1AC - China Debris AC 2NR - Baudrillard 1AR - AC 2NR - K 2AR - AC
Berkeley
3
Opponent: LNU RN | Judge: Sophia Rebar
1AC - Virilio 1NC - Innovation NASA T 1AR - AC 2NR - Topicality 2AR - AC
Churchill
1
Opponent: Strake Jesuit JS | Judge: Nelson Okunlola
1AC - Debris AC 1NC - Baudrillard 1AR - AC 2NR - K 2AR - AC
Churchill
4
Opponent: Strake Jesuit MS | Judge: Breigh Plat
1AC - Ripstein 1NC - Baudrillard 1AR - AC 2NR - K 2AR - AC
Glenbrooks
1
Opponent: Marlborough MJ | Judge: Sreyaash Das
1AC - Prison AC 1NC - Setcol 1AR - AC 2NR - K 2AR - AC
Glenbrooks
5
Opponent: Harvard-Westlake AV | Judge: Dhruv Channa
1AC - Cap Aff 1NC - Setcol 1AR - AC 2NR - K 2AR - AC
Glenbrooks
4
Opponent: Strake Jesuit MS | Judge: Michael Kurian
1AC - Ripstein 1NR - setcol 1AR - AC 2NR - K 2AR - Perm
TFA State
1
Opponent: McNeil YM | Judge: Dylan Jones
1AC - Contractarianism 1NC - Setcol 1AR - AC 2NR - K 2AR - AC
UT Longhorn Classic
3
Opponent: Nevin Gera | Judge: Strake Jesuit CM
1AC - Stock AC 1NC - Setcol 1AR - AC 2NR - K 2AR - AC
UT Longhorn Classic
5
Opponent: Little Rock Central MG | Judge: Sarah Zheng
1AC - Technoliberal Futures AC 1NC - Baudrillard K 1AR - AC 2NR - K 2AR - AC
To modify or delete round reports, edit the associated round.
Cites
Entry
Date
JanFeb - DA - Innovation
Tournament: Berkeley | Round: 3 | Opponent: LNU RN | Judge: Sophia Rebar Innovation DA Space Commercialization drives Tech Innovation in the Status Quo – it provides a unique impetus. Hampson 17 Joshua Hampson 1-25-2017 “The Future of Space Commercialization” https://republicans-science.house.gov/sites/republicans.science.house.gov/files/documents/TheFutureofSpaceCommercializationFinal.pdf (Security Studies Fellow at the Niskanen Center)Elmer The size of the space economy is far larger than many may think. In 2015 alone, the global market amounted to $323 billion. Commercial infrastructure and systems accounted for 76 percent of that 9 total, with satellite television the largest subsection at $95 billion. The global space launch market’s 10 11 share of that total came in at $6 billion dollars. It can be hard to disaggregate how space benefits 12 particular national economies, but in 2009 (the last available report), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) estimated that commercial space transportation and enabled industries generated $208.3 billion in economic activity in the United States alone. Space is not just about 13 satellite television and global transportation; while not commercial, GPS satellites also underpin personal navigation, such as smartphone GPS use, and timing data used for Internet coordination.14 Without that data, there could be problems for a range of Internet and cloud-based services.15 There is also room for growth. The FAA has noted that while the commercial launch sector has not grown dramatically in the last decade, there are indications that there is latent demand. This 16 demand may catalyze an increase in launches and growth of the wider space economy in the next decade. The Satellite Industry Association’s 2015 report highlighted that their section of the space economy outgrew both the American and global economies. The FAA anticipates that growth to 17 continue, with expectations that small payload launch will be a particular industry driver.18 In the future, emerging space industries may contribute even more the American economy. Space tourism and resource recovery—e.g., mining on planets, moons , and asteroids—in particular may become large parts of that industry. Of course, their viability rests on a range of factors, including costs, future regulation, international problems, and assumptions about technological development. However, there is increasing optimism in these areas of economic production. But the space economy is not just about what happens in orbit, or how that alters life on the ground. The growth of this economy can also contribute to new innovations across all walks of life. Technological Innovation Innovation is generally hard to predict; some new technologies seem to come out of nowhere and others only take off when paired with a new application. It is difficult to predict the future, but it is reasonable to expect that a growing space economy would open opportunities for technological and organizational innovation. In terms of technology, the difficult environment of outer space helps incentivize progress along the margins. Because each object launched into orbit costs a significant amount of money—at the moment between $27,000 and $43,000 per pound, though that will likely drop in the future —each 19 reduction in payload size saves money or means more can be launched. At the same time, the ability to fit more capability into a smaller satellite opens outer space to actors that previously were priced out of the market. This is one of the reasons why small, affordable satellites are increasingly pursued by companies or organizations that cannot afford to launch larger traditional satellites. These small 20 satellites also provide non-traditional launchers, such as engineering students or prototypers, the opportunity to learn about satellite production and test new technologies before working on a full-sized satellite. That expansion of developers, experimenters, and testers cannot but help increase innovation opportunities. Technological developments from outer space have been applied to terrestrial life since the earliest days of space exploration. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) maintains a website that lists technologies that have spun off from such research projects. Lightweight 21 nanotubes, useful in protecting astronauts during space exploration, are now being tested for applications in emergency response gear and electrical insulation. The need for certainty about the resiliency of materials used in space led to the development of an analytics tool useful across a range of industries. Temper foam, the material used in memory-foam pillows, was developed for NASA for seat covers. As more companies pursue their own space goals, more innovations will likely come from the commercial sector. Outer space is not just a catalyst for technological development. Satellite constellations and their unique line-of-sight vantage point can provide new perspectives to old industries. Deploying satellites into low-Earth orbit, as Facebook wants to do, can connect large, previously-unreached swathes of 22 humanity to the Internet. Remote sensing technology could change how whole industries operate, such as crop monitoring, herd management, crisis response, and land evaluation, among others. 23 While satellites cannot provide all essential information for some of these industries, they can fill in some useful gaps and work as part of a wider system of tools. Space infrastructure, in helping to change how people connect and perceive Earth, could help spark innovations on the ground as well. These innovations, changes to global networks, and new opportunities could lead to wider economic growth. Strong Innovation solves Extinction. Matthews 18 Dylan Matthews 10-26-2018 “How to help people millions of years from now” https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/10/26/18023366/far-future-effective-altruism-existential-risk-doing-good (Co-founder of Vox, citing Nick Beckstead @ Rutgers University)Re-cut by Elmer If you care about improving human lives, you should overwhelmingly care about those quadrillions of lives rather than the comparatively small number of people alive today. The 7.6 billion people now living, after all, amount to less than 0.003 percent of the population that will live in the future. It’s reasonable to suggest that those quadrillions of future people have, accordingly, hundreds of thousands of times more moral weight than those of us living here today do. That’s the basic argument behind Nick Beckstead’s 2013 Rutgers philosophy dissertation, “On the overwhelming importance of shaping the far future.” It’s a glorious mindfuck of a thesis, not least because Beckstead shows very convincingly that this is a conclusion any plausible moral view would reach. It’s not just something that weird utilitarians have to deal with. And Beckstead, to his considerable credit, walks the walk on this. He works at the Open Philanthropy Project on grants relating to the far future and runs a charitable fund for donors who want to prioritize the far future. And arguments from him and others have turned “long-termism” into a very vibrant, important strand of the effective altruism community. But what does prioritizing the far future even mean? The most literal thing it could mean is preventing human extinction, to ensure that the species persists as long as possible. For the long-term-focused effective altruists I know, that typically means identifying concrete threats to humanity’s continued existence — like unfriendly artificial intelligence, or a pandemic, or global warming/out of control geoengineering — and engaging in activities to prevent that specific eventuality. But in a set of slides he made in 2013, Beckstead makes a compelling case that while that’s certainly part of what caring about the far future entails, approaches that address specific threats to humanity (which he calls “targeted” approaches to the far future) have to complement “broad” approaches, where instead of trying to predict what’s going to kill us all, you just generally try to keep civilization running as best it can, so that it is, as a whole, well-equipped to deal with potential extinction events in the future, not just in 2030 or 2040 but in 3500 or 95000 or even 37 million. In other words, caring about the far future doesn’t mean just paying attention to low-probability risks of total annihilation; it also means acting on pressing needs now. For example: We’re going to be better prepared to prevent extinction from AI or a supervirus or global warming if society as a whole makes a lot of scientific progress. And a significant bottleneck there is that the vast majority of humanity doesn’t get high-enough-quality education to engage in scientific research, if they want to, which reduces the odds that we have enough trained scientists to come up with the breakthroughs we need as a civilization to survive and thrive. So maybe one of the best things we can do for the far future is to improve school systems — here and now — to harness the group economist Raj Chetty calls “lost Einsteins” (potential innovators who are thwarted by poverty and inequality in rich countries) and, more importantly, the hundreds of millions of kids in developing countries dealing with even worse education systems than those in depressed communities in the rich world. What if living ethically for the far future means living ethically now? Beckstead mentions some other broad, or very broad, ideas (these are all his descriptions): Help make computers faster so that people everywhere can work more efficiently Change intellectual property law so that technological innovation can happen more quickly Advocate for open borders so that people from poorly governed countries can move to better-governed countries and be more productive Meta-research: improve incentives and norms in academic work to better advance human knowledge Improve education Advocate for political party X to make future people have values more like political party X ”If you look at these areas (economic growth and technological progress, access to information, individual capability, social coordination, motives) a lot of everyday good works contribute,” Beckstead writes. “An implication of this is that a lot of everyday good works are good from a broad perspective, even though hardly anyone thinks explicitly in terms of far future standards.” Look at those examples again: It’s just a list of what normal altruistically motivated people, not effective altruism folks, generally do. Charities in the US love talking about the lost opportunities for innovation that poverty creates. Lots of smart people who want to make a difference become scientists, or try to work as teachers or on improving education policy, and lord knows there are plenty of people who become political party operatives out of a conviction that the moral consequences of the party’s platform are good. All of which is to say: Maybe effective altruists aren’t that special, or at least maybe we don’t have access to that many specific and weird conclusions about how best to help the world. If the far future is what matters, and generally trying to make the world work better is among the best ways to help the far future, then effective altruism just becomes plain ol’ do-goodery.
2/20/22
JanFeb - DA - Nasa
Tournament: Berkeley | Round: 3 | Opponent: LNU RN | Judge: Sophia Rebar NASA is preserving resources by leveraging private partnerships which is key to implement their operations. Miriam Kramer 21, author of Space, “NASA's plans for the future hinge on the success of private companies,” Axios, 12-7-2021, https://www.axios.com/nasa-private-spaceflight-plans-5a5710e6-5223-4da3-8c5d-5a712e1d862e.html recut faizaan The private space players who will drive NASA's plans for the coming decade are declaring themselves and defining the stakes. Why it matters: NASA plans to focus on getting people to Mars and the Moon, and its deep space exploration ambitions hinge on the agency being able to successfully hand over major operations in low-Earth orbit to private companies. The space agency hopes companies will build private space stations that its astronauts can use and to continue to buy space on private rockets for launching its satellites and other payloads to orbit and beyond. NASA's "big experiment" right now is to test where these commercial partnerships work, the Planetary Society's Casey Dreier told Axios. What's happening: Last week, NASA announced it would award multimillion-dollar contracts to three teams of commercial space companies to start designing and building privately operated space stations.
The plan forces trade-offs that crush effective NASA earth sciences research which risks climate change to go unaddressed. Haymet 7 (Tony, Director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography – University of California, San Diego, Mark Abbott, Dean of the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Science – Oregon State University, and Jim Luyten, Acting Director – Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, “The Planet NASA Needs to Explore”, Washington Post, 5-10, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/09/AR2007050902451.html) recut faizaan Decades ago, a shift in NASA priorities sidelined progress in human space exploration. As momentum gathers to reinvigorate human space missions to the moon and Mars, we risk hurting ourselves, and Earth, in the long run. Our planet -- not the moon or Mars -- is under significant threat from the consequences of rapid climate change. Yet the changing NASA priorities will threaten exploration here at home. NASA not only launches shuttles and builds space stations, it also builds and operates our nation's satellites that observe and monitor the Earth. These satellites collect crucial global data on winds, ice and oceans. They help us forecast hurricanes, track the loss of Arctic sea ice and the rise of sea levels, and understand and prepare for climate changes. NASA's budget for science missions has declined 30 percent in the past six years, and that trend is expected to continue. As more dollars are reallocated to prepare for missions back to the moon and Mars, sophisticated new satellites to observe the Earth will be delayed, harming Earth sciences. The National Academy of Sciences has noted that the Landsat satellite system, which takes important measurements of global vegetation, is in its fourth decade of operation and could fail without a clear plan for continuation. The same is true for the QuikSCAT satellite, which provides critical wind data used in forecasting hurricanes and El Niño effects. In January, a partnership of university and NASA scientists demonstrated that climate change and higher ocean temperatures were reducing the growth of microscopic plants and animals at the heart of the marine food web. Their analysis was based on nearly a decade of NASA satellite measurements of ocean color, which unfortunately are at risk of being interrupted for several years. Sea levels are rising, and the Arctic Ocean may be ice-free in summer. The buildup of carbon dioxide in the oceans threatens to make them more acidic, which may in turn hinder the ability of some types of marine life, including corals, to build their shells and skeletons. We must learn as much as we can to assess these threats and develop solutions. Satellites provide coverage of vast, remote regions of our planet that would otherwise remain unseen, especially the oceans, which play an important role in climate change. Without accurate data on such fundamentals as sea surface height, temperatures and biomass, as well as glacier heights and snowpack thickness, we will not be able to understand the likelihood of dangers such as more severe hurricanes along the Gulf Coast or more frequent forest fires in the Pacific Northwest. Climate change is the most critical problem the Earth has ever faced. Government agencies and the private sector, as well as individual citizens, need to better grasp the risks and potential paths of global climate change. Mitigating these risks and preparing for the effects of warming will require scientific understanding of how our complex planet operates, how it is changing, and how that change will affect the environment and human society. John F. Kennedy's brilliant call to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s set an arbitrary deadline, but the deadline we face today is set by nature. NASA must continue to play a vital role in helping find ways to protect our planet for (and perhaps from) its intelligent life. Exploration of space is a noble quest. But we can't afford to be so starry-eyed that we overlook our own planet.
Warming is inevitable but adjusting government policy can address the worst effects – specifically, for sea level rise. Economist 17, "How government policy exacerbates hurricanes like Harvey," Economist, https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21727898-if-global-warming-were-not-enough-threat-poor-planning-and-unwise-subsidies-make-floods THE extent of the devastation will become clear only when the floodwater recedes, leaving ruined cars, filthy mud-choked houses and the bloated corpses of the drowned. But as we went to press, with the rain pounding South Texas for the sixth day, Hurricane Harvey had already set records as America’s most severe deluge (see Briefing). In Houston it drenched Harris County in over 4.5trn litres of water in just 100 hours—enough rainfall to cover an eight-year-old child. The fate of America’s fourth-largest city holds the world’s attention, but it is hardly alone. In India, Bangladesh and Nepal, at least 1,200 people have died and millions have been left homeless by this year’s monsoon floods. Last month torrential rains caused a mudslide in Sierra Leone that killed over 1,000—though the exact toll will never be known. Around the world, governments are grappling with the threat from floods. This will ultimately be about dealing with climate change. Just as important, is correcting short-sighted government policy and the perverse incentives that make flooding worse. Judgment day The overwhelming good news is that storms and flooding have caused far fewer deaths in recent decades, thanks to better warning systems and the construction of levees, ditches and shelters. The cyclone that struck Bangladesh in 1970 killed 300,000-500,000 people; the most recent severe one, in 2007, killed 4,234. The bad news is that storms and floods still account for almost three-quarters of weather-related disasters, and they are becoming more common. According to the Munich Re, a reinsurer, their number around the world has increased from about 200 in 1980 to over 600 last year. Harvey was the third “500-year” storm to strike Houston since 1979. At the same time, floods and storms are also becoming more costly. By one estimate, three times as many people were living in houses threatened by hurricanes in 2010 as in 1970, and the number is expected to grow as still more people move to coastal cities. The UN reckons that, in the 20 years to 2015, storms and floods caused $1.7trn of destruction; the World Health Organisation estimates that, in real terms, the global cost of hurricane damage is rising by 6 a year. Flood losses in Europe are predicted to increase fivefold by 2050. One cause is global warming. The frequency and severity of hurricanes vary naturally—America has seen unusually few in the past decade. Yet the underlying global trend is what you would expect from climate change. Warmer seas evaporate faster and warmer air can hold more water vapour, which releases energy when it condenses inside a weather system, feeding the violence of storms and the intensity of deluges. Rising sea levels, predicted to be especially marked in the Gulf of Mexico, exacerbate storm surges, adding to the flooding. Harvey was unusually devastating because it suddenly gained strength before it made landfall on Friday; it then stayed put, dumping its rain on Houston before returning to the Gulf. Again, that is consistent with models of a warmer world. Poor planning bears even more blame. Houston, which has almost no restrictions on land-use, is an extreme example of what can go wrong. Although a light touch has enabled developers to cater to the city’s rapid growth—1.8m extra inhabitants since 2000—it has also led to concrete being laid over vast areas of coastal prairie that used to absorb the rain. According to the Texas Tribune and ProPublica, a charity that finances investigative journalism, since 2010 Harris County has allowed more than 8,600 buildings to be put up inside 100-year floodplains, where floods have a 1 chance of occurring in any year. Developers are supposed to build ponds to hold run-off water that would have soaked into undeveloped land, but the rules are poorly enforced. Because the maps are not kept up to date, properties supposedly outside the 100-year floodplain are being flooded repeatedly. Government failure adds to the harm. Developing countries are underinsured against natural disasters. Swiss Re, a reinsurer, says that of the $50bn or so of losses to floods, cyclones and other disasters in Asia in 2014, only 8 were covered. The Bank of International Settlements calculates that the worst natural catastrophes typically permanently lower the afflicted country’s GDP by almost 2. America has the opposite problem—the federal government subsidises the insurance premiums of vulnerable houses. The National Flood Insurance Programme (NFIP) has been forced to borrow because it fails to charge enough to cover its risk of losses. Underpricing encourages the building of new houses and discourages existing owners from renovating or moving out. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, houses that repeatedly flood account for 1 of NFIP’s properties but 25-30 of its claims. Five states, Texas among them, have more than 10,000 such households and, nationwide, their number has been going up by around 5,000 each year. Insurance is meant to provide a signal about risk; in this case, it stifles it. Mend the roof while the sun shines What to do? Flooding strengthens the case for minimising climate change, which threatens to make wet places wetter and storms stormier. Even those who doubt the science would do well to see action as an insurance policy that pays out if the case is proven. However, that will not happen fast, even if all countries, including America, sign up to international agreements. More immediately, therefore, politicians can learn from Houston. Cities need to protect flood defences and catchment areas, such as the wetlands around Kolkata and the lakes in and around Pokhara in Nepal, whose value is becoming clear. Flood maps need to be up to date. Civil engineers, often starved of funds and strangled by bureaucracy, should be building and reinforcing levees and reservoirs now, before it is too late. The NFIP should start to charge market premiums and developing countries should sell catastrophe bonds. All this is a test of government, of foresight and the ability to withstand the lobbying of homeowners and developers. But politicians and officials who fail the test need to realise that, sooner or later, they will wake up to a Hurricane Harvey of their own.The impact’s global war
2/20/22
JanFeb - K - Baudrillard
Tournament: Churchill | Round: 1 | Opponent: Strake Jesuit JS | Judge: Nelson Okunlola open sourced cites not working
1/8/22
JanFeb - K - Baudrillard v2
Tournament: Berkeley | Round: 2 | Opponent: Harker KB | Judge: Samantha McLoughlin 1NC K Our world is dictated by the hyperreal. Society is engrained in the meaningless binary in which we have lost any meaning of truth. This breeds the conditions of semiocapitalism and a paralysis of our psychic process. Swarts no date Swarts, Frederick. The Metaphysic of the Code . fd "Leibniz, that mathematical spirit, saw in the mystic elegance of the binary system that counts only the zero and the one, the very image of creation. The unity of the supreme Being, operating by binary function in nothingness, would have sufficed to bring out of it all the beings." - McLuhan The great simulacra constructed by man pass from a universe of natural laws to a universe of force and tensions of force, today to a universe of structures and binary oppositions. After the metaphysic of being and appearance, after that of energy and determination, comes that of indeterminacy and the code. Cybernetic control, generation from model, differential modulation, feed-back, question/answer, etc.: such is the new operational configuration (industrial simulacra are only operational). Digitality is its metaphysical principle (the God of Leibniz), and DNA its prophet. It is in effect in the genetic code that the "genesis of simulacra" today finds its most accomplished form. At the limit of an always more extensive abolition of references and finalities, of the loss of resemblance and designation, we find the digital program- sign, whose value is purely tactical, at the intersection of the other signals (corpuscles of information/test) and whose structure is that of a macro-molecular code of command and control. At this level the question of signs, of their rational destination, their real or imaginary, their repression, their deviation, the illusion they create or that which they conceal, or their parallel meanings - all of that is erased. We have already seen signs of the first order, complex signs and rich in illusion, change, with the machines, into crude signs, dull, industrial, repetitive, echoless, operational and efficacious. What a mutation, even more radical still, with signals of the code, illegible, with no gloss possible, buried like programmatic matrices light-years away in the depths of the "biological" body - black boxes where all the commandments, all the answers ferment! End of the theatre of representation, the space of signs, their conflict, their silence; only the black box of the code, the molecular emitter of signals from which we have been irradiated, crossed by answers/questions like signifying radiations, tested continuously by our own program inscribed in the cells. Jail cells, electronic cells, party cells, microbiological cells: always the search for the smallest indivisible element, whose organic synthesis would be made according to the givens of the code. But the code itself is but a genetic cell, a generator where myriads of intersections produce all the questions and possible solutions, so that choices (by whom?) can be made. No finality involved with these "questions" (informational and signifying impulsions) but the answer, genetically unchangeable or inflected by minute and aleatory differences. Space is no longer even linear or one- dimensional: cellular space, indefinite generation of the same signals, like the tics of a prisoner gone crazy with solitude and repetition. Such is the genetic code: an erased record, unchangeable, of which we are no more than cells- for-reading. All aura of sign, of significance itself is resolved in this determination; all is resolved in the inscription and decodage. Such is the third-order simulacrum, our own. Such is the "mystic elegance of the binary system, of the zero and the one", from which all being proceeds. Such is the status of the sign that is also the end of signification: DNA or operational simulation. All of this is perfectly well summed up by Sebeok ("Genetics and Semiotics", in Versus): Numerous observations confirm the hypothesis that the internal organic world descends in a straight line from the primordial forms of life. The most remarkable fact is the omnipresence of the DNA molecule. The genetic material of all organisms known on earth is in great measure made up of the nucleonic acids DNA and RNA that contain in their information structure, transmitted by reproduction from one generation to another and furthermore gifted with the capacity of self-reproduction and imitation. Briefly, the genetic code is universal, or almost. Its deciphering was an immense discovery, in the sense that it showed that "the two languages of the great polymers, the language of nucleonic acid and that of protein, are tightly correlated" (Crick, 1966; Clarck/Narcker, 1968). The Soviet mathematician Liapounov demonstrated in 1963 that all living systems transmit by prescribed canals with precision a small quantity of energy or of matter containing a great volume of information, which is responsible for the ulterior control of a great quantity of energy and matter. In this perspective numerous phenomena, biological as well as cultural (stockage, feed-back, canalization of messages and others) can be seen as aspects of the treatment of information. In the last analysis information appears in great part as the repetition of information, or even as another sort of information, a sort of control that seems to be a universal property of terrestrial life, independent of form or substance. Five years ago I drew attention to the convergence of genetics and linguistics - autonomous disciplines, but parallel in the larger field of communication science (of which animal semiotics also is a part). The terminology of genetics is full of expressions taken from linguistics and communication theory (Jacobson, 1968), which also underlined either the major resemblances or the important differences of structure and of function between genetic and verbal codes. . . It is obvious today that the genetic code must be considered the most fundamental of all the semiotic networks, and therefore a prototype of all the other systems of signaling that animals use, man included. From this point of view, molecules which are systems of quanta and behave like stable vehicles of physical information, systems of animal semiotics and cultural systems, including language, constitute a continuous chain of stages, with always more complex energy levels, in the framework of a universal unique evolution. It is therefore possible to describe either language or living systems from a unified cybernetic point-of-view. For the present, this is only a useful analogy or a prediction. A reciprocal rapprochement between animal communication and linguistics can lead to a complete knowledge of the dynamics of semiotics, and such a knowledge can be revealed, in the last analysis, to be nothing less than the very definition of life. And so the current strategic model is designed that everywhere is replacing the great ideological model which constituted political economy in its time. You will find it under the rigorous sign of "science" in the Chance and Necessity of Jacques Monod. The end of dialectical evolution, it is the discontinuous indeterminism of the genetic code that now controls life - the teleological principle. Finality no longer belongs to the term; there is no longer a term, nor a determination. Finality is there beforehand, inscribed in the code. We see that nothing has changed - simply the order of ends yields to the play of molecules, and the order of signifieds to the play of infinitesimal signifiers, reduced to their aleatory commutation. All the transcendant finalities reduced to a dashboard full of instruments. There is still, however, recourse to a nature, to an inscription in "biological" nature - in actuality, a nature distorted by fantasy like she always was, metaphysical sanctuary no longer of origin and substance, but this time of the code; the code must have an "objective" basis. What could be better for that purpose than the molecule and genetics? Monod is the strict theologian of this molecular transcendance, Edgar Morin the rapt disciple (A.D.N.* + Adonai!). But for one as well as the other, the fantasy of the code, which is equivalent to the reality of power, is merged with molecular idealism. (*D.N.A.) Thus we find once more in history that delirious illusion of uniting the world under the aegis of a single principle - that of a homogenous substance with the Jesuits of the Counter Reformation; that of the genetic code with the technocrats of biological science (but also linguistics as well), with Leibniz and his binary divinity as precursor. For the program here aimed at has nothing genetic about it, it is a social and historical program. That which is hypostatized in biochemistry is the ideal of a social order ruled by a sort of genetic code of macromolecular calculation, of P.P.B.S. (Planned Programming Budgeting System), irradiating the social body with its operational circuits. The technical cybernetic finds its "natural philosophy" here, as Monod says. The fascination of the biological, of the biomedical dates from the very beginnings of science. It was at work in Spencerian organicism (sociobiology) on the level of second- and third-order structures (Jacob's classification in The Logic of Life, it is active today in modern biochemistry, on the level of structures of the fourth-order). Coded similarities and dissimilarities: that is certainly the image of cyberniticized social exchange. You only have to add "stereospecific complex" in order to re-inject intracellular communication; that Morin will come to transfigure into molecular Eros.
The 1AC desire to command, control, and cooperate over the unique processes of space represent an attempt to make the cosmos into a geopolitical chess game to control the fluctuation of meaning. Havercroft and Duvall 9 (Jonathan Havercroft and Raymond Duvall; 2009; “Critical astropolitics The geopolitics of space control and the transformation of state sovereignty”; accessed 12/13/21; https://www.law.upenn.edu/live/files/7892-havercroft-and-duvallcritical-astropoliticspdf; Jonathan Havercroft is an Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Southampton. He teaches in the areas of political theory and international relations. He is the editor of the journal Global Constitutionalism; Raymond Duvall is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota; pages 44-50) HB retagged faizaan Astropolitics: realist and liberal strands Realism and astropolitik Everett Dolman3 draws on the writings of Mackinder and Mahan as inspiration for his development of a theory, which he titles Astropolitik. By the term, astropolitik, Dolman means “the application of the prominent and refined realist vision of state competition into outer space policy, particularly the development and evolution of a legal and political regime for humanity’s entry into the cosmos” (Dolman 2002a: 1). While Mahan focused on the structure of the ocean to develop his theories, and Mackinder focused on the topography of land, Dolman turns his attention toward the cartography of outer space. Whereas, at first glance, space may appear to be a “featureless void,” Dolman argues that it “is in fact a rich vista of gravitational mountains and valleys, oceans and rivers of resources and energy alternately dispersed and concentrated, broadly strewn danger zones of deadly radiation, and precisely placed peculiarities of astrodynamics” (Dolman 2002a: 61). In a manner similar to Mahan’s focus on natural sea lanes and “choke points” and Mackinder’s emphasis of geographic regions, Dolman emphasizes orbits, regions of space, and launch points as geopolitically vital assets over which states can be expected competitively and strategically to struggle for control. Orbital paths are important because stable orbits require virtually no fuel expenditure for satellites, whereas unstable orbits make it impossible for satellites to remain in space for a long time. Furthermore, different types of orbits pass over different parts of the earth at different frequencies. As such, the mission of a spacecraft determines in large part which orbit is most useful for it. There are essentially four types of orbits: low-altitude (between 150 km and 800 km above the Earth’s surface); medium-altitude (ranging from 800 km–35,000 km); high-altitude (above 35,000 km); and highly elliptical (with a perigee of 250 km and an apogee of 700,000 km) (Dolman 2002a: 65–7). In addition to pointing to the division of space into orbital planes, Dolman also identifies four key regions of space: 1 Terra, which includes the Earth and its atmosphere up until “just below the lowest altitude capable of supporting unpowered orbit” (Dolman 2002: 69); 2 Earth Space, which covers the region from the lowest possible orbit through to geo-stationary orbit; 3 Lunar Space, which extends from geo-stationary orbit to the Moon’s orbit; and 4 Solar Space, which “consists of everything in the solar system . . . beyond the orbit of the moon” (Dolman 2002a: 70). For Dolman, Earth Space is the astropolitical equivalent of Mackinder’s Outer Crescent, because controlling it will permit a state to limit strategic opportunities of potential rivals and at the same time allow the projection of force for indirect control (i.e. without occupation) of extensive territory of vital strategic importance, in this case (unlike Mackinder’s) potentially the entire Earth. “Control of Earth Space not only guarantees long-term control of the outer reaches of space, it provides a near-term advantage on the terrestrial battlefield” (Dolman 1999: 93). On the basis of these principles, Dolman develops an “Astropolitik policy for the United States” (Dolman 1999: 156), which calls on the U.S. government to control Earth Space. In the current historical–political juncture, no state controls this region. However, rather than leave it as a neutral zone or global commons, Dolman calls for the U.S. to seize control of this geo-strategically vital asset. According to Dolman’s reasoning, the neutrality of Earth Space is as much a threat to U.S. security as the neutrality of Melos was to Athenian hegemony. To leave space a neutral sanctuary could be interpreted as a sign of weakness that potential rivals might exploit. As such, it is better for the U.S. to occupy Earth Space now. Dolman’s astropolitik policy has three steps. The first involves the U.S. withdrawing from the current space regime on the grounds that its prohibitions on commercial and military exploitation of outer space prevent the full exploitation of space resources. In place of the global commons approach that informs that regime, Dolman calls for the establishment of “a principle of free-market sovereignty in space” (Dolman 2002a: 157), whereby states could establish territorial claims over areas they wish to exploit for commercial purposes. This space rush should be coupled with “propaganda touting the prospects of a new golden age of space exploration” (Dolman 2002a: 157). Step two calls for the U.S. to seize control of low-Earth orbit, where “space-based laser or kinetic energy weapons could prevent any other state from deploying assets there, and could most effectively engage and destroy terrestrial enemy ASAT facilities” (Dolman 2002a: 157). Other states would be permitted “to enter space freely for the purpose of engaging in commerce” (Dolman 2002a: 157). The final step would be the establishment of “a national space coordination agency ... to define, separate and coordinate the efforts of commercial, civilian and military space projects” (Dolman 2002a: 157). Within Dolman’s theory of astropolitik is a will-to-space-based-hegemony fuelled by a series of assumptions, of which we would point to three as especially important. First, it rests on a strong preference for competition over collaboration in both the economic and military spheres. Dolman, like a good realist, is suspicious of the possibilities for sustained political and economic cooperation, and assumes instead that competition for power is the law of international political–economic life. He believes, though, that through a fully implemented astropolitical policy “states will employ competition productively, harnessing natural incentives for self-interested gain to a mutually beneficial future, a competition based on the fair and legal commercial exploitation of space” (Dolman 2002a: 4). Thus, underpinning his preference for competition is both a liberal assumption that competitive markets are efficient at producing mutual gain through innovative technologies, and the realist assumption that inter-state competition for power is inescapable in world politics. As we will note more fully below, this conjunction of liberal and realist assumptions is a hallmark of the logic of empire as distinct from the logic of a system of sovereign states. The second and most explicit of Dolman’s key assumptions is the belief that the U.S. should pursue control of orbital space because its hegemony would be largely benign. The presumed benevolence of the U.S. rests, for Dolman, on its responsiveness to its people. If any one state should dominate space it ought to be one with a constitutive political principle that government should be responsible and responsive to its people, tolerant and accepting of their views, and willing to extend legal and political equality to all. In other words, the United States should seize control of outer space and become the shepherd (or perhaps watchdog) for all who would venture there, for if any one state must do so, it is the most likely to establish a benign hegemony. (Dolman 2002a: 157) However, even if the U.S. government is popularly responsive in its foreign policy – a debatable proposition – the implication of Dolman’s astropolitik is that the U.S. would exercise benign control over orbital space, and, from that position, potentially all territory on Earth and hence all people, by being responsible to its 300 million citizens. As such, this benign hegemony would in effect be an apartheid regime where 95 percent of the world would be excluded from participating in the decision-making of the hegemonic power that controls conditions of their existence. This, too, is a hallmark of empire, not of a competitive system of sovereign states. Third, Dolman’s astropolitik treats space as a resource to be mastered and exploited by humans, a Terra Nulius, or empty territory, to be colonized and reinterpreted for the interests of the colonizer. This way of looking at space is similar to the totalizing gaze of earlier geopolitical theorists who viewed the whole world as an object to be dominated and controlled by European powers, who understood themselves to be beneficently, or, at worst, benignly, civilizing in their control of territories and populations (Ó Tuathail 1996: 24–35). This assumption, like the first two, thus also implicates a hallmark of the logic of empire, namely what Ó Tuathail (1996) calls the ‘geopolitical gaze’ (about which we have more to say below), which works comfortably in tandem with a self-understanding of benign hegemony. When these three assumptions are examined in conjunction, Dolman’s astropolitik reveals itself to be a blueprint for a U.S. empire that uses the capacities of space-based weapons to exercise hegemony over the Earth and to grant access to the economic resources of space only to U.S. (capitalist) interests and their allies. This version of astropolitics, which is precisely the strategic vision underlying the policy pronouncements of the National Security Space Management and Organization Commission (Commission 2001) – and subsequently President George W. Bush – with which we began this chapter, is a kind of spatial, or geopolitical, power within the context of U.S. imperial relations of planetary scope. Its ostensive realist foundations are muted, except as a rather extreme form of offensive realism, because the vision is not one of great power competition and strategic balancing, but rather one of imperial control through hegemony. As such, it brings into question the constitution of sovereignty, since empire and sovereignty are fundamentally opposed constitutive principles of the structure of the international system – the subjects of empire are not sovereign. Thus, if astropolitics is to be in the form of Dolman’s astropolitik (and current U.S. policy aspirations), the future of sovereignty is in question, despite his efforts to position the theory as an expression of the realist assumption of great power competition. In later sections of this chapter, we attempt to show what this bringing sovereignty into question is likely to mean, conceptually and in practice. Before turning to that principal concern, however, we consider an alternative geopolitical theory of astropolitics. Liberal-republican astropolitics Over the past twenty-five years, in a series of articles and recently a major book, Daniel Deudney has attempted to rework the tenets of geopolitics and apply them to the contemporary challenges raised by new weapons technologies – particularly nuclear and space weapons (Deudney 1983, 1985, 1995, 2000, 2002, 2007).4 While Deudney finds geopolitical theory of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century theoretically unsophisticated and reductionist, he believes that geopolitical attention to material conditions, spatiality, change, and political processes could form the basis of a theoretically sophisticated contextual–materialist security theory of world politics. Deudney starts from a premise about space weaponization similar to the core of Dolman’s astropolitik, namely that if any state were able to achieve military control of space, it would hold potential mastery over the entire Earth. One preliminary conclusion, however, seems sound: effective control of space by one state would lead to planet-wide hegemony. Because space is at once so proximate and the planet’s high ground, one country able to control space and prevent the passage of other countries’ vehicles through it could effectively rule the planet. Even more than a monopoly of air or sea power, a monopoly of effective space power would be irresistible. (Deudney 1983: 17) Rather than developing the implications of this as a strategic opportunity for any one state (e.g. the U.S.), however, Deudney sees it as a collective problem to be kept in check through collaboration; his project is to avoid space-based hegemony through cooperation among states. In a series of articles on global security written in the 1980s – while Cold War tensions between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. continued to frame much theoretical discussion in international relations – Deudney saw the space age as a double-edged sword in superpower relations. On the one side, space weaponization posed a risk that the superpowers would extend their conflict extra-terrestrially and devise new, deadlier technologies that would enhance the risk of exterminating all of humanity; on the other, according to Deudney, the space age had found productive opportunities for the superpowers to deal with their rivalries in stabilizing collaboration. He notes that the Sputnik mission, while in the popular understanding only an escalation of the Cold War, initially was the result of an internationally organized research program – the International Geophysical Year (Deudney 1985; though see Dolman 2002a: 106–107 for an alternate interpretation of these events as Cold War competition). Another example was President Eisenhower’s proposed “Atoms for Peace” project, which involved the great powers sharing nuclear technology with developing nations for energy purposes. Most famous was the collaboration between the Soviet Union and the U.S. during the 1970s on the rendezvous between an Apollo capsule and the Soyuz space station. Similar multinational collaborations continue to this day, with the most notable example being the International Space Station. In addition to promoting collaboration, according to Deudney, the space age has also enhanced the ability of space powers to monitor each other – through spy satellites – thereby increasing the likelihood that they abide by arms control treaties. Deudney believes that these types of collaboration and increased surveillance could be strengthened and deepened so that great powers could be persuaded over time to “forge missiles into spaceships” (Deudney 1985: 271). In the 1980s this led Deudney to develop a set of specific proposals for a peaceful space policy, including collaboration between space powers on manned missions to the Moon, asteroids, and Mars. The development of an International Satellite Monitoring Agency would make “space-based surveillance technology accessible to an international community” for monitoring ceasefires, crises, compliance with international arms control treaties, and the Earth’s environment (Deudney 1985: 291). These proposals are aimed at promoting collaboration on projects of great scientific and military significance for the individual states. Deudney’s expectation is that such cooperation would mitigate security dilemmas and promote greater ties between states that would co-bind their security without sacrificing their sovereignty. While Deudney has not been explicit about how his astropolitics of collaboration would alter world order, in his more theoretical writings he has elaborated the logic of a liberal-republican international system. In a 2002 article on geopolitics and international theory, he developed what he called a‘historical security materialist’ theory of geopolitics: “In which changing forces of destruction (constituted by geography and technology) condition the viability of different modes of protection (understood as clusters of security practices) and their attendant ‘superstructures’ of political authority structures (anarchical, hierarchical, and federal-republican)” (Deudney 2002: 80). In that work, he identified four different eras in which distinct modes of destruction were predominant: Pre-modern; Early Modern; Global Industrial; and Planetary-Nuclear, as well as two modes of protection: real-statism, which is based on an internal monopoly of violence and external anarchy; and federal-republicanism, which is based on an internal division of powers and an external symmetrical binding of actors through institutions that reduces their autonomy in relation to one another. According to Deudney, in the Planetary-Nuclear age the federal-republican mode of protection is more viable because states “are able to more fully and systematically restrain violence” than under the power balancing practices of real-statist modes of protection (Deudney 2002: 97; see also Deudney 2007: 244–277 for an elaboration of this argument). Although Deudney has not extended his “historical security materialist” approach into explicitly theorizing space weapons, per se (dealt with only tangentially and implicitly in the last two chapters of his recent book), his proposals during the Cold War to foster institutional collaboration between space powers as a way of promoting peace can safely be understood as a form of the mutually binding practices that he associates with the federalrepublican mode of protection. In addition, one of the general conclusions that Deudney reaches about “historical security materialism” is that the more a security context is rich in the potential for violence, the better suited a federal-republican mode of protection is to avoid systemic breakdown. Therefore, it seems reasonable to conclude that within Deudney’s work is a nascent theory of how a federal-republican international system could limit conflict between space powers by binding them together in collaborative uses of space for exploratory and security uses. In this sense, Deudney can be read as the liberal-republican astropolitical counterpart to Everett Dolman.5 While Deudney’s astropolitical theorizations hold out the promise of a terrestrial pacification through space exploration it is interesting to note a significant aporia in his theory – empire as a possible mode of protection. While real-statist modes of protection have an internal hierarchical authority structure, they are based on assumptions of external-anarchy, which is to say a system of sovereign states. Conversely, the federal-republican model is based on a symmetrical binding of units, in a way that no single unit can come to dominate others and accordingly in which they preserve their sovereignty (Deudney 2000, 2002, 2007). In a third mode, to which Deudney gives only scant attention, the case of empire, the hegemony of a single unit is such that other units are bound to it in an asymmetrical pattern that locates sovereignty only in the hegemon, or imperial center. Successful empires, including the Roman, British, and American, permit local autonomy in areas that are not of the imperial power’s direct concern while demanding absolute obedience in areas that are of vital concern to it, particularly when it comes to issues of security.6 Deudney’s implicit astropolitical theory thus ignores structurally asymmetric relations – in effect he ignores power. It is as if in wanting to have the world avoid the possibility of a planetary hegemony at the heart of the premise with which he and Dolman began their respective analyses, he white-washes it by failing to acknowledge the profound asymmetries of aspirations and technological–financial–military capacities among states for control of orbital space. In the next two sections we respond to Deudney’s call for “historical security materialism” by focusing on the premise that he skirts but that Dolman emphasizes, that military control of space means (at least the possibility of) mastery of the Earth. Specifically we examine how a new mode of destruction – space weapons – is the ideal basis for the third mode of protection – empire – through its potential for substantial asymmetry. We argue that the power asymmetries of space weapons have very significant constitutive effects on sovereignty and international systemic anarchy, and underlie the constitution of a new, historically unprecedented, form of empire. Before turning to that central thesis, however, we will first sketch the general contours of a critical astropolitics, which builds on the foundational premise of Dolman and Deudney, but modifies their theories in light of the significant insights of critical theory, particularly with respect to constitutive power. We ask: what consequences of astropolitics can a critical approach illuminate that may be concealed by an astropolitics informed by either liberal-republican or realist assumptions? How can insights offered by the revival of geopolitics in the writings of Deudney and Dolman – particularly the call for a new security materialist mode of analysis – be used to supplement and refine critical international relations theory?
Information creates new systems of reality that feel far more intimate than reality itself – a tool used by the elite to hide the failures of meaning. A loss of information would lead to total disarray. Baudrillard 2 Jean; Simulacra and Simulation; Sociologist/Philosopher, cool dude; 1981; University of Michigan Press; LCA-BP *edited for lang The third hypothesis is the most interesting but flies in the face of every commonly held opinion. Everywhere socialization is measured by the exposure to media messages. Whoever is underexposed to the media is desocialized or virtually asocial. Everywhere information is thought to produce an accelerated circulation of meaning, a plus value of meaning homologous to the economic one that results from the accelerated rotation of capital. Information is thought to create communication, and even if the waste is enormous, a general consensus would have it that nevertheless, as a whole, there be an excess of meaning, which is redistributed in all the interstices of the social - just as consensus would have it that material production, despite its dysfunctions and irrationalities, opens onto an excess of wealth and social purpose. We are all complicitous in this myth. It is the alpha and omega of our modernity, without which the credibility of our social organization would collapse. Well, the fact is that it is collapsing, and for this very reason: because where we think that information produces meaning, the opposite occurs. Information devours its own content. It devours communication and the social. And for two reasons. 1. Rather than creating communication, it exhausts itself in the act of staging communication. Rather than producing meaning, it exhausts itself in the staging of meaning. A gigantic process of simulation that is very familiar. The nondirective interview, speech, listeners who call in, participation at every level, blackmail through speech: "You are concerned, you are the event, etc." More and more information is invaded by this kind of phantom content, this homeopathic grafting, this awakening dream of communication. A circular arrangement through which one stages the desire of the audience, the antitheater of communication, which, as one knows, is never anything but the recycling in the negative of the traditional institution, the integrated circuit of the negative. Immense energies are deployed to hold this simulacrum at bay, to avoid the brutal desimulation that would confront us in the face of the obvious reality of a radical loss of meaning. It is useless to ask if it is the loss of communication that produces this escalation in the simulacrum, or whether it is the simulacrum that is there first for dissuasive ends, to short-circuit in advance any possibility of communication (precession of the model that calls an end to the real). Useless to ask which is the first term, there is none, it is a circular process - that of simulation, that of the hyperreal. The hyperreality of communication and of meaning. More real than the real, that is how the real is abolished. Thus not only communication but the social functions in a closed circuit, as a lure - to which the force of myth is attached. Belief, faith in information attach themselves to this tautological proof that the system gives of itself by doubling the signs of an unlocatable reality. But one can believe that this belief is as ambiguous as that which was attached to myths in ancient societies. One both believes and doesn't. One does not ask oneself, "I know very well, but still." A sort of inverse simulation in the masses, in each one of us, corresponds to this simulation of meaning and of communication in which this system encloses us. To this tautology of the system the masses respond with ambivalence, to deterrence they respond with disaffection, or with an always enigmatic belief. Myth exists, but one must guard against thinking that people believe in it: this is the trap of critical thinking that can only be exercised if it presupposes the naivete and stupidity of the masses 2. Behind this exacerbated mise-en-scène of communication, the mass media, the pressure of information pursues an irresistible destructuration of the social. Thus information dissolves meaning and dissolves the social, in a sort of nebulous state dedicated not to a surplus of innovation, but, on the contrary, to total entropy.*1 Thus the media are producers not of socialization, but of exactly the opposite, of the implosion of the social in the masses. And this is only the macroscopic extension of the implosion of meaning at the microscopic level of the sign. This implosion should be analyzed according to McLuhan's formula, the medium is the message, the consequences of which have yet to be exhausted. That means that all contents of meaning are absorbed in the only dominant form of the medium. Only the medium can make an event - whatever the contents, whether they are conformist or subversive. A serious problem for all counterinformation, pirate radios, antimedia, etc. But there is something even more serious, which McLuhan himself did not see. Because beyond this neutralization of all content, one could still expect to manipulate the medium in its form and to transform the real by using the impact of the medium as form. If all the content is wiped out, there is perhaps still a subversive, revolutionary use value of the medium as such.
Images of catastrophe are exported of suffering and justify structures of violence, they attach a false investment towards different causes just for the ballot creating an inauthentic attachment driving hyperreal desires. Baudrillard ‘94 Jean, “The Illusion of the End” p. 66-71. djb 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.
Hegemony is a paranoid fantasy – the 1AC’s painting China as an obstacle to primacy only externalizes the lack to convince us that the problem lies in Otherness – that creates a feedback loop of insecurity and racialized logics. Solomon ‘15 Ty Solomon, Lecturer in International Relations, University of Glasglow, “The Politics of Subjectivity in American Foreign Policy Discourses,” University of Michigan Press, Jan 2015, KB rc/pat Rather than acknowledging the possibility that the ambiguity of subjectivity cannot be overcome, the prospect of American global domination offers a fantasy that channels the desire for subjectivity in a direction that promises a lack of absolutely nothing for “America.” Yet both this image of American global domination and the discursive attempts to pin down what the nation is missing are fantasy objects—partial manifestations of object a that indeed never existed but are posited to have existed and whose presumed absence sparks the desire for the recovery of the enjoyment that they seem to promise.9 While articulating that what America lacks constitutes the potential source of global chaos, other aspects of the discourse soften the impact of this potential source of global disintegration. Whereas Krauthammer emphasized unipolarity for unipolarity’s sake, without giving too much gravity to potential threats or others, Kristol and Kagan’s text is replete with other potential obstacles to enjoyment. Kristol and Kagan offer up a variety of “rogue states” and other entities that join with national weakness to become threats on the horizon. China and Iran, for example, appear frequently as states that likely will not accede to the international rules that the US lays down or adopt American values. “Whether or not the United States continues to grant most-favored-nation status to China is less important” for Kristol and Kagan (1996: 23) “than whether it has an overall strategy for containing, influencing, and ultimately seeking to change the regime in Beijing.” America should develop a missile defense system capable of “shielding, say, Los Angeles from nuclear intimidation by the Chinese during the next crisis in the Taiwan Strait” (25). The greater defense capabilities the US builds up, the “less chance there is that countries like China or Iran will entertain ambitions of upsetting the present world order”—a world order defined by American principles (26). Spreading American influence abroad “means not just supporting U.S. friends and gently pressuring other nations but actively pursuing policies—in Iran, Cuba, or China, for instance—ultimately intended to bring about a change of regime” (28). And more broadly, Kristol and Kagan fear that given America’s indifference toward foreign affairs, it “may no longer have the wherewithal to defend against threats to America’s vital interests in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, much less to extend America’s current global preeminence well into the future” (24). In one sense, figures such as China and Iran constitute Others against which American “identity” is defined. We are benevolent, while they are aggressive. We spread our universal values to the benefit of all, while they spread fear and threaten peaceful nations. We construct world order, they wantonly seek to undermine it. This illustrates what many IR identity theorists have pointed out—that identity depends on an Other for its definition. Weldes (1999: 220), for example, argues that “identity and difference are mutually constitutive: there is always a politics of identity through which identity and difference are defined in tandem.” In this view, it is perhaps not terribly surprising that Kristol and Kagan’s discourse aided in enhancing neoconservative traction during the later 1990s. Their discourse produces a series of Others against which “American” identity is defined, and consequently these “foreign policy problems allow for the articulation and rearticulation of relations of identity/difference as a means of both constituting and securing state identity” (220). However, the present analysis demonstrates that this process of Othering is itself made possible and sustained by the movements of lack, desire, and enjoyment—the key factors that are mostly neglected in IR identity frameworks. Beyond the mere construction of “us” and “them,” in a more fundamental sense the incompleteness of the collective subject of Kristol and Kagan’s discourse is projected onto the figures of these states. The key notion here is, again, that the subject is a subject of lack. Subjects are always already decentered and disjointed. The movements of lack and anticipated wholeness—and how the subject is produced as dealing with these ambiguities—are the condition of possibility of Self-Other relations. Lack is dealt with through the fantasy implied in their discourse. In Kristol and Kagan’s discourse, the entire world under America’s protective and benevolent wing would be peaceful and largely free of antagonism, tension, and conflict if not for nonconforming states such as China, Iraq, and Iran. Yet rather than Others whose objective presence is deemed threatening, the figures of China, Iran, and others patch up the contingent fantasy of American global supremacy. The fantasy of American security, which is the fantasy of global conformity to American “universal” values, is, like all fantasies, an impossible project. Fantasy offers a way to deal with this contingency through a discourse that attempts to cover over the incompleteness of subject formation and the perpetual unfulfillment of desire for enjoyment. On one hand, Kristol and Kagan offer a neoconservative vision of American global control, while on the other hand, we have the ontological impossibility of such a social totality. What accounts for this discursive discrepancy? The sole answer offered by the discourse is “rogue states” such as Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. Yet, according to the dynamics of desire analyzed here, world order is not prevented by rogue states, but from the impossibility of “fully” constructing such an entity. In other words, the spark of desire stems from the incompleteness of the subject itself, which in turn gives rise to fantasy and Othering: The point is not that “we” are nothing but the drive to annihilate the antagonistic force that prevents us from achieving our full identity. Rather, the antagonistic force is held responsible for the blockage of our full identity, and this permits the externalization of our constitutive lack as subjects to the negating Other, which thus becomes the positive embodiment of our selfblockage. As a result our political actions will tend to be guided by the illusion that the annihilation of the antagonistic force will permit us to become the fully constituted “we” that we have always sought to be. (Torfing 1999: 128–29) This balancing act within fantasy drives much of the identification appeal of Kristol and Kagan’s discourse. While they argue that American internal “weakness,” “mood,” “indifference,” and the like must be confronted with appropriate programs of increased militarization and more nationalistic spectacles (signified by “our” need to more fully adhere to “honor,” “exceptionalism,” “national greatness,” and so on), the coherence of the discourse rests on a fantasy in which a localizable set of Others—“rogue states”—constitute the sole obstacles on which the inescapable contingency and incompleteness of American global domination can be projected. It is not the possibility that America’s values may not in fact be universal, nor is it the possibility that the rest of the world may not welcome with open arms American “benevolent hegemony.” It is not that “we,” the subject, are incapable of fully embracing our enjoyment because of the impossibility of its full experience. It is, as the fantasy rationalizes, a relatively small group of Others that impedes American total global hegemony. They pose an obstacle to our wholeness. If not for these Others, the US and the world would reclaim the mythical wholeness of enjoyment. The fantasy in fact presupposes that the subject was unified before the missing object was lost. Again, Kristol and Kagan remember the days when Reagan summoned the full potential of American spiritual and military might, stared down the Soviet Union, and won the Cold War for the side of freedom. They recall even further in the past, when Theodore Roosevelt inspired Americans to embrace their global responsibilities. Together, both of these leaders “celebrated American exceptionalism” (1996: 32). Thus, the fantasy blames others while simultaneously offering the promise of enjoyment as something missing for which to strive. This double movement within fantasy (an Other to blame and a missing yet promised “sublime object,” both of which are negotiations with lack and incompleteness) is key to tracing the discursive efficacy here. As Yannis Stavrakakis (1999: 82) points out, this “fantasmatic element is crucial for the desirability of all such discourses, in other words for the hegemonic appeal.” America is missing something that it had during both Roosevelt’s and Reagan’s times (partially symbolized by terms such as moral clarity, American principles, honor, national greatness, and so on). The fantasy itself retroactively constructs what it says was lost, a unity that never was. The subject’s loss drives the desire for reclaiming that which is perceived to have been lost (the indefinable object a), and Kristol and Kagan offer a neoconservative fantasy that explains what the subject must do to once again reach wholeness. Through fantasy, we can further draw out some of the key contrasts between Kristol and Kagan’s discourse and Krauthammer’s. As is evident, fantasies are typically constituted through a double movement. On one hand, for an identity to exist, there must be difference. Fantasies usually offer up an Other on which the incompleteness of the subject may be projected. On the other hand, fantasies offer a promise to come—a promise that “we” will recover some “sublime object” that is felt to have been lost (though it never existed). The constitutive dynamics of the first dimension (the frustrations of lack and wholeness that produce a focus a focus on Otherness) and this second dimension (the enticement of a promised enjoyment) are often overlooked in IR identity accounts. In other words, “the stake of social-ideological fantasy is to construct a vision of society which does exist, a society which is not split by an antagonistic division” that will lure subjects to identify with it (Žižek 1989: 126). Krauthammer’s discourse on unipolarity arguably concerned one aspect of fantasy without evoking the other. The unipolarity discourse relied to some extent on its construction of Others for the projection of the collective subject’s lack. Yet the promise it offered actually seemed close to fulfillment—a “unipolar moment” with America on top. The promise of enjoyment fades rather than sparks desire, and this discourse’s relative troubles with resonance may be traced to this aspect. It offered an Other but lacked an appealing promise of enjoyment to come. In contrast, the fantasy implied in Kristol and Kagan’s discourse evokes both dimensions of fantasy. It offers a series of Others that are constructed as threatening but that function as the sites on which the incompleteness of the discourse’s subject is projected. In conjunction, it also offers the promised recovery of a core part of “us” that is felt to be missing. This discourse keeps the indefinable object a at a proper distance to draw subjects to its promise yet not too close so as to kill desire. Placing the fantasies of these two discourses side by side, therefore, we can see more clearly how fundamental both aspects of fantasy’s double movement are to the differing efficacy of these discourses. Hegemonic Logic These elements of fantasy underpinned the neoconservative attempts at discursive hegemony in the late 1990s. Logics of equivalence and difference function here in much the same way as they have in other neoconservative discourses. Boundaries of the collective subject and its Others are constructed through strings of signifiers that attempt to pin down or represent the subject within discourse, and Others are constructed through strings of differences. The Others against which the subject is defined are constructed through different predications that attempt to express who and what they are and what they share against the US. American forces “deter Chinese aggression against democratic Taiwan” in East Asia, help deter a “possible invasion” of South Korea by the North, and help deter “possible aggression by Saddam Hussein or the fundamentalist regime in Iran” in the Persian Gulf (Kristol and Kagan 1996: 20–21). Both “rogue states” such as North Korea and “nuclear intimidation” by the Chinese pose threats to the US mainland (25). China and Iran “entertain ambitions of upsetting the present world order” (26). For Kristol and Kagan, all of these examples illustrate how John Quincy Adams’s warning that the US “ought not go ‘abroad in search of monsters to destroy’” is now outdated (31). “But why not?,” the authors ask, questioning Adams (31). “The alternative is to leave monsters on the loose, ravaging and pillaging to their hearts’ content, as Americans stand by and watch” (31). “Aggression,” “invasion,” “fundamentalist,” “rogue,” “intimidation,” “upsetting,” even “monsters”—these various names and signifiers constitute not just a series of Others (mainly China, Iran, and Iraq) in Kristol and Kagan’s discourse, but all seem to express a common underlying similarity. “Fundamentalists” and “rogues” are almost by definition here “aggressive” and “monsters,” enjoying a combination of “ravaging,” “pillaging,” “aggression,” and “upsetting.” As they are produced in the discourse, the similarities they share may seem to be some “essence” common to such outlaw states. Yet their unfixed definition is passed along this string of signifiers. When one’s definition is interrogated, one must rely on the other signifiers in the chain to fill in the definition. Their meanings, then, both differ and are deferred: they differ to the extent that they are deployable as different signifiers so that one can speak of them as different, yet each of their individual meanings is deferred to the others in the chain. Similarly, logics of equivalence are at work in the construction of the “American” subject. “Moral clarity,” “American exceptionalism,” “moral confidence,” “American principles,” “American influence,” “patriotic mission,” “spirit,” “remoralization,” “honor,” “national greatness,” “heroic,” “elevated patriotism,” “responsibility,” and “moral and political leadership” all attempt to tie together what “America” and the “United States” mean. While each of these signifiers seems to point to a different quality or characteristic of the subject, they also seem to express a certain underlying similarity. Like the construction of difference in the chains constituting America’s Others, the signifiers constructing “America” seem to share a quality that cannot be expressed by any of them individually. Their meanings thus differ and are deferred; each of the signifiers differs from the others in one sense, yet their meanings within the text are deferred to other signifiers in the chain constructing the subject “America.” Their meanings are blurred to the extent that even though they are viewed as expressing a fundamental “Americanness,” nothing fundamental underlies any of the signifiers or the chain as a whole. The meaning of one is deferred to another without touching an underlying essence of the subject, simply because there is no such essence. The meanings circle around that which underlies the chain, which is simply a place of lack—a void (Laclau 1996: 57). Thus, logics of equivalence and difference are at work in the chains constructing both the American subject and America’s threatening Others. Desire itself brings together these chains of identification. Desire for full representation, for a signifier that will represent the split subject in a way that its divisions and ambiguities will be healed, moves from object to object. Without lack there is no desire, and without desire there is no subjectivity. Within Kristol and Kagan’s discourse, the desire for subjectivity is constructed along the series of equivalences that construct both “America” and the Other(s). The desire for a signifier that will fully represent the subject and that will heal its divisions and erase its ambiguity shifts along the series of signifiers that attempt to represent it. “Moral clarity,” “American exceptionalism,” “moral confidence,” “national greatness,” and so on offer the promise of wholeness as laid out in the fantasy, yet all fail in their promise to heal the subject’s split. Thus, desire is constantly frustrated and constantly shifts to avoid this frustration, just as desire is frustrated in its inevitable encounter with the signifiers of the Other(s). The two chains are mutually constitutive of each other, and desire is frustrated in the lack of representation in “our” chain and by the Other(s) that are perceived to block our representation (yet actually function as the signifying patches that allow the subject some coherence). The complete subject that they imply is nothing other than the retroactive construction of itself that did not exist before it was presumed by the fantasy. The equivalences attempt to touch this “America” that is/was without division, yet the fantasy implicit in these signifiers merely covers over a lack. Implicit in these plays of equivalence and difference is the filling and emptying of “universal” and “particular” meanings. The plays of universals and particulars are not just the politics of difference and similarity but are blended with the plays of presence and absence of desire and enjoyment in the discourse. Kristol and Kagan’s discourse is stuffed with universals whose meanings they attempt to fill with particular neoconservative understandings. Most obviously, “America” and the “United States” are nodal points that Kristol and Kagan attempt to give meaning and fantasy. “America” is not by nature an isolationist nation, they argue. Instead, America’s true role is that of the “benevolent” global hegemon (1996: 20). Here, the nation is an ambiguous site of inscription on which Kristol and Kagan write their own understanding of “America.” The United States is a country that, properly understood, actively and aggressively promotes its ideals as those that should define global order. Wrongly understood, it is a country that merely sits on the sidelines to play exemplar for others to follow. Such a policy “of sitting atop a hill and leading by example becomes in practice a policy of cowardice and dishonor,” Kristol and Kagan write scornfully (31). Other universals function in the same manner. “Moral clarity,” “American exceptionalism,” and “moral confidence” can have a range of plausible meanings. “Moral clarity” is deployed to represent what “America,” properly understood, should be. “American exceptionalism” can and has had a range of plausible meanings, yet for them it means the active promotion of “exceptionalism” to a world that does not have it yet needs it. Global order itself depends on it. “Moral confidence” in itself has no intrinsic content outside of the particular meanings attributed to it through hegemonic contestation, and the authors fill it in here as that particularly “American” quality that the subject must recapture and utilize if it is to fully become itself again. The other prominent signifiers, embedded in the neoconservative fantasy offered, function in the same manner. “Moral confidence,” “American princi- ples,” “American influence,” “patriotic mission,” “spirit,” “remoralization,” “honor,” “national greatness,” “heroic,” “elevated patriotism,” “responsibility,” and “moral and political leadership” are all intrinsically ambiguous “universal” signifiers whose contingent meanings are filled in by the particular neoconservative fantasy offered. These universals, then, are not merely filled in by the particular meanings that Kristol and Kagan construct but are intimately and inextricably bound to the plays of desire and enjoyment that are channeled through the discourse of the text. The particular meanings of these universal notions are bound up with fantasies that promise the construction of a subject that implies an erasure of its ambiguities. These fantasies are tied to images of Others that block our enjoyment. If not for these Others (the subject believes) desire would be satisfied, enjoyment would be achieved, and the subject would no longer feel the frustration of its incompleteness. Yet the removal of these Others would still reveal the subject’s ambiguity and lack, simply because lack is constitutive of subjectivity. The creation of political boundaries and frontiers, then, is inextricably tied with the politics of desire and enjoyment.
Images of catastrophe are exported of suffering and justify structures of violence, they attach a false investment towards different causes just for the ballot creating an inauthentic attachment driving hyperreal desires. Baudrillard ‘94 Jean, “The Illusion of the End” p. 66-71. djb 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 alternative is complete negation – a refusal to feed the system that destroys our psyche. The political has lost the will for positive action and now all that is left in the power of the masses is negation. Baudrillard 93 (Baudrillard, Jean), The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, 1993)faizaan In Simmel's words, 'Negation is the simplest thing imaginable. That is why the broad masses, whose component elements cannot achieve agreement as to goals, come together here.' It is useless to expect a positive opinion or a critical will from the masses, for they have none: all they have is an undifferentiated power, the power to reject. Their strength flows solely from what they are able to expel, to negate - and that is, first and foremost, any project that goes beyond them, any class or understanding that transcends them. There is something here of a philosophy of cunning born of the most brutal experience - the experience of animals, or of peasants: 'They won't put that over on us again, we won't fall for their calls to sacrifice, or listen to their pie in the sky.' Profound disgust for the political order - though one that may well coexist with specific political opinions . Disgust for the pretension and transcendence of power, for the inevitability and abomination of the political sphere. Where once there were political passions, we now find only the violence peculiar to a fundamental disgust with everything political. Power itself is founded largely on disgust. The whole of advertising, the whole of political discourse, is a public insult to the intelligence, to reason - but an insult in which we collaborate, abjectly subscribing to a silent interaction. The day of hidden persuasion is over: those who govern us now resort unapologetically to arm-twisting pure and simple. The prototype here was a banker got up like a vampire, saying, 'I am after you for your money' . A decade has already gone by since this kind of obscenity was introduced, with the government's blessing, into our social mores. At the time we thought the ad feeble because of its aggressive vulgarity . In point of fact it was a prophetic commercial, full of intimations of the future shape of social relationships, because it operated, precisely, in terms of disgust, avidity and rape. The same goes for pornographic and food advertising, which are also powered by shamelessness and lust, by a strategic logic of violation and anxiety.
The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater that best disrupts the simulacrum. Role playing contributes to inauthenticity and dead attachment to images of suffering, Antonio 95 Nietzsche's Antisociology: Subjectified Culture and the End of History Author(s): Robert J. Antonio Source: American Journal of Sociology , Jul., 1995, Vol. 101, No. 1 (Jul., 1995), pp. 1-43 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/2782505WHS-AK The "problem of the actor," Nietzsche said, "troubled me for the longest time."'12 He considered "roles" as "external," "surface," or "foreground" phenomena and viewed close personal identification with them as symptomatic of estrangement. While modern theorists saw dif- ferentiated roles and professions as a matrix of autonomy and reflexivity, Nietzsche held that persons (especially male professionals) in specialized occupations overidentify with their positions and engage in gross fabrica- tions to obtain advancement. They look hesitantly to the opinion of oth- ers, asking themselves, "How ought I feel about this?" They are so thoroughly absorbed in simulating effective role players that they have trouble being anything but actors-"The role has actually become the character." This highly subjectified social self or simulator suffers devas- tating inauthenticity. The powerful authority given the social greatly amplifies Socratic culture's already self-indulgent "inwardness." Integ- rity, decisiveness, spontaneity, and pleasure are undone by paralyzing overconcern about possible causes, meanings, and consequences of acts and unending internal dialogue about what others might think, expect, say, or do (Nietzsche 1983, pp. 83-86; 1986, pp. 39-40; 1974, pp. 302-4, 316-17). Nervous rotation of socially appropriate "masks" reduces persons to hypostatized "shadows," "abstracts," or simulacra. One adopts "many roles," playing them "badly and superficially" in the fashion of a stiff "puppet play." Nietzsche asked, "Are you genuine? Or only an actor? A representative or that which is represented? . . . Or no more than an imitation of an actor?" Simulation is so pervasive that it is hard to tell the copy from the genuine article; social selves "prefer the copies to the originals" (Nietzsche 1983, pp. 84-86; 1986, p. 136; 1974, pp. 232- 33, 259; 1969b, pp. 268, 300, 302; 1968a, pp. 26-27). Their inwardness and aleatory scripts foreclose genuine attachment to others. This type of actor cannot plan for the long term or participate in enduring net- works of interdependence; such a person is neither willing nor able to be a "stone" in the societal "edifice" (Nietzsche 1974, pp. 302-4; 1986a, pp. 93-94). Superficiality rules in the arid subjectivized landscape. Neitzsche (1974, p. 259) stated, "One thinks with a watch in one's hand, even as one eats one's midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock market; one lives as if one always 'might miss out on something. ''Rather do anything than nothing': this principle, too, is merely a string to throttle all culture. . . . Living in a constant chase after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretense and overreaching and anticipating others." Pervasive leveling, improvising, and faking foster an inflated sense of ability and an oblivious attitude about the fortuitous circumstances that contribute to role attainment (e.g., class or ethnicity). The most medio- cre people believe they can fill any position, even cultural leadership. Nietzsche respected the self-mastery of genuine ascetic priests, like Socra- tes, and praised their ability to redirect ressentiment creatively and to render the "sick" harmless. But he deeply feared the new simulated versions. Lacking the "born physician's" capacities, these impostors am- plify the worst inclinations of the herd; they are "violent, envious, ex- ploitative, scheming, fawning, cringing, arrogant, all according to cir- cumstances. " Social selves are fodder for the "great man of the masses." Nietzsche held that "the less one knows how to command, the more ur- gently one covets someone who commands, who commands severely- a god, prince, class, physician, father confessor, dogma, or party conscience. The deadly combination of desperate conforming and overreaching and untrammeled ressentiment paves the way for a new type of tyrant. On Case
Outer Space Laws are unclear – private corporations are still capable of escaping due to loopholes in the plan, proves the plan doesn’t solve and just circumvents. Green and Stark 17 Christopher and Eda, “Outer Space Treaty and Beyond: Do Existing Space Laws Put an Astronomical Barrier to Private IP Rights in Space?”, JDSUPRA. 8 September 2020 https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/outer-space-treaty-beyond-do-existing-44028/DebateDrills LC Our limited body of space law provides little guidance. The first international treaty, the “Outer Space Treaty,” was signed by the U.S., Russia, and the U.K. in 1967, quickly followed by the Rescue Agreement. Over the next two decades, three other treaties—the Liability Convention, the Registration Convention, and the Moon Agreement—were also signed by these nations, with most countries following in their footsteps.3 But after that rapid succession of international treaties, there have since been few others. These five documents form the basis of the international space law we have today, but none address the issue of intellectual property rights in space. Rather, upon inspection, it appears that the stated purpose of these treaties may be antithetical to intellectual property protection. The “Outer Space Treaty” espouses communal themes in characterizing space as the “province of all mankind,” the “common heritage of mankind” and to the “benefit of all countries.”4 Unsurprisingly, Article II of the Outer Space Treaty prohibits any appropriation of areas in space, keeping in line with its principle of communal property.5 On the other hand, patents are fundamentally territorial and grant monopoly rights for a period of time. Applied to space, it is unclear just what is open for patent protections. For example, can private companies patent orbital patterns of satellites? Currently, companies may patent the technology or design of satellites that stay in a particular orbit, even if not the orbital pattern itself.6 The practical implications of this are significant, especially with the advent of satellite constellations. If particular satellite technologies, and, indirectly, their orbital patterns, are patentable, then a significant portion of space may be occupied by one satellite constellation, i.e. one company alone.7 Does this private apportionment of space run counter to our notions of sharing space? Some argue that the Outer Space Treaty only bans sovereign appropriation and does not limit private entities from exerting claims. Others counter that private property rights flow from sovereign property claims, so the former is meaningless without the latter.8 So the question remains, can the stated goals of sharing outer space be reconciled with the proprietary nature of patents? Our current corpus of space treaties comes from a period of history when space exploration was undertaken primarily by governments rather than private actors. The cooperative goals were likely a reaction to the time, as the world was coming out of a charged space race. The silence of these space treaties on intellectual property rights presents an opportunity for modern-day agreements to provide patent protections for private companies. Without robust international agreement on patents for space, we may even see less international cooperation as companies refuse to divulge their discoveries.9 Now, as more and more private companies enter space exploration and carry the torch of innovation, it is more important than ever to strike a balance between sharing our “common heritage” and providing patent protections that incentivize invention.10
No debris cascades, but even a worst case is confined to low LEO with no impact Daniel Von Fange 17, Web Application Engineer, Founder and Owner of LeanCoder, Full Stack, Polyglot Web Developer, “Kessler Syndrome is Over Hyped”, 5/21/2017, http://braino.org/essays/kessler_syndrome_is_over_hyped/ Kessler Syndrome is overhyped. A chorus of online commenters great any news of upcoming low earth orbit satellites with worry that humanity will to lose access to space. I now think they are wrong. What is Kessler Syndrome? Here’s the popular view on Kessler Syndrome. Every once in a while, a piece of junk in space hits a satellite. This single impact destroys the satellite, and breaks off several thousand additional pieces. These new pieces now fly around space looking for other satellites to hit, and so exponentially multiply themselves over time, like a nuclear reaction, until a sphere of man-made debris surrounds the earth, and humanity no longer has access to space nor the benefits of satellites. It is a dark picture. Is Kessler Syndrome likely to happen? I had to stop everything and spend an afternoon doing back-of-the-napkin math to know how big the threat is. To estimate, we need to know where the stuff in space is, how much mass is there, and how long it would take to deorbit. The orbital area around earth can be broken down into four regions. Low LEO - Up to about 400km. Things that orbit here burn up in the earth’s atmosphere quickly - between a few months to two years. The space station operates at the high end of this range. It loses about a kilometer of altitude a month and if not pushed higher every few months, would soon burn up. For all practical purposes, Low LEO doesn’t matter for Kessler Syndrome. If Low LEO was ever full of space junk, we’d just wait a year and a half, and the problem would be over. High LEO - 400km to 2000km. This where most heavy satellites and most space junk orbits. The air is thin enough here that satellites only go down slowly, and they have a much farther distance to fall. It can take 50 years for stuff here to get down. This is where Kessler Syndrome could be an issue. Mid Orbit - GPS satellites and other navigation satellites travel here in lonely, long lives. The volume of space is so huge, and the number of satellites so few, that we don’t need to worry about Kessler here. GEO - If you put a satellite far enough out from earth, the speed that the satellite travels around the earth will match the speed of the surface of the earth rotating under it. From the ground, the satellite will appear to hang motionless. Usually the geostationary orbit is used by big weather satellites and big TV broadcasting satellites. (This apparent motionlessness is why satellite TV dishes can be mounted pointing in a fixed direction. You can find approximate south just by looking around at the dishes in your northern hemisphere neighborhood.) For Kessler purposes, GEO orbit is roughly a ring 384,400 km around. However, all the satellites here are moving the same direction at the same speed - debris doesn’t get free velocity from the speed of the satellites. Also, it’s quite expensive to get a satellite here, and so there aren’t many, only about one satellite per 1000km of the ring. Kessler is not a problem here. How bad could Kessler Syndrome in High LEO be? Let’s imagine a worst case scenario. An evil alien intelligence chops up everything in High LEO, turning it into 1cm cubes of death orbiting at 1000km, spread as evenly across the surface of this sphere as orbital mechanics would allow. Is humanity cut off from space? I’m guessing the world has launched about 10,000 tons of satellites total. For guessing purposes, I’ll assume 2,500 tons of satellites and junk currently in High LEO. If satellites are made of aluminum, with a density of 2.70 g/cm3, then that’s 839,985,870 1cm cubes. A sphere for an orbit of 1,000km has a surface area of 682,752,000 square KM. So there would be one cube of junk per .81 square KM. If a rocket traveled through that, its odds of hitting that cube are tiny - less than 1 in 10,000. So even in the worst case, we don’t lose access to space. Now though you can travel through the debris, you couldn’t keep a satellite alive for long in this orbit of death. Kessler Syndrome at its worst just prevents us from putting satellites in certain orbits. In real life, there’s a lot of factors that make Kessler syndrome even less of a problem than our worst case though experiment. Debris would be spread over a volume of space, not a single orbital surface, making collisions orders of magnitudes less likely. Most impact debris will have a slower orbital velocity than either of its original pieces - this makes it deorbit much sooner. Any collision will create large and small objects. Small objects are much more affected by atmospheric drag and deorbit faster, even in a few months from high LEO. Larger objects can be tracked by earth based radar and avoided. The planned big new constellations are not in High LEO, but in Low LEO for faster communications with the earth. They aren’t an issue for Kessler. Most importantly, all new satellite launches since the 1990’s are required to include a plan to get rid of the satellite at the end of its useful life (usually by deorbiting) So the realistic worst case is that insurance premiums on satellites go up a bit. Given the current trend toward much smaller, cheaper micro satellites, this wouldn’t even have a huge effect. I’m removing Kessler Syndrome from my list of things to worry about.
2/20/22
JanFeb - T - Implementation
Tournament: Berkeley | Round: 3 | Opponent: LNU RN | Judge: Sophia Rebar T Implementation Interp: The affirmative debater must defend the hypothetical implementation of the resolution. To clarify, this doesn’t mean that they can’t spread discourse in round or talking about forms of marginalization, but that they have to defend a concrete policy action. “Resolved” means enactment of a law. Words and Phrases 64 Words and Phrases Permanent Edition (Multi-volume set of judicial definitions). “Resolved”. 1964. Definition of the word “resolve,” given by Webster is “to express an opinion or determination by resolution or vote; as ‘it was resolved by the legislature;” It is of similar force to the word “enact,” which is defined by Bouvier as meaning “to establish by law”. Violation- the aff won’t defend implementation. Standards: Ground- I lose access to all policy based disadvantages because you refuse to defend implementation. I can’t go for the Crime DA, the Terror DA, almost every cp, solvency turns, etc in order to answer the aff, you’ll just delink my offense in the 1ar by claiming implementation is irrelevant. Few impacts: A. link turns phil good- you stop a key part of philosophy discussion about util because the neg has no incentive to read a util framework since it can’t generate offense under that framing. B. Kills key neg ground because certain principles like adhering to free speech are good in the abstract; it only makes sense taking everything into context. Ground is key to fairness since equal access to arguments controls equal access to the ballot. C. Pigeonholes the negative out of util even that is my best layer. Aff shouldn’t be able to make the debate just phil because they are most comfortable on that layer. D. Kills policy ed- in your world the we can never have any discussion of policies. Policy education is an independent voter since it is a skill that we can apply to the real world outweighs phil ed on reversibility. Also outweighs on size of link—we still can have phil debates in my interp. 2. TVA- just defend implementation. You can still read phil in my world that claims implementation is irrelevant, just allow the neg to read a framework that claims implementation is relevant and garner offense on arguments that depend on it. Voters: The impact is fairness—a it’s an intrinsic good – debate is fundamentally a game and some level of competitive equity is necessary to sustain the activity Education is a voter – it gives us portable skills for life like research and thinking. Drop the debater – a) it deters future abuse and sets a positive norm Use competing interps – a) reasonability invites arbitrary judge intervention since we don’t know your bs meter No RVIs – a) illogical – you shouldn’t win for being fair – it’s a litmus test for engaging in substance, b) norming – I can’t concede the counterinterp if I realize I’m wrong which forces me to argue for bad norms They can’t weigh their NC – lack of preround prep means their truth claims are untested which you should presume false—they’re also only winning their offense because we couldn’t engage with it
2/20/22
MA - K - Settler Colonialism v1
Tournament: TFA State | Round: 1 | Opponent: McNeil YM | Judge: Dylan Jones Settler colonialism is the governing thought of modernity that posits notions of control and desire into the Western man implanting the seed opportunity born out of genocide. Paperson ‘17 La Paperson, aka K. Wayne Yang, UC San Diego. 2017. “A Third University is Possible”. https://manifold.umn.edu/read/a-third-university-is-possible/section/ba50806d-ff18-4100-9998-784aecb42ae4recut faizaan Land is the prime concern of settler colonialism, contexts in which the colonizer comes to a “new” place not only to seize and exploit but to stay, making that “new” place his permanent home. Settler colonialism thus complicates the center–periphery model that was classically used to describe colonialism, wherein an imperial center, the “metropole,” dominates distant colonies, the “periphery.” Typically, one thinks of European colonization of Africa, India, the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, in terms of external colonialism, also called exploitation colonialism, where land and human beings are recast as natural resources for primitive accumulation: coltan, petroleum, diamonds, water, salt, seeds, genetic material, chattel. Theories named as “settler colonial studies” had a resurgence beginning around 2006. However, the analysis of settler colonialism is actually not new, only often ignored within Western critiques of empire. The critical literatures of the colonized have long positioned the violence of settlement as a prime feature in colonial life as well as in global arrangements of power. We can see this in Franz Fanon’s foundational critiques of colonialism. Whereas Fanon’s work is often generalized for its diagnoses of anti/colonial violence and the racialized psychoses of colonization upon colonized and colonizer, Fanon is also talking about settlement as the particular feature of French colonization in Algeria. For Fanon, the violence of French colonization in Algeria arises from settlement as a spatial immediacy of empire: the geospatial collapse of metropole and colony into the same time and place. On the “selfsame land” are spatialized white immunity and racialized violation, non-Native desires for freedom, Black life, and Indigenous relations. Settler colonialism is too often thought of as “what happened” to Indigenous people. This kind of thinking confines the experiences of Indigenous people, their critiques of settler colonialism, their decolonial imaginations, to an unwarranted historicizing parochialism, as if settler colonialism were a past event that “happened to” Native peoples and not generalizable to non-Natives. Actually, settler colonialism is something that “happened for” settlers. Indeed, it is happening for them/us right now. Wa Thiong’o’s question of how instead of why directs us to think of land tenancy laws, debt, and the privatization of land as settler colonial technologies that enable the “eventful” history of plunder and disappearance. Property law is a settler colonial technology. The weapons that enforce it, the knowledge institutions that legitimize it, the financial institutions that operationalize it, are also technologies. Like all technologies, they evolve and spread. Recasting land as property means severing Indigenous peoples from land. This separation, what Hortense Spillers describes as “the loss of Indigenous name/land” for Africans-turned-chattel, recasts Black Indigenous people as black bodies for biopolitical disposal: who will be moved where, who will be murdered how, who will be machinery for what, and who will be made property for whom. In the alienation of land from life, alienable rights are produced: the right to own (property), the right to law (protection through legitimated violence), the right to govern (supremacist sovereignty), the right to have rights (humanity). In a word, what is produced is whiteness. Moreover, it is not just human beings who are refigured in the schism. Land and nonhumans become alienable properties, a move that first alienates land from its own sovereign life. Thus we can speak of the various technologies required to create and maintain these separations, these alienations: Black from Indigenous, human from nonhuman, land from life. “How?” is a question you ask if you are concerned with the mechanisms, not just the motives, of colonization. Instead of settler colonialism as an ideology, or as a history, you might consider settler colonialism as a set of technologies—a frame that could help you to forecast colonial next operations and to plot decolonial directions. The Settler–Native–Slave Triad Does Not Describe Identities One of the main interventions of settler colonial studies has been to insist that the patterning of social relations is shaped by colonialism’s thirst for land and thus is shaped to fit modes of empire. Because colonialism is a perverted affair, our relationships are also warped into complicitous arrangements of violation, trespass, and collusion with its mechanisms. For Fanon, the psychosis of colonialism arises from the patterning of violence into the binary relationship between the immune humanity of the white settler and the impugned humanity of the native. For Fanon, the supremacist “right” to create settler space that is immune from violence, and the “right” to abuse the body of the Native to maintain white immunity, this is the spatial and fleshy immediacy of settler colonialism. Furthermore, the “humanity” of the settler is constructed upon his agency over the land and nature. As Maldonado-Torres explains, “I think, therefore I am” is actually an articulation of “I conquer, therefore I am,” a sense of identity posited upon the harnessing of nature and its “natural” people. This creates a host of post+colonial problems that have come to define modernity. Because the humanity of the settler is predicated on his ability to “write the world,” to make history upon and over the natural world, the colonized is instructed to make her their claim to humanity by similarly acting on the world or, more precisely, acting in his. Indeed, for Fanon, it is the perverse ontology of settler becomings—becoming landowner or becoming property, becoming killable or becoming a killer—and the mutual implication of tortured and torturer that mark the psychosis of colonialism. This problem of modernity and colonial psychosis is echoed in Jack Forbes’s writings: “Columbus was a wétiko. He was mentally ill or insane, the carrier of a terribly contagious psychological disease, the wétiko psychosis. . . . The wétiko psychosis, and the problems it creates, have inspired many resistance movements and efforts at reform or revolution. Unfortunately, most of these efforts have failed because they have never diagnosed the wétiko.” Under Western modernity, becoming “free” means becoming a colonizer, and because of this, “the central contradiction of modernity is freedom.” Critiques of settler colonialism, therefore, do not offer just another “type” of colonialism to add to the literature but a mode of analysis that has repercussions for any diagnosis of coloniality and for understanding the modern conditions of freedom. By modern conditions of freedom, I mean that Western freedom is a product of colonial modernity, and I mean that such freedom comes with conditions, with strings attached, most manifest as terms of unfreedom for nonhumans. As Cindi Mayweather says, “your freedom’s in a bind.”
The aff’s defense of democracy is rooted in settler colonialism and suppression of indigenous authoritative capacity by preaching inclusion while silencing indigeneity in it’s process. Baker 17 Oliver Baker, PhD candidate and Mellon Fellow American Literary Studies at the University of New Mexico, intersecting histories of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, white supremacy, and class in American literature and culture, “Democracy, Class, and White Settler Colonialism”, 2017, https://www.academia.edu/34506752/Democracy_Class_and_White_Settler_Colonialism) 8-13-20 FD WHS In recent years. settler state policies have shifted away from a strategy Of direct violence and forced assimilation—mostly in response to the political threat posed by the anticolonial nation• alisms of the mid-twentieth century—and toward what Glen Coulthard describes as a politics of -colonial recognition.- in which settler societies promise greater accommodation and recognition of Indigenous groups but only to the extent that claims of sovereignty or demands for decolonization go unheard and remain disavowed: A politics of colonial recognition also calls for reconciliation and healing between settlers and Indigenous peoples as a way to mend what is believed to be a racial or cultural conflict rather than a struggle over land and sovereignty. While settler societies might affirm the diversity Of Indigenous cultures or even lament past incidents Of colonial violence. Centuries-old structures and institutions of dispossession remain in place. These can be witnessed today in the underdevelopment of tribal economies that encourages the privatization of (or the attempt to dissolve) tribally-held land and resources; neoliberal policies that slash public services and deregulate predatory credit and loan industries. while funding entrepreneurial self-help initiatives in Indian Country; the use of state and police violence to brutalize. incarcerate. and murder unsheltered and working poor Indigenous peoples whose presence -off the reservation- in border towns is seen as a threat and danger to the property and flows of capital of settler society. extraction industries that destructively seek to unearth and/or transport fossil fuels on or through tribal lands: and the ongoing refusal of federal governments to honour the treaties, land claims. and rights to self.determination of the Indigenous nations of North America. A second key analytic of settler colonial studies and Indigenous critical theory is the concept of Indigeneity. Although defined in various ways, for this essay3 purposes Indigeneity can be described as the social category of persons whose ways of life. forms of knowing. and modes Of being depend upon originary relationships to land bases that Euro-American settlers have enclosed and continue to occupy. Because Indigenous peoples claim originary ties to these land bases. their presence or attempt to live on and through them challenges the legitimacy of settler society. As a social category constituted through elimination and genocide. Indigeneity should be understood as distinct from, for example. the category of the wage labourer that is structured by proletarianization and hegemony. If wage labourers. whether employed or unemployed. are struc- turally included in the marketplace where their labour power is exploited. the marketplace itself and the liberal state form that upholds it are nonetheless premised on the elimination of Indigenous peoples altogether. The ideological framework that mediates, legitimates. and reproduces Indigenous dispossession and its category of Indigeneity is the colonial and racial grammar of what Jodi Byrd calls "Indianness.¯• The Indian came to be a social ontology in which Indigenous peoples were under- stood as savage. ancient. living fossils of early humanity. stuck outside of time and space in a state of nature. The Indian was and continues to be both abjected and romanticized in settler culture as a person who exists in a state of natural warfare. instability. and conflict. while also appearing liberated from the constraints and alienation of modern life. In this state of nature, the Indian is understood to lack the capacity to labour productivity. possess property. or enter into social con • tracts. Through such meanings. the Indian emerges as the outside or Other to Euro-American forms of liberal democracy. selfhood. and civil society.• As Byrd emphasizes. - European moder- nity hinges upon Indians as the necessary antinomy through which the New World—along with civilization. freedom. sovereignty. and humanity—comes to have meaning. structure. and pres- ence.-•• The Indian. in short, became the figure of the un-sovereign through which it was understood that the Indian might occupy but could never possess the ability or right to own lands or possess selfhood.' i The dispossession of Indigenous lands. resources. and bodies thus came to be seen less as a form of theft than the natural transition from -savage- communalism to civilized market society. Today. Indianness continues. as Byrd puts it. to "transit U.S. empire,- or put into motion, facil. itate, and cohere the United States' settler imperial project that reaches around the world." It is through Indianness that settlers come to view the lands. resources. and bodies of the earth as spaces and objects of a barren wilderness (terra nullius) freely available for expropriation. The current and future populations living in spaces of the lands and controlling the resources that US settler imperialism attempts to seize or control are, as Byrd explains. made "Indian- or abjected as mindless terrorist-savages whose confrontation with the agents of enclosure is under- stood not as an attempt to resist and survive colonization. occupation. and genocide. but an irrational attack against society. civilization. humanity. and the forces of modern progress. In short. Indianness is what legitimates the process of primitive accumulation or what David Harvey calls -accumulation by dispossession.- which is central to the formation. expansion. and domi- nance of global finance capitalism. What an understanding. then. of settler colonialism. Indigeneity. and Indianness demonstrates concerning the question of alliance-building among oppressed groups today is that political organizing through the spaces of the democratic commons or the identity of the settler wage labourer supports rather than disrupts the colonization of Indigenous peoples of North America In the case of the democratic commons. Calls for preserving and expanding the public institutions and spaces of liberal democracy in order to cultivate more radical and progressive forms of democracy is a demand not to undo or transform but to uphold the settler colonial state As Byrd argues. "one reason why a racial' and just democratic society is a lost cause in the United States is that it is always already conceived through the prior disavowed and misremembered colonization of Indigenous lands that cannot be ended by further inclusion or more participation."" Coulthard echoes this point. showing that "in liberal settler states...the •com. not only belong to somebody.. .they also deeply inform and sustain Indigenous modes of thought and behavior"" While it should be acknowledged that the democratic Commons histori- eally has served an important role in cultivating and producing emancipatory modes Of analysis and forms Of social belonging. such gains have nonetheless always depended upon the tion of Indigenous peoples. Any defence. then, of the democratic commons today must at the same time defend Indigenous sovereignty. This means rethinking how groups relate in the spaces Of the commons in Ways that do not perpetuate liberal democracy's colonial project Oi building public institutions and democratic spaces through the seizure, theft, and colonization of Indigenous lands. bodies. and resources. Class .first models of a renewed workers' movement also risk reproducing colonial disposses. Sion When they fail to recognize that the Indian and the settler Wage labourer are structurally distinct categories Of oppression. former is constituted by dispossession through elimination. while the latter is structured by exploitation through hegemony. Even though exploited. settler wage labourers nonetheless come to experience their status in settler colonialism as a place Of refuge and protection tiom dispossession and abjection. The role of the settler state is to ensure and safeguard the settler wage labourers right not only to possess but not to be dispossessed of property, even if the only property the wage labourer possesses is labour power. In fact. possessing labour power as a commodity to sell on the market indexes the settler wage laboureös right and ability to enter the social Contract and find security from the forms structural exclusion natu• ralized in the position of the Indian. Such a status explains why. when neoliberal forms of precarious labour and exclusions from waged life increasingly target settler wage labourers, they are felt and represented as abnormal. undeserving, and. more importantly. grievable occurrences. The dispossession Of settlers challenges the symbolic and material consisten€y Of settler societies that are premised on dispossessing colonial peoples in order to reward and advantage settlers Of all classes. Settler society retains and reproduces its coherence as the promised site of settler sovereignty, possession. and rights by figuring the neoliberal dispossession of settlers as the exception to be if only because Indigenous dispossession remains the norm to be reproduced and repeated. grievability of neoliberal dispossession. heard today in the refrain that globalization has -abandoned the white working class.- depends upon the ungrievability and normalization of Indigenous dispossession that. in the narratives not only Of manifest destiny but also the demo- cratic commons and normative socialist futures. is depicted and accepted as a natural. inevitable. and necessary process. One of the limits. then. of calling for solidarity through the political identity of the wage labourer is that. in settler colonialism. what organized settler wage labourers demand is not necessarily an end to exploitation but the freedom. protection, and refuge from structural dispossession and exclusion that are normalized and naturalized in the social and racial ontologies of the Indian. Movements on behalf of settler labourers risk ending in reform rather than revolution precisely because they do not so much seek to confront capital as they seek refuge and protection within and through it.
Objectivity is a guise that is controlled by settler colonialism in order to propagate settler innocence. There attempts to contribute to an unbiased press only abstracts from confronting settler colonialism and decolonization. Beckermann 19 Beckermann, Kay, ", NEWSPAPERS AS A FORM OF SETTLER COLONIALISM: AN EXAMINATION OF THE DAKOTA ACCESS PIPELINE PROTEST AND AMERICAN INDIAN REPRESENTATION IN INDIGENOUS, STATE, AND NATIONAL NEWS ", 06-14-2019 University of North Dakota, https://library.ndsu.edu/ir/bitstream/handle/10365/31546/Newspapers20as20a20Form20of20Settler20Colonialism.pdf?sequence=1andisAllowed=y, 3-6-2022, faizaan The media—television, radio, newspapers—form Althusser’s communication apparatus (Sevgi and Ozgokceler, 2016). The institutions within the apparatus contribute to settler colonialism as they recognize Indigenous populations; however, the industry controls the narrative of this community through media frames. Beyond these frames, which will be discussed in the next chapter, the narrative is controlled through the ideology and hegemony of media organizations. Based on the ideology of objectivity, news media (theoretically) attempt to distribute accurate and unbiased information to the masses. However, the institutional structure of the media ensures the dominant ideology is being supported (Althusser, 1971; Mullen and Klaehn, 2010). Media owners and managers control the appearance of objectivity and “their forms of social control must be indirect, subtle, and not at all necessarily conscious” (Gitlin, 2003, p. 259). This is achieved through the hiring of personnel who are typically white and upper- middle-class, decisions as to who is promoted or otherwise rewarded, and organizantional 23 policies. The result is upper-level decision makers that were raised in the dominant ideology and share the “core emphasis original hegemonic assumptions of their class” (Gitlin, 2003, p. 260). The media in America are ubiquitous, which makes it an ideal format for those in power to disseminate their ideology to the masses. The media are arguably the most “dynamic part of this ideological structure” (Gramsci, 2009, p. 36) as the dominant class works vehemently to maintain and defend their ideologies and use the press to circulate them to the masses (Gramsci, 2009). News stories that support dominant class ideologies are “reinforcing dominant social norms and values that legitimize the social system” (Gurevitch, Bennett, Curran, and Wollacott, 1982, p. 9) The Propaganda Model investigates how norms and values become standardised in a society. It explores the “relationships between ideology, communicative power and social class interests” (Mullen and Klaehn, 2010, p. 217). Developed by Herman and Chomsky (1988) the model argues that news flows through multple filters, each designed to maintain dominant class power. The Propaganda Model, particularly when viewed through the traditional Marxist lens and Althusser’s ISAs, emphasizes the fact that media are influencers in the control of the dominant ideology (Sevgi and Ozgokceler, 2016). This is accomplished through the five filters of the Propaganda Model: size, ownership, and profit of mass media; advertiser influence; use of sources; flak; and anti-communision as a control mechanism (Herman and Chomsky, 1988). This research focuses on two filters in particular, the size/ownership/profitability of mass media and reliance of government or corporate sources. The size/ownership/profitability (SOP) filter supports the institutional structural argument. The investment needed to start a media organization with significant outreach has grown to extreme proportions (Herman and Chomsky, 1988). Media historian Ben Bagdikian 24 (2004) points out that historically, many different individuals ran the dominant media corporations in America. However, by 2003 only five firms controlled most of the 37,000 media outlets (Bagdikian, 2004). The Big Five,2 as Bagdikian (2004) calls them, have access to the over $2 billion spent per year in advertising; money that helps them purchase and maintain the numerous media entities in their name. This trend continues, as 15 billionaires currently own 90 of American media (Vinton, 2016). This includes individuals such as Jeff Bezos, owner of amazon.com, who purchased the Washington Post for $250 million (Vinton, 2016). Prohibitive costs leads to reduced opportunities for small and/or alternative media to reach the masses as they typically do not possess the necessary capital (Goodwin, 1994).
Thus, the only alternative is decolonization. Tuck and Yang 12(Eve Tuck, Unangax, State University of New York at New Paltz K. Wayne Yang University of California, San Diego, Decolonization is not a metaphor, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012, pp. 1-40, recut FD WHS) An ethic of incommensurability, which guides moves that unsettle innocence, stands in contrast to aims of reconciliation, which motivate settler moves to innocence. Reconciliation is about rescuing settler normalcy, about rescuing a settler future. Reconciliation is concerned with questions of what will decolonization look like? What will happen after abolition? What will be the consequences of decolonization for the settler? Incommensurability acknowledges that these questions need not, and perhaps cannot, be answered in order for decolonization to exist as a framework. We want to say, first, that decolonization is not obliged to answer those questions - decolonization is not accountable to settlers, or settler futurity. Decolonization is accountable to Indigenous sovereignty and futurity. Still, we acknowledge the questions of those wary participants in Occupy Oakland and other settlers who want to know what decolonization will require of them. The answers are not fully in view and can’t be as long as decolonization remains punctuated by metaphor. The answers will not emerge from friendly understanding, and indeed require a dangerous understanding of uncommonality that un-coalesces coalition politics - moves that may feel very unfriendly. But we will find out the answers as we get there, “in the exact measure that we can discern the movements which give decolonization historical form and content” (Fanon, 1963, p. 36). To fully enact an ethic of incommensurability means relinquishing settler futurity, abandoning the hope that settlers may one day be commensurable to Native peoples. It means removing the asterisks, periods, commas, apostrophes, the whereas’s, buts, and conditional clauses that punctuate decolonization and underwrite settler innocence. The Native futures, the lives to be lived once the settler nation is gone - these are the unwritten possibilities made possible by an ethic of incommensurability when you take away the punctuation he says of lines lifted from the documents about military-occupied land its acreage and location you take away its finality opening the possibility of other futures -Craig Santos Perez, Chamoru scholar and poet (as quoted by Voeltz, 2012) Decolonization offers a different perspective to human and civil rights based approaches to justice, an unsettling one, rather than a complementary one. Decolonization is not an “and”. It is an elsewhere
The role of the ballot is to vote for who best centers indigenous scholarship and resistance - Any ethical commitment requires that the aff place themselves in the center of Native scholarship and demands. Carlson 16 Elizabeth Carlson, PhD, is an Aamitigoozhi, Wemistigosi, and Wasicu (settler Canadian and American), whose Swedish, Saami, German, Scots-Irish, and English ancestors have settled on lands of the Anishinaabe and Omaha Nations which were unethically obtained by the US government. Elizabeth lives on Treaty 1 territory, the traditional lands of the Anishinaabe, Nehiyawak, Dakota, Nakota, and Red River Metis peoples currently occupied by the city of Winnipeg, the province of Manitoba, (2016): Anti-colonial methodologies and practices for settler colonial studies, Settler Colonial Studies, DOI: 10.1080/2201473X.2016.1241213, recut FD WHS Arlo Kempf says that ‘where anticolonialism is a tool used to invoke resistance for the colonized, it is a tool used to invoke accountability for the colonizer’.42 Relational accountability should be a cornerstone of settler colonial studies. I believe settler colonial studies and scholars should ethically and overtly place themselves in relationship to the centuries of Indigenous oral, and later academic scholarship that conceptualizes and resists settler colonialism without necessarily using the term: SCT may be revelatory to many settler scholars, but Indigenous people have been speaking for a long time about colonial continuities based on their lived experiences. Some SCTs have sought to connect with these discussions and to foreground Indigenous resistance, survival and agency. Others, however, seem to use SCT as a pathway to explain the colonial encounter without engaging with Indigenous people and experiences – either on the grounds that this structural analysis already conceptually explains Indigenous experience, or because Indigenous resistance is rendered invisible.43 Ethical settler colonial theory (SCT) would recognize the foundational role Indigenous scholarship has in critiques of settler colonialism. It would acknowledge the limitations of settler scholars in articulating settler colonialism without dialogue with Indigenous peoples, and take as its norm making this dialogue evident. In my view, it is critical that we not view settler colonial studies as a new or unique field being established, which would enact a discovery narrative and contribute to Indigenous erasure, but rather take a longer and broader view. Indigenous oral and academic scholars are indeed the originators of this work. This space is not empty. Of course, powerful forces of socialization and discipline impact scholars in the academy. There is much pressure to claim unique space, to establish a name for ourselves, and to make academic discoveries. I am suggesting that settler colonial studies and anti-colonial scholars resist these hegemonic pressures and maintain a higher anti-colonial ethic. As has been argued, ‘the theory itself places ethical demands on us as settlers, including the demand that we actively refuse its potential to re-empower our own academic voices and to marginalize Indigenous resistance’.44 As settler scholars, we can reposition our work relationally and contextually with humi- lity and accountability. We can centre Indigenous resistance, knowledges, and scholarship in our work, and contextualize our work in Indigenous sovereignty. We can view oral Indigenous scholarship as legitimate scholarly sources. We can acknowledge explicitly and often the Indigenous traditions of resistance and scholarship that have taught us and pro- vided the foundations for our work. If our work has no foundation of Indigenous scholarship and mentorship, I believe our contributions to settler colonial studies are even more deeply problematic.
There is no room for settler futurity – any assumption that change can be enacted via reform within the state just concedes to the state’s unethical legislative capacity in the first place and denies indigenous sovereignty. Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernandez 13 EVE TUCK and RUBÉN A. GAZTAMBIDE-FERNÁNDEZ. "Curriculum, Replacement, and Settler Futurity" Rochester29.1 (2013): 72-89. faizaan Settler Futurity. The settler colonial curricular project of replacement is invested in settler futurity, or what Andrew Baldwin calls the “permanent virtuality” of the settler on stolen land (2012, p. 173). When we locate the present of settler colonialism as only the production of the past, we overlook how settler colonialism is configured in relation to a different temporal horizon: the future. To say that something is invested in something else’s futurity is not the same as saying it is invested in something’s future, though the replacement project is invested in both settler future and futurity. Futurity refers to the ways in which, “the future is rendered knowable through specific practices (i.e. calculation, imagination, and performance) and, in turn, intervenes upon the present through three anticipatory logics (i.e. pre-caution, pre-emption and preparedness)” (p. 173). Considering the significance of futurity for researching whiteness and geography, Baldwin (2012) wonders whether a past-oriented approach reproduces the (false), Teleological assumption that white racism can be modernized away. Such an assumption privileges an ontology of linear causality in which the past is thought to act on the present and the present is said to be an effect of whatever came before ... According to this kind of temporality, the future is the terrain upon or through which white racism will get resolved. It cleaves the future from the present and, thus, gives the future discrete ontological form. (p. 174) Thus, in this historical analysis of the settler colonial curricular project of replacement, we seek to emphasize the ways in which replacement is entirely concerned with settler futurity, which always indivisibly means the continued and complete eradication of the original inhabitants of contested land. Anything that seeks to recuperate and not interrupt settler colonialism, to reform the settlement and incorporate Indigenous peoples into the multicultural settler colonial nation state is fettered to settler futurity. To be clear, our commitments are to what might be called an Indigenous futurity, which does not foreclose the inhabitation of Indigenous land by nonIndigenous peoples, but does foreclose settler colonialism and settler epistemologies. That is to say that Indigenous futurity does not require the erasure of now-settlers in the ways that settler futurity requires of Indigenous peoples.
3/10/22
NovDec - K - Settler Colonialism vs Cap
Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 5 | Opponent: Harvard-Westlake AV | Judge: Dhruv Channa Settler colonialism was not just another event in history but a structuring of a “logic of elimination” re-entrenched everyday by Western structures of law and government – the affirmative’s actions deepens the settler state and its biopolitical control of life. Morgensen 11 (Scott Lauria Morgensen, assistant professor of gender studies at Queen’s University, “The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now, Settler Colonial Studies, 2011) Settler colonialism is exemplary of the processes of biopower theorised by Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault. However, settler colonialism remains naturalised within theories of biopower and theories of its relation to coloniality. White supremacist settler colonisation produces specific modes of biopolitics that sustain not only in settler states but also in regimes of global governance that inherit, extend, and naturalise their power. I extend Patrick Wolfe’s theory that a ‘logic of elimination’ constitutes settler colonialism in the genocide and amalgamation of Indigenous peoples, by indicating that this also indigenises and naturalises white settler nations as projections of the West. Agamben’s work illuminates how Indigenous peoples are eliminated in a state of exception to Western law, which by functioning to erase consanguinity – as the patriarch in Roman law eliminates the defiant son – explains Indigenous peoples’ seemingly contradictory incorporation within and excision from the body of white settler nations. This biopolitical process specific to settler colonialism also structures the manner in which white settler societies demonstrably universalize Western law, both within their bounds and in global arenas. My call to denaturalise settler colonialism in social theory is but a first step towards broader study of how the biopolitics of settler colonialism structure current modes of biopower and require concerted critique at the intersections of Indigenous and settler colonial studies. If, following Patrick Wolfe, settler colonialism produces settler societies by pursuing the elimination of Indigenous peoples via amalgamation and replacement, then it is exemplary of biopower. Adapting Giorgio Agamben, we find that Europeans establish Western law and a new People on settled land by practicing an exception to the law that permits eliminating Indigenous peoples while defining settlers as those who replace.1 Settler colonialism performs biopower in deeply historical and fully contemporary ways. As scholars increasingly theorise biopower as definitive of our times, with many insisting that this quality of biopower is colonial, we must confront our inheritance of settler colonialism as a primary condition of biopower in the contemporary world. The work of Michael Foucault and Agamben and of their interlocutors must be resituated within a new genealogy of settler colonialism that can shift interpretations of biopower today. For more than five hundred years, Western law functioned as biopower in relation to ongoing practices of European settler colonialism. Settler colonialism has conditioned not only Indigenous peoples and their lands and the settler societies that occupy them, but all political, economic and cultural processes that those societies touch. Settler colonialism directly informs past and present processes of European colonisation, global capitalism, liberal modernity and international governance. If settler colonialism is not theorised in accounts of these formations, then its power remains naturalised in the world that we engage and in the theoretical apparatuses with which we attempt to explain it. Settler colonialism can be denaturalised by theorising its constitution as biopower, as well as how it in turn conditions all modern modes of colonialism and biopower. My argument critically shifts recent theories of the coloniality of biopower by centreing settler colonialism in analysis. Wolfe has observed in histories of the Americas that a settler colonial ‘logic of elimination’ located Indigenous Americans relationally, yet distinctly from Africans in the transatlantic slave trade or colonised indentured labour, thereby illuminating (as Mark Rifkin notes) the ‘peculiar’ status of Indigenous peoples within the biopolitics of settler colonialism.2 Western law is troubled once European subjects are redefined as settlers in relation to the Indigenous peoples, histories, and lands incorporated by white settler nations. I argue that this tension is engaged productively by Agamben’s tracing of the state of exception to homo sacer, and notably its derivation in Roman law from a thesis of consanguinity. I adapt this quality to illuminate why and how Western law incorporates Indigenous peoples into the settler nation by simultaneously pursuing their elimination. I further argue that these deeply historical processes ultimately enact biopower as a persistent activity of settler states that were never decolonised and of the global regimes that extend and naturalise their power. By the twentieth century – amid a formal demise of colonial empires, putative decolonisation of the global South, and global capitalist recolonisation – the universalisation of Western law as liberal governance was ensured by the actions of settler states. A genealogy of the biopolitics of settler colonialism will explain that the colonial era never ended because settler colonialism remains the naturalised activity projecting Western law and its exception along global scales today. Theories of the biopolitical state, regimes of global governance, and the war on terror will be insufficient unless they critically theorise settler colonialism as a historical and present condition and method of all such power. THEORISING SETTLER COLONIAL BIOPOWER Foucault and Agamben theorised biopower as a present activity that inherits and transforms the deeply historical conditions of Western law. Foucault incited this theory by examining the modern proliferation of procedures to produce the life of the nation in relation to deadly regulation of its others, a process that he argued displaces the power of the sovereign ‘to take life or let live’ with a governmentality that enacts ‘the power to “make” live or “let” die’.3 Judith Butler emphasises that, for Foucault, governmentality in the modern state or in global regimes acts as an ‘extra-legal sphere’ – ‘an art of managing things and persons, concerned with tactics, not laws’ – that then ‘depends upon “the question of sovereignty” no longer predominating over the field of power’.4 Hence, governmentality acts in the name of the very sovereignty that it exceeds, producing ‘a lawless sovereignty as part of its own operation of power’.5 Agamben adapts Foucault’s account of modern biopower as governmentality when he claims that its extra-legal appearance is a recent adaptation of qualities intrinsic to Western law; as he says, ‘it can even be argued that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power’.6 Citing the Roman legal origins of Western law, Agamben links sovereignty to a power to designate subjects of the law as homo sacer, the sacred man who may be killed without being sacrificed or made subject to homicide. The placement of homo sacer in a zone of ‘bare life’ establishes Western law precisely by placing it in abeyance in this case. The sacred man enters a ‘state of exception’ to the law that simultaneously reinforces its rule. Agamben notably defines the exception by reference to the camp as ‘in a decisive way the political space itself of modernity’, which by forming a permanent ‘space for (bare) life’ creates a ‘materialization of the state of exception’ as ‘the rule’.7 Agamben thus reinterprets the biopolitics of the modern state as an effect of Western law’s constitution by the state of exception. In this reading, the function of governmentality to ‘make life’ is compatible with the state of exception remaining intrinsic to law, as consigning certain subjects to a state of bare life (‘let die’) reestablishes a power to produce and defend life among those who remain. Yet significant tensions appear in the work of Foucault and Agamben – and, hence, also in Agamben’s revision of Foucault – in that neither scholar directly theorises colonialism as a context for biopower. Scholars of colonialism respond by arguing that colonialism is intrinsic to processes of biopower in the past and present. Reading Foucault’s account of the modern biopolitical state in relation to colonial situations, Ann Laura Stoler definitively demonstrated that its racial, sexual and national power arise at colonial sites or relationally among colonies and metropoles, not as projections from a European source.8 Following Stoler, modern biopower is the product and process of a colonial world. Achille Mbembe extended such reinterpretations of Foucault in conversation with Agamben by reading the colony as exception, which defines Western law amid the globalisation of European capital and empire.9 Sherene Razack and Sunera Thobani engage all such theories to explain that in contemporary modes of biopower, the colonial returns or never left; and, notably, both centre settler colonialism as a condition of the power they examine.10 Mark Rifkin signally engages Agamben’s theses with settler colonialism by arguing that the ‘geopolitics’ of conquest place Indigenous peoples in a state of exception that simultaneously troubles the territorial and national integrity of settlers as representatives of Western law.11 Together, these scholars respond to colonialism’s elision in theories of biopower by demonstrating that it conditions biopower and critical theory – an intervention deepened by Rifkin’s and my work centreing settler colonialism for study. Addressing these critiques requires adjusting the very advance of Agamben’s argument that biopower is intrinsic to Western law. Michael Dillon identifies a lingering ahistoricity in Agamben’s ‘ontologization’ of Western law that he argues would benefit from a return to Foucault’s genealogical method, which for Katia Genel will result in ‘revisiting and complicating Agamben’s formulations and more complexly applying them’.12 Theorising biopower from within a genealogy of settler colonialism will trace how deeply historical procedures in Western law confronted the specificities of the era of European settlement and shifted in response. In such a genealogy Agamben remains crucial, given that scholars of settler colonialism may trace biopower to situations that existed prior to the eighteenth and nineteenth century era that Foucault linked to the rise of the modern biopolitical state. Already in the sixteenth century and across the Americas, settler colonialism grew to condition colonialism and biopower in settler and other societies worldwide. The continuity of settler colonialism at these sites up to the present then demonstrates that this periodisation meaningfully explains biopower today. Patrick Wolfe’s theorisation of settler colonialism already incites a genealogy of its biopolitical form. Arguing that ‘settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure, not an event’, Wolfe explains that assertions of sovereignty by settlers ground Western law in ‘a logic of elimination’.13 Noting that scholars after Raphael Lemkin tend to correlate genocide with extermination, Wolfe argues that settler colonialism performs genocide alongside a variety of practices that converge on a purposed elimination of Indigenous peoples.14 While the erasure and replacement of Indigenous peoples may transpire through deadly violence, Wolfe emphasises that elimination may follow efforts not to destroy but to produce life, as in methods to amalgamate Indigenous peoples, cultures and lands into the body of the settler nation. As Wolfe and Katherine Ellinghaus explain, this amalgamation precisely narrows or erases the possibility of distinctive Indigenous nationalities challenging the prerogative of the settler nation that means to replace them on, now, ‘its own’ lands.15
The aff is an act of settler futurity that attempts to extend the settler colonial state into the future with the assumption that linear progress can eventually be achieved via reform – the fact that indigenous people are the smallest population group forced to live on a land that was taken from them proves that they reinvest in settler colonial violence– means they cant weigh the case if we prove their starting point is flawed. Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernandez 13 EVE TUCK and RUBÉN A. GAZTAMBIDE-FERNÁNDEZ. "Curriculum, Replacement, and Settler Futurity" Rochester29.1 (2013): 72-89. Settler Futurity. The settler colonial curricular project of replacement is invested in settler futurity, or what Andrew Baldwin calls the “permanent virtuality” of the settler on stolen land (2012, p. 173). When we locate the present of settler colonialism as only the production of the past, we overlook how settler colonialism is configured in relation to a different temporal horizon: the future. To say that something is invested in something else’s futurity is not the same as saying it is invested in something’s future, though the replacement project is invested in both settler future and futurity. Futurity refers to the ways in which, “the future is rendered knowable through specific practices (i.e. calculation, imagination, and performance) and, in turn, intervenes upon the present through three anticipatory logics (i.e. pre-caution, pre-emption and preparedness)” (p. 173). Considering the significance of futurity for researching whiteness and geography, Baldwin (2012) wonders whether a past-oriented approach reproduces the (false), Teleological assumption that white racism can be modernized away. Such an assumption privileges an ontology of linear causality in which the past is thought to act on the present and the present is said to be an effect of whatever came before ... According to this kind of temporality, the future is the terrain upon or through which white racism will get resolved. It cleaves the future from the present and, thus, gives the future discrete ontological form. (p. 174) Thus, in this historical analysis of the settler colonial curricular project of replacement, we seek to emphasize the ways in which replacement is entirely concerned with settler futurity, which always indivisibly means the continued and complete eradication of the original inhabitants of contested land. Anything that seeks to recuperate and not interrupt settler colonialism, to reform the settlement and incorporate Indigenous peoples into the multicultural settler colonial nation state is fettered to settler futurity. To be clear, our commitments are to what might be called an Indigenous futurity, which does not foreclose the inhabitation of Indigenous land by nonIndigenous peoples, but does foreclose settler colonialism and settler epistemologies. That is to say that Indigenous futurity does not require the erasure of now-settlers in the ways that settler futurity requires of Indigenous peoples.
Setcol is the root cause of all capitalistic violence. The whole reason why capitalist institutions feed off workers is bc settlers put those systems there in the first place on stolen land, if we allow indigenous ppl to have power that dissolves the state and these institutions as well it solves the root cause of all of their harms
Their framing of anti-subordination offers token recognition and empathy to alleviate settler anxiety and consolidate their social capital. Sentiments that attempt to eliminate forms of violence will always be corrupted because they fail to acknowledge which groups were the root cause of this violence. Slater 16 (Lisa Slater, PhD (Sydney University), MA (Sydney University), Questioning Care, Chapter 7 in The Pedagogies of Cultural Studies, edited by Andrew Hickey, Routledge, 2016, JKS) What worlds do you care for? Donna Haraway (2008) challenges her readers to become curious about the world-making effects of their caring practices. In this chapter I will examine the world-making effects of settler Australians’ care for Indigenous peoples, and more broadly reflect upon pedagogies of care and the production of the contemporary caring subject. Haraway (1988) has long argued for situated knowledges. As much as we live in an interconnected, entangled world, peoples (or as Haraway might prefer, the more-than-human) also live different histories. To care is to make claims on life and the future (and in so doing draw upon particular pasts). In Australia, the art of caring for others or instituting good health and well- being continues to be modeled on settler liberal concepts of what is a good life and a healthy subject-citizen. In contrast, many Indigenous people have called upon settler Australia to recognize and take seriously alternative life worlds and thus to imagine different futures. To do so, we need to ask, what are the world-making effects of our caring stories? Cultural studies prides itself on a commitment to social justice, and I would argue that such an undertaking requires a radical innovation of how we understand and prac- tice care. My intention is to not simply critique modes of caring for others but rather to run a bit of interference on care: to reflect upon what worlds are we caring for, so we might consider what worlds flourish and what worlds are diminished. To generate new political practices and anticolonial styles of care, we need to draw upon alternative genealogies of care. As cultural studies academics, we care, and teach our students, about social justice. Lately, I’ve been speculating about what our students care for. Or perhaps more accurately, I am curious about knowledge politics, which is much more than revealing the politics or working to produce more accurate facts but rather understanding that the “ways of studying and representing things have world-making effects” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011: 86). The stories we tell about care—knowledge construction and circulation—have material consequences. When I say our students, I mean students of Australian universities, not just my students at the University of Wollongong. Where are we directing their affective force? Over the last few years when teaching undergraduate students, I have been surprised by their self-assured (if not even self-righteous) sense of what social issues are important and deserving of care. But more so, even if they are improvising as knowing, empathetic subjects, they are highly attuned to, and keen to learn, what issues should animate their sympathy and what is the correct response. They know that their care should be directed toward such issues as marriage equality, the environment, poverty, and homelessness, and if I tell them about sweat- shops or the escalating imprisonment rates of Aboriginal people, they will care about that, too. They know not to care is to out oneself as ignorant, or worse a brute or redneck. To care about particular issues is the mark of the civil or the civilized. We might ask, are we in an age of watered-down ethics (Puig de la Bellacasa 2010)? We cultivate awareness and we care about a long list of fashionable issues. Puig de la Bellacasa argues that concern for ethics has become a form of hegemonic thinking. She writes: That we live in the age of ethics is perceivable in an inflationist use of the word: from corporate ethics to everyday ethical living—garbage recycling, fair trade—from international relations to the life sciences, every human practice seems today to cultivate awareness of its ethical component. In most instances interest in the ethical translates in a local or global search for rules, recommendations or resolutions regarding a specific field or profession. (2010: 153) She refers to this as biopolitical morality: forms of power aimed at controlling people’s existence at every level of experience and subjectivity (2010: 155). In an era when the primary role of higher education is to produce work- ers for the knowledge economy, and to secure individual prosperity and social mobility, coupled with the frustration that many academics feel about the lack of student engagement in sociopolitical issues, demonstrations of some form of care and interest seem better than nothing. My concern is that despite our training and commitment to critique, as cultural studies scholars we might be, however inadvertently, conceding to biopolitical morality. However, for many students, Indigenous issues can be some of the trickiest to negotiate. In general students are aware of the socioeconomic disparity between Indigenous and mainstream Australia, and left leaning politicized students are quick to blame past generations and the government. But most sense it’s a mine field, and are wary. My colleagues who teach Indigenous stud- ies (and from my own previous experience) tell me students largely want to learn about ‘dot paintings’ and an ancient culture but do not want to discuss contemporary issues, such as the ongoing impact of colonial and neocolonial practices, because they are considered too political and confronting (terms settler Australians readily apply). Over the years, I have noted the resistances of settler Australian students, which coexist with a particular enthusiasm for so-called ‘traditional’ Aboriginal culture. This cultural dynamic is found in broader Australia, and it is one for which I have developed an intellectual fascination. Of course, not everyone cares about Indigenous people. In Australia, this is only too clear. However, I would argue, concern for Indigenous well-being has become a moral barometer of our time. Thus, settler sensitivity, anxiety, around how to engage with Indigenous issues makes it a productive site for investigating the knowledge politics of care. It would be fair to say, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about care, worrying at care. In particular my interest is, what I am calling in a crude sociological category, “good white people”: progressive settler Australians who want to engage with Indigenous peoples, cultures, and social issues. In short, care. They, or we, are deeply concerned about the so-called “Indigenous problem”; socioeconomic inequality, poor health, education, and housing, and racism, growing incarceration and suicide rates, the closing of remote communities, the ‘loss’ of culture, and the list could go on. There is a lot to worry about. Overwhelmed, the good white person asks, what can we do? Too often the effect is that ‘we’, settler Australians, imagine that we know what the problem is and, like the government, we must find the solutions (Cowlishaw 2013: 245). What is the cultural relationship? Tony Birch argues pity is the “emotion that drives the relationship between conservative and liberal-minded Australians alike in their dealings with Aboriginal people” (Birch 2014: 41). Largely, I agree. However, I think pity is an expression of good old-fashioned settler anxiety; variously understood as a sense of ille- gitimacy or guilt due to Australia’s colonial past and ongoing white privilege (Gelder and Jacobs 1998). Nonetheless, Aboriginal people are objects for mainstream Australia to worry about but not to take seriously. Good white people care about Indigenous people and culture. We are anxious to get ‘it’ right; our sense of self and belonging depends upon it. But more so, anxiety is an historical subjectivity—a social practice, an activity through which the subject is constituted. Foucault claimed that the study of the genealogy of the modern Western subject needed to be twofold. It is not enough to take into account technologies of domination,1 we also need to consider the active practices of self-constitution, which Foucault calls technologies or care of the self: techniques which permit individuals to effect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, on their own souls, on their own thoughts, on their own conduct, and this in a manner so as to transform themselves, modify themselves, and to attain a certain state of perfection, of happiness, of purity, of supernatural power, and so on. (2005: 214) In a simple sense, care of the self is the work we do to know ourselves, to constitute ourselves as subjects in relation to what one understands as the truth (Foucault 1997: 271). In such a truth, Indigenous people are vulnerable and care is performed through acts of benevolence that welcome Indigenous people into an already determined future. I am arguing that a contemporary practice of self-seeking—care of the self—is the activity of knowing who I am in relation to Indigenous issues and intercultural relations, which offers self-certainty. Of course, these activities do not produce an authentic self, but a certain kind of subjectivity that does particular work in the world, reproducing colonial relations of authority and vulnerability. These are, as Foucault argues: not something invented by the individual himself. They are models that he finds in his culture and are proposed, suggested, imposed upon him by his culture, his society, and his social group. (1997: 291).
The labor movement is built on the exploitation of indigenous populations. The aff’s “right to strike” only seeks to benefit the settler labor movement. Settler labor movements fight for higher wages and living standards while simultaneously exploiting indigenous labor and excluding indigenous workers from the labor market. The collective dispossession of the indigenous population ties the settler community together through settler quietism. The aff’s foundational assumptions are complicit in the destructive of Native life and governance. Englert 20 Englert, S. Institute for Area Studies, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands (2020), Settlers, Workers, and the Logic of Accumulation by Dispossession. Antipode, 52: 1647-1666. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12659 AX Dispossession – deprive of land In order to reflect on the particular nature of accumulation by dispossession within a settler colonial context, another issue should be raised: that of the internal social relations within settler colonial societies. Indeed, the most striking aspect of settler colonial societies is the development of a colonial polity in which settlers live, produce, and reproduce themselves socially. They do so on the back of the dispossession of indigenous populations through which they acquire land, resources, and, depending on the context, labour. This—perhaps obvious—characteristic leads to the development of internal class relations and conflicts, alongside confrontations between settlers and indigenous peoples. The history of settler colonialism underscores the conspicuous absence of involvement by settler working classes (as opposed to individuals or limited networks) in mass, sustained challenges against the process of settlement and indigenous dispossession.3 In fact, more often than not, settler labour movements fought for the intensification of settler expansion and racial segregation (see “An Alternative Reading: Settler Colonies and the Exploitation of the Native” above), through colour bars, boycott campaigns and demands for expulsion. In the process, bitter confrontations emerged between settler labour and capital, when the latter and attempted to increase its profit margins through the exploitation of indigenous labour—for example in the context of the white labour movements in Australia and South Africa.4 Yet these conflicts can be resolved, especially while the settler colony continues to expand, by intensifying the dispossession of indigenous populations in order to improve the material conditions of settler workers (see “Case Studies” below). Here, the question of accumulation by dispossession returns to the fore. If settler workers are exploited as workers within the settler colony, they remain settlers. As such they participate in the processes of accumulation by dispossession through the occupation of lands, the elimination or exploitation of indigenous peoples, and the extraction of expropriated resources. For example, at a very basic level, their houses, workplaces, and basic infrastructure such as roads, railways, etc., are all premised on the capture and control of indigenous land. Settler workers are both exploited by settler bosses and their co-conspirators in the dispossession of indigenous peoples. As such, class struggle within a settler society has a dual character: it is waged over the distribution of wealth extracted from their labour as well as over the colonial booty. In the case of Zionism in Palestine, the current associated with the publication Matzpen (“Compass”) developed a class analysis of Israeli society. They came to the conclusion that because the Israeli economy was heavily subsidised from the outside (first primarily by Britain, then by the US) and that this subsidy was not simply going into private hands but was used by the Labour Zionist bureaucracy to organise the development of the Israeli economy and infrastructure, class antagonisms were diverted within its society. Hangebi et al. (2012:83) wrote: The Jewish worker in Israel does not receive his share in cash, but he gets it in terms of new and relatively inexpensive housing, which could not have been constructed by raising capital locally; he gets it in industrial employment, which could not have been started or kept going without external subsidies; and he gets it in terms of a general standard of living, which does not correspond to the output of that society … In this way the struggle between the Israeli working class and its employers, both bureaucrats and capitalists, is fought not only over the surplus value produced by the worker but also over the share each group receives from this external source of subsidies. If this analysis was essentially correct, it underplayed, however, the consequences of an important aspect of Israeli wealth creation (which Matzpen otherwise recognised): the Israeli state, its infrastructure, and its economy were made possible by colonial expansion, land confiscation, the expulsion of Palestinians and the expropriation of their wealth and property. Affordable housing, for example, an issue discussed further below, was not only possible because of the subsidies the Israeli state received from abroad. It was possible because the land on which new houses were built, as well as existing Palestinian houses, had been confiscated by the Israeli army, Palestinians had been expelled in their hundreds of thousands, and the spoils were re-distributed amongst settlers. It was—and remains—the collective dispossession of the indigenous population by the Israeli population as a whole, which ties the settler community together, despite internal class, ethnic, and political divisions. The settler class struggle is fought over the distribution of wealth extracted from settler labour power as well as over the share each group receives from the process of accumulation by dispossession. This dual class and colonial relationship helps explain the relative absence of settler workers’ resistance against settler colonial expansion or alliances with Indigenous peoples.5 This tendency can be understood as “settler quietism”: even if working-class settlers are exploited by their ruling classes, overthrowing the settler state would mean overthrowing a system in which they share, however unequally, in the distribution of the colonial loot. Participating in the process of dispossession and fighting for a greater share of the pie leads to more important and immediate material gains. It also follows, as many anti-colonial thinkers and activists, not least among them Fanon (2001) in the Wretched of the Earth, have argued that indigenous people face the settler population as a whole in their struggle for de-colonisation. This is not to say that individual settlers or specific settler organisations cannot or have not supported struggles for decolonisation. It is however to point out that this is not the case for the majority of the settler working class, while it continues to depend on the continued dispossession of the natives for the quality of its living standards. Whether the settler colony is organised on the basis of an eliminatory or an exploitative model, what remains constant is that the entirety of the settler polity will participate in the process of accumulation by dispossession, and that the different settler classes will struggle both against the natives to impose and maintain this dispossession, as well as amongst themselves in order to determine the nature of its internal distribution. More than that, the specific structural forms of settler rule over the indigenous population is best understood as the outcome of struggle, both between settler classes and between settlers and indigenous populations. This paper now turns to two brief case studies demonstrating this process in the context of Zionism in Palestine. The specificity of Zionism in the history of settler colonialism, its lack of a colonial metropolis, had real consequences for the Zionists in Palestine. Firstly, it could not impose—at first—its control over the land through military force. Secondly it could not organise the transfer of populations to the colony in the same way a state could. In the words of Shafir (1996:155): “Zionism, then, was a colonisation movement which simultaneously had to secure land for its settlers and settlers for its land”. The dual need for land and labour was at the heart of many political developments in the Yishuv. If the question of land was resolved first through acquisition from largely absentee land owners and then (and most extensively) through military violence, the question of immigration came close several times to bringing the whole colonial project to its knees, as the European Jewish population tended to reject Zionism as a political response to the poverty and discrimination they faced. Two distinct political responses emerged within the early settler population. On the one hand, the Jewish farmers and their sponsors hoped to develop a cash crop producing agricultural sector focused on export to Europe and the exploitation of cheap Palestinian workers. This vision was based, as demonstrated by Shafir (1996), on the model of other European projects—especially the French settler colonies of North Africa. On the other hand, the nascent Labour Zionist movement demanded better wages and working conditions for Jewish workers in Palestine, which they argued would be the only way to attract and retain new settlers. This, they claimed, necessitated full separation between the Jewish and Palestinian sectors, removing thereby the “unfair competition” of the cheaper indigenous labour force. This led to the development of a series of new Labour Zionist institutions to organise this “Conquest of Hebrew Labour”, by organising strikes, pickets, and boycotts of Jewish owned businesses that employed Palestinian workers or sold products made by them. The Kibbutzim, the Histadrut,6 and the early Zionist militias were all born out of the process of organising this campaign (Lockman 1996). For example, the Histadrut’s constitution, passed at its founding congress, made clear that it was a Zionist body committed to the project of settlement through the development of an exclusively Jewish society. It stated that the Histadrut’s goal was to: … unite all the workers and labourers in the country who live by their own labour without exploiting the labour of others, in order to arrange for all settlement, economic and also cultural affairs of all the workers in the country, so as to build a society of Jewish labour in Eretz Yisra’el. (quoted in Lockman 1996:68) The similarity between the logic of this statement and that of the white South African strikers mentioned above is remarkable. This struggle—waged against Palestinian workers and Jewish farmers—led to a partial victory for the Labour Zionist movement (Lockman 2012). Key industries, such as construction and agriculture, were taken over by Labour Zionist institutions such as Solal Boneh and the Kibbutzim. At the same time, Jewish representation in colonial institutions was increased through collaboration with the British Mandate authorities especially in the context of crushing the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939. The Labour Zionists took over the Yishuv’s political leadership and created a dominant Jewish sector, without however being able to establish a fully segregated one. It did set in motion the logic of separation as well as laying the infrastructure for a Jewish state, which would be made a reality by its militias’ military violence and mass expulsion of Palestinians during the Nakba. This case study shows that the Labour Zionist movement developed on the basis of opposing Jewish farmers as well as Palestinian workers, a political focus that also shaped its key institutions. The campaign for Hebrew Labour also demonstrates that the “elimination of the native” in the settler colonial context is not a given, as in the Wolfe-an framework, but the outcome of a specific set of struggles that pit both the indigenous population against the settlers, as well as different settler classes against one another.
Thus, the only alternative is decolonization. Tuck and Yang 12 (Eve Tuck, Unangax, State University of New York at New Paltz K. Wayne Yang University of California, San Diego, Decolonization is not a metaphor, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012, pp. 1-40, recut FD WHS) An ethic of incommensurability, which guides moves that unsettle innocence, stands in contrast to aims of reconciliation, which motivate settler moves to innocence. Reconciliation is about rescuing settler normalcy, about rescuing a settler future. Reconciliation is concerned with questions of what will decolonization look like? What will happen after abolition? What will be the consequences of decolonization for the settler? Incommensurability acknowledges that these questions need not, and perhaps cannot, be answered in order for decolonization to exist as a framework. We want to say, first, that decolonization is not obliged to answer those questions - decolonization is not accountable to settlers, or settler futurity. Decolonization is accountable to Indigenous sovereignty and futurity. Still, we acknowledge the questions of those wary participants in Occupy Oakland and other settlers who want to know what decolonization will require of them. The answers are not fully in view and can’t be as long as decolonization remains punctuated by metaphor. The answers will not emerge from friendly understanding, and indeed require a dangerous understanding of uncommonality that un-coalesces coalition politics - moves that may feel very unfriendly. But we will find out the answers as we get there, “in the exact measure that we can discern the movements which give decolonization historical form and content” (Fanon, 1963, p. 36). To fully enact an ethic of incommensurability means relinquishing settler futurity, abandoning the hope that settlers may one day be commensurable to Native peoples. It means removing the asterisks, periods, commas, apostrophes, the whereas’s, buts, and conditional clauses that punctuate decolonization and underwrite settler innocence. The Native futures, the lives to be lived once the settler nation is gone - these are the unwritten possibilities made possible by an ethic of incommensurability when you take away the punctuation he says of lines lifted from the documents about military-occupied land its acreage and location you take away its finality opening the possibility of other futures -Craig Santos Perez, Chamoru scholar and poet (as quoted by Voeltz, 2012) Decolonization offers a different perspective to human and civil rights based approaches to justice, an unsettling one, rather than a complementary one. Decolonization is not an “and”. It is an elsewhere.
The role of the ballot is to vote for who best centers indigenous scholarship and resistance - Any ethical commitment requires that the aff place themselves in the center of Native scholarship and demands. Carlson 16 Elizabeth Carlson, PhD, is an Aamitigoozhi, Wemistigosi, and Wasicu (settler Canadian and American), whose Swedish, Saami, German, Scots-Irish, and English ancestors have settled on lands of the Anishinaabe and Omaha Nations which were unethically obtained by the US government. Elizabeth lives on Treaty 1 territory, the traditional lands of the Anishinaabe, Nehiyawak, Dakota, Nakota, and Red River Metis peoples currently occupied by the city of Winnipeg, the province of Manitoba, (2016): Anti-colonial methodologies and practices for settler colonial studies, Settler Colonial Studies, DOI: 10.1080/2201473X.2016.1241213, recut FD WHS Arlo Kempf says that ‘where anticolonialism is a tool used to invoke resistance for the colonized, it is a tool used to invoke accountability for the colonizer’.42 Relational accountability should be a cornerstone of settler colonial studies. I believe settler colonial studies and scholars should ethically and overtly place themselves in relationship to the centuries of Indigenous oral, and later academic scholarship that conceptualizes and resists settler colonialism without necessarily using the term: SCT may be revelatory to many settler scholars, but Indigenous people have been speaking for a long time about colonial continuities based on their lived experiences. Some SCTs have sought to connect with these discussions and to foreground Indigenous resistance, survival and agency. Others, however, seem to use SCT as a pathway to explain the colonial encounter without engaging with Indigenous people and experiences – either on the grounds that this structural analysis already conceptually explains Indigenous experience, or because Indigenous resistance is rendered invisible.43 Ethical settler colonial theory (SCT) would recognize the foundational role Indigenous scholarship has in critiques of settler colonialism. It would acknowledge the limitations of settler scholars in articulating settler colonialism without dialogue with Indigenous peoples, and take as its norm making this dialogue evident. In my view, it is critical that we not view settler colonial studies as a new or unique field being established, which would enact a discovery narrative and contribute to Indigenous erasure, but rather take a longer and broader view. Indigenous oral and academic scholars are indeed the originators of this work. This space is not empty. Of course, powerful forces of socialization and discipline impact scholars in the academy. There is much pressure to claim unique space, to establish a name for ourselves, and to make academic discoveries. I am suggesting that settler colonial studies and anti-colonial scholars resist these hegemonic pressures and maintain a higher anti-colonial ethic. As has been argued, ‘the theory itself places ethical demands on us as settlers, including the demand that we actively refuse its potential to re-empower our own academic voices and to marginalize Indigenous resistance’.44 As settler scholars, we can reposition our work relationally and contextually with humi- lity and accountability. We can centre Indigenous resistance, knowledges, and scholarship in our work, and contextualize our work in Indigenous sovereignty. We can view oral Indigenous scholarship as legitimate scholarly sources. We can acknowledge explicitly and often the Indigenous traditions of resistance and scholarship that have taught us and pro- vided the foundations for our work. If our work has no foundation of Indigenous scholarship and mentorship, I believe our contributions to settler colonial studies are even more deeply problematic.
Settler colonialism was not just another event in history but a structuring of a “logic of elimination” re-entrenched everyday by Western structures of law and government – the affirmative’s actions deepens the settler state and its biopolitical control of life. Morgensen 11 (Scott Lauria Morgensen, assistant professor of gender studies at Queen’s University, “The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now, Settler Colonial Studies, 2011) Settler colonialism is exemplary of the processes of biopower theorised by Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault. However, settler colonialism remains naturalised within theories of biopower and theories of its relation to coloniality. White supremacist settler colonisation produces specific modes of biopolitics that sustain not only in settler states but also in regimes of global governance that inherit, extend, and naturalise their power. I extend Patrick Wolfe’s theory that a ‘logic of elimination’ constitutes settler colonialism in the genocide and amalgamation of Indigenous peoples, by indicating that this also indigenises and naturalises white settler nations as projections of the West. Agamben’s work illuminates how Indigenous peoples are eliminated in a state of exception to Western law, which by functioning to erase consanguinity – as the patriarch in Roman law eliminates the defiant son – explains Indigenous peoples’ seemingly contradictory incorporation within and excision from the body of white settler nations. This biopolitical process specific to settler colonialism also structures the manner in which white settler societies demonstrably universalize Western law, both within their bounds and in global arenas. My call to denaturalise settler colonialism in social theory is but a first step towards broader study of how the biopolitics of settler colonialism structure current modes of biopower and require concerted critique at the intersections of Indigenous and settler colonial studies. If, following Patrick Wolfe, settler colonialism produces settler societies by pursuing the elimination of Indigenous peoples via amalgamation and replacement, then it is exemplary of biopower. Adapting Giorgio Agamben, we find that Europeans establish Western law and a new People on settled land by practicing an exception to the law that permits eliminating Indigenous peoples while defining settlers as those who replace.1 Settler colonialism performs biopower in deeply historical and fully contemporary ways. As scholars increasingly theorise biopower as definitive of our times, with many insisting that this quality of biopower is colonial, we must confront our inheritance of settler colonialism as a primary condition of biopower in the contemporary world. The work of Michael Foucault and Agamben and of their interlocutors must be resituated within a new genealogy of settler colonialism that can shift interpretations of biopower today. For more than five hundred years, Western law functioned as biopower in relation to ongoing practices of European settler colonialism. Settler colonialism has conditioned not only Indigenous peoples and their lands and the settler societies that occupy them, but all political, economic and cultural processes that those societies touch. Settler colonialism directly informs past and present processes of European colonisation, global capitalism, liberal modernity and international governance. If settler colonialism is not theorised in accounts of these formations, then its power remains naturalised in the world that we engage and in the theoretical apparatuses with which we attempt to explain it. Settler colonialism can be denaturalised by theorising its constitution as biopower, as well as how it in turn conditions all modern modes of colonialism and biopower. My argument critically shifts recent theories of the coloniality of biopower by centreing settler colonialism in analysis. Wolfe has observed in histories of the Americas that a settler colonial ‘logic of elimination’ located Indigenous Americans relationally, yet distinctly from Africans in the transatlantic slave trade or colonised indentured labour, thereby illuminating (as Mark Rifkin notes) the ‘peculiar’ status of Indigenous peoples within the biopolitics of settler colonialism.2 Western law is troubled once European subjects are redefined as settlers in relation to the Indigenous peoples, histories, and lands incorporated by white settler nations. I argue that this tension is engaged productively by Agamben’s tracing of the state of exception to homo sacer, and notably its derivation in Roman law from a thesis of consanguinity. I adapt this quality to illuminate why and how Western law incorporates Indigenous peoples into the settler nation by simultaneously pursuing their elimination. I further argue that these deeply historical processes ultimately enact biopower as a persistent activity of settler states that were never decolonised and of the global regimes that extend and naturalise their power. By the twentieth century – amid a formal demise of colonial empires, putative decolonisation of the global South, and global capitalist recolonisation – the universalisation of Western law as liberal governance was ensured by the actions of settler states. A genealogy of the biopolitics of settler colonialism will explain that the colonial era never ended because settler colonialism remains the naturalised activity projecting Western law and its exception along global scales today. Theories of the biopolitical state, regimes of global governance, and the war on terror will be insufficient unless they critically theorise settler colonialism as a historical and present condition and method of all such power. THEORISING SETTLER COLONIAL BIOPOWER Foucault and Agamben theorised biopower as a present activity that inherits and transforms the deeply historical conditions of Western law. Foucault incited this theory by examining the modern proliferation of procedures to produce the life of the nation in relation to deadly regulation of its others, a process that he argued displaces the power of the sovereign ‘to take life or let live’ with a governmentality that enacts ‘the power to “make” live or “let” die’.3 Judith Butler emphasises that, for Foucault, governmentality in the modern state or in global regimes acts as an ‘extra-legal sphere’ – ‘an art of managing things and persons, concerned with tactics, not laws’ – that then ‘depends upon “the question of sovereignty” no longer predominating over the field of power’.4 Hence, governmentality acts in the name of the very sovereignty that it exceeds, producing ‘a lawless sovereignty as part of its own operation of power’.5 Agamben adapts Foucault’s account of modern biopower as governmentality when he claims that its extra-legal appearance is a recent adaptation of qualities intrinsic to Western law; as he says, ‘it can even be argued that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power’.6 Citing the Roman legal origins of Western law, Agamben links sovereignty to a power to designate subjects of the law as homo sacer, the sacred man who may be killed without being sacrificed or made subject to homicide. The placement of homo sacer in a zone of ‘bare life’ establishes Western law precisely by placing it in abeyance in this case. The sacred man enters a ‘state of exception’ to the law that simultaneously reinforces its rule. Agamben notably defines the exception by reference to the camp as ‘in a decisive way the political space itself of modernity’, which by forming a permanent ‘space for (bare) life’ creates a ‘materialization of the state of exception’ as ‘the rule’.7 Agamben thus reinterprets the biopolitics of the modern state as an effect of Western law’s constitution by the state of exception. In this reading, the function of governmentality to ‘make life’ is compatible with the state of exception remaining intrinsic to law, as consigning certain subjects to a state of bare life (‘let die’) reestablishes a power to produce and defend life among those who remain. Yet significant tensions appear in the work of Foucault and Agamben – and, hence, also in Agamben’s revision of Foucault – in that neither scholar directly theorises colonialism as a context for biopower. Scholars of colonialism respond by arguing that colonialism is intrinsic to processes of biopower in the past and present. Reading Foucault’s account of the modern biopolitical state in relation to colonial situations, Ann Laura Stoler definitively demonstrated that its racial, sexual and national power arise at colonial sites or relationally among colonies and metropoles, not as projections from a European source.8 Following Stoler, modern biopower is the product and process of a colonial world. Achille Mbembe extended such reinterpretations of Foucault in conversation with Agamben by reading the colony as exception, which defines Western law amid the globalisation of European capital and empire.9 Sherene Razack and Sunera Thobani engage all such theories to explain that in contemporary modes of biopower, the colonial returns or never left; and, notably, both centre settler colonialism as a condition of the power they examine.10 Mark Rifkin signally engages Agamben’s theses with settler colonialism by arguing that the ‘geopolitics’ of conquest place Indigenous peoples in a state of exception that simultaneously troubles the territorial and national integrity of settlers as representatives of Western law.11 Together, these scholars respond to colonialism’s elision in theories of biopower by demonstrating that it conditions biopower and critical theory – an intervention deepened by Rifkin’s and my work centreing settler colonialism for study. Addressing these critiques requires adjusting the very advance of Agamben’s argument that biopower is intrinsic to Western law. Michael Dillon identifies a lingering ahistoricity in Agamben’s ‘ontologization’ of Western law that he argues would benefit from a return to Foucault’s genealogical method, which for Katia Genel will result in ‘revisiting and complicating Agamben’s formulations and more complexly applying them’.12 Theorising biopower from within a genealogy of settler colonialism will trace how deeply historical procedures in Western law confronted the specificities of the era of European settlement and shifted in response. In such a genealogy Agamben remains crucial, given that scholars of settler colonialism may trace biopower to situations that existed prior to the eighteenth and nineteenth century era that Foucault linked to the rise of the modern biopolitical state. Already in the sixteenth century and across the Americas, settler colonialism grew to condition colonialism and biopower in settler and other societies worldwide. The continuity of settler colonialism at these sites up to the present then demonstrates that this periodisation meaningfully explains biopower today. Patrick Wolfe’s theorisation of settler colonialism already incites a genealogy of its biopolitical form. Arguing that ‘settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure, not an event’, Wolfe explains that assertions of sovereignty by settlers ground Western law in ‘a logic of elimination’.13 Noting that scholars after Raphael Lemkin tend to correlate genocide with extermination, Wolfe argues that settler colonialism performs genocide alongside a variety of practices that converge on a purposed elimination of Indigenous peoples.14 While the erasure and replacement of Indigenous peoples may transpire through deadly violence, Wolfe emphasises that elimination may follow efforts not to destroy but to produce life, as in methods to amalgamate Indigenous peoples, cultures and lands into the body of the settler nation. As Wolfe and Katherine Ellinghaus explain, this amalgamation precisely narrows or erases the possibility of distinctive Indigenous nationalities challenging the prerogative of the settler nation that means to replace them on, now, ‘its own’ lands.15
The labor movement is built on the exploitation of indigenous populations. The aff’s “right to strike” only seeks to benefit the settler labor movement. Settler labor movements fight for higher wages and living standards while simultaneously exploiting indigenous labor and excluding indigenous workers from the labor market. The collective dispossession of the indigenous population ties the settler community together through settler quietism. The aff’s foundational assumptions are complicit in the destructive of Native life and governance. Englert 20 Englert, S. Institute for Area Studies, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands (2020), Settlers, Workers, and the Logic of Accumulation by Dispossession. Antipode, 52: 1647-1666. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12659 AX Dispossession – deprive of land In order to reflect on the particular nature of accumulation by dispossession within a settler colonial context, another issue should be raised: that of the internal social relations within settler colonial societies. Indeed, the most striking aspect of settler colonial societies is the development of a colonial polity in which settlers live, produce, and reproduce themselves socially. They do so on the back of the dispossession of indigenous populations through which they acquire land, resources, and, depending on the context, labour. This—perhaps obvious—characteristic leads to the development of internal class relations and conflicts, alongside confrontations between settlers and indigenous peoples. The history of settler colonialism underscores the conspicuous absence of involvement by settler working classes (as opposed to individuals or limited networks) in mass, sustained challenges against the process of settlement and indigenous dispossession.3 In fact, more often than not, settler labour movements fought for the intensification of settler expansion and racial segregation (see “An Alternative Reading: Settler Colonies and the Exploitation of the Native” above), through colour bars, boycott campaigns and demands for expulsion. In the process, bitter confrontations emerged between settler labour and capital, when the latter and attempted to increase its profit margins through the exploitation of indigenous labour—for example in the context of the white labour movements in Australia and South Africa.4 Yet these conflicts can be resolved, especially while the settler colony continues to expand, by intensifying the dispossession of indigenous populations in order to improve the material conditions of settler workers (see “Case Studies” below). Here, the question of accumulation by dispossession returns to the fore. If settler workers are exploited as workers within the settler colony, they remain settlers. As such they participate in the processes of accumulation by dispossession through the occupation of lands, the elimination or exploitation of indigenous peoples, and the extraction of expropriated resources. For example, at a very basic level, their houses, workplaces, and basic infrastructure such as roads, railways, etc., are all premised on the capture and control of indigenous land. Settler workers are both exploited by settler bosses and their co-conspirators in the dispossession of indigenous peoples. As such, class struggle within a settler society has a dual character: it is waged over the distribution of wealth extracted from their labour as well as over the colonial booty. In the case of Zionism in Palestine, the current associated with the publication Matzpen (“Compass”) developed a class analysis of Israeli society. They came to the conclusion that because the Israeli economy was heavily subsidised from the outside (first primarily by Britain, then by the US) and that this subsidy was not simply going into private hands but was used by the Labour Zionist bureaucracy to organise the development of the Israeli economy and infrastructure, class antagonisms were diverted within its society. Hangebi et al. (2012:83) wrote: The Jewish worker in Israel does not receive his share in cash, but he gets it in terms of new and relatively inexpensive housing, which could not have been constructed by raising capital locally; he gets it in industrial employment, which could not have been started or kept going without external subsidies; and he gets it in terms of a general standard of living, which does not correspond to the output of that society … In this way the struggle between the Israeli working class and its employers, both bureaucrats and capitalists, is fought not only over the surplus value produced by the worker but also over the share each group receives from this external source of subsidies. If this analysis was essentially correct, it underplayed, however, the consequences of an important aspect of Israeli wealth creation (which Matzpen otherwise recognised): the Israeli state, its infrastructure, and its economy were made possible by colonial expansion, land confiscation, the expulsion of Palestinians and the expropriation of their wealth and property. Affordable housing, for example, an issue discussed further below, was not only possible because of the subsidies the Israeli state received from abroad. It was possible because the land on which new houses were built, as well as existing Palestinian houses, had been confiscated by the Israeli army, Palestinians had been expelled in their hundreds of thousands, and the spoils were re-distributed amongst settlers. It was—and remains—the collective dispossession of the indigenous population by the Israeli population as a whole, which ties the settler community together, despite internal class, ethnic, and political divisions. The settler class struggle is fought over the distribution of wealth extracted from settler labour power as well as over the share each group receives from the process of accumulation by dispossession. This dual class and colonial relationship helps explain the relative absence of settler workers’ resistance against settler colonial expansion or alliances with Indigenous peoples.5 This tendency can be understood as “settler quietism”: even if working-class settlers are exploited by their ruling classes, overthrowing the settler state would mean overthrowing a system in which they share, however unequally, in the distribution of the colonial loot. Participating in the process of dispossession and fighting for a greater share of the pie leads to more important and immediate material gains. It also follows, as many anti-colonial thinkers and activists, not least among them Fanon (2001) in the Wretched of the Earth, have argued that indigenous people face the settler population as a whole in their struggle for de-colonisation. This is not to say that individual settlers or specific settler organisations cannot or have not supported struggles for decolonisation. It is however to point out that this is not the case for the majority of the settler working class, while it continues to depend on the continued dispossession of the natives for the quality of its living standards. Whether the settler colony is organised on the basis of an eliminatory or an exploitative model, what remains constant is that the entirety of the settler polity will participate in the process of accumulation by dispossession, and that the different settler classes will struggle both against the natives to impose and maintain this dispossession, as well as amongst themselves in order to determine the nature of its internal distribution. More than that, the specific structural forms of settler rule over the indigenous population is best understood as the outcome of struggle, both between settler classes and between settlers and indigenous populations. This paper now turns to two brief case studies demonstrating this process in the context of Zionism in Palestine. The specificity of Zionism in the history of settler colonialism, its lack of a colonial metropolis, had real consequences for the Zionists in Palestine. Firstly, it could not impose—at first—its control over the land through military force. Secondly it could not organise the transfer of populations to the colony in the same way a state could. In the words of Shafir (1996:155): “Zionism, then, was a colonisation movement which simultaneously had to secure land for its settlers and settlers for its land”. The dual need for land and labour was at the heart of many political developments in the Yishuv. If the question of land was resolved first through acquisition from largely absentee land owners and then (and most extensively) through military violence, the question of immigration came close several times to bringing the whole colonial project to its knees, as the European Jewish population tended to reject Zionism as a political response to the poverty and discrimination they faced. Two distinct political responses emerged within the early settler population. On the one hand, the Jewish farmers and their sponsors hoped to develop a cash crop producing agricultural sector focused on export to Europe and the exploitation of cheap Palestinian workers. This vision was based, as demonstrated by Shafir (1996), on the model of other European projects—especially the French settler colonies of North Africa. On the other hand, the nascent Labour Zionist movement demanded better wages and working conditions for Jewish workers in Palestine, which they argued would be the only way to attract and retain new settlers. This, they claimed, necessitated full separation between the Jewish and Palestinian sectors, removing thereby the “unfair competition” of the cheaper indigenous labour force. This led to the development of a series of new Labour Zionist institutions to organise this “Conquest of Hebrew Labour”, by organising strikes, pickets, and boycotts of Jewish owned businesses that employed Palestinian workers or sold products made by them. The Kibbutzim, the Histadrut,6 and the early Zionist militias were all born out of the process of organising this campaign (Lockman 1996). For example, the Histadrut’s constitution, passed at its founding congress, made clear that it was a Zionist body committed to the project of settlement through the development of an exclusively Jewish society. It stated that the Histadrut’s goal was to: … unite all the workers and labourers in the country who live by their own labour without exploiting the labour of others, in order to arrange for all settlement, economic and also cultural affairs of all the workers in the country, so as to build a society of Jewish labour in Eretz Yisra’el. (quoted in Lockman 1996:68) The similarity between the logic of this statement and that of the white South African strikers mentioned above is remarkable. This struggle—waged against Palestinian workers and Jewish farmers—led to a partial victory for the Labour Zionist movement (Lockman 2012). Key industries, such as construction and agriculture, were taken over by Labour Zionist institutions such as Solal Boneh and the Kibbutzim. At the same time, Jewish representation in colonial institutions was increased through collaboration with the British Mandate authorities especially in the context of crushing the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939. The Labour Zionists took over the Yishuv’s political leadership and created a dominant Jewish sector, without however being able to establish a fully segregated one. It did set in motion the logic of separation as well as laying the infrastructure for a Jewish state, which would be made a reality by its militias’ military violence and mass expulsion of Palestinians during the Nakba. This case study shows that the Labour Zionist movement developed on the basis of opposing Jewish farmers as well as Palestinian workers, a political focus that also shaped its key institutions. The campaign for Hebrew Labour also demonstrates that the “elimination of the native” in the settler colonial context is not a given, as in the Wolfe-an framework, but the outcome of a specific set of struggles that pit both the indigenous population against the settlers, as well as different settler classes against one another.
Their framing of ‘structural violence’ offers token recognition and empathy to alleviate settler anxiety and consolidate their social capital. Sentiments that attempt to eliminate forms of violence will always be corrupted because they fail to acknowledge which groups were the root cause of this violence. Slater 16 (Lisa Slater, PhD (Sydney University), MA (Sydney University), Questioning Care, Chapter 7 in The Pedagogies of Cultural Studies, edited by Andrew Hickey, Routledge, 2016, JKS) What worlds do you care for? Donna Haraway (2008) challenges her readers to become curious about the world-making effects of their caring practices. In this chapter I will examine the world-making effects of settler Australians’ care for Indigenous peoples, and more broadly reflect upon pedagogies of care and the production of the contemporary caring subject. Haraway (1988) has long argued for situated knowledges. As much as we live in an interconnected, entangled world, peoples (or as Haraway might prefer, the more-than-human) also live different histories. To care is to make claims on life and the future (and in so doing draw upon particular pasts). In Australia, the art of caring for others or instituting good health and well- being continues to be modeled on settler liberal concepts of what is a good life and a healthy subject-citizen. In contrast, many Indigenous people have called upon settler Australia to recognize and take seriously alternative life worlds and thus to imagine different futures. To do so, we need to ask, what are the world-making effects of our caring stories? Cultural studies prides itself on a commitment to social justice, and I would argue that such an undertaking requires a radical innovation of how we understand and prac- tice care. My intention is to not simply critique modes of caring for others but rather to run a bit of interference on care: to reflect upon what worlds are we caring for, so we might consider what worlds flourish and what worlds are diminished. To generate new political practices and anticolonial styles of care, we need to draw upon alternative genealogies of care. As cultural studies academics, we care, and teach our students, about social justice. Lately, I’ve been speculating about what our students care for. Or perhaps more accurately, I am curious about knowledge politics, which is much more than revealing the politics or working to produce more accurate facts but rather understanding that the “ways of studying and representing things have world-making effects” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011: 86). The stories we tell about care—knowledge construction and circulation—have material consequences. When I say our students, I mean students of Australian universities, not just my students at the University of Wollongong. Where are we directing their affective force? Over the last few years when teaching undergraduate students, I have been surprised by their self-assured (if not even self-righteous) sense of what social issues are important and deserving of care. But more so, even if they are improvising as knowing, empathetic subjects, they are highly attuned to, and keen to learn, what issues should animate their sympathy and what is the correct response. They know that their care should be directed toward such issues as marriage equality, the environment, poverty, and homelessness, and if I tell them about sweat- shops or the escalating imprisonment rates of Aboriginal people, they will care about that, too. They know not to care is to out oneself as ignorant, or worse a brute or redneck. To care about particular issues is the mark of the civil or the civilized. We might ask, are we in an age of watered-down ethics (Puig de la Bellacasa 2010)? We cultivate awareness and we care about a long list of fashionable issues. Puig de la Bellacasa argues that concern for ethics has become a form of hegemonic thinking. She writes: That we live in the age of ethics is perceivable in an inflationist use of the word: from corporate ethics to everyday ethical living—garbage recycling, fair trade—from international relations to the life sciences, every human practice seems today to cultivate awareness of its ethical component. In most instances interest in the ethical translates in a local or global search for rules, recommendations or resolutions regarding a specific field or profession. (2010: 153) She refers to this as biopolitical morality: forms of power aimed at controlling people’s existence at every level of experience and subjectivity (2010: 155). In an era when the primary role of higher education is to produce work- ers for the knowledge economy, and to secure individual prosperity and social mobility, coupled with the frustration that many academics feel about the lack of student engagement in sociopolitical issues, demonstrations of some form of care and interest seem better than nothing. My concern is that despite our training and commitment to critique, as cultural studies scholars we might be, however inadvertently, conceding to biopolitical morality. However, for many students, Indigenous issues can be some of the trickiest to negotiate. In general students are aware of the socioeconomic disparity between Indigenous and mainstream Australia, and left leaning politicized students are quick to blame past generations and the government. But most sense it’s a mine field, and are wary. My colleagues who teach Indigenous stud- ies (and from my own previous experience) tell me students largely want to learn about ‘dot paintings’ and an ancient culture but do not want to discuss contemporary issues, such as the ongoing impact of colonial and neocolonial practices, because they are considered too political and confronting (terms settler Australians readily apply). Over the years, I have noted the resistances of settler Australian students, which coexist with a particular enthusiasm for so-called ‘traditional’ Aboriginal culture. This cultural dynamic is found in broader Australia, and it is one for which I have developed an intellectual fascination. Of course, not everyone cares about Indigenous people. In Australia, this is only too clear. However, I would argue, concern for Indigenous well-being has become a moral barometer of our time. Thus, settler sensitivity, anxiety, around how to engage with Indigenous issues makes it a productive site for investigating the knowledge politics of care. It would be fair to say, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about care, worrying at care. In particular my interest is, what I am calling in a crude sociological category, “good white people”: progressive settler Australians who want to engage with Indigenous peoples, cultures, and social issues. In short, care. They, or we, are deeply concerned about the so-called “Indigenous problem”; socioeconomic inequality, poor health, education, and housing, and racism, growing incarceration and suicide rates, the closing of remote communities, the ‘loss’ of culture, and the list could go on. There is a lot to worry about. Overwhelmed, the good white person asks, what can we do? Too often the effect is that ‘we’, settler Australians, imagine that we know what the problem is and, like the government, we must find the solutions (Cowlishaw 2013: 245). What is the cultural relationship? Tony Birch argues pity is the “emotion that drives the relationship between conservative and liberal-minded Australians alike in their dealings with Aboriginal people” (Birch 2014: 41). Largely, I agree. However, I think pity is an expression of good old-fashioned settler anxiety; variously understood as a sense of ille- gitimacy or guilt due to Australia’s colonial past and ongoing white privilege (Gelder and Jacobs 1998). Nonetheless, Aboriginal people are objects for mainstream Australia to worry about but not to take seriously. Good white people care about Indigenous people and culture. We are anxious to get ‘it’ right; our sense of self and belonging depends upon it. But more so, anxiety is an historical subjectivity—a social practice, an activity through which the subject is constituted. Foucault claimed that the study of the genealogy of the modern Western subject needed to be twofold. It is not enough to take into account technologies of domination,1 we also need to consider the active practices of self-constitution, which Foucault calls technologies or care of the self: techniques which permit individuals to effect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, on their own souls, on their own thoughts, on their own conduct, and this in a manner so as to transform themselves, modify themselves, and to attain a certain state of perfection, of happiness, of purity, of supernatural power, and so on. (2005: 214) In a simple sense, care of the self is the work we do to know ourselves, to constitute ourselves as subjects in relation to what one understands as the truth (Foucault 1997: 271). In such a truth, Indigenous people are vulnerable and care is performed through acts of benevolence that welcome Indigenous people into an already determined future. I am arguing that a contemporary practice of self-seeking—care of the self—is the activity of knowing who I am in relation to Indigenous issues and intercultural relations, which offers self-certainty. Of course, these activities do not produce an authentic self, but a certain kind of subjectivity that does particular work in the world, reproducing colonial relations of authority and vulnerability. These are, as Foucault argues: not something invented by the individual himself. They are models that he finds in his culture and are proposed, suggested, imposed upon him by his culture, his society, and his social group. (1997: 291).
Their sociological and demographic analysis of incarcerated populations is not only inadequate, it actively renders carcerality as a dehistoricized tool of state power – indigenous sovereignty challenges the existence of the carceral state Robert Nichols 14, McKnight Land-Grant Professor in Political Theory and Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota, “The Colonialism of Incarceration”, https://nycstandswithstandingrock.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/nichols-2014.pdf In light of this perspective, sociological and demographic analysis of racialized incarcerated populations is inadequate when thinking about the political form of carceral power in North America. The colonial violence of carceral power in North America is not exclusively, or even predominately, a function of the number or proportion of racialized bodies within institutions. Moreover, framing the matter in this way may exacerbate the problem of racialized bodies within penal institutions, this tacitly renders carcerality as a dehistoricized tool of state power—even if distorted by the pathological effects of a racist society—displacing an account of the continuity and linkages between carcerality, state formation and territorialized sovereignty. As indigenous scholars such as Taiaiake Alfred, Joanne Barker, Glen Coulthard, and Audra Simpson (inter alia) have consistently argued, unlike other racialized populations in North America, indigenous peoples constituted self-governing political communities prior to the imposition of European state and market forms.22 Their continued sovereign presence on the North American continent attests then not only to the failure of a series of projects of racial population management, but also fundamentally calls into question the very legitimacy of Euro-American states themselves. The central role of policing, prisons and the criminal justice system in the maintenance and reproduction of the state form is therefore challenged in a manner that exceeds the paradigm of over-representation. Moving beyond the over-representation model means then asking after the political function of the carceral system as a whole beyond that of racialized bodies within. In so doing, we confront a series of new questions: How can we analyze carceral power in the context of an ongoing denial of indigenous peoples not merely as individuals, nor even as “populations,” but as self-organizing, self- governing political collectivities? How are we to apprehend the cataloguing and deploying of statistical evidence itself in this situation, especially when the evidentiary record is itself so indebted to a state apparatus of monitor- ing, tracking, and documenting indigenous bodies?23 How do we draw upon such statistical evidence while recognizing that these numbers constitute bodies as “populations” in a context of a depoliticizing biopolitics of surplus humanity and human management?24 Returning once more to the Canadian case then, indigenous peoples do not merely represent racialized bodies produced by a biopolitics of population management. Rather—and this is the radical actuality that must always be held at bay by the state—they constitute alternative political, economic, ecological and spiritual systems of ordering, governing, and relating. In the context of ongoing occupation, usurpation, dispossession and ecological devastation, no level of representation in one of the central apparatuses of state control and formalized violence would be proportionate. Instead, indigenous sovereignty itself calls forth an alternative normativity that challenges the very existence of the carceral system, let alone its internal organization and operation.
Thus, the only alternative is decolonization. Tuck and Yang 12 (Eve Tuck, Unangax, State University of New York at New Paltz K. Wayne Yang University of California, San Diego, Decolonization is not a metaphor, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012, pp. 1-40, recut FD WHS) An ethic of incommensurability, which guides moves that unsettle innocence, stands in contrast to aims of reconciliation, which motivate settler moves to innocence. Reconciliation is about rescuing settler normalcy, about rescuing a settler future. Reconciliation is concerned with questions of what will decolonization look like? What will happen after abolition? What will be the consequences of decolonization for the settler? Incommensurability acknowledges that these questions need not, and perhaps cannot, be answered in order for decolonization to exist as a framework. We want to say, first, that decolonization is not obliged to answer those questions - decolonization is not accountable to settlers, or settler futurity. Decolonization is accountable to Indigenous sovereignty and futurity. Still, we acknowledge the questions of those wary participants in Occupy Oakland and other settlers who want to know what decolonization will require of them. The answers are not fully in view and can’t be as long as decolonization remains punctuated by metaphor. The answers will not emerge from friendly understanding, and indeed require a dangerous understanding of uncommonality that un-coalesces coalition politics - moves that may feel very unfriendly. But we will find out the answers as we get there, “in the exact measure that we can discern the movements which give decolonization historical form and content” (Fanon, 1963, p. 36). To fully enact an ethic of incommensurability means relinquishing settler futurity, abandoning the hope that settlers may one day be commensurable to Native peoples. It means removing the asterisks, periods, commas, apostrophes, the whereas’s, buts, and conditional clauses that punctuate decolonization and underwrite settler innocence. The Native futures, the lives to be lived once the settler nation is gone - these are the unwritten possibilities made possible by an ethic of incommensurability when you take away the punctuation he says of lines lifted from the documents about military-occupied land its acreage and location you take away its finality opening the possibility of other futures -Craig Santos Perez, Chamoru scholar and poet (as quoted by Voeltz, 2012) Decolonization offers a different perspective to human and civil rights based approaches to justice, an unsettling one, rather than a complementary one. Decolonization is not an “and”. It is an elsewhere.
The role of the ballot is to vote for who best centers indigenous scholarship and resistance - Any ethical commitment requires that the aff place themselves in the center of Native scholarship and demands. Carlson 16 Elizabeth Carlson, PhD, is an Aamitigoozhi, Wemistigosi, and Wasicu (settler Canadian and American), whose Swedish, Saami, German, Scots-Irish, and English ancestors have settled on lands of the Anishinaabe and Omaha Nations which were unethically obtained by the US government. Elizabeth lives on Treaty 1 territory, the traditional lands of the Anishinaabe, Nehiyawak, Dakota, Nakota, and Red River Metis peoples currently occupied by the city of Winnipeg, the province of Manitoba, (2016): Anti-colonial methodologies and practices for settler colonial studies, Settler Colonial Studies, DOI: 10.1080/2201473X.2016.1241213, recut FD WHS Arlo Kempf says that ‘where anticolonialism is a tool used to invoke resistance for the colonized, it is a tool used to invoke accountability for the colonizer’.42 Relational accountability should be a cornerstone of settler colonial studies. I believe settler colonial studies and scholars should ethically and overtly place themselves in relationship to the centuries of Indigenous oral, and later academic scholarship that conceptualizes and resists settler colonialism without necessarily using the term: SCT may be revelatory to many settler scholars, but Indigenous people have been speaking for a long time about colonial continuities based on their lived experiences. Some SCTs have sought to connect with these discussions and to foreground Indigenous resistance, survival and agency. Others, however, seem to use SCT as a pathway to explain the colonial encounter without engaging with Indigenous people and experiences – either on the grounds that this structural analysis already conceptually explains Indigenous experience, or because Indigenous resistance is rendered invisible.43 Ethical settler colonial theory (SCT) would recognize the foundational role Indigenous scholarship has in critiques of settler colonialism. It would acknowledge the limitations of settler scholars in articulating settler colonialism without dialogue with Indigenous peoples, and take as its norm making this dialogue evident. In my view, it is critical that we not view settler colonial studies as a new or unique field being established, which would enact a discovery narrative and contribute to Indigenous erasure, but rather take a longer and broader view. Indigenous oral and academic scholars are indeed the originators of this work. This space is not empty. Of course, powerful forces of socialization and discipline impact scholars in the academy. There is much pressure to claim unique space, to establish a name for ourselves, and to make academic discoveries. I am suggesting that settler colonial studies and anti-colonial scholars resist these hegemonic pressures and maintain a higher anti-colonial ethic. As has been argued, ‘the theory itself places ethical demands on us as settlers, including the demand that we actively refuse its potential to re-empower our own academic voices and to marginalize Indigenous resistance’.44 As settler scholars, we can reposition our work relationally and contextually with humi- lity and accountability. We can centre Indigenous resistance, knowledges, and scholarship in our work, and contextualize our work in Indigenous sovereignty. We can view oral Indigenous scholarship as legitimate scholarly sources. We can acknowledge explicitly and often the Indigenous traditions of resistance and scholarship that have taught us and pro- vided the foundations for our work. If our work has no foundation of Indigenous scholarship and mentorship, I believe our contributions to settler colonial studies are even more deeply problematic.
11/21/21
NovDec - K - Baudrillard vs Ripstein
Tournament: Churchill | Round: 4 | Opponent: Strake Jesuit MS | Judge: Breigh Plat Our world is dictated by the hyperreal. Society is engrained in the meaningless binary in which we have lost any meaning of truth. This breeds the conditions of semiocapitalism and a paralysis of our psychic process. Swarts no date Swarts, Frederick. The Metaphysic of the Code . fd "Leibniz, that mathematical spirit, saw in the mystic elegance of the binary system that counts only the zero and the one, the very image of creation. The unity of the supreme Being, operating by binary function in nothingness, would have sufficed to bring out of it all the beings." - McLuhan The great simulacra constructed by man pass from a universe of natural laws to a universe of force and tensions of force, today to a universe of structures and binary oppositions. After the metaphysic of being and appearance, after that of energy and determination, comes that of indeterminacy and the code. Cybernetic control, generation from model, differential modulation, feed-back, question/answer, etc.: such is the new operational configuration (industrial simulacra are only operational). Digitality is its metaphysical principle (the God of Leibniz), and DNA its prophet. It is in effect in the genetic code that the "genesis of simulacra" today finds its most accomplished form. At the limit of an always more extensive abolition of references and finalities, of the loss of resemblance and designation, we find the digital program- sign, whose value is purely tactical, at the intersection of the other signals (corpuscles of information/test) and whose structure is that of a macro-molecular code of command and control. At this level the question of signs, of their rational destination, their real or imaginary, their repression, their deviation, the illusion they create or that which they conceal, or their parallel meanings - all of that is erased. We have already seen signs of the first order, complex signs and rich in illusion, change, with the machines, into crude signs, dull, industrial, repetitive, echoless, operational and efficacious. What a mutation, even more radical still, with signals of the code, illegible, with no gloss possible, buried like programmatic matrices light-years away in the depths of the "biological" body - black boxes where all the commandments, all the answers ferment! End of the theatre of representation, the space of signs, their conflict, their silence; only the black box of the code, the molecular emitter of signals from which we have been irradiated, crossed by answers/questions like signifying radiations, tested continuously by our own program inscribed in the cells. Jail cells, electronic cells, party cells, microbiological cells: always the search for the smallest indivisible element, whose organic synthesis would be made according to the givens of the code. But the code itself is but a genetic cell, a generator where myriads of intersections produce all the questions and possible solutions, so that choices (by whom?) can be made. No finality involved with these "questions" (informational and signifying impulsions) but the answer, genetically unchangeable or inflected by minute and aleatory differences. Space is no longer even linear or one- dimensional: cellular space, indefinite generation of the same signals, like the tics of a prisoner gone crazy with solitude and repetition. Such is the genetic code: an erased record, unchangeable, of which we are no more than cells- for-reading. All aura of sign, of significance itself is resolved in this determination; all is resolved in the inscription and decodage. Such is the third-order simulacrum, our own. Such is the "mystic elegance of the binary system, of the zero and the one", from which all being proceeds. Such is the status of the sign that is also the end of signification: DNA or operational simulation. All of this is perfectly well summed up by Sebeok ("Genetics and Semiotics", in Versus): Numerous observations confirm the hypothesis that the internal organic world descends in a straight line from the primordial forms of life. The most remarkable fact is the omnipresence of the DNA molecule. The genetic material of all organisms known on earth is in great measure made up of the nucleonic acids DNA and RNA that contain in their information structure, transmitted by reproduction from one generation to another and furthermore gifted with the capacity of self-reproduction and imitation. Briefly, the genetic code is universal, or almost. Its deciphering was an immense discovery, in the sense that it showed that "the two languages of the great polymers, the language of nucleonic acid and that of protein, are tightly correlated" (Crick, 1966; Clarck/Narcker, 1968). The Soviet mathematician Liapounov demonstrated in 1963 that all living systems transmit by prescribed canals with precision a small quantity of energy or of matter containing a great volume of information, which is responsible for the ulterior control of a great quantity of energy and matter. In this perspective numerous phenomena, biological as well as cultural (stockage, feed-back, canalization of messages and others) can be seen as aspects of the treatment of information. In the last analysis information appears in great part as the repetition of information, or even as another sort of information, a sort of control that seems to be a universal property of terrestrial life, independent of form or substance. Five years ago I drew attention to the convergence of genetics and linguistics - autonomous disciplines, but parallel in the larger field of communication science (of which animal semiotics also is a part). The terminology of genetics is full of expressions taken from linguistics and communication theory (Jacobson, 1968), which also underlined either the major resemblances or the important differences of structure and of function between genetic and verbal codes. . . It is obvious today that the genetic code must be considered the most fundamental of all the semiotic networks, and therefore a prototype of all the other systems of signaling that animals use, man included. From this point of view, molecules which are systems of quanta and behave like stable vehicles of physical information, systems of animal semiotics and cultural systems, including language, constitute a continuous chain of stages, with always more complex energy levels, in the framework of a universal unique evolution. It is therefore possible to describe either language or living systems from a unified cybernetic point-of-view. For the present, this is only a useful analogy or a prediction. A reciprocal rapprochement between animal communication and linguistics can lead to a complete knowledge of the dynamics of semiotics, and such a knowledge can be revealed, in the last analysis, to be nothing less than the very definition of life. And so the current strategic model is designed that everywhere is replacing the great ideological model which constituted political economy in its time. You will find it under the rigorous sign of "science" in the Chance and Necessity of Jacques Monod. The end of dialectical evolution, it is the discontinuous indeterminism of the genetic code that now controls life - the teleological principle. Finality no longer belongs to the term; there is no longer a term, nor a determination. Finality is there beforehand, inscribed in the code. We see that nothing has changed - simply the order of ends yields to the play of molecules, and the order of signifieds to the play of infinitesimal signifiers, reduced to their aleatory commutation. All the transcendant finalities reduced to a dashboard full of instruments. There is still, however, recourse to a nature, to an inscription in "biological" nature - in actuality, a nature distorted by fantasy like she always was, metaphysical sanctuary no longer of origin and substance, but this time of the code; the code must have an "objective" basis. What could be better for that purpose than the molecule and genetics? Monod is the strict theologian of this molecular transcendance, Edgar Morin the rapt disciple (A.D.N.* + Adonai!). But for one as well as the other, the fantasy of the code, which is equivalent to the reality of power, is merged with molecular idealism. (*D.N.A.) Thus we find once more in history that delirious illusion of uniting the world under the aegis of a single principle - that of a homogenous substance with the Jesuits of the Counter Reformation; that of the genetic code with the technocrats of biological science (but also linguistics as well), with Leibniz and his binary divinity as precursor. For the program here aimed at has nothing genetic about it, it is a social and historical program. That which is hypostatized in biochemistry is the ideal of a social order ruled by a sort of genetic code of macromolecular calculation, of P.P.B.S. (Planned Programming Budgeting System), irradiating the social body with its operational circuits. The technical cybernetic finds its "natural philosophy" here, as Monod says. The fascination of the biological, of the biomedical dates from the very beginnings of science. It was at work in Spencerian organicism (sociobiology) on the level of second- and third-order structures (Jacob's classification in The Logic of Life, it is active today in modern biochemistry, on the level of structures of the fourth-order). Coded similarities and dissimilarities: that is certainly the image of cyberniticized social exchange. You only have to add "stereospecific complex" in order to re-inject intracellular communication; that Morin will come to transfigure into molecular Eros.
The 1AC desire to command, control, and cooperate over the unique processes of space represent an attempt to make the cosmos into a geopolitical chess game to control the fluctuation of meaning. Havercroft and Duvall 9 (Jonathan Havercroft and Raymond Duvall; 2009; “Critical astropolitics The geopolitics of space control and the transformation of state sovereignty”; accessed 12/13/21; https://www.law.upenn.edu/live/files/7892-havercroft-and-duvallcritical-astropoliticspdf; Jonathan Havercroft is an Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Southampton. He teaches in the areas of political theory and international relations. He is the editor of the journal Global Constitutionalism; Raymond Duvall is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota; pages 44-50) HB retagged faizaan Astropolitics: realist and liberal strands Realism and astropolitik Everett Dolman3 draws on the writings of Mackinder and Mahan as inspiration for his development of a theory, which he titles Astropolitik. By the term, astropolitik, Dolman means “the application of the prominent and refined realist vision of state competition into outer space policy, particularly the development and evolution of a legal and political regime for humanity’s entry into the cosmos” (Dolman 2002a: 1). While Mahan focused on the structure of the ocean to develop his theories, and Mackinder focused on the topography of land, Dolman turns his attention toward the cartography of outer space. Whereas, at first glance, space may appear to be a “featureless void,” Dolman argues that it “is in fact a rich vista of gravitational mountains and valleys, oceans and rivers of resources and energy alternately dispersed and concentrated, broadly strewn danger zones of deadly radiation, and precisely placed peculiarities of astrodynamics” (Dolman 2002a: 61). In a manner similar to Mahan’s focus on natural sea lanes and “choke points” and Mackinder’s emphasis of geographic regions, Dolman emphasizes orbits, regions of space, and launch points as geopolitically vital assets over which states can be expected competitively and strategically to struggle for control. Orbital paths are important because stable orbits require virtually no fuel expenditure for satellites, whereas unstable orbits make it impossible for satellites to remain in space for a long time. Furthermore, different types of orbits pass over different parts of the earth at different frequencies. As such, the mission of a spacecraft determines in large part which orbit is most useful for it. There are essentially four types of orbits: low-altitude (between 150 km and 800 km above the Earth’s surface); medium-altitude (ranging from 800 km–35,000 km); high-altitude (above 35,000 km); and highly elliptical (with a perigee of 250 km and an apogee of 700,000 km) (Dolman 2002a: 65–7). In addition to pointing to the division of space into orbital planes, Dolman also identifies four key regions of space: 1 Terra, which includes the Earth and its atmosphere up until “just below the lowest altitude capable of supporting unpowered orbit” (Dolman 2002: 69); 2 Earth Space, which covers the region from the lowest possible orbit through to geo-stationary orbit; 3 Lunar Space, which extends from geo-stationary orbit to the Moon’s orbit; and 4 Solar Space, which “consists of everything in the solar system . . . beyond the orbit of the moon” (Dolman 2002a: 70). For Dolman, Earth Space is the astropolitical equivalent of Mackinder’s Outer Crescent, because controlling it will permit a state to limit strategic opportunities of potential rivals and at the same time allow the projection of force for indirect control (i.e. without occupation) of extensive territory of vital strategic importance, in this case (unlike Mackinder’s) potentially the entire Earth. “Control of Earth Space not only guarantees long-term control of the outer reaches of space, it provides a near-term advantage on the terrestrial battlefield” (Dolman 1999: 93). On the basis of these principles, Dolman develops an “Astropolitik policy for the United States” (Dolman 1999: 156), which calls on the U.S. government to control Earth Space. In the current historical–political juncture, no state controls this region. However, rather than leave it as a neutral zone or global commons, Dolman calls for the U.S. to seize control of this geo-strategically vital asset. According to Dolman’s reasoning, the neutrality of Earth Space is as much a threat to U.S. security as the neutrality of Melos was to Athenian hegemony. To leave space a neutral sanctuary could be interpreted as a sign of weakness that potential rivals might exploit. As such, it is better for the U.S. to occupy Earth Space now. Dolman’s astropolitik policy has three steps. The first involves the U.S. withdrawing from the current space regime on the grounds that its prohibitions on commercial and military exploitation of outer space prevent the full exploitation of space resources. In place of the global commons approach that informs that regime, Dolman calls for the establishment of “a principle of free-market sovereignty in space” (Dolman 2002a: 157), whereby states could establish territorial claims over areas they wish to exploit for commercial purposes. This space rush should be coupled with “propaganda touting the prospects of a new golden age of space exploration” (Dolman 2002a: 157). Step two calls for the U.S. to seize control of low-Earth orbit, where “space-based laser or kinetic energy weapons could prevent any other state from deploying assets there, and could most effectively engage and destroy terrestrial enemy ASAT facilities” (Dolman 2002a: 157). Other states would be permitted “to enter space freely for the purpose of engaging in commerce” (Dolman 2002a: 157). The final step would be the establishment of “a national space coordination agency ... to define, separate and coordinate the efforts of commercial, civilian and military space projects” (Dolman 2002a: 157). Within Dolman’s theory of astropolitik is a will-to-space-based-hegemony fuelled by a series of assumptions, of which we would point to three as especially important. First, it rests on a strong preference for competition over collaboration in both the economic and military spheres. Dolman, like a good realist, is suspicious of the possibilities for sustained political and economic cooperation, and assumes instead that competition for power is the law of international political–economic life. He believes, though, that through a fully implemented astropolitical policy “states will employ competition productively, harnessing natural incentives for self-interested gain to a mutually beneficial future, a competition based on the fair and legal commercial exploitation of space” (Dolman 2002a: 4). Thus, underpinning his preference for competition is both a liberal assumption that competitive markets are efficient at producing mutual gain through innovative technologies, and the realist assumption that inter-state competition for power is inescapable in world politics. As we will note more fully below, this conjunction of liberal and realist assumptions is a hallmark of the logic of empire as distinct from the logic of a system of sovereign states. The second and most explicit of Dolman’s key assumptions is the belief that the U.S. should pursue control of orbital space because its hegemony would be largely benign. The presumed benevolence of the U.S. rests, for Dolman, on its responsiveness to its people. If any one state should dominate space it ought to be one with a constitutive political principle that government should be responsible and responsive to its people, tolerant and accepting of their views, and willing to extend legal and political equality to all. In other words, the United States should seize control of outer space and become the shepherd (or perhaps watchdog) for all who would venture there, for if any one state must do so, it is the most likely to establish a benign hegemony. (Dolman 2002a: 157) However, even if the U.S. government is popularly responsive in its foreign policy – a debatable proposition – the implication of Dolman’s astropolitik is that the U.S. would exercise benign control over orbital space, and, from that position, potentially all territory on Earth and hence all people, by being responsible to its 300 million citizens. As such, this benign hegemony would in effect be an apartheid regime where 95 percent of the world would be excluded from participating in the decision-making of the hegemonic power that controls conditions of their existence. This, too, is a hallmark of empire, not of a competitive system of sovereign states. Third, Dolman’s astropolitik treats space as a resource to be mastered and exploited by humans, a Terra Nulius, or empty territory, to be colonized and reinterpreted for the interests of the colonizer. This way of looking at space is similar to the totalizing gaze of earlier geopolitical theorists who viewed the whole world as an object to be dominated and controlled by European powers, who understood themselves to be beneficently, or, at worst, benignly, civilizing in their control of territories and populations (Ó Tuathail 1996: 24–35). This assumption, like the first two, thus also implicates a hallmark of the logic of empire, namely what Ó Tuathail (1996) calls the ‘geopolitical gaze’ (about which we have more to say below), which works comfortably in tandem with a self-understanding of benign hegemony. When these three assumptions are examined in conjunction, Dolman’s astropolitik reveals itself to be a blueprint for a U.S. empire that uses the capacities of space-based weapons to exercise hegemony over the Earth and to grant access to the economic resources of space only to U.S. (capitalist) interests and their allies. This version of astropolitics, which is precisely the strategic vision underlying the policy pronouncements of the National Security Space Management and Organization Commission (Commission 2001) – and subsequently President George W. Bush – with which we began this chapter, is a kind of spatial, or geopolitical, power within the context of U.S. imperial relations of planetary scope. Its ostensive realist foundations are muted, except as a rather extreme form of offensive realism, because the vision is not one of great power competition and strategic balancing, but rather one of imperial control through hegemony. As such, it brings into question the constitution of sovereignty, since empire and sovereignty are fundamentally opposed constitutive principles of the structure of the international system – the subjects of empire are not sovereign. Thus, if astropolitics is to be in the form of Dolman’s astropolitik (and current U.S. policy aspirations), the future of sovereignty is in question, despite his efforts to position the theory as an expression of the realist assumption of great power competition. In later sections of this chapter, we attempt to show what this bringing sovereignty into question is likely to mean, conceptually and in practice. Before turning to that principal concern, however, we consider an alternative geopolitical theory of astropolitics. Liberal-republican astropolitics Over the past twenty-five years, in a series of articles and recently a major book, Daniel Deudney has attempted to rework the tenets of geopolitics and apply them to the contemporary challenges raised by new weapons technologies – particularly nuclear and space weapons (Deudney 1983, 1985, 1995, 2000, 2002, 2007).4 While Deudney finds geopolitical theory of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century theoretically unsophisticated and reductionist, he believes that geopolitical attention to material conditions, spatiality, change, and political processes could form the basis of a theoretically sophisticated contextual–materialist security theory of world politics. Deudney starts from a premise about space weaponization similar to the core of Dolman’s astropolitik, namely that if any state were able to achieve military control of space, it would hold potential mastery over the entire Earth. One preliminary conclusion, however, seems sound: effective control of space by one state would lead to planet-wide hegemony. Because space is at once so proximate and the planet’s high ground, one country able to control space and prevent the passage of other countries’ vehicles through it could effectively rule the planet. Even more than a monopoly of air or sea power, a monopoly of effective space power would be irresistible. (Deudney 1983: 17) Rather than developing the implications of this as a strategic opportunity for any one state (e.g. the U.S.), however, Deudney sees it as a collective problem to be kept in check through collaboration; his project is to avoid space-based hegemony through cooperation among states. In a series of articles on global security written in the 1980s – while Cold War tensions between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. continued to frame much theoretical discussion in international relations – Deudney saw the space age as a double-edged sword in superpower relations. On the one side, space weaponization posed a risk that the superpowers would extend their conflict extra-terrestrially and devise new, deadlier technologies that would enhance the risk of exterminating all of humanity; on the other, according to Deudney, the space age had found productive opportunities for the superpowers to deal with their rivalries in stabilizing collaboration. He notes that the Sputnik mission, while in the popular understanding only an escalation of the Cold War, initially was the result of an internationally organized research program – the International Geophysical Year (Deudney 1985; though see Dolman 2002a: 106–107 for an alternate interpretation of these events as Cold War competition). Another example was President Eisenhower’s proposed “Atoms for Peace” project, which involved the great powers sharing nuclear technology with developing nations for energy purposes. Most famous was the collaboration between the Soviet Union and the U.S. during the 1970s on the rendezvous between an Apollo capsule and the Soyuz space station. Similar multinational collaborations continue to this day, with the most notable example being the International Space Station. In addition to promoting collaboration, according to Deudney, the space age has also enhanced the ability of space powers to monitor each other – through spy satellites – thereby increasing the likelihood that they abide by arms control treaties. Deudney believes that these types of collaboration and increased surveillance could be strengthened and deepened so that great powers could be persuaded over time to “forge missiles into spaceships” (Deudney 1985: 271). In the 1980s this led Deudney to develop a set of specific proposals for a peaceful space policy, including collaboration between space powers on manned missions to the Moon, asteroids, and Mars. The development of an International Satellite Monitoring Agency would make “space-based surveillance technology accessible to an international community” for monitoring ceasefires, crises, compliance with international arms control treaties, and the Earth’s environment (Deudney 1985: 291). These proposals are aimed at promoting collaboration on projects of great scientific and military significance for the individual states. Deudney’s expectation is that such cooperation would mitigate security dilemmas and promote greater ties between states that would co-bind their security without sacrificing their sovereignty. While Deudney has not been explicit about how his astropolitics of collaboration would alter world order, in his more theoretical writings he has elaborated the logic of a liberal-republican international system. In a 2002 article on geopolitics and international theory, he developed what he called a‘historical security materialist’ theory of geopolitics: “In which changing forces of destruction (constituted by geography and technology) condition the viability of different modes of protection (understood as clusters of security practices) and their attendant ‘superstructures’ of political authority structures (anarchical, hierarchical, and federal-republican)” (Deudney 2002: 80). In that work, he identified four different eras in which distinct modes of destruction were predominant: Pre-modern; Early Modern; Global Industrial; and Planetary-Nuclear, as well as two modes of protection: real-statism, which is based on an internal monopoly of violence and external anarchy; and federal-republicanism, which is based on an internal division of powers and an external symmetrical binding of actors through institutions that reduces their autonomy in relation to one another. According to Deudney, in the Planetary-Nuclear age the federal-republican mode of protection is more viable because states “are able to more fully and systematically restrain violence” than under the power balancing practices of real-statist modes of protection (Deudney 2002: 97; see also Deudney 2007: 244–277 for an elaboration of this argument). Although Deudney has not extended his “historical security materialist” approach into explicitly theorizing space weapons, per se (dealt with only tangentially and implicitly in the last two chapters of his recent book), his proposals during the Cold War to foster institutional collaboration between space powers as a way of promoting peace can safely be understood as a form of the mutually binding practices that he associates with the federalrepublican mode of protection. In addition, one of the general conclusions that Deudney reaches about “historical security materialism” is that the more a security context is rich in the potential for violence, the better suited a federal-republican mode of protection is to avoid systemic breakdown. Therefore, it seems reasonable to conclude that within Deudney’s work is a nascent theory of how a federal-republican international system could limit conflict between space powers by binding them together in collaborative uses of space for exploratory and security uses. In this sense, Deudney can be read as the liberal-republican astropolitical counterpart to Everett Dolman.5 While Deudney’s astropolitical theorizations hold out the promise of a terrestrial pacification through space exploration it is interesting to note a significant aporia in his theory – empire as a possible mode of protection. While real-statist modes of protection have an internal hierarchical authority structure, they are based on assumptions of external-anarchy, which is to say a system of sovereign states. Conversely, the federal-republican model is based on a symmetrical binding of units, in a way that no single unit can come to dominate others and accordingly in which they preserve their sovereignty (Deudney 2000, 2002, 2007). In a third mode, to which Deudney gives only scant attention, the case of empire, the hegemony of a single unit is such that other units are bound to it in an asymmetrical pattern that locates sovereignty only in the hegemon, or imperial center. Successful empires, including the Roman, British, and American, permit local autonomy in areas that are not of the imperial power’s direct concern while demanding absolute obedience in areas that are of vital concern to it, particularly when it comes to issues of security.6 Deudney’s implicit astropolitical theory thus ignores structurally asymmetric relations – in effect he ignores power. It is as if in wanting to have the world avoid the possibility of a planetary hegemony at the heart of the premise with which he and Dolman began their respective analyses, he white-washes it by failing to acknowledge the profound asymmetries of aspirations and technological–financial–military capacities among states for control of orbital space. In the next two sections we respond to Deudney’s call for “historical security materialism” by focusing on the premise that he skirts but that Dolman emphasizes, that military control of space means (at least the possibility of) mastery of the Earth. Specifically we examine how a new mode of destruction – space weapons – is the ideal basis for the third mode of protection – empire – through its potential for substantial asymmetry. We argue that the power asymmetries of space weapons have very significant constitutive effects on sovereignty and international systemic anarchy, and underlie the constitution of a new, historically unprecedented, form of empire. Before turning to that central thesis, however, we will first sketch the general contours of a critical astropolitics, which builds on the foundational premise of Dolman and Deudney, but modifies their theories in light of the significant insights of critical theory, particularly with respect to constitutive power. We ask: what consequences of astropolitics can a critical approach illuminate that may be concealed by an astropolitics informed by either liberal-republican or realist assumptions? How can insights offered by the revival of geopolitics in the writings of Deudney and Dolman – particularly the call for a new security materialist mode of analysis – be used to supplement and refine critical international relations theory?
The 1AC has been trapped in an endless cycle of investment into possibilities of liberation. The defeat of systems of capital accumulation will not change the fundamental antagonism between individuals that undergirds the social structures. McGowan ’13. McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. University of Nebraska Press, 2013. DJB This position puts psychoanalysis directly at odds with Marxism’s emphasis on the centrality of praxis. Marx theorizes in order to facilitate social change, and every political project by its very nature shares this goal with Marxism. What distinguishes both Marx and Freud as thinkers is their understanding of social antagonism. Where Freud sees antagonism manifesting itself in the excessive suffering of the individual subject, Marx sees it playing out in class struggle. Despite this difference in focus, they share a belief in the fundamental status of antagonism, which separates them from political thinkers (such as John Stuart Mill and John Rawls) who view the social order as whole, as divided by conflicts but not by a fundamental antagonism. We can resolve conflicts through mediation and negotiation, but antagonism implies the impossibility of resolution. An antagonism doesn’t just involve two opposing positions — like that of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat — but conceives of opposition as internal to each position. This idea of each position being internally opposed to itself is what liberal political thinkers cannot grant (if they wish to remain liberal political thinkers). Just as they view society as whole, they also view each conflicting position within society as unified and identical with itself. Not so with Marx and Freud. For Marx, the conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is at the same time the indication of an internal conflict within the bourgeoisie itself. In fact, the bourgeoisie produces the proletariat out of itself through the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. For Freud, the conflict between the individual and the social order is also an internal conflict within the individual and within the social order. Even societies that lack the concept of an individual must nonetheless reckon with this universal antagonism. That is, they must attempt to reconcile the continued existence of the social order with the entrance of new subjects into that order. Though the individual may be a Western idea, the social antagonism resulting from the subject’s entrance into the social order is not. The elaborate marriage rules that Claude Lévi-Strauss uncovered in various societies attest to the problem of this antagonism surfacing universally.12 The individual emerges as a distinct being because the social order cannot reproduce itself without producing a remainder, even if this remainder doesn’t take the form of the individual that is familiar to the Western world. The idea of antagonism allows Marx and Freud to author their radical social critiques. It allows them to see how the proletariat or the individual invests itself in its own oppression, or how the bourgeoisie or the social order contributes to its own subversion. Antagonism is both the cause of social stasis and the possibility for revolutionary change. For Marx and Freud, interpretation must take antagonism as its point of departure, though Marx sees, in the last instance, the possibility of overcoming antagonism through the victory of the proletariat and the consequent elimination of class struggle. Marx envisioned a society in which production would take place for the good of the society rather than for the sake of the accumulation of capital, a change that would allow production to develop without limit. Within the capitalist mode of production, according to Marx, the true barrier to capitalist production is capital itself. It is that capital and its self-valorization appear as the starting and finishing point as the motive and purpose of production; production is production only for capital, and not the reverse, i.e. the means of production are not simply means for a steadily expanding pattern of life for the society of the producers. . . . The means — the unrestricted development of the social forces of production — comes into persistent conflict with the restricted end, the valorization of the existing capital. If the capitalist mode of production is therefore a historical means for developing the material powers of production and for creating a corresponding world market, it is at the same time the constant contradiction between this historical task and the social relations of production corresponding to it. Included in this critique of the capitalist mode of production is the idea of a society in which the means and the end would no longer be in conflict with each other. For Marx, “the unrestricted development of the social forces of production” — a society without antagonism — represents a genuine historical possibility. This is a possibility that Freud rejects because he conceives of antagonism as constitutive of the social structure itself.
Their tricks are futile, debate is a game and they take it too seriously Hoofd ‘17 Ingrid, Assistant Professor Department of Media and Culture Studies, Higher Education and Technological Acceleration, http://www.palgrave.com/it/book/9781137517517 | DJB *brackets for clarity The conception outlined in Chap. 1 of media technologies as not neutral but inherently bound up in aggravating the aporia at the heart of the university immediately suggests that they are a multi-faceted and ambiguous force in the constitution of any learning platform and its pedagogical aims, regardless of the module’s specific content and the assignments that are disseminated through these media. E-learning content itself may in many ways point towards the non-neutrality of the larger socio-economic landscape, in which the medium operates by virtue of the relationship between aesthetics and the context in which this aesthetic is enunciated. The problematic common sense discourse which educators and administrators uphold within higher education, that claims that media are neutral conduits of learning, is therefore itself already symptomatic of a cultural context in which the idea of transparent mediation functions to obscure forms of oppression and disenfranchisement. We can see this misguided claim around neutrality or objectivity that problematically this dissimulates the Eurocentric assumptions behind these tools while simultaneously forcing radical alterity and inter-subjective interpretation and rapport out of the communicative relation in the ‘digital humanities.’ This common sense discourse, as with the very notion of the university itself, is after all historically related to Eurocentric and masculinist ideas of the subject and his potential to autonomously and intentionally transmit as well as control meaning and knowledge through any medium of communication, about which more in Chap. 4 . Instead, I hold to the view in this book that the medium of learning co-constitutes knowledge and engenders certain subject-positions that are consecutively required by the larger economic and social imperatives that universities, and by extension their academic staff, serve. In other words, if the tools and ideology of e-learning are built on a set of assumptions that have historically tended to favour a Western and male elite, what does this mean for local implicates student empowerment and disempowerment along the lines of gender, ethnicity, and class within and outside especially the non-Western classroom? Also, how may the teacher’s responsibility for teaching students, that is, to become profi cient at learning and communicating through new media tools as demanded by the academic institution to ensure the students’ future empowerment and employability lead to a host of tensions within the pedagogical scene between her own in-class authority and the relinquishing of such authority due to the students’ capacity to do ‘self-guided’ online learning? What are the potentials and pitfalls of the displacement of pedagogical authority and responsibility into the e-learning medium, in which, as Lyotard reminds us, power gets uncoupled from truth (or rather, technological power risks becoming the only truth), leaving little space for questioning its automation? This also explains why the advocating of new media in the academic classroom is often simply in and of itself perceived as a ‘good thing’ which will ‘enhance’ learning, as new media themselves problematically come to stand in for humanist ideas of democracy and emancipation. But this ‘virtual emancipation’ for the happy few is then intimately bound up with an accelerated subjugation of the not-so-happy majority, as its prerogative is the sustenance and advancement of neo-liberal globalisation and through its new economic speed-elites. This means that e-learning, through its inherent validation of active, vocal, masculine, connected, and cosmopolitan personhood, is implicated in the reproduction and generation of new hierarchies between students inside as well as outside the university classroom, even though its explicit rhetoric is often about the elimination of these very divisions and disconnections, as well as about an inclusion of the marginalised into the universitas . Some good examples of this paradoxical logic of differential student empowerment (and connection) through oppression (and the dissimulation of disconnection) by way of e-learning are the new learning tools called ‘educational games.’ Educators and teachers logically explore using educational games in the classroom because most of today’s young learners often have ample experience with electronic gaming. Also, the argument is often put forward that if studying can be presented as play, students may be more willing to subject themselves to the ‘un-pleasantries’ of learning. Work as play (or the material confusion of production and play through new media) is nonetheless also one of the hallmarks of the aforementioned contemporary creative economy and its quest for knowledge workers, in which the consumption of electronic media has become thoroughly enmeshed with creative production and circulation. Educational games not only seek to present a learning environment that is in many ways an aesthetic and technical microcosm of a larger current socio-economical context, learning and thinking themselves have becomes a direct extension of the perpetual need for capitalist circulation and innovation, which is itself in turn implicated in forms of highly unequal globalisation and distribution. Electronic games therefore relate to this uneven form of globalisation on two levels: in terms of their technique of instantaneity and acceleration, as well as on the level of their inherently militaristic aesthetics or content (see for instance, also Kline et al. 2003). Learning through educational games must then lead to what I would call a ‘double objectification’ by way of the bilateral speedy dissimulations of oppression that it engenders, especially when it claims to empower the student and seek larger social justice. Let me illustrate this claim with the example of an (at fi rst glance) sympathetic American educational game called Real Lives . According to its online manual, the pedagogical aim of Real Lives is for students to “learn how people really live in other countries” (Educational Simulations 2010). The makers of the game argue that Real Lives is an “empathybuilding world,” which will grant students an “appreciation of their own culture and the cultures of other peoples”—a clear indicator of the speedelitist validation of (virtual) mobility and cross-cultural dialogue. The game starts by assigning to each player a randomly selected character of a certain country, class, and gender. Since the ascription of the game character is based on actual statistical possibilities in terms of place of birth and economic status, the likelihood is high that the character gets born poor in countries like India, Mexico, or in other densely populated places. During the game, the player can take virtual actions like deciding to put her or his character in a school or have her staying at home to help her parents. The player can also determine which hobbies the game character will take up, what job she should take, and so forth. The game time takes one-year leaps at which the student-player can see the impact of external events like disease or fl oods, and his or her own actions on the character and her family. The game software also shows a map of the character’s birth region and its statistics, like its population density, gross annual income, currency, health standards, and such. The character would also possess traits like happiness, athleticism, musicality, and health. While the player’s actions defi nitely infl uence the character and her family’s health and economic status, the potentially interesting part of the game lies in the fact that it contains events and situations that are beyond the player’s control. Such a game structure potentially endows the student with a sense that wider meritocratic or competitive discourses may be fl awed. It is nonetheless obvious that the attributions in Real Lives , while based on statistical facts, may be problematic as they may easily lead students to a simplistic view of a country and its inhabitants. While India, for instance, certainly has many poor people, and while the girls in its poorer areas are frequently not allowed or able to go to school, to have the white Western student come across such representations of ‘India’ time and again can lead to the reproduction of stereotypes and a failure to grasp the complexities of Indian society. Moreover, ‘other’ parts of the world are continually framed through lenses that appeal to a Western mind-set, for instance, through suggesting romantic love interests when the game character reaches adolescence. This then is the first level of objectification that educational games inhabit. But even more serious than such stereotypical representation is the formal mode of objectification and its distancing effects that the game generates. This second objectifi cation resides in how the interface—the ‘flight simulator’—like visual layout on the screen which displays an overview of the categories and character attributes, the major actions and events in the character’s life which can be activated at the stroke of a key—grants the player a false sense of control, as students engage with a machine programmed in such a way that it appears to let them identify with and act out his or her empathy vis-à-vis a ‘real’ child in need. This discursive confusion of reality and simulation is problematic because while students are engrossed in playing this game, the actual children in need disappear from the student-player’s field of vision. Real children in need become a large but distant and vague group of ‘others’ who are effectively beyond the student’s and teacher’s reach of immediate responsibility. As such, time spent engaging in virtual empathy eclipses the real oppressions from the student’s view and experience. In addition, Real Lives eclipses the intricate social and economic relationship between the material production and consumption of such virtual play and the continuous exploitation of people on the brink of social, economic, and environmental disenfranchisement. While relatively affluent young students may indulge in turning other peoples’ distress into an enjoyable and instructive game, such indulgence is precisely based on a speed-elitist neo-liberal structure that exploits the environment, especially that of the poor in countries like India and Mexico, and allows for the outsourcing and feminisation of ever cheaper Third World labour for the computer assembly industry. Long-term attitudinal changes in the student notwithstanding, Real Lives’ disconnecting properties as a technology of acceleration can therefore displacing the effect of the teachers,’ makers,’ and students’ good intentions and empathy into an instantaneous technocratic and symbolic violence. We can see here that the game content is indeed symptomatic of the larger global structures of disenfranchisement, and that the speed-elitist quest for social justice always claims empowerment in the future while engendering disempowerment right now. Although one could counter that such e-learning is only entangled with such negative effects on a macro or global scale, I would nonetheless argue that similar forms of objectifi cation and disenfranchisement also occur within the university classroom as part of e-learning’s justifi cation for residing in speed-elitist discourses and techniques. Four major pieces of evidence of such stratifi cation can be found among the university student body itself, namely issues of ubiquitous teaching and learning, new techniques for surveillance, real-time and spatial disconnection, and the displacement of teacher authority and student responsibility into new media technologies that have become oppressive vision machines.
Information creates new systems of reality that feel far more intimate than reality itself – a tool used by the elite to hide the failures of meaning. A loss of information would lead to total disarray. Baudrillard 2 Jean; Simulacra and Simulation; Sociologist/Philosopher, cool dude; 1981; University of Michigan Press; LCA-BP *edited for lang The third hypothesis is the most interesting but flies in the face of every commonly held opinion. Everywhere socialization is measured by the exposure to media messages. Whoever is underexposed to the media is desocialized or virtually asocial. Everywhere information is thought to produce an accelerated circulation of meaning, a plus value of meaning homologous to the economic one that results from the accelerated rotation of capital. Information is thought to create communication, and even if the waste is enormous, a general consensus would have it that nevertheless, as a whole, there be an excess of meaning, which is redistributed in all the interstices of the social - just as consensus would have it that material production, despite its dysfunctions and irrationalities, opens onto an excess of wealth and social purpose. We are all complicitous in this myth. It is the alpha and omega of our modernity, without which the credibility of our social organization would collapse. Well, the fact is that it is collapsing, and for this very reason: because where we think that information produces meaning, the opposite occurs. Information devours its own content. It devours communication and the social. And for two reasons. 1. Rather than creating communication, it exhausts itself in the act of staging communication. Rather than producing meaning, it exhausts itself in the staging of meaning. A gigantic process of simulation that is very familiar. The nondirective interview, speech, listeners who call in, participation at every level, blackmail through speech: "You are concerned, you are the event, etc." More and more information is invaded by this kind of phantom content, this homeopathic grafting, this awakening dream of communication. A circular arrangement through which one stages the desire of the audience, the antitheater of communication, which, as one knows, is never anything but the recycling in the negative of the traditional institution, the integrated circuit of the negative. Immense energies are deployed to hold this simulacrum at bay, to avoid the brutal desimulation that would confront us in the face of the obvious reality of a radical loss of meaning. It is useless to ask if it is the loss of communication that produces this escalation in the simulacrum, or whether it is the simulacrum that is there first for dissuasive ends, to short-circuit in advance any possibility of communication (precession of the model that calls an end to the real). Useless to ask which is the first term, there is none, it is a circular process - that of simulation, that of the hyperreal. The hyperreality of communication and of meaning. More real than the real, that is how the real is abolished. Thus not only communication but the social functions in a closed circuit, as a lure - to which the force of myth is attached. Belief, faith in information attach themselves to this tautological proof that the system gives of itself by doubling the signs of an unlocatable reality. But one can believe that this belief is as ambiguous as that which was attached to myths in ancient societies. One both believes and doesn't. One does not ask oneself, "I know very well, but still." A sort of inverse simulation in the masses, in each one of us, corresponds to this simulation of meaning and of communication in which this system encloses us. To this tautology of the system the masses respond with ambivalence, to deterrence they respond with disaffection, or with an always enigmatic belief. Myth exists, but one must guard against thinking that people believe in it: this is the trap of critical thinking that can only be exercised if it presupposes the naivete and stupidity of the masses 2. Behind this exacerbated mise-en-scène of communication, the mass media, the pressure of information pursues an irresistible destructuration of the social. Thus information dissolves meaning and dissolves the social, in a sort of nebulous state dedicated not to a surplus of innovation, but, on the contrary, to total entropy.*1 Thus the media are producers not of socialization, but of exactly the opposite, of the implosion of the social in the masses. And this is only the macroscopic extension of the implosion of meaning at the microscopic level of the sign. This implosion should be analyzed according to McLuhan's formula, the medium is the message, the consequences of which have yet to be exhausted. That means that all contents of meaning are absorbed in the only dominant form of the medium. Only the medium can make an event - whatever the contents, whether they are conformist or subversive. A serious problem for all counterinformation, pirate radios, antimedia, etc. But there is something even more serious, which McLuhan himself did not see. Because beyond this neutralization of all content, one could still expect to manipulate the medium in its form and to transform the real by using the impact of the medium as form. If all the content is wiped out, there is perhaps still a subversive, revolutionary use value of the medium as such.
The impact is collective paranoia –we are living in a system of hyper reality, an obscene proliferation of meaning caused by the lack of a reference point for the real events attempting to be described. The system demands that information be found and circulated to replace the actual meaning that has been lost. Debrix and Artrip 14 François Debrix and Ryan E. Artrip, (François Debrix is Director of the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought (ASPECT) and Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech. Debrix researches social and political theory, international relations theory, critical geopolitics, and media and visual studies. He is the author, among other books, of Tabloid Terror: War, Culture, and Geopolitics (2008) and Beyond Biopolitics: Theory, Violence, and Horror in World Politics (2011). He is currently completing a manuscript on the politics and theory of horror and bodily dismemberment. He has also translated several of Jean Baudrillard’s essays for the journal C-Theory. Ryan E. Artrip is a doctoral candidate in the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought (ASPECT) at Virginia Tech. His research interests are in political and cultural theory, international relations theory, and media studies. Artrip is currently engaged in research on viral media and the history of Western representational thought., ) "The Digital Fog Of War: Baudrillard And The Violence Of Representation" International Journal Of Baudrillard Studies, 5-1-2014, https://www2.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-11_2/v11-2-debrix.html, DOA:3-20-2018 It is in this always operative tendency of rendered appearances to yield meaning (even if their meaning is to be information-worthy), not in the image or event itself, that we situate the conditions of possibility and reproducibility for the ever-thickening representational fog and for the violence/virulence of images, or better yet, of appearances. To make war or, as the case may be, the terror event mean something—even in some of the most immediate reactions often designed to evoke injustice or, indeed, incomprehension—is the generative point of violence, the source of representation as a virulent/virtual code and mode of signification. Baudrillard writes, “Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible.” He adds, “We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; … we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us” (Baudrillard, 1988: 63). Indeed, the Western world—increasingly, the global—has found itself with a proliferation of meanings and significations in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It is as if the so-called crisis of nihilism (thought to be characteristic of much critique and philosophical suspicion throughout the 20th century) later on produced something of the opposite order. The mass violence of the 20th century inaugurated not a complete void of despair or meaninglessness, but instead a flood of meaning, if not an overproduction of it. Baudrillard refers to this frantic explosion of meaning/signification as “a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production …” (Baudrillard, 1983: 7). Here, Baudrillard describes a mode of production of a different kind, not motivated by class interests or exploitation of value, but by an automated, perhaps viral, abreaction to the empty core or disenchantment of things and the world: that is to say, the degree to which things seem to lack a singular center of gravity or have lost a justifiable reference to the real world, and yet each thing that “matters” is also an attempt to get at reality as a question of accumulation (of meaning), circulation (of signs), and filling up of all interstitial spaces of communication and value. The end result is an over-abundance of signs and images of reality, something that culminates in what Baudrillard calls hyperreality—things appear more real than reality itself. The story that needs to be told is thus not about the undoubtedly deplorable “truth” or fact of explosive and warlike violence, but about a violence of another sort. In the radical digital transparency of the global scene, we (members of the demos) often have full or direct exposure to explosivity, as we saw above with the image of terror. But what still needs to be thought and problematized is implosivityor what may be called implosive violence. Implosive violence is a violence for which we do not, and perhaps will never, have much of a language (Rancière, 2007: 123). Although, not having a language for it or, rather, as we saw above, seeking to find a language to talk about it and, perhaps, to make sense of it is still sought after. This is, perhaps, what digital pictures of war/terror violence seek to capture or want to force through. Implosive violence, often digitally rendered these days, is in close contact with media technologies and representational devices and techniques because it seeks representation and meaning. This is why implosive violence insists on calling in wars (against terror, for example) and on mobilizing war machines (against terrorist others, against vague enemy figures), but wars and war machines that no longer have—to the extent that they ever had—a clearly identifiable object and subject, or a clear mission/purpose. As such, this implosive violence and its wars (the new Western/global way of war, perhaps) must remain uncertain, unclear, foggy, inwardly driven, representational, and indeed virulent. They must remain uncertain and confused even as they are digitally operative and desperately capture events/images to give the impression that meanings/significations can and will be found. Yet, as we saw above, it is not meanings exactly that must be found, but information and the endless guarantee of its immediate circulation. As information occupies the empty place of meaning, certainty, or truth, images must be instantaneously turned into appearances that search for meanings that will never be discovered because, instead, a proliferation of information-worthy facts and beliefs will take over (perhaps this is what US fake pundit and comedian Stephen Colbert famously referred to as “truthiness”). Or, as Baudrillard puts it, “free from its former enemies, humanity now has to create enemies from within, which in fact produces a wide variety of inhuman metastases” (Baudrillard, 2003). Thus, this implosive violence is destined to be a global violence since it "is the product of a system that tracks down any form of negativity and singularity, including of course death as the ultimate form of singularity. … It is a violence that, in a sense, puts an end to violence itself and strives to establish a world where anything related to the natural must disappear … Better than a global violence, we should call it a global virulence. This form of violence is indeed viral. It moves by contagion, produces by chain reaction, and little by little it destroys our immune systems and our capacities to resist" (2003; our italics). In a way, this global virulence is all-out and everyday war itself. It is also the Global War on Terror, a war whose virulence and ever present (virtual, potential) violence mediatizes and hyper-realizes everyday life for a lot of human bodies in the West and beyond (is that not also something that the Boston Marathon bombing smart phone representations struggled to tell us?). For Baudrillard, this is how we should apprehend the mythos of globalization (since globalization is all about virulence). To suggest, as many still do, that there is any sort of remaining hegemony in the production of cultural and political meanings (as, for example, Horkheimer and Adorno once told us; see Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002) is anachronistic. But it is also a convenient claim to make. As we mentioned above, such a posture implies that hope can be around the corner, that things can be changed, that the demoscan be rescued and liberated, that it can trust the immediacy offered by today’s digitalized media, and that such an immediacy is the guarantee that not all meanings are lost (again, it is about proving meaning by way of information, the real by way of appearances). Viral, virtual, and virulent media representations have assumed the empty throne abandoned by the modern sovereign/core of power in the implosive West/global. The implosive immediacy of proliferating videos, images, memes, articles, utterances, leaks, wikis, blogs, clips, blips, flips, or flops reigns supreme and sovereign. And it is this proliferating sovereignty of digitalized mediation/representation that ensures the circulation of war’s violence/virulence too (it is, in this way, war’s platform and generator). As Baudrillard intimates, this representational, mediatized, and informational virality or virulence is simply the historical logic of the West/modernity brought to its fatal and perhaps absurd end, a tautology of Western modernity and globality inwardly and mediatically hyper-realized (truth, being, and language all operating as one and the same, indifferently, in a circulatory movement of immediately available appearances). It is the eternal recurrence of the same, or perhaps the eternal recurrence of the always already replayed. Of course, we (digital modern subjects) could ignore all this. We could go on to celebrate representational, real-time digital technologies and their visual/viral/virulent practices in the belief that, somehow, they will continue to give us the truth of war, the truth of violence, the truth of senseless terror/horror. Perhaps, they may even give us a new hope/meaning about the demos, about “our” ontological positioning in, through, and with digital media. And maybe the ethical impulse is indeed to ignore or, at least, selectively use this Baudrillardian critique of war’s and representation’s violence and virulence. But another posture, one we advocate, is to take another look at the violence of representation itself, at the virulence of the West and the global, and at modernity’s own implosive history—which, of course, is the history of representation, too—to which today’s digitalized technologies and media owe their significance and, at times, urgency.
The alternative is complete negation – a refusal to feed the system that destroys our psyche. The political has lost the will for positive action and now all that is left in the power of the masses is negation. Baudrillard 93 (Baudrillard, Jean), The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, 1993)faizaan In Simmel's words, 'Negation is the simplest thing imaginable. That is why the broad masses, whose component elements cannot achieve agreement as to goals, come together here.' It is useless to expect a positive opinion or a critical will from the masses, for they have none: all they have is an undifferentiated power, the power to reject. Their strength flows solely from what they are able to expel, to negate - and that is, first and foremost, any project that goes beyond them, any class or understanding that transcends them. There is something here of a philosophy of cunning born of the most brutal experience - the experience of animals, or of peasants: 'They won't put that over on us again, we won't fall for their calls to sacrifice, or listen to their pie in the sky.' Profound disgust for the political order - though one that may well coexist with specific political opinions . Disgust for the pretension and transcendence of power, for the inevitability and abomination of the political sphere. Where once there were political passions, we now find only the violence peculiar to a fundamental disgust with everything political. Power itself is founded largely on disgust. The whole of advertising, the whole of political discourse, is a public insult to the intelligence, to reason - but an insult in which we collaborate, abjectly subscribing to a silent interaction. The day of hidden persuasion is over: those who govern us now resort unapologetically to arm-twisting pure and simple. The prototype here was a banker got up like a vampire, saying, 'I am after you for your money' . A decade has already gone by since this kind of obscenity was introduced, with the government's blessing, into our social mores. At the time we thought the ad feeble because of its aggressive vulgarity . In point of fact it was a prophetic commercial, full of intimations of the future shape of social relationships, because it operated, precisely, in terms of disgust, avidity and rape. The same goes for pornographic and food advertising, which are also powered by shamelessness and lust, by a strategic logic of violation and anxiety.
The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater that best disrupts the simulacrum. Role playing contributes to inauthenticity and dead attachment to images of suffering, Antonio 95 Nietzsche's Antisociology: Subjectified Culture and the End of History Author(s): Robert J. Antonio Source: American Journal of Sociology , Jul., 1995, Vol. 101, No. 1 (Jul., 1995), pp. 1-43 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/2782505WHS-AK The "problem of the actor," Nietzsche said, "troubled me for the longest time."'12 He considered "roles" as "external," "surface," or "foreground" phenomena and viewed close personal identification with them as symptomatic of estrangement. While modern theorists saw dif- ferentiated roles and professions as a matrix of autonomy and reflexivity, Nietzsche held that persons (especially male professionals) in specialized occupations overidentify with their positions and engage in gross fabrica- tions to obtain advancement. They look hesitantly to the opinion of oth- ers, asking themselves, "How ought I feel about this?" They are so thoroughly absorbed in simulating effective role players that they have trouble being anything but actors-"The role has actually become the character." This highly subjectified social self or simulator suffers devas- tating inauthenticity. The powerful authority given the social greatly amplifies Socratic culture's already self-indulgent "inwardness." Integ- rity, decisiveness, spontaneity, and pleasure are undone by paralyzing overconcern about possible causes, meanings, and consequences of acts and unending internal dialogue about what others might think, expect, say, or do (Nietzsche 1983, pp. 83-86; 1986, pp. 39-40; 1974, pp. 302-4, 316-17). Nervous rotation of socially appropriate "masks" reduces persons to hypostatized "shadows," "abstracts," or simulacra. One adopts "many roles," playing them "badly and superficially" in the fashion of a stiff "puppet play." Nietzsche asked, "Are you genuine? Or only an actor? A representative or that which is represented? . . . Or no more than an imitation of an actor?" Simulation is so pervasive that it is hard to tell the copy from the genuine article; social selves "prefer the copies to the originals" (Nietzsche 1983, pp. 84-86; 1986, p. 136; 1974, pp. 232- 33, 259; 1969b, pp. 268, 300, 302; 1968a, pp. 26-27). Their inwardness and aleatory scripts foreclose genuine attachment to others. This type of actor cannot plan for the long term or participate in enduring net- works of interdependence; such a person is neither willing nor able to be a "stone" in the societal "edifice" (Nietzsche 1974, pp. 302-4; 1986a, pp. 93-94). Superficiality rules in the arid subjectivized landscape. Neitzsche (1974, p. 259) stated, "One thinks with a watch in one's hand, even as one eats one's midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock market; one lives as if one always 'might miss out on something. ''Rather do anything than nothing': this principle, too, is merely a string to throttle all culture. . . . Living in a constant chase after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretense and overreaching and anticipating others." Pervasive leveling, improvising, and faking foster an inflated sense of ability and an oblivious attitude about the fortuitous circumstances that contribute to role attainment (e.g., class or ethnicity). The most medio- cre people believe they can fill any position, even cultural leadership. Nietzsche respected the self-mastery of genuine ascetic priests, like Socra- tes, and praised their ability to redirect ressentiment creatively and to render the "sick" harmless. But he deeply feared the new simulated versions. Lacking the "born physician's" capacities, these impostors am- plify the worst inclinations of the herd; they are "violent, envious, ex- ploitative, scheming, fawning, cringing, arrogant, all according to cir- cumstances. " Social selves are fodder for the "great man of the masses." Nietzsche held that "the less one knows how to command, the more ur- gently one covets someone who commands, who commands severely- a god, prince, class, physician, father confessor, dogma, or party conscience. The deadly combination of desperate conforming and overreaching and untrammeled ressentiment paves the way for a new type of tyrant.
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NovDec - K - Baudrillard vs Technoliberal Futures
Tournament: UT Longhorn Classic | Round: 5 | Opponent: Little Rock Central MG | Judge: Sarah Zheng Our world is dictated by the hyperreal. Society is engrained in the meaningless binary in which we have lost any meaning of truth. This breeds the conditions of semiocapitalism and a paralysis of our psychic process. Swarts no date Swarts, Frederick. The Metaphysic of the Code . fd "Leibniz, that mathematical spirit, saw in the mystic elegance of the binary system that counts only the zero and the one, the very image of creation. The unity of the supreme Being, operating by binary function in nothingness, would have sufficed to bring out of it all the beings." - McLuhan The great simulacra constructed by man pass from a universe of natural laws to a universe of force and tensions of force, today to a universe of structures and binary oppositions. After the metaphysic of being and appearance, after that of energy and determination, comes that of indeterminacy and the code. Cybernetic control, generation from model, differential modulation, feed-back, question/answer, etc.: such is the new operational configuration (industrial simulacra are only operational). Digitality is its metaphysical principle (the God of Leibniz), and DNA its prophet. It is in effect in the genetic code that the "genesis of simulacra" today finds its most accomplished form. At the limit of an always more extensive abolition of references and finalities, of the loss of resemblance and designation, we find the digital program- sign, whose value is purely tactical, at the intersection of the other signals (corpuscles of information/test) and whose structure is that of a macro-molecular code of command and control. At this level the question of signs, of their rational destination, their real or imaginary, their repression, their deviation, the illusion they create or that which they conceal, or their parallel meanings - all of that is erased. We have already seen signs of the first order, complex signs and rich in illusion, change, with the machines, into crude signs, dull, industrial, repetitive, echoless, operational and efficacious. What a mutation, even more radical still, with signals of the code, illegible, with no gloss possible, buried like programmatic matrices light-years away in the depths of the "biological" body - black boxes where all the commandments, all the answers ferment! End of the theatre of representation, the space of signs, their conflict, their silence; only the black box of the code, the molecular emitter of signals from which we have been irradiated, crossed by answers/questions like signifying radiations, tested continuously by our own program inscribed in the cells. Jail cells, electronic cells, party cells, microbiological cells: always the search for the smallest indivisible element, whose organic synthesis would be made according to the givens of the code. But the code itself is but a genetic cell, a generator where myriads of intersections produce all the questions and possible solutions, so that choices (by whom?) can be made. No finality involved with these "questions" (informational and signifying impulsions) but the answer, genetically unchangeable or inflected by minute and aleatory differences. Space is no longer even linear or one- dimensional: cellular space, indefinite generation of the same signals, like the tics of a prisoner gone crazy with solitude and repetition. Such is the genetic code: an erased record, unchangeable, of which we are no more than cells- for-reading. All aura of sign, of significance itself is resolved in this determination; all is resolved in the inscription and decodage. Such is the third-order simulacrum, our own. Such is the "mystic elegance of the binary system, of the zero and the one", from which all being proceeds. Such is the status of the sign that is also the end of signification: DNA or operational simulation. All of this is perfectly well summed up by Sebeok ("Genetics and Semiotics", in Versus): Numerous observations confirm the hypothesis that the internal organic world descends in a straight line from the primordial forms of life. The most remarkable fact is the omnipresence of the DNA molecule. The genetic material of all organisms known on earth is in great measure made up of the nucleonic acids DNA and RNA that contain in their information structure, transmitted by reproduction from one generation to another and furthermore gifted with the capacity of self-reproduction and imitation. Briefly, the genetic code is universal, or almost. Its deciphering was an immense discovery, in the sense that it showed that "the two languages of the great polymers, the language of nucleonic acid and that of protein, are tightly correlated" (Crick, 1966; Clarck/Narcker, 1968). The Soviet mathematician Liapounov demonstrated in 1963 that all living systems transmit by prescribed canals with precision a small quantity of energy or of matter containing a great volume of information, which is responsible for the ulterior control of a great quantity of energy and matter. In this perspective numerous phenomena, biological as well as cultural (stockage, feed-back, canalization of messages and others) can be seen as aspects of the treatment of information. In the last analysis information appears in great part as the repetition of information, or even as another sort of information, a sort of control that seems to be a universal property of terrestrial life, independent of form or substance. Five years ago I drew attention to the convergence of genetics and linguistics - autonomous disciplines, but parallel in the larger field of communication science (of which animal semiotics also is a part). The terminology of genetics is full of expressions taken from linguistics and communication theory (Jacobson, 1968), which also underlined either the major resemblances or the important differences of structure and of function between genetic and verbal codes. . . It is obvious today that the genetic code must be considered the most fundamental of all the semiotic networks, and therefore a prototype of all the other systems of signaling that animals use, man included. From this point of view, molecules which are systems of quanta and behave like stable vehicles of physical information, systems of animal semiotics and cultural systems, including language, constitute a continuous chain of stages, with always more complex energy levels, in the framework of a universal unique evolution. It is therefore possible to describe either language or living systems from a unified cybernetic point-of-view. For the present, this is only a useful analogy or a prediction. A reciprocal rapprochement between animal communication and linguistics can lead to a complete knowledge of the dynamics of semiotics, and such a knowledge can be revealed, in the last analysis, to be nothing less than the very definition of life. And so the current strategic model is designed that everywhere is replacing the great ideological model which constituted political economy in its time. You will find it under the rigorous sign of "science" in the Chance and Necessity of Jacques Monod. The end of dialectical evolution, it is the discontinuous indeterminism of the genetic code that now controls life - the teleological principle. Finality no longer belongs to the term; there is no longer a term, nor a determination. Finality is there beforehand, inscribed in the code. We see that nothing has changed - simply the order of ends yields to the play of molecules, and the order of signifieds to the play of infinitesimal signifiers, reduced to their aleatory commutation. All the transcendant finalities reduced to a dashboard full of instruments. There is still, however, recourse to a nature, to an inscription in "biological" nature - in actuality, a nature distorted by fantasy like she always was, metaphysical sanctuary no longer of origin and substance, but this time of the code; the code must have an "objective" basis. What could be better for that purpose than the molecule and genetics? Monod is the strict theologian of this molecular transcendance, Edgar Morin the rapt disciple (A.D.N.* + Adonai!). But for one as well as the other, the fantasy of the code, which is equivalent to the reality of power, is merged with molecular idealism. (*D.N.A.) Thus we find once more in history that delirious illusion of uniting the world under the aegis of a single principle - that of a homogenous substance with the Jesuits of the Counter Reformation; that of the genetic code with the technocrats of biological science (but also linguistics as well), with Leibniz and his binary divinity as precursor. For the program here aimed at has nothing genetic about it, it is a social and historical program. That which is hypostatized in biochemistry is the ideal of a social order ruled by a sort of genetic code of macromolecular calculation, of P.P.B.S. (Planned Programming Budgeting System), irradiating the social body with its operational circuits. The technical cybernetic finds its "natural philosophy" here, as Monod says. The fascination of the biological, of the biomedical dates from the very beginnings of science. It was at work in Spencerian organicism (sociobiology) on the level of second- and third-order structures (Jacob's classification in The Logic of Life, it is active today in modern biochemistry, on the level of structures of the fourth-order). Coded similarities and dissimilarities: that is certainly the image of cyberniticized social exchange. You only have to add "stereospecific complex" in order to re-inject intracellular communication; that Morin will come to transfigure into molecular Eros.
The impact is collective paranoia –we are living in a system of hyper reality, an obscene proliferation of meaning caused by the lack of a reference point for the real events attempting to be described. The system demands that information be found and circulated to replace the actual meaning that has been lost. Debrix and Artrip 14 François Debrix and Ryan E. Artrip, (François Debrix is Director of the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought (ASPECT) and Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech. Debrix researches social and political theory, international relations theory, critical geopolitics, and media and visual studies. He is the author, among other books, of Tabloid Terror: War, Culture, and Geopolitics (2008) and Beyond Biopolitics: Theory, Violence, and Horror in World Politics (2011). He is currently completing a manuscript on the politics and theory of horror and bodily dismemberment. He has also translated several of Jean Baudrillard’s essays for the journal C-Theory. Ryan E. Artrip is a doctoral candidate in the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought (ASPECT) at Virginia Tech. His research interests are in political and cultural theory, international relations theory, and media studies. Artrip is currently engaged in research on viral media and the history of Western representational thought., ) "The Digital Fog Of War: Baudrillard And The Violence Of Representation" International Journal Of Baudrillard Studies, 5-1-2014, https://www2.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-11_2/v11-2-debrix.html, DOA:3-20-2018 It is in this always operative tendency of rendered appearances to yield meaning (even if their meaning is to be information-worthy), not in the image or event itself, that we situate the conditions of possibility and reproducibility for the ever-thickening representational fog and for the violence/virulence of images, or better yet, of appearances. To make war or, as the case may be, the terror event mean something—even in some of the most immediate reactions often designed to evoke injustice or, indeed, incomprehension—is the generative point of violence, the source of representation as a virulent/virtual code and mode of signification. Baudrillard writes, “Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible.” He adds, “We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; … we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us” (Baudrillard, 1988: 63). Indeed, the Western world—increasingly, the global—has found itself with a proliferation of meanings and significations in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It is as if the so-called crisis of nihilism (thought to be characteristic of much critique and philosophical suspicion throughout the 20th century) later on produced something of the opposite order. The mass violence of the 20th century inaugurated not a complete void of despair or meaninglessness, but instead a flood of meaning, if not an overproduction of it. Baudrillard refers to this frantic explosion of meaning/signification as “a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production …” (Baudrillard, 1983: 7). Here, Baudrillard describes a mode of production of a different kind, not motivated by class interests or exploitation of value, but by an automated, perhaps viral, abreaction to the empty core or disenchantment of things and the world: that is to say, the degree to which things seem to lack a singular center of gravity or have lost a justifiable reference to the real world, and yet each thing that “matters” is also an attempt to get at reality as a question of accumulation (of meaning), circulation (of signs), and filling up of all interstitial spaces of communication and value. The end result is an over-abundance of signs and images of reality, something that culminates in what Baudrillard calls hyperreality—things appear more real than reality itself. The story that needs to be told is thus not about the undoubtedly deplorable “truth” or fact of explosive and warlike violence, but about a violence of another sort. In the radical digital transparency of the global scene, we (members of the demos) often have full or direct exposure to explosivity, as we saw above with the image of terror. But what still needs to be thought and problematized is implosivityor what may be called implosive violence. Implosive violence is a violence for which we do not, and perhaps will never, have much of a language (Rancière, 2007: 123). Although, not having a language for it or, rather, as we saw above, seeking to find a language to talk about it and, perhaps, to make sense of it is still sought after. This is, perhaps, what digital pictures of war/terror violence seek to capture or want to force through. Implosive violence, often digitally rendered these days, is in close contact with media technologies and representational devices and techniques because it seeks representation and meaning. This is why implosive violence insists on calling in wars (against terror, for example) and on mobilizing war machines (against terrorist others, against vague enemy figures), but wars and war machines that no longer have—to the extent that they ever had—a clearly identifiable object and subject, or a clear mission/purpose. As such, this implosive violence and its wars (the new Western/global way of war, perhaps) must remain uncertain, unclear, foggy, inwardly driven, representational, and indeed virulent. They must remain uncertain and confused even as they are digitally operative and desperately capture events/images to give the impression that meanings/significations can and will be found. Yet, as we saw above, it is not meanings exactly that must be found, but information and the endless guarantee of its immediate circulation. As information occupies the empty place of meaning, certainty, or truth, images must be instantaneously turned into appearances that search for meanings that will never be discovered because, instead, a proliferation of information-worthy facts and beliefs will take over (perhaps this is what US fake pundit and comedian Stephen Colbert famously referred to as “truthiness”). Or, as Baudrillard puts it, “free from its former enemies, humanity now has to create enemies from within, which in fact produces a wide variety of inhuman metastases” (Baudrillard, 2003). Thus, this implosive violence is destined to be a global violence since it "is the product of a system that tracks down any form of negativity and singularity, including of course death as the ultimate form of singularity. … It is a violence that, in a sense, puts an end to violence itself and strives to establish a world where anything related to the natural must disappear … Better than a global violence, we should call it a global virulence. This form of violence is indeed viral. It moves by contagion, produces by chain reaction, and little by little it destroys our immune systems and our capacities to resist" (2003; our italics). In a way, this global virulence is all-out and everyday war itself. It is also the Global War on Terror, a war whose virulence and ever present (virtual, potential) violence mediatizes and hyper-realizes everyday life for a lot of human bodies in the West and beyond (is that not also something that the Boston Marathon bombing smart phone representations struggled to tell us?). For Baudrillard, this is how we should apprehend the mythos of globalization (since globalization is all about virulence). To suggest, as many still do, that there is any sort of remaining hegemony in the production of cultural and political meanings (as, for example, Horkheimer and Adorno once told us; see Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002) is anachronistic. But it is also a convenient claim to make. As we mentioned above, such a posture implies that hope can be around the corner, that things can be changed, that the demoscan be rescued and liberated, that it can trust the immediacy offered by today’s digitalized media, and that such an immediacy is the guarantee that not all meanings are lost (again, it is about proving meaning by way of information, the real by way of appearances). Viral, virtual, and virulent media representations have assumed the empty throne abandoned by the modern sovereign/core of power in the implosive West/global. The implosive immediacy of proliferating videos, images, memes, articles, utterances, leaks, wikis, blogs, clips, blips, flips, or flops reigns supreme and sovereign. And it is this proliferating sovereignty of digitalized mediation/representation that ensures the circulation of war’s violence/virulence too (it is, in this way, war’s platform and generator). As Baudrillard intimates, this representational, mediatized, and informational virality or virulence is simply the historical logic of the West/modernity brought to its fatal and perhaps absurd end, a tautology of Western modernity and globality inwardly and mediatically hyper-realized (truth, being, and language all operating as one and the same, indifferently, in a circulatory movement of immediately available appearances). It is the eternal recurrence of the same, or perhaps the eternal recurrence of the always already replayed. Of course, we (digital modern subjects) could ignore all this. We could go on to celebrate representational, real-time digital technologies and their visual/viral/virulent practices in the belief that, somehow, they will continue to give us the truth of war, the truth of violence, the truth of senseless terror/horror. Perhaps, they may even give us a new hope/meaning about the demos, about “our” ontological positioning in, through, and with digital media. And maybe the ethical impulse is indeed to ignore or, at least, selectively use this Baudrillardian critique of war’s and representation’s violence and virulence. But another posture, one we advocate, is to take another look at the violence of representation itself, at the virulence of the West and the global, and at modernity’s own implosive history—which, of course, is the history of representation, too—to which today’s digitalized technologies and media owe their significance and, at times, urgency.
Their framework is violent— the will to subjective futurity reduces the inner experience of otherness to instrumental value and death is displaced in the present tense onto marginalized others. Winnubst 06. Shannon Winnubst, professor of Women’s and gender studies at Ohio State University, Queering Freedom, pg. 183 For Bataille, the servility to utility is displayed particularly in the temporality of such a world—the temporality of anticipation. Returning again to the role of the tool, he writes, In efficacious activity man becomes the equivalent of a tool, which produces; he is like the thing the tool is, being itself a product. The implication of these facts is quite clear: the tool’s meaning is given by the future, in what the tool will produce, in the future utilization of the product: like the tool, he who serves—who works—has the value of that which will be later, not of that which is. (1988–91, 2:218) The reduction of our lives to the order of utility forces us to project ourselves endlessly into the future. Bataille writes of this as our anguished state, caused by this anticipation “that must be called anticipation of oneself. For he must apprehend himself in the future, through the anticipated results of his action” (1988–91, 2:218). This is why advanced capitalism and phallicized whiteness must ground themselves in a denial of death: death precludes the arrival of this future. It cuts us off from ourselves, severing us from the future self that is always our real and true self. Resisting the existential turn, however, Bataille refuses to read this denial of death as an ontological condition of humanity. For Bataille, this is a historical and economic denial, one in which only a culture grounded in the anticipation of the future must participate. He frames it primarily as a problem of the intellect. In the reduction of the world to the order of utility, we have reduced our lives and experiences to the order of instrumental reason. This order necessarily operates in a sequential temporality, facing forward toward the time when the results will be achieved, the questions solved, the theorems proved—and also when political domination will be ended and ethical an- guish quieted. As Bataille credits Hegel for seeing, “knowledge is never given to us except by unfolding in time” (1988–91, 2:202). It never appears to us except, finally, “as the result of a calculated effort, an operation useful to some end” (1988–91, 2:202)—and its utility, as we have seen, only drives it forward toward some future utility, endlessly. There are always new and future objects of thought to conquer and domesticate. Within this order of reason, death presents the cessation of the very practice of knowledge itself. Severing us from the future objects of thought and from our future selves, “death prevents man from attaining himself” (1988–91, 2:218). As Bataille explains, “the fear of death appears linked from the start to the projection of oneself into a future time, which is an effect of the positing of oneself as a thing” (1988–91, 2:218). The fear of death derives from the subordination to the order of utility and its dominant form of the intellect, instrumental reason. While death is unarguably a part of the human condition, for Bataille the fear of death is a historically habituated response, one that grounds cultures of advanced capitalism and phallicized whiteness. In those frames of late modernity, death introduces an ontological scarcity into the very human condition: it represents finitude, the ultimate limit. We must distance ourselves from such threats, and we do so most often by projecting them onto sexualized, racialized, and classed bodies. But for Bataille, servility to the order of knowledge is as unnecessary as servility to the order of utility. To die humanly, he argues, is to accept “the subordination of the thing” (1988– 91, 2:219), which places us in the schema that separates our present self from the future, desired, anticipated self: “to die humanly is to have of the future being, of the one who matters most in our eyes, the senseless idea that he is not” (1988–91, 2:219). But if we are not trapped in the endless anticipation of our future self as the index of meaning in our lives, we may not be anguished by this cessation: “If we live sovereignly, the representation of death is impossible, for the present is not subject to the demands of the future” (1988–91, 2:219). To live sovereignly is not to escape death, which is ontologically impossible. But it is to refuse the fear, and subsequent attempts at disavowal, of death as the ontological condition that defines humanity. Rather than trying to transgress this ultimate limit and prohibition, the sovereign person man “cannot die fleeing. He it cannot let the threat of death deliver him over to the horror of a desperate yet impossible flight” (1988–91, 2:219). Living in a temporal mode in which “anticipation would dissolve into NOTHING” (1988–91, 2: 208), the sovereign man person “lives and dies like an animal” (1988–91, 2:219). He lives and dies without the anxiety invoked by the forever unknown and forever encroaching anticipation of the future. As Bataille encourages us elsewhere, “Think of the voracity of animals, as against the composure of a cook” (1988–91, 2:83).
Liberation is liquidated and their revolution is terminally non-unique. There is no longer a risk of political change as all movements have already happened – The only revolutions left are simulated copies of the originals that fail to actualize change. Baudrillard, 93 (Jean, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, 1993) If I were asked to characterize the present state of affairs, I would describe it as 'after the orgy' . The orgy in question was the moment when modernity exploded upon us, the moment of liberation in every sphere . Political liberation, sexual liberation, liberation of the forces of production, liberation of the forces of destruction, women's liberation, children's liberation, liberation of unconscious drives, liberation of art. The assumption of all models of representation, as of all models of anti-representation. This was a total orgy an orgy of the real, the rational, the sexual, of criticism as of anti-criticism, of development as of the crisis of development. We have pursued every avenue in the production and effective overproduction of objects, signs, messages, ideologies and satisfactions . Now everything has been liberated, the chips are down, and we find ourselves faced collectively with the big question: WHAT DO WE DO NOW THE ORGY IS OVER? Now all we can do is simulate the orgy, simulate liberation. We may pretend to carry on in the same direction, accelerating, but in reality we are accelerating in a void, because all the goals of liberation are already behind us, and because what haunts and obsesses us is being thus ahead of all the results - the very availability of all the signs, all the forms, all the desires that we had been pursuing. But what can we do? This is the state of simulation, a state in which we are obliged to replay all scenarios precisely because they have all taken place already, whether actually or potentially. The state of utopia realized, of all utopias realized, wherein paradoxically we must continue to live as though they had not been. But since they have, and since we can no longer, therefore, nourish the hope of realizing them, we can only 'hyper-realize' them through interminable simulation. We live amid the interminable reproduction of ideals, phantasies, images and dreams which are now behind us, yet which we must continue to reproduce in a sort of inescapable indifference. The fact is that the revolution has well and truly happened, but not in the way we expected. Everywhere what has been liberated has been liberated so that it can enter a state of pure circulation, so that it can go into orbit. With the benefit of a little hindsight, we may say that the unavoidable goal of all liberation is to foster and provision circulatory networks. The fate of the things liberated is an incessant commutation, and these things are thus subject to increasing indeterminacy, to the principle of uncertainty. Nothing (not even God) now disappears by coming to an end, by dying. Instead, things disappear through proliferation or contamination, by becoming saturated or transparent, because of extenuation or extermination, or as a result of the epidemic of simulation, as a result of their transfer into the secondary existence of simulation. Rather than a mortal mode of disappearance, then, a fractal mode of dispersal. Nothing is truly reflected any more - whether in a mirror or in the abyssal realm (which is merely the endless reduplication of consciousness). The logic of viral dispersal in networks is no longer a logic of value; neither, therefore, is it a logic of equivalence. There is no longer any such thing as a revolution" of values - merely a circumvention or involution of values . A centripetal compulsion coexists with a decentredness of all systems, an internal metastasis or fevered endogenic virulence which creates a tendency for systems to explode beyond their own limits, to override their own logic - not in the sense of creating sheer redundancy, but in the sense of an increase in power, a fantastic potentialization whereby their own very existence is put at risk.
The alternative is complete negation – a refusal to feed the system that destroys our psyche. The political has lost the will for positive action and now all that is left in the power of the masses is negation. Baudrillard 93 (Baudrillard, Jean), The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, 1993)faizaan In Simmel's words, 'Negation is the simplest thing imaginable. That is why the broad masses, whose component elements cannot achieve agreement as to goals, come together here.' It is useless to expect a positive opinion or a critical will from the masses, for they have none: all they have is an undifferentiated power, the power to reject. Their strength flows solely from what they are able to expel, to negate - and that is, first and foremost, any project that goes beyond them, any class or understanding that transcends them. There is something here of a philosophy of cunning born of the most brutal experience - the experience of animals, or of peasants: 'They won't put that over on us again, we won't fall for their calls to sacrifice, or listen to their pie in the sky.' Profound disgust for the political order - though one that may well coexist with specific political opinions . Disgust for the pretension and transcendence of power, for the inevitability and abomination of the political sphere. Where once there were political passions, we now find only the violence peculiar to a fundamental disgust with everything political. Power itself is founded largely on disgust. The whole of advertising, the whole of political discourse, is a public insult to the intelligence, to reason - but an insult in which we collaborate, abjectly subscribing to a silent interaction. The day of hidden persuasion is over: those who govern us now resort unapologetically to arm-twisting pure and simple. The prototype here was a banker got up like a vampire, saying, 'I am after you for your money' . A decade has already gone by since this kind of obscenity was introduced, with the government's blessing, into our social mores. At the time we thought the ad feeble because of its aggressive vulgarity . In point of fact it was a prophetic commercial, full of intimations of the future shape of social relationships, because it operated, precisely, in terms of disgust, avidity and rape. The same goes for pornographic and food advertising, which are also powered by shamelessness and lust, by a strategic logic of violation and anxiety.
The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater that best disrupts the simulacrum. Role playing contributes to inauthenticity and dead attachment to images of suffering, Antonio 95 Nietzsche's Antisociology: Subjectified Culture and the End of History Author(s): Robert J. Antonio Source: American Journal of Sociology , Jul., 1995, Vol. 101, No. 1 (Jul., 1995), pp. 1-43 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/2782505WHS-AK The "problem of the actor," Nietzsche said, "troubled me for the longest time."'12 He considered "roles" as "external," "surface," or "foreground" phenomena and viewed close personal identification with them as symptomatic of estrangement. While modern theorists saw dif- ferentiated roles and professions as a matrix of autonomy and reflexivity, Nietzsche held that persons (especially male professionals) in specialized occupations overidentify with their positions and engage in gross fabrica- tions to obtain advancement. They look hesitantly to the opinion of oth- ers, asking themselves, "How ought I feel about this?" They are so thoroughly absorbed in simulating effective role players that they have trouble being anything but actors-"The role has actually become the character." This highly subjectified social self or simulator suffers devas- tating inauthenticity. The powerful authority given the social greatly amplifies Socratic culture's already self-indulgent "inwardness." Integ- rity, decisiveness, spontaneity, and pleasure are undone by paralyzing overconcern about possible causes, meanings, and consequences of acts and unending internal dialogue about what others might think, expect, say, or do (Nietzsche 1983, pp. 83-86; 1986, pp. 39-40; 1974, pp. 302-4, 316-17). Nervous rotation of socially appropriate "masks" reduces persons to hypostatized "shadows," "abstracts," or simulacra. One adopts "many roles," playing them "badly and superficially" in the fashion of a stiff "puppet play." Nietzsche asked, "Are you genuine? Or only an actor? A representative or that which is represented? . . . Or no more than an imitation of an actor?" Simulation is so pervasive that it is hard to tell the copy from the genuine article; social selves "prefer the copies to the originals" (Nietzsche 1983, pp. 84-86; 1986, p. 136; 1974, pp. 232- 33, 259; 1969b, pp. 268, 300, 302; 1968a, pp. 26-27). Their inwardness and aleatory scripts foreclose genuine attachment to others. This type of actor cannot plan for the long term or participate in enduring net- works of interdependence; such a person is neither willing nor able to be a "stone" in the societal "edifice" (Nietzsche 1974, pp. 302-4; 1986a, pp. 93-94). Superficiality rules in the arid subjectivized landscape. Neitzsche (1974, p. 259) stated, "One thinks with a watch in one's hand, even as one eats one's midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock market; one lives as if one always 'might miss out on something. ''Rather do anything than nothing': this principle, too, is merely a string to throttle all culture. . . . Living in a constant chase after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretense and overreaching and anticipating others." Pervasive leveling, improvising, and faking foster an inflated sense of ability and an oblivious attitude about the fortuitous circumstances that contribute to role attainment (e.g., class or ethnicity). The most medio- cre people believe they can fill any position, even cultural leadership. Nietzsche respected the self-mastery of genuine ascetic priests, like Socra- tes, and praised their ability to redirect ressentiment creatively and to render the "sick" harmless. But he deeply feared the new simulated versions. Lacking the "born physician's" capacities, these impostors am- plify the worst inclinations of the herd; they are "violent, envious, ex- ploitative, scheming, fawning, cringing, arrogant, all according to cir- cumstances. " Social selves are fodder for the "great man of the masses." Nietzsche held that "the less one knows how to command, the more ur- gently one covets someone who commands, who commands severely- a god, prince, class, physician, father confessor, dogma, or party conscience. The deadly combination of desperate conforming and overreaching and untrammeled ressentiment paves the way for a new type of tyrant.
1/5/22
NovDec - K - Settler Colonialism vs Ripstein
Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 4 | Opponent: Strake Jesuit MS | Judge: Michael Kurian Settler colonialism was not just another event in history but a structuring of a “logic of elimination” re-entrenched everyday by Western structures of law and government – the affirmative’s actions deepens the settler state and its biopolitical control of life. Morgensen 11 (Scott Lauria Morgensen, assistant professor of gender studies at Queen’s University, “The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now, Settler Colonial Studies, 2011) Settler colonialism is exemplary of the processes of biopower theorised by Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault. However, settler colonialism remains naturalised within theories of biopower and theories of its relation to coloniality. White supremacist settler colonisation produces specific modes of biopolitics that sustain not only in settler states but also in regimes of global governance that inherit, extend, and naturalise their power. I extend Patrick Wolfe’s theory that a ‘logic of elimination’ constitutes settler colonialism in the genocide and amalgamation of Indigenous peoples, by indicating that this also indigenises and naturalises white settler nations as projections of the West. Agamben’s work illuminates how Indigenous peoples are eliminated in a state of exception to Western law, which by functioning to erase consanguinity – as the patriarch in Roman law eliminates the defiant son – explains Indigenous peoples’ seemingly contradictory incorporation within and excision from the body of white settler nations. This biopolitical process specific to settler colonialism also structures the manner in which white settler societies demonstrably universalize Western law, both within their bounds and in global arenas. My call to denaturalise settler colonialism in social theory is but a first step towards broader study of how the biopolitics of settler colonialism structure current modes of biopower and require concerted critique at the intersections of Indigenous and settler colonial studies. If, following Patrick Wolfe, settler colonialism produces settler societies by pursuing the elimination of Indigenous peoples via amalgamation and replacement, then it is exemplary of biopower. Adapting Giorgio Agamben, we find that Europeans establish Western law and a new People on settled land by practicing an exception to the law that permits eliminating Indigenous peoples while defining settlers as those who replace.1 Settler colonialism performs biopower in deeply historical and fully contemporary ways. As scholars increasingly theorise biopower as definitive of our times, with many insisting that this quality of biopower is colonial, we must confront our inheritance of settler colonialism as a primary condition of biopower in the contemporary world. The work of Michael Foucault and Agamben and of their interlocutors must be resituated within a new genealogy of settler colonialism that can shift interpretations of biopower today. For more than five hundred years, Western law functioned as biopower in relation to ongoing practices of European settler colonialism. Settler colonialism has conditioned not only Indigenous peoples and their lands and the settler societies that occupy them, but all political, economic and cultural processes that those societies touch. Settler colonialism directly informs past and present processes of European colonisation, global capitalism, liberal modernity and international governance. If settler colonialism is not theorised in accounts of these formations, then its power remains naturalised in the world that we engage and in the theoretical apparatuses with which we attempt to explain it. Settler colonialism can be denaturalised by theorising its constitution as biopower, as well as how it in turn conditions all modern modes of colonialism and biopower. My argument critically shifts recent theories of the coloniality of biopower by centreing settler colonialism in analysis. Wolfe has observed in histories of the Americas that a settler colonial ‘logic of elimination’ located Indigenous Americans relationally, yet distinctly from Africans in the transatlantic slave trade or colonised indentured labour, thereby illuminating (as Mark Rifkin notes) the ‘peculiar’ status of Indigenous peoples within the biopolitics of settler colonialism.2 Western law is troubled once European subjects are redefined as settlers in relation to the Indigenous peoples, histories, and lands incorporated by white settler nations. I argue that this tension is engaged productively by Agamben’s tracing of the state of exception to homo sacer, and notably its derivation in Roman law from a thesis of consanguinity. I adapt this quality to illuminate why and how Western law incorporates Indigenous peoples into the settler nation by simultaneously pursuing their elimination. I further argue that these deeply historical processes ultimately enact biopower as a persistent activity of settler states that were never decolonised and of the global regimes that extend and naturalise their power. By the twentieth century – amid a formal demise of colonial empires, putative decolonisation of the global South, and global capitalist recolonisation – the universalisation of Western law as liberal governance was ensured by the actions of settler states. A genealogy of the biopolitics of settler colonialism will explain that the colonial era never ended because settler colonialism remains the naturalised activity projecting Western law and its exception along global scales today. Theories of the biopolitical state, regimes of global governance, and the war on terror will be insufficient unless they critically theorise settler colonialism as a historical and present condition and method of all such power. THEORISING SETTLER COLONIAL BIOPOWER Foucault and Agamben theorised biopower as a present activity that inherits and transforms the deeply historical conditions of Western law. Foucault incited this theory by examining the modern proliferation of procedures to produce the life of the nation in relation to deadly regulation of its others, a process that he argued displaces the power of the sovereign ‘to take life or let live’ with a governmentality that enacts ‘the power to “make” live or “let” die’.3 Judith Butler emphasises that, for Foucault, governmentality in the modern state or in global regimes acts as an ‘extra-legal sphere’ – ‘an art of managing things and persons, concerned with tactics, not laws’ – that then ‘depends upon “the question of sovereignty” no longer predominating over the field of power’.4 Hence, governmentality acts in the name of the very sovereignty that it exceeds, producing ‘a lawless sovereignty as part of its own operation of power’.5 Agamben adapts Foucault’s account of modern biopower as governmentality when he claims that its extra-legal appearance is a recent adaptation of qualities intrinsic to Western law; as he says, ‘it can even be argued that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power’.6 Citing the Roman legal origins of Western law, Agamben links sovereignty to a power to designate subjects of the law as homo sacer, the sacred man who may be killed without being sacrificed or made subject to homicide. The placement of homo sacer in a zone of ‘bare life’ establishes Western law precisely by placing it in abeyance in this case. The sacred man enters a ‘state of exception’ to the law that simultaneously reinforces its rule. Agamben notably defines the exception by reference to the camp as ‘in a decisive way the political space itself of modernity’, which by forming a permanent ‘space for (bare) life’ creates a ‘materialization of the state of exception’ as ‘the rule’.7 Agamben thus reinterprets the biopolitics of the modern state as an effect of Western law’s constitution by the state of exception. In this reading, the function of governmentality to ‘make life’ is compatible with the state of exception remaining intrinsic to law, as consigning certain subjects to a state of bare life (‘let die’) reestablishes a power to produce and defend life among those who remain. Yet significant tensions appear in the work of Foucault and Agamben – and, hence, also in Agamben’s revision of Foucault – in that neither scholar directly theorises colonialism as a context for biopower. Scholars of colonialism respond by arguing that colonialism is intrinsic to processes of biopower in the past and present. Reading Foucault’s account of the modern biopolitical state in relation to colonial situations, Ann Laura Stoler definitively demonstrated that its racial, sexual and national power arise at colonial sites or relationally among colonies and metropoles, not as projections from a European source.8 Following Stoler, modern biopower is the product and process of a colonial world. Achille Mbembe extended such reinterpretations of Foucault in conversation with Agamben by reading the colony as exception, which defines Western law amid the globalisation of European capital and empire.9 Sherene Razack and Sunera Thobani engage all such theories to explain that in contemporary modes of biopower, the colonial returns or never left; and, notably, both centre settler colonialism as a condition of the power they examine.10 Mark Rifkin signally engages Agamben’s theses with settler colonialism by arguing that the ‘geopolitics’ of conquest place Indigenous peoples in a state of exception that simultaneously troubles the territorial and national integrity of settlers as representatives of Western law.11 Together, these scholars respond to colonialism’s elision in theories of biopower by demonstrating that it conditions biopower and critical theory – an intervention deepened by Rifkin’s and my work centreing settler colonialism for study. Addressing these critiques requires adjusting the very advance of Agamben’s argument that biopower is intrinsic to Western law. Michael Dillon identifies a lingering ahistoricity in Agamben’s ‘ontologization’ of Western law that he argues would benefit from a return to Foucault’s genealogical method, which for Katia Genel will result in ‘revisiting and complicating Agamben’s formulations and more complexly applying them’.12 Theorising biopower from within a genealogy of settler colonialism will trace how deeply historical procedures in Western law confronted the specificities of the era of European settlement and shifted in response. In such a genealogy Agamben remains crucial, given that scholars of settler colonialism may trace biopower to situations that existed prior to the eighteenth and nineteenth century era that Foucault linked to the rise of the modern biopolitical state. Already in the sixteenth century and across the Americas, settler colonialism grew to condition colonialism and biopower in settler and other societies worldwide. The continuity of settler colonialism at these sites up to the present then demonstrates that this periodisation meaningfully explains biopower today. Patrick Wolfe’s theorisation of settler colonialism already incites a genealogy of its biopolitical form. Arguing that ‘settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure, not an event’, Wolfe explains that assertions of sovereignty by settlers ground Western law in ‘a logic of elimination’.13 Noting that scholars after Raphael Lemkin tend to correlate genocide with extermination, Wolfe argues that settler colonialism performs genocide alongside a variety of practices that converge on a purposed elimination of Indigenous peoples.14 While the erasure and replacement of Indigenous peoples may transpire through deadly violence, Wolfe emphasises that elimination may follow efforts not to destroy but to produce life, as in methods to amalgamate Indigenous peoples, cultures and lands into the body of the settler nation. As Wolfe and Katherine Ellinghaus explain, this amalgamation precisely narrows or erases the possibility of distinctive Indigenous nationalities challenging the prerogative of the settler nation that means to replace them on, now, ‘its own’ lands.15
The labor movement is built on the exploitation of indigenous populations. The aff’s “right to strike” only seeks to benefit the settler labor movement. Settler labor movements fight for higher wages and living standards while simultaneously exploiting indigenous labor and excluding indigenous workers from the labor market. The collective dispossession of the indigenous population ties the settler community together through settler quietism. The aff’s foundational assumptions are complicit in the destructive of Native life and governance. Englert 20 Englert, S. Institute for Area Studies, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands (2020), Settlers, Workers, and the Logic of Accumulation by Dispossession. Antipode, 52: 1647-1666. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12659 AX Dispossession – deprive of land In order to reflect on the particular nature of accumulation by dispossession within a settler colonial context, another issue should be raised: that of the internal social relations within settler colonial societies. Indeed, the most striking aspect of settler colonial societies is the development of a colonial polity in which settlers live, produce, and reproduce themselves socially. They do so on the back of the dispossession of indigenous populations through which they acquire land, resources, and, depending on the context, labour. This—perhaps obvious—characteristic leads to the development of internal class relations and conflicts, alongside confrontations between settlers and indigenous peoples. The history of settler colonialism underscores the conspicuous absence of involvement by settler working classes (as opposed to individuals or limited networks) in mass, sustained challenges against the process of settlement and indigenous dispossession.3 In fact, more often than not, settler labour movements fought for the intensification of settler expansion and racial segregation (see “An Alternative Reading: Settler Colonies and the Exploitation of the Native” above), through colour bars, boycott campaigns and demands for expulsion. In the process, bitter confrontations emerged between settler labour and capital, when the latter and attempted to increase its profit margins through the exploitation of indigenous labour—for example in the context of the white labour movements in Australia and South Africa.4 Yet these conflicts can be resolved, especially while the settler colony continues to expand, by intensifying the dispossession of indigenous populations in order to improve the material conditions of settler workers (see “Case Studies” below). Here, the question of accumulation by dispossession returns to the fore. If settler workers are exploited as workers within the settler colony, they remain settlers. As such they participate in the processes of accumulation by dispossession through the occupation of lands, the elimination or exploitation of indigenous peoples, and the extraction of expropriated resources. For example, at a very basic level, their houses, workplaces, and basic infrastructure such as roads, railways, etc., are all premised on the capture and control of indigenous land. Settler workers are both exploited by settler bosses and their co-conspirators in the dispossession of indigenous peoples. As such, class struggle within a settler society has a dual character: it is waged over the distribution of wealth extracted from their labour as well as over the colonial booty. In the case of Zionism in Palestine, the current associated with the publication Matzpen (“Compass”) developed a class analysis of Israeli society. They came to the conclusion that because the Israeli economy was heavily subsidised from the outside (first primarily by Britain, then by the US) and that this subsidy was not simply going into private hands but was used by the Labour Zionist bureaucracy to organise the development of the Israeli economy and infrastructure, class antagonisms were diverted within its society. Hangebi et al. (2012:83) wrote: The Jewish worker in Israel does not receive his share in cash, but he gets it in terms of new and relatively inexpensive housing, which could not have been constructed by raising capital locally; he gets it in industrial employment, which could not have been started or kept going without external subsidies; and he gets it in terms of a general standard of living, which does not correspond to the output of that society … In this way the struggle between the Israeli working class and its employers, both bureaucrats and capitalists, is fought not only over the surplus value produced by the worker but also over the share each group receives from this external source of subsidies. If this analysis was essentially correct, it underplayed, however, the consequences of an important aspect of Israeli wealth creation (which Matzpen otherwise recognised): the Israeli state, its infrastructure, and its economy were made possible by colonial expansion, land confiscation, the expulsion of Palestinians and the expropriation of their wealth and property. Affordable housing, for example, an issue discussed further below, was not only possible because of the subsidies the Israeli state received from abroad. It was possible because the land on which new houses were built, as well as existing Palestinian houses, had been confiscated by the Israeli army, Palestinians had been expelled in their hundreds of thousands, and the spoils were re-distributed amongst settlers. It was—and remains—the collective dispossession of the indigenous population by the Israeli population as a whole, which ties the settler community together, despite internal class, ethnic, and political divisions. The settler class struggle is fought over the distribution of wealth extracted from settler labour power as well as over the share each group receives from the process of accumulation by dispossession. This dual class and colonial relationship helps explain the relative absence of settler workers’ resistance against settler colonial expansion or alliances with Indigenous peoples.5 This tendency can be understood as “settler quietism”: even if working-class settlers are exploited by their ruling classes, overthrowing the settler state would mean overthrowing a system in which they share, however unequally, in the distribution of the colonial loot. Participating in the process of dispossession and fighting for a greater share of the pie leads to more important and immediate material gains. It also follows, as many anti-colonial thinkers and activists, not least among them Fanon (2001) in the Wretched of the Earth, have argued that indigenous people face the settler population as a whole in their struggle for de-colonisation. This is not to say that individual settlers or specific settler organisations cannot or have not supported struggles for decolonisation. It is however to point out that this is not the case for the majority of the settler working class, while it continues to depend on the continued dispossession of the natives for the quality of its living standards. Whether the settler colony is organised on the basis of an eliminatory or an exploitative model, what remains constant is that the entirety of the settler polity will participate in the process of accumulation by dispossession, and that the different settler classes will struggle both against the natives to impose and maintain this dispossession, as well as amongst themselves in order to determine the nature of its internal distribution. More than that, the specific structural forms of settler rule over the indigenous population is best understood as the outcome of struggle, both between settler classes and between settlers and indigenous populations. This paper now turns to two brief case studies demonstrating this process in the context of Zionism in Palestine. The specificity of Zionism in the history of settler colonialism, its lack of a colonial metropolis, had real consequences for the Zionists in Palestine. Firstly, it could not impose—at first—its control over the land through military force. Secondly it could not organise the transfer of populations to the colony in the same way a state could. In the words of Shafir (1996:155): “Zionism, then, was a colonisation movement which simultaneously had to secure land for its settlers and settlers for its land”. The dual need for land and labour was at the heart of many political developments in the Yishuv. If the question of land was resolved first through acquisition from largely absentee land owners and then (and most extensively) through military violence, the question of immigration came close several times to bringing the whole colonial project to its knees, as the European Jewish population tended to reject Zionism as a political response to the poverty and discrimination they faced. Two distinct political responses emerged within the early settler population. On the one hand, the Jewish farmers and their sponsors hoped to develop a cash crop producing agricultural sector focused on export to Europe and the exploitation of cheap Palestinian workers. This vision was based, as demonstrated by Shafir (1996), on the model of other European projects—especially the French settler colonies of North Africa. On the other hand, the nascent Labour Zionist movement demanded better wages and working conditions for Jewish workers in Palestine, which they argued would be the only way to attract and retain new settlers. This, they claimed, necessitated full separation between the Jewish and Palestinian sectors, removing thereby the “unfair competition” of the cheaper indigenous labour force. This led to the development of a series of new Labour Zionist institutions to organise this “Conquest of Hebrew Labour”, by organising strikes, pickets, and boycotts of Jewish owned businesses that employed Palestinian workers or sold products made by them. The Kibbutzim, the Histadrut,6 and the early Zionist militias were all born out of the process of organising this campaign (Lockman 1996). For example, the Histadrut’s constitution, passed at its founding congress, made clear that it was a Zionist body committed to the project of settlement through the development of an exclusively Jewish society. It stated that the Histadrut’s goal was to: … unite all the workers and labourers in the country who live by their own labour without exploiting the labour of others, in order to arrange for all settlement, economic and also cultural affairs of all the workers in the country, so as to build a society of Jewish labour in Eretz Yisra’el. (quoted in Lockman 1996:68) The similarity between the logic of this statement and that of the white South African strikers mentioned above is remarkable. This struggle—waged against Palestinian workers and Jewish farmers—led to a partial victory for the Labour Zionist movement (Lockman 2012). Key industries, such as construction and agriculture, were taken over by Labour Zionist institutions such as Solal Boneh and the Kibbutzim. At the same time, Jewish representation in colonial institutions was increased through collaboration with the British Mandate authorities especially in the context of crushing the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939. The Labour Zionists took over the Yishuv’s political leadership and created a dominant Jewish sector, without however being able to establish a fully segregated one. It did set in motion the logic of separation as well as laying the infrastructure for a Jewish state, which would be made a reality by its militias’ military violence and mass expulsion of Palestinians during the Nakba. This case study shows that the Labour Zionist movement developed on the basis of opposing Jewish farmers as well as Palestinian workers, a political focus that also shaped its key institutions. The campaign for Hebrew Labour also demonstrates that the “elimination of the native” in the settler colonial context is not a given, as in the Wolfe-an framework, but the outcome of a specific set of struggles that pit both the indigenous population against the settlers, as well as different settler classes against one another.
Their theory spikes are a form of rhetorical imperialism that parallels strategies used to silence and eliminate indigeneity. Grande 8 Sandy, Professor of Education at Connecticut College, “Red Pedagogy: The Un-Methodology,” Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies, p 244 However the question of indigenous sovereignty is resolved politically, there will be significant implications on the intellectual lives of indigenous peoples, particularly in terms of education. Lyons (2000) views the history of colonization, in part, as the manifestation of "rhetorical imperialism;' that is, "the ability of dominant powers to assert control of others by setting the terms of debate'' (Lyons,2000, p. 452). Indeed, throughout the history of federal Indian law, terms and definitions have continually changed over time. Indians have gone from "sovereigns'' to "wards” and from "nations" to "tribe” while the practice of "treaty making" has given way to one of agreements (Lyons, 2000). As each change served the needs of the nation-state, Lyons argues that "the erosion of Indian national sovereignty can be credited in part to a rhetorically imperialist use of language by white powers" (Lyons, 2000, p. 453). Thus, just as language was central to the colonialist project, it must be central to the project of decolonization. Indigenous scholar Haunani-Kay Trask (1993) writes, "Thinking in one's own cultural referents leads to conceptualizing in one's own world view which, in turn, leads to disagreement with and eventual opposition to the dominant ideology" (p. 54). Thus, where a revolutionary critical pedagogy compels students and educators to question how "knowledge is related historically, culturally and institutionally to the processes of production and consumption;' a Red pedagogy compels students to question how knowledge is related to the processes of colonization. It furthermore asks how traditional indigenous knowledges can inform the project of decolonization. In short, this implies a threefold process for education. Specifically, a Red pedagogy necessitates (a) the subjection of the processes of Whitestream schooling to critical pedagogical analyses; (b) the decoupling and dethinking of education from its Western, colonialist contexts, including revolutionary critical pedagogy; and (c) the conceptualization of indigenous efforts to reground students and educators in traditional knowledge and teachings. In short, a Red pedagogy aims to create awareness of what Trask terms "disagreements;' helping to foster discontent about the "inconsistencies between the world as it is and as it should be" (Alfred, 1999, p. 132).
Their interpretation of the subject is based on the ideal notions of the white settler. This justifies a paradigm that enforces settler colonialism and indigenous genocide. Even if the card is about Kant, ripstein’s theory of practical reasoning stems form Kant’s findings means they still link. Stoneman 18, Betty. Dept. of Philosophy, 561 S. Kilgo Circle, Emory University The Epistemological and Ethical Functions of Kant’s Binary and Foucault’s Critique of Critique of the Binary. June 7, 2018. https://bettystoneman.wordpress.com/2018/06/07/the-epistemological-and-ethical-functions-of-kants-binary-and-foucaults-critique-of-critique-of-the-binary/ Conclusion Kant’s hierarchical ordering of human groups along a gradation of sub-A status based on the binary of A and non-A serves both epistemological and ethical functions for him. A is taken as the epistemological and ethical starting point, the center of the epistemological and ethical universe. It is from the position of A, that all sub-As are conceptualized as objects of knowledge and all sub-As’ actions are ethically prescribed. Sub-As are known and sub-As’ actions are ethical only in relation to A; only insofar as sub-As fit into A’s self-referential schema. Foucault’s critique of critique of the binary offers us a way to conceptualize Kant’s critique of the knowing subject. Kant’s critique of the knowing subject, I suggest, sets up and maintains a coherent structure to Kant’s ordered hierarchy. Foucault, despite his critique of critique, actively reproduces the very structure that he is critiquing. In a longer paper, I would further pursue the epistemological and ethical functions of Kant’s binary, as well as Foucault’s critique of critique of the binary, through Sylvia Wynter’s perspective. Due to space limitations, I will conclude by offering the suggestion that my reading of Kant is compatible with Wynter’s perspective. Wynter, while utilizing Foucault’s work, offers us a further critique of critique. She argues that intellectuals of the modern episteme “continue to articulate, in however radically oppositional a manner, the rules of the social order and its sanctioned theories.”20 It is no less true today than it was in the classical episteme that “subjects … normatively know Self, Other, as well as their social, physical, and organic worlds, in the adaptively true terms needed for the production and reproduction not only of their then supernaturally legitimated genre of being human, but as well for that of the hierarchical social structures in whose intersubjective field that genre of the human could have alone realized itself.”21 Wynter states, “we continue to know our present order of social reality, and rigorously so, in the adaptive ‘truth-for’ terms needed to conserve our present descriptive statement.”22 My suggestion, aligned with Wynter’s perspective, is that Kant’s use of teleological principles, the knowing subject, and the binary are all conservation truths. They are taken as truth because they conserve, produce, and reproduce the coherent structure. Moreover, Foucault, may be radically challenging this structure by challenging the knowing subject. However, as a critique of critique, Foucault is still operating within the same structure, and thus, is adaptively reproducing the structure. Foucault’s critique of the knowing subject is a critique founded in and of the knowing subject as a European, white, man. Thus, the only alternative is decolonization. Tuck and Yang 12 (Eve Tuck, Unangax, State University of New York at New Paltz K. Wayne Yang University of California, San Diego, Decolonization is not a metaphor, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012, pp. 1-40, recut FD WHS) An ethic of incommensurability, which guides moves that unsettle innocence, stands in contrast to aims of reconciliation, which motivate settler moves to innocence. Reconciliation is about rescuing settler normalcy, about rescuing a settler future. Reconciliation is concerned with questions of what will decolonization look like? What will happen after abolition? What will be the consequences of decolonization for the settler? Incommensurability acknowledges that these questions need not, and perhaps cannot, be answered in order for decolonization to exist as a framework. We want to say, first, that decolonization is not obliged to answer those questions - decolonization is not accountable to settlers, or settler futurity. Decolonization is accountable to Indigenous sovereignty and futurity. Still, we acknowledge the questions of those wary participants in Occupy Oakland and other settlers who want to know what decolonization will require of them. The answers are not fully in view and can’t be as long as decolonization remains punctuated by metaphor. The answers will not emerge from friendly understanding, and indeed require a dangerous understanding of uncommonality that un-coalesces coalition politics - moves that may feel very unfriendly. But we will find out the answers as we get there, “in the exact measure that we can discern the movements which give decolonization historical form and content” (Fanon, 1963, p. 36). To fully enact an ethic of incommensurability means relinquishing settler futurity, abandoning the hope that settlers may one day be commensurable to Native peoples. It means removing the asterisks, periods, commas, apostrophes, the whereas’s, buts, and conditional clauses that punctuate decolonization and underwrite settler innocence. The Native futures, the lives to be lived once the settler nation is gone - these are the unwritten possibilities made possible by an ethic of incommensurability when you take away the punctuation he says of lines lifted from the documents about military-occupied land its acreage and location you take away its finality opening the possibility of other futures -Craig Santos Perez, Chamoru scholar and poet (as quoted by Voeltz, 2012) Decolonization offers a different perspective to human and civil rights based approaches to justice, an unsettling one, rather than a complementary one. Decolonization is not an “and”. It is an elsewhere.
The role of the ballot is to vote for who best centers indigenous scholarship and resistance - Any ethical commitment requires that the aff place themselves in the center of Native scholarship and demands. Carlson 16 Elizabeth Carlson, PhD, is an Aamitigoozhi, Wemistigosi, and Wasicu (settler Canadian and American), whose Swedish, Saami, German, Scots-Irish, and English ancestors have settled on lands of the Anishinaabe and Omaha Nations which were unethically obtained by the US government. Elizabeth lives on Treaty 1 territory, the traditional lands of the Anishinaabe, Nehiyawak, Dakota, Nakota, and Red River Metis peoples currently occupied by the city of Winnipeg, the province of Manitoba, (2016): Anti-colonial methodologies and practices for settler colonial studies, Settler Colonial Studies, DOI: 10.1080/2201473X.2016.1241213, recut FD WHS Arlo Kempf says that ‘where anticolonialism is a tool used to invoke resistance for the colonized, it is a tool used to invoke accountability for the colonizer’.42 Relational accountability should be a cornerstone of settler colonial studies. I believe settler colonial studies and scholars should ethically and overtly place themselves in relationship to the centuries of Indigenous oral, and later academic scholarship that conceptualizes and resists settler colonialism without necessarily using the term: SCT may be revelatory to many settler scholars, but Indigenous people have been speaking for a long time about colonial continuities based on their lived experiences. Some SCTs have sought to connect with these discussions and to foreground Indigenous resistance, survival and agency. Others, however, seem to use SCT as a pathway to explain the colonial encounter without engaging with Indigenous people and experiences – either on the grounds that this structural analysis already conceptually explains Indigenous experience, or because Indigenous resistance is rendered invisible.43 Ethical settler colonial theory (SCT) would recognize the foundational role Indigenous scholarship has in critiques of settler colonialism. It would acknowledge the limitations of settler scholars in articulating settler colonialism without dialogue with Indigenous peoples, and take as its norm making this dialogue evident. In my view, it is critical that we not view settler colonial studies as a new or unique field being established, which would enact a discovery narrative and contribute to Indigenous erasure, but rather take a longer and broader view. Indigenous oral and academic scholars are indeed the originators of this work. This space is not empty. Of course, powerful forces of socialization and discipline impact scholars in the academy. There is much pressure to claim unique space, to establish a name for ourselves, and to make academic discoveries. I am suggesting that settler colonial studies and anti-colonial scholars resist these hegemonic pressures and maintain a higher anti-colonial ethic. As has been argued, ‘the theory itself places ethical demands on us as settlers, including the demand that we actively refuse its potential to re-empower our own academic voices and to marginalize Indigenous resistance’.44 As settler scholars, we can reposition our work relationally and contextually with humi- lity and accountability. We can centre Indigenous resistance, knowledges, and scholarship in our work, and contextualize our work in Indigenous sovereignty. We can view oral Indigenous scholarship as legitimate scholarly sources. We can acknowledge explicitly and often the Indigenous traditions of resistance and scholarship that have taught us and pro- vided the foundations for our work. If our work has no foundation of Indigenous scholarship and mentorship, I believe our contributions to settler colonial studies are even more deeply problematic.
11/21/21
NovDec - K - Settler Colonialism vs Util
Tournament: UT Longhorn Classic | Round: 3 | Opponent: Nevin Gera | Judge: Strake Jesuit CM Settler colonialism was not just another event in history but a structuring of a “logic of elimination” re-entrenched everyday by Western structures of law and government – the affirmative’s actions deepens the settler state and its biopolitical control of life. Morgensen 11 (Scott Lauria Morgensen, assistant professor of gender studies at Queen’s University, “The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now, Settler Colonial Studies, 2011) Settler colonialism is exemplary of the processes of biopower theorised by Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault. However, settler colonialism remains naturalised within theories of biopower and theories of its relation to coloniality. White supremacist settler colonisation produces specific modes of biopolitics that sustain not only in settler states but also in regimes of global governance that inherit, extend, and naturalise their power. I extend Patrick Wolfe’s theory that a ‘logic of elimination’ constitutes settler colonialism in the genocide and amalgamation of Indigenous peoples, by indicating that this also indigenises and naturalises white settler nations as projections of the West. Agamben’s work illuminates how Indigenous peoples are eliminated in a state of exception to Western law, which by functioning to erase consanguinity – as the patriarch in Roman law eliminates the defiant son – explains Indigenous peoples’ seemingly contradictory incorporation within and excision from the body of white settler nations. This biopolitical process specific to settler colonialism also structures the manner in which white settler societies demonstrably universalize Western law, both within their bounds and in global arenas. My call to denaturalise settler colonialism in social theory is but a first step towards broader study of how the biopolitics of settler colonialism structure current modes of biopower and require concerted critique at the intersections of Indigenous and settler colonial studies. If, following Patrick Wolfe, settler colonialism produces settler societies by pursuing the elimination of Indigenous peoples via amalgamation and replacement, then it is exemplary of biopower. Adapting Giorgio Agamben, we find that Europeans establish Western law and a new People on settled land by practicing an exception to the law that permits eliminating Indigenous peoples while defining settlers as those who replace.1 Settler colonialism performs biopower in deeply historical and fully contemporary ways. As scholars increasingly theorise biopower as definitive of our times, with many insisting that this quality of biopower is colonial, we must confront our inheritance of settler colonialism as a primary condition of biopower in the contemporary world. The work of Michael Foucault and Agamben and of their interlocutors must be resituated within a new genealogy of settler colonialism that can shift interpretations of biopower today. For more than five hundred years, Western law functioned as biopower in relation to ongoing practices of European settler colonialism. Settler colonialism has conditioned not only Indigenous peoples and their lands and the settler societies that occupy them, but all political, economic and cultural processes that those societies touch. Settler colonialism directly informs past and present processes of European colonisation, global capitalism, liberal modernity and international governance. If settler colonialism is not theorised in accounts of these formations, then its power remains naturalised in the world that we engage and in the theoretical apparatuses with which we attempt to explain it. Settler colonialism can be denaturalised by theorising its constitution as biopower, as well as how it in turn conditions all modern modes of colonialism and biopower. My argument critically shifts recent theories of the coloniality of biopower by centreing settler colonialism in analysis. Wolfe has observed in histories of the Americas that a settler colonial ‘logic of elimination’ located Indigenous Americans relationally, yet distinctly from Africans in the transatlantic slave trade or colonised indentured labour, thereby illuminating (as Mark Rifkin notes) the ‘peculiar’ status of Indigenous peoples within the biopolitics of settler colonialism.2 Western law is troubled once European subjects are redefined as settlers in relation to the Indigenous peoples, histories, and lands incorporated by white settler nations. I argue that this tension is engaged productively by Agamben’s tracing of the state of exception to homo sacer, and notably its derivation in Roman law from a thesis of consanguinity. I adapt this quality to illuminate why and how Western law incorporates Indigenous peoples into the settler nation by simultaneously pursuing their elimination. I further argue that these deeply historical processes ultimately enact biopower as a persistent activity of settler states that were never decolonised and of the global regimes that extend and naturalise their power. By the twentieth century – amid a formal demise of colonial empires, putative decolonisation of the global South, and global capitalist recolonisation – the universalisation of Western law as liberal governance was ensured by the actions of settler states. A genealogy of the biopolitics of settler colonialism will explain that the colonial era never ended because settler colonialism remains the naturalised activity projecting Western law and its exception along global scales today. Theories of the biopolitical state, regimes of global governance, and the war on terror will be insufficient unless they critically theorise settler colonialism as a historical and present condition and method of all such power. THEORISING SETTLER COLONIAL BIOPOWER Foucault and Agamben theorised biopower as a present activity that inherits and transforms the deeply historical conditions of Western law. Foucault incited this theory by examining the modern proliferation of procedures to produce the life of the nation in relation to deadly regulation of its others, a process that he argued displaces the power of the sovereign ‘to take life or let live’ with a governmentality that enacts ‘the power to “make” live or “let” die’.3 Judith Butler emphasises that, for Foucault, governmentality in the modern state or in global regimes acts as an ‘extra-legal sphere’ – ‘an art of managing things and persons, concerned with tactics, not laws’ – that then ‘depends upon “the question of sovereignty” no longer predominating over the field of power’.4 Hence, governmentality acts in the name of the very sovereignty that it exceeds, producing ‘a lawless sovereignty as part of its own operation of power’.5 Agamben adapts Foucault’s account of modern biopower as governmentality when he claims that its extra-legal appearance is a recent adaptation of qualities intrinsic to Western law; as he says, ‘it can even be argued that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power’.6 Citing the Roman legal origins of Western law, Agamben links sovereignty to a power to designate subjects of the law as homo sacer, the sacred man who may be killed without being sacrificed or made subject to homicide. The placement of homo sacer in a zone of ‘bare life’ establishes Western law precisely by placing it in abeyance in this case. The sacred man enters a ‘state of exception’ to the law that simultaneously reinforces its rule. Agamben notably defines the exception by reference to the camp as ‘in a decisive way the political space itself of modernity’, which by forming a permanent ‘space for (bare) life’ creates a ‘materialization of the state of exception’ as ‘the rule’.7 Agamben thus reinterprets the biopolitics of the modern state as an effect of Western law’s constitution by the state of exception. In this reading, the function of governmentality to ‘make life’ is compatible with the state of exception remaining intrinsic to law, as consigning certain subjects to a state of bare life (‘let die’) reestablishes a power to produce and defend life among those who remain. Yet significant tensions appear in the work of Foucault and Agamben – and, hence, also in Agamben’s revision of Foucault – in that neither scholar directly theorises colonialism as a context for biopower. Scholars of colonialism respond by arguing that colonialism is intrinsic to processes of biopower in the past and present. Reading Foucault’s account of the modern biopolitical state in relation to colonial situations, Ann Laura Stoler definitively demonstrated that its racial, sexual and national power arise at colonial sites or relationally among colonies and metropoles, not as projections from a European source.8 Following Stoler, modern biopower is the product and process of a colonial world. Achille Mbembe extended such reinterpretations of Foucault in conversation with Agamben by reading the colony as exception, which defines Western law amid the globalisation of European capital and empire.9 Sherene Razack and Sunera Thobani engage all such theories to explain that in contemporary modes of biopower, the colonial returns or never left; and, notably, both centre settler colonialism as a condition of the power they examine.10 Mark Rifkin signally engages Agamben’s theses with settler colonialism by arguing that the ‘geopolitics’ of conquest place Indigenous peoples in a state of exception that simultaneously troubles the territorial and national integrity of settlers as representatives of Western law.11 Together, these scholars respond to colonialism’s elision in theories of biopower by demonstrating that it conditions biopower and critical theory – an intervention deepened by Rifkin’s and my work centreing settler colonialism for study. Addressing these critiques requires adjusting the very advance of Agamben’s argument that biopower is intrinsic to Western law. Michael Dillon identifies a lingering ahistoricity in Agamben’s ‘ontologization’ of Western law that he argues would benefit from a return to Foucault’s genealogical method, which for Katia Genel will result in ‘revisiting and complicating Agamben’s formulations and more complexly applying them’.12 Theorising biopower from within a genealogy of settler colonialism will trace how deeply historical procedures in Western law confronted the specificities of the era of European settlement and shifted in response. In such a genealogy Agamben remains crucial, given that scholars of settler colonialism may trace biopower to situations that existed prior to the eighteenth and nineteenth century era that Foucault linked to the rise of the modern biopolitical state. Already in the sixteenth century and across the Americas, settler colonialism grew to condition colonialism and biopower in settler and other societies worldwide. The continuity of settler colonialism at these sites up to the present then demonstrates that this periodisation meaningfully explains biopower today. Patrick Wolfe’s theorisation of settler colonialism already incites a genealogy of its biopolitical form. Arguing that ‘settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure, not an event’, Wolfe explains that assertions of sovereignty by settlers ground Western law in ‘a logic of elimination’.13 Noting that scholars after Raphael Lemkin tend to correlate genocide with extermination, Wolfe argues that settler colonialism performs genocide alongside a variety of practices that converge on a purposed elimination of Indigenous peoples.14 While the erasure and replacement of Indigenous peoples may transpire through deadly violence, Wolfe emphasises that elimination may follow efforts not to destroy but to produce life, as in methods to amalgamate Indigenous peoples, cultures and lands into the body of the settler nation. As Wolfe and Katherine Ellinghaus explain, this amalgamation precisely narrows or erases the possibility of distinctive Indigenous nationalities challenging the prerogative of the settler nation that means to replace them on, now, ‘its own’ lands.15
The labor movement is built on the exploitation of indigenous populations. The aff’s “right to strike” only seeks to benefit the settler labor movement. Settler labor movements fight for higher wages and living standards while simultaneously exploiting indigenous labor and excluding indigenous workers from the labor market. The collective dispossession of the indigenous population ties the settler community together through settler quietism. The aff’s foundational assumptions are complicit in the destructive of Native life and governance. Englert 20 Englert, S. Institute for Area Studies, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands (2020), Settlers, Workers, and the Logic of Accumulation by Dispossession. Antipode, 52: 1647-1666. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12659 AX Dispossession – deprive of land In order to reflect on the particular nature of accumulation by dispossession within a settler colonial context, another issue should be raised: that of the internal social relations within settler colonial societies. Indeed, the most striking aspect of settler colonial societies is the development of a colonial polity in which settlers live, produce, and reproduce themselves socially. They do so on the back of the dispossession of indigenous populations through which they acquire land, resources, and, depending on the context, labour. This—perhaps obvious—characteristic leads to the development of internal class relations and conflicts, alongside confrontations between settlers and indigenous peoples. The history of settler colonialism underscores the conspicuous absence of involvement by settler working classes (as opposed to individuals or limited networks) in mass, sustained challenges against the process of settlement and indigenous dispossession.3 In fact, more often than not, settler labour movements fought for the intensification of settler expansion and racial segregation (see “An Alternative Reading: Settler Colonies and the Exploitation of the Native” above), through colour bars, boycott campaigns and demands for expulsion. In the process, bitter confrontations emerged between settler labour and capital, when the latter and attempted to increase its profit margins through the exploitation of indigenous labour—for example in the context of the white labour movements in Australia and South Africa.4 Yet these conflicts can be resolved, especially while the settler colony continues to expand, by intensifying the dispossession of indigenous populations in order to improve the material conditions of settler workers (see “Case Studies” below). Here, the question of accumulation by dispossession returns to the fore. If settler workers are exploited as workers within the settler colony, they remain settlers. As such they participate in the processes of accumulation by dispossession through the occupation of lands, the elimination or exploitation of indigenous peoples, and the extraction of expropriated resources. For example, at a very basic level, their houses, workplaces, and basic infrastructure such as roads, railways, etc., are all premised on the capture and control of indigenous land. Settler workers are both exploited by settler bosses and their co-conspirators in the dispossession of indigenous peoples. As such, class struggle within a settler society has a dual character: it is waged over the distribution of wealth extracted from their labour as well as over the colonial booty. In the case of Zionism in Palestine, the current associated with the publication Matzpen (“Compass”) developed a class analysis of Israeli society. They came to the conclusion that because the Israeli economy was heavily subsidised from the outside (first primarily by Britain, then by the US) and that this subsidy was not simply going into private hands but was used by the Labour Zionist bureaucracy to organise the development of the Israeli economy and infrastructure, class antagonisms were diverted within its society. Hangebi et al. (2012:83) wrote: The Jewish worker in Israel does not receive his share in cash, but he gets it in terms of new and relatively inexpensive housing, which could not have been constructed by raising capital locally; he gets it in industrial employment, which could not have been started or kept going without external subsidies; and he gets it in terms of a general standard of living, which does not correspond to the output of that society … In this way the struggle between the Israeli working class and its employers, both bureaucrats and capitalists, is fought not only over the surplus value produced by the worker but also over the share each group receives from this external source of subsidies. If this analysis was essentially correct, it underplayed, however, the consequences of an important aspect of Israeli wealth creation (which Matzpen otherwise recognised): the Israeli state, its infrastructure, and its economy were made possible by colonial expansion, land confiscation, the expulsion of Palestinians and the expropriation of their wealth and property. Affordable housing, for example, an issue discussed further below, was not only possible because of the subsidies the Israeli state received from abroad. It was possible because the land on which new houses were built, as well as existing Palestinian houses, had been confiscated by the Israeli army, Palestinians had been expelled in their hundreds of thousands, and the spoils were re-distributed amongst settlers. It was—and remains—the collective dispossession of the indigenous population by the Israeli population as a whole, which ties the settler community together, despite internal class, ethnic, and political divisions. The settler class struggle is fought over the distribution of wealth extracted from settler labour power as well as over the share each group receives from the process of accumulation by dispossession. This dual class and colonial relationship helps explain the relative absence of settler workers’ resistance against settler colonial expansion or alliances with Indigenous peoples.5 This tendency can be understood as “settler quietism”: even if working-class settlers are exploited by their ruling classes, overthrowing the settler state would mean overthrowing a system in which they share, however unequally, in the distribution of the colonial loot. Participating in the process of dispossession and fighting for a greater share of the pie leads to more important and immediate material gains. It also follows, as many anti-colonial thinkers and activists, not least among them Fanon (2001) in the Wretched of the Earth, have argued that indigenous people face the settler population as a whole in their struggle for de-colonisation. This is not to say that individual settlers or specific settler organisations cannot or have not supported struggles for decolonisation. It is however to point out that this is not the case for the majority of the settler working class, while it continues to depend on the continued dispossession of the natives for the quality of its living standards. Whether the settler colony is organised on the basis of an eliminatory or an exploitative model, what remains constant is that the entirety of the settler polity will participate in the process of accumulation by dispossession, and that the different settler classes will struggle both against the natives to impose and maintain this dispossession, as well as amongst themselves in order to determine the nature of its internal distribution. More than that, the specific structural forms of settler rule over the indigenous population is best understood as the outcome of struggle, both between settler classes and between settlers and indigenous populations. This paper now turns to two brief case studies demonstrating this process in the context of Zionism in Palestine. The specificity of Zionism in the history of settler colonialism, its lack of a colonial metropolis, had real consequences for the Zionists in Palestine. Firstly, it could not impose—at first—its control over the land through military force. Secondly it could not organise the transfer of populations to the colony in the same way a state could. In the words of Shafir (1996:155): “Zionism, then, was a colonisation movement which simultaneously had to secure land for its settlers and settlers for its land”. The dual need for land and labour was at the heart of many political developments in the Yishuv. If the question of land was resolved first through acquisition from largely absentee land owners and then (and most extensively) through military violence, the question of immigration came close several times to bringing the whole colonial project to its knees, as the European Jewish population tended to reject Zionism as a political response to the poverty and discrimination they faced. Two distinct political responses emerged within the early settler population. On the one hand, the Jewish farmers and their sponsors hoped to develop a cash crop producing agricultural sector focused on export to Europe and the exploitation of cheap Palestinian workers. This vision was based, as demonstrated by Shafir (1996), on the model of other European projects—especially the French settler colonies of North Africa. On the other hand, the nascent Labour Zionist movement demanded better wages and working conditions for Jewish workers in Palestine, which they argued would be the only way to attract and retain new settlers. This, they claimed, necessitated full separation between the Jewish and Palestinian sectors, removing thereby the “unfair competition” of the cheaper indigenous labour force. This led to the development of a series of new Labour Zionist institutions to organise this “Conquest of Hebrew Labour”, by organising strikes, pickets, and boycotts of Jewish owned businesses that employed Palestinian workers or sold products made by them. The Kibbutzim, the Histadrut,6 and the early Zionist militias were all born out of the process of organising this campaign (Lockman 1996). For example, the Histadrut’s constitution, passed at its founding congress, made clear that it was a Zionist body committed to the project of settlement through the development of an exclusively Jewish society. It stated that the Histadrut’s goal was to: … unite all the workers and labourers in the country who live by their own labour without exploiting the labour of others, in order to arrange for all settlement, economic and also cultural affairs of all the workers in the country, so as to build a society of Jewish labour in Eretz Yisra’el. (quoted in Lockman 1996:68) The similarity between the logic of this statement and that of the white South African strikers mentioned above is remarkable. This struggle—waged against Palestinian workers and Jewish farmers—led to a partial victory for the Labour Zionist movement (Lockman 2012). Key industries, such as construction and agriculture, were taken over by Labour Zionist institutions such as Solal Boneh and the Kibbutzim. At the same time, Jewish representation in colonial institutions was increased through collaboration with the British Mandate authorities especially in the context of crushing the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939. The Labour Zionists took over the Yishuv’s political leadership and created a dominant Jewish sector, without however being able to establish a fully segregated one. It did set in motion the logic of separation as well as laying the infrastructure for a Jewish state, which would be made a reality by its militias’ military violence and mass expulsion of Palestinians during the Nakba. This case study shows that the Labour Zionist movement developed on the basis of opposing Jewish farmers as well as Palestinian workers, a political focus that also shaped its key institutions. The campaign for Hebrew Labour also demonstrates that the “elimination of the native” in the settler colonial context is not a given, as in the Wolfe-an framework, but the outcome of a specific set of struggles that pit both the indigenous population against the settlers, as well as different settler classes against one another. The aff is an act of settler futurity that attempts to extend the settler colonial state into the future with the assumption that linear progress can eventually be achieved via reform – the fact that indigenous people are the smallest population group forced to live on a land that was taken from them proves that they reinvest in settler colonial violence– means they cant weigh the case if we prove their starting point is flawed. Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernandez 13 EVE TUCK and RUBÉN A. GAZTAMBIDE-FERNÁNDEZ. "Curriculum, Replacement, and Settler Futurity" Rochester29.1 (2013): 72-89. Settler Futurity. The settler colonial curricular project of replacement is invested in settler futurity, or what Andrew Baldwin calls the “permanent virtuality” of the settler on stolen land (2012, p. 173). When we locate the present of settler colonialism as only the production of the past, we overlook how settler colonialism is configured in relation to a different temporal horizon: the future. To say that something is invested in something else’s futurity is not the same as saying it is invested in something’s future, though the replacement project is invested in both settler future and futurity. Futurity refers to the ways in which, “the future is rendered knowable through specific practices (i.e. calculation, imagination, and performance) and, in turn, intervenes upon the present through three anticipatory logics (i.e. pre-caution, pre-emption and preparedness)” (p. 173). Considering the significance of futurity for researching whiteness and geography, Baldwin (2012) wonders whether a past-oriented approach reproduces the (false), Teleological assumption that white racism can be modernized away. Such an assumption privileges an ontology of linear causality in which the past is thought to act on the present and the present is said to be an effect of whatever came before ... According to this kind of temporality, the future is the terrain upon or through which white racism will get resolved. It cleaves the future from the present and, thus, gives the future discrete ontological form. (p. 174) Thus, in this historical analysis of the settler colonial curricular project of replacement, we seek to emphasize the ways in which replacement is entirely concerned with settler futurity, which always indivisibly means the continued and complete eradication of the original inhabitants of contested land. Anything that seeks to recuperate and not interrupt settler colonialism, to reform the settlement and incorporate Indigenous peoples into the multicultural settler colonial nation state is fettered to settler futurity. To be clear, our commitments are to what might be called an Indigenous futurity, which does not foreclose the inhabitation of Indigenous land by nonIndigenous peoples, but does foreclose settler colonialism and settler epistemologies. That is to say that Indigenous futurity does not require the erasure of now-settlers in the ways that settler futurity requires of Indigenous peoples.
Thus, the only alternative is decolonization. Tuck and Yang 12 (Eve Tuck, Unangax, State University of New York at New Paltz K. Wayne Yang University of California, San Diego, Decolonization is not a metaphor, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012, pp. 1-40, recut FD WHS) An ethic of incommensurability, which guides moves that unsettle innocence, stands in contrast to aims of reconciliation, which motivate settler moves to innocence. Reconciliation is about rescuing settler normalcy, about rescuing a settler future. Reconciliation is concerned with questions of what will decolonization look like? What will happen after abolition? What will be the consequences of decolonization for the settler? Incommensurability acknowledges that these questions need not, and perhaps cannot, be answered in order for decolonization to exist as a framework. We want to say, first, that decolonization is not obliged to answer those questions - decolonization is not accountable to settlers, or settler futurity. Decolonization is accountable to Indigenous sovereignty and futurity. Still, we acknowledge the questions of those wary participants in Occupy Oakland and other settlers who want to know what decolonization will require of them. The answers are not fully in view and can’t be as long as decolonization remains punctuated by metaphor. The answers will not emerge from friendly understanding, and indeed require a dangerous understanding of uncommonality that un-coalesces coalition politics - moves that may feel very unfriendly. But we will find out the answers as we get there, “in the exact measure that we can discern the movements which give decolonization historical form and content” (Fanon, 1963, p. 36). To fully enact an ethic of incommensurability means relinquishing settler futurity, abandoning the hope that settlers may one day be commensurable to Native peoples. It means removing the asterisks, periods, commas, apostrophes, the whereas’s, buts, and conditional clauses that punctuate decolonization and underwrite settler innocence. The Native futures, the lives to be lived once the settler nation is gone - these are the unwritten possibilities made possible by an ethic of incommensurability when you take away the punctuation he says of lines lifted from the documents about military-occupied land its acreage and location you take away its finality opening the possibility of other futures -Craig Santos Perez, Chamoru scholar and poet (as quoted by Voeltz, 2012) Decolonization offers a different perspective to human and civil rights based approaches to justice, an unsettling one, rather than a complementary one. Decolonization is not an “and”. It is an elsewhere. The role of the ballot is to vote for who best centers indigenous scholarship and resistance - Any ethical commitment requires that the aff place themselves in the center of Native scholarship and demands. Carlson 16 Elizabeth Carlson, PhD, is an Aamitigoozhi, Wemistigosi, and Wasicu (settler Canadian and American), whose Swedish, Saami, German, Scots-Irish, and English ancestors have settled on lands of the Anishinaabe and Omaha Nations which were unethically obtained by the US government. Elizabeth lives on Treaty 1 territory, the traditional lands of the Anishinaabe, Nehiyawak, Dakota, Nakota, and Red River Metis peoples currently occupied by the city of Winnipeg, the province of Manitoba, (2016): Anti-colonial methodologies and practices for settler colonial studies, Settler Colonial Studies, DOI: 10.1080/2201473X.2016.1241213, recut FD WHS Arlo Kempf says that ‘where anticolonialism is a tool used to invoke resistance for the colonized, it is a tool used to invoke accountability for the colonizer’.42 Relational accountability should be a cornerstone of settler colonial studies. I believe settler colonial studies and scholars should ethically and overtly place themselves in relationship to the centuries of Indigenous oral, and later academic scholarship that conceptualizes and resists settler colonialism without necessarily using the term: SCT may be revelatory to many settler scholars, but Indigenous people have been speaking for a long time about colonial continuities based on their lived experiences. Some SCTs have sought to connect with these discussions and to foreground Indigenous resistance, survival and agency. Others, however, seem to use SCT as a pathway to explain the colonial encounter without engaging with Indigenous people and experiences – either on the grounds that this structural analysis already conceptually explains Indigenous experience, or because Indigenous resistance is rendered invisible.43 Ethical settler colonial theory (SCT) would recognize the foundational role Indigenous scholarship has in critiques of settler colonialism. It would acknowledge the limitations of settler scholars in articulating settler colonialism without dialogue with Indigenous peoples, and take as its norm making this dialogue evident. In my view, it is critical that we not view settler colonial studies as a new or unique field being established, which would enact a discovery narrative and contribute to Indigenous erasure, but rather take a longer and broader view. Indigenous oral and academic scholars are indeed the originators of this work. This space is not empty. Of course, powerful forces of socialization and discipline impact scholars in the academy. There is much pressure to claim unique space, to establish a name for ourselves, and to make academic discoveries. I am suggesting that settler colonial studies and anti-colonial scholars resist these hegemonic pressures and maintain a higher anti-colonial ethic. As has been argued, ‘the theory itself places ethical demands on us as settlers, including the demand that we actively refuse its potential to re-empower our own academic voices and to marginalize Indigenous resistance’.44 As settler scholars, we can reposition our work relationally and contextually with humi- lity and accountability. We can centre Indigenous resistance, knowledges, and scholarship in our work, and contextualize our work in Indigenous sovereignty. We can view oral Indigenous scholarship as legitimate scholarly sources. We can acknowledge explicitly and often the Indigenous traditions of resistance and scholarship that have taught us and pro- vided the foundations for our work. If our work has no foundation of Indigenous scholarship and mentorship, I believe our contributions to settler colonial studies are even more deeply problematic. Extinction is a settler narrative that obscures the foundations of settler violence, justifies further violence, normalizes whiteness as normative, and precludes politics of decolonization Dalley 16 Hamish Dalley (2016): The deaths of settler colonialism: extinction as a metaphor of decolonization in contemporary settler literature, Settler Colonial Studies, DOI: 10.1080/2201473X.2016.1238160 SJBE Settlers love to contemplate the possibility of their own extinction; to read many contemporary literary representations of settler colonialism is to find settlers strangely satisfied in dreaming of ends that never come. This tendency is widely prevalent in English-language representations of settler colonialism produced since the 1980s: the possibility of an ending – the likelihood that the settler race will one day die out – is a common theme in literary and pop culture considerations of colonialism’s future. Yet it has barely been remarked how surprising it is that this theme is so present. For settlers, of all people, to obsessively ruminate on their own finitude is counterintuitive, for few modern social formations have been more resistant to change than settler colonialism. With a few exceptions (French Algeria being the largest), the settler societies established in the last 300 years in the Americas, Australasia, and Southern Africa have all retained the basic features that define them as settler states – namely, the structural privileging of settlers at the expense of indigenous peoples, and the normalization of whiteness as the marker of political agency and rights – and they have done so notwithstanding the sustained resistance that has been mounted whenever such an order has been built. Settlers think all the time that they might one day end, even though (perhaps because) that ending seems unlikely ever to happen. The significance of this paradox for settler-colonial literature is the subject of this article. Considering the problem of futurity offers a useful foil to traditional analyses of settlercolonial narrative, which typically examine settlers’ attitudes towards history in order to highlight a constitutive anxiety about the past – about origins. Settler colonialism, the argument goes, has a problem with historical narration that arises from a contradiction in its founding mythology. In Stephen Turner’s formulation, the settler subject is by definition one who comes from elsewhere but who strives to make this place home. The settlement narrative must explain how this gap – which is at once geographical, historical, and existential – has been bridged, and the settler transformed from outsider into indigene. Yet the transformation must remain constitutively incomplete, because the desire to be at home necessarily invokes the spectre of the native, whose existence (which cannot be disavowed completely because it is needed to define the settler’s difference, superiority, and hence claim to the land) inscribes the settler’s foreignness, thus reinstating the gap between settler and colony that the narrative was meant to efface.1 Settler-colonial narrative is thus shaped around its need to erase and evoke the native, to make the indigene both invisible and present in a contradictory pattern that prevents settlers from ever moving on from the moment of colonization.2 As evidence of this constitutive contradiction, critics have identified in settler-colonial discourse symptoms of psychic distress such as disavowal, inversion, and repression.3 Indeed, the frozen temporality of settler-colonial narrative, fixated on the moment of the frontier, recalls nothing so much as Freud’s description of the ‘repetition compulsion’ attending trauma.4 As Lorenzo Veracini puts it, because: ‘settler society’ can thus be seen as a fantasy where a perception of a constant struggle is juxtaposed against an ideal of ‘peace’ that can never be reached, settler projects embrace and reject violence at the same time. The settler colonial situation is thus a circumstance where the tension between contradictory impulses produces long-lasting psychic conflicts and a number of associated psychopathologies.5 Current scholarship has thus focused primarily on settler-colonial narrative’s view of the past, asking how such a contradictory and troubled relationship to history might affect present-day ideological formations. Critics have rarely considered what such narratological tensions might produce when the settler gaze is turned to the future. Few social formations are more stubbornly resistant to change than settlement, suggesting that a future beyond settler colonialism might be simply unthinkable. Veracini, indeed, suggests that settler-colonial narrative can never contemplate an ending: that settler decolonization is inconceivable because settlers lack the metaphorical tools to imagine their own demise.6 This article outlines why I partly disagree with that view. I argue that the narratological paradox that defines settler-colonial narrative does make the future a problematic object of contemplation. But that does not make settler decolonization unthinkable per se; as I will show, settlers do often try to imagine their demise – but they do so in a way that reasserts the paradoxes of their founding ideology, with the result that the radical potentiality of decolonization is undone even as it is invoked. I argue that, notwithstanding Veracini’s analysis, there is a metaphor via which the end of settler colonialism unspools – the quasi-biological concept of extinction, which, when deployed as a narrative trope, offers settlers a chance to consider and disavow their demise, just as they consider and then disavow the violence of their origins. This article traces the importance of the trope of extinction for contemporary settler-colonial literature, with a focus on South Africa, Canada, and Australia. It explores variations in how the death of settler colonialism is conceptualized, drawing a distinction between historio-civilizational narratives of the rise and fall of empires, and a species-oriented notion of extinction that draws force from public anxiety about climate change – an invocation that adds another level of ambivalence by drawing on ‘rational’ fears for the future (because climate change may well render the planet uninhabitable to humans) in order to narrativize a form of social death that, strictly speaking, belongs to a different order of knowledge altogether. As such, my analysis is intended to draw the attention of settlercolonial studies toward futurity and the ambivalence of settler paranoia, while highlighting a potential point of cross-fertilization between settler-colonial and eco-critical approaches to contemporary literature. That ‘extinction’ should be a key word in the settler-colonial lexicon is no surprise. In Patrick Wolfe’s phrase,7 settler colonialism is predicated on a ‘logic of elimination’ that tends towards the extermination – by one means or another – of indigenous peoples.8 This logic is apparent in archetypal settler narratives like James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826), a historical novel whose very title blends the melancholia and triumph that demarcate settlers’ affective responses to the supposed inevitability of indigenous extinction. Concepts like ‘stadial development’ – by which societies progress through stages, progressively eliminating earlier social forms – and ‘fatal impact’ – which names the biological inevitability of strong peoples supplanting weak – all contribute to the notion that settler colonialism is a kind of ‘ecological process’ 9 that necessitates the extinction of inferior races. What is surprising, though, is how often the trope of extinction also appears with reference to settlers themselves; it makes sense for settlers to narrate how their presence entails others’ destruction, but it is less clear why their attempts to imagine futures should presume extinction to be their own logical end as well. The idea appears repeatedly in English-language literary treatments of settler colonialism. Consider, for instance, the following rumination on the future of South African settler society, from Olive Schreiner’s 1883 Story of an African Farm: It was one of them, one of those wild old Bushmen, that painted those pictures there. He did not know why he painted but he wanted to make something, so he made these. … Now the Boers have shot them all, so that we never see a yellow face peeping out among the stones. … And the wild bucks have gone, and those days, and we are here. But we will be gone soon, and only the stones will lie on, looking at everything like they look now.10 In this example, the narrating settler character, Waldo, recognizes prior indigenous inhabitation but his knowledge comes freighted with an expected sense of biological superiority, made apparent by his description of the ‘Bushman’s’ ‘yellow face’, and lack of mental self-awareness. What is not clear is why Waldo’s contemplation of colonial genocide should turn immediately to the assumption that a similar fate awaits his people as well. A similar presumption of racial vulnerability permeates other late nineteenthcentury novels from the imperial metropole, such as Dracula and War of the Worlds, which are plotted around the prospect of invasions that would see the extinction of British imperialism, and, in the process, the human species. Such anxieties draw energy from a pattern of settler defensiveness that can be observed across numerous settler-colonial contexts. Marilyn Lake’s and Henry Reynold’s account of the emergence of transnational ‘whiteness’ highlights the paradoxical fact that while white male settlers have been arguably the most privileged class in history, they have routinely perceived themselves to be ‘under siege’, threatened with destruction to the extent that their very identity of ‘whiteness was born in the apprehension of imminent loss’. 11 The fear of looming annihilation serves a powerful ideological function in settler communities, working to foster racial solidarity, suppress dissent, and legitimate violence against indigenous populations who, by any objective measure, are far more at risk of extermination than the settlers who fear them. Ann Curthoys and Dirk Moses have traced this pattern in Australia and Israel-Palestine, respectively.12 This scholarship suggests that narratives of settler extinction are acts of ideological mystification, obscuring the brutal inequalities of the frontier behind a mask of white vulnerability – an argument with which I sympathize. However, this article shows how there is more to settler-colonial extinction narratives than bad faith.
Case
Even if COVID is still remnant, India’s covid situation is improving and cases are declining – prefer our evidence because it is more recent than theirs. Pathi 21 Krutika Pathi, , "Glimmer of hope seen in India, but virus crisis not over yet", 5-17-2021, AP NEWS, https://apnews.com/article/india-coronavirus-pandemic-science-health-business-d23d000a99574f0b9e0cff2b58c3bd1b, 12-3-2021, faizaan With over 24 million confirmed cases and 270,000 deaths, India’s caseload is the second highest after the U.S. But experts believe that the country’s steeply rising curve may finally be flattening — even if the plateau is a high one, with an average of 340,000 confirmed daily cases last week. On Monday, reported infections continued to decline as cases dipped below 300,000 for the first time in weeks. It is still too early to say things are improving, with Mumbai and New Delhi representing only a sliver of the overall situation. For one, drops in the national caseload, however marginal, largely reflect falling infections in a handful of states with big populations and/or high rates of testing. So the nationwide trends represent an incomplete and misleading picture of how things are faring across India as a whole, experts say.