Of

Plan Flaw: USFG is the United States Faceters Guild, which

doesnt have any domestic surveillance neg on presumption.
United States Faceters Guild No Date http://www.usfacetersguild.org/history.shtml
USFG History Our organization had its beginning as the USA Competition Faceters in January 1990, when it was proposed
as a support group for the USA team in the Australian Faceting Challenge . Our first
newsletter appeared in April 1991. At that time, the goals were expanded to include compiling a set of rules for Single Stone
Competitions. Since that time, we have established a comprehensive set of Single Stone Rules to assist in encouraging greater
uniformity in the judging of single stone competitions. Our Constitution lists our purposes as (1) to promote the art, skill, and
teaching of faceting; (2) to expand the knowledge of natural and laboratory-made crystals; (3) to develop and promote uniform rules
for faceting competitions within the US and among other countries; (4) to sponsor or assist in managing competitions; and (5) to
serve as a national repository and clearing house for faceting designs, published materials, and general information for faceters

An equally important objective of the USFG is to advance the skills of

faceters who want to achieve as close to perfection as possible. One of the best
ways to approach perfection is to enter competitions where skilled judging denotes
perfection, or via "private assessment." We are working on a system to allow
members to have stones critiqued by a qualified master cutter.
everywhere.

Vote Neg
a. Af Condo dont let them clarify in the 2AC, allows them
to shift their advocacy in the later speeches to spike out
of all our ofense 2AC isnt good enough, Im reading the
1NC now.
b. Best Policy Option discourages lazy plan writing and
cultivates a legitimate stasis from which we can debate.
c. Predictable Limits - they explode the limits of topical
actors, kills neg research burden and makes af an insta
win every time.

Of
Interp teams should advocate a curtailment of domestic
surveillance
Domestic surveillance means the acquisition of nonpublic
information regarding United States persons
Small 8 United States Air Force Academy
Matthew, His Eyes are Watching You: Domestic Surveillance, Civil Liberties and
Executive Power during Times of National Crisis, 2008,
http://cspc.nonprofitsoapbox.com/storage/documents/Fellows2008/Small.pdf
Before one can make any sort of assessment of domestic surveillance policies, it is
first necessary to narrow the scope of the term domestic surveillance.
Domestic surveillance is a subset of intelligence gathering . Intelligence, as it is to be
understood in this context, is information that meets the stated or understood needs of policy makers and has

domestic
surveillance is a means to an end; the end being intelligence . The intelligence
community best understands domestic surveillance as the acquisition of
nonpublic information concerning United States persons (Executive Order 12333 (3.4) (i)). With
been collected, processed and narrowed to meet those needs (Lowenthal 2006, 2). In essence,

this definition domestic surveillance remains an overly broad concept.

Violationthe af alters the usage of domestic when defining

surveillance, which is not a strategy for curtailing domestic
surveillance.
Vote neg
Predictable limitsredefining surveillance explodes the limits
of the topic because that makes anything surveillance
Groundwe lose core neg ground because no Disads link to
changing a definition.
FX T They dont directly curtail surveillance which justifies
dropping icebreakers on the NSA to curb the ability to collect
data, encourages lazy plan writing and makes for a messy
debate.

Finally, SSD Solves all of their ofense reading a discursive

criticism of affirmatives definitions of domestic surveillance as
exclusive towards native bodies means they can still access all
of their args, but in this space we cant.

Of
Their faith that one day the law can be reformed legitimizes its
presence the belief that it can be simultaneously a site of
governmentality and emancipation from said fixture neglects
the ontological status of the law.
Comarof 1 (John - Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology, Oppenheimer
Fellow in African Studies at Harvard University, Colonialism, Culture, and the Law: A Foreword pgs. 306311)//kbuck

It was appropriate, therefore, that in the name of universal pro- gress, they be
subordinated to a superior European legal order. As a result, vernacular dispute-settlement institutions,
.

their jurisdictions and mandates severely restricted, were everywhere formally, sometimes forcibly, incorpo- rated into the colonial
state at the lowest levels of its hierarchy of courts and tribunals; furthermore, local cultural practices deemed primitive or
dangerous were statutorily criminalized (Snyder 1981; Moore 1986). But this was not the only mode of lawfare inflicted on
colonized peoples. An- other, somewhat less well documented, came in the form of commissions of inquiry instituted to investigate,
document, and legislate such things as traditional authority, land-holding patterns, property relations, marriage practices, rituals,
and beliefs. Wherever they were established, these com- missions, which often had an elaborate ethnological aspect to them (see,
e.g., Shamir and Hacker 2001), laid the ground for native administration and, with it, the terms on which indigenous life-worlds
were to be trans- formed under the sign of modernity (Ashforth 1990). If the first flush of work on law and colonialism foregrounded

it soon produced its own antithesis: studies that set out to

show, typically in exquisite historical and/or ethnographic detail, that subordinated
peoples frequently mobilize[d] aspects of the in- troduced legal system to
challenge both old and new hierarchies of power (Merry 1994,40); that the counterhegemonic can and does arise from deep within colonial legalities (Shamir 2000:27); that
when they begin to find a voice, peoples who see themselves as disadvantaged
often do so either by 2. But see Roberts 1985 for a carefully argued contrary view, at least in respect of Tswana law.
Introduction 307speaking back in the language of the law or by disrupting its means and
ends (Comaroff 1994, xii). At times this has taken the form of direct appeal to colonial
justice, which in some contexts-although by no means all and certainly not alwayshas shown itself willing, or found itself com- pelled, to protect the rights of the
colonized against the power of colonizers . At times it has involved a
counterdeployment ofparliamentary language, and of the culture of constitutionality
in which it is embedded, in an effort to reverse legally entrenched forms
ofdiscrimination. At times it has manifested itself in the dramatic use of the dock-asplatform, by otherwise si- lenced political prisoners, from which to make
impassioned calls to public action, even to enact their own martyrdom before a
watching world. The dialectical point of rest between these two poles-between
(1) the early emphasis on the lawfare of domination and (2) the revisionist focus on
the counterinsurgent, contestatory possibilities inherent in even the most
oppressive colonial legal regimes-is overdetermined, almost too easy: it sees law
as a vehicle simultaneously of governmentality and of its subver- sion , of
subjection and emancipation, of dispossession and reappropriation
the brute logic of European domination,

Static Identity is a product of majoritarian thought that

enables the sovereign to calculate and organize bodies based
on their deviances from each other. This allows power to
simply be shifted, but never combatted. Insofar as there is an
inside, there must always be an outside.
Madhu 12 (P. 6/4/12 Associate Prof. Amity University,
https://www.academia.edu/1618628/On_Minority_Politics On Minority Politics, Academia, DOA 8/30/15)//kbuck

A minority, Deleuze explains, can be

small in number; but it can also be largest in number, constitute an absolute,
indefinite majority (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 469, 518). What defines a minority is
not the number but relations internal to the number. A numerically small but economically richest and
politically powerful top one percent is majority though their number could only be countable handful. The majority, irrespective of its
numerical strength, assumes a state of power and domination , not the other way around (Deleuze & Guattari 1987:
105). Here, minority is defined in terms of quality rather than quantity . Identity refers to the state of remaining the
same under varying conditions. It is the condition of being oneself distinguished from
the other. Identities are expected to represent one as one actually is. Identity in politics is the politics drawn out of the state of Identity. It is the
politics of ones being in the state of religious, linguistic, caste, gender, race or sexual orientation. Minority politics challenges
the spread and territory of power relations that constitute internal and external
assemblages. Internal assemblages are habituated mindsets, routine-habitus-praxis, and flow of practices; external assemblages are the
situations and relations that constitute the internal assemblage. Both internal and external assemblages are emergent
realities resonating to the power relations condition them. Subjectivations of marginality, narcissistic
This paper explains the minority politics and distinguishes it from identity politics.

projections, irreflexivity, and discriminatory jouissance are instances of internal assemblage. Distribution of capitals and liabilities in their symbolic,

Assemblages begin micro-politically by extracting

territory from milieus and thereby extending itself to molar scales . Classes, castes,
tribes, genders are stratified and reproduced as assemblage effect . Assemblage effects latter
cultural, monitory terms constitutes the external assemblage.

assume the value of properties, essences, conformities and their respective narcissus. The assemblages in tandem with other emergent assemblages in a

They function as
internal machines beyond mere behavior. The sufficient condition for identity politics is to have or concoct identities.
given milieu become semiotic systems overpowering regimes of signs that mold pragmatics, actions and passions.

The necessary condition for minority politics is to have creative-dissenting voices. Identity is neither necessary nor sufficient condition for
minority politics. Identities are invented by grouping people of similar dissents. Dissents within identities pre-exist their formations. Therefore, identities
are maintained by silencing dissents within by projecting external enemies. Dissents loom large once the enemy is dissolved. For this reason,

having an enemy or victim out there is necessary precondition for identity politics . It
is not that feminist movements all of a sudden discovered that there is a dissent
within; it was there even before the identitarian movement. Once formed, to sustain
identity groupings, identitarians have to have enemies outside. Identity politics is
the politics of self vs. other. Minority politics, on the contrary, does not bank upon self-other dichotomy. However, identity politics
share a thin ground with minority politics as both of them have something to dissent. Identities exist only within assemblages reinforcing their
territorializations. The contention of minority politics is that majoritarian power is built upon shallow grounds of territorializations though their super
structures appear unshakably grounded. Much like the majoritarian, identitarians attempt to build its own superstructure upon its shallow territorialities.
Identarians focus upon sticking together within identities; minority politics on the other hand prepares the contenders to take off new lines of flights.
Identity politics captivates beings into identity states; minority politics emphasizes on becoming, cracking, breaking off into a process of continuous
variation. Identarians measure their power by their capacity to enter into and make themselves felt within the majority assemblage. Identitarian
becoming is becoming the majority which is not a becoming at all (Deleuze 1987: 106). Identitarian becoming is a counter-evental becoming (Madhu,
2012). Contrarily, the matter of becoming-minoritarian is opposed to being majoritarian. Identities are claimed by reducing multiplicities into unified
whole. Multiplicity of minority politics is irreducible pure multiplicity that escapes the abstract opposition between the multiple and the one. The
Multiplicity is not the numerical fragment of a lost unity or totality. It does not either represent a unity to come. They are not multiplicities of elements
constituting a unity. The multiplicity is rhizomatic, libidinal, unconscious, inter-penetrative, molecular and intensive multiplicities. They are composed of
particles that do not divide without changing in nature (othering); while vary, they vary other multiplicities; they constantly dissemble and assemble
themselves in course of their communication with other multiplicities (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987:36.-37). Pure multiplicity of minority politics tolerates no
dependencies on the identical nor it allows any positioning of an essence as what the thing is (Deleuze 1994: 191). On the contrary, the multiplicity of

Identity politics, unlike

subscribes to one or other unitary, molar and totalizing paranoia against
the countervailing identities. Nazis preoccupation with Aryan identity, Jewish claim
of chosen by God status, discounting disbelievers as infidels, claims of caste/race
the identity politics is arborescent, extensive, divisible, molar, totalizable, hierarchiesed, essentialized and conscious.
minority politics,

distinctions, nationalist identities and even gender based divisive identity claims are
molar in character. Glued to the molar orientation one may seek a long trajectory of
ones identity vis--vis that of others projecting ones identity claims based on
imagined if not real objects in space and time . Molarists listen to the roar of the sea but care less for the sound of
each wave. The molar perspective limits its holders from acknowledging multiplicities or
recognizing the transformation of the identities. From the molar logic of identity politics, the world is mechanically
divided into the identities they categorize: male vs. female, upper vs. lower castes, black vs. white etc. In its commitment to the
centralized identities, Identity politics is committed to defend identities. Identity
politics tend to individualize, self-identify, essentialize, totalize and generalize. Minor
politics on the other hand de-individulize, de-essentialize, de-totalize and opens up one to the micro politics of everyday life (Foucault 2005: xv, xvi).
Identities are individuated entities. The individual, self and identities are products of power as Foucault point out (Foucault 2005: xv). Power is the force
that prevents the truth games from collapsing. As Foucault observes, de-individualizing dismantle identities (Foucault 2005: xvi). Identity politics unlike
minority politics has models to imitate. Heroes and heroines of identity politics are reified, idolized and worshipped by the Identity ideologues. Models

A minority has no model, its a

becoming, a process (Deleuze 1995: 173). Minority politics traverses through unknown terrains. The future is opaque. The
process of minority politics is creative and singular, irreducible and non-totalisable .
developed at one site of identity is customized and used in other sites. Unlike the identitarians,

Identity politics on the other hand has no unknown terrains: the path is known, enemy is identified and even enemys conspiracies are deciphered! The
distinction between minority and identity politics is sometimes blurred. For instance, queer politics is also represented as sexual-minority-politics. The
heterosexual occupies the position of majority within the queer discourse not because the heterosexual is more numerous than children, non-whites,
homosexuals or women, but because he forms the qualitative standard against which these others are measured (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 105). Ethnic
nationalism, cosmopolitan internationalism, autonomist demands and other forms of identity politics of race, caste, gender, religious, linguistic kinds
occasionally share minoritarian ethos (Guattari 1995: 3). Minority politics do not share ground with identity politics in taming multiplicities, managing

Unlike identity politics

minority politics have no self-interest to protect. Also, minority politics, does not require any permanent body of
activists or intellectuals strategizing its agenda. Minority politics is a political expression of persons in
diverse life condition challenging all sorts of fascisms, narcissisms, control
mechanisms and molar stereotypes that tend to block free flow of life. Identity
politics tend to use identity as the cultural asset . For minority politics, the cultural asset of minorities is not
identity, but creativity (Gilroy 2005: 434). Identity politics does not cease to be identitarian by imbibing
majoritarian ways. It has no ethical guard against their conversion into microfascism. Deleuze writes, It is not the marginals who create the lines; they install
themselves on these lines and make them their property, and this is fine when they
have that strange modesty of men [sic] of the line, the prudence of the
experimenter, but it is a disaster when they slip into the black hole from which they
no longer utter anything but the micro-fascist speech of their dependency and their
giddiness: We are the avantgarde, We are the marginals. (Deleuze & Parnet 1987: 139) The crux of minoritarian politics lies in
internal dissents, conforming to identitarian norms or being meshed within the identitarian narcissus.

recognizing that the majority is an abstract and empty representation of an ideal identity that is linked to particular systems of power and control. The
processes of minoritarian-becoming will always trigger the unbecoming of the majoritarian by collapsing its legitimizing territorializations and triggering
new creations. Deleuze observes, The creation calls for a future form, for a new earth and people that do not yet exist (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 108).
The becoming of minority politics is creative liberation the future from the majoritarian corruptions; it is also liberating the present from the futuristic
majoritarian desire. Deleuze warns, that a minority borrows majority ways only at the risk of stifling minority creativity, drying up a spring or stopping a

For the
identitarians, the other is invariably the one frozen into the identity of the enemy
camp. No true dialogue is possible with the others. Altogether differently, from the perspective of minority
flow (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 276). Minority politics cease to be minoritarian when majoritarian ways are borrowed.

politics the majoritarian politics as corrupt and alienated. The majoritarian fascism is corruption misrecognized. Becoming minority is shedding off the
historically and situationally acquired corruption. Majoritarians are not fated for ever to be under the spell of majoritarian territory. Majoritarian corruption
does not shut off one from the minoritarian breakaway event. Deleuze puts it, A people is always a creative minority, and remains one even when it
acquires majority (Deleuze 1995: 173). Majority and minority are not mutually exclusive two poles. A majority breaks away into events of minoritarian
politics; similarly, a minority can acquire territories and be absorbed into majoritarian counter-event. Becoming is only becoming minority. Becoming
minority is to spurt into events. There is no becoming-majoritarian; majority is never becoming. All becoming is minoritarian (Deleuze &Guattari 1987:
106). Deleuze prophesizes majoritarian ideology has but to go when the corruption is recognized widely (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 469). Ours is becoming

What distinguishes identity politics from

minority politics are the majoritarian tendencies of the former: narcissus,
conformity to identities, static representation of identities, and its
tendency to territorialize. Exposing the systems of dominations in the claims of
race, caste or gender instead of conceiving them as dominated vs. dominating
identities and deconstructing the purity claims within the discourses of dominance
the age of minorities (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 469).

and letting off the identities go minoritizes the identity politics (Deleuze &Guattari 1987: 379). The
contention of minority politics is that the majoritarian power is built upon shallow grounds of
territorializations though their super structures appear unshakably grounded.
Minority politics deterritorializes the majoritarian claims. Deterritorialisation strips the halo
of the majoritarian assemblages. It is the politics of annihilating the transcendental underpinnings of the majoritarian territorializations. It suspends the
majoritarian trajectory guiding the history of the marginalized. It suspends the majoritarian train from laying its rail (Bourdieu 1980: 57). It is taking a line
of flight from the given history (Deleuze &Guattari 1987: 254). The dissenting lines of deterritorializsation of minority politics form assemblages outside
the circuits of the existing territorialities. The nomadic waves or flows of deterritorialization go from central layer to periphery, then form a new centre to
the new periphery transforming the epistrata towards increased deterritorialization and destratification (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987:60). Identity politics,
instead holds territories and strata for a sense of epistemic security and tend to prevent collapse of reified identities. Minority politics is fundamentally a
politics of deterritorialization and destratification. It is the politics on one un-becoming of oneself, challenging the intimate narcissus. Baliber writes, We
are, always narcissistically in search of images of ourselves, when it is structures that we should be looking for (Balibar 2002: 100). It is politics of
transcending sense of dominance and fascism. Deleuze writes, Non-white: we all have to become that, whether we are white, yellow, or black (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987: 470). Identity politics, contrarily, fixes its holders to ideological mold of the prescribed identity-self. Identity ideologues take identities

Identities are assemblages involuted into what

they are processed by historically emergent territorializations. Identities are
assembled, dissembled or ensembled according to the contingent territorializations,
deterritorializations and counter territorializations . Identities vanish or acquire different dimensions with reifying
or de-reifying current territorializations. The disposition of Identity politics is to cling to identities. Clinging to identities blinds
them to politics beyond identities. Identity claims are molar and monadic. From the monadic
as sui-genesis entities. They overlook the virtuality of identities.

epistemology they find it difficult to recognize the monad-cracking multiplicities, diversities and contradictions. For the identity ideologues identity
explanation is the ultimate panacea. For them the hurdle for their progress or wellbeing is unquestionably the intentional agency of others of other
identities. There ends their explanation. It was evident in Hitlers presentation of Jews as those responsible for the German suffering. The clash of

minority politics is
always anti-fascist, antiessentialist, deterritorializing & counter-narcissus .
It problematizes the assemblages and its territorial grip over its elements . It exposes the
micro-politics of territorialization. It distinguishes events from counter-events. Its object is not persons bearing one or other identities. It probes
into unacknowledged conditions and open to unintended consequences while also
meticulously map conscious, unconscious, tacit operations of dominance and
fascism and exposes them to facilitate de-territorialziation of the oppressive or
fascist assemblages. Minority politics exposes the historical and situational ontology of assemblages towards unwinding them. Minority
civilization of the American neo conservatives is another telling tale of identity ideology. Contrary to that,

politics is a means to a higher form of freedom and revolution. It is revolution in the sense of winding back the majoritarian corruption towards becoming
nomad i.e. reconstituting free-flowing-unrestrained-nomadic social relations in smooth space (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 36; 1994: 88). It is a move

Minority politics is
fundamentally ethical in the sense it is a politics that avoids becoming
fascist. Identity politics on the contrary is not guarded from fascist
tendencies.
towards undoing the oppositional dualism of majority vs. minority, destabilizing all identities.

This is a violent demonstration of the deterrence of reality; the

system operates by splicing identity into neat categories,
coding over subjectivity, all the while assigning bodies to an
identity to be plugged in the machine of capital production.
Our lives become preselected for the bemusement of the
powerful, leaving nothing to chance, everything becomes
calculable before the law.
Robinson 12 (Andrew - a political theorist and activist based in the UK, 6/8,
https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-8/ Jean Baudrillard: aleatory power and deterrence//kbuck

Reality is destroyed, or subordinated to the code, in several ways. It can be generated from blueprints provided by the code (as discussed in earlier
sections). It can be deterred, such that real events are not able to happen . Or it can be recuperated
through aleatory mechanisms of power. Let us start with the third possibility. The system is aleatory. This means that it
operates through the management of chance. It is determined in its broad outlines, but relies on chance for its

details. It rests on probabilities. Because the system determines outcomes

genetically generating the different options through the code only certain things
are possible. The variation by chance and probability allows the system to control phenomena at an aggregate level. An aleatory
system also brings in and incorporates resistances as they occur. It assigns them a
place in the code, as niche markets, questionnaire options, political parties, categories of deviance. It is a machine of total
recuperation which doesnt wait for movements to emerge before it assigns them a category it catches them in their early stages and pre-empts them.
For instance, a new social critique might rapidly give rise to a new party or NGO which is quickly recuperated. Or it might be articulated by corporations
themselves, as a new niche market. Although this process is often effective, it also contains problems for the system, because ultimately, it means that
the system is governed by chance. We are plunged into an abnormal uncertainty. In response, the system creates an excess of causality and finality. But
this compounds the problem. Determined responses become hypertelic they exceed their end. They become ends in themselves, pass the limits of their
functions or use-values, and colonise the entire system. This process is also referred to as excrescence. It is similar to the proliferation of cancer cells in
the body. For Baudrillard, this arrangement depends on a particular religious ontology. An accidental world implies an infinite will and energy, to keep all
determinate connections from forming. According to Baudrillard, reason seeks to break the necessary connections among things which arise within cycles
of symbolic exchange and conceptions of fate. Chance the possibility of indeterminate, mutually indifferent elements relating freely is an effect of this
decomposition of connections. It is an idea invented in modernity, along with the idea of a formless, unbonded world. It can only exist in a world without
symbolic exchange. And it depends on the continued suppression of symbolic exchange. The idea of chance or the aleatory can be related to the

Chance is actually impossible on a certain level. It is the perception we are left with after the
a world in which one wanders like a dead soul, with little chance of
intense connections. Chance, and also statistical causality, remove both responsibility and seduction (or destiny). The dual
rule of chance and necessity expresses a human desire for control over the
metamorphosis of things. This control destroys the initiatory or ceremonial field. It thus paradoxically
destroys any sense of mastery over our destiny. The order of production exists to
make the order of metamorphosis impossible to control flow and becoming . Simulation
elimination of symbolic exchange in various ways.
destruction of causality. It is

is also associated with a process Baudrillard terms deterrence. This term is a play on nuclear deterrence between the superpowers (before 1991), which
Baudrillard saw as a telling case of deterrence in general, a simulated conflict which exists to preclude a real clash, a form of manipulation rather than

Deterrence is not so much a power relation as a mindset. It holds people in

check by making them feel powerless, disappointed, neutralised deterred. When it
is strong enough, it no longer needs violent repression or war it precludes conflict
in advance. In nuclear deterrence for instance, life is reduced to survival and conflicts become
pointless, as they cant reach the ultimate stakes. Simulation feigns reality and thereby deters or prevents
destruction.

reality. But this feigned reality is not entirely unreal, because it produces effects of reality it is like a faked illness which produces real symptoms. Think
for instance of punishments applied in response to acts: theyre neither an objectively real consequence, since theyre invented, nor an imagined
consequence, since they actually happen. Theyre a simulated consequence, an artificially created hyper-reality. According to Baudrillard, there is no true

It controls
people in a different way through persuasion or modelling. Instead of demanding
that people submit to a prior model or norm, it interpellates people as already being
the model or the majority. It thereby destroys the distance between the self and the
norm, making transgression more difficult. It creates a doubled self from which it is hard to extract oneself. The
reality against which simulation can be compared. It is therefore more subversive of reality than a simple appearance or falsehood.

question from where do you speak, how do you know? is silenced by the response, but it is from your position that I speak. Everything appears to
come from and return to the people. The doubled self is portrayed and displayed in forms such as CCTV images, without a gap between representation
and what is represented. This same doubling happens across different spheres the model is truer than the true, fashion is more beautiful than the
beautiful, hyperreality is more real than the real, and so on. The effect of excess comes from the lack of depth (of the imaginary, but also perhaps of
relations and of context). Doubles are inherently fascinating. Theyre very different from the seduction of effective images and illusions, such as trompe
loeil (a type of art which can be mistaken for a real object). The double allows a kind of manipulation or blackmail in which the system takes hostage a
part of the self affect, desire, a secret and uses it for control. Baudrillard thinks we are stalked by our doubles, like in the film The Student of Prague. Yet
doubles are also insufficient. People dont like being verified and predicted in advance. People prefer ideas of destiny to random probability. Deterrence is
a barrier between ourselves and our drive for the symbolic. Deterrence also has an effect of deterring thought, of mental deterrence. It discourages

. Disempowerment feeds into this deterrence of

thought, as do the media, and the promotion of superficial sociality. At the same time, the system
also creates a kind of generalised social lockdown or universal security system. This
lockup and control system is designed to prevent any real event from happening .
This system, based on norms, replaces older systems of violence , war and law, creating a social
desert around itself. It tries to pre-plan everything, to leave nothing to contingencies or
chance. It tries to make everything manageable through statistics and
predetermined responses. The system tries to prevent accidental death through
systematic, organised death. For Baudrillard, this is the culmination of years of civilising process and socialisation. It is the
people from thinking critically, hence feeding unreality

culmination of the evolution of the dominant system. The failure of progressive teleologies has occurred because powers to lock-down and control have

The result is a kind of generalised nihilism. Deterrence

induces general mobilisation, pacification and dissuasion a death or incorporation
increased faster than powers to emancipate.

of active energies. The state dreams of dissuading and annihilating all terrorism preemptively, through a generalised terror on every level. This is the price of the security of which people now
dream, as Baudrillard already observed in 1983 eighteen years before the states dream was realised. Overt and selective repression transmutes over
time into generalised preventive repression. For instance, the police according to Baudrillard do not reduce violence they simply take it over from crime
and and become even more dangerous. The code deters every real process by means of its operational double. For instance, it prevents real revolutions
by means of simulated revolutions, real wars by means of simulated wars, and so on. This leaves no space for the real to unfold of its own accord or for
events to happen. Baudrillard thinks prisons and death are being replaced by a more subtle regime of control based on therapy, reform and normalisation.
The right and left are now represented mainly by the split between direct repression and indirect pacification. Baudrillard sees these options corresponding
to the early, violent phase of capitalism, with its emphasis on conscious psychology and responsibility, and its more advanced, neo-capitalist form, which
draws on psychoanalysis and offers tolerance and reform. A therapeutic model of society, promoted by advertisers, politicians and modern experts,
actually covers up real conflicts and contradictions. It seeks to solve social problems by re-injecting simulations such as controlled smiles and regulated

a regime of social control through security and safety,

blackmailing people into conformity with the threat of their own death . He sees this as
surrounding people with a sarcophagus to prevent them from dying a kind of living
death. Deterrence functions by an anxiety to act because action brings about massive destruction. Nuclear states cant go to war because of
communication. He also refers to

mutually assured destruction. Workers wont strike because the entire economy would be shut down. Small powers which get nuclear weapons actually

buy into their own deterrence Memory of the Holocaust is neutralised by its constant repetition on television. While this shuts down resistance, it also
makes the systems power unusable. Power becomes frozen and self-deterred. It creates a protective zone of maximum security which radiates through
the territory held by the system. It is a kind of glacis, a zone where any assailant is constantly under fire from the systems defenders. In a simulated
world, events are prevented because no social logic or story can be deployed according to its own logic. A social force risks annihilation if it tries this. This
leads to an evacuation of any historical stake from society. We are now living through the death pangs of strong referentials, including of the sense of
being in the march of history or in hope/at risk of a pending revolution. It might actually be better to think of it as incapacitation rather than deterrence.

everything is
neutralised, and reinscribed in the system. This absolute model of security is according to Baudrillard elaborated from
People become unable or afraid to act because the capacity to fight and win has been taken away. This means that

nuclear war. The nuclear battle station is the point from which the model of deterrence radiates out through social life. Deterrence is directed against a
range of phenomena such as complexity, finality, contradiction, accident, rupture, chance, and transversality. Yet paradoxically, events continue to happen
at ground level, below the level of data-control. Misfortunes and personal crises multiply. The social becomes organised like a disaster-movie script, with
constant struggles to survive, states of exception, discourses of risk-avoidance and risk-management a situation of everyday precarity. The function of
deterrence is not to prevent this permanent crisis. It is rather to prevent it from having system-level effects. Phenomena such as the Gulf War, Watergate,
and other political/media events are treated by Baudrillard as instances of deterrence. They are based on a simulation of a situation where the old stakes
still matter, keeping old antagonisms and lost phenomena artificially alive as simulacra. They thus exude operational negativity preventing the
emergence of real antagonisms. Non-war in the Gulf The theory of deterrence is exemplified in Baudrillards analysis of what happened in 1991, when
according to him, the Gulf War did not take place. What took place, instead, was a non-war. This is a type of conflict specific to the third order of
simulation. A non-war is a simulated war. It reproduces exactly the elements of a real war, down to its destruction, death, propaganda, and so on. But it is
not a situation which arises between adversaries, which is a real, unpredictable event. A true war is a strategic conflict over an absent centre of power
which no-one can occupy. Both sides believe in a cause; the outcome is unpredictable. This is why a non-war is not a true war. Real power, according to
Baudrillard, is a strategy, a relation of force, and a stake. It is subject to death and the symbolic. On the other hand, power exercised to conceal its own
absence is no longer subject to death and the symbolic. It can persist indefinitely, as an object of consumer demand. For Baudrillard, war is pointless and
impossible to wage in the nuclear era. There is no proportion between means (total annihilation) and ends (strategic objectives). Hence, the scene of war
the scenario of total conflict to the death, or of adversity over stakes between combatants will never again take place. War becomes impossible to
exchange'; it escapes symbolic exchange. The distillation of war in everyday fear prevents the final apocalyptic clash. Arguably, non-war is to war as
hyperreality is to reality. A non-war is a simulation in the sense of derivation from a prior model. Western powers fight non-wars based on models, and go
to war based on models. The non-war, at least on the western side, is an operational unfolding of models and signs already planned in advance. The
symbolic dimension, the exchange with the enemy, the reversibility of actions, are absent. This is why, for Baudrillard, it is not a war, even though all the
other characteristics of war are very much present. He emphasises repeatedly that non-war is still as deadly as war ever was. What it has lost is the
adversity of the adversaries, the ideological seriousness of a war between two counterposed possibilities, the reality of victory or defeat as systemic

Rather,
the purpose of western power, and usually of both adversaries, is to prevent the
liquidation of the systems deterrence. This requires the destruction of symbolic exchange, and hence of pre-capitalist
changes. For Baudrillard, western non-wars are now simulations in that there isnt really a fight to the death between two adversaries.

societies and groups. Non-war is missing the symbolic dimension a true war might have the possibility of reversibility, or conflictual dialogue with an
enemy so to speak. Contact between America and Iraq did not happen during the Gulf War. America can only imagine an adversary in their own image.
They are invulnerable to symbolic violence, due to their pragmatism and masochism. America has been caught in a spiral of unconditional repression by
the aspiration to be a global police force. They try to humiliate by defeating the enemy impersonally nothing personal and avoid seeing or meeting
the adversary. They seek to show the infallibility of their machine, displaying signs of relentlessness. They seek to avoid any reaction or living impulse.

In

electronic war, the enemy no longer exists there is only refractory data to be
neutralised and brought into the consensus. Non-war entails non-recognition of the
enemy as such, with precision and abstract operations displacing direct conflict . On the
American side, it is like safe sex war with a condom on. But on the other hand, America cannot imagine the other and
therefore seeks to annihilate whatever cannot be converted to the American way of
life. Meanwhile, the TV audience are also deterred, and experience voyeurism and repentance over the fate of hostages. They consent to be gently
terrorised, but never lose their underlying indifference. Yet even this minimal participation is enough to rescue war and politics, for now. America played
the Gulf War as a game of deterrence. They refused to bargain. Saddam, in contrast, played it as a symbolic game of ruses, bargains, trickery and
disguise. As a result, both missed their target. They fought in two different times and spaces. The enemy was foreclosed. There was not enough
communication for deterrence or war to be effective. Non-wars are not, however, directed primarily at rival nation-states. They are primarily waged to
domesticate or liquidate grassroots movements and symbolic challenges which restore the dimensions of the real and the event which the system fears.
Non-war is waged to absorb and reduce what is singular and irreducible. The Gulf War, Baudrillard suggests, was aimed at the Islamic world. The French
colonial war in Algeria was aimed at the revolutionary movement. The Vietnam War was aimed at guerilla revolt. Baudrillards reading of Vietnam (which
could equally apply to Iraq and Afghanistan) is that the real goal was to make the enemy predictable. This is why the American defeat did not destroy
American global power. Each war ended as the revolutionary impulse was tamed or bureaucratised. Non-wars are usually won or lost by which regime
comes under threat from its own population first. Sometimes, they are lost because an accident, an event, or a loss of power to the other, breaks the
machine of war and its appearance of infallibility as in Somalia.

Power has shifted its manifestation rather than necropolitical

threats of death, power is instigated by the refusal to give
such, making life a living death. The judge should affirm the
Gift of Death as means of disrupting the symbolic exchange, in
favor of breaking down the value coded onto life by domestic
surveillance.
Baudrillard, 93 (Jean, Symbolic Exchange and Death, p. 39-43)//kbuck
A symbolic stake. Every stake is symbolic. There have only ever been symbolic stakes. This dimension is etched everywhere into the structural law of value, everywhere immanent in the code.

is instituted on death.

Labour power

A [hu]man must die to become labour power He converts this death into a wage. But the economic violence capital inflicted on him [them] in the equivalence of the wage

and labour power is nothing next to the symbolic violence inflicted on him by his definition as a productive force. Faking this equivalence is nothing next to the equivalence, qua signs, of wages and death. The very possibility of
quantitative equivalence presupposes death. The equivalence of wages and labour power presupposes the death of the worker, while that of any commodity and any other presupposes the symbolic extermination of objects. Death
makes the calculation of equivalence, and regulation by indifference, possible in general. This death is not violent and physical, it is the indifferent consumption of life and death, the mutual neutralisation of life and death in sur-vival,
or death deferred. Labour is slow death. This is generally understood in the sense of physical exhaustion. But it must be understood in another sense. Labour is not opposed, like a sort of death, to the 'fulfilment of life', which is the
idealist view; labour is opposed as a slow death to a violent death. That is the symbolic reality Labour is opposed as deferred death to the immediate death of sacrifice. Against every pious and 'revolutionary' view of the 'labour (or
culture) is the opposite of life' type, we must maintain that the only alternative to labour is not free time, or non-labour, it is sacrifice. All this becomes clear in the genealogy of the slave. First, the prisoner of war is purely and simply
put to death (one does him an honour in this way). Then he is 'spared' [epargne] and conserved [conserve] (=servus), under the category of spoils of war and a prestige good: he becomes a slave and passes into sumptuary
domesticity It is only later that he passes into servile labour However, he is no longer a 'labourer', since labour only appears in the phase of the serf or the emancipated slave, finally relieved of the mortgage of being put to death.
Why is he freed? Precisely in order to work. Labour therefore everywhere draws its inspiration from deferred death. It comes from deferred death. Slow or violent, immediate or deferred, the scansion of death is decisive: it is what
radically distinguishes two types of organisation, the economic and the sacrificial. We live irreversibly in the first of these, which has inexorably taken root in the differance of death. The scenario has never changed. Whoever works

the worst it inflicts

on them is refusing them death by deferring their death that they are made
into slaves and condemned to the indefinite abjection of a life of labour The
substance of labour and exploitation is indifferent in this symbolic relation
Power is therefore
that of
allowing to live - a life that the slave lacks the power to give. The master confiscates
the death of the other while retaining the right to risk his own. The slave is refused
this, and is condemned to a life without return, and therefore without possible
expiation
This is the violence the master does to
the slave, condemning him to labour power There lies the secret of power
has not been put to death, he is refused this honour And labour is first of all the sign of being judged worthy only of life. Does capital exploit the workers to death? Paradoxically,
. It is

40

. The power of the master

always primarily derives from this suspension of death.

never, contrary to what we might imagine, the power of putting to death, but exactly the opposite,

. By removing death, the master removes the slave from the circulation of symbolic goods.

(in the dialectic of the

master and the slave, Hegel also derives the domination of the master from the deferred threat of death hanging over the slave). Labour, production and exploitation would only be one of the possible avatars of this power structure,
which is a structure of death. This changes every revolutionary perspective on the abolition of power. If power is death deferred, it will not be removed insofar as the suspension of this death will not be removed. And if power, of
which this is always and everywhere the definition, resides in the act of giving without being given, it is clear that the power the master has to unilaterally grant life will only be abolished if this life can be given to him - in a non-

There is no other alternative; you will never abolish this power by staying
alive, since there will have been no reversal of what has been given. Only the
surrender of this life, retaliating against a deferred death with an immediate death,
constitutes a radical response, and the only possibility of abolishing power No
revolutionary strategy can begin without the slave putting his own death back at
stake, since this is what the master puts off in the differance from which he profits
by securing his power Refuse to be put to death, refuse to live in the mortal reprieve
of power,
deferred death.

refuse the duty of this life and never be quits with living, in effect be under obligation to settle this long-term credit through the slow death of labour, since this slow death does not alter the future of this

abject dimension, in the fatality of power Violent death changes everything, slow death changes nothing, for there is a rhythm, a scansion necessary to symbolic exchange: something has to be given in the same movement and
following the same rhythm, otherwise there is no reciprocity and it is quite simply not given. The strategy of the system of power is to displace the time of the exchange, substituting continuity and mortal linearity for the immediate
retaliation of death. It is thus futile for the slave (the worker) to give little by little, in infinitesimal doses, to the rope of labour on which he is hung to death, to give his life to the master or to capital, for this 'sacrifice' in small doses is
no longer a sacrifice - it doesn't touch the most important thing the differance of death, and merely distils a proce s whose structure remains the same. We could in fact advance the hypothesis that in labour the exploited 41 renders
his life to the exploiter and thereby regains, by means of this very exploitation, a power of symbolic response. There was counter-power in the labour process as the exploited put their own (slow) death at stake. Here we agree with
Lyotard's hypothesis on the level of libidinal economics: the intensity of the exploited's enjoyment Uouissance] in their very abjection. And Lyotard is right. Libidinal intensity, the charge of desire and the surrendering of death are
always there in the exploited,26 but no longer on the properly symbolic rhythm of the immediate retaliation, and therefore total resolution. The enjoyment of powerlessness (on sole condition that this is not a phantasy aimed at
reinstating the triumph of desire at the level of the proletariat) will never abolish power .The very modality of the response to the slow death of labour leaves the master the possibility of, once again, repeatedly, giving the slave life
through labour The accounts are never settled, it always profits power, the dialectic of power which plays on the splitting of the poles of death, the poles of exchange. The slave remains the prisoner of the master's dialectic, hile his
death, or his distilled life, serves the indefinite repetition of domination. This domination increases as the system is charged with neutralising the symbolic retaliation by buying it back through wages If, through labour, the exploited
attempts to give his life to the exploiter, the latter wards off this restitution by means of wages. Here again we must take a symbolic radiograph. Contrary to all appearances and experience (capital buys its labour power from the
worker and extorts surplus labour), capital gives labour to the worker (and the worker himself gives capital to the capitalist). In German this is Arbeitgeber the entrepreneur is a 'provider of labour', and Arbeitnehmer it is the capitalist
who gives, who has the initiative of the gift, which secures him, as in every social order, a preeminence and a power far beyond the economic. The refusal of labour, in its radical form, is the refusal of this symbolic domination and
the humiliation of being bestowed upon. The gift and the taking of labour function directly as the code of the dominant social relation, as the code of discrimination. Wages are the mark of this poisonous gift, the sign which

They sanction this unilateral gift of labour, or rather wages symbolically

buy back the domination exercised by capital through the gift of labour
epitomises the whole code.

At the same time, they furnish

capital with the possibility of confining the operation to a contractual dimension, thus stabilising confrontation on economic ground. Furthermore, wages turn the wage-earner into a 'consumer of goods', reiterating his status as a
'consumer of labour' and reinforcing his symbolic deficit. To refuse labour, to dispute wages is thus to put the process of the gift, expiation and economic compensation back into question, and therefore to expose the fundamental
symbolic process. Wages are no longer 'grabbed' today You too are given a wage, not in exchange for labour, but so that you spend it which is itself another kind of labour In the consumption or use of objects, the wage-consumer
finds 42 SYMBOLIC EXCHANGE AND DEATH herself reproducing exactly the same symbolic relation of slow death as she undergoes in labour The user experiences exactly the same deferred death in the object (she does not sacrifice
it, she 'uses' it and 'uses' it functionally) as the worker does in capital. And just as wages buy back this unilateral gift of labour, the price paid for the object is only the user buying back the object's deferred death. The proof of this
lies in the symbolic rule which states that what falls to you without charge (lotteries, presents, gambling wins) must not be devoted to use, but spent as pure loss. Every domination must be bought back, redeemed. This was formerly
done through sacrificial death (the ritual death of the king or the leader), or even by ritual inversion (feasts and other social rites: but these are still forms of sacrifice). This social game of reversal comes to an end with the dialectic of
the master and the slave, where the reversibility of power cedes its place to a dialectic of the reproduction of power The redemption of power must always, however, be simulated, and this is done by the apparatus of capital where
formal redemption takes place throughout the immense machine of labour, wages and consumption. Economics is the sphere of redemption par excellence, where the domination of capital manages to redeem itself without ever
really putting itself at stake. On the contrary, it diverts the process of redemption into its own infinite reproduction. This is perhaps where we find the necessity of economics and its historical appearance, at the level of societies so
much more vast and mobile than primitive groups, where the urgency of a system of redemption which could be measured, controlled and infinitely extended (which rituals cannot be) all at the same time, and which above all would
not put the exercise and heredity of power back into question. Production and consumption are an original and unprecedented solution to this problem.

this new form,

By simulating redemption in

the slide from the symbolic into the economic allows the definitive hegemony of political force over society to be secured. Economics miraculously succeeds in masking the real structure of

power by reversing the terms of its definition. While power consists in unilateral giving (of life in particular, see above), a contrary interpretation has been successfully imposed: power would consist in a unilateral taking and
appropriation. Under cover of this ingenious retraction, real symbolic domination can continue to do as it will, since all the efforts of those under this domination will rush into the trap of taking back from power what it has taken from

them, even 'taking power' themselves, thus blindly pushing on along the lines of their domination. In fact, labour, wages, power and revolution must all be read against the grain: labour is not exploitation, it is given by capital, wages
are not grabbed, capital gives them too -it does not buy a labour power, it buys back the power of capital;27 THE END OF PRODUCTION 43 the slow death of labour is not endured, it is a desperate attempt, a challenge to capital's

the only efective reply to power is to give it back what it gives

you, and this is only symbolically possible by means of death .
unilateral gift of labour;

However, if, as we have seen, the

system itself deposes economics, removes its substance and its credibility, then, in this perspective, doesn't it put its own symbolic domination back into question? No, since the system brings about the overall reign of its power
strategy, the gift without counter-gift, which becomes fused with deferred death. The same social relations are set up in the media and in consumption, where we have seen (,Requiem pour les Media' [Utopie, 4, 1971]) that there is
no possible response or counter-gift to the unilateral delivery of messages. We were able to interpret (CERFl's project concerning automobile accidents) autoslaughter as the price that the collective pays to its institutions .. the
State's gifts inscribe a 'debt in the collective accounts book. Gratuitous death is then merely an attempt to absorb this deficit. The blood on the roads is a desperate form of compensation for the State's tarmac gifts. The accident

Every 'rational'
is effectively negligible

thus takes its place in the space that institutes a symbolic debt towards the State. It is likely that the more this debt grows, the more marked will be the tendency towards the accident.

strategy for curbing this phenomenon

(prevention, speed limits, rescue services, repression)

. They

simulate the possibility of integrating the accident into a rational system, and are therefore incapable of grasping the root of the problem: balancing a symbolic debt which founds, legitimates and reinforces the collective dependency
on the State. On the contrary, these 'rational' strategies accentuate the phenomenon. In order to avert the effects of accidents, they propose to institute more mechanisms, more state institutions, supplementary 'gifts', which are
simply means of aggravating the symbolic debt. In this way the struggle is everywhere opposed to a political authority (cf. Pierre Clastres, Society against the State [tr R. Hurley and A. Stein, New York: Zone Books, 1990]), which sets
all the power it can draw from its showers of gifts - the survival it maintains and the death it withdraws above the struggle in order to stockpile and then distil it for its own ends. Nobody really accepts this bonus forever, you give

This is the only

absolute weapon, and the mere collective threat of it can make power collapse.
Power, faced with this symbolic 'blackmail'
loses its footing: since it
thrives on my slow death, I will oppose it with my violent death And it is because we
are living with slow death that we dream of a violent death. Even this dream is
unbearable to power
what you can,28 but power always gives more so as to serve better, and an entire society or a few individuals can go to great lengths, even their own destruction, to put an end to it.

(the barricades of '68, hostage-taking),

The only advocacy is a fatal one; to push the system beyond its
limits, allowing for the death of the world disrupts coding of it
only a violent disruption of the symbolic value distributed to
life is fatal enough to break down the system.
Baudrillard, 93 (Jean, Symbolic Exchange and Death, p. 1-5)//kbuck
The reality principle corresponded to a certain stage of the law of value . Today the
whole system is swamped by indeterminacy , and every reality is absorbed by the
hyperreality of the code and simulation. The principle of simulation governs us now, rather
than the outdated reality principle. We feed on those forms whose finalities have disappeared.
No more ideology, only simulacra. We must therefore reconstruct the entire genealogy of
the law of value and its simulacra in order to grasp the hegemony and the
enchantment of the current system. A structural revolution of value. This genealogy
must cover political economy, where it will appear as a second order simulacrum, just like all those that stake everything on the

Capital no longer belongs to the order of

operates with political economy as its simulated model. The entire
apparatus of the commodity law of value is absorbed and recycled in the larger
apparatus of the structural law of value, thus becoming part of the third order of
simulacra (see below). Political economy is thus assured a second life, an eternity, within
the confines of an apparatus in which it has lost all its strict determinacy, but
maintains an effective presence as a system of reference for simulation. It was
exactly the same for the previous apparatus - the natural law of value - which the
system of political economy and the market law of value also appropriated as their
imaginary system of reference ('Nature'): 'nature' leads a ghostly existence as usevalue at the core of exchange-value. But on the next twist of the spiral, use-value is seized as an
alibi within the dominant order of the code. Each configuration of value is seized by
the next in a higher order of simulacra . And PREFACE 3 each phase of value integrates the
prior apparatus into its own as a phantom reference, a puppet reference, a
simulated reference. A revolution separates each order from its successor
these are the only genuine revolutions. We are in the third order, which is the order no longer
of the real, but of the hyperreal. It is only here that theories and practices, themselves floating and
indeterminate, can reach the real and beat it to death . Contemporary revolutions are indexed on the
real: the real of production, the real of signification, whether conscious or unconscious.
political economy it

immediately prior state of the system. They are all buttressed by a nostalgia for the resurrection of the real in all its forms, that is as

second-order simulacra: dialectics, usevalue, the transparency and finality of production the 'liberation' of the unconscious, of

All these liberations provide the

ideal content for the system to devour in its successive revolutions, and which it
brings subtly back to life as mere phantasmas of revolution . These revolutions are
only transitions towards generalised manipulation. At the stage of the aleatory
processes of control, even revolution becomes meaningless. The rational, referential, historical
repressed meaning (the signifier, or the signified named 'desire'), and so on.

and functional machines of consciousness correspond to industrial machines. The aleatory, nonreferential, transferential,
indeterminate and floating machines of the unconscious respond to the aleatory machines of the code. But even the unconscious is
reabsorbed by this operation, and it has long since lost its own reality principle to become an operational simulacrum. At the precise
point that its psychical reality principle merges into its psychoanalytic reality principle, the unconscious, like political economy, also

The systemic strategy is merely to invoke a number of floating

values in this hyperreality This is as true of the unconscious as it is of money and theories. Value rules
according to the indiscernible order of generation by means of models, according to
the infinite chains of simulation. Cybernetic operativity, the genetic code, the aleatory order of mutation, the
uncertainty principle, etc., succeed determinate, objectivist science, and the dialectical view of history and consciousness. Even
critical theory, along with the revolution, turns into a second-order simulacrum , as
do all determinate processes. The deployment of third-order simulacra sweeps all
this away, and to attempt to reinstate dialectics, 'objective' contradictions, and so
on, against them would be a futile political regression . You can't fight the aleatory by
imposing finalities, you can't fight against programmed and molecular dispersion
with prises de conscience and dialectical sublation, you can't fight the code with
political economy, nor with 'revolution' All these outdated weapons (including those we find in
firstorder simulacra, in the ethics and metaphysics of man and nature, usevalue, and other liberatory systems of reference) are
gradually neutralised by a higher-order general system . Everything that filters into the nonfinality
becomes a model of simulation.

of thoe space-time of the code or that attempts to intervene in it, is 4 PREFACE disconnected from its own ends, disintegrated and
absorbed. This is the well known effect of recuperation, manipulation, of circulating and recycling at every level.

'All dissent

must be of a higher logical type than that to which it is opposed'

(Anthony Wilden, System and

Structure [London: Tavistock, 1977], p. xxvii). Is it at least possible to find an even match to oppose third-order simulacra? Is there a
theory or a practice which is subversive because it is more aleatory than the system itself, an indeterminate subversion which would
be to the order of the code what the revolution was to the order of political economy? Can we fight DNA? Certainly not by means of
the class struggle. Perhap simulacra of a higher logical (or illogical) order could be invented. beyond the current third order, beyond
determinacy and indeterminacy But would they still be simulacra? Perhaps death and death alone, the reversibility of death, belongs

Only symbolic disorder can bring about an interruption

in the code. Every system that approaches perfect operativity simultaneously approaches its downfall. When the system
to a higher order than the code.

says ' A is A', or 'two times two equals four', it approaches absolute power and total absurdity; that is, immediate and probable
subversion. A gentle push in the right place is enough to bring it crashing down. We know the potential of tautology when it
reinforces the system's claim to perfect sphericity (Ubu Roi's belly). Identity is untenable: it is death, since it fails to inscribe its own
death. Every closed or metastable, functional or cybernetic system is shadowed by mockery and instantaneou subversion (which no
longer takes the detour through long dialectical labour), because all the system's inertia acts against it. Ambivalence awaits the
most advanced systems, that, like Leibniz's binary God, have deified their functional principle. The fascination they exert, because it
derives from a profound denial such as we find in fetishism, can be instantaneously reversed. Hence their fragility increases in

These systems, even when they are based on radical

indeterminacy (the loss of meaning), fall prey, once more, to meaning. They
collapse under the weight of their own monstrosity, like fossilised dinosaurs, and
immediately decompose. This is the fatality of every system committed by its own
logic to total perfection and therefore to a total defectiveness, to absolute
infallibility and therefore irrevocable breakdown . the aim of all bound energies is their own death. This is
why the only strategy is catastrophic , and not dialectical at all. Things must be pushed to the
limit, where quite naturally they collapse and are inverted. At the peak of value we are closest to
proportion to their ideal coherence.

ambivalence, at the pinnacle of coherence we are closest to the abys of corruption which haunts the reduplicated signs of the code.

Simulation must go further than the system. Death must be played against
death. a radical tautology that makes the system's own logic the ultimate
weapon. The only strategy against the hyperrealist system is some form of pataphysics, 'a
science of imaginary solutions', that is, a science-fiction of the system' reversal against itself at PREFACE 5 the extreme

limit of simulation, a reversible simulation in a hyperlogic of death and destruction . 1

The symbolic demands meticulous reversibility Ex-terminate every term, abolish value in the term's revolution
against itself: that is the only symbolic violence equivalent to and triumphant over
the structural violence of the code. A revolutionary dialectic corresponded to the commodity law of value and its
equivalents, only the scrupulous reversion of death corresponds to the code's indeterminacy and the structural law of value.2

All that remains for us is theoretical violence

-speculation to the death, whose only method is the radicalisation of hypotheses.
Even the code and the symbolic remain terms of simulation. it must be possible to
extract them, one by one, from discourse.
Strictly speaking, nothing remains for us to base anything on.

Case
How does winning this debate round help the people dying at
the hands of Imperial Domination? The 1ACs fetishization of
the ballot commodifies the sufering of these disenfranchised
communities, and only ensures the commodification of
victimized bodies.
Hermes 13 - (Mary prof. @ Univ of Minnesota, Life in the Undercommons Sustaining Justice-Work Post
Disillusionment http://journal.jctonline.org/index.php/jct/article/viewFile/480/pdf)//kbuck
(Mary)

How does knowledge creation include and flow back to the people we are
studying? There is a wall of us and them that is colonizing and exploitive the
response is to make pathways for knowledge production to flow back (and forth).
Chelda and Erin are cutting paths for others to come into the University (e.g., the next student of African descent in our department
might have find it more inclusive and dignifying), and creating spaces for collective work. So there is a new
furrow, and all your efforts are not just directed back to endless hoops of publications, presentations, promotions and pontification.
In my work as a professor, I make sure that at least half my time goes right to people, communities, and reservations, struggling to
recover their indigenous languages. And so we go back there regularly, we Skype there weekly, and we pull them into the University
to both create knowledge (i.e., how do we teach adults oral Ojibwe language in a way that is "Ojibwe"?) while supporting their
agenda. I write grants to support that work --I am doing that now and always doing that. My recent Spring semester course was

changing and reorienting the way we do research to put

community agendas as the thing we respond to and work back and forth with (Dance,
Gutirrez, & Hermes, 2010). This work is creating a space for knowledge production within the
University that does not necessarily count like a big name publication or an
award. Instead, it interrupts the system of exploiting knowledge from communities ,
like the White Earth reservation group I work with, and instead responds to their learning needs. This work
is not not allowed as a part of my Associate Professor job, it is just not as clearly rewarded by the system. These are the
cracks (products of the undercommons) that I believe can be creatively bolstered
to change the flow of constant knowledge production by and for our own exclusive
group in the academy. I do write for and with my peers, but I spend nearly equal time thinking through, and responding
about learning from this

to, the problem of indigenous language revitalization with the White Earth reservation community. So knowledge production for
whom? If we say the community or the academy in this case, it quickly breaks down. Through a non-profit, I employ two recently
graduated community (Native American language community) members to work with me on a project at the White Earth
reservation to revitalize the Ojibwe language there. I use my university time, as this is research, and yet I am also part of the
bigger Ojibwe language community. My closest colleague (happens to be white) in my department acts as an advisor and sounding
board, and makes some of the trips with us. I am talking with folks in the Deans office about how to write a grant to support the
work. The White Earth day care group I work with constantly informs my developing pedagogical theory of what it takes for adults to

this is knowledge production that comes from and goes

right back to meet a community need. However, the community in this case does not seem all that
clearly distinct from the academy, and certainly not at odds with it. Can we imagine a different kind of
academy? One that is not in tension with community (the community folks are trying to get into our
learn Ojibwe in an informal setting. Certainly,

Ivory Tower)? The University is a state funded resource for many different communities, and exists to serve these communities. It

The
language of exclusion and the dichotomization between community and
university inhibits my imagination, and it has an effect on the internalization of
hegemony: my internal authoritative voice that creates a hierarchy of communities
with the University at the top. Therein lies another reason not to always write or speak in academic jargon, or even
exclusively, in theory-laden vernacular. Jargon is a discursive practice, which reinscribes academic
discourse and can alienate other discourse communities . After seventeen years of being some sort
of professor, I write this. This did not happen because I made it as a professor, but because
I continue to surround myself and be engaged with people who were not grounded
exclusively in academic work. There were certainly points when I felt so isolated from anything to do with the
is a common resource and at the same time a structure that constrains community - where is our agency in this?

Ojibwe community that I thought I had to quit the whole thing - and likewise points when I was immersed in community activism,

and politics, and longed for the intellectual refuge of theory (Hermes, 2004). I have gone back and forth, but havent given up the
economic security of the University job, only negotiated with it. When I started at University of Minnesota-Duluth, ten years ago, I
negotiated with the Dean that I would live near the reservation (90 miles south of the University) and work with the Lac Courte
Oreilles OJibwe community. I asked that this be counted as my service work. In theory, this worked, but in practice some colleagues
felt I was not a good departmental citizen (I wasnt) and this came up in a review for tenure. I was too far away (not seen) and my
work too much on the margins (starting an Ojibwe immersion school) to be understood. I risked getting tenure for sure. I hunkered
down and published more, which was not understood or appreciated by the fledgling school where I worked, but it did satisfy the
tenure review process. I was held accountable by two very different sets of rules and groups of people with very different goals, and
at times I know I seemed to be letting both of them down. Looking back however, it was worth it. The school is very successful
(without me) and my work in revitalization and academic communities has more moments of coming together than it ever has. The
stress and tension is small in comparison to many jobs. And in the end, I have to remember what a privileged job this is and the
responsibilities that come with it. Undercommons Instead - Everyday Activism, Everyday Transgression During our sessions, time
was carved out for each of us to locate ourselves as activists, but we also troubled this term and its association with a hero

The oppressive refinery tactics of the academy (labor exploitation, isolation,

coerced assimilation, etc.,) can dislocate even the most grounded of us if we are not
careful to continuously evaluate and resist their effects on our activities. One such tactic
archetype.

mobilized by the hierarchy of the university, especially in education departments, is the archetype of white, Lady Bountiful the
missionary teacher figure endeavoring to civilize, fix and save marginalized peoples in light of her imposed and assumed purity,

Our justice work in communities

is often fetishized in the university, positioning us as heroes and saviors. It can
be commoditized into jobs, tenure, and advancement within the university without
us ever having to do anything to seriously challenge the status quo or destabilize
our privileged positions as academics. We are privileged, but we are also refugees in
the academy because these spaces were not designed for indigenous, black, or
white women (Moten & Harney, 2004; Bousquet, 2008). Moten and Harney (2004) describe the undercommons as a maroon
omniscience, and superiority (Harper & Cavanagh, 1994; Meiners, 2002; 2007).

community and an unsafe neighborhood for the university (p. 103). In the undercommons of the university, we subvert the
incorporation of our collective potential into metrics, into bureaucratic time-sucks, into curriculum vitae boosters: In that
Undercommons of the university one can see that it is not a matter of teaching versus research or even the beyond of teaching
versus the individualization of research. To enter this space is to inhabit the ruptural and enraptured disclosure of the commons that
fugitive enlightenment enacts, the criminal, matricidal, queer, in the cistern, on the stroll of the stolen life, the life stolen by
enlightenment and stolen back, where the commons give refuge, where the refuge gives commons (Moten & Harney, 2004, p. 103).
By better understanding how we negotiate the ways in which our desires for the university as a place where we can freely engage
each other in radical efforts for change within and beyond it scrape up against our experiences within its institutional borders, we

We can carve out cracks in the institution, and

make space and time for challenging its coercive forces and our own complicities
with it. We move in these spaces with critical enthusiasm about the work ahead. We come with incredible hope
able to meet the challenges of our communities within and beyond the University. There is an expectation that
can broaden and strengthen these undercommons.

obtaining credentials translates to gaining strength and support to do our work. We open up these spaces in the institution to
challenge what is not working for friends, our colleagues, families, communities, and us. We are comforted by the stealthy
radicalism of the undercommons. Here, we come ready to learn what hasnt been taught and change what we do not appreciate.

the undercommons is inclusive of the

people, the folk, and the communities that the university would rather remain silent.
When we come we leave the door open behind us, because we know,

The Academy is the new factory. The knowledge produced by

the affirmative will only be assimilated into the proliferation of
western thought codifying our bodies into empty vessels
ready to be managed, producing socially dead students
awaiting their life of production and consumption.
Occupied UC Berkeley In 9 (Anon. Grad Student @ uCal Berkeley, Anti-Capital Projects:
Questions & Answers. Anti-Capital Projects. 11-19-2009. http://anticapitalprojects.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/anticapital-projects/)//kbuck

The classroom just like the

workplace just like the university just like the state just like the economy manages
our social death, translating what we once knew from high school, from work, from
Yes, very much a cemetery. Only here there are no dirges, no prayers, only the repeated testing of our threshold for anxiety, humiliation, and debt.

our family life into academic parlance, into acceptable forms of social conflict. Who
knew that behind so much civic life
) was so much social death

(electoral campaigns, student body representatives, bureaucratic administrators, public relations officials, Peace and Conflict Studies,

ad nauseam

? What postures we maintain to claim representation, what limits we assume, what desires we dismiss? And in this moment of crisis they ask us

to twist ourselves in a way that they can hear. Petitions to Sacramento, phone calls to Congressmeneven the chancellor patronizingly congratulates our September 24th student strike, shaping the meaning and the force of the
movement as a movement against the policies of Sacramento. He expands his institutional authority to encompass the movement. When students begin to hold libraries over night, beginning to take our first baby step as an
autonomous movement he reins us in by serendipitously announcing library money. He manages movement, he kills movement by funneling it into the electoral process. He manages our social death. He looks forward to these
battles on his terrain, to eulogize a proposition, to win this or thathe and his look forward to exhausting us. He and his look forward to a reproduction of the logic of representative governance, the release valve of the university
plunges us into an abyss where ideas are wisps of etherthat is, meaning is ripped from action. Lets talk about the fight endlessly, but always only in their managed form: to perpetually deliberate, the endless fleshing-out-ofwhen
we push the boundaries of this form they are quick to reconfigure themselves to contain us: the chancellors congratulations, the reopening of the libraries, the managed general assemblythere is no fight against the administration
here, only its own extension. Each day passes in this way, the administration on the look out to shape student discourseit happens without pause, we dont notice nor do we care to. It becomes banal, thoughtless. So much so that
we see we are accumulating days: one semester, two, how close to being this or that, how far? This accumulation is our shared history. This accumulationevery once in a while interrupted, violated by a riot, a wild protest,

A dead but restless and desirous life. The

university steals and homogenizes our time yes, our bank accounts also, but it also
steals and homogenizes meaning. As much as capital is invested in building a killing
apparatus abroad, an incarceration apparatus in California, it is equally invested
here in an apparatus for managing social death. Social death is, of course, simply
the power source, the generator, of civic life with its talk of reform, responsibility,
unity A life, then, which serves merely as the public relations mechanism for death:
its garrulous slogans of freedom and democracy designed to obscure the shit and
decay in which our feet are planted. the university is a graveyard, but it is also a
factory: a factory of meaning which produces civic life and at the same time
produces social death A factory which produces the illusion that meaning and reality
can be separated
Everywhere the same whimsical ideas of the future. Everywhere
democracy.Everywhere discourse to shape our desires and distress in a way
acceptable to the electoral state, discourse designed to make our very moments
here together into a set of legible and fruitless demands. Totally managed death. A
machine for administering death, for the proliferation of technologies of death
These are merely the
personifications of the rule of the dead, the pools of investments, the buildings, the
flows of materials into and out of the physical space of the universityeach one the
product of some exploitationwhich seek to absorb more of our work, more tuition,
more energy. The university is a machine which wants to grow, to accumulate, to
expand, to absorb more and more of the living into its peculiar and perverse
machinery: high-tech research centers, new stadiums and office complexes.
unforgettable fucking, the overwhelming joy of love, life shattering heartbreakis a muted, but desirous life.

Yes,

; which everywhere reproduces the empty reactionary behavior of students based on the values of life (identity), liberty (electoral politics), and happiness (private property).

. As elsewhere,

things rule. Dead objects rule. In this sense, it matters little what face one puts on the universitywhether Yudof or some other lackey.

And at this critical

juncture the only way it can continue to grow is by more intense exploitation, higher tuition, austerity measures for the departments that fail to pass the test of relevancy. But the irrelevant departments also have their place.

With their pure motives of knowledge for its own sake, they perpetuate the blind
inertia of meaning ostensibly detached from its social context. As the university
cultivates its cozy relationship with capital, war and power, these discourses and
research programs play their own role, co-opting and containing radical potential

. And so

we attend lecture after lecture about how discourse produces subjects, ignoring the most obvious fact that we ourselves are produced by this discourse about discourse which leaves us believing that it is only words which matter,

. The university gladly permits the precautionary lectures on biopower;

on the production of race and gender; on the reification and the fetishization of
commodities. A taste of the poison serves well to inoculate us against any
confrontational radicalism.
The graveyard of liberal good
intentions, of meritocracy, opportunity, equality, democracy.
In seminars and lectures and essays, we
pay tribute to the universitys ghosts, the ghosts of all those it has excludedthe
immiserated, the incarcerated,
This is our gothicwe are so morbidly aware, we are so practiced at stomaching
horror that the horror is thoughtless.
words about words which matter

And all the while power weaves the invisible nets which contain and neutralize all thought and action, that bind revolution inside books, lecture

halls. There is no need to speak truth to power when power already speaks the truth. The university is a graveyard as es.

Here the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a

nightmare on the brain of the living. We graft our flesh, our labor, our debt to the skeletons of this or that social clich.

the just-plain-fucked. They are summoned forth and banished by a few well-meaning phrases and research programs, given their book titles, their

citations.

In this graveyard our actions will never touch, will never become the conduits of a movement, if we remain permanently

barricaded within prescribed identity categoriesour force will be dependent on the limited spaces of recognition built between us. Here we are at odds with one another socially, each of us: students, faculty, staff, homebums,
activists, police, chancellors, administrators, bureaucrats, investors, politicians, faculty/ staff/ homebums/ activists/ police/ chancellors/ administrators/ bureaucrats/ investors/ politicians-to-be. That is, we are students, or students of
color, or queer students of color, or faculty, or Philosophy Faculty, or Gender and Women Studies faculty, or we are custodians, or we are shift leaderseach with our own office, place, time, and given meaning. We form teams, clubs,
fraternities, majors, departments, schools, unions, ideologies, identities, and subculturesand thankfully each group gets its own designated burial plot. Who doesnt participate in this graveyard? In the university we prostrate
ourselves before a value of separation, which in reality translates to a value of domination. We spend money and energy trying to convince ourselves were brighter than everyone else. Somehow, we think, we possess some trait

that means we deserve more than everyone else. We have measured ourselves and we have measured others. It should never feel terrible ordering others around, right? It should never feel terrible to diagnose people as an expert,
manage them as a bureaucrat, test them as a professor, extract value from their capital as a businessman. It should feel good, gratifying, completing. It is our private wet dream for the future; everywhere, in everyone this same
dream of domination. After all, we are intelligent, studious, young. We worked hard to be here, we deserve this. We are convinced, owned, broken. We know their values better than they do: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.This
triumvirate of sacred values are ours of course, and in this moment of practiced theaterthe fight between the university and its own studentswe have used their words on their stages: Save public education! When those values
are violated by the very institutions which are created to protect them, the veneer fades, the tired set collapses: and we call it injustice, we get indignant. We demand justice from them, for them to adhere to their values. What many
have learned again and again is that these institutions dont care for those values, not at all, not for all. And we are only beginning to understand that those values are not even our own. The values create popular images and ideals
(healthcare, democracy, equality, happiness, individuality, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, public education) while they mean in practice the selling of commodified identities, the states monopoly on violence, the expansion
of markets and capital accumulation, the rule of property, the rule of exclusions based on race, gender, class, and domination and humiliation in general. They sell the practice through the image. Were taught well live the images
once we accept the practice. In this crisis the Chancellors and Presidents, the Regents and the British Petroleums, the politicians and the managers, they all intend to be true to their values and capitalize on the university
economically and sociallywhich is to say, nothing has changed, it is only an escalation, a provocation. Their most recent attempt to reorganize wealth and capital is called a crisis so that we are more willing to accept their new
terms as well aswhat was always dead in the university, to see just how dead we are willing to play, how non-existent, how compliant, how desirous. Every institution has of course our best interest in mind, so much so that were

Each
bulging institutional value longing to become more than its sentiment through us,
each of our empty gestures of feigned-anxiety to appear under pressure, or of coolambivalence to appear accustomed to horror, every moment of student life, is the
management of our consent to social death. Social death is our banal acceptance of
an institutions meaning for our own lack of meaning. Its the positions we
thoughtlessly enact. Its the particular nature of being owned. Social rupture is the
initial divorce between the owners and the owned.
willing to pay, to enter debt contracts, to strike a submissive pose in the classroom, in the lab, in the seminar, in the dorm, and eventually or simultaneously in the workplace to pay back those debts.

A social movement is a function of war. War contains the ability to create a new frame, to

build a new tension for the agents at play, new dynamics in the battles both for the meaning and the material. When we move without a return to their tired meaning, to their tired configurations of the material, we are engaging in

It is November 2009. For an end to the values of social death we need ruptures
and self-propelled, unmanaged movements of wild bodies. We need, we desire
occupations. We are an antagonistic dead.
war.

Talk to your friends, take over rooms, take over as many of these dead buildings. We will find one another.

Their radical resistance is not-so-radical. Outright anarchy is

banal, and only exacerbates the control of a formerly dying
system. This only ushers bodies into the simulation of liberal
democracy, codifying their bodies into willful subjects, simply
existing in the shadow of the law.
Robinson 12 (Andrew - a political theorist and activist based in the UK, 9/7 An A to Z of Theory | Jean
Baudrillard: Strategies of Subversion https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-11/)//kbuck

opponents of the system replace

explosive strategies with implosive strategies. Such strategies outbid the system in the
direction in which it is already going, and/or restore symbolic exchange. Explosion responds to
the order of production. Implosion and reversal similarly respond to the order of networks,
combinations and flows. We live in an era when games of chance and vertigo have replaced competitive, expressive
games. For Baudrillard, an effective subversion today would involve becoming more aleatory
than the system. Baudrillard sees this as possible through symbolic disorder, the return of symbolic exchange. Death
offers a higher order than the code, one which can move beyond and overthrow it. Baudrillard argues for catastrophic
Alternative strategies to overthrow the code Baudrillard proposes that

rather than dialectical responses. Catastrophic responses involve pushing things to their limit. Catastrophe is not necessarily a

catastrophe for the system, not for anyone else. Something is catastrophic in the
it is a winding-down of a cycle to its
horizon or to a transition-point where an event happens . The catastrophe is the point
of transition after which nothing has meaning from ones own point of view. But the
rejection of the codes demand for meaning makes catastrophe no longer negative .
Catastrophe is the passage to an entirely different world. The challenge must now be taken up at a higher level. The
challenge the code poses for us is the liquidation of all its structures, finding at the end only
negative idea Baudrillard means

bad sense only from a linear mode of thought. From another point of view,

symbolic exchange. Baudrillard proposes that we become the nomads of this desert, but disengaged from the mechanical illusion of

We should live this space, devoid of meaning, as a return to the territory, as symbolic exchange. To
We should reconstruct the
current space as a sacred space, a space without pathways, while rejecting the seduction of
value allowing work, value, the dying system to bury themselves. Baudrillard was writing this
value.

become, as one writer puts it, the hunters and gatherers of the contemporary megacity.

before the rise of contemporary surveillance and policing practices, which make it far harder to live in the systems spaces as if they
were territorial. It seems the system has somehow gained a reprieve from death, as it has several times before. It has done this by
further deepening and expanding the code, and by drawing on reactionary and fascistic energies. According to Baudrillard,

the

challenge is to avoid fascination with the death throes of the system, to avoid giving
it our energies in this way to simply leave it to die. The system keeps itself alive
by staging the ruse of its death , while leaving the subjects it has created intact. It is,
rather, through our own death (or metamorphosis) that the system collapses. With the social
failing, it seeks new energy, drawing on the marginal rebellions of excluded groups. For this reason, Baudrillard is suspicious of

attempts to recreate marginal systems of meaning, instead calling for the logical
exacerbation of the systems logic. One part of this revolt is the recreation of direct relations. The code depends
on everything being segmented and reduced to it, hence separated from others. Where exchange happens for instance, direct
communication in a liberated area the finality of the code is shattered. Any kind of social practice or language which does not rely
on the distinctions made by the code is revolutionary. Connections between people which dont depend on their social status,
solidarity across social borders, is revolutionary. Baudrillard also calls for the expansion of pataphysics the formulation of
imaginary solutions and problems in parody of science, similar to Situationist detournement and post-Situationist subvertisement
and culture jamming. One might also see phenomena such as Internet memes as pataphysical. For Baudrillard, pataphysics is a

The revolutionary
aspect of emancipatory movements (say, of Tahrir Square or the Argentinazo or Occupy) does not
reside in their demands or significations, but in their existence beyond these, as direct
connection. The real struggle is always against the code. But the system defuses or
recuperates struggles by redirecting them from the code to reality. This turns them
into struggles within the system.
further stage beyond simulation, which raises the stakes on it. This leads to particular implications.

The 1AC is founded on vampirism of the sufering to nourish

the psyche of the West their politics necessarily forefronts
theories, methods, and explanations mired in the sufering of
others by way of unconscious prefabricated politics of charity
cannibalism. They advance projects of understanding which
reproduce and feed of fantasies of the sufering other
resulting in inevitable exploitation and decimation. All of this
plays out like a market: their depictions of sufering exchange
for your ballot and a symbolic economy is reproduced in the
moment of decision which ultimately creates a DEMAND for
more sufering, turns the case.
Baudrillard 94 (Jean, ex-Prof of Sociology at Paris X, The Illusion of the End p.
66-70)
We have long denounced the capitalistic, economic exploitation of the poverty of the 'other half of the world' ['autre

We must today denounce the moral and sentimental exploitation of that

poverty - charity cannibalism being worse than oppressive violence. The extraction
and humanitarian reprocessing of a destitution which has become the equivalent of
oil deposits and gold mines. The extortion of the spectacle of poverty and , at the
same time, of our charitable condescension : a worldwide appreciated surplus of fine
sentiments and bad conscience . We should, in fact, see this not as the extraction of raw materials, but
monde].

as a waste-reprocessing enterprise. Their destitution and our bad conscience are, in effect, all part of the wasteproducts of history- the main thing is to recycle them to produce a new energy source. We have here an escalation
in the psychological balance of terror. World capitalist oppression is now merely the vehicle and alibi for this other,
much more ferocious, form of moral predation. One might almost say, contrary to the Marxist analysis, that

material exploitation is only there to extract that spiritual raw material that is the
misery of peoples, which serves as psychological nourishment for the rich countries and
media nourishment for

our daily lives. The 'Fourth World' (we are no longer dealing with a 'developing' Third

World) is once again beleaguered, this time as a catastrophe-bearing stratum .

The West is whitewashed

in the reprocessing of the rest of the world as waste and residue. And the white
world repents and seeks absolution - it, too, the waste-product of its own history.
The South is a natural producer of raw materials, the latest of which is catastrophe.
The North, for its part, specializes in the reprocessing of raw materials and hence
also in the reprocessing of catastrophe. Bloodsucking protection, humanitarian interference,
Medecins sans frontieres, international solidarity, etc. The last phase of colonialism: the New Sentimental Order is
merely the latest form of the New World Order .

Other people's destitution becomes our

adventure playground. Thus, the humanitarian offensive aimed at the Kurds - a show of repentance on the part
of the Western powers after allowing Saddam Hussein to crush them - is in reality merely the second phase of the
war, a phase in which charitable intervention finishes off the work of extermination. We are the consumers of the

our own eforts to

alleviate it (which, in fact, merely function to secure the conditions of
reproduction of the catastrophe market); there, at least, in the order of moral
ever delightful spectacle of poverty and catastrophe, and of the moving spectacle of

profits, the Marxist analysis is wholly applicable: we see to it that extreme poverty is
reproduced as a symbolic deposit, as a fuel essential to the moral and sentimental
equilibrium of the West. In our defence, it might be said that this extreme poverty was largely of our own
making and it is therefore normal that we should profit by it. There can be no finer proof that the distress of the
rest of the world is at the root of Western power and that the spectacle of that distress is its crowning glory than the
inauguration, on the roof of the Arche de la Defense, with a sumptuous buffet laid on by the Fondation des Droits de
l'homme, of an exhibition of the finest photos of world poverty. Should we be surprised that spaces are set aside in

Just as the economic

crisis of the West will not be complete so long as it can still exploit the resources of
the rest of the world, so the symbolic crisis will be complete only when it is no
longer able to feed on the other half's human and natural catastrophes (Eastern
Europe, the Gulf, the Kurds, Bangladesh, etc.). We need this drug, which serves us
as an aphrodisiac and hallucinogen. And the poor countries are the best suppliers as, indeed, they are of other drugs. We provide them, through our media, with the
means to exploit this paradoxical resource, just as we give them the means to
exhaust their natural resources with our technologies. Our whole culture lives off
this catastrophic cannibalism, relayed in cynical mode by the news media, and
carried forward in moral mode by our humanitarian aid, which is a way of
encouraging it and ensuring its continuity, just as economic aid is a strategy for
perpetuating under-development. Up to now, the financial sacrifice has been
compensated a hundredfold by the moral gain. But when the catastrophe market
itself reaches crisis point, in accordance with the implacable logic of the market, when distress becomes
scarce or the marginal returns on it fall from overexploitation , when we run out of disasters from
the Arche d' Alliance. for universal suffering hallowed by caviar and champagne?

elsewhere or when they can no longer be traded like coffee or other commodities, the West will be
forced to produce its own catastrophe for itself , in order to meet its need for
spectacle and that voracious appetite for symbols which characterizes it even more
than its voracious appetite for food. It will reach the point where it devours itself. When we have finished sucking
out the destiny of others, we shall have to invent one for ourselves. The Great Crash, the symbolic crash, will come
in the end from us Westerners, but only when we are no longer able to feed on the hallucinogenic misery which
comes to us from the other half of the world. Yet they do not seem keen to give up their monopoly. The Middle East,

Latin America are really going flat out in the distress and
catastrophe stakes, and thus in providing symbolic nourishment for the rich world.
They might be said to be overdoing it: heaping earthquakes, floods, famines and
ecological disasters one upon another, and finding the means to massacre each
other most of the time. The 'disaster show' goes on without any let-up and our
Bangladesh, black Africa and

sacrificial debt to them far exceeds their economic debt. The misery with which they generously overwhelm us is
something we shall never be able to repay. The sacrifices we offer in return are laughable (a tornado or two, a few

tiny holocausts on the roads, the odd financial sacrifice) and, moreover, by some infernal logic, these work out as
much greater gains for us, whereas our kindnesses have merely added to the natural catastrophes another one
immeasurably worse: the demographic catastrophe, a veritable epidemic which we deplore each day in pictures. In
short, there is such distortion between North and South, to the symbolic advantage of the South (a hundred
thousand Iraqi dead against casualties numbered in tens on our side: in every case we are the losers), that one day
everything will break down. One day, the West will break down if we are not soon washed clean of this shame, if an
international congress of the poor countries does not very quickly decide to share out this symbolic privilege of
misery and catastrophe. It is of course normal, since we refuse to allow the spread of nuclear weapons, that they
should refuse to allow the spread of the catastrophe weapon. But it is not right that they should exert that
monopoly indefinitely. In any case,

the under-developed are only so by comparison with the

Western system and its presumed success . In the light of its assumed failure, they
are not under-developed at all. They are only so in terms of a dominant
evolutionism which has always been the worst of colonial ideologies. The argument here
is that there is a line of objective progress and everyone is supposed to pass through its various stages (we find the
same eyewash with regard to the evolution of species and in that evolutionism which unilaterally sanctions the
superiority of the human race). In the light of current upheavals, which put an end to any idea of history as a linear
process, there are no longer either developed or under-developed peoples .

Thus, to encourage hope of

evolution - albeit by revolution - among the poor and to doom them, in keeping with
the objective illusion of progress, to technological salvation is a criminal absurdity. In
actual fact, it is their good fortune to be able to escape from evolution just at the point when we no longer know
where it is leading. In any case, a majority of these peoples, including those of Eastern Europe, do not seem keen to
enter this evolutionist modernity, and their weight in the balance is certainly no small factor in the West's
repudiation of its own history, of its own utopias and its own modernity. It might be said that the routes of violence,
historical or otherwise, are being turned around and that the viruses now pass from South to North, there being
every chance that, five hundred years after America was conquered, 1992 and the end of the century will mark the
comeback of the defeated and the sudden reversal of that modernity. The sense of pride is no longer on the side of
wealth but of poverty, of those who - fortunately for them - have nothing to repent, and may indeed glory in being
privileged in terms of catastrophes. Admittedly, this is a privilege they could hardly renounce, even if they wished
to, but natural disasters merely reinforce the sense of guilt felt towards them by the wealthy by those whom God
visibly scorns since he no longer even strikes them down. One day it will be the Whites themselves who will give up
their whiteness. It is a good bet that repentance will reach its highest pitch with the five-hundredth anniversary of
the conquest of the Americas. We are going to have to lift the curse of the defeated - but symbolically victorious peoples, which is insinuating itself five hundred years later, by way of repentance, into the heart of the white race.