Narratives

Good

K2 Whiteness
Narratives are key to break down whiteness it breaks down the unity of racist
structures and allows other perspectives to appear the very structures that allow
whiteness to function invisibly.
Burke 2012
(Kevin J. Burke, PhD, in curriculum, teaching, and educational policy, The Village in the City:
Critical Race Theory, Schooling, and a Live, Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, Volume 8.
2012, accessed 8/20/13, JK)
Implicit in this border-making is the sense that the demarcation of space as included and excluded
(inclusive and exclusive), people as internal or external, lies in a moral virtue of one peoples claim
to specific territory over that of others (Garbutt 2006: 1). Such a construction of identity is

rooted for Garbutt, in the notion of autochthony which denotes a local as being born of a land,
in the process serving as an aid to collective forgetfulness for, say, how the land was
appropriated. This allows for the single unifying myth (2) of the foundation of a space, a place
outlined by a founding forgetting (3) whereby it becomes easy to mark outsiders foreign, alien,
improbable and undesirable by erasing indigeneity from a place. Quite often that which we choose
to (and choose not to) tell of these stories of place and self (and thus other) determines where the
lines of demarcation fall. Work in genres such as memoir, autobiography, and narrative, Laing
(2000)argues allow for interplay between self-perception [and] other perception where
these perceptions and the various social and cultural factors in which they are steeped may
conflict with one another, creating potential and actual instabilities (as cited in Versaci 2007: 48).
Indeed a central tenet of whiteness as an epistemological a priori (Moreton-Robinson 2004:
75) turns on the ability to define an other through the construction of insider and outsider status
where by whiteness is defined by what it is not (animal or liminal) (78). For Giannacopoulos

(2007) this involves the dual action of appropriated indigenousness for the sake of re-positioning
what and who is possible in a space. And out of that action, those positionings, come stories,
narratives. Connelly and Clandinin (1990) see narrative as the study of the ways humans
experience the world (2). A notion that Daniell (1999) further refines, believing that stories (most
particularly memoir and narrative) become how individuals and groups engage in self-formation
(408). In the same vein, Brodkey (1996)sees critical auto ethnography as functioning similarly to
open up a space of resistance between the individual and the collective at contact zones seen as
social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other such that social identities
are the serious, impish, ridiculous, generous, wary, contradictory singular selves constructed and
reconstructed (28), here, in the de-racialised stories of a space and place.

K2 Borders/ Exclusion
Narratives solve exclusion they allow new perspectives that conflict with dominant
opinions and challenge the single unifying myth that supports exclusion by
allowing for new social spaces.
Burke 2012
(Kevin J. Burke, PhD, in curriculum, teaching, and educational policy, The Village in the City:
Critical Race Theory, Schooling, and a Live, Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, Volume 8.
2012, accessed 8/20/13, JK)
Implicit in this border-making is the sense that the demarcation of space as included and excluded
(inclusive and exclusive), people as internal or external, lies in a moral virtue of one peoples claim
to specific territory over that of others (Garbutt 2006: 1). Such a construction of identity is

rooted for Garbutt, in the notion of autochthony which denotes a local as being born of a land,
in the process serving as an aid to collective forgetfulness for, say, how the land was
appropriated. This allows for the single unifying myth (2) of the foundation of a space, a place
outlined by a founding forgetting (3) whereby it becomes easy to mark outsiders foreign, alien,
improbable and undesirable by erasing indigeneity from a place. Quite often that which we choose
to (and choose not to) tell of these stories of place and self (and thus other) determines where the
lines of demarcation fall. Work in genres such as memoir, autobiography, and narrative, Laing
(2000)argues allow for interplay between self-perception [and] other perception where
these perceptions and the various social and cultural factors in which they are steeped may
conflict with one another, creating potential and actual instabilities (as cited in Versaci 2007: 48).
Indeed a central tenet of whiteness as an epistemological a priori (Moreton-Robinson 2004:
75) turns on the ability to define an other through the construction of insider and outsider status
where by whiteness is defined by what it is not (animal or liminal) (78). For Giannacopoulos

(2007) this involves the dual action of appropriated indigenousness for the sake of re-positioning
what and who is possible in a space. And out of that action, those positionings, come stories,
narratives. Connelly and Clandinin (1990) see narrative as the study of the ways humans
experience the world (2). A notion that Daniell (1999) further refines, believing that stories (most
particularly memoir and narrative) become how individuals and groups engage in self-formation
(408). In the same vein, Brodkey (1996)sees critical auto ethnography as functioning similarly to
open up a space of resistance between the individual and the collective at contact zones seen as
social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other such that social identities
are the serious, impish, ridiculous, generous, wary, contradictory singular selves constructed and
reconstructed (28), here, in the de-racialised stories of a space and place.

Bad

1NC Shell
Narrative fails to subvert the dominant paradigm They
recreate absolutisms
Clawson 98 (Mark, J.D. Stanford, 22 Legal Stud. Forum 353)
These subjective identities give certain individuals solid ground
upon which they can build a progressive framework of thought. But
the narrowly defined identities of contemporary progressivism limit
the possibility that those outside the narrow group of interest will
share the agenda. One might hope that progressives could be somewhat
open-minded. But as Stanley Fish has observed, "to say that one's mind
should be open sounds fine until you realize that it is equivalent
to saying that one's mind should be empty of commitments, should
be a purely formal device." n165 Assuming that a broad base of
progressive factions can mold diverse individuals-with distinct
notions of identity-into a cohesive whole is simply asking the
framework of progressive thought to do something that, in the end,
it cannot. Contemporary narratives of identity seek to resolve the
questions of authority that plague progressivism, but they lack the
power that religion once held. In an earlier era, progressives could unite
behind an over-arching paradigm that commanded them to "do as they
would be done by." n166 Since widely shared cultural assumptions
fueled the progressive agenda of early decades, slavery was
vanquished and monopolies were crushed. But increasingly subjective
narratives of identity command obeisance only within narrow
spheres, not translating easily into the realities of other social worlds.
The interpretation of the world facilitated by these narrow
identities-including a well-defined course of future action-is accessible
only to those who share their cultural assumptions. This
interpretation may, in fact, challenge the social worlds established by
other progressives. In the end, it seems that progressive narratives, like
Frye's romances, end where they began, but with a difference. n167
Questions of authority and feelings of dissonance remain in the larger
progressivism, but those who gain new identities now live in
temporary worlds of absolutes.

Narratives support hegemonic structures- they link personal

experience to universal unquestionable truth
Ewick and Silbey 95 (Patricia Susan S. Law & Society Review, 00239216,
19, Vol. 29, Issue 2)
In the previous section, we discussed how narratives, like the lives and
experiences they recount, are cultural productions. Narratives are generated

interactively through normatively structured performances and interactions.

Even the most personal of narratives rely on and invoke collective narratives
symbols, linguistic formulations, structures, and vocabularies of motive
without which the personal would remain unintelligible and uninterpretable.
Because of the conventionalized character of narrative, then, our stories are
likely to express ideological effects and hegemonic assumptions.[ 10] We are as
likely to be shackled by the stories we tell (or that are culturally available for
our telling) as we are by the form of oppression they might seek to reveal. In
short, the structure, the content, and the performance of stories as they are
defined and regulated within social settings often articulate and reproduce
existing ideologies and hegemonic relations of power and inequality . It is
important to emphasize that narratives do more than simply reflect or express
existing ideologies. Through their telling, our stories come to constitute the
hegemony that in turn shapes social lives and conduct "The hegemonic is not
simply a static body of ideas to which members of a culture are obliged to
conform" (Silberstein 1988:127). Rather, Silberstein writes, hegemony has "a
protean nature in which dominant relations are preserved while their
manifestations remain highly flexible. The hegemonic must continually evolve so
as to recuperate alternative hegemonies." In other words, the hegemonic gets
produced and evolves within individual, seemingly unique, discrete personal
narratives. Indeed, the resilience of ideologies and hegemony may derive from
their articulation within personal stories. Finding expression and being
refashioned within the stories of countless individuals may lead to a polyvocality
that inoculates and protects the master narrative from critique. The hegemonic
strength of a master narrative derives, Brinkley Messick (1988:657) writes,
from "its textual, and lived heteroglossia [, s]ubverting and dissimulating itself
at every turn"; thus ideologies that are encoded in particular stories are
"effectively protected from sustained critique" by the fact that they are
constituted through variety and contradiction. Research in a variety of social

settings has demonstrated the hegemonic potential of narrative by

illustrating how narratives can contribute to the reproduction of existing
structures of meaning and power. First, narratives can function specifically as
mechanisms of social control (Mumby 1993). At various levels of social
organization ranging from families to nation-states storytelling instructs
us about what is expected and warns us of the consequences of nonconformity .
Oft-told family tales about lost fortunes or spoiled reputations enforce
traditional definitions and values of family life (Langellier & Peterson 1993).
Similarly, bureaucratic organizations exact compliance from members through
the articulation of managerial prerogatives and expectations and the
consequences of violation or challenge (Witten 1993). Through our narratives

of
courtship, lost accounts, and failed careers, cultures are constructed; we "do"
family, we "do" organization, through the stories we tell (Langellier &
Peterson 1993). Second, the hegemonic potential of narrative is further
enhanced by narratives' ability to colonize consciousness. Well-plotted stories
cohere by relating various (selectively appropriated) events and details into a
temporally organized whole (see part I above). The coherent whole, that is, the
configuration of events and characters arranged in believable plots, preempts

The events seem to speak for themselves; the tale

appears to tell itself. Ehrenhaus (1993) provides a poignant example of a
cultural meta-narrative that operates to stifle alternatives. He describes the
currently dominant cultural narrative regarding the United States's
involvement in the Vietnam War as one that relies on themes of dysfunction
and rehabilitation. The story, as Ehrenhaus summarizes it, is structured as a
social drama which characterizes both the nation and individual Vietnam
veterans as having experienced a breakdown in normal functioning only
recently resolved through a process of healing. This narrative is persuasive
alternative stories.

because it reiterates and elaborates already existing and dominant metaphors

and interpretive frameworks in American culture concerning what Philip Rieff

(1968) called the "triumph of the therapeutic" (see also Crews 1994).
Significantly, the therapeutic motif underwriting this narrative depicts
veterans as emotionally and psychologically fragile and, thus, disqualifies
them as creditable witnesses. The connection between what they saw and
experienced while in Vietnam and what the nation did in Vietnam is severed.
In other words, what could have developed as a powerful critique of warfare as
national policy is contained through the image of illness and rehabilitation, an
image in which "'healing' is privileged over 'purpose' [and] the rhetoric of
recovery and reintegration subverts the emergence of rhetoric that seeks to
examine the reasons that recovery is even necessary" (Ehrenhaus 1993:83).
Constituent and distinctive features of narratives make them particularly potent
forms of social control and ideological penetration and homogenization . In part,
their potency derives from the fact that narratives put "forth powerful and
persuasive truth claims claims about appropriate behavior and values
that are shielded from testing or debate" (Witten 1993:105). Performative
features of narrative such as repetition, vivid concrete details, particularity of
characters, and coherence of plot silence epistemological challenges and often
generate emotional identification and commitment. Because narratives make
implicit rather than explicit claims regarding causality and truth as they are
dramatized in particular events regarding specific characters, stories elude
challenges, testing, or debate. Van Dijk (1993) has reported, for instance, that
stories containing negative images and stereotypes of nonwhite persons are less
subject to the charge of racism when they recount personal experiences and
particular events. Whereas a general claim that a certain group is inferior or

dangerous might be contested on empirical grounds, an individual story

about being mugged, a story which includes an incidental reference to the
nonwhite race of the assailant, communicates a similar message but under
the protected guise of simply stating the "facts." The causal significance or
relevance of the assailant's race is, in such a tale, strongly implied but not
subject to challenge or falsifiability. Thus representations, true and/or false,

made implicitly without either validation or contest, are routinely exchanged in

social interactions and thereby occupy social space. Third, narratives contribute
to hegemony to the extent that they conceal the social organization of their
production and plausibility. Narratives embody general understandings of the
world that by their deployment and repetition come to constitute and sustain the
life-world. Yet because narratives depict specific persons existing in particular
social, physical, and historical locations, those general understandings often
remain unacknowledged. By failing to make these manifest, narratives draw on

unexamined assumptions and causal claims without displaying these assumptions

and claims or laying them open to challenge or testing. Thus, as narratives
depict understandings of particular persons and events, they reproduce,
without exposing, the connections of the specific story and persons to the
structure of relations and institutions that made the story plausible . To the extent
that the hegemonic is "that order of signs and practices, relations and
distinctions, images and epistemologies that come to be taken-for-granted as
the natural and received shape of the world and everything that inhabits it"
(Comaroff & Comaroff 1991), the unarticulated and unexamined plausibility is
the story's contribution to hegemony. The following two examples drawn from
recent sociolegal research illustrate the ways in which legally organized
narrativity helps produce the taken-for-granted and naturalized world by effacing
the connections between the particular and the general. Sara Cobb (1992)
examines the processes through which women's stories of violence are
"domesticated" (tamed and normalized) within mediation sessions. Cobb
reports that the domestication of women's stories of violence are a consequence
of the organization of the setting in which they are told: within mediation, the
storyteller and her audience are situated within a normative organization that
recognizes the values of narrative participation over any substantive moral or
epistemological code or standard. Being denied access to any external

standards, the stories the women tell cannot therefore be adjudged true or
compelling. The stories are interpreted as one version of a situation in which
"multiple perspectives are possible." Cobb demonstrates how this particular
context of elicitation specifically buries and silences stories of violence,
effectively reproducing women's relative powerlessness within their families.
With women deprived of the possibility of corroboration by the norms of the
mediation session, their stories of violence are minimized and "disappeared ."

As
a consequence, the individual woman can get little relief from the situation
that brought her to mediation: she is denied an individual legal remedy (by
being sent from court to mediation) and at the same time denied access to
and connections with any collective understanding of or response to the
sorts of violence acknowledged by the law (through the organization of the
mediation process). Through this process, "violence, as a disruption of the moral
order in a community, is made familiar (of the family) and natural the
extraordinary is tamed, drawn into the place where we eat, sleep and [is] made
ordinary" (ibid., p. 19). Whereas mediation protects narratives from an

interrogation of their truth claims, other, formal legal processes are

deliberately organized to adjudicate truth claims. Yet even in these settings,
certain types of truth claims are disqualified and thus shielded from
examination and scrutiny. The strong preference of courts for individual
narratives operates to impede the expression (and validation) of truth claims
that are not easily represented through a particular story. Consider, for
example, the Supreme Court's decision in the McClesky case (1986). The
defendant, a black man who had been convicted of the murder of a police
officer, was sentenced to death. His Supreme Court appeal of the death
sentence was based on his claim that the law had been applied in a racially
discriminatory way, thus denying him equal protection under the law. As part
of McClesky's appeal, David Baldus, a social scientist, submitted an amicus

brief in which he reported the results of his analysis of 2,000 homicide cases
in that state (Baldus 1990). The statistical data revealed that black
defendants convicted of killing white citizens were significantly more likely to
receive the death sentence than white defendants convicted of killing a black
victim. Despite this evidence of racial discrimination, the Court did not
overturn McClesky's death sentence. The majority decision, in an opinion
written by Justice Powell, stated that the kind of statistical evidence
submitted by Baldus was simply not sufficient to establish that any racial
discrimination occurred in this particular case. The court declared, instead,
that to demonstrate racial discrimination, it would be necessary to establish
that the jury, or the prosecutor, acted with discriminatory purpose in
sentencing McClesky.[ 11] Here, then, an unambiguous pattern of racial
inequity was sustained through the very invocation of and demand for
subjectivity (the jury's or prosecutor's state of mind) and particularity (the
refusal to interpret this case as part of a larger category of cases) that are
often embodied in narratives. In this instance, relative powerlessness and
injustice (if one is to believe Baldus's data) were preserved, rather than
challenged, by the demand for a particular narrative about specific concrete
individuals whose interactions were bounded in time and space. In other
words, the Court held that the legally cognizable explanation of the
defendant's conviction could not be a product of inferential or deductive
comprehension (Mink 1970; Bruner 1986). Despite its best efforts, the
defense was denied discursive access to the generalizing, and authoritative,
language of social logico-deductive science and with it the type of "truths" it
is capable of representing. The court insists on a narrative that effaces the
relationship between the particular and the general, between this case and
other capital trials in Georgia. Further, the McClesky decision illustrates not
only how the demand for narrative particularity may reinscribe relative
powerlessness by obscuring the connection between the individual case and
larger patterns of institutional behavior; it also reveals how conventionalized
legal procedures impede the demonstration of that connection.[ 12] The
court simultaneously demanded evidence of the jurors' states of mind and
excluded such evidence. Because jury deliberations are protected from
routine scrutiny and evaluation, the majority demanded a kind of proof that
is institutionally unavailable. Thus, in the McClesky decision, by insisting on a
narrative of explicit articulated discrimination, the court calls for a kind of
narrative truth that court procedures institutionally impede. As these
examples suggest, a reliance on or demand for narrativity is neither unusual nor
subversive within legal settings. In fact, given the ideological commitment to
individualized justice and case-by-case processing that characterizes our legal
system, narrative, relying as it often does on the language of the particular and
subjective, may more often operate to sustain, rather than subvert, inequality
and injustice. The law's insistent demand for personal narratives achieves a kind
of radical individuation that disempowers the teller by effacing the connections
among persons and the social organization of their experiences. This argument

is borne out if we consider that being relieved of the necessity, and costs, of

telling a story can be seen as liberatory and collectively empowering. Insofar

as particular and subjective narratives reinforce a view of the world made up
of autonomous individuals interacting only in immediate and local ways, they
may hobble collective claims and solutions to social inequities (Silbey 1984).
In fact, the progressive achievements of workers' compensation, no-fault
divorce, no-fault auto insurance, strict liability, and some consumer
protection regimes derive directly from the provision of legal remedies
without the requirement to produce an individually crafted narrative of right
and liability.

Generic
Narratives cannot predict the outcome of the situation which kills all solvency
Thomas J Kaplan 1993 The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and
Planning Duke University Press Page 181
The second objection to the use of narrativity suggests that narrative
statements can never apply to the future. Analytical philosophers such as
Arthur Danto have shown convincingly that the narrative structure can
explain why events occurred at the same time that they describe what has
occurred. In the process, however, narratives apply logically only to the
past. 35 This is because in order for a sentence to be truly part of a
narrative, the narrator must know something that the character he
describes did not knownamely, how the story comes out in the end . A

sentence like The author of the Emancipation Proclamation was born in

1809 is thus quintessentially narrative. Nancy Hanks Lincoln could not have
known at the time she gave birth to Abraham what the author of this
sentence knew.

Narratives are too simplistic to be useful for understanding foreign

policy.
Dowdall 12
{Jonathan Dowdall, works for the UK Joint Delegation at NATO, Do Stories
Help or Hinder Our Understanding of Foreign Affairs?, Policymic, online at
http://www.policymic.com/articles/3290/do-stories-help-or-hinder-ourunderstanding-of-foreign-affairs, accessed 07/09/13} A.S.
Understandings of narrative vary, but the basic concept is that
peoples understanding of the world can be broken down into the
stories they tell. Stories and narrative are the cognitive means by which
people understand events the mental progressions along which we define
ourselves, our beliefs, and our policies. This is a necessary short-hand
technique for understanding the world. It helps a wider audience appreciate
global issues and understand how to handle them. However, relying on
narratives does have some drawbacks. An excellent speech by Tyler Cowen
from 2009 explores this issue, and raises three reasons why relying too
heavily on narrative can be dangerous. Firstly, narratives tend to be too
simple. They fall into archetypes such as good vs. evil, or a battle.
The problem is, the world is rarely that simple, and this can have
dangerous consequences. For example, after 9/11 the Bush
administration created a very simple story: the War on Terror. It spoke of
bad guys in the Middle East and good guys in the U.S. military who would
stop them. Yet, the complexities of regional power dynamics, or modern
perceptions of the U.S. in the Islamic world, or the basic discussion of
whether intervention was even a good idea were lost in this narrative. It was
a good, understandable story, but arguably bad policy. Another
problem with relying on stories is that you can tell only so many.

People will often use one particular narrative to justify a position and
will then be unable to deviate from that view. For instance, you may
argue that U.S. cooperation with Saudi Arabia must change because of that
countrys harsh interpretation of Shariah law. Issues of oil reliance, or
regional balance of power, or the like, cannot break this narrative in the
viewers mind. Yet, the reality of the modern world is that it is multipolar, interconnected, often morally ambiguous. States which execute
bad laws are often simultaneously global trade partners, or fellow voters
on a mutually beneficial UN resolution. There are usually a series of
contradictory stories in any foreign policy issue, and this should
urge caution about falling onto any single explanation. Finally,
narrative can be too convincing. In short, good stories can manipulate
us. Anyone who has listened to an impassioned speech even if it is
completely incorrect will attest to the power of a good story to convince.
Such manipulation has led to some of the worst crimes in human
history - such as anti-Semitic narratives about global wealth during the
Holocaust. Clearly, if a narrative justifies an extreme position, we have
to think very carefully about the stories we are using. GOP candidates
calling for an invasion of Iran which most other pundits declare a terrible
foreign policy idea certainly spring to mind. The conclusion? Narratives
are a natural and necessary human mechanism for understanding the
world, but they cannot be relied upon too heavily. Foreign policy is
complex, and may require the practitioner to engage in deeper
analysis, or to weigh up contradictory viewpoints simultaneously.
Often, it will require a compromise that ruins any simple story.
When news broke Monday of the worst mass shooting in U.S.
history, the question many horrified Americans most wanted to
answer was, Who was the shooter?

Individualistic approaches hinder effective public policy.

Goss 07
{Kristin A. Goss, assistant professor of public-policy studies and political
science at the Sanford Institute of Public Policy, Bad Public Policy
Contributes To The Death Count, published April 18 2007, Duke Sanford;
school of public policy, online at http://news.sanford.duke.edu/newstype/commentary/2007/bad-public-policy-contributes-death-count, accessed
07/09/13} A.S.
The assumption that we can make policy based on individual stories
is dangerous because, for a variety of reasons, individual stories call our
attention to factors that make those cases unique, not factors that tie them
together. What ties these massacres together is guns. In the immediate
aftermath of the Virginia Tech killings, before the gunman was publicly
named, speculation swirled about his identity and motives. He was rumored
to be, alternately, a lone gunman with no known ties to the university; a
jealous boyfriend seeking revenge on his girlfriend; a disgruntled former
student seeking revenge against the university; or a Chinese national

possibly bent on harming America. Yesterday we learned that the gunman

was a troubled 23-year-old South Korean national who was also a resident
student at Virginia Tech. Important as that information may be to lawenforcement officers piecing together the crime, its hard to see how those
details help us frame meaningful policy to prevent further shootings.
Understanding an assailants motives or his place in the social order tells us
very little about what to do next. And yet we persist in analyzing these
massacres in terms of the unique stories of the individual perpetrators: the
South Korean immigrant loner at Virginia Tech; the psychologically haunted
milk-truck driver at the Amish school last year; the white supremacist at the
California day-care center in 1999; the alienated Trenchcoat Mafia at
Columbine High School eight years ago. Why do we understand these events
as dark tales of deranged individuals? Part of the answer is that human
beings need to make sense of senseless events, and narratives help us do
so. The stories we construct tend to reassure us that such traumatic events
won't happen to us -- that the event was an isolated incident, perpetrated
by a one nut in circumstances that dont apply to our lives. But there may
be particular reasons why Americans, more than people from other
nations, are especially likely to construct narratives that revolve
around individuals as both villains and heroes. For one, individualism is
deeply ingrained in our political culture -- the set of assumptions
drummed into us by the nation-building stories we learned as
schoolchildren and by the Constitution, which enshrines individual
rights and liberties as the foundation of our democracy. Our
individualistic political culture is nowhere more apparent than in debates
over firearms. After all, our founding myths -- musket-bearing citizen militias
overthrowing a distant tyrant, rugged frontiersmen who made the nation
great -- revolve around guns. So does the Second Amendment to the
Constitution. Our cultural predilection to understand public events in terms of
individuals is reinforced by the news media, which are in the business of
constructing and selling narratives. By focusing on an individual, whether as
hero or villain, journalists can condense complex information into a format,
the dramatic story, that busy readers or viewers can quickly grasp. Good
stories are good business. Yet recognizing the power of stories about
heroes and villains does not mean that these stories are a solid
foundation for public policy. The problem is nowhere more apparent than
in the case of school shootings. In 2002 the U.S. Secret Service conducted a
comprehensive analysis of all such shootings from 1974 through 2000 -- a
total of 37 incidents, with 41 assailants. Among the reports most striking
findings: There is no profile of a school shooter; instead, the students who
carried out the attacks differed from one another in numerous ways. In
other words, focusing on individual traits would have told us nothing about
how to construct policies to prevent such shootings from happening in the
future. Indeed, portraying public problems in terms of individual
stories may actually hinder effective policy responses. In a 1990 study,
the political scientist Shanto Iyengar, of Stanford University, found that,

when news-media stories about poverty spotlight poor individuals, viewers

are far likelier to hold the poor person responsible for his plight than when
the media spotlight structural forces, such as unemployment in the
manufacturing sector. A logical implication of this study is that focusing on
individual woes may curtail important debates about collective
solutions to poverty.

Rhetoric of personal stories is used to distract from actual evidence.

McDonough 2000
{John E. McDonough, associate professor at the Heller School at Brandeis
University and former health committee chairman in the Massachusetts
House of Representatives, Using And Misusing Anecdote In Policy Making,
published 2000, Health Affairs, online at
http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/20/1/207.full, accessed 07/09/13}
A.S.
These two encounters illustrate both the value and harm of relying on
storytelling in making public policy. Stories can enable lawmakers to
understand a legitimate need for policy change but just as readily can lead
them to make bad policy decisions. Stories can bring to life drab data
analyses, helping us to visualize problems and opportunities for change. But
stories also can lead us down wasteful and dangerous paths and
blind us to uncomfortable uncomfortable truths we would prefer to
ignore, like the fact that there yet is no easy cure for breast cancer. It comes
as no surprise, then, that almost as common as using narrative and anecdote
in policy making is criticizing them. Former Minnesota state legislator
Lee Greenfield often remarks that one compelling anecdote (true or
false) at a crucial moment in a floor debate can vaporize a mountain
of data and careful policy analysis.

Genealogy

Genealogy Good

Generic
Genealogical interrogation lays the groundwork for everyday activity and can create
broad change.
Medina 11
Medina 11 (Jose Medina, October 2011, Associate Professor of Philosophy at
Vanderbilt, Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance: Counter-Memory,
Epistemic Friction, and Guerrilla Pluralism, 6/26/12,K.H.)
As Foucault puts it, it is the coupling together of the buried scholarly knowledge and
knowledges that were disqualified by the hierarchy of erudition and sciences that gives strength
to genealogical critique.34 What both of these forms of subjugated knowledges brings to the fore is
the historical knowledge of struggles, the memory of combats, the very memory that had until
then been confined to the mar-gins.35 And this is exactly what the critical and transformative work
of genealogical investigations consists in , according to Foucault: with the coupling together of

scholarly erudition and local memories, genealogical investigations provide a meticulous

rediscovery of struggles and the raw memory of fights; this coupling *<+ allows us to constitute
a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of that knowledge in contemporary tactics. 36
Genealogical investigations can unearth multiple paths from buried or forgotten past struggles to
the present; and thus they can promote a critical awareness that things are as they are because of a
history of past struggles that are hidden from view, which can have a great impact on how we
confront our struggles in the present. As McWhorters genealogical investigations il-lustrate so

well, one consequence of that awareness is the recognition that todays status quo was far from
inevitable and need not persist into tomorrow.37 Genea-logies are insurrections against
hegemonic power/knowledge effects of discursive practices. Thus, for example, McWhorters
genealogical account of racism in the US is an intellectual assault on the power-effects of
institutionalized, entrenched, and taken-for-granted academic, clinical, moralistic, and religious
discourses about ra-cism.38 And it is important to note that the possibilities of critique that are
opened up by unearthing marginalized past struggles benefit not only those whose expe-riences and
lives have been kept in the dark, but the entire social body, which can now become critically
conscious of the heterogeneity of histories and experiences that are part of the social fabric. This is

why McWhorters genealogy of racism makes racial oppression relevant in novel and
unexpected ways to a wide variety of groups and publics that can now relate to old struggles in
new ways.39

Solves Oppression
The genealogical methodology is a system by which pluralism flourishes and is
therefore preferable to any other methodology to solve the white exceptionalism in
the squo. What genealogy does is it focuses on subjugated knowledges as well as
mainstream ones and compares them therefore opening up an opportunity where
racism can be nullified.
Medina 11
(Jose Medina, October 2011, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt,
Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance: Counter-Memory, Epistemic
Friction, and Guerrilla Pluralism, 6/26/12, K.H.)
The central goal of this paper is to show the emancipatory potential of the epistemological
framework underlying Foucaults work. More specifically, I will try to show that the Foucaultian
approach places practices of remembering and for-getting in the context of power relations in
such a way that possibilities of resistance and subversion are brought to the fore. When our
cultural practices of remembering and forgetting are interrogated as loci where multiple power
relations and power struggles converge, the first thing to notice is the heterogeneity of differently
situ-ated perspectives and the multiplicity of trajectories that converge in the epistemic negotiations
in which memories are formed or de-formed, maintained alive or killed . The discursive practices in

which memory and oblivion are manufactured are not uniform and harmonious, but
heterogeneous and full of conflicts and tensions. Foucault invites us to pay attention to the past
and ongoing epistemic battles among competing power/knowledge frameworks that try to
control a given field. Different 2 Ibid. 95. Foucault Studies, No. 12, pp. 9-35. 11 fields or
domains of discursive interactioncontain particular discursive regimes with their particular ways
of producing knowledge. In the battle among power/ knowledge frameworks, some come on top and
become dominant while others are displaced and become subjugated. Foucaults methodology
offers a way of exploiting that vibrant plurality of epistemic perspectives which always contains
some bodies of experiences and memories that are erased or hidden in the mainstream frame-works
that become hegemonic after prevailing in sustained epistemic battles. What Foucault calls
subjugated knowledges3 are forms of experiencing and remembering that are pushed to the
margins and rendered unqualified and unworthy of epistemic respect by prevailing and hegemonic
discourses.

Solves Racism
Genealogies are specifically helpful in combating racism and hegemonic supremacy
because of its ability to transform ideas based on perspectives.
Medina 11
(Jose Medina, October 2011, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt,
Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance: Counter-Memory, Epistemic
Friction, and Guerrilla Pluralism, 6/26/12,K.H.)
Subjugated knowledges remain invisible to mainstream perspectives; they have a precarious
subterranean existence that renders them unnoticed by most people and impossible to detect by
those whose perspective has already internalized certain epistemic exclusions. And with the
invisibility of subjugated knowledges, certain possibilities for resistance and subversion go
unnoticed. The critical and emancipa-tory potential of Foucaultian genealogy resides in challenging
established practices of remembering and forgetting by excavating subjugated bodies of
experiences and memories, bringing to the fore the perspectives that culturally hegemonic practices
have foreclosed. The critical task of the scholar and the activist is to resurrect subju-gated
knowledgesthat is, to revive hidden or forgotten bodies of experiences and memoriesand to
help produce insurrections of subjugated knowledges .4 In order to be critical and to have
transformative effects, genealogical investigations should aim at these insurrections, which are
critical interventions that disrupt and interrogate epistemic hegemonies and mainstream
perspectives (e.g. official histories, standard interpretations, ossified exclusionary meanings, etc).

Such insurrections involve the difficult labor of mobilizing scattered, marginalized publics and of
tapping into the critical potential of their dejected experiences and memories. An epistemic insurrection requires a collaborative relation between genealogical scholars/activists and the subjects
whose experiences and memories have been subjugated: those subjects by themselves may not
be able to destabilize the epistemic status quo until they are given a voice at the epistemic table
(i.e. in the production of knowledge), that is, until room is made for their marginalized
perspective to exert resistance, until past epistemic battles are reopened and established
frameworks become open to con-testation. On the other hand, the scholars and activists aiming to
produce insurrec-tionary interventions could not get their critical activity off the ground if they
did not draw on past and ongoing contestations, and the lived experiences and memo- 3 See esp.
Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended (New York: Picador, 2003), 7-9. 4 See Foucault,
Society Must be Defended, 9, where he introduces and explains the notion of the insurrection
of subjugated knowledges that genealogical investigations should aim at. In sec-tion 1 I explain
the relationship between critical genealogy and the insurrection of subjugated knowledges.
Medina: Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance 12 ries of those whose marginalized
lives have become the silent scars of forgotten struggles.2

Unified histories = preserve those in power. Genealogical tellings of history can

interrupt narratives that maintain racial superiority.
Medina 11
(Jose Medina, October 2011, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt,
Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance: Counter-Memory, Epistemic

Friction, and Guerrilla Pluralism, 6/26/12,K.H.)

Official histories are produced by monopolizing knowledge-producing prac-tices with
respect to a shared past. Official histories create and maintain the unity and continuity of a
political body by imposing an interpretation on a shared past and, at the same time, by
silencing alternative interpretations of historical experien-ces. Counter-histories try to undo
these silences and to undermine the unity and continuity that official histories produce. Foucault
illustrates this with what he calls the discourse of race war that emerged in early modernity as a
discourse of resis-tance for the liberation of a race against the oppression of another, e.g. of the
Saxons under the yoke of the Normans. Foucault argues that in Europeand especially in
Englandthis discourse of race war functioned as a counter-history8 until the end of the 19th
Century, at which point it was turned into a racist discourse (aimed not at the liberation of an

oppressed race, but at the supremacy of an allegedly superior race that views all others as an
existential threat). In lecture IV of Society Must Be Defended Foucault sets out to analyze the
counterhistorical function of the race-war discourse in early modernity.9 Part of what the racewar discourse did was to retrieve the untold history of a people which could be used as a weapon
against the official history that legitimized their oppression. This counter-history tapped into the
subversive power of a silenced historical experience and reactivated the past to create distinctive
knowledge/power effects: new meanings and normative attitudes were mobilized, so that

what was officially presented as past glorious victories that legitimized monarchs and feudal
lords as the rightful owners of the land to whom taxes were owed, now appeared as unfair
defeats at the hands of abusive conquerors who became oppressors and had to be
overthrown.

Solves Whiteness
In order to truly understand the concept of the black body we must view it in the
historical perspective of racial experiences that constitute whiteness
Yancy 2005
(George Yancy Associate Professor of Philosophy, Duquesne University works primarily in the
areas of critical philosophy of race, critical whiteness studies, and philosophy of the Black
experience. 2005 Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body The Journal of Speculative
Philosophy 19.4 (2005) 215-241
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_speculative_philosophy/v019/19.4yancy.html accessed
6/27/12)
To theorize the Black body one must "turn to the [Black] body as the radix for interpreting
racial experience" (Johnson [1993, 600]).1 It is important to note that this particular
strategy also functions as a lens through which to theorize and critique whiteness; for the
Black body's "racial" experience is fundamentally linked to the oppressive modalities of
the "raced" white body. However, there is no denying that my own "racial" experiences or the
social performances of whiteness can become objects of critical reflection. In this paper, my
objective is to describe and theorize situations where the Black body's subjectivity, its lived
reality, is reduced to instantiations of the white imaginary, resulting in what I refer to as "the
phenomenological return of the Black body."2 These instantiations are embedded within and
evolve out of the complex social and historical interstices of whites' efforts at self-construction
through complex acts of erasure vis--vis Black people. These acts of self-construction, however,
are myths/ideological constructions predicated upon maintaining white power. As James Snead
has noted, "Mythification is the replacement of history with a surrogate ideology of [white]
elevation or [Black] demotion along a scale of human value" (Snead 1994, 4). How I understand
and theorize the body relates to the fact that the bodyin this case, the Black bodyis capable
of undergoing a sociohistorical process of "phenomenological return" vis--vis white
embodiment. The body's meaningwhether phenotypically white or blackits ontology, its
modalities of aesthetic performance, its comportment, its "raciated" reproduction, is in
constant contestation. The hermeneutics of the body, how it is understood, how it is "seen,"
its "truth," is partly the result of a profound historical, ideological construction. "The
body" is positioned by historical practices and discourses. The body is codified as this or
that in terms of meanings that are sanctioned, scripted, and constituted through processes
of negotiation that are embedded within and serve various ideological interests that are
grounded within further power-laden social processes. The historical plasticity of the body,
the fact that it is a site of contested meanings, speaks to the historicity of its "being" as
lived and meantwithin the interstices of social semiotics. Hence: a) the body is less of a
thing/being than a shifting/changing historical meaning that is subject to cultural
configuration/reconfiguration. The point here is to interrogate the "Black body" as a "fixed and
material truth" that preexists "its relations with the world and with others"3 ; b) the body's
meaning is fundamentally symbolic (McDowell 2001, 301), and its meaning is congealed
through symbolic repetition and iteration that emits certain signs and presupposes certain norms;
and, c) the body is a battlefield, one that is fought over again and again across particular
historical moments and within particular social spaces. "In other words, the concept of the body
provides only the illusion of self-evidence, facticity, 'thereness' for something

fundamentally ephemeral, imaginary, something made in the image of particular social

groups" (301).

Genealogy Bad

1NC
1. The genealogy method is bad it is tied to archaic forms of knowledge production
based off of exclusionary Greek thought and is an ineffective method for educational
activities like debate.
Magrini 2009 (Magrini, James, currently completing his Doctorate of Philosophy of Education,
"Aligning Nietzsche's "Genealogical" Philosophy With Democratic Educational Reform"
(2009).Philosophy
Scholarship.Paper 12., http://dc.cod.edu/philosophypub/12, accessed 6/2/13, JK)
Since it is impossible to divorce Nietzsches understanding of truth from the values that underlie
it, and, considering Nietzsche was ultimately a conservative with respect to his conception of a
national system of education, e.g., Nietzsches conception stems from the ancient Greek ideal
(where misogyny, culturally elitism, phallo-centricism, and logo-centricism ruled the day), and
most particularly from the virtue-ethics of Aristotle, it is difficult to rectify Nietzsches view
with any contemporary notion of a liberal, democratic education. In closing, while Nietzsches
perspectivism has certain implications for a notion of education that embraces a multiplicity of
perspectives for experiencing knowledge and eschews any and all notions of objective,
authoritarian notions of truth with a capital T, it is Nietzsches antiquated valuesystem, which
can never be divorced from his epistemology, that poses the problem of incorporating his views
into the movement for educational reform in this contemporary age. If we read Nietzsche closely
and attempt to remain true to his philosophy, it is impossible to square him completely with the
current movement for equitable and just educational reform in this everchanging, heterogeneous
landscape.

2. Genealogies fracture current movements and can be co-opted by multinational

corporations we need collectively organized resistance.
McIvor 10 (David, Kettering Foundation, Nov. 8, 2010, The Politics of Speed: Connolly,
Wolin, and the Prospects for Democratic Citizenship in an Accelerated Polity, Polity, Vol. 43,
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/polity/journal/v43/n1/full/pol201023a.html - oliver g)
However, Shapiro does not seem to entertain the possibility that such desynchronization
might instead bring about more intense class and cultural stratification. This will, it is true,
make the recognition of contending co-presences more frequent, as the life experiences of
the rich and the rest desynchronize. Yet it may also make the continuous renegotiation
of these co-presences more difficult and hence less certain. At the very least, Shapiro does
not demonstrate why social centrifugalism and the disruptions of economic and cultural
times contain democratic potential, or why exactly they should be celebratedaside
from the fact that they open up our political and cultural identities to new sources of inspiration
and agon. Yet if political action remains, in Weber's phrase, the slow boring of hard boards,
and if democracy is essentially concerned with equality, then Shapiro's reluctance to provide
strategies of negotiation for an accelerating, pluralizing world undercuts his own
normative/political vision.25 Shapiro also does not adequately address the Deweyan anxiety
that in the absence of an organized public (or multiple organized publics), concentrated
economic powers will exert undue influence over public policy. Social centrifugalism or

fragmentation is a fact, but, as Sheldon Wolin puts it, some fragments are less fragmented
than others multiculturalism and multinational corporations are not equivalences .26 In
a society of vast inequality of power and privilege, where influence is concentrated in
cultural and economic elites and punishment and privation are meted out to an
increasingly permanent underclass, fragmentation requires an accompanying strategy of
organization. Otherwise centrifugalism will perversely support a system it supposedly
disrupts. Social speed begets pluralization, but it remains to be seen whether it serves a
pluralistic democracy.

Genealogy is an ineffective method of combatting whiteness because it

misunderstands how power operates
Gunder 10 (Michael, University of Aucklands, New Zealand, Planning as the ideology of
(neoliberal) space, Planning Theory 9: 298, http://plt.sagepub.com/content/9/4/298 - oliver g)
For Foucault, ideology is neither negative nor positive, ideology is coexistent with knowledge as
practised; it is the use of ideology which determines its positivity or nega- tivity for social
purposes (Sholle, 1988). Foucault (1980: 131) argues that every society has its regime of truth,
its general politics of truth: that is, the type of discourse which it accepts and makes function
as true, and genealogy is the tool through which we can examine this truth and see how we
govern ourselves and others through its production (McCarthy, 1990: 443). This regime of truth
is beyond simple ideology critique, for Foucault (1980: 133) the political question . . . is not
error, illusion, alienated conscious- ness or ideology; it is truth itself. Accordingly, Foucault
admonishes us to move on from a concept of ideology, or hegemony, as it still maintains the
concept of sovereignty, be it a sovereignty of the people, an idea, or that of government
(Doxiadis, 1997). Foucault argues for a move away from a legitimizing source of power. This is an
argument consis- tent with that of Deleuze (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983) to do away with the
societal shap- ing hegemony, or power, of transcendental ideals (Smith, 2007; Wood, 2009). I
agree with the desires of Foucault and Deleuze to do away with the striating nature of authority
sovereign, religious or undefined sublime ideal to shape societal action and direction. To that
end I support the research regime of Hillier (2005, 2007, 2008) to propose a Deleuzian-derived
multiplanar theory of spatial planning and governance. But, and this is a big but, we still reside in
a global culture steeped in transcendent ideals of a better world, a world shaped by ideology, and I
would suggest that we will likely continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Further, for Zizek
(1999: 66), Foucaults abandonment of the problematic of ideology entails a fatal weakness, for
Foucaults theorizing cannot explain the concrete mechanism of the emergence of power; that is ,
he cannot bridge the abyss that separates micro-procedures from the spectre of Power itself and
its very materialization of causal effect within the world. That is, Foucault fails to theorize the
generative principle of sociosymbolic forma- tions (Vighi and Feldner, 2007: 142). Hence, an
engagement with striating ideology is crucial to engaging with an understanding of contemporary
spatial planning, gover- nance and wider society as to what hegemonically defines THE accepted
truth. Indeed, McCarthy (1990) actually attributes Foucaults genealogical project of discourse
analy- sis to this very ideological agenda, even though Foucault disavows himself from the very act
of ideological critique.

Genealogy Bad - Generic

The genealogy method is bad it is tied to archaic forms of knowledge production
based off of exclusionary Greek thought and is a poor choice for education reform.
Magrini 2009 (Magrini, James, currently completing his Doctorate of Philosophy of Education,
"Aligning Nietzsche's "Genealogical" Philosophy With Democratic Educational Reform"
(2009).Philosophy
Scholarship.Paper 12., http://dc.cod.edu/philosophypub/12, accessed 6/2/13, JK)
Since it is impossible to divorce Nietzsches understanding of truth from the values that underlie
it, and, considering Nietzsche was ultimately a conservative with respect to his conception of a
national system of education, e.g., Nietzsches conception stems from the ancient Greek ideal
(where misogyny, culturally elitism, phallo-centricism, and logo-centricism ruled the day), and
most particularly from the virtue-ethics of Aristotle, it is difficult to rectify Nietzsches view
with any contemporary notion of a liberal, democratic education. In closing, while Nietzsches
perspectivism has certain implications for a notion of education that embraces a multiplicity of
perspectives for experiencing knowledge and eschews any and all notions of objective,
authoritarian notions of truth with a capital T, it is Nietzsches antiquated valuesystem, which
can never be divorced from his epistemology, that poses the problem of incorporating his views
into the movement for educational reform in this contemporary age. If we read Nietzsche closely
and attempt to remain true to his philosophy, it is impossible to square him completely with the
current movement for equitable and just educational reform in this everchanging, heterogeneous
landscape.

Co-opted by Coorporation
Genealogies fracture current movements and can be co-opted by multinational
corporations we need collectively organized resistance.
McIvor 10 (David, Kettering Foundation, Nov. 8, 2010, The Politics of Speed: Connolly,
Wolin, and the Prospects for Democratic Citizenship in an Accelerated Polity, Polity, Vol. 43,
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/polity/journal/v43/n1/full/pol201023a.html - oliver g)
However, Shapiro does not seem to entertain the possibility that such desynchronization
might instead bring about more intense class and cultural stratification. This will, it is true,
make the recognition of contending co-presences more frequent, as the life experiences of
the rich and the rest desynchronize. Yet it may also make the continuous renegotiation
of these co-presences more difficult and hence less certain. At the very least, Shapiro does
not demonstrate why social centrifugalism and the disruptions of economic and cultural
times contain democratic potential, or why exactly they should be celebratedaside
from the fact that they open up our political and cultural identities to new sources of inspiration
and agon. Yet if political action remains, in Weber's phrase, the slow boring of hard boards,
and if democracy is essentially concerned with equality, then Shapiro's reluctance to provide
strategies of negotiation for an accelerating, pluralizing world undercuts his own
normative/political vision.25 Shapiro also does not adequately address the Deweyan anxiety
that in the absence of an organized public (or multiple organized publics), concentrated
economic powers will exert undue influence over public policy. Social centrifugalism or
fragmentation is a fact, but, as Sheldon Wolin puts it, some fragments are less fragmented
than others multiculturalism and multinational corporations are not equivalences.26 In
a society of vast inequality of power and privilege, where influence is concentrated in
cultural and economic elites and punishment and privation are meted out to an
increasingly permanent underclass, fragmentation requires an accompanying strategy of
organization. Otherwise centrifugalism will perversely support a system it supposedly
disrupts. Social speed begets pluralization, but it remains to be seen whether it serves a
pluralistic democracy.

Misunderstands Power
Genealogy is an ineffective method of combatting whiteness because Foucault
misunderstands how power operates
Gunder 10 (Michael, University of Aucklands, New Zealand, Planning as the ideology of
(neoliberal) space, Planning Theory 9: 298, http://plt.sagepub.com/content/9/4/298 - oliver g)
For Foucault, ideology is neither negative nor positive, ideology is coexistent with knowledge as
practised; it is the use of ideology which determines its positivity or nega- tivity for social
purposes (Sholle, 1988). Foucault (1980: 131) argues that every society has its regime of truth,
its general politics of truth: that is, the type of discourse which it accepts and makes function
as true, and genealogy is the tool through which we can examine this truth and see how we
govern ourselves and others through its production (McCarthy, 1990: 443). This regime of truth
is beyond simple ideology critique, for Foucault (1980: 133) the political question . . . is not
error, illusion, alienated conscious- ness or ideology; it is truth itself. Accordingly, Foucault
admonishes us to move on from a concept of ideology, or hegemony, as it still maintains the
concept of sovereignty, be it a sovereignty of the people, an idea, or that of government
(Doxiadis, 1997). Foucault argues for a move away from a legitimizing source of power. This is an
argument consis- tent with that of Deleuze (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983) to do away with the
societal shap- ing hegemony, or power, of transcendental ideals (Smith, 2007; Wood, 2009). I
agree with the desires of Foucault and Deleuze to do away with the striating nature of authority
sovereign, religious or undefined sublime ideal to shape societal action and direction. To that
end I support the research regime of Hillier (2005, 2007, 2008) to propose a Deleuzian-derived
multiplanar theory of spatial planning and governance. But, and this is a big but, we still reside in
a global culture steeped in transcendent ideals of a better world, a world shaped by ideology, and I
would suggest that we will likely continue to do so for the foreseeable future . Further, for Zizek
(1999: 66), Foucaults abandonment of the problematic of ideology entails a fatal weakness, for
Foucaults theorizing cannot explain the concrete mechanism of the emergence of power; that is,
he cannot bridge the abyss that separates micro-procedures from the spectre of Power itself and
its very materialization of causal effect within the world. That is, Foucault fails to theorize the
generative principle of sociosymbolic forma- tions (Vighi and Feldner, 2007: 142). Hence, an
engagement with striating ideology is crucial to engaging with an understanding of contemporary
spatial planning, gover- nance and wider society as to what hegemonically defines THE accepted
truth. Indeed, McCarthy (1990) actually attributes Foucaults genealogical project of discourse
analy- sis to this very ideological agenda, even though Foucault disavows himself from the very act
of ideological critique.

Symbolic Violence

Good

Solves Latin America

Fanons philosophy of race has spurred major social movements already in Latin
America, Latin Americans have already started to take their rights back and
decolonialize their own centers. The pedagogy learned from his philosophies
however are virtually unused in America, even by the left, and our education on
issues of race and reclaiming it have been stunted.
Frantz Fanon Foundation 2011
(Reflections from the Personal and from Latin America Today, The Political-Pedagogical Force
of Fanon and the Wretched of the Earth., Frantz Fanon Foundation, November 5th 2011,
http://frantzfanonfoundation-fondationfrantzfanon.com/?p=1176, Accessed 7/4/13, JK)
Todays event is to commemorate the fifty years since Frantz Fanons passing and since the
publication of his Wretched of the Earth. One way to celebrate not just the legacy and
importance of Fanon, but his continuing presence, is to give testimony to how his thought, work,
and praxis have impacted us and how they continue to live on today. That is, how they push in
each of one of us forms of struggle, learning, unlearning and relearning, and transformation in our
heads, in our souls and hearts, and on the ground. It is from this perspective and stance that I wish
to share some reflections with regard to the political-pedagogical force of Frantz Fanon in my own
life and formation over the last 40 years, and in the context of the lived processes of
decolonization and social transformation occurring in Latin America today. My first politicalpedagogical encounter with Fanon was in 1971, soon after the English translation of Wretched of
the Earth became available. This text became the guiding tool to stimulate discussion and debate

between the SDS-Students for a Democratic Society chapter I was involved with at the time and
a cell of the Black Panthers. Our collective reading of Fanon brought to the fore the constitutive
role of race and dehumanization in colonial-imperial struggles, something that the traditional Left
in the United States and elsewhere, neglected to see and consider in its thought and actions then,
but also, one could argue, continues to be neglected in large part today. The text forced people to
define their position and commitment; while many chose to negate Fanons admonishments, a few,
like myself, found meaning in his arguments and consequence in his political-pedagogical challenge.
I refer here not only to the unlearning and relearning required in decolonization and social
transformation, but also the unlearning and relearning required in addressing white privilege and
in working in alliance and co-struggle. Fanon and the Wretched of the Earth pushed me to define
my position, to begin to confront at the personal and socio-political levels the defining role of race,
and move toward a commitment and stance that, over the years, has come to be crucial in defining
and shaping my self and my life project. My second political-pedagogical encounter with Fanon
and this text was in the 1980s, in the context of collaborative work with the Brazilian pedagogue
Paulo Freire. Others and myself were able to negotiate with Harvard University, where Paulo was

at the time (living and teaching in exile), for him to spend a semester a year for three years at the
University of Massachusetts at Amherst where I was finishing my doctorate and teaching. During
this period, I had the privilege of working closely with Paulo, co-facilitating with him dialogic
seminars with Puerto Rican activists, students, and community members where Wretched of the
Earth was a central text. It was through Paulos re-reading of Fanon, and in the context of
understanding the colonial condition of Puerto Ricans in the U.S., that he began to rethink out loud
his Pedagogy of the Oppressed. A rethinking reflected in his last books: Pedagogy of Hope and

Pedagogy of Indignation in which he also comes to re-see Brazil as an African nation, but in
which he much more clearly and directly dialogues with Frantz Fanon. Those who have read
Pedagogy of the Oppressed may recall Freires somewhat timid citing of Fanon. Here, Freire

assumed that his oppressed and Fanons damnes or wretched of the earth were one and the
same. Yet the readings done in the context of the politics of US communities of color, and most
specifically of Puerto Ricans as colonial subjects, and after an important lived experience in
Guinea Bissau, pushed distinct political-pedagogical imperatives in Freire; the intertwine of raceracialization and dehumanization began to take on a new significance. This experience still
remains vivid. For me, the simultaneous dialogue with Freire, Fanon and with the community
remains a central pillar in my own political-pedagogical formation. Here, Fanons force as a
pedagogue became much more apparent to me. The third political-pedagogical encounter is much
more recent and comes in the context of Latin America, and most specifically Ecuador, where I
have lived for the past 17 years, accompanying social movements and the struggles and processes of
and for change. In this place, Fanons Wretched of the Earth affords important lessons today not
only for decolonization but also for, and in a related sense, rethinking the national question. In
2008 Ecuador initiated a historic project of rethinking and refounding society, nation, and State.
The formation of a national Constituent Assembly made up, not of political parties or elected party
officials, but members of civil society interested in and committed to profound change, pushed forth
a new radical Constitution that names a plurinational and intercultural State. In the surrounding

debates and discussions, some of which I was privy to as an invitee to the Assembly and as a
member of an unofficial advisory team to an Afroecuadorian assembly woman, the question of
the national was central. The consideration of Afroecuadorians within the past and present
national project was of particular significance given the fact that Afrodescendants had no official
recognition in Ecuador until 1998; their humanity and existence was, beginning with the system
of kidnapping and enslavement until very recent times, continually put in doubt and subject to
negation. In this context, Fanon and the Wretched of the Earth once again are of politicalpedagogical utility. The reading and re-reading of this text affords ever-new insights on
revolutionary projects, the national as question and project, and on decolonization as a continual
process of learning, unlearning, relearning. Its reading, for example, by Afroecuadorian lawyers in
a class I just recently taught on the application of Afro rights in light of the new Constitution and
the plurinational intercultural State, was crucial in raising once again the concern of
dehumanization and its interrelation with the structures of race, racism and racialization,
constitutive elements of the coloniality of power still present. Photocopies of his text circulate

among Afro leaders and activists, Fanon not as an iconic figure or referent, but again as a
political-pedagogical guide, facilitator, and tool useful for reading and comprehending the
struggles and processes of the present, where the past and future are, without a doubt,
inextricably intertwined. As Fanon the pedagogue once said: to unlearn that imposed and
assumed through colonization and dehumanization, and the relearning to be men and women.
Fanon in this context is one of the elders. It is the pedagogy of Frantz Fanon and Frantz Fanon as
a pedagogue that I wish to recall today. A pedagogy and a pedagogical stance that, in essence and
foundation, are of the decolonial; a decolonial pedagogy of sorts grounded in three key processes
and components: In affirmation and in articulation as a form of co-relationality that pushes a
thinking and acting from and with; In humanization as liberation, as the constructing of a
radically different collective existence -or re-existence as the Afrocolombian Adofo Albn has
described it-, all of which point to decolonizing visions, philosophies, and practices of LIFE and
living; In collective hope and love, two components so central to Frantz Fanons work, so
necessary for radical nation building, and so central to a decolonial project. In the fifty years
since Fanons passing to the other side and since the first publication of the Wretched of the Earth,
both continue to live on, challenging us to not give up, to not become complacent, and to take arms,
albeit symbolic, social, political, epistemic, and most of all pedagogical ones. Fanon, the decolonial
pedagogue, Fanon the elder whose words continue to guide and challenge us in the path to unlearn
and relearn, to think and act from and with the struggles still present today for humanization,

liberation, and decolonization.

NB: Ontological Denial DA

Methods that ignore symbolic violence deny non-whites an ontology and put them in
the hellish zone of nonbeing. This categorizes them as below-otherness, in need of
our assistance in order to have any worth. Symbolic violence is key to stop this
denial because it doesnt wait for them to be recognized, the oppressed instead force
themselves to be known.
Ciccariello-Maher 2010
(George, a Ph.D Candidate in political theory at the University of California, Jumpstarting the
Decolonial Engine: Symbolic Violence from Fanon to Chvez, Project Muse,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v013/13.1.ciccariello-maher.html, 2010, accessed
7/4/13, JK)
In his seminal first book Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon sets out to analyze the structure of antiBlack racism and how best to confront it. Operating within-but-against a Hegelian framework (as
he also operates within-but-against both psychoanalysis and phenomenology), Fanon identifies
what he deems the fundamental barrier to inter-racial recognition: racialized subjects, according to
Fanon, lack what he calls "ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man."3 Black subjects are
seen but not seen; they exist but they are not (human). This is what philosopher Lewis Gordon
deems "the hellish zone of nonbeing," "a zone neither of appearance or disappearance."4 Not only
does this "below-Otherness" render politicsas publicityimpossible, but the same applies for
ethics: "damnation means that the black (or better, the blackened) lives the irrelevance of
innocence the absence of a Self-Other dialectic in racist situations means the eradication of
ethical relations. Where ethics is derailed, all is permitted." 6 Racialization, put simply, creates a

situation which lacks the necessary reciprocity for the Hegelian master-slave dialectic to
operate.7 For equality to be contemplated, for the obligation to recognize the other to have any
traction at all, racialized subjects must first seize access to ontology, storming the fortified heaven
of being itself. Turning more directly to Hegel's master-slave dialectic in an appendix to Black
Skin, White Masks, Fanon concludes that, in the face of such ontological blockage, full humanity
can only emerge through the effort to impose one's existence (as "subjective certainty") onto
another (thereby converting it into "objective fact"). In this "quest of absoluteness," the

resistance of the other yields desire, what Fanon calls "the first milestone on the road that leads
to the dignity of the spirit."8 Desire, moreover, requires that I risk my life in conflict for the object
of that desire, thereby pushing me beyond bare life and toward independent self-consciousness.
Historically, however, the black slave has been granted her freedom by the former slaveholder, who
"decided to promote the machine-animal-men to the supreme rank of men," and as a result access
to full humanitywhich can only appear by way of mutual and conflictual recognitionremained
blocked: "Say thank you to the nice man," the mother tells her little boy but we know that often
the little boy is dying to scream some other, more resounding expression. The white man, in the
capacity of master, said to the Negro, "From now on you are free." But the Negro knows nothing of
the cost of freedom, for he has not fought for it The former slave needs a challenge to his
humanity, he wants a conflict, a riot. But it is too late.9 Since there has been no reciprocity in the
process, since blacks are denied access to ontology, they have not, according to Fanon, been able to
follow the Hegelian path of turning away from the master and finding liberation in the object.

Instead, lack of reciprocity leads the slavein a gesture of internalized self-hatredto turn

toward the master and abandon the object, but this effort at mutual recognition remains
unrequited, as the master desires from the slave only work.10 We can already anticipate here the
broad strokes of Fanon's theory of violence: for the racialized subject, self-consciousness as
human requires symbolic violence, it requires the assertion of reciprocity within a historical
situation marked by the denial of such reciprocity, and if necessary, the provocation of conflict
through the assertion of alterity.11 Only then will the slave be freed from this two-sided blockage of
the dialectic, enforcing recognition (externally) onto the master while developing (internally) a
degree of autonomy and self-confidence. It is this very lack of ontological resistance which
provokes an outburst by Fanon, one which bears within it the structure of his theory of violence.
Under the objectifying gaze of a white woman and her son, Fanon responds by violently shouting:
"Kiss the handsome Negro's ass, madame!" Shame flooded her face. At last I was set free from my
rumination. At the same time I accomplished two things: I identified my enemies and I made a
scene. A grand slam. Now one would be able to laugh. The field of battle having been marked out,
I entered the lists.12 Why should the identification of the enemy cause such a seismic ontological
shift? Because to discover an enemy, and to discover it clearly, was also to turn away from the
master and discover something essential about oneself: as Fanon puts it, "I had incisors to test. I
was sure they were strong."13 Since ontology had been denied, since there was no basis for the
smooth operation of Hegel's dialectic of recognition, such a basis had to be created: "Since the
other hesitated to recognize me, there remained only one solution: to make myself known."14
Fanon's theory of symbolic ontological violence, then, could be summarized in these three words:
making oneself known. And to make himself known meant, in the context of ontological
disqualification, to seize hold of the only identity available to him, the one imposed on him through
precisely this same ontological disqualification: "I resolved, since it was impossible for me to get
away from an inborn complex, to assert myself as a BLACK MAN."15 It is at this moment that

Fanon, against the universal ache of every shred of his being, "buries himself in the black abyss"
that he himself would criticize in no uncertain terms.16 Hence while Fanon is relentless in his
criticism of especially the most essentialist forms of Negritude (especially that of Lopold
Senghor17), he nevertheless insists on the dialectical necessity of a moment of black identity as
the functional content of his early symbolic decolonial violence (a function to be replaced in
Algeria by national consciousness). This dialectical necessity emerges most powerfully in Fanon's
scathing and heartrending indictment of Sartre, who had reduced black identity to a merely
antithetical moment in a preordained dialectical progression whose resolution was the proletariat.
Fanon writes: For once, that born Hegelian had forgotten that consciousness has to lose itself in
the night of the absolute, the only condition to attain to consciousness of self Jean-Paul Sartre, in
this work, has destroyed black zeal. In opposition to historical becoming, there had always been
the unforeseeable. I needed to lose myself completely in negritude at the very moment when I
was trying to grasp my own being, Sartre, who remained The Other, gave me a name and thus
shattered my last illusion Not yet white, no longer wholly black, I was damned.18 Despite
Sartre's best intentions, in subsuming black identity to a closed dialectic he had short-circuited the
generativity of decolonial violenceits ability to re-build the colonized and force recognition on the
colonizerthereby blocking Fanon's access to being.19 Symbolic violence and the access to the

equality of being that it promises passesin a seeming paradox which is nevertheless held open
for eventual dialectical resolutionthrough the realm of division and (in this case, black)
identity. But how can merely making oneself known constitute a violent act? Here we turn again
to Gordon: the blackened lives the disaster of appearance where there is no room to appear
nonviolently. Acceptable being is nonexistence, nonappearance, or submergence To change things
is to appear, but to appear is to be violent since that group's appearance is illegitimate. Violence, in
this sense, need not be a physical imposition. It need not be a consequence of guns and other
weapons of destruction. It need simply be appearance.20 For racialized subjects, the very act of

appearing, of making oneself known, is a violent act both for its ontological implications and for its
inevitable reception. That is, it constitutes a challenge to the prevailing structures of symbolic
ontological violencethe walls of exclusion which divide being from non-beingand as a result of
this disruption, black appearance historically appears as "violent" regardless of its content. 21 And

were it not perceived as such, for Fanon, then its ontological shock-value might dissipate,
undermining the external element of its function. And even when that content is nominally
"violent," this often masks its ontological function. It is no accident that the Fanon of Black Skin,
White Masks had thought it suitable to cite Sartre's The Respectful Prostitute and Richard
Wright's Native Son on the same page. "A feeling of inferiority?" he asks himself, of himself: "No,
a feeling of nonexistence," he responds. The only response to the immobility of not being able to
bring oneself to kill the master is to "explode to shatter the hellish cycle." 22 Turning away from

the master (the internal function of symbolic decolonial violence), in practice, often coincides
with the realization that that most basic proof of human equalityvulnerability to death at the
hands of anotheralso applies to whites. For this recognition to be put into practice often entails
at least the threat of actual violence as the mechanism for enforced recognition (the external
function). To the symbolic ontological violence of racialization, then, Fanon seems at first to
respond in kind, with a violence which is equally symbolic in its function, but one which rather than
determining being undoes the exclusionary barriers of ontology. This is a symbolic violence which
operates toward the decolonization of being,23 and which is utterly incommensurable in both its
actual and (more fundamental) symbolic forms with the violence of the racist/colonizer.

Historical Materialism

Good

Pre-requisite Generic
Gender and racial oppression are all products of a capitalism system capitalism
generates oppression to keep itself functional and exercise control.
KOVEL 2002 [Joel Kovel, Alger Hiss Prof. At Bard, 2002 The Enemy of Nature, Zed Books, p. 123125]
If, however we ask the question of efficacy, that is, which split sets the others into motion, then priority would have to be given to class, for
the plain reason that class

relations entail the state as an instrument of enforcement and control, and

it is the state that shapes and organizes the splits that appear in human ecosystems. Thus class
is both logically and historically distinct from other forms of exclusion (hence we should not talk of classism to go
along with sexism and racism, and species-ism). This is, first of all, because class is an essentially [hu]man-made category, without root
in even a mystified biology. We cannot imagine a human world without gender distinctions although we can imagine a world without
domination by gender. But a world without class is eminently imaginable indeed, such was the human world for the great majority of our

class
signifies one side of a larger figure that includes a state apparatus whose conquests and
regulations create races and shape gender relations. Thus there will be no true resolution of racism so long as class
species time on earth, during all of which considerable fuss was made over gender. Historically, the difference arises because

society stands, inasmuch as a racially oppressed society implies the activities of a class-defending state.0 Nor can gender inequality be
enacted away so long as class society, with its state, demands the super-exploitation of womans labou r.

Class society
continually generates gender, racial, ethnic oppressions and the like, which take on a life of
their own, as well as profoundly affecting the concrete relations of class itself. It follows that class
politics must be fought out in terms of all the active forms of social splitting. It is the management of these divisions
that keeps state society functional.

Embracing a methodology of anti-capitalism is a precursor to all action without

declaring war on capitalism, all forms of praxis are bankrupt and all revolutionary
politics stifled.
Katz 2k (Adam, English Instructor at Onodaga Community College. 2000. Postmodernism and the Politics of
Culture. Pg. 127-128)
Virno does recognize the danger that a politics predicated upon Exodus, by downgrading the absolute enmity implicit in the traditional Marxist
assumption that class struggle in its revolutionary form issues in civil war, leads to the assumption that one is swimming with the current or is being

A politics aimed at the establishment of liberated zones within

capitalism under the assumption that the state will wither away without actually being
smashed leads to the problematic one sees over and over again in postmodern cultural
studies: doing what comes naturally as radical praxis. To counter this, Virno redefines the unlimitedly reactive
driven irresistibly forward (1996, 203).

enmity of the Multitude in terms of the right to resistance (206): What deserve to be defended at all costs are the works of friendship. Violence is not geared to visions of some hypothetical tomorrow, but functions to ensure respect and a continued existence for things that were mapped
out yesterday. It does not innovate, but acts to prolong things that are already there: the autonomous expressions of acting-in-concert that arise out of
general intellect, organisms of non-representative democracy, forms of mutual protection and assistance (welfare, in short) that have emerged outside
of and against the realm of State Administration. In other words, what we have here is a violence that is conservational (206). The decisiveness of the
question of absolute enmity becomes clear if we ask a rather obvious question: What distinguishes autonomous expressions from any privatized space
(say, Internet chat rooms) that withdraws from the common in the name of friendships, mutual aid, or, for that matter, networks, gated communities, or

nothing can lead more directly to the death of revolutionary politics than the
assumption that the days of absolute enmity are over. Autonomous expressions necessarily
lead to the esoteric and the singular as the paths of least resistance. Therefore (as in all LeftNietzscheanisms), they take as their main enemy the programmatic and the decidable, transforming
liberation into a private, simulacral affair, regardless of their denunciations of capitalism. I will
whatever? In short,

only theory and action that

establish spaces that bring the common out into the openbefore an outside (theory and judgment) so as to
make visible the concentrated political-economic force of the ruling classcan count as a
genuinely new politics.
return to this issue in the next two chapters, but I want to conclude this discussion by stressing that

Solves Language/ Identity

Historical materialism is an indispensable tool for the critical interrogation of
language and identitythe affirmative risks being absorbed into the dominant
cultural frame
Foster '96 - prof. of sociology @ Univ. Oregon (John, "In Defense of History," in "In Defense of
History," Ed. by E. Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.185-193, RG)
The weaknesses of postmodernismfrom an emancipatory perspective thus far overshadow
its strengths. Missing from Foucault's analysis, like that of postmodernism generally, is any
conception of a counter-order to the disciplinary orders described. In the more extreme case of "textual
postmodernists"those postmodernist thinkers like Derrida, as distinct from Foucault, who deny any reality outside the text the political
and historical weaknesses from a left perspective are even more glaring. By undermining the
very concept of historyin any meaningful sense beyond mere story-tellingsuch theorists
have robbed critical analysis of what has always been its most indispensable tool. The denial
within postmodernist theory of the validity of historical critique covers up what is really at issue: the
denial of the historical critique of capitalism, leading to a convergence between left thought
infected by Nietzsche and the dominant liberal "end of history" conception. The danger of such
ahistorical or anti-historical views, as E.P. Thompson observed, is that one loses sight not of "reason in history" in
some abstract sense, but rather of "the reasons of power and the reasons of money." Historical
materialism at its best provides a way out of this dilemma. This is not to ignore the fact that Marxismwhich has
18

19

sometimes given rise to its own crude interpretations and historical travesties, as in the case of Stalinismhas frequently been identified with the
kind of "totalizations" and "essentialisms" that postmodernist theorists have singled out. As Thompson pointed out in a 1977 essay on Christopher
Caudwell, Marxism has sometimes relied on " 'essentialist' tricks of mind," the "tendency to intellectualize the social process""the rapid
delineation of the deep process of a whole epoch." These are things that the historian (and social scientists in general) should guard against. But

to abandon theory and historical explanation entirely in order to avoid "essentialism" and "foundationalism" is a bit like throwing out the baby in order to keep the bathwater clean. Marx himself
provided another model, actively opposing theory (even "Marxist" theory) that purported to be "suprahistorical." In his Theses on Feuerbach, he
presented what still ranks as the most thorough- going critique of what he called the "essentialist" conception of human beings and nature. Indeed,

historical materialism has long engaged in its own self-critique, precisely in order to expel the
kinds of "essentialisms," "positivisms," and "structuralisms" that have intruded on the philosophy
of praxis itself-a self-critique that has produced the insights of theorists like Gramsci, Sartre, Thompson, and Raymond Williams.
20

These thinkers distanced themselves from the positivistic "official Marxism" that grew out of the Second International and later turned into a
caricature of itself in the form of Stalinism. Yet they held firm to the critique of capitalism and their commitment to the struggles of the
oppressed. Moreover, these particular examples tell us that

if what has sometimes been called "the postmodern

agenda"consisting of issues like identity, culture, and languageis to be addressed at all,
this can only be accomplished within a historical context. And here one might openly wonder with Foucault "what
difference there could ultimately be between being a historian and being a Marxist." When placed within a more holistic
historical materialist contextanimated by the concept of praxisthe problems raised by
postmodernism look entirely different. As David McNally says, "Language is not a prison-house, but a site of struggle." What
the contributions in this volume have in common is the insistence that issues like language, culture, nationality, race, gender, the environment,
revolution, and history itself are only effectively analyzed within a context that is simultaneously historical in character, materialist (in the sense
of focusing on concrete practices), and revolutionary. Such analyses do not abandon the hope of transcending capitalism, nor of the notion of
human progress as a possible outcome of historical struggles. It is said that Nicholas I, Czar of Russia, issued an order banning the word
"progress." Today we no longer believe, in a nineteenth century sense, in automatic human progress, embodying some definite contentthe idea
that the Czar found so threatening. But this does not mean, as the philosopher Michael Oakeshott contended with respect to political activity in
the 1950s, that we "sail a boundless and bottomless sea" that has "neither starting-point nor appointed direction" and that our only task is "to keep
afloat on an even keel." Historyas centuries of struggle and indeed progress suggestis more meaningful than that.

To abandon
altogether the concept of progress, in the more general sense of the possibility of progressive
human emancipation, would only be to submit to the wishes of the powers that be. Such political
disengagement by intellectuals on the left in the present epoch could only mean one thing: the total obeisance to capital. 21 The irony of post-

modernism is that while purporting to have transcended modernity, it abandons from the start all hope of transcending capitalism itself and
entering a post-capitalist era. Postmodernist

theory is therefore easily absorbed within the dominant cultural

frame and has even given rise recently to texts such as Postmodern Marketing, which attempts to utilize the insights of thinkers like Foucault,
Derrida, Lyotard, and Baudillard to market goods within a capitalist economy. Perhaps this will be the final destiny of postmodernist theoryits
absorption by the vast marketing apparatus of the capitalist economy, adding irony and color to a commercial order that must constantly find new
ways to insinuate itself into the everyday lives of the population. Meanwhile, historical

materialism will remain the

necessary intellectual ground for all those who seek, not to revel in the "carnival" of capitalist
productive and market relations, but to transcend them.
22

Solves Race
Historical Materialism allows us to interrogate the effects daily productive and
material forces have on race relations. Only through examining capitalism can we
understand why the aff impacts happen in the first place.
Young 1 - professor of English @ University of Alabama (Robert, The Linguistic Turn,
Materialism and Race:
Toward an Aesthetics of Crisis, Callaloo, 24(1), Winter 2001, pp. 334-345, Project MUSE, RG)
Postmodernists reunderstand the subject, not as the rational cause of social meaning, but rather
the effect of the articulation of various discursive practices. Roland Barthes makes this point clear in S/Z when he
says, I is not an innocent subject, anterior to the text, one which will subsequently deal with the text as it would an object to dismantle or a site
to occupy. This I which approaches the text is already itself a plurality of other text, of codes which are infinite or, more precisely, lost (10).
Michel Foucault also points up the constructedness of the subject when he argues that: The

individual is not a pregiven entity

which is seized on by the exercise of power. The individual, with his identity, is the product of a
relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces (73-74). Perhaps the
classic poststructuralist view of the subject, though, is found in Jacques Derrida. For Derrida, The subject (in its identity with itself, or
eventually in its consciousness of its identity with itself, its selfconsciousness) is inscribed in language, is a function of language, becomes a
speaking subject only by making its speech conform . . . to the system of the rules of language as system of differences, or at very least by
conforming to the general laws of difference (15).
The view of the subject as a language construct has framed postmodern discourses of race. For example, Henry Gates

argues that
Race has become a trope of ultimate, irreducible difference between culture . . . [and thus] Race is the
ultimate trope of difference because it is so very arbitrary in its application (Race 5). In the Signifying Monkey Gates develops his project of
investigating rhetorical structures and privileges the mechanics of the meaning-making process and foregrounds the materiality and willful
play of the signifier (59). Thus for Gates blackness is produced in the text through a complex process of signification and therefore There

can be no transcendent blackness, for it can not and does not exist beyond manifestations in
specific figures (237).
Theorizing race as text has led to proclamations, such as the one by Anthony Appiah, that race is a fiction: The truth is that there are no races
(Appiah 35). The politics of such a discourse is perhaps clearest in Kobena Mercers essay 1968: Periodizing Politics and Identity, where he,
too, recognizes the meaninglessness of race and marks how the [race] signifier itself became the site for the making and remaking of meanings
(430). Thus politics becomes a matter of semiotic freedom and democracy is seen as a struggle over relations of representation (Mercer 429)
and not the relations of production. In short, what is offered as emancipation is not equal access to economic resources but the pleasure of
disrupting dominant and oppressive meanings. While such discursive intervention is important, especially for an historically marginalized group,
it is urgent to recognize that social change will come about not by emancipating signs from totalities but by displacing the relations of production,
for although the relations of production do not evade, they nevertheless always exceed the fate of signs.
Not only do such postmodern discourses reify culture, in what Kenan Malik calls cultural formalism, but in their anti-totality move and
privileging of the logic of indeterminacy postmodernists suppress notions of causality. Postmodern

discourses of race merely

assert the constructedness of the (race) sign and bracket the political economy of race, and
consequently the text is set as the limit of intelligibility. In arguing for the constructed-ness of race but locating it
textually there is a theoretical problem in accounting for the textual inscription of race or its
extra-textual effects in daily life under capitalism (and we must account for extratextual effects because for people of
color it is a matter of life and death).

Postmodernists are unable to explain why race has acquired its oppressive social meaning in the
first place and across various localitiesthat is race is a translocal articulation. Reading race as essentially
constructed but not accounting for its production, race is mystified and metaphysics is reintroduced; in fact, in a recent symposium on race and
racism Howard Winant asserts that Race remains a mysterious phenomenon(7). Race

is not a mystery as it operates today

as a material practice in marking racially coded subjects for differential levels of surplus
extraction and violence and it has an historical emergence. As Alex Callinicos indicates, Racism as we
know it today developed during a key phase in the development of capitalism as the dominant
mode of production on a global scalethe establishment during the 17th and 18th centuries of
colonial plantations in the New World using slave labour imported from Africa to produce
consumer goods such as tobacco and sugar and industrial outputs such as cotton for the world

market (11). As Eric Williams succinctly put it, Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the
consequence of slavery (7).
While most postmodern discourses have moved away from ontologically based inquiries, a recent essay by Linda Alcoff attempts to (re)configure
race as an ontological category. Her intervention opens the possibility for foregrounding the nexus between race and materialism. This
possibility is quickly closed down as her discourse moves away from materialism and thus for Alcoff Race is a particular, historically and
culturally located form of human categorization . . . (7). The question again is why? Why

is race a form of human

categorization? And is race identity really a matter of language games? And are these games
essentially self-originating and autonomous? Of course not. These games are always already situated within and
the effect of the prevailing economic / political /cultural /ideological conditions. As Malik points out Racial differentiation
emerges out of real social and economic mechanisms (10), and they are not ontologically pregiven.
In other words, this human categorization is an historical articulation of racialized division of labor
structuring asymmetrical access to surplus. Alcoff reduces thought about the real to the real itself and this articulates an
empiricist idealism. Therefore what is really at stake here is not so much the question of ontology and the related question of objectivitywhich
puts one on the road to materialismas much as it is the articulation of what Roy Bhaskar has called the epistemic fallacy and consequently
the recuperation of experience. One must remember Alcoffs original concern was not only to validate hybrid identity or hybrid positionality
against purist, essentialist accounts but also to take into account the full force of race as a lived experience (9). Of course, as I also pointed out
earlier, it

is politically urgent to mark such experiences but an ontological reinscription of race

reifies race and as such disables a transformative projecta project aimed at negating the
deployment of race as a structure for exploitation. Under way, then, is the alliance of postmodern
discourses, which de-essentializes identity, with this humanist identity. These two apparently
antagonistic discourses are actually colluding in suppressing the political economy of race. The
trajectoryfrom the postmodernist constructed identity to the humanist subjectmay be clearly mapped out in a series of works by Gates.

K2 Politics
Historical Materialism is key to politics: The political subject they would create in
lieu of abandoning traditional politics is a floating form of subjectivity that sustains
the hegemony of transnational capitalism.
Laura Bartlett Snyder, Doctoral Fellow in the English Department at Louisville, An
Introduction, 2000, http://athena.louisville.edu/a-s/english/babo/snyder/bounintro.html,
accessed 10/15/02
This web site explores the ways postmodern theories of subjectivity
facilitate global capitalism. The seed for this project was planted during Deconstructed Selves, Postmodern
Narratives, a session at the 20th Century Lit. Conference. I had just heard a paper on Crash so thoughts of cyborgs and strange postmodern
desires were already mingling with a project topic that was due in my Theories of Interpretation seminar. While Silvio Gaggi flashed slides
of Cindy Shermans photographythe pictures of her well-groomed, appropriately feminized body, a 50s starlet in juxtaposition with
images of excrement, false eyelashes, cigarette butts--I discovered my topic: the ways that the postmodern notion of subjectivity--

fluid, unfixed, transgressed boundaries--and the modern notion of

subjectivity-stable, unified, coherent, preserved boundaries-are analogous to the
evolution from classical to global/late capitalism. My theory: While the
dissolution of boundaries in postmodern subjectivity may at first
seem wildly radical, it actually facilitates the hegemony by
interpellating the ideal subject of global capitalism, one who can
manipulate fluid capital, produce/consume intangible data, and
accept the dissolution of national boundaries for the purpose of
exporting manufacturing work to 3rd world countries, for the purpose of
global e-commerce, and for the formation of multinational corporations.

Solves IR
Historical Materialism makes the socionomic a meaningful part of international
relations and exposes the problematic assumptions of their behavioral and
categorical models
Halliday 94 [Fred, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, A
Necessary Encounter: Historical Materialism and International Relations in Rethinking
International Relations (Basingstoke: Macmillan), 47-73]
This prominence of classes as analytic tools has two immediate consequences for International
Relations. First, it invests the major conflicts of international politics with a distinct socioeconomic
character. Though it may be untrue to say, paraphrasing Marx, that all the history of International Relations has been one of class struggle, it
has certainly been a major and at times decisive component. The competitive spread of the European empires , the outbreaks of the
two world wars, the gold standard crisis of 1931, the OPEC price rises of 1971-73, the disputes over trade and
interest rates within the Atlantic Alliance in the early 1980s, US-Japanese trade conflict in the 1990s -- all now appear
as, in broad -63- terms, part of conflict between capitalist ruling classes, between old established
capitalist powers and their new rivals, the latter produced by the development of capitalist social
relations within their own countries. Many of the disputes that have marked twentieth century history became inter-imperialist
and intercapitalist disputes, beyond their specific national, geographic and historical characteristics: as already noted, this issue of conflict
between great powers, not the dynamics of 'North-South' relations was the main question addressed by Lenin and others, in the debate on
imperialism before the First World War. Secondly,

in this light, the debates that have flourished within

International Relations for so long appear to be founded on some questionable premises. Since
the state is not an independent entity, but is rather located in a particular socio-economic and
class context, the debate on whether the state is losing power to non-state actors changes
character. For the question now becomes not whether the state has recently, i.e. since 1945 or 1970, lost preeminence to non-state actors but
how far the 'non-state' actors who have always affected the power and character of the state act through the state or through other channels.

These non-state actors, i.e. classes, have always been there, but have exercised their power in a
variety of ways. The question of how far the boundary between domestic and international
politics has broken down also acquires a different significance; in capitalism classes have always
operated internationally, from the bankers and trading companies of the sixteenth century
onwards, and have in turn been affected domestically by changes in the international economic
and political situation. 31 The primacy of classes therefore serves in a dual sense to place in
question the concept of the 'nation-state': it shows, first, that the state itself is, to a considerable
extent, a function of wider social forces, and secondly that the impermeability of domestic
politics is an appearance which conceals a permanent, underlying, internationalisation of
political and economic factors. In Marx's own writings, there is an interesting tension on this issue: his political instincts led him
to emphasise the international character of the proletariat, the working class, and their aspiration and ability to organise on an international basis
against their class enemies; yet his theory contained within it another suggestion, namely that it was not the working class, but the bourgeoisie,
who -64- were the most international, since their education and culture on the one hand, and their very economic interests on the other, were
such as to lead them to act more and more internationally. The subsequent history of capitalism has, as much as anything, been one in which the
internationalisation of the ruling class has proceeded as fast as, or even faster than, that of the working class -- hence, as Jeff Frieden, Stephen
Gill, Kees van der Pijl and others have shown, the EC (European Community), the Trilateral Commission, the Group of 7 and many others are
examples of transnational lite coordination, for the better management of the economy, both national and international.

K2 Gender
Historical materialist analysis is a precondition to meaningful feminist critique
their arguments are mired in privilege and maintainince of the status quo
Stabile '96 - associate prof. in the Dept. of Mass Comm @ Univ. of Wisconsin (Carol A.,
"Postmodernism, Feminism, and Marx: Notes from the Abyss," in "In Defense of History," Ed.
by E. Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.144-, RG)
The defense of "rights," abstracted from historical, political, and economic contexts, has
weakened feminist politics and contributed to a general sense that feminism serves only narrow
and privileged interests. Historical materialism offers the possibility of coalitions based on a
broader understanding of the exploitative nature of capitalist relations of production, enlisting
women and men in struggles against family violence, further cuts to already severely diminished
social programs, and, moreover, against the system that benefits from these ills. Furthermore, it proposes
that women's liberationif it is to include all womenis incompatible with capitalism.
Historical materialism has the advantage of offering the kind of self-re-flexivityso lacking in
postmodernism and contemporary feminismthat I've tried to underscore in this essay. It at once forces us to
understand our theories, our practices, and our positions in relation to the dominant structure of
power, and provides a much more effective basis for an understanding of the positions of both
women and men within multinational capitalism and of contemporary shifts in these positions.
Consider, for example, the debate about "family values." The conventional feminist argument is that the New Right's call for a return to family
values is simply a backlash. On the one hand, this backlash is said to represent an attempt to reinstate a traditional version of the nuclear family in
order to force women out of the labor force and back into the home. On the other hand, it is seen as a measure of the effectiveness of the feminist
movement, insofar as women now have the "choice" of working. What disappears from view in these analyses is the fact that economic
conditions have forced upon middle class women the dubious advantage of working one or more full-time jobs in addition to domestic labor, and
that this social change benefits capitalism, and not individual men. Poor

and working class women (many of them

women of color) have long worked outside the home, although few of them would call their
alienated and often desperate labor a matter of "choice." What is being represented as a gain for
women simply means that middle class women are now being compelled by the necessities of
capitalism to make the "choice" that has traditionally been available to poor and working class
women. To argue that the debates about family values are intended to force women back into the domestic sphere overlooks the fact that there
can be no return to the traditional nuclear family because it is no longer economically feasible. To argue that these debates about family values
were provoked by feminist successes is to accept the ideological mystification that treats the economic mandates of capitalism as if they were free
life-style "choices." I would like to believe that feminists are, in fact, committed to revolutionary social change, but there's another, less pleasant
possibility to contemplateone that points to the dangers of ignoring class position. It

could be that many who call

themselves feminists are interested only in maintaining their own class privilege or in gaining celebrity
status. From that point of view, Marxism is a serious threat not only because it represents a
challenge to the theoretical foundations of a postmodern feminism, but also because it reveals the
historical, material, and class foundations of certain forms of knowledge. It is fairly clear how women such as
Katie Roiphe, Naomi Wolf, and Camille Paglia use feminism as a marketing strategy to promote their books, images, and careers, instead of
promoting equality and social justice. But as

long as so many feminists refuse to acknowledge their own

privilege and the ways in which we all "benefit" from the exploitation of less-privi leged
women and men, feminism in general will be in danger of becoming a professional strategy
rather than a political project.

Historical Materialism > Epistemology

The affirmative focuses on the philosophy of the mind. The belief that their
discourse and their transformative performance can change the world hides the fact
that we must revolutionize the real world, not some mental one.
Marx 84, Karl, philosopher and revolutionary, The German Ideology

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/germanideology/ch01b.htm) IG
[II. 1. Preconditions of the Real Liberation of Man] [...] We shall,

of course, not take the trouble to enlighten our wise

philosophers by explaining to them that the liberation of man is not advanced a single step by reducing
philosophy, theology, substance and all the trash to self-consciousness and by liberating man from the domination
of these phrases, which have never held him in thrall. Nor will we explain to them that it is only possible to achieve
real liberation in the real world and by employing real means, that slavery cannot be abolished without the steamengine and the mule and spinning-jenny, serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, and that, in
general, people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in
adequate quality and quantity. Liberation is an historical and not a mental act, and it is brought about by historical
conditions, the development of industry, commerce, agriculture, the conditions of intercourse...[There is here a gap in the
manuscript] In Germany, a country where only a trivial historical development is taking place, these mental developments, these
glorified and ineffective trivialities, naturally serve as a substitute for the lack of historical development, and they take
root and have to be combated. But this fight is of local importance. [2. Feuerbachs Contemplative and Inconsistent Materialism] In reality and
for the practical materialist, i.e. the communist, it is a question of revolutionising the existing world, of practically
attacking and changing existing things. When occasionally we find such views with Feuerbach, they are never more than isolated
surmises and have much too little influence on his general outlook to be considered here as anything else than embryos capable of development.
Feuerbachs conception of the sensuous world is confined on the one hand to mere contemplation of it, and on the other to mere feeling; he says
Man instead of real historical man. Man is really the German. In the first case, the contemplation of the sensuous world, he necessarily
lights on things which contradict his consciousness and feeling, which disturb the harmony he presupposes, the harmony of all parts of the
sensuous world and especially of man and nature. To remove this disturbance, he must take refuge in a double perception, a profane one which
only perceives the flatly obvious and a higher, philosophical, one which perceives the true essence of things . He does not see how the

sensuous world around him is, not a thing given direct from all eternity, remaining ever the same, but the product of
industry and of the state of society; and, indeed, in the sense that it is an historical product, the result of the activity
of a whole succession of generations, each standing on the shoulders of the preceding one, developing its industry
and its intercourse, modifying its social system according to the changed needs. Even the objects of the simplest sensuous
certainty are only given him through social development, industry and commercial intercourse. The cherry-tree, like almost all fruit-trees, was,
as is well known, only a few centuries ago transplanted by commerce into our zone, and therefore only by this action of a definite society in a
definite age it has become sensuous certainty for Feuerbach.

Bad

NB: Cap

Ontology

Bad

1NC
Prioritizing ontology and epistemology over specific policy formulations paralyzes
problem solving measures ensuring short-term annihilation.
Owen 2002
[David Owen Millennium Journale of international studies 2002 Re-Orientation Internatioal Relations: On Pragmatism, Pluralism and Practical Reasoning]
Commenting on the philosophical turn in IR, Wver remarks that [a] frenzy for words like epistemology and ontology often signals this philosophical turn,
although he goes on to comment that these terms are often used loosely.4 However, loosely deployed or not, it is clear that debates concerning ontology and
epistemology play a central role in the contemporary IR theory wars. In one respect, this is unsurprising since it is a characteristic feature of the social sciences that
periods of disciplinary disorientation involve recourse to reflection on the philosophical commitments of different theoretical approaches, and there is no doubt that
such reflection can play a valuable role in making explicit the commitments that characterise (and help individuate) diverse theoretical positions. Yet, such a
philosophical turn is not without its dangers and I will briefly mention three before turning to consider a confusion that has, I will suggest, helped to promote the IR

the philosophical turn is that it has an inbuilt tendency

to prioritise issues of ontology and epistemology over explanatory and/or interpretive power
as if the latter two were merely a simple function of the former. But while the explanatory and/or interpretive power of a
theoretical account is not wholly independent of its ontological and/or epistemological commitments (otherwise criticism of these features would not
be a criticism that had any value), it is by no means clear that it is, in contrast, wholly dependent on these philosophical
commitments. Thus, for example, one need not be sympathetic to rational choice theoryto recognise that it can provide powerful accounts of certain kinds
theory wars by motivating this philosophical turn. The first danger with

of problems, such as the tragedy of the commons in which dilemmas of collective action are foregrounded. It may, of course, be the case that the advocates of rational
choice theory cannot give a good account of why this type of theory is powerful in accounting for this class of problems (i.e., how it is that the relevant actors come to
exhibit features in these circumstances that approximate the assumptions of rational choice theory) and, if this is the case, it is a philosophical weaknessbut this does
not undermine the point that, for a certain class of problems

, rational choice theory may provide the best account

available to us. In other words, while the critical judgement of theoretical accounts in terms of their ontological and/or epistemological sophistication is
one kind of critical judgement, it is not the only or even necessarily the most important kind. The second danger run by the philosophical turn is that because

prioritisation of ontology and epistemology promotes theory-construction from philosophical first principles, it cultivates
a theory-driven rather than problem-driven approach to IR. Paraphrasing Ian Shapiro, the point can be put like this:
since it is the case that there is always a plurality of possible true descriptions of a given action, event or phenomenon, the challenge is to decide which is the most apt

theorydriven work is part of a reductionist program in that it dictates always opting for the
description that calls for the explanation that flows from the preferred model or theory.5 The
in terms of getting a perspicuous grip on the action, event or phenomenon in question given the purposes of the inquiry; yet, from this standpoint,

justification offered for this strategy rests on the mistaken belief that it is necessary for social science because general explanations are required to characterise the
classes of phenomena studied in similar terms. However, as Shapiro points out, this is to misunderstand the enterprise of science since whether there are general

this
strategy easily slips into the promotion of the pursuit of generality over that of empirical validity. The third
explanations for classes of phenomena is a question for social-scientific inquiry, not to be prejudged before conducting that inquiry.6 Moreover,

danger is that the preceding two combine to encourage the formation of a particular image of disciplinary debate in IRwhat might be called (only slightly tongue in
cheek) the Highlander viewnamely, an image of warring theoretical approaches with each, despite occasional temporary tactical alliances, dedicated to the
strategic achievement of sovereignty over the disciplinary field. It encourages this view because the turn to, and prioritisation of, ontology and epistemology
stimulatesthe idea that there can only be one theoretical approach which gets things right, namely, the theoretical approach that gets its ontology and epistemology
right. This image feeds back into IR exacerbating the first and second dangers, and so a potentially vicious circle arises.

2. Ontological questioning is useless unless it is coupled with policy action simply

questioning takes away agency and makes us spectators to flawed politics instead of
actors fixing the flaws.
Rorty 98 (prof of philosophy at Stanford, Richard, 1998, achieving our country, Pg. 7-9)JFS
Such people find pride in American citizenship impossible, and
vigorous participation in electoral politics pointless. They associate
American patriotism with an endorsement of atrocities: the importation of African
slaves, the slaughter of Native Americans, the rape of ancient forests, and the Vietnam War. Many of them
think of national pride as appropriate only for chauvinists: for the sort of American who rejoices that America
can still orchestrate something like the Gulf War, can still bring deadly force to bear whenever and wherever

When young intellectuals watch John Wayne war movies after reading
Heidegger, Foucault, Stephenson, or Silko, they often become convinced
that they live in a violent, inhuman, corrupt country. They begin to think of
it chooses.

themselves as a saving remnant-as the happy few who have the insight
to see through nationalist rhetoric to the ghastly reality of
contemporary America. But this insight does not move them to
formulate a legislative program, to join a political movement, or to share in a national
hope. The contrast between national hope and national self-mockery and self-disgust becomes vivid when
one compares novels like Snow Crash and Almanac of the Dead with socialist novels of the first half of the
century-books like The Jungle, An American Tragedy, and The Grapes of Wrath. The latter were written in the
belief that the tone of the Gettysburg Address was absolutely right, but that our country would have to
transform itself in order to fulfill Lincoln's hopes. Transformation would be needed
because the rise of industrial capitalism had made the individualist rhetoric of America's first century
obsolete. The authors of these novels thought that this rhetoric should be replaced by one in which America
is destined to become the first cooperative commonwealth, the first classless society. This America would be
one in which income and wealth are equitably distributed, and in which the government ensures equality of
opportunity as well as individual liberty. This new, quasi-communitarian rhetoric was at the heart of the
Progressive Movement and the New Deal. It set the tone for the American Left during the first six decades of
the twentieth century. Walt Whitman and John Dewey, as we shall see, did a great deal to shape this rhetoric.

The difference between early twentieth-century leftist in tellectuals and the majority of their contemporary counterparts is the
difference between agents and spectators. In the early decades
of this century, when an intellectual stepped back from his or
her country's history and looked at it through skeptical eyes, the
chances were that he or she was about to propose a new political
initiative. Henry Adams was, of course, the great exception-the great abstainer from politics. But
William James thought that Adams' diagnosis of the First Gilded Age as a symptom of irreversible moral and
political decline was merely perverse. James's pragmatist theory of truth was in part a reaction against the
sort of detached spectators hip which Adams affected. For James, disgust with American hypocrisy and selfdeception was pointless unless accompanied by an effort to give America reason to be proud of itself in the

The kind of proto- Heideggerian cultural pessimism which

Adams cultivated seemed, to James, decadent and cowardly. "Democracy," James
future.

wrote, "is a kind of religion, and we are bound not to admit its failure. Faiths and utopias are the noblest
exercise of human reason, and no one with a spark of reason in him will sit down fatalistically before the
croaker's picture. "2

K2: Anthro
A pragmatic approach to the environment is key anthropocentrism is inevitable as
animals cannot speak for themselves, we have to judge events on a case-by-case
basis a blind focus on rejecting anthropocentrism is no better than just blindly
accepting it.
Parker 1996 (Kelly A. Parker, professor of philosophy, environmental studies, and liberal
studies at Grand. Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan, Environmental Pragmatism,
1996, http://www.public.iastate.edu/~jwcwolf/Papers/Parker.pdf, accessed 9/8/13, JK)
The pragmatist would ask why we should be expected to pledge allegiance to any of these flags a
priori, and exclude the others. Genuine value emerges at all of these focal levels. Indeed there

will be conflicts because of this, but the occurrence of such moral conflict is not peculiar this
approach. Antigone found that "family values can tragically conflict with the values of the state;
today's CEO likewise finds that business values conflict with the value of an endangered owl's
habitat. Denying that one or the other sphere is worthy of consideration may appear to prevent
potential moral conflict from arising, but only at the risk of serious moral blindness. Blind
anthropocentrism has deplorable consequences for the non-human world, but a blindly
misanthropic ecocentrism is no less deplorable. Again, pluralism is a fact encountered in
experience. Value arises in a variety of relationships among differing parts of the experienced
world. Each situation must be appraised on its own distinct terms. As before, the twin values of
sustainability and diversity provide reference points. Sometimes we rightly focus on the
sustainability of the whole system; sometimes on 'the unique value of an individual. Sometimes
the individual or the system is human and sometimes it is not. From this perspective,
environmental ethics can be seen as continuous with other areas of ethics, a distinct but integral
part of value inquiry in general. I have spoken of the experience of organisms-in-environments
as centrally important. Pragmatism is "anthropocentric" (or better, "anthropometric")24 in one
respect: the human organism is inevitably the one that discusses value. This is so because human
experience, the human perspective on value, is the only thing we know as humans. Many other
entities indeed have experience and do value things. Again, this is not to say that human whim is
the measure of all things, only that humans are in fact the measurers. This must be a factor in all
our deliberations about environmental issues. We can and should speak on the others' behalf when
appropriate, but we cannot speak from their experience. We can in some sense hear their voices,
but we cannot speak in their voices. I see no way out of our own distinctively human bodies. In
this sense, the human yardstick of experience becomes, by default, the measure of all things .
Although the debate over environmental issues is thus limited to human participants, this is not
inappropriate - after all, the debate centers almost exclusively on human threats to the world.
Wolves, spotted owls, and old growth forests are unable to enter the ethics debate except through
their human spokespersons, and that is perhaps regrettable. Far better that they should speak for
themselves! Lacking this, they do at least have spokespersons - and these spokespersons, their
advocates, need to communicate their concerns only to other humans. To do this in anthropic
value categories is not shameful. It is, after all, the only way to go.

Epistimology

Bad

1NC
1. Prioritizing ontology and epistemology over specific policy formulations paralyzes
problem solving measures ensuring short-term annihilation
Owen 2002
[David Owen Millennium Journale of international studies 2002 Re-Orientation Internatioal Relations: On Pragmatism, Pluralism and Practical Reasoning]
Commenting on the philosophical turn in IR, Wver remarks that [a] frenzy for words like epistemology and ontology often signals this philosophical turn,
although he goes on to comment that these terms are often used loosely.4 However, loosely deployed or not, it is clear that debates concerning ontology and
epistemology play a central role in the contemporary IR theory wars. In one respect, this is unsurprising since it is a characteristic feature of the social sciences that
periods of disciplinary disorientation involve recourse to reflection on the philosophical commitments of different theoretical approaches, and there is no doubt that
such reflection can play a valuable role in making explicit the commitments that characterise (and help individuate) diverse theoretical positions. Yet, such a
philosophical turn is not without its dangers and I will briefly mention three before turning to consider a confusion that has, I will suggest, helped to promote the IR

the philosophical turn is that it has an inbuilt tendency

to prioritise issues of ontology and epistemology over explanatory and/or interpretive power
as if the latter two were merely a simple function of the former. But while the explanatory and/or interpretive power of a
theoretical account is not wholly independent of its ontological and/or epistemological commitments (otherwise criticism of these features would not
be a criticism that had any value), it is by no means clear that it is, in contrast, wholly dependent on these philosophical
commitments. Thus, for example, one need not be sympathetic to rational choice theoryto recognise that it can provide powerful accounts of certain kinds
theory wars by motivating this philosophical turn. The first danger with

of problems, such as the tragedy of the commons in which dilemmas of collective action are foregrounded. It may, of course, be the case that the advocates of rational
choice theory cannot give a good account of why this type of theory is powerful in accounting for this class of problems (i.e., how it is that the relevant actors come to
exhibit features in these circumstances that approximate the assumptions of rational choice theory) and, if this is the case, it is a philosophical weaknessbut this does
not undermine the point that, for a certain class of problems

, rational choice theory may provide the best account

available to us. In other words, while the critical judgement of theoretical accounts in terms of their ontological and/or epistemological sophistication is
one kind of critical judgement, it is not the only or even necessarily the most important kind. The second danger run by the philosophical turn is that because

prioritisation of ontology and epistemology promotes theory-construction from philosophical first principles, it cultivates
a theory-driven rather than problem-driven approach to IR. Paraphrasing Ian Shapiro, the point can be put like this:
since it is the case that there is always a plurality of possible true descriptions of a given action, event or phenomenon, the challenge is to decide which is the most apt

theorydriven work is part of a reductionist program in that it dictates always opting for the
description that calls for the explanation that flows from the preferred model or theory.5 The
in terms of getting a perspicuous grip on the action, event or phenomenon in question given the purposes of the inquiry; yet, from this standpoint,

justification offered for this strategy rests on the mistaken belief that it is necessary for social science because general explanations are required to characterise the
classes of phenomena studied in similar terms. However, as Shapiro points out, this is to misunderstand the enterprise of science since whether there are general

this
strategy easily slips into the promotion of the pursuit of generality over that of empirical validity. The third
explanations for classes of phenomena is a question for social-scientific inquiry, not to be prejudged before conducting that inquiry.6 Moreover,

danger is that the preceding two combine to encourage the formation of a particular image of disciplinary debate in IRwhat might be called (only slightly tongue in
cheek) the Highlander viewnamely, an image of warring theoretical approaches with each, despite occasional temporary tactical alliances, dedicated to the
strategic achievement of sovereignty over the disciplinary field. It encourages this view because the turn to, and prioritisation of, ontology and epistemology
stimulatesthe idea that there can only be one theoretical approach which gets things right, namely, the theoretical approach that gets its ontology and epistemology
right. This image feeds back into IR exacerbating the first and second dangers, and so a potentially vicious circle arises.

2. Ontological questioning is useless unless it is coupled with policy action simply

questioning takes away agency and makes us spectators to flawed politics instead of
actors fixing the flaws.
Rorty 98 (prof of philosophy at Stanford, Richard, 1998, achieving our country, Pg. 7-9)JFS
Such people find pride in American citizenship impossible, and
vigorous participation in electoral politics pointless. They associate
American patriotism with an endorsement of atrocities: the importation of African
slaves, the slaughter of Native Americans, the rape of ancient forests, and the Vietnam War. Many of them
think of national pride as appropriate only for chauvinists: for the sort of American who rejoices that America
can still orchestrate something like the Gulf War, can still bring deadly force to bear whenever and wherever

When young intellectuals watch John Wayne war movies after reading
Heidegger, Foucault, Stephenson, or Silko, they often become convinced
that they live in a violent, inhuman, corrupt country. They begin to think of
it chooses.

themselves as a saving remnant-as the happy few who have the insight
to see through nationalist rhetoric to the ghastly reality of
contemporary America. But this insight does not move them to
formulate a legislative program, to join a political movement, or to share in a national
hope. The contrast between national hope and national self-mockery and self-disgust becomes vivid when
one compares novels like Snow Crash and Almanac of the Dead with socialist novels of the first half of the
century-books like The Jungle, An American Tragedy, and The Grapes of Wrath. The latter were written in the
belief that the tone of the Gettysburg Address was absolutely right, but that our country would have to
transform itself in order to fulfill Lincoln's hopes. Transformation would be needed
because the rise of industrial capitalism had made the individualist rhetoric of America's first century
obsolete. The authors of these novels thought that this rhetoric should be replaced by one in which America
is destined to become the first cooperative commonwealth, the first classless society. This America would be
one in which income and wealth are equitably distributed, and in which the government ensures equality of
opportunity as well as individual liberty. This new, quasi-communitarian rhetoric was at the heart of the
Progressive Movement and the New Deal. It set the tone for the American Left during the first six decades of
the twentieth century. Walt Whitman and John Dewey, as we shall see, did a great deal to shape this rhetoric.

The difference between early twentieth-century leftist in tellectuals and the majority of their contemporary counterparts is the
difference between agents and spectators. In the early decades
of this century, when an intellectual stepped back from his or
her country's history and looked at it through skeptical eyes, the
chances were that he or she was about to propose a new political
initiative. Henry Adams was, of course, the great exception-the great abstainer from politics. But
William James thought that Adams' diagnosis of the First Gilded Age as a symptom of irreversible moral and
political decline was merely perverse. James's pragmatist theory of truth was in part a reaction against the
sort of detached spectators hip which Adams affected. For James, disgust with American hypocrisy and selfdeception was pointless unless accompanied by an effort to give America reason to be proud of itself in the

The kind of proto- Heideggerian cultural pessimism which

Adams cultivated seemed, to James, decadent and cowardly. "Democracy," James
future.

wrote, "is a kind of religion, and we are bound not to admit its failure. Faiths and utopias are the noblest
exercise of human reason, and no one with a spark of reason in him will sit down fatalistically before the
croaker's picture. "2

K2: Anthro
A pragmatic approach to the environment is key anthropocentrism is inevitable as
animals cannot speak for themselves, we have to judge events on a case-by-case
basis a blind focus on rejecting anthropocentrism is no better than just blindly
accepting it.
Parker 1996 (Kelly A. Parker, professor of philosophy, environmental studies, and liberal
studies at Grand. Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan, Environmental Pragmatism,
1996, http://www.public.iastate.edu/~jwcwolf/Papers/Parker.pdf, accessed 9/8/13, JK)
The pragmatist would ask why we should be expected to pledge allegiance to any of these flags a
priori, and exclude the others. Genuine value emerges at all of these focal levels. Indeed there

will be conflicts because of this, but the occurrence of such moral conflict is not peculiar this
approach. Antigone found that "family values can tragically conflict with the values of the state;
today's CEO likewise finds that business values conflict with the value of an endangered owl's
habitat. Denying that one or the other sphere is worthy of consideration may appear to prevent
potential moral conflict from arising, but only at the risk of serious moral blindness. Blind
anthropocentrism has deplorable consequences for the non-human world, but a blindly
misanthropic ecocentrism is no less deplorable. Again, pluralism is a fact encountered in
experience. Value arises in a variety of relationships among differing parts of the experienced
world. Each situation must be appraised on its own distinct terms. As before, the twin values of
sustainability and diversity provide reference points. Sometimes we rightly focus on the
sustainability of the whole system; sometimes on 'the unique value of an individual. Sometimes
the individual or the system is human and sometimes it is not. From this perspective,
environmental ethics can be seen as continuous with other areas of ethics, a distinct but integral
part of value inquiry in general. I have spoken of the experience of organisms-in-environments
as centrally important. Pragmatism is "anthropocentric" (or better, "anthropometric")24 in one
respect: the human organism is inevitably the one that discusses value. This is so because human
experience, the human perspective on value, is the only thing we know as humans. Many other
entities indeed have experience and do value things. Again, this is not to say that human whim is
the measure of all things, only that humans are in fact the measurers. This must be a factor in all
our deliberations about environmental issues. We can and should speak on the others' behalf when
appropriate, but we cannot speak from their experience. We can in some sense hear their voices,
but we cannot speak in their voices. I see no way out of our own distinctively human bodies. In
this sense, the human yardstick of experience becomes, by default, the measure of all things .
Although the debate over environmental issues is thus limited to human participants, this is not
inappropriate - after all, the debate centers almost exclusively on human threats to the world.
Wolves, spotted owls, and old growth forests are unable to enter the ethics debate except through
their human spokespersons, and that is perhaps regrettable. Far better that they should speak for
themselves! Lacking this, they do at least have spokespersons - and these spokespersons, their
advocates, need to communicate their concerns only to other humans. To do this in anthropic
value categories is not shameful. It is, after all, the only way to go.

Pedagogy

Discourse

Predictions

Predictions Good

Scenario Planning Good

Predictions are necessary even if they could be wrong, scenario planning helps
reduce uncertainty and the alternative is policy paralysis
Whitt 2009
[Richard, Washington Telecom and Media Counsel at Google, Adaptive Policymaking: Evolving and Applying Emergent Solutions for U.S. Communications
Policy, Federal Communications Law Journal, vol. 61, issue 3, Questia]

prognostication and planning are difficult, if not impossible, to get

right. The inevitable personal limitations of information, perception, and cognition,
coupled with a dynamic and unpredictable environment, makes failure far more common
than success. Attempting long-range planning can also clash with the adaptive principle of making contextual, evidence-based decisions. Still,
appreciating this reality should not lead to decisional paralysis. Those making public policy
must do what they can to peer into the fog and discern some patterns that can help shape
analysis. There are a number of possible ways to project into the present and future, using a mix of reason and imagination, to solve problems. I will briefly
touch on three that are based more on policy option scenarios rather than outfight predictions. Peter Schwartz has devised what he calls
"the art of the long view," which is premised on developing and using scenarios to help
cabin uncertainty and improve decision making. (332) This multi-stage process involves (1)
identifying a focal decision, (2) listing the key factors influencing the success or failure of that decision, (3) listing the driving forces (social,
Emergence Economics tells us that

economic, political, environmental, and technological) that influence the key factors, (4) ranking the key factors and driving forces based on relative importance and

selecting the potential scenarios along a matrix, (6) fleshing out the scenarios, (7)
assessing the implications, and (8) selecting leading indicators and signposts. (333) An important takeaway here is
that the use of scenarios can help identify the various environmental forces that can affect
implementation of a policy decision, reducing to some degree the uncertainty that otherwise
surrounds that process. Closer to the near-term, Richard Ogle talks about utilizing "the idea-spaces of the extended mind,"
which he identifies as including qualities like imagination, intuition, and insight . (334) As Ogle sees it, reason proceeds
degree of uncertainty, (5)

cautiously and looks backward, while the imagination and its allied capacities look more boldly forward. (335) More specifically, the Cartesian model of thinking is

creative breakthroughs typically

involve leaps into the unknown. (337) Because the imagination is the mind's supreme faculty
for dealing with the future, and it reaches places where reason cannot go, Ogle suggests
ways to harness the imagination to improve one's decision-making abilities. (338) As Ogle quotes
Einstein, "Logic will get you from A to B, imagination will take you everywhere." (339) Finally, Thomas Homer-Dixon argues for the
necessity to develop a "prospective mind ... comfortable with constant change, radical
surprise, and even breakdown." (340) He sees each of these as inevitable features of our world,
requiring us constantly to anticipate a wide variety of futures. "We need to exercise our imaginations so that we can
challenge the unchallengeable and conceive the inconceivable." (341) He also argues: "Precise
prediction is impossible because our complex and nonlinear world is full of unknown
unknowns--things we do not know that we do not know." (342) But a mind open to numerous possibilities is better
equipped to anticipate and deal with change than a mind closed off to such possibilities .
based on continuity, because logical and probabilistic reasoning cannot abide gaps. (336) By contrast,

Economic Predictions Good

Models are critical to good economic theory net benefit is education
Krul 2010
[PhD at Brunel University, Masters in Economic History from the London School of Economics, How to Criticize and How Not to Criticize Positive Neoclassical
Economics I: Models, http://mccaine.org/2010/11/06/how-to-criticize-and-how-not-to-criticize-positive-neoclassical-economics-i-models/]

This does, however, raise some real questions which can be fruitfully used as points of criticism . The main
point is the necessity of understanding the nature of the predictive value that these models are
supposed to have and that they are supposed to be judged by. As is well-known by now in philosophy of science,
the actual factual outcomes which would constitute the empirical test for theories are
underdetermined by theory: for any given factual case there is always more than one theory that can account
for it. In practice it is therefore not easily possible to apply a simple methodology that ignores whatever the assumptions may be and builds a
predictive model, and then compares it with rival predictive models for the purposes of empirical testing. There will never be
agreement about to what extent reality matches with given such theories , as is shown by the long-term
persistence of strong theoretical divisions, whether between Marxists and neoclassical economists or more narrowly between Keyenesians and
monetarists. It is almost impossible to determine a priori therefore at what level one should declare the

problem to occur if the facts do not match the predictions of a model : maybe the data are wrongly
gathered, or maybe the data are polluted by third variables affecting them, or maybe the model was
wrongly constructed, or maybe the theory is incorrect . Which of these one thinks the most likely one in any given case
tends to depend strongly in practice on the political and theoretical implications it would have and the degree to which they fit ones preconceived
idea of how the world works. As Friedman states: Observed facts are necessarily finite in number; possible

hypotheses infinite. If there is one hypothesis that is consistent with the available evidence, there are
always an infinite number that are.(4) Understanding this fact also allows us to understand the different uses to
which modelling in neoclassical economics can be put (and not only in neoclassical economics). Because one
cannot go directly from a model to reality to check whether the predictions hold true, the models
function, as Uskali Mki and others have pointed out, as a model world. They are worlds in which the assumptions
made hold true worlds in which perfect information exists, profit is maximized, or whatever. This
allows them to be judged on their theoretical virtues as a way of distinguishing one hypothesis
about the known facts from another, in light of the above mentioned underdetermination .(5) These
theoretical virtues, again, would be primarily those of parsimony and of elegance of explanation, as
well as the manner in which it allows hitherto complicated matters to be formalized for ease of use.
In such a way, this formalization can allow us to grapple better with complicated questions by distilling
them into clearly defined elements when they would otherwise remain muddled . As Levins and Lewontin
defend mathematical formalization in science: Mathematics is used mostly in modeling in order to predict the outcomes of systems of
equations. But is also has another use: educating the intuition so that the obscure becomes obvious . When we
abstract from the reality of interest to create mathematical objects, we do this because some
questions that would seem intractable can now be grasped immediately.

Reject their sweeping indicts of models prefer the specificity and diversity of
applied economic methods
Krul 2010
[PhD at Brunel University, Masters in Economic History from the London School of Economics, How to Criticize and How Not to Criticize Positive Neoclassical
Economics I: Models, http://mccaine.org/2010/11/06/how-to-criticize-and-how-not-to-criticize-positive-neoclassical-economics-i-models/]

The role of assumptions in models can therefore be manifold, as manifold as the purpose of the
models themselves. Models in economics will then namely be seen as having two major possible functions (there are also some minor
ones which I will not go into in detail): either they function as purely theoretical model worlds, and the purpose
of the exercise is to elucidate some aspect hitherto unacknowledged about this model world, thereby
improving the precision of and knowledge about a given positive economic theory, or a model
attempts to directly make a claim about real causes that operate in reality, by either making a
predictive claim on the basis of the models abstraction of reality or by making a claim about the

reality of the causal factor identified in the model . These two different approaches are both common
in neoclassical economics and are not always properly differentiated by the economists themselve s.
Yet they should attract accordingly different criticisms on their merits. Uskali Mki again has described very well what the difference is
between the substitute systems, as he calls the former type, and the surrogate systems , as he calls the
latter type: One kind of criticism attacks styles of inquiry that treat a model as a substitute system only,
not even intending it as a means for gaining access to the real world. The alleged problem is that there is no
attempt. The other kind of criticism acknowledges a model being treated as a surrogate system, but
blames it for failing in accessing the social world. The alleged problem is that there is a failed attempt. The
history of economics exhibits both kinds of criticism. (7) In order to criticize neoclassical economics
effectively, one must separate these two types of criticism. The unrealisticness of assumptions is warranted insofar as a
given models identification of causes can, in the terminology of Mki, be said still to resemble the real causes operating in the world; it is an
empirical question whether this is the case or not, and therefore one that is very liable to the underdetermination problem identified above.
However, there are also cases in which the unrealisticness is always unwarranted. There are several such cases. The most important one is the
case in which either the model is only used to elucidate other models or assumptions in positive neoclassical

economics, without making the attempt to connect it with the real world in any way, except highly
indirectly on the basis of the principle that most of neoclassical economics can be accepted as
known and true, and therefore elucidating theoretical aspects of neoclassical economics
assumptions is helpful. Here the model is then subject to the so what? critique: even if it is true that a
given model has certain properties as a thought experiment, it is still necessary to justify
empirically the connection of the thought experiment to reality. However, there is obviously room for maneouvre
here: as Mki also points out, what appears from a critics point of view as a substitute system can from the point of view of a practitioner appear
as a surrogate system, it just happens that the model discussed in a given paper is only remotely connected with the eventual application to reality.
Again, there will be disagreement on the point of this being true or not, and the more remote the

application to reality is, the greater the room for challenge. Very often in economic papers the
models discussed make no hypothesis about reality at all, or when they do, the hypothesis makes an
immediate and unjustified leap from the theoretical properties of the model to the theoretical
properties of reality here is an excellent terrain for criticizing neoclassical economics, which seems
especially prone to these errors. A slightly less significant but also relevant point of criticism for modelling in this context is the
use of assumptions in models for the purposes of tractability, including presentation for pedagogical purposes and the like. Here, it is of the
utmost importance that such assumptions when unrealistic are as trivial and as irrelevant to the
actual point of contention as possible. As Mki has pointed out but perhaps not emphasized strongly enough, contrary to
the habitual practice of many neoclassical economists, any unrealistic assumptions made for the
purposes of tractability must not have any ontological implications. As his example goes: A few decades ago
economists lacked the mathematical tools for dealing with increasing returns and monopolistic competition in a general equilibrium framework.
This violated the ontological convictions of many economists working on development issues: these economists conceived of (major parts of) the
economy as being governed by positive feedback mechanisms and market imperfections. In case a conflict between ontology and tractability is
resolved in favor of tractability while suppressing ontology, the obvious suspicion is that the models that ensue are (or are to be) treated as
substitute systems only.

Rejection Bad
Turnrejecting strategic predictions of threats makes them inevitabledecisionmakers will rely on preconceived conceptions of threat rather than the more
qualified predictions of analysts
Fitzsimmons 2007
[Michael, Washington DC defense analyst, The Problem of Uncertainty in Strategic Planning, Survival, Winter 06-07, online]

If not sufficiently bounded, a high degree of

variability in planning factors can exact a significant price on planning. The complexity
presented by great variability strains the cognitive abilities of even the most sophisticated
decision- makers.15 And even a robust decision-making process sensitive to cognitive limitations necessarily sacrifices depth of analysis for breadth as
variability and complexity grows. It should follow, then, that in planning under conditions of risk, variability in
strategic calculation should be carefully tailored to available analytic and decision
processes. Why is this important? What harm can an imbalance between complexity and cognitive or analytic capacity in strategic planning bring? Stated
simply, where analysis is silent or inadequate, the personal beliefs of decision-makers fill the
void. As political scientist Richard Betts found in a study of strategic sur- prise, in an environment that lacks clarity,
abounds with conflicting data, and allows no time for rigorous assessment of sources and
validity, ambiguity allows intuition or wishfulness to drive interpretation ... The greater the
ambiguity, the greater the impact of preconceptions.16 The decision-making environment that Betts describes here is one
of political-military crisis, not long-term strategic planning. But a strategist who sees uncertainty as the central fact of his
environ- ment brings upon himself some of the pathologies of crisis decision-making. He invites
ambiguity, takes conflicting data for granted and substitutes a priori scepticism about the
validity of prediction for time pressure as a rationale for discounting the importance of analytic
rigour. It is important not to exaggerate the extent to which data and rigorous assessment can illuminate strategic choices. Ambiguity is a fact of life, and
But handling even this weaker form of uncertainty is still quite challenging.

scepticism of analysis is necessary. Accordingly, the intuition and judgement of decision-makers will always be vital to strategy, and attempting to subordinate those
factors to some formulaic, deterministic decision-making model would be both undesirable and unrealistic. All the same, there is danger in the opposite extreme as

Without careful analysis of what is relatively likely and what is relatively unlikely, what
will be the possible bases for strategic choices? A decision-maker with no faith in
prediction is left with little more than a set of worst-case scenarios and his existing beliefs about the world to
confront the choices before him. Those beliefs may be more or less well founded, but if they are not made
explicit and subject to analysis and debate regarding their application to particular
strategic contexts, they remain only beliefs and premises, rather than rational judgements.
Even at their best, such decisions are likely to be poorly understood by the organisations
charged with their implementation. At their worst, such decisions may be poorly understood by the decision-makers themselves.
well.

A2 Menand
This evidence doesnt applyit doesnt indict all predictions, just those that are
made by pundits without evidence
Menand 2005
(Louis, The New Yorker, 10/5, lexis)
It was no news to Tetlock, therefore, that experts got beaten by formulas. But he does believe that he discovered something about why

some people

make better forecasters than other people. It has to do not with what the experts believe but with the way they think. Tetlock uses
Isaiah Berlin's metaphor from Archilochus, from his essay on Tolstoy, "The Hedgehog and the Fox," to illustrate the difference. He says: Low scorers
look like hedgehogs: thinkers who "know one big thing," aggressively extend the explanatory reach of that one big thing
into new domains, display bristly impatience with those who "do not get it," and express considerable confidence that they are already pretty proficient forecasters, at

High scorers look like foxes: thinkers who know many small things

least in the long term.

(tricks of their trade),
are skeptical of grand schemes, see explanation and prediction not as deductive exercises but rather as exercises in flexible "ad hocery" that require stitching together
diverse sources of information, and are rather diffident about their own forecasting prowess. A hedgehog is a person who sees international affairs to be ultimately
determined by a single bottom-line force: balance-of-power considerations, or the clash of civilizations, or globalization and the spread of free markets. A hedgehog is
the kind of person who holds a great-man theory of history, according to which the Cold War does not end if there is no Ronald Reagan. Or he or she might adhere to
the "actor-dispensability thesis," according to which Soviet Communism was doomed no matter what. Whatever it is, the big idea, and that idea alone, dictates the
probable outcome of events. For the hedgehog, therefore, predictions that fail are only "off on timing," or are "almost right," derailed by an unforeseeable accident.
There are always little swerves in the short run, but the long run irons them out. Foxes, on the other hand, don't see a single determining explanation in history. They
tend, Tetlock says, "to see the world as a shifting mixture of self-fulfilling and self-negating prophecies: self-fulfilling ones in which success breeds success, and
failure, failure but only up to a point, and then self-negating prophecies kick in as people recognize that things have gone too far." Tetlock did not find, in his sample,
any significant correlation between how experts think and what their politics are. His hedgehogs were liberal as well as conservative, and the same with his foxes.
(Hedgehogs were, of course, more likely to be extreme politically, whether rightist or leftist.) He also did not find that his foxes scored higher because they were more
cautious-that their appreciation of complexity made them less likely to offer firm predictions. Unlike hedgehogs, who actually performed worse in areas in which they

foxes enjoyed a modest benefit from expertise

specialized,
. Hedgehogs routinely over-predicted: twenty per cent of the outcomes
that hedgehogs claimed were impossible or nearly impossible came to pass, versus ten per cent for the foxes. More than thirty per cent of the outcomes that hedgehogs
thought were sure or near-sure did not, against twenty per cent for foxes. The upside of being a hedgehog, though, is that when you're right you can be really and
spectacularly right. Great scientists, for example, are often hedgehogs. They value parsimony, the simpler solution over the more complex. In world affairs, parsimony
may be a liability-but, even there, there can be traps in the kind of highly integrative thinking that is characteristic of foxes. Elsewhere, Tetlock has published an
analysis of the political reasoning of Winston Churchill. Churchill was not a man who let contradictory information interfere with his idees fixes. This led him to make
the wrong prediction about Indian independence, which he opposed. But it led him to be right about Hitler. He was never distracted by the contingencies that might

Tetlock also has an unscientific point to make, which is that "we as

a society would be better off if participants in policy debates stated their beliefs in testable
forms"-that is, as probabilities-"monitored their forecasting performance , and honored their reputational
combine to make the elimination of Hitler unnecessary.

bets." He thinks that we're suffering from our primitive attraction to deterministic, overconfident hedgehogs. It's true that the only thing the electronic media like better

Tetlock notes, sadly, a point that Richard Posner has made about these kinds of public
intellectuals, which is that most of them are dealing in "solidarity" goods, not "credence" goods. Their
analyses and predictions are tailored to make their ideological brethren feel good-more white swans
than a hedgehog is two hedgehogs who don't agree.

for the white-swan camp. A prediction, in this context, is just an exclamation point added to an analysis. Liberals want to hear that whatever conservatives are up to is
bound to go badly; when the argument gets more nuanced, they change the channel. On radio and television and the editorial page, the line between expertise and
advocacy is very blurry, and pundits behave exactly the way Tetlock says they will. Bush Administration loyalists say that their predictions about postwar Iraq were
correct, just a little off on timing; pro-invasion liberals who are now trying to dissociate themselves from an adventure gone bad insist that though they may have
sounded a false alarm, they erred "in the right direction"-not really a mistake at all.

A2 Expertism Bad
Rejecting expertism means you vote for Palin- this allows conservative, reactionary,
uneducated masses to takeover democracy and swamp reason
Lilla 2008
Mark Lilla is a professor of humanities at Columbia University and a former editor of the Public Interest.WSJ 11-8-08
http://sec.online.wsj.com/article/SB122610558004810243.html?mod=article-outset-box

there grew up a new generation of conservative writers who

cultivated none of their elders' intellectual virtues -- indeed, who saw themselves as
counter-intellectuals. Most are well-educated and many have attended Ivy League universities; in fact, one of the masterminds
of the Palin nomination was once a Harvard professor. But their function within the conservative movement
is no longer to educate and ennoble a populist political tendency, it is to defend that tendency against the
supposedly monolithic and uniformly hostile educated classes. They mock the advice of
Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They
ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never
lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a
large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. They
hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them . Back
in the '70s, conservative intellectuals loved to talk about "radical chic," the well-known
tendency of educated, often wealthy liberals to project their political fantasies onto brutal
revolutionaries and street thugs, and romanticize their "struggles." But "populist chic" is just
the inversion of "radical chic," and is no less absurd, comical or ominous. Traditional
conservatives were always suspicious of populism, and they were right to be. They saw
elites as a fact of political life, even of democratic life. What matters in democracy is that
those elites acquire their positions through talent and experience, and that they be educated
to serve the public good. But it also matters that they own up to their elite status and defend
the need for elites. They must be friends of democracy while protecting it, and themselves,
from the leveling and vulgarization all democracy tends toward. Writing recently in the New York Times, David
Brooks noted correctly (if belatedly) that conservatives' "disdain for liberal intellectuals" had slipped into
"disdain for the educated class as a whole," and worried that the Republican Party was alienating educated voters. I
couldn't care less about the future of the Republican Party, but I do care about the quality
of political thinking and judgment in the country as a whole. There was a time when conservative intellectuals raised
The die was cast. Over the next 25 years

the level of American public debate and helped to keep it sober. Those days are gone. As for political judgment, the promotion of Sarah Palin as a possible world
leader speaks for itself. The Republican Party and the political right will survive, but the conservative intellectual tradition is already dead. And all of us, even liberals
like myself, are poorer for it.

Utilitarianism

Good

1NC
1. Util is the only ethical system sacrifice for the overall good is the only way to
treat people equally.
Cumminsky, 96 (David, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bates College and Ph.D. from UM, Kantian Consequentialism, p. 145146)
In the next section, I will defend this interpretation of the duty of beneficence. For the sake of argument, however, let us first simply assume that
beneficence does not require significant self-sacrifice and see what follows. Although Kant is unclear on this point, we will assume that
11

significant self-sacrifices are supererogatory.

Thus, if I must harm one in order to save many, the individual whom I will harm by my action is

not morally required to affirm the action. On the other hand, I have a duty to do all that I can for those in need. As a consequence

I am
faced with a dilemma: If I act, I harm a person in a way that a rational being need not consent to;
if I fail to act, then I do not do my duty to those in need and thereby fail to promote an objective
end. Faced with such a choice, which horn of the dilemma is more consistent with the formula of the end-in-itself? We must not
obscure the issue by characterizing this type of case as the sacrifice of individuals for some
abstract "social entity." It is not a question of some persons having to bear the cost for some
elusive "overall social good." Instead, the question is whether some persons must bear the
inescapable cost for the sake of other persons. Robert Nozick, for example, argues that "to use a person in
this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a separate person,
that his is the only life he has."12 But why is this not equally true of all those whom we do not
save through our failure to act? By emphasizing solely the one who must bear the cost if we act,
we fail to sufficiently respect and take account of the many other separate persons, each with
only one life, who will bear the cost of our inaction. In such a situation, what would a conscientious Kantian agent, an
agent motivated by the unconditional value of rational beings, choose? A morally good agent recognizes that the basis of
all particular duties is the principle that "rational nature exists as an end in itself" (GMM 429). Rational
nature as such is the supreme objective end of all conduct. If one truly believes that all rational beings have an equal
value, then the rational solution to such a dilemma involves maximally promoting the lives and
liberties of as many rational beings as possible (chapter 5). In order to avoid this conclusion, the nonconsequentialist Kantian needs to justify agent-centered constraints. As we saw in chapter 1, however, even most
Kantian deontologists recognize that agent-centered constraints require a non-value-based rationale.
But we have seen that Kant's normative theory is based on an unconditionally valuable end. How can a concern for the value of rational beings
lead to a refusal to sacrifice rational beings even when this would prevent other more extensive losses of rational beings? If the moral law is
based on the value of rational beings and their ends, then what is the rationale for prohibiting a moral agent from maximally promoting these two
tiers of value? If

I sacrifice some for the sake of others, I do not use them arbitrarily, and I do not
deny the unconditional value of rational beings. Persons may have "dignity, that is, an
unconditional and incomparable worth" that transcends any market value (GMM 436), but
persons also have a fundamental equality that dictates that some must sometimes give way for
the sake of others (chapters 5 and 7). The concept of the end-in-itself does not support the view that we
may never force another to bear some cost in order to benefit others. If one focuses on the equal value of all
rational beings, then equal consideration suggests that one may have to sacrifice some to save many.

2. Privileging ethics over political consequences dooms their ethical system and
politics.
Isaac, 02 [Jeffrey, Professor of Political Science and director of the Center for the
Study of Democracy and Public Life at Indiana University, Dissent, Ends, Means,
and Politics, Spring, ebsco]

Power is not a dirty word or an unfortunate feature of the world. It is the core of politics. Power is
the ability to effect outcomes in the world. Politics, in large part, involves contests over the distribution and use of power. To accomplish anything in the political world, one must attend to the means that are necessary to
bring it about. And to develop such means is to develop, and to exercise, power. To say this is not to say that power is beyond moral- ity.
It is to say that power is not reducible to morality. As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt
have taught, an

unyielding concern with moral goodness undercuts political responsibility. The concern
may be morally laudable, re- flecting a kind of personal integrity, but it suf- fers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to
see that the purity of ones intention does not ensure the achievement of what one intends. Abjuring violence or refusing to make common cause with morally compromised parties may
seem like the right thing; but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard to view them as
serving any moral good beyond the clean con- science of their supporters; (2) it fails to see that
in a world of real violence and injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of powerlessness; it is
often a form of complicity in injustice. This is why, from the standpoint of poli- ticsas opposed to religionpacifism is
always a potentially immoral stand. In categorically re- pudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent injustices with any
ef- fect;

and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended consequences as it is about
intentions; it is the effects of action, rather than the motives of action, that is most significant.
Just as the alignment with good may engender impotence, it is often the pur- suit of good
that generates evil. This is the lesson of communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that ones goals be
sincere or idealistic; it is equally important, always, to ask about the effects of pursuing these
goals and to judge these effects in pragmatic and histori- cally contextualized ways. Moral
absolutism in- hibits this judgment. It alienates those who are not true believers. It promotes
arrogance. And it undermines political effectiveness.

3. Extinction outweighs and should be evaluated before anything else

Jonathan Schell 1982 Harold Willens Peace Fellow at the Nation Institute, The Fate
of the Earth, page 95 http://www.colorado.edu/AmStudies/lewis/film/schell.pdf
accessed 6/30/12
it is clear that at present, with some twenty thousand megatons of nuclear explosive power in
existence, and with more being added every day, we have entered into the zone of uncertainty,
which is to say the zone of risk of extinction. But the mere risk of extinction has a
significance that is categorically different from, and immeasurably greater than that of any
other risk, and as we make our decisions we have to take that significance into account. Up
to now, every risk has been contained within the frame of life; extinction would shatter the
frame. It represents not the defeat of some purpose but an abyss in which all human purposes
would be drowned for all time. We have no right to place the possibility of this limitless,
eternal defeat on the same footing as risks that we run in the ordinary conduct of our
affairs in our particular transient moment of human history. To employ a mathematical
analogy, we can say that although the risk of extinction may be fractional, the stake is,
humanly speaking, infinite, and a fraction of infinity is still infinity. In other words, once we
learn that a holocaust might lead to extinction we have no right to gamble, because if we lose, the
game will be over, and neither we nor anyone else will ever get another chance. Therefore,
although scientifically speaking, there is all the difference in the world between the mere
possibility that a holocaust will bring about extinction and the certainty of it, morally they are the
same, and we have no choice but to address the issue of nuclear weapons as though we knew for
a certainty that their use would put an end to our species.

4. Utilitarianism inevitable we constantly attempt to balance rights.

Green, 02 Assistant Professor Department of Psychology Harvard University (Joshua,
November 2002 "The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth About Morality And What To
Do About It", 314)
Some people who talk of balancing rights may think there is an algorithm for deciding which rights take priority over which. If thats what we
mean by 302 balancing rights, then we are wise to shun this sort of talk. Attempting to solve moral problems using a

complex deontological algorithm is dogmatism at its most esoteric, but dogmatism all the same.
However, its likely that when some people talk about balancing competing rights and obligations
they are already thinking like consequentialists in spite of their use of deontological language . Once
again, what deontological language does best is express the thoughts of people struck by strong, emotional moral intuitions: It doesnt matter
that you can save five people by pushing him to his death. To do this would be a violation of his rights!19 That is why angry

protesters say things like, Animals Have Rights, Too! rather than, Animal Testing: The Harms
Outweigh the Benefits! Once again, rights talk captures the apparent clarity of the issue and
absoluteness of the answer. But sometimes rights talk persists long after the sense of clarity and absoluteness has faded. One thinks,
for example, of the thousands of children whose lives are saved by drugs that were tested on animals and the rights of those children. One
finds oneself balancing the rights on both sides by asking how many rabbit lives one is willing to
sacrifice in order to save one human life, and so on, and at the end of the day ones underlying
thought is as thoroughly consequentialist as can be, despite the deontological gloss. And whats wrong with
that? Nothing, except for the fact that the deontological gloss adds nothing and furthers the myth that there really are rights, etc. Best to
drop it. When deontological talk gets sophisticated, the thought it represents is either dogmatic in
an esoteric sort of way or covertly consequentialist.

5. Util creates a unique value for life predicting to stop future extinction episodes
allows us to appreciate all lives and share a deep concern for the state of our world.
The Co-Intelligence Institute, 2K2
[Fear and Empowerment Work, http://www.co-intelligence.org/y2k_despairempowermt.html,
accessed 3-2-2007, JT]
Apocalyptic Y2K expectations can make us afraid, depressed and numb. Intense emotions like this
can wipe us out -- to a point where we can't act effectively. But it turns out there is a gift hidden at the core
of these emotions, a gift that gives us power.
But first a bit of history.

During the 1980s some peace activists realized that their fellow citizens were paralyzed by
fear and powerlessness in the face of the threat of nuclear war. They observed people lost in denial,
trying to go about their lives as if the threat didn't exist. Wanting to learn more about this phenomenon, these activists
listened carefully to these haunted people -- and searched their own hearts, as well. They
discovered that under everyone's denial was a deep caring for their lives, their children's
future, and the fate of their world. From that insight, these activists developed a number of emotional
and spiritual approaches to help people in groups break through their denial and despair to contact that deep caring. Once they got
in touch with their shared feelings and stories and passion for life, such groups often found a new vitality and

determination to do something about the problem. Buddhist scholar and systems thinker Joanna Macy,
pioneer in this work, called it "despair and empowerment work."

A number of people who were involved with that work a decade or more ago, are now
evolving new forms which they are applying to threats such as ecological collapse and the
socioeconomic collapse that could be triggered by the Y2K computer problem and our dependence on technology.

A2: Humans Not Special

People are a unique arrangement of molecules that have a value simply for being so
unique, dont buy any of their were nothing special arguments, we need to save
as many lives as possible because once this arrangement is gone, its gone forever.
Myers 2009 (PZ, Biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris, December 10

th

2009, Science Blogs,

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/12/the_dead_are_dead.php, accessed 3/6/12, JK)

I have heard that first argument so many times, and it is facile and dishonest. We

are not just "energy". We are a

pattern of energy and matter, a very specific and precise arrangement of molecules in
movement. That can be destroyed. When you've built a pretty sand castle and the tide comes in
and washes it away, the grains of sand are still all there, but what you've lost is the
arrangement that you worked to generate, and which you appreciated. Reducing a complex functional order to
nothing but the constituent parts is an insult to the work. If I were to walk into the Louvre and set fire to the
Mona Lisa, and afterwards take a drive down to Chartres and blow up the cathedral, would
anyone defend my actions by saying, "well, science says matter and energy cannot be created
or destroyed, therefore, Rabid Myers did no harm, and we'll all just enjoy viewing the ashes
and rubble from now on"? No. That's crazy talk. We also wouldn't be arguing that the painting and the
architecture have transcended this universe to enter another, nor would such a pointless claim ameliorate our loss in this universe.
The rest of his argument is quantum gobbledy-gook. The behavior of subatomic particles is not a good guide to what to expect of
the behavior of large bodies. A photon may have no rest mass, but I can't use this fact to justify my grand new weight loss plan;
quantum tunnelling does not imply that I can ignore doors when I amble about my house. People are not particles! We

are the product of the aggregate behavior of the many particles that constitute our bodies, and
you cannot ignore the importance of these higher-order relationships when talking about our
fate.

A2: Zimmerman
1. Every ethical system uses utilitarian calculus to some degree makes at least
some form of ontological damnation inevitable.
2. Extinction outweighs it shatters the frame of life and makes any reconciliation
with value impossible, thats Schell. We need to live to fight another day.
3. Your evidence is missing a crucial partthe part that says you are wrong. Nuke
war outweighs.
Michael E. Zimmerman, Professor of Philosophy at Tulane, Contesting Earths Future: Radical
Ecology and Postmodernity, 1994, pg 119-120 Heidegger asserted that human self-assertion,
combined with the eclipse of being, threatens the relation between being and human Dasein.
Loss of this relation would be even more dangerous than a nuclear war that might bring about
the complete annihilation of humanity and the destruction of the earth. This controversial claim
is comparable to the Christian teaching that it is better to forfeit the world than to lose ones soul
by losing ones relation to God. Heidegger apparently thought along these lines: it is possible
that after a nuclear war, life might once again emerge, but it is far less likely that there will ever
again occur an ontological clearing through which such life could manifest itself. Further, since
modernitys one-dimensional disclosure of entities virtually denies them any being at all, the
loss of humanitys openness for being is already occurring. Modernitys background mood is
horror in the face of nihilism, which is consistent with the aim of providing material happiness
for everyone by reducing nature to pure energy. The unleashing of vast quantities of energy in
nuclear war would be equivalent to modernitys slow-motion destruction of nature: unbounded
destruction would equal limitless consumption. If humanity avoided nuclear war only to survive
as contented clever animals, Heidegger believed we would exist in a state of ontological
damnation: hell on earth, masquerading as material paradise. Deep ecologist might agree that a
world of material human comfort purchased at the price of everything wild would not be a world
worth living in, for in killing wild nature, people would be as good as dead. But most of them
could not agree that the loss of humanity's relation to being would be worse than nuclear
omnicide, for it is wrong to suppose that the lives of millions of extinct and unknown
species are somehow lessened because they were never "disclosed" by humanity.

4. Extinction outweighs ontology people will inevitably rise up, unless they all die
before they can. Scratch Zimmerman, reverse it.
Jonas 96 (Hans, Former Alvin Johnson Prof. Phil. New School for Social Research and Former Eric Voegelin
Visiting Prof. U. Munich, Morality and Mortality: A Search for the Good After Auschwitz, p. 111-112)
With this look ahead at an ethics for the future, we are touching at the same time upon the question of the future of freedom. The unavoidable
discussion of this question seems to give rise to misunderstandings. My dire prognosis that not only our material standard of living but also our
democratic freedoms would fall victim to the growing pressure of a worldwide ecological crisis, until finally there would remain only some form
of tyranny that would try to save the situation, has led to the accusation that I am defending dictatorship as a solution to our problems. I shall
ignore here what is a confusion between warning and recommendation. But I have indeed said that such a tyranny

would still be

better than total ruin; thus, I have ethically accepted it as an alternative. I must now defend this standpoint, which I continue to support,
before the court that I myself have created with the main argument of this essay. For are we not contradicting ourselves in

prizing physical survival at the price of freedom? Did we not say that freedom was the condition of our capacity for
responsibilityand that this capacity was a reason for the survival of humankind?; By tolerating tyranny as an alternative to
physical annihilation are we not violating the principle we established: that the How of existence
must not take precedence over its Why? Yet we can make a terrible concession to the primacy of
physical survival in the conviction that the ontological capacity for freedom, inseparable as
it is from man's being, cannot really be extinguished, only temporarily banished from the
public realm. This conviction can be supported by experience we are all familiar with. We have
seen that even in the most totalitarian societies the urge for freedom on the part of some
individuals cannot be extinguished, and this renews our faith in human beings. Given this faith, we have
reason to hope that, as long as there are human beings who survive , the image of God will continue
to exist along with them and will wait in concealment for its new hour. With that hopewhich in
this particular case takes precedence over fearit is permissible, for the sake of physical survival, to accept if
need be a temporary absence of freedom in the external affairs of humanity. This is, I want to emphasize, a
worst-case scenario, and it is the foremost task of responsibility at this particular moment in world history to prevent it from happening. This is in
fact one of the noblest of duties (and at the same time one concerning self-preservation), on the part of the imperative of responsibility to avert
future coercion that would lead to lack of freedom by acting freely in the present, thus preserving as much as possible the ability of future
generations to assume responsibility. But more than that is involved. At

stake is the preservation of Earth's entire

miracle of creation, of which our human existence is a part and before which man reverently
bows, even without philosophical "grounding." Here too faith may precede and reason follow; it is faith that longs for
this preservation of the Earth (fides quaerens intellectum), and reason comes as best it can to faith's aid with arguments, not knowing or even
asking how much depends on its success or failure in determining what action to take. With this confession of faith we come to the end of our
essay on ontology.

A2: Non-Human Value

Extinction first: Nothing has value outside of an evaluating agent the reason that
they can claim that non-living things have value in the first place is because they
ARE evaluating agents. Post-extinction, things may exist, but they will be valueless.
Parker 1996 (Kelly A. Parker, professor of philosophy, environmental studies, and liberal
studies at Grand. Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan, Environmental Pragmatism,
1996, http://www.public.iastate.edu/~jwcwolf/Papers/Parker.pdf, accessed 9/8/13, JK)
The last point I want to touch upon is one that many take to be the most important issue in
environmental ethics. It is often repeated that the viability of environmental ethics depends on
establishing the intrinsic value of the non-human world. (Perhaps I should use the term "inherent
value." I'll deal with that momentarily.) The main concern is that as long as the non-human world
is seen as a stock of resources having only instrumental value, there can be no genuine
"environmental ethic." To be morally considerable in a strong sense, the non-human world must
be more than useful. It must be valuable in its own right Pragmatism cuts this Gordian knot by
denying that instrumental value and intrinsic value are ever mutually exclusive. The being of any
existent thing, human or non-human, is constituted in its relations with other things in a context of
meaningful connections. Thus anything that is good is both instrumentally valuable (it affects
some goods beyond itself) and intrinsically valuable (it is good for what it is, a significant entity
essential to the constitution of these relations). We can indeed distinguish the two kinds of value,
but nothing can ever be instrumentally valuable without at the same time possessing intrinsic
value. Thus even the "last man" on earth, in Richard Routley's classic scenario, would be doing
something morally wrong in wantonly destroying parts of the natural world. 25 He would be

annihilating intrinsically good pans of the field of experience. He would be needlessly damaging
not just those supposedly discrete things, but intrinsically good parts of himself and of all other
beings potentially or actually in the experiential web. People may mean something else by
"intrinsic value," however. Callicott reserves the term "intrinsic value" for the goodness of
something independent of any consciousness that might value it.26 This is sometimes called the
"inherent value" or "inherent worth" of natural objects. Now, pragmatism would point out that
where there is and could in principle be no valuing agent, there is no conceivable experience - and
hence no aesthetic or moral value at all. In a universe of mere objects absent a valuing
consciousness, things may have being but not value. Perhaps intrinsic/inherent value is the
contemporary equivalent of the medieval concept of "ontological goodness" - then in so far as it
exists, everything is good in God's eyes. Or perhaps whatever is, is good for some non-human

consciousness other than God. (These latter two cases conform to what Callicott identifies as
inherent value.) I respect both of these possibilities, but as a human philosopher I cannot, and
need not, comprehend them from the inside. If there were no human agent there would after all be
no possibility (and no need) for the kind of environmental ethic we seek. I do not know what it is
like to be God, nor do I know what it is like to be a bat. The concept of intrinsic/inherent value is
thus either meaningless, or else it reduces to the value of something that enters into ecological
relations that do not immediately affect any human agent. All that is, however, does eventually,
mediately, affect some human agent. Its value can thus be cognized by humans, and its moral
considerability can be acknowledged and respected. The lesson here, that we are connected at all
points to our environments, and they to us, is the Alpha and the Omega of pragmatic thought
about the environment.

Deontology