should do - whether it be chatting with our friend , playing with our children, cultivating the land in a different way, developing and

implementing projects for a critical education. These are times or spaces in which we take control of our own lives, assume the responsibility of our own humanity. Dignity is the unfolding of the power of No. Our refusal confronts us with the opportunity, necessity and responsibility of developing our own capacities . The women and men who left Mr. Peel in the lurch were confronted with the opportunity and necessity of developing abilities suppressed by their previous condition of servitude. The teachers who reject the state textbooks are forced to develop another

education. The assumption of responsibility for our own lives is in itself a break with the logic of domination . This does not mean that everything will turn out to be perfect . The dignity is a breaking, a negating, a moving, an exploring. We must be careful not to convert it into a positive concept that might give it a deadening fixity. The women and men who deserted Mr. Peel may well have turned into small landholders who defended their property against all newcomers. The teachers who take their schools to create a critical education may possibly reproduce

authoritarian practices as bad as those which they are rejecting. It is the moving that is important,

the moving against-and-beyond: the negating and creating of those who abandoned Mr. Peel, more than the new spaces that they created; the taking of the schools by the teachers, more than the schools that they have

taken. It is the assuming of our own responsibility that is important, though the results may well be contradictory .6 Dignity , the movement of negating-and-creating, of taking

control of our own lives, is not a simple matter : it is, we said, a dark liquid bubbling up from a lake of

possibility. To give a positive solidarity to what can only be a moving of refusing and creating and exploring can easily lead to disillusion. A pro-Zapatista collective, or a social centre, or a group of piqueteros ends in conflict and disarray and we conclude that it all was an illusion, instead of seeing that such dignities are inevitably contradictory and

experimental. The cracks are always questions, not answers . It is important not to

romanticize the cracks, or give them a positive force that they do not possess. And yet, this is where start: from the cracks, the fissures, the rents, the spaces of rebellious negation-and- creation. We start from the particular, not from the totality. We start from the world of misfitting, from the multiplicity of particular rebellions, dignities, cracks , not from the

great unified Struggle that simply does not exist, nor from the system of domination. We start from being angry and lost and trying to create something else, because that is where we live, that is where we are. Perhaps it is a strange place to start, but we are looking for a strange thing. We are looking for hope in a dark night? We are trying to theorize hope-against-hope. This is surely the only subject matter of theory that is left.

2. We control root cause:a. Cross-apply DnG ev and 1AC Patton—only we start at the level of

preconscious desire—without our analysis revolutionary thoughts and actions get coopted because underlying motivations don’t

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change means no risk of neg solvency and only a risk of perm solvency

b. We control the best form of identity formation—theirs replicates systems of oppression through homogenization and misrepresentationColebrook 2 (Claire Colebrook 2002 (Understanding Deleuze) Pg 29-30)

According to Deleuze the structuralist and common-sense location of difference within a system renders difference both negative and extensive. In the common-sense view difference is negative because it depends on being the relation between things that are in themselves self-present and

identical. So difference is secondary. And Structuralist difference is also negative; it is the differentiation within some undifferentiated being—again making difference dependent on some structure which differentiates. Structural difference is given only through its effects, and the effect is that of the system—and thus difference is ultimately traced back to an identity (such as language, structure or culture) which we can never grasp in itself. For structuralism, there is supposedly some single medium or agent of difference, even if this is signification, culture or language in general. All difference has been reduced to one governing system or form of difference, and so what is primary is not difference at all, but some thing that

differentiates. In the structuralist picture, difference is what divides, ‘cuts up’ or organises some supposedly pre-linguistic or pre-differential real. The ‘real’ is therefore out of reach , other, lost, lacking. Reality is now constructed or ‘synthesized’. Against this negative understanding of difference, Deleuze insists that difference is positive. It is not that there is some undifferentiated real that we then differentiate through language. There are real differences and becomings that are far greater (or smaller) than the

differences we mark in language. We cannot enclose difference or synthesis within human or even organic life. Life itself is difference and synthesis . We cannot even say that each ‘point’ of life differentiates itself in its own way, because life is not a collection of different or

distinct points. It is continuous difference, and between any two points that we might locate on this continuum of difference there is an infinity of further difference, each different in ‘its’ own way. Rather than understanding the world as a totality of equivalent points, each relating to each other across some unified space, Deleuze refers to curves and inflections (Deleuze 1993). So what we have is not a world which is then differentiated, but curves or inflections: a life of distinct and infinite variations or deviations, while no curve or event of difference and becoming is the same as any other. The ‘atoms’ or smallest units that make up life are not things but events of difference: Inflection is the ideal genetic element of the variable curve or fold.

Inflection is the authentic atom, the elastic point … Bernard Cache defines inflection—or

the point of inflection—as an intrinsic singularity. Contrary to ‘extrema’ (extrinsic singularities, maximum and minimum), it does not refer to coordinates: it is neither high nor low, neither right nor left, neither regression nor progression … Thus inflection is the pure Event of the line or of the point, the Virtual, ideality par excellence (Deleuze 1993, pp. 14–15). We could imagine one point of life as apprehending or perceiving another, such that points preceded perception,

relation and becoming (mind perceiving world, for example). Or, with Deleuze, we could regard life as a series of curves or inflections. A’s relation to, or perception of, B would not be a straight line or direct

picture, it would be inflected by the specific manner of what A is. And the same would apply to B’s relation to A.

Relations and differences would be neither uniform nor symmetrical—and this would be because the style or manner of difference would depend on each specific event of difference. (A and B are what they are only because they have their own forms of becoming, or their own tendencies for difference.)

c. Specifically true for ableism—prefer this evidence—it’s written by a disabled person about her disability in relation to DeleuzeKuppers 9 [Petra, disabled Deleuzoguattarian, “Toward a Rhizomatic Model of Disability: Poetry, Performance, and Touch” from the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies vol. 3 no. 3 of 2009, pgs. 225-228 or 6-9 of the Project MUSE PDF, UoR-NW]Disability is the realm I traverse with a strong sense of the haptic, the touching of concepts and bodies.

Disability is a slippery word that holds nightshade and sunlight, a concept that grows above ground, in our disability culture politics, and below, in the privacy of the disarticulation of pain, of isolation, of the lived reality of social and physical oppression: Principles of connection and heterogeneity:

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any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order. … [N]ot every trait in a rhizome is necessarily linked to a linguistic feature: semiotic chains of every nature are connected to very diverse modes of coding (biological, political, economic, etc.) that bring into play not only different regimes of signs but also states of things of differing status. (Deleuze and Guattari, Plateaus, 7) One of the central struggle s in Disability Studies concerns models of disability , a somewhat fixed generic form by now, and much

discussed in the Social Science and Humanities literature on disability. In these models, disability activism and, later, Disability Studies , plumb the meaning of the word disability, and put it into play with the way that disability is culturally and socially grasped. In the social model , disability is a category that is extrinsic to specific bodily being : a wheelchair user becomes disabled when she encounters a stairwell. And she can embrace the label as a sign of shared oppression, identification across a social position.6 In the medical model , disability is intrinsic: this body is disabled , faulty, in need of being (and potentially able to

be) cured, managed, rehabilitated. I propose a rhizomatic model of disability, already a model, slanted, quotationed, rather than a mode of experience. This is a model in which the extrinsic and intrinsic mix and merge, as they do in my own physical and psychical being when I am in pain, and cannot walk up the stairs, and wish for a painkiller, and take pride in my difference (what other

choice do I have?), and feel unable to speak of the nature of my discomfort, cannot find the words, but find comfort in the company of others whose pain might be different, but who somehow feel sympatico . The rhizomes in A Thousand Plateaus connect at any point of their surface, assemble into new life forms, run along the surface of the earth, and just beneath it, mixing below and above, refusing fixed differentiation (and of course, the schizoanalytic rhizome is not the

biological rhizome, but neither is it ‘not it’: the two, concrete and abstract, are in productive tension). To me, in my life reality, thinking about my disability as a rhizomatic formation is useful and productive . And of course Deleuzoguattarian politics are specific, momentary, individual, and not-reproduceable. And yet I feel that there is currency in this rhizomatic model for more than just me and my personal imaginary. Without knowing what specific assemblages will emerge for any one reader-operator, a rhizomatic model allows the co-existence of “not only different regimes of signs but also states of things of differing status” (Deleuze

and Guattari, Plateaus, 7)— and that last part of the quote, things of differing status, resonates with my lived experience of disability as one that lives in a simultaneity of codes, devalued and valued at the same time. The rhizomatic model of disability produces an abundance of meanings that do not juxtapose pain and pleasure or pride and shame, but allow for an immanent transformation, a coming into being of a state of life in this world, one that is constantly shifting and

productive of new subject/individual positions. But, like all Deleuzoguattarian concepts, this rhizomatic model of disability is only useful when used. It cannot have truth status, for it is empty of specific meaning. It is a movement rather than a definition. Thus, the rhizomatic model of disability is not a new model. If it were, we would be back at a recipe, a fixed state. Instead, it is radically singular, flexing its membranes to touch words (disabled, pain), experiences (pain, joy) and other concrete objects in the world (stairs, pills, people, the

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ground, a table around which we are sharing our libations). To give an example: the conceptual character of pain is filled with markers of reality, with existence on multiple levels, with background/foreground shifts, with mobility that “can be connected to anything other, and must be” (Deleuze and

Guattari, Plateaus, 7). This is not the same as saying “pain shades the world,” as if pain was a paint wash over a person’s experience. I posit that the experience of pain can resonate with a rhizomatic conception of multiple simultaneous gazes intertwining . In one of Karen Fiser’s poems, a painwash does extend over the

world, but its monochrome is undone quickly. Pain is here not the solidly negative experience it so often is in a lot of work by non-disabled (and disabled) people. Pain, a halt in speech, instead becomes a moment where attention can be focused , where a single moment opens up, blooms, and sensations fill a space. Here is one of the stanzas of “Still Life with Open Window”: Time spent in pain exists absolutely, without structure, demarcation or relief, it is all one color, like winter’s rainy sfumato inscriptions on gray. Meanwhile, the other, inner life goes on, unwitnessed, the shadow a tree makes on the wall, rippling like water. (Fiser 36) There are many colors in the words, different shapes the words make in my mind, and they all echo with and rewrite the meaning of sfumato, smoky, layered: there is a richness here, in nuance, not mono-colored, but delicately smeared, “rippling like water.” The poem moves precisely from ‘all one color’ to the specific, small instances of change that are all held within the moment of pain. The word meanwhile speaks to me of this rhizomatic simultaneity, not a balance so much as a productive tension. The last lines of the poem are: They will have to be connected by what flowers within the moments themselves. Each moment must expand to hold this infinite, unexpected joy. (Fiser 36) In this poem, formal qualities such as the rhythm of the words mitigate gently against a dissolve, a static absence of sensation, and calmly negates the singularity that many people think of as ‘constant

pain,’ but without a facile celebration of richness. Pain is unspeakable, maybe, but very much communicable in disability culture poetry, where it can open up nuances and surfaces, clasp meanings together, and allow different textures to co-exist. In this way of thinking pain with a Deleuzoguattarian toolbox, a thought , a movement or a state can code-switch, move simultaneously on different tracks, one ‘with pain’ (as in, ‘ in pain’), the other ‘with Pain,’ as a companion , an observer onto the self. Tactility governs my sense of the word disabled. In disability culture, we fit the label to ourselves like a velvet glove, like smooth plastic handles, like a ripped battle flag, like a gaping hospital gown that transforms into

white lace when we shimmy. What I am doing here is exploring the affective registers of disability metaphors, their haptic potential. We can find distance between the word and ourselves. Like many body theorists, Maurice Merleau-Ponty uses disabled people as case studies to unravel how humans inhabit their bodies and minds. He writes about the blind tailor to whom needle and scissors are natural extensions, integrated into a bodily schema. Is the lived experience denying the word disability? Surely not, for as soon as that same blind tailor engages in another life activity, goes to a party, for instance, he will find the word

lopped back at him in its multiple forms: cripple, invalid, blind beggar, helpless… Instead of opposing the real-life experience of fully adapted disabled people and the (negative) connotations of disability as a social experience, a rhizomatic approach can let these tensions build, can touch one to the other, can see the multiplicity of experience and thought that opens up in the touching . Rhizomatic disability emerges in the perspectival, in a fluid realm: “nomads entertaining tactile relations among themselves” (Deleuze and Guattari, Plateaus, 493).

3. Terminal defense—someone will always be excluded—they can’t articulate a form of debate that includes people who are blind and deaf—this is net worse because their criticism ends up drawing lines between who is and isn’t worthy of inclusion

4. No brightline—how fast is too fast? No way to enforce this brightline means no solution to spreading

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5. [If they read Breckenridge and/or Lang] The world doesn’t listen to any of us—I’m a woman and my partner is a nonbinary queer person on welfare—make them prove that ableism is a unique starting point for confronting oppression—perm solves best because only the 1AC prescribes a general methodology capable of addressing multiple forms of oppression, key to intersectionality

6. [If they read DSRB] We solve Reid-Brinkley—our methodology opens the space for truly new knowledge production by breaking from the stateform, which territorializes all thought in advance—that’s 1AC Gilbert and Bell

AT: BIOPOWER/AGAMBEN

Disciplinary societies are being replaced by societies of control endorsed by capitalism and the State—their opposition to sovereignty is no longer revolutionary but our methodology solvesDeleuze 92 (Bad ass French dude, kicked it with Felix Guattari, schizoanalyst, philosopher, Author of “Capitalism and Schizophrenia” (This essay first appeared in french in L'Autre journal, no. 1 (May 1990) Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript on the Societies of Control", OCTOBER 29, Winter 1992, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp.3-7, Pg. 1-3 Get you some free access: http://pdflibrary.wordpress.com/2008/02/12/deleuze-postscript-at-the-society-of-control/, [CL])Foucault has brilliantly analyzed the ideal project of these environments of enclosure, particularly visible within the factory: to concentrate; to distribute in space; to order in time; to compose a productive force within the dimension of space-time whose effect will be greater than the sum of its

component forces. But what Foucault recognized as well was the transience of this model: it succeeded that of

the _societies of sovereignty_, the goal and functions of which were something quite different (to tax rather than to organize production, to rule on death rather than to administer life); the transition took place over time, and Napoleon seemed to effect the large-scale conversion from one society to the other. But in their turn the disciplines underwent a crisis to the benefit of new forces that were gradually instituted and which accelerated after World War II: a disciplinary society was what we already no longer were, what we had ceased to be. We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure--prison, hospital, factory, school,

family. The family is an "interior," in crisis like all other interiors--scholarly, professional, etc. The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished , whatever the length of their expiration periods.

It's only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door. These are the _societies of control_, which are in the process of replacing disciplinary societies . "Control" is the name Burroughs proposes as a term for the new monster, one that Foucault recognizes as our immediate future. Paul Virilio also is continually analyzing the ultrarapid forms of free-floating control that replaced the old disciplines operating in the time frame of a closed system. There is no need to invoke the extraordinary pharmaceutical productions, the molecular engineering, the genetic manipulations, although these are

slated to enter the new process. There is no need to ask which is the toughest regime, for it's within each of them that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another. For example, in the crisis of the hospital as environment of enclosure, neighborhood clinics, hospices, and day care could at first express new freedom, but they could participate as well in mechanisms of control that are equal to the harshest of confinements. There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons. 2.

Logic The different internments of spaces of enclosure through which the individual passes are independent variables: each time one is supposed to start from zero, and although a common language for all these places exists, it is _analogical_. One the other hand,

the different control mechanisms are inseparable variations, forming a system of variable geometry the language of which is numerical (which doesn't necessarily mean binary).

Enclosures are _molds_, distinct castings, but controls are a _modulation_, like a self- deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve

whose mesh will transmute from point to point. This is obvious in the matter of salaries: the factory was a body that contained its internal forces at the level of equilibrium, the highest possible in terms of production, the lowest

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possible in terms of wages; but in a society of control, the corporation has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas. Of course the factory was already familiar with the system of

bonuses, but the corporation works more deeply to impose a modulation of each salary, in states of perpetual metastability that operate through challenges, contests, and highly comic group sessions. If the most idiotic

television game shows are so successful, it's because they express the corporate situation with great precision. The factory constituted individuals as a single body to the double advantage of the boss who surveyed each element within the mass and the unions who mobilized a mass resistance; but the corporation constantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation , an excellent motivational force that opposes individuals against one another and runs through each, dividing each within. The modulating principle of "salary according to merit" has not failed to tempt national education itself. Indeed, just as the corporation replaces the factory, _perpetual training_ tends to replace the _school_,

and continuous control to replace the examination. Which is the surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation. In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the

factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything--the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation. In _The Trial_, Kafka, who had

already placed himself at the pivotal point between two types of social formation, described the most fearsome of judicial forms. The _apparent acquittal_ of the disciplinary societies (between two incarcerations); and the _limitless postponements_ of the societies of control (in continuous variation) are two very different modes of juridicial life, and if our law is hesitant, itself in

crisis, it's because we are leaving one in order to enter the other. The disciplinary societies have two poles: the signature that designates the _individual_, and the number or administrative numeration that indicates his or her position within a _mass_. This is because the disciplines never saw any

incompatibility between these two, and because at the same time power individualizes and masses together,

that is, constitutes those over whom it exercises power into a body and molds the individuality of each member of that body. (Foucault saw the origin of this double charge in the pastoral power of the

priest--the flock and each of its animals--but civil power moves in turn and by other means to make itself lay "priest.") In the societies of control, on the other hand, what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a _password_, while on the other hand disciplinary societies are regulated by _watchwords_ (as much from the point of view of

integration as from that of resistance). The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become _"dividuals,"_ and masses, samples, data, markets, or _"banks."_ Perhaps it is money that

expresses the distinction between the two societies best, since discipline always referred back to minted money that locks gold as numerical standard, while control relates to floating rates of exchange, modulated according to a rate established by a set of standard currencies. The old monetary mole is the animal of the space of enclosure, but the serpent is that of the societies of control. We have passed from one animal to the other, from the mole to the serpent, in the system under which we live, but also in our manner of living and in our relations with others. The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network. Everywhere _surfing_ has already replaced the older _sports_.

What is the link? “You use the State” isn’t enough – our micropolitical resistance to the way the State codifies struggle is adaptive and challenges the State and fascism at every turn. We constantly challenge the legitimacy of biopolitical structures of sovereignty from the bottom-up. Our methodology solves the link, that’s 1AC Patton.

Case is a disad—desire is key to change that’s Patton—only our methodology provides a true path of resistance by locating lines of flight—their static advocacy doesn’t engage desire and ensures the replication of their impacts—more evDeleuze and Guattari 1972, Anti-Oedipus, 347-8

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Not only can the libidinal investment of the social field interfere with the investment of interest, and constrain the most disadvantaged, the most exploited, to seek their ends in an oppressive machine, but what is reactionary or revolutionary in the preconscious investment of interest does not necessarily coincide with what is reactionary or revolutionary in the unconscious libidinal investment. A revolutionary preconscious investment bears upon new aims , new social syntheses, a new power . But

it could be that a part at least of the unconscious libido continues to invest the former body, the old form of power, its codes, and its flows. It is all the easier, and the contradiction is all the better masked, as a state of forces does not prevail over the former state without preserving or reviving the old full body as a residual and subordinated territoriality (witness how the capitalist machine revives the despotic Urstaat, or how the socialist machine preserves a State and market monopoly capitalism). But there is something more serious: even when the libido embraces the new body -the new force that corresponds to the effectively revolutionary goals and syntheses from the viewpoint of the preconscious- it is not certain that the unconscious libidinal investment is itself revolutionary. For the same breaks do

not pass at the level of the unconscious desires and the preconscious interests. The preconscious revolutionary break is sufficiently well defined by the promotion of a socius as a full body carrying new aims, as a form of power or a formation of sovereignty that subordinates desiring-production under new conditions. But even though the unconscious libido is charged with investing this socius, its investment is not necessarily revolutionary in the same sense as the preconscious investment. In fact, the unconscious revolutionary break implies for its part the body without organs as the limit of the socius that desiring-production subordinates in its turn, under the condition of an overthrown power, an overthrown

subordination. The preconscious revolution refers to a new regime of social production that creates, distributes, and satisfies new aims and interests. But the unconscious revolution does not merely refer to the socius that conditions this

change as a form of power: it refers within this socius to the regime of desiring-production as an overthrown power on the body without organs, It is not the same state of flows and schizzes: in one case the break is between two forms of socius, the second of which is measured according to its capacity to introduce the flows of desire into a new code or a new axiomatic of interest; in the other case the break is within the socius itself, in that it has the capacity for causing the flows of desire to circulate following their positive lines of escape, and for breaking them again following breaks of productive breaks, The most general principle of

schizoanalysis is that desire is always constitutive of a social field . In any case desire belongs to the infrastructure,

not to ideology: desire is in production as social production, just as production is in desire as desiring-production. But these forms can be understood in two ways, depending on whether desire is enslaved to a structured molar aggregate that it constitutes under a given form of power and gregariousness, or whether it subjugates the large aggregate to the functional multiplicities that it itself forms on the molecular scale (it is no more a case of persons or individuals in this instance than in the other). If the preconscious revolutionary break appears at the first level, and is defined by the characteristics of a new aggregate, the unconscious or libidinal break belongs to the second level and is defined by the driving role of desiring-production and the position of its multiplicities. It is

understandable, therefore, that a group can be revolutionary from the standpoint of class interest and its preconscious investments, but not be so-and even remain fascist and police- like- from the standpoint of its libidinal investments, Truly revolutionary preconscious interests do not necessarily imply unconscious investments of the same nature; an apparatus of interest never takes the place of a machine of desire.

Especially in the context of the K—desire determines the power of the state—global politics are the manifestation of individual desires means our interrogation of desire is uniquely keyBallantyne 7 (Andrew, Tectonic Cultures Research Group at Newcastle University , "Deleuze and Guattari for Architects" 87-92)

The state is presented as something quite different, having a tendency to disconnect from the wider networks: The State indeed proceeds otherwise: it is a phenomenon of intra-consistency. It makes points resonate together , points that are not necessarily already town-poles but very diverse points of order, geographic, ethnic, linguistic, moral, economic, technological particularities. It makes the town resonate with the countryside. It operates by stratification; in other words, it forms a vertical, hierarchized aggregate that spans the horizontal lines in a dimension of depth. In retaining given elements, it necessarily cuts off their relations with other elements, which become exterior, it inhibits, slows down, or controls those relations; if the State has a circuit of its own , it is an internal circuit dependent primarily upon resonance , it is a zone of recurrence that isolates itself from the remainder of

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PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE LEONARDIthe network, even if in order to do so it must exert even stricter controls over its relations with that remainder. The question is not to find out whether

what is retained is natural or artifical (boundaries), because in any event there is deterritorialization. But in this case deterritorialization is the result of the territory itself being taken as an object, as a material to stratify, to make resonate. Thus the central power of the State is hierarchical, and constitutes a civil-service sector; the centre is not in the milieu, but on top, because the only way it can recombine what it isolates is through subordination. Of course there is a multiplicity of States no less than of towns, but it is not the same type of multiplicity: there are as many States as there are vertical cross sections in a dimension of depth, each separated from the others, whereas the town is inseparable from the horizontal network of towns. Each State is a global (not local) integration, a redundancy of resonance (not of frequency), an operation of the stratification of the territory (not of the polarization of the milieu). (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980, 433) So it is in principle a straightforward business to draw a map of nations on a sheet of paper, because – except in disputed territories – there is a boundary that cuts the state off from the surrounding states. The boundaries might be redrawn from time to time, but in principle the centrally

determined laws operate up to the state’s limit and not beyond. The crucial point here is that the ‘centre’ where the decisions are taken is not in the milieu, but above it, outside it, on another stratum . So this description of the state and its organization correlates with the ‘hylomorphic’ conception of form – derived from Aristotle’s ideas, and here

importantly to be contrasted with the idea of ‘emergent’ form, or immanence. The substance of the state is formed by a power that acts from a higher stratum than the substance. The town-networks are immanent in their milieux. The state has form , the town is formless. Of course towns can have order imposed upon them from a higher stratum, but that is not what makes them work, and it is no way to understand urban design. Towns make the milieu for individual buildings, and one needs to understand the interdependence of building and milieu if one is to design a successful building – a building

that sustains life, and that becomes a thriving organism. The factors that make people, or buildings or towns live and work and thrive are formless and need to be understood, but they operate in milieux that are cut across by various apparatuses that act like the state, tending to separate a part of the network from its wider surroundings. For example, the ownership of land is regulated in ways that are like the setting up of state boundaries, and in some respects my state-defined legal responsibility stops at the edge of my land. Certainly if I am inclined to act as a non-transgressing citizen then that is going to be where my building has to stop. Traditionally architecture has been preoccupied with form, for example in Le Corbusier’s definition: ‘Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light’ (Le Corbusier, 1923, 29). This is delivered from a higher stratum: ‘magnificent’ is clearly above the milieu, and ‘masterly’ and ‘correct’ behaviours conform to a pattern determined from above. And we have learnt to see form (here ‘masses’) as ‘what the man in command has thought to himself,’ and has been able to express. So Le Corbusier’s definition of architecture belongs entirely to the mindset of the state, and we can enlist him to the service of the fonctionnariat and have him design buildings as limited well-defined object-parcels that tend to separate themselves from their surroundings. The cult of pure form, of beautiful shapes that enchant us with their other-worldly promise of an unencumbered life, is the staple of the glossy architectural magazines. The immanent order in the life played out in buildings remains undiscovered in these images, which prefer to show how closely one can aspire to live in surroundings that have geometric definition or well-defined pictorial qualities. Immanent order might emerge at a domestic scale if unselfconscious housekeeping routines were the exclusive determinant in forming the house, but, if we can, we usually try to shape things so as to lay claim to status of one sort or another, for example by making the house in some way look like a house. Most of

us, most of the time, have an idea of what a house looks like. Our sense of form derives not only from the emergent properties of the milieu, but also from the regimes of signs that surround us, and that we deploy . Where human buildings are concerned, emergent form is more evident at the scale of the city, where the individual buildings might be self-conscious but where the wider picture is often left to take care of itself. Friedrich Engels described this happening in nineteenth-century Manchester, when there was an astonishing boom, and over the course of only a few decades it was transformed from a village into a metropolis. The surprising thing here was that despite the evident free-for-all, a clear order did emerge. The town itself is peculiarly built, so that someone can live in it for years and travel into it and out of it daily without ever coming into contact with a working-class quarter or even with workers – so long, that is to say, as one confines himself to his business affairs or to strolling about for pleasure. This comes about mainly in the circumstances that through an unconscious, tacit agreement as much as through conscious, explicit intention the working-class districts are most sharply separated from the parts of the city reserved for the middle class [. . .] Manchester’s monied aristocracy can now travel from their houses to their places of business in the centre of town by the shortest routes, which run right through the working-class districts, without even noticing how close they are to the most squalid misery which lies immediately about them on both sides of the road. This is because the main streets which run from the Exchange in all directions out of the city are occupied almost uninterruptedly on both sides by shops, which are kept by members of the middle and lower-middle classes. In their own interests these shopkeepers should keep up their shops in an outward appearance of cleanliness and respectability; and in fact they do so [. . .] Those shops which are situated in the commercial quarter or in the vicinity of the middle-class districts are more elegant than those which serve to cover the workers’ grimy cottages. Nevertheless, even these latter adequately serve the purpose of hiding from the eyes of the wealthy gentlemen and ladies with strong stomachs and weak nerves the misery and squalor that form the completing counterpart, the indivisible complement, of their riches and luxury. I know perfectly well that this deceitful manner of building is more or less common to all big cities [. . .] I have never elsewhere seen a concealment of such fine sensibility of every thing that might offend the eyes and nerves of the middle classes. And yet it is precisely Manchester that has been built less according to a plan and less within the limitations of official regulations – and indeed more through accident – than any other town. (Engels, 1845, 84–6)3 Engels explains how the pattern of the city is generated not by the imposition of form from a higher level, but by decisions taken within the milieu, especially but not exclusively by the small shopkeepers. He calls the manner of building ‘deceitful’, and in doing so places himself on a higher stratum, because from within the milieu that is not the way it looks. If anybody does notice what is going on (and Engels leads us to believe that they don’t) then what they would tell us, if we asked, would be that appropriate judgements were being made about

what type of building belonged in each type of place. It would look like a matter of decorum, not deceit or hypocrisy. The milieu in which one lives is inhabited not only by other people with whom one interacts, but also by animals, vegetation, flakes of snow and mountain peaks, and by ideas – including on occasion ideas about how to deal with buildings – that are part of our ecology. So here in the Manchester that Engels saw, but of which he was not altogether a part, the ideas about architectural decorum were widely shared among the people who had the means to act upon them. They did not need to take an overview of the whole, but only to see where it would make sense to open up shop,

and how to run the place in order to make a decent living. It involves no radical thinking, but a pervasive common sense that within the milieu seems to remain unchallenged. From outside and

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above it looks deceitful and as though there has been some sort of brainwashing. From within it looks as if things are going swimmingly. The city – this city, at least in this account of it – is a self-organizing system, whose order is immanent. In the same way the account of the schizo-analytic subject – the individual person – at the beginning of Anti-Oedipus, is a self-organizing system which under one description has a unified will and a personal name, but under another description is a

teeming swarm of desiring-machines that have no way of forming a view of the whole. Just as a person can be coerced into the adoption of inflexible social roles , such as those offered by the ‘holy family’ – the nuclear family unit, which is presented as useful to capitalism and Oedipalizing in its effects – so can a city be given an appearance of correctness and magnificence that may not help it to live. The imposition of ‘form’ might give a city the appearance of respectability and high status, but if it does not mesh with the networks that generate the city’s life then it will be left with deserted boulevards and windswept plazas that might look good in photographs but which will not help the place to flourish. It would be far better to find oneself in an unselfconscious city like Engels’s Manchester that does what it has to do without making a claim to cultural status for itself. There were of course grave problems with Manchester, and many people lived in abysmal conditions, but there was no doubting the city’s overall vitality. The surprise was the apparent clarity of its organization, given the lack of any centralized planning control. In order to generate another city like Manchester one would not specify a form, but would put in place the conditions: a world-beating commercial operation that has need of a large workforce (much of it with limited skill, and therefore poorly paid). The rest more or less follows as a consequence. The people who set things in motion become very rich, and although they are a small class of people they have the money to dispense to see that their desires are acted upon. The people on low wages have access to a different range of things, which cost less and are more widely available. The needs of every level of society are met by service-providers who are dependent on the central commercial operations, but at one or more removes. It is this middling class of the milieu – which might have an official wing in a magistrature – that seems to be critical in determining the decorum of the place, selecting the places where the shops will be set up, and making the best of their façades. So long as this lower-middle class has a shared sense of propriety, and the other classes do not overwhelm it, then its pervasive sense of order can prevail without reference to centralized control mechanisms. It is Middle England, and in Manchester especially the small shopkeepers, who seem to have the decisive impact on the city. Heroic architects design one-off oddities in the city, but its fabric is apparently unselfconscious emergent ‘design’, for which an individual can

make no claim to authorship. It is the outcome of thousands of local decisions, much as we see in ant colonies that build themselves anthills , and slime-mould communities that seem to solve the problem of finding the shortest route across a labyrinth (Johnson, 2001).

This means only we solve the alternative – our movement problematizes the way individuals desire fascism on the micro level, which resonates into a larger resistance to biopolitical tyranny, that’s Gilbert 8.

Perm: do the aff and all non-competitive parts of the alt.1) Solves the link: the aff and the alt are ideologically aligned in terms of

pragmatic action against the State. 2) There is no such thing as a mutually exclusive advocacy against our

politics of affirmation because the point is to play with the content and ethos of the K to create new and inventive politicsMassumi 83 (Brian, Professor of something at a place of respectable respectedness; A Thousand Plateaus, Introduction)

" State philosophy " is another word for the representational thinking that has characterized Western metaphysics since Plato, but has suffered an at least momentary setback during the last quarter century at the hands of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and

poststructuralist theory generally. As described by Deleuze,16 it reposes on a double identity: of the thinking subject, and of the concepts it creates and to which it lends its own presumed attributes of sameness and constancy. The subject, its concepts, and also the objects in the world to which the concepts are applied have a shared, internal essence: the self-resemblance at the basis of identity.

Representational thought is analogical; its concern is to establish a correspondence between these symmetrically structured domains. The faculty of judgment is the policeman of analogy, assuring that each of the three terms is honestly

itself, and that the proper correspondences obtain. In thought its end is truth, in action justice. The weapons it wields in their pursuit are limitative distribution (the determination of the exclusive set of properties possessed by each

term in contradistinction to the others: logos, law) and hierarchical ranking (the measurement of the degree of perfection of a term's self-resemblance in relation to a supreme standard, man, god, or gold: value, morality). The m odus o perandi is negation : x = x = not y. Identity, resemblance, truth, justice, and negation. The rational foundation for order. The established order, of course: philosophers have traditionally been employees of the State. The collusion between philosophy and the State was most explicitly enacted in the first decade of the nineteenth century with the foundation of the University of Berlin, which was to become the model for higher learning throughout Europe and in the United States. The goal laid out for it by Wilhelm von Humboldt (based on proposals by Fichte and Schleiermacher) was the "spiritual and moral training of the nation," to be achieved by "deriving everything from an original principle" (truth), by "relating everything

to an ideal" (justice), and by "unifying this principle and this ideal in a single Idea" (the State). The end product would be "a fully legitimated subject of knowledge and society"17—each mind an analogously organized mini-State

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morally unified in the supermind of the State. Prussian mind-meld.18 More insidious than the well-known practical cooperation between university and government (the burgeoning military funding of research) is its philosophical role in the propagation of the form of representational thinking itself, that "properly spiritual absolute State" endlessly reproduced and disseminated at every level of the social fabric. Deconstruction-influenced feminists such as Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray have attacked it under the name "phallogocentrism" (what the most privileged model of rocklike identity is goes without saying). In the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari describe it as the "arborescent model" of thought (the proudly erect tree under whose spreading boughs

latter-day Platos conduct their class). "Nomad thought" does not immure itself in the edifice of an ordered interiority; it moves freely in an element of exteriority. It does not repose on identity; it rides difference. It does not respect the artificial division between the three domains of representation, subject, concept, and being; it replaces restrictive analogy with a conductivity that knows no bounds. The concepts it creates do not merely reflect the eternal form of a legislating subject, but are defined by a communicable force in relation to which their subject, to the extent that they can be said to have one, is only secondary. They do not

reflect upon the world but are immersed in a changing state of things. A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window . What is the subject of the brick? The arm that throws it? The body connected to the arm? The brain encased in the body? The situation that brought brain and body to such a juncture? All and none of the above. What is its object? The window? The edifice? The laws the edifice shelters? The class and other power relations encrusted in the laws? All and none of the above. "What interests us are the circumstances."19 Because

the concept in its unrestrained usage is a set of circumstances, at a volatile juncture. It is a vector: the point of application of a force moving through a space at a given velocity in a given direction. The concept has no subject or object other than itself. It is an act. Nomad thought replaces the closed equation of representation , x = x = noty (I = I = not you) with an open equation :.. . + y + z + a + ...(...+ arm + brick + window + . . .). Rather than analyzing the world into discrete components, reducing their manyness to the One of identity, and ordering them by rank, it sums up a set of disparate circumstances in a shattering blow. It synthesizes a multiplicity of elements without effacing their heterogeneity or hindering their potential

for future rearranging (to the contrary). The m odus o perandi of nomad thought is affirmation , even when its apparent object is negative. Force is not to be confused with power. Force arrives from outside to break constraints and open new vistas. Power builds walls. The space of nomad thought is qualitatively different from State space. Air against earth. State space is "striated," or gridded. Movement in it is confined as by gravity to a horizontal plane, and limited by the order of that plane to preset paths between

fixed and identifiable points. Nomad space is "smooth," or open-ended. One can rise up at any point and move to any other. Its mode of distribution is the nomos: arraying oneself in an open space (hold the street), as opposed to the logos of entrenching oneself in a closed space (hold the fort). A Thousand Plateaus is an effort to construct a smooth space of thought. It is not the first such attempt. Like State philosophy, nomad thought goes by many names. Spinoza called it "ethics." Nietzsche called it the "gay science." Artaud called it "crowned anarchy." To Maurice Blanchot, it is the "space of literature." To Foucault, "outside

thought."20 In this book, Deleuze and Guattari employ the terms "pragmatics" and "schizoanalysis," and in the introduction describe a rhizome network strangling the roots of the infamous tree. One of the points of the book is that nomad thought is not confined to philosophy. Or that the kind of philosophy it is comes in many forms. Filmmakers and painters are philosophical thinkers to the extent that they explore the potentials of their respective mediums and break away from the beaten paths.21 On a strictly formal level, it is mathematics and music that create the smoothest of the smooth spaces.22 In fact,

Deleuze and Guattari would probably be more inclined to call philosophy music with content than music a rarefied form of philosophy. Which returns to our opening question. How should A Thousand Plateaus be played ? When you buy a record there are always cuts that leave you cold. You skip them. You don't approach a record as a closed book that you have to take or leave. Other cuts you may listen to over and over again . They follow you. You find yourself humming them under your breath as you go about your daily business.

EXT: DELEUZE 92

We have passed out of the age of the Factory. In the age of the Corporation there are no permanent analogical spaces owned by the State, but a single corporation that disperses itself through the social field – a continuous field of “dividuation” that breaks down the sovereign into the daily life of the capitalist subject. Identity has become immanent, decoded in flows of capital. Deleuze 92 (Bad ass French dude, kicked it with Felix Guattari, schizoanalyst, philosopher, Author of “Capitalism and Schizophrenia” (This essay first appeared in french in L'Autre journal, no. 1 (May 1990) Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript on the Societies of Control", OCTOBER 29, Winter 1992, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp.3-7, Pg. 3-5 Get you some free access: http://pdflibrary.wordpress.com/2008/02/12/deleuze-postscript-at-the-society-of-control/, [CL])

Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society--not that machines are determining, but because they express those social forms capable of generating them and using them. The old societies of sovereignty made use of simple machines--levers, pulleys, clocks; but the recent disciplinary societies equipped themselves with

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machines involving energy, with the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage; the societies of control operate with machines of a third type , computers, whose passive danger is jamming and whose active one is piracy or the introduction of viruses. This technological evolution must be, even more profoundly, a mutation of capitalism, an already well-known or familiar mutation that can be summed up as follows: nineteenth- century capitalism is a capitalism of concentration, for production and for property. It therefore erects a factory as a space of enclosure, the capitalist being the owner of the means of production but also, progressively, the owner of other spaces conceived through analogy (the worker's familial house, the school). As for markets, they are conquered sometimes by specialization, sometimes by colonization, sometimes by

lowering the costs of production. But in the present situation, capitalism is no longer involved in production , which it often relegates to the

Third World, even for the complex forms of textiles, metallurgy, or oil production. It's a capitalism of higher-order production. It no- longer buys raw materials and no longer sells the finished products: it buys the finished products or assembles parts. What it wants to sell is services but what it wants to buy is stocks. This is no longer a capitalism for production but for the product, which is to say, for being sold or marketed. This is essentially dispersive, and the factory has given way to the corporation. The family, the school, the army, the factory are no longer the distinct analogical spaces that converge towards an owner--state or private power--but coded figures --deformable and transformable-- of a single corporation that now has only stockholders . Even art has left the spaces of enclosure in order to enter into the open circuits of the bank. The conquests of the market are made by grabbing control and no longer by disciplinary training, by fixing the exchange rate much more than by lowering costs, by

transformation of the product more than by specialization of production. Corruption thereby gains a new power. Marketing has become the center or the "soul" of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world. The operation of markets is now

the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters. Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration , infinite and discontinuous. Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt. It is true that capitalism has retained as a constant the extreme poverty of three-quarters of humanity, too poor for debt, too numerous for confinement: control will not only have to deal with erosions of frontiers but with the explosions within shanty towns or ghettos. 3. Program The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant (whether animal in a reserve or human in a corporation, as with an electronic collar), is not necessarily one of science fiction. Felix

Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one's apartment, one's street, one's neighborhood, thanks to one's (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on

a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person's position-- licit or illicit--and effects a universal modulation. The socio-technological study of the mechanisms of control, grasped at their inception, would have to be categorical and to describe what is already in the process of substitution for the disciplinary sites of enclosure, whose crisis is everywhere proclaimed. It may be that older methods, borrowed from the former societies of sovereignty, will return to the fore, but with the necessary modifications. What counts is that we are at the beginning of something. In the _prison system_: the attempt to find penalties of "substitution," at least for petty crimes, and the use of electronic collars that force the convicted person to stay at home during

certain hours. For the _school system_: continuous forms of control, and the effect on the school of perpetual training, the corresponding abandonment of all university research, the introduction of the "corporation" at all levels of

schooling. For the _hospital system_: the new medicine "without doctor or patient" that singles out potential sick people and subjects at risk, which in no way attests to individuation--as they say--but substitutes for the individual or numerical body the code of a "dividual" material to be controlled. In the _corporate system_: new ways of handling money, profits, and humans that no longer pass through the old factory form. These are very small examples, but ones that will allow for better understanding of what is meant by the crisis of the institutions, which is to say, the progressive and dispersed installation of a new system of domination . One of the most important questions will concern the ineptitude of the unions: tied to the whole of their history of struggle against the disciplines or within the spaces of enclosure, will they be able to adapt themselves or will they give way to new forms of resistance against the societies of control? Can we already grasp the rough outlines of the coming forms, capable of threatening the joys of marketing? Many young people strangely boast of being "motivated"; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It's up to them to discover what they're being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. The coils of a serpent are even more complex that the burrows of a molehill.

1AR: DELEUZE 92

Extend the Deleuze 92 – we control uniqueness, disciplinary societies don’t exist any more, capitalism has replaced them with societies of control, where modes of organization are repressive mechanisms of desire in the individual. 2 impacts:

1) Turns the K – alt doesn’t solve anything, it gets absorbed and appropriated by capitalism. The transition from school to barracks to factory is seamless, a modeling rather of the family model onto all of society: Oedipus, mommy-daddy-me.

2) Case is an impact turn – the alternative can’t answer the question “why do the masses desire their own repression?” Deleuze 92 says that the corporation has become gaseous, the question of desire is central to the way sovereignty operates in biopolitics. Their alternative equates to politics on the macro level – extend Gilbert 8, we need micropolitical strategies to challenge the society of control.

___ And, more evidence – modes of control originate from desire, not some transcendent State. The masses desired capitalism and the fascist machine.

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Deleuze and Guattari 95 ("Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium", ["Chaosophy", ed. Sylvere Lothringer, Autonomedia/Semiotexte 1995], retreived from textz.com in 2002)

GD: Of course, capitalism was and remains a formidable desiring machine. The monary flux , the means of production, of manpower, of new markets, all that is the flow of desire . It's enough to consider the sum of contingencies at the origin of capitalism to see to what degree it has been a crossroads of

desires, and that its infrastructure, even its economy, was inseparable from the phenomnea of desire. And fascism too --one must say that it has "assumed the social desires", including the desires of repression and death .

People got hard-ons for Hitler , for the beautiful fascist machine. But if your question means: was capitalism revolutionary in its

beginnings, has the industrial revolution ever coincided with a social revolution? No, I don't thing so. Capitalism has been tied from its birth to a savage repressiveness; it had it's organization of power and its state apparatus from the start. Did capitalism imply a dissolution of the

previous social codes and powers? Certainly. But it had already established its wheels of power, including its power of state, in the fissures of previous regimes . It is always like that: things are not so progressive; even before a social formation is established, its instruments of exploitation and repression are already there, still turning in the vaccuum, but

ready to work at full capacity. The first capitalists are like waiting birds of prey. They wait for their meeting with the worker, the one who drops through the cracks of the preceding system. It is even, in every sense, what one calls primitive accumulation.

1AR: LINK DEBATE

Their link arguments are non-sensical: we defend a micropolitical movement that changes what it means to engage the political through protest, that resonates into the State to alter the way fascism occurs. Extend Patton, we challenge current democratic structures that enable biopolitical violence as part of a becoming-democratic, aff solves.

Extend the Ballantyne evidence – the State is not a transcendent monolithic thing with eyes and a mouth and a wand that makes shit happen. We’re winning a core uniqueness question, the State is composed of millions of desiring-machines working like ants in an anthill. Power is held in immanence, a result of directed desire that can either be loosed on the Body without Organs as entropic energy or appropriated and organized by the State. 3 impacts:

1) Terminal defense – all of their link arguments lose context, they can’t win a reason that we prop up “the State” when we’re winning the desire debate.

2) No impact – what they perceive as State violence is repressed desire. Extend Bell, the reason liberalism and the State become fascist is because of the securitizing desire to extinguish contingency.

3) Link turn – we solve, our micropolitical movement removes people from the mass hysteria of loving fascist oppression. “From outside and above it looks deceitful and as though there has been some sort of brainwashing. From within it looks as if things are going swimmingly.” Only by removing people from the frenzied love of State dominance and protection can we solve the link.

___ And, extend “we solve the alt” – our Gilbert evidence says that our micropolitical challenge takes back the political. We use the nomadic war machine to challenge biopolitics. As long as we’re winning the desire debate, we win that our politics resonate into the State, solves the root of the alt.

AT: FEMINISM

Terminal defense – The old binaries of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are dead. Their categorization is blind to immanence – the harsh reality is that the status quo doesn’t exist. There is no static existence, no

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sexual identities carved in stone. Rather, there is a radial rhizome of ‘N’ sexes, a constantly changing plane of becoming-sexual. Our nomadic movement solves the link. Holland 99 (Eugene, Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the Ohio State University; Deleuze and Guatarri’s Anti-Oedipus and introduction to Schitzoanalysis) Pg 43-44)

Deleuze and Guattari then take the case against exclusive disjunction one step further, arguing against one of the cornerstones of Lacan’s structural psychoanalysis, the binary opposition involved in what he sometimes called the ‘‘Real” difference between the sexes: the necessity of being either male or female.32 Deleuze and Guattari categorically deny the validity of the

opposition. No one is really exclusively male or female any more than they are exclusively heterosexual or homosexual; everyone is at the same time neither and both: neither in the sense of remaining irreducible to any single essence, while still entertaining elements of both , yet without combining the two into any kind of synthesis that would eliminate the differences between them. Such is the form of subjectivity produced by inclusive disjunctive synthesis. As in the

case of illegitimate conjunctive syntheses which fail to completely segregate the nuclear family, exclusive gender disjunctions even within the nuclear family ultimately fail to impose binary sexuality . The family supposedly starts with only two sexes available for identification: male and female. But that illegitimately excludes homosexuality: if we include homosexuality, the number of sexes increases to four (in alphabetical order: heterosexual female, heterosexual male, homosexual female, homosexual male). But then there are also two modes of relation – object-choice and identification – so the possibilities for sexual “identity” multiply yet again: we could distinguish male-identified homosexual females with female object-choice (butch–femme relations) from male-identified homosexual females with male object-choice (butch–butch relations); male-identified heterosexual males with female object-choice (“normal” Oedipal relations) from male-identified heterosexual females with male object-choice (a kind of ‘‘inverted” Oedipal relation), and so

on. Even on this level, which still presupposes the validity of a global distinction between “male” and “female ,” binary sexual identity has mushroomed into multiplicity .33 Yet even if on what Deleuze and Guattari call the “molar” level, the level of “external”

object-choice and identification, there may still be recognizable sexual identities (though clearly many more than two), on the “molecular” level sexual “identity” is comprised of a multiplicity of “internal” features (including what are sometimes called “secondary” sexual characteristics) that are not reducible to the reproductive organs alone. These may include body-hair, bone and muscle mass, breast size, propensity to aggression or

passivity, to the emotional or rational, and so forth.34 Here, too, there are no longer just two sexual identities but rather diverse ways of “being a man” which go far beyond being just “straight” or “gay,” a variety of ways of being “a lesbian,” say, which go far beyond being “butch” or “femme.” The result, Deleuze and Guattari insist, is that there are “not one or even two, but n sexes” ( 296/352): there is no such thing as sexual identity, no such thing as heterosexuality, homosexuality, or bi-sexuality except as gross

approximations – only multiplicity or what they call “trans-sexuality.” It is never really a question of being either a man or a woman , either straight or gay, and so on, but of affirming a multiplicity of innumerable differences ; with legitimate disjunctive syntheses, it is never a question of being either this or that, but of constantly exploring real alternatives and of (whatever one once was or is now) always becoming-otherwise: this…or this…or this…or this.

Their binarist discourse is a microaggression against genderqueer people and identities—the impacts are stereotypes and the legitimization of violence, every instance key and vote them downRoxie 12 [Marilyn Roxie, male-identified genderqueer, response to a question on their site,

http://genderqueerid.com/post/36717212805/ NCP-NW]

My understanding of a   microaggression  is that it refers to more subtle forms of discrimination, “little” every day things that can end up pil ing up and really hurting. To see examples of microaggressions

in the context of gender, you can visit: http://www.microaggressions.com/context/gender/ See also their FAQ. Considering microaggressions matters because (due to their scale compared to direct violence and overt harassment) they can end up being overlooked even though they cause the perpetuation of stereotypes and harm and occur in people’s every day lives. Remember that you may not always be able to relate to someone else’s experience of a microaggression because it is very personal, and the   irritation   and frustration   of the situation is often the result of a build-up of many similar events over time. It is important to be empathetic and see the situation from the perspective of the given group / identity. This is the first I’m hearing of micro erasure, but I am thinking that they are meaning it as a

similar concept applied to the term erasure (ignoring or denying an identity).

Turn – GlobalizationCapitalism relies on the artificial creation of limits—feminine identities are not liberating but become sites of new cooption—challenging formations of desire are key to solve the turn and the KZalloua 8 (Zahi, Assistant Professor of French at Whitman College , "The Future of an Ethics of Difference After Hardt and Negri’s Empire" MUSE)

The merits of Empire lie in its desire to reconfigure the center/periphery model of analysis, and, more importantly, to complicate the identification by postcolonial theorists of globalization with neo-imperialism (or the U.S.) by examining more closely how repressive power currently functions. At the heart of Hardt and Negri’s critique is their contention that the nation-state is an outdated notion, belonging to a prior era of “modern,” imperialist sovereignty that has been superseded by the new, imperial

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sovereignty of an “Empire” structured by the flow of capital. Any critique of globalization based on the assumption that nation-states are the primary locus of power is misguided: “We insist on asserting that the construction of Empire is a step forward in order to do away with any nostalgia for the power structures that preceded it and refuse any political strategy that involves returning to that old arrangement, such as trying to resurrect the nation-state to protect against global capital” (43). No one is immune from the logic of global capital. Inside/outside and local/global dichotomies are, strictly speaking, illusory, since we all “feed into and support the development of the capitalist imperial machine ” (45). It is therefore not [End Page 128] only false, but counterproductive and damaging, “ to claim that we can (re) establish local identities that are in some sense outside and protected against the global flows of capital and Empire ,” that is, to think difference in terms of a particular locale resisting a general global trend (45). As a corrective to this misguided vision of the nation or the local’s capacity for resistance, Hardt and Negri argue for a reconceptualization of globalization as a “regime of the production of identity and difference, or really of homogenization and heterogenization” (45). This understanding of globalization relies more specifically on Foucault’s notion of biopower, which manifests itself through “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations” (1978, 140). Contrary to prior models of power, Foucault’s conception underscores power’s productive or positive nature. As he writes in Discipline and

Punish, “We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’ , it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact, power produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth” (194). Under

what they call the “society of control” (23), a formulation they borrow from Deleuze, Hardt and Negri uphold power’s productive principle (“[Empire] produce[s] not only commodities but also subjectivities” [32]), and extend the scope of Foucault’s analysis of the normalizing effects of power beyond disciplinary institutions (such as the prison and the asylum). In the “society of control,” along with its unprecedented “flexible and fluctuating networks,” the “normalizing apparatuses of disciplinarity” intensify, becoming more general, “more ‘democratic,’ ever more immanent to the social field, distributed through the brains and bodies of the citizens” (23). Given the nature and dominance of global power, described again in Deleuzian terms as an “imperial machine,” Hardt and Negri deny the possibility of transcendence, that is, of adopting a critical position from nowhere, a subject position uncontaminated by ideology; such an “external standpoint no longer exists” (34). A critique of Empire must remain immanent and resist the temptation of transcendence. It is this failure to recognize that modern sovereignty has given way to Empire that typically gives social critics the transcendental urge to posit a form of discourse that “could oppose the informational colonization of being” (34), the assimilative, instrumental rationality prevalent in American capitalism (Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communication would be one example). The appeal to difference common to postmodernist and postcolonial circles seems to suffer from precisely such a sense of transcendence, a desire to embrace difference—the margin, the excluded other—en-soi, outside of Western hegemony. One of the refrains of Empire is the need to know our “true enemy” [End Page 129] (137). With the end of colonialism and the disappearing powers of the nation-state, the new enemy is Empire, an enemy which

nevertheless holds the promise of a better, more democratic future: The passage to Empire and its processes of globalization offer new possibilities to the forces of liberation . . . . Our political task . . . is not simply to resist these processes but to reorganize them and redirect them toward new ends. The creative forces of the multitude that sustain Empire are also capable of autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative political organization of global flows and exchanges. (xv) Globalization . . . is really a condition for the liberation of the multitude. (52) In

other words, globalization is not an obstacle to overcome but a system to struggle with and transform (re-invent) on the plane of immanence. Rather than arguing for a politics of difference , for the “truth” of the other’s difference, postmodernist and postcolonial theorists would do better to recognize that they are playing into the hands of their enemies and perpetuating Empire, which gladly celebrates difference : “This new enemy not only is resistant to the old weapons but actually thrives on them, and thus joins its would-be antagonists in applying them to the fullest. Long live difference! Down with essentialist binaries!” (138). Hybridity, then, the once cherished strategy for combating identitarian boundaries and antagonisms, has become the new norm of globalization; as a result, hybridity as a concept has lost its critical edge. It can no longer serve as an effective means of resistance to the homogenizing force of Empire, since it is neutralized and absorbed by the very system it purports to contest.

Turn – TranscendenceThe alt injects the lack in feminine identity. Their formation of oppressed feminine identity as a shadow of the masculine creates castration as the basis for representation of sexuality. Even ‘feminine liberation’ only re-inscribes the power of the transcendent phallusDeleuze and Guattari 72 (AO, 294-6)

What we call anthropomorphic representation is just as much the idea that that there are two sexes as the idea that there is only one. We know how Freudianism is permeated by this bizarre notion that there is finally only one sex , the masculine, in relation to which the woman, the feminine, is defined as a lack , an absence. It could be thought at first that such a hypothesis founds the

omnipotence of a male homosexuality. Yet this is not at all the case; what is founded here is rather the statistical aggregate of intersexual loves . For if the woman is defined as a lack in relation to the man, the man in his turn lacks what is lacking in the woman, simply in another fashion: the idea of a single sex necessarily leads to the erection of a phallus as an object on high, which distributes lack as two non-superimposable sides and makes the two sexes communicate in a common absence-castration . Women, as psychoanalysts or psychoanalyzed, can then rejoice in showing man the way, and in recuperating equality in difference. Whence the irresistibly comical nature of the formulas according to which one gains access to desire through castration. But the idea that there are two sexes, after all, is no better. This time, like Melanie Klein, one attempts to define the female sex by means of positive

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characteristics, even if they be terrifying. At least in this way one avoids phallocentrism, if not anthropomorphism. But this time, far from founding the communication between the two sexes, one founds instead their separation into two homosexual series that remain statistical. And one does not by any means escape castration. It is simply that castration, instead of being the principle of sex conceived as the masculine sex (the great castrated soaring

Phallus), becomes the result of sex conceived as the feminine sex (the little hidden absorbed penis). We maintain therefore that castration is the basis for the anthropomorphic and molar representation of sexuality. Castration is the universal belief that brings together and disperses both men and women under the yoke of one and the same illusion of consciousness, and makes them adore this yoke. Every attempt to determine the nonhuman nature of sex-for example, "the Great Other" in Lacan-while conserving myth and castration, is defeated from the start. And what does Jean-Francois Lyotard mean, in his commentary-so profound, nevertheless-on Marx's text, when he sees the opening of the nonhuman as having to be "the entry of the subject into desire through castration"? 12 Long live castration, so that desire may be strong? Only fantasies are truly desired? What a perverse, human, all-too-human idea! An

idea originating in bad conscience, and not in the unconscious. Anthropomorphic molar representation culminates in the very thing that founds it, the ideology of lack. The molecular unconscious , on the contrary, knows nothing of castration, because partial objects lack nothing and form free multiplicities as such; because the multiple breaks never cease producing flows, instead of repressing them, cutting them at a single stroke-the only break capable of exhausting them; because the syntheses constitute

local and nonspecific connections, inclusive disjunctions, nomadic conjunctions: everywhere a microscopic transsexuality, resulting in the woman containing as many men as the man, and the man as many women, all capable of entering men with women, women with men-into relations of production of desire that overturn the statistical order of the sexes. Making love is not just becoming as one, or even two, but becoming as a hundred thousand. Desiring-machines or the nonhuman sex: not one or even two sexes, but n sexes. Schizoanalysis is the variable analysis of the n sexes in a subject, beyond the anthropomorphic representation that society imposes on this subject, and with which it represents its own sexuality. The schizoanalytic slogan of the desiring-revolution will be first of all: to each its own sexes.

1AR: ‘N’ SEXES/HOLLAND

___ Extend Holland 99 – masculine and feminine are empty signifiers, they mean nothing. Dividing sex into binaries ignores immanent identity. There’s no such thing as a static sexual identity, rather there’s only ‘n’ sexes where sexuality evolves and resonates between male and female and transsexual and transgender and transvestite and so on. Sexuality is radial: 3 impacts:

1. Terminal defense – we non-unique the K and take out alt solvency. “Feminine” liberation means nothing in the context or OUR nomad politics. What are you liberating from?

2. We solve the link – our nomadism reconfigures sexuality through a notion of radial sexes. There’s no such thing as sexuality without an Oedipal repression of desire, political and sexual. Schizo politics spill over, that’s Gilbert.

3. They re-trench hierarchies – seeing sexuality as binary only makes patriarchy worse: even when they “solve” they only create a flip-side of male oppression.

1AR: TRANSCENDENCE T/

___ Extend Deleuze and Guattari 72 – they turn the feminine into the shadow of the phallus: sexuality isn’t transcendent, with one form of domination. It is controlled by desire: identity is not static, it’s made up of desiring machines. Their alternative creates femininity-as-Lack: the feminine is always already weak compared to the masculine until it is liberated: we see a flat plane of immanence: a politics of nomadism solves. 2 impacts:

1. Turns the K – they retrench patriarchy materially by seeing the feminine as the underside of masculinity. Case is a DA to the alt.

2. External fascism impact – they cut off molecular becomings of identities as aggregates, creating rigid segmentations of the feminine into a mold of the organism.

Can read: <Organism card>

AT: LEVINAS

Their politics is more religion than strategy. Levinas’ ethics collapse upon themselves when faced with political decisions. Their concept of ethics requires a concrete division between the self and others – instead, we should affirm a porous understanding of the self which opens space for the affirmation of all

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identities. We should not seek a point where all identities are respected equally, we should seek a point where identity is no longer relevantZalloua 8 (Zahi,Assistant Professor of French at Whitman College , "The Future of an Ethics of Difference After Hardt and Negri’s Empire" MUSE)

In the ever-expanding “War on Terror,” a struggle that followed the publication of Empire and continues to serve as a critical test case for Hardt and Negri’s claims, the question of cultural

difference and its incomprehensibility is both urgent and perilous. While an affirmation of absolute difference functions, or is intended to function, to block the West’s reifying gaze, it is also susceptible to co-optation by the imperial machine of Empire. The Islamic Other, for example, is indeed constructed as different in such a discourse—he or she is alien, savage, and less than human, not a hybrid mirror of his or her fellow global citizens. Such othering mechanisms also concretely demonstrate the risk of overemphasizing non-understanding, Glissantian opacity or alterity. Derrida’s well-known phrase that “every other is wholly other [tout autre est tout autre]” opens itself up to this (mis)interpretation (1993, 22). The utterance seems utterly devoid of any context; in the words of Peter Hallward, it actually singularizes the other, stripping him or her of facticity, or historical specificity.23 In Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, Alain Badiou locates the source of this fascination, or rather obsession,

with difference in the philosophy of Lévinas, taking issue with Lévinas’ dominant, cult-like status in ethical circles, and with his having almost single-handedly framed all of ethical discourse in terms of an “ethics of difference.” Badiou scrutinizes, in particular, Lévinas’ contention that the other is radically other (“The Other comes to us not only out of context but also without

mediation” [Lévinas 1996, 53; qtd. in Badiou 2001, xxii]): “The other always resembles me too much for the hypothesis of an originary exposure of his alterity to be necessarily true” (22). Badiou argues that for Lévinas the source of the other’s radical otherness must originate elsewhere, in an absolute Other, which can, in the final analysis, only be God: “There can be no ethics without God the ineffable” (22). Lévinasian ethics, then, turns out to be a religion, and if one is tempted to simply bracket the divine, secularizing Lévinas’ ethics of difference, as it were, what one is left with is but a “decomposed religion,” nothing more than “dog’s dinner” (23). Such an ethics of difference treats all others qua others abstractly and formally but distinguishes in practice between others who are like me and those who are not. As Badiou puts it, “[T]his celebrated ‘other’ is acceptable only if he is a good other . . . . That is to say: I respect differences, but only, of course, in so far as that which differs also respects, just as I do, the said differences” (24). [End Page 144] Lévinas’ own resistance to giving any content to the form of the other is perhaps made most apparent in a radio broadcast with Shlomo Malkin and Alain Finkelkraut, shortly after the massacres of hundreds of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Israeli-occupied Lebanon in 1982. News of the massacres shocked the

world and deeply disturbed the Jewish community, leading Malkin to ask Lévinas, “You are the philosopher of the ‘other.’ Isn’t history, isn’t politics the very site of the encounter with the ‘other,’ and for the Israeli isn’t the ‘other’ above all Palestinian?” He answers, My definition of the other is completely different. The other is the neighbor, who is not necessarily my kin but who may be. But if your neighbor attacks another neighbor, or treats him unjustly, what can you do? Then alterity takes on another character, in alterity we can find an enemy, or at least we are faced with the problem of knowing who is right and who is wrong, who is just and who is unjust. There are people who are wrong. Lévinas’ response amounts to a dismissal of the question. Refusing to compromise on his ethics of (absolute) difference, Lévinas opts for uncharacteristic simplicity, a straightforward commentary on a complex political reality. Howard Caygill observes in Lévinas’ stance “a coolness of political judgement that verged on the chilling, an unsentimental understanding of violence and power almost worthy of Machiavelli” (2002, 1), while Michael Shapiro discerns in Lévinas’ comments a privileging of the Jew as the exemplary radical other and a “blind spot” (1999, 68), an inability to imagine any

other in the position of exclusion and victimhood. For Lévinas, then, political choices, based on a criterion of religious and national sameness, ostensibly trump an ethics of unyielding openness. For others still, Lévinas’ position reveals more than Zionist ideology and a cold

indifference to the plight of the Palestinians; it crystallizes the disjunction between theory and practice. “What Levinas is basically saying,” writes Slavoj Žižek, “is that, as a principle, respect for alterity is unconditional (the highest sort of respect), but, when faced with a concrete other, one should nonetheless see if he is a friend or an enemy. In short, in practical politics, the respect for alterity strictly means nothing” (2004, 106).

Levinas amounts to nothing more than an elaborate identity politics. Their argument falls to the trappings of static identity – they prevent revolutionary exchanges of identity which forces rigidity into politics, strangling the possibility of true interaction with othersZalloua 8 (Zahi,Assistant Professor of French at Whitman College , "The Future of an Ethics of Difference After Hardt and Negri’s Empire" MUSE)

If Lévinas’ philosophy of the other—as it is elaborated in Totality and Infinity25—seems to offer, then, either an unconditional (impossible) ethics or a (crude) pragmatic/nationalist/religious politics, Derrida’s blurs the boundaries between ethics and politics, pointing

to the imbrication of the two. When, for instance, Derrida objects to identity politics (a group “fighting for [its] own identity”), he does so not

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because of its reliance on an outdated politics of difference (Hardt and Negri’s complaint), or its fixation on the other qua other (Badiou’s complaint), but because it fails to address the question of difference adequately: “Once you take into account this inner and other difference, then you pay attention to the other and you understand that fighting for your own [End Page 147] identity is not exclusive of another identity, is open to another identity. And this prevents totalitarianism, nationalism, egocentrism, and so on” (1997c, 13). Derrida does not so much reject the desire for recognition and identity (in) politics

(“who could be against ‘identity’?” he asks) as call attention to the potential effects of its exclusionary logic: “Like nationalism or separatism, pro-identity politics encourage a misrecognition of the universality of rights and the cultivation of exclusive differences, transforming difference into opposition,” an opposition which “also tends, paradoxically, to erase differences”

(2005, 119). Informed by a deconstructive model of identity, one that underscores the historically contingent and discursive character of identity, Laclau and Mouffe argue for a post-Marxist politics that recognizes the necessity of some fixed meaning (“a discourse incapable of generating any fixity of

meaning is the discourse of the psychotic” [112]) while, at the same time, insisting on its malleability “through the critique of every type of fixity, through an affirmation of the incomplete open and politically negotiable character of every identity” (104). For Laclau and Mouffe, one needs to provide an alternative to the false choice between identity and nonidentity, since “neither absolute fixity nor absolute non-fixity is possible” (111). What is possible for politics and ethics, however, is a reduction in the rigid fixity of meaning. Glissant’s rhizomatic or relational model of identity gestures toward that possibility: We have passed from a belief in single root identity to the hope for rhizome identity. We must have the courage to admit that rhizome identity or identity-Relation is neither an absence of identity nor a lack of identity nor a weakness. It is a dizzying inversion of the nature of identity. But here again, the peoples are afraid of it.

<Read identity politics answers>

AT: STATISM

The state is inconsequential to change. Our desire and the political potential within it determines the power and direction of the state, not the other way around. The state and the global order of politics are ultimately only the manifestation and condensation of individual desires, resonating into a collective force. To challenge these structures, we must begin at the origin of the desire for fascism.Ballantyne 7 (Andrew, Tectonic Cultures Research Group at Newcastle University , "Deleuze and Guattari for Architects" 87-92)

The state is presented as something quite different, having a tendency to disconnect from the wider networks: The State indeed proceeds otherwise: it is a phenomenon of intra-consistency. It makes points resonate together, points that are not necessarily already town-poles but very diverse points of order, geographic, ethnic, linguistic, moral, economic, technological particularities. It makes the town resonate with the countryside. It operates by stratification; in other words, it forms a vertical, hierarchized aggregate that spans the horizontal lines in a dimension of depth. In retaining

given elements, it necessarily cuts off their relations with other elements, which become exterior, it inhibits, slows down, or controls those relations; if the State has a circuit of its own, it is an internal circuit dependent primarily upon resonance, it is a zone of recurrence that isolates itself from the remainder of the network, even if in order to do so it must exert even stricter controls over its relations with that remainder. The question is not to find out whether what is retained is natural or artifical (boundaries), because in any event there is deterritorialization. But in this case

deterritorialization is the result of the territory itself being taken as an object, as a material to stratify, to make resonate. Thus the central power of the State is hierarchical, and constitutes a civil-service sector; the centre is not in the milieu, but on top, because the only way it can recombine what it isolates is through subordination. Of course there is a multiplicity of States no less than of towns, but it is not the same type of multiplicity: there are as many States as there are vertical cross sections in a dimension of depth, each separated from the others, whereas the town is inseparable from the horizontal network of towns. Each State is a global (not local) integration, a redundancy of resonance (not of frequency), an operation of the stratification of the territory (not of the polarization of the milieu). (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980, 433) So it is in principle a straightforward business to draw a map of nations on a sheet of paper, because – except in disputed territories – there is a boundary that cuts the state off from the surrounding states. The

boundaries might be redrawn from time to time, but in principle the centrally determined laws operate up to the state’s limit and not beyond. The crucial point here is that the ‘centre’ where the decisions are taken is not in the milieu, but above it, outside it, on another stratum. So this description of the state and its organization correlates with the ‘hylomorphic’ conception of form – derived from Aristotle’s ideas, and here importantly to be contrasted with the idea of

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‘emergent’ form, or immanence. The substance of the state is formed by a power that acts from a higher stratum than the substance. The town-networks are immanent in their milieux. The state has form, the town is formless. Of course towns can have order imposed upon them from a higher stratum, but that is not what makes them work, and it is no way to understand urban design. Towns make the milieu for individual buildings, and one needs to understand the interdependence of building and milieu if one is to design a successful building – a building that sustains life, and that becomes a thriving organism.

The factors that make people, or buildings or towns live and work and thrive are formless and need to be understood, but they operate in milieux that are cut across by various apparatuses that act like the state, tending to separate a part of the network from its wider surroundings. For example, the ownership of land is regulated in ways that are like the setting up of state boundaries, and in some respects my state-defined legal responsibility stops at the edge of my land. Certainly if I am inclined to act as a non-transgressing citizen then that is going to be where my building has to stop. Traditionally architecture has been preoccupied with form, for example in Le Corbusier’s definition: ‘Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light’ (Le Corbusier, 1923, 29). This is delivered from a higher stratum: ‘magnificent’ is clearly above the milieu, and ‘masterly’ and ‘correct’ behaviours conform to a pattern determined from above. And we have learnt to see form (here ‘masses’) as ‘what the man in command has thought to himself,’ and has been able to express. So Le Corbusier’s definition of architecture belongs entirely to the mindset of the state, and we can enlist him to the service of the fonctionnariat and have him design buildings as limited well-defined object-parcels that tend to separate themselves from their surroundings. The cult of pure form, of beautiful shapes that enchant us with their other-worldly promise of an unencumbered life, is the staple of the glossy architectural magazines. The immanent order in the life played out in buildings remains undiscovered in these images, which prefer to show how closely one can aspire to live in surroundings that have geometric definition or well-defined pictorial qualities. Immanent order might emerge at a domestic scale if unselfconscious housekeeping routines were the exclusive determinant in forming the house, but, if we can, we usually try to shape things so as to lay claim to status of one sort or another, for example by making the house in some way

look like a house. Most of us, most of the time, have an idea of what a house looks like. Our sense of form derives not only from the emergent properties of the milieu, but also from the regimes of signs that surround us, and that we deploy. Where human buildings are concerned, emergent form is more evident at the scale of the city, where the individual buildings might be self-conscious but where the wider picture is often left to take care of itself. Friedrich Engels described this happening in nineteenth-century Manchester, when there was an astonishing boom, and over the course of only a few decades it was transformed from a village into a metropolis. The surprising thing here was that despite the evident free-for-all, a clear order did emerge. The town itself is peculiarly built, so that someone can live in it for years and travel into it and out of it daily without ever coming into contact with a working-class quarter or even with workers – so long, that is to say, as one confines himself to his business affairs or to strolling about for pleasure. This comes about mainly in the circumstances that through an unconscious, tacit agreement as much as through conscious, explicit intention the working-class districts are most sharply separated from the parts of the city reserved for the middle class [. . .] Manchester’s monied aristocracy can now travel from their houses to their places of business in the centre of town by the shortest routes, which run right through the working-class districts, without even noticing how close they are to the most squalid misery which lies immediately about them on both sides of the road. This is because the main streets which run from the Exchange in all directions out of the city are occupied almost uninterruptedly on both sides by shops, which are kept by members of the middle and lower-middle classes. In their own interests these shopkeepers should keep up their shops in an outward appearance of cleanliness and respectability; and in fact they do so [. . .] Those shops which are situated in the commercial quarter or in the vicinity of the middle-class districts are more elegant than those which serve to cover the workers’ grimy cottages. Nevertheless, even these latter adequately serve the purpose of hiding from the eyes of the wealthy gentlemen and ladies with strong stomachs and weak nerves the misery and squalor that form the completing counterpart, the indivisible complement, of their riches and luxury. I know perfectly well that this deceitful manner of building is more or less common to all big cities [. . .] I have never elsewhere seen a concealment of such fine sensibility of every thing that might offend the eyes and nerves of the middle classes. And yet it is precisely Manchester that has been built less according to a plan and less within the limitations of official regulations – and indeed more through accident – than any other town. (Engels, 1845, 84–6)3 Engels explains how the pattern of the city is generated not by the imposition of form from a higher level, but by decisions taken within the milieu, especially but not exclusively by the small shopkeepers. He calls the manner of building ‘deceitful’, and in doing so places himself on a higher stratum, because from within the milieu that is not the way it looks. If anybody does notice what is going on (and Engels leads us to believe that they don’t) then what they would tell us, if we asked, would be that appropriate judgements were being made about what type of

building belonged in each type of place. It would look like a matter of decorum, not deceit or hypocrisy. The milieu in which one lives is inhabited not only by other people with whom one interacts, but also by animals, vegetation, flakes of snow and mountain peaks, and by ideas – including on occasion ideas about how to deal with buildings – that are part of our ecology. So here in the Manchester that Engels saw, but of which he was not altogether a part, the ideas about architectural decorum were widely shared among the people who had the means to act upon them.

They did not need to take an overview of the whole, but only to see where it would make sense to open up shop, and how to run the place in order to make a decent living. It involves no radical thinking, but a pervasive common sense that within the milieu seems to remain unchallenged. From outside and above it looks deceitful and as though there has been some sort of brainwashing. From within it looks as if things are going swimmingly. The city – this city, at least in this account of it – is a self-organizing system, whose order is immanent. In the same way the account of the schizo-analytic subject – the individual person – at the beginning of Anti-Oedipus, is a self-organizing system which under one description has a unified will and a personal

name, but under another description is a teeming swarm of desiring-machines that have no way of forming a view of the whole. Just as a person can be coerced into the adoption of inflexible social roles, such as those offered by the ‘holy family’ – the nuclear family unit, which is presented as useful to capitalism and Oedipalizing in its effects – so can a city be given an appearance of correctness and magnificence that may not help it to live. The imposition of ‘form’ might give a city the appearance of respectability and high status, but if it does not mesh with the networks that generate the city’s life then it will be left with deserted boulevards and windswept plazas that might look good in photographs but which will not help the place to flourish. It would be far better to find oneself in an unselfconscious city like Engels’s Manchester that does what it has to do without making a claim to cultural status for itself. There were of course grave problems with Manchester, and many people lived in abysmal conditions, but there was no doubting the city’s overall vitality. The surprise was the apparent clarity of its organization, given the lack of any centralized planning control. In order to generate another city like Manchester one would not specify a form, but would put in place the conditions: a world-beating commercial operation that has need of a large workforce (much of it with limited skill, and therefore poorly paid). The rest more or less follows as a consequence. The people who set things in motion become very rich, and although they are a small class of people they have the money to dispense to see that their desires are acted upon. The people on low wages have access to a different range of things, which cost less and are more widely available. The needs of every level of society are met by service-providers who are dependent on the central commercial operations, but at one or more removes. It is this middling class of the milieu – which might have an official wing in a magistrature – that seems to be critical in determining the decorum of the place, selecting the places where the shops will be set up, and making the best of their façades. So long as this lower-middle class has a shared sense of propriety, and the other classes do not overwhelm it, then its pervasive sense of order can prevail without reference to centralized control mechanisms. It is Middle England, and in Manchester especially the small shopkeepers, who seem to have the decisive impact on the city. Heroic architects design one-off oddities in the city, but its fabric is apparently unselfconscious emergent ‘design’, for

which an individual can make no claim to authorship. It is the outcome of thousands of local decisions, much as we see in ant colonies that build themselves anthills, and slime-mould communities that seem to solve the problem of finding the shortest route across a labyrinth (Johnson, 2001).

They made maybe the worst argument to make against my aff – the entire aff is a unique link turn, we criticize the way the masses engage the State in terms of desire. The state appropriates nomadic war machines used to challenge the State now, only a risk our micropolitics solves State violence.

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Can read: <Micro-fascism impact/biopower answers>

1AR: BALLANTYNE

Extend the Ballantyne evidence – the State is not a transcendent monolithic thing with eyes and a mouth and a wand that makes shit happen. We’re winning a core uniqueness question, the State is composed of millions of desiring-machines working like ants in an anthill. Power is held in immanence, a result of directed desire that can either be loosed on the Body without Organs as entropic energy or appropriated and organized by the State. 3 impacts:

1) Terminal defense – all of their link arguments lose context, they can’t win a reason that we prop up “the State” when we’re winning the desire debate.

2) No impact – what they perceive as State violence is repressed desire. Extend Bell, the reason liberalism and the State become fascist is because of the securitizing desire to extinguish contingency.

3) Link turn – we solve, our micropolitical movement removes people from the mass hysteria of loving fascist oppression. A quote from the card, “From outside and above it looks deceitful and as though there has been some sort of brainwashing. From within it looks as if things are going swimmingly.” Only by removing people from the frenzied love of State dominance and protection can we solve the link.

___ And, more evidence - in the age of the Integrated World Capitalism there are no permanent analogical spaces owned by the State, but a single corporation that disperses itself through the social field, a continuous field of “dividuation” that breaks down the sovereign into the daily life of the capitalist subject. Power and the State have become immanent, decoded in flows of capital. Deleuze 92 (Bad ass French dude, kicked it with Felix Guattari, schizoanalyst, philosopher, Author of “Capitalism and Schizophrenia” (This essay first appeared in french in L'Autre journal, no. 1 (May 1990) Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript on the Societies of Control", OCTOBER 29, Winter 1992, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp.3-7, Pg. 3-5 Get you some free access: http://pdflibrary.wordpress.com/2008/02/12/deleuze-postscript-at-the-society-of-control/, [CL])

Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society--not that machines are determining, but because they express those social forms capable of generating them and using them. The old societies of sovereignty made use of simple machines--levers, pulleys, clocks; but the recent disciplinary societies equipped themselves with machines involving energy, with the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage; the societies of control operate with machines of a third type , computers, whose passive danger is jamming and whose active one is piracy or the introduction of viruses. This technological evolution must be, even more profoundly, a mutation of capitalism, an already well-known or familiar mutation that can be summed up as follows: nineteenth- century capitalism is a capitalism of concentration, for production and for property. It therefore erects a factory as a space of enclosure, the capitalist being the owner of the means of production but also, progressively, the owner of other spaces conceived through analogy (the worker's familial house, the school). As for markets, they are conquered sometimes by specialization, sometimes by colonization, sometimes by

lowering the costs of production. But in the present situation, capitalism is no longer involved in production , which it often relegates to the

Third World, even for the complex forms of textiles, metallurgy, or oil production. It's a capitalism of higher-order production. It no- longer buys raw materials and no longer sells the finished products: it buys the finished products or assembles parts. What it wants to sell is services but what it wants to buy is stocks. This is no longer a capitalism for production but for the product, which is to say, for being sold or marketed. This is essentially dispersive, and the factory has given way to the corporation. The family, the school, the army, the factory are no longer the distinct analogical spaces that converge towards an owner--state or private power--but coded figures --deformable and transformable-- of a single corporation that now has only stockholders . Even art has left the spaces of enclosure in order to enter into the open circuits of the bank. The conquests of the market are made by grabbing control and no longer by disciplinary training, by fixing the exchange rate much more than by lowering costs, by

transformation of the product more than by specialization of production. Corruption thereby gains a new power. Marketing has become the center or the "soul" of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world. The operation of markets is now

the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters. Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but

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also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration , infinite and discontinuous. Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt. It is true that capitalism has retained as a constant the extreme poverty of three-quarters of humanity, too poor for debt, too numerous for confinement: control will not only have to deal with erosions of frontiers but with the explosions within shanty towns or ghettos. 3. Program The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant (whether animal in a reserve or human in a corporation, as with an electronic collar), is not necessarily one of science fiction. Felix

Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one's apartment, one's street, one's neighborhood, thanks to one's (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on

a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person's position-- licit or illicit--and effects a universal modulation. The socio-technological study of the mechanisms of control, grasped at their inception, would have to be categorical and to describe what is already in the process of substitution for the disciplinary sites of enclosure, whose crisis is everywhere proclaimed. It may be that older methods, borrowed from the former societies of sovereignty, will return to the fore, but with the necessary modifications. What counts is that we are at the beginning of something. In the _prison system_: the attempt to find penalties of "substitution," at least for petty crimes, and the use of electronic collars that force the convicted person to stay at home during

certain hours. For the _school system_: continuous forms of control, and the effect on the school of perpetual training, the corresponding abandonment of all university research, the introduction of the "corporation" at all levels of

schooling. For the _hospital system_: the new medicine "without doctor or patient" that singles out potential sick people and subjects at risk, which in no way attests to individuation--as they say--but substitutes for the individual or numerical body the code of a "dividual" material to be controlled. In the _corporate system_: new ways of handling money, profits, and humans that no longer pass through the old factory form. These are very small examples, but ones that will allow for better understanding of what is meant by the crisis of the institutions, which is to say, the progressive and dispersed installation of a new system of domination . One of the most important questions will concern the ineptitude of the unions: tied to the whole of their history of struggle against the disciplines or within the spaces of enclosure, will they be able to adapt themselves or will they give way to new forms of resistance against the societies of control? Can we already grasp the rough outlines of the coming forms, capable of threatening the joys of marketing? Many young people strangely boast of being "motivated"; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It's up to them to discover what they're being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. The coils of a serpent are even more complex that the burrows of a molehill.

AT: HILLMAN

Hillman concedes a core framing question – desire of the masses to go to war is where the heart of conflict lies. He says, “how do wars begin? They begin in the shrill voice in the heart of the people, the press, and the leaders who perceive "enemies" and push for a fight” (Hillman 2004, pg. 205)

We solve the link and the alt – our analysis of the desire to go to war in Iraq uses the same starting point as the alternative, there’s no reason intellectually imagining war is good. Their links are predicated on repressed desire to end war: we liberate desire, unique turn.

There’s no link to the K, 3 arguments1) We affirm war: the nature of the nomadic war machine war and conflict. The war machine, like power, has no initial objective and no final goals until it is ascribed positive or negative purpose. The state uses violent final goals, striations, containments, etc, on the war machine turning it into a negative force capable only of inflicting pain. Instead, the forces of war and power should be turned free – we should engage in our inner lust for war and express power in positive ways to counter negative forces.Deleuze and Guattari 87 (A Thousand Plateaus, pg 230-231)

There are many reasons to believe that the war machine is of a different origin, is a different assemblage, than the State apparatus. It is of nomadic origin and is directed against the State apparatus. One of the fundamental problems of the State is to appropriate this war machine that is foreign to it and make it a piece in its apparatus, in the form of a stable military institution; and the State has always encountered major difficulties in this. It is precisely when the war machine has reached the point that it has no other object but war, it is when it substitutes destruction for mutation, that it frees the most catastrophic charge. Mutation is in no way a transformation of war; on the contrary, war is like the fall or failure of mutation, the only object left for the war machine after it has lost its power to change. War, it must be said, is only the abominable residue of the war machine, either after it has allowed itself to be appropriated by the State

apparatus, or even worse, has constructed itself a State apparatus capable only of destruction. When this happens, the war machine no longer draws mutant lines of flight, but a pure, cold line of abolition. (Later, we will propose a theory of the complex relation between the war machine and war.)31 This brings us back to the paradox of

fascism, and the way in which fascism differs from totalitarianism. For totalitarianism is a State affair: it essentially concerns the relation between the State as a localized assemblage and the abstract machine of overcoding it effectuates. Even in the case of a military dictatorship, it is a State army, not a war machine, that takes power and elevates the State to the totalitarian stage. Totalitarianism is quintessentially conservative. Fascism, on the other hand, involves a war machine. When fascism builds itself a totalitarian State, it is not in the sense of a State army taking power, but

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of a war machine taking over the State. A bizarre remark by Virilio puts us on the trail: in fascism, the State is far less totalitarian than it is suicidal. There is in

fascism a realized nihilism. Unlike the totalitarian State, which does its utmost to seal all possible lines of flight, fascism is constructed on an intense line of flight, which it transforms into a line of pure destruction and abolition. It is curious that from the very beginning the Nazis announced to Germany what they were bringing: at once wedding bells and death, including their own death, and the death of the Germans. They thought they would perish but that their undertaking would be resumed , all across Europe, all over the world, throughout the solar system. And the people cheered, not because they did not understand, but because they wanted that death through the death of others. Like a

will to wager everything you have every hand, to stake your own death against the death of others, and measure everything by "deleometers." Klaus Mann's novel, Mephisto, gives samplings of entirely ordinary Nazi speeches and conversations: "Heroism was something that was being ruled out of our lives. . . . In reality, we are not marching forward, we are reeling, staggering. Our beloved Fiihrer is dragging us toward the shades of darkness and everlasting nothingness. How can we poets, we who have a special affinity for darkness and lower depths, not admire him? . . . Fires blazing on the horizon; rivers of blood in all the streets; and the frenzied dancing of the survivors, of those who are still spared, around the bodies of the dead!"32 Suicide is presented not as a punishment but as the crowning glory of the death of others. One can always say that it is just a matter of foggy talk and ideology, nothing but ideology. But that is not true. The insufficiency of economic and political definitions of fascism does not simply imply a need to tack on vague, so-called ideological determinations. We prefer to follow Faye's inquiry into the precise formation of Nazi statements, which are just as much in evidence in politics and economics as in the most absurd of conversations. They always contain the "stupid and repugnant" cry, Long

live death!, even at the economic level, where the arms expansion replaces growth in consumption and where investment veers from the means of production toward the means of pure destruction. Paul Virilio's analysis strikes us as entirely

correct in defining fascism not by the notion of the totalitarian State but by the notion of the suicidal State: so-called total war seems less a State undertaking than an undertaking of a war machine that appropriates the State and channels into it a flow of absolute war whose only possible outcome is the suicide of the State itself. "The triggering of a hitherto unknown material process, one that is limitless and aimless. . . . Once triggered, its mechanism cannot stop at peace, for the indirect strategy effectively places the dominant powers outside the usual categories of space and time. . . . It was in the horror of daily life and its environment that Hitler finally found his surest means of governing, the legitimation of his policies and military strategy; and it lasted right up to the end, for the ruins and horrors and crimes and chaos of total war, far from discharging the repulsive nature of its power, normally only increase its scope. Telegram 71 is the normal outcome: If the war is lost, may the nation perish. Here, Hitler decides to join forces with his enemies in order to complete the destruction of his

own people, by obliterating the last remaining resources of its life-support system, civil reserves of every kind (potable water, fuel, provisions, etc.)."33 It was this reversion of the line of flight into a line of destruction that already animated the molecular focuses of fascism, and made them interact in a war machine instead of resonating in a State apparatus. A war machine that no longer had anything but war as its object and would rather annihilate its own servants than stop the destruction. All the dangers of the other lines pale by comparison.

___ We draw a distinction between total war and agonism: we have a disad to the alternative, they affirm total war of the fascist State and engage in a fascist fantasy of imagining the State as it bloodies our enemies. We engage the molecular desire for war: they fantasize about the molar forms of war. Buchanan 5 (Ian holds the foundation Chair of Communication and Cultural Studies at Charles Darwin University, “War in the age of intelligent machines and unintelligent government,” Australian Humanities Review Issue 36, July 2005, dml)

This, according to Deleuze and Guattari, “is the point at which Clausewitz's formula is effectively reversed”. When total war - i.e., war which not only places the annihilation of the enemy's army at its centre but its entire population and economy too - becomes the object of the State-appropriated war machine, “then at this level in the set of all possible conditions, the object and the

aim enter into new relations that can reach the point of contradiction.” In the first instance, the war machine unleashed by the State in pursuit of its object, total war,

remains subordinate to the State and “merely realises the   maximal conditions ” 22   of its aims . Paradoxically, though, the more successful it is in realising the State's aims, the less controllable by the State it becomes . As the State's aims grow on the

back of the success of its war machine, so the restrictions on the war machine's object shrink until - scorpion like - it effectively subsumes the State , making it just one of its many moving parts. In Vietnam, the State was blamed for the failure of the war machine precisely because it attempted to set limits on its object. Its inability to adequately impose these limits not only cost it the war, but in effect its sovereignty too. Since then the State has been a puppet of a war machine global in scope and ambition. This is the status of militarism today and no-one has

described its characteristics more chillingly than Deleuze and Guattari: This worldwide war machine , which in a way 'reissues' from the States, displays two successive figures: first, that of fascism, which makes war an unlimited movement with no other aim than itself ; but

fascism is only a rough sketch, and the second, postfascist, figure is that of a war machine that takes peace as its object directly, as the peace of Terror or Survival. The war machine reforms a smooth space that now claims to control, to

surround the entire earth. Total war is surpassed, toward a form of peace more terrifying still. 23 It is undoubtedly Chalmers

Johnson who has done the most to bring to our attention the specific make-up of what Deleuze and Guattari call here the worldwide war machine.24

 His description of a global 'empire of bases' is consistent with Deleuze and Guattari's uptake of Paul Virilio's concept of the 'fleet in being'. This is the paradoxical transformation of the striated space of organisation into a new kind of 'reimparted' smooth space “which outflanks all gridding and invents a neonomadism in the service of a war machine still more disturbing than the States”.

25 Bases do not by themselves secure territory, but as is the case with a battle fleet their mobility and their firepower mean they can exert an uncontestable

claim over territory that amounts to control. This smooth space surrounding the earth is, to put it back into Baudrillard's terms,

the space of simulation. The empire of bases is a virtual construct with real capability. Fittingly enough, it was Jean Baudrillard

who first detected that a structural change in post-WWII militarism had taken place. In Simulacra and Simulation he argues that the Vietnam War was a demonstration of a new kind of will to war, one that no longer thought in terms of winning or losing, but defined itself instead in terms of perseverance . 26  It demonstrated to the US's enemies, clients and allies alike its

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willingness to continue the fight even when defeat was certain, or had in a sense already been acknowledged (the US strategy of 'Vietnamising' the war which commenced shortly after the Tet offensive in 1968, and become official policy under Nixon, was patently an admission that the war couldn't be won - in the short term it was Johnson's way of putting off admitting defeat until after the election so as to give Hubert Humphrey some chance of victory; in the longer term it was a way of buying time for a diplomatic

solution).27

 It was a demonstration of the US's reach, of its ability to inflict destruction even when its troops were withdrawing and peace talks (however futile) were under way. It also demonstrated to the American people that the fight   could   be continued as the troops were withdrawn, a factor that as I've already pointed out would become decisive in re-shaping militarism as an incorporeal system. It was also a demonstration to the American domestic population that the country's leaders were willing to continue to sacrifice lives to prove this point.28 The contrary view, that Nixon wanted to end the war sooner but was unable to do so because domestic politics didn't allow it, in no way contradicts this thesis. If anything it confirms it because if true it would mean, as Deleuze and Guattari

have said of fascism, “at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions”, the American people   wanted   Vietnam , and, as they add, “ it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for.”

29 While there can be no doubt Vietnam

was an unpopular war that was eventually brought to a halt by popular pressure, it is a sobering thought to remind oneself that it was a war that lasted some 10 years. If one takes 1967 as the decisive turning point in popular opinion, the moment when protest against the war became the prevailing view and support for it dwindled into a minority murmur, then one still has to take stock of the fact that it took a further 6 years for US troops to be fully withdrawn. 30   The kind of sustained popular pressure that brought the Vietnam War to a close has not yet even begun to build in the US in spite of the fact that the death toll has passed 1500 (as of March 2005). Wars are spectacles in the traditional sense of being events staged to convey a specific message, but also in the more radical or postmodern sense that spectacle is the final form of war, the form war takes when it takes peace as its object. Hence the military's facilitation of the media (this backfired to a large degree in Vietnam, but the lessons learned then are put to good use today). Ultimately, though, as Baudrillard rightly argues, the “media and official news services are only there to maintain the illusion of an actuality, of the reality of the stakes, of the objectivity of the facts.”31 Chomsky's analyses of current trends in US imperialism confirm this thesis. As he argues, 'preventive' wars are only fought against the basically defenceless.32 Chomsky adds two further conditions that chime with what we have already adduced: there must be something in it for the aggressor, i.e., a fungible return not an intangible moral reward, and the opponent must be susceptible to a portrayal of them as 'evil', allowing the victory to be claimed in the name of a higher moral purpose and the actual venal purpose to be obscured.33 At first glance, waging war to prevent war appears to be as farcical as fucking for virginity, but that is only if we assume that the aim of the war is to

prevent one potential aggressor from striking first. Or, rather, given that it is alleged that the putative enemy, Al Qaeda and its supposed supporters, took first blood (the Rambo reference is of course deliberate), we are asked to believe the current war is being fought to prevent a second, more damaging strike. The obsessive and suitably grave references to Weapons of Mass Destruction by the various mouthpieces of the Bush regime (Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, but also Blair and Howard) is plainly calculated to compel us to accept that any such second strike will be of biblical, or worse, Hollywood proportions. As one joke put it, the Americans could be certain that Iraq had at least some Weapons of Mass Destruction because they had the receipts to prove it. The grain of truth in this joke reveals the true purpose of the war - it was a demonstration to all of America's clients that it wouldn't tolerate 'price-gouging'. Obviously I am speaking metaphorically here, but the fact is that Iraq is a client of the US, it purchases arms and consumer goods and sells oil at a carefully controlled price. Why this arrangement suddenly became so unsatisfactory is subject to a great deal of speculation which centre on two basic theories: (1) when Iraq switched from the dollar to the euro it posed an intolerable threat to the stability of the US currency; (2) the US is positioning itself to monopolise oil ahead of growing Chinese demand.

Either way, if one wants a metaphor to describe US imperialism it wouldn't it wouldn't be MacDonald's, a comparatively benign operator, but the predatory retail giant Wal-Mart.34

 In other

words, today's wars are fought to demonstrate will. The age of gunboat diplomacy has given way to the age of gunboat commerce.35 When war changed its object it was able to change its aim

too and it is this more than anything that has saved 'real' war from itself. Baudrillard's later work on the spectacle of war misses this point: through becoming spectacles the fact that real wars

(i.e., territorial wars) are no longer possible has not diminished their utility - the US isn't strong enough to take and hold Iraq, but it can use its force to demonstrate to other small nations that it can inflict massive damage and lasting pain on anyone who would dare defy it. Baudrillard's lament that the real Gulf War never took place can only be understood from this viewpoint - although he doesn't put it in these words, his insight is essentially that war in its Idealised form is much more terrifying than peace. Again, although Baudrillard himself doesn't put it this way, the conclusion one might draw from the paradigm shift in war's rationalisation enumerated above - from pragmatic object (defeating North Vietnam) to symbolic object (defending the credibility of the fight forces) -is that war has become

'postmodern'.36 This shift is what enables the US to ideologically justify war in the absence of a proper object and

indeed in the absence of a known enemy. T he Bush regime's 'War on Terror' is the apotheosis of this change: the symbolic (terror) has been made to appear instrumental (terrorism ), or more precisely the symbolic is now able to generate the

instrumental according to its own needs. This is the moment when the war machine becomes militarism , the moment when doxa becomes doctrine.

What is a war machine? The answer to this question must always be, it is a concept. But because of the way Deleuze and Guattari create their concepts, by abstracting from the historical, there is always a temptation to treat the war machine as primarily descriptive. More importantly, the war machine is only one element in a complex treatise which is ultimately a

mordant critique of the present. Deleuze and Guattari's analysis proceeds via a threefold hypothesis: (1) the war machine is a nomad invention that does not have war as its primary object, war is rather a second-order objective; (2) the war machine is exterior to the State apparatus, but when the State appropriates the war machine its nature and function changes, its polarity is effectively reversed so that it is directed at the nomads themselves; (3) it is only when the war machine has been appropriated by the State that war becomes its primary object . 37  Deleuze and Guattari are careful to clarify that their main purpose in assigning the invention of the war machine to the nomads is to assert its historical or 'invented' character. Their implication is that the nomadic people of the steppes and deserts do not hold the secret to understanding the war machine. We need to look past the concrete historical

and geographical character of the war machine to see its eidetic core.38

 Clearly, it is not “the nomad who defines this constellation of characteristics”; on the contrary, “it is this constellation

that defines the nomad, and at the same time the essence of the war machine.”39 In its nomad origins, the war machine does not have war as its primary objective. Deleuze and Guattari arrive at this conclusion by way of three questions. First of all they ask, is battle the object of war? Then they ask if war is the object of the war machine. And finally they ask if the war machine is the object of the State. The first question requires further and immediate clarification, they say, between when a battle is sought and when it is avoided. The difference between these two states of affairs is not the difference between an offensive and defensive posture. And while it is true that at first glance war does seem to have battle as its object whereas the guerrilla has nonbattle his

object, this view is deceiving. Dropping bombs from 10 000 metres above the earth, firing missiles from a distance of hundreds of kilometres, using unpiloted drones to scout for targets, using satellite controlled and guided

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weapons, are the actions of a war-machine that has no interest at all in engaging in battle. The truism that the Viet Cong frustrated the US Army in Vietnam by failing to engage them in battle should not be taken to mean the US Army sought battle and the enemy did not. The Viet Cong frustrated the US Army by failing to succumb to its nonbattle strategies and forced them into seeking battles with an elusive army with a better understanding of the terrain. If operation “Rolling Thunder”, or any of the

many other battle-avoiding stratagems the US attempted had worked, they would not have sought battle at all.40

 Ironically, too, as Gabriel Kolko points out, the more strategic the US tried to make its offensive operations, i.e., the more it tried to disengage from face-to-face encounters on the battlefield, the more passive its posture became because of its escalating logistical support

requirements and increasing reliance on high maintenance technology.41 By the same token, it is clear that the guerilla armies of the Viet Cong did in fact seek

battle, but did so on their own terms. As Mao said, the guerrilla strikes where the other is weak and retreats whenever the stronger power attacks, the point being that the guerrilla is constantly on the look out for an opportunity to engage the enemy.

42Battle and nonbattle “are the double object of

war, according to a criterion that does not coincide with the offensive and the defensive, or even with war proper and guerrilla warfare.”43

 For this reason the question has to be pushed further back to ask if war is even the object of the war machine? Too often the answer to this question is automatically 'yes', but this reflects a precise set of historical circumstances and not an essential condition. It is true, throughout history, the nomads are regularly to be found in conflict situations, but this is because history is studded with collisions between war machines and the states and cities which would grind them into the dust. War is thrust upon the war machine, but its actual occupation is quite different. It could even be said to be peaceful were we not

suspicious of that term. And as I have already argued, it is when the war machine takes peace itself as its object that it enters its most terrifying phase.

2) Extend the Churchill evidence – our argument has nothing to do with pacifism. Ward Churchill was an AIM activist and his view of pacifism is similar to ours: North American pacifism is an Oedipal form of repression that restricts political struggle to the realm of the symbolic. We condensate Hillman’s affirmation of war metaphorically onto the political. Their alt of molar war overcodes our resistance.

3) We problematize the desire that led to the molar fascism of the war in Iraq, solves the internal warrants of their link evidence: we engage in the desire of the masses to go to war. ___ Everywhere we go we create smooth spaces; places of invention and experimentation and immanence. Protest movements are trapped in an apparatus of capture: the war machine has been appropriated by the State and used to ossify fascism in the heads of the masses. Our politics is mobile: engage OUR fantasy of the nomad war machine. Conley 6 (Verena Andermatt, professor of literature at Harvard, “Borderlines; Deleuze and the Contemporary World, 95-100)

Deleuze and Guattari propose an adventitious network, a mobile structure that can be likened to underground filaments of grass or the mycelia of

fungi. A rhizome moves horizontally and produces offshoots from multiple bifurcations at its meristems. It changes its form by connecting and reconnecting. It does not have a finite or ultimate shape. Space does not pre-exist the rhizome; rather, it is created through and between the proliferating lines. Rhizomes connect and open spaces in-between which, in the rooted world of the tree, an inside (the earth) is separated from an outside (the atmosphere). Unlike the tree, the rhizome can never be fixed or reduced to a single point or radical core. Its movement is contrasted with the stasis of the arborescent model. In ‘Rhizome’ the vertical, arborescent model contributes to the creation of striated spaces. In the ebullient imagination of the two authors it appears that the latter slow down and even prevent movement of the kind they associate with emancipation and creativity . Instead of imitating a tree, Deleuze and Guattari exhort their readers to make connections by following multiple itineraries of investigation, much as a rhizome moves about the surface it creates as it

goes. Rhizomes form a territory that is neither fixed nor bears any clearly delimited borders. In addition to this novel way of

thinking, rhizomatically, the philosophers make further distinctions between smooth and striated spaces. Smooth spaces allow optimal circulation and favour connections. Over time, however, smooth spaces tend to become striated. They lose their flexibility. Nodes and barriers appear that slow down circulation and reduce the number of possible connections. Writing Anti-Oedipus in a post-1968 climate,

Deleuze and Guattari propose rhizomatic connections that continually rearticulate smooth space in order not only to criticise bourgeois capitalism with its institutions – the family, school, church, the medical establishment (especially psychiatry) – but also to avoid what they see as a deadened or zombified state of things. They criticise the state for erecting mental and social barriers and for creating oppositions instead of furthering connections. Institutions and the state are seen as the villains that control and immobilize people from the top down. They argue that when the family, the church or the ‘psy’ instill guilt in a child, mental barriers and borders are erected. The child’s creativity, indeed its mental and physical mobility are diminished in the process .

Such a condition cripples many adults who have trees growing in their heads . Deleuze and Guattari cite the example of Little Hans, a child analysed by Freud and whose creativity, they declare, was blocked by adults who wrongly interpreted his attempts to trace lines of flight within and through the structure of the family

into which he had been born (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 14). The state, too, functions by ordering, organizing and arresting movement, by creating relations of inclusion and exclusion. The state facilitates the creation of rigid and often ossified

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institutions. It enacts laws of inclusion and exclusion that order the family and the social in general. It tries to immobilize and dominate the social world. Yet the social cannot be entirely dominated. The organising régime of the order- word is never stable. It is constantly being transformed. Lines detach themselves from fuzzy borders and introduce variations in the constant of the dominant order. These variations can lead to a break and produce lines of flight that bring about entirely new configurations. Of importance in the late 1960s and 1970s is the doing away with institutions and the state

that represses subjects. In Anti-Oedipus, the philosophers show how institutions like the family and psychiatry repress sexuality and desire in order to maximize their revenue. They argue for the creation of smooth spaces where desire can circulate freely. In A Thousand Plateaus, the bourgeois state ordered by the rules of capitalism is criticised. Deleuze and Guattari rarely contexualise the ‘state’ in any specific historical or political terms. Constructing a universal history of sorts, the philosophers note that

the state apparatus appears at different times and in different places. This apparatus is always one of capture. It appropriates what they call a ‘nomadic war machine’ that never entirely disappears. The nomadic war machine eludes capture and traces its own lines of flight. It makes its own smooth spaces.

Alt doesn’t solve, there’s no reason imagining war on a molar level is key to solve. Past imagining war their alternative has no political strategy – start by asking the question of the masses in 2003: what happens next? After the neg imagines war, they AT BEST engage the same logic of problematizing the animal desire for total destruction inherent to fascism. ___ Alt doesn’t solve war – there’s no concrete political solution. Our problematization is their alternative introduced into the political. Heinegg 4 (Peter, teaches in the department of humanities at Union College, “The Cult of Ares,” http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=3842,)

Perhaps the only serious flaw in Hillman’s case is the abrupt way he discounts the “testosterone hypothesis,” war as a more or less exclusively guy-thing. He mentions the legendary Amazons and alludes to, without naming, Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher and female suicide-bombers in Chechnya. “Patriarchy,” he somewhat dubiously claims, “does not originate war but serves war to give it form and bring it to order by means of hierarchical control, ritual ceremony, art, and law.” Perhaps the validity of such sky-writing generalizations cannot be fully tested until the

distant day when women win full equality. At any rate, the inevitable question remains: having traced war into the very structures of humanness, what in heaven’s name are we to do about it? Of course, if 10,000 years of civilization have failed to come up with a satisfactory answer, we can hardly fault Hillman’s for sounding lame: he calls for “aesthetic intensity.” Noting the relentless Philistinism of warlike nations, including the United States, he bids us imagine the creation of beauty transforming “civilization’s

wasteful ‘stress.’” War might lose some of its sublime magic if “all [its] diabolic inventiveness , intolerant obsession and drive to conquer” were “compelled toward culture.” Needless to say, Hillman cannot tell us just how that might be done. But then again, concrete fixes are not what grand visionaries like Hillman are all about. In this warmhearted,

learned, intensely personal yet densely theoretical Last Hurrah, he bids us look past the clichés of conservative patriotism and liberal meliorism into the scary abysses of our Martian selves . Given the hideous stories on the nightly news these days, it’s an invitation that is hard to resist.

The alt doesn’t solve the aff – they don’t have an internal link to engaging microfascism, the alternative doesn’t problematize desire, they drive it further forward into insanity. Their alt doesn’t map onto the political, they even say they don’t defend actually going to war. Make them explain what protest politics look like in a world of the alt.

<2AC K Frontline>

Perm: engage the fantasy of war through the lens of the nomadic war machine.

<Perm 2AC>

1AR: DESIRE

We’re ahead on the desire debate; Hillman 4 concedes that wars begin in the cries of the masses. Conceding desire is damning, it means we access the alt directly, 2 impacts:

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1) We solve the alt – our analysis of the desire to go to war produces a nomadic politics of resistance to fascism. While conflict is inevitable, total war under fascism isn’t.

2) Terminal link defense – their links are predicated on a repression of desire to end war, we internally turn this warrant by liberating desire from Oedipal constraints, unique turn to the link. They don’t solve Oedipus, that’s a solvency deficit to the alt.

1AR: NO LINK

Drop down to the link debate – they’re in a double bind, either – A) the aff doesn’t link because we engage the war inherent to the nomadic war machine, OR, B) the alt asks you to embrace the total war of fascism, meaning the aff is an impact turn to the alt. 3 link turns from the 2AC:

1) War Machines – the nature of the nomadic war machine is conflict, agonism is an inevitable part of politics. The question is not ‘whether’ we affirm war but ‘how’ we affirm it – we take back the war machine for nomads, giving it no end purpose and turning the forces of war free on the political. The State uses striations and containments to turn the war machine into a negative force of molar warfare. We solve for the inner lust for war by allowing war to manifest in positive ways, that’s D&G 87.

2) Churchill – the entire link debate is based on a rejection of violence, Churchill is NOT a pacifist, our aff is about engaging forms of politics outside of pacifist repression. Politics is made of pacifist symbolic struggle now, we’re the only risk of passing the level of symbolic fantasies. They imagine war in a molar frame and make micropolitical action impossible.

3) Desire – we problematize the desire of the masses to go to war, directly accesses the internal links of their Hillman cards. We literally control the direction of the link, we redirect the desire of the masses to go war in foreign lands and turn it against the State, that’s Conley 6. Our politics is mobile, apparatuses of capture sediment that mobility and channel desire into negativity: that’s the ONLY reason war is inevitable.

1AR: BUCHANAN

Extend the Buchanan 5 – our Buchanan and D&G cards draw a distinction between the total war of the fascist State and the agonism inherent in politics. The alternative affirms a molar understanding of war, as if States were identities with their own facebook pages and everything. But the State doesn’t exist, it’s just an organization of desiring-machines. The molar view of war engages a fascist fantasy of State violence: they imagine the Iraq war as a mythic quest we should engage in. 2 impacts:

1) They ignore desire, making the replication of genocide and imperialism inevitable. Case is an impact turn, specifically Churchill: you shouldn’t imagine the secret bombings of Cambodia and the immolation of monks with a smile on your face, you should use it as a locus to challenge fascism. Turns the alt and acts as an independent fascism disad.

2) Ontology – fascist ontology arrests the difference that makes life interesting, extend Bell. They install a terrifying peace of liberalism.

___Our affirmation is molecular, on the level of bodies and desire: we engage the molecular desire for war and conflict. Our engagement with war is agonistic, it challenges why we desire fascism and our own repression, and how we can direct the desire for war through productive war machines in the political.

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1AR: ALT =/= SOLVE

Extend the alt doesn’t solve – there’s no reason imagining war on a molar level does ANYTHING to effect the way the State wages war. Past imagining war with a smile their alternative has no political strateg. The alt doesn’t map onto the political, 3 arguments:

1) Pragmatics – they don’t defend an ACTUAL molar war: litmus test, they won’t defend re-invading Vietnam for the sake of war. AT BEST they access the same logic of problemitzation from the 1AC, and the perm solves.

2) Protest – ask the question of the masses in 2003: “what next?” They can’t tell you what protest politics look like post-alt.

3) Fascism – they don’t access microfascism, the alternative does the opposite of our analysis of desire, they ask for more of the status quo on a molar level. They ask the State to be MORE imperial, independent ontology disad to the alt, that’s Bell.

___ Extend Heinegg 4 – they don’t have a concrete political solution. Hillman’s “aesthetic intensity” just asks people to imagine the diabolical logic of war as a method of disenchanting the masses of war. Their alt ONLY solves by causes the masses to eventually reject war, but they don’t know what comes next.

___ AND, independently we outweigh – while we defend micropolitical action in terms of desire, we also defend how this strategy maps onto protest politics. Their alt never leaves the room: our politics has legs.

AT: NORMATIVITY

What a loser, get out of here and get a political strategy hippy. The alternative doesn’t even pretend to have ANY tangible impact on the political. <2AC K Frontline>

The link debate is a joke, extend the 1AC Patton evidence – normative deterritorialization for Deleuze and Guattari is a practice of constantly thinking outside the State through every day political actions. Being political can look like anything at all, it’s a question of investment of desire. Patton makes 2 arguments: 1) We’ll mark a difference between absolute and relative deterritorialization – absolute equates to theory, a thought apparatus with no connection to the political. Their alternative is trapped in absolute deterritorializations, an intellectual masturbation that never maps onto the political. Our politics takes their alternative into the streets, a relative deterritorialization. Combining the two is key to effectuating philosophical thought.

2) Becoming-democratic – we’re a K of the current system of legal domination and bureaucracy, we solve the internal warrants of their link evidence. “immanent utopianism will draw upon elements of existing political normativity to suggest ways in which the injustice or intolerability of present institutional forms of social life might be removed.” We solve the impact directly.___ Our form of political engagement reignites the potential of the individual to create change – not located solely in the state, but still aware of the way our politics resonates into the political. We control

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uniqueness: 1AC Gilbert says movements fail now because they’re apolitical - only our politics can effectively challenge state oppression and empower individual decision making

And extend Churchill – our entire aff is about disrupting discourse that keeps us within channels of bureaucratic acceptance. The reason protest movements fail is because they have permits to be in public spaces, and they get sponsors and invite hot dog vendors and celebrities and the whole charade ends calmly at 6:30 so no one misses a new episode of House. The aff is a K of current normative legal thought, we engage a nomadic politics OUTSIDE the State apparatus.

And, Churchill is a disad to the alt – their reliance on endless non-normative discourse in which discussion is NEVER placed in the context of political action is a symbolic politics of comfort that ignores imperial genocide and never challenges fascism.

Plan text is key – it’s not a question of subordinating our movement to government action, it’s a question of how we arrive at the plan. Our nomad politics is a bottom-up roadmap, solves 100% of the link.

--- The Defense ---The case is a solid piece of terminal uniqueness against the K, the question of how we engage politics is the whole reason we read an aff. Their answer to the question is “do nothing, just keep talking.” Our Churchill evidence changes the whole game, we don’t get to determine the terms of engagement with the State. They control violence, and they’ve proven they’ll use it. We have to respond to that with an effective political strategy: strategy and tactics on the level of bodies is key, that’s Gilbert.

No impact – no reason giving anti-normative thought processes a rhizomic political manifestation is bad. Even if they win the link debate, no reason to vote negative. Alt doesn’t solve the case – no offensive reason to vote neg, if anything they just think about the aff. The alternative is tautological, engaging in thought to engage in thought. Solves nothing, it’s masturbation.

And, “Perm: engage the alternative through the lens of our nomadic political thought.” Perm isn’t severance – we defend the entirety of the 1AC, the perm utilizes our political methodology as a lens to interpret the K. Read the aff into the K like a minor literature. Nomad thought skirts the normative interrupt, we never subordinate theory to action, instead we blur the line between the two, creating a smooth space for political philosophy, that’s Gilbert and Patton. ___ And, more evidence: their totalizing method precludes challenging real power relations. The perm combines theory and action into a political strategy: that’s key to overcome right-wing backlash.Deleuze and Foucault 72 (Gilles and Michel, two awesome French dudes, invented the unicorn, discussion recorded March 4, 1972, published in a special issue of L’Arc No. 49, pp. 3-10, “Intellectuals & Power: A conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze”, http://kasamaproject.org/2010/05/10/foucault-and-deleuze-on-intellectuals-and-power/, [CL])

DELEUZE: On the basis of our actual situation, power emphatically develops a total or global vision. That is, all the current forms of repression (the racist repression of immigrant workers, repression in the factories, in the educational system, and the general repression of youth) are easily totalised from the point of view of power. We should not only seek the unity of these forms in the reaction to May ’68 , but more appropriately, in the concerted preparation and organisation of the near future, French capitalism now relies on a “margin” of unemployment and has abandoned the liberal and paternal mask that promised full employment. In this perspective, we begin to see the unity of the forms of repression: restrictions on immigration, once it is acknowledged that the most difficult and thankless jobs go to immigrant workers-repression in the factories, because the French must reacquire the “taste” for increasingly harder work; the struggle against youth and the repression of the educational system, because police repression is more active when there is less need for young people in the work force. A wide range of professionals (teachers, psychiatrists, educators of all kinds, etc.) will be called upon to exercise functions that have traditionally belonged to the police. This is

something you predicted long ago, and it was thought impossible at the time: the reinforcement of all the structures of confinement. Against this global policy of power, we initiate localised counter-responses, skirmishes , active and occasionally preventive defences. We have no need to totalise that which is invariably totalised on the side of power; if we were to move in this direction, it would mean restoring the representative forms of centralism and a hierarchical structure .

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We must set up lateral affiliations and an entire system of net- works and popular bases; and this is especially difficult. In any case, we no longer define reality as a continuation of politics in the traditional sense of competition and the distribution of power, through the so-called representative

agencies of the Communist Party or the General Workers Union(6). Reality is what actually happens in factories, in schools, in barracks, in prisons , in police stations. And this action carries a type of information which is altogether different from that found in newspapers (this explains the kind of information carried by the Agence de Press Liberation (7).’FOUCAULT: Isn’t this difficulty of finding adequate forms of struggle a result of the fact that we continue to ignore the problem of power? After all, we had to wait until the nineteenth century before we began to understand the nature of exploitation, and to this day, we have yet to fully comprehend the nature of power. It may be that Marx and Freud cannot satisfy our desire for understanding this enigmatic thing which we call power, which is at once visible and invisible, present and hidden, ubiquitous. Theories of government and the traditional analyses of their

mechanisms certainly don’t exhaust the field where power is exercised and where it functions. The question of power re- mains a total enigma. Who exercises power? And in what sphere? We now know with reasonable certainty who exploits others, who receives the profits, which people are involved, and we know how these funds are reinvested. But as for power . . . We know that it is not in the hands of those who govern. But, of course, the idea of the “ruling class” has never received an adequate

formulation, and neither have other terms, such as “to dominate … .. to rule … .. to govern,” etc. These notions are far too fluid and require analysis. We should also investigate the limits imposed on the exercise of power-t he relays through which it operates and the extent of its influence on the often insignificant aspects of the hierarchy and the forms of control , surveillance, prohibition, and constraint. Everywhere that power exists, it is being exercised . No one, strictly speaking, has an official right to power; and yet it is always excited in a particular direction, with some people on one side and some on the other. It is often difficult to say who holds power in a precise sense, but it is easy to see who lacks power. If the reading of your books (from Nietzsche to what I anticipate in Capitalism and Schisophrenia (8) has been essential for me, it is because they seem to go very far in exploring this problem:

under the ancient theme of meaning, of the signifier and the signified , etc., you have developed the question of power, of the inequality of powers and their struggles. Each struggle develops around a particular source of power (any of

the countless, tiny sources- a small-time boss, the manager of “H.L.M.,”‘ a prison warden, a judge, a union representative, the editor-in-chief of a newspaper). And if pointing out these sources-denouncing and speaking out-is to be a part of the struggle , it is not because they were previously unknown. Rather, it is because to speak on this subject, to force the institutionalised networks of information to listen, to produce names, to point the finger of accusation, to find targets, is the first step in the reversal of power and the initiation of new struggles against existing forms of power. if the discourse of inmates or prison doctors constitutes a form of struggle, it is because they confiscate, at least temporarily, the power to speak on prison conditions-at present, the exclusive property of prison administrators and their cronies in reform groups. The discourse of struggle is not opposed to the unconscious, but to the secretive. It may not seem like much; but what if it turned out to be more than we expected? A whole series of misunderstandings relates to things that are “bidden,” “repressed,” and “unsaid”; and they permit the cheap “psychoanalysis” of the proper objects of struggle. It is perhaps more difficult to unearth a secret than the unconscious. The two themes frequently encountered in the recent past, that “writing gives rise to repressed elements” and that “writing is necessarily a subversive activity,” seem to betray a number of operations that deserve to be severely denounced.

<2AC Perm>

1AR: PATTON

Extend Patton 7 – our understanding of political movements is that struggle can look like anything at all. We criticize the way the creativity of protest movements is stifled by the State: their logic challenges our normative criticism by preventing this debate from ever going beyond an exercise in intellectual masturbation. Patton makes 2 arguments –

1) Theory v. Practice – their alternative is trapped in a model of absolute deterritorialization that never maps onto the political. We give their alternative legs so that it does more than give you a headache. Combining the theory and practice is key to effectuation of philosophical thought.

2) Becoming-democratic – we kritik the current system of bureaucratic domination, solves their internal links. We use normative strategies to engage a utopian immanence that changes institutions, means their links are terminally non-unique: they describe a legal system that we don’t operate in. We solve the impact.

___ Extend Gilbert – we don’t just tamper with a uniqueness question, we’re moving whole fucking continents in the political. We don’t center our politics in the State, we reignite the potential of the individual to orient desire that resonates into the State. Movements fail now because of the apolitical nature of modern protest strategies – we MUST begin with the way strategies are effectuated on the level of bodies, that’s the 1AC Gilbert. Only our politics can challenge domination and empower the individual to become-democratic. Means the 1AC IS a political project with real effects.

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___ Plan text is key – it’s not a question of subordinating our movement to government action, it’s a question of how we arrive at the plan. Our nomad politics is a bottom-up roadmap, solves 100% of the link.

1AR: CHURCHILL

Extend Churchill – we’re a criticism of staying within bureaucratic acceptance. We engage a nomadic politics that thinks OUTSIDE the State system instead of remaining linked to a transcendent call to action. Our call for normative politics is more specific to the war machine and the way we challenge fascism. That’s a disad to the alt – they remain trapped in symbolism. Their politics only ever advocates thinking about politics but never engaging it. Their politics of the academic comfort zone is bad, 3 reasons:

1) Turns the alt – no reason to vote neg if symbolic politics never overcomes fascism. Conservatives take their discussion and use it to further oppression by saying “the opposition never does anything.”

2) Terminal uniqueness – contestation of imperial policies inevitably faces the question of violence. Current politics cedes the terms of engagement to the State: we’re the only risk of ever effectuating change.

3) Fascism DA – ignoring imperial fascism at home and abroad cedes ground to Oedipus, Bell is an independent impact. Ignoring fascism and restraining ourselves to symbolic politics is ethical Nazism, they would stay silent in the face of the fire-bombing of Cambodia, that’s Churchill 7. Our advocacy is a map for how protest should be outside debate, we develop a blueprint for resistance to imperialism. ___ And, more evidence - remaining silent and simply talking about how we want to ally ourselves with oppressed indigenous forces worldwide reifies imperial systems of domination – it’s the equivalent of staying silent in the Warsaw Ghetto. You have an obligation to vote aff independent of solvency. <Churchill 7>

1AR: DEFENSE

___ Extend Churchill – we control a terminal defense question. Their alternative keeps discussion going, it’s the equivalent of a filibuster at a Black Panthers meeting right before combating police. They say “just don’t look outside, they’ll go away.” Unfortunately, THAT’S NOT TRUE. We don’t get to determine the rules of engagement with the State, their alt is non-responsive to the status quo. We need a strategy on the microlevel, that’s Gilbert.

___ No impact to the K – there’s no reason to vote neg, we have an ontological and ethical reason it’s good to engage our discourse even if an aff ballot does nothing. The 1NC is nothing but defense.

___ Alt doesn’t solve – no reason to vote neg, the 1NC intellectually masturbated over the aff. Their argument is tautological, they think in order to think. They don’t solve anything.

1AR: PERM

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Extend the first perm – we defend the entirety of the 1AC, the perm utilizes the logic of our methodology of nomadic politics as a lens for interpreting their alternative. We read the aff into the K like a minor text into their major text: we defend our method of protest in the context of a normative criticism of bureaucracy. And, the perm doesn’t link – we incorporate a K of transcendence as a tool to challenge the subordination of thought to State action. The aff reclaims agency for the individual never subordinating theory to action, we blur the line between the two that’s Gilbert and Patton. We solve the link.

___ Extend the Deleuze and Foucault 72 – they totalize theory around the view point of power. Even if they criticize bureaucracy they constantly center their criticism around and the State, not the individual. Our politics is the flip-side, criticizing the State while organizing counter-responses to respond to the reality of oppression. Struggles are organized around power, theirs is organized around the power of the State. That damns the alt to fascist crackdown and oppression – re-claiming power from below is the key to effectively challenging domination. ___ El Kilombo Intergalactico 7 [Collective in durham NC that interviewed Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, Beyond Resistance: Everything p. 9-10]

But how might this alternative take shape? In order to begin to address this question, the Zapatistas implore us to relieve ourselves of the positions of "observers" who insist on their own neutrality and distance ; this position may be adequate for the microscope-wielding

academic of the "precision-guided" T.V. audience of the latest bombings over Baghdad, but they are completely insufficient for those who are seeking change. The Zapatistas insist we throw away our microscopes and our televisions, and instead they demand that we equip our "ships" with an "inverted periscope." According to what the Zapatistas have stated, one can never ascertain a belief in or vision of the future by looking at a situation from the position of "neutrality" provided for you by the existing relations of power . These methods will only allow you to see what already is , what the balance of the relations of forces are in your field of

inquiry. In other words, such methods allow you to see that field only from the perspective of those who rule at any given moment. In contrast, if one learns to harness the power of the periscope not by honing in on what is happening "above" in the halls of the self-important, but by placing it deep below the earth, below even the very bottom of society, one finds that there are struggles and memories of struggles that allow us to identify not "what is" but more importantly " what will be ." By harnessing the transformative capacity of social movement, as well as the memories of past struggles that drive it, the Zapatistas are able to identify the future and act on it today. It

is a paradoxical temporal insight that was perhaps best summarized by "El Clandestino" himself, Manu Chao, when he proclaimed that, " the future happened a long time ago!" Given this insight afforded by adopting the methodology of the inverted periscope, we are able to shatter the mirror of power , to show that power does not belong to those who rule. Instead, we see that there are two completely different and opposed forms of power in any society: that which emerges from above and is exercised over

people (Power with a capital "P"), and that which is born below and is able to act with and through people (power with a lower case "p"). One is set on maintaining that which is (Power), while the other is premised on transformation (power). These are not only not the same thing; they are (literally)

worlds apart. According to the Zapatistas, once we have broken the mirror of Power by identifying an alternative source of social organization, we can then see it for what it is—a purely negative capacity to isolate us and make us believe that we are powerless. But once we have broken that mirror spell, we can also see that power does not come from above, from those "in Power," and therefore that it is possible to exercise power without taking it—that is, without simply changing places with those who rule. In this regard, it is

important to quote in its entirety of the famous Zapatista motto that has been circulated in abbreviated form among movements throughout the world: "What we seek, what we need and want is for all those people without a party or an organization to make agreements about what they don't want and what they do want and organize themselves in order to achieve it (preferably through

civil and peaceful means), not to take power, but to exercise it ." Only now can we understand the full significance of this statement's challenge.

AT: BATAILLE

At the top, we’re going to make a critical distinction between our differing ideologies that will lose them the round. The key difference is how we approach fascism. Our affirmative changes the direction of the

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flows of desire in order to reorient itself from the fascist State path and prevent the State from appropriating the war machine – Bataille’s criticism throws itself on one strata of desire and drives it into irrationality. 2 impacts: 1) K Turns itself – they can’t engage an ontology of excess in world of fascist repression. Desire is key, the reasons the masses desire their own repression is the root of the politics of Bataille and excess: limiting excess in the name of fear happens because of Oedipalization. 2) The case is an impact turn – they don’t solve for the reason the masses desire fascism, means they only drive the appropriation of the war machine into total war and despotism. ___ More evidence: total war and appropriation by the State outweighs. Their politics never goes beyond the theatre or the sacrificial altar. Mapped onto micropolitical movements, the alt causes despotism. Desire is key to understanding the fascist machine. Buchanan 5 (Ian holds the foundation Chair of Communication and Cultural Studies at Charles Darwin University, “War in the age of intelligent machines and unintelligent government,” Australian Humanities Review Issue 36, July 2005, dml)

This, according to Deleuze and Guattari, “is the point at which Clausewitz's formula is effectively reversed”. When total war - i.e., war which not only places the annihilation of the enemy's army at its centre but its entire population and economy too - becomes the object of the State-appropriated war machine, “then at this level in the set of all possible conditions, the object and the

aim enter into new relations that can reach the point of contradiction.” In the first instance, the war machine unleashed by the State in pursuit of its object, total war,

remains subordinate to the State and “merely realises the   maximal conditions ” 22   of its aims . Paradoxically, though, the more successful it is in realising the State's aims, the less controllable by the State it becomes . As the State's aims grow on the

back of the success of its war machine, so the restrictions on the war machine's object shrink until - scorpion like - it effectively subsumes the State , making it just one of its many moving parts. In Vietnam, the State was blamed for the failure of the war machine precisely because it attempted to set limits on its object. Its inability to adequately impose these limits not only cost it the war, but in effect its sovereignty too. Since then the State has been a puppet of a war machine global in scope and ambition. This is the status of militarism today and no-one has

described its characteristics more chillingly than Deleuze and Guattari: This worldwide war machine , which in a way 'reissues' from the States, displays two successive figures: first, that of fascism, which makes war an unlimited movement with no other aim than itself ; but

fascism is only a rough sketch, and the second, postfascist, figure is that of a war machine that takes peace as its object directly, as the peace of Terror or Survival. The war machine reforms a smooth space that now claims to control, to

surround the entire earth. Total war is surpassed, toward a form of peace more terrifying still. 23 It is undoubtedly Chalmers

Johnson who has done the most to bring to our attention the specific make-up of what Deleuze and Guattari call here the worldwide war machine.24

 His description of a global 'empire of bases' is consistent with Deleuze and Guattari's uptake of Paul Virilio's concept of the 'fleet in being'. This is the paradoxical transformation of the striated space of organisation into a new kind of 'reimparted' smooth space “which outflanks all gridding and invents a neonomadism in the service of a war machine still more disturbing than the States”.

25 Bases do not by themselves secure territory, but as is the case with a battle fleet their mobility and their firepower mean they can exert an uncontestable

claim over territory that amounts to control. This smooth space surrounding the earth is, to put it back into Baudrillard's terms,

the space of simulation. The empire of bases is a virtual construct with real capability. Fittingly enough, it was Jean Baudrillard

who first detected that a structural change in post-WWII militarism had taken place. In Simulacra and Simulation he argues that the Vietnam War was a demonstration of a new kind of will to war, one that no longer thought in terms of winning or losing, but defined itself instead in terms of perseverance . 26  It demonstrated to the US's enemies, clients and allies alike its willingness to continue the fight even when defeat was certain, or had in a sense already been acknowledged (the US strategy of 'Vietnamising' the war which commenced shortly after the Tet offensive in 1968, and become official policy under Nixon, was patently an admission that the war couldn't be won - in the short term it was Johnson's way of putting off admitting defeat until after the election so as to give Hubert Humphrey some chance of victory; in the longer term it was a way of buying time for a diplomatic

solution).27

 It was a demonstration of the US's reach, of its ability to inflict destruction even when its troops were withdrawing and peace talks (however futile) were under way. It also demonstrated to the American people that the fight   could   be continued as the troops were withdrawn, a factor that as I've already pointed out would become decisive in re-shaping militarism as an incorporeal system. It was also a demonstration to the American domestic population that the country's leaders were willing to continue to sacrifice lives to prove this point.28 The contrary view, that Nixon wanted to end the war sooner but was unable to do so because domestic politics didn't allow it, in no way contradicts this thesis. If anything it confirms it because if true it would mean, as Deleuze and Guattari

have said of fascism, “at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions”, the American people   wanted   Vietnam , and, as they add, “ it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for.”

29 While there can be no doubt Vietnam

was an unpopular war that was eventually brought to a halt by popular pressure, it is a sobering thought to remind oneself that it was a war that lasted some 10 years. If one takes 1967 as the decisive turning point in popular opinion, the moment when protest against the war became the prevailing view and support for it dwindled into a minority murmur, then one still has to take stock of the fact that it took a further 6 years for US troops to be fully withdrawn. 30   The kind of sustained

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popular pressure that brought the Vietnam War to a close has not yet even begun to build in the US in spite of the fact that the death toll has passed 1500 (as of March 2005). Wars are spectacles in the traditional sense of being events staged to convey a specific message, but also in the more radical or postmodern sense that spectacle is the final form of war, the form war takes when it takes peace as its object. Hence the military's facilitation of the media (this backfired to a large degree in Vietnam, but the lessons learned then are put to good use today). Ultimately, though, as Baudrillard rightly argues, the “media and official news services are only there to maintain the illusion of an actuality, of the reality of the stakes, of the objectivity of the facts.”31 Chomsky's analyses of current trends in US imperialism confirm this thesis. As he argues, 'preventive' wars are only fought against the basically defenceless.32 Chomsky adds two further conditions that chime with what we have already adduced: there must be something in it for the aggressor, i.e., a fungible return not an intangible moral reward, and the opponent must be susceptible to a portrayal of them as 'evil', allowing the victory to be claimed in the name of a higher moral purpose and the actual venal purpose to be obscured.33 At first glance, waging war to prevent war appears to be as farcical as fucking for virginity, but that is only if we assume that the aim of the war is to

prevent one potential aggressor from striking first. Or, rather, given that it is alleged that the putative enemy, Al Qaeda and its supposed supporters, took first blood (the Rambo reference is of course deliberate), we are asked to believe the current war is being fought to prevent a second, more damaging strike. The obsessive and suitably grave references to Weapons of Mass Destruction by the various mouthpieces of the Bush regime (Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, but also Blair and Howard) is plainly calculated to compel us to accept that any such second strike will be of biblical, or worse, Hollywood proportions. As one joke put it, the Americans could be certain that Iraq had at least some Weapons of Mass Destruction because they had the receipts to prove it. The grain of truth in this joke reveals the true purpose of the war - it was a demonstration to all of America's clients that it wouldn't tolerate 'price-gouging'. Obviously I am speaking metaphorically here, but the fact is that Iraq is a client of the US, it purchases arms and consumer goods and sells oil at a carefully controlled price. Why this arrangement suddenly became so unsatisfactory is subject to a great deal of speculation which centre on two basic theories: (1) when Iraq switched from the dollar to the euro it posed an intolerable threat to the stability of the US currency; (2) the US is positioning itself to monopolise oil ahead of growing Chinese demand.

Either way, if one wants a metaphor to describe US imperialism it wouldn't it wouldn't be MacDonald's, a comparatively benign operator, but the predatory retail giant Wal-Mart.34

 In other

words, today's wars are fought to demonstrate will. The age of gunboat diplomacy has given way to the age of gunboat commerce.35 When war changed its object it was able to change its aim

too and it is this more than anything that has saved 'real' war from itself. Baudrillard's later work on the spectacle of war misses this point: through becoming spectacles the fact that real wars

(i.e., territorial wars) are no longer possible has not diminished their utility - the US isn't strong enough to take and hold Iraq, but it can use its force to demonstrate to other small nations that it can inflict massive damage and lasting pain on anyone who would dare defy it. Baudrillard's lament that the real Gulf War never took place can only be understood from this viewpoint - although he doesn't put it in these words, his insight is essentially that war in its Idealised form is much more terrifying than peace. Again, although Baudrillard himself doesn't put it this way, the conclusion one might draw from the paradigm shift in war's rationalisation enumerated above - from pragmatic object (defeating North Vietnam) to symbolic object (defending the credibility of the fight forces) -is that war has become

'postmodern'.36 This shift is what enables the US to ideologically justify war in the absence of a proper object and

indeed in the absence of a known enemy. T he Bush regime's 'War on Terror' is the apotheosis of this change: the symbolic (terror) has been made to appear instrumental (terrorism ), or more precisely the symbolic is now able to generate the

instrumental according to its own needs. This is the moment when the war machine becomes militarism , the moment when doxa becomes doctrine.

What is a war machine? The answer to this question must always be, it is a concept. But because of the way Deleuze and Guattari create their concepts, by abstracting from the historical, there is always a temptation to treat the war machine as primarily descriptive. More importantly, the war machine is only one element in a complex treatise which is ultimately a

mordant critique of the present. Deleuze and Guattari's analysis proceeds via a threefold hypothesis: (1) the war machine is a nomad invention that does not have war as its primary object, war is rather a second-order objective; (2) the war machine is exterior to the State apparatus, but when the State appropriates the war machine its nature and function changes, its polarity is effectively reversed so that it is directed at the nomads themselves; (3) it is only when the war machine has been appropriated by the State that war becomes its primary object . 37  Deleuze and Guattari are careful to clarify that their main purpose in assigning the invention of the war machine to the nomads is to assert its historical or 'invented' character. Their implication is that the nomadic people of the steppes and deserts do not hold the secret to understanding the war machine. We need to look past the concrete historical

and geographical character of the war machine to see its eidetic core.38

 Clearly, it is not “the nomad who defines this constellation of characteristics”; on the contrary, “it is this constellation

that defines the nomad, and at the same time the essence of the war machine.”39 In its nomad origins, the war machine does not have war as its primary objective. Deleuze and Guattari arrive at this conclusion by way of three questions. First of all they ask, is battle the object of war? Then they ask if war is the object of the war machine. And finally they ask if the war machine is the object of the State. The first question requires further and immediate clarification, they say, between when a battle is sought and when it is avoided. The difference between these two states of affairs is not the difference between an offensive and defensive posture. And while it is true that at first glance war does seem to have battle as its object whereas the guerrilla has nonbattle his

object, this view is deceiving. Dropping bombs from 10 000 metres above the earth, firing missiles from a distance of hundreds of kilometres, using unpiloted drones to scout for targets, using satellite controlled and guided weapons, are the actions of a war-machine that has no interest at all in engaging in battle. The truism that the Viet Cong frustrated the US Army in Vietnam by failing to engage them in battle should not be taken to mean the US Army sought battle and the enemy did not. The Viet Cong frustrated the US Army by failing to succumb to its nonbattle strategies and forced them into seeking battles with an elusive army with a better understanding of the terrain. If operation “Rolling Thunder”, or any of the

many other battle-avoiding stratagems the US attempted had worked, they would not have sought battle at all.40

 Ironically, too, as Gabriel Kolko points out, the more strategic the US tried to make its offensive operations, i.e., the more it tried to disengage from face-to-face encounters on the battlefield, the more passive its posture became because of its escalating logistical support

requirements and increasing reliance on high maintenance technology.41 By the same token, it is clear that the guerilla armies of the Viet Cong did in fact seek

battle, but did so on their own terms. As Mao said, the guerrilla strikes where the other is weak and retreats whenever the stronger power attacks, the point being that the guerrilla is constantly on the look out for an opportunity to engage the enemy.

42Battle and nonbattle “are the double object of

war, according to a criterion that does not coincide with the offensive and the defensive, or even with war proper and guerrilla warfare.”43

 For this reason the question has to be pushed further back to ask if war is even the object of the war machine? Too often the answer to this question is automatically 'yes', but this reflects a precise set of historical circumstances and not an essential condition. It is true, throughout history, the nomads are regularly to be found in conflict situations, but this is because history is studded with collisions between war machines and the states and cities which would grind them into the dust. War is thrust upon the war machine, but its actual occupation is quite different. It could even be said to be peaceful were we not

suspicious of that term. And as I have already argued, it is when the war machine takes peace itself as its object that it enters its most terrifying phase.

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Next, there’s no link to the aff – we recognize our reflection in their mirror, but it’s hard to define exactly what we recognized. Our identity isn’t static, we equate our image in the mirror to fuzz on a TV screen. You can try to pick out patterns in the black dots, but it doesn’t mean anything.

They’ve been fooled by the mirror, not us—we already know about the violent nature of our advocacy, but we engage and embrace this violenceDeleuze and Guattari 72 (Gilles and Felix, Anti-Oedipus, 381-2)

What, finally, is the opposition between schizoanalysis and psychoanalysis, when the negative and positive tasks of schizoanalysis are taken as a

whole? We constantly contrasted two sorts of unconscious or two interpretations of the unconscious: the one schizoanalytic, the other psychoanalytic; the one schizophrenic, the other neurotic-Oedipal; the one abstract and nonfigurative , the other imaginary; but also the one really concrete, the other symbolic; the one machinic, the other structural; the one molecular, microphysical, and micrological, and the other molar or

statistical; the one material, the other ideological; the one productive, the other expressive. We have seen how the negative task of schizoanalysis must be violent , brutal: defamiliarizing, de-oedipalizing, decastrating ; undoing theater, dream, and fantasy;

decoding, de territorializing-a terrible curettage, a malevolent activity . But everything happens at the same time. For at the same time the process is liberated -the process of desiring-production, following its molecular lines of escape that already define the mechanic's task of the schizoanalyst. And the lines of escape are still full molar or social investments at grips with the whole social field: so that the task of schizoanalysis is ultimately that of discovering for every case the nature of the libidinal investments of the social field, their possible internal conflicts, their relationships with the preconscious investments of the same field, their possible conflicts with these-in short, the entire interplay of the desiring-machines and

the repression of desire. Completing the process and not arresting it, not making it turn about in the void, not assigning it a goal. We'll never go too far with the deterritorialization, the decoding of flows. For the new earth ("In truth, the earth will one day become a place of healing") is not to be found in the neurotic or perverse reterritorializations that arrest the process or assign it goals; it is no more behind than ahead, it coincides with the completion of the process of desiring-production, this process that is always and already complete as it proceeds, and as long as it proceeds. It therefore remains for us to see how, effectively, simultaneously, these various tasks of schizoanalysis proceed .

Perm: do the advocacy and all non-exclusive parts of the alternative.___ Your own author agrees with our perm – the war machine is catastrophic expenditure, a total destructive force by the State. Against the backdrop of the war on terror, we must avoid limitless expenditure in order to stop feeding the war machine – our politics of being opposed to fascism still engages glorious expenditure while avoiding fascist ontology. Allan Stoekl, 2007, Professor of French and Comparative Literature – Penn State University, “Excess and Depletion: Bataille’s Surprisingly Ethical Model of Expenditure” in Reading Bataille Now edited by Shannon Winnubst, p. 253-4

Humans waste not only the energy accumulated by other species, but, just as important, their own energy, because humans themselves soon hit the limits to growth. Human society cannot indefinitely reproduce: soon enough what today is called the “carrying capacity” of an environment is reached.3 Only so many babies can be born, homes built, colonies founded. Then limits are reached. Some excess can be used in the energy and population required for military expansion (the case, according to Bataille, with Islam {1976a, 83-92; 1988, 81-91}), but soon that too screeches to a halt. A steady state can be attained by devoting large numbers of people and huge quantities of wealth and labor to useless activity: thus the large numbers of unproductive

Tibetan monks, nuns, and their lavish temples (1976a, 93-108; 1988, 93-110). Or, most notably, one can waste wealth in military buildup and constant warfare. No doubt this solution kept populations stable in the past (one thinks of constant battles between South American Indian tribes), but in the present (i.e., 1949) the huge amounts of wealth devoted to military armament , worldwide, can only lead to nuclear holocaust (1976a, 159-60; 1988, 169-71). This final point leads to Bataille’s version of a Hegelian “Absolute Knowing,” one based not so much on the certainty of a higher knowledge as on the certainty of a higher

expenditure, improperly conceived, can threaten the very existence of society. Bataille’s theory, then, is a profoundly ethical one: we must somehow distinguish between versions of excess that are “on the scale of the universe,” and whose recognition- implementation guarantees the survival of society (and human expenditure), and other versions that entail blindness to the real role of expenditure and thereby threaten man’s, not to mention the planet’s, survival . This, in very rough outline, is the main thrust of

Bataille’s book. By viewing man as waster rather than conserver, Bataille manages to invert the usual order of economics: the moral imperative , so to speak, is the furthering of a “good” expenditure, which we might lose sight of if we stress an inevitably selfish model of conservation or utility. For if conservation is put first, inevitably the bottled-up forces will break loose, but in unforeseen and in, so to speak, untheorized ways. We should focus our attention, not on conservation, maintenance, and the steady state – which can lead only to mass destruction and the ultimate wasting of the world – but instead on the modes of waste in

which we, as human animals, should engage. But how does one go about privileging waste in an era in which waste seems to be

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the root of all evil? Over fifty years after the publication of The Accursed Share, we live in an era in which nuclear holocaust no longer seems the main threat. But other dangers lurk, ones just as terrifying and definitive:

global warming, deforestation, and the depletion of resources – above all, energy resources: oil, coal, even uranium. How can we possibly talk about valorizing waste, when waste seems to be the principle evil threatening the continued existence of the biosphere on which we depend? Wouldn’t it make more sense to stress conservation, sustainability, downsizing, rather than glorious excess?

<Perm 2AC>

Next, they don’t have any internal link to their fascism claims, 2 arguments:1) They assume that we are proposing a specific solution to fascism. The question is the model of

politics we affirm and how we engage with the State in the first place. 2) Alt doesn’t question desire for fascism, Gilbert and Patton prove desire is key.

Next, their movement will fail. The alt ensures class division and regimes of desire remain in place: the only people who can sacrifice are those in the comfort zone. Our 1AC Churchill is terminal defense, they won’t sacrifice if it costs them something. They only reinforce hierarchies of power, retrenching the status quo.Wolin 4 Richard Wolin, Distinguished Professor of History at the City University of New York Graduate Center, 2004 (The Seduction of Unreason pp 102-103)

But problems exist with Bataille's use of ethnographic literature on sacrifice and the gift. For in certain respects his naïve employment of

Mauss's findings risks regressing behind his mentor's account. For Bataille, the glory of ritual lies in its gratuitousness: qua social practice, ritual is totally removed from utilitarian ends. And as such, it engenders privileged moments when society embraces loss qua loss. Sacrifice in particular involves a transfiguration of everyday life that verges on apotheosis: both victim and community temporarily cross the line separating the sacred from the profane. The victim becomes a demigod momentarily permitted to dwell among the gods and the community stands in enhanced proximity to the sacred. For Bataille, profane existence is a "thing world," a sphere of life beholden to mundane considerations of use. Its denizens grapple fecklessly with the cycle of production and reproduction that constitutes "mere life." "Sacrifice," Bataille observes, "restores to the sacred world that which servile use has degraded, rendered profane." Religion is purely "a matter of detaching from the real order, from the poverty of things, and of restoring the divine order" When viewed from the Bataillesque standpoint of "nonproductive expenditure," acts of destruction sacrifice, potlatch, war, and violence ennoble. Destruction emancipates both objects and persons from the pro¬fane considerations of use. As Bataifie contends, "Destruction is the best means of negating a utilitarian relation."53 The grandeur of sacrifice or gift giving lies in their restoration of "intimacy": a proximity to the sacred reminiscent of Heideggerian "nearness to Being" (Nahe). As Bataille explains: The victim is a surplus taken from the mass of useful wealth. And he can only be withdrawn from it in order to be consumed profidessly, and therefore utterly destroyed. Once chosen, he is the accursed share, destined for violent consumption. But the curse tears him away from the order of things; it gives him a recognizable figure, which now radiates intimacy, anguish, the profundity of living beings .... This was the price men paid to escape their downfall and remove the weight introduced in them

by the avarice and cold cal¬culation of the real order. 54 Yet insofar as they misconstrue the historical parameters of ritual practice, these celebratory descriptions risk becoming glib. Ultimately, Bataille 's appreciation of these phenomena succumbs to a type of "primitivism" He decontextualizes the cult practices he analyzes the better to incorporate them within his own theoretical agenda : "an anthropology that will itself provide a living and orgiastic myth to overturn, through its experience on a collective level, 'modern' sterile

bourgeois society"55 Bataille understands sacrifice as gratuitous and nonutilitarian. Acts of sacrifice , he claims, have "no ends beyond themselves." But this contention is misleading . Although Bataille is correct in describing such practices as unrelated to the production of wealth, they are very much oriented toward the reproduction of existing power relations . As practiced among the Aztecs, human sacrifice redounded to the credit of the ruling caste (priests and aristocracy), providing them with a quasi divine power to preside over life and death. For these reasons, it is deceptive to claim, as Bataille repeatedly does, that sacrifice has no end beyond itself. One could

raise an analogous criticism of Bataille's treatment of potlatch the public, demonstrative destruction of wealth as well as gift giving. In truth, only those who possess great wealth can afford to destroy it . Consequently, the option to engage in potlatch does not exist for society's lower classes." Like sacrifice, potlatch is implicated in the reproduction of social hierarchy. Such acts reinforce the status and prestige of those who destroy their wealth. In nearly every case, the practitioners of potlatch belong to the upper strata of

society. Those who are forced to passively endure the potlatch are in effect humiliated. Through such acts, their lowly social rank is reaffirmed. The same is true of gift giving. Gifts are not freely bestowed, shorn of ulterior ends. Bataille seizes on the aspect of gift giving that serves his purposes. Gift giving is not an economic transaction; it is neither an act of barter, nor does it aim at the enhancement of social wealth.

Instead, in the first instance with gift giving, social relations among persons are at issue. As with both sacrifice and potlatch, what is at stake with the gift are relations of power . When given in accordance with social ritual, gifts always come

with strings attached: unless the gift can be returned in kind, its social function is to intimidate the recipient. The object of gift giving as a social ritual is to derogate and shame the recipient by virtue of his or her inability to return a gift of equal value . Gift giving, too, then

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must he classified as a ritual practice that is in no sense gratuitous or free. Far from being an end in itself, as Bataille claims, it is fully implicated in the production and reproduction of social power.

<K Frontline>

1AR: DA TO ALT

Extend the 2AC-1, we make a distinction between political ideologies. Bataille throws the war machine further into the jowls of the State as part of an irrational sacrificial politics: the litmus test is asking ‘what does the alternative look like applied to protest movements?’ Their alternative tells protesters to start sacrificing people in public and become radically apolitical. 2 impacts:

1) K turns itself – their radical irrationality is too avante garde. Rather than trying to be insane and outside the rationality of liberalism, engage our ontology of desire. We solve the root of limitation of excess, which is fear politics. The alt collapses into despotism when it’s applied to protest. ___ Deleuze and Guattari 80 [Gilles and Felix, professors at the University of Paris VIII at Vincennes, ATP, p160-1] 159

You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn; and you have to keep small supplies of significance and subjectification, if only to turn them against their own systems when the circumstances demand it, when things, persons, even situations force you to; and you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to

the dominant reality. Mimic the strata. You don't reach the BwO, and its plane of consistency, by wildly destratifying. That is why we encountered the paradox of those emptied and dreary bodies at the very beginning: they had emptied themselves of their organs instead of looking for the point which they could patiently and momentarily dismantle the organization of organs we call the organism. There are, in fact, several ways of botching the BwO: either one fails to produce it, or one produces it more or less, but nothing is produced on it, intensities do not pass or are blocked. This is because the BwO is always swinging between the surfaces that stratify it and the plane that

sets it free. If you free it with too violent an action, if you blow apart the strata without taking precautions, then instead

of drawing the plane you will be killed, plunged into a black hole, or even dragged toward catastrophe. Staying stratified - organized,

signified, subjected - is not the worst that can happen ; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever . This is

how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and

escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO. Connect, conjugate, continue: a whole "diagram," as opposed to still

signifying and subjective programs. We are in a social formation; first see how it is stratified for us and in us and at the place where we are; then descend from the strata to the deeper assemblage within which we are held; gently tip the assemblage , making it pass over to the side of the plane of consistency. It is only there that the BwO reveals itself for

what it is: connection of desires, conjunction of flows, continuum of intensities. You have constructed your own little machine, ready when needed to be plugged into other collective machines.

2) Case outweighs – they don’t solve the reason the masses desire fascism – they’re conceding a core uniqueness question out of the block, desire controls the internal link to fascism because it’s organized ontologically in the individual. Catastrophic excess in the form of imperial war-making is inevitable in the world of the alt, they do nothing to change desire.

___ Extend Buchanan – specifically, total war outweighs. Turns the K, desire doesn’t change post-1NC, means the masses can still desire fascism. Their politics isn’t meant to leave the theatre or the altar. Fascism results in catastrophic forms of expenditure because the State war machine takes total war as its object – turns the link warrants. We solve, aff decenters State thinking.

1AR: LINK DEBATE

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Extend the no link – 2 arguments. 1. Identity – we don’t have a static identity to be doubled. We’re an affirmation of political strategy

– there’s nothing to criticize, the only link is that we pretend to be activists. We know our affirmation doesn’t leave the room, but we say the role of the ballot should be a determination of how to map political strategies onto activism. The aff is an ontology disad to their model of tragic theater.

2. Violence - The double they want to shock us with has already been seen, we know our advocacy is grotesque and violent, but we wouldn’t be schizophrenic if we weren’t. Extend D&G 72, deterritorializations are necessarily ugly because they involve reterritorializations.

1AR: PERM

Extend Perm: non-exclusive – the perm solves, we engage in the political strategy of nomadism and integrate their ontology of excess into our evolving idea of power. Extend Stoekl 7 – if we win that the war machine is catastrophic expenditure we win that our politics is compatible with the alt. The total destruction of the State war machine whose goal is a ‘terrifying peace’, specifically in the context of the War on Terror, prevents any possibility of a politics of excess. 3 impacts:

1. We preclude the alt – we can’t successfully engage the alternative without prevents microfascism. 2. We solve the alt – challenging catastrophic expenditure through our nomadic reclaiming of the

war machine opens spaces to affirm limitless expense. 3. Fascism NB to the perm – we still engage glorious expenditure through the nomad war machine.

Any risk that the aff is glorious expenditure means you vote aff: the fascism impact to the aff outweighs a risk of the link.

1AR: I/L TO FASCISM

Extend the “no internal link to fascism” argument – 2 reasons:1. Desire – extend Gilbert and Bell, politics of desire is key to challenge fascism. They don’t question

the motivations of why people beg for State control. 2. Particularism – they assume we’re proposing a specific solution to fascism. Extend Gilbert,

molecular revolution at the level of bodies is key to instantiate a politics of desire that challenges fascism. Fascism as a result of catastrophic expenditure is caused by Oedipal desire for security from negative identities.

1AR: WOLIN

Extend Wolin 4 – The alt ignores political reality, 3 reasons: 1. Class – class division ensures regimes of desire remain in place. Extend Churchill – the only

people who can sacrifice in the alternative are in a comfort zone already, meaning they don’t effect the lower class.

2. No solvency – people won’t leave the comfort zone from Churchill without a change of desires, it’s a question of whether protesters repress themselves or decide to challenge Oedipal channeling.

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3. No strategy – what does their movement even do? Do people just start sacrificing animals in public spaces? Sacrifice doesn’t actually effect the State, they only reproduce existing power relations.

AT: SPANOS

The 1AC is a unique link turn – their evidence assumes a finality to the micropolitical action of the 1AC. Instead, our politics is continuous, a self-referential movement that places the infinite of becoming in the realm of the political. Our creative thinking overcomes finality. That’s our Goddard evidence.

Their link is silly – we read a massive piece of Churchill evidence that agrees, their Spanos evidence only refers to STATUS QUO methodologies of protest and resistance, it isn’t predictive of micropolitical transformations of desire. The 1AC isn’t a Jeremiad – we don’t call for peace, that’s Churchill. The nature of the war machine is agonism, it’s a question of what our Bell evidence calls “total war” or agonism vs. the State. We don’t promote a singular identity politics, we engage becoming-Other, that’s Gilbert and Patton.

The debate space is key – imperial control has manifested itself into the sphere of communication – cutting off politics before it can be developed. Interjecting the affirmative politics of rhizomatic movements into the ether debate is necessary to challenge state sovereignty and reclaim agency<Ether>

Their alternative fails to make a distinction between strategy and tactics – they affirm an ontological lens, not a way of effectuating micropolitical change. The alt doesn’t translate into pragmatic action, which means the case is a DA. The alt doesn’t solve the aff – central to the question of the aff is how we engage the political on a micropolitical level from the perspective of protesters as political agents. They access none of our Patton evidence. Patton makes a differentiation between absolute and relative deterritorialization, the alternative never translates from high theory into pragmatic action, which means their negation never becomes-democratic.Their alternative is a rejection – this doesn’t imply an affirmation of things not-the-plan, it’s just a rejection. The alt is a negative action, you don’t let them become a floating PIK because that skews 2ac strategy and allows them to arbitrarily solve the aff.

The aff solves the alt – our movement implies an ontological escape from the State. Our politics of desire is necessary to understand the significance of Vietnam as part of our colonial history. The same desires of the masses to go to war in Vietnam have been replicated in Iraq, transforming the State into a militarist war machine. Star this card, it’s more specific and warranted than every link they’ll read. <Buchanan 5>

Aff solves the impact – we don’t need to engage their methodology, they concede the Bell evidence out of the 1NC. This is damning, we solve the psychological imperialism inherent to Oedipus, fear politics castrates life in the name of death. As long as we win the content of the 1AC we solve their offense externally.

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AT: MARXISM

1. We control uniqueness – the reason revolutions fail is because they ignore the question of desire, that’s Gilbert. Only a risk we solve the alternative.

2. No link – they have a link of omission AT BEST, our aff is about how to create a better roadmap for material revolutions, that’s Patton. We have to analyze how the masses are organized in the social field before we can have a normative process for revolt.

3. Link turn – We solve the link, extend Gilbert and Patton, we create a bottom-up roadmap for revolutions that’s key to overcome why the masses desire their own repression. The alt recreates fascism, we’re the only risk of solving.

Capitalism is not an external force, it is internally produced and created by the desires of the masses. Our challenge to dominant forms of desire is a necessary precondition to effectuating the revolutionZalloua, 2008 (Zahi,Assistant Professor of French at Whitman College , "The Future of an Ethics of Difference After Hardt and Negri’s Empire" MUSE)

The merits of Empire lie in its desire to reconfigure the center/periphery model of analysis, and, more importantly, to complicate the identification by postcolonial theorists of globalization with neo-imperialism (or the U.S.) by examining more closely how repressive power currently functions. At the heart of Hardt and Negri’s critique is their contention that the nation-state is an outdated notion, belonging to a prior era of “modern,” imperialist sovereignty that has been superseded by the new, imperial

sovereignty of an “Empire” structured by the flow of capital. Any critique of globalization based on the assumption that nation-states are the primary locus of power is misguided: “We insist on asserting that the construction of Empire is a step forward in order to do away with any nostalgia for the power structures that preceded it and refuse any political strategy that involves returning to that old arrangement, such as trying to resurrect the nation-state to protect against global capital” (43). No one is immune from the logic of global capital. Inside/outside and local/global dichotomies are, strictly

speaking, illusory, since we all “feed into and support the development of the capitalist imperial machine” (45). It is therefore not [End Page 128] only false, but counterproductive and damaging, “to claim that we can (re)establish local identities that are in some sense outside and protected against the global flows of capital and Empire,”

that is, to think difference in terms of a particular locale resisting a general global trend (45). As a corrective to this misguided vision of the nation or the local’s capacity for resistance, Hardt and Negri argue for a reconceptualization of globalization as a “regime of the production of identity and difference, or really of homogenization and heterogenization” (45). This understanding of globalization relies more specifically on Foucault’s notion of biopower, which manifests itself through “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations” (1978, 140). Contrary to prior models of power, Foucault’s conception underscores power’s productive or positive nature. As he writes in Discipline and Punish, “We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact, power produces reality; it produces domains of objects and

rituals of truth” (194). Under what they call the “society of control” (23), a formulation they borrow from Deleuze, Hardt and Negri uphold power’s productive principle (“[Empire] produce[s] not only commodities but also subjectivities” [32]), and extend the scope of Foucault’s analysis of the normalizing effects of power beyond disciplinary institutions (such as the prison and the asylum). In the “society of control,” along with its unprecedented “flexible and fluctuating networks,” the “normalizing apparatuses of disciplinarity” intensify, becoming more general, “more ‘democratic,’ ever more immanent to the social field, distributed through the brains and bodies of the citizens” (23). Given the nature and

dominance of global power, described again in Deleuzian terms as an “imperial machine,” Hardt and Negri deny the possibility of transcendence, that is, of adopting a critical position from nowhere, a subject position uncontaminated by ideology; such an “external standpoint no longer exists” (34). A critique of Empire must remain immanent and resist the temptation of transcendence. It is this failure to recognize that modern sovereignty has given way to Empire that typically gives social critics the transcendental urge to posit a form of discourse that “could oppose the informational colonization of being” (34), the assimilative, instrumental rationality prevalent in American capitalism (Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communication would be one example). The appeal to difference common to postmodernist and postcolonial circles seems to suffer from precisely such a sense of transcendence, a desire to embrace difference—the margin, the excluded other—en-soi, outside of Western hegemony. One of the refrains of Empire is the need to know our “true enemy” [End Page 129] (137). With the end of colonialism and the disappearing powers of the nation-state, the new enemy is Empire, an enemy which nevertheless holds the

promise of a better, more democratic future: The passage to Empire and its processes of globalization offer new possibilities to the forces of liberation . . . . Our political task . . . is not simply to resist these processes but to reorganize them and redirect them toward new ends. The creative forces of the multitude that sustain Empire are also capable of autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative political organization of global flows and exchanges. (xv) Globalization . . . is really a condition for the liberation of the multitude. (52) In other words,

globalization is not an obstacle to overcome but a system to struggle with and transform (re-invent) on the plane of immanence. Rather than arguing for a politics of difference, for the “truth” of the other’s difference,

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postmodernist and postcolonial theorists would do better to recognize that they are playing into the hands of their enemies and perpetuating Empire, which gladly celebrates difference: “This new enemy not only is resistant to the old weapons but actually thrives on them, and thus joins its would-be antagonists in applying them to the fullest. Long live difference! Down with essentialist binaries!” (138). Hybridity, then, the once cherished strategy for combating identitarian boundaries and antagonisms, has become the new norm of globalization; as a result, hybridity as a concept has lost its critical edge. It can no longer serve as an effective means of resistance to the homogenizing force of Empire, since it is neutralized and absorbed by the very system it purports to contest.

History is insufficient to explain the events of ’68—our framing of history is more accurate and creates the possibility for successful resistance against capitalism by examining desireLambert 6 (Greg, "Who's Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari?")

Here, I will return again to the major problematic that will guide my exposition of the reception of the Capitalism and Schizophrenia project: why the revolution of desire did not take

place. But then this begs a more preliminary question: a revolution of desire? Would this not take the form of a farce? To assume the image of a revolutionary desire is already to situate the concept of revolution itself into another order of repetition, one that is quite different from the historical Marxist problematic concerning the repetitions and the failures of political revolutions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I would argue that this repetition and this difference, enunciated in the idea of a revolutionary desire that would not take the form of the previous series, is properly comic in its historical significance. To say that it is comic, however, is not to remove it from its historical precedent, but rather to claim that it belongs to the movement of history itself. How so? In a remarkable and very telling note that appears in Difference and Repetition, midway through the chapter ‘Repetition for Itself’, Deleuze comments on Marx’s theory of historical repetition from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. First,

according to Deleuze, historical action must be understood from the basis of repetition; thus, according to Rosenberg, ‘historical actors or creators can create only under the condition that they identify themselves with figures from the past. It is in this sense that history is theatre . . .’ (Deleuze 1994: 91). ‘It is also in this sense that Marx introduces the possibility of comic repetition, when an action, rather than leading to metamorphosis and the production of something new, forms a kind of involution, the opposite of authentic creation’ (Deleuze 1994: 91). The idea of a ‘revolution of desire’ already presupposes the failure of a metamorphosis of the first order – the outward and historical transformation of social and political institutions – and in this sense it is properly a comic repetition because the historical agent has already confronted that the act required for the first kind of metamorphosis is ‘too big’ and thus chooses another manner of metamorphosis or repetition of the act itself. Clearly, I am writing according to the law of the second repetition, a comic repetition. Correctly grasped, a comic repetition of the act must be understood from the perspective of a defect in the original historical actor or in a profound caesura in time between the failed Foreword: Why the Revolution (of Desire) Did Not Take Place 7 action and the present metamorphosis which appears as its comic double. We might understand this, for example, in

the sense that the identification with an original historical figure (‘the proletariat’) today has achieved the dimension of comic repetition, of theatre, in which so many actors have emerged upon the stage to claim this identification as the basis of their own identity (women, minorities, the oppressed, etc.). As a result, however, history has become mythic in form if not also in content: ‘their action becomes the spontaneous repetition of an old role; it is the

revolutionary striving for “something entirely new” that causes history to become veiled in myth’ (Deleuze 1994: 91). And yet, this does not make this form of identification any less profound, or historical, any more than it demotes the nature of the desires that are the new expressions of ‘revolutionary striving’. In fact, in the number of repetitions of the original figure, an even more profound metamorphosis occurs that belongs to the present and to the present alone: by which the ‘identity’ of this actor dissolves, becoming ‘no one’, a modern Oedipus ‘who searches for the scattered members of the great victim’ (Deleuze 1994: 91). It is important to understand that the relationship between these two moments, or between these two repetitions, is not dialectical. In one of the most beautiful statements that occurs in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze writes, ‘the negative is the image of difference, but a flattened and inverted image,

like the candle in the eye of an ox – the eye of the dialectician dreaming of a futile combat?’(Deleuze 1994: 51). The negative is only the product of a genetic affirmation. It is not, as many of Deleuze and Guattari’s most severe critics would have it, that desire is simply displacement of the authentic act, or its disguised ideological representative, but rather the repetition of the act itself in the present, and the manner in which both the agent and the action must undergo a more profound metamorphosis in order to achieve a third synthesis, in which the defective agent and the tragic image of the failed action dissolve in favour of a future that presupposes that such a metamorphosis of the agent and the act is already completed. Here, Deleuze reverses Marx’s original sequence: comic repetition actually precedes truly tragic (or dramatic) metamorphosis; the contemporary

historical agent, finding the magnitude of the original act ‘too big’, enters into a becoming that produces a state of being equal to the action. He writes: In effect, there is always a time when the imagined act is supposed ‘too big for me’. This defines a priori the past or before. It matters little whether or not the event itself occurs, or whether the act has been performed or not: past, present and future are not distributed according to these empirical criteria. Oedipus has already carried out the act, Hamlet has not yet done so, but in either case the first part of the symbol is lived in the past, they are in the past and live themselves as such so long as they experience the image of the act that is too big for them. The second time, which relates to the caesura itself, is thus the present of metamorphosis, a becoming-equal to the act and a doubling of the self, and the projection of an ideal self in the image of the act. (Deleuze

1994: 89) Returning to the original actor, the one who failed to live up to the act due to some fundamental defect or ‘tragic flaw’: is not the nature of this defect or tragic flaw desire itself? This constitutes the standard complaint of all great revolutionary failures: the workers were a little too fascist in their desires; they were

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dupes who were tricked into desiring their own oppression. Consequently, from the second or comic repetition, in identifying with the original

historical actor as the basis for the present action, it would make sense that this action would be situated on the plane of desire itself. However, this second repetition aims at the total metamorphosis of the ground (desire) and, each time, the figure that belongs to this moment is only a figure that appears against this ground, causing the ground to appear as a multiplicity of desires that take it up and attempt to transform it. Thus, the revolution of desire would be defined as a present of metamorphosis, a becoming-equal of the actor as well as projection of an ideal self in the image of the act itself, which no longer appears, from the perspective of a past that is already finished, and in the image that remains ‘too big for me’. Are not all the ideal figures that Deleuze and Guattari create to represent this metamorphosis of the present those figures whose identities dissolve in favour of the process or the act itself – ‘becoming-woman’, becoming-animal’, becoming-molecular, lastly, ‘becoming-imperceptible’? Moreover, does not the image of the act that belongs to the process of ‘becoming’ take place purely in a present that has no clearly definable relation to a past or to a future, a present defined only in terms of an indefinite time or duration of the act itself? And yet, this time only belongs to the image of the action itself, to the process of ‘becoming’. Yet, very few readers have linked this image of becoming to Deleuze’s earlier writings on the three repetitions, or have discerned the identity of figure of ‘becoming-x’ as the projection of an ideal actor in the image of the act itself.

This is a prerequisite—capitalism as an economic system begins at the level of molecular desire—change is impossible without changing the desires of people who support capitalismLambert 6 (Greg, "Who's Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari?")

Is it really the displacement of disguising of a true image of action, or rather is it the apprehension of the act that belongs to a new series and a new form of subjectivity that continues to resonate with the first series, causing it to become transformed, with new elements added that might allow us to apprehend the manner in which the desire associated with transformation continues to insist and become socially creative? Returning to the traditional explanations of the Foreword: Why the Revolution (of Desire) Did Not Take Place 9 defect that is made to account for great historical failures, and to desire as the ground where this defect remains as a wound that cannot be healed by the work of memory or by renewed action. ‘The workers desire their own repression’. All of the great ideology-critiques of the twentieth century begin with this fundamental premise. From very early on, Deleuze and Guattari were never

satisfied with these answers and even went so far as to reject the concept of ideology itself as a causal factor (about which I will say more later on). No one ‘wants’ to be repressed; therefore, if the workers desired repression and became fascist as a result of this positive desire, the answers must be sought at another level than in the organization of collective interests. As Deleuze and Guattari write:

Only microfascism provides an answer to a global question: why does desire desire its own repression, how can it desire its own repression? The masses certainly do not passively submit to power; nor do they ‘want’ to be repressed, in a kind of masochistic hysteria; nor are

they tricked by an ideological lure. Desire is never separable from complex assemblages that necessarily tie into molecular levels, from microformations already shaping postures, attitudes, perceptions, expectations, semiotic systems, etc. Desire is never an undifferentiated instinctual energy, but itself results from a highly developed, engineered setup rich in interactions: a whole supple segmentarity

that processes molecular energies and potential gives desire a fascist determination. Leftist organizations will not be the last to secrete microfascisims. It’s too easy to be antifascist on a molar level, and not even see the fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both personal and collective. (DG 1987: 215) The above passage, which is repeated in many different variations throughout the volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, constitutes the significance of Deleuze and Guattari’s intervention into the field of this historical debate, as well as

what could be called their positive discovery. This concerns the positive discovery of desire itself which does not exist merely at the level of its representations, nor even at the level of the subject who feels, perceives, believes, acts. It also exists at a molecular level composed of an entirely different multiplicity, made up from all the little perceptions, feelings, habits and the little actions like an organic body. Therefore, what Deleuze and Guattari name as the molar and molecular can be seen as another variation of the two repetitions above, this time located within the two levels of what they call the socius. Early on in Deleuze’s career he edited a collection called Instincts and Institutions (1952), in which he wrote a preface under the same title. I will come back to this work often, since I consider it to be a blueprint for some of the

ideas that appear in the later work by Deleuze and Guattari. Institutions are only the sedimentation of the instincts that populate and compose them, down to the desires, the habits, the dreary and mundane routines. This is what Deleuze defines as the first

synthesis that constitutes the present in time, and yet it is a passive synthesis. It is made up of ‘all our rhythms, our reserves, our reaction times, the thousand intertwinings, the presents and the fatigues of which we are composed . . .’ (Deleuze 1994: 77). But, as Deleuze writes in a passage that immediately follows, ‘there must be another time in which the first synthesis can occur’. This refers us to a second synthesis, which is the passive

synthesis of memory, more profound than the passive repetition of habit. There can be no revolution of the level of institutions without a concomitant revolution of on the level of instincts: a molecular revolution!

<Go to “K/2 Solve Fascism” in ID Ptx for more cards>

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1AR: PERM

Extend Massumi 83 – you should combine their material revolution with our lens of desire. Analyzing the desire of the masses is the only way to escape their historicism that traps movements in cycles of failure. There’s no reason our aff is exclusive to material strategies: the perm transforms their normative revolt on the plane of immanence, that’s Patton and Gilbert.

Disad to the alt - Revolution alone is worthless: we must rethink the way political groups are formulated in the status quo or we will infinitely repeat the oppression of Hitler and Mussolini___ Deleuze and Guattari 1995 ("Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium", ["Chaosophy", ed. Sylvere Lothringer, Autonomedia/Semiotexte 1995], retreived from textz.com in 2002)

FG: Exactly. And that's what interests us. Where do these eruptions, these uprisings, these enthusiasms come from that cannot be explained by a social rationality and that are diverted, captured by the power at the moment they are born? One cannot account for a revolutionary situation by a simple analysis of the interests of the time. In 1903 the Russian Social Democratic Party debated the alliances and organization of the proletariat, and the role of the avant-garde. While pretending to prepare for the revolution, it was suddenly shaken up by the events of 1095 and had to jump on board a moving train. There was a crystallization of desire on board a wide social scale created by a yet incomprehensible situation. Same thing in 1917. And there too, the

politicians climbed on board a moving train, finally getting control of it. Yet no revolutionary tendency was able or willing to assume the need for a soviet-style organization that could permit the masses to take real charge of their interests and their desire. Instead, one put machines in circulation, so-called political organizations, that functioned on the model elaborated by Dimitrov at the Seventh International Congress--alternating between popular fronts and sectarian retractions--and that always led to the same repressive results. We saw it in 1936, in 1945, in 1968. By their very axiomatic, these mass machines refuse to liberate revolutionary energy. It is, in an underhanded way, a politics comparable to that of the President of the Republic or of the clergy, but with red flag in hand. And we think that this corresponds to a certain position vis-a-vis desire, a profound way of envisioning the ego, the individual, the family. This raises a simple dilemma: either one finds a new type of structure that finally moves toward the fusion of collective desire and revolutionary organization: or one continues on the present path and, going from repression to repression, heads for a new fascism that makes Hitler and Mussolini look like a joke.

1AR: ALT GENERIC

Extend Deleuze and Guattari 72 – they don’t answer the core uniqueness question of how collectives form. Their alternative doesn’t solve, 2 arguments

1) Desire – they concede desire produces the social, which means conditions for revolution won’t occur without a micropolitical movement of desire. ___ The masses desired capitalism – only the aff can solveDeleuze and Guattari 1995 ("Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium", ["Chaosophy", ed. Sylvere Lothringer, Autonomedia/Semiotexte 1995], retreived from textz.com in 2002)

GD: Of course, capitalism was and remains a formidable desiring machine. The monary flux, the means of production, of manpower, of new markets, all that is the flow of desire. It's enough to consider the sum of contingencies at the origin of capitalism to see to what degree

it has been a crossroads of desires, and that its infrastructure, even its economy, was inseparable from the phenomnea of desire. And fascism too--one must say that it has "assumed the social desires", including the desires of repression and death. People got hard-ons for Hitler, for the beautiful fascist machine. But if your

question means: was capitalism revolutionary in its beginnings, has the industrial revolution ever coincided with a social revolution? No, I don't thing so. Capitalism has been tied from its birth to a savage repressiveness; it had it's organization of power and its state apparatus from the start. Did capitalism imply a dissolution of the previous social codes and powers? Certainly. But it had already established its wheels of power, including its power of state, in the fissures of previous regimes. It is always like that: things are not so progressive; even before a social formation is established, its

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instruments of exploitation and repression are already there, still turning in the vaccuum, but ready to work at full capacity. The first capitalists are like waiting birds of prey. They wait for their meeting with the worker, the one who drops through the cracks of the preceding system. It is even, in every sense, what one calls primitive accumulation.

2) Fascism – even if their material revolution succeeds, it re-inscribes domination. The Marxist revolution is no different from any other party politics – the enemy is always the same. They maintain new structures of organization, creating a fascist axiomatic

1AR: ZALLOUA/UNIQUENESS

Extend Zalloua 8, we’re winning a uniqueness question. Capitalism is not a massive “thing”, it’s produced internally through desire. 3 arguments,

1) No solvency – they isolate themselves to a historic lens of materialist struggles. Without a politics of desire they can’t solve the reason capitalism exists. People desired capitalism, that’s Deleuze and Guattari 95.

2) Politics of Despair - the alt tries to be too external to capitalism, which only isolates their revolution, that’s Churchill from the 1ac.

3) Delirium – The case is a pre-requisite to any discussion of capitalism – before we challenge an economic system, we must confront the latent desire of the masses, which institutionalizes repression of the self and others. In order to evaluate the system of capitalism we must have the tools necessary to understand and alter politics at the level of desire

___ Deleuze and Guattari 95 ("Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium", ["Chaosophy", ed. Sylvere Lothringer, Autonomedia/Semiotexte 1995], retrieved from textz.com in 2002)

QUESTION: When you describe capitalism, you say: "There isn't the slightest operation, the slightest industrial or financial mechanism that does not reveal the dementia of the capitalist machine and the pathological character of its rationality (not at all a false rationality, but a true rationality of *this* pathology, of *this madness*, for the machine does work, be sure of it). There is no danger of this machine going mad, it has been mad from the beginning and that's where its rationality comes from. Does this mean that after this "abnormal" society, or outside of it, there

can be a "normal" society? GILLES DELEUZE: We do not use the terms "normal" or "abnormal". All societies are rational and irrational at the same time. They are perforce rational in their mechanisms, their cogs and wheels, their connecting systems, and even by the place they assign to the irrational. Yet all this presuposes codes or axioms which are not the products of chance, but which are not intrinsically rational either. It's like theology: everything about it is rational if you accept sin, immaculate conception, incarnation. Reason is always a region cut out of the irrational -- not

sheltered from the irrational at all, but a region traveresed by the irrational and defined only by a certain type of relation between irrational factors. Underneath all reason lies delirium, drift. Everything is rational in capitalism, except capital or capitalism itself. The stock market is certainly rational; one can understand it, study it, the capitalists know how to use it, and yet it is completely delirious, it's mad. It is in this sense that we say: the rational is always the rationality of an irrational. Something that hasn't been adequately discussed about Marx's *Capital* is the extent to which he is fascinated by capitalists mechanisms, precisely because the system is demented, yet works very well at the same time. So what is rational in a

society? It is -- the interests being defined in the framework of this society -- the way people pursue those interests, their realisation. But down below, there are desires, investments of desire that cannot be confused with the investments of interest, and on which interests depend in their determination and distribution: an enormous flux, all kinds of libidinal-unconscious flows that make up the delirium of this society. The true story is the history of desire. A

capitalist, or today's technocrat, does not desire in the same way as a slave merchant or official of the ancient Chinese empire would. That people in a society desire repression, both for others and *for themselves*, that there are always people who want to bug others and who have the opportunity to do so, the "right" to do so, it is this that reveals the problem of a deep link between libidinal desire and the social domain. A "disinterested" love for the oppressive machine: Nietzsche said some beautiful things about this permanent triumph of slaves, on how the embittered, the depressed and the weak, impose their mode of life upon us all. Q: So what is specific to capitalism in all

this? GD: Are delirium and interest, or rather desire and reason, distributed in a completely new, particularly "abnormal" way in capitalism? I believe so. Capital, or money,

is at such a level of insanity that psychiatry has but one clinical equivalent: the terminal stage. It is too complicated to describe here, but one detail should be mentioned. In other societies, there is exploitation, there are also scandals and secrets, but that is part of the "code", there are even explicitly secret codes. With capitalism, it is very different: nothing is secret, at least in principle and according to the code (this is why capitalism is "democratic" and can "publicize" itself, even in a juridical sense). And yet nothing is admissable. Legality itself is inadmissable. By contrast to other societies, it is a regime born of the public *and* the

admissable. A very special delirium inherent to the regime of money. Take what are called scandals today: newspapers talk a lot

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about them, some people pretend to defend themselves, others go on the attack, yet it would be hard to find anything illegal in terms of the capitalist regime. The prime minister's tax returns, real estate deals, pressure groups, and more generally the economical and financial mechanisms of capital

-- in sum, everything is legal, except for little blunders, what is more, everything is public, yet nothing is admissable. If the left was "reasonable," it would content itself with vulgarizing economic and financial mechanisms. There's no need to publicize what is private, just make sure that what is already public is beeing admitted publicly. One would find oneself in a

state of dementia without equivalent in the hospitals. Instead, one talks of "ideology". But ideology has no importance whatsoever: what matters is not ideology, not even the "economico-ideological" distinction or opposition, but the *organisation of power*. Because organization of power-- that is, the manner in which desire is already in the economic, in which libido invests the economic -- haunts the exonomic and nourishes political forms of repression.

1AR: LAMBERT 1

Extend the first Lambert 6 – the alternative centers around a historical model of the proletariat. Their overfocus on identity claims as a starting point for revolution dooms us to party politics all over again. Historicism doesn’t overcome the problem of desire: the proletariat desired repression by the State. Even if they succeed they don’t solve the aff. They are Marx’s new comic repetition: EVERYONE has become the proletariat, it’s an empty signifier drained of revolutionary potential. ___ And, more evidence. Historically Marxism collapses to groupuscules based on style and political alliances. The aff is key to solve. Deleuze and Guattari 1995 ("Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium", ["Chaosophy", ed. Sylvere Lothringer, Autonomedia/Semiotexte 1995], retreived from textz.com in 2002)

Q: Your analysis is convincing in the case of the Soviet Union and of capitalism. But in the particulars? If all ideological oppositions mask, by definition, the conflicts of desire, how would you

analyze, for example, the divergences of three Trotskyite groupuscules? Of what conflict of desire can this be the result? Despite the political quarrels, each group seems to fulfill the same function vis-a-vis its militants: a reassuring hierarchy, the reconstitution of a small social milieu, a final explanation of the world.... I dont't see the difference. FG: Because any resemblance to existing groups is merely fortuitous, one can well imagine one of these groups defining itself first by its fidelity to hardened positions of the communist left after the creation of the Third International. It's a whole axiomatics, down to the phonological level -- the way of articulating certain words, the gesture that accompanies them -- and then the structures of organization, the conception of what sort of relationships to maintain with the allies, the centrists, the adversaries.... This may correspond to a certain figure of Oedipalization, a reassuring, intangible universe like that of the obsessive who loses his sense of security if one shifts the position of a single, familar object. It's a question of reaching, through

this kind of identification with recurrent figures and images, a certain type of efficiency that characterized Stalinism--except for its ideology, prescisely. In other respects, one keeps the general framework of the method, but adapts oneself to it very carefully: "The enemy is the same, comrades, but the conditions have changed." Then one has a more open groupuscule. It's a compromise: one has crossed out the first image, whilst maintaining it, and injected other notions. One multiplies meetings and training sessions, but also the external interventions. For the desiring will, there is --- as Zazie says-- a certain way of bugging students and militants, among others. In the final analysis, all these groupuscules say basically the same thing. But they are radically opposed in their *style*: the definition of the leader, of propaganda, a conception of discipline, loyality, modesty, and the asceticism of the militant. How does one account for these polarities without rummaging in the economy of desire of the social machine? From anarchists to Maoists the spread is very wide, politically as much as analytically. Without even considering the mass of people, outside the limited range of the groupuscules, who do not quite know how to distinguish between the leftist elan, the appeal of union action, revolt, hesitation of indifference... One must explain the role of these machines.. these goupuscules and their work of stacking and sifting--in crushing desire. It's a dilemma: to be broken by the social system of to be integrated in the pre-established structure of these little churches. In a way, May

1968 was an astonishing revelation. The desiring power became so accelerated that it broke up the groupuscules. These later pulled themselves together; they participated in the reordering business with the other

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repressive forces, the CGT [Communist worker's union], the PC, the CRS [riot police]. I don't say this to be provocative. Of course, the militants

courageously fought the police. But if one leaves the sphere of struggle to consider the function of desire, one must recognize that certain groupuscules approached the youth in a spirit of repression: to contain liberated desire in order to re-channel it

1AR: LAMBERT 2

Extend the second Lambert 6 – capitalism didn’t land on an asteroid, it appeared because the masses desired it. It infects the entirety of the social: their alternative can never escape the relationality of capitalism. Aff is a pre-requisite to the alternative. Without engaging molecular politics of desire capitalism will inevitably come back. Altering the system requires altering the individuals who resonate their desires to create it. ___ The alt engages capitalism as a unitary system, calling on the proletariat to banish the space monster. That crushes movements and reinscribes capital: we have to smash it into a thousand pieces to solve. Gibson-Graham 96 (J.K. Gibson-Graham, Professor of Human Geography at the Australian National University and Professor of Geosciences at the University of Massachusates, Amherst, 1996 (The End of Capitalism (As We Know It)

One of our goals as Marxists has been to produce a knowledge of capitalism. Yet as “that which is known,” Capitalism has become the intimate enemy. We have uncloaked the ideologically-clothed, obscure monster, but we have installed a naked and visible monster in its place. In return for our labors of creation, the monster has robbed us of all force. We hear – and find it easy to believe – that the

left is in disarray. Part of what produces the disarray of the left is the vision of what the left is arrayed against. When capitalism is represented as a unified system coextensive with the nation or even the world, when it is portrayed as crowding out all other economic forms, when it is allowed to define entire societies , it becomes something that can only be defeated and replaced by a mass collective movement (or by a

process of systemic dissolution that such a movement might assist). The revolutionary task of replacing capitalism now seems outmoded and unrealistic, yet we do not seem to have an alternative conception of class transformation to take its place. The old political economic “systems” and “structures” that call forth a vision of revolution as systemic replacement still seem to be dominant in the Marxist political imagination. The New World Order is often represented as political fragmentation founded upon economic unification. In this vision the economy appears as the last stronghold of unity and singularity in a world of diversity and plurality. But why can’t the economy be fragmented too? If we theorized it as fragmented in the United States, we could being to see a huge state sector (incorporating a variety of forms of appropriation of surplus labor), a very large sector of self-employed and family-based producers (most noncapitalist), a huge household sector (again, quite various in terms of forms of exploitation, with some households moving towards communal or collective appropriation and others operating in a traditional mode in which one adult appropriates surplus labor

from another). None of these things is easy to see. If capitalism takes up the available social space, there’s no room for anything else. If capitalism cannot coexist, there’s no possibility of anything else. If capitalism functions as a unity, it cannot be partially or locally replaced. My intent is to help create the discursive conception under which socialist or other noncapitalist construction becomes “realistic” present activity rather than a ludicrous or utopian goal. To achieve this I must smash Capitalism and see it in a thousand pieces. I must make its unity a fantasy, visible as a denial of diversity and change.

*** COUNTERPLANS ***

AT: WORD PICS

1. No solvency – they have no idea what a movement would look like that incorporated their criticism. The CP doesn’t resonate into a micropolitical movement.

2. <K perm 2AC>

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The net benefit is fluid language: language is just a compilation of signifiers that we give power to. Investments of desire are the key internal link to their impact. Their ordering of language is the ethic of the despot. Perm solves. Deleuze and Guattari 72 (Gilles and Felix; Anti-Oedipus) 207-209

There is no linguistic field without biunivocal relations-whether between ideographic and phonetic values, or between articulations of different levels,

monemes and phonemes-that finally ensure the independence and the linearity of the deterritorialized signs. But such a field remains defined by a transcendence, even when one considers this transcendence as an absence or an empty locus, performing the necessary

foldings, levelings (rabattements), and subordinations-a transcendence whence issues throughout the system the inarticulate material flux in which this transcendence operates, opposes, selects, and combines: the signifier. It is curious, therefore, that one can show so well the servitude of the masses with respect to the minimal elements of the sign within the immanence of language, without showing how the domination is exercised through and in the transcendence of the signifier .* There, however, as elsewhere, an irreducible

exteriority of conquest asserts itself. For if language itself does not presuppose conquest, the leveling operations (les operations de rabattement) that constitute written language indeed presuppose two inscriptions that do not speak the same language: two languages (langages), one of masters, the other of slaves. Jean Nougayrol describes just such a situation: "For the Sumerians, [a given sign] is water; the Sumerians read this sign a, which signifies water in Sumerian. An Akkadian comes along and asks his Sumerian master: what is this sign? The Sumerian replies: that's a. The Akkadian takes this sign for a, and on this point there is no longer any relationship between the sign and water, which in Akkadian is called mil. ... I believe that the presence of the Akkadians

determined the phoneticization of the writing system ... and that the contact of two peoples is almost necessary before the spark of a new writing can spring forth."55 One cannot better show how an operation of biunivocalization organizes itself around a despotic signifier, so that a phonetic and alphabetical chain flows from it . Alphabetical writing is not for illiterates, but by

illiterates. It goes by way of illiterates, those unconscious workers. The signifier implies a language that overcodes another language, while the other language is completely coded into phonetic elements. And if the unconscious in fact includes the topical order of a double inscription, it is

not structured like one language, but like two. The signifier does not appear to keep its promise, which is to give us access to a modern and functional understanding of language. The imperialism of the signifier does not take us beyond the question, "What does it mean T"; it is content to bar the question in advance, to render all the answers insufficient by relegating them to the status of a simple signified. It challenges exegesis in the name of recitation, pure textuality, and superior "scientificity" (scientificite). Like the young palace dogs too quick to drink the verse water, and who never tire of crying: The signifier, you have not reached the signifier, you are still at the level of the signifieds! The signifier is the only thing that gladdens their hearts. But this master signifier remains what it was in ages past, a transcendent stock that distributes lack to all the elements of the chain, something in common for a common absence, the authority that channels all the breaks-flows into one and the same locus of one and the same cleavage: the detached object, the phallus-and-castration, the bar that delivers over all the depressive subjects to the great paranoiac king. 0 signifier, terrible archaism of the despot where they still look for the empty

tomb, the dead father, and the mystery of the name! And perhaps that is what incites the anger of certain linguists against Lacan, no less than the enthusiasm of his followers: the vigor and the serenity with which Lacan accompanies the signifier back to its source, to its veritable origin, the despotic age, and erects an infernal machine that welds desire to the Law, because, everything considered-so Lacan thinks-this is indeed the form in which the signifier is in agreement with the unconscious, and the form in which it produces effects of the signified in the unconscious.* The signifier as the repressing representation, and the new displaced represented that it induces , the famous metaphors and metonymy-all of that constitutes the overcoding and de territorialized despotic machine. The despotic signifier has the effect of overcoding the territorial chain. The signified is precisely the effect of the signifier, and not what it represents or what it designates. The signified is the sister of the borders and the mother of the interior. Sister and mother are the concepts that correspond to the great acoustic image, to the voice of the new alliance and direct filiation. Incest is the very operation of overcoding at the two ends of the chain in all the territory ruled by the despot, from the borders to the center: all the debts of alliance are converted into the infinite debt of the new alliance, and all the extended filiations are subsumed by direct filiation. Incest or the royal trinity is therefore the whole of the repressing representation insofar as it initiates the overcoding.

The system of subordination or signification has replaced the system of connotation. To the extent that graphism is flattened onto the voice-the graphism that, not so long ago, was inscribed flush with the body-body representation subordinates itself to word representation: sister and mother are the voice's signifieds. But to the extent that this flattening induces a fictitious voice from on high that no longer expresses itself except in the linear flux, the despot himself is the signifier of the voice that, along with the two signifieds, effects the overcoding of the whole chain. What made incest impossible-namely, that at times we had the appellations (mother, sister) but not the persons or the bodies, while at other times we had the bodies, but the appellations disappeared from view as soon as we broke through the prohibitions they bore-has ceased to exist. Incest has become possible in the wedding of the kinship bodies and family appellations, in the union of the signifier with its signifieds.

<If time, read “AT: Grammar/Interpretation” here>

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3. Perm – do the CP. They’re functionally the same.And the perm isn’t severance: they have to prove the CP is functionally and textually competitive. Solves their offense for why textual competition is good. No reason functional competition is bad. Functional competition is the only way to have pragmatic analysis of our political strategies, aff is a reason functional competition is good.

4. Their project of censorship destroys the liberatory potential of literature. Their desire to cast out the dangerous elements of a text leeches it of its beauty: this is the same desire our 1ac criticizes. The negative desires to expel the elements of our literary machine they find dangerous and reduce our art to something “permissible.” Their microfascism parallels book burning. Bradbury 79 (Ray (Coda, from Farenheit 451 Bad Ass writer, a mothafucking G)

"About two years ago, a letter arrived from a solemn young Vassar lady telling me how much she enjoyed reading my experiment in space mythology, The Martian Chronicles. But, she

added, wouldn't it be a good idea , this late in time, to rewrite the book inserting more women's characters and roles? A few years

before that I got a certain amount of mail concerning the same Martian book complaining that the blacks in the book were Uncle Toms and why didn't I "do them over"? Along about then came a note from a Southern white suggesting that I was prejudiced in favor of the blacks and the entire story should be dropped.

Two weeks ago my mount of mail delivered forth a pip-squeak mouse of a letter from a well-known publishing house that wanted to reprint my story " The Fog Horn" in a high school reader. In my story, I had described a lighthouse as having, late at night, an illumination coming from it that was a "God-Light." Looking up at it from the

viewpoint of any sea-creature one would have felt that one was in "the Presence." The editors had deleted "God-Light" and "in the Presence." Some five years back,

the editors of yet another anthology for school readers put together a volume with some 400 (count 'em) short stories in it. How do you cram 400 short stories by Twain, Irving, Poe, Maupassant and Bierce into one book? Simplicity itself. Skin, debone, demarrow, scarify, melt, render down and destroy. Every adjective that counted, every verb that moved, every metaphor that weighed more than a mosquito - out! Every simile that would have made a sub-moron's mouth twitch - gone! Any aside that explained the two-bit philosophy of a first-rate writer - lost! Every story, slenderized, starved, blue-penciled, leeched and bled white, resembled every other story. Twain read like Poe read like Shakespeare read like Doestoevsky read like - in the finale - Edgar Guest. Every word of more than three syllables had been razored. Every image that demanded so much as one instant's attention - shot dead. Do you begin to

get the damned and incredible picture? How did I react to all of the above? By "firing" the whole lot. By sending rejection slips to each and every one. By ticketing the assembly of idiots to the far reaches of hell. The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority , be it Baptist / Unitarian, Irish / Italian /

Octogenarian / Zen Buddhist, Zionist / Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib / Republican, Mattachine / FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes

the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme. Fire-Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the libraries closed forever. "Shut the door, they're coming through the window, shut the window, they're coming through the door," are the words to an old song. The fit my lifestyle with newly arriving butchers/censors every month. Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy Del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place. A final test for old Job II here: I sent a play, Leviathan 99, off to a university theater a month ago. My play is based on the "Moby Dick" mythology, dedicated to Melville, and concerns a rocket crew and a blind space captain who venture forth to encounter a Great White Comet and destroy the destroyer. My drama premieres as an opera in Paris this autumn. But, for now, the university wrote back that they hardly dared to my play - it had no women in it! And the ERA ladies on campus would descend with ballbats if the drama department even tried. Grinding my bicuspids into powder, I suggested that would mean, from now on, no more productions of Boys in the Band (no women), or The Women (no men). Or, counting heads, male and female, a good lot of Shakespeare that would never be seen again, especially if you count lines and find that all the good stuff went to the

males! I wrote back maybe they should do my play one week, and The Women the next. They probably thought I was joking, and I'm not sure that I wasn't. For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real word is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture. If the Chicano intellectuals wish to re-cut my "Wonderful Ice Cream Suit" so it shapes "Zoot," may the belt unravel and the pants fall. For, let's face it, digression is the soul of wit. Take philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton

or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones. Laurence Sterne said it once: Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and one cold eternal winter would reign in every page. Restore them to the writer - he steps forth like a bridegroom, bids them all-hail, brings in variety and forbids the appetite to fail.

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1AR: NO SOLVENCY (WORD PICS)

Extend 2AC-1, no solvency – the CP doesn’t map onto a larger struggle against the State. There isn’t a way to pragmatically engage our movement and edit its words for content.

___ That means they’re just a criticism of language without an alternative, they just say you should reject the word. 2 arguments:

1) We solve, they don’t – nomad politics is adaptive, we can absorb and incorporate their criticism as part of a larger challenge to the State, that’s our Patton evidence. They just reject, their evidence isn’t reverse causal and rejecting the word doesn’t engage our micropolitics.

2) DA to the CP: they blow apart the strata. Radical negation of our language makes affirmative struggle impossible. Aff gently tips lingual assemblages, solves the K, that’s D&G 72.

___ And, more evidence. Deleuze and Guattari 80 [Gilles and Felix, professors at the University of Paris VIII at Vincennes, ATP, p160-1] 159

You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn; and you have to keep small supplies of significance and subjectification, if only to turn them against their own systems when the circumstances demand it, when things, persons, even situations force you to; and you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant

reality. Mimic the strata. You don't reach the BwO, and its plane of consistency, by wildly destratifying . That is why we encountered the paradox of those emptied and dreary bodies at the very beginning: they had emptied themselves of their organs instead of looking for the point which they could patiently and momentarily dismantle the organization of organs we call the organism. There are, in fact, several ways of botching the BwO: either one fails to produce it, or one produces it more or less, but nothing is produced on it, intensities do not pass or are blocked. This is because the

BwO is always swinging between the surfaces that stratify it and the plane that sets it free. If you free it with too violent an action, if you blow apart the strata without taking precautions, then instead of drawing the plane you will be killed, plunged into a black hole, or even dragged

toward catastrophe. Staying stratified - organized, signified, subjected - is not the worst that can happen ; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever . This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them , produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and

bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO. Connect, conjugate, continue: a whole "diagram," as opposed to still signifying and

subjective programs. We are in a social formation; first see how it is stratified for us and in us and at the place where we are; then descend from the strata to the deeper assemblage within which we are held; gently tip the assemblage, making it pass over to the side of the plane of consistency. It is only there that the BwO reveals itself for what it is: connection of desires, conjunction of

flows, continuum of intensities. You have constructed your own little machine, ready when needed to be plugged into other collective machines.

1AR: PERM: DO BOTH (WORD PICS)

Extend 2AC-2, that’s the first perm – the CP is nothing more than a modification of the aff. Our Massumi evidence is a framing of the way you should read our aff. The aff is like a record: the words they criticize are nothing more than tracks they don’t like. The aff and the CP are part of a larger open equation open to infinite combinations.

And extend the fluid language net benefit, that’s Deleuze and Guattari 72 – 3 arguments1) Terminal uniqueness – their understanding of language is non-unique, language is not static, it’s a

set of signifiers that only have the power we give it. We straight turn their K: challenging

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dominant signifiers through a nomadic understanding of language is key to solve microfascism, that’s Massumi 83 and D&G 72.

2) Intent – language is an empty locus until we fill it. Words aren’t inherently geopolitical or racist, it’s a question of how we use them. We undermine language as we use it, hiding bombs in our literature.

3) Turn and impact – they police language, deciding which signifiers can and can’t contain liberatory potential. That means the CP can never solve because it re-inscribes the ethic of despotism by taking sovereign claim of language.

___ The impact is a lingual war machine: they turn text into monuments, a transcendent model of truth that overcodes language into a fascist organism. At every step along the way the neg wants to direct our politics: assign a target and a goal to our movement. Vote aff to liberate language from goals and targets.Deleuze and Guattari 80 (Gilles and Felix, philosophers and rhizomes, A Thousand Plateaus pg 376-378, dml)

But noology is confronted by counterthoughts, which are violent in their acts and discontinuous in their appearances, and whose existence is mobile in history. These are the acts of a "private thinker," as opposed to the public professor: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, or even Shestov. Wherever they dwell, it is the steppe or the desert. They destroy images. Nietzsche's Schopenhauer as Educator is perhaps the greatest critique ever directed against the image of thought and its relation to the State. "Private thinker," however, is not a

satisfactory expression, because it exaggerates interiority, when it is a question of outside thought.44 To place thought in an immediate relation with the outside, with the forces of the outside, in short to make thought a war machine, is a strange undertaking whose precise procedures can be studied in Nietzsche (the aphorism, for example, is very different from the maxim, for a maxim, in the republic of letters, is like an organic State act or

sovereign judgment, whereas an aphorism always awaits its meaning from a new external force, a final force that must conquer or subjugate it, utilize it). There is another reason why "private thinker" is not a good expression. Although it is true that this counterthought attests to an absolute solitude, it is an extremely populous solitude, like the desert itself, a solitude already intertwined with a people to come, one that invokes and awaits that people, existing only through it, though it is not yet here. "We are lacking that final force, in

the absence of a people to bear us. We are looking for that popular support." Every thought is already a tribe, the opposite of a State . And this form of exteriority of thought is not at all

symmetrical to the form of Anteriority. Strictly speaking, symmetry exists only between different poles or focal points of interiority. But the form of exteriority of thought—the force that is always external to itself, or the

final force, the «th power—is not at all another image in opposition to the image inspired by the State apparatus. It is , rather, a force that destroys both the image and its copies , the model and its reproductions, every possibility of subordinating thought to a model of the True, the Just, or the Right (Cartesian truth, Kantian just, Hegelian right, etc.). A "method" is the striated space of the cogitatio universalis and draws a path that must be followed from one point to another. But the form of exteriority situates thought in a smooth space that it must occupy without counting, and for which there is no possible method, no conceivable reproduction, but only relays, intermezzos, resurgences. Thought is like the Vampire; it has no image, either to constitute a model of or to copy. In the smooth

space of Zen, the arrow does not go from one point to another but is taken up at any point , to be sent to any other point, and tends

to permute with the archer and the target. The problem of the war machine is that of relaying, even with modest means, not that of the architectonic model or the monument. An ambulant people of relayers, rather than a model society. "Nature propels the philosopher into mankind like an arrow; it takes no aim but hopes the arrow will stick somewhere. But countless times it misses and is depressed at the fact The artist and the philosopher are evidence against the purposiveness of nature as regards the means it employs, though they are also first-rate evidence as to the wisdom of its purpose. They strike home at only a few, while they ought to strike home at everybody—and even these few are not struck with the force with which the philosopher and artist launch their shot."45 We have in mind in particular two pathetic texts, in the sense that in them thought is truly a pathos (an antilogos and an antimythos). One is a text by Artaud, in his letters to Jacques Riviere, explaining that thought operates on the basis of a central breakdown, that it lives solely by its own incapacity to take on form, bringing into relief only traits of expression in a material, developing peripherally, in a pure milieu of exteriority, as a function of singularities impossible to universalize, of circumstances impossible to interiorize. The other is the text by Kleist, "On the Gradual Formation of Ideas in Speech" ("Uber die allmachliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden"), in which Kleist denounces the central interiority of the concept as a means of control—the control of speech, of language, but also of affects, circumstances and even chance. He distinguishes this from thought as a proceeding and a process, a bizarre anti-Platonic dialogue, an antidialogue between brother and sister where one speaks before knowing while the other relays before having understood: this, Kleist says, is the thought of the Gemut, which proceeds like a general in a war machine should, or like a body charged with electricity, with pure intensity. "I mix inarticulate sounds, lengthen transitional terms, as well as using appositions when they are unnecessary." Gain

some time, and then perhaps renounce, or wait. The necessity of not having control over language , of being a foreigner in one's own tongue, in order to draw speech to oneself and " bring something incomprehensible into the world." Such is the form of exteriority, the relation between brother and sister, the becomingwoman of the thinker, the becoming-thought of the woman: the Gemut that refuses to be controlled, that forms a war machine . A thought grappling with exterior forces instead of being gathered up in an interior form, operating by relays instead of forming an image; an event-thought, a haecceity,

instead of a subject-thought, a problem-thought instead of an essencethought or theorem; a thought that appeals to a people instead of taking itself for a government ministry. Is it by chance that whenever a "thinker" shoots an arrow, there is a man of the State, a shadow or an image of a man of the State, that counsels and admonishes him, and wants to assign him a targe t or "aim"? Jacques Riviere does not hesitate to respond to Artaud: work at it, keep on working, things will come out all right, you will succeed in finding a method and in learning to express clearly what you think in essence (cogitatio universalis). Riviere

is not a head of State, but he would not be the last in the Nouvelle Revue Francaise to mistake himself for the secret prince in a republic of letters or the gray eminence in a State of right. Lenz and Kleist confronted Goethe, that grandiose genius, of all men of letters a

veritable man of the State. But that is not the worst of it: the worst is the way the texts of Kleist and Artaud themselves have ended up becoming monuments, inspiring a model to be copied—a model far more insidious than the others—for the artificial stammerings and innumerable tracings that claim to be their equal.

2AR: FLUID LANGUAGE (WORD PICS)

The status quo of language is manipulation through the capitalist confines of singularity that prevent us from bearing witness against the despotism implicit in the world of arborescence. Their embodiment of the linguist requires following the assumptions of the despot – using the arbitrary nature of language to create boundaries that legitimized slavery upon the masses by establishing the sovereignty of the despot. When the creator of the harms we indict is able to limit us out of the debate by the usage of grammar and spin on definitions we can never create the movement and dissent necessary to rid the world of the call for our own destruction.

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The field of language is marked by a transcendence that opposes our ethic of immanence. Transcendence is the view of a singular point, here grammar, overreaching all other machines on the plane and prevents our ideology of the immanent body without organs where every point can freely connect with the other – we get to weigh the advantages of the case against T because giving their position legitimacy through the ballot is an affirmation of singularity and our aff is an indictment of this singularity.

The signifier of language destroys the concept it tried to convey – our evidence gives the analogy of the Sumerian who names water with the symbol A, and when that symbol is related to the Akkadian it loses all meaning. This biunivocalization organizes itself around the despotic signifier because there is no other way to convey meaning after the introduction of singularity in language. The signifier constantly overcodes and co-ops other languages allowing for the imperialism of the west that led to the invasion of Iraq. T is another connection for the global expansion of fascism that leads to our desire for fascism and our own destruction. AND their argument means nothing because of the imperialism of the signifier – the signifier relegates all answers to nothing leaving us trapped in a world of questions only destroying movements making the 1AC an impact turn.

1AR: BRADBURY DA (WORD PICS)

Extend 2AC-4, that’s censorship – their K amounts to book burning. By destroying the offensive and dangerous parts of text we leech it of its beauty. If every word that could be taken as racist, or sexist, or geopolitical, or imperialist were excluded we would have nothing to strike emotion in literature. 2 Impacts:

1) Ontology – their aesthetic puts white-out on and black bars on everything that makes life interesting. This is an Oedipal ontology of fear that seeks to protect individuals from themselves. The 1AC is a DA to the PIC.___ And, aesthetics comes first, that’s Bradbury 79. The things that make life beautiful are the only things that make it worth living.

2) Turn – They close books and empty minds. Beatty from Fahrenheit 451 describes the way in which first a few pages were burned because they were offensive, and slowly it spread to all of literature. Their K is the same, setting precedent for excluding anything that could offend anyone. For the same reason we tolerate KKK rallies and Fred Phelps we need to tolerate the little things.

1AR: PERM: DO THE CP (WORD PICS)

Extend 2AC-3, that’s “perm: do the CP” – the plan and the CP are functionally the same, you vote aff if our micropolitics is still good in the world of the CP. They don’t get a language severance argument because the content of our 1AC affirms a fluid understanding of language: we still advocate the entire aff.

___The perm isn’t severance: extend our interpretation of competition, they have to win that the CP is functionally AND textually competitive. That solves all of their offense: they don’t have any reason that excluding functional competition is good, which means any offense on our interp is an aff ballot.

___ And, extend functional competition is good – it’s key to pragmatic analysis of political strategies. If we win the content of the 1AC we win a reason functional competition is good: analyzing normative methods of struggle is the only way to engage the political, means we internal link turn their solvency mechanism and their education arguments.

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AT: AGENT/CONSULT CP

-- Agent --1. The question of what the “agent” of the affirmative is in terms of government agencies misses the boat. The aff is an evolving movement, chaotically spreading in all directions, never static, never staying still. The CP debate isn’t a question of “should the XO do it?” or “should the courts make a ruling?” the question is how we comport ourselves micropolitically in terms of the capital-S State. -- Consult --1. You can end the CP debate right now by asking “what did they say?” – consultation doesn’t engage the politics of the 1AC. “Let’s resist Oedipus, but let’s then ask the State how the revolution should go.” Yeah, that makes sense.

2. The CP misses the point – the idea of CP’s in general against my aff makes no sense, our affirmative is a micropolitical engagement with the State. The question is not what part of what government is involved in the plan or who we consult; the aff is about the way that we come to the conclusion of withdrawing troops. They remain within Oedipus, channeling our movement through filters of State acceptance. <Can read Colebrook 2>

3. Perm: do both. Either the perm solves because the movements of the plan and the CP are the same or they don’t solve because their CP is a top-down solution. Our bottom-up blueprints match, perm solves.

<Read Security stuff>

*** DISADS ***

GENERIC FRONTLINE

Extend the 1AC Bell evidence – 4 arguments1) Epistemology: their authors are flawed because they work within a desire given to them by the

State. Security experts and scientists are nothing but the new State philosophers: built with a love for fascism and bomb shelters.

2) Terminally non-unique: their scenarios are false. The war machine constructs their disads to scare the masses into exercising desire in a way complicit with the function of the State. Bell says liberalism MAKES catastrophes to scare the public. Unless we solve for the fascist construction of liberalism war and catastrophe is inevitable.

3) No impact: death is not the terminus of a fear politics of liberalism, only an intensity. There’s no impact to our biological death: it would be preferable to a life lived in fear and cannibalistic desire.

4) Fascism: the logic of securitization in the disad turns us into cannibals, desiring our own domination. Desiring the protection of governmentality is exactly the reason things like the

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PATRIOT Act happen. Voting aff is the only risk of solving fascism: even if they solved case, they infuse a politics of fear into their movement, meaning it will collapse into fascism because their desire is still triangulated within the State.

___ Their ethic of fear castrates life in the name of death and the collective. This framing of life causes the Oedipal desire for fascism to creep into every facet of existence - the impact is a sickness that ushers in a depressive tone of existenceSeem 83 (Mark, Intro to Anti-Oedipus, xvii, Murray)

To be anti-oedipal is to be anti-ego as well as anti-homo, willfully attacking all reductive psychoanalytic and political analyses that remain caught within the sphere of totality and unity, in

order to free the multiplicity of desire from the deadly neurotic and Oedipal yoke. For Oedipus is not a mere psychoanalytic construct, Deleuze and Guattari explain. Oedipus is the figurehead of imperialism , "colonization pursued by other means, it is the interior colony, and we shall see that even here at home ... it is our intimate colonial education." This internalization of man by man , this "oedipalization," c reates a new meaning for suffering, internal suffering, and a new tone for life : the depressive tone . Now depression does not just come about one fine day, Anti-Oedipus goes on, nor does Oedipus appear one day in the Family and feel secure in remaining there. Depression and

Oedipus are agencies of the State, agencies of paranoia, agencies of power, long before being delegated to the family. Oedipus is the figure of power as such, just as neurosis is the result of power on individuals. Oedipus is everywhere. For anti-oedipalists the ego, like Oedipus, is "part of those things

we must dismantle through the united assault of analytical and political forces."4 Oedipus is belief injected into the unconscious, it is what gives us faith as it robs us of power, it is what teaches us to desire our own repression . Everybody has been oedipalized and neuroticized at

home, at school, at work. Everybody wants to be a fascist . Deleuze and Guattari want to know how these beliefs succeed in taking hold of a body, thereby silencing the productive machines of the libido. They also want to know how the opposite situation is brought about, where a body successfully wards off the effects of power. Reversing the Freudian

distinction between neurosis and psychosis that measures everything against the former, Anti-Oedipus concludes: the neurotic is the one on whom the Oedipal imprints take, whereas the psychotic is the one incapable of being oedipalized, even and especially by psychoanalysis. The first task of the revolutionary, they add, is to learn from the psychotic how to shake off the Oedipal yoke and the effects of power, in order to initiate a radical politics of desire freed from all beliefs. Such a politics dissolves the mystifications of power through the kindling, on all levels, of anti-oedipal forces-the schizzes-flows-forces that escape coding, scramble the codes, and flee in all directions: orphans (no daddy-mommy-me), atheists

(no beliefs), and nomads (no habits, no territories). A schizoanalysis schizophrenizes in order to break the holds of power and institute research into a new collective subjectivity and a revolutionary healing of mankind. For we are sick, so sick, of our selves!

AT: POLITICS

1. No link – we have to assume the political climate that would exist after the micropolitical movement of the aff. And there’s no link in a world post-aff because the movement would have changed public and political perception of the war. ___ Our micropolitics is the only means to create political change – we solve the link.Colebrook 2 (Claire, Understanding Deleuze, Pg. xxxviii)

Human freedom became the problem. If human beings are free, does this mean that there is some ultimate ‘man’ who can be liberated from the forces of production; or

does radical freedom mean that there is no longer any human essence to which politics can appeal ? All this came to a head in the

student sit-ins and disruptions of 1968. There were protests throughout Europe in the late 1960s which were random , unthought out,

and motivated not by the economically defined class of workers so much as by students and intellectuals . In the aftermath of these disruptions it was realised that politics was no longer the affair of economic classes and large or ‘molar’ groupings . Local disruptions at the level of knowledge, ideas and identity could

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transform the political terrain . Deleuze and others opened the politics of the virtual: it was no longer accepted that actual material reality, such as the

economy, produced ideas. Many insisted that the virtual (images, desires, concepts) was directly productive of social reality. This overturned the simple idea of ideology, the idea that images and beliefs were produced by the governing classes to deceive us about our real social conditions. We have to do away with the idea that there is some ultimate political reality or actuality which lies behind all our images. Images are not just surface effects of some underlying economic cause; images and the virtual have their own autonomous power. This is where structuralism and post-1968 politics

intersected. We need to see our languages and systems of representation not just as masks or signs of the actual, but as fully real powers in their own right. The way we think, speak, desire and see the world is itself political ; it produces relations, effects, and organises our bodies .

2. No internal link – their understanding of politics is backward. Desire feeds into macropolitics causing the effects of government policy. We shouldn’t be bogged down by the blackmail of the system: their impacts are just lies by liberalism to perpetuate the State, that’s Bell.

3. Focus on the political details of the plan is bad – their disad amounts to betting on a beauty contest. “The political” is now subsumed by capital: their system never criticizes capital itself, case is a DA. Mumia Abu-Jamal 8 (Changeless Change: The Law of Politics. Transcriped from radio essay available online http://www.prisonradio.org/mumia.htm [col. writ. 4/5/08] (c))

True change doesn't come through the ballot box -- even though we're all taught that it does.   For voting was instituted to insure stability, not change. I know this may seem somewhat sacrilegious to many entranced during this current political season, for it certainly looks like change. But if we look deeper, we see how the very process itself -- the campaign -- is an exercise in conformity .   People come to political campaigns to reassure themselves that their politicians won't bring too much change. In essence, our political campaigns are little more than slick popularity contests: who looks best?  Who makes me feel most comfortable?  Who would I like to have a brew with? John Kerry lost in 2004 not only because large parts of Ohio were stolen, nor that he was successfully swift-boated by lies about his tour in Vietnam; he lost because his opponents launched a stealth campaign against him branding him as an intellectual, an egghead with advanced degrees who even spoke French! Americans, especially in this age of anti-intellectualism, aren't comfortable with eggheads.  So, they comfortably 'elected' a blockhead.

Therein lies the current contrast between Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton -- not race nor gender -- but popularity. At bottom, our politics is 95% beauty contest. On issues, the two are almost inseparable. And truth be told (despite right wing propaganda to the contrary) neither are actually liberals; both are neo liberals, who are, at heart,

globalists of the NAFTA type. Neither wants to repeal NAFTA -- they want to "re-negotiate" it (not really surprising considering that both are also lawyers.). They are vy ing for who will become Chief Manager of the Empire , after the Bush wrecking crew is done. Neither are anti- imperialists -- they just want better, smarter management of it; empire, with a smile . (John McCain promises he won't smile)

How could it be otherwise with the almost obscene amounts of money in play ?   How could it be other than this with the hundreds of millions of dollars that have sloshed through all of the presidential campaigns, most of it for media ad buys? That doesn't mean that people aren't interested, or even desperate for change.  But

what kind of change will they get? When's the last time you've heard any presidential candidate mention the words imperialism,   poor people, or -- heavens forfend! -- capitalism?   If they mention capitalism, it's almost like a religion that needs defending -- for no "viable" candidate criticizes capitalism.   For, like a religion, it must be believed in. Just like politicians are believed in, until they inevitably betray those who voted for them . Who do you think they ultimately owe their loyalty to; those who voted for them?  Or those who gave them millions of dollars to run?

1AR: POLITICS

___ Extend 2AC-1, no link – 2 arguments1) Terminal defense – their link only happens in the political climate post-1AC. We have to assume

what politics is like after a our micropolitical movement. The interests of the GOP and the democrats and the way law is passed is fundamentally changed in our deterritorialization of the democratic body, that’s Patton.

2) Link turn – our movement changes public and systemic perception of the war, we internally turn the warrants to their link arguments.

___ Extend Colebrook 2 – we straight turn the disad, 2 arguments1) Terminal defense – politics is not a question of molar groupings like class and party, their impacts

are inevitable in the current political frame. The problem is the system, not specific instances.

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2) We solve – only our politics alter the way desire is invested. Local disruptions of desire reform and disorganize fascist bodies.

___ Extend 2AC-2, no internal link – their causal chain is a trick by liberalism. Desire creates their policies on a macrolevel, our turn is overwhelms the link, micropolitics is key to change the macrosystem. ___ And, external impact, their politics revives the State, means they never solve the aff. Extend Bell, liberalism creates catastrophes like the disad to create fear necessary to sustain itself. Only a risk we solve.

___ Extend 2AC-3, the Mumia card – 3 arguments1) Terminal defense – change doesn’t come through the ballot box, campaigns and modern protests

are conformist beauty contests designed to be political masturbation that never gets anywhere. Political details only distract us from micropolitical input to the system of oppression.

2) Capitalism disad – the political is inundated with capital. The system fails to address imperial capitalism because it needs it, external impact to the disad.

And, that turns the disad – <Cap is bad, MPX specific>

3) Empire disad – focus on the details of the political process mask microfascism and make imperial war inevitable. They replaced Bush with a smiling Empire. External impact, case is a DA.

And, turns the disad – <Empire impact, Ether would be best if there’s time>

AT: MIDDLE EAST STABILITY

Our nomadic political framework resonates with the structure of politics in Iraq. The figure of the nomad is alive today, but its message and potential is smothered by militarism. Ultimately, we must seek a free Nomad, disconnected from the state and its desire for purified goals and objectives. Understanding nomad politics is a pre-requisite to solving conflict in the Middle East. Greenberg 7 (Ilan, Associated Press, "Ancient Nomads Offer Insights to Modern Crises", http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/08/world/asia/08nomads.html) Dr. Frachetti’s work concerns Bronze Age nomads, and his scholarship is aimed purely at a historical understanding of how a preliterate society functioned more than 3,000 years ago. But his

work coincides with a geopolitical reality that has important implications for American foreign policy makers: many of the countries that most trouble the West — like Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia — have government institutions that reflect a nomadic past. “Take Afghanistan, where politics are much more dispersed,” said Dr. Frachetti, while sitting in an upscale Almaty cafe in July, a few days before trekking to the Saryesik-Atyrau Desert to conduct

that remote area’s first archeological survey. “I think some of our foreign policy complications derive from our inability to locate a nomadic dynamic within contemporary political structures.” Recent investigations have challenged long-held views of nomadic culture as purely transient, with little impact on the urban, sophisticated societies that emerged later. Instead, scientists like Dr. Frachetti are discovering that nomadic cultures are flexible, switching between transient and more sedentary ways of life, and assimilating and inventing new ideas and technologies. Nomads created durable political cultures that still influence the way those countries interact with outsiders or negotiate internal power struggles. While the view that tribe and clan — the basic building blocks of nomadic, or semi-transient societies— influence the contemporary politics of some countries is

nothing new, specialists in nomadic studies argue that policy makers have overlooked important “cultural intelligence,” like family relationships, when analyzing governments that grew out of tribal traditions. “Families, tribes these are the things that matter here,” said

Oraz Jandosov, co-chairman of a Kazakhstan opposition political party. “Foreigners talk about these things, but it’s only talk. They don’t understand them.” Countries like Iraq and Afghanistan may take on the trappings of modern, Western nation-states, with parliaments, justice departments and other governmental agencies, researchers say. But politics are still driven by the customs and institutions of nomadism, in which political disputes were settled at the level of family, clan and tribe. “In and of itself you can’t graft what happened two thousand years ago and say that’s what it is today, but it helps to understand how these societies have found successful strategies and how they respond to outside forces,” Dr. Frachetti said. “By not

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exploring the depth to which nomadic populations have contributed to local political systems, we are naïve to an important aspect of the social fabric of parts of the Near East and Central Asia.” The United States military has learned the importance of tribes in Iraq, as evidenced by its policy of arming Sunni Arab tribal chiefs in Anbar Province to fight the leading insurgent group there, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Yet, despite calls for a deeper appreciation of cultures far from the mainstream, “the United States government hasn’t been willing to pony up the money to educate” policy makers on “these areas with deep nomadic traditions,” said a Central Asia specialist working for the United States government. The official requested anonymity because he was not cleared to speak with reporters. “It takes a half a million dollars and four or five years to train a specialist in these parts of the world,” the official said. “Even now we hardly have anyone up to speed about the border areas of Pakistan or the tribal politics of Somalia.” And in Central Asia, recent

American foreign policy setbacks — such as a deal in May between Turkmenistan and Russia to build a new gas pipeline, widely viewed as a rebuke to American

interests — can be traced partly to an American misunderstanding of how nomadic traditions shape attitudes in the region. In that case, said Sean R. Roberts, a Central Asia researcher at Georgetown University, American negotiators mistakenly emphasized the benefits of joining the orbit of Western nations. With its nomadic traditions, he said, Turkmenistan placed a far higher emphasis on independence. “If there’s anything for American policy makers to understand about formerly nomadic people is that they generally place an all-important pride in their independence,” he said in a telephone interview.

Their predictions about the Middle East follow the same misinformed epistemology as the US occupation of Iraq. The west has refused to effectively engage in Middle Eastern politics, causing the proliferation of racist stereotypes and justifying continued military escalation.Hirchi, Mohammed '07, "Media Representations of the Middle East," WACC. World Assoc. for Christian Communication. Online.

This marking of difference is articulated within clear boundaries; it does not tolerate ambiguous, unstable or hybrid spaces of indeterminacy. According to Hall: ‘Stable culture requires things to stay in their appointed place. Symbolic boundaries keep the categories ‘pure’, giving cultures their unique meaning and identity. What

unsettles culture is “matter out of place”– the breaking of our unwritten rules and codes’ (1997: 236). This process of purification legitimizes exclusion, intolerance and racism. It also allocates marginal identities to individuals who do not conform to the values of the West as a geographical and a cultural space. In this perspective, symbolic representations are necessary to maintain difference: ‘Symbolic boundaries are central to all culture. Marking “difference” leads us, symbolically, to close ranks, shore up culture and to stigmatize and expel anything which is defined as impure, strangely attractive precisely because it is forbidden, taboo, threatening to cultural order’ (Hall, 1997: 237). Throughout the centuries, symbolic boundaries have been very powerful in

maintaining separation between nations and individuals. Since its first contacts with the Arab world, the West has developed a set of stereotypes depicting Arabs as uncivilized and violent. One of the most prominent texts that capture this historical encounter is the 12th century French epic poem ‘The Song of Rolland.’ The Enlightenment, a period during which philosophers ranked societies along an evolutionary scale from ‘barbarism’ to ‘civilization’, enormously contributed to the vulgarization of this ideology. With the spread of colonization during the 19th century, a well organized scholarship devoted to the representation of ‘Otherness’ emerged as a defining

moment in this cross-cultural history. In the United States, a similar ideology evolved throughout the 20th century. From 1945 onward, the United States became increasingly involved with the Arab world and Israel. As a staunch supporter of Israel, America found itself in a difficult position to negotiate its preeminence in a world of competitive interests. Media corporations took an active role in redefining American cultural and political agendas. Representation of the Middle East in mainstream American media Many media experts in the United States would argue that American media cover the Middle East within the worldview of a primarily Western audience. The coverage will thus remain negative and stereotypical unless a redefinition of cultural differences between the United States and the Middle East is negotiated.

Diplomatic historians approach U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East from a rational perspective privileging American interests in the region. Culture, in this context, plays a subordinate role. In this institutional framework, news media can be seen as a driving force behind political mobilization, both domestically and internationally. The media fosters stereotypical representations of Middle Eastern cultures and peoples and promote misunderstanding and intolerance in the mainstream American culture. Since 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, these negative representations became even more anchored in the American cultural imaginary. Media apparatuses contribute enormously to the construction of these images and symbols rather than construct a conceptual model that sheds light on the complex relationship between the media, culture, and the political process. In the United States, despite the fact that Arabs have significantly contributed to the well being of this nation for at least the last two centuries, negative representations of this ethnic group abound in scope and intensity. The constructed images manipulated throughout time have delegated Arabs to second

degree citizens, unable to embrace the secular ideals of the Western worldview. In this respect, the representation of Middle Easterners in the American media is articulated within the framework of a binary oppositional dynamics where the Middle East is classified as an undesired space of barbarism and tyranny. As cultural critic Stuart Hall puts it, ‘binary oppositions are crucial for all

classification/establish a difference to facilitate the tasks of organizing systems of perceptions and classifications’ (1997: 226). This system of classification is elaborated to maintain oppositional relationships between the civilized and the uncivilized, etc. and to create an atmosphere of fear and discomfort to enhance ‘difference’ for the purpose of controlling the Other. In this context, misrepresentation becomes an effective instrument for advancing political agendas. Throughout the history of the West, negative portrayals have been used to develop means by which the imperial project can be achieved through visual representations. These representations serve as a popular medium to create a link between the Imperial eye and the domestic imagination. In France for example, the Colonial Exhibition at the end of the 19th century served to capture the relationship between the empire and its ‘domestic other’. Representation is a complex phenomenon, especially when dealing with cultural differences. It engages emotions, attitudes, reactions and tries to control the viewer’s fears and questions. It also promotes a set of cultural values that respond to the anxieties of the viewer. In this context, the Middle-Easterner in American popular media is defined according to these historical and cultural paradigms. Besides his barbarism and his violence, he is also depicted as belonging to the realm of emotions, violent savage and blood thirsty. Mainstream images of the Arab in the American media operate according to a dynamics of cultural distortions; the Arab is always portrayed as closer to nature than culture, genetically incapable of ‘civilized’ refinements. The

concept of ‘Naturalization’ connotes the impossibility of Arabs to embrace culture. Therefore, they are imprisoned in a space of stability and of fixed ‘difference’ and meaning. They are beyond history and incapable of embracing cultural emancipation.

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Violence continues in Iraq, fueled by Western representations of the Middle East as barbaric and inhuman. Their cries of instability are identical to the justifications for intervention which have left thousands sufferingFalk, '05. Richard "Imperial vibrations, 9/11, and the ordeal of the Middle East," Paper 23, U of Cali. http://repositories.cdlib.org /gis/23

No matter how these issues are understood, it seems clear that the Middle East has become for the 21st century what Europe was in the 20th, that is, the pivot of geopolitical struggle for world domination, the regional site where the most dangerous risks of strategic warfare are at their highest. -add a qualifying phrase, something to convey HOW they are similar since the differences are so striking: maybe as objects of struggles for control?] Indeed, it is Europe that has recently adopted an anti-imperial moderating voice critical of American global leadership. This European critical stance is mocked by neoconservative ideologues as the `old Europe.' Properly understood, it is the European call for a geopolitics deferential to international law and the United Nations that is really expressive of a `new Europe.' This is not the “new Europe” of EU enlargement undertaken after the cold war to include countries formerly in the Soviet bloc, but of a political consciousness that seeks for the sake of its own interests to moderate conflict and contain the American imperial appetite and restrain war making impulses. This European perspective is by no means monolithic, and is as yet in an exploratory mode, undecided and in disagreement about how far to push a challenge to American leadership. Europe remains generally subordinate to the American approach to global security, lacking the strategic assets to pursue a truly independent world role. Nowhere is this subordination more obvious than in the Middle East. For this reason, the mild European dissents from key American policies in the region lack geopolitical weight. It is here that American priorities with respect to support for Israel continue to doom the Palestinians to the cruel realities of

prolonged occupation, along with the persistent erection of obstacles blocking Palestinian self-determination, without encountering a serious European challenge. It is here in the

Middle East that the American semi-secular crusade on behalf of `freedom' has turned the cities of Iraq into wastelands of death and devastation, while the rest of the world waits and wonders. It is here that the control of energy reserves and prices is likely to determine the course of the world economy for at least the next twenty years, and it is the American approach that alone is important in challenging

anti-Western currents of opinion. It is here that the viability of Washington's grand strategy of global domination is being tested by the strength of nationalist and cultural/religious resistance, while Europe comments from the sidelines. And it is here that the American public has been subjected to a propaganda onslaught to the effect that the sole purpose of U.S. military presence in the Middle East is to defeat `terrorism,' which itself is explicitly linked to Islamic extremism, as epitomized by the al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001. The Europeans generally do not believe this propaganda, but lack the means to contest it meaningfully. According to President Bush, it is only the extermination of these anti-American Islamic networks that can bring peace and security to the world, and until that (in fact unrealizable) end has been achieved, the region and the world will necessarily have to be treated as a borderless war zone. Such prospects are dismal and dangerous, if not altogether apocalyptic, in their implications. At the very least, we need to comprehend the gravity of this situation as it bears upon the peoples of the Middle East, America, and the world. EMPIRE AND ORIENTALISM The four books under review here need to be considered against this broader background. Each makes a distinct contribution to a better grasp of the situation confronting the world since 9/11. Each is critical of and exceedingly worried by American behavior. Each is influenced by the writings and outlook of Edward Said. Each is convinced that America has unrealizable imperial ambitions that are intensifying the distress of the Middle East peoples, particularly the Palestinians, and dangerously inflaming further anti-American resentments among Muslims everywhere, especially in Arab countries. Each is convinced that the history of the Middle East needs to be taken into account in assessing the contemporary situation. And each believes that Orientalist views of the region and its problems have shaped perceptions of leaders and citizens, exerting a deforming effect on the American capacity to think clearly about policy, action, goals. But beyond these similarities, each author takes on the issues in an innovative and illuminating scholarly manner, and these four books can and should be read as complements to one another. Yet despite these commonalities, there is surprisingly little overlap. It is easiest, perhaps, to begin with Rashid Khalidi's Resurrecting Empire. It is meant for the non-specialist, covering mostly familiar ground in a clear style and displaying an impressive command of the subject-matter of imperial ambition in the Middle East. Khalidi's historical baseline for comprehending the present is the period immediately after World War I. That was the period when the British and French successfully rejected Woodrow Wilson's half-hearted efforts to insist that the principles of selfdetermination be applied to the peoples previously ruled by the Ottoman Empire. Khalidi argues that the American effort to fill the imperial shoes of the British and French in the region was misguided from the outset, and nowhere more so than with respect to the Israel/Palestine conflict. There is a sensible chapter devoted to the conflict, criticizing as self-defeating the approach taken by Israel and Washington. Khalidi proposes that future diplomatic efforts should not defer discussion of the core issues of land, Jerusalem, refugees, and water until the last stage of negotiations. Moreover, Israel must be induced to freeze, if not reverse, its provocative actions with respect to the underlying contested issues, with the construction and expansion of settlements being treated as radically inconsistent with a search for a solution that has any prospect of being acceptable to the Palestinians. On the broader issues of American empire, Khalidi

reflects critically on the scale and grandiosity of the vision that he considers “in many ways unprecedented in human history.” (p.153). He looks at the failures of past colonial efforts to pacify the region, as well as at American frustrations experienced during the cold war, to draw his major geopolitical lesson, which is a counsel of restraint: “If this is a lesson in anything, it is in the limitations of raw power, and in the capacity of stubborn local realities to dissipate even the most vivid ideological projections” (p.175).. Khalidi believes that American society can come to understand political reality to the extent necessary to act intelligently and humanely if it can brush aside the influence of pressure groups so as to be able to perceive, with the benefit of an awareness of anticolonial nationalism in the Arab world during the 20th century, the dangers and fallacies of a `resurrecting empire' project. To reach this awareness, American leaders and the

public must first realize how the policy being justified in the name of `anti-terrorism' is seen elsewhere in the world, especially the Middle East: as a colonizing project driven by oil, Israel, and strategic goals of regional domination. This project, argues Khalidi, is certain to fail, imposing tragedy and catastrophe on both the perpetrators and the victimized peoples seeking to survive in the midst of bloody struggle. While Khalidi presents political reality in the Middle East as

filtered through a historically conditioned geopolitics, Zachery Lockman is preoccupied with the influence of ideologically loaded interpretative filters provided by the prevailing modes of scholarly interpretation that have long distorted our perceptions of the region and its civilization. He argues that the policy makers cannot act constructively in relation to Islam and the Middle East until they free themselves of the “Orientalist” paradigms of interpretation that appear to validate perceptions of the Islamic other as an implacable and barbaric enemy . Contending Visions of the Middle East is a sophisticated, lucidly presented account of what Lockman labels as “the politics of knowledge” (p. 3). It seeks to uncover the deep roots of Orientalism, contending that the clash between Islam and the West began in earnest over nine hundred years ago, specifically in 1095 when the First Crusade was launched in response to Pope Urban II's call to Christians “to unite, mobilize and attack the `enemies of God.'” (p. 27) The related contention is that from this time onward, “Islam occupied a unique (though never simple) place in the imaginations of western Europeans . . .that it was Europe's `other' in a special sense” (p. 36). Islam was regarded as “the dangerous enemy right next door, the usurper which had seized the Holy Land as well as many other lands in which Christianity once flourished, and which continued to constitute a threat to Christendom” (p. 37). Lockman seeks to expose the ideological roots of Orientalism as constituted by a combination of Western civilizational self-esteem (at the expense of others) and a simplistic view of Islam in essentialist terms of degenerate otherness. The civilizational outlook of the West was originally shaped in an ancient Greece that assessed the world in terms of a fundamental dualism between the civilized self and the barbaric other. Such a dualism later was adopted by Europe in general and applied to Islam, which was portrayed by scholarly discourse as an unchanging essence fostering `Oriental despotism' producing uniformly oppressive political arrangements. It also featured an “Islamic mind,” or an “Arab mind,” which was irrational and illogical, as contrasted with the “Western mind,” which was rational and coherent. The reader is then taken on an intellectual tour through the scholarly landscape that marks the evolution of this Orientalist perception, giving detailed attention to the work of H.A.R. Gibb and Bernard Lewis, which he labels “late Orientalism.” Lewis is portrayed convincingly as a scholar who used his erudition dangerously as an ideological tool to promote his inflammatory insistence on `a clash of civilizations' (anticipating Huntington's notorious social scientific argument built around the same phrase). The Islamic world was viewed as opposed to all that was modern, and as irremediably autocratic in state/society relations. For Lockman, the Lewis outlook, formulated more than twenty years before the 9/11 attacks, involved the standard view of Islam as a unitary civilization without important internal tensions. Under this view, the Islamic resurgence, coupled with the “failed encounter with modernity,” produced rage and extremism among the Arab masses, thereby posing “a serious threat to the `Judeo-Christian' West” (p. 175). Lockman presents himself as dedicated to the humane and responsible uses of knowledge as the basis of a more appropriate politics. He ends the book by reaffirming his central message that as Americans we no longer can “afford not to know, if we ever could. The costs of historical amnesia, willful ignorance, and crude misunderstandings about the rest of the world and our place in it pervade American society, culture and politics and only likely to rise, and it is the innocent here and abroad who will by and large pay the price.” (p.272) It is a call to redeem the politics of knowledge from those who would lead society astray with hidden imperialist agendas or misleading readings of civilizational essentialism. Such a call from within seems appropriate given the way the Bush administration has mobilized willing academic accomplices such as Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami to explain its crusading commitment to moving forward on the path of warfare and imperial geopolitics in the aftermath of 9/11. COLONIALISM REDUX While all four books under review here make a major contribution to a better understanding of America's relationship to the Middle East, the originality and profundity of Derek Gregory's The Colonial Present puts it at the top of my list. In a significant respect, Mamdani's approach links with that espoused by Gregory in his truly extraordinary volume: both emphasize the U.S. claim of being exempt from the limits on its behavior imposed by international law and common morality. It is this invocation of a state of exception, and with it an ethos of impunity for transgressing even the most basis norms of international law, that leads Gregory to accept the illuminating relevance of Giorgio Agamben's concept of homo sacer to designate humans totally unprotected by any concept of right or status and who can be killed or abused at will. Provocatively, Gregory insists that America is conducting its response to 9/11 within this space of exception, treating “Taliban fighters and al-Qaeda terrorists, Afghan refugees and civilians” as homines sacri (p. 63). The reference here is obviously to the indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets and, more vividly, to the manner of confinement and interrogation, which includes the invention of designations (`enemy combatants'), procedures (secret military commissions to assess criminal liability), and non-places (Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay, which is subject to the law of neither United States nor Cuba). Gregory's “space of exception” also involves the systemic and repeated reliance on collective punishment against `the enemy,' a designation made possible by essentialized thinking that fails to acknowledge individual diversity and choice. The main thrust [thrust?] of Gregory's book is to insist that it is delusion to comment on world order as if the colonial era were over and could be assessed from a post-colonial

standpoint. Using the modes of control relied upon by the United States and Israel to impose their will upon Afghanistan, Iraq, and Palestine, Gregory shows in vivid detail that each of these war zones embodies an ongoing colonialist relationship between occupiers and indigenous populations. No punches are pulled in developing the overall argument: “The Zionist dream of uniting

the diaspora in a Jewish state was by its very nature a colonial project. In a gesture that has been repeated time and time again since the European conquest of the New World, the discourse of modern Zionism constructed Palestine as a space empty of its native Arab population.” (p.78) Zionism in this regard functions for Gregory as a root metaphor for the overall character of the colonial present. In each of these settings—Afghanistan, Iraq, and Palestine--the familiar dualism is conveyed of barbaric destroyers from the desert arrayed against the forces of civilization conceived as builders and modernizers. Gregory's approach, like that of the other authors, is informed by Edward Said's work on Orientalism; like them, too, he repudiates the apologists for the colonial present, including Lewis, Huntington, and Ajami. Gregory's formulation here is worth quoting: “To them, the Islamic world—in the singular—was degenerate, a throwback to feudalism, and hence incapable of reaching an accommodation with the modern world (no less singular, but prototypically American)” (p. 58). This is what Gregory aptly calls “Orientalism with a vengeance” (p. 58). Part of what makes this book valuable, beyond its explicit concerns, is Gregory's gift for theorizing in ways that give the reader enduring tools for understanding the unfolding world order, a globality that defies the traditional interpretative categories of international relations. Gregory's sophistication as a political geographer is put to excellent use, especially in his description of `imaginative

137“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE LEONARDIcartographies' (e.g., p. 117), the places and non-places depicted by the colonial mind at its worst as spaces without rules where `killing fields' can be established. [omit? yes]. In this vein Gregory does not hesitate to connect Israel's occupation of the West Bank and America's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with each other and, more dramatically, with the chilling recall of Nazi atrocity and mentality (see pp. 117-43). The chapter on the Israeli occupation of Palestine is uncompromising in its critique of the behavior of an occupying power and as a model for American behavior toward its adversaries since 9/11. Gregory's geographical imagination is illuminating. His contrast between the territorializing of an essentially non-territorial enemy in the terror war with the `aggressive deterritorializing' of the world economy, thereby liberating market forces to wreck havoc on various communities around the world, is of the utmost importance in grasping the changing nature of world order. In the end, Gregory gives a dark reading to the trends

associated with the colonial present that are the preoccupation of his book. He contends that the American project, properly understood, is totalizing in its situating the entire world within the imaginative borders of its empire. Part of the reason it can do this is its elimination of any sense of an `outside' that has traditionally set limits on the reach of aspirants to world empire (p. 255). If Gregory offers a note of hope, it comes at the very end of his book in the form of a

signpost pointing to a more benevolent future and calling for “the destruction of the architectures of enmity that have been produced and have been sustained by those dreadful events [the 9/11 attacks]” (p. 262). And finally, “it will be necessary to explore other spatializations and other topologies, and to turn our imaginative geographies into geographical imaginations that can enlarge and enhance our sense of the world and enable us to situate ourselves within it with care, concern, and humility.” (p.262). Like Mamdani,

Gregory counsels that America will have to learn how, in Derrida's words, `to live together well' in this turbulent world of the 21st century--if it is to live at all! This will require a far stronger sense of human solidarity and spirit of geopolitical humility than have hitherto been demonstrated . For this to be possible, a surge of inventiveness will be required to devise new

categories for construing and adjusting to an unfolding world order that is best understood as transitional and beset by contradictory tendencies. There is a common message and motif in these fine books, and that is that the path of empire is littered with corpses and will end in mass burials. Further, dividing the world along civilizational lines of friends and enemies leads to self-destructive authoritarianism at home and fierce wars abroad. Will we have the wisdom, imagination, and strength to construct a sustainable imaginative geography that replaces the nightmares of exterminationist scenarios and grandiose visions of global empire with a quest for `humane governance'? These questions are posed by these authors in sweepingly general language, but also are depicted by them on the ground by reference to frighteningly concrete imagery of violence and destruction. And so we are wisely instructed!

AT: MILITARY TECH GOOD

The development of new military technology takes place upon the backdrop of acceleration – as more advanced weaponry is developed, the human element of war becomes more and more minimal. Instincts are sacrificed for precision tools, human compassion and reason replaced with systems to analyze probability. Their calls for a new weapon enhance an ontology of war that seeks to depersonalize violence, ushering in a new system of ethics which can end only in massive wars and the deployment of super weapons to erase populationsVirilio 98 (Paul, crazy guy who doesn’t have email or an answering machine, “The State of Emergency,” The Virilio Reader, pg 48 – 57)

The ancient inter-city duel, war between nations, the permanent conflict between naval empires and continental powers have all suddenly disappeared, giving way to an unheard-of

opposition: the juxtaposition of every locality, all matter. The planetary mass becomes no more than a “critical mass,” a precipitate resulting from the extreme reduction of contact time, a fearsome friction of places and elements that only yesterday were still distinct and separated by a buffer of distances, which have suddenly become anachronistic. In The Origin of Continents and Oceans, published in 1915, Alfred Wegener writes that in the beginning the earth can

only have had but one face, which seems likely, given the capacities for interconnect ion. In the future the earth will have but one interface... If speed thus appears as the essential fall-out of styles of conflicts and cataclysms, the current “arms race” is in fact only “the arming of the race” toward the end of the world as distance, in other words as a field of action. The term “deterrence” points to the ambiguity of this situation,

in which the weapon replaces the protection of armor, in which the possibilities of offense and offensive ensure in and of themselves the defense, the entire defensive against the “explosive” dimension of strategic arms, but not

at all against the “implosive” dimension of the vectors’ performances, since on the contrary the maintenance of a credible “strike power” requires the constant refining of the engines’ power, in other words of their ability to reduce geographic space to nothing or almost nothing. In fact, without the violence of speed, that of weapons would not be so fearsome. In the current context, to disarm would thus mean first and foremost to decelerate, to defuse the race toward the end. Any treaty that does not limit the speed of this race (the speed of means of communicating destruction) will not limit strategic arms, since from now on the essential object of strategy consists in maintaining the non-place of a general delocalization of means that alone still allows us to gain fractions of seconds, which gain is indispensable to any freedom of action.

As General Fuller wrote, “When the combatants threw javelins at each other, the weapon’s initial speed was such that one could see it on its trajectory and parry its effects with one’s shield. But when the javelin was replaced by the bullet, the speed was so great that parry became impossible.” Impossible to move one’s body out of the way, but possible if one moved out of

the weapon’s range; possible as well through the shelter of the trench, greater than that of the shield — possible, in other words, through space and matter. Today, the reduction of warning time that results from the supersonic speeds of assault leaves so little time for detection, identification and response that in the case of a surprise attack the supreme authority would have to risk abandoning his supremacy of decision by authorizing the lowest echelon of the defense system to immediately launch anti-missile missiles. The two political superpowers have thus far preferred to avoid this situation through negotiations, renouncing anti-

missile defense at the same time. Given the lack of space, an active defense requires at least the material time to intervene. But these are the “war materials” that disappear in the acceleration of the means of communicating destruction. There remains only a passive defense that consists less in reinforcing itself against the megaton powers of nuclear weapons than in a series of constant, unpredictable, aberrant movements, movements which are thus strategically effective — for at least a little while longer, we hope. In fact, war now rests entirely on the deregulation of time and space. This is why the technical maneuver that consists in complexifying the vector by constantly improving its performances has now totally supplanted tactical maneuvers on the terrain, as we have seen. General Ailleret points this out in his history of weapons by stating that the definition of arms programs has become one of the essential elements of strategy. If in ancient conventional warfare we could still talk about army maneuvers in the fields, in the current state of affairs, if this maneuver still exists, it no longer needs a “field”. The invasion of the instant succeeds the invasion of the territory. The countdown becomes the scene of battle, the final frontier. The opposing sides can easily ban bacteriological, geodesic or meteorological warfare. In reality, what is currently at stake with strategic arms limitation agreements (SALT I) is no longer the explosive but the vector, the vector of

138“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE LEONARDInuclear deliverance, or more precisely its performances. The reason for this is simple: where the molecular or nuclear explosive’s blast made a given area unfit for existence, that of the implosive

(vehicles and vectors) suddenly reduces reaction time, and the time for political decision, to nothing. If over thirty years ago the nuclear explosive completed the cycle of spatial wars, at the end of this century the implosive (beyond politically and economically invaded territories)

inaugurates the war of time. In full peaceful coexistence, without any declaration of hostilities, and more surely than by any other kind of conflict, rapidity delivers us from this world. We have to face the facts: today, speed is war, the last war. But let’s go back to 1962, to the crucial events of the Cuban missile crisis. At that time, the two superpowers had fifteen minutes’ warning time for war. The installation of Russian rockets on Castro’s island threatened to reduce the Americans’ warning to thirty seconds, which was unacceptable for President Kennedy, whatever the risks of his categorical refusal. We all know what happened: the installation of a direct line — the “hot line” — and the interconnection of the two Heads of State! Ten years later, in 1972, when the normal warning time was down to several minutes — ten for ballistic missiles, a mere two for satellite weapons — Nixon and Brezhnev signed the first strategic arms limitation agreement in Moscow. In fact, this agreement aims less at the quantitative limitation of weapons (as its adversary/partners claim) than at the preservation of a properly “human” political power, since the constant progress of rapidity threatens from one day to the next to reduce the warning time for nuclear war to less than one fatal minute — thus finally abolishing the Head of State’s power of reflection and decision in favor of a pure and simple automation of defense systems. The decision for hostilities would then belong only to several strategic computer programs. After having been (because of its destructive capacities) the equivalent of total war — the nuclear missile- launching submarine alone is able to destroy 500 cities — the war machine suddenly becomes (thanks to the reflexes of the strategic calculator) the very decision for war. What will remain, then, of the “political reasons” for deterrence? Let us recall that in 1962, among the reasons that made General de Gaulle decide to have the populations ratify the decision to elect the President of the Republic by universal suffrage, there was the credibility of deterrence, the legitimacy of the referendum being a fundamental element of this very deterrence. What will remain of all this in the

automation of deterrence? in the automation of decision? The transition from the state of siege of wars of space to the state of emergency of the war of time only took several decades, during which the political era of the statesman was replaced by the apolitical era of the State apparatus. Facing the advent of such a regime, we would do well to wonder about what is much more than

a temporal phenomenon. At the close of our century, the time of the finite world is coming to an end; we live in the beginnings of a paradoxical miniaturization of action, which others prefer to baptize automation. Andrew Stratton writes, “We commonly believe that automation suppresses the possibility of human error. In fact, it transfers that possibility from the action stage to the conception stage. We are now reaching the point where the possibilities of an accident during the critical minutes of a plane landing, if guided automatically, are fewer than if a pilot is controlling it. We might wonder if we will ever reach the stage of automatically controlled nuclear weapons, in which the margin of error would be less than with human decision. But the possibility of this progress threatens to reduce to little or nothing the time for human decision to intervene in the system.” This is brilliant. Contraction in time, the disappearance of the territorial space, after that of the fortified city and armor, leads to a situation in which the notions of “before” and “after” designate only the future and the past in a form of war that causes the “present” to disappear in the instantaneousness of decision. The final power would thus be less one of imagination than of anticipation, so much so that to govern would be no more than to foresee, simulate, memorize the simulations; that the present “Research Institute” could appear to be the blueprint of this final power, the power of utopia. The loss of material space leads to the government of nothing but time. The Ministry of Time sketched in each vector will finally be accomplished following the dimensions of the biggest vehicle there is, the State-vector. The whole geographic history of the distribution of land and countries would stop in favor of a single regrouping of time, power no longer being comparable to anything but a “meteorology.” In this precarious fiction speed would suddenly become a destiny, a form of progress, in other words a “civilization” in which each speed would be something of a “region” of time. As Mackinder said, forces of pressure are always exerted in the same direction. Now, this single direction of geopolitics is that

which leads to the immediate commutation of things and places. War is not, as Foch claimed, harboring illusions on the future of chemical explosives, “a worksite of fire.” War has always been a worksite of movement, a speed-factory. The technological breakthrough, the last form of the war of movement, ends up, with deterrence, at the dissolution of what separated but also distinguished, and this non-distinction corresponds for us to a political blindness. We can verify it with General de Gaulle’s decree of January 7, 1959, suppressing the distinction between peacetime and wartime. Furthermore, during this same period, and despite the Vietnamese exception that proves the rule, war has shrunk from several years to several days, even to several hours. In the 1 960s a mutation occurs: the passage from wartime to the war of peacetime, to that total peace that others still call “peaceful coexistence.” The blindness of the speed of means of communicating destruction is not a liberation from

geopolitical servitude, but the extermination of space as the field of freedom of political action. We only need refer to the necessary controls and constraints of the railway, airway or highway infrastructures to see the fatal impulse: the more speed increases, the faster freedom decreases. The apparatus’ self-propulsion finally entails the self-sufficiency of automation. What happens in the example of the racecar driver, who is no more than a worried lookout for the catastrophic probabilities of his movement, is reproduced on the political level as soon as conditions require an action in real time.2 Let us take, for example, a crisis situation: “From the very beginning of the Six Days’ War in 1967, President Johnson took control of the White House, one hand guiding the Sixth Fleet, the other on the hot line. The necessity of the link between the two became clearly apparent as soon as an Israeli attack against the American reconnaissance ship Liberty provoked the intervention of one of the fleet’s aircraft carriers. Moscow examined every blip on the radar screens as attentively as Washington did: would the Russians interpret the air planes’ change of course and their convergence as an act of aggression? This is where the hot line came in: Washington immediately explained the reasons for this operation and Moscow was reassured” (Harvey Wheeler). In this example of strategic political action in real time, the Chief of State is in fact a “Great Helmsman.” But the prestigious nature of the people’s historical guide gives way to the more prosaic and rather banal one of a “test pilot” trying to maneuver his machine in a very narrow

margin. Ten years have passed since this “crisis state,” and the arms race has caused the margin of political security to narrow still further, bringing us closer to the critical threshold where the possibilities for properly human political action will disappear in a “State of Emergency”; where telephone communication between statesmen will stop, probably in favor of an interconnection of computer systems, modern calculators of strategy and, consequently, of politics. (Let us recall that the computers’ first task was to solve simultaneously a series of complex equations aimed at causing the trajectory of the anti-aircraft projectile and that of

the airplane to meet.) Here we have the fearsome telescoping of elements born of the “amphibious generations”; the extreme proximity of parties in which the immediacy of information immediately creates the crisis; the frailty of reasoning power, which is but the effect of a miniaturization of action — the latter resulting

from the miniaturization of space as a field of action. An imperceptible movement on a computer keyboard, or one made by a “skyjacker” brandishing a cookie box covered with masking tape, can lead to a catastrophic chain of events that until recently was inconceivable. We are too willing to ignore the fact that, alongside the threat of proliferation resulting from the acquisition of nuclear explosives by irresponsible parties, there is a

proliferation of the threat resulting from the vectors that cause those who own or borrow them to become just as irresponsible. In the beginning of the 1 940s, Paris was a six-days’ walk from the border, a three-hours’ drive, and one hour by plane. Today the capital is only several minutes away from anywhere else, and anywhere else is only several minutes away from its end — so much so that the tendency, which still existed several years ago, to advance one’s destructive means closer to the enemy territory (as in the Cuban missile crisis) is reversing. The present tendency is toward geographic disengagement, a movement of retreat that is due only to the progress of the vectors and to the extension of their reach (cf. the American submarine Trident, whose new missiles can travel 8 to 10,000 kilometers, as opposed to the Poseidon’s 4 to 5,000). Thus, the different strategic nuclear forces (American and Soviet) will no longer need to patrol the area in the target continents; they can henceforth retreat within their territorial limits. This is confirmation that they are abandoning a form of geostrategic conflict. Alter the reciprocal renunciation of geodesic war, we will possibly see the abandonment of advanced bases, extending to America’s extraordinary abandonment of its sovereignty over the Panama Canal... A sign of the times, of the time of the war of time. Nonetheless, we must note that this strategic retreat no longer has anything in common with the retreat that allowed conventional armies to “gain time by losing ground.” In the retreat due to the extended reach of the ballistic vectors, we in fact gain time by losing the space of the (stationary or mobile) advanced bases, but this time is gained at the expense of our own forces, of the performances of our own engines, and not at the enemy’s expense, since,

symmetrically, the latter accompanies this geostrategic disengagement. Everything suddenly happens as if each protagonist’s own arsenal became his (internal) enemy, by advancing too quickly. Like the recoil of a firearm, the implosive movement of the ballistic performances diminishes the field of strategic forces. In fact, if the adversary/partners didn’t pull back their means of communicating destruction while lengthening their reach, the higher speed of these means would already have reduced the time of decision about their use to nothing. Just as in 1972, in Moscow, the partners in this game abandoned plans for an anti-missile missile defense, so five years later they wasted the advantage of swiftness for the very temporary benefit of a greater extension of their intercontinental missiles. Both seem to fear — all the while seeking — the multiplying effect of speed, of that speed activity so dear to all armies since the Revolution. In the face of this curious contemporary regression of strategic arms limitation agreements, it is wise to return to the very principle of deterrence.

The essential aim of throwing ancient weapons or of shooting off new ones has never been to kill the enemy or destroy his means, but to deter him , in other words, to force him to interrupt his movement. Regardless of whether this physical movement is one that allows the assailed to contain the assailant or one of invasion, “the aptitude for war is the aptitude for movement,” which a Chinese strategist expressed in these words: “An army is always strong enough when it can come and go, spread out and regroup, as it wishes and when it wishes.” For the last several years, however, this freedom of movement has been hindered not by the enemy’s capacity for resistance or reaction, but by the

refinement of the vectors used. Deterrence seems to have passed suddenly from the fire stage, in other words the explosive stage, to that of the movement of vectors, as if a final degree of nuclear deterrence had appeared, still poorly mastered by the actors in the global strategic game. Here again, we must return to the strategic and tactical realities of weaponry in order to grasp the present logistical reality. As Sun Tzu said, “Weapons are tools of ill omen.” They are first feared and fearsome as threats, long before being used. Their “ominous” character can be split into three components the threat of their performance at the moment of their invention, of their production; the threat of their use against the enemy; the effect of their use, which is fatal for persons and destructive for their goods. If these last two components are unfortunately known, and have long been experimented with, the first, on the other hand, the (logistical) ill omen of the invention of their performance, is less commonly recognized. Nonetheless, it is at this level that the question of deterrence is raised. Can we deter an enemy from inventing

new weapons, or from perfecting their performance? Absolutely not. We thus find ourselves facing this dilemma: The threat of use (the second component) of the nuclear arm prohibits the terror of actual use (the third component). But for this threat to remain and allow the strategy of deterrence, we are forced to develop the threatening system that characterizes the first component: the ill omen of the appearance of new performances for the means of communicating destruction. Stated plainly, this is the perpetual sophistication of combat means and the replacement of the geostrategic breakthrough by the technological breakthrough, the great logistical maneuvers. We must face the facts: if ancient weapons deterred us from interrupting movement, the new weapons deter us from interrupting the arms race. Moreover, they require in their technological (dromological) logic the

139“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE LEONARDIexponential development, not of the number of destructive machines, since their power has increased (simply compare the millions of projectiles in the two World Wars to the several

thousands of rockets in contemporary arsenals), but of their global performances. Destructive capabilities having reached the very limits of possibility with thermonuclear

arms, the enemy’s “logistical strategies” are once more oriented toward power of penetration and flexibility of use. The balance of terror is thus a mere illusion in the industrial stage of war, in which reigns a perpetual imbalance, a constantly raised bid, able to invent new means of destruction without end. We have proven ourselves, on the other hand, not only quite incapable of destroying those we’ve already produced (the ‘waste products” of the military industry being as hard to recycle as those of the

nuclear industry), but especially incapable of avoiding the threat of their appearance. War has thus moved from the action stage to the conception stage that, as we know, characterizes automation. Unable to control the emergence of new means of destruction,

deterrence, for us, is tantamount to setting in place a series of automatisms, reactionary industrial and scientific procedures from which all political choice is absent. By becoming “strategic,” in other words, by combining offense and defense, the new weapons deter us from interrupting the movement of the arms race, and the “logistical strategy” of their production becomes the inevitable production of destructive means as an obligatory factor of non-war — a vicious circle in which the inevitability of production replaces that of destruction. The war machine is now not only all of war, but also becomes the adversary/partners’ principal enemy by depriving them of their freedom of movement.’ Dragged unwillingly into the “servitude without honor” of deterrence, the protagonists henceforth practice the “politics of the worst,” or more precisely, the “apolitics of the worst,” which necessarily leads to the war machine one day becoming the very decision for war — thus accomplishing the perfection of its self-sufficiency, the automation of deterrence. The suggestive juxtaposition of the terms deterrence and automation allows us to understand better the structural axis of contemporary military- political events, as H. Wheeler specifies: “Technologically possible, centralization has become politically necessary.” This shortcut recalls that of Saint-Just’s famous dictum: “When a people can be oppressed, it will be” — the difference being that this techno-logistical oppression no longer concerns only the “people,” but the “deciders” as well. If only yesterday the freedom of maneuver (that aptitude for movement which has been equated with the aptitude for war) occasionally required delegations of power up to the secondary echelons, the reduction of the margin of maneuver due to the progress of the means of communicating destruction causes an extreme concentration of responsibilities for the solitary decision-maker that the Chief of State has become. This contraction is, however, far from being complete; it continues according to the arms race, at the speed of the new capacities of the vectors, until one day it will dispossess this last man. In fact, the movement is the same that restrains the number of projectiles and that reduces to nothing or almost nothing the decision of an individual deprived of counsel.

The maneuver is the same as the one that today leads us to abandon territories and advanced bases, and as the one that will one day lead us to renounce solitary human decision in favor of the absolute miniaturization of the political field which is automation. If in Frederick the Great’s time to win was to advance, for the supporters of deterrence it is to retreat, to leave places, peoples and the individual where they are — to the point where dromological progress closely resembles the jet engine’s reaction propulsion, caused by the ejection of a certain quantity of movement (the product of a mass times a velocity) in the direction opposite to the one we wish to take. In this war of recession between East and West — contemporary not with the illusory limitation of strategic arms, but with the limitation of strategy itself— the power of thermonuclear explosion serves as an artificial

horizon for a race that is increasing the power of the vehicular implosion. The impossibility of interrupting the progress of the power of penetration, other than by an act of faith in the enemy, leads us to deny strategy as prior knowledge. The automatic nature not only of arms and means, but also of the command, is the same as denying our ability to reason: Nicht raisonniren! Frederick the Second’s order is perfected by a deterrence that leads us to reduce our freedom not only of action and decision, but also of conception. The logic of arms systems is eluding the military framework more and more, and moving toward the engineer responsible for research and development — in expectation, of course, of the system’s self- sufficiency. Two years ago Alexandre Sanguinetti wrote, “It is becoming less and less conceivable to build attack planes, which with their spare parts cost several million dollars each, to transport bombs able to destroy a country railroad station. It is simply not cost-effective.” This logic of practical war, in which the operating costs of the (aerial) vector automatically entail the heightening of its destructive capability because of the requirements of transporting a tactical nuclear weapon, is not limited to attack planes; it is also becoming the logic of the State apparatus. This backwardness is the logistical consequence of producing means to communicate destruction. The danger of the nuclear weapon, and of the arms system it implies, is thus not so much that it will explode, but that it exists and is imploding in our minds. Let us summarize this phenomenon: Two bombs interrupt the war in the Pacific, and several dozen nuclear submarines are enough to ensure peaceful coexistence.. This is its numerical aspect. With the appearance of the multiple thermonuclear warhead and the rapid development of tactical nuclear arms, we see the miniaturization of explosive charges... This is its volumetric aspect. After having cleared the planet surface of a cumbersome defensive apparatus by reducing undersea and underground strategic arms, they renounce world expanse by reducing the trouble spots and advanced bases... This is its geographical aspect. Once responsible for the operations, the old chiefs of war, strategists and generals, find themselves demoted and restricted to simple maintenance operations, for the sole benefit of the Chief of State... This is its political aspect. But this quantitative and qualitative scarcity doesn’t stop. Time itself is no longer enough: Constantly heightened, the vectors’ already quasisupersonic capacities are superseded by the high energies that enable us to approach the speed of light... This is its spatio-temporal aspect. After the time of the State’s political relativity as nonconducting medium, we are faced with the no-

time of the politics of relativity. The full discharge feared by Clausewitz has come about with the State of Emergency. The violence of speed has become both the location and the law, the world’s destiny and its destination.

AT: NUCLEAR WAR

Questioning the paranoiac logic of the assassin is a pre-requisite to solving nuclear war. Deleuze and Guattari 80 (A thousand Plateaus, p. 345-346)

Material thus has three principal characteristics: it is Molecularized matter; it has a relation to forces to be harnessed; and it is defined by the operations of consistency

applied to it. Finally, it is clear that the relation to the earth and the people has changed and is no longer of the romance type. The earth is not at its most deterritorialized: not only a point in a galaxy, but one galaxy among others. The people is not at its most Molecularized: a molecular population, a people of oscillators as so many forces of interaction. The artist discards romantic figures, relinquishes both the forces of the earth and those of the people. The combat , if combat there is, has moved . The established powers have occupied the earth ; they have built people’s organizations. The mass media , the great people’s organizations of the party or union type, are machines for reproduction , fuzzification machines that effectively scramble all the terrestrial forces of the people. The established powers have placed us in the situation long ago, even before it had been installed (Nietzsche, for example). They became away of it because the same vector was traveling their own domain: a molecularization, an atomization of the material, coupled with a cosmicization of the forces taken up by that material. The question then became whether the molecular or atomic “populations” of all natures (mass media, monitoring

procedures, computers, space weapons) would continued to bombard the existing people in order to train it or control it or annihilate it – or if other molecular populations were possible, could slip in to the first and give rise to a people yet to come . As Virilio say in his very rigorous analysis of the depopulation of the people and the deterritorialization of the earth, the question has become: “ to dwell as a poet or as an assassin ?” The assassin is one who bombards the existing people with molecular populations that are forever closing all of the assemblages, hurling them into a n even wider and deeper black hole. The poet on the other hand is one who lets loose molecular populations in hopes that this will sow the seeds of, or even engender , the people to come, that these populations will pass into a people to come, open

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a cosmos. Once again, we must not make it seem as though the poet gorged on metaphors: it may be that the sound of molecules to pop music are at this very moment implanting here and there a people of a new type , singularly indifferent to the orders of the radio, to computer safeguards, to the threat of the atomic bomb .

AT: HEGEMONY

Hard or soft power, it doesn’t matter – hegemony is dead, their model structurally produces blowback and resistant subjectivity through the lived out experience of oppression. The US can’t maintain power when the world doesn’t consent to it: the result is competition, distrust, imperial war, hegemonic collapse and a powder keg of nuclear catastrophe. Voting aff is key to collapse Empire. Hardt and Negri 9 (Michael and Antonio, Intellectual badasses, taught with K all-stars Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault at Vincennes, “Commonwealth”, 2009, pgs. 203-14)

The most significant event of the first decade of the new millennium for geopolitics may be the definitive failure of unilateralism. At the end of the last millennium a

genuinely new global situation had emerged, which set in motion new processes o f governance and began to establish new structures of global order. A new Empire was being formed that was qualitatively different from the previous ly existing imperialisms , which had been based primarily on the power of nation-states. Instead of engaging directly the formation of Empire, however, the dominant forces on the global scene, the U.S. government in particular, denied and repressed the novelty, conjuring up specters from the past, forcing dead figures of political rule to stumble across the stage and replay outdated dreams of grandeur. Ambitions of imperialist conquest,

nationalist glory, unilateral decision making, and global leadership were all revived, with horrifyingly real violence. Within the United States, where these fantasies were most powerful, what had seemed in the past to be alternatives— isolationism, imperialism, and internationalism—were resuscitated and woven together , turning out merely to be different faces of the same project, all stitched together with the thread of U.S. exceptionalism . It took only a few years, though, for these ghostly figures to collapse in a

lifeless heap. The financial and economic crisis of the early twenty-first century delivered the final blow to U.S. imperialist glory. By the end of the decade there was general recognition of the military, political, and economic failures of unilateralism.' There is no choice now but to confront head-on the formation of Empire. The decade put an end to dreams of a unipolar world. The conventional narrative of international relations scholars is that the twentieth century witnessed a major transformation from a multipolar world ruled by a set of dominant nation-states—which traces its roots back to the Peace of Westphalia but emerged in truly global form through the European, U.S., and Japanese imperialist projects— to the bipolar world defined by the two cold war superpowers. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war opened an alternative, in the minds of many scholars and policymakers, between a return to some form of multipolarity or the creation of a unipolar system centered on the United States, the sole

superpower, a single imperialist with no competitors or peers. The attempt and failure to establish U.S. hegemony and unilateral rule in the course of the decade, however, proved the vision of a unipolar world to be an illusion . At this point even the strategists of U.S.

power are beginning to recognize that what the collapse of unipolarity signals is not a return to any previous bipolar or multipolar arrangement but the emergence of a new order . " At first glance," explains Richard Haass, former director of policy planning at the U.S. State Department, the world today may appear to be multipolar. The major powers— China, the European Union (EU), India, Japan, Russia, and the United States—contain just over half the

world's people and account for 75 percent of global G D P and 80 percent of global defense spending. Appearances, however, can be deceiving. Today's world differs in a fundamental way from one of classic multipolarity : there are many more power centers, and quite a few of these poles are not nation-states. Indeed, one of the cardinal features of the contemporary international system is that nation-states have lost their monopoly on power and in some

domains their preeminence as well. States are being challenged from above, by regional and global organizations; from below, by militias; and from the side, by a variety of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and corporations. Power is now found in many hands and in many places.

According to Haass, therefore, none of the conventional geometries — unipolar, bipolar, or multipolar— adequately describes the emerging global order. "The principal characteristic of twenty-first century international relations," he continues,

"is turning out to be nonpolarity: a world dominated not by one or two or even several states but rather by dozens of actors possessing and exercising various kinds of power. This represents a tectonic shift from the past."2 It has now become uncontroversial, even commonplace, to pose the contemporary global order, which has in fact been forming since the end of the cold war, as characterized by a distribution of powers, or more precisely a form of network power, which requires the wide collaboration of dominant nation-states, major corporations, supranational economic and political institutions, various NGOs , media conglomerates, and a series of other powers. It is quickly becoming common sense, in other words, that

the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of Empire. Was it a lost decade, then? After this detour through resurrected

imperialist adventures and unilateral pretenses, which "perfected" the imperialist machine only to demonstrate its definitive obsolescence, are we right back where we were before? We need to look a bit more closely at the failures of unilateralism and the impossibility of multilateralism to see how the formation of Empire has proceeded through this process—both how its shape has clarified and how it has moved i n new directions.

The attempt to create a unipolar order centered on the United States was really a coup d'etat within the global system, that is, a dramatic subordination o f all the "aristocratic" powers o f the emerging imperial order, such as the other dominant nation-states and the supranational institutions, in

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order to elevate the "monarchical" power of the United States. The coup d'etat was an effort to transform the emerging form of Empire back into an old imperialism, but this time with only one imperialist power. The primary events and ultimate failure of the coup have by now been thoroughly chronicled

by journalists and scholars. Plans for a " N ew American Century" were i n place well before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, but every coup needs a trigger , a catastrophic event that legitimates taking the reins of power. The rhetoric of a "war on terror" justified a state of emergency in the imperial system , and the coup was set in motion in the attempt to concentrate the powers of the global order in the hands of the United States, establishing unilateral control, raising or lowering the status of nation-states according to their alignment with the will of Washington, undermining the capacities and autonomy of the international and supranational institutions, and so forth. On the

emerging imperial system was imposed a central authority through which all global decisions were to pass. The invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq were the centerpiece , but the coup also involved a series of economic and political operations at various levels i n the global system. The military failures were thus the most visible but by no means the only measure o f the collapse o f the coup. From this perspective, then, it is not true, as so many tirelessly repeat, that everything changed on September 11. The rhetoric of a historic break facilitated the forces of the coup, but we can see clearly now, after the coup has failed and the dust cleared, that the attacks and the subsequent unilateralist adventures, however horrifying and tragic, were not in fact moments of radical change but steps in the formation of Empire.4 It is no coincidence that in the heady early days o f the coup some of the planners and supporters began to sing the praises of past imperialist formations, especially those of the United States and Britain. Whereas for several decades the term "imperialist" had functioned as an insult across the political spectrum almost comparable to the accusation of "fascist," suddenly a small but significant group of pundits and politicians publicly embraced imperialism! Others, even when shying away from using the term, resurrected all the conventional apologies for imperialism: its

ability to remake the global environment, its civilizing influence, its moral superiority, and so forth. More prudent scholars and policymakers accepted as given the coup d'etat and its success but warned against its excesses and sought to make its reign more humane and long-lasting. Typical of this effort were the various discussions of hegemony that cautioned against the dangers of relying too heavily on "hard power" and recommended strong doses of " soft power ."5 Running throughout

these various positions, however, despite their differences, was an imperialist conception of political order . The visionaries most dedicated to the coup and most convinced of its success were the so-called neoconservatives, a much-publicized group of journalists, pseudo-academics, and government officials who have a strong presence in the mainstream and conservative sectors of the U.S. media. These ideologues are "idealists" in the sense that they share a vision of a global political

order in which the United States holds overwhelming power, unilaterally decides political issues for other nations, and thereby guarantees global peace. And they are equally apocalyptic, warning about the dire consequences of not following their dictates. "There is no middle way for Americans" in the war on terror, write David Frum and Richard Perle

ominously. "It is victory or holocaust."6 These ideologues are fundamentally against Empire—against, that is, collaboration with the wide network of powers in

the emerging imperial formation— and for imperialism. Their war cry, in effect, is "Imperialism or death!" Though long on vision, neoconservatives are remarkably short on substance. In their hubris they pay little attention to the necessary bases for exercising imperialist power and maintaining unilateral hegemony. Their plans rely heavily on military power, but they fail to invent or develop new military capacities, putting their faith simply in a strategic transformation, as we will see in the next sec tion. They show astonishingly little concern, furthermore, for economic planning. A t times they ally themselves with proponents of neoliberal economics, but that remains peripheral to their vision. The essence o f their agenda is political: establishing and exercising the unilateral capacity o f the United States to "shape the global environment," to organize and dictate global political affairs. Even in the political realm, though, neoconservatives disregard the need to gain moral and political authority. They seem to take for granted that nation-states and other significant powers w i l l unquestioningly consent to the wishes ofWashington.The neoconservatives, i n short, strike the pose of the great British imperialists o f a bygone era, but without the substance to support their dreams—without the force to maintain domination or the consent to sustain hegemony—they strike only a farcical figure.7 They embarked on a very strange project: to assert hegemony without concern for, and even scorning the necessary prerequisites for, that hegemony itself. After the failure o f the coup d'etat became apparent, the neoconservatives scattered into separate camps.The most intelligent and most opportunistic try to save their careers by shifting their positions— for example, reasserting the power o f nation-states for global order—and claiming they never really agreed with the

coup in the first place. The hardliners instead remain convinced of the vision and simply blame the Bush administration or others for carrying it out poorly, focusing most often on military errors made in Iraq. The coup did not, of course, fail only because

of incompetence. U .S. unilateralism and its imperialist projects were already dead before the coup forced them to their feet to thrash about for a few bloody years. Perhaps the neoconservative ideologues are the adequate gravediggers for an ideology that was already defunct. One other oddly symmetrical historical anomaly of this period is the explosion of scholarly and popular books on the Left that analyzed the coup as a return to imperialism. For a couple of years, roughly from 2003 to 2005, such books dominated

the shelves of bookstores. There is no new world order, they explain, no new form of Empire, and thus (what a relief!) no need for new concepts and theories. Global order and domination continue to be defined, as they were throughout the twentieth century, by U.S. imperialism. These arguments are correct on the surface, of course, since the coup was indeed an attempt to resurrect imperialism, but profoundly mistaken in substance. The tradition of dead generations still weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. In effect these scholars were duped by the boasting of the instigators of the coup, accepting at face value their resurrected figures and pretenses to imperialist power. Such theories of a new (or not so new) U.S. imperialism are really an inverted repetition of U.S. exceptionalism, such that the United States is an exception here not, as the U.S. celebrants and apologists would have it, because o f its virtue and vocation for freedom and democracy but rather because o f its w i l l to dominate, and moreover, since many nation-states share that w i l l , its power to do so. The time has come, though, to let the dead bury the dead.9 The Exhaustion of U.S. Hegemony Now that the coup d'etat has failed and the attempt to establish the unilateral control of the United States over global affairs has been all but aborted, we need to detail the breakdown in military, economic, political, and moral affairs in order to analyze the current state in which this leaves the

imperial system. The military failure is most visible and dramatic. The invasion of Afghanistan and the quick collapse of the Taliban government were really only a prelude. Iraq would be the proving ground where the United States demonstrates it can "go it alone," in defiance of the United Nations and some of its primary traditional allies. Baghdad is conquered quickly with little resistance, forces of the United States and its allies spread throughout the national territory, and a U.S. occupying administration is established. By the summer of 2003 the mission has been accomplished: unilateral military power has proved its effectiveness, and the coup d'etat seems to stand on firm ground. The victor starts looking around for new arenas (Syria? Iran?) in which to exert its

power. Over the course of the next few years, however, the presumed military victory is swept away: at first with drips and drops of resistance to the occupation forces, then periodic showers, and finally massive downpours. Afghanistan, which was once reported to be successfully under the control of the occupying

forces and the appointed government, is soon revealed to be rocked by serious conflicts. In Iraq the occupying military forces and their counterparts in the newly created Iraqi government are forced into the position of the boy with his finger in the dike . As death tolls rise, so do the possibilities of a flood and unrestricted civil war. The eventual "surge" of U.S. forces and decline of violence in Iraq cannot change the fact that has been revealed. On the proving ground of Iraq, unilateral military power has not demonstrated its ability to create and guarantee global order but has, on the contrary, shown its complete inability to

do so. Even if the United States eventually declares victory, unilateralism was defeated in Iraq. In retrospect the failure in Iraq highlights two well-established truths of military thought. The first demonstrates the necessary size and composition of a conquering and occupying army. A primary element of the unilateral project in Iraq was the military

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PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE LEONARDIstrategy often referred to as the "revolutionary in military affairs" (RMA) or "defense transformation." This strategy, which was most publicly supported at the time by U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, often against the objections of generals and the military establishment, is based on two primary strategic innovations: reducing troop levels through the coordinated use of information and weapons technologies in combat; and reorganizing military formations to make them lighter, more mobile, and more flexible. The 2003 "victory of Baghdad" and the seeming success of this strategy briefly inspired dreams of cyborg and robot armies that could vanquish enemies with no soldiers lost (no U.S. soldiers, that is). As Iraqi resistance grew, however, the effectiveness of the strategy was quickly undermined. It became obvious that the relatively small army organized i n technologically equipped mobile units is a powerful offensive weapon but unable to defend established positions, or rather, in journalistic jargon, it can win the war but not the peace. The traditional view that occupations require large numbers returned as common sense. By early 2007, with Rumsfeld ousted as secretary of defense, the U.S. government effectively abandons the core strategies of the "revolutionary in military affairs" and begins instead a dramatic escalation of troops in Iraq.10 A second traditional military view reconfirmed by the defeat in Iraq highlights the vast difference in subjectivity on the two sides of conflict.

Armed resistance, particularly armed resistance against an occupying army, is a terrific engine of the production of subjectivity . The occupation creates an extraordinary willingness among Iraqis to risk harm and death, sometimes taking horrible, barbaric forms. It teaches us, once again, that the presence of the occupier is

sufficient to produce resistance. For the occupying army, however, there is no such production of subjectivity, regardless of all the ideological campaigns to link the war to the September 11 attacks and, more generally, to create "terrorism" or radical Islam as a unified global enemy. At certain points in the past, patriotism enabled a production of subjectivity that could support a foreign war effort, but today the effectiveness of that mechanism is limited. Occupying armies now tend, in one way or another, to be populated by mercenaries. Machiavelli recognized long ago the superiority of a "people in arms" to any mercenary army because of the production of subjectivity that drives it. And no technological advantage will ever address that subjective imbalance. These two obstacles for U.S. unilateralist military strategy—the limitations of technological transformations and the imbalance in subjectivity—coincide powerfully in urban warfare. Military strategists are well aware that insurgencies and resistances will increasingly be located in metropolises and that the technological apparatus mobilized by the RMA is ill equipped for this environment. In the labyrinthine passageways of the urban landscape it is difficult to fight and kill at a distance. The metropolis is also a factory for the production of subjectivity, as we argue in De Corpore 2 at the end of this

section of the book. The well-established spaces of the common , the circuits of communication, and the social habits that form the metropolis serve as powerful multipliers of the production of subjectivity in resistance . A metropolis can ignite overnight, and the blazes stubbornly refuse to be extinguished. Defeat in one campaign, of course, does not disprove a military strategy. Some are bound to say that the fiasco was due merely to tactical errors, such as dismissing former Baath Party officials, disbanding the Iraqi military, or failing to counter the resistance quickly enough. We can rest assured, too, that the strategists in the U.S. military and its allied think tanks are busy working—with the aid of abstract theories and video game simulations—to reformulate the R M A for urban environments and achieve goals like "persistent area dominance" through technological and strategic innovations.1 2 Israeli military theorists also are hard at work developing effective strategies to control urban environments without exposing troops to risk.1 3 It is already clear, though, that regardless of future innovations and refinements, this strategy cannot support a unilateral military project of the United States. The primary architects of the U.S. war i n Iraq may be naive or inexpert military strategists, but they are undoubtedly lucid political thinkers. They are conscious that large numbers of U S . casualties are certain to undermine domestic support. They are also thinking ahead, beyond Afghanistan and Iraq, to the future requirements of a unilateral global order. There is no way that the U.S. military can match up to other major powers, such as Russia and

China, in the logic of the old military strategy. It simply does not have the numbers. The promise of the new strategy is that it can overcome the numerical imbalance and turn asymmetry to its advantage. Such a technological-strategic advantage, its authors believe, is the only hope for creating long-lasting unilateral military control. Although they answer the needs of the political logic, however, these strategies have proved unable to hold up militarily, even against relatively small, poorly equipped militias like those i n Afghanistan and Iraq. The international political hegemony of the United States has also rapidly declined during the period of the coup and its failure. Some of the architects of the 2003 Iraq invasion probably did expect U.S. tanks to be greeted in Baghdad with flowers and kisses and, moreover, other nation-states to be grateful to the United

States for taking leadership in the war. It will soon be hard to remember that during significant periods of the twentieth century, especially during the most intense years of the cold war, the U nited S tates enjoyed a hegemonic position in many parts of the world. The ideological explanation of U.S. hegemony has been predicated on the notion that the United States acts consistently , both domestically and abroad, to promote and defend freedom and democracy . We know well, however, the long history of the U.S. government undermining democratically elected governments and supporting dictatorships, through overt and covert operations, from Guatemala and Chile to the Philippines and Indonesia.1 4 The real cause for consent to U.S. hegemony rested on the fact that other nation-states believed the actions of the United States consistently advanced their own national interests, or rather the interests of those in power. This is a delicate balance, though, because material interests are necessarily coupled with the "idealistic" ideological rationale and cannot survive without i t . 1 5 As Cicero said of Rome, U.S. global leadership often sounded to its allies more like patrocinium than imperium. The photos of Abu Ghraib prison can serve as a symbol for the erosion of the moral and political authority of the United States and the inversion o f its image from defender of freedom and democracy to violator of basic rights and international law. For decades, of course, critical

voices have protested the way the U.S. military has trained death squads and encouraged the use of torture. The photos of U.S. soldiers torturing and mocking prisoners in Iraq, however, completely shattered what remained of its virtuous image , shifting focus to the widespread use of terror and torture as a political and military tool by the United States, in Guantanamo and other irregular prisons, and underlining the fact that the U.S. government approves and promotes the use of torture i n violation of international law. "We are in danger of losing something much more important than just the war in Iraq," Thomas Friedman warns after the publication of the Abu

Ghraib photos. "We are i n danger of losing America as an instrument of moral authority and inspiration in the world."1 6 The U nited S tates is certainly not the greatest violator o f

rights or proponent of torture, but its image can no longer function as a paradigm for the promotion of rights and law, freedom and democracy. The ideological cover of U.S. hegemony probably wore thin, we suspect, because its substance had already emptied out. Other powers had determined, in other

words, that the international action of the United States—its wars, its unilateral adventures, its economic models, and so forth—no longer consistently advanced their own interests. We w ll have to analyze this shift more closely in the next section in terms o f economic interests, but for the moment it

is sufficient to recognize how the failure of the coup d'etat coincides with the decline of the hard and soft power of the U nited S tates , that is, the defeat of its military strategy and the collapse of its moral and political authority.

*** DEATH ***

AT: DEATH (LONG)

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Extend the 2AC on Bell, specifically C and D, the “no impact” and the Seem evidence from “fascism.” Death is a fantasy – our biology means we cannot truly “die” or cease to be, rather we enter a new form of becoming: becoming earth. Becoming-nitrogen. Even if we are all wiped from the face of the earth in a hailstorm of nuclear bombs the process of life goes on even at the micro level. There is no unique warrant for why the biological construct of human deserves a place higher than the construct of atoms. This desire to be secure from death is the most personal level of microfascism that negates our ability to live life to its fullest and breeds ressentiment.Deleuze and Guattari 72 [AO, 330-39]

But it seems that things are becoming very obscure, for what is this distinction between the experience of death and the model of death? Here again , is it a death desire?

A being-far-death? Or rather an investment of death, even if speculative? None of the above. The experience of death is the most common of occurrences in the unconscious, precisely because it occurs in life and for life, in every passage or becoming, in every

intensity as passage or becoming. It is in the very nature of every intensity to invest within itself the zero intensity starting from which it is produced, in one moment, as that which grows or diminishes according to an infinity of degrees (as Klossowski noted, "an afflux is necessary merely to signify the absence of intensity"). We have attempted to show in this respect how the relations of attraction and repulsion produced such states, sensations, and emotions, which imply a new energetic conversion and form the third kind of synthesis, the synthesis of conjunction. One might say that the unconscious as a real subject has scattered an apparent residual and nomadic subject around the entire compass of its cycle, a subject that passes by way of all the becomings corresponding to the included disjunctions: the last part of the desiring-machine, the adjacent part. These intense becomings and feelings, these intensive emotions, feed deliriums and hallucinations. But in themselves, these intensive emotions are closest to the matter whose zero degree they invest in itself.

They control the unconscious experience of death, insofar as death is what is felt in every feeling , what never ceases and never finishes happening in every becoming-in the becoming-another-sex, the becoming-god, the becoming-a-race, etc., forming zones of intensity on the body without organs. Every intensity controls within its own life the experience of death, and

envelops it. And it is doubtless the case that every intensity is extinguished at the end, that every becoming itself becomes a becoming-death! Death, then, does actually happen . Maurice Blanchot distinguishes this twofold nature dearly, these two

irreducible aspects of death; the one, according to which the apparent subject never ceases to live and travel as a One·-"one never stops and never has done with dying"; and the other, according to which this same subject, fixed as I, actually dies-which is to say it finally ceases to die since it ends up dying, in the reality of a last instant that fixes it in this way as an I, all the while undoing the intensity, carrying it back to the zero that envelops it.From one aspect to the other, there is not at all a personal deepening, but something quite different: there is a return from the experience of death to the model of death, in the cycle of the desiring-machines. The cycle is closed. For a new departure, since this I is another? The experience of death must have given us exactly enough broadened experience, in order to live and know that the desiring-machines do not die. And that the subject as an adjacent part is always a "one" who conducts the experience, not an I who receives the model. For the model itself is not the I either, but the body without organs. And I does not rejoin the model without the model

starting out again in the direction of another experience. Always going from the model to the experience, and starting out again, returning from the model to the experience, is what schizophrenizing death amounts to, the exercise of the desiring-machines (which is their very secret, well understood by the terrifying authors). The machines tell us this, and make us live it, feel it, deeper than delirium and further than hallucination: yes, the return to repulsion will condition other attractions, other functionings, the setting in motion of other working parts on

the body without organs, the putting to work of other adjacent parts on the periphery that have as much a right to say One as we ourselves do. " Let him die in his leaping through unheard-of and unnamable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin on the horizons where the other collapsed! " 29 The Eternal Return as experience, and as the deterritorialized circuit of all the cycles of desire. How odd the psychoanalytic venture is. Psychoanalysis ought to be a song of life, or else be worth nothing at all. It ought, practically, to teach us to sing life. And see how the most defeated, sad .song of death emanates from it: eiapopeia. From the start, and because of his stubborn dualism of the drives, Freud never stopped trying to limit the discovery of a subjective or vital essence of desire as libido. But when the dualism passed into a death instinct against Eros, this was no longer a simple limitation, it was a liquidation of the libido. Reich did not go wrong here, and was perhaps the only one to maintain that the product of analysis should be a free and joyous person, a carrier of the life flows, capable of carrying them all the way into the desert and decoding them-even if this idea necessarily took on the appearance of a crazy idea, given what had become of analysis. He demonstrated that Freud, no less than lung and Adler, had repudiated the sexual position: the fixing of the death instinct in fact deprives sexuality of its generative role on at least one essential point, which is the genesis of anxiety, since this genesis becomes the autonomous cause of sexual repression instead of its result; it follows that sexuality as desire no longer animates a social critique of civilization, but that civilization on the contrary finds itself

sanctified as the sale agency capable of opposing the death desire. And how. does. it do this? By in principle turning death against death, by making this turned-back death (la mort ret aurneev into a force of desire by putting it in the service of a pseudo life through an entire culture of guilt feeling. There is no need to tell all over how psychoanalysis culminates in a theory of culture that takes up again the age-old task of the ascetic ideal Nirvana, the cultural extract, judging life, belittling life, measuring life against death, and only retaining from life what the death of death wants very much to leave us with - a sublime resignation . As Reich says, when psychoanalysis began to speak of Eros, the whole world breathed a sigh of relief': one knew what this meant, and that

everything was going to unfold within a mortified life , since Thanatos was now the partner of Eros, for worse but also for better. Psychoanalysis becomes the training ground of a new kind of priest, the director of bad conscience: bad conscience has made us sick, but that is what will cure us! Freud did not hide what was really at issue with the introduction of the death instinct: it is not a question of any fact whatever, but merely of a principle, a question of principle. The death instinct is pure silence, pure transcendence, not givable and not given in experience. This very point IS remarkable: It IS because death, according

144“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE LEONARDIto Freud, has neither a model nor an experience, that he makes of it a transcendent principle."! So that the psychoanalysts who refused the death instinct did so for the same reasons as those who accepted it: some said that there was no death instinct since there was no model or experience in the unconscious; others, that there was a death instinct precisely because there was no model or experience. We say, to the contrary, that there is no death instinct because there is both the model and the

experience of death in the unconscious. Death then is a part of the desiring-machine, a part that must itself be judged, evaluated in the functioning of the machine and the system of its energetic conversions, and not as an abstract principle. If Freud needs death as a principle, this is by virtue of the requirements of the dualism that maintains a qualitative opposition between the drives (you will not escape the conflict): once the dualism of the sexual drives and the ego drives has only a topological scope, the qualitative or dynamic dualism passes between Eros and Thanatos. But the same enterprise is continued and reinforced-eliminating the machinic element of desire, the desiring-machines. It is a matter of eliminating the libido, insofar as it implies the possibility of energetic conversions in the machine (Libido-Nurnen-Voluptas). It is a matter of imposing the idea of an energetic duality rendering the machinic transformations impossible, with everything obliged to pass by way of an indifferent neutral energy, that energy emanating from Oedipus and capable of being added to either of the two irreducible forms neutralizing, mortifying life.* The purpose of the topological and dynamic dualities is to thrust aside the point of view of functional multiplicity that alone is economic. (Szondi situates the problem clearly: why two kinds of drives qualified as molar, functioning mysteriously, which is to say Oedipally, rather than n genes of drives-eight molecular genes, for example-functioning machinically") If one looks in this direction for the ultimate reason why Freud erects a transcendent death instinct as a principle, the reason will be found in Freud's practice itself. For if the principle has nothing to do with the facts, it has a lot to do with the psychoanalyst's conception of psychoanalytic practice, a conception the psychoanalyst wishes to impose. Freud made the most profound discovery of the abstract subjective essence of desire-Libido. But since he re-alienated this essence, reinvesting it in a subjective system of representation of the ego, and since he receded this essence on the residual territoriality of Oedipus and under the despotic signifier of castration, he could no longer conceive the essence of life except in a form turned back against itself, in the form of death itself. And this neutralization, this turning against life, is also the last way in which a depressive

and exhausted libido can go on surviving, and dream that it is surviving: "The ascetic ideal is an artifice for the preservation of life ... even when he wounds himself, this master of destruction , of self-destructing- the very wound itself compels him to live. . . ."32 It is Oedipus, the marshy earth, that gives off a powerful odor of decay and death; and it is castration, the pious ascetic wound, the signifier, that makes of this death a conservatory for the Oedipal life . Desire is in itself not a desire to love, but a force to love, a virtue that gives and produces, that engineers. (For how could what is in life still desire life? Who would want to call that a desire?) But desire must turn back against itself in the name of a horrible Ananke, the Ananke of the weak and the depressed, the contagious neurotic Ananke; desire must produce its shadow or its monkey, and find a strange artificial force for vegetating in the void, at the heart of its own Jack. For better days to come? It must-but who talks in this way? What abjectness-become a desire to be loved, and worse, a sniveling desire to have been loved, a desire that is reborn of its

own frustration: no, daddy-mommy didn't love me enough. Sick desire stretches out on the couch, an artificial swamp, a little earth, a little mother. "Look at you, stumbling and staggering with no use in your legs .... And it's nothing but your wanting to be loved which does it. A maudlin crying to be loved, which makes your knees go all ricky."33 Just as there are two stomachs for the ruminant, there must also exist two abortions, two castrations for sick desire: once in the family, in the familial scene, with the knitting mother; another time in an asepticized clinic, in the psychoanalytic scene, with specialist artists who know how to handle the death instinct and "bring off" castration, "bring off" frustration.

Is this really the right way to bring on better days? And aren't all the destructions performed by schizoanalysis worth more than this psychoanalytic conservatory, aren't they more a part of an affirmative task? "Lie down, then, on the soft couch which the

analyst provides and try to think up something different ... if you realize that he is not a god but a human being like yourself, with worries, defects, ambitions, frailties, that he is not the repository of an all-encompassing wisdom [=code] but a wanderer, along the [deterritorialized] path, perhaps you will cease pouring it out like a sewer, however melodious it may sound to your ears, and rise up on your own two legs and sing with your own God-given voice [Numen]. To confess, to whine, to complain, to commiserate, always demands a toll. To sing it doesn't cost you a penny. Not only does it cost nothing-you actually enrich others (instead of infecting them) .... The phantasmal world is the world which

has not been fully conquered over. It is the world of the past, never of the future. To move forward clinging to the past is like dragging a ball and chain.... We are all guilty of crime, the great crime of not living life to the full.' You weren't born Oedipus, you caused it to grow in yourself ; and you aim to get out of it through fantasy, through castration, but this in turn you have caused to grow in Oedipus-namely, in yourself: the horrible

circle. Shit on your whole mortifying, imaginary, and symbolic theater. What does schizoanalysis ask? Nothing more than a bit of a relation to the outside, a little real reality. And we claim the right to a radical laxity, a radical

incompetence- the right to enter the analyst's office and say it smells bad there. It reeks of the great death and the little ego. Freud himself indeed spoke of the link between his "discovery" of the death instinct and World War I, which remains the model of capitalist war. More generally, the death instinct celebrates the wedding of psychoanalysis and capitalism; their engagement had been full of hesitation . What we have tried to show apropos

of capitalism is how it inherited much from a transcendent death-carrying agency, the despotic signifier, but also how it brought about this agency's effusion in the full immanence of its own system: the full body, having become that of capital-money, suppresses the distinction between production and antiproduction; everywhere it mixes

antiproduction with the productive forces in the immanent reproduction of its own always widened limits (the axiomatic). The death enterprise is one of the principal and specific forms of the absorption of surplus value in capitalism. It is this itinerary that psychoanalysis rediscovers and retraces with the death instinct: the death instinct is now only pure silence in its transcendent distinction from life, but it effuses all the more, throughout

all the immanent combinations it forms with this same life. Absorbed, diffuse, immanent death is the condition formed by the signifier in capitalism, the empty locus that is everywhere displaced in order to block the schizophrenic escapes and place restraints on the flights . The only modern myth is the myth of zombies-mortified schizos, good for work, brought back to reason. In this sense the primitive and the barbarian, with their ways of coding death, are children in comparison to modern man and his axiomatic (so many unemployed are needed, so many deaths, the Algerian War doesn't kill more people than weekend automobile accidents. planned death in Bengal, etc.). Modern man "raves to a far greater extent. His delirium is a

145“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE LEONARDIswitchboard with thirteen telephones. He gives his orders to the world. He doesn't care for the ladies. He is brave, too. He is decorated like crazy. In man's game of chance the death instinct, the

silent instinct is decidedly well placed, perhaps next to egoism. It takes the place of zero in roulette. The house always wins. So too does death . The law of large numbers works for death."35 It is now or never that we must take up a problem we had left hanging. Once it is said that capitalism works on the basis of decoded flows as such, how is it that it is infinitely further removed from desiring-production than were the primitive or even the barbarian systems, which nonetheless code and overcode the flows? Once it is said that desiring-production is itself a decoded and deterritorialized production, how do we explain that capitalism, with its axiomatic, its statistics, performs an infinitely vaster repression of this production than do the preceding regimes, which nonetheless did not lack the necessary repressive means? We have seen that the molar statistical aggregates of social production were in a variable relationship of affinity with the molecular formations of desiring-production. What must be explained is that the capitalist aggregate is the least affinal, at the very moment it decodes and deterritorializes with all its might. The answer is the death instinct, if we call instinct in general the conditions of life that are historically and socially determined by the relations of production

and antiproduction in a system. We know that molar social production and molecular desiring-production must be evaluated both from the viewpoint of their identity in nature and from the viewpoint of their difference in regime. But it could be that these two aspects, nature and regime, are in a sense potential and are actualized only in inverse proportion. Which means that where the regimes are the closest, the identity in nature is on the contrary at its minimum; and where the identity in nature appears to be at its maximum, the regimes differ to the highest degree. If we examine the primitive or the barbarian constellations, we see that the subjective essence of desire as production is referred to large objectities, to the territorial or the despotic body, which act as natural or divine preconditions that thus ensure the coding or the overcoding of the flows of desire by introducing them into systems of representation that are themselves objective. Hence it can be said that the identity in nature between the two productions is completely hidden there: as much by the difference between the objective socius and the subjective full body of desiring-production, as by the difference between the qualified codes and overcodings of social production and the chains of decoding or of deterritorialization belonging to desiring production, and by the entire repressive apparatus represented in the savage prohibitions, the barbarian law, and the rights of anti-production.

And yet the difference in regime, far from being accentuated and deepened, is on the contrary reduced to a minimum, because desiring production as an absolute limit remains an exterior limit, or else stays unoccupied as an internalized and displaced limit , with the result that the machines of desire operate on this side of their limit within the framework of the socius and its codes. That is why the primitive codes and even the despotic overcodings testify to a polyvocity that functionally draws them nearer

to a chain of decoding of desire: the parts of the desiring-machine function in the very workings of the social machine; the flows of desire enter and exit through the codes that continue, however, to inform the model and experience of death that are elaborated in the unity of the socio-desiring-apparatus. And it is even less a question of the death instinct to the extent that the model and the experience are better coded in a circuit that never stops grafting the desiring-machines onto the social machine and implanting the social machine in the desiring-machines. Death comes all the more from without as it is coded from within. This is especially true of the system of cruelty, where death is inscribed in the primitive mechanism of surplus value as well as in the movement of the finite blocks of debt. But even in the system of despotic terror, where debt becomes infinite and where death experiences an elevation that tends to make of it a latent instinct, there nonetheless subsists a model in the overcoding law, and an experience for the overcoded subjects, at the same time as anti-production remains separate as the share owing to the overlord. Things are very different in capitalism. Precisely

because the flows of capital are decoded and deterritorialized flows; precisely because the subjective essence of production is revealed in capitalism; precisely because the limit becomes internal to capitalism , which continually

reproduces it, and also continually occupies it as an internalized and displaced limit; precisely for these reasons , the identity in nature must appear for itself between social production and desiring-production. But in its turn, this identity in nature, far from favoring an affinity in regime between the two modes of production, increases the difference in regime in a catastrophic fashion, and assembles an apparatus of repression the mere idea of which neither savagery nor barbarism could provide us. This is because, on the basis of a general collapse of the large objectities, the decoded and de territorialized flows of capitalism are not recaptured or co-opted, but directly apprehended in a codeless axiomatic that consigns them to the universe of subjective representation. Now this universe has as its function the splitting of the subjective essence (the identity in nature) into two functions, that of abstract labor alienated in private property that reproduces the ever wider interior limits, and that of abstract desire alienated in the privatized family that displaces the ever narrower internalized limits. The double alienation-s-

labordesire- is constantly increasing and deepening the difference in regime at the heart of the identity in nature. At the same time that death is decoded, it loses its relationship with a model and an experience, and becomes an instinct; that is, it effuses in the immanent system where each act of production is inextricably linked to the process of anti production as capital. There where the codes are undone, the death instinct lays hold of the repressive apparatus and begins to direct the circulation of the libido. A mortuary axiomatic. One might then believe in liberated desires, but ones that, like cadavers, feed on images. Death is not

desired, but what is desired is dead, already dead: images. Everything labors in death, everything wishes for death . In truth, capitalism has nothing to co-opt; or rather, its powers of co-option coexist more often than not with what is to be co-opted, and even anticipate it. (How many revolutionary groups as such are already in place for a co-option that will be carried out only in the future, and form an apparatus for the absorption

of a surplus value not even produced yet-which gives them precisely an apparent revolutionary position.) In a world such as this , there is no living desire that could not of itself cause the system to explode, or that would not make the system dissolve at one end where everything would end up following behind and being swallowed up-a question of regime.

AT: DEATH (SHORT)

146“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE LEONARDI

Extend the 2AC on Bell, specifically C and D, the “no impact” and the Seem evidence from “fascism.” Death is a fantasy – our biology means we cannot truly “die” or cease to be, rather we enter a new form of becoming: becoming earth. Becoming-nitrogen. Even if we are all wiped from the face of the earth in a hailstorm of nuclear bombs the process of life goes on even at the micro level. There is no unique warrant for why the biological construct of human deserves a place higher than the construct of atoms. This desire to be secure from death is the most personal level of microfascism that negates our ability to live life to its fullest and breeds ressentiment.Deleuze and Guattari 72 [AO, 330-39]

But it seems that things are becoming very obscure, for what is this distinction between the experience of death and the model of death? Here again , is it a death desire?

A being-far-death? Or rather an investment of death, even if speculative? None of the above. The experience of death is the most common of occurrences in the unconscious, precisely because it occurs in life and for life, in every passage or becoming, in every

intensity as passage or becoming. It is in the very nature of every intensity to invest within itself the zero intensity starting from which it is produced, in one moment, as that which grows or diminishes according to an infinity of degrees (as Klossowski noted, "an afflux is necessary merely to signify the absence of intensity"). We have attempted to show in this respect how the relations of attraction and repulsion produced such states, sensations, and emotions, which imply a new energetic conversion and form the third kind of synthesis, the synthesis of conjunction. One might say that the unconscious as a real subject has scattered an apparent residual and nomadic subject around the entire compass of its cycle, a subject that passes by way of all the becomings corresponding to the included disjunctions: the last part of the desiring-machine, the adjacent part. These intense becomings and feelings, these intensive emotions, feed deliriums and hallucinations. But in themselves, these intensive emotions are closest to the matter whose zero degree they invest in itself.

They control the unconscious experience of death, insofar as death is what is felt in every feeling , what never ceases and never finishes happening in every becoming-in the becoming-another-sex, the becoming-god, the becoming-a-race, etc., forming zones of intensity on the body without organs. Every intensity controls within its own life the experience of death, and

envelops it. And it is doubtless the case that every intensity is extinguished at the end, that every becoming itself becomes a becoming-death! Death, then, does actually happen . Maurice Blanchot distinguishes this twofold nature dearly, these two

irreducible aspects of death; the one, according to which the apparent subject never ceases to live and travel as a One·-"one never stops and never has done with dying"; and the other, according to which this same subject, fixed as I, actually dies-which is to say it finally ceases to die since it ends up dying, in the reality of a last instant that fixes it in this way as an I, all the while undoing the intensity, carrying it back to the zero that envelops it.From one aspect to the other, there is not at all a personal deepening, but something quite different: there is a return from the experience of death to the model of death, in the cycle of the desiring-machines. The cycle is closed. For a new departure, since this I is another? The experience of death must have given us exactly enough broadened experience, in order to live and know that the desiring-machines do not die. And that the subject as an adjacent part is always a "one" who conducts the experience, not an I who receives the model. For the model itself is not the I either, but the body without organs. And I does not rejoin the model without the model

starting out again in the direction of another experience. Always going from the model to the experience, and starting out again, returning from the model to the experience, is what schizophrenizing death amounts to, the exercise of the desiring-machines (which is their very secret, well understood by the terrifying authors). The machines tell us this, and make us live it, feel it, deeper than delirium and further than hallucination: yes, the return to repulsion will condition other attractions, other functionings, the setting in motion of other working parts on

the body without organs, the putting to work of other adjacent parts on the periphery that have as much a right to say One as we ourselves do. " Let him die in his leaping through unheard-of and unnamable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin on the horizons where the other collapsed! " 29 The Eternal Return as experience, and as the deterritorialized circuit of all the cycles of desire. How odd the psychoanalytic venture is. Psychoanalysis ought to be a song of life, or else be worth nothing at all. It ought, practically, to teach us to sing life. And see how the most defeated, sad .song of death emanates from it: eiapopeia. From the start, and because of his stubborn dualism of the drives, Freud never stopped trying to limit the discovery of a subjective or vital essence of desire as libido. But when the dualism passed into a death instinct against Eros, this was no longer a simple limitation, it was a liquidation of the libido. Reich did not go wrong here, and was perhaps the only one to maintain that the product of analysis should be a free and joyous person, a carrier of the life flows, capable of carrying them all the way into the desert and decoding them-even if this idea necessarily took on the appearance of a crazy idea, given what had become of analysis. He demonstrated that Freud, no less than lung and Adler, had repudiated the sexual position: the fixing of the death instinct in fact deprives sexuality of its generative role on at least one essential point, which is the genesis of anxiety, since this genesis becomes the autonomous cause of sexual repression instead of its result; it follows that sexuality as desire no longer animates a social critique of civilization, but that civilization on the contrary finds itself

sanctified as the sale agency capable of opposing the death desire. And how. does. it do this? By in principle turning death against death, by making this turned-back death (la mort ret aurneev into a force of desire by putting it in the service of a pseudo life through an entire culture of guilt feeling. There is no need to tell all over how psychoanalysis culminates in a theory of culture that takes up again the age-old task of the ascetic ideal Nirvana, the cultural extract, judging life, belittling life, measuring life against death, and only retaining from life what the death of death wants very much to leave us with - a sublime resignation . As Reich says, when psychoanalysis began to speak of Eros, the whole world breathed a sigh of relief': one knew what this meant, and that

everything was going to unfold within a mortified life , since Thanatos was now the partner of Eros, for worse but also for better. Psychoanalysis becomes the training ground of a new kind of priest, the director of bad conscience: bad conscience has made us sick, but that is what will cure us! Freud did not hide what was really at issue with the introduction of the death instinct: it is not a question of any fact whatever, but merely of a principle, a question of principle. The death instinct is pure silence, pure transcendence, not givable and not given in experience. This very point IS remarkable: It IS because death, according

147“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE LEONARDIto Freud, has neither a model nor an experience, that he makes of it a transcendent principle."! So that the psychoanalysts who refused the death instinct did so for the same reasons as those who accepted it: some said that there was no death instinct since there was no model or experience in the unconscious; others, that there was a death instinct precisely because there was no model or experience. We say, to the contrary, that there is no death instinct because there is both the model and the

experience of death in the unconscious. Death then is a part of the desiring-machine, a part that must itself be judged, evaluated in the functioning of the machine and the system of its energetic conversions, and not as an abstract principle. If Freud needs death as a principle, this is by virtue of the requirements of the dualism that maintains a qualitative opposition between the drives (you will not escape the conflict): once the dualism of the sexual drives and the ego drives has only a topological scope, the qualitative or dynamic dualism passes between Eros and Thanatos. But the same enterprise is continued and reinforced-eliminating the machinic element of desire, the desiring-machines. It is a matter of eliminating the libido, insofar as it implies the possibility of energetic conversions in the machine (Libido-Nurnen-Voluptas). It is a matter of imposing the idea of an energetic duality rendering the machinic transformations impossible, with everything obliged to pass by way of an indifferent neutral energy, that energy emanating from Oedipus and capable of being added to either of the two irreducible forms neutralizing, mortifying life.* The purpose of the topological and dynamic dualities is to thrust aside the point of view of functional multiplicity that alone is economic. (Szondi situates the problem clearly: why two kinds of drives qualified as molar, functioning mysteriously, which is to say Oedipally, rather than n genes of drives-eight molecular genes, for example-functioning machinically") If one looks in this direction for the ultimate reason why Freud erects a transcendent death instinct as a principle, the reason will be found in Freud's practice itself. For if the principle has nothing to do with the facts, it has a lot to do with the psychoanalyst's conception of psychoanalytic practice, a conception the psychoanalyst wishes to impose. Freud made the most profound discovery of the abstract subjective essence of desire-Libido. But since he re-alienated this essence, reinvesting it in a subjective system of representation of the ego, and since he receded this essence on the residual territoriality of Oedipus and under the despotic signifier of castration, he could no longer conceive the essence of life except in a form turned back against itself, in the form of death itself. And this neutralization, this turning against life, is also the last way in which a depressive

and exhausted libido can go on surviving, and dream that it is surviving: "The ascetic ideal is an artifice for the preservation of life ... even when he wounds himself, this master of destruction , of self-destructing- the very wound itself compels him to live. . . ."32 It is Oedipus, the marshy earth, that gives off a powerful odor of decay and death; and it is castration, the pious ascetic wound, the signifier, that makes of this death a conservatory for the Oedipal life . Desire is in itself not a desire to love, but a force to love, a virtue that gives and produces, that engineers. (For how could what is in life still desire life? Who would want to call that a desire?) But desire must turn back against itself in the name of a horrible Ananke, the Ananke of the weak and the depressed, the contagious neurotic Ananke; desire must produce its shadow or its monkey, and find a strange artificial force for vegetating in the void, at the heart of its own Jack. For better days to come? It must-but who talks in this way? What abjectness-become a desire to be loved, and worse, a sniveling desire to have been loved, a desire that is reborn of its

own frustration: no, daddy-mommy didn't love me enough. Sick desire stretches out on the couch, an artificial swamp, a little earth, a little mother. "Look at you, stumbling and staggering with no use in your legs .... And it's nothing but your wanting to be loved which does it. A maudlin crying to be loved, which makes your knees go all ricky."33 Just as there are two stomachs for the ruminant, there must also exist two abortions, two castrations for sick desire: once in the family, in the familial scene, with the knitting mother; another time in an asepticized clinic, in the psychoanalytic scene, with specialist artists who know how to handle the death instinct and "bring off" castration, "bring off" frustration.

2AR: DEATH OVERVIEW

They have conceded the long Deleuze and Guattari evidence.4 Implications1. There is no impact to death. We are nothing but carbon, hydrogen, and sulfur and the act of death as described by the 1AC is only a re-articulation of this matter. The end of the beating heart is only the beginning of a new form of becoming - becoming death, becoming earth. Even nuclear annihilation continues the life cycle by birthing billions of new radiation cells.

2. Questions of only body counts allow the continuation of the worst things in the world so long as people don’t die. We never stopped slavery; just exported it to sweatshops, never ended fascism just called it patriotism, and never stopped genocide, just labeled it peace actions. The affirmative impact framework justifies the worst forms of bare life by repressing our desires in the name of life as solely continuing to breath.

3. There is no honor or beauty in human life - death is forgotten fast as another worker takes your place. we become mortified zombies good for work. Everything wishes for death because there is nothing to live for but another routine day at the factory. Capitalism produces carbon copies of life used to power the mills.

4. We castrate our lives in the name of death, that’s also Seem 83 and Bell, the cannibalism warrant - Death grabs hold of the libido and strangles joy because it is safer to sit on our couch with duct tape and bottled water watching fox news. This framing of life causes the Oedipal desire for fascism to creep into every facet of existence - the impact is a sickness that ushers in a depressive tone of existence

148“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

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AT: VTL SUBJECTIVE

Even if value to life is subjective, their framing of life leaves individuals powerless to decide their own values. Only we allow for the possibility of viewing life as an experience with both positive and negative values. We empower the individual to control their own relationship towards life, no longer strangled by the demand to surviveBallantyne 2007 (Andrew, Tectonic Cultures Research Group at Newcastle University , "Deleuze and Guattari for Architects" 57-58

The blocs of experience and sensation that shape a person’s developmen t , are turned into an image of building-blocks that construct

the novelist’s characters, and they develop with reference to rhythms and amplitudes . The novelist simplifies of course, but one of the reasons we respond to James’s characters is that we feel as though we know them. We have witnessed various formative experiences along with them, so to some extent we vicariously share their intuitions. It is a lesson that the film industry has brilliantly learnt, so that we can emote at the same time as the characters on the screen. Part of the skill in screen acting is being able to

look blank enough for the audience to project its emotions on to the actor, and part of the editor’s skill is knowing how long the audience needs. The mainstream film Thelma and Louise (1991) is a story about deterritorialization, where the characters are taken out of their common-sense routines, have various life-enhancing and traumatic experiences, which we witness with them, and they end by embracing death by driving off a cliff into the Grand Canyon . The canyon is the culmination of a series of breathtaking landscapes,

including Monument Valley, where the majesty of the earth in desert conditions is evoked by the combination of images and music. After the desert has worked on the women, it seems preferable to them to choose death – absolute deterritorialization – to going back home to resume the old routines. There is a moment when Thelma’s old life territorializes around the sound of her husband’s voice on the telephone , and we feel it trying to take hold of her again; but she resists it and breaks off the conversation. The story could have been told as a descent into madness and despair, but we are taken through the characters’ experiences in a way that allows us to feel, with them, that suicide is the optimistic option. So the film ends with a freeze-frame on their car, after it has driven off the cliff, but before it has started to fall. The montage of their happiest moments together, and the up-beat music, leave one with the impression that deterritorialization is the answer. In this case it is the sound of the husband’s voice that is the territorializing tune, that structures Thelma’s mental space into the frame of the domestic routines that used to shape her life. The clutter of terrible furniture in the house, and the husband’s assumption that he has the right to issue orders to her, contrasts with her freedom and the profundity of emotions she has experienced on the road as her horizons have broadened. Establishing territory is architecture’s great and normal role. The monument is a song. A building usually establishes a practical domain, and often marks out the extent of a proprietor’s property, but aside from establishing ownership, the territory it marks out is a zone where a certain ethos applies: a work place, a drill ground, a dance hall, a quiet hotel lounge, a convivial bar, a cocooned bedroom . . . almost little ‘hurdy-gurdy places’. The architecture helps us to do the things that need to be done, and reinscribes the established order. The clutter stops one seeing beyond it. This is the architecture of Thelma before her escape. Or the architecture of Theseus, the heroic princely embodiment of the ordinary jock, who shows physical courage and ingenuity, who has spent time in the gym and has put on the muscle that will defeat a superior being. He never understands the labyrinth or the Minotaur, but he outwits them by a ruse – the thread supplied by Ariadne in her ‘cheerleader’ days. Establishing territories in this way is a necessary developmental phase, and it is the role that buildings normally have. ‘Art begins not with flesh, but with the house. That is why architecture is the first of the arts’

(Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, 186). Having established a house, one can take steps outside it – towards an architecture where the territories tremble, where the ethoses get mixed up, but it seems to be more like work on oneself than on buildings – each of the higher men leaves his domain – the structures collapse. Dionysus knows no other architecture than that of routes and trajectories. He has no territory because he is everywhere on the earth.

AT: VTL INEVITABLE

Despite what you may think, there are lives out there that are not worth living. Sometimes, existence is so terrifyingly horrible that no amount of good can ever make up for the bad.Benatar 06 (David, Associate Professor of Philosophy at University of Cape Town, Better Never to Have Been, pg 63-64)

There is a further (non-distributional) consideration that can affect an assessment of a life's quality. Arguably, once a life reaches a certain threshold of badness (considering both the amount and the distribution of its badness), no quantity of good can outweigh it, because no amount of good could be worth that badness. It is just this assessment that Donald ('Dax') Cowart made of his own life - or at least of that part of his

life following a gas explosion that burnt two-thirds of his body. He refused extremely painful, life-saving treatment, but the doctors

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ignored his wishes and treated him nonetheless. His life was saved, he achieved considerable success, and he reattained a satisfactory quality of life. Yet, he continued to maintain that these post-burn goods were not worth the costs the enduring the treatments to which he was subjected. No matter how much good followed his recovery, this could not outweigh, at least in his own assessment, the bad of the burns and treatment that he experienced. The point may be expressed more generally. Compare two lives - those of X and Y - and consider, for

simplicity's sake, only the amount of good and bad (and not also the distributional considerations). X's life has (relatively) modest quantities of good and bad - perhaps fifteen kilo-units of positive value and five kilo-units of negative value. Y's life, by contrast, has unbearable quantities of bad (say, fifty kilo-units of negative value). Y's life also has much more good ( seventy kilo-units of positive value ) than does X's. Nevertheless, X's life might reasonably be judged less bad , even if Y's has greater net value, judged in strictly quantitative terms - ten kilo-units versus twenty kilo-units of positive value. This shows further why the assignment of values in Figure 2.4 (in the previous chapter) must, as I argued there, be wrong.

AT: <3 LIFE/VIDEO GAMES + DEBATE + PORN + BIEBS = VTL

Humanity is psychologically conditioned to lie to itself. The intuitive belief in life’s value is worthless. Benatar 06 (David, Associate Professor of Philosophy at University of Cape Town, Better Never to Have Been, pg 99-101)

Those cases in which the offspring turn out to regret their existence are exceedingly tragic, but where parents cannot reasonably foresee this, we cannot say, the argument would suggest, that they do wrong to follow their important interests in having children. Things would be quite different, according to this argument, if the majority or even a sizeable minority of people regretted coming into existence. Under such circumstances the above justification for having children certainly would be doomed. However, given that most people do not regret their having come into existence, does the argument work? In fact, the argument is problematic (and not only for the reasons that Seana Shiffrin raises and which I mentioned in Chapter 2). Its form has been widely criticized in other contexts, because of its inability to rule out those harmful interferences in people's lives (such as

indoctrination) that effect a subsequent endorsement of the interference. Coming to endorse the views one is indoctrinated to hold is one form of adaptive preference - where an interference comes to be endorsed. However, there are other kinds of adaptive preference of which we are

also suspicious. Desired goods that prove unattainable can cease to be desired ('sour grapes'). The reverse is also true. It is not uncommon for people to find themselves in unfortunate circumstances (Being forced to feed on lemons) and adapt their preferences to suit their predicament ('sweet lemons'). If coming into existence is as great a harm as I suggested, and if that is a heavy psychological burden to bear, then it is quite possible that we could be engaged in a mass self-deception about how wonderful things are for us. If that is so, then it might not matter, contrary to what is claimed by the procreative argument just sketched, that most people do not regret their having come into existence. Armed with a strong argument for the harmfulness of slavery, we would not take the slaves' endorsement of their enslavement as a justification for their enslavement, particularly if we could point to some rationally questionable psychological phenomenon that explained the slaves' contentment. If that is so, and if coming into existence is as great a harm as I have argued it is, then we should not take the widespread contentment with having come into existence as a justification for having children.

AT: INTRINSIC VTL/LIFE IS GOOD

Our argument may seem counterintuitive, but you still have to hold the negative up to the same standard of argumentation you would with any other negative position. Impassioned stories of the delight they’ve found in life or pleas to “common sense” and intrinsic value aren’t arguments – they’re excuses for debate. Make the aff logically justify their stance that existence is good.Benatar 06 (David, Associate Professor of Philosophy at University of Cape Town, Better Never to Have Been, pg 202 – 206)

The view that coming into existence is always a harm runs counter to most people’s intuitions. They think that this view simply cannot be right. Its implications, discussed in Chapters 4 to 6, do not fare any better in the court of common intuitions. The idea that people should not have babies, that there is a presumption in favour of abortion (at least in the earlier stages of gestation), and that it would be best if there were no more conscious life on the planet is likely to be dismissed as

ridiculous. Indeed, some people are likely to find these views deeply offensive. A number of philosophers have rejected other views because they imply that it would be better not to bring new people into existence. We already saw, in the previous chapter, that a number of thinkers reject the maximin principle because it implies that there should be no more people. There are other examples, however. Peter

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PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE LEONARDISinger rejects a ‘moral ledger’ view of utilitarianism, whereby the creation of an unsatisfied preference is a kind of ‘debit’ that is cancelled only when that preference is satisfied. He says that his view must be rejected because it entails that it would be wrong ‘to bring into existence a child who will on the whole be very happy, and will be able to satisfy nearly all her preferences, but will still have some preferences unsatisfied’.² Nils Holtug rejects frustrationism³—the view that while the frustration of preferences has negative value, the satisfaction of preferences simply avoids negative value and contributes nothing positive. Frustrationism implies that we harm people by bringing them into existence if they will have frustrated desires (which everybody has). Thus he dismisses frustrationism as ‘implausible, indeed deeply counter-intuitive’.⁴ Of the implication that it is ‘wrong to have a child whose life is much better

than the life of anyone we know’, he says: ‘Surely, this cannot be right.’⁵ I now turn to the question whether it matters that my conclusions are so counter-intuitive. Are my arguments instances of reason gone mad? Should my conclusions be dismissed on account of being so eccentric? Although I understand what motivates these questions, my answer to each of them is an emphatic ‘no’. At the outset, it is noteworthy that a view’s counter-intuitiveness cannot by itself constitute a decisive consideration against it. This is because intuitions are often profoundly unreliable—a product of mere prejudice. Views that are taken to be deeply counter-intuitive in one place and time are often taken to be obviously true in another. The view that slavery is wrong, or the view that there is nothing wrong with ‘miscegenation’, were once thought to be highly implausible and counter-intuitive. They are now taken, at least in many parts of the world, to be self-evident. It is not enough, therefore, to find a view or its implications counter-intuitive, or even offensive. One has to examine the

arguments for the disliked conclusion. Most of those who have rejected the view that it is wrong to create more people have done so without assessing the argument for that conclusion. They have simply assumed that this view must be false. One reason against making this assumption is that the conclusion follows from views that are not only accepted by most people but are also quite reasonable. As I explained

in Chapter 2, the asymmetry of pleasure and pain constitutes the best explanation of a number of important moral judgements about creating new people. All my argument does is uncover that asymmetry and to show where it leads. It might be suggested, however, that my argument should be understood as a reductio ad absurdum of the commitment to asymmetry. In other words, it might be said that accepting my conclusion is more counter-intuitive than rejecting asymmetry. Thus, if one is faced with the choice between accepting my conclusion and rejecting asymmetry, the latter is preferable. There are a number of problems with this line of argument. First, we should remember just what it is to which we are committed if we reject asymmetry. Of course, there are various ways of rejecting asymmetry, but the least implausible way would be by denying that absent pleasures are ‘not bad’ and claiming instead that they are ‘bad’. This would commit us to saying that we do have a (strong?) moral reason and thus a presumptive duty, based on the interests of future possible happy people, to create those people. It would also commit us to saying that we can create a child for that child’s sake and that we should regret, for the sake of those happy people whom we could have created but did not create, that we did not create them. Finally, it would commit us not only to regretting that parts of the earth and all the rest of the universe are uninhabited, but also to regretting this out of concern for those who could otherwise have come into existence in these places. Matters become still worse if we attempt to abandon asymmetry in another way—by claiming that absent pains in Scenario B are merely ‘not bad’. That would commit us to saying that we have no moral reason, grounded in the interests of a possible future suffering person, to avoid creating that person. We could no longer regret, based on the interests of a suffering child, that we created that child. Nor could we regret, for the sake of miserable people suffering in some part of the world, that they were ever created. Those who treat my argument as a reductio of asymmetry may find it easier to say that they are prepared to abandon asymmetry than actually to embrace the implications of doing so. It certainly will not suffice to say that it is better to give up asymmetry and then to proceed, in their ethical theorizing and in their practice, as though asymmetry still held. At the very least, then, my argument should force them to wrestle with the full implications of rejecting asymmetry, which extend well beyond those that I have outlined. I doubt very much that many of those who say that they would rather give up asymmetry really would abandon it. A second problem with treating my argument as a reductio of asymmetry is that although my

conclusions may be counterintuitive, the dominant intuitions in this matter seem thoroughly untrustworthy. This is so for two reasons. First, why should we think that it is acceptable to cause great harm to somebody—which the arguments in Chapter 3 show we do whenever we create a child—when we could avoid doing so without depriving that person of anything? In other words, how reliable can an intuition be if, even absent the interests of others, it allows the infliction of great harm that could have been avoided without any cost to the person who is harmed? Such an intuition would not be worthy of respect in any other context. Why should it be thought to have such force only in procreative contexts? Secondly, we have excellent reason for thinking that pro-natal intuitions are the product of (at least non-rational, but

possibly irrational) psychological forces. As I showed in Chapter 3, there are pervasive and powerful features of human psychology that lead people to think that their lives are better than they really are. Thus their judgements are unreliable. Moreover, there is a good evolutionary explanation for the deep-seated belief that people do not harm their children seriously by bringing them into existence. Those who do not have this belief are less likely to reproduce. Those with reproduction-enhancing beliefs are more likely to breed and pass on whatever attributes incline one to such beliefs. What is important to both of these reasons is that it is not merely my extreme claim—that coming into existence is a harm even when a life contains only an iota of suffering—that is counterintuitive. My more moderate claim—that there is sufficient bad in all actual lives to make coming into existence a harm, even if lives with only an iota of bad would not be harmful—is also counterintuitive. If only the extreme claim ran counter to common intuitions, then these intuitions would be (somewhat) less suspect. However, then it would have to be said that my extreme claim would be more palatable if all actual lives were largely devoid of bad. This is because the claim would be primarily of theoretical interest and would have little application for procreation, given that the interests of existent people could more plausibly be thought to outweigh the harm to new people. But it is not merely my extreme claim that runs counter to most people’s intuitions. Most

people think it is implausible that it is harmful and wrong to start lives filled with as much bad as all actual lives contain. Worse still, those who would treat my argument as a reductio of asymmetry should note that their argument could also be used by a species doomed to lives much worse than our own. Although we might see their lives as great harms, if they were subject to the kinds of optimistic psychological forces characteristic of humans they too would argue that it is counter-intuitive to claim that they were harmed by being brought into existence. That which would not be counter-intuitive from our perspective would be counterintuitive from theirs. Yet we can see, with the benefit of some distance from their lives, that little

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store should be placed on their intuitions about this matter. Something similar can be said about the common human intuition that creating (most) humans is not a harm.⁶

1AR: THE COSMOS

We are not just biology—in a very real way, everything is connected throughout all time and space—the plane of immanence is our true and physical reality, and their lines between life and death are meaningless and counterproductive—instead of fearing death, we affirm life Lanza 2010 (Robert Lanza is considered one of the leading scientists in the world. He is currently Chief Scientific Officer at Advanced Cell Technology, and a professor at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. "Who Are We? Experiments Suggest You're Not Who You Think" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-lanza/spirituality-who-are-we-e_b_551719.html)

We are more than we've been taught in biology class . Everyday life makes this obvious. Last weekend I set out on a walk. There was a roar of dirt bikes from the nearby sandpit, but as I went further into the forest the sound gradually disappeared. In a clearing I noticed sprays of tiny flowers (Houstonia caerulea) dotting the ground. I squatted down to examine them. They were about a quarter-of-an-inch in diameter with yellow centers and petals ranging in color from white to deep purple. I was wondering why these flowers had such bright coloring, when I saw a fuzzy little creature with a body the size of a BB darting in and out of the flowers. Its wings were awkwardly large and beating so fast I could hardly see their outline. This tiny world was as wondrous as Pandora in Avatar. It took my breath away. There we were, this fuzzy little creature and I, two living objects that had entered into each others' world. It flew off to the next flower, and I, for my part, stepped back careful not to destroy its habitat. I wondered if our little interaction was any different from

that of any other two objects in the Universe. Was this little insect just another collection of atoms -- proteins and molecules spinning like planets around the sun? It's true that the laws of chemistry can tackle the rudimentary biology of living systems, and as a medical doctor I can recite in detail the chemical foundations and cellular organization of animal cells: oxidation, biophysical metabolism, all the

carbohydrates, lipids and amino acid patterns. But there was more to this little bug than the sum of its biochemical functions. A full understanding of life can't be found only by looking at cells and molecules. Conversely, physical existence can't be divorced from the animal life and structures that coordinate sense perception and experience (even if these,

too, have a physical correlate in our consciousness). It seems likely that this creature was the center of its own sphere of physical reality just as I was the center of mine. We were connected not only by being alive at the same moment in Earth's 4.5 billion year history, but by something suggestive - a pattern that's a template for existence itself . The bug had little eyes and antenna, and possessed sensory cells that transmitted messages to its brain. Perhaps my existence in its universe was limited to some shadow off in the distance. I don't know. But as I stood up and left, I no doubt dispersed into the

haze of probability surrounding the creature's little world. Science has failed to recognize those properties of life that make it fundamental to our existence. This view of the world in which life and consciousness are bottom-line in understanding the larger universe -- biocentrism -- revolves around the way our consciousness relates to a physical process. It's a vast mystery that I've pursued my entire life with a lot of help along the way, standing on the shoulders of some of the most lauded minds of the modern age. I've also come to conclusions that would shock my predecessors, placing biology above the other sciences in an attempt to find the theory of everything that has evaded other

disciplines. We're taught since childhood that the universe can be fundamentally divided into two entities -- ourselves, and that which is outside of us. This seems logical. "Self" is commonly defined by what we can control. We can move our fingers but I can't

wiggle your toes. The dichotomy is based largely on manipulation, even if basic biology tells us we've no more control over most of the trillions of cells in our body than over a rock or a tree. Consider everything that you see around you right now -- this page, for example, or your hands and fingers. Language and custom say that it all lies outside us in the external world. Yet we can't see anything through the vault of bone that surrounds our brain. Everything you see and experience -- your body, the trees and sky -- are part of an active process occurring in your mind. You are this process, not just that tiny part you control with motor neurons. You're not an object -- you are your consciousness. You're a unified being, not just your wriggling arm or foot, but part of a larger equation that includes all the colors, sensations and objects you perceive. If you divorce one side of the equation from the other you cease to exist. Indeed, experiments confirm that particles only exist with real properties if they're observed. Until the mind sets the

scaffolding of things in place, they can't be thought of as having any real existence -- neither duration nor position in space. As the great physicist John Wheeler said, "No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon." That's why in real experiments, not just the properties of matter -- but space and time themselves -- depend on the observer. Your consciousness isn't just part of the equation − the equation is you.

1AR: UTIL BAD

Relying on strict utilitarian calculus justified suicide bombing, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and continued genocide in the name of fascist peace-making

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Farer 2008 (Tom,former President of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States, is Dean of the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver; "Un-Just War Against Terrorism and the Struggle to Appropriate Human Rights": Human Rights QUarterly, Volume 30, Number 2; MUSE)

American leaders who thought of themselves as thoroughly decent people, as exemplars of the values of the West, authorized the incineration of the inhabitants of those cities, and years afterwards continued to defend the decision, defended

it in the only way they could, on grounds that in doing so, they were saving American lives170 and carrying out the purposes

for which the long and terrible Second World War was fought. It is a pure consequentialist argument unless one takes the position that through their passive support for the government of Japan, all of the Japanese were in some sense guilty, a position that cannot be reconciled with the distinction between combatants and non-combatants that,

as Elshtain rightly argues, is central to just war thought. Palestinian suicide bombers and their defenders make exactly the same consequentialist argument: "We are illegally and unjustly occupied. We are penned into what amount to open-air

concentration camps run by the inmates but surrounded by guards. We tried passive resistance and were beaten down.171 We tried negotiation, but did not delay by one second the seizure of our land and the proliferation of armed colonies in our midst.172 We threw stones and were shot down and had our limbs broken.173 Thousands of us are imprisoned without due process of law;174 thousands have [End Page 401] been subjected to cruel and inhuman

interrogation.175 We have no army, no air force. We cannot attack combatants, so we must drive up the cost of occupation by attacking non-combatants." And they could cite as precedents the actions of pre-state Jewish military formations, primarily the Irgun which numbered among its leaders a future Prime Minister of Israel, Menachem Begin. The hawkish historian, Benny

Morris, writes of a dialectic of terrorism between Israelis and Arabs beginning in mid-1937: "Now for the first time, massive bombs were placed in crowded Arab centers, and dozens of people were indiscriminately murdered and maimed."176 In one exemplary case "an Irgun operative dressed as an Arab placed two large milk cans filled with TNT and shrapnel in the Arab market in downtown Haifa. The subsequent explosion killed twenty-one and wounded fifty-two."177 Referring to this period the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, favorably and repeatedly cited by Elshtain, wrote: "They think it is all right to murder anyone who can be

murdered—an innocent English Tommy or a harmless Arab in the market of Haifa."178 Defenders of human rights must in the end reject consequentialist arguments no matter who makes them. The right of the innocent to life is trumps. But those of us who in the name of human rights deny weak objects of alien domination the only means they may have to make their oppressors recalculate costs and benefits have a special obligation to

help them. It is in part because their recognition of that obligation is so selective that the neo-conservatives' claim to be champions of human rights seems meretricious. In the particular case of Palestine, they are not simply indifferent to the status quo of subordination and misery that is the Palestinians' lot; rather they are among its advocates.179 When as members of the Reagan administration they saw continued US support for Saddam Hussein even as he waged genocidal warfare against the Kurds, they did not resign. When the government of El Salvador massacred peasants they saw no evil.180 They have repeatedly proven that they are consequentialists; for them human [End Page 402] rights are not trumps, and that is a second critical difference between them and liberal advocates of human rights.

DEATH =/= EXIST – QUANTUM PHYSICS

Quantum physics proves death is not a non-event - your fear is sadly misplacedLanza 2009 (Robert Lanza is considered one of the leading scientists in the world. He is currently Chief Scientific Officer at Advanced Cell Technology, and a professor at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. "Does Death Exist? New Theory Says 'No'", http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-lanza/does-death-exist-new-theo_b_384515.html)

Many of us fear death. We believe in death because we have been told we will die. We associate ourselves with the body, and we know that bodies die. But a new scientific theory suggests that death is not the terminal event we think. One well-known aspect of quantum physics is that certain observations cannot be predicted absolutely. Instead, there is a range of possible

observations each with a different probability. One mainstream explanation, the "many-worlds" interpretation, states that each of these possible observations corresponds to a different universe (the 'multiverse'). A new scientific theory - called biocentrism - refines these

ideas. There are an infinite number of universes, and everything that could possibly happen occurs in some universe. Death does not exist in any real sense in these scenarios. All possible universes exist simultaneously, regardless of what happens in any of them. Although individual bodies are destined to self-destruct, the alive feeling - the 'Who am I?'- is just a 20-watt fountain of energy operating in the brain. But this energy doesn't go away at death. One of the surest axioms of science is that energy never dies; it can neither be created nor destroyed. But does this energy transcend from one world to the other?

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Life is infinite - don't fear the reaperLanza 2010 (Robert Lanza is considered one of the leading scientists in the world. He is currently Chief Scientific Officer at Advanced Cell Technology, and a professor at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. "Do You Only Live Once? Experiments Suggest Life Not One-Time Deal" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-lanza/do-you-only-live-once-exp_b_508440.html)

We think we die and rot into the ground, and thus must squeeze everything in before it's too late. If life -- yours,

mine -- is a just a one-time deal, then we're as likely to be screwed as pampered. But experiments suggest this view of the world may be wrong. The results of quantum physics confirm that observations can't be predicted absolutely. Instead, there's a range of possible observations each with a different probability. One mainstream explanation, the "many-worlds" interpretation, states

that there are an infinite number of universes (the "multiverse"). Everything that can possibly happen occurs in some universe. The old mechanical -- "we're just a bunch of atoms" −- view of life loses its grip in these scenarios. Biocentrism extends this idea, suggesting that life is a flowering and adventure that transcends our ordinary linear way of thinking. Although our individual bodies are destined to self-destruct, the "me'' feeling is just energy operating in the brain. But this energy doesn't go away at death. One of the surest principles of science is that energy never dies; it can neither be created nor destroyed. When we die, we do so not in the

random billiard ball matrix but in the inescapable life matrix. Life has a non-linear dimensionality −- it's like a perennial flower that returns to bloom in the multiverse.

DEATH =/= EXIST – LINEARITY

Linearity is a myth - time and space surround us all. Death does not happen because we will always exist in some ontological state in some alien form, either past present or future. There is no such thing as a finality to life, there is only a new formLanza 2009 (Robert Lanza is considered one of the leading scientists in the world. He is currently Chief Scientific Officer at Advanced Cell Technology, and a professor at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. "Does Death Exist? New Theory Says 'No'", http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-lanza/does-death-exist-new-theo_b_384515.html)

Consider an experiment that was recently published in the journal Science showing that scientists could retroactively change something that had happened in the past. Particles had to decide how to behave when they hit a beam splitter. Later on, the experimenter could turn a second switch on or off. It turns out that what the observer decided at that point, determined what the particle did in the past. Regardless of the choice you, the observer, make, it is you who will experience the outcomes that will result. The linkages between these various histories and universes transcend our ordinary classical ideas of space

and time. Think of the 20-watts of energy as simply holo-projecting either this or that result onto a screen. Whether you turn the second beam splitter on or off, it's still the same battery or agent responsible for the projection. According to Biocentrism, space and time are not the hard objects we think. Wave your hand through the air - if you take

everything away, what's left? Nothing. The same thing applies for time. You can't see anything through the bone that surrounds your brain. Everything you see and experience right now is a whirl of information occurring in your mind. Space and time are simply the tools for putting everything together. Death does not exist in a timeless, spaceless world. In the end, even Einstein admitted, "Now Besso" (an old friend) "has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us...know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." Immortality doesn't mean a perpetual existence in time without end, but rather resides outside of time altogether.

DEATH =/= EXIST – ENERGY

Life is simply a combination of the physical body and 20 watts of energy flowing through synapses. Our perception of death is merely the freeing of energy into the multiverse, continuing the infinite cycle of life and rebirth. Energy cannot be destroyed, only transformedLanza 2010 (Robert Lanza is considered one of the leading scientists in the world. He is currently Chief Scientific Officer at Advanced Cell Technology, and a professor at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. "Does Death Exist?: Life Is Forever, Says Theory" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-lanza/does-death-exist-life-is_b_410306.html)

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In the cartoon, Bugs Bunny swallows nitroglycerine and gunpowder, and springs back to life even when he gets flattened by a boulder. But it's not just Bugs. Experiments suggest that life can't be destroyed either. As discussed in Part I, the 'many-worlds' interpretation of quantum physics states that there are an infinite number of universes (the 'multiverse'). Everything that can possibly happen occurs in some universe. Death doesn't exist in any real sense in these scenarios since all of them exist simultaneously regardless of what happens in any of them. The 'Who am I?' feeling is just a 20-watt fountain of energy operating in the brain. But this energy doesn't go away at death. One of the surest axioms of science is that energy never dies; it can't be created or destroyed. Scientists think they can say where life begins and ends. We generally reject the multiple universes of Star Trek as fiction, but it turns out there is more than a morsel of

scientific truth in this popular genre. According to Biocentrism, space and time aren't the hard objects we think, but rather tools our mind uses to put everything together. When bodies die, they do so not in the random billiard-ball matrix but in the inescapable-life matrix. Consider all the days that have passed since the beginning of time. Now stack them like chairs, and seat yourself on the very top. Isn't it amazing that you just happen to be here now, perched seemingly by chance on the cutting edge of infinity? Science claims it's a big accident, a one-in-a-gazillion chance. But the mathematical possibility of being on top of infinity -- of your consciousness ending -- is zero. Imagine existence like a recording. Depending on where the needle is placed you hear a certain song. This is the present; the music, before and after is the past and future. Likewise, every moment endures always. All songs exist simultaneously, although we only experience them piece by piece.

DEATH =/= EXIST – NON-EXISTENCE

It is impossible to experience non-existence – there is nothing to fear and nothing to worry about. Even if your body dies, your consciousness will live on as free energyLanza 2010 (Robert Lanza is considered one of the leading scientists in the world. He is currently Chief Scientific Officer at Advanced Cell Technology, and a professor at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. "Does Death Exist?: Life Is Forever, Says Theory" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-lanza/does-death-exist-life-is_b_410306.html)

When you lose a loved one, you can't imagine a happy ending. But consider: you and I, indeed the entire human species could have been wiped out like the Neanderthals a hundred times over. Whether it's flipping the switch in the Science experiment or falling out a tree, it's the 20-watts of energy that will experience the result in the multiverse. But by definition, you can't experience nonexistence (you'll always seem to be alive, now, on top of time). After

Bugs gets blown up, there's a moment when you think he's dead. But the show always continues. Likewise, according to Biocentrism, consciousness can't be extinguished in a timeless, spaceless world. That's why you're here despite the preposterous odds against it. Bottom line: you may get flattened now and then, but life can't be stamped out. Last year, Dennis' son scored a touchdown at the football game. Dennis and the other parents went wild. Remember, the silly rabbit never dies.

AT: EMPATHY/ETHICS

Death should not preclude the ethical. Because the death of any individual is inevitable, it is more pertinent to ask how we should react to death than how we can prevent it. We believe it is better to accept the infinite cycle of life because it allows us to find comfort in our mortality, in our inability to affect the universe. Denying the infinity of life ensures sadness and depression, creating a grotesque form of nihilism which believes in the futility of life Lanza 2009 (Robert Lanza is considered one of the leading scientists in the world. He is currently Chief Scientific Officer at Advanced Cell Technology, and a professor at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. "Does Death Exist? New Theory Says 'No'", http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-lanza/does-death-exist-new-theo_b_384515.html)

This was clear with the death of my sister Christine. After viewing her body at the hospital, I went out to speak with family members. Christine's

husband - Ed - started to sob uncontrollably. For a few moments I felt like I was transcending the provincialism of time. I thought about the 20-watts of energy, and about experiments that show a single particle can pass through two holes at the same time. I could not dismiss the conclusion: Christine was both alive and dead, outside of time. Christine had had a hard life. She had finally found a man that she loved very much. My younger sister couldn't make it to her wedding because she had a card game that had been

155“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

PROTEST AFF: MASTER FILE LEONARDI

scheduled for several weeks. My mother also couldn't make the wedding due to an important engagement she had at the Elks Club. The wedding was one of the most important days in Christine's life. Since no one else from our side of the family showed, Christine asked me to walk her down the aisle to give her away. Soon after the wedding, Christine and Ed were driving to the dream house they had just bought when their car hit a patch of black ice. She was thrown from the car and landed in a banking of snow. "Ed," she said "I can't feel my leg." She never knew that her liver had been ripped in half

and blood was rushing into her peritoneum. After the death of his son, Emerson wrote "Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature." Whether it's flipping the switch for the Science experiment, or turning the driving wheel ever so slightly this way or that way on black-ice, it's the 20-watts of energy that will experience the result. In some cases the car will swerve off the road, but in other cases the car will continue on its way to my sister's dream house. Christine had recently lost 100 pounds, and Ed had bought her a surprise pair of diamond earrings. It's going to be hard to wait, but I know Christine is going to look fabulous in them the next time I see her.

EXTINCTION INEVITABLE

Their understanding of extinction is inevitable – science will eventually replace the human experience with more efficient robot replicas. Lanza 2010 (Robert Lanza is considered one of the leading scientists in the world. He is currently Chief Scientific Officer at Advanced Cell Technology, and a professor at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. "Will Machines Take Over the World? The Scientific Turning Point" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-lanza/science-technology-will-m_b_569948.html

Physicists believe the "Theory of Everything" is hovering around the corner, and yet I'm struck that consciousness is still a mystery. We assume the mind is totally controlled by physical laws, but there's every reason to think that the observer who opens Schrödinger's box has a capacity greater than that of other physical objects. The difference lies not in the gray matter of the brain, but in the way we perceive the

world. How are we able to see things when the brain is locked inside a sealed vault of bone? Information in the brain isn't woven together automatically any more than it is inside a computer. Time and space are the manifold that gives the world its order. We instinctively know they're not things, objects you can feel and smell. There's a peculiar intangibility about them.

According to biocentrism, they're merely the mental software that, like in a CD player, converts information into 3D. And this brings me back to the train hauling TVs into the city. I suspect that in some years there might even be a robot in the conductor's seat, blowing the whistle that warns pedestrians to get off the track. In the 1950's, neurologist William Walter built a device that reacted to its environment. This primitive robot had a photoelectric cell

for an eye, a sensing device to detect objects, and motors that allowed it to maneuver. Since then robots have been developed using advanced technology that allows them to "see," "speak," and perform tasks with greater precision and flexibility. Eventually we may even be able to build a machine that can reproduce and evolve. "Can we help but wonder," asked Isaac Asimov, "whether computers and robots may not eventually replace any human ability? Whether they may not replace human beings by rendering them obsolete? Whether artificial intelligence, of our own creation, is not fated to be our replacement as dominant entities on the planet?" These are the questions that I pondered along the

railroad tracks that day, and that trouble me when I see cyborgs on TV. However, for an object -- a machine, a computer -- there's no other principle but physics, and the chemistry of the atoms that compose it. Unlike us, they can't have a unitary sense experience, or consciousness, for this must occur before the mind constructs a spatial-temporal reality. Eventually science will understand these algorithms well enough to create 'thinking' machines and enhancements to ourselves (both biological and artificial) that we can't even fathom. And after over 200,000 years of evolution, Homo sapiens, as a distinct species, may go extinct, not by a meteor or nuclear weapons, but by our desire to achieve perfection.

156“And did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?” – Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd