Neg vs.

North Broward KR---Michigan---

Round 6
1NC
 OFF
TOPICALITY.

Affs must be topical. The 1AC isn’t:

‘Resolved’ before a colon means legislative forum.

ACC 13 # Army Career College. 12. Punctuation -- The Colon and Semicolon, United States Army,
Warrant Officer Career College, Last Reviewed: December 19, 2013,
http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/wocc/ColonSemicolon.asp

The colon introduces the following: A list, but only after "as follows," "the following," or a noun for which the list is an appositive: Each scout will
carry the following: (colon) meals for three days, a survival knife, and his sleeping bag. The company had four new officers: (colon) Bill Smith, Frank Tucker, Peter
Fillmore, and Oliver Lewis. A long quotation (one or more paragraphs): In The Killer Angels Michael Shaara wrote: (colon) You may find it a different story from the
one you learned in school. There have been many versions of that battle [Gettysburg] and that war [the Civil War]. (The quote continues for two more paragraphs.)

A formal quotation or question : The President declared: (colon) "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." The question is: (colon) what can
we do about it? A second independent clause which explains the first: Potter's motive is clear: (colon) he wants the assignment. After the introduction of a business
letter: Dear Sirs: (colon)Dear Madam: (colon) The details following an announcement For sale: (colon) large lakeside cabin with dock A formal resolution,
after the word "resolved :" Resolved: (colon) That this council petition the mayor.

‘The USFG’ denotes the three branches.

U.S. Legal 16, organization offering legal assistance and attorney access, “United States Federal
Government Law and Legal Definition,” https://definitions.uslegal.com/u/united-states-federal-
government/

The U nited S tates F ederal G overnment is established by the US Constitution. The Federal Government shares sovereignty over the United Sates with the
individual governments of the States of US. The Federal government has three branches: i) the legislature , which is the US Congress,
ii) Executive , comprised of the President and Vice president of the US and iii) Judiciary . The US Constitution prescribes a system of
separation of powers and ‘checks and balances’ for the smooth functioning of all the three branches of the Federal Government. The US Constitution

limits the powers of the Federal Government to the powers assigned to it; all powers not expressly assigned to the
Federal Government are reserved to the States or to the people.

“Fiscal redistribution” refers to government taxes and transfers.

Alexander Hicks 86, Researcher, Northwestern University, 1986, “CLASS INFLUENCE ON
REDISTRIBUTIVE POLICY: THE CASE OF U.S. STATE GOVERNMENTS, 1951-1961,” Journal of Political and
Military Sociology, Vol. 14
The present redistributive policy focus is on a particular type of government redistribution that may be called direct fiscal redistribution to the
poor (hereafter DFRP). Fiscal redistribution refers here to redistribution of money and in-kind income among
strata of households by means of both government spending and taxing (i.e., fiscal ) activities. For
example, increased generosity in public assistance payment levels and reliance upon progressive
income as opposed to regressive sales taxes can provide positive fiscal redistribution . Direct fiscal
redistribution refers to that part of such redistribution that can be accounted for in terms of government's relatively direct
and immediate give-and-take of expenditures and taxes to and from income strata of households.
Current evidence suggests that such redistribution is considerable in advanced capitalist political democracies, especially vis-à-vis the poor (e.g.,
Reynolds and Smolensky, 1977; Hicks and Swank, 1984b). During the 1970s DFRP apparently augmented the "pre-fisc" income share of poor
households in the U.S. by over 100 percent (see Reynolds and Smolensky, 1977: 74 on the U.S.; and Hicks and Swank, 1984b on advanced
capitalism).

Only our interp preserves fairness. Two internal links.

1. LIMITS. Debate without a resolution unpredictably explodes the number of topical
affs, rigging the game against the neg.
2. GROUND. Teams run to undefinable and uncontestable moral truisms without
constraints on discussion.

Fairness outweighs---both sides depend on it, and it provides a model for

understanding why their impacts, like suffering and racism, have any basis in morality.
It’s the only impact this ballot can solve.
 OFF
DEBATE PIK.
Their recognition and claim of a holistic debate community performs its existence and
produces affective investments that sustain its legitimacy---turning the case
Lundberg 12 – Dr. Christian Lundberg, Co-Director of the University Program in Cultural Studies and
Professor of Rhetoric at the University of North Carolina, PhD in Communication Studies from
Northwestern University, MA in Divinity from Emory University, BA from the University of Redlands,
Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric, p. 174-177

Thus, "as hysterics you demand a new master: you will get it!" At
the register of manifest content, demands are claims for
action and seemingly powerful, but at the level of the rhetorical form of the demand or in the register of
enjoyment, demand is a kind of surrender . As a relation of address the hysterical demand is more a
demand for recognition and love from an ostensibly repressive order than a claim for change . The
limitation of the students' call on Lacan does not lie in the end they sought but in the fact that the hysterical address never quite breaks free
from its framing of the master. The fundamental problem of democracy is not articulating resistance over and
against hegemony but rather the practices of enjoyment that sustain an addiction to mastery and a
deferral of desire.

Hysteria is a politically effective subject position in some ways, but it is politically constraining from the perspective of organized
political dissent. If not a unidirectional practice of resistance, hysteria is at
best a politics of interruption . Imagine a world
where the state was the perfect and complete embodiment of a hegemonic order , without interruption or
remainder, and the discursive system was hermetically closed. Politics would be an impossibility: with no site for contest or
reappropriation, politics would simply be the automatic extension of structure. Hysteria is a site of interruption, in that hysteria represents a
challenge to our hypothetical system, refusing straightforward incorporation by its symbolic logic. But,
stepping outside this
hypothetical non-polity, on balance, hysteria is politically constraining because the form of the demand, as a way of

organizing the field of political enjoyment, requires that the system continue to act in certain
ways to sustain its logic . Though on the surface it is an act of symbolic dissent, hysteria represents an
affirmation of a hegemonic order and is therefore a particularly fraught form of political subjectivization.
The case of the hysteric produces an additional problem in defining jouissance as equivalent with hegemony. One way of defining hysteria is to
say that it is a form of enjoyment that is defined by its very disorganization. As Gerard Wajcman frames it, the fundamental analytical problem
in defining hysteria is precisely that it is a paradoxical refusal of organized enjoyment by a constant act of deferral. This deferral functions by
asserting a form of agency over the Other while simultaneously demanding that the Other provide an organizing principle for hysterical
enjoyment, something the Other cannot provide. Hysteria never moves beyond the question or the riddle, as Wajcman argues: the "hysteric ...
cannot be mastered by knowledge and therefore remains outside of history, even outside its own .... [I]f hysteria is a set of statements about
the hysteric, then the hysteric is what eludes those statements, escapes this knowledge .... [T]he history of hysteria bears witness to something
fundamental in the human condition-being put under pressure to answer a question.T'" Thus, a difficulty for a relatively formal/ structural
account of hegemony as a substitute for jouissance without reduction: where is the place for a practice of enjoyment that by its nature eludes
nanling in the order of knowledge? This account of hysteria provides a significant test case for the equation betweenjouissance and hegemony,
for the political promise and peril of demands and ultimately for the efficacy of a hysterical politics. But the results of such a test can only be
born out in the realm of everyday politics.

On Resistance: The Dangers of Enjoying One's Demands

The demands of student revolutionaries and antiglobalization protestors provide a set of opportunities for
interrogating hysteria as a political practice. For the antiglobalization protestors cited earlier, demands to be added to a list of
dangerous globophobes uncannily condense a dynamic inherent to all demands for recognition. But the demands of the Mexico Solidarity
Network and the Seattle Independent Media project demand more than recognition: they also demand danger as a specific mode of
representation. "Danger" functions as a sign of something more than inclusion, a way of reaffirming the protestors' imaginary agency over
processes of globalization. If danger represents an assertion of agency, and the assertion of agency is proportional to the deferral of desire to
the master upon whom the demand is placed, then demands to be recognized as dangerous are doubly hysterical. Such demands are also
demands for a certain kind of love, namely, the state might extend its love by recognizing the
dangerousness of the one who makes the demand. At the level the demand's rhetorical function, dangerousness is
metonymically connected with the idea that average citizens can effect change in the prevailing order, or that they might be recognized as
agents who, in the instance of the list of globalophobic leaders, can command the Mexican state to reaffirm their agency by recognizing their
dangerousness. The
rhetorical structure of danger implies the continuing existence of the state or governing
apparatus's interests, and these interests become a nodal point at which the hysterical demand is
discharged. This structure generates enjoyment of the existence of oppressive state policies as a point for
the articulation of identity. The addiction to the state and the demands for the state's love is also bound up with a
fundamental dependency on the oppression of the state: otherwise the identity would collapse. Such
demands constitute a reaffirmation of a hysterical subject position: they reaffirm not only the subject's marginality in the
global system but the danger that protestors present to the global system . There are three practical implications for this
formation.

First, for the hysteric the simple discharge of the demand is both the beginning and satisfaction of the political project. Although there is always
a nascent political potential in performance, in this case the performance of demand comes to fully eclipse the desires that animate content of
the demand. Second, demand allows institutions that stand in for the global order to dictate the direction of
politics. This is not to say that engaging such institutions is a bad thing; rather, it is to say that when
antagonistic engagement with certain institutions is read as the end point of politics, the field of political
options is relatively constrained. Demands to be recognized as dangerous by the Mexican government or as a powerful
antiglobalization force by the WTO often function at the cost of addressing how practices of globalization are reaffirmed at the level of
consumption, of identity, and so on or in thinking through alternative political strategies for engaging globalization that do not hinge on the
state and the state's actions.

Paradoxically, the third danger is that an addiction to the refusal of demands creates a paralyzing disposition toward institutional politics.
Grossberg has identified a tendency in left politics to retreat from the "politics of policy and public debate.":" Although Grossberg identifies the
problem as a specific coordination of "theory" and its relation to left politics, perhaps a hysterical commitment to marginality informs the
impulse in some sectors to eschew engagements with institutions and institutional debate. An addiction to the state's refusal often makes the
perfect the enemy of the good, implying a stifling commitment to political purity as a pretext for sustaining a structure of enjoyment dependent
on refusal, dependent on a kind of paternal "no." Instead of seeing institutions and policy making as one part of the political field that might be
pressured for contingent or relative goods, a hysterical politics is in the incredibly difficult position of taking an addressee (such as the state)
that it assumes represents the totality of the political field; simultaneously it understands its addressee as constitutively and
necessarily only a locus of prohibition .
These paradoxes become nearly insufferable when one makes an analytical cut between the content of a demand and its rhetorical
functionality. At the level of the content of the demand, the state or institutions that represent globalization are figured as
illegitimate, as morally and politically compromised because of their misdeeds, Here there is an assertion of
agency, but because the assertion of agency is simultaneously a deferral of desire , the identity produced in

the hysterical demand is not only intimately tied to but is ultimately dependent on the continuing
existence of the state, hegemonic order , or institution. At the level of affective investment , the state or
institution is automatically figured as the legitimate authority over its domain. As Lacan puts it: "demand in itself
... is demand of a presence or of an absence ... pregnant with that Other to be situated within the needs that it can satisfy. Demand
constitutes the Other as already possessing the 'privilege' of satisfying needs, that it is to say, the power of
depriving them of that alone by which they are satisfied."46
We can agree with the rest of the aff strategy and negate only certain frames. 2NR
consolidation is best.

Only conditional tests of limited agreement incentivize narrow testing of their specific
claims. Requiring us to disprove the entire aff forces extreme impact turns that lack
nuance and political utility.

Nuanced testing optimizes praxis

Williams 15 – Douglas Williams, Third-Generation Organizer, BA in Political Science from the
University of Minnesota at Morris, MPA from the University of Missouri Columbia, Doctoral Student in
Political Science at Wayne State University, internally quoting Freddie DeBoer, Lecturer at Purdue
University and PhD in Rhetoric and Composition from Purdue University and MA in English with a
Concentration in Writing and Rhetoric from The University of Rhode Island, The South Lawn,
https://thesouthlawn.org/2015/03/10/the-dead-end-of-identity-politics/ [language modified]

What conversation is there to be had around that? It is as if the mere existence of her identity inoculates
her from any critique. How did we get here?

Freddie DeBoer makes a great point in his piece on what he calls “critique drift“:

“This all largely descends from a related condition: many in the broad online left have adopted a
norm where being an ally means that you never critique people who are presumed to be
speaking from your side, and especially if they are seen as speaking from a position of greater
oppression. I understand the need for solidarity, I understand the problem of undermining and
derailing, and I recognize why people feel strongly that those who have traditionally been
silenced should be given a position of privilege in our conversations. But critique drift
demonstrates why a[n] [effective] healthy, functioning political movement can’t forbid tactical
criticism of those with whom you largely agree. Because critical vocabulary and political
arguments are common intellectual property which gain or lose power based on their
communal use, never criticizing those who misuse them ultimately disarms [undermines] the
left. Refusing to say ‘ this is a real thing, but you are not being fair or helpful in making that
accusation right now’ alienates potential allies, contributes to the burgeoning backlash against
social justice politics, and prevents us from making the most accurate, cogent critique
possible.”

Look, I am Black. Also, sometimes, I can be wrong. Those two things are not mutually exclusive, and yet
we have gotten to a point where any critique of tactics used by oppressed communities can result in
being deemed “sexist/racist/insert oppression here-ist” and cast out of the Social Justice Magic Circle.
And listen, maybe that is cool with some folks. Maybe the revolution that so many of these types speak
about will simply consist of everyone spontaneously coming to consciousness and there will be no need
for coalitions, give-and-take, or contact with people who do not know every word or phrase that these
groups use as some sort of litmus test for the unwashed.
But for the rest of us who reside in a reality-based world, where every social interaction is not tailored
for your idiosyncratic indignations, we know that casting folks out for the tiniest of offenses will lead to a
Left that will forever be marginalized and ineffective. I have stated before that the kind of people who
put out these lists and engage in the kind of identitarian caterwauling that has become rote copy on the
Internet might actually want that, as a world where left-wing activism is made potent and
transformative will be one where they cannot simply take comfort in their cocoon of self-righteousness.
But damn them when I can turn on my computer and see one Black person after another being gunned
down by police. Damn them when we have a president that can sit there with a straight face and speak
the words of freedom and liberation while using the power at his disposal to deny those very concepts
to others. And damn them when we can get thousands of words on Patricia Arquette drunk at a party or
how it is privileged to not like the same musicians that they do, but we cannot seem to get any thoughts
on how the biggest moment for communities of color since the 1960s is being squandered in a hail of
intergenerational squabbling. And do not even get me started on people writing articles that malign
long-standing activist organizations without a whiff of evidence that there has been any wrongdoing on
their part.
 OFF
CAP K.
The 1AC’s atomized and identity-based approach to political organizing precludes a
class struggle---that causes extinction through environmental degradation,
imperialism, and the collapse of human civilization---the alternative is to build an
economic democracy.
Chris Wright 23, Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago, author of Worker Cooperatives and
Revolution and Popular Radicalism and The Unemployed In Chicago During The Great Depression,
2/22/2023, "How to Rebuild the Left," https://dissidentvoice.org/2023/02/how-to-rebuild-the-left/

One might as well state the matter clearly: given the realities of global warming , rampant environmental destruction ,
escalating imperialistic clashes , and a crisis-prone global economy, there is no hope for the world unless
an international left can be resurrected . A left at least as powerful as the one that created social democracy in the wake of World War II. As
complex in their origins as the world’s ills are, they can be expressed and explained in a single sentence: internationally, there is a political right, a proto-fascist far-
right, and a stagnant though tenacious center, but, in effect, no left. That is, there is no real force that authentically represents the interests of the exploited and

immiserated majority. No wonder things are so bad. The burning question is: how to build such a left?

How not to build it is clear : devote inordinate attention to issues of race , gender , and sexuality . Indeed,
a major reason the left is so [ deficient ] weak today is that for decades it—or something that has claimed the mantle of the left, in
academia, the media, and politics—has focused disproportionately on such issues, neglecting grievances that unite
people across boundaries of race, gender, and sexuality. The ineffectual nature of such a “left” should be obvious from one
consideration alone: “ universal ” issues—which affect workers whatever their identity —of wages, working conditions,
income and wealth distribution, scarce housing, unemployment, public health, student and consumer debt, ecological

destruction, the shrinking and starving of public goods, murderous imperialism, hypertrophying militarism, and the very
survivability of human civilization are scarcely touched by discourses and activism around racial and
gender disparities. (“We want to have it as good as white cisgendered men! ” Okay, meanwhile you’ll
still be dealing with all the crises I just mentioned .) If you want to build a new world , you don’t go about it
by ignoring working-class grievances as such, attending only to matters that affect, say, women, gays, and
black people; you target the very structures of capitalism, the class-defined exploitative institutions
that have oppressed billions (of white men too, even heterosexual ones!) for centuries.

It has been fashionable among liberals and “leftists” for years to ridicule this so-called “ class reductionism ,” but thankfully
resistance is finally building to reactionary po st mo dern shibboleths about the equivalence of different
types of oppression , or even the priority of racial and gender oppression over class! Norman Finkelstein, for example, who is widely known as the
courageous and academically martyred advocate of Palestinian rights, has just published a book called I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It!: Heretical Thoughts on
Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom. I’ve written a lengthy review here; suffice it to say that Finkelstein is fearless, and ruthless, in his exposition

of analytical and political common sense. Adolph and Touré Reed are well known for exposing the follies of what they call “ race reductionism ”—
for example, the gloomy and ahistorical academic school of Afro-pessimism —and their colleague Cedric Johnson has
published a book called The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now: Debating Left Politics and Black Lives Matter that eviscerates the current faddish nostalgia for Black Power.
(Again, for anyone who would prefer a summary and critique, I wrote a review of the book that also goes into some depth in defense of Marxism against its
postmodern critics.)

Examples could be multiplied, but Musa al-Gharbi has already performed this service in a recent article titled “Woke-ism Is Winding Down.” If it is true that

wokeness has passed its peak and is, or soon will be, on the decline, this is likely not something to be uncritically celebrated. Nevertheless, it may open
the space for a more serious left politics that tackles agendas such as rolling back American
imperialism and rebuilding social democracy . Or even, perhaps, advancing the distant goal of economic
democracy , i.e., workers’ control of the economy . Somehow, this traditional lodestar of the left has been almost
totally forgotten and abandoned .

Left academics have honed the art of “problematizing” political common sense , for example by inventing a
concept called “ racial capitalism ” and using it to argue that “ white supremacy ” is a pillar of capitalism
no less foundational than class exploitation itself —as if Shanghai or, say, Lagos, Nigeria, not being ruled by “whites,” aren’t capitalist
cities—but people with a modicum of analytical intelligence will see through these woke gambits. The more you talk about how racist all
whites are and how much more oppressed all blacks [black people] are, the more you’re serving the
business class by dividing the working class . Why else would the New York Times, quintessential outlet of liberal
business, have invested enormous resources into the 1619 Project if not that it understood the profoundly

non-radical implications of such racialism? Better to talk about racial capitalism than simply capitalism—racial exploitation than class
exploitation—reparations (at the expense of white workers) than socialism. The reparations discourse is a brilliant way to destroy

working-class solidarity .

With a kernel of political rationality, one can see that it’s necessary to reach out to white workers , not alienate them or
ignore them. Leftists could learn a thing or two from (of all people) Ralph Waldo Emerson , of whom a woman who frequently heard his
lectures said, “Whatever else it might be that I cannot understand, he tells me this one thing, that I am not a God-forsaken sinner. He has made me feel that I am

worth something in the sight of God, and not a despised creature.” The contemporary “left,” from feminists to critical race theorists, tells white
men (and the women who identify with them) that they’re despised creatures worth nothing in the sight of God. It shouldn’t be a surprise
when people take this message to heart and turn to a Republican Party that cares not a whit about their well-being but at least tells them it does.

As surprising as this might sound, empathy , rather than demonization, can be a useful tool for organizing a movement . If, like
most liberals and leftists, one doesn’t live among the mythologized and despised “white working class,” one can
at least read about their experiences , thus undermining one’s own prejudices and finding common
ground on which to educate and organize . Take a book like Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American
Right, published in 2016. She makes it clear that, however misguided are most supporters of Donald Trump’s Republican Party, the large
majority are not neo-Nazis , virulent racists , or wealthy cynics eager to crush the working class . “Blue-
collar” white men across the South, and the communities they represent, are “victims” no less than the victimized groups celebrated by liberals.
Neoliberal capitalism has left them behind , as they suffer from (at best) stagnating wages , environmental
pollution and destruction, decaying infrastructure, decaying communities, and poor public health
outcomes. Meanwhile, they’re conscious of their low status: “we’re seen as backward and poor.” Hochschild’s exercise in empathy, as in the following
passage, is sadly lacking among most liberals and leftists today:

You [an average white man in the South] are a stranger in your own land. You do not recognize yourself in how others see you. It is a struggle to feel
seen and honored…

You turn to your workplace for respect—but wages are flat and jobs insecure. So you look to other sources of honor. You get no extra points for your
race. You look to gender, but if you’re a man, you get no extra points for that either. If you are straight you are proud to be a married, heterosexual
male, but that pride is now seen as a potential sign of homophobia—a source of dishonor. Regional honor? Not that either. You are often disparaged
for the place you call home. As for the church, many look down on it, and the proportion of Americans outside any denomination has risen… People

like you—white, Christian, working and middle class—suffer this sense of fading honor
demographically too, as this very group has declined in numbers.
To begin to wrest power from a depraved Republican and Democratic elite , a corporate sector that
cares about literally nothing but profits , it is necessary to appeal to “white America” no less than “black
America” (to use race-reductionist metaphors implicit in identity politics). As always, you start by emphasizing what you have in
common with people, for instance that you care deeply, as they do, about community, family, economic
security, a healthy natural environment, and that you resent no less than they do impersonal
government bureaucracies that tax your hard-earned money to wage wars abroad and in fact—here’s an opportunity for
education—redistribute income upwards, to wealthy investors and big business. You don’t talk about how racist these people are—
after all, everyone is a little racist (including against whites), a little sexist (against men too: “Men are arrogant, stupid, misogynistic!”), and has numerous prejudices

and unappealing traits—but instead you argue that people of all races are being exploited and victimized , and that
ostensibly “lazy” black people work just as hard as whites to get ahead but are just as burdened by taxes and bills and debt. It doesn’t require much

imagination to find common ground with struggling whites. Over time, using the “class reductionist” strategy of Bernie Sanders,
you educate people and build a movement that promises to transform society much more radically
than little identitarian programs of reducing disparities will.

None of this requires that you sacrifice the interests of minorities . It is rather the only way to fully
realize those interests , given both the necessity of a broad popular movement and the (in most respects)
shared interests of minorities and working-class white men. Through common struggle , not through
woke demonization , you’ll succeed in reducing the incidence of racism, sexism, homophobia, and other
such vices .

In short, as Finkelstein argues in his eloquent new book, it’s

urgent for leftists to shed their race obsessions and gender
obsessions and remember the Marxian lesson that class solidarity —albeit incorporating identitarian goals—is the sine
qua non of a revolutionary movement. Hardly anything is more important today than organizing to make
class struggle the defining issue of, for example, the left wing of the Democratic Party.

Objective economic structures, not subjective identities , are the fundamental evil to be combatted. Until
they are , the left will remain, in effect, nonexistent .
Case
 Ballot Solvency---1NC
The 1AC’s value stands on its own---responding to it with judgement and the ballot is
a hollow validation that siphons off political energy and draws them into the
oppressive gaze of the academy---vote Negative to decline affirmation
Phillips 99 – Dr. Kendall R. Phillips, Professor of Communication at Central Missouri State University,
PhD in Speech Communication from Pennsylvania State University, MA in Speech Communication from
Central Missouri State University, BS in Psychology and Sociology from Southwest Baptist University,
“Rhetoric, Resistance, and Criticism: A Response to Sloop and Ono”, Philosophy & Rhetoric, Volume 32,
Number 1, p. 96-101

My concern with this movement centers around an issue that Sloop and Ono seem to take as a given, namely, the
role of the critic . On one hand, calling for the systematic investigation of existing marginalized discourses is a natural extension both of
critical rhetoric (see McKerrow 1989, 1991) and of the general ideological turn in criticism (see Wander 1983). On the other hand, the ease
of transition from criticism in the service of resistance to criticism of resistance may obscure the need to
address some fundamental issues regarding the general function of rhetorical criticism in an uncertain
and contentious world. Beyond licensing the critic to engage in political struggle, Sloop and Ono advocate the pursuit
of covert resistant discourses.

Such a move not only stretches our understanding of rhetoric and criticism, but also alters significantly the
relationship between critic and out- law. Critical interrogation of dominant discursive practices in the
service of political/cultural reform is supplanted in favor of positioning covert out- law communities as
objects of investigation . Invited to seek out subversive discourses, the critic is positioned as the active
agent of change and the out-law discourse becomes merely instrumental . Rather than academic
criticism acting in service of everyday acts of resistance, everyday acts of resistance are put into the
service of academic criticism.
Rhetorical resistance

That we are "caught within conflicting logics of justice that are culturally struggled over" (Sloop and Ono 1997, 50) and that rhetoric is
employed in these struggles seems an uncontroversial statement. Despite the theoretical miasma surrounding judgment, Sloop and Ono
accurately note, the material process of rendering judgments (and of disputing the logics of litigation) continues in the world of actually
practiced discourse. In the materially contested world, rhetoric is utilized both by those seeking to secure the grounds of dominant judgment
and by those seeking to undermine or supplant dominant cultural logics with some out-law notion of justice.

The distinction between these two cultural groups, "in-law" and out- law, however, deserves some consideration prior to any discussion of the
role of the critic as implied in the out-law discourse project. The discourse of the dominant or those within the bounds of superordinate logics
of litigation is reminiscent of Michel De Certeau's (1984) strategic discourse. For De Certeau, strategies are utilized by those who have authority
by virtue of their proper position. Strategies exploit the institutionally guaranteed background consensus by which power relations (and
litigations) are maintained and advanced. In contrast, tactics are utilized by those having no proper place of authority within the discursive
economy who must seek opportunities whereby the discourse of the dominant might be undermined and contested. To extend Sloop and
Ono's definition, out-law discourses are those that can (and, by their analysis, do) take advantage of situations (e.g., race riots) to disrupt the
regularity of dominant cultural groups.

The ongoing struggle between strategically instituted cultural dominants and the "out-law always lurk[ing] in the distance" (66) is
acknowledged, even celebrated, by Sloop and Ono. What their acknowledgment fails to provide, however, is a clear need for critical
intervention. Indeed, quite the reverse is presented: It is the critic (particularly the left-leaning critic) who needs out-law discourse. While the
struggles over justice, equality, and freedom have gone on, the left-leaning critics are those who have theoretically excluded themselves from
the disputes. The study of out-law dis- courses, then, provides a means to reinvigorate the intellectual and re-institute (academic) leftist
thinking into popular political struggles (53-54). Thus, Sloop and Ono's project incorporates three types of rhetoric: the rhetoric of the in-law,
presumably the traditional object of critical attention; the rhetoric of the out-law, the study of which may transform our understanding of
judgment as well as reinvigorate leftist democratic critiques; and the rhetoric of the critics who, having lost their political po- tency, can exploit
the discourse of the out-law to promote ideological struggles. It is to this critical rhetoric that I now turn.
Resistance criticism

Sloop and Ono (1997) clearly state the relationship they envision between the rhetorical critic and out-law discourse: "Ultimately, we will argue
that the role of critical rhetoricians is to produce 'materialist conceptions of judgment,' using out-law judgments to disrupt dominant logics of
judgment" (54; emphasis added). Here the critic seeks out vernacular discourse (60), focuses on the methods and values embodied in these
communities (62), listens to and evaluates the out-law community (62-63), and chooses appropriate discourses for the purpose of disrupting
dominant practices (63). Essentially, it is the critic who seeks out marginalized discourses and returns them to the center for the purpose of
provoking dominant cultural groups (63).

Despite acknowledging the efficacy of out-law discourses, Sloop and Ono assume that the critiques generated and presented by the out-law
community have only minimal effect. The irony, and indeed arrogance, of this assumption is evident when they claim: "There are cases,
however, when, without the prompting of academic critics, out-law discourses serve local purposes at times and at others resonate within
dominant discourses, disrupting sedimented ways of thinking, transforming dominant forms of judgment" (60; emphasis added). Sloop and Ono
seem to suggest that such locally generated critiques are the exception, whereas the political efficacy of the academic critic is the rule. This
seems an odd claim, given that the justification for their out-law discourse project is the lack of politically viable academic critique and the
perceived potency of out-law conceptions of judgment. Their
suggestion that out-law communities are in need of the
academic critic contradicts not only the already disruptive nature of existing out-law discourses (the grounds
for using out-law discourse), but also the impotence of contemporary critical discourse (the warrant for studying out-law discourse).

By this I do not mean that the critiques and theories generated by academically instituted intellectuals have not been incorporated into
subversive discourses. Just as out-law discourses inevitably mount critiques of dominant logics, so, too, the perspectives on rhetoric and
criticism generated by academics are used in resistance movements. Feminist critiques of patriarchy, queer theories of homophobia,
postcolonial interrogations of race have found their way into the service of resistant groups. The key distinction I wish to make is that the
existence of criticism (academic or self-generated) in resistance does not necessitate Sloop and Ono's move to a criticism of resistance.

What Sloop and Ono fail to offer is an adequate argument for " taking public speaking out of the streets
and studying it in the classroom , for treating it less as an expression of protest " (Wander 1983, 3) and more
as an object for analysis and reproduction within the political economy of the academy . Philip Wander
made a similar charge against Herbert Wicheln's early critical project, and this concern should remain at the forefront of any discussion aimed
at expanding the scope and function of criticism. Sloop and Ono offer numerous directives for the critic without
addressing whether the critic should be examining out-law discourses in the first place . While it is
too early to suggest any definitive answer to the question of criticism of resistance, some preliminary arguments as to why critics should not
pursue out-law discourses can be offered:

(1) Hidden out-law discourses may have good reasons to stay hidden . Sloop and Ono specifically instruct us that "the
logic of the out-law must constantly be searched for, brought forth" (66) and used to disrupt dominant practices. But are we to believe
that all out-law discourses are prepared to mount such a challenge to the dominant cultural logic? Or, indeed, that the members of out-
law communities are prepared to be brought into the arena of public surveillance in the service of
reconstituting logics of litigation? It seems highly unlikely that all divergent cultural groups have developed equally, or that all members of
these groups share Sloop and Ono's "imperial impulse" (51) to promote their conceptions and practices of justice.

(2) Academic critical discourse is not transparent. Here I allude to the overall problem of translation (see Foucault 1994; Lyotard 1988; Lyotard
and Thebaud 1985; Zabus 1995) as an extension of the previous concern. Critical discourse cannot become the medium of commensurability for
divergent language games. Are we to believe that the "use" of out-law dis- course by critics to disrupt dominant practices can fail to do violence
to these diverse/divergent logics? Are out-law discourses merely tools to be exploited and discarded in the pursuit of returning leftist academic
dis- course to the center?

(3) Perhaps the academic translation of out-law discourse could be true to the internal logic of the out-law community. And, perhaps
the
re-presentation of out-law logic within the academic community will bestow a degree of legitimacy on
the out-law community. Nonetheless , the effect of legitimizing out-law discourse is unknown and
potentially destructive . In an effort to siphon the political energy of out-law discourse into academic
practice, we may ultimately destroy the dissatisfaction that serves as a cathexis for these out-law
discourses. It seems possible that academic recognition might take the place of struggle for material
opportunities (see Fraser 1997). But, will academic legitimation create any material changes in the
conditions of out-law communities? I mean to suggest, not that it is better to allow the out-law community to suffer for its cause,
but rather that incorporating the struggle into an (admittedly) impotent academic critique does not offer a prima facie alternative.

(4) Criticism of resistance denies the practical and theoretical importance of opportunity. Returning to De Certeau's notion of tactics, the
crucial element of these discursive moves is their use of opportunity to disrupt the proper authority of the dominant. The kairos of intervention
provides the key to undermining "in-law" discourses. But when is the "right moment in time" for the academic reproduction of out-law
discourse? Mapping the points of resistance (ala Foucault and Biesecker) entails interrogating "in-law" discourses for their incongruities and
contradictions, not turning the academic gaze upon those communities waiting for an opportunity. Out-laws do not lurk in the forefront (66),
hoping to be exposed by academic critics; they wait for the right moment for their disruption. Rhetoricians can provide rhetorical instructions
for seeking opportunities and for exploiting these opportunities (literally making the culturally weaker argument the stronger), but this does not
justify interrogating (intervening in) the cultural logics of the marginalized.

The concerns raised here are not designed to dismiss Sloop and Ono's provocative essay. The divergent critical logic they outline deserves
careful consideration within the critical community, and it is my hope that the concerns I raise may help to further problematize the
relationship between

resistance and rhetorical criticism.

Rhetorical criticism

As I have suggested, my purpose is to use the provocative nature of Sloop and Ono's project to extend disputes regarding the ends of rhetorical
criticism. Diverging perspectives on the ends of criticism have been categorized by Barbara Warnick (1992) as falling along four general lines:
artist, analyst, audience, and advocate. Leah Ceccarelli (1997) discerns similar categories around the aesthetic, epistemic, and political ends of
rhetorical criticism.

The out-law discourse project presents clear ties to the notion of critic as advocate. For
Sloop and Ono, the critic is an
interested party , discerning (and at times disputing) the underlying values and forces contained within a
discourse. Additionally, however, the out-law discourse critic is an analyst focusing on the hidden ,
aberrant texts of the out-law and "rendering] an incoherent or esoteric text comprehensible" (Warnick 1992, 233).
Now, I am not suggesting that a critic must serve only one function or that the roles of advocate and analyst are mutually exclusive; rather,
these entanglings of power (political ends) and knowledge (epistemic ends) are inevitable. My concern is that we not
neglect the complexity of these entanglements. Turning covert out-law discourses into objects of our analyses runs

the risk of subjecting them both to the gaze of the dominant and to the power relations of the
academy . As the works of Michel Foucault (especially 1979, 1980) aptly illustrate, practices presented as extending such noble goals as
emancipation and humanity may endow institutions of confinement and objectification. Any justification for studying out-law dis- course
because doing so may extend our political usefulness in the pursuit of emancipatory goals must not obscure the already existing power
relations authorizing such studies. Our attempts to extend our domains of knowledge and expertise (authority) must not be pursued
unreflexively.
 Legal Engagement Good---1NC
There are contingent gains to be made in trans politics that are necessary to prevent
right-wing crackdowns and avoid the pitfalls of legal reform, but particularity and
attention to institutional design are key.
Yeros and Chiesi 22 [Stathis G. Yeros, Department of Architecture, College of Design, Construction
and Planning, University of Florida. Leonardo Chiesi, Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche e Sociali,
Università degli Studi di Firenze, 50127 Florence, Italy. "Trans Territorialization: Building Empowerment
beyond Identity Politics." https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/11/10/429] TGNC = transgender/gender
non-conforming, MSH = My Sistah’s House

MSH’s work in Memphis has the characteristics of what we call trans territorialization .
We propose that
Comparing these characteristics with earlier forms of LGBTQ+ territorialization, such as gayborhoods, we argue that the new ways of
creating space for TGNC empowerment that this case study demonstrates are partial examples in a broader
repertory of activist placemaking . In this context, placemaking refers to entanglements of physical spaces, TGNC embodiments,
neighborhood, municipal, and state politics that operate across spatial scales. Trans territorialization extends the study of LGBTQ+ space
beyond its traditional focus on white middle-class urban landscapes. It
can also inform how urban studies scholars
understand embodied differences in contemporary cities more broadly. This section summarizes the four main characteristics
of trans territorialization in Memphis and considers their generalizable attributes.

First, in our case study, home ownership emerged as the main building block of black TGNC
empowerment. Centering homeownership responds to the history of disinvestment in black
neighborhoods and the lack of support for black homeowners. Meanwhile, it employs the classic image of the American
single-family home and its ideals about domesticity. The tiny homes that MSH has built or renovated over the past two years employ core
design elements of single-family homes that can be found in Memphis’s middle and working-class neighborhoods: pitched roof, front door
accessible from the sidewalk via a driveway, front porch as an interstitial space between the public sidewalk and the private home, and, in some
cases, a backyard. This building typology is traditionally associated with the nuclear family, and its ubiquitous iconography has shaped the
meaning of domesticity in mainstream post-war U.S. culture. Yet, even though they reference this building type, the tiny homes can
comfortably accommodate only one individual, thereby subverting the meaning of its original hetero-
normative symbolism .

The borrowed iconography of the single-family home is related to the second characteristic of trans territorialization.
MSH does not center on the gender and sexual identities of the homes’ occupants in its efforts to build
TGNC -friendly spaces. In other words, the structures associated with these spaces (tiny homes, duplexes, the
community park) do not stand out as outwardly legible examples of LGBTQ+ sociality and culture. This is different from how
gayborhoods, especially in larger cities, communicate sexual nonconformity to their residents, visitors, and the heterosexual public.
Gayborhoods typically have a commercial core, where rainbow flags and sometimes overtly homosexual imagery in advertisements underlie
everyday habitation. We view the lack of comparable LGBTQ+ commercial spaces in the Memphis neighborhoods we examined not as missing
elements but as a distinct characteristic of the kinds of spatial appropriations associated with trans territorialization. In traditional gayborhoods,
public and commercial spaces overlap. Moreover, activism around commercial spaces, such as bars, has historically marked important moments
in the contemporary LGBTQ+ rights movement (Armstrong 2002; D’Emilio [1983] 1998). In contradistinction, within the Memphis
neighborhoods we studied, the notions of public and commercial space are distinct. Noncommercial spaces such as the garden patio and the
community garden discussed in this paper, rather than cafes, bars, and other businesses, allow residents and their friends to meet each other in
person. In the context of trans territorialization, they are the primary sites for black TGNC community
empowerment .
The third characteristic concerns how MSH conceptualizes and builds for safety. The spaces we visited in Memphis were integrated within
existing neighborhoods without introducing any form of defensive design. There are no fortified gates, cameras, or alarm systems. This
openness to the neighborhood can, in fact, be seen as a safety mechanism. As a woman who lives in one of the tiny homes told us, she felt safer
when she kept the blinds of her street-facing window open. Regarding the organization’s decision to integrate the homes within existing
neighborhoods, Kayla Gore, its founder and executive director, explained that “it’s just safer for people who might be living alone to have a
neighborhood in such close proximity.” During our visits, we also witnessed how Gore builds relationships with the owners of the houses
surrounding MSH’s properties. Besides introducing herself to them and discussing different aspects of the construction, Gore told us that the
organization has to follow a city-mandated formal process of notifying neighbors about the organization’s plans and the people who will occupy
the new units. As a result, MSH can flag potential problems even before the new occupants move in.

Finally, and relatedly, the kind of trans territorialization that we observed in Memphis can only be understood as a phenomenon that takes
place at the neighborhood level, rather than in (or as) individual buildings. Although in this paper we focused on the work of a single
organization, similar initiatives have emerged during the past five years in other cities and rural communities in the U.S. and elsewhere. For
example, House of Tulip is a Community Land Trust that was recently established in New Orleans, Louisiana, to provide “zero-barrier housing,
case management, linkage to care, and community programming to trans and gender non-conforming people in need of a safe place to stay
while growing the supply of affordable housing in [the city]” (House of Tulip n.d.). Similarly, Queer the Land in Seattle, Washington, set up a
Community Land Trust to purchase a house with a large garden in a residential neighborhood that they started to renovate in 2022 with the
goal to house a group of ten to fifteen queer and trans people of color and build a self-sustaining community around urban gardening (Queer
the Land n.d.). Similar initiatives are “transing” neighborhoods (Gorny and van den Heuvel 2017) from Oakland, California, to New York and
from the San Diego–Tijuana border to Albuquerque, New Mexico (Oakland CLT n.d.; Casa de Luz n.d.; Queering the Farm n.d.).

5. Conclusions

In this paper, we argued that a new form of LGBTQ+ placemaking with generalizable attributes has emerged
during the past five years. We described this as trans territorialization and traced its emergence in localized
efforts primarily by TGNC people of color to resist displacement , houselessness, and economic
disenfranchisement in Memphis, Tennessee. Trans territorialization is characterized by an emphasis on affordable homeownership,
operates within existing neighborhoods, and makes them safer for TGNC people. As a process, trans territorialization is driven by the
appropriation of everyday spaces through habitation without overt references to LGBTQ+ culture and politics, such as rainbow flags and
LGBTQ+-centered businesses that are prevalent in earlier forms of urban gayborhoods. The latter have their roots in the politicization of
LGBTQ+ identities in the early 1970s and the emergence of gay commercial urban enclaves. Gayborhoods have historically sought to establish
territories within cities with their own distinct symbolism, which led to the consolidation of LGBTQ+ economic and political power.

Trans territorialization responds to a different historical mom ent, characterized by the precedent of
legal protections of LGBTQ+ rights, but also the knowledge that these rights , which are increasingly
under threat by the conservative turn in U.S. politics, are especially fragile in Southern states. Moreover,
this historical moment is characterized by housing precarity across U.S. cities and rising economic inequality. The case
study discussed in this paper offers insights into how TGNC people of color, who are most vulnerable to these conditions,
appropriate space and build individual and collective empowerment within existing neighborhoods, transforming them in the process. The MSH
programs we analyzed are still being actively developed and their attributes are debated, responding to needs that arise
from everyday habitation. We anticipate that future
work in this area will further illuminate the kinds of spaces that
emerge from these debates along with their manifold entanglements with the histories and lived
realities of racism, transphobia, and class disenfranchisement.

Trans legal engagement is not “assimilation” or “liberal” but contests the normalizing
function of the law – the alternative forecloses key sites to exercise agency to make
the world more inhabitable
West 13 – Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Vanderbilt University (Isaac, Transforming
Citizenships: Transgender Articulations of the Law, p25-26)

When we refrain from immediately trying to position demands for recognition within a framework of
assimilation ( the perspective of oneness), we start to hear how individuals may be making more robust claims on the body politic.
More often than not, these demands argue for the acceptance and accommodation of difference , not its denial or
erasure . Thus, the expression of one's desire to be treated with dignity and respect must not be equated with
conformity or false consciousness . To the contrary, rights claims and demands for recognition, as we have
already established, are articulations that can performatively produce subjective opportunities for challenging the
pressures of oneness . Karen Zivi accurately describes these discursive formations as "a performative politics" that is "neither perfectly
subversive in its effects nor an exact replication of existing regulatory norms:' Such claims are not perfectly mimetic and hence normalizing for
they require "two moves: invocation and critique."88 Butler names this practice a "performative contradiction'' to explain how individuals can
articulate themselves into symbolic economies to expose the failures of the promises of equality and freedom for all citizens. The demand for
equality and freedom, Butler contends, "starts to take what it asks for;' because "to make the demand on freedom is already to begin its
exercise and then to ask for its legitimation is to also announce the gap between its exercise and its realization and to put both into public
discourse in a way so that that gap is seen, so that that gap can mobilize?" The demand alone cannot materialize its desired effect - it is, after
all, an articulation available for multiple interpretations and effectivities. Yet, an articulation
of citizenship works within the
performative contradiction's invocation of already established norms and its linkage to its own constitutive
exclusions to initiate a critique of the universality of freedom and equality . Therefore, the outright dismissal
of citizenship as inherently normative and normalizing must be resisted as a critical impulse and deferred
until the articulation is properly contextualized . With this theoretical framework in play, we must be mindful of the fact that
the use of rhetorics of normalcy employed in citizenship claims, as in 'Tm a citizen just like you;' does not carry the same connotations for all
people in all situations. We can take this seemingly simple phrase at face value and strip it of its nuance, but its complete and complex
articulation may be lost when we assume this claim is tied to an intention of denying one's differences from others. Michael Cobb's study of
queer articulations of religious and national identities underscores this point in suggesting that "perhaps the 'normal' is the desire for legibility,
a desire for community, and a desire for another route into social resistance and minority complaint that need not be so 'counter' public in
order to be innovative and queer:' The publicity attached to and enabled by articulations of normalcy and equality, Cobb concludes, "does not
always imply that one has uncritically submitted to, or is even protected by, the state or even the church. Perhaps this decision is not so much
about ease as it is about protection, about insuring that one's life is still valuable enough not to destroy"> It is not always the case that
invocations of citizenship rely on an either/or logic of assimilation or radical alterity-sometimes it is a rhetorical move of both/and involving the
desire to be a citizen like everyone else even as an individual wants to preserve his or her difference and maintain a critical relationship with the
norms authorizing inclusion into a community. Thus, Currah, Iuang, and Minter invite us to consider this radical demand in relation to trans
people: the radical dimensions of the transgender movement arise neither from simply claiming that trans people are
"normal;' which we certainly are, nor from claiming that we are "exceptional;' which we also are, but from arguing that being
transgender is eminently compatible with all else that comes with being human, the ordinary as well as the
extraordinary.91 If we want to work toward cultures underwritten by wholeness, as opposed to oneness, we cannot

make sweeping generalizations about the experience of citizenship. Instead, we must look to see how
citizenship is a performatively produced set of stranger relationalities that may not be entirely faithful to
the intentions of the state or cultural hegemonies. The performativity of citizenship entails a reiteration of discourses already
operating in culture, discourses saturated with history and ripe with the potential for appropriation. As spaces of citizenship are perfor-matively
reproduced, individuals both do and undo citizenship. They do citizenship as they rely upon certain discursive expectations to gain recognition
as subjects. At the same time, they also undo citizenship as subjects articulating unexpected elements into their demands for recognition.
Likewise, subjects are constantly done and undone as they struggle to negotiate the contingent discourses working around and through them. It
is in this dialectical negotiation that subjective agency is born, which leads us to the second intervention proposed by Trans-forming
Citizenship's more generous judgments about these contextualized performances of citizenship. By
focusing on transgender
deployments of citizenship as performatively produced articulations of the law, we do not have to see
mundane activities or demands for equality as merely the enactment of unreflective liberal subjectivities .

Instead, we can start to see how individuals exercise agency in these interactions and make the worlds
around them more inhabitable by queering public cultures . To this point, I have avoided defining queer, queering, and
queerness for fear of assigning them essentialized meanings. I recognize, however, my use of these terms is the fulcrum on which
disagreements over my readings may rest. In that spirit then, I wish to adopt Sedwick's rendering of queer as "the open mesh of possibilities,
gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's
sexuality aren't made ( or can't be made) to signify monolithically">' For what follows, the key phrase is "open mesh'' as we want to remain
aware of dissident identities that may not always appear queer at first glance. To begin to draw out the implications of this understanding of
queering public cultures, stranger relationalities, and the performativity of citizenship, we will return in another chapter, like Mayne herself, to
one of the most, if not the most, quotidian practices of citizenship: using public bathrooms.

The only way for movements to create change is through strategic engagement with
the institutions they criticize via an inside-outside straetgy—here’s ev from one of the
most well-known and successful activists in history.
Peter Staley 22 former member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and Treatment &
Data Teach-In (T&D), Never Silent: ACT UP and My Life in Activism (Chicago: Chicago Review Press,
2022). 105-106 NL

I was now totally hooked on the power of activism . And not just activism in the streets . T&D decided
early on to play a dual-track , inside-outside game . We were always willing to meet with government
officials and pharmaceutical executives to push our demands . If they refused to meet or ignored our
demands, we’d take to the streets— the outside game . And often, after a demonstration, we’d return
to a negotiating table and continue the inside game with some added leverage.

This wasn’t a novel approach. Instead, it was the mark of most successful movements . Martin Luther
King Kr. never stopped meeting American presidents while planning large demonstrations and
campaigns. Greenpeace snuck inside Exxon’s headquarters to demonstrate in their executive boardroom
yet still negotiated with the company many times , both before and after their trespass. Not that we
made these connections at the time. Our inside-outside strategy was born of desperation. We felt the
clock ticking and latched onto any and all tactics that might work.

Luckily for me, I loved doing both kinds of activism —the hard-nosed lobbying and the adrenaline-
primed lawbreaking. And doing both together as a one-two punch seemed to have the greatest effect .

Our understanding of legal reform avoids their ontological criticism – conceptualizing

the law as mutually constituted by the “material” and the “social” allows for a re-
gendered legal rationality that is embodied, recognizes a proliferation of gender and
sexual identities, and focuses on strategic reforms
Grear 11 – Reader of Law at Cardiff University (Anna, Also Adjunct Associate Professor of Law at the
University of Waikato, New Zealand, “’Sexing the matrix’: embodiment, disembodiment and the law –
towards the re-gendering of legal rationality,” in Gender, Sexualities and Law, p50-51)

In the light of the biological instability of sex and the widespread suffering caused by the ideological deployment of
binary (and oppositional) sex ‘normativity’42 (including to intersexuals), it seems more just to characterize the
universal subject of law not as sexually differentiated in a dichotomous sense but as sexually variegated and mutable .
One way of doing this is to see sex (and potentially gender) not as binary but as existing on an embodied
multi-sex/omnigendered spectrum (or continuum)43 that moves between notional spectrum-extremes of ‘male’
and ‘female’ but, crucially, without essentializing them . This spectrum, thoroughly embodied , could
embrace a related proliferation of sexual and gender identities and also explicitly allow space for self-
ascribed and transgender (and transsexual) identifications – a position, in fact, far more consonant with liberalism’s
fundamental commitment to individual self-expression than the imposition of the binary sex construct and its gendered
‘normativities’. This approach would also be consistent with embracing the complexity of the mutual
constitution of the material and social while retaining an important critical role for the ontic
materiality of the body itself . And, because this theoretical construct would embrace an explicitly embodied spectrum, rather than
a disembodied hybridity, it retains our important ability to speak of ‘maleness/masculinity/masculinisation’ and
‘femaleness/feminity/feminisation’, thus retaining, rather than erasing, the political languages currently vital to critique of the masculinism of
legal rationality and its gendered abstractionism. It may be possible, in this way, to see sex and gender as ‘shifting’ and ‘multiplicitous’ as Otto
advocates but without embracing yet another form of disembodiment. There
is deconstructive power in the ambiguity of the
‘ontic materiality’ of human embodiment and great potential for its role as an ethical guide in the face
of the exclusions implicated by legal quasi-disembodiment. Opening an embodiment-centered imaginative aperture for the
re-gendering of legal rationality and its related human universal could just prove to be one of the most critical imaginative leaps we can make in
the opening decades of the twenty-first century. Certainly the important task of reflecting on the extension of legal subjectivity to embrace new
entities and to reflect deepening ethical concerns in the face of technological developments and the associated ravages enacted upon the living
environment underlines the need to address the foundational dualism underlying the violent historical and contemporary exclusion of all those
‘non-insiders’ so invidiously feminized by liberal legal rationality. It is worth recalling, in the closing words of this chapter, that the modern
oppositional sex binary was imposed in precisely the same temporal and political matrix that saw the emergence of radical notions of human
equality and the birth of human rights discourse.44 The science of physical difference emerged as an ideological tool with which to invalidate
equality claims and to protect elite male privilege and ‘more than ever, politics necessitated two and only two sexes.’45 Challenging
the
foundational sex binary underlying exclusionary legal masculinism and then fully exploring the implications
for the gender of legal rationality may be one of the most strategic critical tasks facing us in the context of
the inequalities , ravages and intimately interlinked oppressions produced by twenty-first-century neoliberal
globalized corporate hegemony and its related historical exclusions.
 AT: Affect---1NC
Affect theory shuts down research on the social nature of language and discourse---
that impedes emancipatory change
Margaret Wetherell 13, Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Auckland, Australia, and
Emeritus Professor at the Open University, UK, 11/8/13, “Affect and discourse – What’s the problem?
From affect as excess to affective/discursive practice,” Subjectivity, Vol. 6, p. 349-368

The recent ‘turn to affect’ in social and cultural research has been built on the notion of affect as a kind of
excess. Affect is contrasted with the discursive and the cognitive , and distinguished from ‘domesticated’

emotion. The focus is on the presumed direct hit of events on bodies and on what is sensed rather than
known . This formulation in combination with the need for new methods has disconnected discourse
studies from research on affect . In common with other recent critics, I argue that the formulation of affect as an
excess is unsustainable . I focus here, however, on the methodological consequences . The objective of
affect research is to produce textured, lively analyses of multiple modes of engagement and to understand the working of
power through patterns of assemblage. Intriguingly, fine-grain studies of discursive practice might realize
these aims more effectively than some new, ‘non-representational’ methodological approaches. I contrast
one example of non-representational empirical investigation with an example of discursive research on normative episodic sequences. My
general aim is to build a more productive dialogue between rich traditions in discourse studies and new lines of research on affect and emotion.

One of the most significant developments in recent years has been the renewed interest in affect and emotion in social research (Massumi,
2002; Sedgwick, 2003; Ahmed, 2004; Thrift, 2004, 2008a; Clough with Halley, 2007; Greco and Stenner, 2008; Seigworth and Gregg, 2010;
Blackman, 2012). As Connolly (2002) argues, the turn (back) to affect is an acknowledgement that social and
political events can work on citizens just as a film works on an audience , inviting participation in roller
coasters of identification, investment, disgust, elation and cynicism. Events can mediate an enthralling
or terrifying embodied immersion (see also Berlant, 2005, 2008; Walkerdine, 2007; Protevi, 2009; Walkerdine and Jiminez, 2012).

Currently, the study of affect tends to mark out not just a research area but also particular theoretical and
epistemological commitments , registered as various paradigmatic breaks. Affect emerged as a new kind of
conceptual tool from readings of Deleuze , the philosophy of Spinoza, A. N. Whitehead and Henri Bergson (for
example, Massumi , 2002; Barad , 2007; Motzkau, 2007; Stenner, 2008; Brown and Stenner, 2009; Williams, 2010). As Blackman
(2007, 2008, 2010, 2012) describes, there are other, often surprising, genealogical connections, as some
contemporary theorists revive the uncanny, and re-run the interest early ‘fathers’ (such as Tarde, LeBon
and William James ) expressed in the paranormal and in processes of suggestion and contagion.
Research on affect resonates particularly with a new focus on materiality and relationality, part of broader emphases on the interweaving of
the material, the social, the biological and the cultural, exploring processes of their co-joint figuring and articulation (Haraway, 2004, 2008;
Latour, 2004, 2005; Despret, 2004a, 2004b). Affect studies often attempt to highlight the ‘transpersonal and pre-
personal’ (Anderson, 2009), treating affect as an emergent property of extensive assemblages that construct
affective atmospheres. Curiosity about affect intersects, too, with a turn to the ‘post-human’, a standpoint that attempts to engage
equally and in an even-handed way, as cultural geographer Thrift (2008b, p. 83) puts it, with parrots, tool using Caledonian crows, humans and
‘nature actors’ such as oil. In these various guises, affect theory draws attention to the ways in which ‘bodies’ very broadly defined (human,
animal, biological, technological, cultural), combine, assemble, articulate and shift into new formations, worked upon, as well as working on.

In this article, my concern is with human affect. I focus, in particular, on the relationship between affect and discourse. For
one of the
many in affect studies (for example, Thrift, 2000, 2004, 2008a; Anderson, 2004, 2006; Dewsbury, 2003; Lorimer, 2005, 2008),
distinguishing aspect s of affect scholarship is that it emphasizes processes beyond, below and past
discourse . Human affect is formulated as a kind of ‘ extra-discursive’ event (Massumi, 2002; Thrift, 2004, 2008a).
This formulation, combined with the need for new methods to work at the limits of what can be readily verbalized, has provoked a
very evident turn away from discourse studies . At what point, however, does this disconnect between
affect and discourse impede social research?
I come at this question from social psychology and from a history of previous work in critical discourse studies (for example, Wetherell, 1998,
2007), bemused by the caricatured and generalized accounts of discourse research often found in affect scholarship, and by the absence of a
productive dialogue between affect and discourse research. Like other recent critics (for example, Hemmings, 2005; Thien, 2005; Laurier and
Philo, 2006; Gill and Pratt, 2008; Papoulias and Callard, 2010; Pile, 2010; Leys, 2011; Blackman, 2012), the separation
of human affect
from discourse, and from mindfulness, seems to me unsustainable . Not least, this is built on a deeply
problematic psychology (Leys, 2011; Wetherell, 2012, Chapters 2 and 3). My aim in this article is not to dwell further on these critical
points, however, but to try and grapple with the consequences for empirical research, and for method. I want to show in detail through the
critical analysis of one example of a ‘non-representational’ investigation (McCormack, 2003), how the impasse between affect and
discourse hampers affect research.

I also want to argue that it is time for affect scholars to engage again more thoroughly with discourse studies. The
broad aim of affect
theory is to deliver the tools required for lively, textured research on embodied social action and for
productive insights into the entangled forms of assembling constituting social life moment to moment.
Intriguingly, fine-grain studies of discourse practice might offer ways of doing this at a point where attempts
to construct non-representational research seem to run into the sand. To demonstrate this, I will look in detail at one
research example (Goodwin, 2006) from discourse studies on the normative episodic sequences found in naturally occurring interactions in
girls’ playgroups. This investigates, precisely, how talk, body actions, affect, material contexts and social relations assemble in situ.

It doesn’t withstand basic scrutiny.

Rick Anthony Furtak 17, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Colorado College, “What the Empirical
Evidence Suggests,” Chapter 2 of Knowing Emotions: Truthfulness and Recognition in Affective
Experience, Stras

CONTROVERSIES IN AFFECTIVE SCIENCE

By and large, neuroscientists who emphasize “higher” cortical activity in emotion reject a strict disjunction between emotion and reason, as other cognitive
theorists do;4 meanwhile, those who focus on subcortical activation sound more like Jamesian somatic theorists, claiming, for instance, that “emotional feelings”
occur when we become aware of our own inner physiological perturbations.5 How could we explain this discrepancy? Some of the divergence may arise from
differences in method and orientation, such as we find between the research programs of Damasio and LeDoux. Damasio’s research is focused on people whose
affective capacities are impaired as a result of brain injury: he has found that neurological damage in certain areas can hinder emotional responses as well as
practical reasoning abilities.6 This seems to warrant the inference that emotion and cognition are integrated, rather than being categorically distinct and
independently functioning systems. LeDoux, on the other hand, has focused mainly on the physiology of fear behavior in rats: this research has led him to conclude
that an immediate startle response can take place even if only subcortical neural pathways are activated. LeDoux speculates that a similar process can also occur in
human beings: when a hiker meets a snake on the trail ahead, for instance, his frightened reaction may involve a “low road to the amygdala” that is triggered prior
to any cortical activity.7 And, once again, “if fear can occur without mediation of the neocortex,” as Prinz explains, then “perhaps fear can occur without
cognition.”8 According to (what has become) the standard interpretation, this is indeed the upshot of LeDoux’s research. It is typical for emotion researchers to cite
LeDoux as having proven that “emotions such as fear fall into two different ‘tracks’ of neural response, some involving the cerebral cortex and some . . . more
primitive,”9 the latter of course travelling upon the “low road.”

Many philosophical authors give the impression that the existence of subcortical emotions, independent of
“higher” cognition, has been decisively established . LeDoux’s postulated neural “low road” directly from the thalamus to the amygdala, and the
“quick and dirty” travel it is supposed to enable, is baldly embraced by a surprising number of thinkers.10 LeDoux’s work is taken to demonstrate that emotions “are
to a large extent isolated from our higher-order cognitive processes,” due to the “low road” hypothesis;11 as another author declares, this “fast pathway”—though
admittedly a tiny fraction of a second quicker than the “slow” cortical route, even if the “low road” account is true—triggers fear responses “long before” we
become aware of whatever has frightened us.12 And the list goes on. In one survey of recent emotion research, intended for a general audience, we find the
unequivocal statement that “fear is controlled by two separate pathways in the [human] brain,” alongside a diagram of the postulated “high” and “low” routes.13

Yet this kind of assertion blatantly ignores the ongoing controversy among neuroscientists as to
whether LeDoux’s conclusions are justified, even regarding the rats that are the primary focus of his research.14 Damasio,
for his part, says that he “cannot endorse” the proposition that the neurological activity associated with human emotions is confined to “the brain’s down-under”
even in simple cases, since “it is apparent that emotion is played out under the control of both subcortical and neocortical structures.”15 A hiker could not even see
what appears at first glance to be a snake without some activity in the cerebral cortex. And Edmund Rolls finds it “unlikely that the subcortical route” identified by
LeDoux “is generally relevant” for emotion in human beings, since there is good reason to think that any perceptual event more complex than sensing a sudden
flash of light or burst of sound—such as hearing a familiar tune, for instance, or perceiving a facial expression—must involve the kind of cognition that “requires
cortical processing.”16 As phenomenologists have pointed out,17 and as our own experience attests, we seldom hear mere “noises” without meaning: ordinarily we
perceive sounds with an awareness of what we are hearing, such as a particular vehicle approaching from up the street, and the same is true for visual perception.
The conclusion drawn in one careful overview of the neural circuitry involved in auditory and visual processing is that LeDoux’s subcortical pathway “does not
inform us, in any significant way, about the emotion process in humans.”18

Other neuroscientists have observed that affective responses involve the joint activity of multiple brain areas, none of which should be conceptualized as exclusively
affective or cognitive.19 Pessoa, for instance, explains that “cognition and emotion are strongly integrated in the brain,” specifically that “brain regions viewed as
‘affective’ are also involved in cognition” and “brain regions viewed as ‘cognitive’ are also involved in emotion,” which testifies to “a broader cognitive-affective
control circuit.” Also, some researchers have noted that it is rather hasty to make general statements about human emotions based on data concerning initial knee-
jerk reactions in rats,20 which LeDoux himself no longer identifies as the emotion of fear; instead, he now suggests, we ought to refer to the topic of his research as
the “innate circuits” implicated in threat “detection and response,” and to avoid conflating these with “the feeling of being afraid.”21 He adds that the “phenomenal
experience” or “conscious feeling” of fear relies on “cortical areas” that allow us “to cognitively represent the threat as a perceptual event.”22 There
is a
considerable difference between what is suffered by a rodent startled by a tone that has been paired with
shock and the fear experienced by a human being as she enters a doctor’s office to learn the result of a
biopsy .23 Although he has not always discouraged readers from making this kind of extrapolation, LeDoux does advise caution, reminding us that even the
“crucial” functioning of the amygdala is part of a larger system,24 which includes an entire living organism in a meaningful environment. Mental functions are
seldom “localized” in one neural region, despite what numerous popular overviews of emotion research might suggest.25 For these reasons, it would be judicious to
refrain from speaking about a part of the brain as if this were the location where emotions take place, or as if it were a little mind having experiences of its very own
—such as fearing, remembering, and getting angry.

Unfortunately, philosophers have not always been cautious about using evidence that is limited and
indefinite to justify sweeping conclusions . Thus, we are assured by Robinson that LeDoux’s analyses of “conditioned fear in rats” have
“wide and important implications for naturally occurring fear—including fear in human beings—as well as for the study of emotion in general.”26 By virtue of this
extrapolation, she moves rapidly from startled rats to frightened human beings, then claims that all human emotions are “noncognitive,” and that our affective life
consists of “rough” and “dirty” appraisals that are precipitated without cognition. And others are willing to make the same inference, or generalization, from
shocked rodents in a controlled setting to a complete theory of emotions in human beings. So, while neuroscientists such as Rolls and Pessoa bring forward
evidence suggesting that a subcortical route to the amygdala “is unlikely to be involved in most emotions,” and point out that LeDoux’s view “has been challenged”

and “is the subject of ongoing debate,”27 numerous philosophers continue to characterize the contested view as a
foregone conclusion , an empirically proven and uncontroversial fact . This remains true after LeDoux’s own published
revocation. For instance, relying on the presumption that human emotions involve only a “low road” in the brain, “isolated from our higher-order cognitive
processes,” Tappolet dismisses any cognitive account of emotions as obviously flawed.28 Robinson grounds her assertion that affective appraisal is “very fast, . . .
bypassing cognition,” on this metaphor also.29 Even Nussbaum, who is hardly a noncognitivist, nonetheless views LeDoux’s research as proving that fear is a
“primitive emotion,” one that “often hijacks thought” entirely.30 Out of the vast array of empirical research on emotion, a few well-publicized but debatable results
have been the focus of an exorbitant amount of attention. This could be due in part to wishful thinking about the promise of using empirical findings to resolve
difficult questions about the mind, and partly to the common-sense appeal of the notion that a rapid affective reaction must travel on a “fast track” through the
brain. LeDoux himself, who has been singled out for critique here largely because of how the consequences of his research are often portrayed, has recently
protested that his work has been widely misunderstood, and is actually in line with “cognitive theories of emotion,” rather than with noncognitive accounts.31 Even
apart from that claim, it would seem that a reappraisal is overdue.

Yet even if it did turn out to be the case that affective and cognitive processes operated on two segregated levels, one quick and another slow, the more efficient
kind of mental processing is no more than “a few milliseconds” faster than the other; this is one of several reasons why, as Mikko Salmela sums up, “recent
neuroscientific evidence suggests that the divide between a subcortical ‘low road’ and a cortical ‘high road’,” and the distinction it implies between
emotion and reason, is simply misleading .32 We need to be more patient and cautious when interpreting evidence from empirical
psychology: experimental findings can force us to revise our account of what emotions are, but they need to be checked against our best phenomenological
accounts of affective experience. It would require quite a bit of elasticity for a noncognitive theory of emotion to explain everything from an instance of reacting to a
sudden flash of light or burst of sound to an episode of being moved on behalf of Anna Karenina’s predicament; however, this is the range that must be
encompassed by any general account of human emotions. Toward one end of the spectrum from lesser to greater cognitive complexity, we find the simple affective
reflex of being startled by a fire hydrant that is mistaken for an animal due to its vertical axis of symmetry; at the other end of this continuum, we have the rapid and
viscerally disquieting yet intricately thought-informed experience of returning home to find a swastika painted on our neighbor’s door. In the latter case, our
affective response activates a set of intelligent attitudes and beliefs, but it involves a felt sense of bodily agitation just as much as the former case does. At the same
time, the simpler emotion (like the more complex one) incorporates a kind of perceptual recognition, an intake of meaningful information from the world.33 Each
instance of fear, then, “aims toward truth,” toward getting something right, and this is precisely why it can be mistaken, as it is when we momentarily misconstrue
an inanimate object as a creature facing us.34 Our prehistoric ancestors may have been more likely to get angry upon receiving a blow to the head, as James says,
while we more often become angered by such offenses as getting cut off in traffic.35 However, both the primitive episode of anger and the more “civilized” one
have the same kind of intentional content: in both cases, an embodied human being is upset or agitated by what is perceived as a nontrivial wrongdoing. And it
seems plausible that the two episodes of anger, like the more and less rudimentary cases of fear, may involve similar patterns of somatic agitation.
We should bear in mind Aristotle’s observation that passions or emotions ought to be attributed to the person who is experiencing the emotion, and not to some
part of that person.36 Thus, we rightly say, “I made a decision” or “I had an idea,” since it is we ourselves who think and decide, not an organ or another part of our
anatomy doing its own thing. Likewise, it is you who sees, not your eyes, although your eyes are involved in your seeing.37 And by the same token, when you feel
pity or fear, it is you who feels these emotions—not just your mind, your brain, or your sympathetic nervous system. Whatever we might find out from studying the
conditions under which the amygdala is activated, we certainly do not learn that the amygdala itself is capable of apprehending danger. People with brains have
emotions, but brains (or parts of brains) do not have emotions of their own.38 To think that they do is to make a category mistake, ascribing to part of a living
organism a state that can only be meaningfully ascribed to the whole organism.39 It is “not my brain but I myself” that warmly recognizes my grandmother, and not
my brain but I myself (a human being with a brain) that is ontologically the kind of thing that can experience emotions.40 This is an elementary theoretical point, yet
it is frequently ignored in interdisciplinary research on emotions. So readers of prominent texts in this field will be told, with an air of scientific authority, that
“emotions reside in perceptual systems of the brain,” that there is a place “where desires can be found in the brain,” that “our brains can often decide in seconds”
how to respond to a stimulus, and that “the prefrontal cortex acts as an efficient manager of emotion.”41 This may be harmless enough if understood as shorthand
for the well-founded claim than an author intends to be making (provided that he or she does not actually mean to imply that our heads are full of “homunculi” who
are experiencing emotions). But it is nonetheless a misleading way to speak, and it can lead philosophers to such conceptual confusions as the notion that oxytocin
is “not itself an emotion, but apparently an element of love and related emotions such as trust.”42 Should anyone so much as entertain the ontological possibility
that oxytocin could be an emotion? By even considering the notion that a chemical in the brain could itself qualify asan emotion, the author making this claim
evinces an absurd belief about what human emotions are.

In order to exercise good judgment in appealing to scientific findings, we must bear in mind that emotions do not take place in a private interior realm, enclosed
within the skull. Rather, they arise from our engagement with the world, as we are provoked by actions, events, and situations; and they have their identity by
virtue of much that is external to the living organism. An investigation of “fear behavior” could not get started unless we could specify the conditions under which
fear would arise: e.g., in creatures who are disturbed by a sudden noise (which may indicate threat). This does not mean that a physiological analysis of fear cannot
inform us of anything other than what we already knew about this emotion; it does, however, set boundaries to the investigation. We must be able to distinguish
instances of fear in order to measure the neurological activity that is characteristic of fear, and for this reason it is impossible for us to find out from such
measurements that fear is something radically unlike what we thought it was in the first place.43 Damasio rightly points out that research on “the brain’s emotional
apparatus” can provide us with knowledge that is ethically relevant, by helping us to understand emotions such as fear and grief, and more protracted mood states
as well;44 what it cannot show us is that fear, grief, and anxiety are merely “in the head.” From the vantage point of a grieving or frightened person, one’s affective
state is outwardly oriented: it is about some aspect of the world. Likewise, when I become angry, “the location of my anger” is not only within me, but (as we might
say) in the space between myself and the person at whom this emotion is directed.45 The emotions we feel, then, “are part of our cognitive engagement with the
world,” and “integral to our ability to grasp the meaning of a situation.” What goes on in the brain of an emotional person, therefore, is just one part of a larger
story.

Ideally, the relationship between conceptual explanation and empirical research ought to be a symbiotic one. In the absence of careful philosophical analysis of
mood and emotion, as Owen Flanagan observes, “the neuroscientists don’t know what they are looking for.”46 Phenomenological observations and explanations
should also be informed and even (when appropriate) revised by research from the human and natural sciences.

However, the balance between empirical work and theoretical explanation, in which each is able to learn from the other, is
lost when philosophers limit their role to that of simply reporting upon experimental findings. Instead of selectively citing the latest study that appears to support
our own preferred view, as if this “resolved” the matter once and for all,47 we should attempt to make sense of disagreements between leading researchers, and to
figure out how the phenomena can support such variant views. The discrepancy between LeDoux’s account of emotion and Damasio’s is an instructive case. It could
be that the impersonal cognitive abilities that are intact in Damasio’s patients, who suffer from an impairment of emotional reasoning pertaining to personal
matters, are the same cognitive abilities that LeDoux has often described as not essential to affective arousal.48 If this is the case, as I believe it is, it would suggest
that modes of cognitive functioning which are relevant to thinking about matters of personal significance require emotion, whereas other modes of cognition (those
associated with impersonal reflection) may by comparison be affectively flat and neutral.49 This, in turn, may help us to specify what type of cognitive activity is
(and is not) involved in most human emotions.

Even if we could define a certain type of emotion in terms of a characteristic pattern of brain activity—and the fact of neural plasticity
may prevent us from doing this too strictly—we still would not have identified the characteristic somatic agitation that is typically part of our
affective experience . That is, the “feeling of bodily changes” emphasized by William James does not include any felt sense of our own brain activity as
such.50 This is agreed upon not only by phenomenologists, but also by naturalists of the most reductive sort.51 Our experience of being emotionally moved does,
however, incorporate some awareness of the muscle contractions associated with our own facial expressions and postural changes (such as flinching or cowering),
and we can also feel such bodily changes as increased heart rate and sweat gland activity (which is correlated with heightened electrical conductivity in the skin), as
well as interoceptive (colloquially, “gut”) feelings.52 Somatic feelings such as these play “a prominent and vital role” in our affective experience, and when emotion
researchers focus on what is distinctly somatic about human emotions, what they have in mind are our characteristic feelings of bodily upheaval.53 What concerns
us, however, as Goldie clarifies, is “the phenomenology or the qualitative nature of our personal experience of these changes rather than . . . the impersonally
observable, and quantitatively measurable, changes themselves.”54 Yet the tendency to speak about felt bodily changes as if they must be about nothing other than
one’s own physical state (still perpetuated by Prinz and other theorists)55 can lead us to assume that, if our emotions have any intentional content, this must be
despite their bodily nature. It is a mistake to assume that our embodied affective feelings are an extraneous aspect of emotions, unrelated to their intentionality. So,
after reviewing some additional empirical evidence—which supports the view that our feeling of being in a certain emotional state does typically include a sense of
the embodied upheaval associated with that emotion56—I will explain how the somatic agitation we feel when we are affectively moved might actually contribute
to the way that the emotions inform us about how things are going in our world of concern.
2NC
Topicality
 AT: Ruberg
This is particularly true for the aff---rearticulating money’s role and adopting a job
guarantee makes possible a liberatory trans agenda which is much more radical than
the aff.
Nia Cola 21, published in Money on the Left: History, Theory, Practice is a peer-reviewed, open access
journal of scholarship in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, "Modern Monetary Theory and the
Trans Agenda (Essay)," July 30 2021 https://moneyontheleft.org/2021/07/30/modern-monetary-theory-
and-the-trans-agenda/ NL

To be trans today is to be treated as a political agent at all times, but afforded no substantive political
agency. Everything you do is scrutinized, as your right to exist remains under constant review. In response, trans liberation means
actualizing authentic ways of being , without waiting for the sovereign judgment of cis society. The
question of how to achieve this will always be open-ended and multi-faceted . Whatever our focus,
however, trans liberation requires a gender framework that expands the present bounds of possibility ,
in excess of the limited forms of life that have been previously afforded space. Modern Monetary
Theory (MMT) gives us just that framework . MMT allows space for limitless social rearticulation
through public spending and employment . In positing money as an infinite public resource, MMT
provides a viable counter-narrative to dominant theories of “commodity money,” which account for
human differences as economic costs and potential liabilities when it comes to building a mass political
base. And while the prevailing economics casts money as an unproductive and symbolic veil over finite resources, MMT’s insistence on money’s active role in
directing production allows us to see the affordance of difference as a policy variable. MMT also serves as a powerful analogue for the

trans struggle against what could be called “sound gender” ideology—the assertion of a strictly material
gender reality that the introduction of new pronouns can only debase. Grounded in such materialist reductionism, the
stigmatization of trans people is implicit in the hegemonic gender binary system, which is part and parcel of colonial systems of knowledge and control. The
patriarchal family, as an “independent” driver of social reproduction, stands in for the Western nation-state’s self image as necessarily profit-seeking and extractive.
And Western anxieties about queer and trans forms of life allegedly “replacing” traditional lifestyles are in some ways a projection of the West’s own justification for
settler-colonialism, whereby the existence of colonizers required the genocidal “replacement” of indigenous populations. The sweeping social identities that
Western thought derives from the ideology of biological dimorphism, however, are by no means universal. Despite sexual dimorphism, not all cultures have held to
a strictly binary view of gender. There
are, in fact, many ways for sexual reproduction to be folded into social
reproduction, and so the supposedly “practical” and “material” bases of gender identity are in fact
socially constructed and essentially contestable . What is more, because the archetypal reproductive
household is socially constructed, the very fact of trans existence holds open space for rearticulation
and reconfiguration . Trans existence, in other words, belies the falseness of cis society’s claims about itself. If trans existence is so destabilizing, what
we’re dealing with are the symptoms of repressed truths about gender—namely, that there are no fixed truths. A rigid gender binary restricts individuals from
acting outside of a narrow scope of social norms and becomes the basis for social and economic exclusions predicated on one’s performance of gender. While there
is nothing evil about trying on binary gender roles, the politics of performance must be self-consciously nested in a contingent and playful non-binary spectrum.

This essential space to play and experiment with gender cannot be conceived merely as escaping
coercion . It demands ongoing cultivation and maintenance by way of an MMT-based political
economic “agenda” that aims to secure trans agency in myriad urgent ways. The Trans Agenda As a function
of a repressive cis gender binary regime, trans people must daily confront tremendous hardships and
challenges. They face extraordinarily high rates of unemployment, for example , often recorded at around three to four
times the rate for cis people. Trans persons also suffer from meager wages, lower levels of college attainment on average, and extremely
high rates of poverty. Due to social and institutional discrimination, a large proportion of trans people are involved in the Sex Work (SW) industry. The
criminalization and stigmatization of this precarious line of work exposes trans people to high degrees of financial and bodily risk, contributing greatly to the high
rates of violence perpetrated against the trans community. For this reason, decriminalizing SW is an essential part of any trans liberation agenda. It is undeniable,
however, that a significant portion of trans participation in SW is tied to discrimination elsewhere, and so justice for trans sex workers cannot be taken in isolation. If
trans people are going to achieve liberation, it will mean provisioning lives we want to lead—including those of us who happily participate in SW. The issue of
discrimination at the point of access to social goods can be viewed as a matter of equal protection under the law, and for this the solution is simple: pass statutes
that make it illegal to discriminate on the basis of gender identity. While this is of course a long Civil Rights fight, a good start would be passing the Equality Act,
which would immediately alleviate explicit discrimination as a concern by making it illegal at the federal level. The Equality Act was passed by the House for the
second time on February 25, 2021 and is awaiting a vote in the Senate. Still, the trans agenda must go further. A comprehensive policy platform could fill a tome, of
course, and it would be good to develop such an agenda in the future. Here, however, I
would like to focus on two key policies–a Federal Job
Guarantee (FJG) and, below, Medicare for All–which are only realizable if we embrace the radical implications of
MMT . The MMT lens implores us to look at the world in an expansive and generative way, rejecting
binary and zero-sum thinking at the level of fiscal provisioning. The fundamental insight of MMT is that money is not a private
commodity that must be taken from the market via taxation in order to fund the public sector. To the contrary, governments create money to finance their
operations, and taxation is simply one tool among many to manage the shape and distribution of monetary demand (as well as ensure a common denomination.

Money’s role in mediating access to and participation in social provisioning is a limitless public
resource , which can be used however we want and across any time horizon . For this reason, the monetary agency of
the Federal government to name and finance public priorities can be mobilized at any time to create a public option for employment. If designed and fought for as a
fully inclusive and trans affirming program, a
FJG would not only establish a wage-and-benefits floor for the entire
economy and begin to challenge and change the social meaning of work. It would also create an inalienable foundation to
both support and further facilitate trans liberation, while buttressing trans resilience against hostile
employment authorities . Building a trans positive FJG, meanwhile, would build union power by diversifying and expanding the traditional white cis
culture of union membership. As a unionized public works system, the FJG will no doubt irreversibly alter the
balance of power between unions and employers throughout the economy . Yet while unions have in the past proven
to be crucial countervailing forces against employers, traditional unions are far from perfect and insufficient on their own. Indeed, even in their heyday, large unions

predominantly shaped and supported a repressive and exclusionary mid-center social order. A diversified FJG union, by contrast, will not merely
boster trans life. It would also strengthen the bargaining power of public and private unions alike by preventing them from holding minority groups
hostage to exclusionary majorities, or even corrupt alliances with management. A FJG union, moreover, would allow workers to refuse to work in striking sectors,
providing an expansive foundation for industrial solidarity that transcends the false opposition between living for one’s self and living for one’s class. Too Many
Pronouns Chasing Too Few Genders? As with any expansion of government spending, the standard objection leveled against the FJG is that it will cause runaway
inflation. Behind this explicit argument looms an implicit and quite violent social implication: If paying everyone to work increases the rate of inflation, as might be
alleged by mainstream economists, the implication is that some of those people are being paid above what they’re worth. Or to paraphrase the economists, it is too
many dollars chasing too few socially legitimate goods. Setting aside other critiques of mainstream economics, this is a startling statement about the value of the
work of women, queer people, and people of color. It’s a declaration that we are not capable of producing work valuable enough to justify a living wage. If one
outright rejects the possibility that marginalized people can make social contributions that justify a living wage, then it follows that they either should live off the
goodwill of “the productive” through redistributive policies, or that they don’t deserve to live at all. While few people will state the latter openly, the former view is
highly patronizing and built to fail under pressure. Buttressed by such toxic logics, the
work of marginalized communities has therefore
long been under-valued , and the expectation that their employment will result in inflation reflects this
legacy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the inflation bogeyman is also wielded against trans people through opposition
to trans healthcare. Medical interventions allow trans people to assimilate into cis society to the extent that they desire, or equally to challenge the
gendered expectations that are hurting them in the first place. We can hear echoes of the inflation panic about illegitimate jobs in objections to trans inclusion in
universal healthcare policies such as Medicare for All. According to this reactionary logic, gender affirming care is superfluous and cosmetic rather than “material” in
some fundamental sense. The suggestion that there is a tradeoff between trans and universal healthcare implies that provisioning healthcare services for trans

people is beyond the capacity of our economy to manage. But this is a demonstrably false statement . The expansion of trans healthcare
would likely be a one-off event in terms of increased capacity needs. It is reasonable to expect the amount of trans people who would need to be served would
increase as stigma falls, more people decide to transition, and healthcare provisions become more available; however, there is scarce evidence that provisioning
such a future is somehow beyond our economy’s ability to adapt to these increased needs. It can be hard to shake the feeling that many of these detractors are
opposed to trans healthcare not because they genuinely believe in a resource constraint, but simply because they do not wish to see trans people exist in public life.
Queering Money To
guarantee adequate jobs and healthcare to trans people—and build coalitions around
such struggles— we need a fundamental shift in thinking when it comes to government budgeting .
When money is imagined as fundamentally scarce, social change is routed through the problematic
language of redistribution and replacement rather than creation. This in turn creates an “any port in the storm” mentality when
it comes to building coalitions, as the variegated experiences of trans people are reduced to a representative “average” trans person who can be more simplistically
advocated for. And as we see, the impulse to reduce and assimilate what is particular into what is imagined as universal for the sake of “widening the coalition” is
observable in class reductionist calls to not discuss trans healthcare at all, in favor of supposedly “universal” healthcare services. MMT, by contrast, provides

a different foundation that allows us to articulate a comprehensive trans agenda on generative rather
than zero sum terms . In the MMT story, when public money is motivated toward some end, fiscal
authorities create it. Because money is created rather than found, spending precedes rather than
follows taxation. Creation does not need to be “paid for” by destruction, and the trans agenda does not
need to be routed through such zero sum logics . Money creation authorizes public job creation at the same time that it authorizes
private purchasing power. In the dominant economic view, money creation is inflationary because it is imagined as abstract bids on fundamentally scarce goods. In
contradistinction to this view, MMT sees public spending, not as subtracting from a fixed pool of public resources, but instead directing its expansion. This is
because, as any heterodox economist will tell you, resources are as socially constructed as gender. The flow of inputs at every point of production is linked to the
flow of outputs at another. Capacity is therefore created rather than given, and when the government invests properly it can create new capacity over time. The

policies discussed above are possible only with an MMT framework that speaks in the register of rights
and guarantees , rather than goals and aspirations. A FJG will require large variations in spending, and any method of ‘paying for’ the program would have
to be just as flexible. And while Medicare for All would likely entail more stable spending patterns, it’s too great a budget item to tie to taxation, dollar for dollar.
The last thing we need is policy that analogizes gender affirming healthcare services to zero sum redistribution. A
proper budget in an MMT
framework would deliberately target resource bottlenecks and invest in expanding production where
necessary . If properly wielded and understood, public money harbors radical potential to reshape
society for the better. These two policies would vastly improve life for trans people , but there is no final word in
what makes the trans agenda, any more than there is a final word in what makes a trans person. It is imperative, however, to go big. Putting a Federal

Job Guarantee and Medicare for All into action for this trans agenda would be a great start.
Case
 Ballot
Third is CRUEL OPTIMISM---locating political value in the ballot instills an adaptive
politics of being and effaces institutional constraints that reproduce structural
violence
Brown 95 – Dr. Wendy Brown, Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley,
Ph.D in Political Philosophy from Princeton University, States of Injury, p. 21-23

For some, fueled by opprobrium toward regulatory norms or other modalities of domination, the language of "resistance" has taken up
the ground vacated by a more expansive practice of freedom. For others, it is the discourse of “empowerment” that carries the
ghost of freedom's valence.

Yet as many have noted, insofar as resistance is an effect of the regime it opposes on the one hand, and insofar as its
practitioners often seek to void it of normativity to differentiate it from the (regulatory) nature of what
it opposes on the other, it is at best politically rebellious; at worst, politically amorphous. Resistance stands
against , not for; it is re-action to domination, rarely willing to admit to a desire for it, and it is neutral with regard to
possible political direction . Resistance is in no way constrained to a radical or emancipatory aim. a fact that emerges clearly as soon as one
analogizes Foucault's notion of resistance to its companion terms in Freud or Nietzsche. Yet in some ways this point is less a critique of Foucault, who especially in
his later years made clear that his political commitments were not identical with his theoretical ones (and un- apologetically revised the latter), than a sign of his
misappropriation. For Foucault, resistance marks the presence of power and expands our under- standing of its mechanics, but it is in this regard an analytical
strategy rather than an expressly political one. "Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet. or rather consequently, this resistance
is never in a
position of exteriority to power. . . . (T]he strictly relational character of power relationships . . . depends
upon a multiplicity of points of resistance: these play the role of adversary, target, support, or handle in
power relations.*39 This appreciation of the extent to which resistance is by no means inherently subversive of power
also reminds us that it is only by recourse to a very non-Foucaultian moral evaluation of power as bad or that which is to be overcome that it is possible to equate
resistance with that which is good, progressive, or seeking an end to domination.

If popular and academic notions of resistance attach, however weakly at times, to a tradition of protest, the other contemporary substitute for a discourse of
freedom—“empowerment”—would seem to correspond more closely to a tradition of idealist reconciliation. The language of resistance
implicitly acknowledges the extent to which protest always transpires inside the regime ;
“empowerment,” in contrast, registers the possibility of generating one’s capacities, one’s “self-esteem,” one’s life
course, without capitulating to constraints by particular regimes of power. But in so doing, contemporary discourses of empowerment

too often signal an oddly adaptive and harmonious relationship with domination insofar as they
locate an individual’s sense of worth and capacity in the register of individual feelings, a register implicitly
located on something of an other worldly plane vis-a-vis social and political power. In this regard, despite its
apparent locution of resistance to subjection, contemporary discourses of empowerment partake strongly of
liberal solipsism —the radical decontextualization of the subject characteristic of liberal discourse that is key to the fictional sovereign individualism of
liberalism. Moreover, in its almost exclusive focus on subjects’ emotional bearing and self-regard, empowerment is a

formulation that converges with a regime’s own legitimacy needs in masking the power of the regime .
This is not to suggest that talk of empowerment is always only illusion or delusion. It is to argue, rather, that while the notion of empowerment articulates that
feature of freedom concerned with action, with being more than the consumer subject figured in discourses of rights and eco- nomic democracy,
contemporary deployments of that notion also draw so heavily on an undeconstructed subjectivity that they
risk establishing a wide chasm between the (experience of) empowerment and an actual capacity to
shape the terms of political, social, or economic life . Indeed, the possibility that one can “feel
empowered” without being so forms an important element of legitimacy for the antidemocratic
dimensions of liberalism .
1NR
PIK---Debate
 Solvency---2NC
It presumes a regressive understanding of discourse as static and intentioned that’s
been disproven by waves of theoretical advancement in rhetorical studies---
attempting to confine and restrict the meaning of performance renders their speech
powerless, which link turns the case, and denies the excitability of speech, which is
critical to progressive re-appropriation to challenge systems of oppression
Young 11 – Dr. Kelly Michael Young, Professor of Communication at Wayne State University, PhD in
Communication Studies from Wayne State University, MA in Communication Studies from Ball State
University, BS in Secondary Education from Ball State University, “IMPOSSIBLE CONVICTIONS:
CONVICTIONS AND INTENTIONALITY IN PERFORMANCE AND SWITCH-SIDE DEBATE”, Contemporary
Argumentation & Debate, p. 6-19

Despite the fact that the theorists who provide the strongest defense for the performative power of
discourse draw from Austin (1975) and Derrida (1988), very few debaters read evidence or base their
arguments within the performative frameworks articulated by these theorists . As a result, much of
academic debate’s engagement with the exciting possibilities offered by this literature is lost as the
students selectively adopt in self-serving fashion from this work. Examples of these self-serving practices include the
debaters who present a hodge-podge of arguments from various critical theorists to generate offensive responses to opponents’ arguments
with no understanding of the implications and contractions created at the intersections of those theorists’ ideas. Or, they realize that there are
contradictions but know that it would take the other side too long to explain them and so these problems are simply glossed over. Worse,
many of the debate practices adopted to defend elements of performance debate may run contrary to
this literature base . For example, opponents of performative arguments will often run quasi-counterplans that select and
advocate parts of the 1AC performance or permute part of the negative’s performative framework. In response, teams
will contend
that their opponents cannot “just snatch [the performance] and add it [to their speech]….Kritik is a verb, and not
a noun, which means you have to do it in order for it to be done” (Evans, 2011a, para. 15). Similarly, teams will
contend that their opponents’ attempt to capture part of their performance is inauthentic and insincere
because they did not initiate the performance (Zompetti, 2004). However, given Butler’s (1997) and Derrida’s (1988)
perspectives on the performative, which will be discussed at length later in this essay, these claims to an authentic and
sincere performance are perhaps problematic . Before we turn to that discussion, I want to explore a second recent development
that relates to sincerity and convictions: the contemporary debate about the ethics and effect of switch-sides debate (SSD).

The Debate about SSD

1950-1960s: SSD as Unethical Indoctrination

Speech communication journals have hosted a number of debates about the ethical implications of the debate tournament practice of having students debate both
sides of a given proposition. With the rise of tournamentstyle debate competitions in the 1930s, debate educators became highly concerned about the ethical and
pedagogical value of having students debate against their convictions by having to switch sides on a topic each round. In 1954, the selection of the national college
debate topic, Resolved: that the United States should extend diplomatic recognition to the communist government of China, generated a great deal of controversy
(English, Llano, Mitchell, Morrison, Rief, & Woods., 2007). At the height of the Cold War and McCarthyism, a number of schools such as the military academies
refused to affirm the topic in fear that affirmation would “indoctrinate America’s youth, while giving aid and comfort to the enemy” (English et al., 2007, p. 222).

Within this context, Murphy (1957) outlines the fundamental objection to SSD in arguing, “debate…is a form of public speaking. A public statement is a public
commitment. Before one takes the platform, [he/she] should study the question, [he/she] should discuss it until [he/she] knows where [he/she] stands. Then [he/
she] should take that stand” (p. 2). In his review of public speaking ethics literature, Murphy (1957) contends that when students argue against their convictions,
they are both immoral and “public liar[s]” (p. 2). To avoid this, Murphy (1957) argues that students should debate only from their sincere beliefs.

In their response to Murphy (1957), both Cripe (1957) and Dell (1958) maintain that tournament-style debating is a unique form of analytic speaking that is different
than persuasive debate about political conviction. As such, both scholars suggest that there is great pedagogical value to viewing controversies from both sides
within an educational setting. Additionally, Dell (1958) contends that because all ethics are contextual, SSD should be seen as an ethical practice. Of the many
arguments raised and debated, the two most frequently discussed were: (1) that debate tournaments are or are not public speaking situations; and (2) that SSD
does or does not teach essential logical skills necessary to avoid dogmatism (Cripe, 1957; Galloway, 2007; Murphy, 1957). Put differently, Cripe (1957) explains, “the
whole problem seems to be one of definition, of defining what ‘debate’ is, and what ‘ethical’ means” (p. 209).

Central to these broader ethics arguments is the status of students’ convictions. For instance, according to Murphy (1957), students are most likely to have
welldeveloped convictions prior to engaging in debate and SSD only creates confusion for students in what they sincerely believe. In response, Cripe (1957) and Dell
(1958) maintain that debaters can separate their true feelings while making the best possible case for a different side for the purposes of competition. In addition,
they refute Murphy’s argument that students have firm convictions on a number of complicated topics prior to debating. As they conclude, students’ true beliefs
are likely underdeveloped and can be best clarified and strengthened by SSD. Additionally, according to Cripe (1957) and Dell (1958), SSD helps develop good future
citizens because it best guards against the development of rigid ideological views. Summarizing the debate aptly, Greene and Hicks (2005) conclude, “at the heart of
the ‘debate about debate’…was the idea of conviction and how it should guide the moral economy of liberal citizenship” (p. 100).

In their later review of the controversy, Klopf and McCroskey (1964) maintain that the debate over the ethics of SSD is over. As they explain,

The relative ethic has been accepted by a large majority of those involved directly with academic debate. Both by their opinions and their actions they believe
switch-sides debating is ethical. So do we. The controversy over the ethics of debating both sides is [finished]! (para. 25-26)

While the majority of coaches and directors may have declared SSD ethical, the status and importance of student convictions remained up for debate, as we see in
another debate 40 years later.

2000s: SSD as Cultural Technology of Imperialism

Greene and Hicks (2005) revisited the 1950-1960s debate to interrogate the cultural effect that results from the promotion of SSD debate as a corrective for
intransigence. Rather than assess the ethical implications of SSD on students, Greene and Hicks (2005) examine: The articulation of the debate community as a zone
of dissent against McCarthyist tendencies developed into a larger and somewhat uncritical affirmation of switch-side debate as a “technology” of liberal
participatory democracy….tied to a normative conception of American democracy that justifies imperialism. (English et al., 2007, p. 223-224) In advancing this
argument, Greene and Hicks (2005) contend that SSD creates a gap between a student’s “embodied speech act and his/her speech convictions” that allows for the
privileging of a method of conflict resolution that is based on reason rather than beliefs or authority (p. 120). As they conclude, the controversy “pre-figures how a
deliberative theory of democracy requires a moral theory of the subject to prepare that subject for the transformational potential associated with the ‘gentle force
of the better argument’” (Greene & Hicks, 2005, p. 120). Greene and Hicks’ implied alternative to SSD returns to the earlier form of debate that “privileges personal
conviction” as the governing element of debate (Stannard, 2006, para. 32). In doing so, they suggest that academic debate should close the gap between the speech
act of debate and the individual’s first order convictions.

Following Greene and Hicks’ (2005) lead, Massey (2006a) calls on academic debate coaches to reform SSD in order to allow students debating on the affirmative of a
topic the space to express their true beliefs. Somewhat mirroring Murphy’s (1957) concerns, Massey (2006a) maintains that “we should not separate speech from
conviction…discourse creates reality, and we must examine the effects that verbalizing things [students] might disagree with could have on the [audience]” (para.
17). In a different argument, Massey (2006a) is concerned that students are harmed by SSD because recent debate resolutions always require the affirmative to
defend action by the United States federal government and state action. As he further explains, affirmative debaters must always debate from an “exceptionalists
view” without ever interrogating the federal government’s role in causing a host of problems (Massey, 2006a, para. 11). Consequently, Massey (2006a) contends
that SSD

…forces a one way ideological conformity, rather than a give and take reflection that most proponents of switch side debate want to presume. My position is debate
can be a training ground for discussing those issues that are important to debaters, and giving students agency for dealing with your own personal oppressions and
inequalities. (para. 11)

To best capture the benefits of SSD, Massey (2006b) claims that students on the negative are required to refute whatever the affirmative team presents, which
gains “all the benefits of switch side debate” (para. 2). Ultimately, Massey’s criticism has less to do with Greene and Hicks’s (2005) concern with the cultural effect
of promoting a certain model of liberal citizenship and more with the potential exceptionalist effect that having to defend the United States federal government has
on students. However, like Greene and Hicks, Massey privileges the verbal expression of conviction as what should regulate student advocacy.

In response to Greene and Hicks (and as an effect, responding to Massey as well), English et al. (2007) defend SSD in arguing that “rather than acting as a cultural
technology expanding American exceptionalism, switch side debating originates from a civic attitude that serves as a bulwark against fundamentalism of all stripes”
(p. 224). Similarly, Stannard (2006) contends that conviction-driven debate would produce “simultaneous zones of speech activism” that cause students to be:

…so wrapped up in their own micropolitics, or so busy preaching to themselves and their choirs, that they will never understand or confront the rhetorical tropes
used to mobilize both resource and true believers in the service of continued material domination. (para. 35)

Thus, for English et al. (2007) and Stannard (2006), SSD is a technology that prevents the very moral and cultural problems that concern Greene and Hicks (2005)
and Massey (2006a).

In an additional defense, Galloway (2007) outlines a dialogic model of competitive debate that “preserves the affirmative team’s obligation to uphold the debate
resolution” while, at the same time, allowing the speech act of the debater to take a number of forms (e.g., critical, performative, policy) (p. 2). Once offered, the
affirmative speech act awaits response from the negative. The promise of the model, according to Galloway (2007), is that it preserves the stable predictability of a
resolution while allowing debaters to engage these propositions in a number of ways. In making this argument, Galloway (2007) responds to advocates of
conviction-driven debate in contending that SSD does not cause students to lose their beliefs. Instead, “conviction is not a priori to discussion, it flows from it”
through the testing of ideas and beliefs (p. 11).

Ultimately, both debates about SSD are founded on the idea that student convictions are important. However, what is disputed is the impact that communication
has on these convictions. For instance, for the opponents of SSD, conviction exists prior to public debate and is grounded in the sincere intentions of the speaker
(Murphy, 1957). Yet, these beliefs are fragile, as they are always at risk of being corrupted and lost in public argument. For the supporters of SSD, conviction is
something discovered, tested, and sustained through public speech acts. While both of these positions bank a great deal on the importance and role of student
convictions in speech acts, there is no discussion in these debates about how students construct or convey these beliefs through communication and performance.
Given that academic debate remains a communication activity, how we convey our sincere beliefs and what effect those speech acts have are rather important
issues to explore. In that vein, the next section of this essay explores the speech act theories of Austin, Butler, and Derrida and their implications for these debates
about sincere beliefs and performance.

Speech Act, Performance Theory, and Convictions

As my review of both performance debate theory and the reoccurring debate over SSD suggests, a number of questions about the expression of convictions remain
unanswered. For instance, how do we recognize that students are debating from their true beliefs? What effect do these convictions have on debates? What are the
effects of using convictions as the governing principle to evaluate speech acts or promote competitive debate? Before answers to these questions can be discerned,
I now turn to speech act theory, as it may provide a number of insights into the underlying concerns about student convictions in competitive debate.

Austin’s Speech Act Theory

For many years in linguistic and rhetorical study, the prevailing explanation of the operation of linguistics
was that the conscious speaker and his/her sincere intentions controlled the meaning of communication
within a rhetorical situation (Culler, 1981). Argumentation and communication scholarship also often presumed that the “primary
purpose of language was to be descriptive or make true or false (constantive) statements about the world” (Alfino, 1991, p. 144). However,
Austin (1975) maintains that several statements do not fit within the constantive category. Rather, many utterances “actually perform the
action to which they refer (e.g., ‘I promise to pay you tomorrow’)” (Culler, 1981, p. 16). In his work, Austin (1975) argues that these
performative statements, rather than being a special case, constitute a majority of statements while the constantive is a special case of the
performative.

Austin (1975) also identifies two levels of effect for any speech act to further clarify the nature and use of performative utterances. The first is
the perlocutionary effect, which is the psychological consequences of the speech act, which include motivating and persuading an immediate
audience. In swaying or moving the audience, the speech act may convince someone to change his/her feelings or thoughts or even take action.
But these changes may be indirect as they affect an intermediary person and occur over time as a result of the original speech act (Butler,
1997). The second level is illocutionary force, which is the performative effects of declaring, identifying, promising, and requesting. As Austin
(1975) explains, illocutionary force is the “performance of an act in saying something as opposed to performance of an act of saying something”
(pp. 99-100). Illocutionary force is a direct consequence of a speech act; however, the
force of the speech act is not located
within “merely a single moment” and cannot succeed with just a simple utterance (Butler, 1997, p. 3). Rather,
illocutionary effects rely on a number of prior conventions and rituals. For example, as Austin (1975) suggests, successful illocutionary acts
depend on a number of conditions:

(A.1) There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of
certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances, and further, (A.2) the particular person and circumstances in a given case must be
appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked. (B.1) The procedure must be executed by all participants both correctly and
(B.2) completely. (pp. 14-15)

In outlining these various conditions for effective performances, Austin seeks to demonstrate that the conditions and conventions of a given
context are what control the illocutionary effect of discourse. In doing so, he privileges convention and context over the consciousness and
intentions of speakers as the source of performative effect.

While elevating the importance of context over speaker’s intentions, Austin (1975) also awkwardly seeks to exclude non-serious, or what he
calls “parasitic,” speech acts (p. 22). For instance, he considers performances by an actor or statements made in jest as intelligible yet parasitic
uses of language. Yet, in excluding these fake or infelicitous speech acts, Austin (1975) inadvertently privileges the conscious speaker and
his/her sincere intentions as the center of his speech act system—the very thing he sought to avoid (Bérubé, 2004).

Derrida and Butler’s Speech Act Theory

In highlighting the shortcoming of Austin’s (1975) desire to preserve conscious intentions and sincerity, Derrida (1988) asks:
can
communication have an inherent, intended and sincere meaning? In responding to his own question, Derrida (1988)
maintains that sincere intentions cannot control a speech act because it is constantly repeatable —iterable
—as it is cited and recited by different speakers in different contexts . While the speaker might have a genuine purpose
in making a statement, as the statement is used and repeated by other speakers in different contexts, the meaning and the force of the
statement changes. For example, if debate students use this article as evidence in a debate brief, I cannot control how they use material from
this essay in their arguments. As more and more students cite the argument, we all become multiple “authors” of
the speech act . Likewise, my citation of various scholars within this essay creates an assemblage of ideas that have very different
meaning and force once combined into this article. Thus, while many people helped create this document, the absence of their intent and
presence allows me to deploy their ideas and thoughts in different ways.
Influenced by de Saussure’s (1972) notions of linguistic structuralism, absence and presence, and diachronic studies of meaning and Barthes’s
(1977) work on the “death of the author,” Derrida contends, that the “structure of absence” in all uses of language allows all utterances to be
endlessly cited and iterated (Alfino, 1991, p. 146). This
inherent possibility of continuous citation and repetition, according to
Derrida, is the very condition in which discourse remains meaningful and has effect, even if the meaning is
different in each new context (Alfino, 1991). Within Derrida’s (1988) system of speech acts, authorial intent does not disappear, but instead
must be understood as an effect that “no longer [is] able to govern the entire scene and the system of utterance” (p. 20). Additionally, the
privileging of the author’s sincere intentions and beliefs in an appropriate context for a performance
should be understood as an attempt to restrict the infinite meanings of the performance (Stocker,

2006). In addition, Derrida (1988) contends that sincere

intentions and beliefs cannot control systems of meaning
because we cannot read the speaker’s mind, our communication always expresses more than we
anticipate, and intention and belief is never fully present to the speaker due to the unconscious.
Consequently, what matters most in a speech act is how context makes possible the structure,
conventions, and meaning of communication.
In making these arguments, Derrida (1988) maintains what Austin wants to exclude—the non-serious and infelicitous performance. In doing so,
Derrida argues that the possibility of non-serious or fake performances and reiterations of performances demonstrate that intentionality
and sincerity do not regulate the absolute meaning of a speech act. Instead, the system is never fully closed.
Rather, it is porous and constantly open to change due to the context and conventions within and outside
the immediate context in which the performance occurs (Derrida, 1988).
In her ruminations about the nature of injurious speech and the problems associated with censorship, Butler (1997) builds on Austin’s and
Derrida’s works to argue that a structural gap between intention and sincerity and an utterance is necessary in
order for language to have agency. Like Derrida, Butler (1997) contends that language and speech acts are always
plagued with excess. As she further explains, the speech act is “always to some extent unknowing about what
it performs, that it always says something that it does not intend” (Butler, 1997, p. 10). Even in the situation where a
predetermined topic is up for discussion – like a resolution for debate – Butler (1997) would contend that meaning remains unsettled because
the words in the topic and the arguments made for either side of the topic do not have stable meaning. For instance, thousands of debates
each year occur under a shared national debate resolution, yet each debate is significantly different than the other, even when they deal with
similar sub-sets of the resolution. The very fact that there is no consensus on what a debate resolution precisely means at the end of a debate
season and debates are performed so differently under one topic throughout a season demonstrates the play and excess of speech acts. This
structural inability to master or control our performances and speech acts for Butler (1997) does not mark the
failure of communication; instead, it serves as its radical potential . For example, without a gap between
intention and beliefs and utterance, discourse is unrecoverable and fixed . However, if a gap does exist,
contested and once harmful words like “queer” can be re-appropriated and given new meaning within
different contexts by different speakers. This does not mean that the discourse is acceptable
uncritically; rather, the new use of the terms demonstrate the exclusive nature of the rhetoric and
produces a democratic contestation over formerly racist or misogynist discourse that extend the
range of the term. For instance, the activist group Queer Nation re-appropriates the term “queer” in
order to contest the exclusive nature of labels such as “gay,” “lesbian,” or “homosexual.” In doing so,
the group seeks to highlight the homophobic fear of what is “queer” by turning the term against itself ,
as the group’s motto, “We’re here. We’re Queer. Get used to it!” signifies (Brontsema, 2012). Another example of re-
appropriation can be seen as a result of the recent decision by Arizona’s Tucson Unified School District
to ban certain books from the district’s Mexican-American Studies program. The action caused several
activists to form the Librotraficante Caravan, an underground and traveling library featuring the work of
writers who were banned by the district. The group’s name – book trafficker – and tactics reclaim a
number of negative stereotypes surrounding immigration, like the underground smuggling/trafficking of
goods (Steiner, 2012). Through this re-appropriation over time, these terms lose their harmful effect and
can be used in new and powerful ways through iteration (Butler, 1993, 1997).

Due to this break between belief, intent, and rhetoric, the force and power of discourse cannot be
located in a single speech act. As Butler (1997) explains in the context of hate speech, “racist speech works through the
invocation of convention; it circulates, and though it requires a subject for its speaking, it neither begins nor ends with
the subject who speaks or with the specific name that is used” (p. 34). In other words, the illocutionary force of
a speech act comes from the prior conventions and citational history that both precedes and conditions
the use of particular discourse. While an individual can be liable for what is said at a perlocutionary level, reprimanding and
rejecting the speech act does little to curb the force and power of the discourse at an illocutionary level of
uptake. Indeed, such attempts actually lock into place injurious speech, “ preserving their power to injure,
and arresting the possibility of a reworking that might shift their context and purpose” (Butler, 1997, p. 38).
Instead of preserving this injurious history, efforts to reclaim or re-signify discourse require laying claim
to a term or utterance and using it against its “constitutive historicity” (Butler, 1993, p. 227). Yet, to Butler (1993),
re-signification or the queering of language through performance is not simply a question of will or conviction.
Rather, performance requires both the enactment of the utterance and the transference of binding power onto
that utterance. The authority of the act is not determined by an external judge or the intent and convictions of the speaker; instead, it is
located in the citational history of the discourse (Butler, 1993).
 Link---2NC
The only thing that makes debate practices resemble transphobic violence is the
ideological investment in their ability to do violence. However, their identification of a
defined practice and explicit violation of that norm in response only strengthens that
system by affirming its coherence and the power of debate to bring meaningful norms
into existence. Voting Neg is a means of vacating the ideology of debate norms as
violence and divesting it of any remaining authority by refusing to view it as anything
more than it really is---just a Bricker 3 AM brain scramble.
Bjerg 11 – Ole Bjerg, Professor in the Department of Management, Politics, and Philosophy at the
Copenhagen Business School, PhD in Sociology at Department of Sociology at the University of
Copenhagen, Former Visiting Scholar at Yale University, Master of Sociology at Department of Sociology
at the University of Copenhagen, Poker: The Parody of Capitalism, p. 193-195

The idea of law instituting order in an otherwise anarchical world of unrestrained desire (e.g., in Hobbes)
is actually a myth produced in the domain of fantasy and ideology. First, the myth gives legitimacy to law
by explaining why it is necessary, but second and perhaps more importantly the myth tells us what we
would really want if it were not for the law restraining us. Thus, the message of the law is split into the
explicit prohibition and the fantasmatic injunction to transgress the law.9 In this way law interacts
with fantasy in the domain of ideology in order to teach the subject what and how to desire.

An important implication of this understanding of the relation between fantasy and law is that even in
transgression, the subject does not move beyond the domain of law . A thief illegally appropriating
consumer goods by transgressing the law of property does not violate the fundamental principles for
the structuring of desire in the consumer society. It may in fact even be argued that his transgressive act
confirms the desirability of the consumer goods. Since the thief will go to such extremities in order to
attain the goods, the goods must indeed be something extraordinary.

In Baudrillard’s analysis of the difference between law and rule, we find the following reflection related
to transgression: Ordinarily we live within the realm of the Law, even when fantasizing its abolition .
Beyond the law we see only its transgression or the lifting of a prohibition . For the discourse of law
and interdiction determines the inverse discourse of transgression and liberation. However, it is not the
absence of the law that is opposed to the law, but the Rule .10

Instead of transgression or absence of law, Baudrillard suggests the rule as being opposed to law. The
argument is here not that by following the rule of the game, the player is violating the law of society.
The point is rather the much more subtle one that by entering the sphere of the rule and the game the
player moves beyond the ideological domain of the law .

Law, desire, and subjectivity tie into each other in a kind of Gordian knot. In the game, where law is
substituted for the rule, this knot is cut. In its explicit contingency, the rule is not supported by fantasy.
The rule does not hold a promise of satisfaction ; no sublime object is imagined beyond the rule. The
rule claims to be nothing more than what it is .
So what is the attraction of the rule and the game, if not satisfaction of a desire? Entering the game
means voluntarily submitting to an arbitrary rule with no higher meaning . This act is, however, a way
of delivering oneself from the law . Since transgression is already inscribed in the law even in the
violation of a prohibition, we are still caught in the web of the law and its matrix of
satisfaction/unsatisfaction . In the violation, we may contradict the explicit word of the law but we are
still confirming its underlying principle of desire.

When choosing to submit to the rules of a game, however, we step into another order not structured
by the law and desire. We renounce our desire , not in an ascetic abstinence from particular objects of
desire (which is by the way only an extreme sublimation of the objects of desire), but by letting
ourselves be seduced into an order not promising any kind of satisfaction at all . In this way, we move
beyond the law’s matrix of satisfaction/unsatisfaction. When obeying the law, our conscious rational
belief in it is supported by an unacknowledged irrational belief. Yet, entering the game, we openly
acknowledge the pure contingency of the rule, and so our conscious submission to it is based on no
belief whatsoever . We have no illusions that the game is nothing but an illusion , and so our approach
to the game is perhaps more “realistic” than our approach to the law.

The game’s sole principle . . . is that by choosing the rule one is delivered from the law . Without a
psychological or metaphysical foundation, the rule has no grounding in belief. One neither believes nor
disbelieves a rule— one observes it . The diffuse sphere of belief, the need for credibility that
encompasses the real, is dissolved in the game . Hence their immorality: to proceed without believing in
it, to sanction a direct fascination with conventional signs and groundless rules.11

In the game, desire is suspended and so is desire’s eternal shadow figure, unsatisfaction, which is a
necessary condition for the reproduction of desire. In the game, there is no promise and therefore no
disappointment . In the order of the law, we may find enjoyment in the momentary and partial
satisfaction of our desires through obtainment of different objects. The joy of the game stems not from
this kind of satisfaction but exactly from the suspension of the satisfaction/unsatisfaction matrix.