Deleuze - Ddi 2015 Sws
Deleuze - Ddi 2015 Sws
Deleuze - Ddi 2015 Sws
From Gregg Lamberts The War Machine and a people who revolt:
Because everything may seem a bit muddled at this point, let us go back over the major
propositions so far:
1. Provisionally speaking, according to Deleuze and Guattari the war-machine is invented by the
nomads, not by the State. Strictly speaking, the State invents nothing; it merely appropriates, being itself
an empty form of appropriation.
2. Being always external to the State-Form, the war-machine in its essence has only one goal, the
destruction of the State-Form; thus in appropriating the war-machine, the State must always assign it
another object: total war against an enemy (Der Feind). The question is therefore less the realization of
war than the appropriation of the war-machine. It is at the same time that the State apparatus
appropriates the war machine, subordinates it to its political aims, and gives it war as its direct object.31
3. There are also other situations that Deleuze and Guattari allude to when they say that under certain
conditions, defined by infinitely lower quantities, the war-machine can make use of war in order to
create something else (e.g., new nonorganic social relations).
4. However, in both these situations, according to the two kinds of war machines produced or created,
it appears that one thing is absolutely necessary: an object, whether direct or merely supplementary.
The problem then becomes: what happens when this object is not provided, or the State fails to resolve
this object-relation correctly? It is here that we find the many examples of those exceptional situations
where the war-machine takes itself as an object, becoming a double suicide machine. 32
1ac CX questions
Rhizomes
Why vote neg?
Will you defend the advocacy for the entire debate?
How are the millions of Americans unaware of the extent of
government surveillance controlled by miscofascisms?
What was it that made you start reading Deleuze?
What is becoming? Will you defend it?
War Machine
What is the effect of the advocacy statement?
Are there any examples of war machines in the status quo?
Doesnt the Baltimore uprisings prove that war machines are
only short lived since the protests lasted less than two weeks?
Misunderstandings
Although panoptic theories of surveillance have accomplished much in surveillance studies, Foucault
failed to account for ICTs and technical advances such as the internet. Post- panoptic theories have sought
to fill this gap, such as Haggerty and Ericson's (2000) attempt to reconceptualise surveillance as an
assemblage. The assemblage considers surveillance to be a dispersed and rhizomatic phenomenon, being
conducted by an unrelated multiplicity of groups and practices (Palmas 2011). The conglomerate of
surveillance entities instead seeksto break the individual into a desired set of discrete data, called flows.
These flows represent the many streams of information that contribute to databases, circulate in
information networks, and form an individuals data self. The technical developments and implications of
surveillance have encouraged many theoretical explanations. However these theories often favour
analysing broader social and technical trends, without considering the individual in the analysis. Haggerty
and Ericson(2006) attempt to include more of the individual by examining flows of personal data in the
assemblage, but they again ignore the effects of surveillance on the individual's lived experience (Wood
2007:256). Many of these perspectives also assume surveillance to be a uniform social phenomenon, and
do not attempt to explore how those under surveillance reactor respond to it. While the technical and
structural aspects of surveillance are clearly highlighted, how the individual's experience fits in these
structures is obscured. Such considerations are especially important, given the spread and implications of
surveillance in contemporary Western society.
important to familiarize oneself for the time being with two theoretical
terms: the "big Other" and "gaze." The latter often lends itself to a multitude of theoretical interpretations, each one replete with
its own definition and conceptualization of functioning. To preempt against too much confusion, however, we'll focus on the gaze as discussed
hereunder. To start, the twentieth century psychoanalyst Badass, Jacques Lacan,
we are already present at the scene of our own absence. What this means is that, any good ol'
fantasy functions properly only by "removing" ourselves from the fantasy we are having. Take as an
example Disney's Wall-E, the story of a convivial little robot that looks like an anthropomorphized Mars rover, that "falls in love" with Eva, a
robot that basically looks like an egg. Essentially, this is a fantasy of a post-human earth - though of course dreamed up by someone (human) and,
definitely watched by a whole bunch of (human) people. Hence the perspective in which "I am present at the very scene of my own absence" - the
human viewer reduced to the "impossible" gaze - as if I'm not a part of the very "reality" I'm observing. This is, in a nutshell, the definition of
gaze. The big Other, on the other hand, is a bit more involved. Its definition is inherently nuanced. To start off, what we'll call the
Symbolic
big Other is something that is shared by everyone. It is none other than that which embodies the
very ideological essence of the socio-symbolic order of our lives; rules and etiquette - especially
juridical Law itself - customs and beliefs, everything you should or should not do, what you
aspire toward, and who or what you aspire to be, all of this and more, individually or in
combination, constitutes the Symbolic big Other. The subject's big Other (hereafter, the
Imaginary big Other), however, is a sort of private investment in the Symbolic big Other, a personal
allegiance to the ruling ideology which sustains the narratives, beliefs, and lived fantasies of the
very culture in which the subject is immersed. Each Imaginary big Other is distinct in its own
unique way: my Imaginary big Other may be, say, a patriotic bricolage (not really, but you get the point) - a composite of things like, e.g.,
Uncle Sam, the American soldier trope, "God" and Tim Tebow. And your Imaginary big Other may embody, say, just Emily Post, or maybe some
vague ideological package of some other normative principles. In any case, the
Imaginary big Other refers directly to that distinctly personalized social standard by
which each of us respectively measures ourselves - 24/7/365 (yes, the big Other can make itself known even in our
dreams). Virtually everybody shares in the Symbolic big Other, for it's that very point from which the
general "will-of-the-people" is reflected back to the people, so that we can see ourselves as we appear in this
reflection - as a consistent social "whole." In other words, the big Other is that which gives substance to the body
politic. We are its subjects. And despite not really existing - that, at the imaginative level of the individual, it's really none other than
one's own internalization of society's dos-and-don'ts - the big Other is nonetheless experienced as a sort of independent phantasm which
situates itself smack dab in the middle of any social interaction like some kind of incorporeal incarnation of a necessary third-wheel that both
instructs and scrutinizes our every thought, utterance, and move. As such, the big Other ensures
all have a big Other. It is, to repeat an emphasis from earlier, that
standard by which we measure ourselves: our own private piece of the larger, public social space
we inhabit. To paraphrase iek, the gaze of the Symbolic big Other is my own view of myself,
which I see through eyes that are not authentically my own. Here, one should not fail to notice the
Symbolic big Other's striking resemblance to Bentham's "Panopticon," that omnipresent, omniscient "God'seye-view" intended to watch over us wherever we go. The likeness is unmistakable, simply because Bentham's little wet dream embodies the big
Other as such. The essential point to take away from this is that one's
bring the Panopticon, the gaze of the Symbolic big Other as such, with us wherever we go. Social
networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., instantiate this. But what, precisely, does this even mean? Well, this is where things
get both revelatory and a bit complicated. The trouble with all this is that, to return to Copjec's analysis, the Symbolic big Other is "a point of
convergence of the general will-of-the-people." What
this means - and bear with me here, because this may turn
confusing - is that the Symbolic big Other, as such, signifies the very mode of appearance in
which we appear to ourselves, for ourselves, as we desire to appear as such. So it would follow that, if we
appear to ourselves, for ourselves, as images to be controlled, manipulated, tracked, watched,
and so on, as we certainly do in today's digital medium of social networking - which, by the way,
we collectively, willfully and, pleasurably participate in - then this zeitgeist of the modern
majority will inevitably converge at a centralized point: which is to say, the big Other, both its
Symbolic and Imaginary incarnations, will appear in the guise of "Big Brother." At the individual
level, each of us embodies "Big Brother": we are intrigued with the act of watching, tracking,
manipulating, images of ourselves. At the Symbolic level, the truth of this enjoyment expresses
itself today in all of its unsettling perversity: PRISM.
Despite Haggerty and Ericsons allusion to Foucaults theory of power, it is clear that they
have misinterpreted it when they suggest that Foucaults panopticon could be read as an
extension of Orwells Big Brother. Similarly, Mathiesen makes the mistake of fetishising the power of the gaze and failing to see
how the gaze is only a mechanism of power within a certain concrete assemblage. Both articles presume
the gaze to be
unidirectional, both make the mistake of presuming the gaze to have an inherent power and,
importantly, both reinstate a sovereign subject behind power. This is obvious from their
fetishisation of the watcher as opposed to the watched . Far from moving beyond Foucault their
conception of power is decidedly pre-Foucault; in emphasising the power of vision in
Foucault, they miss Foucaults vision of power. The question, it seems to me, is not whether we are a post-panoptical
society, but whether the microphysics of power is no longer conceptually useful.
if the surveillance system itself is less than it is perceived to be? What if, despite the best efforts
of Homeland Security and its ilk, those rhizomatic networks of pulsating data cannot finally be controlled
and directed? This is the more emancipatory notion explored by William Bogard in his Deleuzean
elaboration of lines of flight. Post-panoptic surveillance is deterritorialized as well as rhizomic and as
such resists exclusionary control strategies. In the panopticon, which is a machinic assemblage, material flows are joined and
separated. But in enunciative assemblages, words are attached to things by relations of power. The soultraining of the panopticon with its moulded subjects gives way to flexibly modulated hybrid subjects,
suited to varying circumstances. But lines of flight within these latter systems include file-sharing, decryption, using proxies and
sousveillance as well as conventional political anti-surveillance strategies. Does this mean, as Felix Guattari (1990) provocatively
puts it, that there may be safety in the machine? Bogards reply brings Heidegger (1977) into the conversation but
concludes with a carefully qualified yes.
are nonlinear, nonbinary, and nonunitary structures (even the term structure is potentially
misleading). How accurate can this model be for a control system that grounds itself in information science?
Information science is based on a tree model whose content is articulated in normal (central tendency) probability functions, not on the model of a
rhizome. And tree models, as Deleuze and Guattari note, invariably serve closed, hierarchical systems of decision and control the state, the
police, the corporation, and so on (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 67). On the other hand, if the emerging network of global
surveillance is an open system in which each information node can and must connect to every other, then
it makes sense to call this system a rhizome. Certainly, surveillance today is more decentralized, less
subject to spatial and temporal constraints (location, time of day, etc.), and less organized than ever before by the
dualisms of observer and observed, subject and object, individual and mass. The system of control is
deterritorializing, and the effects of this are to intensify but also, in a very real sense, to democratize
surveillance. The very logic of information networks that information must be free to flow between any
part of the system, for surveillance means more ways to observe the observers, bypass their firewalls,
access their databases and decode their communications. The question today is whether centres of power states or
corporations can control the global networks their own information requirements push them to produce. Certainly, they can make some kinds of
information very difficult to access, and this is easier for them the more networks are like trees (where all branches emanate from a single trunk
or central stem). But if networks are rhizomes, information becomes next to impossible to secure, and no
firewall, password or encryption technology works for long. If networks are rhizomes, power based on
security or secrecy has good reason to be concerned.
outside the prison almost useless. Although this development in one sense has made us all prisoners of
the surveillance assemblage, it has also made a prisoner of the assemblage itself by threatening to make
its operations more transparent and its efforts to profit from information more difficult. It has to set up
machines to flee its own capture (encryption, password protection, firewalls, simulation), but those machines are difficult
to secure in a networked society where any information refuses to stay locked up for long. As Foucault understood, the
techniques of verification developed in the prison are turned back on the prison, which from the
beginning becomes the object of public scrutiny and investigation. When these techniques are informated, and then
become widely available to the general population facilitated by the expansion of electronic networks and growing access to computers the
potential for totalizing control grows, but so does the potential for resistance to that control. Drrenmatt
imagined contemporary society as an electronic nightmare of surveillance, where everyone observes the observer of the
observer, everyone is watched and recorded by everyone else, and the entire system of verification is
given up to a network a network, however, that contains no more privileged points of access or escape,
no more hierarchical control of observation, no more panoptic structuring of visibility (Drrenmatt 1988).
organized by the industrial model, and all forms of labour had to industrialize even though industry in itself accounted for
only a small proportion of global output, today production is structured by the information sector of the economy despite its
size relative to global production as a whole. Immaterial production is the production of ideas, knowledge,
communication, affects and social relations, and today labor and society have to informationalize, become intelligent, become
communicative, become affective (Hardt and Negri 2004: 109). 4 Ultimately, immaterial
Biopower is the negative form of the common. It refers to a production of life that simultaneously threatens the
planet with destruction and death (war, ecological catastrophe, the annihilation of species). Hardt and Negri often describe the
rule of biopower as a state of global civil war, governed by exceptionalism and unilateralism in global politics and economics,
highintensity police actions and preemptive strikes, and of course networked surveillance. It is what Virilio has called elsewhere a state of
pure war, or what Baudrillard has referred to as virtual, simulated war (Baudrillard 1995a; Virilio 1997). Whatever its name, the dominant
climate of the new common is fear, however broadly that term is defined, accompanied by the need for safety and security (or the absence of risk)
(Beck 1992, 1999). In postmodernity, the need for security replaces defence as the moral justification for global
police/surveillance interventions of all kinds, in military matters to be sure, but also in economic, political and cultural affairs, in matters of
health, sexuality, education, entertainment, 5 and so on. War becomes the common framework through which all problems are recognized and
addressed, both in the relation of states to other states, but of states to their own populations as well. In fact, when it comes to the multiplicity of
wars in postmodernity, the old categories of international or intranational conflict no longer apply. The regime of biopower, like the
modern system of penality, has no walls and is truly a global form of sovereignty; it dismantles the old oppositions
between public and private spheres, erases the economic and political boundaries between states, and aims at the
absolute elimination of risk in advance through the development of sophisticated communications and information
gathering and decoding technologies; that is, through networks of surveillance and control. Didier Bigo discusses this at
length in this volume. The new common, however, organized by biopower and subject to the controls of networked
surveillance, also has liberatory and democratic potentials, which Hardt and Negri locate in what they call
biopolitical production, the production of the multitude (which for them has replaced industrial labour as the postmodern force
of revolutionary change) (Hardt and Negri 2004). Biopolitical production is not biopower, although it is not the opposite of biopower
either. Both engage the production of life and social relations in their entirety, but in very different ways. Hardt and Negri write, Biopower
stands above society, transcendent, as a sovereign authority and imposes its order . Biopolitical production, in
contrast, is immanent to society and creates social relations and forms through collaborative forms of labor (Hardt and
Negri 2004: 945). Biopower is the new form of empire, whereas biopolitical production is the new form of resistance
to empire. Both are effects of changes in the organization of production brought about by the advent of postmodern
systems of control; that is, by transformations in the surveillance assemblage and the expansion of information
networks. In arguments reminiscent of Marx that the development of the means of global communication creates the potential for the
revolutionary organization of labour, they show how global information systems have destabilized not only traditional forms of private property
and have cut across class divisions, but also race, gender and other hierarchies, producing a common poverty from which new forms of
democratic participation and social creativity can emerge. It is as if biopower, the system of sovereign control supported by
global surveillance and the culture of war and fear, had produced the very communicative and geopolitical
conditions necessary for the development of a shared humanity. Hardt and Negri are quick to point out, however, that the idea of
a new common does not imply the sameness of its elements or some transcendent identity standing over society, but rather consists of
singularities whose differences constitute a heterogeneous multiplicity capable of spontaneous organization and the power to deconstruct the
global sovereign regime of biopower (Hardt and Negri 2004: 1289). Today, despite differences of class, race, gender, nation,
occupation, language, religion, age, etc., new forms of resistance are arising grounded in the common subjection of
the global population to the imperatives of biopower, and its common transformation of labour into a global network
of informated production. Ironically, the surveillance assemblage has opened a new de territorialized space of
communication that with time may undermine the regime of global biopower. Biopower depends on the control of
information, but also on the rhizomatic qualities of networks to facilitate global production and coordinate the global
division of labour. These are contradictory ends, but beyond that, they point to a new refuge from power in networks that is absent in
panoptic systems. In the latter, one had to find a space within a confined area where one could hide in plain sight. In the former, one can hide
in all the multiplicity of ways information provides, and the possibilities of resistance are greatly expanded.
Impact work
Bioptix turns
Biopower in a DEMOCRATIC government is vital to rights,
tolerance, and inclusionthis takes out their all of their
impacts
Dickinson 4 (Edward Ross Dickinson, Associate Professor, History Ph.D., U.C.
Berkeley, 2004 Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse
About Modernity, Central European History, vol. 37, no. 1, 148)
the rights of the individual, guaranteed formally by the
constitution and substantively by the welfare system, were the central element of
the dominant program for the management of social problems. Almost no one in this period
advocated expanding social provision out of the goodness of their hearts. This was a strategy of social
management, of social engineering. The mainstream of social reform in Germany believed that guaranteeing
In the Weimar model, then,
basic social rights the substantive or positive freedom of all citizens was the best way to turn people into
could implant that power at every level of their lives in political and associational life, in the family, in the
workplace, and in leisure activities. In the welfarist vision of Weimar progressives, the task of the state was to
create an institutional framework that would give individuals the wherewithal to integrate themselves successfully
into the national society, economy, and polity. The Nazis aimed, instead, to give the state the wherewithal to do
with every citizen what it willed. And where Weimar welfare advocates understood themselves to be constructing a
system of knowledge and institutions that would manage social problems, the Nazis fundamentally sought to
abolish just that system by eradicating by finding a final solution to social problems. Again, as Peukert
pointed out, many advocates of a rights-based welfare structure were open to the idea that stubborn cases might
original purpose of these methods was to increase state power, but its aim has also been,
from the beginning, the welfare of the individual and of the entire population, the
improvement of their condition, the increase of their wealth, their longevity, health and
even happiness71 happiness of all and everyone (omnes et singulatim): The sole
purpose of the police, one of the first institutional loci of the nascent biopower, is
to lead man to the utmost happiness to be enjoyed in this life, wrote De Lamare in
Treaty on the Police at the beginning of the eighteenth century.72 According to
Foucault, one should not, however, concentrate only on the modern state in looking
for the origin of biopower. One should examine also the religious tradition of the
West, especially the Judeo-Christian idea of a shepherd as a political leader of his
people.73
No Solvency
1nc
(War Machine specific) No solvency advocate- No evidence that
says that a war machine would actually stop measures of
surveillance on social movements. Your only way to solve is to
collapse the entire structure of the state
The War Machine fails to make change- micropolitics does not
make macro changes and it just gets placed back into the
capitalistic system.
Dean, 2005 (Jodi Dean, Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith
College;Zizek against democracy, Law, Culture and the Humanities, Volume 2,
Number 2, http://lch.sagepub.com/content/1/2/154.full.pdf//AGY)
Zizeks three arguments against multiculturalismits failure to call into question the capitalist economy, its
speculative identity with irrational violence, and its preclusion of politicizationcan be read in terms of divergences
from Connolly, Hardt and Negri, and Deleuze and Guattari. So, not only does Connollys emphasis on the
pluralization of modes of becoming and Hardt and Negris account of a multitude of singularities seek to open the
technoculture decreases their radicality. Furthermore, Zizeks emphasis on the speculative identity of toleration and
irrational violence contrasts with efforts in behalf of an ethos of generosity or critical responsiveness in Connollys
work. For Zizek, insofar as such an ethos aims to combat and eliminate dogmatic certainty, it rests on precisely that
fundament of irrational, contingent attachment it seeks to erase. And, finally, Zizeks rejection of a multitude of
singularities should be read as an alternative to Hardt and Negri. For Zizek, singular positions are not political. They
become political through articulation with other struggles and, in this way, are inseparable from the division of the
social. Echoing Badiou, moreover, Zizek argues that emphasis on multitude and diversity masks the underlying
monotony of todays global life. He writes, is there anything more monotonous than the Deleuzian poetry of
contemporary life as the decentred proliferation of multitudes, of non-totalizable differences? What occludes (and
thereby sustains) this monotony is the multiplicity of resignifications and displacements to which the basic
The more things change, the more they remain the same .
Or, lots of little micro-struggles dont automatically produce macro-level
change. Accordingly, one could say that even though Zizek is an avowed theorist of totality, Deleuze is the
ideological texture is submitted.
totalizing theorist, the theorist whose all inclusive account of the social cannot account for the division necessary
Deleuze, and with him Connolly and Hardt and Negri, embraces an ethics of
affirmation that eliminates negativity from the political . Politics becomes immanent,
part of the nature of things, arising as a force both destructive and productive,
deterritorializing and territorializing. And all this teaming activity is ultimately
inseparable from the flows and intensities circulating through the networks of global
capitalist technoculture. Universalization Ive argued thus far that Zizek rejects the celebration of
diversity insofar as he finds it ultimately embedded in global capital and hence incapable
of opening up a space for politics. Ive mentioned as well his specific criticism of multiculturalism on the
for political struggle.
grounds that it prevents the universalization necessary for politicization. I move now to look more carefully at
Zizeks account of universalization and how it links up with politics. In a nutshell, for Zizek universalization is the
key to politicization: without the claim to universality, there simply is no politics. This rendering of the political is a
second primary difference between his position and alternative approaches prominent in Left critical cultural and
political theory: for Zizek without division and exclusion there can be no politics.
militarizing favelas, organizing training of armed units there. And, the ultimate scare: now that he is feeling the
economic effects of the "resistance" to his rule of the capital (temporary shortages of some goods in the statesubsidized supermarkets), he has announced the constitution of his own political party ! Even
some of his allies are skeptical about this movedoes it signal the return to the standard party-state politics?
of politics (like the grass roots slum committees). So what should we say to someone like Chavez? "No,
do not grab state power, just subtract yourself, leave the laws of the [State] situation in place"? Chavez is often
dismissed as a clownish comedian, but would not such a subtraction reduce him to a new version of
Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatista movement in Mexico, to whom many Leftist refer as "Subcomediante
Marcos"? Today,
it is the great capitalists, from Bill Gates to ecological polluters, who "resist" the
State The four features presupposed in the Marxist notion of the proletariat are, of course, grounded in the
singular capitalist mechanism; they are four effects of the same structural cause. Perhaps one can even map
Cohen's four features that threaten the indefinite self-reproduction of the global capital: "majority" appears as
ecology, a topic that concerns us all; "poverty" characterizes those excluded and living in slums; "producing wealth"
is more and more dependent on scientific and technological developments like biogenetics; and, finally,
"exploitation"
reappears in the impasses of intellectual property, where the owner exploits the
results of collective labor. The four features form a kind of semiotic square, the intersecting of two
oppositions along the lines of society/nature and inside/outside the social Wall of a new apartheid: ecology
designates the outside of nature; slums designate the social outside; biogenetics, the natural inside; and
intellectual property, the social inside. Why in this overlapping of the four antagonisms is not the Laclauian empty
signifier("people")filled in through the struggle for hegemony? Why is it not yet another attempt in the series of
the "rainbow coalitions" of oppressed sexual practices, races, religions, etc.? Because we still need a proletarian
position, the position of the "part of no-part." In other [End Page 43] words, if one wants an older model, it is rather
the good old Communist formula of the alliance of "workers, poor farmers, patriotic small bourgeoisie, and honest
intellectuals": note how the four terms are not at the same levelonly workers are listed as such, while the other
same goes
for today's four antagonisms: it is the antagonism between the Excludedthe
"animals" according to global capitaland the Includedthe "political animals "
three are qualified ("poor farmers, patriotic small bourgeoisie, honest intellectuals").4 Exactly the
proper, those participating in capitalismthat is the zero-level antagonism, coloring the entire terrain of struggle.
Consequently, only those ecologists are included who do not use ecology to legitimize the oppression of the
"polluting" poor, trying to discipline Third World countries; only those critics of bio-genetic practices who resist the
conservative (religious-humanist) ideology that all too often sustains this critique; only those critics of intellectual
private property who do not reduce the problem to a legalistic issue .
monopoly, we would have the absurd situation in which a private individual would literally own the software texture
our basic network of communication.) "Commons" also include the shared infrastructure of public transport,
electricity, post, etc., and the commons of external nature threatened by pollution and exploitation (from oil to
forests and natural habitat), as well as the commons of internal nature (the biogenetic inheritance of humanity).
What all these struggles share is an awareness of the destructive potentialup to the self-annihilation of humanity
itselfif the capitalist logic of enclosing these commons is allowed a free rein . It is this
reference to "commons"this substance of productivity that is neither private nor publicthat justifies the
resuscitation of the notion of Communism. Commons can thus be linked to what Hegel, in his Phenomenology,
deployed as die Sache, the shared social thing-cause, "the work of all and everyone," the substance kept alive by
incessant subjective productivity.5 [End Page 44]
They think that dealing with the institutional side is reformism, that it doesn't
change anything. As far as they're concerned, the institutions should be ignored because only one kind of
thing is worthwhile, anarchismwhich I question deeply . I think it's very naive, as you yourself say, to
ignore the state on the basis that "it's useless," or "it oppresses us," and therefore
to leave it aside and try to do something totally from outside, as though it might be
possible for us to destroy it like that. Suely Rolnik: This malaise in relation to institutions is nothing
new; on the contrary, the feeling is particularly strong in our generation which, since the
1960s, has taken institutions as one of its main targets . But it's true that the malaise has been
especially pronounced in Brazil over the last few years, and in my view this must have to do with an absolutely
objective (and obvious) fact, which is the hardness of the dictatorship to which we were subjected for so long. The
rigidity of that regime is embodied in all the country's institutions, in one way or another; in fact, that constituted an
the instituted, as the sole, exclusive parameter in the organization of oneself and of relations with the other, and
thus avoid succumbing to the danger of collapse that might be brought about by any kind of change.
Those are
two styles of symbiosis with the institution: either "gluey" adhesion and
identification (those who adopt this style base their identity on the "instituted"), or else repulsion and
counteridentification (those who adopt this style base their identity on negation of the
"instituted," as if there were something "outside" the institutions, a supposed
"alternative" space to this world). Seen in this light, both "alternativism" and
"bureaucratism" restrict themselves to approaching the world from the viewpoint of
its forms and representations, from a molar viewpoint; they protect themselves
against accessing the molecular plane, where new sensations are being produced
and composed and ultimately force the creation of new forms of reality ,. They both
reflect a blockage of instituting power, an impossibility of surrender to the processes of singularization, a need for
conservation of the prevailing forms, a difficulty in gaining access to the molecular plane, where the new is
engendered. It's
"squareness" we risk succumbing to it again, in a more disguised form. In this respect, I agree with you: the
institutions aren't going to be changed by pretending that they don't exist. Nonetheless, it's necessary to add two
tendency to make believe that itdoesn't exist, so as not to have to enter into contact with sensations of frustration
and powerlessness that go beyond the limit of tolerability (indeed, this is a general reaction before any traumatic
experience). And in order to survive, people try in so far as possible to create other territories of life, which are
often clandestine.
2nc
Rhisomaticism doesnt solve the only solution is overconformity.
Krips, 10 (Henry. Professor of Cultural Studies, Andrew W. Mellon All-Claremont
Chair of Humanities at CGU. "The Politics of the Gaze Foucault, Lacan and iek."
Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research CU 2.1 (2010): 91-102. Web.
20 July 2015.)TB
Central to ieks account of the modern state is the concept of an obscene underside of the law
, namely widespread practices petty tax evasion, speeding, walking on the grass, etc which,
although strictly speaking illicit, are unofficially tolerated. This network of practices is sustained thanks to
what iek calls an ideological phantasy that keeps them an open secret everyone knows about
and participates in them in private, but no one mentions them, let alone publicly flaunts participating in them.
Such practices constitute points of failure of the law in so far as they fall in an indeterminate zone in relation to legal
categories: on the one hand, in so far as they are tolerated they are not straightforwardly illegal, but, on the
other hand, neither are they legal; and as such, constitute a fundamental illegality at the heart of the legal system. ieks point is
that, rather than undermining the law, the obscene underside of the law sustains it the law is
tolerated because of the little secret pleasures that people derive from its obscene underside. In
Lacanian terms, we may say that the obscene underside of the law is the set of necessary but repressed
points of failure of the legal system in short, it is the symptom of the legal system. In particular, in the context of a
legal state apparatus that is held in place by a panoptic system of surveillance, the obscene
underside of the law is a liminal zone of high anxiety that, like the Emperors body under his
new clothes, is obscenely visible to each of his subjects in the privacy of their own visual field,
yet must be shrouded in a cloak of invisibility in the public realm. This is the site of the gaze. How are we
to oppose such a system, which seemingly coexists with, indeed depends upon its own systematic transgression? According to iek,
not by acts of resistance, since the system is readily able to accommodate, indeed depends upon such acts. 6 Instead, iek
suggests opposition through acts of overconformity, which, rather than protesting let alone
breaking the law, insist upon it to the letter, even when ideological common sense suggests
otherwise. In particular, this means a refusal to turn a blind eye from manifestations of laws
obscene underside. As iek puts it: Sometimes, at least the truly subversive thing is not to disregard the
explicit letter of Law on behalf of the underlying fantasies, but to stick to this letter against the
fantasy which sustains it.Is not an exemplary case of such subversion-through-identification provided by Jaroslav Haseks The
Good Soldier Schweik, the novel whose hero wreaks total havoc by simply executing the orders of his superiors in an overzealous and all-tooliteral way (iek 1997: 30, 22, 31). What
attention to what should now he the obvious (and perfectly explicit) limitations of this philosophy of unlimited
consequences of what happens within the actually existing world as such. Unlike Darwin or Marx, for instance, the
being synonymous with speed, as the incarnation of a pure and immeasurable multiplicity; an irruption of the
ephemeral and of the power of metamorphosis (TP, 336, 352). Like any creating, a war machine consists and
and abstract, precisely, rather than directed or waged [menee]. Once a social field is defined less by its conflicts
and contradictions than by the lines of flight running through it, any distinctive space for political action can only
be subsumed within the more general dynamics of creation or life. And since these dynamics are themselves antidialectical if not anti-relational, there can be little room in Deleuzes philosophy for relations of conflict or solidarity,
i.e. relations that are genuinely between rather than external to individuals, classes, or principles.
the embattled margins of empire. In a perverse twist of fate, it may be that today, in places like Palestine, Haiti, and
Iraq, the agents of imperialism have more to learn from Deleuzian rhizomatics than do their opponents. As we have
repeatedly seen, the second corollary of Deleuzes disqualification of actuality concerns the paralysis of the subject
or actor. Since what powers Deleuzes cosmology is the immediate differentiation of creation through the infinite
proliferation of virtual creatings, the creatures that actualize these creatings are confined to a derivative if not
limiting role. A creatures own interests, actions or decisions are of minimal or preliminary significance at best: the
renewal of creation always requires the paralysis and dissolution of the creature per se. The notion of a constrained
subject does or decides and what is done or decided through the subject. By rendering this distinction absolute he
than the tenor of existence, the intensification of life. Absolute life or creation tolerates no norm external to itself.
The creative movement that orients us out of the world does not depend on a transcendent value beyond the world.
After Spinoza, after Nietzsche, Deleuze rejects all forms of moral evaluation or strategic judgment. Every instance of
decision, every confrontation with the question what should we do?, is to be resolved exclusively in terms of what
we can do. An individuals power or capacity is also its natural right, and the answer to the question of what an
individual or body should do is again simplicity itself it should go and will always go as far as it can (WP, 74; EP,
258). But on the other hand, we know that an individual can only do this because its power is not that of the
individual itself. By doing what it can,
works through it, and which alone acts or rather, which alone is. What impels u to persevere in our being
has nothing to do with us as such. So when, in the conclusion of their last joint project, Deleuze and Guattari
observe the vitalism has always had two possible interpretations, it is not surprising that they should opt for
the resolutely in-active interpretation. Vitalism, they explain, can be conceived either in terms of an
Idea that acts but is not, and that acts therefore only from the point of view of an external cerebral knowledge; or of
a force that is but does not act, and which is therefore a pure internal Feeling [Sentir].
Deleuze and Guattari embrace this second interpretation , they choose Leibnizian being over
Kantian act, precisely because it disables action in favour of contemplation . It suspends any
relation between a living and the lived, between a knowing and the know, between a creating and the created. They
embrace it because what feeling preserves is always in a state of detachment in relation to action and even to
movement, and appears as a pure contemplation without knowledge. As Deleuze understands, living
contemplation proceeds at an immeasurable distance from what is merely lived, known or decided. Life lives and
it is
philosophys aim to extract from the state of affairs the pure (virtual) event, and thus to
sever ties with actuality altogether. In this move, philosophy becomes mysticism, fully
spiritualised and dematerialised,8 and thus a moment of pure affirmation. Reliant on this movement
are all of the positive traits of Deleuzes philosophy,9 but this also leads to one particular trait which
makes Deleuzes position politically absolutely untenable . The move to a philosophy
of the virtual means a move to a philosophy of absolute affirmation, within which
the political action of the creature in the face of oppression no longer has meaning .
however, we require philosophy, the smile without the cat, as it were.7 On Hallwards reading,
One escapes the world through a line of flight which takes one (if this term can still find any applicability) to the
a universal light), then the possibility of either of these stances, which rely on our relations as creatures to other
called for. Instead of this, on Hallwards reading, Deleuze is arguing that one should move to pure contemplation
of the world. The real preoccupation of [Hallwards] book concerns the value of this advice.11
My personal experience is
that practically all of the "radical" academics silently count on the long-term
stability of the American capitalist model, with the secure tenured position as their ultimate
professional goal (a surprising number of them even play on the stock market ). If there is a
imperceptibly translated into the benign universe of Cultural Studies chic.
thing they are genuinely horrified of, it is a radical shattering of the (relatively) safe life environment of the
title refers, they will half-confidentially signal that it is, of course, that October in this way, one can indulge in the
jargonistic analyses of modern art, with the hidden assurance that one is somehow retaining the link with the
radical revolutionary past ... With regard to this radical chic, the first gesture toward Third Way ideologists and
practitioners should be that of praise: they at least play their game straight and are honest in their acceptance of
global capitalist coordinates, in contrast to the pseudo-radical academic Leftists who adopt toward the Third Way
the attitude of utter disdain, while their own radicality ultimately amounts to an empty gesture which obligates no
one to anything determinate.
1nc
War Machine causes total extinction.
Lambert 10 (Gregg Lambert, Professor of Humanities and Founding Director of
the Humanities Centre at Syracuse University; The War Machine and a people who
revolt, Theory & Event 13.3,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v013/13.3.lambert.html// AGY)
In conclusion, I will risk providing my own perspective on this question, which will take the form of a hypothesis concerning two
areas of future research or lines of inquiry. According to the earlier statement quoted above, there is one point of view where the
difference between the two poles is greatest: death. In other words, it is by inhabiting this perspective that one might introduce a
maximal difference in order to separate violence from violence, in order to cause something to appear. As Deleuze and Guattari
speculate, this something = x would have to do with what they call the incommensurable character of the quantities that confront
one another in the two kinds of warmachines. 39 In order to occupy the perspective or point of view of death, as if staring out
from deaths own eyes, one line of research would be to continue to analyze the exceptional figures that Deleuze and Guattari
creativemuch more so than prodigious Nature herself. Here, I recall a line from Camus who once said that if one has difficultly
imagining the death caused by a plague, one only has to think of an audience in a movie theater being piled up in the town square.
we have
created a kind of death that is aimed at entire population s. This is the death created
by the technological advancement of the war-machine of the first kind: total
extermination, absolute extinction, the production of nearly infinite quantities along
a scale that corresponds to final stage universal Capitalism .
Nowadays, such quantities are not so difficult to imagine! With the development of late-Capitalist societies,
sands, for example, differs qualitatively from the striated fields of the sedentary state dwellers. Yet this contrast of
smooth and striated spaces, though initially framed in geographic terms, Deleuze and Guattari extend in a number
Of ways, to include different artifacts (felt vs fabric), different kinds of time (unpulsed rhythm vs pulsed meter),
different forms of thought (nomad science vs royal science, fractal geometry vs Euclidean geometry), different
the "war
machine" is simply a term for the metamorphic force of deterritorialization, and
"smooth space" the name Of the body without organs, Or plane of consistency,
created and permeated by that metamorphic force. As Deleuze explains in an interview on A
approaches to the arts (Egyptian, Gothic or Byzantine art vs Greco-Roman art) and so on. Ultimately,
Thousand Plateaus: We define the "war machine" as a linear assemblage which constructs itself on lines of flight. In
this sense, the war machine does not at all have war as its object; it has as its object a very special space, smooth
space, which it composes, occupies and propagates. ,VomcuiLm is precisely this combination "war machinesmooth space." We try to show how and in what case the war machine takes war for its object (when the
apparatuses Of the State appropriate the war machine which does not initially belong to them). A war machine
tends to be revolutionary, or artistic, much more so than military. CPP SOS 1/331 The war machine does not have
war as its object, yet still it is called the war machine, and though its function is primarily revolutionary or artistic,
metamorphic war machine will turn into a veritable machine of war, a negative force bent solely on destruction. It is
striking how frequently images Of war, especially Of an apocalyptic sort, appear in the lyrics of death and black
metal (and occasionally doom as well). Often the persona in death and black metal songs adopts the pose of a
warrior and espouses an ethos of unrestrained destruction. The warriors imagined in these songs, however, are not
representatives Of an organized military regime but embodiments Of an anarchic force Of chaos. They inhabit a
space outside the regular order of any state apparatus and serve as mythic figures of a dimension of unrestrained
2nc
Turn Deleuzes war machine is itself violent.
Zizek 7 (Slavoj, U of Ljubljana, Mao Zedong: the Marxist Lord of
Misrule, Lacan.com, http://www.lacan.com/zizmaozedong.htm)
There IS thus, beyond all cheap jibes and superficial analogies, a profound structural homology between the Maoist
permanent self-revolutionizing, the permanent struggle against the ossification of State structures, and the inherent
dynamics of capitalism. One is tempted to paraphrase here Brecht, his "What is the robbing of a bank compared to
the founding of a new bank?", yet again: what are the violent and destructive outbursts of a Red Guardist caught in
the Cultural Revolution compared to the true Cultural Revolution, the permanent dissolution of all life-forms
necessitated by the capitalist reproduction? It is the reign of today's global capitalism which is the true Lord of
Misrule. No wonder, then, that, in order to curb the excess of social disintegration caused by the capitalist
explosion, Chinese officials not celebrate religions and traditional ideologies which sustain social stability, from
Buddhism to Confucianism, i.e., the very ideologies that were the target of the Cultural Revolution. In April 2006, Ye
Xiaowen, China's top religious official, told the Xinhua News Agency that "religion is one of the important forces
from which China draws strength," and he singled out Buddhism for its 'unique role in promoting a harmonious
society," the official formula for combining economic expansion with social development and care; the same week,
China hosted the World Buddhist Forum. [27] The role of religion as the force of stability against the capitalist
dynamics is thus officially sanctioned - what is bothering Chinese authorities in the case of sects like Falun Gong is
merely their independence from the state control. (This is why one should also reject the argument that Cultural
Revolution strengthened socialist attitudes among the people and thus helped to curb the worst disintegrative
excesses of today's capitalist development: quite on the contrary, by undermining traditional stabilizing ideologies
like Confucianism, it rendered the people all the more vulnerable to the destabilizing effects of capitalism.) This
capitalist reappropriation of the revolutionary dynamics is not without its comic sideeffects. It was recently made public that, in order to conceptualize the IDF urban warfare
against the Palestinians, the IDF military academies systematically refer to Deleuze
and Guattari, especially to Thousand Plateaux, using it as "operational theory" - the
catchwords used are "Formless Rival Entities", "Fractal Manoeuvre", "Velocity vs. Rhythms", "The Wahabi War
During the battle soldiers moved within the city across hundreds of metres of overground tunnels carved out
through a dense and contiguous urban structure. Although several thousand soldiers and Palestinian guerrillas were
manoeuvring simultaneously in the city, they were so "saturated" into the urban fabric that very few would have
been visible from the air. Furthermore, they used none of the city's streets, roads, alleys or courtyards, or any of the
external doors, internal stairwells and windows, but moved horizontally through walls and vertically through holes
blasted in ceilings and floors. This form of movement, described by the military as "infestation", seeks to redefine
what does it follow from all this? Not, of course, the nonsensical accusation of Deleuze and Guattari as theorists of
perhaps, is THE question today, and this is the way one should REPEAT Mao, re-inventing his message to the
hundreds of millions of the anonymous downtrodden, a simple and touching message of courage: "Bigness is
nothing to be afraid of. The big will be overthrown by the small. The small will become big." The same message of
courage sustains also Mao's (in)famous stance towards a new atomic world war: We stand firmly for peace and
against war. But if the imperialists insist on unleashing another war, we should not be afraid of it. Our attitude on
this question is the same as our attitude towards any disturbance: first, we are against it; second, we are not afraid
of it. The First World War was followed by the birth of the Soviet Union with a population of 200 million. The Second
World War was followed by the emergence of the socialist camp with a combined population of 900 million. If the
imperialists insist on launching a third world war, it is certain that several hundred million more will turn to
socialism, and then there will not be much room left on earth for the imperialists.
machine was the invention of the nomad, because it is in its essence the constitutive element of smooth space, the
occupation of this space, displacement within this space, and the corresponding composition of people: this is its
sole and veritable positive object (nomos). Make the desert, the steppe, grow; do not depopulate it, quite the
If war necessarily results, it is because the war machine collides with States
and cities, as forces (of stri-ation) opposing its positive object: from then on, the war machine has as
its enemy the State, the city, the state and urban phenomenon, and adopts as its objective their
annihilation. It is at this point that the war machine becomes war: annihilate the forces of the State,
contrary.
destroy the State-form. The Attila, or Genghis Khan, adventure clearly illustrates this progression from the positive
happen that this supplementarity is comprehended through a progressive, anxiety-ridden revelation. Such, for
example, was the adven- ture of Moses: leaving the Egyptian State behind, launching into the desert, he begins by
forming a war machine, on the inspiration of the old past of the nomadic Hebrews and on the advice of his father-inlaw, who came from the nomads. This is the machine of the Just, already a war machine, but one that does not yet
(armed observation), then perhaps take things to extremes (war of annihilation). Then the Jewish people experience
doubt, and fear that they are not strong enough; but Moses also doubts, he shrinks before the revela- tion of this
we
would say that the relation between war and the war machine is necessary but
"synthetic" (Yahweh is necessary for the synthesis). The question of war, in turn, is pushed further back and is
subordinated to the relations between the war machine and the State apparatus. States were not the
supplement. And it will be Joshua, not Moses, who is charged with waging war. Finally, speaking like Kant,
first to make war: war, of course, is not a phenomenon one finds in the universality of Nature, as
nonspecific violence. But war is not the object of States, quite the contrary. The most archaic States do
not even seem to have had a war machine , and their domination, as we will see, was based on
other agencies (comprising, rather, the police and prisons). It is safe to assume that the intervention of an extrinsic
or nomad war machine that counterattacked and destroyed the archaic but powerful States was one of the
mysterious reasons for their sudden annihilation. But the State learns fast. One of the biggest questions from the
point of view of universal history is: How will the State appropriate the war machine, that is, consti- tute one for
itself, in conformity with its size, its domination, and its aims? And with what risks? (What we call a military
institution, or army, is not at all the war machine in itself, but the form under which it is appropriated by the State.)
In order to grasp the paradoxical character of such an undertak- ing, we must recapitulate the hypothesis in its
The war machine is that nomad invention that in fact has war not as its
primary object but as its second-order, supplementary or synthetic objective, in the sense that it is
entirety. (1)
determined in such a way as to destroy the State-form and city-form with which it collides. (2) When the State
appropriates the war machine, the latter obviously changes in nature and function, since it is afterward directed
against the nomad and all State destroyers, or else expresses relations between States, to the extent that a State
undertakes exclusively to destroy another State or impose its aims upon it. (3) It is pre- cisely after the war machine
has been appropriated by the State in this way that it tends to take war for its direct and primary object, for its
"analytic" object (and that war tends to take the battle for its object). In short, it is at one and the same time that
the State apparatus appropriates a war machine, that the
that war be- comes subordinated to the aims of the State.
1nc
The IDFs use of the war machine causes massive structural
violence and oppression.
Weizman 2006 (Eyal Weizman, Israeli intellectual who is a professor of Spatial
and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London; The Art of War: Deleuze,
Guattari, Debord, and The Israeli Defence Force,
http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/art-war-deleuze-guattari-debord-andisraeli-defence-force//AGY)
Kokhavis intention in the battle was to enter the city in order to kill members of the
Palestinian resistance and then get out. The horrific frankness of these objectives, as recounted to me by
Shimon Naveh, Kokhavis instructor, is part of a general Israeli policy that seeks to disrupt Palestinian resistance on political as well
as military levels through targeted assassinations from both air and ground. If you still believe, as the IDF would like you to, that
moving through walls is a relatively gentle form of warfare, the following description of the sequence of events might change your
soldiers assemble behind the wall and then , using explosives, drills or hammers,
they break a hole large enough to pass through . Stun grenades are then sometimes
thrown, or a few random shots fired into what is usually a private living-room occupied by
unsuspecting civilians. When the soldiers have passed through the wall, the occupants are locked inside one of
the rooms, where they are made to remain sometimes for several days until the operation is concluded, often
without water, toilet, food or medicine. Civilians in Palestine, as in Iraq, have experienced the
unexpected penetration of war into the private domain of the home as the most
profound form of trauma and humiliation. A Palestinian woman identified only as Aisha, interviewed by a
journalist for the Palestine Monitor, described the experience: Imagine it youre sitting in your livingroom, which you know so well; this is the room where the family watches television
together after the evening meal, and suddenly that wall disappears with a
deafening roar, the room fills with dust and debris, and through the wall pours one
soldier after the other, screaming orders. You have no idea if theyre after you, if
theyve come to take over your home, or if your house just lies on their route to
somewhere else. The children are screaming, panicking. Is it possible to even begin
to imagine the horror experienced by a five-year-old child as four, six, eight, 12
soldiers, their faces painted black, sub-machine-guns pointed everywhere, antennas
protruding from their backpacks, making them look like giant alien bugs, blast their
way through that wall?[3] Naveh, a retired Brigadier-General, directs the Operational Theory Research Institute, which
mind. To begin with,
trains staff officers from the IDF and other militaries in operational theory defined in military jargon as somewhere between
strategy and tactics. He summed up the mission of his institute, which was founded in 1996: We are like the Jesuit Order. We
attempt to teach and train soldiers to think. [] We read Christopher Alexander, can you imagine?; we read John Forester, and other
architects. We are reading Gregory Bateson; we are reading Clifford Geertz. Not myself, but our soldiers, our generals are reflecting
In a
lecture Naveh showed a diagram resembling a square of opposition that plots a set of
logical relationships between certain propositions referring to military and guerrilla operations. Labelled with phrases such as
on these kinds of materials. We have established a school and developed a curriculum that trains operational architects.[4]
Difference and Repetition The Dialectics of Structuring and Structure, Formless Rival Entities, Fractal Manoeuvre, Velocity vs.
Rhythms, The
I asked
Naveh why Deleuze and Guattari were so popular with the Israeli military . He replied that
war machine. Similarly, in their discussion of smooth space it is implied that this conception may lead to domination.)
several of the concepts in A Thousand Plateaux became instrumental for us [] allowing us to explain contemporary situations in a
way that we could not have otherwise. It problematized our own paradigms. Most important was the distinction they have pointed
out between the concepts of smooth and striated space [which accordingly reflect] the organizational concepts of the war
machine and the state apparatus. In the IDF we now often use the term to smooth out space when we want to refer to
operation in a space as if it had no borders. [] Palestinian areas could indeed be thought of as striated in the sense that they are
2nc
The Israeli Defense Forces uses the War Machine.
Lambert 10 (Gregg Lambert, Professor of Humanities and Founding Director of
the Humanities Centre at Syracuse University; The War Machine and a people who
revolt, Theory & Event 13.3,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v013/13.3.lambert.html// AGY)
In saying this, of course, I realize that this last association has become extremely inconvenient today in relation to
the image of the suicide bomber, the member of an anomalous and nomadic band, who walks into a public square
to explode his own organs precisely in an effort, it seems, to ward off the State form. Equally problematic are
the
Nomadology Turn
1nc
Nomadology turn- Nomads are futile- affirming the Nomad and
war machine creates an inherent dialectic that creates no
change.
Mann 95 (1995; Paul Mann, Professor of English at Pomona College; Stupid
Undergrounds, http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.595/mann.595//AGY)
Intellectual economics guarantees that even the most powerful and challenging work cannot protect itself from the
and Guattari did not adequately protect their thought from this dialectical reconfiguration (one is reminded of
Breton's indictment against Rimbaud for not having prevented, in advance, Claudel's recuperation of him as a
proper Catholic), but no vigilance would have sufficed in any case. The work of Deleuze and Guattari is evidence
virtual models and maps close off the very exits they indicate . The
problem is in part that rhizomes, lines of flight, smooth spaces, BwOs, etc., are at one and the
same time theoretical-political devices of the highest critical order and merely
fantasmatic, delirious, narcissistic models for writing, and thus perhaps an instance of the alltoo-proper blurring of the distinction between criticism and fantasy. In Deleuze-speak, the stupid
underground would be mapped not as a margin surrounding a fixed point, not as a fixed site determined
strictly by its relation or opposition to some more or less hegemonic formation, but as an intensive, n-dimensional
intersection of rhizomatic plateaus. Nomadology and rhizomatics conceive such a
"space" (if one only had the proverbial nickel for every time that word is used as a critical metaphor, without the
slightest reflection on what might be involved in rendering the conceptual in spatial terms) as a liquid, colloidal
that, in real time,
suspension, often retrievable by one or another techno-metaphorical zoning (e.g., "cyberspace"). What is at stake,
however, is not only the topological verisimilitude of the model but the *fantastic* possibility of nonlinear passage,
of multiple simultaneous accesses and exits, of infinite fractal lines occupying finite social space. In the strictest
in which this opposition turns back on itself. It is not yet time to abandon work that so deeply challenges our
intellectual habits as does that of Deleuze and Guattari, and yet, before it has even been comprehended, in the
render them more pointless. The stupid optimism of every work that takes up these
figures is, by itself, the means of that futility and that immanent obsolescence. One must pursue it still.
Such a
space could quite conceivably reject the logic of capital but still be horrendously
oppressive. In contrast, I can imagine some sort of rural, vaguely anarcho-inspired,
hippyish commune that says all the right things, is explicitly against all forms of
oppressive nastiness, but that through various cultural practices and material
barriers is a pretty unfriendly place for people of colour and not very supportive of everyday
is currently theorized, that this has any more of a basis than just not liking that particular grouping.
political work of/in communities of colour. I can imagine, moreover, such a place being regarded by broader left-ish
publics as a genuine crack, and worthy of forms of solidarity and cooperation and admiration that the compound
above is not. Im not saying anything about how these two hypotheticals should be regarded and responded to, just
the books minimalist approach to the content of spaces that break in some
try to do things differently but that (by the books own admission
are likely to) reproduce oppressive practices and relations in other respects is basically to
avoid the issue, which is unhelpful. So. The point Im making is that cracks and their potentially oppressive
pointing out that
contents are undertheorized and I can see ways in which that undertheorization and the ways in which it is justified
could be ways to escape dealing with that oppression , even given an acknowledgment that
imperfections are inevitable. There are also some tensions in the theory that deserve more attention. For instance,
there is no question that the book opposes sectarianism and puritanical politics, and encourages ways of work that
can only be resolved in the course of doing things. But I would still like to have heard more of what Holloway had to
say about navigating such tensions in practice. I also feel a faint anxiety that this approach would lead to us
meaning people struggling against capitalism and other oppressions in diverse ways
and under diverse banners to miss something, in the sense that its rejection of the state
form and its rejection of dissident theorizing that is done from the standpoint of the totality
might cause us to overlook something. I fundamentally agree with both of those stances, but I think it
is probably good that people in revolutionary traditions that do not accept them will continue to challenge them.
important to familiarize oneself for the time being with two theoretical
terms: the "big Other" and "gaze." The latter often lends itself to a multitude of theoretical interpretations, each one replete with
its own definition and conceptualization of functioning. To preempt against too much confusion, however, we'll focus on the gaze as discussed
hereunder. To start, the twentieth century psychoanalyst Badass, Jacques Lacan,
out hunting [...] a footstep heard in a corridor [The gaze exists] not at the level of [a particular] other whose gaze surprises the subject looking
through the keyhole. It is that the other surprises him, the subject, as an entirely hidden gaze. [3] And then there is what Slovenian philosopher
and cultural critic, Slavoj iek,
Symbolic
big Other is something that is shared by everyone. It is none other than that which embodies the
very ideological essence of the socio-symbolic order of our lives; rules and etiquette - especially
juridical Law itself - customs and beliefs, everything you should or should not do, what you
aspire toward, and who or what you aspire to be, all of this and more, individually or in
combination, constitutes the Symbolic big Other. The subject's big Other (hereafter, the
Imaginary big Other), however, is a sort of private investment in the Symbolic big Other, a personal
allegiance to the ruling ideology which sustains the narratives, beliefs, and lived fantasies of the
very culture in which the subject is immersed. Each Imaginary big Other is distinct in its own
unique way: my Imaginary big Other may be, say, a patriotic bricolage (not really, but you get the point) - a composite of things like, e.g.,
Uncle Sam, the American soldier trope, "God" and Tim Tebow. And your Imaginary big Other may embody, say, just Emily Post, or maybe some
vague ideological package of some other normative principles. In any case, the
Imaginary big Other refers directly to that distinctly personalized social standard by
which each of us respectively measures ourselves - 24/7/365 (yes, the big Other can make itself known even in our
dreams). Virtually everybody shares in the Symbolic big Other, for it's that very point from which the
general "will-of-the-people" is reflected back to the people, so that we can see ourselves as we appear in this
reflection - as a consistent social "whole." In other words, the big Other is that which gives substance to the body
politic. We are its subjects. And despite not really existing - that, at the imaginative level of the individual, it's really none other than
one's own internalization of society's dos-and-don'ts - the big Other is nonetheless experienced as a sort of independent phantasm which
situates itself smack dab in the middle of any social interaction like some kind of incorporeal incarnation of a necessary third-wheel that both
instructs and scrutinizes our every thought, utterance, and move. As such, the big Other ensures
all have a big Other. It is, to repeat an emphasis from earlier, that
standard by which we measure ourselves: our own private piece of the larger, public social space
we inhabit. To paraphrase iek, the gaze of the Symbolic big Other is my own view of myself,
which I see through eyes that are not authentically my own. Here, one should not fail to notice the
Symbolic big Other's striking resemblance to Bentham's "Panopticon," that omnipresent, omniscient "God'seye-view" intended to watch over us wherever we go. The likeness is unmistakable, simply because Bentham's little wet dream embodies the big
Other as such. The essential point to take away from this is that one's
this means - and bear with me here, because this may turn
confusing - is that the Symbolic big Other, as such, signifies the very mode of appearance in
which we appear to ourselves, for ourselves, as we desire to appear as such. So it would follow that, if we
appear to ourselves, for ourselves, as images to be controlled, manipulated, tracked, watched,
and so on, as we certainly do in today's digital medium of social networking - which, by the way,
we collectively, willfully and, pleasurably participate in - then this zeitgeist of the modern
majority will inevitably converge at a centralized point: which is to say, the big Other, both its
Symbolic and Imaginary incarnations, will appear in the guise of "Big Brother." At the individual
level, each of us embodies "Big Brother": we are intrigued with the act of watching, tracking,
manipulating, images of ourselves. At the Symbolic level, the truth of this enjoyment expresses
itself today in all of its unsettling perversity: PRISM.
Cap
1nc
1. Capitalism feeds on war machines- Capitalism has become
Deleuzian by anticipating and coopting lines of flight. Be
relying on a vanguard minority to oppose capitalism, Deleuze
ignored that its nature is to feed off resistance.
Vandenberghe, 8 (Frederic. Research professor in sociology at the Institute of
Social and Political Studies (IESP, formerly known as IUPERJ), part of the State
University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. "Deleuzian Capitalism." Philosophy & Social
Criticism 34.8 (2008): 877-903. Web. 22 July 2015.
<https://www.academia.edu/859731/Deleuzian_capitalism>.)TB
The machinic phylum that animates capitalism and ows through its unied body without organs is money. Money is always
in ux and never rests. It is, as Simmel says in his Philosophy of Money,the objectivation of economic circulation in a symbol without substance that represents all possible
goods and that, by substituting itself for them, speeds up the circulation of goods. Flowing through the subsystems of society, invading them from underneath, vivifying them from within,
money is the bloodthat ows through the veins of capitalism and unies the subsystems into the single market of the integrated world system of the world economy(Braudels conomie-monde
).Marxfamouslylikenedcapitaltoavampire.Capital is dead labour which, like a vampire, only becomes alive by sucking out living labour, and
the more it sucks, the more it is lively(Marx, 1968: 247). Marx had obviously understood the internal connec-tion between labour and capital when he predicted its
enlarged repro-duction on a global scale, but xed as he was on the category of work, he could not foresee that production would become post-industrial andthat capital
could exist and reproduce itself without labour (Vanden-berghe, 2002). But capitalism is inventive and productive, and to capi-talize, it progressively leaves the factory and invades, like a
parasite, allspheres of life and the life-world itself. At the end, it ends up, as we shall see, producing and consuming life itself. The basic principle of rhizomatic sociology
is that society is always en fuite , always leaking and eeing, and may be understood in terms of the manner in which it deals
with its lignes de fuite , or lines of ight. There is always something that ees and escapes the system, something that is
not controllable, or at least not yet controlled. With their machinic analysis of becoming, Deleuze and Guattari want to encourage leakages
and cause a run off faire fuire as when you drill a hole in the pipeor open up the abscess(Guattari, 1977: 120; Deleuze and Guattari,1980: 249; Deleuze, 1990: 32). The
intention is obviously anti-systemic draining the system, digging holes, continuing the work of the old mole. Yet, today, the capitalistic system itself
thrives on anti-systematicity,articial negativity(Adorno), or repetition and difference(Deleuze). It feeds, as it were, on its own problems and in the process it changesitself
and mutates. The repetition of the same eventually leads to differ-ence, which is tantamount to saying that the survival of
capitalism means continuity with difference. Capitalism explores and anticipates the de-territorializing lines of ight to
capture them from without, enter into symbiosis with them, and redirect them from within, like a parasite, towards its own
ends. Capitalism is inventive; its creativity knows nolimits it is of the viral type(Deleuze and Guattari, 1980: 580). Deleuze and Guattari put their anti-capitalist
hopes in the guerrilla tactics of the schizoid minority that refuses to play the game (Marcuses nicht mitmachen ) of the self-content majority.
Although they know that the squirms of the dispersed minority accompany the war machine of the entrepreneurial companies like their
supplement, although they realize that capitalism advances like a war machine that feeds on the lines of ight and indicated that capitalism
knows no internal limits, they nevertheless believed that capitalism would nd its logical conclusionintheschizophrenicproduction
ofafreeowofdesire:Schizophreniaisthe external limit of capitalism itself (Deleuze and Guattari, 1972: 292).What they apparently meant by
that mad statement is that the nal crisis of capitalism would eventually be generated not by the regulation or domestication of
capitalism but by the complete commodication of the desiring machines that we are. Only by accelerating the decadence of the present system,
only through some kind of self-commodication ina consumerist potlatch, would the capitalist system be beaten by its own
game: Which is the revolutionary path, if theresone? Towithdraw from the worldma r ke t ... in a cur ious rene wa l of the ec onomic solution of the
fa scists? Or might it go in the opposite direction? To go still further in the movementof the market, of decoding and territorialisation? ... Not withdraw from
theprocess, but going further, accelerating the process, as Nietzsche said. As amatter of fact, we aint seen nothing yet. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1972: 285) 1 A quarter of a century
later, the process of accumulation has accelerated to the point that capitalism itself has become Deleuzian in form, in styleand in content .
This junction is not accidental. As usual, an ironic and profoundly perverse relationship exists between the romantic ethic and the spirit of capitalism (Campbell, 1987: 20227). Needless to
say that I am not claiming that Deleuzes libertarian critique of capitalism was anti-critical or phoney from the start and that Deleuze is somehow the Giddens of the 1970s: a neo-liberal
disguised as a libertarian, or Thatcher on LSD. What I am claiming is, rather, that capitalism has progressively integrated the critique of capitalism into its
mode of functioning, with the result that capitalism appears stronger than ever, whereas the critiqueof capitalism seems rather disarmed.
politics which were forged in the birth of the nation-state, the rise of capitalism, and a Twentieth Century of unpre-
and speed, politics withers and retreats. In this paralysis of the political imaginary, the future has been cancelled. 4.
Since 1979, the hegemonic global political ideology has been neoliberalism ,
found in some variant throughout the leading economic powers. In spite of the deep structural challenges the new
since 20078,
neoliberal programmes have only evolved in the sense of deepening. This
continuation of the neoliberal project, or neoliberalism 2.0, has begun to apply another
round of structural adjustments, most significantly in the form of encouraging new and aggressive
incursions by the private sector into what remains of social democratic institutions and services. This is in
spite of the immediately negative economic and social effects of such policies, and
global problems present to it, most immediately the credit, financial, and fiscal crises
the longer term fundamental barriers posed by the new global crises.
2nc
Fluidity link- the risomatic form of the war machine allows for
capitalism to co-opt it and place it under the capitalistic order.
Diken and Laustsen 01 (2001; Bulent Diken, Professor of Sociology at
Lancaster University, and Carsten Bagge Laustsen, Professor of Political Science at
Aarhus University; Enjoy Your Flight! Fight Club as a symptom of the Network
Society, http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/sociology/research/publications/papers/dikenlaustsen-enjoy-your-fight.pdf//AGY)
de-traditionalized, increasingly reflexive individuals no longer have ready-made
symbolic authorities, and they complain, as does Tyler in Fight Club, we are a generation of men raised by
The
women. He never knew his father (Palahniuk 1997: 49). In the social space within which Fight Club emerges
A place
no longer determined by the law and tradition or by the solidity of a habitus. What
follows is the burden of reflexivity as one has to choose ones place in the social,
because identity is no longer a matter of occupying an already given subject
position. Hence one desperately searches for a true identity, tries to find an objective correlate to being. I loved
there is no father, only a ruse of signs, an experience of a smooth space without symbolic hierarchies.
my life. I loved my condo. I loved every stick of furniture. That was my whole life. Everythingthe lamps, the chairs,
This friction-free,
smooth space is of course the space of contemporary capitalism, of flows. What is often
overlooked is that in this social space fantasies are violated , not because they are
forbidden but because they are not. Today fantasies are subsumed under capital ,
and a market for the extreme and the perverted is growing . In our post-Oedipal era, the
the rugswere me. The dishes were me. The plants were me. The television was me.
paradigmatic mode of subjectivity is the polymorphously perverse subject that follows the command to enjoy; no
longer the Oedipal subject integrated into the symbolic order through castration (iek 1999: 248). If, in the
reflexive society, the symbolic father of the uncompromising No! is in retreat, the void is filled with either ersatz
authorities (e.g. ethical committees) or authorities that make transgression or perversion of the Law a rule in the
service of enjoyment. Thus, the standard situation of the disciplinary subject is reversed: we no longer have the
public Order of hierarchy, repression and severe regulation, subverted by the secret acts of liberating
transgression ... on the contrary, we have public social relations among free and equal individuals, where the
passionate
always in a state of becoming. Control, he says, is short-term and rapidly shifting, but at the same time
continuous and unbounded, whereas discipline was long-term, infinite and discontinuous (Deleuze 1995: 181). If
the geography of discipline worked in terms of fixed points or positions, control operates in terms of mobility, speed,
The symptom of
control society is the collapse of the institutional walls: not that discipline ends with
the deterritorialization of institutions. Rather, discipline, now freer than ever from territorial
flexibility, anonymity and contingent identities, in terms of the whatever (Hardt 1998: 32).
constraints, has become more immanent to the social field (Hardt & Negri 2000). In control society subjectivity is
produced simultaneously by numerous institutions in different combinations and doses; hence
social space
tends to lose its delimitation: one is factory worker outside the factory, student outside the school,
inmate outside prison, insane outside the asylumall at the same time. It belongs to no identity and all
of themoutside the institutions but even more intensely ruled by their disciplinary
logics (Hardt & Negri 2000: 331-2). This unfinished, constantly mutating status of
everything does not bring with it freedom, but control , which corresponds to the
immanent, axiomatic logic of capital. Capitalism does no longer function according to
the discourse of the master (iek 1999: 373). Control is not given by castration, that is,
by a restriction of the subjects ability to move and to act, by a limitation in being . It
pertains to flows; the universe of capitalism is immanent, infinite, without an end . As
Fight Club says, living in it is like living in The IBM Stellar Sphere, The Philip Morris Galaxy, Planet Starbucks. The
source of anxiety in this open, smooth space is not lack of being; rather, too much
pseudo-freedom, e.g. freedom to consume. [T]he anxiety generated by the risk society is that of a superego:
what characterizes the superego is precisely the absence of a proper measureone obeys its commands not
enough / or too much; whatever one does, the result is wrong and one is guilty. The problem with the superego is
that it can never be translated into a positive rule to be followed (iek 1999: 394). Thus, permitted enjoyment
You may!turns into the prescriptive enjoymentYou must!(iek 2000: 133). In other words, the demise of the
symbolic authority does in no way imply the demise of authority as such, and herein lies the paradox of the theory
of reflexivity, its blindness to the (re)emerging non-symbolic forms of authority.
The paradox of
postmodern individuality: the injunction to be oneself, to realize ones creative potential, results in the
exact opposite, that is, the feeling of the inauthenticity of all acts . No act, no commodity is
really it. My inner being is not expressed that way, either (Ibid. 22-23). Extreme
individuality reverts to its opposite, causing the subject experience to be uncertain
and faceless, changing from mask to mask, trying to fill the void behind the mask
by shifting between idiosyncratic hobbies (iek 1999: 373).
Cant solve
D&G cant escape capitalism
Zizek, 4 (Slavoj. Professor of Sociology at the Institute for Sociology, Ljubljana University, 2004,
interviewed by Glyn Daly, Senior Lecturer in Politics in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at
University College, Northampton, Conversations With Zizek, p. 151-52)
Would this be a kind of twisted version of Deleuze and Guattari? Its virtually the opposite of Deleuze and
Guattari, because they have this idea of capitalist schizophrenia, the bad paranoia, which then explodes
into a good revolutionary schizophrenia. But I think that Deleuze and Guattari are dangerously close to
some kind of pseudo anti-psychiatry celebration of madness. I think that madness is something horrible
people suffer and Ive always found it false to try and identify some liberating dimension in
madness. In any case, the limit that the social psychologists are referring to is of a far more
straightforward kind. For example, according to some American estimates at least 70 per cent of todays
academics and professors are on either Prozac or some other form of psychotropic drug. It is no longer
the exception. It is literally that in order to function we already need psycho-pharmacy. So that is the
limit: we will simply start getting crazy. But I dont buy this notion of an external limit. I think that
capitalism has this incredible capacity of turning catastrophe into a new form of access. Capitalism can
turn every external limit to its development into a challenge for new capitalist investment. For example,
let us assume that there will be some big ecological catastrophe. I think that capitalism can simply turn
ecology itself into a new field of market competition , like, you know, who will produce the better
product, which will be ecologically better.
Coloniality
Deleuzes theory excludes consideration of indigenous
societies root cause of classism
Spivak 85 (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an Indian literary theorist, philosopher
and University Professor at Columbia University, where she is a founding member of
the school's Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Can the subaltern
speak?1985. From Cary Nelson, Lawrence Grossbergs Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture. University of Illinois Press, 1988) TB
That Deleuze and Foucault ignore both the epistemic violence of imperialism and
the international division of labor would matter less if they did not , in closing, touch on
third-world issues. But in France it is impossible to ignore the problem of the tiers monde, the inhabitants of
the erstwhile French African colonies. Deleuze limits his consideration of the Third World to
these old local and regional indigenous elite who are, ideally, subaltern. In this context,
references to the maintenance of the surplus army of labor fall into reverse-ethnic
sentimentality. Since he is speaking of the heritage of nineteenth-century territorial imperialism, his reference
is to the nation-state rather than the globalizing center "French capitalism needs greatly a floating signifier of
unemployment. In this perspective,
immigrant workers; repression in the factories, because the French must reacquire the 'taste' for increasingly
harder work; the struggle against youth and the repres-sion of the educational system" (ED, 211-12). This is an
acceptable analysis. Yet it shows again that the Third World can enter the resistance program of an alliance politics
directed against a "unified repression" only when it is confined to the third-world groups that are directly accessible
Fem
Rather than seeing philosophy as a question of conditions, Deleuze and Guattaris What is Philosophy?
suggests that we think any such posited conditions as illusions of transcendence (1994: 49). To see all transcendent
conditions as illusions generated from within immanence involves recognising that these illusions (such as the subject, God or Being) are effected
according to a good image of thought. The idea of a grounding transcendence ensures in advance what thought will
be. The positing of a general transcendent condition enables thought to continue as self-recognition.
In a
radical empiricism, however, immanence is no longer immanent to something else (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 47). Immanence is only
conceivable as immanence to some transcendence if there is a pre-established plane: a general field already understood or deter- mined in a
certain way. The realisation that there is this plane is the first challenge of Deleuzes empiricism. The second challenge that we might avoid
altogether this transcendent Something = x and think THE plane of immanence (and thereby thought without an image) is the less immediately
realisable task (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 59). In Empiricism and Subjectivity (1991a) Deleuze sets the problem of immanence in relation to
Kants philosophy of representation. Transcendence, Deleuze argues, is an empirical fact. Only transcendental philosophy takes this fact and
places it within the domain of representation such that the given becomes a Something = x (an effect of the subject). The given, here, is seen to
depend on the subjects synthesis (Deleuze 1991a: 111). An empiricist philosophy, on the other hand, looks at what we are doing to establish
relations within the given (133); in which case, there would be no transcendence in general (Being) but a distrib- ution of different connections,
habits, singularities and passions. An immanent philosophy creates its concepts, not according to a pre-established plane, but in an attempt to
think new planes. If we see philosophy, not as an enquiry into the conditions of difference but as the challenge to think
difference in the absence of conditions for difference (Deleuze 1994a: 28), then philosophy will be a creative
rather than a critical procedure. If the illusions of transcendence are inevitably reintroduced (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 51) this is
because concepts, once created, are taken as eternal. As the creation of new concepts, philosophy is the challenge of
immanence, the task of thinking a concept as event, and not as a representation of some predetermined
transcendence. Philosophy is the challenge of an immanence that would be accommodated to itself (208) and not justified by something
other than, or tran- scendent to, the event of thought. This is why philosophy is not history of philosophy but becoming (59). But if
philosophy is not an explanation of the genesis or possi- bility of difference but the creation of different
concepts, what happens to sexual difference that difference that has functioned as the exemplary
instance of difference in theories of ethical dif- ference? Early feminist criticism of Deleuze recognised
one thing clearly enough: if difference is no longer an originary condition, and if difference is no longer
the difference of the genesis of the subject, then sexual difference is no longer foundational, no longer the
difference from which all other (given) differences are effected. Against Deleuze and the collapse of
sexual difference into difference in general, feminist ethics in a number of forms has suggested that we
remain within the transcendental or quasi- transcendental question, the question of the conditions for
determinate differences.
Rhizomes Counter-advocacy
The central characteristic of the modern state is an obscene
underside of the law. This underside is constituted by
relatively insignificant, widespread practices like speeding and
walking on grass. The state is only able to function premised
on these activities being unofficially permitted. So, contrary to
what the aff says, acts of resistance dont end up achieving
any solvency. Instead, we propose the counter-advocacy of
overconforming to the law. Only this can destroy the
ideological phantasy behind law and dismantle the modern
panoptic surveillance state.
Krips, 10 (Henry. Professor of Cultural Studies, Andrew W. Mellon All-Claremont
Chair of Humanities at CGU. "The Politics of the Gaze Foucault, Lacan and iek."
Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research CU 2.1 (2010): 91-102. Web.
20 July 2015.)TB
Central to ieks account of the modern state is the concept of an obscene underside of the law
, namely widespread practices petty tax evasion, speeding, walking on the grass, etc which,
although strictly speaking illicit, are unofficially tolerated. This network of practices is sustained thanks to
what iek calls an ideological phantasy that keeps them an open secret everyone knows about
and participates in them in private, but no one mentions them, let alone publicly flaunts participating in them.
Such practices constitute points of failure of the law in so far as they fall in an indeterminate zone in relation to legal
categories: on the one hand, in so far as they are tolerated they are not straightforwardly illegal, but, on the
other hand, neither are they legal; and as such, constitute a fundamental illegality at the heart of the legal system. ieks point is
that, rather than undermining the law, the obscene underside of the law sustains it the law is
tolerated because of the little secret pleasures that people derive from its obscene underside. In
Lacanian terms, we may say that the obscene underside of the law is the set of necessary but repressed
points of failure of the legal system in short, it is the symptom of the legal system. In particular, in the context of a
legal state apparatus that is held in place by a panoptic system of surveillance, the obscene
underside of the law is a liminal zone of high anxiety that, like the Emperors body under his
new clothes, is obscenely visible to each of his subjects in the privacy of their own visual field,
yet must be shrouded in a cloak of invisibility in the public realm. This is the site of the gaze. How are we
to oppose such a system, which seemingly coexists with, indeed depends upon its own systematic transgression? According to iek,
not by acts of resistance, since the system is readily able to accommodate, indeed depends upon such acts. 6 Instead, iek
suggests opposition through acts of overconformity, which, rather than protesting let alone
breaking the law, insist upon it to the letter, even when ideological common sense suggests
otherwise. In particular, this means a refusal to turn a blind eye from manifestations of laws
obscene underside. As iek puts it: Sometimes, at least the truly subversive thing is not to disregard the
explicit letter of Law on behalf of the underlying fantasies, but to stick to this letter against the
fantasy which sustains it.Is not an exemplary case of such subversion-through-identification provided by Jaroslav Haseks The
Good Soldier Schweik, the novel whose hero wreaks total havoc by simply executing the orders of his superiors in an overzealous and all-too-
1nc
The United States Federal Government should completely
outlaw any domestic surveillance conducted on social and/or
political movements and the predictive policing policy.
1. Your Royden 15 card says that the structural violence
caused in the status quo comes from the FBIs surveillance of
movements with the Stingray, Dirtbox technology, and Joint
Terrorist Forces.
2. Curtailing surveillance on movements and Predictive
policing policy ends racial discrimination allowing movements
to prevail and solve. Your own 1ac evidence.
Cyril 15 (April 2015, Malkia Amala Cyril; The Progressive, April 2015 edition,
http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/03/188074/black-americas-statesurveillance//AGY)
targeted surveillance frequently includes the indiscriminate collection of the
private data of people targeted by race but not involved in any crime . For targeted
communities, there is little to no expectation of privacy from government or corporate
surveillance. Instead, we are watched, either as criminals or as consumers. We do not expect
The trouble is,
policies to protect us. Instead, weve birthed a complex and coded culturefrom jazz to spoken dialectsin order to
navigate a world in which spying, from AT&T and Walmart to public benefits programs and beat cops on the block, is
as much a part of our built environment as the streets covered in our blood. In a recent address, New York City
Police Commissioner Bill Bratton made it clear: 2015 will be one of the most significant years in the history of this
organization. It will be the year of technology, in which we literally will give to every member of this department
use is Broken Windows. This approach to policing places an undue focus on quality of life crimeslike selling
loose cigarettes, the kind of offense for which Eric Garner was choked to death. Without oversight, accountability,
transparency, or rights, predictive policing is just high-tech racial profiling indiscriminate data
collection that drives discriminatory policing practices. As local law enforcement agencies increasingly adopt
surveillance technologies, they use them in three primary ways: to listen in on specific conversations on and offline;
to observe daily movements of individuals and groups; and to observe data trends. Police departments like
Brattons aim to use sophisticated technologies to do all three. They will use technologies like license plate readers,
which the Electronic Frontier Foundation found to be disproportionately used in communities of color and
communities in the process of being gentrified. They will use facial recognition, biometric scanning software, which
the FBI has now rolled out as a national system, to be adopted by local police departments for any criminal justice
purpose. They intend to use body and dashboard cameras, which have been touted as an effective step toward
accountability based on the results of one study, yet storage and archiving procedures, among many other issues,
remain unclear. They will use Stingray cellphone interceptors. According to the ACLU, Stingray technology is an
invasive cellphone surveillance device that mimics cellphone towers and sends out signals to trick cellphones in the
area into transmitting their locations and identifying information. When used to track a suspects cellphone, they
also gather information about the phones of countless bystanders who happen to be nearby. The same is true of
domestic drones, which are in increasing use by U.S. law enforcement to conduct routine aerial surveillance. While
drones are currently unarmed, drone manufacturers are considering arming these remote-controlled aircraft with
weapons like rubber bullets, tasers, and tear gas. They will use fusion centers. Originally designed to increase
interagency collaboration for the purposes of counterterrorism, these have instead become the local arm of the
intelligence community. According to Electronic Frontier Foundation, there are currently seventy-eight on record.
They are the clearinghouse for increasingly used suspicious activity reportsdescribed as official documentation
of observed behavior reasonably indicative of pre-operational planning related to terrorism or other criminal
activity. These reports and other collected data are often stored in massive databases like e-Verify and Prism. As
anybody whos ever dealt with gang databases knows, its almost impossible to get off a federal or state database,
even when the data collected is incorrect or no longer true.
racial and religious profilingit relies on it . Just as stop and frisk legitimized an initial, unwarranted
contact between police and people of color, almost 90 percent of whom turn out to be innocent of
any crime, suspicious activities reporting and the dragnet approach of fusion centers target communities of
color. One review of such reports collected in Los Angeles shows approximately 75 percent were of people
of color. This is the future of policing in America, and it should terrify you as much as
it terrifies me. Unfortunately, it probably doesnt, because my life is at far greater risk than the lives of white
Americans, especially those reporting on the issue in the media or advocating in the halls of power. One of the most
terrifying aspects of high-tech surveillance is the invisibility of those it disproportionately impacts. The NSA and FBI
have engaged local law enforcement agencies and electronic surveillance technologies to spy on Muslims living in
the United States. According to FBI training materials uncovered by Wired in 2011, the bureau taught agents to
treat mainstream Muslims as supporters of terrorism, to view charitable donations by Muslims as a funding
mechanism for combat, and to view Islam itself as a Death Star that must be destroyed if terrorism is to be
contained. From New York City to Chicago and beyond, local law enforcement agencies have expanded unlawful and
covert racial and religious profiling against Muslims not suspected of any crime. There is no national security reason
to profile all Muslims. At the same time, almost 450,000 migrants are in detention facilities throughout the United
States, including survivors of torture, asylum seekers, families with small children, and the elderly. Undocumented
migrant communities enjoy few legal protections, and are therefore subject to brutal policing practices, including
statistic as evidence of greater criminality, a 2012 study confirms that black defendants are at least 30 percent
on millions of cellphones if it were not already spying on black people, Muslims, and migrants. As surveillance
racial disparities
are being made invisible by a media environment that has failed to tell the story of
surveillance in the context of structural racism . Reporters love to tell the technology story. For
technologies are increasingly adopted and integrated by law enforcement agencies today,
some, its a sexier read. To me, freedom from repression and racism is far sexier than the newest gadget used to
reinforce racial hierarchy. As civil rights protections catch up with the technological terrain, reporting needs to catch
up, too. Many journalists still focus their reporting on the technological trends and not the racial hierarchies that
these trends are enforcing. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, Everything we see is a shadow cast by that which we
We are living in an
incredible time, when migrant activists have blocked deportation buses, and a
movement for black lives has emerged, and when women, queer, and trans
experiences have been placed right at the center . The decentralized power of the Internet makes
that possible. But the Internet also makes possible the high-tech surveillance that threatens to
drive structural racism in the twenty-first century . We can help black lives matter by
ensuring that technology is not used to cement a racial hierarchy that leaves too
many people like me dead or in jail . Our communities need partners, not
gatekeepers. Together, we can change the cultural terrain that makes killing black
do not see. Journalists have an obligation to tell the stories that are hidden from view.
people routine. We can counter inequality by ensuring that both the technology and
the police departments that use it are democratized. We can change the story on surveillance to
raise the voices of those who have been left out. There are no voiceless people, only those that aint been heard
Lets birth a new norm in which the technological tools of the twenty-first century
create equity and justice for allso all bodies enjoy full and equal protection, and
the Jim Crow surveillance state exists no more.
yet.
Solvency
State Good
The State solves for racial prejudice.
Franklin 93 (1993; John Hope Franklin, Professor of Legal History in the Law
School at Duke University and the Professor Emeritus of History; THE COLOR LINE:
Legacy for the Twenty-First Century, University of Missouri Press / COLUMBIA AND
LONDON , pg. 45//AGY)
Neither the courts nor the Congress nor the president can declare by fiat, resolution,
or executive order that the United States is a color-blind society. They can only
facilitate a movement in that direction by discharging their duties in a way that
reflects their commitment to such a goal. Form that point on, it is the people of all colors who must
work in every way possible to attain that goal. Those who insist that we should conduct ourselves as if such a
utopian state already existed have no interest in achieving it and, indeed, would be horrified if we even approached
it.
talking with the brilliant historian Barbara Fields. One point she makes that very few Americans understand is that
racism is a creation. You read Edmund Morgans work and actually see racism being inscribed in
the law and the country changing as a result . If we accept that racism is a creation,
then we must then accept that it can be destroyed . And if we accept that it can be destroyed, we
must then accept that it can be destroyed by us and that it likely must be destroyed by
methods kin to creation. Racism was created by policy. It will likely only be
ultimately destroyed by policy. Over at his blog, Andrew Sullivan offers a reply: I dont believe the law
created racism any more than it can create lust or greed or envy or hatred. It can encourage or mitigate these
profound aspects of human psychology it can create racist structures as in the Jim Crow South or Greater Israel.
But it can no more end these things that it can create them. A complementary strategy is finding ways for the
targets of such hatred to become inured to them, to let the slurs sting less until they sting not at all. Not easy. But a
more manageable goal than TNCs utopianism. I can appreciate the point Sullivan is making, but I'm not sure it's
relevant to Coates' argument. It is absolutely true that "Group loyalty is deep in our DNA," as Sullivan writes. And if
you define racism as an overly aggressive form of group loyaltybasically just prejudicethen Sullivan is right to
throw water on the idea that the law can "create racism any more than it can create lust or greed or envy or
position of slavery generated a stigma that then justified continued enslavementblacks are lowly, therefore we
Slavery (and later, Jim Crow) wasn't built to reflect racism as much as
it was built in tandem with it. And later policy, in the late 19th and 20th centuries, further entrenched
must keep them as slaves.
white supremacist attitudes. Block black people from owning homes, and they're forced to reside in crowded slums.
Onlookers then use the reality of slums to deny homeownership to blacks, under the view that they're unfit for
suburbs. In other words, create a prohibition preventing a marginalized group from engaging in socially sanctioned
behaviorowning a home, getting marriedand then blame them for the adverse consequences. Indeed, in
arguing for gay marriage and responding to conservative critics, Sullivan has taken note of this exact dynamic. Here
he is twelve years ago, in a column for The New Republic that builds on earlier ideas: Gay men--not because they're
gay but because they are men in an all-male subculture--are almost certainly more sexually active with more
partners than most straight men. (Straight men would be far more promiscuous, I think, if they could get away with
it the way gay guys can.) Many gay men value this sexual freedom more than the stresses and strains of
monogamous marriage (and I don't blame them). But this is not true of all gay men. Many actually yearn for social
stability, for anchors for their relationships, for the family support and financial security that come with marriage. To
deny this is surely to engage in the "soft bigotry of low expectations." They may be a minority at the moment. But
with legal marriage, their numbers would surely grow. And they would function as emblems in gay culture of a
sexual life linked to stability and love. [Emphasis added] What else is this but a variation on Coates' core argument,
that society can create stigmas by using law to force particular kinds of behavior ?
Insofar as gay men were viewed as unusually promiscuous, it almost certainly had something to do with the fact
that society refused to recognize their humanity and sanction their relationships. The absence of any institution to
mediate love and desire encouraged behavior that led this same culture to say "these people are too degenerate to
If the prohibition against gay marriage helped create an antigay stigma, then lifting itas we've seen over the last decadehas helped destroy
it. There's no reason racism can't work the same way .
participate in this institution."
The state is also seen as an expression of greater capacities against want, hunger,
and injustice; as an escape from the arbitrariness of communities established on
narrower rules of inclusion/exclusion; as identity removed somewhat from capricious attachments. No
doubt, the modern state has undermined traditional values of tolerance and pluralism,
subjecting indigenous society to Western-centered rationality. But tradition can also conceal
particularism and oppression of another kind. Even the most elastic interpretation of universality cannot find virtue
in attachments refurbished by hatred, exclusivity, or religious bigotry. A negation of the state is no guarantee that a
bridge to universality can be built. Perhaps the task is to rethink modernity, not to seek refuge in a blind celebration
of tradition. Outside, the state continues to inflict a self-producing "security dilemma"; inside, it has stunted the
that continues to straitjacket the South Asian imagination must be linked to the project of creating an ethical and
humane order based on a restructuring of the state system that privileges the mighty and the rich over the weak
a reconstruction of statesociety relations inside the state appears to be a more fruitful avenue than wishing
the state away, only to be swallowed by Western-centered globalization and its
powerful institutions. A recognition of the patent failure of other institutions either to
deliver the social good or to procure more just distributional rewards in the global
political economy may provide a sobering reassessment of the role of the state. An
appreciation of the scale of human tragedy accompanying the collapse of the state
in many local contexts may also provide important points of entry into rethinking
the one-sided onslaught on the state. Nowhere are these costs borne more heavily than in the
and the poor.74 Recognizing the constrictions of the modern Third World state,
postcolonial, so-called Third World, where time-space compression has rendered societal processes more savage
and less capable of adjusting to rhythms dictated by globalization.
against the brutality of mass slaughter shames us . We have the historical record to ransack for
precedent and corollaries-letters, documents, testaments, books-written words that would even "preserve their
validity in the eyes of a man threatened with instant death."21 The truths gleanable from the record of totalitarian
barbarism cited in them may be common knowledge; they are by no means commonly acknowledged.22 They
appear in print upon many a page; they have not yet-still not yet-sufficiently penetrated human consciousness.
Herein lies the supreme lesson for intellectuals, those who have the projective power to grasp what is not yet
during decades when they repeatedly risked careers, freedom, and their very lives, often in dangerous solitary
who formed the unifying consensus, developed the liberating philosophy, wrote the rallying
framed the politics, mobilized the will and energies of disparate groups, and
literally took to the streets to lead nonviolent protests that became revolutions . The
most profound insights into this process that gradually penetrated social consciousness sufficiently to make
challenges to power,
cries,
revolution possible can be read in the role Viclav Havel played before and during
Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution. As George Steiner reflects, while "the mystery of creative and
analytic genius ... is given to the very few," others can be "woken to its presence and exposed to its demands."24
Havel possesses that rare creative and analytic genius. We see it in the spaciousness of his moral vision for the
future, distilled from the crucible of personal suffering and observation; in his poet's ability to translate both
experience and vision into language that comes as close as possible to truth and survives translation across
cultures; in the compelling force of his personal heroism. Characteristically, Havel raises local experience to
universal relevance. "If today's planetary civilization has any hope of survival," he begins, "that hope lies chiefly in
what we understand as the human spirit." He continues: If we don't wish to destroy ourselves in national, religious
or political discord; if we don't wish to find our world with twice its current population, half of it dying of hunger; if
we don't wish to kill ourselves with ballistic missiles armed with atomic warheads or eliminate ourselves with
bacteria specially cultivated for the purpose; if we don't wish to see some people go desperately hungry while
others throw tons of wheat into the ocean; if we don't wish to suffocate in the global greenhouse we are heating up
for ourselves or to be burned by radiation leaking through holes we have made in the ozone; if we don't wish to
exhaust the nonrenewable, mineral resources of this planet, without which we cannot survive; if, in short, we don't
wish any of this to happen, then we must-as humanity, as people, as conscious beings with spirit, mind and a sense
of responsibility-somehow come to our senses.25 Somehow we must come together in "a kind of general
The
Prague Spring was "the inevitable consequence of a long drama originally played
out chiefly in the theatre of the spirit and the conscience of society ," a process triggered
mobilization of human consciousness, of the human mind and spirit, human responsibility, human reason."26
and sustained "by individuals willing to live in truth even when things