Tournament: USC | Round: Octas | Opponent: Troy Independent AP | Judge: Joseph Barquin, Noah Christiansen, Kristiana Baez
Of the Cheshire Cat there remains only the Smile.
Of the dream only a memory trace.
Of the real there remains only the virtual.
And of the Other only a spectral form
We begin with a brief history of debate, its disappearance and reappearance as a militaristic game of informatics, logistics, and digitization – everything outside a reassured order must be destroyed through forms of asymmetrical violence paraded around as a fight – this is the key analysis the 1AC misses, by framing themselves as a disruption of the repetition of debate they breathe life back into fundamentally reactionary forces – the same way Louisville created the PRL or Ryan Wash created a massive conservative movement against debate – this card turns AC Meiner
Baudrillard 81 (Jean, Professor of Phil of Culture and Media Criticism at the European Graduate School, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 24-25 shree)
These staged presidential assassinations are revealing because they signal the status of all negativity in
AND
the mortal blows of simulation, even and especially if they are revolutionary.
"If the matrix were to make a movie about the matrix, The Matrix is surely the movie it would make"—we think this is true of the 1ac's relationship to debate. The move towards authentic radical theory within the cemetery walls of the Western university merely engenders a semiotic fantasy of radicalism paving over very real conditions of violent colonialism, pain, and death in order to make this space possible. We will be very clear here. Debate is not a home. Debate never will be.
Anarchist News 10. “The University, Social Death, and the Inside Joke,” http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20100220181610620
Universities may serve as progressive sites of inquiry in some cases, yet this does
AND
interpretation and every connotation, no longer denoting anyone or anything."56
The affirmative is caught in an exaltation of use-value that perpetuates capitalism
Baudrillard 76 (Jean, Prof of Phil at EGS, “When Bataille Attacked the Metaphysical Principle of Economy, trans David Miller)
The central idea is that the economy which governs our societies results from a misappropriation of the fundamental human principle, which is a solar principle of expenditure. Bataille's thought goes, beyond proper political economy (which in essence is regulated through exchange value), straight to the metaphysical principle of economy. Bataille's target is utility, in its root. Utility is, of course, an apparently positive principle of capital: accumulation, investment, depreciation, etc. But in fact it is, on Bataille's account, a principle of powerlessness, an utter inability to expend. Given that all previous societies knew how to expend, this is, an unbelievable deficiency : it cuts the human being off from all possible sovereignty. All economics are founded on that which no longer can, no longer knows how to expend itself, on that which is incapable of becoming the stake of a sacrifice. It is therefore entirely residual, it is a limited social fact; and it is against economy as a limited social fact that Bataille wants to raise expenditure, death, and sacrifice as total social facts--such is the principle of general economy. The principle of utility (use value) blends with the bourgeoisie, with this capitalist class whose definition for Bataille (contrary to Marx) is negative: it no longer knows how to expend. Similarly, the crisis of capital, its increasing mortality and its immanent death throes, are not bound, as in the work of Marx, to a history, to dialectical reversals, but to this fundamental law of the inability to expend, which give capital over to the cancer of production and unlimited reproduction. There is no principle of revolution in Bataille's work: "The terror of revolutions has only done more and more (de mieux en mieux) to subordinate human energy to industry." There is only a principle of sacrifice-the principle of sovereignty, whose diversion by the bourgeoisie and capital causes all human history to pass from sacred tragedy to the comedy of utility. This critique is a non-Marxist critique, an aristocratic critique; because it aims at utility, at economic finality as the axiom of capitalist society. The Marxist critique is only a critique of capital, a critique coming from the heart of the middle and petit bourgeois classes, for which Marxism has served for a century as a latent ideology: a critique of exchange value, but an exaltation of use value-and thus a critique, at the same time, of what made the almost delirious greatness of capital, the secular remains of its religious quality: investment at any price, even at the cost of use value. The Marxist seeks a good use of economy. Marxism is therefore only a limited petit bourgeois critique, one more step in the banalization of life toward the "good use" of the social! Bataille, to the contrary, sweeps away all this slave dialectic from an aristocratic point of view, that of the master struggling with his death. One can accuse this perspective of being pre or post-Marxist. At any rate, Marxism is only the disenchanted horizon of capital-all that precedes or follows it is more radical than it is. What remains uncertain in the work of Bataille (but without a doubt this uncertainty cannot be alleviated), is to know whether the economy (capital), which is counterbalanced on absurd, but never useless, never sacrificial expenditures (wars, waste . ..), is nevertheless shot through with a sacrificial dynamic. Is political economy at bottom only a frustrated avatar of the single great cosmic law of expenditure? Is the entire history of capital only an immense detour toward its own catastrophe, toward its own sacrificial end? If this is so, it is because, in the end, one cannot not expend. A longer spiral perhaps drags capital beyond economy, toward a destruction of its own values; the alternative is that we are stuck forever" in this denial of the sacred, in the vertigo of supply, which signifies the rupture of alliance (of symbolic exchange in primitive societies) and of sovereignty. Bataille would have been impassioned by the present evolution of capital in this era of floating currencies, of values seeking their own level (which is not their transmutation), and the drift of finalities (which is neither sovereign uselessness nor the absurd gratuitousness of laughter and death). But his concept of expenditure would have permitted only a limited analysis : it is still too economic, too much the flip side of accumulation, as transgression is too close to the inverse figure ofprohibition.4 In an order which is no longer that of utility, but an aleatory order of value, pure expenditure, while retaining the romantic charm of turning the economic inside out, is no longer sufficient for radical defiance -it shatters the mirror of market value, but is powerless against the shifting mirror of structural value. Bataille founds his general economy on a "solar economy" without reciprocal exchange, on the unilateral gift that the sun makes of its energy : a cosmogony of expenditure, which he deploys in a religious and political anthropology . But Bataille has misread Mauss: the unilateral gift does not exist. This is not the law of the universe. He who has so well explored the human sacrifice of the Aztecs should have known as they did that the sun gives nothing, it is necessary to nourish it continually with human blood in order that it shine. It is necessary to challenge the gods through sacrifice in order that they respond with profusion. In other words, the root of sacrifice and of general economy is never pure and simple expenditure-or whatever drive pulsion of excess that supposedly comes to us from nature-but is an incessant process of challenge Wfi. The "excess of energy" does not come from the sun (from nature) but from a continual higher bidding in exchange-the symbolic process that can be found in the work of Mauss, not that of the gift (that is the naturalist mystique into which Bataille falls), but that of the counter-gift . This is the single truly symbolic process, which in fact implies death as a kind of maximal excess-but not as individual ecstasy, always as the maximal principle of social exchange. In this sense, one can reproach Bataille for having "naturalized" Mauss (but in a metaphysical spiral so prodigious that the reproach is not really one), and for having made symbolic exchange a kind of natural function of prodigality, at once hyper-religious in its gratuitousness and much too close still, a contrario, to the principle of utility and to the economic order that it exhausts in transgression without ever leaving behind. It is "in the glory of death" d hauteur de mort that one rediscovers Bataille, and the real question posed remains: "How is it that all men have encountered the need and felt the obligation to kill living beings ritually? For lack of having known how to respond, all men have remained in ignorance of that which they are." There is an answer to this question beneath the text, in all the interstices of Bataille's text, but in my opinion not in the notion of expenditure, nor in this kind of anthropological reconstruction that he tries to establish from the "objective" data of his day: Marxism, biology, sociology, ethnology, political economy, the objective potential of which he tries to bring together nevertheless, in a perspective which is neither exactly a genealogy, nor a natural history, nor a Hegelian totality, but a bit of all that. But the sacred imperative is flawless in its mythic assertion, and the will to teach is continually breached by Bataille's dazzling vision, by a "subject of knowledge" always "at the boiling point." The consequence of this is that even analytic or documentary considerations have that mythic force which constitutes the sole-sacrificial-force of writing.
K comes first—The subversiveness of a strategy of resistance can only be effective if it begins with the object and deconstructing the metaphysics of value.
Baudrillard 1 (professor of phil at EGS, Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, pg. 75shree)
This is why use-value fetishism is indeed more profound, more “mysterious” than the fetishism of exchange value. The mystery of exchange value and the commodity can be unmasked, relatively —it has been since Marx — and raised to consciousness as a social relation. But value in the case of use value is enveloped in total mystery, for it is grounded anthropologically in the (self-) “evidence” of a naturalness, in an unsurpassable original reference. This is where we discover the real “theology” of value — in the order of finalities: in the “ideal” relation of equivalence, harmony, economy and equilibrium that the concept of utility implies. It operates at all levels: between man and nature, man and objects, man and his body, the self and others. Value becomes absolutely self-evident, la chose la plus simple. Here the mystery and cunning (of history and of reason) are at their most profound and tenacious. If the system of use value is produced by the system of ex¬change value as its own ideology — if use value has no autonomy, if it is only the satellite and alibi of exchange value, though system-atically combining with it in the framework of political economy —then it is no longer possible to posit use value as an alternative to exchange value. Nor, therefore, is it possible to posit the “restitution” of use value, at the end of political economy, under the sign of the “liberation of needs” and the “administration of things” as a revolu¬tionary perspective. Every revolutionary perspective today stands or falls on its ability to reinterrogate radically the repressive, reductive, rationalizing meta-physic of utility. All critical theory depends on the analysis of the object form.’0 This has been absent from Marxist analysis. With all the political and ideological consequences that this implies, the result has been that all illusions converged on use value, idealized by oppos¬ition to exchange value, when it was in fact only the latter’s natur¬alized form.
Charity Cannibalism DA—we become addicted to the feeling of solving ethical crises, causing us to artificially construct more—snowballs to extinction
Baudrillard 94 (Jean, ex-Prof of Sociology at Paris X, “The Illusion of the End” p. 66-71shree)
We have long denounced the capitalistic, economic exploitation of the poverty of the 'other half of the world' 'autre monde. We must today denounce the moral and sentimental exploitation of that poverty - charity cannibalism being worse than oppressive violence. The extraction and humanitarian reprocessing of a destitution which has become the equivalent of oil deposits and gold mines. The extortion of the spectacle of poverty and, at the same time, of our charitable condescension: a worldwide appreciated surplus of fine sentiments and bad conscience. We should, in fact, see this not as the extraction of raw materials, but as a waste-reprocessing enterprise. Their destitution and our bad conscience are, in effect, all part of the waste-products of history- the main thing is to recycle them to produce a new energy source. We have here an escalation in the psychological balance of terror. World capitalist oppression is now merely the vehicle and alibi for this other, much more ferocious, form of moral predation. One might almost say, contrary to the Marxist analysis, that material exploitation is only there to extract that spiritual raw material that is the misery of peoples, which serves as psychological nourishment for the rich countries and media nourishment for our daily lives. The 'Fourth World' (we are no longer dealing with a 'developing' Third World) is once again beleaguered, this time as a catastrophe-bearing stratum. The West is whitewashed in the reprocessing of the rest of the world as waste and residue. And the white world repents and seeks absolution - it, too, the waste-product of its own history. The South is a natural producer of raw materials, the latest of which is catastrophe. The North, for its part, specializes in the reprocessing of raw materials and hence also in the reprocessing of catastrophe. Bloodsucking protection, humanitarian interference, Medecins sans frontieres, international solidarity, etc. The last phase of colonialism: the New Sentimental Order is merely the latest form of the New World Order. Other people's destitution becomes our adventure playground. Thus, the humanitarian offensive aimed at the Kurds - a show of repentance on the part of the Western powers after allowing Saddam Hussein to crush them - is in reality merely the second phase of the war, a phase in which charitable intervention finishes off the work of extermination. We are the consumers of the ever delightful spectacle of poverty and catastrophe, and of the moving spectacle of our own efforts to alleviate it (which, in fact, merely function to secure the conditions of reproduction of the catastrophe market); there, at least, in the order of moral profits, the Marxist analysis is wholly applicable: we see to it that extreme poverty is reproduced as a symbolic deposit, as a fuel essential to the moral and sentimental equilibrium of the West. In our defence, it might be said that this extreme poverty was largely of our own making and it is therefore normal that we should profit by it. There can be no finer proof that the distress of the rest of the world is at the root of Western power and that the spectacle of that distress is its crowning glory than the inauguration, on the roof of the Arche de la Defense, with a sumptuous buffet laid on by the Fondation des Droits de l'homme, of an exhibition of the finest photos of world poverty. Should we be surprised that spaces are set aside in the Arche d' Alliance. for universal suffering hallowed by caviar and champagne? Just as the economic crisis of the West will not be complete so long as it can still exploit the resources of the rest of the world, so the symbolic crisis will be complete only when it is no longer able to feed on the other half's human and natural catastrophes (Eastern Europe, the Gulf, the Kurds, Bangladesh, etc.). We need this drug, which serves us as an aphrodisiac and hallucinogen. And the poor countries are the best suppliers - as, indeed, they are of other drugs. We provide them, through our media, with the means to exploit this paradoxical resource, just as we give them the means to exhaust their natural resources with our technologies. Our whole culture lives off this catastrophic cannibalism, relayed in cynical mode by the news media, and carried forward in moral mode by our humanitarian aid, which is a way of encouraging it and ensuring its continuity, just as economic aid is a strategy for perpetuating under-development. Up to now, the financial sacrifice has been compensated a hundredfold by the moral gain. But when the catastrophe market itself reaches crisis point, in accordance with the implacable logic of the market, when distress becomes scarce or the marginal returns on it fall from overexploitation, when we run out of disasters from elsewhere or when they can no longer be traded like coffee or other commodities, the West will be forced to produce its own catastrophe for itself, in order to meet its need for spectacle and that voracious appetite for symbols which characterizes it even more than its voracious appetite for food. It will reach the point where it devours itself. When we have finished sucking out the destiny of others, we shall have to invent one for ourselves. The Great Crash, the symbolic crash, will come in the end from us Westerners, but only when we are no longer able to feed on the hallucinogenic misery which comes to us from the other half of the world. Yet they do not seem keen to give up their monopoly. The Middle East, Bangladesh, black Africa and Latin America are really going flat out in the distress and catastrophe stakes, and thus in providing symbolic nourishment for the rich world. They might be said to be overdoing it: heaping earthquakes, floods, famines and ecological disasters one upon another, and finding the means to massacre each other most of the time. The 'disaster show' goes on without any let-up and our sacrificial debt to them far exceeds their economic debt. The misery with which they generously overwhelm us is something we shall never be able to repay. The sacrifices we offer in return are laughable (a tornado or two, a few tiny holocausts on the roads, the odd financial sacrifice) and, moreover, by some infernal logic, these work out as much greater gains for us, whereas our kindnesses have merely added to the natural catastrophes another one immeasurably worse: the demographic catastrophe, a veritable epidemic which we deplore each day in pictures. In short, there is such distortion between North and South, to the symbolic advantage of the South (a hundred thousand Iraqi dead against casualties numbered in tens on our side: in every case we are the losers), that one day everything will break down. One day, the West will break down if we are not soon washed clean of this shame, if an international congress of the poor countries does not very quickly decide to share out this symbolic privilege of misery and catastrophe. It is of course normal, since we refuse to allow the spread of nuclear weapons, that they should refuse to allow the spread of the catastrophe weapon. But it is not right that they should exert that monopoly indefinitely. In any case, the under-developed are only so by comparison with the Western system and its presumed success. In the light of its assumed failure, they are not under-developed at all. They are only so in terms of a dominant evolutionism which has always been the worst of colonial ideologies. The argument here is that there is a line of objective progress and everyone is supposed to pass through its various stages (we find the same eyewash with regard to the evolution of species and in that evolutionism which unilaterally sanctions the superiority of the human race). In the light of current upheavals, which put an end to any idea of history as a linear process, there are no longer either developed or under-developed peoples. Thus, to encourage hope of evolution - albeit by revolution - among the poor and to doom them, in keeping with the objective illusion of progress, to technological salvation is a criminal absurdity. In actual fact, it is their good fortune to be able to escape from evolution just at the point when we no longer know where it is leading. In any case, a majority of these peoples, including those of Eastern Europe, do not seem keen to enter this evolutionist modernity, and their weight in the balance is certainly no small factor in the West's repudiation of its own history, of its own utopias and its own modernity. It might be said that the routes of violence, historical or otherwise, are being turned around and that the viruses now pass from South to North, there being every chance that, five hundred years after America was conquered, 1992 and the end of the century will mark the comeback of the defeated and the sudden reversal of that modernity. The sense of pride is no longer on the side of wealth but of poverty, of those who - fortunately for them - have nothing to repent, and may indeed glory in being privileged in terms of catastrophes. Admittedly, this is a privilege they could hardly renounce, even if they wished to, but natural disasters merely reinforce the sense of guilt felt towards them by the wealthy – by those whom God visibly scorns since he no longer even strikes them down. One day it will be the Whites themselves who will give up their whiteness. It is a good bet that repentance will reach its highest pitch with the five-hundredth anniversary of the conquest of the Americas. We are going to have to lift the curse of the defeated - but symbolically victorious - peoples, which is insinuating itself five hundred years later, by way of repentance, into the heart of the white race. No solution has been found to the dramatic situation of the under-developed, and none will be found since their drama has now been overtaken by that of the overdeveloped, of the rich nations. The psychodrama of congestion, saturation, super abundance, neurosis and the breaking of blood vessels which haunts us - the drama of the excess of means over ends – calls more urgently for attention than that of penury, lack and poverty. That is where the most imminent danger of catastrophe resides, in the societies which have run out of emptiness. Artificial catastrophes, like the beneficial aspects of civilization, progress much more quickly than natural ones. The underdeveloped are still at the primary stage of the natural, unforeseeable catastrophe. We are already at the second stage, that of the manufactured catastrophe - imminent and foreseeable - and we shall soon be at that of the pre-programmed catastrophe, the catastrophe of the third kind, deliberate and experimental. And, paradoxically, it is our pursuit of the means for averting natural catastrophe - the unpredictable form of destiny - which will take us there. Because it is unable to escape it, humanity will pretend to be the author of its destiny. Because it cannot accept being confronted with an end which is uncertain or governed by fate, it will prefer to stage its own death as a species.
The aff is another instantiation of the white hyper real – it becomes another analytical encounter with whiteness and the world which just opens up more forms of liberal recognition politics
Gillespie 17 (John Gillespie, “On the Prospect of Weaponized Death”, Propter Nos, 2:1, 2017)
It is this fact that permits black death to be subsumed in simulations by each
AND
the semiotics of the white hyper-reality. White Disneyland stays intact.
When confronted with the ethical injunction of the aff, respond with “I would prefer not to”—vote neg on presumption
Baudrillard 98 (Jean Baudrillard, “Present Considerations: The Uncertainty of All Value Systems” xx-xx-1998, GS)
It’s also the parody of political emancipation. Is capitalism for you the cold monster
AND
Marcuse. Decidedly, freedom isn’t simple, and liberation even less so.