Opacity K - Northwestern 2015

Opacity = Mann/Abbas
1NC
1NC
Use of suffering to advance a political agenda objectifies the oppressed and is a
prophylactic preventing action
Berlant 98 (Lauren – George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English at the
University of Chicago, Ph.D. from Cornell University, “Poor Eliza,” in American Literature,
Volume 70, Number 3, p. 635-668,
http://www2.law.columbia.edu/faculty_franke/Gay_Marriage/Poor%20Eliza.pdf)
What distinguishes these critical texts are the startling ways they struggle to encounter the Uncle Tom form without reproducing it, declining to pay the
inheritance tax. The postsentimental does not involve an aesthetic disruption to the contract sentimentality makes between its texts and readers -that
proper reading will lead to better feeling and therefore to a better self. What changes is the place of repetition in this contract, a crisis frequently
thematized in formal aesthetic and generational terms. In
its traditional and political modalities, the sentimental
promises that in a just world a consensus will already exist about what constitutes uplift ,
amelioration, and emancipation, those horizons toward which empathy powerfully directs itself.
Identification with suffering, the ethical response to the sentimental plot, leads to its repetition
in the audience and thus to a generally held view about what transformations would bring the
good life into being . This presumption, that the terms of consent are transhistorical once true feeling is shared, explains in
part why emotions, especially painful ones, are so central to the world-building aspects of
sentimental alliance. Postsentimental texts withdraw from the contract that presumes consent to the conventionally desired outcomes of
identification and empathy. The desire for unconflictedness might very well motivate the sacrifice of
surprising ideas to the norms of the world against which this rhetoric is being deployed. What, if
anything, then, can be built from the very different knowledge/experience of subaltern pain? What can memory do to create conditions for freedom
and justice without reconfirming the terms of ordinary subordination? More than a critique of feeling as such, the
postsentimental
modality also challenges what literature and storytelling have come to stand for in the creation of
sentimental national subjects across an almost two-century span. Three moments in this genealogy, which differ as much from each
other as from the credulous citation of Uncle Tom's Cabin we saw in The King and I and Dimples, will mark here some potential within the arsenal that
counters the repetition compulsions of sentimentality. This essay began with a famous passage from James Baldwin's "Everybody's Protest Novel," a
much-cited essay about Uncle Tom's Cabin that is rarely read in the strong sense because its powerful language of rageful truth-telling would shame in
advance any desire to make claims for the tactical efficacy of suffering and mourning in the struggle to transform the United States into a postracist
nation. I cited Baldwin's text to open this piece not to endorse its absolute truth but to figure its frustrated opposition to the sentimental optimism that
equates the formal achievement of empathy on a mass scale with the general project of democracy. Baldwin's special contribution to what
sentimentality can mean has been lost in the social-problem machinery of mass society, in which the
production of tears where
anger or nothing might have been became more urgent with the coming to cultural dominance
of the Holocaust and trauma as models for having and remembering collective social
experience .20 Currently, as in traditional sentimentality, the authenticity of overwhelming pain that
can be textually performed and shared is disseminated as a prophylactic against the
reproduction of a shocking and numbing mass violence. Baldwin asserts that the overvaluation of such
redemptive feeling is precisely a condition of that violence. Baldwin's encounter with Stowe in this essay comes
amidst a general wave of protest novels, social-problem films, and film noir in the U.S. after World War Two: Gentleman's Agreement, The Postman
Always Rings Twice, The Best Years of Our Lives. Films like these, he says, "emerge for what they are: a mirror of our confusion, dishonesty, panic,
trapped and immobilized in the sunlit prison of the American dream." They
cut the complexity of human motives and self-
understanding "down to size" by preferring "a lie more palatable than the truth" about the
social and material effects the liberal pedagogy of optimism has , or doesn't have, on "man's"
capacity to produce a world of authentic truth, justice, and freedom .21 Indeed, "truth" is the keyword for
Baldwin. He defines it as "a devotion to the human being, his freedom and fulfillment: freedom which cannot be legislated, fulfillment which cannot be
charted."22 In contrast, Stowe's totalitarian religiosity, her insistence
that subjects "bargain" for heavenly redemption
with their own physical and spiritual mortification, merely and violently confirms the fundamental
abjection of all persons, especially the black ones who wear the dark night of the soul out where
all can see it. Additionally, Baldwin argues that Uncle Tom's Cabin instantiates a tradition of locating the destiny of the nation in a false model of
the individual soul, one imagined as free of ambivalence, aggression, or contradiction. By "human being" Baldwin means to repudiate stock identities as
such, arguing that their stark simplicity confirms the very fantasies and institutions against which the sentimental is ostensibly being mobilized. This
national-liberal refusal of complexity is what he elsewhere calls "the price of the ticket" for
membership in the American dream.23 As the Uncle Tom films suggest, whites need blacks to "dance" for
them so that they might continue disavowing the costs or ghosts of whiteness, which involve
religious traditions of self-loathing and cultural traditions confusing happiness with analgesia. The
conventional reading of "Everybody's Protest Novel" sees it as a violent rejection of the sentimental.24 It is associated with the feminine (Little
Women), with hollow and dishonest capacities of feeling, with an aversion to the real pain that real experience brings. "Causes, as we know, are
notoriously bloodthirsty," he writes.25 The
politico-sentimental novel uses suffering vampirically to simplify the
subject, thereby making the injunction to empathy safe for the subject. Of course there is more to the story.
Baldwin bewails the sentimentality of Richard Wright's Native Son because Bigger Thomas is not the homeopathic Other to Uncle Tom after all, but
one of his "children," the heir to his negative legacy.26 Both Tom and Thomas live in a simple relation to violence and die knowing only slightly more
than they did before they were sacrificed to a white ideal of the soul's simple purity, its emptiness. This
addiction to the formula of
redemption through violent simplification persists with a "terrible power": it confirms that U.S.
minorities are constituted as Others even to themselves through attachment to the most
hateful, objectified, cartoon-like versions of their identities, and that the shamed subcultures of
America really are, in some way, fully expressed by the overpresence of the stereotypical image.
This creates a marketplauce of trauma for consumption, constructing the Other

as an object in a sentimental economy, and shielding criticism of the law
Berlant 99 (Lauren – George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English at the
University of Chicago, Ph.D. from Cornell University, “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy
and Politics,” in Cultural Pluralism, Identity Politics and the Law, Ed. Sarat & Kearns, p. 49-54)
Ravaged wages and ravaged bodies saturate the global marketplace in which the United States seeks
desperately to compete “competitively,” as the euphemism goes, signifying a race that will be won by the nations
whose labor conditions are most optimal for profit? In the United States the media of the political public
sphere regularly register new scandals of the proliferating sweatshop networks “at home” and “abroad,” which
has to be a good thing, because it produces feeling and with it something at least akin to
consciousness that can lead to action.3 Yet even as the image of the traumatized worker
proliferates, even as evidence of exploitation is found under every rock or commodity, it
competes with a normative/utopian image of the U.S. citizens who remains unmarked ,
framed, and protected by the private trajectory of his life project which is sanctified at the juncture where the
unconscious meets history: the American Dream.4 in that story one’s identity is not borne of suffering, mental, physical, or economic. If the
U.S. Worker’s lucky enough to live at an economic moment that sustains the Dream he gets to appear at his least national when he is working and at his
most national at leisure, with his family or in semipublic worlds of other men producing surplus manliness (e.g., via sports). In the American
dreamscape his identity is private property, a zone in which structural obstacles and cultural differences fade into an ether of prolonged, deferred, and
individuating enjoyment that he has earned and that the nation has helped him to earn. Meanwhile, exploitation
only appears as a
scandalous nugget in the sieve of memory when it can be condensed into an exotic thing of
momentary fascination, a squalor of the bottom too horrible to be read in its own actual
banality. The exposed traumas of workers in ongoing extreme conditions do not generally induce more than
mourning on the part of the state and the public culture to whose feeling based opinions the
state is said to respond. Mourning is what happens when a grounding object is lost, is dead, no
longer living (to you). Mourning is an experience of irreducible boundedness: I am here, I am
living, he is dead, I am mourning. It is a beautiful, not sublime, experience of emancipation: mourning
supplies the subject the definitional perfection of a being no longer in flux . It takes place over a
distance: even if the object who induces the feeling of loss and helplessness is neither dead nor
at any great distance from where you are? In other words, mourning can also be an act of aggression, of social
deathmaking: it can perform the evacuation of significance from actually-existing subjects . Even
when liberals do it, one might say, are ghosted for a good cause.6 The sorrow songs of scandal that
sing of the exploitation that is always "elsewhere" (even a few blocks away) are in this sense
aggressively songs of mourning. Play them backward, and the military march of capitalist
triumphalism (The Trans-Nationale) can be heard . Its Lyric, currently creamed by every organ of
record in the United States, is about necessity. It exhorts citizens to understand that the "bottom
line" of national life is neither utopia nor freedom but survival , which can only be achieved by a
citizenry that eats its anger , makes no unreasonable claims on resources or controls over
value , and uses its most creative energy to cultivate intimate spheres while scrapping a Life
together flexibly in response to the market world’s caprice 8. In this particular moment of expanding class
unconsciousness that looks like consciousness emerges a peculiar, though not unprecedented, here: the exploited child. If a worker can be infantilized,
pictured as young, as small, as feminine or feminized, as starving, as bleeding and diseased, and as a (virtual) sieve, the righteous indignation around
procuring his survival resounds everywhere. The child must not be sacrificed to states or to profiteering. His wounded image speaks a truth that
subordinates narrative: he has not “freely” chosen his exploitation; the optimism and play that are putatively the right of childhood have been stolen
from him. Yet only "voluntary" steps are ever taken to try to control this visible sign of what is ordinary and systemic amid the chaos of capitalism, in
order in make its localized nightmares seem uninevitable. Privatize the atrocity, delete the visible sign, make it seem foreign. Return the child to the
family, replace the children with admits who can look dignified while being paid virtually the same revoking wage. The problem that organizes so much
feeling then regains livable proportions, and the uncomfortable pressure of feeling dissipates, like so much gas. Meanwhile, the
pressure of
feeling the shock of being uncomfortably political produces a cry for a double therapy—to the
victim and the viewer . But before "we" appear too complacently different from the privileged
citizens who desire to caption the mute image of exotic suffering with an aversively fascinated
mooning (a desire for the image to be dead, a ghost), we must note that this feeling culture crosses over into
other domains, the domains of what we call identity politics, where the wronged take up voice
and agency to produce transformative testimony, which depends on an analogous conviction
about the self-evidence and therefore the objectivity of painful feeling. The central concern of this essay is to
address the place of painful feeling in the making of political worlds. In particular, I mean to challenge a powerful popular belief in the
positive workings of something I call national sentimentality , a rhetoric of promise that a nation can
be built across fields of social difference through channels of affective identification and
empathy. Sentimental politics generally promotes and maintains the hegemony of the national
identity form , no mean feat in the face of continued widespread intercultural antagonism and
economic cleavage. But national sentimentality is more than a current of feeling that circulates in a political field: the phrase describes a
longstanding contest between two models of US. citizenship. In one, the classic made}, each citizen’s value is secured by an
equation between abstractness and emancipation: a cell of national identity provides
juridically protected personhood for citizens regardless of anything specific about them . In the
second model, which was initially organized around labor , feminist , and antiracist struggles of
the nineteenth-century United States, another version of the nation is imagined as the index
of collective life . This nation is propled by suffering citizens and noncitizens whose structural
exclusion from the utopian-American dreamscape exposes the state's claim of legitimacy and
virtue to an acid wash of truth telling that makes hegemonic disavowal virtually impossible, at
certain moments of political intensity. Sentimentality has long been the means by which mass
subaltern pain is advanced, in the dominant public sphere, as the true core of national
collectivity . It operates when the pain of intimate others burns into the conscience of classically
privileged national subjects, such that they feel the pain of flawed or denied citizenship as their pain.
Theoretically, to eradicate the pain those with power will do whatever is necessary to return the nation once more to its legitimately utopian
order. Identification with pain, a universal true feeling, then leads to structural social change. In return,
subalterns scarred by the pain of failed democracy will reauthorize universalist notions of citizenship in the national utopia, which involves in a
redemptive notion of law as the guardian of public good. The object of the nation and the law in this light is to eradicate systemic social pain, the
absence of which becomes the definition of freedom. Yet,
since these very sources of protection—the state, the law, patriotic
ideology—have traditionally buttressed traditional matrices of cultural hierarchy , and since their historic
job has been to protect universal subject I citizens from feeling their culture} and corporeal specificity as
a political vulnerability, the imagined capacity of these institutions to assimilate to the affective
tactics of subaltern counterpolitics suggests some weaknesses, or misrecognitions, in these
tactics. For one thing, it may be that the sharp specificity of the traumatic model of pain implicitly
mischaracterizes what a person is as what a person becomes in the experience of social
negation; this model also falsely premises a sharp picture of structural violence's source and
scope, in tum promoting a dubious optimism that law and other visible sources of inequality , for
example, can provide the best remedies for their own taxonomizing harms . It is also possible that
counterhegemonic deployments of pain as the measure of structural injustice actually sustain

the utopian image of a homogeneous national metaculture , which can look like a healed or
healthy body in contrast to the scarred and exhausted ones. Finally, it might be that the tactical use of
trauma to describe the effects of social inequality so overidentifies the eradication of pain
with the achievement of justice that it enables various confusions: for instance, the equation of
pleasure with freedom or the sense that changes in feeling , even on a mass scale, amount to
substantial social change. Sentimental politics makes these confusions credible and these
violences bearable, as its cultural power confirms the centrality of inter-personal identification
and empathy to the vitality and viability of collective life . This gives citizens something to do in
response to overwhelming structural violence. Meanwhile, by equating mass society with that
thing called "national culture," these important transpersonal linkages and intimacies are too
frequently serve as proleptic shields, as ethically uncontestable legitimating devices for
sustaining the hegemonic field.9
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Links
Discourse
Discourse of social movements guarantees state cooption and collapse of the
movement
Mann 96 (Paul, Department of English Pomona College, "The Nine Grounds of Intellectual
Warfare", http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.196/mann.196)
The quasi-conflictual structure of the colloquium; the nationalization of intellectual outlooks (e.g., French
vs. Anglo-American feminism, English studies vs. German philology in the wake of the First
World War); the "diversification" of disciplines carried out as the conquest and colonization of discrete areas of academic
territory, and all the ensuing turf wars between departments, methodologies, etc.; rising concern about the invasive, "violent"
force of interrogation and argument in even so innocuous an act as literary interpretation; all the petty jockeying for personal
advantage that will pass for intellectual combat: these are horizonal phenomena, indications of more prevalent and insistent
orders of conflict that structure intellectual work and, perhaps, work in general. Beyond these familiar instances, imagine for a
moment (it is a fable, not philosophy) that Hegel, or at least Kojève's Hegel, was right: consciousness, history, civilization begin
with combat: "man, to be really, truly 'man,' and to know that he is such, must . . . impose
the idea he has of
himself on beings other than himself," in a fight to the death in which no one dies, and in
which the stakes are only recognition, the establishment of a certain narcissistic regime, the invention of nothing
12
more than the subject. Perhaps then the first violence is the formal and ideal reduction of the complexity of conflict to a
dialectical system. Let me modulate the fable a bit further: When imposition is collective, the fight becomes battle. When it is
strategically directed, it becomes warfare. When
we fight to impose not our own idea but an idea that
has been imposed upon us, and with which we identify so intensely it is as if the idea were
our own, we become soldiers. The soldier is essential to the dialectic: neither master nor quite simply slave but the
device that mediates between them. The soldier is slave as hero, risking death in order to impose the
master's will on another slave. Perhaps intellectual soldiers too are not slaves who can
comprehend their slavery and still revolt but hoplite phalanxes marshalled in order for the
day of intellectual battle; Plato's guardians in the chariot of reason, and a chariot is, after all, a military transport. It is
not even precisely that some specific other has imposed his idea on us: the master is always in part a figure out of our own
imagination, out of our desire and fear, a stand-in for a "true" master we can never quite locate and who need not even really
exist, and we confront "death" in his name, in various surrogate forms, so that we will never have to confront our death. Any
veteran of combat could testify to the folly of this project, even though the veteran might only have shifted his or her own
allegiance to another ideal. The slave's fear of death is thus overcome as a warrior fantasy, itself in the service of a master the
slave has to some degree invented. For the intellectual warrior as well, fear of death -- of not being
recognized, and thus of not being -- is not overcome but displaced, sublimated, pursued
through a vast array of surrogates, including the sublime study of death. Intellectual warfare
is not a culmination of the master-slave dialectic but its proxy, its aesthetic. The sentimental
violence of dialectics. Today almost everyone seems to believe that, at the end of this struggle, what
we confront is not the triumph of absolute reason but the collapse of the entire project ,
the idea, the hope and dream of the absolute. I would argue that this theoretical collapse is the event-horizon,
the phenomenal threshold, of intellectual warfare . The theoretical abandonment of the absolute is rarely
accompanied by its disappearance: the absolute returns in a ghostly form, haunting precisely those discourses that claim to
have left it behind, and that continue to orient themselves around its evacuation. Nevertheless, this half-waking from the half-
dream of absolute reason returns us to a primal dialectical scene, to a war for recognition now without stakes. In the farcical
relativism that results, dominance is ever more explicitly a matter not of truth but of force. And if we discover that we have
never gone further, that force is all that ever mattered, can we say that the dialectic ever occurred at all?
Discourse of solving problems leads to perpetuation of the state

To repeat: The object of criticism is always a symptom, if you will, of the structure of critical discourse itself, always a
phenomenalization of the device. But this device tends to appear in a surrogate form, still dissimulated and displaced; it
appears and does not appear, makes itself known in ways that further conceal its stakes. And it always appears too late, at the
very moment it ceases to function: a kind of theory-death, a death that is not a termination but a particular sort of elaboration.
Now, everywhere we look, critics will be casting off their clerical mantles and rhetorical labcoats for suits of discursive armor;
7
the slightest critical aggression or ressentiment will be inflated with theoretical war-machines and territorial metaphorics. At
the same time, the
very rise of war discourse among us will signal the end of intellectual warfare
for us, its general recuperation by the economics of intellectual production and exchange . It
might therefore be delusional -- even, as some would argue, obscene, given the horrible damage of real war -- to think of this
academic bickering as warfare, and yet it remains a trace of war, and perhaps the sign of a potential combat some critical force
could still fight. It would be a mistake to assume that this metamorphosis of discourse as war into discourse on war has
occurred because criticism has become more political. On the contrary, criticism has never been more than a
political effect -- "policy" carried out, and in our case dissipated, by other means. The long process of seizing politics as
the proper object of criticism is one more tardy phenomenalization of the device. What we witness -- and what difference
would it make even if I were right? -- is not proof of the politicization of criticism but an after-image of its quite peripheral
integration with forms of geopolitical conflict that are, in fact, already being dismantled and remodeled in war rooms, defense
institutes, and multinational corporate headquarters. War
talk, like politics talk, like ethics talk, like all
critical talk, is nostalgic from the start. While we babble about territories and borders, really
still caught up in nothing more than a habitual attachment to disciplinary "space" and
anxious dreams of "agency," the technocrats of warfare are developing strategies that no
longer depend on any such topography, strategies far more sophisticated than anything we
have imagined. And we congratulate ourselves for condemning them, and for our facile analogies between video games
and smart bombs. I would propose two distinct diagnoses of the rise of war talk. On one hand, war talk is merely another
exercise in rhetorical inflation, intended to shore up the fading value of a dubious product, another symptom of the
imaginary politics one witnesses everywhere in critical discourse, another appearance of a
structural device at the very moment it ceases to operate . On the other hand, war talk might still indicate
the possibility of actually becoming a war machine, of pursuing a military equivalent of thought beyond all these petty
contentions, of realizing the truth of discourse as warfare and finally beginning to fight. It will be crucial here not to choose
between these diagnoses. In the domain of criticism they function simultaneously, in a perpetual mutual interference; there is
no hope of extricating one from the other, no hope of either becoming critical warriors or being relieved of the demand that
we do so.
Individualized Movements
Individualized movements fail – intellectual position prevents change and
causes movements to crumble
Nothing is more important to the intellectual than a position. Even the fabled collapse of foundations has done little to change
this: economically, discursively, this collapse turns out to be yet another position, something to believe in and hold true, the
consolidation of "flows," "drift," etc., into the most familiar academic architecture. You
must have a position, and if
you do not, one will be assigned to you, or you will simply not exist. The homology of position as
standpoint and position as job, budget line, FTE, is a matter of a great deal more than analogy or vulgar marxism. With a
position, everything is possible. You are supported by a truth, a discipline, a methodology, a rhetorical style, a discursive form,
a mode of production and exchange. You know where you stand, you recognize yourself by your position; you see yourself
there because you see yourself seen there. Your
position is your identity and value; it authorizes your
work, circulates it, constitutes it as property, lends you the security of ownership. But at the
same time nothing is possible with a position. To hold a position is to be held by it, to be
caught up in its inertial and economic determinations, to be captured by an identity that you
might not, finally, believe to be quite your own . Nothing could be more difficult than really,
substantively, radically to change one's mind, change the forms in which one works, risk
everything by leaving behind a position on which, it seems, everything has come to rely.
The position is a fundamental form of civilization. Recall Virilio's remark that the city itself originates in a position, a garrison, a
17
defensive posture, a logistical form. To adopt the terminology of A Thousand Plateaus, the position is a "sedentary
18
In academic criticism, the
fortification" of "state armies"; it is entirely contained by the state apparatus.
symbolic place of the state is occupied and held by the text or oeuvre, around which the
defending force of commentaries is deployed ; in a field such as English or Comparative Literature, the state or
national form of the text is clearly and hence problematically manifested. The critic defends the text by the elaborate
construction of interpretations around it; at the same time, in a kind of fractal homomorphism, the critic's own position is
defined and defended by the construction of the paper circle of his or her own works. The more forces occupy a position, the
stronger it will be. The
barrage of words projected from the most heavily fortified strongholds
(currently: New Historicism, postcolonial criticism, certain orders of gender and race theory)
can repel critiques by sheer force of numbers . Indeed, conflict between positions is itself one of the chief
means by which they are defined. As Rose points out, for Freud war "not only threaten[s] civilization, it can also advance it. By
tending towards the conglomeration of nations, it operates [not only] like death [but also] like the eros which strives to unify"
19
(16). In intellectual warfare, the strategic form of this erotic unification is the discipline, in every sense of the word.
Mechanisms of regimental identification are crucial here. It would be impossible to overestimate the importance of esprit de
corps to garrisoned forces. Healthy competition keeps troops battle-sharp and singles out the most effective officers, but such
it is a mistake to refer to
conflict must be contained and focused toward strategic goals. If, on one hand,
intellectual movements, since their force is always institutional, static, on the other hand
it is the fixity of the intellectual position that proves to be illusory . A position must not only be held,
but advanced. The surrounding territory must come under its influence and control. Furthermore, as Clausewitz indicates,
defenses tend to become offensive. It is not simply that the best defense is a good offense; defenses, like attacks, exceed the
limits of strategic reason. The escalating, offensive character of nuclear deterrence has long been noted. So also for the
provocative force of the most striking cultural formations: defensive postures escalate beyond the power of whatever threat
they face. More importantly, the position is never more than a temporary establishment: once consolidated, its termination is
assured; the more force it generates, the more certain that its walls will be breached. That is Virilio's brief against deterrence:
it exhausts its own resources, it destroys the societies it defends. There is no indefensible position, and no position that can be
defended for very long. At
the moment a position is founded, its destruction has begun . Defections to
other positions, other cities of words, are doubtless already under way. The
intellectual position is therefore not
simply a ground, let alone a foundation, however attached to or identified with it its garrison becomes, even in
the act of arguing that there is no foundation. On the contrary, the position turns out to be a point along a vector, a line of
advance or retreat, a temporary encampment, a bivouac, of strategic or tactical importance alone, and supportable only by
means of its relation to other positions, other forces, counterforces, and logistical agencies all along the line. There is no
question that the strength of the sited force's investment in its ground, however temporary, is crucial. But in the end
every position will turn out to have been a relay-point or intersection, the temporary
location of an intellectual army whose grounding is not to be measured by its "rightness " --
the archaic notion of truth proven by combat may be said to survive only in the academy -- but by its force and
resistance in relation to other quantities of force, velocity, intensity, logistical power, tactical skill, etc., all of which will not
only support but eventually help to detach that army from its ground. In psychoanalytic terms, it would be necessary to see the
texts that a writer deploys around his or her position as defense mechanisms of another order, that is to say, as symptoms, but
not only of an individual pathology: rather as encysted trouble-spots on the intersecting curves of discursive forces about
which the intellectual is often barely, if at all, aware, and which no one -- no chaos theorist of discursive physics -- will ever be
able to map.
Suffering
Performance of suffering commodifies suffering and kills any chance of solvency
Abbas 10 (Asma, Bard College at Simon's Rock, Division of Social Studies, “Voice Lessons:
Suffering and the Liberal Sensorium”,
https://www.academia.edu/12959331/Voice_Lessons_Suffering_and_the_Liberal_Sensorium)
In a liberal society, every performance of justice requires a performance of suffering . Such enactments,
whether sufferers represent themselves or are represented by others, are the struggles to make suffering matter that are at once
political, ethical, and aesthetic. In being the realm where we make our sufferings matter, the political is constituted by struggles over
what matter is, no less than what suffering is. Politics
is, thus, not limited to the battles of appropriations
that begin once the form and content of presence and absence, and the sensing and suffering of
these have been determined; it includes every act that negotiates the materiality, the life, and the death, of these forms
and contents. Examining the demands of presence liberal modernity places on suffering brings up the question of how the
“problem” of suffering is framed for us in ordinary experience . In the aftermath of religious wars, modern
political thought betroths itself to the question of suffering and ways of avoiding it. Subsequent formulations of justice in various
ideologies correspond to how they understand suffering—all involving a certain insistence on the coordinates of presence. This essay
is moved by collaborations between liberal politics, ethics, and aesthetics that edify presence exemplified
by voice—speaking for oneself or others, ultimately of one’s suffering, instrumental to a prescribed end—as an
indisputable element of a liberal democracy and an index of one’s inclusion in it.1 These collaborations maintain this
ideology of representation and inclusion as a lifeworld . I seek a rethinking and reconfiguring of these in order to
yield an approach to suffering centred on the labours of those who suffer their hurt and their experience of making it present for
liberal structures. In focussing on instances where the very privileging
of voice—prior to and beyond what the
representations as products of this process do—shapes, undercuts, and maims
the suffering it is meant to be
making present, I posit that the experience of suffering deserves to be (acknowledged as) the
subject of politics in away that does not relegate it to being an object or event harnessed merely
as injury, identity, or other currency in liberal politics.2 The sensorium sponsored by liberalism assigns
undisputed value to a form of expressed suffering as fitting with recognition, inclusion, and empowerment. When a certain premium
on representing suffering hammers both the suffering and the suffering subject into a pre-scripted form, this representational
imperative itself becomes an ascetic ideal that violates rather than honours suffering, even in
the most fervent attempts at justice. This consideration is lost to arguments between those who want to speak for us
and those who want us to speak—still speak!—for ourselves; suspicion of the modes of speech and presence sanctified within these
debates is, thus, requisite. These perverse
attachments to voice qua speech betray a regimented
objectification and alienation of suffering on which they rest . I argue that this assumes and enables the
arbitrary designation of the subjects and objects of politics without taking into account the negotiations over the material that gets
sculpted into these subjects and objects. This genetic neglect is of nothing less than a fundamental moment of the collaboration
between ordinary politics, ethics, aesthetics in the creation of the political as a realm and a form. As a result of this, many
imaginative possibilities of the nature and remit of politics, political method, and political
subjectivity, are also neglected. The relation between suffering and making it present for political consideration is
certainly a holdover of democratic aspirations within contemporary liberal politics. Voicing suffering, then, becomes a
value in and of itself in any version of the politics of representation, even when there are
disagreements over who should speak and for whom —a whole range of critiques within democratic theory have
explored further the conditions within which such speech becomes possible or not, enabled or not, valued or not. Here, I take a step
back from the work that is premised on suffering
as object of political method, reliant on various re-
presentations as mediators of this experience in the political realm . Examining some of the central conceits
of the emphasis on voice as such a mediator for suffering to matter politically, I ask for more suspicion of the assumed relation
between, on the one hand, suffering made object, and, on the other hand, the righteous reliance on the action of voice. Assuming
and affirming these determinations as normal and necessary happens only to the detriment of an aesthetic-political experience that
can help vivify a political method to which suffering and its sensorial demands are intrinsic and internal. This is because voice
itself constructs the experience of the suffering subject, and the very presence of the subject
(both the suffering and the sufferer) , thus configuring the range of possible relations between suffering and politics.
Individualized suffering rhetoric leads to exclusionary politics and moots the
1AC
The statistics discussed above speak of how we grieve and whether or not we are the bereft. They bring up our capacities to
suffer and our ways of relating to suffering, our own and others. These issues extend beyond
sufferings graspable in these statistics, to those limit-cases where these measurements and
quantifications fail. In cases of immense suffering—especially “natural” suffering—other forms of translation and sense-
making have to kick in, in order to mediate our experience of them. The regime of valuing suffering endemic to
liberalism does not leave the sphere of this “readymade” suffering untouched . The arbitrary values
placed on various sufferings also appear in the realm of grand disasters, their definition flagging the thresholds—of political
sensibility and of the ability to suffer—that help plot liberal discourse. Any
crisis, disaster or injury comes to be
within a sensuous machinery involving interpreters, translators and sufferers . While statistics such as
the DALYs exemplify the creation of an event out of suffering so that it can at least count even if only in this paltry way, the case of
natural disasters or genocide—“events” first, one’s suffering and another’s medal for philanthropy after—liberal modernity does
something importantly different. It shows off its specialty in readymade events of human suffering that can then be rendered
productive. Both cases—of producing events and of rendering events productive—obscure and dislocate the suffering that
necessitates the making of an event and the suffering that is caused by the sensuous pathology of liberalism. Ways of
treating
suffering that define the terms of a disaster and the terms in which a disaster is read can also
dysfunctionalize sense and mute other voices . One eventually just forgets to speak, or speaks only to affirm or
negate. Kant teaches us to talk about suffering only so far as it is caused by human action; liberalism’s naturalised focus
is on the injuriousness and harmfulness of human beings whose ownership of their bodies and
their selves is predicated on their ability to be injured . This ownership relies on a separation of the domains of
god and man whereby suffering itself is secularised. When this happens, explanations are given in the form of who is responsible for
the suffering in order to assess whether it is an injury that is addressable or suffering that, absent being rendered injury, must be
quickly shelved somewhere else. So, the
secularism of suffering counters the non-metaphysical claims of
political liberals by clearly showing that even unassuming liberals cannot help but assume and
operationalize a particular metaphysics of suffering as they, in the most basic way, determine the spaces where
certain forms of suffering are allowed to dwell.
The political aspect of suffering commodifies suffering as a tool to win the

ballot
Abbas 10 (Asma, Bard College at Simon's Rock, Division of Social Studies, “Liberalism and
Human Suffering: Materialist Reflections on Politics, Ethics, and Aesthetics”)
Conversations about suffering abound in what we may call the “official” public sphere. Suffering
is made present in a standard way: it is domesticated into pain and harm, which become the
central, overarching, occluding motifs in our experience of our own and others’ suffering and in
our relation and response to it. The usual locus of ethical-political discourses that take suffering seriously is why and how
someone would be driven to cause harm, what history unleashes suffering, and how we must respond to scenarios of human
suffering that defy human imagination. In all these, the
positions of the perpetrator and the observer-
respondent are often the coordinates within which the victim is evidenced. In their focus on
how to acknowledge, affirm, and remove suffering , such conversations about victims and their injuries (codified
harms) have suffering and sufferers as the object of diagnosis, prognosis, and remedy. Debates feature questions of whether, for
whom, and for what to speak; who speaks for others; who speaks for themselves; how to make space for people to speak for
themselves; whom to bid speak; whether or not we can know someone’s pain; and how to make them or their speech go away.
These puzzles revolve around, ironically, the agents qua respondents to someone’s suffering—the saviors, liberators, lip-readers,
empowerers—whose regard for others is fed by a fervor steeped in the unacknowledged privilege of framing these conversations
and puzzles and is subsequently quite taxing to those who already suffer. Moreover, it is striking and, at times, incredible how much
these “agents” are the ones most needy of reassurance and tending in forms ranging from, say, a regular serving of abstract hope in
the future of humanity, to relief from guilt of their privilege, to conquest of the inscrutable, to stability in the stock market after a
tragedy somewhere else. It seems that the eager
anxiety about the “perspective of the victims,” whether in
hearing their voices, forcing them to speak, or speaking for them , is indulged as long as it completes “my”
knowledge, “my” picture, or “my” sense of justice. This scenario accords consolatory functions to sensuousness, speech, and
representation not only, or even primarily, for those who suffer and are the plaintiffs but also for those in power when they demand
that sufferers speak and act their suffering in certain, prescribed ways. There
is no room here for the vast space
between the said and the unsaid, the enacted and the undone, where those for whom speech is
always a response persist. For many, even speaking for oneself is almost always a response whose burden is never felt by
those who always get to interrogate and sympathize. This voice seemingly necessitated by suffering in turn polices the modes of
suffering and subjectivity possible. Harm
and representation turn out to be reciprocal as the haunted
negotiations between liberalism and democracy continue, rendering liberal democratic politics
always in debt to suffering. This voice does carry, shaping the experience and the dominant aesthetic and political
imaginations of people outside liberal democracies, to the extent that such voice becomes an index of their democratic desire
insofar as those with the goods find it familiar. These forced familiarities severely compromise the fundamental experience
channeled in this performance that could lead to different intimacies and alternative liberatory
counter-discourses in the face of such scripted and mimicked desire to begin with.
Suffering politics reproduce the conditions that led to the suffering

After placing lives and suffering into compartments public and private, personal and political,
interior and exterior, liberalism picks the battles that pertain to obtrusive political
superstructures. It prioritizes the injustices, cruelties, and complicities that pertain to the
political— narrowly understood in relation to the state and its laws—because it remembers the vulnerability and
historical disposability of human lives in the face of the state’s monopoly over violence. 11 Injury,
with its connotation of human, or at least discernible subjective, responsibility in contrast to “evil,” is the preponderant and
fundamental frame for liberal justice. The interconnections between autonomy, subjectivity, injury, representation, rights, and
justice repeatedly reveal that a sensibility regarding boundaries, opposition, conflict, pain, and despair permeates all relevant issues
in liberalism to this day. Given this, it
is possible that liberalism’s rational autonomous individual is more
than a consequence of forgetting the horrors within which the ideology arose and within which
it lives, as Shklar alleges. She provides clues to seeing this individual as product of a moral psychology distrustful of the body and
its passions. Notions of choice, free will, and autonomy recast the state of passive reaction characterized by fear, tentativeness, and
paranoia into a condition that is self-assuringly self-imposed. Perhaps the demon of pain would dissolve into the analgesic of
productivity and progress.12 Whose labor produces whose confidence, and whose suffering whose redemption, are questions left to
be asked of liberalism. Multiple
logics orient liberalism to the reality of human suffering. First, is the
universalistic domestication of pain and fear into harm and injury and the possessive
individualism that frames our relations not only to our own injuries but to others’ as well . The
possessive individualism entails that suffering be alienable into injury and the injury be possessed. Liberal structures, whether
utilitarian or not, share the conceit that a “natural” economy of pain and pleasure, and of suffering and activity, exists, and that their
only role is managing their (re)distribution within society. A second logic tells of the key role of tolerance and impartiality in the
relations that contain and nourish the political economy of injury. This economy claims, defines, and
affirms its own scarcities (as does any economy). Third, is the logic that strings together the healthy autonomous agent
with certain proclivities and capacities, political institutions understood as such agents, and the victim and agent as fixed and polar
subjectivities. Fourth, a
mixture of dogmatic idealism and empiricism actively sunders epistemic and
ontic processes in relation to the body that needs, loves, suffers, and acts .
Transparency
Making ourselves transparent fails and causes our knowledge to be taken by
the powerful
Phillips 99 (Kendall – Professor of Communication at Syracuse University, “Rhetoric, Resistance,
and Criticism: A Response to Sloop and Ono,” in Philosophy & Rhetoric, Volume 32, Number 1,
1999, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40238019?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents)
Despite acknowledging the efficacy of out-law discourses. Sloop and Ono assume that the critiques generated and presented by the out-law community
have only minimal effect. The irony, and indeed arrogance, of this assumption is evident when they claim: "There are cases, however, when, without
the prompting of academic critics, out-law discourses serve local purposes at times and at others resonate within dominant discourses, disrupting
sedimented ways of thinking, transforming dominant forms of judgment" (60; emphasis added). Sloop and Ono seem to suggest that such locally
generated critiques are the exception, whereas the political efficacy of the academic critic is the rule. This seems an odd view, given that the
justification for their out-law discourse project is the lack of politically viable academic critique and the perceived potency of out-law conceptions of
judgment. Their suggestion
that out-law communities are in need of the academic critic contradicts
not only the already disruptive nature of existing out-law discourses (the grounds for using out-law discourse),
but also the impotence of contemporary critical discourse (the warrant for studying out-law discourse). By this I do not
mean that the critiques and theories generated by academically instituted intellectuals have not been incorporated into subversive discourses. Just as
out-law discourses inevitably mount critiques of dominant logics, so, too, the perspectives on rhetoric and criticism generated by academics are used in
resistance movements. Feminist critiques of patriarchy, queer theories of homophobia, postcolonial interrogations of race have found their way into
the service of resistant groups. The key distinction I wish to make is that the existence of criticism (academic or self-generated) in resistance does not
necessitate Sloop and Ono's move to a criticism of resistance. WhatSloop and Ono fail to offer is an adequate
argument for "taking public speaking out of the streets and studying it in the classroom , for
treating it less as an expression of protest" (Wander 1983, 3) and more as an object for analysis and reproduction
within the political economy of the academy . Philip Wander made a similar charge against Herbert Wicheln's early critical
project, and this concern should remain at the forefront of any discussion aimed at expanding the scope and function of criticism. Sloop and Ono offer
numerous directives for the critic without addressing whether the critic should be examining out-law discourses in the first place While it is too early to
suggest any definitive answer to the question of criticism of resistance, some preliminary arguments as to why critics should not pursue out-law
discourses can be offered: (1) Hidden out-law discourses may have good reasons to stay hidden . Sloop and Ono
specifically instruct us that "the logic of the out-law must constantly be searched for, brought forth" (66) and used to disrupt dominant practices. But
are we to believe that all out-law discourses are prepared to mount such a challenge to the
dominant cultural logic? Or, indeed, that the members of out-law communities are prepared to be
brought into the arena of public surveillance in the service of reconstituting logics of litigation ? It
seems highly unlikely that all divergent cultural groups have developed equally, or that all members of these groups share Sloop and Ono's "imperial
impulse" (51) to promote their conceptions and practices of justice. (2) Academic critical discourse is not transparent . Here I
allude to the overall problem of translation (see Foucault 1994; Lyotard 1988; Lyotard and Thebaud 1985; Zabus 1995) as an extension of the previous
concern. Critical discourse cannot become the medium of commensurability for divergent language games. Are
we to believe that the
"use" of out-law discourse by critics to disrupt dominant practices can fail to do violence to
these diverse/divergent logics? Are out-law discourses merely tools to be exploited and discarded in
the pursuit of returning leftist academic discourse to the center ? (3) Perhaps the academic translation of out-law
discourse could be true to the internal logic of the out-law community. And, perhaps the re-presentation of out-law logic within the academic
community will bestow a degree of legitimacy on the out-law community. Nonetheless, the effect of legitimizing out-law
discourse is unknown and potentially destructive . In an effort to siphon the political energy of
out-law discourse into academic practice , we may ultimately destroy the dissatisfaction that
serves as a cathexis for these out-law discourses. It seems possible that academic recognition
might take the place of struggle for material opportunities (see Fraser 1997). But, will academic
legitimation create any material changes in the conditions of out-law communities? I mean to
suggest, not that it is better to allow the out-law community to suffer for its cause, but rather that incorporating the struggle
into an (admittedly) impotent academic critique does not offer a prima facie alternative The concerns
raised here are not designed to dismiss Sloop and Ono's provocative essay. The divo-gent critical logic they outline deserves careful consideration
within the critical conmninity, and it is my hope that the concerns I raise may help to further probleoiatize the relationship between resistance and
rhetorical criticism. As I have suggested, my purpose is to use the provocative nature of Sloop and Ono's project to extend disputes regarding the ends
of rhetorical criticism. Diverging perspectives on the ends of criticism have been categorized by Barbara Wamick (1992) as falling along four general
lines: artist, analyst, audience, and advocate. Leah Ceccarelli (1997) discerns similar categories around the aesthetic, epistemic, and political ends of
rhetorical criticism. The out-law discourse project presents clear ties to the notion of critic as advocate. For Sloop and Ono, the critic is an interested
party, discerning (and at times disputing) the underlying values and forces contained within a discourse. Additionally, however, the out-law discourse
critic is an analyst focusing on the hidden, aberrant texts of the out-law and "render[ing] an incoherent or esoteric text comprehensible" (Wamick 1992,
233). Now, I am not suggesting that a critic must serve only one function or that the roles of advocate and analyst are mutually exclusive; rather, these
entanglings of power (political ends) and knowledge (epistemic ends) are inevitable. My concern is that we not neglect the complexity of these
entanglements. Turning covert out-law discourses into objects of our analyses runs the risk of
subjecting them both to the gaze of the dominant and to the power relations of the academy .
As the works of Michel Foucault (especially 1979, 1980) aptly illustrate, practices presented as extending such
noble goals as emancipation and humanity may endow institutions of confinement and
objectification. Any justification for studying out-law discourse because doing so may extend our political usefulness in the pursuit of
emancipatory goals must not obscure the already existing power relations authorizing such studies. Our attempts to extend our domains of knowledge
and expertise (authority) must not be pursued unrefiexively.
Disidentification from representative politics is key

Papadopoulos et al. 8 (Dmitris – Reader in Sociology and Organisation at the University of
Leicester, Niamh Stephenson – teaches social science at the University of New South Wales, and
Vassilis Tsianos – teaches sociology at the University of Hamburg, Germany, Escape Routes:
Control and Subversion in the Twenty-First Century, p. 69-70)
To escape policing and start doing politics necessitates dis-identification - the refusal of
assigned, proper places for participation in society. As indicated earlier, escape functions not as a form of exile, nor as mere
opposition or protest, but as an interval which interrupts everyday policing (Ranciere, 1998). Political disputes - as distinct
from disputes over policing - are not concerned with rights or representation or with the construction of a
majoritarian position in the political arena. They are not even disputes over the terms of inclusion or the
features of a minority. They occur prior to inclusion, beyond the terms of the double-R axiom, beyond the majority-
minority duality. They are disputes over the existence of those who have no part (and in this sense they are
disputes about justice in a Benjaminian sense of the word, Benjamin, 1996a). Politics arises from the emergence of the
miscounted, the imperceptible , those who have no place within the normalising organisation of the
social realm. The refusal of representation is a way of introducing the part which is outside of
policing, which is not a part of community, which is neither a minority nor intends to be included within
the majority. Outside politics is the way to escape the controlling and repressive force of
contemporary politics (that is of contemporary policing); or else it is a way to change our senses, our habits, our
practices in order to experiment together with those who have no part , instead of attempting to
include them into the current regime of control. This emergence fractures normalising , police logic .
It refigures the perceptible, not so that others can finally recognise one's proper place in the social
order, but to make evident the incommensurability of worlds , the incommensurability of an
existing distribution of bodies and subjectivities with the principle of equality . Politics is a refusal
of representation. Politics happens beyond, before representation. Outside politics is the materialisation of the attempt to occupy this space
outside the controlling force of becoming majoritarian through the process of representation. If we return to our initial question of how people contest
control, then we can say that when regimes of control encounter escape they instigate processes of
naming and representation. They attempt to reinsert escaping subjectivities into the subject-
form . Outside politics arises as people attempt to evade the imposition of control through their
subsumption into the subject-form. This is not an attempt simply to move against or to negate representation. Nor is it a matter of
introducing pure potential and imagination in reaction to the constraining power of control. Rather, escape is a constructive and
creative movement - it is a literal , material, embodied movement towards something which
cannot be named, towards something which is fictional . Escape is simultaneously in the heart of
social transformation and outside of it . Escape is always here because it is non-literal, witty and hopeful.
Impactish Stuff
L2 Liberalism
The AFF is the ascetic priest commodifying suffering the liberal marketplace
Abbas 10 (Asma – Professor of Social Studies at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, Liberalism and
Human Suffering: Materialist Reflections on Politics, Ethics, and Aesthetics, p. 125-129)
Following Chapter 4’s discussion, labor as value implies that labor not only creates commodities but also becomes a commodity. Thus, labor as a
commodity also takes a fetish character. The worker, whose worth is reducible to the value of his labor, becomes a commodity. In turn, the worker
performs not only as a commodity but also as the guardian of a commodity. This provides clues for thinking of victims
who are deemed
reducible to their injuries without recognition of the fact that their own work involves, beyond
the suffering that is being represented , enacting their assigned fetish character and negotiating
the fetish character of the injuries they carry . What Marx has to say about the actions of commodities, and of those who
bear them on their way to the marketplace, may help us reconstruct the script—for the injuries and for the victims who bear them—performed in
seeking and delivering liberal justice. This would also allow a gesture to the elements of acting and representing that surpass the script’s injunctions.
Marx opens up the interpretive possibilities thus: Commodities
cannot themselves go to the market and perform
exchanges in their own right. We must, therefore, have recourse to their guardians, who are possessors of commodities. . . . In
order that these objects may enter into relation with each other as commodities, their guardians
must place themselves in relation to one another as persons whose will resides in those objects ,
and must behave in such a way that each does not appropriate the commodity of the other , and
alienate his own, except through an act to which both parties consent. . . . Here the persons
exist for one another merely as representatives, and hence owners, of commodities. . . . The characters
who appear on the economic stage are merely personifications of economic relations; it is as the bearers of these economic relations that they come
into contact with each other.8 The cognate of this process, in liberalism, features victims as possessors and
personifications of injuries that are themselves the products of the relations and processes of
representation that comprise the labor of suffering . The relations implied by the fetishism of injuries ensure that the
possession takes the form of personification. In other words, the bearer of an injury absorbs into her personification
the relations that injury as value and commodity signifies . Her performance in the market of
liberal justice is in line with the precepts of injury as commodity . Personified in the victim, the injuries act
out in the market for liberal justice . Marx goes on to say, In their difficulties our commodity owners think like Faust: “Im Anfang
war die Tat.” [“In the beginning was the deed.”–Goethe, Faust.] They have therefore already acted and transacted before thinking. The natural laws of
the commodity have manifested themselves in the natural instinct of the owners of commodities. They can only bring their commodities into relation
as values, and therefore as commodities, by bringing them into an opposing relation with some one other commodity as the universal equivalent. . . .
Through the agency of the social process it becomes the specific social function of the
commodity which has been set apart to be the universal equivalent. It thus becomes— money.
“Illi unum consilium habent et virtutem et potestatem suam bestiae tradunt. Et ne quis possit emere aut vendere, nisi qui habet characterem aut
nomen bestiae aut numerum nominis ejus.” [“These have one mind, and shall give their power and strength unto the beast.” Revelations, 17:13; “And
that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.” Revelations, 13:17.] (Apocalypse.)9
Marx suggests that the fetish character is impressed upon, especially when he says that relations between men “take the form” of a relation between
things. This “appearing as” and “form taking” happen together in the acting that is underway. So
when we represent others or
ourselves as victims with certain capacities and desires, suffering takes the form of injury, injuries
appear as our suffering, and social relations take the form of relations between injuries . Here, all
representation tries to approximate an acting as, forgetting and even obliterating the relation
that may enable an acting for . This is what Marx means when he says that commodities, as fetishes, have “absolutely no connection
with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom.”10 In fetishism, appearance and form-taking converge, removing the
space between the material and its form, and resulting in the process that makes one into the other. Seeing
victims as personified
injuries within liberalism takes us back to ascetic theater and to the actors of Rawls’s injury play ,
bringing up an interesting aspect of the acting as . These actors are representations of actual
beings and of their actual or potential injuries , reducible to the abstract equality posited not only
by the injury-form and its fetishism but also by the veil’s impartiality . In Rawls, the actors are
personifications of “injury as value” without being victims. Injury becomes radically generalized ,
universalized , and abstract because the performance has left the body of the sufferer . It is as if
Rawls has paid his dues to production in convoking the original position and overloading it with these productive, representational tasks so that his
idealized society has no memory of the production at all. And when we come to the market for justice, we no longer know if we had a suffering to
speak for. Recalling from Chapter 4 the kinds of subsumption that persist between labor and suffering in capitalism and liberalism, Rawls can be seen as
taking the next step from brokering our injuries to rendering them currency, or something more like futures speculations, like never before, completely
skipping the labor and the suffering as mediators of this value to some degree. This resonates with the move of financialization, endemic to
neoliberalism, as it retires the labor theory of value altogether and recasts its fidelity to classical liberals.11 Given Rawls’s strictures on voice, memory,
language, and embodiment that enter the original position, one wonders whether any knowledge or personality at all can be had by individuals in the
original position.12 This dubious less-than-humanness of actors in the original position recalls the in-between, part perceptible, part imperceptible
nature of commodities as fetishes. Fetishes know themselves through repetitive acts—in this case, their role-plays. The images they see across the veil
are their own but are never recognized as such, since neither they nor others know or remember who they are (rather, they know, remember, and
replay the dictates of their congealed ethos). Recognition here requires an imposed similitude, a making of the other in and through one’s own image;
the images are then enlisted in the ascetic theater as lost souls, made available to the senses of the fetishes in the original position. Theimpact
of the literalization of pain, the annihilation of poetry and metaphor in the original position , and
the bracketed memories of those who make it inside the original position , must be seen in light
of how this enactment disables and enables other enactments and other roles played. That these
fetishes are life forms that act in conformance with the requirements of the ascetic theater of
liberal politics recalls Nietzsche’s notion of ascetic morality and its manifestation of “life against
life.” The Primary Function of Ascetic Morality. It will be immediately obvious that such a self-contradiction as the ascetic appears to represent— life
against life—is, physiologically, a simple absurdity. It can only be apparent. . . . Let us replace the usual interpretation of asceticism with a brief
formulation of the facts of the matter: the ascetic ideal springs from the protective instinct of a degenerating life which tries by all means to sustain
itself and to fight for its existence . . . life wrestles in it and through it with death and against death; the ascetic ideal is an artifice for the preservation of
life.13 As discussed in Chapter 2, there is a fundamental connection between an ascetic ideal and the form of injury, for there would be no ascetic ideal
without ascertaining injury and injurer. The ideal, here like a fetish, is nourished by a resuffering, ressentiment, of
the injury by the sufferers. It is kept alive by a redirection of the life that the ressentiment
entails, by a searing into memory that freezes the meaning of the act that injured . Precisely so,
ascetic ideals and fetishes seem to be very similar—in their paradoxes of life , memory, and
suffering. They are kept alive by memory but are amnesiac about their sources and origins; they
are kept alive by imposing a stasis on the life of the sufferer as their resuffering shortchanges
the ability to suffer life in general . Here, Nietzsche gives us further (performance) notes for the fetish character, and the life it
furnishes and is furnished by, as it plays out in liberal ascetic theater: How regularly and universally the ascetic priest
appears in almost every age; belongs to no one race, prospers everywhere, emerges from
every class of society . . . . An ascetic life is a self-contradiction: here rules ressentiment without equal, that of an insatiable instinct and
power-will that wants to become master not over something in life but over life itself, over its most profound, powerful and basic conditions; here an
attempt is made to employ force to block up the wells of force; here physiological well-being itself is viewed askance. . . . We stand before a discord
that wants to be discordant, that enjoys life itself in this suffering and even grows more self-confident and triumphant the more its own presupposition,
its physiological capacity for life, decreases. “Triumph
in the ultimate agony”: the ascetic ideal has always fought
under this hyperbolic sign; in this enigma of seduction, in this image of torment and delight, it
recognized its brightest light, its salvation, its ultimate victory .14
Suffering is used by liberal institutions for entertainment – further perpetuates

liberalism
In crying “tragedy!” liberalism (1) commits to abating human suffering, (2) resigns to the
impossibility of getting everything we want (what it calls the irreconcilability of choices), (3)
draws up a balance sheet of pain and pleasure that can at best break even, and (4) deems
human agentic action as central to the causing or courting of suffering, domesticated as pain . This
centrality of human action ironically coexists with liberalism’s insistent powerlessness in the face of the suffering it confronts.
Liberalism’s tragedy results from the irreconcilability of pregiven wills and choices , while its
utilitarianism is perfectly at odds with a tragic sense, an aversion to suffering implicit here. The scarcity of choices that
emerge in the redefinition of tragedy is mirrored in the scarcity against which mainstream
liberal capitalist economics pits our needs . This scarcity is not always real but contrived. It may have to do with how
the abundance and capacities within us are displaced and projected onto the fetishes outside of us, whether the state, or god, or
other commodities. Religion takes charge of this scarcity by then letting its opposite thrive in the domain of charity and
philanthropy, not to mention salvation and redemption. Privatized notions of suffering correspond to scarcities
in human relations. Bounded individualities whose relationships are predicated on protecting
themselves from violation of boundaries would fit Murdoch’s understanding of interiorized
scarcity. She writes, “Scarcity ‘interiorized’ leads every man to see his fellow as the Other, and as the principle of Evil.” The
individual and its other are reified in conflict on the basis of this scarcity.32 Murdoch is not romanticizing a passive, nonagonistic
harmony but lamenting these reductions: of conflict (and ultimately desire) to scarcity, of suffering to harm and injury, and of
suffering for and with others to tolerance. This
scarcity and economy pervades tolerance and harm,
concepts that affirm logics of separation, segregation and conquest, between one individual and
the other, between the subject and the object of the tolerance, and between various realms of
existence. Liberalism insists, rather assiduously, on the subject-object divide in the case of
suffering—such that the only way someone else’s suffering can be mine is if it is translated as a
setback to my interest.33 The agent and the victim, the sufferer and her other, are placeholders suspended within the
constitutive strictures of liberalism that require property, injury, and the injurable property-owning subject. The liberal secularist
separation between various realms of existence does not allow for the enduring of existential pain or angst to infect one’s capacity
to tolerate or to respond to the suffering of the nonexistential kind (unless, of course, one can somehow translate existential pain
into harm). Any liberalism avowedly attuned to the ubiquity of human victimization and injustice should be asked how sufferers
get divided between tolerant agents and victims .
Liberalism thrives on suffering – discourse only furthers the system

Liberalism continually refuses to acknowledge or confront the processes that underlie and
overwrite its needed abstractions such as subjectivity, victimization, ownership, memory, pain,
injury, harm, and representation. When it does try to grasp the dynamic processes constituting experience, liberalism
cannot do so without congealing them. In dividing up experience into suffering, injury, and injustice, it remains oblivious and
insensitive to the internal relations between various registers of the experience it installs and shapes. By virtue of their shared
formalism, idealist and empiricist liberalisms affirm each other’s inability to recognize the spatial or temporal excess and residue of
concepts. The word “admission” conveys this mechanistic logic, where
subjects and their suffering are admitted
into liberalism on preset terms, and where entry into a sphere or arena requires registering at
the door with an assigned role, relinquishing any matter and materiality not relevant to the
operations of liberal justice. The problem is not passivity per se but the lack of respect both the idealists and the
empiricists have for the body’s way of suffering through the world. The inert woundedness in each case is considered inferior to the
condition that puts the wounds to use, trades them, alienates them, or transcends them, with amputations, anesthesia, repression,
denial, and amnesia. The
idealist body, transcended, stays around as a tool for knowing, assessing,
and doing. It becomes easily colonizable, with all ability to ask questions and pass judgment
reposed securely in supposedly superior faculties . When liberals like Shklar invest in their empiricism or
materialism, the body is more present, but it is always already conscripted—at best, as the barricade at which these conflicts are
fought; at worst, as one source of subjugated knowledge among others. Such materialism
separates our ways of
knowing, being, and confronting the matter and categories of experience; it is not dialectical.
Any return to the body without a requisite disruption in these terms of relating knowledge,
experience, creation, and destruction to each other, ontologically and epistemologically, is
bound to only exhume the body in predictably vulgar and servile ways . The victim is similarly redeemed by
being corralled back to the center of a liberal politics that conceives of itself as having any fidelity to its founding. The word
“inclusion,” when used in conventional political discourse, still potentially misleads by suggesting that what is now being included or
admitted was ever out. It is hard, though, to take liberalism at its word about when it excludes and when it includes—unless, of
course, when each is seen in a relation to the other and to the conditions therein.46 If
the sufferer does not fulfill these
conditions, her suffering remains invisible and illegible. When these conditions are enforced as
the premise for suffering to matter and justice to be done, the violence, humiliation, and
subjection that are conferred in this process are either not even sensed or are accepted as
inevitable. Maybe when all is said and done, despite its steadfast adherence to a noble will to admit the excluded, liberalism
has failed to earn any trust in it ability to sense absent presences and present absences—
otherwise, why the impulse to hide one’s face every time the curtain call sounds for the
meticulously dictated performances of victims?
Liberalism turns us all into slaves of the system and makes suffering worthless
Liberalism may have ushered in yet another coming of slave morality , in order never to be caught in its
own act: where one can either follow the pied piper into fifteen minutes of glorious victimhood, or
resist this accommodation by regularising the pain so that the former is no longer tempting. This
may be the only way the remainder, the excess of the discourse, protects itself . Or, to be hopeful for a
moment, this could force another sensibility of suffering, obligation and sympathy altogether, beyond the depleted senses of the
colonisers. A materialist ought to be able to embrace finitudes and deaths, those of senses as well, when one’s senses of damage
have been damaged beyond damage, when suffering only becomes material when someone in power names it so. Maybe it opens
the possibility of seeing the affluent enact their farce of petting their consciences so that any
mention of human
suffering immediately triggers a Pavlovian response to recite, for instance, how much private humanitarian aid
has flowed into South East Asia or Haiti. Is there a closeness in the silence that the Rabbi keeps, and which Prior Walter rewrites? Is
there a different way those that are “closer” ought to suffer? What contempt must or does this familiarity breed—and toward
whom? Is silence the consequence of questions that no longer seem to fit? When silence is deemed the befitting response to
suffering, is that an essential claim about suffering, or a historical one? Perhaps the words
and queries preceding the
moment of speech are so overpowering that the sufferer does not even know where to begin .
Liberal inadequacies in this regard also miss the fact of the how elite philosophical, political, and legal discourses
are complicit in rendering suffering—whether “natural” or “moral”—mute by insisting on a
certain kind of speech and translation. The way in which the question has forever been posed deserves only a very
deeply felt refusal to speak.
L2 Neoliberalism
Politics of suffering re-entrench liberalism and further neoliberal exploitation
When the practices and politics of sufferers betray their complicities with the systems in whose
mirror they practise their speeches to get them right —...finally, this time!—the scope and reach of the
hegemony of the current political economy of injury becomes evident . The backdrop against which the
production or distribution of suffering in the world should be examined can be expanded by looking at the discourses that
span—courtesy of a history of colonialism and an ongoing reality of neoliberal imperialism —even those
states that lack the basic “rule of law” and well-functioning institutions that are the hallmark of liberal democracy. One is bound to
find remarkable continuities, and grounds for radical solidarities, between the
experiences and political desires of
those marginalised and betrayed along any avenue of global capitalism —including the well-
functioning liberal-capitalist societies and the tragically oxymoronic feudal-capitalist ones. The
fundamental consonance between the moments discussed above is that suffering is treated as topic or object of
political, legal, or social inquiry and practice . This keeps us, at best, shackled within certain idealistic modes of
ethics, aesthetics, and politics that flaunt their empirical prowess at will. It also betrays the constitutive continuities between these
modes, acknowledging and harnessing which is essential to the life of the political built by, with, and around those who suffer and
their sufferings. The
irreducible materiality of suffering as subject of politics will have to be intrinsic, even
immanent, to a method that writes such a politics: a
method that factors in those ordinary and ubiquitous
experiences of suffering—even the experiences of subjection to an economy of representation
and inclusion en route to liberal justice —that risk obliteration even by many well-meaning victim-centered politics.
Alternatives
Secret Alt.
The alternative is secret. To reveal the methods behind intellectual warfare is
to kill all chance of solvency
It is nonetheless already the case that, in critical discourse, behind all the humanistic myths of communication,
understanding, and interpretive fidelity, one finds the tactical value of misinterpretations. In an argument it is often
crucial for combatants not to know their enemy, to project instead a paper figure, a
distortion, against which they can conceive and reinforce their own positions . Intelligence, here, is
not only knowledge of one's enemies but the tactical lies one tells about them, even to oneself. This is so regular a
phenomenon of discursive conflict that it cannot be dismissed as an aberration that might be remedied through better
One identifies one's own signal in part by
communication, better listening skills, more disinterested criticism.
jamming everyone else's, setting it off from the noise one generates around it. There is, in other
words, already plenty of fog in discursive warfare, and yet we tend to remain passive in the face of it, and for the most part
completely and uncritically committed to exposing ourselves to attack. Imagine
what might be possible for a
writing that is not insistently positional, not devoted to shoring itself up, to fixing itself in place, to laying out all
its plans under the eyes of its opponents. Nothing, after all, has been more fatal for the avant-gardes than the form of the
manifesto. If only surrealism had been more willing to lie, to dissimulate, to abandon the petty narcissism of the position and
the desire to explain itself to anyone who would listen, and instead explored the potential offered it by the model of the secret
society it also hoped to be. Intellectual
warfare must therefore investigate the tactical advantages
of deception and clandestinity over the habitual, quasi-ethical demands of clarity and
forthrightness, let alone the narcissistic demands of self-promotion and mental
exhibitionism, from however fortified a position . If to be seen by the enemy is to be
destroyed, then intellectual warfare must pursue its own stealth technology . Self-styled
intellectual warriors will explore computer networks not only as more rapid means of communication and publishing but as
means for circumventing publication, as semi-clandestine lines of circulation, encoded correspondence, and semiotic speed.
There will be no entirely secure secrecy, just as there are no impregnable positions -- that too is Virilio's argument -- but a
shrouded nomadism is already spreading in and around major discursive conflicts. There are many more than nine
grounds, but the rest are secret.
Useless Scholarship
Our alternative is useless scholarship --- this is the only way to prevent co-
option
Forte 9 (Maximilian – Professor of Anthropology at Concordia University, ““Useless
Anthropology”: Strategies for Dealing with the Militarization of the Academy,” in ZERO
ANTHROPOLOGY, 5-22-9, http://zeroanthropology.net/2009/05/22/%E2%80%9Cuseless-
anthropology%E2%80%9D-strategies-for-dealing-with-the-militarization-of-the-academy/)
One does not need to seek employment with the Pentagon , take part in counterinsurgency, or work for the Human
Terrain System in order to provide useful, even if involuntary, support for the national security, intelligence and
military goals of the U.S., or any NATO state for that matter. In fact, one does not even need to be an American anthropologist in order to
provide the U.S. military and intelligence with the information they seek. One needs to simply produce useful anthropology
and not be mindful of the consequences of how it can be used by unintended audiences, now or in the future, to support agendas of which one may
have limited awareness and even less desire to support. With this and much more in mind, my ambition is to seek the creation of a useless
anthropology, and while some would say I was always on the right track for achieving that, I think more
of us need to share a goal of
producing useless research , to make worthless contributions , and by useless I mean useless to
power , to empire, to domination, to regimes of scrutiny and inspection of the periphery . And not just
useless, but even toxic and repulsive to the scientists of conquest – an anthropology of both withdrawal and resistance ,
free of false dilemmas that work to support business as usual, willing to set fire to the crops we planted if it stops them
from being harvested by the tyrant , liberating ourselves from being our own best hostages. The idea is to refuse
further engagement with the international traffic in information and knowledge that supports
the workings of empire, capital, and the state. In this presentation I seek to make three main points. First, to indicate some of
the ways that all of us can be even unwillingly useful in supporting U.S. military and intelligence interests. Second, to reflect on the meaning of useful
anthropology. Third, to point the way to possible alternatives, that could entail unthinking anthropology as we know it. With reference to the first
point, Gerald Sider made the point that at this moment in history “there is no such thing as an innocent anthropology” (p. 43). We know now that the
U.S. military and intelligence are looking for ways of incorporating scholars in producing a
global surveillance net . One way is to bring social scientists on counterinsurgency and pacification missions. Another is to have them
conduct analysis of stolen Iraqi documents (see here and here), or to conduct fieldwork in areas of emerging or potential threat and describe the
radicalization process and ways of counteracting it, as part of the Pentagon’s Minerva Research Initiative, managed in partnership with the National
Science Foundation. Another is to comb through open access electronic resources. And yet another is just to get everything for free, by scanning,
copying, seizing any or all electronic devices or written records from researchers as they enter the United States whether returning home to the U.S., or
just traveling through, U.S. Border Patrol and Customs agents can: scan and hold laptops indefinitely; they can make electronic copies of hard drives,
flash drives, cellphones, iPods, pagers, beepers, video and audio tapes; and, they can seize papers, documents, books, pamphlets, or even litter. This is
also true of Canada and the UK. Open access publishing, and publishing in electronic formats that are thus amenable to automated harvesting, is a
critically important way that ethnographic data can be used by the national security state without the willing participation of researchers. “Intelligence
does not have to be secret to be valuable!” says the website of the University of Military Intelligence, regarding open access resources, which takes us
to Intelink-U, part of the U.S. Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office, emerging from the Open Source Information System which serves the US
intelligence community with open source intelligence. Among Intelink-U’s subscriptions is the University of New Mexico’s Latin America Database, as
well as EbscoHost Databases. The Foreign Military Studies office is also in the process of creating the World Basic Information Library (WBIL), which
promotes the concept of “distance drilling” telling us that: “About 85% of requirements in the intelligence business can be met with open source,
unclassified sources, and can be exploited by qualified military reservists working by telecommuting. The WBIL has remotely located reservists from all
four branches of the service doing ‘virtual’ collection and production utilizing their home Personal Computers.” Also, the Information Operations
Advisory Task Force states that it has a “requirement to provide US Forces [in] Afghanistan…with the capability to collect, analyze, and disseminate
open source (i.e. sociological or anthropological) information.” With reference to the second point of this presentation, the bases for a useful
anthropology, let us note that useful, objective, neutral, and scientific, are once again the buzzwords for an anthropology aligned with power, in the
service of the national security state, while rhetorically attempting to move the militarization of the academy beyond the sphere of “politics”. Criticism
is political; support is scientific. If you oppose military objectives, you are biased; if you provide practical knowledge, you are objective, and objective is
good, just like machines are good. On the other hand, military interest in anthropology is to a significant extent the
perhaps unintended outcome of anthropology’s success in marketing itself . The compulsion in
this discipline, from the time before its institutionalization in universities, has been to market itself to power as a
useful science, with valuable contributions to make, later boasting of the vital importance of ethnography as
anthropology’s unique contribution, so much so that anthropology and ethnography are wrongly equated. We wanted the
attention of elites, and now we’ve got it. The military is interested in both culture and
ethnography . In an article in National Defense Magazine, we are told that “A deeper understanding of culture has become an official part of
Marine Corps strategy.” Meanwhile, General William “KIP” Ward, Commander, United States Africa Command, said this about the Pentagon’s work in
Africa: “A lot of activity goes on in the continent through our non-government organizations. Academia is involved. When I was in previous
assignments, someone came to me and would talk about, well, ‘Ward, you need to get a cultural anthropologist on your team.’ I said, what! A cultural
what? Anthropologist? To do what? Get out of here. Or, ‘Ward, you need to have someone to help you understand the human dimension. You need
some human terrain analysis.’ I said, ‘what? Get out of here.’ But it’s important, and where do those skills, talents reside — academia.” But for more
academics to be more useful, they need to get over certain twinges of moral compunction. In the minds of the state and military some of us have
already reverted to being a tool of imperialism, assuming we were ever anything else. Not serving imperialism is routinely called “retreating from the
world” by some. Montgomery McFate, the anthropology PhD who has been the most prominent spokesperson for the Human Terrain System, wrote in
a military journal that, “Over the past 30 years, as a result of anthropologists’ individual career choices and the tendency toward reflexive self-criticism
contained within the discipline itself, the discipline has become hermetically sealed within its Ivory Tower….anthropologists still prefer to study the
‘exotic and useless,’ in the words of A.L. Kroeber….The retreat to the Ivory Tower is also a product of the deep isolationist tendencies within the
discipline.” (p. 28) She doesn’t stop there, unfortunately, she notes that, “frequently backed up by self-reflexive neo-Marxism, anthropology began a
brutal process of self-flagellation, to a degree almost unimaginable to anyone outside the discipline….The turn toward postmodernism within
anthropology exacerbated the tendency toward self-flagellation….(also) This movement away from descriptive ethnography has produced some of the
worst writing imaginable.” (p. 28) In this regard, she merely echoes some of the conservative and often overwrought backlash within the discipline over
this trend that it imagined to be postmodern, whatever that is, apparently being self-critical is evil. With reference to the third and final point of this
presentation, looking for alternatives and options to cooptation, for less useful anthropologies, I was
inspired by Sider’s ideas about how a partisan anthropology, done “to help the victims of currently intensifying inequalities,” might begin, and it
would begin in “the design of fieldwork and in the context of understanding struggle ” (p. 44). He
advocates against interviews, against asking questions of so-called informants, and against any
form of recording data. Asking questions, he notes, is a seemingly simple act that opens our work to
use by those who seek to dominate and control the people we study (p. 45). There are other ways we can work,
he says, less open, but not impervious, to subsequent manipulation. Other options include choosing research projects that, in the eyes of the national
security state, are entirely useless, and to write up the results in very esoteric language, with ample self-criticism. Another option is do to more
“research at home” either collaborating with persons who are not the subject of either a moral panic or some hyperbolic national security hysteria, or,
producing critiques of the way elites exercise power and enforce inequalities and injustices. Another option is open source ethnography done online, to
collaborate with the producers of online information of ethnographic value, remixing it so that it becomes problematic to military examination. Not
publishing in open access formats is another option, especially once the work is not funded by a public agency, the argument that “the public has a
right to the research it funded” vanishes into irrelevance. We can also imagine experimenting with forms of research communication that defy easy
understanding and conventional requirements of the military planner’s database, such as fictionalized ethnographies; ethnographic poetry; open
source cinema (see here also); theatrical coproductions, and so forth.
Opaque Politics
Opaque movements are the only way to solve for identity based movements
Britton 99 (Celia M., Carnegie Professor of French at Aberdeen University in Scotland,
“Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory Strategies of Language and Resistance”)
The humanist conception of identity also allows it to incorporate “naturally” a spontaneous and authentic language, which expresses
it and forms an important element in its constitution. This
simple equation between language and identity is
contested by Glissant’s “counter-politics” and also by Spivak, who says, for instance, “One needs to be
vigilant against simple notions of identity which overlap neatly with language or location ." Derrida,
too, shows how the position of those who cannot fully identify with any language, like himself as a colonial French Jew from Algeria,
reveals the oppression inherent in the idealizing of the “mother tongue”: “That was my culture, it taught me the disasters into which
men can be plunged by an incantatory appeal to the mother tongue. Right from the start my culture was political culture.” Relation
as a whole is also intimately connected to another of Glissant's main theoretical concepts: " opacity."
Respect for the
Other includes respect for the "opacity" of the Other's difference, which resists one's attempts
to assimilate or objectify it. "The poetics of relation presuppose that each of us encounters the
density (the opacity) of the Other. The more the Other resists in his thickness or his fluidity
(without restricting himself to this), the more expressive his reality becomes, and the more
fruitful the relation becomes" (IP, 24). Relation thus safeguards the Other's difference; it is "the welcome opaqueness,
through which the other escapes me" (CD, 162). Therefore, just as I cannot reduce the Other to my norms, nor
conversely can I become the Other , in the kind of exoticizing identification that Glissant attributes to Segalen (of whom
he writes that "personally I believe he died of the Other's opacity," PR, 208). Accepting the Other's opacity means also accepting that
there are no truths that apply universally or permanently. 19 Relationand opacity work together to resist the
reductiveness of humanism. Le discours antillais speaks of the need "to develop everywhere, in
defiance of a universalizing and reductive humanism , the theory of specifically opaque structures. In the world of
[Relation], which takes over from the homogeneity of [essence], to accept this opaqueness that is, the irreducible
density of the other is to truly accomplish, through diversity, a human objective. Humanity is
perhaps not the `image of man' but today the evergrowing network of recognized opaque
structures" (CD, 133). In this sense opacity becomes a militant position, so that Glissant can state
unequivocally, "We must fight against transparence everywhere " (DA, 356), and claim that opacity is a right:
"We demand for all the right to opacity" (PR, 209). Finally, on the last page of Le discours antillais, he equates opacity simply with
freedom: ''their [opacity], which is nothing, after all, but their freedom'' (CD, 256).
Historical Analysis
The alternative is a historical analysis of the liberal relation to suffering – only
then can we separate suffering and liberalism
Recognising the historical determinants of the form and content of our suffering is essential to
the debate over the “right” location of suffering in politics and over the “right” legibility and, indeed, utterability and audibility of
the same. It is common, in democratic theory and practice, to be sensitive to the costs of speaking
for the others who suffer, whether we seek to compensate or to liberate them. But, when everyone speaking for
oneself as such becomes the guiding principle of ethical and democratic politics, some of the
issues of speech and subjectivity are rendered ahistorical and thus ill-addressed . The unquestioned
meaning, purpose, and value accorded to speech and self-presentation in this process cannot help but domesticate and tokenise
those who, along with their wounds and scars, make it to the proverbial table of democratic conversation. This betrays many
scarcities on the part of those who compel this speech in order to include. I believe that these human,
sensual, political
scarcities can be mitigated by infusions of different notions of selfhood, self-expression, and
presence, et cetera, from other ways of life in other space-times and from domains outside
politics narrowly defined. This inclusion has a method, whether intentional or not, of excluding
and privileging. We see this manifested in renewals of maps of everyday life when a self-aggrandising multiculturalism,
posing as progressive politics, neuters and evacuates the politics of class, race, and gender . This
happens also when philanthropic commitments render others visible in a way that makes even the master-slave dialectic seem
optimistic, when our care constructs its objects monologically, when only the speech that responds to us counts as speech, or when
others serve as faithful illustrations of our moral conundrums or successes. It turns out that if
others do not speak or do
not make themselves understood, despite the space given to them, they either must not have
anything to say, or they need to do more homework . This speechlessness is indeed a delicate
and not a fragile event (to recall Thoreau’s sense of the delicate in opposition to the
paradoxical abstract, numb, damage-proneness of the liberal sensibility ).4 Contemporary politics
knows no better than to dishonour this delicate event with its garrulity of word, number, and image.
The alternative solves – only an examination of past suffering can allow us to

separate liberalism from suffering
The sensibilities and the relations to suffering that do exist in the forms of marginalities people
own and manifest everyday (hence my beginnings with Kushner), can push us to rethink and refigure the
very collaborations between politics, ethics, and aesthetics that institute the political as a
practical, ontic and epistemic realm. They also force us to acknowledge that the casualties of democratization and
liberalization are not merely, or most importantly, the exotic othernesses of different national cultures. Rather, the casualty of note
is the sensorium, the moulding of which homogenizes not only the performed desires for democracy and justice but also, and most
If, as discussed above, voice is
crucially, the experience—the suffering and the everyday enactment—of that desire itself.
what indexes democracy in the negotiations between liberalism and democracy, then the roots
and sources of this voice—in sense experience and in suffering—continue to be formalized
within liberalism’s own priorities . Thus, for these democratic hauntings to not be meaningless or
farcical, the responses to these imperatives can be found traversing the senses and their
everyday lived aesthetic work as sources of a re-imagined materialist politics . The imagining of such a
politics deems the ability to suffer and to speak as something to be striven for, grasped anew. This is, indeed, the
work of
salvaging suffering from the arbitrary dissipations imposed on it by those who not only refuse to
take responsibility for the plight that they have a role in creating and locating, but also
shamelessly arbitrate how the wounded make their suffering matter .
Deleuze Affirmation Alternative
Affirmation of future good, resentment about past bad
Braidotti 6 (Rosi – Professor of Humanities at Utrecht University, “Affirmation versus
Vulnerability: On Contemporary Ethical Debates,” in Symposium, Volume 10, Number 1, p. 13-
14, http://deleuze.tausendplateaus.de/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/boundas-symposium-
final.pdf)
This produces a number of significant shifts: from negative to affirmative; from entropic to
generative; from incomprehensible, meaningless, and crazy to virtual waiting to be actualized; from constituting
constitutive outsides to a geometry of affects that require mutual synchronization; from a melancholy and split to an open-ended web-like subject;
from the epistemological to the ontological turn in poststructuralist philosophy. This
introduces a temporal dimension into
the discussion that leads to the very conditions of possibility of the future , to futurity as such. For an ethics of
sustainability, the expression of positive affects is that which makes the subject last or endure . It is
like a source of long-term energy at the affective core of subjectivity (Grosz, 2004). Nietzsche has also been here
before, of course. The eternal return in Nietzsche is the repetition, yet neither in the compulsive mode of neurosis nor in the negative erasure that
marks the traumatic event. It is the eternal return of and as positivity (Ansell-Pearson, 1999). This
kind of ethics addresses the
affective structure of pain and suffering but does not locate the ethical instance within it , be it in the
mode of compassionate witnessing (Bauman 1993; 1998) or empathic co-presence. In a nomadic, Deleuzian-Nietzschean perspective, ethics is
essentially about transformation of negative into positive passions , that is, about moving beyond
the pain . This does not mean denying the pain but rather activating it, working it through. Again, the
positivity here is not supposed to indicate a facile optimism or a careless dismissal of human suffering .
What is positive in the ethics of affirmation is the belief that negative affects can be
transformed. This implies a dynamic view of all affects, even those that freeze us in pain, horror, or
mourning. Affirmative nomadic ethics puts the motion back into e-motion and the active back into activism , introducing movement, process, and
becoming. This shift makes all the difference to the patterns of repetition of negative emotions. What is negative about negative
affects is not a value judgment (any more than it is for the positivity of difference), but rather the effect of arrest,
blockage, and rigidification that comes as a result of an act of violence, betrayal, a trauma—or which can
be self-perpetuated through practices that our culture simultaneously chastises as self-
destructive and cultivates as a mode of discipline and punishment : all forms of mild and extreme addictions,
differing degrees of abusive practices that m ortify and glorify the bodily matter, from binging to bodily modifications. Abusive, addictive, or destructive
practices do not merely destroy the self but harm the self’s capacity to relate to others, both human and non-human others. Thus they harm the
capacity to grow in and through others and become others. Negative
passions diminish our capacity to express the
high levels of interdependence, the vital reliance on others, which is the key to a non-unitary and dynamic
vision of the subject. What is negated by negative passions is the power of life itself , as the dynamic
force, vital flows of connections and becomings. This is why they should not be encouraged, nor should we be rewarded for lingering around them too
long. Negative passions are black holes . An ethics of affirmation involves the transformation of
negative into positive passions: resentment into affirmation , as Nietzsche put it. The practice of transforming
negative into positive passions is the process of reintroducing time, movement, and transformation into a stifling
enclosure saturated with unprocessed pain . It is a gesture of affirmation of hope in the sense of
affirming the possibility of moving beyond the stultifying effects of the pain , the injury, the
injustice. This is a gesture of displacement of the hurt, which fully contradicts the twin logic of claims and compensation. This is achieved through a
sort of de-personalization of the event, which is the ultimate ethical challenge. The displacement of the ego-indexed negative
passions or affects reveals the fundamental senselessness of the hurt , the injustice, or injury one has suffered.
“Why me?” is the refrain most commonly heard in situations of extreme distress. This expresses rage as well as anguish at one’s ill fate. The answer is
plain: for no reason at all. Examples of this are the banality of evil in large-scale genocides like the Holocaust
(Arendt,1963), and the randomness of surviving them (think of Primo Levi who could/not endure his own survival). There is something
intrinsically senseless about the pain or injustice : lives are lost or saved for all and no reason at
all. Why did some go to work in the WTC on 9/11 while others missed the train? Why did Frida Kahlo take that tram which crashed so that she was
impaled by a metal rod, and not the next one? For no reason at all. Reason has nothing to do with it. That is precisely the
point.
Break Away Alt
The alternative is to break away from the liberal politics of suffering
Leicester, Niamh Stephenson – teaches social science at the University of New South Wales,
and Vassilis Tsianos – teaches sociology at the University of Hamburg, Germany, Escape
Routes: Control and Subversion in the Twenty-First Century, p. xii-xiii)
This book is about social transformation; it proposes a processual vision of change. We want to move away from thinking about
change as primarily effected through events. To focus on the role of events is to foreground particular
moments when a set of material, social and imaginary ruptures come together and produce a break in the flow
of history - a new truth. Much of the twentieth century's political thinking casts revolt and revolution as the most central events in
creating social change. But the (left's) fixation on events cannot nurture the productive energy required to
challenge the formation of contemporary modes of control in Global North Atlantic societies. An event is never in the
present; it can only be designated as an event in retrospect or anticipated as a future possibility. To pin our hopes on events is a
nominalist move which draws on the masculinist luxury of having the power both to name things and to wait
about for salvation. Because events are never in the present, if we highlight their role in social change we do so
at the expense of considering the potence of the present that is made of people's everyday
practices : the practices employed to navigate daily life and to sustain relations , the practices which are at the
heart of social transformation long before we are able to name it as such. This book is about such fugitive occurrences rather than
the epiphany of events. Social transformation, we argue, is not about cultivating faith in the change to come, it is
about honing our senses so that we can perceive the processes which create change in ordinary life .
Social transformation is not about reason and belief, it is about perception and hope. It is not about the production of subjects, but about the
making of life. It is not about subjectivity, it is about experience.In the following pages, we look for social change in seemingly
insignificant occurrences of life: refusing to subscribe to a cliched account of one's life story; sustaining the capacity to work in insecure and
highly precarious conditions by developing informal social networks on which one can rely; or living as an illegal migrant below the
radar of surveillance. These everyday experiences are commonly neglected in accounts of social and
political transformation . This might be partly because they neither refer to a grand narrative of social change nor are they
identifiable elements of broader, unified social movements. However, this book presents the argument that such imperceptible
moments of social life are the starting point of contemporary forces of change . But what makes
some everyday occurrences transformative and many others not? Transformative processes change the conditions of social existence by paving
the way for new transformations (rather than by creating fixed identifiable things or identities). We
can trace social change
in experiences that point towards an exit from a given organisation of social life
without ever intending to create an event. This is why we talk about ways of escaping. The thesis of the book is that
people escape: only after control tries to recapture escape routes can we speak of 'escape from'. Prior to its regulation, escape is primarily
imperceptible. We argue that these moments where people subvert their existing situations without naming their practice (or having it named)
as subversion are the most crucial for understanding social transformation. These imperceptible moments trigger social transformation, trigger
shifts which would have appeared impossible if described from the perspective of the existing situation. You can never really know exactly when
people will engage in acts of escape. The art of escape appears magical, but it is the mundane, hard and sometimes painful everyday practices
that enable people to craft situations that seem unimaginable when viewed through the lens of the constraints of the present. The
account we give of social transformation does not entail cultivating faith in the event
to come, rather it involves cultivating faith in the elasticity and magic of the present .
Another world is here . Escape routes are transformative because they confront control
with something which cannot be ignored. A system of power must try to control and reappropriate acts of escape. Thus,
the measure of escape is not whether it avoids capture; virtually all trajectories of escape will, at some point, be redirected towards control. We
are trained to think that the end product of political struggle is all about a
transformative end point, a revolt, a strike, a successfully built up organisation, a revolution. However, this
perspective neglects the most important question of all: How does social transformation begin? Addressing this
question demands that we cultivate the sensibility to perceive moments when things do not yet have a name. There is nothing heroic about
escape. It usually begins with an initial refusal to subscribe to some aspects of the social order that seem to be inescapable and indispensable for
governing the practicalities of life. In other words, the very first moment of subversion is the detachment from what may seem essential for holding a
situation together and for making sense of that situation. Escape is a mode of social change that is simultaneously elusive and forceful enough to
challenge the present configuration of control.
A focus on the present is key to actualize imperceptible politics
Leicester, Niamh Stephenson – teaches social science at the University of New South Wales,
and Vassilis Tsianos – teaches sociology at the University of Hamburg, Germany, Escape
Routes: Control and Subversion in the Twenty-First Century, p. 72-74)
Imperceptible Politics Transform the Body We have an ally in writing this book: time. Writing at the beginning of the twenty-first century we are not
simply making reference to the present. The current times allow the book to happen. In
the beginning of the third millennium ,
we are precariously situated on a rather aseptic, sober, glamorous facade, with lots of neglected
agony beneath. This book could easily be fuelled by mourning and lament (as criticised by Brown, 1995), or
it could strive to culminate in some kind of genealogy (N. Rose, 1999) or critical deconstruction of the present (Žižek, 2005b). It could even attempt to
refuse despondent visions of the future by promising that agony is, in principle, translatable into euphoria (a mode of engagement critically analysed by
G. Rose, 1996). But we are writing not as active and watchful observers of our times; we are not even writing
in the flow of time, as its loyal handmaidens. Rather, time – with all its stubbornness and smoothness, its warm reliability and its
disorienting absence of synchronicity – fuels these micro-electrical firings which govern the muscles of our fingers on the keyboards
of our sleek laptops. Time both writes us and yields material with which we can address the
predicament of resistance. New tools of subversion are emerging, but they have not crystallised ,
they are ungraspable. This describes our encounter with imperceptible politics ; it is not simply
situated in our present conditions of postliberal sovereignty . Of course, imperceptible politics is
demanded by our situatedness. But at the same time, it is imaginary and outside of the present historical
chronotope. It is only possible to work on the real conditions of the present by invoking
imaginaries which take us beyond the present . And this trajectory away from the present is achieved by working in time, by
intensifying the present. Imperceptible politics works with the present . Time is fractured and non-
synchronous – the historical present can be understood both as containing residues of the past and as anticipating the future (Marvakis, 2005;
Bloch, 1986). Yet it is impossible to identify either the past or the future by moving backwards or
forwards in time. Neither move is possible. Time forces us to work in the present , by training our
senses to examine what appears evident as well as what is absent . This sensibility enables us to
perceive and imagine things and ourselves in unfamiliar ways , to follow open trajectories. Time
contains both experiences of the world which have been rendered invisible and the seeds of experience which may be possible to realise (Santos,
2003). Imperceptible politics can be neither perceived nor conducted from a transcendent perspective; that is,
elaborating a ‘metaphysics of the present’ (as criticised in Adam, 1995) can reveal nothing of the mode of engagement with the present we are
describing. This engagement entails experiencing time in a subjective and embodied way, being forced to transform ourselves in order to deal with this
current predicament of resistance. Situated in the present historical regime of control, imperceptible
politics involves remaking
the present by remaking our bodies: the ways we perceive, feel, act. Imperceptible politics transforms our bodies. Loving
the present , existing in the present , imperceptible politics is practised in the present . It works
with social reality in the most intimate and immanent ways , recalling the whole history and
practice of escape, as we described earlier, and rethinking it anew. Doing imperceptible politics entails the
refusal to use our perceptual and action systems as instruments for representing the current
political conditions of resistance. It functions through diffraction rather than reflection (Haraway, 1997,
1991c): diffraction creates ‘effects of connection, of embodiment, and of responsibility for an
imagined elsewhere that we may yet learn to see and build here’ (Haraway, 1992, p. 295). In this sense
imperceptible politics is more concerned with changing the very conditions of perception and
action than with changing what we see . Only such bodily, lived transformations are sufficient for interrupting the pervasive
sensibilities being shaped by sovereign powers.
AT:
AT: Perm
Rejecting liberalism while still endorsing the AFF reaffirms the idea that a
responsible agent can morally determine the nature of suffering --- total
rejection of liberalism is key
Abbas 10 (Asma – Professor of Social Studies at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, Liberalism and
Human Suffering: Materialist Reflections on Politics, Ethics, and Aesthetics, p. 38-39)
The dizzying back and forth between professed Kantians and Humeans blurs the fact that, regardless of whether morality is anchored interior to the
acting subject or determined by the effects of the actions of the subject as they play out in the outside world, the unit of analysis is quite the same.
Thus, when touchy liberals desire better attention to the fact of human pain and suffering, they
manage to talk about cruelty where, ironically, cruel actions are derivatives of cruel agents and
the victim’s suffering is just fallout . Besides this shared inability to dispel the primacy of the agent and
the perpetrator in favor of the sufferer of pain , the rift between Kant and Hume is deceptive in another way. In terms of
historical evolution, the current status of cruelty betrays a fetish of the active agent . It is no accident
that the terms “good” and “evil” require a focus on cruelty and its infliction , leaving untouched
the suffering of cruelty. Moral psychology ends up being the psychology of cruelty , which is a
moral question, and hence of those who cause it. In the same frame, suffering is never a moral, let alone
political or legal, question unless a moral agent with a conscience has caused it. All sufferers
automatically become victims in the eyes of politics and law when “recognized.” Suffering is thus
relevant as a political question only after it is a moral one , when it is embodied and located in a
certain way, when it surpasses arbitrary thresholds. It is one thing to claim that liberalism , whether
empiricist or idealist, cannot overcome its subject-centeredness even in its moments of empathy for the
“victim.” It is another to understand the stubborn constitution of the agent at the helm of liberal
justice and ask what makes it so incurable and headstrong and what the temperament of this
stubbornness might be: is it pathetic, squishy, helplessly compassionate, humble, philanthropic,
imperialist, venomous, neurotic, all of the above, or none of these? Not figuring out this pathos is bound to
reduce all interaction with liberal assertions to one or another act of editing or “correcting”
them. Inadvertently, all protests to liberalism tread a limited, predictable path and will be, at some point,
incorporated within it. Liberalism’s singular gall and violence is accessed every time a resistance
to it is accommodated by liberalism. Think, for instance, not only of how often liberals affirm their
clumsiness and mediocrity in speaking for the other’s suffering but also of how quickly its
antagonists—purveyors of many a righteous anti-representational politics—“make space” for the voice of others
without challenging the (liberal, colonizing) structures that determine and distribute the suffering
and speaking self, and the suffering and speaking other, to begin with. This protest leaves unquestioned what it means to speak for one’s own, or
others’, suffering and whether there are other ways of speaking suffering that problematize these as the only options.
AFF
2AC Answers
2AC - Transparent Movements Solve
Transparent movements key to create real change – empirics
Casero-Ripollés and Feenstra 12 (Andreu and Ramón A., Universitat Jaume I de Castelló,
“The 15-M movement and the new media: a case study of how new themes were introduced
into Spanish political discourse”,
http://repositori.uji.es/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10234/80466/53905.pdf?sequence=1)
This new news environment heralds a paradigm change. The scenario of topdown information control under the journalistic and
political elites to maintain social order has shifted to a new dynamic in which chaos prevails. Here, surplus
of information
has replaced scarcity, many-to-many news distribution channels prevail over one-to-many,
transparency prevails over opacity, accessibility over exclusivity, interactivity over passivity, and
competition over monopoly (McNair, 2006). Instability and interdependence hold sway in this new news environment,
which is defined by uncertainty (Lowrey and Gade, 2011). Journalism is heading towards modified and redefined power relations and
the disappearance of existing dividing lines. The eradication of borders is tied in with the process of digital convergence (Jenkins,
2006; Dupagne and Garrinson, 2007; Deuze, 2007) that is shaping the new news environment. In this context, journalism is
becoming increasingly liquid (Deuze, 2008) and operates in a more open scenario. This new news environment has given rise to a
system of hybrid news (Chadwick, 2011), based on a blend of old and new media (Fenton, 2010). The outstanding events of 2011
have clearly revealed the new news environment’s potential to create new stories. The
Arab uprisings, mass protests in
Greece and, later on, the fast growing #Occupy movement, are examples of this new
phenomenon. In these cases, the new media have played a prominent role in coordinating the
protests, in communicating real-time images and up-to-date information, and in the processes of contagion (Cottle, 2011; Lotan
et al., 2011; Della Porta, 2011). The 15-M movement offers a paradigmatic example of this phenomenon, as we explore below.
2AC - Opaque Movements Fail
Public movements are key to legitimization of movements
Rebughini 10 (Paola, University of Milan, Italy, “Critique and social movements: Looking
beyond contingency and normativity”, http://est.sagepub.com/content/13/4/459.full.pdf+html)
At this point, it appears clear that within the social theories of critique, dichotomies such as contingent-
normative, situated-transcendent, local-universal, accidental-necessary, are often linked to
other dichotomies such as private-public, individual-collective and micro-macro. These polarities seem to indicate that
critique is born in a local, situated and contingent way, but in order to consolidate and defend itself it needs
legitimation, and therefore needs to refer to more universal types of validity and normativity
that are transcendent to the context . The creation process and universalizable validity of critique are, however, two
movements that remain analytically distinct (Benhabib, 1992). At the same time individual practices of resistance and critique are
born in a context that is restrained by symbolic grammar and language, by habitus and disposition, by routines and common sense;
the break that single individuals manage to create in these processes must be communicated and made known to others in order to
acquire the strength and visibility necessary to consolidate critique as a moment of change or of resistance. The
social
movements are the social phenomena that best allow us to understand how these processes
arise, how a critique that is born in a local and daily context from individual initiative and
contingent accident can be consolidated and legitimated through a process of collectivization .
Modern social movements rely on communication to solve

The space of daily life is defined both by its proximity but also – in an interconnected and globalized world – by the openings and
connections with the dimensions that transcend the here and now and immediacy of context. The
path that leads to
public mobilization is therefore that of the formation of more widespread networks in which
contact with other groups and individuals mobilizes in the same form of resistance, and projects
are made, and this leads to critical behaviour that is locally contingently formed to be expressed
in a more systematic way in the public sphere through a form of conflict that defines individual common normative references as
adversaries and interlocutors (Castells, 2002). Over the past thirty years, research conducted into the ‘new social movements’ and
on the more recent phase of critical
mobilization against neo-liberal economic globalization has revealed
that collective action that aspires to express a critique , to widen the space for democracy and individual
freedom, often grows from networks that are initially formed in the area of local and daily life of the activists, with parallel links to
normative references that transcend the specific ‘fluid’ context of the mobilization: critique of neoliberalist capitalism, the need for
social justice, environmental protection, and recognition of cultural differences. This union between contingent and local
components of mobilization and more general references and norms has been facilitated over the past twenty years by transitional
mediated networks via the internet and by the construction of ‘virtual public spheres’ (Calhoun, 2004; van de Donk et al., 2004;
Langman, 2005) that refer to the idea of a common ‘Global Civil Society’ that communicates via websites, blogs, alternative media,
and continental and global forums. Even if communicative aspects – initially cited by Adorno even before Habermas –
have always been central to mobilization (progressive but also reactionary) and in the construction of a public
sphere, the present internet-based mobilizations and cyber-activism have profoundly transformed the way in which critique can
emerge within the public sphere. As
a consequence, even though every form of mobilization is based on
forms of media communication, the nature of this media has a fundamental role, and the
internet has allowed the unprecedented rapid and capillary distribution of critical issues even if
they have often been packaged and become sectorial.
2AC - Opacity Not Key
Opacity has no effect on the success of a movement
The frame of normative references, ‘consensual truths’ and symbolic resources constituted by the contemporary
communicative networks of mobilization presents a broad horizon of sense for protests and
critical forms that are tied to a specific context and its constraints . The networks also contribute to the
creation of collective identities that ‘emerge within an interactive process in which social networks define their values and the
meaning of their action’ (Langman, 2005: 57). In this sense, local
and contingent mobilizations have been able to
base their legitimacy, inserting themselves into a frame of normative references and of similar
mobilizations that by now have a transnational character . Naturally these references do not function in an
automatic way, we often witness the reflexive appropriation – diversified according to contexts – of a general framework that is
based on the recognition of fundamental human rights – such as global justice – but also on an anti-liberalist and anti-militarist
the success of critique expressed by a movement cannot be measured
standpoint. In this sense,
solely through the numerical visibility of a demonstration on public soil , but also and above all by the
quantity of information that the mobilization is able to circulate and by the changes in daily
practice that it is able to provoke. IT webs have anyway played a propulsive role that has enormously facilitated the
circulation of information and expressions of critique, even if the transnationalization of mobilization or the existence of more
general frames of reference also existed in the past. Today organizational networks exist that are capable of
mobilizing initiatives and people on a trans-continental scale; networks are thus plural, inclusive
and geometrically variable, they tend to be anti-hierarchical and are perceived as a space for the experimentation of forms
of participative and deliberative democracy. The extension of these networks and their speed of action have also facilitated the
circulation of references of validity on which actions and protests are based and upon which the
legitimacy of critique is based. As a consequence, the spread of local actions, the pluralism of the issues in play and the
contingency of critical expressions have been compensated with the construction of a common normative frame of reference, even
if not unified and marked by old tensions between references to justice and those to autonomy and between appeals to difference
and those to equality.
2AC – Link Turn
We can sever the suffering of []’s connections with liberal individualism,
connecting it to our politics of freedom
Weheliye 14 (Alexander – Associate Professor of African American Studies at Northwestern
University, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of
the Human, Duke University Press, 2014, p. 14-15)
Consequently, rather than assuming that suffering must always follow the path of wounded
attachments in search of recognition from the liberal state , and therefore dismissing any form of
politics that might arise from the undergoing of political violence as inherently essentialist, my
thinking is more in line with a materialist reconceptualization of suffering.29 Asma Abbas does not conscript
minoritarian suffering to the realm of individual ressentiment used in the service of gaining
liberal personhood but, instead, argues for an “understanding of suffering that allows us to
honour the suffering and hope of others not because we are humbled by their impenetrability
and unknowability, but because of how we see our sufferings and our labours as co-constitutive
of the world we inhabit, however homelessly.”^0 Once suffering that results from political violence
severs its ties with liberal individualism , which would position this anguish in the realm of a dehumanizing exception,
we can commence to think of suffering and enfleshment as integral to humanity . I emphasize the
family ties between political violence and suffering not because they are nobler or more worthy than other forms of suffering, but
because they usher us away from the liberal notion of wounding that is at the core of modern western politics and culture. Given
the prominence of political violence within the histories of colonialism, indigenous genocide,
racial slavery, internment, de jure segregation, and so on, black studies and other incarnations of
racialized minority discourse offer pathways to distinctive understandings of suffering that serve
as the speculative blueprint for new forms of humanity , which are defined above all by overdetermined
conjurings of freedom. Overall, I am asking whether there exists freedom (not necessarily as a commonsensically positive
category, but as a way to think what it makes possible) in this pain that most definitely cannot be reduced to
mere recognition based on the alleviation of injury or redressed by the laws of the liberal
state , and if said freedom might lead to other forms of emancipation , which can be imagined but not (yet)
described.
2AC – AT: Brown/Ressentiment
Nietzsche was sexist and so is calling our politics ‘ressentiment’
Seung Chung 12 (Hye – Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Colorado State
University, “Beyond ‘Extreme’: The Cinema of Ressentiment,” in Kim Ki-duk, p. 23)
Though ressentiment was denounced as a vengeful and poisonous “slave morality” by Nietzsche, affirmative possibilities of the
concept have been recuperated by contemporary scholars and philosophers. For example, M. J. Bowles argues, “ Ressentiment
in fact marks the potentiality of a tremendous energy source . ... To exploit human ressentiment
is something of an art” (14-15). Rebecca Stringer sees ressentiment as “an inevitable and potentially
positive force in feminism” that is partly responsible for shaping such institutional practices as
affirmative action and womens studies (266-67). Countering Wendy Brown’s call for “a feminist politics
without ressentiment ” Stringer recuperates feminist ressentiment as a regenerative force that can
give rise to creativity, agency, responsibility, and new power (266-69). Jeffrey T. Nealon calls
ressentiment a “political anger of transformation” that might “open a space for us to respond to
subjective or communal expropriation in other than resentful ways” (277). According to Nietzsche, a
profound comprehension of ressentiment is possible only by and among those who share the same ailments and agonies. The sick
are in need of “doctors and nurses who are sick themselves.. . . [The man of ressentiment) must be sick himself, he must really be a
close relative of the sick and the destitute in order to understand them” (92).
Explanation
Neg
Basic info to know
To run this Kritik it is important to understand the 3 components of personality
(according to Freud), those being the Id, Ego, and Super Ego.
- Id: This is the only component that you are with (and no it’s not
pronounced like ID) and it is based on the pleasure principle, meaning
the id gets what pleases it at all costs with no regards with the rules or
considerations of others or society. The Id constantly seeks immediate
gratification – for example this could explain things like rape or other
impulsive/irrational things. The Id doesn’t care about the consequences
of it’s actions.
Example: Let’s say your friend has a cupcake and it looks really
good. Like REALLY GOOD. The Id would just take the cupcake from
your friend’s hand and eat it, with no care in the world about how
your friend feels or whether that was morally acceptable.
- Superego: This part of your personality is practically the polar opposite
of the Id and develops around ages 6-7. The Superego is like your
conscience (not to be confused with conscious) and makes decisions
entirely based off of morals, constantly giving consideration to the
negative consequences that may result from their actions and how it
affects others. This is molded by the ideals of society.
Example: (same cupcake examle) the super ego would not eat the
cupcake because they do not want to upset their friend and know
it is immoral to steal.
- Ego: The ego is the most important part. The Ego should be the
strongest part of the personality in healthy individuals and one of its jobs
is to try to make the best decisions by trying to satisfy the needs of BOTH
the Id AND the superego.
Example: (same cupcake example) the Ego would ask the friend if
they could have or try some of the cupcake.
The thesis of the conscious, pre/subconscious and unconscious can best be
explained by these diagrams, the iceberg metaphor
The conscious mind makes up very little of our actual mind(s) as a whole.
A lot of it mainly consists of what you’re thinking at that moment and
how you are perceiving things around you. It is made up mostly of the
ego (the one whose job is to make decisions satisfying both the id and
the superego).
The preconscious mind isn’t as important in this K, but it’s mainly made
up of retrievable memories and things you know that you know and can
remember that you know. It mainly consists of the super and the ego
The unconscious mind is very important and makes up a large majority of
our mind, hence why the unconscious level is the biggest part of the
iceberg. This is a large part of our mind that is very hard to access if not
impossible and is where most of our driving impulses come from. It is
LARGELY made up of the id. The Unconscious mind contains bad things
that influence you like: fears (important), violent motives, unacceptable
sexual desires (like rape), irrational wishes, selfish needs, immoral urges,
and shameful experiences. The reason that there is all this bad stuff in
the subconscious is because the ego has pushed it down there (a defense
mechanism called repression) to keep it from being conscious or
something that we have to think about. Because the Id is there, it wants
us to act on those urges at times depending on what the situation is.
The K itself
Given that information, the K is simple. Basically the link is that the plan was
based on a fear that the government is after them or trying to get into their
information and violate their rights. This is bad because fear is part of the
unconscious mind, which is mainly ruled by the impulsive, irrational id.
The impact is that we can’t do the plan because making decisions based off of
our id/unconscious is a bad idea because it contains all those bad things
including the irrational id. Meaning that we can never truly make good
decisions because it’s just the id trying to do things regardless of the outcome
or whether it’s a good idea. This creates serial policy failure in this instance and
other instances because when we just do what the id wants us to, because its
seeks immediate gratification, we allow it to get stronger, strong enough to
eventually be more powerful than the ego, WHICH IS NOT GOOD.
Another impact is that making decisions that are driven from our
unconscious is bad because if we do that we allow the unconscious more
power and they may allow for violence and rape since the unconscious
contains drives of unacceptable sexual desires and immoral/violent
urges like rape and structural violence or just straight up killing people.
So we can’t let the unconscious come up to our conscious decision
making or else things like that which were meant to be hidden are now
brought to the surface
The alternative is to vote neg because that allows us to say NO to the
unconscious desires/desires of the id which doesn’t allow for it to get stronger.
This allows the Ego to use a defense mechanism called repression (mentioned
above) to push down those urges back to the unconscious/id level where
they’re hidden and unseen, away from our conscious thoughts and decision
making.
There is also a floating PIC alternative but it’s eh in my personal opinion.
What that alt is saying is that we can do the plan but we need to have a
reprogramming of our mind first through meditation, allowing us to
expel the negativity and the urges that our bad within our mind. This
also allows us to make more decisions with our conscious mind.
Psychoanalysis K
1NC Individual Module
The plan acts out of a fear that the government disrespects our rights, leading
to decision-making rooted in the negativity of the unconscious mind – these
reps shape reality
Anando 10 (Anando – Anando is one of the women in the ASHA Foundation, UK, list of 240 "influential,
inspiring women from all walks of life and from around the world who are outstanding in their fields." She has over 30
years experience of practicing and working with Osho meditations and transformative techniques. Her workshops have
taken her to every corner of the world, to work with people of all nationalities. Anando worked closely with Osho for
many years, and her loving joyful and direct approach allows people to quickly realise their own potential for inner
bliss and joy. Anando was formerly a lawyer and business manager, so she understands well the tensions and stresses
involved in everyday life – “It's now a proven fact - Your unconscious mind is running your life!” – Life Trainings –
November 26, 2010 – http://www.lifetrainings.com/Your-unconscious-mind-is-running-you-life.html)
The subconscious mind cannot move outside its fixed programs – it automatically reacts to
situations with its previously stored behavior responses . AND (here’s the rub), it works without the
knowledge or control of the conscious mind. This is why we are generally unaware of our
behavior, in fact most of the time we are not even aware that we are acting unconsciously. Studies from as far back as the
seventies show that our brains begin to prepare for action just over a third of a second before we consciously decide to act. In other
words, even
when we ‘think’ we are conscious, it is our unconscious mind which is actually
making our decisions for us. And it seems the unconscious mind is running us on its automatic
pilot mode, 95% of the time! Neuroscientists have shown that the conscious mind provides 5% or less of our cognitive
(conscious) activity during the day – and 5% they say is for the more aware people, many people operate at just 1% consciousness.
Dr Lipton also says that the unconscious mind operates at 40 million bits of data per second, whereas the conscious mind processes
at only 40 bits per second. So the unconscious mind is MUCH more powerful than the conscious mind, and it is the
unconscious mind which shapes how we live our life . The scientists show that most of our
decisions, actions, emotions and behavior depend on the 95% of brain activity that is beyond our conscious
awareness, which means that 95 – 99% of our life comes from the programming in our subconscious mind. Osho has talked
about this for more than forty years, but it is pretty graphic when you hear the scientific statistics which bear it out, isn’t it! So, our
life reflects our unconscious programming . This is because the job of the subconscious is to create reality out of its
program, ie to prove the program is true. So if you have negative programming in your unconscious , Dr
Lipton says 95% of the time you will recreate those negative experiences in your life . And as those
of us who have ever taken the time to check out our unconscious thoughts know, most of the programs our
unconscious mind runs are based in negativity – for example fear of what other people are
thinking about us, fear of not being loved and respected as we are , etc, etc.
The unconscious mind is dominated by the Id

McLeod 9 (Saul McLeod – This site is written, designed and coded by me, Saul McLeod, and I am a graduate
teaching assistant at The University of Manchester. Previous to this I taught A-level psychology at Wigan and Leigh
College for ten years. I have a degree in psychology and have a masters degree in research. I am also undertaking a
PhD part time at The University of Manchester. – “Unconscious Mind” – Simply Psychology – February 20, 2009 –
http://www.simplypsychology.org/unconscious-mind.html)
The pre-conscious contains thoughts and feelings that a person is not currently aware of , but which
can easily be brought to consciousness. It exists just below the level of consciousness before the
unconscious mind. This is what we mean in our everyday usage of the word available memory. For example, you are
presently not thinking about your mobile telephone number, but now it is mentioned you can recall it with ease. Mild
emotional experiences may be in the subconscious but sometimes traumatic and powerful
negative emotions are repressed and hence not available in the subconscious . Our feelings,
motives and decisions are actually powerfully influenced by our past experiences, stored in
the pre-conscious and instincts from the unconscious . Freud applied these three systems to his structure of the
personality, or psyche – the id, ego and superego. Here the id is regarded as entirely unconscious whilst the ego
and superego have conscious, preconscious, and unconscious aspect. Freud also regarded the mind to be like an
iceberg, where the greatest part is hidden beneath the water or unconscious.
The Id allows unconscious motivations and irrational impulses to take control

when making decisions – leads to serial policy failure
Eveleigh 1 (DOUG EVELEIGH – As General Counsel, Eveleigh is responsible for all of Britannica’s legal affairs
as well as human resources. He joined the company in early 2014 after tenures with the international law firm Mayer
Brown, LLP, and Solo Cup Company. His legal experience is broad. He’s worked as a litigator in the intellectual
property field and has extensive knowledge of patent, trademark, copyright and trade secret matters. He’s also well
acquainted with compliance and regulatory issues. Doug holds a B.S. in manufacturing engineering from the Boston
University College of Engineering and a law degree from John Marshall Law School in Chicago – “Id” – Encyclopedia
Britannica – Feb 1, 2001 – http://www.britannica.com/topic/id-psychology)
Id, in Freudian psychoanalytic theory, one of the three agencies of the human personality , along with the ego
and superego. The oldest of these psychic realms in development, it contains the psychic content related to the
primitive instincts of the body, notably sex and aggression , as well as all psychic material that is inherited and
present at birth. The id (Latin for “it”) is oblivious of the external world and unaware of the passage of
time. Devoid of organization, knowing neither logic nor reason, it has the ability to harbour
acutely conflicting or mutually contradictory impulses side by side. It functions entirely
according to the pleasure-pain principle , its impulses either seeking immediate fulfillment or
settling for a compromise fulfillment. The id supplies the energy for the development and continued functioning of
conscious mental life, though the working processes of the id itself are completely unconscious in the
adult (less unconscious in the child). In waking life it belies its content in slips of the tongue, wit, art, and other at least partly
nonrational modes of expression. The primary methods for unmasking its content, according to Freud, are the analysis of dreams
and free association. Many
psychoanalysts now consider the conception of an id overly simple, though still
useful in drawing attention to the unconscious motivations and irrational impulses within
even the most normal human being .
The alternative is to vote negative to awaken the ego and superego to repress
the Id, keeping unacceptable impulses buried in the unconscious, unexpressed
Gullo 12 (Matthew Gullo – I am a clinical psychologist working in the addiction field. Currently, I am employed as
a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Early Career Fellow at the Centre for Youth Substance
Abuse Research, University of Queensland. My research focuses primarily on cognitive and neuropsychological
mechanisms underlying adolescent substance abuse, particularly those related to impulse control, decision-making, and
personality. I also maintain my clinical practice as a Visiting Clinical Psychologist at the Alcohol and Drug Assessment
Unit, Princess Alexandra Hospital. – “A dangerous method? In defence of Freud’s psychoanalysis” – The Coversation
– March 27, 2012 – http://theconversation.com/a-dangerous-method-in-defence-of-freuds-psychoanalysis-5989)
Freud described the id as the mental expression of our base instincts and bodily impulses , “a
cauldron of seething excitations". Such impulses compel us to pursue rewarding experiences (such as food and sex) and avoid
punishing ones (such as pain and rejection). The id even produces opposing impulses simultaneously ,
compelling us to both move toward and away from something, or someone. Think of fatty foods, drugs, or an attractive stranger.
How do we control such impulses? Enter the ego. The ego’s role in our personality – through
organising and synthesising our mental processes in a coherent way – is to resolve the
conflicts that arise from the id . According to Freud, the ego makes us stop to think about a situation
and its consequences. We can remember smoking causes cancer , and that infidelity can lead to divorce -
things we, presumably, want to avoid . The ego pulls us out of the moment, temporarily. Thanks to the ego,
we aren’t constantly running amuck, seeking instant gratification . But its job doesn’t end
there. A part of the ego also imposes idealistic standards on our behaviour that compete with
the id as well. This is the superego, our conscience . Freud described the superego as the
parent in our head. It is always watching us, and judging the id’s desires : “no respectable person would
drink themselves stupid”; “a loyal spouse would never be even slightly tempted by another.” The
superego is therefore often at loggerheads with the id. The ego acts as a referee between the
id and the superego, between our impulses and our ideals . To achieve this task, says Freud, the ego calls
on myriad mental tricks, such as repression, to keep unacceptable impulses buried in the
unconscious, unexpressed . According to Freud’s theory, mental illness arises when the ego is incapable
of maintaining control of the id and superego, when their impulses are too strong . Freud believed this
imbalance was often caused by early childhood trauma.
1NC State Module
The unconscious mind itself is politics which perpetuates the master’s discourse
to create the era of the other. The alternative is to reject the 1AC to create
fundamentally different politics, one which is not restricted to the resistance or
the subversion of the master’s closure by uncovering its radical contingency
equating to a “for all” policy
Riha 12 (Jelica Šumič Riha – Jelica Šumič Riha is a Slovenian philosopher, political theorist, and translator,
associated with the Ljubljana school of psychoanalysis – “Politics and Psychoanalysis in the Times of the Generalized
Metonymization” – Filozofski vestnik – September 6, 2012 –
http://filozofskivestnikonline.com/index.php/journal/article/viewFile/106/112)
Retroactively, the
statement “Politics is the unconscious”, can then be viewed as a formalization
of the equivalence between the master’s discourse and the discourse of the unconscious, as
indeed they are both conceived as the discourse of the Other , more exactly, like a language which
is organized by the instance of the Other. The second formula amounts to the reversal of the first: if the first formula,
insofar as it is centred around the famous point de capiton, provides us with a formula of metaphorization, the second formula is
one of the generalization of metonymy, or, rather, of the general metonymyzation. Taking into account the mutation of
the discourse of the master resulting from the total hegemony of the capitalist discourse and
thus opening a perspective lacking a 98 jelica šumič riha quilting point , the second formula can
therefore be viewed as a formula forged by Lacan for the era of the nonexistent Other , that of
the not-all, an era of a discourse without conclusion. The difference between the first and the second
formula, can therefore be exemplified in a shift that has been taking place in contemporary theorizing of politics over the past
few decades – namely, a drift away from a perspective in which the realms of rhetoric and politics
are viewed as antinomian towards an understanding of politics in terms of an open-ended,
undecidable space of discursivity which requires tropological displacements for its very
constitution . Now this concerns our problem directly: to evaluate the contemporary possibility of change in the present
conjecture while taking into account the mutation of the master’s discourse, that namely which is articulated
to the lack in the Other, to the barred Other, and which Lacan, as is well known, designated as the discourse of the
capitalist. One of the great merits of Lacan’s approach such as it is announced by the statement “the unconscious is
politics” lies not only in his highlighting the deadlocks that the emancipatory politics faces in a
universe of the inexistent Other . Our claim is namely that in opening the perspective of the not-all,
Lacan indicates at the same time the possibility of a fundamentally different politics, one which is not
restricted to the resistance to and/or the subversion of the master’s closure by uncovering its
radical contingency. What follows is an attempt to outline the space of the problem of the not-
all and to show if and to what extent politics and psychoanalysis are able to face and to resist
the deadlicks inherent to the generalized metonymization while theorizing and practicing new
forms of the non-segregationist collectivity. Our aim in this essay is to contribute towards an understanding of this
complex issue, and in particular to look at the political and theoretical difficulties associated with
the construction of the universal in an infinite universe, a universe without a beyond
Retroactively, the statement “Politics is the unconscious”, can then be viewed as a formalization
of the equivalence between the master’s discourse and the discourse of the unconscious, as
indeed they are both conceived as the discourse of the Other , more exactly, like a language which
is organized by the instance of the Other. The second formula amounts to the reversal of the first: if the first formula,
insofar as it is centred around the famous point de capiton, provides us with a formula of metaphorization, the second formula is
one of the generalization of metonymy, or, rather, of the general metonymyzation. Taking into account the mutation of
the discourse of the master resulting from the total hegemony of the capitalist discourse and
thus opening a perspective lacking a 98 jelica šumič riha quilting point , the second formula can
therefore be viewed as a formula forged by Lacan for the era of the nonexistent Other , that of
the not-all, an era of a discourse without conclusion. The difference between the first and the second
formula, can therefore be exemplified in a shift that has been taking place in contemporary theorizing of politics over the past
few decades – namely, a drift away from a perspective in which the realms of rhetoric and politics
are viewed as antinomian towards an understanding of politics in terms of an open-ended,
undecidable space of discursivity which requires tropological displacements for its very
constitution . Now this concerns our problem directly: to evaluate the contemporary possibility of change in the present
conjecture while taking into account the mutation of the master’s discourse, that namely which is articulated
to the lack in the Other, to the barred Other, and which Lacan, as is well known, designated as the discourse of the
capitalist. One of the great merits of Lacan’s approach such as it is announced by the statement “the unconscious is
politics” lies not only in his highlighting the deadlocks that the emancipatory politics faces in a
universe of the inexistent Other . Our claim is namely that in opening the perspective of the not-all,
Lacan indicates at the same time the possibility of a fundamentally different politics, one which is not
restricted to the resistance to and/or the subversion of the master’s closure by uncovering its
radical contingency. What follows is an attempt to outline the space of the problem of the not-
all and to show if and to what extent politics and psychoanalysis are able to face and to resist
the deadlicks inherent to the generalized metonymization while theorizing and practicing new
forms of the non-segregationist collectivity. Our aim in this essay is to contribute towards an understanding of this
complex issue, and in particular to look at the political and theoretical difficulties associated with
the construction of the universal in an infinite universe, a universe without a beyond
Links
Politics = Unconscious
Fear = Unconscious
The plan is created out of state phobia, acting out of fear which is rooted in the
unconscious mind, dominated by the Id
Roy No Date (Roy (unknown last name) – retired criminologist and researcher and veteran of the U.S. Navy. –
“A PSYCHOANALYTIC UNDERSTANDING OF YOUR LIFE CYCLE STAGES—THE PIONEER WORK OF
SIGMUND FREUD—PART II” – The Reasoned Society – No Date –
https://thoughtdigest.wordpress.com/tag/unconscious-mind/)
Psychoanalytic theory of the conscious and unconscious mind is often explained using an iceberg
metaphor. Conscious awareness is the tip of the iceberg, while the unconscious is represented by the ice
hidden below the surface of the water. Many of us have experienced what is commonly referred to as a Freudian slip.
These misstatements are believed to reveal underlying, unconscious thoughts or feelings. Freudian slips can also apply to conscious
thoughts and feelings as well. Quite often these feelings, whether conscious or unconscious, are ambivalent feelings. Consider the
following example: James has just started a new relationship with a woman he met at school. While talking to her one afternoon, he
accidentally calls her by his ex-girlfriend’s name. If you were in this situation, how would you explain this mistake? Many of us might
blame the slip on distraction or describe it as a simple accident. However, a psychoanalytic theorist might tell you that this is much
more than a random accident. The
psychoanalytic view holds that there are inner forces outside of your
awareness that are directing your behavior. For example, a psychoanalyst might say that James misspoke due to
unresolved feelings for his ex or perhaps because of misgivings about his new relationship. The founder of psychoanalytic theory was
Sigmund Freud. While his theories were considered shocking at the time and continue to create debate and controversy, his work
had a profound influence on a number of disciplines, including psychology, sociology, anthropology, literature, and art. The term
psychoanalysis is used to refer to many aspects of Freud’s work and research, including Freudian therapy and the research
methodology he used to develop his theories. Freud relied heavily upon his observations and case studies of his patients when he
formed his theory of personality development. Before we can understand Freud’s theory of personality, we must first understand his
view of how the mind is organized. According
to Freud, the mind can be divided into two main parts: The
conscious mind includes everything that we are aware of. This is the aspect of our mental
processing that we can think and talk about ration ally. A part of this includes our memory, which is not always
part of consciousness but can be retrieved easily at any time and brought into our awareness. Freud called this ordinary memory the
preconscious.
The unconscious mind is a reservoir of feelings, thoughts, urges [including fantasies], and
memories that are outside of our conscious awareness. Most of the contents of the unconscious
are unacceptable or unpleasant, such as feelings of pain, anxiety , or conflict that is yet to be
revealed to those around us. According to Freud, the unconscious continues to influence our behavior
and experience, even though we are unaware of these underlying influences . Parenthetically, we may
be consciously aware of our fantasies; however, many of these consciously circulating thoughts and feelings may not necessarily
generate conflict that would create anxiety. Fantasies in the conscious reahlm can indeed be very pleasant experiences. However,
the superego [see concept below] still keeps a close check on those who want to act out their fantasies. Personality Development
According to Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of personality, personality is composed of
three elements. These three elements of personality are known as the id, the ego and the superego. They work
together to create complex human behaviors. The Id The id is the only component of personality that is
present from birth. This aspect of personality is entirely unconscious and includes all of the
instinctive and primitive behaviors. According to Freud, the id is the source of all psychic energy, making it the primary
component of personality. The id is driven by the pleasure principle, which strives for immediate
gratification of all desires, wants, and needs. If these needs are not satisfied immediately, the
result is a state of anxiety or tension. The Id doesn’t necessarily try to resolve the tension. For example, an increase in
hunger or thirst should produce an immediate attempt to eat or drink. The id is very important early in life, because it ensures that
an infant’s needs are met. If the infant is hungry or uncomfortable, he or she will cry until the demands of the id are met. By age 3 or
4 a child will begin to delay gratification, i.e., the demands are seen as not having to achieve immediate satisfaction.
Immediately satisfying these needs is not always realistic or even possible. If we were ruled
entirely by the pleasure principle, we might find ourselves grabbing things we want out of other
people’s hands to satisfy our own cravings. This sort of behavior would be both disruptive and
socially unacceptable . According to Freud, the id tries to resolve the tension created by the pleasure principle through the
primary process which involves forming a mental image of the desired object as a way of satisfying the need.
Impacts
Otherization
The construct of the other accelerates racism and inquality, dehumanizing the
other
Memmi 2000 (Albert, Professor Emeritus of Sociology @ Unv. Of Paris, RACISM, translated by
Steve Martinot, pp.163-165)
The struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission, without remission,
probably never achieved, yet for this very reason, it is a struggle to be undertaken without
surcease and without concessions. One cannot be indulgent toward racism. One cannot even let the
monster in the house, especially not in a mask. To give it merely a foothold means to augment the bestial part
in us and in other people which is to diminish what is human. To accept the racist universe to
the slightest degree is to endorse fear, injustice, and violence. It is to accept the persistence of
the dark history in which we still largely live. It is to agree that the outsider will always be a
possible victim (and which [person] man is not [themself] himself an outsider relative to someone else?). Racism
illustrates in sum, the inevitable negativity of the condition of the dominated ; that is it
illuminates in a certain sense the entire human condition . The anti-racist struggle, difficult though it
is, and always in question, is nevertheless one of the prologues to the ultimate passage from animality to
humanity. In that sense, we cannot fail to rise to the racist challenge. However, it remains true that one’s moral
conduct only emerges from a choice: one has to want it. It is a choice among other choices, and always debatable in its foundations
and its consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking, that the choice to conduct oneself morally is the condition for the establishment
of a human order for which racism is the very negation. This is almost a redundancy. One cannot found a moral order,
let alone a legislative order, on racism because racism signifies the exclusion of the other and
his or her subjection to violence and domination. From an ethical point of view, if one can
deploy a little religious language, racism is “ the truly capital sin. ”fn22 It is not an accident that
almost all of humanity’s spiritual traditions counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows, or strangers . It is not just a
question of theoretical counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows or strangers. It is not just a
question of theoretical morality and disinterested commandments. Such unanimity in the safeguarding of
the other suggests the real utility of such sentiments. All things considered, we have an interest in banishing injustice, because
injustice engenders violence and death. Of course, this is debatable. There are those who think that if one is strong enough, the
assault on and oppression of others is permissible. But no one is ever sure of remaining the strongest .
One day, perhaps,
the roles will be reversed. All unjust society contains within itself the seeds of its own death. It is
probably smarter to treat others with respect so that they treat you with respect. “Recall,” says the
bible, “that you were once a stranger in Egypt,” which means both that you ought to respect the stranger because you were a
stranger yourself and that you risk becoming once again someday.It is an ethical and a practical appeal – indeed,
it is a contract, however implicit it might be. In short, the refusal of racism is the condition for
all theoretical and practical morality . Because, in the end, the ethical choice commands the political
choice . A just society must be a society accepted by all. If this contractual principle is not
accepted, then only conflict, violence, and destruction will be our lot. If it is accepted, we can
hope someday to live in peace. True, it is a wager, but the stakes are irresistible.
Id/Unconscious = Serial Policy Failure
Political changes are impossible when rooted in the unconscious – this serial
policy failure leads us right into 1984
Collier 13 (Andrew Collier – writer and author specializing in psychoanalysis – “Lacan, psychoanalysis and the
left” – Marxists – j July 6, 2013 – https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj2/1980/no2-007/collier.html
My point is that the idea of carrying out a political revolution within the realm of unconscious
phantasy is an illusion. Attempts to act directly on the unconscious by political means lead
straight to 1984 . At the same time, the world of phantasy is in the last analysis produced by real material conditions [32], and
I see no reason to believe that a patriarchal unconscious could long outlive a patriarchal society . In the
meantime it is necessary to keep concrete political attacks on sexual oppression in the foreground, and not to let them get buried
under notions of liberation within the limits of pure ‘discourse’. If
we are to understand the relations between
‘the personal’ and ‘the political’, we must avoid any too-easy identification between the two. If
we read Lacan, let us read him as a psychoanalyst, and not expect to cull any theory of Cultural Revolution from his work. Probably
non-neurotic
psychoanalysis has little to offer politically, except as a by-product of its therapeutic work – i.e. a
revolutionary will be a better one than one who is using politics as an outlet or a prop.
This is what 1984 looks like

1984 by George Orwell is a dystopian novel. This means that it describes a nightmare vision of future society –
The polar opposite to a perfect world. George Orwell creates this image through a number of different methods and
techniques. Language/Style The language in the novel is simple. There are no metaphors and limited figurative
speech to permit no freedom for the reader to imagine the society in a less oppressive way. The plain vocabulary seems
unimaginative and seems as if Orwell is writing purely to reach the end because he has to – the way that life is lived in
1984. Winston has a flat in Victory mansions, which sounds grand and expensive though because of the government it is
constantly cold, broken, dark and depressive as is life outside in the community. The adjectives
are suppressive and miserable throughout the book – for example, “vile” and “gritty” are mentioned in paragraph
one.The verbs are often violent – e.g. hate, want and fight. Free indirect discourse (writing in the 3rd person) lets the reader
become a part of the story.Newspeak is the new language that has been set up by the party in order to give people even less
freedom and free thought. Setting/Environment/Landscape The contrast between Winston’s vision of a perfect world and the
reality of the society in which he is living is quite shocking. He dreams of a golden world with freedom and happiness
though the society that he is living in is suppressive and depressing . Winston has a flat in victory mansion which
sounds very upmarket but it is as oppressive as outside. The world is divided up into airstrip one ,
Oceania, Eurasia and East Asia. The names, allies and details are changed for each country according to their relationship with the
party. Characterisation Inner party members can live in luxury often with servants. Outer party
members must live in Victory Mansions – small dirty apartments. The living conditions for the Proles are
poor. The three classes of people all wear a different dress. The Proles are large, strong humans. They are weatherbeaten from
hard work outside. The outer party members are thin and frail due to a lack of food , though they are not
ill or unhealthy. The inner party members seem to have a distinctive air of authority and
arrogance about them. Physical deterioration (e.g. Winston’s mind and pale, fragile body) are a sign of metal deterioration.
Oppression Orwell uses symbolism to depict the loss of privacy (e.g. the Big Brother tele screens and posters). He
uses language to show the loss of expression (and therefore individuality) and the loss of mental
control and ability. He uses his characterisation to show the losses of emotional freedom. The novel starts
with constant observation which is a common theme throughout. This is showing the loss of privacy
The id allows for bad decision making, leading to selfish and impulsive decisions
– voting aff lets the id get too powerful, which hurt us in the long run
Heffner 14 (Dr. Christopher L. Heffner – Dr. Heffner holds a Bachelor’s Degree in psychology and business
administration, a Master’s in psychology, a Doctorate of Psychology (Psy.D.) and Doctorate of Philosophy (Ph.D.,
ABD), both in clinical psychology. He is licensed as a psychologist in the State of Florida (PY6115) and is a member
of the Florida Psychological Association and the International Society for Mental Health Online. He has over 15 years
experience as a clinician, five years in mental health administration, and nearly eight years teaching undergraduate and
graduate courses and supervising students in psychology and education. – “Chapter 3: Section 5: Freud’s Structural and
Topographical Model” – All Psych – August 21, 2014 – http://allpsych.com/psychology101/ego/#.Vbgy5rNVikp)
According to Freud, we are born with our Id . The id is an important part of our personality because as newborns, it
allows us to get our basic needs met. Freud believed that the id is based on our pleasure principle. In other
words, the id wants whatever feels good at the time, with no consideration for the reality of the
situation. When a child is hungry, the id wants food, and therefore the child cries. When the child needs to be changed, the id
cries. When the child is uncomfortable, in pain, too hot, too cold, or just wants attention, the id speaks up until his or her needs are
met.The id doesn’t care about reality, about the needs of anyone else, only its own
satisfaction. If you think about it, babies are not real considerate of their parents’ wishes. They
have no care for time, whether their parents are sleeping, relaxing, eating dinner, or bathing.
When the id wants something, nothing else is important . Within the next three years, as the child interacts
more and more with the world, the second part of the personality begins to develop. Freud called this part the Ego. The ego is based
on the reality principle. The ego understands that other people have needs and desires and that sometimes being impulsive
or selfish can hurt us in the long run . Its the ego’s job to meet the needs of the id, while taking into consideration the
reality of the situation. By the age of five, or the end of the phallic stage of development, the Superego develops. The Superego is
the moral part of us and develops due to the moral and ethical restraints placed on us by our caregivers. Many equate the superego
with the conscience as it dictates our belief of right and wrong. In a healthy person, according to Freud, the ego is the strongest so
that it can satisfy the needs of the id, not upset the superego, and still take into consideration the reality of every situation. Not an
easy job by any means, butif the id gets too strong, impulses and self gratification take over the
person’s life . If the superego becomes to strong, the person would be driven by rigid morals, would be judgmental and
unbending in his or her interactions with the world. You’ll learn how the ego maintains control as you continue to read.
Unconscious = Violence
Thinking with the unconscious mind allows for endless violence like rape and
aggression
PhD part time at The University of Manchester. – “Unconscious Mind” – Simply Psychology – Febrary 20, 2009 –
http://www.simplypsychology.org/unconscious-mind.html)
The unconscious mind contains our biologically based instincts (eros and thanatos) for the primitive
urges for sex and aggression . While we are fully aware of what is going on in the conscious mind, we have no idea of
what information is stored in the unconscious mind. The unconscious contains all sorts of significant and
disturbing material which we need to keep out of awareness because they are too threatening
to acknowledge fully. So, the unconscious is not like a dust bin containing unimportant or
irrelevant thoughts . Rather, it is precisely because they are so powerful that they are kept
buried . Nevertheless, they exert a significant influence .
The Id has a desire to kill, rape, steal and more – allowing the Id gratification,
doing the plan, in this instance makes it more powerful, spilling over to these
instances
Birgitte 13 (Birgitte – I'm educated as a cultural anthropologist (a Masters) which means I have a sceptical mind
and take no cultural norms for granted, no matter how powerful they may seem – “Sigmund Freud the Controversial
Pioneer of Psychology: The Famous Psychosexual Stages of Child Development” – Positive Parenting Ally – March 8,
2013 – http://www.positive-parenting-ally.com/sigmund-freud.html)
This is perhaps Freud's most well-known publication and discusses the relationship between the
individual and the civilization in which he lives. Freud suggests that there is a great deal of
tension between the individual and society because a person has an inherent desire for
freedom while society inflicts very specific rules of conformity and expected behavior that
requires a repression of many natural instincts. Since the Id is driven by the pleasure principle,
it is concerned only with immediate gratification . It has no concern for the effect that certain
actions will have on others, but wants its needs met regardless of the propriety of methods. Society , on the other
hand, has laws prohibiting certain actions such as killing, rape, stealing, or substance abuse.
The Id (or biological instincts) is at odds with the laws that are created to protect society as a whole, and this
results in discontentment in the individuals.
Framing
Utilitarianism disregards respect for the individual and perpetuates societal
inequality by evaluating utility as a whole
Freeman 94 – Avalon Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D.
Harvard University, J.D. University of North Carolina (Samuel, “Utilitarianism, Deontology, and
the Priority of Right,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 23, No. 4, Autumn, pp. 313-349,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265463)
The inclusion of all sentient beings in the calculation of interests severely undermines the force
of any claim that utilitarianism is an "egalitarian" doctrine, based in some notion of equal
concern and respect for persons. But let us assume Kymlicka can restore his thesis by insisting that it concerns, not
utilitarianism as a general moral doctrine, but as a more limited thesis about political morality. (Here I pass over the fact that none of
the utilitarians he relies on to support his egalitarian interpretation construe the doctrine as purely political. The drift of modern
utilitarian theory is just the other way: utilitarianism is not seen as a political doctrine, to be appealed to by
legislators and citizens, but a nonpublic criterion of right that is indirectly applied [by whom is a
separate issue] to assess the nonutilitarian public political conception of justice. ) Still, let us assume it is as a
doctrine of political morality that utilitarianism treats persons, and only persons, as equals. Even in this form it cannot be
that maximizing utility is "not a goal" but a "by-product," "entirely derived from the prior
requirement to treat people with equal consideration " (CPP, p. 31) Kymlicka says, "If utilitarianism is best seen
as an egalitarian doctrine, then there is no independent commitment to the idea of maximizing welfare" (CPP, p. 35, emphases
added). But how can this be? (i) What is there about the formal principle of equal consideration (or for that matter occupying a
universal point of view) which would imply that we maximize the aggregate of individuals' welfare? Why not assume, for example,
that equal consideration requires maximizing the division of welfare (strict equality, or however equal division is to be construed);
or, at least maximize the multiple (which would result in more equitable distributions than the aggregate)? Or, why not suppose
equal consideration requires equal proportionate satisfaction of each person's interests (by for example, determining our resources
and then satisfying some set percentage of each person's desires) . Or finally we might rely on some Paretian principle: equal
consideration means adopting measures making no one worse off. For reasons I shall soon discuss, each of these rules is a better
explication of equal consideration of each person's interests than is the
utilitarian aggregative method, which in effect
collapses distinctions among persons. (2) Moreover, rather than construing individuals' "interests" as their actual (or
rational) desires, and then putting them all on a par and measuring according to intensity, why not construe their interests lexically,
in terms of a hierarchy of wants, where certain interests are, to use Scanlon's terms, more "urgent" than others, insofar as they are
more basic needs? Equal consideration would then rule out satisfying less urgent interests of the majority of people until all means
have been taken to satisfy everyone's more basic needs. (3) Finally, what is there about equal consideration, by itself, that requires
maximizing anything? Why does it not require, as in David Gauthier's view, optimizing constraints on individual utility maximization?
Or why does it not require sharing a distribution? The point is just that, tosay we ought to give equal consideration
to everyone's interests does not, by itself, imply much of anything about how we ought to
proceed or what we ought to do. It is a purely formal principle , which requires certain added, independent
assumptions, to yield any substantive conclusions. That (i) utilitarian procedures maximize is not a "by-product"
of equal consideration. It stems from a particular conception of rationality that is explicitly incorporated into the procedure.
That (2) individuals' interests are construed in terms of their (rational) desires or preferences, all of
which are put on a par, stems from a conception of individual welfare or the human good: a
person's good is defined subjectively, as what he wants or would want after due reflection. Finally (3), aggregation
stems from the fact that, on the classical view, a single individual takes up everyone's desires as if they
were his own, sympathetically identifies with them, and chooses to maximize his "individual"
utility. Hare, for one, explicitly makes this move. Just as Rawls says of the classical view, Hare "extend[s] to society the principle of
choice for one man, and then, to make this extension work, conflat[es] all persons into one through the imaginative acts of the
impartial sympathetic spectator" (TJ, p. 27). If these are independent premises incorporated into the justification of utilitarianism
and its decision procedure, then maximizing
aggregate utility cannot be a "by-product" of a procedure
that gives equal consideration to everyone's interests. Instead, it defines what that procedure is.
If anything is a by-product here, it is the appeal to equal consideration . Utilitarians appeal to impartiality in
order to extend a method of individual practical rationality so that it may be applied to society as a whole (cf. TJ, pp. 26-27).
Impartiality, combined with sympathetic identification, allows a hypothetical observer to experience the desires of others as if they
were his own, and compare alternative courses of action according to their conduciveness to a single maximand, made possible by
equal consideration and sympathy. The
significant fact is that, in this procedure, appeals to equal consideration
have nothing to do with impartiality between persons. What is really being given equal
consideration are desires or experiences of the same magnitude. That these are the desires or
experiences of separate persons (or, for that matter, of some other sentient being) is simply an incidental fact
that has no substantive effect on utilitarian calculations. This becomes apparent from the fact that we can more
accurately describe the utilitarian principle in terms of giving, not equal consideration to each person's interests, but instead equal
consideration to equally intense interests, no matter where they occur. Nothing is lost in this redescription, and a great deal of
clarity is gained. It is in this sense that persons
enter into utilitarian calculations only incidentally. Any
mention of them can be dropped without loss of the crucial information one needs to learn how
to apply utilitarian procedures. This indicates what is wrong with the common claim that
utilitarians emphasize procedural equality and fairness among persons, not substantive equality
and fairness in results. On the contrary, utilitarianism, rightly construed, emphasizes neither procedural nor substantive
equality among persons. Desires and experiences, not persons, are the proper objects of equal concern in utilitarian procedures.
Having in effect read persons out of the picture at the procedural end, before decisions on distributions even get underway, it
is
little wonder that utilitarianism can result in such substantive inequalities . What follows is that
utilitarian appeals to democracy and the democratic value of equality are misleading . In no sense do
utilitarians seek to give persons equal concern and respect.
Policy decisions directed at maintaining human survival through whatever

means will encourage genocide, war, and the destruction of moral values
Callahan 73 – Co-Founder and former director of The Hastings Institute, PhD in philosophy
from Harvard University (Daniel, “The Tyranny of Survival”, p 91-93)
The value of survival could not be so readily abused were it not for its evocative power. But abused it has been. In the
name of
survival, all manner of social and political evils have been committed against the rights of
individuals, including the right to life. The purported threat of Communist domination has for over two
decades fueled the drive of militarists for ever-larger defense budgets, no matter what the cost to
other social needs. During World War II, native Japanese-Americans were herded, without due process of law, to detention
camps. This policy was later upheld by the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States (1944) in the general context that a threat
to national security can justify acts otherwise blatantly unjustifiable. The survival
of the Aryan race was one of the
official legitimations of Nazism. Under the banner of survival, the government of South Africa imposes a ruthless
apartheid, heedless of the most elementary human rights. The Vietnamese war has seen one of the greatest of the many absurdities
tolerated in the name of survival: the destruction of villages in order to save them. But it is not only in a political setting that survival
has been evoked as a final and unarguable value. The
main rationale B. F. Skinner offers in Beyond Freedom and Dignity
for the controlled and conditioned society is the need for survival. For Jacques Monod, in Chance and
Necessity, survival requires that we overthrow almost every known religious, ethical and political system. In genetics, the survival of
the gene pool has been put forward as sufficient grounds for a forceful prohibition of bearers of offensive genetic traits from
marrying and bearing children. Some have even suggested that we do the cause of survival no good by our misguided medical efforts
to find means by which those suffering from such common genetically based diseases as diabetes can live a normal life, and thus
procreate even more diabetics. In the field of population and environment, one can do no better than to cite Paul Ehrlich, whose
works have shown a high dedication to survival, and in its holy name a willingness to contemplate governmentally enforced
abortions and a denial of food to surviving populations of nations which have not enacted population-control policies. For all these
reasons it
is possible to counterpoise over against the need for survival a "tyranny of survival."
There seems to be no imaginable evil which some group is not willing to inflict on another for
sake of survival, no rights, liberties or dignities which it is not ready to suppress . It is easy, of course, to
recognize the danger when survival is falsely and manipulatively invoked. Dictators never talk about their aggressions, but only
about the need to defend the fatherland to save it from destruction at the hands of its enemies. But my point goes deeper than that.
It is directed even at a legitimate concern for survival, when that concern is allowed to reach an intensity which would ignore,
suppress or destroy other fundamental human rights and values. The potential tyranny survival as value is that it is
capable, if not treated sanely, of wiping out all other values. Survival can become an obsession and a disease,
provoking a destructive single-mindedness that will stop at nothing. We come here to the fundamental moral dilemma. If, both
biologically and psychologically, the need for survival is basic to man, and if survival is the precondition for any and all human
achievements, and if no other rights make much sense without the premise of a right to life—then how will it be possible to honor
and act upon the need for survival without, in the process, destroying everything in human beings which makes them worthy of
survival. To put it more strongly, if the price of survival is human degradation, then there is no moral reason why an effort should be
made to ensure that survival. It would be the Pyrrhic victory to end all Pyrrhic victories. Yet it would be the defeat of all defeats if,
because human beings could not properly manage their need to survive, they succeeded in not doing so.
Utilitarianism destroys value to life by forcing the individual to take risks on a

cost-benefit basis in an effort to increase overall utility of an entity, while
demoralizing the individual’s own system of values
Schroeder 86 – Professor of Law at Duke (Christopher H., Prof of Law at Duke, “Rights Against
Risks,”, April, Columbia Law Review, pp. 495-562, http://www.jstor.org/pss/1122636)
From the individual's point of view, the balancing of costs and benefits that utilitarianism
endorses renders the status of any individual risk bearer profoundly insecure. A risk
bearer cannot determine from the kind of risk being imposed on him whether it is
impermissible or not. The identical risk may be justified if necessary to avoid a calamity and unjustified if the product
of an act of profitless carelessness, but the nature and extent of the underlying benefits of the risky
action are fre quently unknown to the risk bearer so that he cannot know whether or
not he is being wronged. Furthermore, even when the gain that lies behind the risk is well-known, the
status of a risk bearer is insecure because individuals can justifiably be inflicted with ever
greater levels of risk in conjunction with increasing gains . Certainly, individual risk bearers may be
entitled to more protection if the risky action exposes many others to the same risk, since the likelihood that technological
risks will cause greater harm increases as more and more people experience that risk. This makes the risky action less likely
that insight seems scant comfort to an individual, for it
to be justifiable. Once again, however,
reinforces the realization that, standing alone, he does not count for much . A strategy of
weighing gains against risks thus renders the status of any specific risk victim substantially contingent upon the claims of
others, both those who may share his victim status and those who stand to gain from the risky activity. The anxiety to
preserve some fundamental place for the individual that cannot be overrun by larger social considerations underlies what
despite its
H.L.A. Hart has aptly termed the "distinctively modern criticism of utilitarianism,"58 the criticism that,
famous slogan, "everyone [is] to count for one,"59 utilitarianism ultimately denies each
individual a primary place in its system of values. Various versions of utilitarian ism evaluate actions by
the consequences of those actions to maximize happiness, the net of pleasure over pain, or the satisfaction of desires.60
Whatever the specific formulation, the goal of maximizing some mea sure of utility obscures and
diminishes the status of each individual . It reduces the individual to a conduit, a reference point that
registers the appropriate "utiles," but does not count for anything independent of his monitoring function.61 It also
produces moral requirements that can trample an individual, if necessary, to maximize utility,
since once the net effects of a proposal on the maximand have been taken into account,
the individual is expendable. Counting pleasure and pain equally across individuals is a laudable proposal, but
counting only plea sure and pain permits the grossest inequities among individuals and the trampling of the few in
furtherance of the utility of the many. In sum, utilitarianism makes the status of any individual
radically contingent. The individual's status will be preserved only so long as that status con tributes to increasing
total utility. Otherwise, the individual can be discarded
Alternatives
State Alt Solvency
Psychoanalysis is the only way to create a new form of emancipatory politics
through a focus on individuals as opposed to collective politics of the squo
Riha 12 (Jelica Šumič Riha – Jelica Šumič Riha is a Slovenian philosopher, political theorist, and translator,
associated with the Ljubljana school of psychoanalysis – “Politics and Psychoanalysis in the Times of the Generalized
Metonymization” – Filozofski vestnik – September 6, 2012 –
http://filozofskivestnikonline.com/index.php/journal/article/viewFile/106/112)
Politics, likewise, irrespective of the type of government, confronts the impossible-real under the
guise of a similar impasse: how to hold together singularities which have nothing in common.
Modern politics, at least from the French Revolution onwards, has treated this impossibility of the social
bond by constructing a form of collectivity which would be “for all” . It is a paradoxical collectivity since the
condition for its very constitution requires the exclusion of the exception, of some otherness that is
presumed to be evading the universalisation . One could then say, what is really at stake between psychoanalysis
and politics is the issue of heterogeneity. Politics and psychonalysis thus appear to be two different languages for articulating
heterogeneity that are in confrontation with 100 jelica šumič riha each other. But is the heterogeneity in psychoanalysis the same as
that which we encounter in politics? What is at issue here is precisely the question: under
what conditions is it
legitimate to bring together politics and psychoanalysis? Indeed, any attempt to relate
psychoanalysis to politics is far from obvious. According to the received idea, there seems to be no common ground
permitting their encounter. In this view, psychoanalysis is presumed to be defending the rights of the
singular, of that precisely which resists the universal . Indeed, psychoanalysis is by definition the domain of the
“not for all”. As such, psychoanalysis cannot, without losing its competence, force the boundaries of confidentiality imposed by its
practice to wander into a domain in which, on the contrary, something is valid only insofar as it applies to all. From this view,
psychoanalysis has no competence in the domain destined “for all”. Politics, by contrast, designed as the order of the collective,
as politics is preoccupied with the question of that which
deals with the masses, with the multiple. In so far
is valid for all, in can only turn a blind eye to the singular : the proper object of psychoanalysis. For
politics, in which there seems to be no place for the singular , it would be an illigitimate step to
make the opposite move: from the “for all” to that of the “only for one”. Indeed, if we follow the
received idea, what makes their encounter impossible, is a double interdiction of the passage
from the register of the singular to that of the multiple . We propose to reverse this perspective
and to examine under what circumstances the relation between these two domains, that of
the “for all” and that of the “irreducible singularity”, can be established . So the very fact of posing the
question of heterogenity in politics and psychoanalysis, requires the construction of a site, a scene for
their encounter. Our guide in this pivoting of perspective, will be Lacan . We will refer, more specifically, to
his Television, in which he presents both his critique of politics as a way out of capitalism and the task of psychoanalysis in a universe
governed by the capitalist discourse: “The more saints, the more laughter; that’s my principle, to wit, the way out of capitalist
discourse – which would not constitute progress, if it happens only for some.”12 12 J. Lacan, Television, trans. J. Mehlman, W.W.
Nortin & Co., New York 1990, p. 16. 101 politics and psychoanalysis in the times of the generalized metonymization However,
it
is important to consider how psychoanalysis can emerge as a way out of the capitalist discourse.
It is true that Lacan harboured some ambitions concerning the role of psychoanalysis in our
world, as he puts it. First of all it should be noted that to propose psychoanalysis as a solution ,
as the way out of capitalism, is only possible in the very specific circumstance of the collapse of the
belief in the emancipatory power of politics . In this rather enigmatic remark Lacan namely pinpoints one of the
greatest problems we face today: the growing impasses of the way out of capitalism, i.e. of a master’s discours that yields to the
generalized metonymization. At
the same time psychoanalisis, according to Lacan, faces a paradoxical
task: to find a way out of a discourse which is considered to be limitless, “eternal”, a discourse
which precisely knows of no way out. It could, then, be said that what Lacan proposes as a solution is animated by the
“passion of and for the real”: to invent, to force even, in the situation of an impasse, a radically new solution, that of an immanent
transcendence.
It seems that psychoanalysis, according to Lacan, is capable of succeeding there
where the politics of emancipation failed : to find a way out of the growing impasses of capitalism. Indeed, one
is tempted to say that psychoanalysis emerges as a tenant-lieu, place-holder of the impossible,
absent emancipatory politics. Or to be even more precise: psychoanalysis is a new name for
the politics of emancipation – with all the consequences which follow from this substitution .
Ego Alt Solvency
Repression is the best way to avoid unconscious influences in this and other
instances of decision making
Sifferlin 14 (Alexandra Sifferlin – Alexandra Sifferlin is a writer for TIME. She covers public health issues
including infectious and chronic disease, big ideas in medicine, and breaking news. – “Study: Freud Was Wrong About
Repressed Memories” – Time – March 9, 2014 – http://time.com/30216/study-repressing-memories-wont-
unconsciously-influence-behavior/)
But according to a study published in the journal PNAS, suppressing unwanted memories
actually interferes with the brain’s activity and reduces the likelihood that the event unconsciously
influences a person’s behavior . Researchers from the Medical Research Council (MRC) Cognition and Brain Sciences
Unit and the University of Cambridge’s Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute (BCNI) had participants learn a variety of
picture-word pairs while hooked up to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that monitored their brain activity. After
learning the picture-word pairs, the
participants were asked to either think of the image that
corresponded to a word or to suppress the memory of the image and its corresponding word .
Next, participants were asked to identify objects that were visually distorted and displayed for a brief amount of time.
Participants had a harder time identifying the objects they had suppressed compared with those
they had not. Brain imaging showed that suppressing memories of the objects interfered with activity in the brain’s
visual areas, leading researchers to conclude an “out of sight, out of mind” effect. The suppressed
memory , according to the brain imaging, doesn’t remain intact, making it less likely that it affects our
behavior in a Freudian way . If suppressing traumatic memories as a coping mechanism can
actually help, these findings may be able to help psychologists treat patients with traumatic
memories, and could contribute to further research on issues like intrusive memories, which are
common among people suffering disorders like PTSD .
Repression is necessary to maintain equilibrium and repress the violent and

inappropriate thoughts of the id, this is essential to navigate through life
Stevenson 1 (David B. Stevenson – Writes for Brown University specializing in pscyhology – “repression” – The
Victorian Web – February 1, 2001 – http://www.victorianweb.org/science/freud/repression.html)
Repression , a fundamental, usually unconscious function of the ego, maintains equilibrium in
the individual by repressing inappropriate, unfeasible, or guilt-causing urges, memories and
wishes (all usually of the id ) to the level of the unconscious, where they will be out of sight, if not
out of mind. The ability to repress dangerous or unsettling thoughts turns out to be vital to
the individual's ability to negotiate his way through life . If a child had never learned to repress the urge to
steal his sister's ice cream cone, for example, he would have spent years in punishment. If the boss at work cannot
repress her sexual desire for her secretary, she will be unable to function, her mind consumed
by illicit, inappropriate and impossible urges. Only the timely repression of harmful impulses
and urges gives the individual the capacity to move on and meet the demands of an ever-
changing world.
Repression by the Ego is key to make disturbing and threatening impulses in

our conscious decision making
PhD part time at The University of Manchester. – “Defense Mechanisms” – Simply Psychology – February 24, 2011 –
http://www.simplypsychology.org/defense-mechanisms.html
This was the first defense mechanism that Freud discovered, and arguably the most
important. Repression is an unconscious mechanism employed by the ego to keep disturbing
or threatening thoughts from becoming conscious . Thoughts that are often repressed are those that would
result in feelings of guilt from the superego. For example, in the Oedipus complex aggressive thoughts
about the same sex parents are repressed
PIC Solvency
The alternative is to have a reprogramming of the unconscious mind to create a
pathway to conscious thinking through meditation and then do the plan
Anando 10 (Anando – Anando is one of the women in the ASHA Foundation, UK, list of 240 "influential,
inspiring women from all walks of life and from around the world who are outstanding in their fields." She has over 30
years experience of practicing and working with Osho meditations and transformative techniques. Her workshops have
taken her to every corner of the world, to work with people of all nationalities. Anando worked closely with Osho for
many years, and her loving joyful and direct approach allows people to quickly realise their own potential for inner
bliss and joy. Anando was formerly a lawyer and business manager, so she understands well the tensions and stresses
involved in everyday life – “It's now a proven fact - Your unconscious mind is running your life!” – Life Trainings –
November 26, 2010 – http://www.lifetrainings.com/Your-unconscious-mind-is-running-you-life.html)
So… how to get out of this endless cycle of old programs and start to be more in the conscious
mind? Because of the power of the unconscious mind (one million times more powerful than the conscious mind), and the
amount of time it is running us (95 – 99%), Lipton says it takes a lot more than positive thinking to get out of
it. Because as soon as you forget to be conscious, the unconscious is back in charge again. Sound familiar? He suggests
meditation, hypnotherapy or other reprogramming approaches . And in fact, in the parallel field of neuroscience, a
number of experiments with Buddhist meditators have shown that people can actually change
their brain structure (regardless of their age) by creating new neural pathways just by
conscious thinking . The same research also shows, by the way, that people who meditate regularly have
higher immunity and lower blood pressure, among other health benefits.
Meditation is key to reprogram the negativity of the unconscious

Cunningham 4/29/15 (Lori Cunningham – Music Health Specialist – “3 Simple Brain Hacks to Reprogram
Your Thinking” – Lori Cunningham – April 29, 2015 – http://musichealthcoach.com/3-simple-brain-hacks-to-
reprogram-your-thinking/)
Since we’ve been storing so much information in our subconscious since the beginning of our
existence, we have both negative and positive beliefs. The key to changing negative patterns is
to change negative beliefs, especially with the subconscious mind ! These negative beliefs
keep on influencing your behavior and life experiences, keeping you in a viscous cycle that continually repeats,
unless you literally reprogram them . We act on our thoughts and emotions. Period. So if you want to
change anything,your health, your business, your relationships, you first have to change your
thinking and emotional state, making your two minds get along ! But how exactly do you do this ?
The key is to gain access to your subconscious mind . When you’re awake and alert, you’re not as receptive to
new ideas and ways of doing things, especially if most of the “data” in your mind is telling you otherwise. There are three simple
Meditation: Meditation helps you get into an altered
brain hacks to reprogram your subconscious mind:
state of consciousness, which helps you have better access to your subconscious mind. This
creates the best environment for changing old, limiting programming . If you’re in an altered
state of consciousness, like what meditation does, it allows new ideas to be accepted easier .
These meditative states allows positive thinking to take root and it literally bypasses the
conscious mind and accesses your subconscious mind. Music is an important aspect of meditation because it
creates more harmony within many different aspects of your physical brain and body, gives you a calming energy, and helps create
positive attitude thoughts. Music helps you change your state of consciousness very quickly
AT:
AT: Freud is Wrong
Freud was right about the unconscious
Dvorsky 13 – YOUR AUTHOR (George Dvorsky – George P. Dvorsky is a Canadian bioethicist,
transhumanist, and futurist. He is a contributing editor at io9 and producer of the Sentient Developments – “Why Freud
Still Matters, When He Was Wrong About Almost Everything” – IO9 – October 17, 2013 – http://io9.com/why-freud-
still-matters-when-he-was-wrong-about-almost-1055800815)
The Unconscious Mind: Okay, sure, Freud’s got some problems. But he also nailed a few things .
For example, Freud was startlingly correct in his assertion that we are not masters of our own
mind. He showed that human experience, thought, and deeds are determined not by our
conscious rationality, but by irrational forces outside our conscious awareness and control —
forces that could be understood and controlled by an extensive therapeutic process he called psychoanalysis. Freud didn’t
discover the unconscious mind, of course . That distinction goes to French psychiatrist Pierre Janet. Freud was also
influenced by his professor Jean Martin Charcot, a famed neurologist who dabbled in hypnosis. But it was Freud who took
the concept to the next level by breaking it down even further — and by applying it to
psychotherapy and “free associating,” where patients would openly talk about their feelings and
experiences regardless of how irrelevant, absurd, or upsetting it sounded . Today, very few would
argue against the idea of the unconscious mind . Freud’s claim for the central role of the
unconscious mind in human actions was recently explored by experimental psychologists in a
collection of essays called Frontiers of Consciousness. For sure, we now know that the unconscious brain doesn’t
exist or function in the way that Freud suggested — but we know it does in fact exist . The brain performs a
myriad number of tasks in the background , particularly in managing our autonomous bodily processes, the way it
affects our conscious, cognitive functioning, and how we interpret our surroundings.
Freud was right about repression

Dvorsky 13 – YOUR AUTHOR (George Dvorsky – George P. Dvorsky is a Canadian bioethicist,
transhumanist, and futurist. He is a contributing editor at io9 and producer of the Sentient Developments – “Why Freud
Still Matters, When He Was Wrong About Almost Everything” – IO9 – October 17, 2013 – http://io9.com/why-freud-
still-matters-when-he-was-wrong-about-almost-1055800815)
Freud’s take on memories continues to be interesting — particularly suppressed memories . We
now know that memories are selective, and that they’re constantly being rewritten each time
they’re recalled. People retain memories of events not as they happened, but rather in the way they are active when
memories are being reformed. And Freud's take on defense mechanisms still holds relevance . Few people, including
psychologists, would deny that we all too regularly employ such defenses as denial,
repression , projection, intellectualization, and rationalization . The same can be said for his ideas on
transference and catharsis. What’s more, as regards Oedipal and Electra issues, few would deny that there’s at least some modicum
of truth to the idea that many of us carry so-called mommy and daddy issues. Human
psychology is a very complex
and fuzzy thing, and it’s not always easy for science to definitively prove or compartmentalize
something that just feels right. And though we no longer subscribe to Freudian dream interpretation, some of our
dreams are so blatantly driven by our conscious and subconscious desires and fears that it’s obvious Freud was onto something. To
deny this would be hallucinatory, ludicrous — and completely unfair to his legacy.
Even if Freud isn’t 100% accurate, no psychologist is – he got the basic structure
right
Gullo 12 (Matthew Gullo – I am a clinical psychologist working in the addiction field. Currently, I am employed as
a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Early Career Fellow at the Centre for Youth Substance
Abuse Research, University of Queensland. My research focuses primarily on cognitive and neuropsychological
mechanisms underlying adolescent substance abuse, particularly those related to impulse control, decision-making, and
personality. I also maintain my clinical practice as a Visiting Clinical Psychologist at the Alcohol and Drug Assessment
Unit, Princess Alexandra Hospital. – “A dangerous method? In defence of Freud’s psychoanalysis” – The Coversation
– March 27, 2012 – http://theconversation.com/a-dangerous-method-in-defence-of-freuds-psychoanalysis-5989)
Still, in
many ways, Freud got the basic structure right 100 years ago , even after he abandoned
neurobiology. We should certainly keep this in mind when watching Cronenberg’s film, and whenever we catch ourselves
smirking at concepts such as penis envy and the Oedipus complex. As Freud himself said: “You must not judge too
harshly a first attempt at giving a pictorial representation of something so intangible as psychical
processes.”
Aff Answers
Perms
Perm VS. Ego Alt
Perm do the plan and reject the urges of the id in all other instances
Perm VS. State 1NC Alt
Perm do the plan then the alt
Perm VS. PIC
Perm do the plan then meditate to open up pathways to our conscious and
expel negativity – solves serial policy failure
They’re Wrong
Freud is wrong
Freud couldn’t be more wrong – his work is out dated and NONE OF IT has been
proven, INCLUDING the Id
Dvorsky 13 (George Dvorsky – George P. Dvorsky is a Canadian bioethicist, transhumanist, and futurist. He is a
contributing editor at io9 and producer of the Sentient Developments – “Why Freud Still Matters, When He Was
Wrong About Almost Everything” – IO9 – October 17, 2013 – http://io9.com/why-freud-still-matters-when-he-was-
wrong-about-almost-1055800815)
But his legacy is a shaky one. Freud has, for the most part, fallen completely out of favor in academia.
Virtually no institution in any discipline would dare use him as a credible source. In 1996,
Psychological Science reached the conclusion that “[T]here is literally nothing to be said, scientifically or therapeutically, to the
advantage of the entire Freudian system or any of its component dogmas." As
a research paradigm, it’s pretty much
dead. Many of Freud’s methodologies, techniques, and conclusions have been put into question.
Moreover, his theories have even proved damaging — and even dangerous — to certain
segments of the population . His perspectives on female sexuality and homosexuality are reviled, causing many feminists
to refer to him by a different kind of ‘F’ word. Some even argue that his name should be spelled “Fraud”
and not Freud . “Freud is truly in a class of his own,” writes Todd Dufresne, an outspoken critic. “ Arguably
no other notable figure in history was so fantastically wrong about nearly
every important thing he had to say . But, luckily for him, academics have been — and
still are — infinitely creative in their efforts to whitewash his errors , even as lay readers grow
increasingly dumbfounded by the entire mess.” Without a doubt, many of these criticisms and
valid and totally justified . But a renewed look at his legacy shows that Freud’s contribution is far from over — both in
terms of his influence on culture and science. Yes, even for a guy who died in 1939, his work is incredibly out
of date. We’ve learned much about the human brain and the way our psychologies work since
that time — but he got the ball rolling. Much of today’s work is still predicated on many of his original insights. Some areas
of inquiry have been refined and expanded, while others abandoned and dismissed altogether in
favor of new theories. This is good. This is how science advances. Before we take a look at where Freud was right, let’s
consider where he went wrong. Freudian Fallacies: The primary trouble with Freud is that , while his
ideas appear intriguing and even common sensical, there’s very little empirical evidence to back
them up. Modern psychology has produced very little to substantiate many of his claims. For instance, there’s no
scientific evidence in support of the idea that boys lust after their mothers and hate their
fathers. He was totally, utterly wrong about gender. And his notion of “penis envy” is now both laughable and tragic. There’s
no proof of the id, ego, or superego . There’s also no evidence to support the notion that human development
proceeds through oral, anal, phallic, and genital stages. Nor that the interference, or arresting, of these stages
leads to specific developmental manifestations .
Lacan is wrong
**this applies to the state 1NC
Lacan was influenced by Freud

Books 12 (2012 Books – Literary analysis of books created in 2012 – “3.2 Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism: An
Overview” – 2012 Books – December 20, 2012 – http://2012books.lardbucket.org/books/creating-literary-analysis/s07-
02-psychoanalytic-literary-critic.html)
Psychoanalytical literary criticism, on one level, concerns itself with dreams, for dreams are a reflection of the unconscious psychological states of
dreamers. Freud, for example, contends that dreams are “the guardians of sleep” where they become “disguised fulfillments of repressed
wishes.”Sigmund Freud.The Interpretation of Dreams in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay, (New York: Norton, 1989). To Freud, dreams are the “royal
Jacques
road” to the personal unconscious of the dreamer and have a direct relation to literature, which often has the structure of a dream.
Lacan, a disciple of Freud, was influenced by Freud’s psychoanalytical theories and contended
that dreams mirrored our unconscious and reflected the way we use language ; dreams, therefore,
operate like language, having their own rhetorical qualities. Another Freud disciple, Carl Jung, eventually rejected Freud’s theory that dreams are
manifestations of the personal unconsciousness, claiming, instead, that they reflect archetypes that tap into the “collective unconsciousness” of all
humanity.Sigmund Freud. The Interpretation of Dreams in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay, (New York: Norton, 1989).
Freud couldn’t be more wrong – his work is out dated and NONE OF IT has been
proven, INCLUDING the Id
Dvorsky 13 (George Dvorsky – George P. Dvorsky is a Canadian bioethicist, transhumanist, and futurist. He is a
contributing editor at io9 and producer of the Sentient Developments – “Why Freud Still Matters, When He Was
Wrong About Almost Everything” – IO9 – October 17, 2013 – http://io9.com/why-freud-still-matters-when-he-was-
wrong-about-almost-1055800815)
But his legacy is a shaky one. Freud has, for the most part, fallen completely out of favor in academia.
Virtually no institution in any discipline would dare use him as a credible source. In 1996,
Psychological Science reached the conclusion that “[T]here is literally nothing to be said, scientifically or therapeutically, to the
advantage of the entire Freudian system or any of its component dogmas." As
a research paradigm, it’s pretty much
dead. Many of Freud’s methodologies, techniques, and conclusions have been put into question.
Moreover, his theories have even proved damaging — and even dangerous — to certain
segments of the population . His perspectives on female sexuality and homosexuality are reviled, causing many feminists
to refer to him by a different kind of ‘F’ word. Some even argue that his name should be spelled “Fraud”
and not Freud . “Freud is truly in a class of his own,” writes Todd Dufresne, an outspoken critic. “ Arguably
no other notable figure in history was so fantastically wrong about nearly
every important thing he had to say . But, luckily for him, academics have been — and
still are — infinitely creative in their efforts to whitewash his errors , even as lay readers grow
increasingly dumbfounded by the entire mess.” Without a doubt, many of these criticisms and
valid and totally justified . But a renewed look at his legacy shows that Freud’s contribution is far from over — both in
terms of his influence on culture and science. Yes, even for a guy who died in 1939, his work is incredibly out
of date. We’ve learned much about the human brain and the way our psychologies work since
that time — but he got the ball rolling. Much of today’s work is still predicated on many of his original insights. Some areas
of inquiry have been refined and expanded, while others abandoned and dismissed altogether in
favor of new theories. This is good. This is how science advances. Before we take a look at where Freud was right, let’s
consider where he went wrong. Freudian Fallacies: The primary trouble with Freud is that , while his
ideas appear intriguing and even common sensical, there’s very little empirical evidence to back
them up. Modern psychology has produced very little to substantiate many of his claims. For instance, there’s no
scientific evidence in support of the idea that boys lust after their mothers and hate their
fathers. He was totally, utterly wrong about gender. And his notion of “penis envy” is now both laughable and tragic. There’s
no proof of the id, ego, or superego . There’s also no evidence to support the notion that human development
proceeds through oral, anal, phallic, and genital stages. Nor that the interference, or arresting, of these stages
leads to specific developmental manifestations .
Psychoanalysis Fails
Psychoanalysis has no scientific data and isn’t effective – fails
Brace 6 (Robin A. Brace – Robin Brace has a full theology degree including study of both Hebrew and Greek. He
and his wife are Bible-believing Christians, yet they are non-affiliated and independent – “The Utter Failure of the
19th/20th Century Atheistic Icons SIGMUND FREUD (1856 - 1939) The Dismal Failure of Freud's Theory of
Psychoanalysis; Facing the Truth of a Failed "Science"” – UK Apologetics – March 12, 2006 –
http://www.ukapologetics.net/22truthaboutfreud.html)
Increasingly, Freud's theories are seen as being very much his own theories and no real basis for
a deeper scientific understanding of the human mind . A. Grünbaum in the Précis of The Foundations of
Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, (9, 217-284, 1986) plainly believes that the reasoning
on which Freud based his entire psychoanalytic theory was "fundamentally flawed , even if the
validity of his clinical evidence were not in question" but that "the clinical data are themselves suspect; more
often than not, they may be the patient's responses to the suggestions and expectations of the analyst" (p. 220). So Grünbaum
concludes that in order for psychoanalytic hypotheses to be validated in the future, data must
be obtained from extraclinical studies rather than from data obtained in a clinical setting (p. 228).
In other words, Grünbaum and other critics, including Colby, assert that Freud's psychoanalysis is seriously lacking
in empirical data (Colby, K. M. An Introduction to Psychoanalytic Research. p 54, New York: Basic, 1960). Wide areas of
Freud's teaching are now questioned but perhaps few areas as strongly as his belief that sexual
repression (of various sorts) is a prime reason for psychological problems later in one's life . In An Outline
of Psychoanalysis Freud contended that sexual life begins with manifestations which start to present themselves in early childhood
(p. 22-25). He proposes four main phases in sexual development which are a. The oral phase. b. The sadistic-anal phase. c. The
phallic phase. d.The genital phase. Freud suggests that each phase is characterized by specific occurrences. During the oral phase,
the individual places emphasis on providing satisfaction for the needs of the mouth, which emerges as the first erotogenic zone (p.
24). During the sadistic-anal phase, satisfaction is sought through aggression and in the excretory function. During the phallic phase,
the young boy enters the Oedipus phase where he fears his father and castration while simultaneously fantasizing about sexual
relations with his mother (p. 25). The young girl, in contrast, enters the Electra phase, where she experiences penis envy, which
often culminates in her turning away from sexual life altogether. Following the phallic phase is a period of latency, in which sexual
development comes to a halt (p. 23). Finally, in the genital phase, the sexual function is completely organized and the coordination
of sexual urge towards pleasure is completed. Errors occurring in the development of the sexual function result in homosexuality
and sexual perversions, according to Freud (p. 27). However, truthfully
all of this is a mere theory which was not
backed up with any exhaustive evidence. But more seriously these "phases" are not according to the experiences of
thousands of people. Freud tended to come to firm conclusions and his later devotees came to look
upon some of his conclusions as "science" but - as is increasingly being realised - none of this is
science of any real sort. Moreover, to take the whole bulk of his theories (even apart from his
sexual repression theory), any significant or meaningful scientific data is rarely to be found , As
John F. Kihlstrom has so accurately pointed out, 'Freud's cultural influence is based, at least implicitly, on the premise that his theory
is scientifically valid. But from
a scientific point of view, classical Freudian psychoanalysis is dead as
both a theory of the mind and a mode of therapy (Crews, 1998; Macmillan, 1996). No empirical evidence
supports any specific proposition of psychoanalytic theory , such as the idea that development proceeds
through oral, anal, phallic, and genital stages, or that little boys lust after their mothers and hate and
fear their fathers. No empirical evidence indicates that psychoanalysis is more effective, or
more efficient, than other forms of psychotherapy , such as systematic desensitization or assertiveness training.
No empirical evidence indicates the mechanisms by which psychoanalysis achieves its effects,
such as they are, are those specifically predicated on the theory, such as transference and
catharsis.'
Psychoanalysis fails and is unethical – new advances in psychology are more
preferable
Clemens 6 (Justin Clemens – Justin Clemens is an Australian academic known for his work on Alain Badiou,
psychoanalysis, European philosophy, and contemporary Australian art and literature – “Only Psychoanalysis Can
Make You Really Unhappy” – Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Vol 1, No 2 –
January 23, 2006 – http://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/22/44)
Psychoanalysis can no longer be considered a serious epistemological, medical or political force,
now that “Big Pharma,” the DSM-IV, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and rigorous cost-efficiency
exigencies determine mental health delivery in the first world. This doesn’t just mean that there won’t be
any more free analyses for poor people, but marks a decisive shift in the conception, development and provision of psychological
care: belief in the transformative and therapeutic powers of talk now appears thoroughly archaic if not simply deluded. Why talk—
or, indeed, listen—when you can get yourself irradiated, do your six sessions of CBT homework, and pop pills? Rather than
listening to patients, why not “listen to Prozac,” which undoubtedly has much happier things to
say and cheerier news to convey than sufferers themselves. And rather than relying upon such
theoretical constructs as the “Oedipal complex” or “the anal character,” the elementary
particles of our acronymic mental universe have morphed into SSRIs, MRIs, and PETs . As for
subjectivity, who needs it when you can see people’s brains grinding away in full living colour on a
plasma TV? After all, the effects of brain lesions caused by accident or disease—some of which, until recently, could only be
revealed by autopsy, too late for the sufferers—can now be watched on-screen. Changes in electrical conductance, potentials and
magnetic fields in the brain can be registered, monitored, recorded and analysed with unprecedented accuracy in real time.
Developments in molecular neurobiology permit the “knock-out” of particular genes in order to
test physical and psychological consequences. What these new technologies enable is not only
the visualization of previously invisible phenomena, nor just their depiction in greater detail, nor
simply their recording with greater accuracy than previously—although all of this is the case . Nor
is it just a quantum leap in the capacity to correlate results in one discipline with those in another, to bring together disparate
research from all over the globe with an unprecedented rapidity. Rather, for the first time, brain, mind and behaviour can be studied
simultaneously, in situ. It is this synchronisation of the study of brain, consciousness and activity that conditions the most exciting
developments. As Antonio Damasio puts it, “The organism’s private mind, the organism’s public behavior, and its hidden brain can
thus be joined in the adventure of theory, and out of the adventure come hypotheses that can be tested experimentally, judged on
their merits, and subsequently endorsed, rejected, or modified.”[1] The
discoveries these technologies have
permitted about the development, structure, function and activity of the brain have rendered
older hypotheses obsolete, as they have suggested radical new ones. When individual
psychological disturbances or singular behaviours start being traced to brain lesions or to
mutant genes, we are no longer in a world of humanistic encouragement, but in the regime of
biological determinism. As Mark Solms notes, “The modern neuroscientific quest to solve the mystery
of consciousness…involves an attitude to human subjectivity directly antithetical to the
psychoanalytic attitude.”[2] Is it finally goodbye to psychoanalysis, then? The problem remains that the
actual science being done by researchers such as Damasio doesn’t always support the claims made for this science by the
dominating triumvirate of Technology, Capitalism and Government. As ever, in our interminably post-Cartesian universe, the real
problem remains how to suture nature to culture, brain to mind, theory and practice. Sure,
one might even admit
there’s no coherent formulation of the mind-body problem, and that mind should be considered
an emergent property of brains—but there’s still no way for science to give any plausible
resolution of the qualia problem.[3] In principle, it seems unlikely that neuroscience will be legitimately able to ascribe
psychological features to the brain.[4] And it’s not so much an issue of explaining how the new drugs work—as explaining away why
they don’t. Ifpsychoanalysis, then, is to have a future, it is perhaps going to be by attending to
these symptomatic gaps in the scientific evidence, and by building its precarious house upon the
opacities of reason. But perhaps it can hope for even more? This may be possible, too, as such eminent
researchers as Solms and Eric Kandel testify. The question still needs to be asked: what scope is there for
psychoanalysis as an ethical practice?
AT: Impact
Unconscious Mind = Good Decisions
Turn – the unconscious mind makes the BEST decisions and the conscious mind
makes the worst, the alt creates serial policy failure
Sherwood 8 (Jonathan Sherwood – Over 20 years of Non-Profit and Governmental Experience, with specialties
in Community Planning and Development; Supportive Housing Program Design; Grant Management and Compliance;
Non-Profit Organizational Development and Management; Community Needs Assessment; Program Evaluation – “Our
Unconscious Brain Makes the Best Decisions Possible” – University of Rochester – December 26, 2008 –
http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=3295)
Researchers at the University of Rochester have shown that the human brain—once thought to
be a seriously flawed decision maker—is actually hard-wired to allow us to make the best
decisions possible with the information we are given. The findings are published in today's issue of the
journal Neuron. Neuroscientists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky received a 2002 Nobel Prize for their 1979 research that
argued humans rarely make rational decisions. Since then, this has become conventional wisdom among
cognition researchers. Contrary to Kahnneman and Tversky's research, Alex Pouget, associate professor of
brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, has shown that people do indeed
make optimal decisions—but only when their unconscious brain makes the choice. "A lot of
the early work in this field was on conscious decision making, but most of the decisions you
make aren't based on conscious reasoning," says Pouget. "You don't consciously decide to stop at
a red light or steer around an obstacle in the road. Once we started looking at the decisions
our brains make without our knowledge, we found that they almost always reach the right
decision , given the information they had to work with." Pouget says that Kahneman's approach was to tell a
subject that there was a certain percent chance that one of two choices in a test was "right." This meant a person had to consciously
compute the percentages to get a right answer—something few people could do accurately. Pouget has been
demonstrating for years that certain aspects of human cognition are carried out with
surprising accuracy . He has employed what he describes as a very simple unconscious-decision
test. A series of dots appears on a computer screen, most of which are moving in random directions. A controlled number
of these dots are purposely moving uniformly in the same direction, and the test subject simply
has to say whether he believes those dots are moving to the left or right . The longer the subject watches
the dots, the more evidence he accumulates and the more sure he becomes of the dots' motion. Subjects in this test
performed exactly as if their brains were subconsciously gathering information before reaching
a confidence threshold, which was then reported to the conscious mind as a definite, sure
answer. The subjects, however, were never aware of the complex computations going on,
instead they simply "realized" suddenly that the dots were moving in one direction or another.
The characteristics of the underlying computation fit with Pouget's extensive earlier work that suggested the human brain is wired
naturally to perform calculations of this kind. "We've been developing and strengthening this hypothesis for years—how the brain
represents probability distributions," says Pouget. "We knew the results of this kind of test fit perfectly with our ideas, but we had to
devise a way to see the neurons in action. We
wanted to see if, in fact, humans are really good decision
makers after all, just not quite so good at doing it consciously . Kahneman explicitly told his subjects what
the chances were, but we let people's unconscious mind work it out. It's weird, but people rarely
make optimal decisions when they are told the percentages up front."
AT: Alt
Otherization
Alt can’t result in the aff and cedes the political – psychoanalysis can’t translate
into politics
Layton 12 (Lynne Layton – Ph.D. is Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychology, Harvard Medical School. She has
taught courses on women and popular culture and on culture and psychoanalysis for Harvard’s “Committee on Degrees
in Women’s Studies” and “Committee on Degrees in Social Studies”. Currently, she teaches at the Massachusetts
Institute for Psychoanalysis. She is the author of Who’s That Girl? Who’s That Boy? Clinical Practice Meets
Postmodern Gender Theory (Analytic Press, 2004), co-editor, with Susan Fairfield and Carolyn Stack, of Bringing the
Plague. Toward a Postmodern Psychoanalysis (Other Press, 2002), and co-editor, with Nancy Caro Hollander and
Susan Gutwill of Psychoanalysis, Class and Politics: Encounters in the Clinical Setting (Routledge, 2006). She is co-
editor of the journal Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society and associate editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality. She
has a private practice in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in Brookline, Ma. – “Psychoanalysis And Politics:
Historicising Subjectivity” – NCBI – December 14, 2012 – http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3653236/)
In “normalising” dependency and interdependence as part of what it means to be human , and in
critiquing versions of autonomy that deny an embeddedness in relation , contemporary
psychoanalytic theory (particularly relational analytic theory and all those theories indebted to the Hungarian and British
Independent traditions lauded by Young-Bruehl) offers something of a counter-discourse to hegemonic neoliberal discourses. All of
the psychoanalytic theories of which I am aware certainly counter what Binkley describes as the versions of subjectivity promoted in
neoliberal discourses, that is, theories and practices that have no use for looking within for understanding suffering, for
thinking
about an individual's problems in the context of relationships , or for any notion of unconscious
process that divides the self against the self . Where psychoanalysis certainly falls short, however, is
in its continued separation of the psychic from the social, its general refusal to understand
what people suffer from as having something to do with societal conditions . So I do believe in the
importance of Young-Bruehl's project to question and think historically about what psychoanalytic theories promote as the good . I
do not think that the practices promoted by psychoanalysis are inherently democratic ,
precisely because of the way the social is dissociated from conceptualisations of subjectivity .
One effect of the way psychoanalysis separates the psychic and the social is that psychoanalysts
today , in the US at least, have little impact on public policy . But the marginalisation of psychoanalysis is not the
fault of psychoanalytic theory alone: It is also in no small measure due to the dominance of neoliberal discourses. Perhaps precisely
because psychoanalysis has lost its hegemony and become a minority discourse , we find current
trends in psychoanalysis that do connect with progressive politics , trends that likely also grew out of the
progressive politics of the 60s, a time in which many of our current theorists came of age. Among these trends, I would include
the radical questioning and re-thinking of the authority of the analyst and the awareness of the
effect of the analyst's unconscious on treatments (e.g., Mitchell, 1997[24]; Hoffman, 1998[11]); re-
formulations of theory that acknowledge the power inequities inherent in many social norms
and that thus work to challenge power and depathologise non-normative ways of being ; and a
commitment, in some quarters at least, to think about the ways that politics enter the clinic (Samuels, 2001[26];
Layton et al., 2006[23]).
Ego Alt
Alt can’t result in the aff and cedes the political – psychoanalysis Cant’t
translate into politics
thinking
commitment, in some quarters at least, to think about the ways that politics enter the
Repression of the id leads to unimaginable consequences

Stevenson 1 (David B. Stevenson – Writes for Brown University specializing in pscyhology – “repression” – The
Victorian Web – February 1, 2001 – http://www.victorianweb.org/science/freud/repression.html)
Although repression thus functions as a vital coping tool, it also can cause great anguish. A
repressed urge of the id , though it may be in the unconscious, still affects the actions and
thoughts of the individual . Indeed, conflicting urges or painful memories thus repressed have the
potential to cause great anxiety, though the individual will not understand what causes it . As the
repressed items teem and surge beneath the conscious surface, they sap vital psychic energy and constantly force the individual to
maintain lines of defense mechanisms against his own unconscious. But as the urges boil up, the individual
eventually will find release , through some external displacement, displaced emotion, or other
mechanism. This release, coming as it does from uncontrollable and often unfathomable
depths, can cause unpredictable, sometimes unimaginable reactions: The wife who has
repressed her anger at her husband for fifteen years suddenly lights him and his bed on fire ;
the frustrated worker smashes equipment while on the job one afternoon. The repression causes anxiety,
discomfort, even neurosis; the cathartic release causes massive emotional and often physical
damage
The alt causes crime – constant repression of the Id creates an overly harsh ego,
causing a buildup of negative thoughts and urges, resulting in people lashing
out and regression
O’Connor 9 (Tom O’Connor – Tom O’ Connor who was the Executive Director of the California Board of
Psychology from 1987 to 2005 spoke on the history of professional regulation in his state. – “PSYCHOLOGICAL
CRIMINOLOGY” – www.drtomoconnor.com – Aug 27, 2009 - http://www.drtomoconnor.com/1060/1060lect03a.htm)
the basic cause of crime is over socialization, leading to an overly harsh
Using this id-ego-superego model,
superego, which represses the id so harshly that pressure builds up in the id and there is an
explosion of acting-out behavior . This pressure build-up in the id contains both silenced and
repressed urges as well as a kind of frustration called guilt for impulsive actions which did
manage to slip out . Guilt is a very common problem because of all the urges and drives coming
from the id and all the prohibitions and codes in the superego. There are a variety of ways an individual
handles guilt, and these are called defense mechanisms (see table for complete list). Sublimation Desires of the id are diverted to
Repression: Desires of the id are stuffed back into subconscious
healthy outlets approved by the superego
and the person denies they exist or engages in Freudian slips Regression: Desires of the id are
followed impulsively to escape from hearing the superego (reality) Denial/Intellectualization Anxiety about
following desires of the id goes unacknowledged or treated unemotionally Projection Prohibitions of the superego are applied as
standard for judging others and not oneself Fixation Prohibitions of the superego are so strong that the person develops
fears/phobias Undoing Superego is so strong that the person continually makes amends or apologies for what they do Reaction
formation Both id and superego are so strong that person does the opposite of both, sometimes identifying with aggressors
Displacement Both id and superego are so strong and ego is so weak that person settles for second best or any available substitute
(something better than nothing) Of
the defense mechanisms, psychoanalysts have put forward displacement as
their number one choice for explaining crime . A few criminologists have explored the others, most notably, reaction
formation, but the list remains largely unexhausted because, essentially, the ideas are untestable.
Turn – repression leads to more irrational decision-making. The Alt recreates

their impact
Messerly 14 (John G. Messerly – John G. Messerly is an Affiliate Scholar of the IEET. He received his PhD in
philosophy from St. Louis University in 1992. He was a member of the faculty of both the philosophy and computer
science departments for many years at the University of Texas at Austin, where he taught courses on the ethical and
philosophical implications of emerging technologies. He is the author of books on ethical theory, evolutionary
philosophy, and the meaning of life, as well as dozens of articles, mostly on transhumanist themes. He is also an
Affiliate Member of the Evolution, Complexity, and Cognition Group (localized at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel), and
an adjunct professor of philosophy at Seattle University. – “Theories of Human Nature: Chapter 17 – Freud – Part 1” –
The Meaning of Life – November 18, 2014 – http://reasonandmeaning.com/2014/11/18/theories-of-human-nature-
chapter-16-freud-part-1/)
Freud believed that repression was a primary cause of neuroticism. If someone experiences drives or desires (or
beliefs) that conflict with standards or norms they are supposed to adhere to, then such feelings are often
repressed. Repression is a defense mechanism used to avoid mental conflict. But repression ultimately
doesn’t work, for the desires or drives remain in the unconscious exerting their influence. They
may lead to irrational behaviors that we cannot control. Furthermore much of the blame for neuroses Freud
attributes to the social world. Parents and other parts of culture may make unrealistic demands upon people. In fact Freud
speculated that entire societies can be described as neurotic . While the exact meaning of this claim is
ambiguous, clearly some societies do better at providing the conditions in which individuals can
flourish.
PIC
Alt can’t result in the aff and cedes the political – psychoanalysis doesn’t
translate into politics
thinking
commitment, in some quarters at least, to think about the ways that politics enter the clinic (Samuels, 2001[26];
Layton et al., 2006[23]).
Meditation kills VTL – depression

Garden 7 (MARY GARDEN – a freelance journalist who lives in Queensland, Australia. She is the author of The
Serpent Rising––A Journey of Spiritual Seduction. – “Can Meditation Be Bad for You?” – The Humanist – August 22,
2007 – http://thehumanist.com/magazine/september-october-2007/features/can-meditation-be-bad-for-you)
The practice of meditation has been abused by people. They want immediate and quick results ,
just as they expect quick returns for everything they do in daily life . . . the mind must be brought under control in
slow degrees and one should not try to reach for the higher states without proper training. We
have heard of over-enthusiastic young men and women literally going out of their minds
because they adopted the wrong attitudes towards meditation . Dr. Lorin Roche, a meditation teacher,
says a major problem arises from the way meditators interpret Buddhist and Hindu teachings. He points out that meditation
techniques that encourage detachment from the world were intended only for monks and
nuns. He has spent thirty years doing interviews with people who meditate regularly and says
many were depressed . He says they have tried to detach themselves from their desires, their loves, and their passion.
“Depression is a natural result of loss, and if you internalize teachings that poison you against
the world, then of course you will become depressed.” The Dalai Lama has said that Eastern forms of meditation
have to be handled carefully: “Westerners who proceed too quickly to deep meditation should learn
more about Eastern traditions and get better training than they usually do. Otherwise, certain
physical or mental difficulties appear.”
Framing
High risk of extinction - doomsday argument
Nick Bostrom, 2012 ("A Primer on the Doomsday Argument" http://www.anthropic-
principle.com/?q=anthropic_principle/doomsday_argument)
Here is the doomsday argument. I will explain it in three steps: ¶ Step I¶ Imagine a universe that consists of one hundred cubicles. In
each cubicle, there is one person. Ninety of the cubicles are painted blue on the outside and the other ten are painted red. Each
person is asked to guess whether she is in a blue or a red cubicle. (And everybody knows all this.) ¶ Now, suppose you find yourself in
one of these cubicles. What color should you think it has? Since 90% of all people are in blue cubicles, and since you don’t have any
other relevant information, it seems you should think that with 90% probability you are in a blue cubicle. Let’s call this idea, that you
should reason as if you were a random sample from the set of all observers, the self-sampling assumption. ¶ Suppose everyone
accepts the self-sampling assumption and everyone has to bet on whether they are in a blue or red cubicle. Then 90% of all persons
will win their bets and 10% will lose. Suppose, on the other hand, that the self-sampling assumption is rejected and people think that
one is no more likely to be in a blue cubicle; so they bet by flipping a coin. Then, on average, 50% of the people will win and 50% will
lose. – The rational thing to do seems to be to accept the self-sampling assumption, at least in this case. ¶ Step II¶ Now we modify the
thought experiment a bit. We still have the hundred cubicles but this time they are not painted blue or red. Instead they are
numbered from 1 to 100. The numbers are painted on the outside. Then a fair coin is tossed (by God perhaps). If the coin falls heads,
one person is created in each cubicle. If the coin falls tails, then persons are only created in cubicles 1 through 10. ¶ You find yourself
in one of the cubicles and are asked to guess whether there are ten or one hundred people? Since the number was determined by
the flip of a fair coin, and since you haven’t seen how the coin fell and you don’t have any other relevant information, it seems you
should believe with 50% probability that it fell heads (and thus that there are a hundred people). ¶ Moreover, you can use the self-
sampling assumption to assess the conditional probability of a number between 1 and 10 being painted on your cubicle given how
the coin fell. For example, conditional on heads, the probability that the number on your cubicle is between 1 and 10 is 1/10, since
one out of ten people will then find themselves there. Conditional on tails, the probability that you are in number 1 through 10 is
one; for you then know that everybody is in one of those cubicles.¶ Suppose that you open the door and discover that you are in
cubicle number 7. Again you are asked, how did the coin fall? But now the probability is greater than 50% that it fell tails. For what
you are observing is given a higher probability on that hypothesis than on the hypothesis that it fell heads. The precise new
probability of tails can be calculated using Bayes’ theorem. It is approximately 91%. So after finding that you are in cubicle number 7,
you should think that with 91% probability there are only ten people.¶ Step III¶ The last step is to transpose these results to our
actual situation here on Earth. Let’s formulate
the following two rival hypotheses. Doom Early: humankind goes
extinct in the next century and the total number of humans that will have existed is, say, 200 billion.
Doom Late: humankind survives the next century and goes on to colonize the galaxy; the total number of
humans is, say, 200 trillion. To simplify the exposition we will consider only these hypotheses. (Using a more fine-
grained partition of the hypothesis space doesn’t change the principle although it would give more exact numerical
values.)¶ Doom Early corresponds to there only being ten people in the thought experiment of Step II. Doom Late corresponds to
there being one hundred people. Corresponding the numbers on the cubicles, we now have the "birth ranks" of human beings –
their positions in the human race. Corresponding to the prior probability (50%) of the coin falling heads or tails, we now have some
prior probability of Doom Soon or Doom Late. This will be based on our ordinary empirical estimates of potential threats to human
survival, such as nuclear or biological warfare, a meteorite destroying the plant, runaway greenhouse effect, self-replicating
nanomachines running amok, a breakdown of a metastable vacuum state due to high-energy particle experiments and so on
(presumably there are dangers that we haven’t yet thought of). Let’s say that based on such considerations, you think that
there is a 5% probability of Doom Soon. The exact number doesn’t matter for the structure of the
argument.¶ Finally, corresponding to finding you are in cubicle number 7 we have the fact that you find that your birth rank is
about 60 billion (that’s approximately how many humans have lived before you). Just as finding you are in cubicle 7 increased the
probability of the coin having fallen tails, so finding you are human number 60 billion gives you reason to
think that Doom Soon is more probable than you previously thought. Exactly how much more probable will depend
on the precise numbers you use. In the present example, the posterior probability of Doom Soon will be very
close to one. You can with near certainty rule out Doom Late.¶ *¶ That is the Doomsday argument in a nutshell. After hearing
about it, many people think they know what is wrong with it. But these objections tend to be mutually incompatible, and often they
hinge on some simple misunderstanding. Be sure to read the literature before feeling too confident that you have a refutation. ¶ If
the Doomsday argument is correct, what precisely does it show? It doesn’t show that there is no point trying to reduce threats to
human survival "because we’re doomed anyway". On the contrary, the Doomsday
argument could make such
efforts seem even more urgent. Working to reduce the risk that nanotechnology will be abused
to destroy intelligent life, for example, would decrease the prior probability of Doom Soon , and
this would reduce its posterior probability after taking the Doomsday argument into account; humankind’s life expectancy would go
up.
Future generations
Bostrom and Andersen 2012 (The Atlantic, "We're underestimating the Risk of Human
Extinction" http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/were-underestimating-
the-risk-of-human-extinction/253821/)
Well suppose you have a moral view that counts future people as being worth as much as present people. You might say that
fundamentally it doesn't matter whether someone exists at the current time or at some future
time, just as many people think that from a fundamental moral point of view, it doesn't matter where somebody is
spatially---somebody isn't automatically worth less because you move them to the moon or to Africa or something. A human life
is a human life. If you have that moral point of view that future generations matter in proportion to their
population numbers, then you get this very stark implication that existential risk mitigation has a much
higher utility than pretty much anything else that you could do . There are so many people that
could come into existence in the future if humanity survives this critical period of time ---we might
live for billions of years, our descendants might colonize billions of solar systems, and there could be billions and billions times more
people than exist currently. Therefore, even
a very small reduction in the probability of realizing this
enormous good will tend to outweigh even immense benefits like eliminating poverty or curing
malaria, which would be tremendous under ordinary standards.
High risk - new technologies and observer selection effect

Bostrom and Andersen 2012 (The Atlantic, "We're underestimating the Risk of Human
Extinction" http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/were-underestimating-
the-risk-of-human-extinction/253821/)Bostrom: Well, there's another line of thinking that's very similar to what
you're describing that speaks to how much weight we should give to our track record of survival. Human beings have been around
for roughly a hundred thousand years on this planet, so how much should that count in determining whether we're going to be
around another hundred thousand years? Now there are a number of different factors that come into that
discussion, the most important of which is whether there are going to be new kinds of risks that haven't
existed to this point in human history ---in particular risks of our own making, new technologies that we might develop
this century, those that might give us the means to create new kinds of weapons or new kinds of accidents. The fact that
we've been around for a hundred thousand years wouldn't give us much confidence with
respect to those risks. ¶ But, to the extent that one were focusing on risks from nature, from asteroid attacks or risks from
say vacuum decay in space itself, or something like that, one might ask what we can infer from this long track record of survival. And
one might think that any
species anywhere will think of themselves as having survived up to the
current time because of this observation selection effect . You don't observe yourself after you've
gone extinct, and so that complicates the analysis for certain kinds of risks.¶ A few years ago I wrote a paper
together with a physicist at MIT named Max Tegmark, where we looked at particular risks like vacuum decay, which is this
hypothetical phenomena where space decays into a lower energy state, which would then cause this bubble propagating at the
speed of light that would destroy all structures in its path, and would cause a catastrophe that no observer could ever see because it
would come at you at the speed of light, without warning. We were noting that it's
somewhat problematic to apply
our observations to develop a probability for something like that, given this observation
selection effect. But we found an indirect way of looking at evidence having to do with the formation date of our planet, and
comparing it to the formation date of other earthlike planets and then using that as a kind of indirect way of putting a bound on that
kind of risk. So that's another way in which observation selection effects become important when you're trying to estimate the odds
of humanity having a long future.
Reps Not First
Need to start with policy action
Rigakos and Law 9 (George, Assistant Professor of Law at Carleton University, and Alexandra, Carleton University, “Risk,
Realism and the Politics of Resistance”, Critical Sociology 35(1) 79-103)
McCann and March (1996: 244) next set out the ‘justification for treating everyday practices as significant’ suggested by the above
literature. First, the works studied are concerned with proving people are not ‘duped’ by their surroundings. At the level of
consciousness, subjects ‘are ironic, critical, realistic, even sophisticated’ (1996: 225). But McCann and March
remind us that earlier radical or Left theorists have made similar arguments without resorting to
stories of everyday resistance in order to do so. Second, everyday resistance on a discursive level is said
to reaffirm the subject’s dignity. But this too causes a problem for the authors because they: query why subversive
‘assertions of self ’ should bring dignity and psychological empowerment when they produce no greater material
benefits or changes in relational power … By standards of ‘realism’, … subjects given to avoidance and ‘lumping it’
may be the most sophisticated of all. (1996: 227) Thus, their criticism boils down to two main points. First, everyday
resistance fails to tell us any more about so-called false consciousness than was already
known among earlier Left theorists; and second, that a focus on discursive resistance ignores the role of
material conditions in helping to shape identity. Indeed, absent a broader political struggle or chance
at effective resistance it would seem to the authors that ‘powerlessness is learned out of the accumulated
experiences of futility and entrapment’ (1996: 228). A lamentable prospect, but nonetheless a source of closure for
the governmentality theorist. In his own meta-analysis of studies on resistance, Rubin (1996: 242) finds that ‘ discursive
practices that neither alter material conditions nor directly challenge broad structures are
nevertheless’ considered by the authors he examined ‘the stuff out of which power is made and remade’. If
this sounds familiar, it is because the authors studied by McCann, March and Rubin found their claims about everyday resistance on
the same understanding of power and government employed by postmodern theorists of risk. Arguing against celebrating
forms of resistance that fail to alter broader power relations or material conditions is , in part,
recognizing the continued ‘real’ existence of identifiable, powerful groups (classes). In
downplaying the worth of everyday forms of resistance (arguing that these acts are not as worthy of the label as
those acts which bring about lasting social change), Rubin appears to be taking issue with a locally focused
vision of power and identity that denies the possibility of opposing domination at the level of
‘constructs’ such as class. Rubin (1996: 242) makes another argument about celebratory accounts of everyday resistance that
bears consideration: [T]hese authors generally do not differentiate between practices that reproduce
power and those that alter power. [The former] might involve pressing that power to become more adept at
domination or to dominate differently, or it might mean precluding alternative acts that would more successfully challenge power. …
[I]tis necessary to do more than show that such discursive acts speak to , or engage with, power. It
must also be demonstrated that such acts add up to or engender broader changes. In other words, some
of the acts of
everyday resistance may in the real world, through their absorption into mechanisms of power,
reinforce the localized domination that they supposedly oppose. The implications of this argument can be
further clarified when we study the way ‘resistance’ is dealt with in a risk society.
Reps focus kills ptx

Bryant 2014 (Levi R. Bryant, "Thoughts on the Social and Political Implications of
Correlationism" https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2014/01/20/thoughts-on-the-social-and-
political-implications-of-correlationism/)
…the political problem of contemporary philosophy identified by the ‘new realists’ is, in fact, the product of a
more fundamental epistemic problem. In his book After Finitude, Quentin Meillassoux calls this problem ‘correlationism’
and identifies it as an essentially post-Kantian legacy, which continues to dominate and limit philosophy. As a matter of fact,
correlationism lies at the heart of postmodern theory and consists in the premise that thought can
only ‘think itself,’ that the real is inaccessible to knowledge and human subjectivity, and that there is nothing but discursive
constructs that fully determine thinking and that are meth0dologically accounted for all the way down. (1 – 2)¶ Thought thinking
only itself. Thought only encountering itself. In the jargon of postmodern and poststructuralist lingo, this
would be the
thesis of infinite semiosis, where signs (“thoughts”) only ever relate to other signs . Within ths
framework, discursivity comes to be the hegemonic framework defining all of being. At the level of politics and social
theory more generally, if the correlationist thesis is true the consequences are clear: all social phenomena are discursive and
all solutions to social and political problems will be discursive . The sole sphere of the political will be the
discursive and all questions of politics will be questions of speech-acts and interpretation.¶ The problem here is not that
many theorists recognize that the discursive and semiotic plays an important role in the social and the
political. It does and I’ve repeated this tirelessly. The problem is with what happens when thought or the semiotic
becomes a hegemon, an “all”, foreclosing our ability to recognize other forms of power. What I’ve wanted to say is that not
all power functions discursively. In my last post and elsewhere I spoke of some other forms of politics:¶
Thermopolitics: The politics surrounding energy in the form of calories and fuels such as gasoline
and coal, and how our life and our very bodies are structured by energy dependencies and by being
trapped in particular distributive networks that render these forms of energy available. I’m being quite literal when I speak of
energy, talking about the effects, for example, of the absence of food in certain educational environments on
cognition, for example; and am generally hostile to metaphorical extensions of the concept of energy which I see as erasing the
dimension of real materiality. ¶ Geopolitics: The role that features of natural and built geography such as
mountain ranges, rivers, oceans, soil conditions, roads, housing design , etc., play in the form that social
relations take and how they impact individual bodies.¶ Chronopolitics: The way in which the structuration of time
organize what is possible for us. For example, the structuration of the working day, how much we can say and comprehend
at any given time, the impact of things like the invention of the clock, etc.¶ Oikopolitics: This would be the domain of
political economy described so well by Marxists.¶ So five different types of politics: Semiopolitics (or what currently dominates
critical theory), thermopolitics, geopolitics, chronopolitics, and oikopolitics. No doubt there are other sites of the
political or political struggle that we could speak of, but this is a good start. Also, it should be obvious that these
aren’t exclusive domains, but are entangled in all sorts of important ways . For example, something might
take place at the level of semiopolitics (speech, law, rhetoric, norms, communication) that has all sorts of impact at the level of
thermopolitics. Congress might decide to cut programs that fund school meal programs. This, in turn, will have a thermodynamic
impact on those students that go without the calories they need developmentally and cognitively to function in a particular way.
There is an entanglement here of semiopolitical and thermopolitical domains. The young student here has been constrained both at
the level of semiotic phenomena and thermodynamic structures.¶ The point is that if
true, semiotic intervention (speech-
acts, protests, interpretations, deconstructions, etc) will
not be an appropriate response to all political
problems because social formations are not entirely structured by the semiotic . The child in that
school does not suffer from a lack of the right signs, but from a lack of calories needed to run the engine
of his thought and body. Certainly semiotic interventions might be needed to render that energy available, but it is the energy itself
that is at issue and the absence of that energy that forms the spider web entangling him in his position. A correlationist
perspective tends to erase this as even being a site of the political.

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Opacity = Mann/Abbas

This creates a marketplauce of trauma for consumption, constructing the Other

counterhegemonic deployments of pain as the measure of structural injustice actually sustain

Discourse of solving problems leads to perpetuation of the state

The political aspect of suffering commodifies suffering as a tool to win the

Suffering politics reproduce the conditions that led to the suffering

Disidentification from representative politics is key

Suffering is used by liberal institutions for entertainment – further perpetuates

Liberalism thrives on suffering – discourse only furthers the system

The alternative solves – only an examination of past suffering can allow us to

Modern social movements rely on communication to solve

The unconscious mind is dominated by the Id

The Id allows unconscious motivations and irrational impulses to take control

This is what 1984 looks like

Policy decisions directed at maintaining human survival through whatever

Utilitarianism destroys value to life by forcing the individual to take risks on a

Repression is necessary to maintain equilibrium and repress the violent and

Repression by the Ego is key to make disturbing and threatening impulses in

Meditation is key to reprogram the negativity of the unconscious

Freud was right about repression

Lacan was influenced by Freud

Repression of the id leads to unimaginable consequences

Turn – repression leads to more irrational decision-making. The Alt recreates

Meditation kills VTL – depression

High risk - new technologies and observer selection effect

Reps focus kills ptx

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