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DECOLONIZE 1NC
The idea of producing a transcript of reality as from a
position of observation and reportage constitutes
knowledge on the basis of colonialitythe epistemology
begins from the presupposition of centered colonial power
its not about the content its about the location of the
speaker
Mignolo 2009 (Walter, Professor of Humanities at Duke, Theory, Culture,
& Society 26.7/8, Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and DeColonial Freedom)
The introduction of geo-historical and bio-graphical configurations in
processes of knowing and understanding allows for a radical reframing (e.g. de-colonization) of the original formal apparatus of
enunciation.2 I have been supporting in the past those who maintain that it
is not enough to change the content of the conversation, that it is of
the essence to change the terms of the conversation. Changing the
terms of the conversation implies going beyond disciplinary or
interdisciplinary controversies and the conflict of interpretations. As
far as controversies and interpretations remain within the same
rules of the game (terms of the conversation), the control of
knowledge is not called into question. And in order to call into
question the modern/colonial foundation of the control of
knowledge, it is necessary to focus on the knower rather than on the
known. It means to go to the very assumptions that sustain locus
enunciations. In what follows I revisit the formal apparatus of enunciation
from the perspective of geo- and bio-graphic politics of knowledge. My
revisiting is epistemic rather than linguistic, although focusing on the
enunciation is unavoidable if we aim at changing the terms and not
only the content of the conversation. The basic assumption is that
the knower is always implicated, geo- and body-politically, in the
known, although modern epistemology (e.g. the hubris of the zero
point) managed to conceal both and created the figure of the
detached observer, a neutral seeker of truth and objectivity who at
the same time controls the disciplinary rules and puts himself or
herself in a privileged position to evaluate and dictate.
Links
Environment
Environmental use is a symptom of colonial thought
rather than a neutral expression of the truth of the
natural world
Adams and Mulligan 2003 (W.M. and Martin, Professors of Geography
at Cambridge, Decolonizing Nature : Strategies for Conservation in a
Postcolonial Era, p. 5)
Richard Grove (1995) and other environmental historians (see, for
example, Griffiths and Robbins, 1997) have made the point that
experiences of colonialism with regard to exploiting nature have
been far from uniform, and that an impetus to conserve nature
began when colonial authorities grew alarmed at the speed of
environmental degradation in colonized lands. Somewhat
paradoxically, while ideas about the exploitation of nature moved
with the colonizers from the centre to the periphery of old empires,
ideas about the conservation of nature circulating in the periphery
were brought back to the centre. However, it is important to
recognize that both the exploitation of nature in the colonies and
the impetus to conserve nature for longer-term human use were a
product of the colonial mindset, which was shaped by the interaction
between colonial experiences in the centre and periphery. The
colonial mindset can only be understood by looking at this
interaction; but it was fundamentally rooted in European values,
which constructed nature as nothing more than a resource for
human use and wildness as a challenge for the rational mind to
conquer. As Tom Griffiths (1996) has pointed out, even those settlers who
were most enamoured of the flora and fauna in their adopted
homelands saw themselves as either hunters or collectors, and
wanted to assert their mastery over the wildness that they
simultaneously admired and feared, or to collect specimens that
could be named and safely deposited in museums. Early colonial
ideas about the conservation of nature essentially grew out of a
broader desire to tame the wild.
visions behind and confront new issues, armed with the necessary expert
knowledge and free deliberation that takes peoples concrete needs and
demands into account (iek, 1999b: 198). Postpolitics is thus about the
administration (policing) of environmental, social, economic or other
domains and they remain, of course, fully within the realm of the possible, of
existing social relations; they are the partition of the sensible. The
ultimate sign of postpolitics in all Western countries, iek (2002:
303) argues, is the growth of a managerial approach to government:
government is reconceived as a managerial function, deprived of its proper
political dimension. Postpolitics refuses politicization in the classical Greek
sense; that is, politics as the metaphorical universalization of particular
demands, which aims at more than the negotiation of interests. The
consensual times we are currently living in have thus eliminated a genuine
political space of disagreement. However, consensus does not equal peace or
absence of contestation (Rancire, 2005: 8). Under a postpolitical condition:
Everything is politicized, can be discussed, but only in a non-committal way
and as a non-conflict. Absolute and irreversible choices are kept away;
politics becomes something one can do without making decisions
that divide and separate. When pluralism becomes an end in itself, real]
politics is pushed to other arenas (Diken and Laustsen, 2004: 7). Difficulties
and problems, such as re-ordering the urban or re-shaping the
environment that are generally staged and accepted as problematic need
to be dealt with through compromise, managerial and technical
arrangement and the production of consensus: Consensus refers to that
which is censored . . . Consensus means that whatever your personal
commitments, interests and values may be, you perceive the same things,
you give them the same name. But there is no contest on what appears, on
what is given in a situation and as a situation. Consensus means that the only
point of contest lies on what has to be done as a response to a given
situation. Correspondingly, dissensus and disagreement dont only
mean conflict of interests, ideas and so on. They mean that there is
a debate on the sensible givens of a situation, a debate on that which
you see and feel, on how it can be told and discussed, who is able to name it
and argue about it . . . It is about the visibilities of the places and abilities of
the body in those places, about the partition of private and public spaces,
about the very configuration of the visible and the relation of the visible to
what can be said about it . . . Consensus is the dismissal of politics as a
polemical configuration of the common world (Rancire, 2003b: 46). The key
feature of consensus is the annulment of dissensus . . . the end of politics
(Rancire, 2001: 32). Of course, this postpolitical world eludes choice and
freedom (other than those tolerated by the consensus) and, in the absence of
real politicization of particulars, the only position of real dissent is that
of either the traditionalist (those stuck in the past and who refuse to
accept the inevitability of the new global neoliberal order) or the
fundamentalist. The only way to deal with them is by sheer violence,
by suspending their humanitarian and democratic rights. The
postpolitical relies on either including all in a consensual pluralist order and
on excluding radically those who posit themselves outside the consensus. For
them, as Agamben (2005) argues, the law is suspended; they are
literally put outside the law and treated as extremists and terrorists.
Link: Objectivity
Idea of objective disciplinary viewpoint attempts to
insulate itself from charges of racism and violence: this
self-anesthetization perpetuates this violence
Mignolo 2009 (Walter, Professor of Humanities at Duke University,
Dispensable and Bare Lives Coloniality and the Hidden Political/Economic
Agenda of Modernity in Human Architecture: The Journal of the Sociology of
Self-Knowledge 7.2)
Thus, it is as a South American from European descent cum Hispanic Latino
in the US (ethnic identification) and someone trained in semiotic, discourse
analysis and literary theory, that I approach racism in the modern/colonial
and imperial/colonial world.5 The equation is relevant since I am not
starting from the discipline to understand an imperial management
of human subjectivities (through racism) but, on the contrary, I start
from the subjective feelings of my own history and of those who are not
immigrants in South America, but dissenting creoles from Spanish descent
or Mestizos and Mestizas. That is, I joined forces with those who
instead of using their privileges, in South America, of being from
European descent (one way or another, that is, Creoles, Mestizas or
Immigrants), takeJJJ advantage of their privilege to join the
struggles carried on by progressive Indians and progressive AfroSouth and Caribbean Americans. I am not representing or
speaking for them (Indians and Afro-descendent). They have been
speaking for themselves for centuries. And of course, no one will
accuse me of representing or speaking for them when the them
in question are Jews or Islamic. I use semiotics, discourse analysis and
literary theory as a tool to deal with the problem I just outlined. I am not
using semiotics as a method to dissect racism as something
that is outside of myself and that I can study through my
disciplinary identifi- cation. I am not hiding myself under the
clothing of disciplinary objectivity, as if disciplinary formations
where not infected by the modern racial matrix or were epistemic
formations outside of it. I am here inverting the process and this
inversion is indeed my methodology: the problem at hand is
infected already by the racial matrix and there is no way to hide
from this infection in any discipline (semiotics, sociology, political
science, biology, bio-technology) and pretend that racism and
human being or humanity can be described and explained from
the uncontaminated eyes of God (theology) or eyes of Reason
(egology). Furthermore, disciplines are a surrogate for religious and ethnic
identities. Disciplinary identities are formed under the principle of
objectivity, neutrality, reason without passion, mind without
interference of affects, etc. Disciplinary identities are formed on the
basis of a set of beliefs posited as detached from individual
experiences and subjective configurations. However, disciplinary
identities are no less identities than religious or ethnic ones. From
the sixteenth century on, epistemic and ontological constructions of
Development
Idea of societal improvement, development, and
advancement attached to the epistemically invalid idea of
knowing what is better
Mignolo 2009 (Walter, Professor of Humanities at Duke, Theory, Culture,
& Society 26.7/8, Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and DeColonial Freedom)
If you engage in the de-colonial option and put anthropology at your
service like Smith does, then you engage in shifting the geography of
reason in unveiling and enacting geopolitics and body-politics of
knowledge. You can also say that there are non-Maori anthropologists of
Euro-American descent who are really for and concerned with the
mistreatment of Maoris and that they are really working to remedy the
situation. In that case, the anthropologists could follow two different paths.
One would be in line with Father Bartolome de las Casas and with Marxism
(Marxism being a European invention responding to European problems).
When Marxism encounters people of color, men or women, the
situation becomes parallel to anthropology: being Maori (or Aymara, or
Afro-Caribbean, like Aime Cesaire and Frantz Fanon) is not necessarily a
smooth relation because Marxism privileged class relations over
racial hierarchies and patriarchal and heterosexual normativity. The
other would be to submit to the guidance of Maori or Aymara
anthropologists and engage with them in the de-colonial option. A
politics of identity is different from identity politics the former is
open to whoever wants to join, while the latter tends to be bounded
by the definition of a given identity. I am not saying that a Maori
anthropologist has epistemic privileges over a New Zealand anthropologist of
Anglo-descent (or a British or US anthropologist). I am saying that a New
Zealand anthropologist of Anglo descent has no right to guide the
locals in what is good or bad for the Maori population. That is
precisely the problem that appears in the report of the Harvard
International Review, where a group of US experts believe they can
really decide what is good and what is bad for developing
countries. Granted, there are many locals in developing countries
who, because of imperial and capitalist cosmology, were led to
believe (or pretended they believed) that what is good for developed
countries is good for underdevel- oped as well because the former
know how to get there and can lead the way for underdeveloped
countries to reach the same level. I am just saying, following Wiredus
dictum (African, know thyself), that there is a good chance that Maoris
would know what is good or bad for them better than an expert from
Harvard or a white anthropologist from New Zealand. And there is also
a good chance that an expert from Harvard may know what is good for him
or her and his or her people, even when he or she thinks that they are stating
what is good for them, the underdeveloped countries and people.
Link - Globalization/Securitization
Globalization is tied a defensive sovereignty which
creates methods of surveillance. This new regime makes
destruction of identity, racism and bare life inevitable
Turner 2007(Turner, Bryan, sociologist, former professor of Sociology at
the University of Cambridge, The Enclave Society: Towards a Sociology of
Immobility, http://home.iscteiul.pt/~apad/justica01/textos/12_Turner_0778071.pdf)
Urry is clearly correct to emphasize global flows and networks as key
features of the modern world. However, as the economy becomes
increasingly global, especially in terms of the flow of finance,
investment and commodities, states and their bureaucracies have in
many respects become more rigid in attempting to defend the
principle of sovereignty. There is, as a result, a profound contradiction
between the economic requirements of flexibility and fluidity and the states
objective of defending its territorial sovereignty. In particular with the
growth of a global war on terror after 9/11, states, rather than
becoming more porous, have defended their borders with increasing
determination. From a historical perspective, it is useful to remind ourselves
that the flow of people has become more rather than less restrictive.
John Torpey (2000) has argued that the invention of the passport as a
method of surveillance and regulation was a product of twentiethcentury statehood. In a similar fashion Saskia Sassen (1999) in Guests and
Aliens showed how the free flow of workers in Europe, that had been
traditional during harvest time, was changed by the transformation of such
guests into political aliens. My argument is that, while there may be an
increasing global flow of goods and services, there is emerging a parallel
immobility regime exercising surveillance and control over migrants,
refugees and other aliens. If sociology is to be criticized, it is not because it
has neglected globalization; it is because it has neglected the rise of global
security systems whose stated aim is to protect residential populations
against the perceived risk of mobile populations. The changing mood of the
social sciences against the argument that societies are becoming more
porous and borders are disappearing was perhaps sharply illustrated by the
special issue of the European Journal of Social Theory in 2006. This issue
noted in particular that in the wake of the events of 9/11 and the more
recent acts of terrorism in Bali, Madrid and London, governments have began
to reassess their border-opening policies (Newman, 2006: 181). Proponents
of globalization need to recognize the fact that territory and reterritorialization, at a variety of spatial scales, remain a major form
of societal organization and ordering (Newman, 2006: 183). The
principal causes of re-territorialization are said to be: the
development of policies of securitization, the terrorist threat to
urban centres and civil society, the growth in negative sentiments
towards immigration and foreign workers, and a social mood that is
hostile to cosmopolitanism. The empirical evidence concerning European
disoriented with respect to the world in which they lived. They could not
practice their old ways, and the new ways which they were expected to
learn were in a constant ystate of change because they were not a
cohesive view of the world but simply adjustments which whites
were making to the technology they had invented.
Gender Link
Traditional critiques of conflating sex and gender lock the
linksex was primary in the colonial narrativefocus on
type of work locks the link
Lugones 2010 (Maria, Professor of Comparative Literature at Binghamton
University, Toward a Decolonial Feminism in Hypatia 25.4)
It is important to note that often, when social scientists investigate
colonized societies, the search for the sexual distinction and then
the construction of the gender distinction results from observations
of the tasks performed by each sex. In so doing they affirm the
inseparability of sex and gender characteristic mainly of earlier
feminist analysis. More contemporary analysis has introduced arguments
for the claim that gender constructs sex. But in the earlier version, sex
grounded gender. Often, they became conflated: where you see sex, you will
see gender and vice versa. But, if I am right about the coloniality of
gender, in the distinction between the human and the non-human,
sex had to stand alone. Gender and sex could not be both
inseparably tied and racialized. Sexual dimorphism became the
grounding for the dichotomous understanding of gender, the
human characteristic. One may well be interested in arguing that
the sex that stood alone in the bestialization of the colonized, was,
after all, gendered. What is important to me here is that sex was
made to stand alone in the characterization of the colonized. This
strikes me as a good entry point for research that takes coloniality seriously
and aims to study the historicity and meaning of the relation between sex
and gender.[[
This last section returns to an earlier point about the inherently political
nature of feminist scholarship, and attempts to clarify my point about the
possibility of detecting a colonialist move in the case of structurally
unequal first/third-world relation in scholarship. The nine texts in the
Zed Press Women in the Third World series that I have discussed focused on
the following common areas in discussing womens status within various
societies: religion, family/kinship structures, the legal system, the
sexual division of labor, education , and finally political resistance. A
large number of western feminist political writings on the third
world focus on these themes. Of course, the Zed texts have various
emphases. For example, two of the studies, Women of Palestine (1982) and
Indian Women in Struggle (1980), focus explicitly on female militance and
political involvement , while Women in Arab Societies (1980) deals with
womens legal, religious, and familial stats. In addition, each text references a
variety of methodologies and degrees of care in making generalizations.
Interestingly enough, however, almost all the texts assume women as a
category of analysis in the manner designated above. Clearly, this is an
analytical strategy which is neither limited to these Zed Press publications in
general. However, in the particular texts under question, each text assumes
women have a coherent group identity within the different cultures
discussed, prior to their entry into social relations. Thus, Omvedt can tlak
about Indian Women; while referring to a particular group of women in the
State of Maharashta, Cutrufellia bout Women of Africa and Minces about
Arab Women as if these groups of women have some sort of obvious cultural
coherence, distinct form men in these societies. The status or position of
women is assumed to be self evident because women as an already
constituted group are placed within religious, economic, familial and legal
structures. However, this focus on the position of women whereby
women are seen as coherent group across contexts, regardless of
class or ethnicity., structures the world in ultimately binary,
dichotomous terms, where women are always seen in opposition to
men, patriarchy is always necessarily male dominance, and the
religious, legal, economic, and familial systems are implicitly
assumed to be constructed by men. Thus, both men and women are
always seen as preconstituted whole populations, and relations of
dominance and exploitation are also posited in terms of whole
peoples wholes coming into exploitative relations. It is only when
men and women are seen as different categories or groups
possessing different already constituted categories of experience,
cognition and interests as grops that such a simplistic dichotomy is
possible. What does this imply about the structure and functioning of power
relations? The setting up of the commonality of third world womens
struggles across classes and cultures against a general notion of
oppression ( primarily the group in power - i.e, men) necessitates
the assumption of something like what Michel Foucault calls the
& Society 26.7/8, Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and DeColonial Freedom)
If you are getting the idea of what shifting the geography of reason
and enacting geo-politics of knowledge means, you will also be
understanding what the de-colonial option in general (or de-colonial
options in each partic- ular and local history) means. It means, in the first
place, to engage in epistemic disobedience, as is clear in the three
examples I offered. Epistemic disobedience is necessary to take on civil
disobedience (Gandhi, Martin Luther King) to its point of non-return.
Civil disobedience, within modern Western epistemology (and
remember: Greek and Latin, and six vernacular European modern and
imperial languages), could only lead to reforms, not to
transformations. For this simple reason, the task of de-colonial
thinking and the enactment of the de-colonial option in the 21st
century starts from epistemic de-linking: from acts of epistemic
disobedience.
Humanity
Idea of humanity constitutes those outside the idea as
lacking in order to shore up coloniality and recenter
Europeanism
Mignolo 2009 (Walter, Professor of Humanities at Duke, Theory, Culture,
& Society 26.7/8, Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and DeColonial Freedom)
Before, a disclaimer is necessary. Much has been said and written about
Michel Foucaults concept of bio-politics. Bio-politics refers to emerging
state technologies (strategies, in a more traditional vocabulary) of
population control that went hand in hand with the emergence of
the modern nation-state. Foucault devoted his attention mainly to Europe,
but such technologies were applied to the colonies as well. In Argentina (and
South America in general), for example, the push for eugenics toward the end
of the 19th century has been studied in detail lately. The differences
between bio-politics in Europe and bio-politics in the colonies lie in
the racial distinction between the European population (even when
bio-politically managed by the state) and the population of the
colonies: less human, sub- humans, as Smith pointed out. But it is also
important to remember that bio-political techniques enacted on
colonial populations returned as a boomerang to Europe in the
Holocaust. Many have already underlined the uses of colonial techniques
applied to non-European populations to control and exterminate the Jewish
population. This consideration shifts the geog- raphy of reason and
illuminates the fact that the colonies were not a second- ary and
marginal event in the history of Europe but, on the contrary, colonial
history is the non-acknowledged center in the making of modern
Europe. Thus, body-politics is the darker side and the missing half
of bio- politics: body-politics describes de-colonial technologies
enacted by bodies who realized that they were considered less
human at the moment they realized that the very act of describing
them as less human was a radical un-human consideration. Thus, the
lack of humanity is placed in imperial actors, institutions and
knowledges that had the arrogance of deciding that certain people
they did not like were less human. Body-politics is a fundamental
component of de-colonial thinking, de-colonial doing and the decolonial option. Historically, geo-politics of knowledge emerged in the
Third World contesting the imperial distribution of scientific labor that
Pletsch mapped out. Body-politics of knowledge has had its more pronounced
manifestations in the United States, as a consequence of the Civil Rights
movement. Who were the main actors of the body-politics of knowledge?
Women first white women, soon joined by women of color (and linking with
geo-politics, so- called third world women); Latino and Latina scholars and
activists; Afro-Americans and Native-Americans, mainly.
coming to fruition of the horror contained in everyday existence under the sway of sovereign politics in the
West. Thus our response to the camps is in part a recognition of our own predicament as participants in the
reduction of life to bare life and politics to biopolitics. As Foucault reminds us, "we are all governed and, to
that extent, in solidarity."[83] But this is no use if our invocation of the trope of humanitarian crisis repeats
the metaphor that reinforces the very power that produces the humanitarian emergency in the first place . As
Agamben puts it: It is almost as if, starting from a certain point, every decisive political event were doublesided: the spaces, the liberties, and the rights won by individuals in their conflicts with central powers
always simultaneously prepared a tacit but increasing inscription of individual's lives within the state order,
thus offering a new and more dreadful foundation for the very sovereign power from which they wanted to
liberate themselves.[84] This double-sidedness, of course, recalls Jacques Derrida's double-contradictory imperative, where the
question, for example, of whether and in what way to intervene in a humanitarian emergency is a dilemma that has to be resolved in
any particular instance by a decision.[85] Aid cannot be both offered and withheld: only one course of action can take place. But to
seek general rules applicable overall to aid organizations and their operations is to duck the very question of the political that is
inherently involved.[86] Agamben's work enables us to analyze what is at stake in the politics of the decision.
He elaborates how sovereign power operates through the state of emergency and how the very posing of the
question through the trope of emergency is always already on the side of sovereignty. The implication of the
argument in this article is that although the power of the sovereign state over the lives of its populations has been
successfully challenged in the post-Cold War period and the notion of humanitarian concern as overriding sovereignty widely
accepted, this is not a liberation or an emancipation but merely the beginning of another and more
authoritarian form of sovereign control over life. Just as the role of the revolution in the transition to
modern state rule can be seen as an ironic strengthening of central authority, so the role of humanitarian
intervention can be seen as a tightening of a global structure of authority and control. There is a fundamental
biopolitical fracture in the structure of the West.[88] From time to time, the attempt is made to produce a unified political community
by exterminating those that occupy the place of homines sacri, or bare life, whether they be slaves, Jews, gypsies, people of the Third
World, or the underclass. Such attempts inevitably give rise to another homo sacer, in an endless cycle of exclusion, obliteration, and
reincarnation. In this way, every society decides who its "sacred men" will be. However, this limit has been extended further and
further, and "in the new biopolitical horizon of states with national sovereignty ... bare life is no longer
confined to a particular place or a definite category. It now dwells in the biological body of every living
being."[89]
Warming Link
Affirmative impact claims are an opportunity cost with
confronting consumptive root cause of warmingthey
offload impacts into an incompetent South to deny
Northern complicity in global destruction
Grove 2011 (Kevin, Professor of Geography at OSU, Insuring Our
Progress/Cap/Development Link
Disinterested idea of progress, saving, or preventing
catastrophe suggests the possibility of an apolitical
world: this also creates the referent of politics as an
abstract category rather than real bodies
Mignolo 2009 (Walter, Professor of Humanities at Duke, Theory, Culture,
& Society 26.7/8, Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and DeColonial Freedom)
Theo- and ego-politics of knowledge also bracketed the body in
knowl- edge-making (Mignolo, 2007a). By locating knowledge in the mind
only, and bracketing secondary qualities (affects, emotions,
desires, anger, humilia- tion, etc.), social actors who happened to be
white, inhabiting Europe/ Western Christendom and speaking
specific languages assumed that what was right for them in that
place and which fulfilled their affects, emotions, fears and angers
was indeed valid for the rest of the planet and, conse- quently, that
they were the depositor, warrantor, creator and distributor of
universal knowledge. In the process of globally enacting the European
system of belief and structure of knowledge, human beings who were not
Christian did not inhabit the memories of Europe, from Greece through Rome,
were not familiar with the six modern imperial European languages and,
frankly, did not care much about all of that until they realized that they were
expected and requested to submit to the European (and in the 20th century
to the United States also), knowledge, belief, life style and world view.
Responses to the contrary came, since the 16th century, from all over the
globe, but imperial theo- and ego-politics of knowledge managed to prevail
through economically sustained institutions (universities, museums,
delegations, state officers, armies, etc.). Now, the type of responses I am
referring to were responses provoked by the making and remaking
of the colonial matrix of power: a complex conceptual structure that
guided actions in the domain of economy (exploitation of labor and
appropriation of land/ natural resources), authority (government,
military forces), gender/sexuality and knowledge/subjectivity. Since
the responses I am referring to were responses to the colonial
matrix of power, I would describe such responses as de-colonial
(Mignolo, 2007b). The cases/examples I offered in Section III also show that in
such responses de-colonial geo-politics of knowledge confronted imperial
theo- and ego-politically based assumptions on the universality of Western
knowledge-making and institutional grounding. But there is still another
dimension in de-colonial politics of knowl- edge relevant for my
argument: the claim that knowledge-making for well being rather
than for controlling and managing populations for imperial interest
shall come from local experiences and needs, rather than from local
imperial experiences and needs projected to the globe, invokes also
the body-politics of knowledge. Why? Because not only regions and
locales in which imperial languages were not ancestrally spoken and
that were alien to the history of Greek and Latin were disqualified
Morality Link
Their compulsive moralization is a farce that promotes the
hegemony of the law which justifies totalitarianism
Agamben 95( Giorgio, philosopher, Homo Sacer pg 35)
It is truly astounding how Kant, almost two centuries ago and under the
heading of a sublime moral feeling, was able to describe the very
condition that was to become familiar to the mass societies and
great totalitarian states of our time. For life under a law that is in
force without signifying resembles life in the state of exception, in
which the most innocent gesture or the smallest forgetfulness can
have most extreme consequences. And it is exactly this kind of life
that Kafka describes, in which law is all the more pervasive for its total lack of
content, and in which a distracted knock on the door can mark the
start of uncontrollable trials. Just as for Kant the purely formal character
of the moral law founds its claim of universal practical applicability in every
circumstance, so in Kafkas village the empty potentiality of law is so
much in force as to become indistinguishable from life. The existence
and the very body of Joseph K. 36 PART 1 : THE LOGIC OF SOVEREIGNTY
ultimately coincide with the Trial; they become the Trial. Benjamin sees this
clearly when he writes, objecting to Scholems notion of a being in force
without significance, that a law that has lost its content ceases to exist and
becomes indistinguishable from life: Whether the students have lost the
Scripture or cannot decipher it in the end amounts to the same thing, since a
Scripture without its keys is not Scripture but life, the life that is lived in the
village at the foot of the hill on which the castle stands (Benjamin and
Scholem, Briefwechsel, p. 155). And this provokes Scholem (who does not
notice that his friend has grasped the difference perfectly well) to insist that
he cannot agree that it is the same thing whether the students have lost
their Scripture or cannot decipher it, and it even seems to me that this is the
greatest mistake that can be made. I refer to precisely the difference
between these two stages when I speak of a Nothing of Revelation (ibid.,
p. 163).
Poverty Link
Concept of poverty puts a human face of capitalism,
suggesting the possible humanization of a concept which
is fundamentally and integrally not humanizable
because of its consubstantiality with colonialism
Mignolo 2009 (Walter, Professor of Humanities at Duke University,
Link Aid/Poverty
The affs attempt to play superhero is a faade that hides
the subjugation of other populations from public view
Zembylas 10(Michalinos, professor of Education at the Open University of
Threats Link
Threats constitute mechanisms to construct community
only as the opposition to said threatsthis trades in the
identity of disposability but subordinating humans to
logics
Mignolo 2009 (Walter, Professor of Humanities at Duke University,
Postmodernism Link
Postmodernists remain apolitical by recentering an idea
of reason even as they distance themselves from it
Mignolo 2007 (Walter, semiologist and professor of Humanities at Duke
Agamben Link
Agambens reliance on the figure of the Muselmann
recreates colonial violence
Scheuller 2009 (Mahani, Professor of English at the University of Florida,
form of life without dignity, a bare life that conforms to nothing and is
absolutely immanent (69). But while the idea of a form of life as
immanent might be debatable, there is nothing immanent about
the term Muselmann itself.9 Agamben is well aware of the cultural
coordinates of the terms, but chooses to spend only two pages of
Remnants interrogating the term itself. Agamben begins by citing Ryn and
Klodzinskis 1987 study on the phenomenon of the Muselmann in the
concentration camp: They excluded themselves from all relations to their
environment. If they could still move around, they did so in slow motion,
without bending their knees.... Seeing them from afar, one had the
impression of seeing Arabs praying. This image was the origin of the term
used at Auschwitz for people dying of malnutrition: Muslims (43). He follows
with Wolfgang Sofskys explanation of how the term Muslemann, in common
use in Auschwitz, spread to other camps as well. In Majdanek the living dead
were termed donkeys, in Dachau they were cretins, in Stutthof cripples,
in Buchenwald tired sheikhs and in womens camps Muselweiber/female
muslims. (Agamben, 1999: 44). Agamben does not comment on these
explanations but attempts to provide one of his own: The most likely
explanation of the term can be found in the literal meaning of the Arabic
word muslim: the one who submits unconditionally to the will of God. It is this
meaning that lies at the origin of the legends concerning Islams supposed
fatalism, legends of which are found in European culture starting with the
Middle Ages (this deprecatory sense of the term is present in European
languages, particularly in Italian). But while the Muslims resignation consists
in the conviction that the will of Allah is at work every moment and in even
the smallest events, the Muselmann of Auschwitz is instead defined by a loss
of will and consciousness. (Agamben 1999: 45) I cite this passage at length
because it demonstrates Agambens contradictory awareness of, yet
clear participation in, the discourse of Orientalism. He is cognizant of the
overdetermined nature of western ideas about Islamic fatalism and the
denigration of Muslims in the West, but the complication that the
dehumanization of Muslims might introduce into the numerous
theorizations about a post-Holocaust ethics does not concern
Agamben. Instead of interrogating the idea of Islamic fatalism,
Agamben reproduces it in the very attempt to distinguish between the
Muslims resignation and that of the Muselmann of Auschwitz. In Agambens
very certainty of what constitutes the Muslims resignation, the Muslim as
multiply constituted subject is denied; instead, the Muslim is rendered as
simply a fact, a stable object of knowledge, an ontological fact like
the Orient. What Agamben neglects to address, and what must be
addressed, is how the very idea of the thingness of bare life, the unseakable,
the grey zone as Primo Levi calls it, is thought through a process of
Othering. Why is the Muselmann as figure alone of no concern to Agamben?
How does the Muselmann in the imaginary of Europe take such a central
space that he gets deployed as the very limit of the human? Once we begin
to undertake such an examination, it becomes clear that even the very idea
of bare life, in its erasure of the Muselmann as anything but a figure,
functions contradictorily to, on the one hand, metaphorize this Other out of
existence (the Muselmann is simply the most abject camp prisoner) and to
repeatedly semanticize the figure of the Arab praying or the look of the
oriental as a complete absence of will and feeling. And yet the numerous
scholars using the idea of bare life and the Muselmann in fields as varied as
sociology, philosophy, history, legal studies, and human rights activism have
simply accepted the use of the term Muselmann along with its cultural
coordinates (e.g. Bernstein 2006; McQuillan 2005; Norris 2000; Diken and
Laustsen n.d.). Only Gil Anidjar in his groundbreaking study of the
construction of the enemy pays attention to the use of the term Muselmann
in camp. Anidjars reading demonstrates how Agambens analysis
completely ignores, for instance, the insistent manner in which the
inconsistently transliterated term Muselmann finds its way in camp
jargon (Anidjar 2003: 140). Given the semanticide committed by the
Nazis, their ability to decontextualize words completely, such an
absence of inquiry is particularly troubling (139). Anidjar rightly
refuses to accept Primo Levis explanation that Muslim is simply a
term like Canada or Mexico names given to certain buildings in camp
and which has no referential value and demonstrates instead how
Montesquieu and Hegel see both Jews and Muslims partaking in religions that
demand abjection (Anijdar 2003: 12733). Thus to accept the term
Muselmann as non-referential or to claim that its connotations in camp
literature have no relation with its usage in other contexts is to deny how
Orientalism functions in the most unlikely of contexts, normalizing the
dehumanization of the non-West. The very impossibility of naming the
basest or liminal of human conditions without resort to the figure
of the Muslim/Arab should give us pause. Indeed, the irony today is
that the Muslim/Arab is used as a limit figure standing inbetween
the human and the non-human, a figure which in Guantanamo and
in Palestine embodies the condition where life and law become
indistinguishable and the killing machine becomes operative. This
figure of bare life, concocted out of Orientalism, becomes the
justification for conditions of indefinite detention, occupation, and
ethnic cleansing.[
how and why some members of society, and by implication any of us,
can be stripped of any legal protection or community membership,
and killed or subjected to any lesser punishment including torture,
with impunity. The Native American experience is, arguably, the
paradigmatic case of entire populations being dispossessed, killed
with impunity, provided no protection legal or otherwise, or, as in the case
of the Cherokee and other southern nations, having the formal legal
recognition by both the local states and the US Supreme Court, superseded
by executive power (by President Andrew Jackson to be precise). Granted, no
book can cover every relevant case and Agambens books discussed here are
both short, if dense. But he does, in State of Exception go over a very
thorough history of states of emergency and the use of exceptional powers
by governments all over the world9 . Tracing the roots of both states of
exception and of the construction of homo sacer figures in liberal
democratic countries is a part of the exercise that Agamben is
engaged in. Thus failing to even refer to Native Americans is
significant, both with reference to the historical period when The
only good Indian is a dead Indian was a practical guide to genocide
that more closely approximates homo sacer historically than
anything I can imagine and to the present day when many Native
Americans would argue with reason that little has changed. The
second omission, more difficult to explain by Agambens geographical
origins, is any reference at all to the history of colonialism, or to
conditions in the ex-colonial world of the Global South. Arendt,
despite numerous failings of analysis and history some of which I discuss
below, nevertheless to her credit makes the relationship between imperialism
and racism in the colonies and totalitarianism in Europe a central part of
her analysis in the Origins of Totalitarianism10. Yet there is no discussion
of this relationship in Agamben . In this sense, Agamben represents an
analytical step backwards from Arendt, not a further development of her
insights. The rest of the world has dropped off the mental map. This
is not just a question of priorities, of the brevity of books that
cant cover everything, nor even of Eurocentrism though it
certainly is in part that. It is rather a serious failure of analysis and
historical imagination that, as we will see below, makes Agambens
theoretical discussion less useful and reduces dramatically its
explanatory power. For many decades, in country after country, continent
after continent, European and other colonial powers could act with
impunity and without regard to the life of, let alone legally
recognized rights of the colonized people. The Belgian Congo, and the
horrors of slavery; the repeated experience of mass famine in India (done
away with since Independence and the establishment of democratic
government); the labeling of resistance against expropriation and foreign
rule Mau Mau to define it as an atavistic throwback to savagery to enable the
British rulers to destroy it militarily; over a million dead in the Algerian
struggle for Independence against the French; the near-genocide in Libya by
the Italians, the list could go on for pages. None of it relevant,
presumably, either to states of exception, in which sovereigns are
Butler Link
Butler relies on a Eurocentric concept of the human by
positing a homology of vulnerability
Scheuller 2009 (Mahani, Professor of English at the University of Florida,
the Other fixed me there. (Fanon 1967: 109) For the black person, Fanon
suggests, an apprehension of vulnerability and loss leads not to an
empathetic subjectivity, but rather to an objecthood because the dominant
culture denies him human recognition.10 To use Agambens terms here, we
might say that the black person gets constructed as the limit of the human,
as bare life. Fanon writes: There is of course the moment of being for
others of which Hegel speaks, but every ontology is made unattainable in a
colonized and civilized society (Fanon 1967: 109). Critiquing Hegels
exposition of the reciprocity of recognition between master and slave, Fanon
emphasizes the significance of unequal power relations: For Hegel there is
reciprocity; here the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What
he wants from the slave is not recognition but work (220). Butler is well
aware of the risks in postulating a common human vulnerability as the basis
for a transformative ethics and politics and repeatedly acknowledges the
impact of systemic inequalities to ideas of a universalized vulnerability. She
writes: I do not mean to deny that vulnerability is differentiated, that
it is allocated differentially across the globe ...I am referring to violence,
vulnerability, and mourning, but there is a more general conception
of the human with which I am trying to work here, one in which we
are, from the start, given over to the other,J one in which we are,
from the start, even prior to individuation itself, by virtue of bodily
requirements, given over to some set of primary others. (Butler 2004:
31) Here lies the source of Butlers problematic humanism. It is the
attempt to create a homology between the intimate and public
spheres, the use of ahistorical and acontextual psychoanalytic
structures as paradigms for the sociopolitical, the parallel between
national policy as subject (mentioned earlier) and the human
subject
Foucault Link
Foucaults work ruined by his own unacknowledged
colonial imaginaryhe still centers Western epistemology
even by positioning it as the subject/object of a
geneoalogy
Alcoff 2007 (Linda, Professor at Syracuse University, Mignolos
Neoliberalism Link
Colonial modernity subordinates alterity so that it is
included but does not disrupt the violent colonial
consensus
Levinson 2007 (Brett, Professor of Comparative Literature at
Binghamton, South Atlantic Quarterly 106.1, Globalizing Paradigms, or, The
Delayed State of Latin American Theory)
This ideal of global liberation via heterogeneity nonetheless risks
turning into its opposite, which Hegel labels bad infinity: the endless
accumulation of more and more that does not alter the totality into
which the more inserts itself.7 In fact, universal heterogeneity,
like speculative capital, can add endlessly onto itself, subject upon
subject, agent upon agent, yet shift nothing at all since one cannot
add to infinity, or affect infinity by introducing others. Having
completed its appropriation of land, air, and sea, hence with no
more places to offer the other, global capitalism lures each new
figure, all comers, into its fold by extending to them a theoretical
lot, a transcendentalhence vacantpurely symbolic territory (it is
called identity). The lack or privation of the other, this vacancy, is hence
converted into the others property, one private property alongside other
private properties in a globe made up of an endless series of private
properties, a pluralism that is thoroughly controlled, monitored, and managed
by, and that is also completely compatible with, Western capitalism. The
subtraction or negation of the other (the emptied site) turns into that others
essence or place which, when added in, makes for and contributes to a
global multiplicity while at the time it adds or alters, precisely, nothing. The
whole, however heterogeneous, goes uninterrupted by
augmentations in number (which are indeed limitless, as borders
break down and novel encounters, hence novel peoples, form),
by all interventions or inventions. The latter, in fact, only avow the
necessity of the totality, affirmingJJJJ it as the only possible space
into which one can go. The famous idea of a neoliberal
consensus, key term of contemporary Latin American political
thought, is therefore but a label for a bad infinity. For within this
consensus, global capitalism or the market appears, increasingly, as
the sole site into which Latin American peoples, even ones not yet
extant, can enter. As an infinity, the consensus is without an
outside, therefore without any present or future alterity. Nothing
more is possible: the more one adds, the more one adds no more,
for history is over. Bets placed on the delay are thus taken off the
table, for, within a totalized heterogeneity, there is no to come,
hence nothing coming in. This is why Latin American subalternism
must indeed fail: full representation of its heterogeneity, its success,
would mean the end even of the potential for the universal
freedom upon which the discourse places its stakes
Hermeneutics Link
Hermeneutics are the corollary friend of westen
epistemology, not its opposite
Alcoff 2007 (Linda, Professor at Syracuse University, Mignolos
Arendt/Holocaust Link
Arendtian analysis/analysis that begins from the
Holocaust is centrifugal in a modernist way
Mignolo 2009 (Walter, Professor of Humanities at Duke University,
white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures
which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the
coolies of India, and the niggers of Africa (pp. 36; italics mine, WM). We
should add the Indigenous, Native, Fourth Nations, Aboriginals of Americas
from Chile to Canada, Australia and New Zealand. As for the analysis that
Cesaire imagined and suspected will reveal what he described in the
paragraph above, was perhaps providedindirectlyby Claudia Koonzs
magisterial The Nazi Conscience (2003). Koonz observes that[[[[[[[[[[[
What surprised Jewish Germans during this period was not the
cruelty of kleptocrats, fanatics, and malcontents, but the behavior
of friends, neighbors, and colleagues who were not gripped by
devotion to Nazism Germans who, in 1933, were ordinary Western
Europeans had become in 1939, anything but. (2003, pp 11-12) The telling
lesson of Cesaires suspicion and Koonzs scholarly conclusion is how
subjectivities have been formed under the naturalization of dispensability of
human lives in the frame of the colonial matrix of power. During the period
of heavy slave trade lives made dispensable for economic reasons
implied that the people involved in slave trade or benefiting
directly or indirectly from it, did not subjectively care. And if they
did not care it was because either they accepted that Africans were
not quite human or did not care because they were getting used
to accepting the fact that there are human lives who are just as
dispensable as human beings even though necessary as workers, be they
enslaved, servants or employed at minimum wage and without health
insurance, etc. In the Holocaust (in which the main victims where Jews
although other irregular people and citizens were also considered
dispensablegypsies as well as Aryan citizens alleged to have damaged
genes or homosexual inclinations, shared a heritage, language and culture
with their tormentors), were declared a problem to be solved (see chapter
on Du Bois, titled What Does It Mean to be a Problem?, by Lewis Gordon in
his Existentia Africana, Routlege, 2000,). To solve the problem it was
necessary to invent strategies (technologies as we say today) to
eradicate them from the community, to make them non-citizens, to
deprive them of all citizenship rights and once they were converted
to things (but not into commodities), to exterminate them. Hannah
Arendt offered the first conceptualization, to my knowledge, of a situation in
which human lives become dispensable when they are stripped of the legal
web that links people to the State, that is, that makes people citizens. Like
Cesaire, who saw the problems in Europe from his experience of colonial
histories, Arendt saw the problems in Africa and Asia from her
experience as a Jew in Germany. That is why Arendts view is
centrifugal while C- saire is centripetal: geo-politics of knowledge
is crucial to delink (or to decouple) from imperial assumptions that
categories of knowledge are one and uni-versal; that is,
knowledge is and should be centrifugal. First of all, Arendt
elaborates on the philosophical implications and shortcomings of
the Rights of Man. Writing while the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights was not yet stamped, Arendts reflection is on the Declarations of the
Rights of Man and of the Citizens that followed the French Revolution but
was preceded by the Bill of Rights in late seventeenth century England and
War on Drugs
The war on drugs is an example of US imperialism we
Otherize traffickers to justify endless violence
Galeano 04 interviewed by Alex Baspineiro, (Eduardo,
Uruguayan writer and journalist, Eduardo Galeano: The War on
Drugs is a Great Imperial Hypocrisy,
http://narconews.com/Issue35/article1122.html 11/8/04)
Framework
Framework: Detachment
Must incorporate epistemology mindful of colonial context
reality structured by this espistemology
Alcoff 2007 (Linda, Professor at Syracuse University, Mignolos
Framework: Language
Demand for the opposite content of Enlightenment
misunderstands how thinking works-our inability to name
it is an effect of colonial politics
Mignolo 2007 (Walter, semiologist and professor of Humanities at Duke
University, DELINKING: THE RHETORIC OF MODERNITY, THE LOGIC OF
COLONIALITY AND THE GRAMMAR OF DE-COLONIALITY
http://www.ceapedi.com.ar/imagenes/biblioteca/libros/20.pdf)
The spatial/temporal and imperial/colonial differences are organized
and interwoven through what Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano has
articulated as the colonial matrix of power, which was instituted at the
inception of the modern world (according to the narratives told by
European men of letters, intellectuals and historians) or the modern/colonial
world (if we define it through the critical consciousness of dissidents Creoles
and mestizos, as well as from oppressed, exploited and marginalized history
of Indians and Blacks in the Americas). The rhetoric of modernity with
its various distinctions, I have been arguing here, goes hand in
hand with the logic of coloniality, which allows me to make the
strong claim that coloniality is constitutive of modernity; that there
is no modernity without coloniality. Giddens (and Jrgen Habermas and
Charles Taylor as quoted earlier by Dussel) tells half of the story, the imperial
half that we also find in Las Casas, Hegel and Huntington. But what is the
logic of coloniality and how does it work? A terminological question emerges
here? Is the modern world the same as modernity? Is the colonial matrix
of power the same than coloniality? As with any question of language, the
answers are up for grab. The point should be to avoid the modern
expectation that there is a word that carries the true meaning of
the thing instead of the form of consciousness and the universe of
meaning in which the word means. Meaning is not a true value but
a reflection of cognitive (epistemic and hermeneutic) force and
import within particular geo-political designs. As in Jorge Luis Borges
The Garden of Forking Path, once you select one of three courses of action,
the second or the third un-chosen paths become real as possible worlds.
Alternative
Alt: Decoloniality
Must start from the position of the decolonial to solve
Mignolo 2009 (Walter, Professor of Humanities at Duke University,
Dispensable and Bare Lives Coloniality and the Hidden Political/Economic
Agenda of Modernity in Human Architecture: The Journal of the Sociology of
Self-Knowledge 7.2)
We arrive here at the crux of the matter: dispensable lives and bare
lives. Bare lives are the consequences of legal-political racism at
work in and for the control of authority. Thus, the concept of
citizenship fulfilled that role and insured the authority of the State
to keep people in and out of it. Citizenship is a legal-administrative entity
that was con-fused with the nationality of the person with his or her citizen
number. For that reason, undesirable nationals (in this case German Jews),
could be deprived of their citizen number because of their na- tionality; being
Jewish was not exactly belonging to a given religion but to a given ethnicity.
Those who were born free but had the bad luck of being born in
languages, religions, histories, memories, and styles of life that
were not the norm of a given nation-state (say, Spain, France or
Germany), may run into trouble . And the Holocaust was an extreme and
dramatic exercise of the state controlling the nation(s). Dispensable lives
are instead the consequences of the racist foundation of economic
capitalist practices: cost reductions, financial gains, accumulation
to re-invest to further accumulation, are economic goals that put
human lives in second place. Racism is a necessary rhetoric in order
to devaluate, and justify, dispensable lives that are portrayed (by
hegemonic discourses) as less valuable. Once again, the bottom
line of racism is devaluation and not the color of your skin. The
color of your skin is just a marker used to devaluate. Thus, human
lives as commodities and the fact that slavery transforms human
being into commodities, means that they did not just lose their
rights but they lost their humanity. At the other end, the concept
of citizenship served a similar regulatory function for controlling
population. Thus, it is not only the loss of polity itself that expels him (Man)
from humanity, as Arendt has it. Enslaved Africans have been not expelled
but pulled out from their community. It is shortsighted, and self-serving, for
Arendt to say that yet in the light of recent events it is possible to say that
even slaves still belonged to some sort of human community (pp. 297), and
to place bare life and the Holocaust above dispensable lives, human lives
transformed into commodities. Thus, both crimes against humanity
dispensable and bare livesare ingrained in the very logic of coloniality.
Certain lives become dispensable in racist rhetoric to justify economic
control, chiefly exploitation of labor and appropriation of natural. Lives are
dispensable when expelled from humanity not because the loss of polity but
because they are pulled out of their community (enslaved Africans yesterday,
young women and children today) to become commodities. Lives become
bare in racist rhetoric that justifies national homogeneity and ideal citizens.
In the first case, commodity is preferable to humanity; in the second
theory that goes beyond the point to which Max Horkheimer carried the
meaning of critique in Kant. Horkheimer was still working within the frame of
the ego-politic of knowledge and the radicalism of his position must be
understood within that frame, and his critical concept of theory could
offer no more than a project of emancipation (epistemic, political,
ethical, economic) within the conceptual frame of the
modern/colonial world. Traditional theory was, to summarize Horkheimers
position in a nutshell, constructed on the basis of givens, on the empirical
acceptance, for instance, of laws in nature that science has only to dis-cover.
Critical theory, on the other hand, would interrogate the very assumptions
that Nature is governed by laws; and will also open the question on the
consequences of such assumptions in and for a capitalist society. Critical
theory should now be taken further, to the point and project of delinking and of being complementary with decolonization. That is, as
the foundations of the non-Eurocentered diversality of an-otherparadigm68 . The Eurocentered paradigms of knowledge (its theoand egopolitical versions) has reached a point in which its own
premises should be applied to itself from the repository of
concepts, energies and visions that have been reduced to silences
or absences by the triumphal march of Western conceptual
apparatus.69 TheJ hegemonic modern/colonial and Eurocentered
paradigm70 needs to be decolonized. But how does epistemic
decolonization works? . What is its grammar (that is, its vocabulary,
syntax and semantics)? There are at least two procedures here. One
would be to show the partiality and limitations of the theo and ego
politics of knowledge and understanding. The other is offered by
growth and expansion of the geo and bio politics of knowledge and
understanding. Both are de-linking procedures. It will not suffice to
denounce its content while maintaining the logic of coloniality, and
the colonization of knowledge, intact. The target of epistemic decolonization is the hidden complicity between the rhetoric of
modernity and the logic of coloniality. For critical theory to
correspond with decolonization, we need to shift the geography of
knowledge and recast it (critical theory) within the frame of geoand bio-politics of knowledge. Thus, the first step in the grammar of
decolonization could be cast, using an expression coming from the
documents of the Universidad Intercultural de los Pueblos Indgenas del
Ecuador, learning to unlearn71 . Dussel and Fanon give us two solid starting
points to do sothe first connected with epistemic geopolitics and the
second with epistemic bio-politics. When critical theory becomes decolonial critique it has of necessity to be critical border thinking
and, by so doing, the de-colonial shift (decolonization of knowledge
and of being) marks the Eurocentered limits of critical theory as we
know it today, from early version of the Frankfurt School, to later
post-structuralists (e.g. Derrida) and postmodernists (e.g. Jameson).
Lets see how the de-colonial shift operates and why it cannot be
subsumed as epistemic break (Foucault) or paradigmatic change (Khun).
The de-colonial shift belongs literally to a different space, to the
epistemic energy and the lack of archive that has been supplanted
by the rumor of the dis-inherited or the damns in Fanons
De-linking is the bestit explains why poststructural/post-modern interventions fail and disturbs the
anchor of normalcy that perpetuates coloniality
Mignolo 2007 (Walter, semiologist and professor of Humanities at Duke
colonial differences. At the same time, because the West is all over
the rest in a outward expansion and the rest is all over the west
in an in-war mobilization lead by migrations, border thinking
becomes crucial in any de-colonial project that will start from the
weaker end of the imperial and colonial differences. When the
languages and categories began to be activated in order to build a
world in which many world will coexist, by social actors aiming at decolonization of knowledge and being and of delinking from the
imperial modernity, the splendors of human imagination and
creative will open up. Certainly, there is no safe place an any
language can be used, by social actors, to surrender to the languages and
categories of thought of Western capitalism as it is the case also with the
adaptation of corporate values in the power sector of China, Japan, the
Arabic world and Russia. De-linking requires analysis of the making and
remaking of the imperial and colonial differences and it requires
visions and strategies for the implementation of border thinking
leading to de-colonization of knowledge and of being; from here,
new concepts of economy and social organization (politics) will be
derived. Solutions from the political theories of the West, from
Aristotle and Plato to Machiavelli, Hobbes and Locke; to Marx and
Gramsci and to Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss have been exhausted
and without border thinking any exercise in this arena could only
lead to spinning the spin within the bubble of imperial modernity.
De-linking means to remove the anchor in which the normalcy
effect has been produced as to hide the fact that the anchor can
be removed and the edifice crumbled. Trans-modernity would be
the overall orientation of de-colonizing and of delinking projects, an
orientation toward pluri-versality as universal project leading toward
a world in which many worlds will co-exist. Border thinking, once
again, is one of the methods that can help us move to sustain a
visiona plur-versal and not a uni-versal vision--and to implement a set of
strategies to accomplish it. The future could no longer be owned by
one way of life (la pense unique of Ramonet), can not be dictated
by one project of liberation and de-colonization, and cannot be a
polycentric world within Western categories of thoughts. A world in
which many worlds could co-exist can only be made by the shared
work and common goals of those who inhabit, dwell in one of the
many worlds co-existing in one world and where differences are not
cast in terms of values of plus and minus degree of humanness.[[
And that is how I understand Quijanos assertion, quoted above, that
epistemic decolonization is necessary to make possible and move
toward a truly intercultural communication; to an exchange of
experiences and significations as the foundation of an-other
rationality. The exchange works as an alternative to Kosellecks
space of experience, and an-other rationality replaces the
horizon of expectations. In fact, I submit that the horizon of
expectations here will be precisely pluri-versality as a universal
project. That is, the uni-versality of the project has to be based on
the assumption that the project cannot be designed and
implemented by one ethnic group, but has to be inter-epistemic
global left means falling back into the old house while just
changing the carpet .[
options start from the principle that the regeneration of life shall
prevail over primacy of the production and reproduction of goods at
the cost of life (life in general and of humanitas and anthropos
alike!). I illustrate this direc- tion, below, commenting on Partha Chatterjees
re-orienting eurocentered modernity toward the future in which our
modernity (in India, in Central Asia and the Caucasus, in South America,
briefly, in all regions of the world upon which eurocentered modernity was
either imposed or adopted by localctors assimilating to local histories
inventing and enacting global designs) becomes the statement of
interconnected dispersal in which de-colonial futures are being played out.
new decision concerning the threshold beyond which life ceases to be politically
relevant, becomes only 'sacred life,' and can as such be eliminated without
punishment" (p. 139). This expansion of the range of life meriting protection does not limit sovereignty,
but provides sites for its expansion. In recent decades, factors that once might have been indifferent to
sovereignty become a field for its exercise. Attributes such as national status, economic status, color, race,
sex, religion, geo-political position have become the subjects of rights declarations. From a liberal or
cosmopolitan perspective, such enumerations expand the range of life protected from and serving as a
limit upon sovereignty. Agamben's analysis suggests the contrary. If indeed sovereignty is bio-political
before it is juridical, then juridical rights come into being only where life is incorporated
within the field of bio-sovereignty. The language of rights, in other words, calls up and
depends upon the life caught within sovereignty: homo sacer. Agamben's alternative
is therefore radical. He does not contest particular aspects of the tradition. He does not suggest we
expand the range of rights available to life. He does not call us to deconstruct a tradition whose power lies
in its indeterminate status. Instead, he suggests we take leave of the tradition and all its
terms. Whatever being is a life that defies the classifications of the tradition, and its
reduction of all forms of life to homo sacer. Whatever being therefore has no common
ground, no presuppositions, and no particular attributes. It cannot be broken into
discrete parts; it has no essence to be separated from its attributes; and it has no
common substrate of existence defining its relation to others. Whatever being cannot
then be broken down into some common element of life to which additive series of
rights would then be attached. Whatever being retains all its properties, without any
of them constituting a different valuation of life (1993: 18.9). As a result, whatever
being is "reclaimed from its having this or that property, which identifies it as
belonging to this or that set, to this or that class (the reds, the French, the Muslims) -- and it
is reclaimed not for another class nor for the simple generic absence of any
belonging, but for its being-such, for belonging itself." (0.1-1.2). Indifferent to any distinction
between a ground and added determinations of its essence, whatever being cannot be grasped by a power
built upon the separation of a common natural life, and its political specification. Whatever being dissolves
the material ground of the sovereign exception and cancels its terms. This form of life is less postmetaphysical or anti-sovereign, than a-metaphysical and a-sovereign. Whatever is indifferent not because
its status does not matter, but because it has no particular attribute which gives it more value than
another whatever being. As Agamben suggests, whatever being is akin to Heidegger's Dasein. Dasein, as
Heidegger describes it, is that life which always has its own being as its concern -- regardless of the way
any other power might determine its status. Whatever being, in the manner of Dasein, takes the form of an
"indissoluble cohesion in which it is impossible to isolate something like a bare life. In the state of
exception become the rule, the life of homo sacer, which was the correlate of sovereign power, turns into
existence over which power no longer seems to have any hold" (Agamben 1998: 153). We should pay
attention to this comparison. For what Agamben suggests is that whatever being is not any abstract,
inaccessible life, perhaps promised to us in the future. Whatever being, should we care to see it,
is all around us, wherever we reject the criteria sovereign power would use to classify
and value life. "In the final instance the State can recognize any claim for identity -even that of a State identity within the State . . . What the State cannot tolerate in any way, however, is
that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without a
representable condition of belonging" (Agamben 1993:85.6). At every point where we refuse the
distinctions sovereignty and the state would demand of us, the possibility of a nonstate world, made up of whatever life, appears.
Biopower Alt
The alternative is to teat away from the colonialist
framing. We bring in usage of the law and that alloys to
be free from sovereign content and leads to true
liberation.
AGAMBEN 05
[Giorgio philosopher, prof aesthetics U. Verona State of Exception p63-4]
In the Kafka essay, the enigmatic image of a law that is studied but no longer practiced corresponds, as a sort of remnant, to the
unmasking of mythico-juridical violence effected by pure violence. There is, therefore, still a possible figure of law
after
its nexus with violence and power has been deposed, but it is a law that no longer has force or application,
like the one in which the new attorney, leafing through our old books, buries himself in study, or like the one that Foucault
may have had in mind when he spoke of a new law that has been freed from all discipline and all relation
to sovereignty.
What can be the meaning of a law that survives its deposition in such a way? The difficulty Benjamin faces here corresponds to a
problem that can be formulated (and it was effectively formulated for the first time in primitive Christianity and then later in the
Marxian tradition) in these terms: What becomes of the law after it messianic fulfillment? (This is the controversy that opposes Paul to
the Jews of his time.) And what becomes of the law in a society without classes? (This is precisely the debate
between Vyshinsky and Pashukanis.) These are the questions that Benjamin seeks to answer with his
reading of the new attorney. Obviously, it is not a question here of a transitional phase that never achieves
its end, nor of a process of infinite deconstruction that, in a maintaining the law in a spectral life, can no
longer get to the bottom of it. The decisive point here is that the law no longer practiced, but studied is
not justice, but only the gate that leads to it. What opens a passage toward justice is not the erasure of law,
but its deactivation and inactivity [inoperosita] that is, another use of the law. This is precisely what the force-of
law (which keeps the law working [in opera] beyond its formal suspension) seeks to prevent. Kafkas characters and this is why they
interest us have to do with this spectral figure of the law in the state of exception; they seek, each one following his or her own
strategy, to study and deactivate it, to play with it.One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects,
not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good . What is found after the law is not a
more proper and original use value that precedes the law, but a new use that is born only after it. And use,
which has been contaminated by law, must also be freed from its own value. This liberation is the task of
study, or of play. And this studious play is the passage that allows us to arrive at that justice that one of
Benjamins posthumous fragments defines as a state of the world in which the world appears as a good that
absolutely cannot be appropriated or made juridical (Benjamin 1992, 41).
have developed the concept and study of biopolitics. In any case, however, the entry of zoe into the sphere of the polis the
politicization of bare life as such constitutes the decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of
the political-philosophical categories of classical thought. It is even likely that if politics today seems to be passing through a lasting
eclipse, this is because politics has failed to reckon with this foundational event of modernity. The enigmas
(Furet, LAllemagne nazi, p. 7) that our century has proposed to historical reason and that remain with us (Nazism is only the
most disquieting among them) will be solved only on the terrain biopolitics on which they were formed. Only
within a biopolitical horizon will it be possible to decide whether the categories whose opposition founded modern politics (right/left,
private/public, absolutism/democracy, etc.) and which have been steadily dissolving, to the point of entering today into a real zone of
indistinction will have to be abandoned or will, instead, eventually regain the meaning they lost in that very
horizon. And only a reflection that, taking up Foucaults and Benjamins suggestion, thematically interrogates the
link between bare life and politics, a link that secretly governs the modern ideologies seemingly most
distant from one another, will be able to bring the political out of its concealment and, at the same tine,
return thought to its practical calling.
Impacts
Slow Violence
Catastrophic violence representations trade off with
critiquing slow violencethe real under the radar threat
to life
Nixon 2011 (Rob, Professor of English at UW-Madison, Slow Violence and
the Environmentalism of the Poor p. 2-3)
Three primary concerns animate this book, chief among them my con- viction
that we urgently need to rethinkpolitically, imaginatively, and
theoreticallywhat I call slow violence. By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed
destruc- tion that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional
violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence is
customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in
time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant
sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of
violence, a violence that is neither spectacu- lar nor instantaneous,
but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions
playing out across a range of temporal scales. In so doing, we also
need to engage the representational, narrative, and strategic challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence. Climate
change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation,
the radioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host of other
slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes present formidable
represen- tational obstacles that can hinder our efforts to mobilize
and act decisively. The long dyingsthe staggered and staggeringly
discounted casualties, both human and ecological that result from
wars toxic aftermaths or climate changeare underrepresented in
strategic planning as well as in human memory. Had Summers
advocated invading Africa with weapons of mass destruction, his proposal
would have fallen under conventional definitions of violence and been
perceived as a military or even an imperial invasion. Advocating invading
countries with mass forms of slow-motion toxic- ity, however, requires
rethinking our accepted assumptions of violence to include slow violence.
Such a rethinking requires that we complicate conven- tional
assumptions about violence as a highly visible act that is
newsworthy because it is event focused, time bound, and body
bound. We need to account for how the temporal dispersion of slow
violence affects the way we per- ceive and respond to a variety of
social afflictionsfrom domestic abuse to posttraumatic stress and, in
particular, environmental calamities. A major challenge is
representational: how to devise arresting stories, images, and
symbols adequate to the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed
effects. Crucially, slow violence is often not just attritional but also
exponential, operating as a major threat multiplier; it can fuel longterm, proliferat- ing conflicts in situations where the conditions for
sustaining life become increasingly but gradually degraded. Politically
and emotionally, different kinds of disaster possess unequal heft.
from slow violence are, moreover, out of sync not only with our
narrative and media expectations but also with the swift seasons of
electoral change. Politicians routinely adopt a last in, first out
stance toward environmental issues, admitting them when times are
flush, dumping them as soon as times get tight. Because preventative
or remedial environmental legislation typically targets slow violence, it
cannot deliver dependable electoral cycle results, even though those results
may ultimately be life saving. Relative to bankable pocketbook actions
therell be a tax rebate check in the mail next Augustenvironmental
payouts seem to lurk on a distant horizon. Many politiciansand indeed
many votersroutinely treat environmental action as critical yet not urgent.
And so generation after generation of two- or four-year cycle politicians add
to the pileup of defer- rable actions deferred. With rare exceptions, in the
domain of slow violence yes, but not now, not yet becomes the
modus operandi. How can leaders be goaded to avert catastrophe
when the political rewards of their actions will not accrue to them
but will be reaped on someone elses watch decades, even centuries,
from now? How can envi- ronmental activists and storytellers work to counter
the potent political, corporate, and even scientific forces invested in
immediate self-interest, procrastination, and dissembling? We see such
dissembling at work, for instance, in the afterword to Michael Crichtons 2004
environmental con- spiracy novel, State of Fear, wherein he argued that we
needed twenty more years of data gathering on climate change before any
policy decisions could be ventured.17 Although the National Academy of
Sciences had assured former president George W. Bush that humans were
indeed causing the earth to warm, Bush shopped around for views that
accorded with his own skepticism and found them in a private meeting with
Crichton, whom he described as an expert scientist. To address the
challenges of slow violence is to confront the dilemma Rachel Carson faced
almost half a century ago as she sought to dramatize what she eloquently
called death by indirection.18 Carsons subjects were biomagnification and
toxic drift, forms of oblique, slow-acting violence that, like climate change,
pose formidable imaginative difficulties for writers and activists alike. In
struggling to give shape to amorphous menace, both Car- son and reviewers
of Silent Spring resorted to a narrative vocabulary: one reviewer portrayed
the book as exposing the new, unplotted and myste- rious dangers we insist
upon creating all around us,19 while Carson her- self wrote of a shadow
that is no less ominous because it is formless and obscure.20 To confront
slow violence requires, then, that we plot and give figurative shape
to formless threats whose fatal repercussions are dispersed across
space and time. The representational challenges are acute, requiring
creative ways of drawing public attention to catastrophic acts that
are low in instant spectacle but high in long-term effects. To
intervene representation- ally entails devising iconic symbols that
embody amorphous calamities as well as narrative forms that infuse
those symbols with dramatic urgency.
Imperialism
The catastrophes of imperialism trump other impacts
Modern Western
Civilization used war as well as peace to gain the whole world as a domain
to benefit itself at the expense of others: The expansion of the
culture and institutions of modern civilization from its centers in
Europe was made possible by imperialistic war It is true missionaries and
hand gun to the atom bomb, from the printing press to the mass media).
traders had their share in the work of expanding world civilization, but always with the support, immediate
or in the background, of armies and navies (pp. 251-252). The importance of dominance as a primary
[Dominance]
is probably the most important single element in the causation of
major modern wars (p. 85). European empires were thrown up all over
the world in this process of benefiting some at the expense of others, which was
characterized by armed violence contributing to structural violence: World-empire is built by
conquest and maintained by force Empires are primarily
organizations of violence (pp. 965, 969). The struggle for empire has
motive in civilized war in general was also emphasized for modern war in particular:
greatly increased the disparity between states with respect to the political control of resources, since there
can never be enough imperial territory to provide for all (p. 1190). This disparity between states, not to
mention the disparity within states, both of which take the form of racial differences in life expectancies,
Probably at least 10 per cent of deaths in modern civilization can be attributed directly or indirectly to
war The trend of war has been toward greater cost, both absolutely and relative to population The
proportion of the population dying as a direct consequence of battle has tended to increase (pp. 246,
structural violence was a function of armed violence, past and present, then Wrights estimate was very
civilization is
responsible for one-third of 20th century deaths. This is surely selfdestruction carried to a high level of efficiency. The structural situation has been
conservative indeed. Assuming that war is some function of civilization, then
improving throughout the 20th century, however, so that structural violence caused only 20% of all
deaths in 1980 (Eckhardt, 1983c). There is obviously room for more improvement. To be sure, armed
violence in the form of revolution has been directed toward the reduction of structural violence, even as
imperial
violence came first, in the sense of creating structural violence, before revolutionary violence
emerged to reduce it. It is in this sense that structural violence was
basically, fundamentally, and primarily a function of armed violence
in its imperial form. The atomic age has ushered in the possibility,
and some would say the probability, of killing not only some of us for
the benefit of others, nor even of killing all of us to no ones benefit,
but of putting an end to life itself! This is surely carrying selfdestruction to some infinite power beyond all human comprehension. Its too much, or
armed violence in the form of imperialism has been directed toward its maintenance. But
superfluous, as the Existentialists might say. Why we should care is a mystery. But, if we do, then the need
for civilized peoples to respond to the ethical challenge is very urgent indeed.
think that Pax Americana vv:ill be able to avoid the same fate. While
a feverish nationalism might sustain elite domestic legitimacy
temporarily, it cannot secure the same kind of popular support
internationally, any more than could a United States-managed world
economy that sows its own dysfunctions in the form of mounting
chaos, poverty. and inequality. To the extent the United States is
determined to set itself above the rest of the world, brandishing
technologically awesome military power and threatening planetary survival in
the process, it winds up subverting its own requirements for
international stability and hegemony. In a perpetual struggle to
legitimate their actions, American leaders invoke the familiar and trusted, but
increasingly hollow, pretext of exporting democracy and human rights. With
the eclipse of the Communist threat, U.S. foreign policy followed the path of
"humanitarian intervention," cynically employing seductive motifs like
multiculturalism, human rights, and democratic pluralism-all naturally
designed for public consumption. Few knowledgeable observers outside the
United States take such rhetoric seriously, so its propagandistic merit is
confined mainly to the domestic sphere, although even here its
credibility is waning. "Democracy" becomes another self-serving facade for
naked U.S. geopolitical interests, even as its popular credibility has become
nearly exhausted, all the more with the fraudulent claims invoked to justify
the war on Iraq. Strikingly, the concept of democracy (global or domestic)
receives litde critical scrutiny within American political discourse, the mass
media, or even academia; the de~ocratic ~umanitarian motives of U.S.
foreign policy have become an arncle of fa.tth, and not just among
neoconservatives. Yet even the most cursory inventory of the postwar
historical record demonstrates a pervasive legacy of U.S. support for
authoritarian regimes across the globe and a rathe_r flagr~t contempt for
democracy where it hinders (imputed) nanonal mterests. Throughout the
Middle East and Central Asia the United States has established close ties with
a variety of dictators and monarchs willing to collaborate with American
geopolitical and neoliberal agendas. The recent armed interventions in
the Balkans, Mghanistan, and Iraq have left behind poor, chaotic,
violence-ridden societies far removed from even the most generous
definition of pluralist democracy. The case of Iraq is particularly
instructive. Framing "preemptive" war as a strike against Saddarn Hussein's
tyranny and for "liberation;' the Bush administration-its assertions regarding
terrorist links, weapons of mass destruction, and inuninent Iraqi military
threats shown to be liesscandalously trumpets the old myths while corporate
boondoggles become more transparent by the day. The recent experience of
U.S. involvement in Iraq reveals everything but democratic intent: support for
Hussein throu~hout the 1980s, including his catastrophic wa.t against Iran;
two devastanng military invasions; more than a decade of United States-led
economic sanctions costing hundreds of thousands of lives; surveillance and
bombings spanning more than a decade; repeated coup and assassination
plots~ cynic~ use of the UN inspections process for intelligence and covert
operatlons; atd to terrorist insurgents; an illegal, costly, and dictatorial
military occupation. As elsewhere, U.S. ambitions in Iraq were never about
democracy but were and are a function of resource wars, geopolitical
strategy, and domestic pressures exerted by a powerful war machine. The
U.S. war economy, providing future ammunition to the new Left and
succeeding antiwar movements. These conceptual breakthroughs, however,
would be largely abandoned throughout the 1980s and 1990s owing in part to
the famous "Vietnam syndrome," in part to the grov.ring backlash against
movements of the 1960s, in part to an increasing focus on domestic issues.
Aside from a small nucleus of radical intellectuals, it seemed no
longer fashionable to indulge in discourses related to U.S. imperial
power, now considered beyond the pale of rational debate. Much of
what Mills wrote before his untimely death in 1963 was less a reflection on
the existing state of affairs than a prophetic look to the future. Writing in the
early days of the cold war, he was not entirely able to foresee the length and
intensity of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry, the horrors of counterinsurgency war in
Indochina, or later military interventions that would help legitimate American
imperial expansion. Mills did, nonetheless, grasp a fundamental logic of U.S.
capitalism grounded in relentless pursuit of wealth and power across the
globe-a pursuit necessitating a huge military machine. For Mills, the power
elite was comprised of people "in command of the major hierarchies and
organizations of modern society. They rule the big corporations. They run the
machinery of state and claim its prerogatives. They direct the military
establishment."' As he put it: During modem times, and especially in the U.S.,
men had come to look upon history as a peaceful continuum interrupted by
war. But now; the American elite does not have any real image of peace ....
The only seriously accepted plan for "'peace" is the fully loaded pistol. In
short war or a high state of war preparedness is felt to be the normal and
seemingly permanent condition of the U.S.2 Mills saw that the Pentagon had
already become a behemoth political and economic structure in its own right,
its elites increasingly prepared to view world politics in distinctly military
terms. And like Melman later, he understood the crucial role of science and
teclmology in buttressing the war economy. Mills viewed the Pentagon system
as far more than an instrument of foreign policy; it would be integral to the
development of a militarized society and culture. Thus: "American militarism,
in fully developed form, would mean the triumph in all areas oflife of the
military metaphysics, and hence the subordination to it of all other ways
oflife."3 That such tendencies were little more than embryonic at the time
Mills vvas writing lends his insights even greater power. What Mills saw in the
1950s was, oddly enough, a military-industrial complex that few others were
able to see-then or later. The structural and ideological features of the
Pentagon system have been in place since roughly the time of Pearl Harbor.
U.S. military spending remained more or less constant throughout the cold
war years, at $300 billion in constant fiscal year 2000 dollars, fell modesdy
and briefly during the 1990s, and then rose dramatically after 9/11, with
projected levels of$500 billion by 2008. U.S. military forces remain scattered
across the globe, in more than one hundred countries at nearly one thousand
installations, with several hundred ships deployed in the major oceans and
seas and a massive air fleet ready to attack at a moment's notice-all armed
with enough nuclear weaponry to destroy the earth many times over. With
Star \\lars, moreover, the United States is the only nation dedicated to a fullfledged militarization of space, enhancing its surveillance, intelligence, and
strike capabilities. fu of 2003 the Pentagon accounted for nearlv 45 percent of
total world military spending, triple what Russia and Clrina ~ogether allocate,
more than the next nine nations combined, and roughly twenty-five times the
military ourlays of all designated rooue states taken together. The United
States is likely to spend hundreds of bifuons of dollars maintaining its armed
presence in the Middle East, much US cc " "th.e of it going to the occupatlon
oflraq as part of the . . enort to remap region. Since 1990 the United States
has sold nearly $200 billion m arms to 140 countries, and it plans vast new
sales in connection wLth the eastvl~~d expansion of NATO. When framed by
an increasingly aggressive geopolitlcal strategy, defined as full-spectrum
dominance, 1t 15 easy to see how these elements of militarism have
provided U.S. elites with enough power to block rival centers of power-yet
another meaning of the New World Order. &, Mills was the first to foresee, the
war economy, the Pentagon bureaucracy, and an aggressive foreign policy
converge wii:P.in the same matrix of development; they share an identical
logic. Since World War II the US military has provided an international shield
for Western corporate and financialmterests, more globalized today than
ever. At the same time, military Keynes1amsm as a tUun of state qit:ilism has
furnished a major stimulus for domestic economic f!Towth on a foundation of
scientific and technological innovation wedded to :normous corporate
profits.&. Noam Chomsky observes, "It is difficult to imagine a system better
designed for the benefit of the privileged few than the military system:'4
Legitimated by the need to wage global combat agamst a series of
"enemies," the Pentagon system establishes a nearly 1deal umty of state,
economy, and armed forces-a unity not matched by any other nation. The
deflected and sublimated discourse of U.S. militarism has become
one of the tragedies of American public life, obscuring from view the
terrible costs and consequences of Empire: millions of human
casualties resulting from a legacy of foreign interventions, trillions
of dollars in resources drained from the national treasury, ecological
devastation, ongoing threat of nuclear catastrophe, militarization of
society, evisceration of democratic practices, corruption of
international agencies and institutions. While such realities might seem
obvious enough to any rational observer, they ha~e received little attention
within the established public sphere, reflectlng a poverty of discourse that is
simultaneously political, intellectual, and cultural. The post-9/11 milieu has
simply deepened this retreat, even as the role of the U.S. military in world
politics becomes the object of heightened (but uncritical) attention. What
Mills viewed as rather axiomatic in the 1950s lS met today either ""With
silence or celebratory acceptance. . This gulf between discourse and reality is
nowhere more ob~ous th~ in an educational system that seems explicirly
designed to mysnfy soc1al awareness; the topic of U.S. imperial and military
power, except where occasl~ nally celebrated, is largely taboo. This is just as
true for university-level reading as in high school or the lower grades. A
survey of thirty-six widely used college texts m the fields of history, political
science, and sociologythose disClplines expected to address the U.S. role in
world affairs-reveals some fascinating but disturbing information. No fewer
than twenty-seven of these required course readings, ranging in length from
three hundred to six hundred pages, contain absolutely nothing about the
American military m any of 1ts dimenswns. The nine remaining texts present
only minimal references, usually no more than one paragraph and never
more than three pages, all totally lacking in critical perspective. Such
Structural Fascism
Coloniality is characterized by a soft fascism that exerts
violence on everything and propagates intentional wars to
prop up empire
Escobar 2004 (Arturo, Professo fo Anthrhopology at Duke University, in
Third World Quarterly 25.1 After the Third World?)
One of the main consequences, for Santos, of the collapse of
emancipation into regulation is the structural predominance of
exclusion over inclusion. Either because of the exclusion of many of those
formerly included, or because those who in the past were candidates for
inclusion are now prevented from being so, the problematic of exclusion
has become terribly accentuated, with ever growing numbers of
people thrown into a veritable 'state of nature'. The size of the
excluded class varies of course with the centrality of the country in
the world system, but it is particularly staggering in Asia, Africa
and Latin America. The result is a new type of social fascism as 'a
social and civilizational regime'.20 This regime, paradoxically,
coexists with democratic societies, hence its novelty. This fascism
may operate in various modes: in terms of spatial exclusion;
territories struggled over by armed actors; the fascism of insecurity;
and of course the deadly financial fascism, which at times dictates
the marginalisation of entire regions and countries that do not
fulfil the conditions needed for capital, according to the IMF and its
faithful management consultants.2' To the former Third World correspond
the highest levels of social fascism of these kinds. This is, in sum, the world
that is being created by globalisation from above, or hegemonic
globalisation. Before moving on, it is important to complete this rough
representation of today's global capitalist modernity by looking at
the US-led invasion of Iraq in early 2003. Among other things, this
episode has at last made two things particularly clear: first, the willingness
to use unprecedented levels of violence to enforce dominance on a
global scale; second, the unipolarity of the current empire. In
ascension since the Thatcher-Reagan years, this unipolarity reached its
climax with the post-li September regime, based on a new
convergence of military, economic, political and religious interests
in the USA. In Alain Joxe's compelling vision of imperial globality,
what we have been witnessing since the first Gulf war is the rise of
an empire that increasingly operates through the management of
asymmetrical and spatialised violence, territorial control, sub
contracted massacres, and 'cruel little wars', all of which are aimed
at imposing the neoliberal capitalist project. At stake is a type of
regulation that operates through the creation of a new horizon of
global violence. This empire regulates disorder through financial
and military means, pushing chaos to the extent possible to the
outskirts of empire, creating a 'predatory' peace to the benefit of a
global noble caste and leaving untold poverty and suffering in its
path. It is an empire that does not take responsibility for the well-
being of those over whom it rules. As Joxe puts it: The world today is
united by a new form of chaos, an imperial chaos, dominated by the
imperium of the United States, though not controlled by it. We lack the
words to describe this new system, while being surrounded by its images ...
World leadership through chaos, a doctrine that a rational European school
would have difficulty imagining, necessarily leads to weakening states-even
in the United States-through the emerging sovereignty of corporations and
markets.22 The new empire thus operates not so much through conquest,
but through the imposition of norms (free-markets, US-style democracy and
cultural notions of consumption, and so forth). The former Third World is,
above all, the theatre of a multiplicity of cruel little wars which,
rather than being barbaric throwbacks, are linked to the current
global logic. From Colombia and Central America to Algeria, subSaharan Africa and the Middle East these wars take place within
states or regions, without threatening empire but fostering
conditions favourable to it. For much of the former Third World
(and of course for the Third World within the core) is reserved 'the
World-chaos', free-market slavery, and selective genocide.23 In
some cases this amounts to a sort of 'paleo-micro-colonialism'
within regions,24 in others to balkanisation, in yet others to brutal
internal wars and massive displacement to free up entire regions
for transnational capital (particularly in the case of oil, but also
diamonds, timber, water, genetic resources, and agricultural
lands). Often these cruel little wars are fuelled by mafia networks,
and intended for macroeconomic globalisation. It is clear that this new
Global Empire ('the New World Order of the American imperial monarchy')25
articulates the 'peaceful expansion' of the free-market economy with
omnipresent violence in a novel regime of economic and military global- ityin other words, the global economy comes to be supported by a global
organisation of violence and vice versa.26 On the subjective side,
what one increasingly finds in the Souths (including the South within the
North) are 'diced identities' and the transformation of cultures of solidarity
into cultures of destruction.
Discomfort Good
Discomfort suggests the limits of systems and what
exceeds them
Stone-Mediatore 1998 (Shari, Professor of Philosophy, Chandra
Biopolitics Impact
Sovereign forms of politics operate in management of
biological life. When power of the state that exercise
itself is based on the control of the body this becomes bio
politics. This destroys life and allows manifestation inside
the state of exception.
EDKINS 0
Professor of ptx at wales university-card was cut from alternatives 25:1-page 3-6
According to Agamben's account in Homo Sacer, the first move of classical
Western politics
was the separation of the biological and the political. The natural life of zoe, understood
as the simple fact of living common to all living beings, was excluded from the polis and confined
to the oikos, or domestic sphere(article continues2 pages)
Like the feminists, Agamben argues that the separation of zoe and bios is a practice of
inclusion by exclusion that isconstitutive of sovereignty in the modern Western sense
from the beginning. In other words, the exclusion of zoe from the polis is at the same
time an inclusion. It is not just with the rise of the modern state, as Michel Foucault would
have us believe, that zoe is included in state power. Foucault argues that at the
beginning of the modern era, natural life comes to be included more and more in the
mechanisms and calculations of state power. At this point, politics becomes biopolitics,
and whereas for Aristotle man was a living animal with a capacity for political existence, modern man
becomes "an animal whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question." Modernity for
Foucault is the point at which the species and the individual as a simple living body
become what is at stake in a society's political strategies. At one and the same time
it becomes possible both to protect life and to organize a holocaust. However, according
to Agamben this picture needs to be corrected and Foucault's analysis of power in modernity completed .
Sovereign power in the West is constituted from the start by the very inclusion by
exclusion of natural life: sovereignty is the originary structure in which law refers to
life. More than this inclusion by exclusion, sovereign power in the West is constituted by its ability to
suspend itself in a state of exception, or ban: "The originary relation of law to life is not application but
abandonment." The paradox of sovereignty is that the sovereign is at the same time inside and outside the
sovereign order: the sovereign can suspend the law. What defines the rule of law is the state of exception
when law is suspended. The very space in which juridical order can have validity is created and defined
through the sovereign exception. However, the exception that defines the structure of
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
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
who are its symbol reproduced itself a new, there by turning the whole German people into sacred life
that is doomed to death and into a biological body that has to be infinitely purified (by eliminating the mentally ill
and the carriers of hereditary diseases). And today, in a different and yet analogous way, the capitalistic-democratic plan to
eliminate the poor not only reproduced inside itself the people of the excluded but also turns all the
populations of the Third World into naked life. Only a politics that has been able to come to terms with the
fundamental biopolitical split of the West will be able to arrest this oscillation and put an end to the civil
war that divides the people and the cities of the Earth. .
Answers to:
relation between Delany's subjective perceptual clarity and his text. Without
paying attention to these relations between Delany's experience and his
writing, Scott cannot distinguish the text's value from other representations
of gay identity or of the sexual revolution; it is merely "the substitution of
one interpretation for another." If Scott intimates, but never fully confronts,
the role of experience in Delany's rewriting of his identity, it is because
"experience" in her theory can be nothing but a mirror of available
discourses (whether these be ruling or oppositional discourses), with no
excess. Ironically, such a theory reverses the empiricist privileging of
subjective experience over language only to retain its one-dimensional,
vision-oriented structure. Scott's insight is that vision is not immediate
contact with an outside world but is always already mediated by discursive
categories; yet she still considers this "seeing" of the world (now understood
to be ideologically constituted) to be all of experience. In effect, experience
for Scott is what Harding calls "spontaneous consciousness": the awareness
one has of one's "individual experience" before any reflection on that
experience or any consideration of the social construction of one's iden- tity
(Harding 1991, 269, 287, 295). As Harding suggests, we cannot call this
experience "immediate," for it is thoroughly mediated by dominant cultural
texts. It is, however, spontaneous, for it is experienced as if it were an
immedi- ate view of one's life and world. Empiricists naturalize this
spontaneously conscious awareness; Scott recognizes this to be prefigured
by discursive prin- ciples. For both, though, this exhausts experience.
Indeed, this is why Scott is not concerned to distinguish between experience
and language; in her view, experience can be nothing other than what
codified categories enable one to conceptualize, and hence to "see." Scott's
unwitting narrowing of the realm of experience is also marked by her single
reference to, and subsequent neglect of, the visceral domain. If she were to
address the latter, she would confront aspects of experience that, while
perhaps inextricable from language, are not mediated by language in the
same way or to the same extent as perception.9 Scott's inattention to
visceral experience is symptomatic of her reduction of the many layers of
experience to a spontaneous "vision." To be sure, Scott is interested in the
possibility of "seeing differently." Still, lacking a concept of experience
distinct from discourse, she cannot explain the resources for creating or the
motivations for employing oppositional dis- courses. Flattening experience
into discursively constituted perception, Scott can recognize only two ways
of treating experience: a naive empiricist presen- tation of experience as
evidence, or an (objectifying) analysis of the language in which others have
represented experience. The only critical project here is the theorist's
analysis of language. Yet Scott's own reading of Delany indicates a text that
fits into neither of these categories, but rather works within the tension
between writing and experience and responds creatively to that tension.
A2: Perm
Half measures that attempt to more fully universalize and
include cannot sever the 1AC methodologythis
circumscribes the scope of the permutations capacity to
succeed
Alcoff 2007 (Linda, Professor at Syracuse University, Mignolos
there, but the way they are represented as unrepresentable (as escaping).
Naming, says de Certeau, is not the painting of a reality any more than it
is elsewhere; it is a performative act organizing what it enunciates. It does
what it says and constitutes the savagery it declares. Just as one
excommunicates by naming, the name wild both creates and defines what
the scriptural economy situates outside of itself.26 To understand
subalternity thus is to side with the argument that it is a
discursive effect. This, at least, seems to me the most theoretically
interesting use of the term, although the word subaltern can be, and indeed
has been, used to think through other sorts of problems as well. In his
Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, Ranajit Guha calls our attention
to the way insurgent peasants in India were, much like the Quebra-Quilos
rioters, deemed nonpolitical by the functionaries of the colonial state. They
were excommunicated from the category of the political as well as the
categories of reason and agency (so fundamental to a post-Enlightenment
notion of the human) and assimilated to other, nonhuman categories. The
natural rhetoric that organizes so many representations of peasant
insurgency noted by Guha (peasant rebellions heaved like earthquakes
and spread like wildfire) flags the way the subaltern becomes
unrecognizable in human terms. In other words, since the act of insurgency
shows that these peasants have not been fully subjected, their actions
cannot therefore be understood through the category of the subject. In
saying this I am relying on Althussers formulation of the subject as
fundamentally subjected through ideology, a formulation which makes visible
the articulations between the grounds upon which the modern (human)
subject is constructed and those upon which modern political systems are
built or at least imagined. When I claim the subaltern is the nonsubject,
therefore, what I mean is that this is how they are represented. This use of a
notion of subalternity refers thus not to an autonomous or
external domain but to the rebellions as they were committed to
paper, to the rebellions as they were rendered unintelligible,
turned into the equivalent of nonsense or noise. Gayatri Spivaks
famous and controversial statement that the subaltern could not
speak proposed that such excommunication (to continue with de
Certeaus term) could not be undone retroactively. Denied a
subjectJJJJJ position from which to speak in the first place, they
could not be granted such a position in hindsight. This line of
thought on subalternity addresses therefore the problem of
limitsthe limits of representation and the limits of knowledge.
Not just any limits, however, but limits that are specifically a
consequence of problems of dominance and power. On the one hand,
the nonsense of the subaltern confirms the (colonial) order
because it is an effect of the discursive practices and the grid of
intelligibility of that order. It also confirms the colonial order as what is, by
definition, not nonsense. But this is not the whole story told by
subalternity: the production of the rebellions as sheer noise also
betrays the existence of a pressure on that same order, which is,
after all, responding to an insurgency. Subalternity spells out an
it was telling that by the time of the fourth WSF in Mumbai, many who felt
that the particular concerns of race and peasantry were being
ignored, organized to form Mumbai Resistance 2004.[[ Others, like Aziz
Choudry (2005: 1), argue that The doomsday scenario of corporate
rule, transnational plunder, environmental and social disaster which
many opponents of the global free market economy warn of has
long been everyday reality for many Indigenous Peoples. To make
this critique is not to question the motivations of the organizers of the
World Social Forum or to suggest that the issues raised in the forum are
not integral to understanding and resisting a rapacious capitalism.
But precisely because the WSF presents itself as a global resistance
movement, we should be vigilant about what constitutes the global
and what gets left out. Whose global resistance and for whom are
questions we should continue to raise. What critics like Choudry
suggest is that by downplaying the importance of movements for
self-determination, these voices for global resistance fail to
acknowledge longstanding injustices and the continued colonization
of settler colonies, issues that ought to be central to a global civil
society. The end of the Cold War and the need to find theoretical paradigms
useful for the post-9/11 world have created in the West an allure for different
kinds of universal theories. Yet, as some critics have suggested,
universalizing or globalizing theories need to recognize the limits of
universalization at the outset. Thus, Etienne Balibar (1995) proffers a notion
of ambiguous universality by contending that no discussion about
universality can proceed with a univocal concept of the Universal.
Similarly, Zillah Eisenstein (2004: 29) reformulates humanism by suggesting
possibilities for multiple partial connections which are similarly different and
differently similar. Instead of universality, she posits the idea of
polyversality. Such healthy scepticisms about global theory are
necessary or theory can ominously parallel the dictates of
neoliberal global capitalism and reflect, largely, the concerns of the
West. It is therefore important to hold on to the postcolonial call to
decolonize theory because like Rey Chow (1992: 157) I believe that the
colonial in the term postcolonial is operative within global
capitalism and global culture and perhaps even more so in global
progressive intellectual culture in which the traces of western
parochialism parading as universalism are so well masked. And yet I
am not suggesting that the task of decolonization is ever complete.
Cultural colonialism continues to reinvent itself in ways that are
unpredictable, non-synchronous, non-linear, and unfamiliar.
Decolonizing theory, if it has to mean anything, must be a continual
process, a dialectical one of critique and self-critique, constantly
alert to processes of recolonization.
something to which we have no other access than through the fiction of their articulation and the patient
work that, by unmasking this fiction, separates what it had claimed to unite. But disenchantment does not
restore the enchanted thing to its original state: According to the principle that purity never lies at the
origin, disenchantment gives it only the possibility of reaching a new condition. To show law in its
nonrelation to life and life in its nonrelation to law means to open a space between them for human action,
which once claimed for itself the name of politics. Politics has suffered a lasting eclipse because it has
been contaminated by law, seeing itself, at best, as constituent power (that is, violence that makes law), when it is
not reduced to merely the power to negotiate with the law. The only truly political action, however, is that
which severs the nexus between violence and law. And only beginning from the space thus opened will it
be possible to pose the question of a possible use of law after the deactivation of the device that, in the state
of exception, tied it to life. We will then have before us a pure law, in the sense in which Benjamin speaks of a pure
language and a pure violence. To a word that does not bind, that neither commands nor prohibits anything, but says only itself,
would correspond an action as pure means, which shows only itself, without any relation to an end. And, between the two, not a lost
original state, but only the use and human praxis that the powers of law and myth had sought to capture in the state of exception.
indistinction, bare life, or homo sacer, becomes both the subject and the object of the political order: it is
both the place for the organization of state power, in the forms of discipline and objectification described by Foucault, and
the place for emancipation from it, through the birth of modern democracy and the demand for human
rights.
This move of biological life to the center of the political scene in the West leads to a transformation of the
political realm itself, one that effectively constitutes its depoliticization. That depoliticization takes place side by
side with the politicization of bare life. Bare life is politicized and political life disappears. This irony is explained
by the way the link forged in modernity between politics and bare life, a link that underpins ideologies from
the right and the left, has been ignored. As Agamben says, "if politics today seems to be passing through a lasting eclipse,
this is because politics has failed to reckon with this foundational event of modernity. ... Only a reflection that ... interrogates
the link between bare life and politics ... will be able to bring the political out of its concealment." Any
attempt to rethink the political space of the West must begin with an awareness of the impossibility of the
classical distinction between private life and political existence and examine the zones of indistinction into
which the oppositions that produced modern politics in the West--inside/outside, right/left, public/private--have
dissolved. Agamben proposes that "it is on the basis of these uncertain and nameless terrains, these difficult zones of indistinction, that
AGAMBEN 05
[Giorgio philosopher, prof aesthetics U. Verona State of Exception p87]
Of course, the task at hand is not to bring the state of exception back within its spatially and temporally
defined boundaries in order to then reaffirm the primacy of a norm and of rights that are themselves
ultimately grounded in it. From the real state of exception in which we live, it is not possible to return to the
state of law [stato di diritto], for at issue now are the very concepts of state and law. But if it is possible
to attempt to halt the machine, to show its central fiction, this is because between violence and law,
between life and norm, there is no substantial articulation. Alongside the movement that seeks to keep them
in relation at all costs, there is a countermovement that, working in an inverse direction in law and in life,
always seeks to loosen what has been artificially and violently linked. That is to say, in the field of tension
of our culture, two opposite forces act, one that institutes and makes, and one that deactivates and deposes.
The state of exception is both the point of their maximum tension and as it coincides with the rule that
which threatens today to render them indiscernible. To live in state of exception means to experience both
of these possibilities and yet, by always separating the two forces, ceaselessly to try to interrupt the
working of the machine that is leading the West toward global civil war.
Aff
A2: Mignolo
Mignolos theory implies an attachment to the originary
pure voices of the Otherreinscribes essentialism
Michaelson and Shershow, 2007 (Scott and Scott,Professors of
A2: Epistemology
Mignolos theory of anti-espistemology is based on its
own epistemic truth which holds the fact of colonization
to have emerged externall as a warrant for the ballot
this contradiction suggests one can speak of suffering
without linking to the coloniality critique
Alcoff 2007 (Linda, Professor at Syracuse University, Mignolos
Epistemology of Coloniality The New Centennial Review 7.3)
But I would press Mignolo on two points. The first concerns his notion of
truth. Mignolo rejects the project of reclaiming epistemology and
advocates for the shift to gnoseology, because he sees epistemology
as fundamentally a project that is pursuant of truth, and because he
sees truth as necessarily imperial, territorial, and denotative. But it is
difficult to interpret Mignolos own project in any way other than as
a project concerned with truth and with the way in which the colonial
systems of knowing inhibited and precluded both the understanding
and the identification of truth. The denotative ap- proach might have
limited application to the shift he has in mind, but there is still an
epistemically based normative distinction operating in his critique of
the coloniality of power. Take for example Mignolos use of Glissants
concept of diversality, a concept he contrasts to universality but also to
plurality in which alterna- tives are not in active integration or interaction.
Diversality maps differences as coconstitutive and as potentially integrated,
in the way that a bicultural identity can shift between multiple frames of
reference without collapsing the differences but also without organizing them
into hierarchies. As opposed to imperial resolutions, Glissant wants to
maintain the fundamental ambiguity of colonial identity, that doubled reality
that is alive to more than one here and now. This is not merely an ethically
or politically motivated alternative to universality, I want to suggest, but a
metaphysically motivated one. It is an alternative model for conceptualizing
subjectivity and knowledge that might make sense of the existence of many
worlds as well as to make visible their interrelationality and connectedness.
This surely has political advan- tages, but it also can make possible an
advance in descriptive adequacy for pluritopic horizons.
Interdisciplinarity Counter-K
Your move to insist that we are not part of an antieurocentric movement ignites the difference- based
paradigm wars and destroy a productive leftist
interdisciplinarity
Sandoval 2000 (Chela, professor of Chicano studies at University of
Interdisciplinarity Impact
Interdisciplinarity checks cracks, fissures, and errors in
specialized realmsonly an interdisciplinary approach
shores up internal theories while also solving external
impacts
Nissani 1997 (Moti, Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Wayne State
the assertion about hard labor ignores anthropological findings that some
"primitive" tribes enjoyed much leisure. Or take, finally, the key assertion in
an influential, and otherwise excellent, educa- tion treatise, that, of all the
animals, "man is the only one to treat not only his actions but his very self
as the object of his reflection." A passing acquaintance with ape behavior
and, especially, with Gordon Gallup's work on self-awareness in chimpan-
zees and orangutans (Gallup, 1979), would have surely led this author to
qualify both this statement and its implications. This comedy of errors could
be expanded to fill volumes. Such oversights can be found in works of
the highest quality: they are part and parcel of the scholarly condi-
tion. In the non-existent world of pure disciplinarity, the people who
commit such errors and their colleagues, being strict
disciplinarians, would have not been in a posi- tion to catch them.
And all those fancied strict disciplinarians who could spot such
errors would have never learned of their existence. Zealous divisions of
this type are of course fictional (Ruscio, 1986). The routine detection of
crossdisciplinary over- sights shows that we do not yet live in a pure
disciplinary world. Nonetheless, the oversights that do escape notice for
years suggest that the world in which we do live is Disciplinary Cracks
According to most interdisciplinary theorists, some problems of
knowledge are neglected because they "fail to fit in with
disciplinary boundaries thus falling in the interstices between
them" (Huber, 1992, p. 285; see also Campbell, 1969; Kavaloski, 1979;
Kockelmans, 1979). For instance, it seems reasonable to suppose that
psychol- ogy has something to do with price raising, but, in 1977, this
problem fell outside the domain of both psychology and economics; it
therefore received insufficient attention (Boulding, 1977). Before this
sensible claim can be accepted, it must be borne out by the historical
record. So far, this record is open to an opposite interpretation: potentially
productive questions in No Man's Lands do eventually get attention.
Witness, for example, the ongoing search for extraterrestrial life, which shifts
along between astronomy and biology. Or witness explorations in scientific
parapsychology, which fall between psychology and mysticism. Perhaps, as
Ruscio (1986) argues, the disciplines are not in practice as sharply
demarcated as most theorists suppose. Disciplinary researchers seem
capable of filling productive, yet unoccupied, niches, so that the opportunities
for fruitful research in the gray areas among the disciplines are perhaps not
missed for long. Regardless of the historical reality of unexplored gray
areas, one point is perfectly clear: such areas include important topics which
often require interdisciplinary research. Complex or Practical Problems
Suppose that you wished to understand the Soviet-American Cold War.
Suppose further that you were interested in fathoming this entire conflict,
not merely one or another of its aspects. A few years and a few bookshelves
later, you might realize that most experts have failed to arrive at a selfcontained portrait because they examined this subject from a
single disciplinary perspective. An integrated approach, you might
conclude, holds a greater promise of bringing you closer to a finn grasp of
this complex subject than any important but one-sided study. Thus, in this
particular instance, you may begin with history. At some point of your
ambitious undertaking, you would realize that history falls short, and that
the Third World policies of both America and Russia are important to your
subject. At another point you might conclude that the theories and practices
of totalitarianism and democracy must be understood as well. You may
prolong this branching out process for a while, until a reasonably coherent
picture emerges. If you persevered, your broad synthesis may well embody
a deeper understanding than any uni-disciplinary approach could possi- bly
muster. Or suppose you wanted to understand the nature of political
liberties. You might examine the subject from a philosophical perspective,
and, if you are an original thinker, come up with some interesting
observations. Or you might examine it from a historical standpoint, focusing
perhaps on the conflict between Athens and Sparta, or between the Third
Reich and France. Or, if you happened to be a science historian, you might
focus on the similarities between scientific and democratic decision-making.
All these disciplinary contributions may be valuable. But some hunters for
truth go beyond this point: when their quarry ignores human-made "no
trespassing" signs, they continue the chase. If, besides this interdisciplinary
resolve, they also have an original mind, they may end up writing an epochmaking book on the Open Society and its Enemies. In such cases, those who
stop at the disciplinary edge run the risk of tunnel vision. Besides these
obvious intellectual costs (cf. Saxe, 1945), narrow disciplinarity is
frequently accompanied by a social cost. It is possible, for instance,
that the high costs and risks humanity endured throughout the
Cold War period are traceable in part to the tunnel vision of
decision-makers and their academic advisors (Nissani, 1992). Human-
ity's use of new reproductive technologies is open to a similar interpretation:
The failure to engage wisdom of an adequate breadth for addressing the
subject at hand, along with the disciplinary norms that encourage such
failure, are painfully evident even in the best of the recent books on the
impact of the new reproductive technologies ... [books which] fail to
transcend the narrow boundaries of their own argumentative fields to offer
broad-based and widely comprehensible options for our collective future
(Condit, 1993, p. 234). Bertrand Russell's (1960, p. xv) characterization of
politics may still merit our atten- tion: "It is the custom among those who are
called 'practical' men," he says, "to condemn any man capable of a wide
survey as a visionary: no man is thought worthy of a voice in politics unless
he ignores or does not know nine tenths of the most impor- tant relevant
facts." Even well-meaning statesmen may err because they do not
understand the technical, social, or scientific aspects of a policy: It is
dangerous to have two cultures which can't or don't communicate ....
Scientists can give bad advice and decision-makers can't know
whether it is good or bad. On the other hand, scientists in a divided
culture provide a knowledge of some poten- tialities which is theirs alone. All
this makes the political process more complex, and in some ways more
dangerous, than we should be prepared to tolerate for long, either for the
purposes of avoiding disasters, or for fulfilling ... a definable social hope
(Snow, 1964b, p. 98). The intellectual, social, and personal price of narrow
compartmentalization has been often remarked upon (Boulding, 1977;
Easton, 1991; Eliade, 1977; Gaff, 1989; Gass, 1972; Mayville, 1978; Petrie,
1986). Indeed, history might have been different if the experts who
developed fire retardants in children's nightwear examined their mutagenic
potential (Swoboda, 1979), if the people who put together the Aswan Dam
had been trained to remember the large picture, if the people who marketed
thalidomide looked beyond its tranquilizing and economic potential. An
interdisciplinary back- ground may have not caused industry experts to
adopt a more balanced view of the tobacco/cancer link, but it might have
tempered their outfight advocacy of smoking In more general terms, "recent
history is filled with cautionary tales [all showing] the dangerous, sometimes
fatal, narrowness of policies recommended by those who possess expert
knowledge." Experts prefer quantifiable variables, they tend to ignore
contextual complexity, and their scope is often limited (Marx, 1989). All too
often, experts forget that "problems of society do not come in disciplineshaped blocks" (Roy, 1979, p. 165). Of the many episodes which capture
our society's disciplinary dilemma in more personal terms, I should like to
relate one. It involves a nuclear weapons scientist who gradually became
alienated from his work. His epiphany came in the experience he had in the
mid-1980s when visiting the Soviet Union for the first time: Walking in Red
Square ... [seeing] so many young people ... he began to weep
uncontrollably .... Before that, Moscow had been no more than a set of lines
at various levels of rads and pressures and calories per square centimeter
that one had to match with the bombs. (Lifton & Markusen, 1990, pp. 273274) Again, for all I know, the production of nuclear weapons could be
justified on moral grounds, but this is not the point here. To democrats and
humanitarians, the frightening point is this: in this word of
specialists, a highly educated person can be unaware of the social
and moral dimensions of her actions. H. G. Wells said someplace that
history is a race between education and catastrophe, but this captures only
part of our plight. Ironically, in this age, one may know much about a subject
and yet know little about its ramifications. I for one know decent people who
know everything about the chem- istry of CFCs and nothing about the ozone
layer (Nissani, 1996); everything about internal combustion engines and
nothing about global warming; everything about minimum wage legislation
and nothing about poverty. Compartmentalization, besides lack of education,
is the enemy; an enemy that can only be conquered through holistic
scholarship and education: Previously, men could be divided simply into the
learned and the ignorant, those more or less the one, and those more or less
the other. But your specialist cannot be brought in under either of these two
categories. He is not learned, for he is formally ignorant of all that does not
enter into his specialty; but neither is he ignorant, because he is "a
scientist," and "knows" very well his own tiny portion of the uni- verse. We
shall have to say that he is a learned ignoramus, which is a very serious
matter, as it implies that he is a person who is ignorant, not in the fashion of
the ignorant man, but with all the petulance of one who is learned in his own
special line (Ortega y Gassett, 1932). To sum up. Many complex or
practical problems can only be understood by pulling together
insights and methodologies from a variety of disciplines. Those who
forget this simple truth run the intellectual risk of tunnel vision
and the social risk of irrespon- sible action. In some areas,
interdisciplinary research has long been practiced, e.g., materials research
or American studies. Such areas, and the habit of holistic vision they foster,
should become more numerous. Future specialists will perhaps be able to
see their field "as part of a wider context, to reflect on the impact of their
discipline' s activities on society, and to enhance their ability to contribute to
social developments" (Huber, 1992, p. 290).
Solves war
Karlsson 11(Lars, information officer at the University of
Gothenburg, Cross-disciplinary research could mean more
effective military interventions,
http://www.samfak.gu.se/english/News/News/News_Detail//crossdisciplinary-research-could-mean-more-effective-militaryinterventions.cid979339 2/18/2011)
Several academic disciplines study how to achieve success in
military interventions in internal wars, not least peace studies and war
studies. But the fact that researchers in the various disciplines formulate the
problems differently and use different scientific methods means that they
often reach different conclusions. A thesis from the University of Gothenburg
Biopolitics Answers
Agambens alternative can never be conceptualized as
anything but negativity and nothingness it cant
positively create change.
DERANTY 04
[Jean-Phillipe Borderlands E-journal prof philosophy Macquarie U. vol3 #1 www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au]
Agambens coming community is a community of subjects that exist only as negative potentialities
(actualities that are the possibility of not-being, actualisations of potentiality), the "whatever singularities". Because he has
severed the concept of the community from all normative ties, and has rejected all conceptual and
normative distinctions (between state of nature and civil state, law and violence, nomos and physis, normal state and exception,
etc.), this community-to-come can only be ever described negatively, as beyond all forms of community, and
accessed only in the flight from all present and all immanence. It is difficult to avoid thinking that the
assumed messianism of this radical politics is only a form of negative theology.
that is not disjunctive. The power that subjects and excludes socially can also empower politically simply
because the exclusion is already a form of address which unwittingly provides implicit recognition. Power
includes by excluding, but in a way that might be different from a ban. This insight is precisely the one that
Foucault was developing in his last writings, in his definition of freedom as "agonism" (Foucault 1983: 208-228):
"Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free" (221). The hierarchical,
exclusionary essence of social structures demands as a condition of its possibility an equivalent implicit
recognition of all, even in the mode of exclusion. It is on the basis of this recognition that politics can
sometimes arise as the vindication of equality and the challenge to exclusion.
procedureswere widespread throughout the Reich, but no one even tried to pretend that these were the
norm. By striving to locate in the camp what he calls the very paradigm of political space, Agamben erects aninsurmountable
frontier around concentration camps which become, in fact, isolated from their surrounding society, and turns them into an exclusive
outside. Consequently, Agamben fails to envisage the global system which surrounded the camps, and included numerous social and
economic interfaces present on the entire territory of the Third Reich. Agambens attempt to locate a paradigm in the
camp is seriously flawed, because any paradigm must be conceived and constructed from the viewpoint of
a whole society.
literature suggests that European settlement outside of Europe shaped institutional, educational, technological, cultural, and
economic outcomes. This literature has had a serious gap: no direct measure of colonial European settlement.In this paper, we (1)
construct a new database on the European share of the population during the early stages of colonization and (2) examine its impact on
central role in the way that colonial European settlement affects development today.I read hastily, but see important new data and
patterns. I dont really buy the instrumental variables (sorry, Bill) but then again I dont really buy any of the historical instruments
people use to get around thorny causality issues. That doesnt make me a total party pooperI just think we have to take all the causal
claims and mechanisms pretty cautiously.Some