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Tournament: All | Round: 1 | Opponent: All | Judge: All Hi I'm Lily! I use she/they pronouns. Please contact me before round if there is anything I can do to accommodate you in round! *FOR BLAKE: This is my first tournament of the year, I will disclose cases as I run them, please feel free to reach out for disclosure before round however.
The resolution is undergirded by a dualistic understanding of systems and being - instrumentalism relies on the flawed conception of a unified subject and static identity, which reinforces inherently static dichotomies – traditionally "male" vs. traditionally "female" discussions, assertive men vs. submissive women– those that fail to conform become viewed as the witch-like monstrous other, to be either eradicated or forced to conform – instead of forcing us to adhere to strictures of conformity, allow us to frame discourse and identity through becoming – the body is a plane on which chaotic, everchanging forces act, and embracing this is key
Ella Brians. 2011. ~Ella Brians (B.A., Amherst College, French and Philosophy; M.A., New School for Social Research, Philosophy) works on poetry and poetics from Romanticism to Modernism in English, French and German~, The 'Virtual' Body and the Strange Persistence of the Flesh: Deleuze, Cyberspace and the Posthuman, Deleuze and the Body. https://edinburgh.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.3366/edinburgh/9780748638642.001.0001/upso-9780748638642-chapter-6. EC This brings us, finally, to Deleuze. Ann Weinstone has grouped Deleuze's work AND and materiality, but that also sees these two tasks as intimately interconnected.
We must strive to become the monstrosity of the other - before we can reach liberation
Massumi 99 Massumi, Brian. A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. MIT Press, 1999 (LHZ 1/2/20) The productive processes of becoming-other and becoming-the-same follow very AND . The select achieve death (maximum entropy). 107-108
Thus, I embrace the job of the witch in undermining and questioning the gender binary that permeates the gender spheres and debate, in order to combat its pervasive violence and achieve liberation. This means I reject the appropriation of outer space by private entities and curse private entities for trying to appropriate space similar to the way heteronormative spaces have tried to appropriate me.
It is just after six pm. Your lips quiver in time with your heart.
There are questions you really shouldn't ask yourself when you've lost this much sleep:
How is your body yours when others name it for you?
How do you take it back?
You pick at the fleece of your jacket and swallow hard. You've read about this before, in the book that pulled you back into witchcraft: a story of the first time the author flew, burst in an explosion of feathers and light from her ribs, unfurled into the air and left her body under the trees. You want it. You want so badly to leave your bones.
This should be easy. You've never lived in your body, not really. The facsimile of ownership inherent in holding an identity that never matched your biology forced you out as soon as you learned it was possible.
So here you sit, under a bookcase, warm light from the table in the corner invading your sight. You close your eyes and try—
And try—
And try to step out.
Your mouth tastes like rich brown bread, tongue a hard twist of muscle against your teeth.
Did I ever tell you: teeth carry the oxygen of where you grew up. Are yours full of the ions of some wild land, or the terror of your stuffy room where you drew air across your teeth just to prove you could?
You wonder why not both. Aren't they both wild and strange in their own way?
Can you have both?
Do you want both?
You peel away from your skin, pull free of the body that's been taken from you. Ephemeral bones stretch and crack.
You have no idea what you want to become.
That's fine: after all, is it really shapeshifting when you have no real form to return to?
Mutability - HAWKE (Hawke is a full-time student who aspires to be a full-time witch. Ze lives in CA with a couple of middle-aged cats and a steadily-growing bone collection. Those two things are not related, from Arcane Perfection, published 2017) Issues devoid of gender are a clear indicator of hegemonic masculinity; this has created AND What are the methods by which we can transcend this silence on gender?
Using feminist pedagogy in an educational space helps eliminate ideologies of privilege. This is a prerequisite to larger moral policy discussions, because otherwise the only voices we hear are those of the privileged. This becomes a bigger issue when the resolution at hand isnt accessible queer bodies
Teachnology What Is Feminist Pedagogy?, www.teach-nology.com/teachers/methods/feminist_pedagogy/ 1/2/20 While ideally used in a university setting, feminist pedagogy can be employed in elementary AND among friends or family or neighbors, but allows everyone the same opportunities.
The appropriation of space is a move to colonize space for the use of rich, white men. This comes from the same string of ideology that patriarchal violence is born from – a need to guarantee white men have immediate access to everything and anything they want.
Bianco 18 Bianco, Marcie."The Patriarchal Race to Colonize Mars Is Just Another Example of Male Entitlement." NBCNews.com, NBCUniversal News Group, 2 Aug. 2019, www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/patriarchal-race-colonize-mars-just-another-example-male-entitlement-ncna849681 These men, particularly Musk, are not only heavily invested in who can get AND result of men giving up on the planet they have all but destroyed.
The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater who most performatively and methodologically breaks traditional, binary norms.
Gender a is binary construct created by the patriarchy, we must break away form the binary to become something new
Massumi 99 (2) Massumi, Brian. A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. MIT Press, 1999 LHZ 1/2/20 Deleuze and Guattari do not deny the reality of sexual difference. They simply argue AND correlated cascade of supramolecular self-inventions. 86-89
12/18/21
Investigative Aesthetics
Tournament: State | Round: 2 | Opponent: MSouth BJ | Judge: Meurrens, Bradley I'll provide the definition of objectivity within the case - specifically my 2nd card.
The value is Striving for Truth – democratic systems rely on deliberation and consensus to operate, knowing the truth is fundamental to informed decision making First, textuality - the text of the resolution is a question of moral actions in a democracy. This means the round has to be about what actions lead to a better democracy, not other arbitrary frameworks, no matter how good they are. Prefer this for a 3 reasons: a) jurisdiction - the judge is bound by the resolution, even if you agree that they are winning that their framework is better, that doesn't matter if they aren't winning that it's better within the context of a democracy. b) ground - the resolution is a fixed point that gives a common ground for debaters to debate on. Allowing any sort of framework that ignores the specific wording of the resolution makes it harder for debaters to prepare well-reasoned responses to common frameworks. c) resolutional burden - The NC has the burden to negate the specific resolution and not just cherry-picked words from it. They have to prove why under the pretenses of an ethical code governed from democracy, that the resolution is bad. If their framework isn't relevant to democracy, I can concede all their offense and still win the debate because they don't negate the specific resolution. Thus the criterion is investigative aesthetics. First, the criterion is the best way to achieve truth, because it strives for truth while criticizing the traditional formations of truth - allowing for unbiased formations of it. Fuller, Matthew, and Eyal Weizman. Investigative Aesthetics. ~first edition~. Verso, 2021. e-book. 25 Sept. 2021. Aesthetic investigations have a double aim: they are at the same time investigations of the world and enquiries into the means of knowing it. This means that they seek accountability both for events and for the devices with which we perceive them. They deal with the production of evidence while questioning and interrogating the notion of evidence, and with it the cultures of knowledge production or truth claims that it relies upon. They engage in the presentation of facts while being aware of the way each presentation, indeed each media form, can distort the very facts they produce. They seek to establish claims to truth while criticising the institutions of power and knowledge with their monopoly over the mechanisms of truth production. The media technologies of artificial intelligence, satellite images, social media platforms, smart cities or facial recognition cameras are not neutral; they are products of specific political and historical contexts, with inbuilt biases, opacity, partiality and illegibility and have the potential to enhance discrimination and domination. Here's the definition - Investigative Aesthetics reformulates objectivity. Objectivity isn't an idealized scientific truth. Objectivity denotes a process that is achieved through political, scientific, and social investigation of knowledge to arrive at a fully unbiased and objective understanding of that knowledge. Fuller, Matthew, and Eyal Weizman. Investigative Aesthetics. ~first edition~. Verso, 2021. e-book. 25 Sept. 2021. We are interested in the continued differentiation within and between the lab and the studio, but also in the affinities they engender as they become different to each other – even sometimes weirder than each other. Today there are compelling reasons for science and art to resynthesise and merge the different modes in which each undertakes open-ended experimentation on things and the modes of seeing them. One way into this is via a re-coordination around the notion of objectivity suggested by historians of science Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison.4 In the often conventional view of the term, objectivity is taken to be a form of knowledge that bears no trace of the knower. Rather than this reductive ideal, Daston and Galison suggest that objectivity could be something worked at through commonly held projects, such as the generation of knowledge about particular problems or phenomena. Objectivity, they argue, is produced in relation to an object, a map, a diagram, an instrument that bears the traces of, and is indeed propelled by, the specific interests of those that develop it. The object in turn is the means to bring their enquiries together in order to understand them. Following this conceptualisation we can propose that the enquiry increases awareness of the object and, at the same time, expands the multiplicity of subjects and subjectivities involved in the investigation. In the development of a particular kind of knowledge through artefacts designed to probe it (perhaps the object might be something such as the diagram of a certain species or the map of a terrain), objectivity becomes a process of work in which knowledge is constituted in and about the objects and tools – human and non-human – of investigation. Whereas, in the nineteenth century, the epistemic virtue of objectivity was understood to be a property of the subject, that of the idealised scientific self, Daston and Galison's book flips the meaning of the term back towards the object. The scientific object gains value precisely through emerging from the interaction of multiple particular interests. It is in these relations, that an object is founded. The object – evidence, in our context – becomes a joint site of work, one that can extend to providing a field of liaison for self-reflexive artists and scientists, and others, such as those in political struggle, to jointly create. In such creation, situatedness is the defining feature of the very notion of evidence. It comes into being and is enhanced through the practices of interweaving and cross-checking of perspectives and epistemological frameworks. In the investigative aesthetics which is the subject of this book, this interweaving is also organisational and political. Rather than being confined to the coherent logic of black-boxed institutions of authority, a constitutive objectivity is based on open processes and new alignments between different sites, organisations and institutions of diverse natures, standing and perspectives Contention 1 Investigative Aesthetics uphold democracy.
Currently existing power structures are the ones determining truth, this truth is often post-truth which aims to skew objective truth. Using Investigative Aesthetics we must question these people in power and the truths which they manipulate to formulate a more accurate perception of fact and put power back into the public. 2. Investigative Aesthetics allows the public to be included in the assemblage of truth, this allows for informed democratic decision making. Fuller, Matthew, and Eyal Weizman. Investigative Aesthetics. ~first edition~. Verso, 2021. e-book. 25 Sept. 2021. Though sharing aspects of the suspicion of the societal pillars of power knowledge, but instead of the relativism and conspiracy of the post-truthers, investigative aesthetics proposes a more vital and risky form of investigative production. Whereas anti-epistemologists indeed do anything but investigate, investigative aesthetics most often seeks to integrate (but not homogenise) multiple viewpoints, opening up the circles of investigation, establishing new alignments between different sites, styles and institutions of diverse types and standings. These include the science laboratory, the artist's studio, the university, activist organisations, social groups rejecting the status of victim for that of agency and leadership, national and international legal fora (when they can be effectively used), the media, and cultural institutions. This kind of work seeks to create a poly-perspectival assemblage of open epistemic and aesthetic multiplicity. As such, the process of investigation might itself establish a social contract that includes all the participants in this assemblage of truth production and dissemination that Forensic Architecture calls 'open verification'.20 Facts bearing upon public decisions will have to be produced, presented and verified in the public domain. Sometimes when the fora for such contestation do not exist, when, as is the case now in many places, the communicative situation resembles a civil war as much as a public sphere, the production of facts can catalyse social production. Here, we find communities taking on the means of production: the production of the most precious meta-political condition, that of the reality around them and in which they are formed. Investigative aesthetics builds off of this idea of common grounds - a journalism that opens dialogue first for communities that suffer violence, tests divergent viewpoints, and maintains open avenues for new evidence- this is a prerequisite for democracy. Fuller, Matthew, and Eyal Weizman. Investigative Aesthetics. ~first edition~. Verso, 2021. e-book. 25 Sept. 2021. Take, for example, simply the complexity of a distributed human network of practitioners necessarily working together to articulate the logic of the violence inflicted upon it: the communities on the ground that suffer such violence at first hand lead and take the initiative, collecting information by undertaking recordings such as videos and testimonies; then there are lines of solidarity that develop with activists who stand hand-in-hand with them; then there are lawyers, scientists and other investigators; then publishers, distributors and readers; and then multiple mainstream and alternative media channels and cultural institutions, in which the accounts are circulated and contested. The list of kinds of entities and of involvements goes on. These polyphonic networks are uneven and asymmetrical, skewed by different privileges and degrees of access creating difficulties that need to be recognised and worked at. Creating the commons is hard work, but creates a possible foundation for politics, while itself being a form of political action. With each new investigation, a new community of praxis is woven from the interaction and mutual testing of divergent viewpoints. The struggle for common ground is an essential meta-political condition: a precondition for any political initiative and struggle to take place. Such a common ground requires invention and needs to be continuously remade, reinforced and fought over. This common ground must not be fenced off, but must maintain margins that are open to new information and ever-newer perspectives, evidence and interpretations that test prior ones. As such it must take the risk of disagreement as an imperative. In this way, it has something to do with the foundational formulations of science as a commons.11 Working within the polyphony of the investigative commons is what sharpens it, renders it able to sense and make sense. But expanding the sense of what constitutes the grounding for adequate knowledge entails further difficulty. This is part of the reason why traditional modes of enquiry have sometimes succumbed to hermeticism, becoming sealed off, only recognising certain techniques or forms of investigation. Contention 2 - Investigative aesthetics solves for discrimination Anti-epistemology and post-truth is welded by ultra-nationalists to promote white supremacy, patriarchy, and colonization. The only means to solve this is the active finding of truth through investigative aesthetics Fuller, Matthew, and Eyal Weizman. Investigative Aesthetics. ~first edition~. Verso, 2021. e-book. 25 Sept. 2021. The rise of what can be called anti-epistemology, often referred to as 'post-truth', makes the work of investigative aesthetics all the more urgent. In recent incarnations anti-epistemology is the stock-in-trade of a digitally oriented, racist and ultra-nationalist tendency that has made the obscuring, blurring and manipulation of facts their path to power. Investigative aesthetics is partly necessitated by the bluntness with which the rise of reactionary governments and their online volunteer brigades and proxies rule through the distortion of facts and the promulgation of vivid falsehoods. Investigative aesthetics seeks to challenge established formations of power over the always complicated questions of truth. This challenge is urgent because it happens at the same time as the rise of political powers that aim to replace the always conditional concept of truth with a thrilling sense of certainty. Such certainty can come in the form of ideological blinkers, both in the sense of fixed ideas and in that of the bundles of norms and routines that accrete as a subject. But it can also come with a snigger or with bombast as the 'free' speech of those who say 'what everybody knows but are too afraid to say', an apparently anti-ideological opportunism that lauds itself as the virile opposition to technocrats and weaklings. For such figures of certitude the present condition of multiple interlocking crises – ecological, social, political, technical, economic – is one in which truth has become recalcitrant. Science, for them, is both lauded and admonished. The idea of science is upheld when it can provide a source of uncomplicated facts and attacked when its actual practices describe the necessary conditions of doubt. Individual governments built upon such attitudes may well be phased out, but the methods of aggressive anti-epistemology will survive them. Fact-formation is undermined through means that do not attempt to arrive at truth, but to impart the frisson of rebellion through conformity. By these means, histories of genocide, structures of white supremacy and patriarchy, and systematisations of state or corporate violence, colonisation and dispossession are naturalised and placed beyond question. Investigative aesthetics look deeper into the ways culture and politics have been influenced by a history of structural violence and colonization in order to reveal the truth behind incidents of systematic oppression. Built off of the premises of investigative aesthetics, forensic architecture is a real life example of objective journalism that fights against these violences. Fuller, Matthew, and Eyal Weizman. Investigative Aesthetics. ~first edition~. Verso, 2021. e-book. 25 Sept. 2021. It is in this way that the systemic conditions of a larger political context reveal themselves in incidents. Examples of this can be found in Forensic Architecture's series of works on police violence entitled 'The Long Duration of the Split Second'. Each of these investigates different incidents of police officers shooting innocents in the US, the UK, Greece, Palestine and Turkey. These shootings are defended under the 'split-second argument', where an officer claims the suspect's right to life is suspended because an imminent threat is perceived 'in the heat of the moment'. This defence relies on the notion of natural instinct. But this instinct is culturally and politically produced and can be traced to a long history of the structural violence of colonisation, segregation and domination that dehumanised the colonised and the enslaved and turns them into legitimate prey. There is a huge epistemological, temporal and geographical space to be traversed from the detail of the incident to larger historical contexts. The investigative work moves between the scales of the local, politically and culturally entrained, to vast geographies and histories. Combining the detail of the incident with wider forms of understanding requires bringing together different forms of knowledge that can also often test each other. To trace evidentiary threads requires labour and care. Because it starts from an incident, investigative aesthetics is grounded in experience, and the perspective it brings to bear is openly partial, embedded, activist or militant, rather than a 'disinterested' or neutral view from nowhere. Making sense must also not mean simple conformity to a culture, especially that of a homogeneous mass of variously privileged perspectives which are ormed by their perspectival interpretations. Situated experience is varied and subject to different kinds of access, understanding and interpretation. In such a condition, aesthetics is also about developing sensibilities of extremely careful looking and noticing. As such it is also an ethical position because opening one's ability to sense is opening oneself to the experience of pain, as opposed to the danger of developing an anaesthesia to political injustice which would in turn remove investigation from the proximate relation to the event that it aims to comprehend and to trace. There are constantly aesthetic, political and ethical choices to be made, for example in determining which incidents should be pursued and how wide to open the investigative angle, just as there are to working out which aesthetic impressions can become evidence, and for what.
3/19/22
ableism
Tournament: North Star | Round: 1 | Opponent: Millard South JG | Judge: Synya, Anna
Space Witches CP
I agree with their fwk questioning masc concepts is good Cornell defines Private entity: (A) In general Except as otherwise provided in this paragraph, the term "private entity" means any person or private group, organization, proprietorship, partnership, trust, cooperative, corporation, or other commercial or nonprofit entity, including an officer, employee, or agent thereof. Definition: Private entity from 6 USC § 1501(15)(A). (n.d.). LII / Legal Information Institute. Retrieved January 21, 2022, from https://www.law.cornell.edu/definitions/uscode.php?width=840andheight=800andiframe=trueanddef_id=6-USC-625312480-168358316andterm_occur=999andterm_src=title:6:chapter:6:subchapter:I:section:1501 Allow space to act as an utopian future for witches. A place to explore and create instead of viewing space through the perspective of the rich white man. Thaddeus-Johns 21, J. (2021, November 24). Space pagans and smartphone witches: Where tech meets mysticism. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/24/arts/design/technoshamanism-hmkv-germany.html Treister's neat, colorful works on paper feature flying saucers and stars laid out in a kabbalah tree-of-life diagram, and blueprints for imagined scientific systems and extraterrestrial architecture. As billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos look to outer space as the next frontier for human expansion, Treister has imagined a utopian alternative: space exploration as a process in which rituals and visions play as much of a role as solar power and artificial intelligence. Many esoteric practices connect communities to a higher power, Arns said, which is why outer space features in so many contemporary artists' explorations of spirituality. "It's making a link between the microcosm and macrocosm," she added, creating "an idea of a world that doesn't only include the Earth." The counter plan is Space Witches. Witches as individuals as a private entity should be allowed to appropriate space. We appropriate the stars, the moon, and the solar system to create an all inclusive and future orientated horizon. This space exists outside the realm of the normative and on a fluid plane of shape shifting and creation. Space will act as a haven for witches. The affirmative rejects going to space because of the confines of the rich white man. Instead of being concerned with the money and actions of them let us freely explore. As long as they frame disclourse in the debate space as hetronormative we can never have any real change, the conversation needs to completely shit to enhjoying space. The neg solves for the harms of the afff by doing this and allowing witches in for different purposes of appropriating space that don't perpetuate the harms of the aff. Also their case is non-unique, the harms still continue on earth no matter what, redefining space doesn't solve for oppersion or pain like allowing witches in space will.
No solvency - Notions of one feminist project are universalizing and defeat the goals of diverse schools of feminist thought
Zalewski, Head of the School of Social Science at Aberdeen University, 03 (Marysia, "'Women's Troubles' Again In IR", Gender and International Relations, International Studies Review 5, 2003 JSTOR)AS We know feminism is really feminisms. Its boundaries, such as they exist, AND the male/masculine realm amounts to little more than lip-service.
The Aff attaches meaning to the ballot and creates an optimistic relationship to the object. This produces a cruel fantasy of solvency around a meaningless paper.
Berlant, U-Chicago, "Cruel Optimism" 11: (Berlant, Lauren. University of Chicago. "Cruel Optimism" Duke University Press. 2011. Pgs. 2) Whatever the experience of optimism is in particular, then, the affective structure of AND of profound threat that is, at the same time, profoundly confirming.
The Aff presents their communication in this room hoping that we can collectively create a better world. This produces a relation of cruel optimism with the political.
Berlant, U-Chicago, "Cruel Optimism" 11: (Berlant, Lauren. University of Chicago. "Cruel Optimism" Duke University Press. 2011. Pgs. 226-227) Public spheres are always affect worlds, worlds to which people are bound, when AND has the negative force of cynicism or the dark attenuation of political depression.
First, Solvency Takeout: cruel optimism solidifies relations of oppression. This passivity cannot solve.
Berlant, U-Chicago, "Cruel Optimism" 11: (Berlant, Lauren. University of Chicago. "Cruel Optimism" Duke University Press. 2011. Pgs. 43) This means that the object of cruel optimism here appears as the thing within any AND we can sustain a coasting sentience, in response to being too alive.
Second, Case TURN: Cruel Optimism reproduces normativity and causes further repetitions of oppression. This locks us into a relation of living death.
Berlant, U-Chicago, "Cruel Optimism" 11: (Berlant, Lauren. University of Chicago. "Cruel Optimism" Duke University Press. 2011. Pgs. 180) The desire for a less-bad life involves finding resting places; the reproduction AND manifestation in their own lives could easily have produced their rejection of it?