Kritik List

Table of Contents

Kritik ListKritiks

Wendy Brown KritikDada KritikSchlag KritikGur-Ze’ev KritikEhrenfeld Tech KritikMasses FrameworkBlue CrayonsVampiricism KritikCruel OptimismStrategy KritikTuck and Yang Kritik

Kritiks

Wendy Brown Kritik

Identity politics are parasitically attached to the very oppression that they try to overcome. Formulating politics in terms of identity and suffering turns their argument because identity itself is ontologically and psychologically dependent on suffering and evil.  Politics becomes revenge against the agents of suffering rather than creating political spaces in which suffering can be overcome.Despite all aspirations to radicality, identity politics remains mired in a thoroughly liberal, modernist conception of the subject: that the essence of one is basically free and historical accident sometimes intrudes upon that freedom, that the Good derives from actualizing this freedom, that this freedom is an exercise of our essential natures rather than politically contingent accidents of power.Debate exacerbates these problems: the ballot writes suffering into identity and institutionalizes identity politics’ dependence on suffering.  Because debate already occurs against the backdrop of oppression, privilege, and suffering, the ballot can only ever be a vehicle for revenge.Brown 1995 Wendy, Professor of Political Science at Berkeley, States of Injury, pp. 66-74Liberalism contains from its inception a generalized incitement to what Nietzsche terms ressentiment, the ANDis reiterated in the investments of late modern democracy’s primary oppositional political formations.

Dada Kritik DADA is unDADA and Truth is unTruth – only accepting DADA can we accept and reject truthTzara ‘18 (Tristan, “Dada Manifesto 1918,” 1918, twice convicted sexual predator)"Philosophy is the question... fill the vessel"Philosophy is the question: from which side shall we look at life, God, the idea or other phenomena. Everything one looks at is false. I do not consider the relative result more important than the choice between cake and cherries after dinner. The system of quickly looking at the other side of a thing in order to impose your opinion indirectly is called dialectics, in other words, haggling over the spirit of fried potatoes while dancing method around it. If I cry out: Ideal, ideal, ideal, Knowledge, knowledge, knowledge, Boomboom, boomboom, boomboom, I have given a pretty faithful version of progress, law, morality and all other fine qualities that various highly intelligent men have discussed in so many books, only to conclude that after all everyone dances to his own personal boomboom, and that the writ er is entitled to his Tzara, “Dada Manifesto 1918” boomboom: the satisfaction of pathological curiosity a private bell for inexplicable needs; a bath; pecuniary difficulties; a stomach with repercussions in tile; the authority of the mystic wand formulated as the bouquet of a phantom orchestra made up of silent fiddle bows greased with filters made of chicken manure. With the blue eye-glasses of an angel they have excavated the inner life for a dime’s worth of unanimous gratitude. If all of them are right and if all pills are Pink Pills, let us try for once not to be right. Some people think they can explain rationally, by thought, what they think. But that is extremely relative. Psychoanalysis is a dangerous disease, it puts to sleep the anti-objective impulses of man and systematizes the bourgeoisie. There is no ultimate Truth. The dialectic is an amusing mechanism which guides us / in a banal kind of way / to the opinions we had in the first place. Does anyone think that, by a minute refinement of logic, he had demonstrated the truth and established the correctness of these opinions? Logic imprisoned by the senses is an organic disease. To this element philosophers always like to add: the power of observation. But actually this magnificent quality of the mind is the proof of its impotence. We observe, we regard from one or more points of view, we choose them among the millions that exist. Experience is also a product of chance and individual faculties. Science disgusts me as soon as it becomes a speculative system, loses its character of utility that is so useless but is at least individual. I detest greasy objectivity, and harmony, the science that finds everything in order. Carry on, my children, humanity . . . Science says we are the servants of nature: everything is in order, make love and bash your brains in. Carry on, my children, humanity, kind bourgeois and journalist virgins . . .I am against systems, the most acceptable system is on principle to have none. To complete oneself, to perfect oneself in one's own littleness, to fill the vessel

WE ARE BOTH AFF AND NEG. WE CHOOSE TO AFFIRM AND NEGATE THE RESOLUTION. We are the only side on your ballot as the aff makes their speech time irrelevant. As the judge, your only choice in this round is voting negativeFlake ‘19 (Otto, “Thoughts,” 1919, Otto can dance if he wants to, he can leave his friends behind)"The prerequisite for... are capable of."

THE SECURITIZED LOGIC OF THE 1AC LEADS TO ENDLESS WARFA RE. JUST KIDDING ABOUT THAT. TOTALLY NOT TRUE. LOOOUUUUD NOOIIIISES!COD ‘19 (Central Office of Dadaism, “Put Your Money in DADA,” 1919, the COD knows the way of the universe)

"dada is the... money in Dada"

Imagining a different world is the key prerequisite to being able to effectively change it – Suess’s permissive language and nonsense images disrupt containment policies and Cold War paranoia by using imagination to break through dominant systems of language and knowledge.Nel 99 (Philip, PhD @ Vanderbilt, Prof @ Kansas State, “Dada Knows Best: Growing up "Surreal" with Dr. Seuss,” Children's Literature, Volume 27, 1999, pgs. 150-184, PM)Given Seuss's challenges to common sense,…wrote in a letter to Seuss, "Dr. Seuss, you have an imagination with a long tail" (Cott 18).

This ability to imagine a happy ending in spite of an uncertain future is critical to The Butter Battle’s questioning the logic of mutually assured destruction. Only by using absurdity to reveal the irrationality of existing nuclear policies can we encourage readers to create new solutions to the problem of nuclear armsNel 99 (Philip, PhD @ Vanderbilt, Prof @ Kansas State, “Dada Knows Best: Growing up "Surreal" with Dr. Seuss,” Children's Literature, Volume 27, 1999, pgs. 150-184, PM)Although the Times reviewer was correct in saying that The Butter Battle…using their imaginations as a source of strength.

Schlag Kritik There is no reason to vote affirmative: They cannot articulate any linkage between their prescriptions and practical, worldly effects Schlag 90(Professor of Law at University of Colorade, 1990, Pireer, Stanford Law Review, November, Page Lexis)In fact... advice into effect.Their conception of communication is normative - the affirmative view language as a neutral conduit for thought, which neglects that much of language is ineffectiveSchlag 90(Professor of Law at University of Colorade, 1990, Pireer, Stanford Law Review, November, Page Lexis)One answer is... in constructing communication.Their description of the status quo presupposes a rational, autonomous subject that not only describes the bureaucracy, but also our agency to act as empowered cartersian egos - in reality, these subject positions do not existSchlag 91(Pierre, Colorado Law Professor, 139 U. PA REV. 801, April)For these legal thinkers... the legal academy practice.Their rhetorical performance shields us for responsibility for our own contributions to material pain and sufferingDelgado 91(Richard, Colorado Law Professor, 139 PA L. REV. 933 April)But what is the cash value... has been faced with subsistence claims

Gur-Ze’ev Kritik Their framework for debate is mired in totalitarian ideology—the privileging of “oppressed” voices over and against that of “oppressors” buys into a dangerously homogenizing world view which authorizes genocidal violence against all world views that are not sufficiently “liberatory.”Gur-Ze’ev 98 (Ilan, Education—Haifa University, 1998  “Toward a Non-Repressive Critical Pedagogy,” http://construct.haifa.ac.il/~ilangz/Critpe39.html)Freire’s Critical Pedagogy did not grow out of mere principles but out of his directANDAmerican colleges so as to be successful in the present order of things.Their elevation of personal experience as intrinsically valid is a dangerous political gesture – their notion of liberation is an illusion which works to stave of real changeGur-Ze’ev 98 (Ilan, Education—Haifa University, 1998  “Toward a Non-Repressive Critical Pedagogy,” http://construct.haifa.ac.il/~ilangz/Critpe39.html)From this perspective, the consensus reached by the reflective subject taking part in theANDan effort to transcend reality and the present realm of self-evidence.Their view of power and white privilege as “norms” that are possessed ignores the process of the constitution of identity. There is no coherent way for non-blacks to participate in their movement because they can’t just ‘take off’ their knapsack of privileges.McWhorter 5 (Ladelle McWhorter, University of Richmond, “Where do white people come from? A Foucaultian critique of Whiteness Studies,” Philosophy Social Criticism, 31: 533)It is true then that, as the Whiteness Studies theorists so often say, ANDis testament to how deeply and profoundly stuck race theorists typically still are. Vote negative to affirm the countering of violence of the oppressed from a individual standpoint.Vote to negate their strategically oriented praxis. Your ballot can be used as form of counter-education which is able to challenge their dangerous utopianism while mounting a more effective challenge to dominant knowledge production regimes precisely because it refuses to ascribe normative standards for what makes a strategy “emancipatory.”Gur-Ze’ev 98 (Ilan, Education—Haifa University, 1998  “Toward a Non-Repressive Critical Pedagogy,” http://construct.haifa.ac.il/~ilangz/Critpe39.html)Critical Theory is committed to universal emancipation, in the sense I have presented,ANDonly non-repressive form of hope possible in such an educational project. 

2NCAT: Not our Critical PedagogyThey still link—their project is still beholden to utopianism—only our strategy of counter-education which explicitly abandons the normalizing constraints of their framework can make possible meaningful social change.Gur-Ze’ev 98 (Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, Education—Haifa University, 1998“Toward a Non-Repressive Critical Pedagogy,” http://construct.haifa.ac.il/~ilangz/Critpe39.html)“Critical Pedagogy” has many versions today, as does “critical theory”.(ANDto oppose the dogmas and illusions of the hegemonic versions of Critical Pedagogy.AT PermCounter education is mutually exclusive with their project—we refuse their attempt to ground our pedagogy in one particular liberatory framework—the alternative is less than the aff.Biesta 98 (Gert J. J. Biesta, Educational Sciences—Utrecht, 1998“SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION…SUGGESTIONS FOR THE IMPOSSIBLE FUTURE OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGY,” Educational Theory 48:4)Negative utopianism provides the starting point for Cur-Ze’ev’s nonrepressive  form of critical pedagogyANDwill be able to stand up and confront ”the  forgetfulness of being.”

Ehrenfeld Tech Kritik The aff’s worship of a technological solution to the world’s problems creates a view of humanity as useless and incomplete and makes their solution inevitably failEhrenfeld, prof of biology at Rutgers, 81[David, professor of biology at Rutgers University, studied at Harvard, Ph.D in Zoology from University of Florida, known author, The Arrogance of Humanism, Ch. 3 Pg. 84-86] Here we see a remarkable aberration of perspective. During most of the story, ANDparents for permission to have their limbs amputated and replaced by bionic substitutes. The worship of technology legitimizes violence that culminates in nuclear extinctionEhrenfeld, prof of biology at Rutgers, 81 [David, professor of biology at Rutgers University, studied at Harvard, Ph.D in Zoology from University of Florida, known author, The Arrogance of Humanism, Ch. 3 Pg. 103-104] Despite the prevalence of the machine cult, machines are not particularly easy to worshipANDpunishment that makes the anger of a righteous God seem welcome by comparison. That’s the only way the atrocities of humanism can be solvedEhrenfeld, prof of biology at Rutgers, 81 [David, professor of biology at Rutgers University, studied at Harvard, Ph.D in Zoology from University of Florida, known author, The Arrogance of Humanism, Ch. 7 Pg. 261-262]To understand that we are not steering this planet in its orbit does not mean ANDis the best that we can hope for, and it is enough.

Masses Framework A. Interpretation: The affirmative must defend instrumental passage of a topical policy action

B. Violation: The 1AC lacks definitive policy course of action through affirmation of the resolution

C. Reasons to prefer:

1. Preservation of debateMost real worldBaudrillard 1983 (Jean, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities or The End of the Social and Other Essays.  Pages 30-48)

The mass realizes that the … for any useless and absurd purpose.”

Voters for the reasons above

Blue Crayons Code Blue!Politics are dead!Baudrillard 1993 (Transparency of Evil, pages 39-40)Once upon a time there was much… , to the interests of statistical disorder.

Hence, the aff’s methodology is mistaken in assuming that their emphasis on local experience can translate into political change. Their aff merely establishes political redistributions onto others, thus maintaining the system.Adam Katz, English Instructor at Onodaga Community College. 2000. Postmodernism and the Politics of “Culture.” Pg. 146-147 Habermas’s understanding of undistorted … of the cultural studies public intellectual.

In fact, today no one can be expected to be entirely responsible for their own life, answerable to every aspect of their current situation or social location – this is a utopian hoax!  Yet the affirmative continues to call for such impossibility, chaining all under its method to a truly unheard of form of self-servitude and managementBaudrillard 1993 (Jean, The Transparency of evil: essays on extreme phenomena / Jean Baudrillard; translated by James Benedict.  London: New York: Verso, 1993 Page 165)

We live in a culture …  nerves or thought: a truly unheard of servitude.

Their over totalizing criticism we must refuse meaning by becoming the masses to escape the glass coffin the affirmative places around us Robinson 12 (Andrew, political theorist and activist based in the UK, "Jean Baudrillard: The Masses" Oct, 26, 2012, ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-12/, Date Accessed: Apr 16, 2014) IB

The masses aren’t mystified. It isn’t that they … economic management, rendering consumption unmanageable.

The masses are key resistance method we must reject their hipster bullshit to increase survivability – only the sovereign mass can neutralize the system present within the 1ACRobinson 12 (Andrew, political theorist and activist based in the UK, "Jean Baudrillard: The Masses" Oct, 26, 2012, ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-12/, Date Accessed: Apr 16, 2014) IB

In discussing resistance from below, Baudrillard’s main …. as a subject in struggle; and sometimes as acting unconsciously, without knowing it.

The 1AC attempt at criticism reifies the same systems of the status quo that attempt to universalize itself. This inevitably fails and does nothing but uphold current dominate structures. Criticizing the system while trying to make it better only allows for a politic of self congratulation, we never then change anything about ourselves thus politics remains the same. Only political passivity spurs actions in these spaces Baudrillard ’05 (The Intelligence of Evil)It is the secret failing of politics that it is no … compete to take power, but that they should not want it.

Vampiricism Kritik

A) Link - The aff feeds on the suffering of victims, driving the overly hegemonic forces which underpin the violence that creates the conditions for their critique in the first place.

B) Impact - The value of those forms of oppression become their vampiric sustenanceBerlant 1999 (Lauren, George M. Pullman Professor, Department of English, University of Chicago, “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy and Politics” in Cultural Pluralism, Identity Politics and the Law ed. Sarat & Kearns, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, Pg. 49-54)

Ravaged wages and ravaged bodies ... ethically uncontestable legitimating devices for sustaining the hegemonic field.9

Cruel Optimism A) Link The affirmative’s attachment to a better form of debate is an object of desire. Even in our calls to change the system, we always maintain the optimistic thought that things will change as we get more ballots. This is a relationship of “cruel optimism,” hiding the violence done within a debate space that we continue to see as safe.

B) Impact - Productivity is a fantasy -- the promise of debate keeps us working within a liberal institution, wasting our time in this place that can’t change the world. The more we think debate can do something for us, the more the fantasy grows and the crueler the relationship of optimism will be.Berlant 2007 Lauren Berlant “Cruel Optimism: On Marx, Loss and the Sense” 33-36

When we talk about an object of desire, we are really talking about a cluster of promises we want someone or something to make to us and make possible for us. This cluster of promises could be embedded in a person, a thing, an institution, a text, a norm, a bunch of cells, smells, a good idea - whatever. To phrase 'the object of desire' as a cluster of promises is to allow us to encounter what's incoherent or enigmatic in our attachments, not as confirmation of our irrationality but as an explanation for

our sense of our endurance in the object, insofar as proximity to the object means proximity to the cluster of things that the object promises , some of which may be clear to us while others not so much. In other words, all attachments are optimistic . That does not mean that they all feel optimistic: one might dread, for example, returning to a scene of hunger or longing

or the slapstick reiteration of a lover or parent's typical misrecognition. But the surrender to the return to the scene where the object hovers in its potentialities is the operation of optimism as an affective form. In optimism, the subject leans toward promises contained within the present moment of the encounter with their object .'

'Cruel optimism' names a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realisation is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic . What's cruel about these

attachments, and not merely inconvenient or tragic, is that the subjects who have x in their lives might not well endure the loss of their object or scene of desire, even though its presence threatens their well-being , because whatever the content of the attachment is, the continuity of the form of it provides something of the continuity of the subject's sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world. This phrase points to a condition different than that of melancholia, which is enacted in the subject's desire to temporise an experience of the loss

of an object/scene with which she has identified her ego continuity. Cruel optimism is the condition of maintaining an attachment to a problematic object . One more thing: the cruelty of an optimistic attachment is, I think, usually

something an analyst observes about someone's or some group's attachment to x, since usually that attachment

exists without being an event, or even better, seems to lighten the load for someone/some group.^ But if the cruelty of an attachment is experienced by someone/some group, even in disavowed fashion, the fear is that the loss of the object/scene of promising itself will defeat the capacity to have any hope about anything. Often this fear of loss of a scene of optimism as such is unstated and only experienced in a sudden incapacity to manage startling situations, as we will see below.One might point out that all objects/scenes of desire are problematic, in that investments in them and projections onto them are less about them than about what cluster of desires and affects we can manage to keep magnetised to them. I have indeed wondered whether all optimism is cruel, because the experience of loss of the conditions of its reproduction can be so breathtakingly bad, just as the threat of the loss of x in the scope of one's attachment drives can feel like a threat to

living on itself. But some scenes of optimism are clearly crueller than others : where cruel optimism operates, the very vitalising or animating potency of an object/ scene of desire contributes to the attrition of the very thriving that is supposed to be made possible in the work of attachment in the first place. This might point to something as

banal as a scouring love, but it also opens out to obsessive appetites, working for a living, patriotism, all kinds of things. One makes affective

bargains about the costliness of one's attachments, usually unconscious ones, most of which keep one in proximity to the scene of desire/attrition.This means that a poetics of attachment always involves some splitting off of the story I can tell about wanting to be near x (as though x has autonomous qualities) from the activity of the emotional habitus I have constructed by having x in my life in order to be able to project out my endurance as proximity to the complex of

what x seems to offer and proffer. To understand cruel optimism, therefore, one must embark on an analysis of rhetorical indirection,

as a way of thinking about the strange temporalities of projection into an enabling object that is also disabling. I learned how to do this from reading Barbara Johnson's work on apostrophe and free indirect discourse. In her poetics of indirection, each of these

rhetorical modes is shaped by the ways a writing subjectivity conjures other ones so that, in a performance of fantasmatic intersubjectivity, the writer gains superhuman observational authority, enabling a performance of being made possible by the proximity of the object. Because this object is something like what I am describing in the optimism of attachment, I'll describe a bit the shape of my transference with her thought.In 'Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,' which will be my key referent bere, Johnson tracks the political consequences of apostrophe for what has become foetal personhood: a silent, affectively present but physically displaced interlocutor (a lover, a foetus) is animated in speech as distant enough for a conversation but close

enough to be imaginable by the speaker in whose head the entire scene is happening.' But the condition of projected possibility, of a hearing

that cannot take place in the terms of its enunciation ('you' are not here, 'you' are eternally belated to the conversation with you that I am imagining) creates a fake present moment of intersubjectivity in which, nonetheless, a performance of address can take place. The present moment is made possible by the fantasy of you, laden with the x qualities I can project

onto you, given your convenient absence. Apostrophe therefore appears to be a reaching out to a you, a direct movement from place x to y, but it is actually a turning back, an animating of a receiver on behalf of the desire to make something happen now that realises something in the speaker, makes the speaker more or differently possible, because she has admitted, in a sense, the importance of

speaking for, as, and to, two: but only under the condition, and illusion, that the two is really (in) one.

Apostrophe is thus an indirect, unstable, physically impossible but phenomenologically vitalising movement of rhetorical animation that permits subjects to suspend themselves in the optimism of a potential occupation of the same psychic space of others , the objects of desire who make you possible (by having some promising qualities, but also by not being there).'' Later work, such as on 'Muteness Envy,' elaborates Johnson's description of the gendered

rhetorical politics of this projection of voluble intersubjectivity.'^ The paradox remains that the conditions of the lush submerging of one consciousness into another require a double negation : of the speaker's boundaries , so s/he can grow bigger in

rhetorical proximity to the object of desire; and of the spoken of, who is more or less a powerful mute placeholder providing an opportunity for the speaker's imagination of her/his/their flourishing.

Of course psychoanalytically speaking all intersubjectivity is impossible . It is a wish, a desire, and a demand for an

enduring sense of being with and in x, and is related to that big knot that marks the indeterminate relation between a feeling of recognition and misrecognition - recognition is the misrecognition you can bear, a transaction that affirms you without,

again, necessarily feeling good or accurate (it might idealise, it might affirm your monstrosity , it might mirror your desire to be nothing enough to live under the radar, it might feel just right, and so on).'' Johnson's work on projection shows that scenes of impossible identity, rhetorically rendered, open up meaning and knowledge by mining the negative - projective, boundary dissolving - spaces of attachment to the object of address who must be absent in order for the desiring subject of intersubjectivity to get some traction, to stabilise her proximity to the object/scene of promise. In free indirect discourse, a cognate kind of suspension, the circulation of this kind of merged and submerged observational subjectivity, has less pernicious outcomes, at least when Johnson reads Zora Neale Hurston's practice of it.' In a narrator's part-merging with a character's consciousness, say, free indirect discourse performs the impossibility of locating an observational intelligence in one or any body, and therefore forces the reader to transact a different, more open relation of unfolding to what she is reading, judging, being, and thinking she understands. In Jobnson's work such a transformative transaction through reading/speaking 'unfolds' the subject in a good

way, despite whatever desires they may have not to become significantly different." In short, Johnson's work on projection is about the optimism of attachment, and is often itself optimistic about the negations and extensions of personhood that forms of suspended intersubjectivity demand from the reader.What follows is not so buoyant: this is an essay politicising Freud's observation that 'people never willingly abandon a libidinal position, not even, indeed, when a

substitute is already beckoning to them'.^ It comes from a longer project about the politics, aesthetics, and projections of political depression. Political depression persists in affective judgments of the world's intractability - evidenced in affectlessness, apathy, coolness,

cynicism, and so on - modes of what might be called detachment that are really not detached at all but constitute ongoing relations of sociality.'" The politically depressed position is manifested in the problem of the difficulty of detaching from life-building modalities that can no longer be said to be

doing their work , and which indeed make obstacles to the desires that animate them ; my archive tracks practices of self-interruption, self-suspension, and self-abeyance that indicate people's struggles to change, but not traumatically, the terms of value in which their life-making activity has been cast."

Cruel optimism is , then, like all phases, a deictic, a phrase that points to a proximate location: as an analytic lever it is an incitement to inhabit

and to track the affective attachment to what we call 'the good life,' which is for so many a bad life that wears out the subjects who nonetheless, and at the same time, find their conditions of possibility within it. My

assumption is that the conditions of ordinary life in the contemporary world even of relative wealth, as in the US, are conditions of the

attrition or the wearing out of the subject, and that the irony - that the labour of reproducing life in the contemporary world is also the activity of being worn out by it - has specific implications for thinking about the ordinariness of suffering, the violence of normativity, and the 'technologies of patience' or lag

that enable a concept of the later to suspend questions of the cruelty of the now.'^ Cruel optimism is in this sense a concept pointing toward a mode of lived imminence, one that grows from a perception about the reasons people are not Bartlehy, do not prefer to

interfere with varieties of immiseration, but choose to ride the wave of the system of attachment that they are used to , to syncopate with it, or to be held in a relation of reciprocity, reconciliation, or resignation that does not mean defeat by it. Or perhaps they move to normative form to get numb with the consensual promise, and to misrecognise that

promise as an achievement . This essay traverses three episodes of suspension - from John Ashhery, Charles Johnson, and Ceoff Ryman - of the reproduction of habituated or normative life. These suspensions open up revelations about the promises that had clustered as people's objects of desire, stage

moments of exuberance in the impasse near the normal, and provide tools for suggesting why these exuberant attachments keep ticking not like the time bomb they might be but like a white noise machine that provides assurance that what seems like static really is, after all, a rhythm people can enter into while they're dithering, tottering, bargaining, testing, or otherwise being worn out by the promises that they have attached to in this world.

C) Alt - Vote negative. Reject the notion that we are going to change and take the risk of opting out of the entire system. There is always a cruel desire for you to think you can help despite. Vote neg to recognize and reject that desire or we only rebuild the optimismBerlant 11 Lauren Berlant, the George M. Pullman Professor of English at the University of Chicago, Ph.D. from Cornell University, “Cruel Optimism” p.169-174This is a way of describing the specificity of the experience of ordinariness–of, as Thomas Dumm writes, “ordinary life, the life-world, the everyday, the quotidian,

the low, the common, the private, the personal” – in its visceral temporality today. The ordinary, in La Promesse and Rosetta, is organized around the solicitation of children to the reproduction of what we should call not the good life but “the bad life” – this is , a life dedicated to moving toward the good life ’s normative/utopian zone but actually stuck in what we might call survival time, the time of

struggling, drowning, holding onto the ledge, treading water – the time of not-stopping.The Dardennes draw the Belgium of the 1990s as a colony of globalization with its legal citizens trying to maintain a grip on the waning shards of liberty, sovereignty, and economic hegemony: it’s a world of intensified economic and social volatility, a mainly deindustrialized, small business economy where impersonality and intimacy are enmeshed in a renewed regime of sweatshops and domestic labor. This world is visually and physically crowded, both overwhelming and underwhelming in its assault, allowing little time to luxuriate in its sounds, tastes, and smells. As Achille Mbembe and Janet Roitman put it, about the African context, this “suggests that it is in everyday life that the crisis as a limitless experience and a field dramatizing particular forms of subjectivity is authored, receives its translations, is institutionalized, loses its exceptional character and in the end, [appears] as a ‘normal,’ ordinary and banal phenomenon.”Mbembe and Roitman see crisis ordinariness as the condition for the production of revolutionary consciousness. But the Dardennes’ scenario puts forth no hint of that, nor of the potentiality or revolutionary possibility that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri attribute to the activity of immaterial labor in their analysis of the

contemporary global mode of production. In these films, the citizen’s dissatisfaction leads to reinvestment in the normative promises of capital and intimacy under capital. The quality of that reinvestment is not political in any of the normative senses,

though–it’s a feeling of aspirational normalcy , the desire to feel normal, and to feel normalcy as a ground of dependable life, a life that does not have to keep being reinvented. That feeling does not require any

particular forms of living to stimulate it; nor does it depend on the flourishing of the forms of living to which it attaches.

Optimism attaches to their mere existence . The will to feel that feeling again becomes the first order object of desire. But this puts pressure on the infrastructure of the social world to be maintained despite its distributions of

violence and negation.

A nearly comic, silent movie-style example from La Promesse plays out this activity beautifully, pointing additionally to what’s singular about globalization’s sensual flesh. It is Igor’s job to white out the immigrant passports, making their bearers seem already legal. Yet when he arrives at Assita’s papers and sees the contrast of her dark skin and her white teeth, erasing working-class staining and emphasizing his racial whiteness as a homage to her smile and also to her blotted-out identity. It is also clear that he doesn’t get it: his racial location, his privilege of citizenship, his dependency on her familial labor. Nothing happens from this moment of play, whose gestures are ordinary, forgettable, forgotten. In fact, in these films play itself is a momentary privilege crowded out constantly by risk, which is play with life-denting consequences. Both play and risk are shaped by the pressures of contemporary labor, with its demands for survival and incitement to fantasy without a

scaffold, a net, or a retreat. Play allows a sense of normalcy, though, while risk tries to make some headway in the impasse: play is the performance of an interruption without risk. Yet it takes place as barely enjoyed comic relief from the risk that must be borne.

Thus, how to talk about the need to maintain binding to the normal in the context of crisis is a theoretical and political problem of more than consciousness. The Dardennes represent consciousness under present systemic economic, political, and intimate conditions as absorbed in regimes of bargaining with movement amid the slow train wreck that is always coming in the catastrophic time of capitalism, where if you’re lucky you get to be exploited, and if you’re lucky you can avoid one more day being the focus of a scene that hails and ejects you when it is your time to again become worthless. This is why

exploitation is not what the children cast as the enemy. They want to be exploited , they enter the proletarian economy in the crummy service-sector jobs it is all too easy to disdain as the proof of someone’s loserdom or tragedy. The risk would be opting out of the game . One does not necessarily require families or nations to secure this feeling; any reciprocal form will do–friendship, collegiality, a project, the state, a union, whatever has the capacity to deliver an affective, transpersonal sense of unconflictedness, belonging, and worth.

The history of sentimentality around children that sees them as the reason to have optimism–for if nothing else, their lives are not already ruined–

thus takes on an ethical, political, and aesthetic purchase in these films. The audience is obligated to side with the child’s will not to be defeated , even if the difference between defeat and all its others is the capacity to attach optimism for a less bad future to a blighted field of possibility . We are incited to have compassion for fruitless and even self-undermining–cruel–desires. In La Promesse, the promise of post-Fordist citizenship marks out agency not as that which changes the world but as that which bargains with it by developing affective bonds or “promise” within the regime of production that extends everywhere, as everyone is on the make. In Rosetta, belonging isn’t an a priori but something that must be purchased by participation in the everyday economy. Community and civil society from this class perspective are not seen as resources for building anything, neither fantasy nor an ordinary life that can be

trusted, rested in. Attachments are as brittle as the economic system that hails and then bails on its reserve army of workers .

Strategy Kritik In order to change status quo politics, the affirmative needs to explain how to change things, including specific mechanisms and steps that can be taken. All successful historical movements had specific goals and strategies Reed 09 Adolph Reed Jr. is a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. “The limits of anti-racism”Antiracism is a favorite … about what counts as racism.

The aff’s performance of care of the self privileges ethics over democratic politics.  Survival strategies and self-elaboration are incontestable – but self-determination becomes narcissism.   

Ella MYERS Poli Sci @ Utah ‘8 “Resisting Foucauldian Ethics: Associative Politics and the Limits of the Care of the Self” Contemporary Political Theory 7 p. 134-138

Ethics as the Care of the Self Foucault’s … of solipsism remains close at hand (1997b, 287).

To transform the world, we need to be strategists. While the affirmative sets a goal, this is not a strategy. While they all wanted to end racism, their process of getting there was very differentLewis 13 Civil Rights and the Changing World HOW HISTORY WAS MADE AND HOW IT'S BEING WRITTEN. By Earl Lewis | HUMANITIES, January/February 2013 | Volume 34, Number 1.5 If the participants can be seen as strategists, they … came to see themselves as part of an African diaspora.25

That means the affirmative could easily endorse racist policies. Plenty of things that are said to be anti-racist can end up being more racist than the status quo. The main the issue is that we are unsure which tactics will be successful. Fine 12 Michelle Fine, Distinguished Professor, Graduate Center, CUNY “Notes on Whiteness and Health”http://www.racismreview.com/blog/2012/12/15/whiteness-and-health/Finally, I was struck by the ironies of anti-racist … they were presumably designed to combat.

Instead, we endorse a discussion focused on the question of strategy. This can make sure that our methods move away from oppression and don’t get coopted. Of course, there are numerous strategies and advantages and disadvantages to every single one. Thus, in order to decide which method to use, we must debate them. This is the only way to achieve the benefits of the affirmativeLewis 13 Civil Rights and the Changing World HOW HISTORY WAS MADE AND HOW IT'S BEING WRITTEN. By Earl Lewis | HUMANITIES, January/February 2013 | Volume 34, Number 1.5 Longtime social and civil rights activist, … parallels the entire history of racial subjugation and the struggle for opportunity in the United States.3

Tuck and Yang Kritik The debate-academy is a terminally flawed institution for engaging subaltern identity. The aff must be REFUSED: they trade stories of pain for ballots, betting that the judge will be complicit in assigning symbolic purchase to oppression. This self-congradulatory exercise conflates the subaltern with the intellectual, perpetuating SETTLER COLONIALISM and accelerating their libidinal attraction for OPPRESSION-TOURISM. TUCK & YANG professors 2014 (Eve, associate professor of educational foundations and coordinator of Native American Studies at the State University of New York at New Paltz, and K. Wayne, assistant professor ethic studies a UC San Diego, “R-Words: Refusing Research” in D. Paris & M.T. Winn (Eds.) Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry With Youth and Communities, p. 224-229, note://// indicates par. breaks)AR VT14Under coloniality, Descartes’ formulation, cognito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I AND, and not the origins of the disciplines that we attend to now.

There is no radical affirmative knowledge production – they legitimize the zombie politics within the university system, which churns out meaninglessness even in instances of supposedly liberal, well-meaning politics. OCCUPIED UC BERKELEY 2010 (Anonymous grad student, “The University, Social Death, and the Inside Joke” Feb 20,http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20100220181610620, note://// indicates par. breaks)AR VT14Universities may serve as seem progressive sites of inquiry in some cases, ANDevery interpretation and every connotation, no longer denoting anyone or anything."56

The alternative is a refusal of their affirmation, which is not a sheer negativity and which is productive by virtue of its act of deflection and redirection. Yes we still stand here as negative debaters giving speeches in a hollowed-out activity, but only the affirmative has advanced subaltern representations within the activity. The negative is the artistic performance of the failure of debate – the skeletal structure remains so that the judge can orient their refusal. The negative must be understood in the manner of Gonzales-Day’s “Erased Lynchings” photographs. We are not the people in the picture but rather the project of Gonzales-Day’s artistic reconstructions, realized in debate. We PIC out of the aff but leave in the bare structural shell of debate, performing its absurdity so that you can know you cannot vote affirmative.    TUCK & YANG professors 2014 (Eve, associate professor of educational foundations and coordinator of Native American Studies at the State University of New York at New Paltz, and K. Wayne, assistant professor ethic studies a UC San Diego, “R-Words: Refusing Research” in D. Paris & M.T. Winn (Eds.) Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry With Youth and Communities, p. 239-242, note://// indicates par. breaks)AR VT14 For the purposes of our discussion, the most important insight to draw ANDabout refusal connects our conversation back to desire as a counterlogic to settler colonial 

Our argument still links to their indigenous appeal in this debate space – they are not a material struggle for indigenous sovereignty, but only the METAPHORIZATION of that struggle in the esoteric context of a debate spaceTUCK & YANG professors 2014 (Eve, associate professor of educational foundations and

coordinator of Native American Studies at the State University of New York at New Paltz, and K. Wayne, assistant professor ethic studies a UC San Diego, “R-Words: Refusing Research” in D. Paris & M.T. Winn (Eds.) Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry With Youth and Communities, p. 243, note://// indicates par. breaks)AR VT14At this juncture, we don’t intend to offer a general framework for refusal, ANDresearched are, and how the historical/ representational context for research matters.

It is a PRIOR QUESTION of whether the debate community deserves to hear your voice.  Our argument is that debate replicates the structures of the academy. It is a not a site for justice but just for the stockpiling of evidence. Introducing stories into the debate space only exposes you to the violence of academic colonialism. TUCK & YANG professors 2014 (Eve, associate professor of educational foundations and coordinator of Native American Studies at the State University of New York at New Paltz, and K. Wayne, assistant professor ethic studies a UC San Diego, “R-Words: Refusing Research” in D. Paris & M.T. Winn (Eds.) Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry With Youth and Communities, p. 232-234, note://// indicates par. breaks)AR VT14One might ask what is meant by the academy, and by the academy being ANDwith the strategies of producing legitimated knowledge based on the colonization of knowledge.

Refusal is beneficial – it interrupts the destructive march of the academyTUCK & YANG professors 2014 (Eve, associate professor of educational foundations and coordinator of Native American Studies at the State University of New York at New Paltz, and K. Wayne, assistant professor ethic studies a UC San Diego, “R-Words: Refusing Research” in D. Paris & M.T. Winn (Eds.) Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry With Youth and Communities, p. 237-238, note://// indicates par. breaks)AR VT14In this final section, our task is to engage in a more tentative, ANDthings differently. Refusal, taken seriously, is about humanizing the researcher.

Tomorrow Today KritikThe affirmative is pathologically consumed with injury from the past, which infinitely defers the work of generating a guide for the future. This is a BAD METHOD – 1) it locks in identity along categories of EXCLUSION, and 2) it overdetermines their identity with RESENTMENT. They manipulate the divide as a forever-stasis where they make islands of their own identity and are foreclosed-in-advance from any criticism. Their self-serving insulation from criticism is perverse narcissism, and at its core is anti-debate. It does nothing for charting future possibilities.   

BHAMBRA and MARGEE 2010  (Gurminder, prof of Sociology U of Warwick, and Victoria, U Brighton, “Identity Politics and the Need for a ‘Tomorrow’”, Economic and Policy Weekly, April 10, retrieved fromhttp://www.academia.edu/471824/Identity_Politics_and_the_Need_for_a_Tomorrow_ )AR DISTRICTS14

We wish to turn now to a related problem within identity politics that can be best described as the problem of the reification of politicised identities. Brown (1995) positions herself within the debate about identity politics by seeking to elaborate on “the wounded character of politicised identity’s desire” (ibid: 55); that is, the problem of “wounded attachments” whereby a claim to identity becomes over-invested in its own historical suffering and perpetuates its injury through its refusal to give up its identity claim. Brown’s argument is that where politicised identity is founded upon an experience of exclusion, for example, exclusion itself becomes perversely valorised in the continuance of that identity. In such cases, group activity operates to maintain and reproduce the identity created by injury (exclusion) rather than – and indeed, often in opposition to – resolving the injurious social relations that generated claims around that identity in the first place. If things have to have a history in order to have a future, then the problem becomes that of how history is con- structed in order to make the future. To the extent that, for Brown, identity is associated primarily with (historical) injury, the future for that identity is then already determined by the injury “as both bound to the history that produced it and as a reproach to the present which embodies that history” (ibid 1995: 73). Brown’s sug- gestion that as it is not possible to undo the past, the focus back- wards entraps the identity in reactionary practices, is, we believe, too stark and we will pursue this later in the article.

Politicised identity, Brown maintains, “emerges and obtains its unifying coherence through the politicisation of exclusion from an ostensible universal, as a protest against exclusion” (ibid: 65). Its continuing existence requires both a belief in the legitimacy of the universal ideal (for example, ideals of opportunity, and re- ward in proportion to effort) and enduring exclusion from those ideals. Brown draws upon Nietzsche in arguing that such identi- ties, produced in reaction to conditions of disempowerment and inequality, then become invested in their own impotence through practices of, for example, reproach, complaint, and revenge. These are “reactions” in the Nietzschean sense since they are substitutes for actions or can be seen as negative forms of action. Rather than acting to remove the cause(s) of suffering, that suf- fering is instead ameliorated (to some extent) through “the estab- lishment of suffering as the measure of social virtue” (ibid 1995: 70), and is compensated for by the vengeful pleasures of recrimi- nation. Such practices, she argues, stand in sharp distinction to – in fact, provide obstacles to – practices that would seek to dispel the conditions of exclusion.

Brown casts the dilemma discussed above in terms of a choice between past and future, and adapting Nietzsche, exhorts the adoption of a (collective) will that would become the “redeemer of history” (ibid: 72) through its focus on the possibilities of creat- ing different futures. As Brown reads Nietzsche, the one thing that the will cannot exert its power over is the past, the “it was”. Confronted with its impotence with respect to the events of the past, the will is threatened with becoming simply an “angry spec- tator” mired in bitter recognition of its own helplessness. The one hope for the will is that it may, instead, achieve a kind of mastery over that past such that, although “what has happened” cannot be altered, the past can be denied the power of continuing to de- termine the present and future. It is only this focus on the future, Brown continues, and the capacity to make a future in the face of human frailties and injustices that spares us from a rancorous decline into despair. Identity politics structured by ressentiment – that is, by suffering caused by past events – can only break out of the cycle of “slave morality” by remaking the present against the terms of the past, a remaking that requires a “forgetting” of that past. An act of liberation, of self-affirmation, this “forgetting of the past” requires an “overcoming” of the past that offers iden- tity in relationship to suffering, in favour of a future in which identity is to be defined differently.

In arguing thus, Brown’s work becomes aligned with a posi- tion that sees the way forward for emancipatory politics as re- siding in a movement away from a “politics of memory” (Kilby 2002: 203) that is committed to articulating past injustices and suffering. While we agree that investment in identities prem- ised upon suffering can function as an obstacle to alleviating the causes of that suffering, we believe that Brown’s argument as outlined is problematic. First, following Kilby (2002), we share a concern about any turn to the future that is figured as a complete abandonment of the past. This is because for those who have suffered oppression and exclusion, the injunction to give up articulating a pain that is still felt may seem cruel and impossible to meet. We would argue instead that the “turn to the future” that theorists such as Brown and Grosz call for, to revitalise feminism and other emancipatory politics, need not be conceived of as a brute rejection of the past.

Indeed, Brown herself recognises the problems involved here, stating that

[since] erased histories and historical invisibility are themselves such integral elements of the pain inscribed in most subjugated identities [then] the counsel of forgetting, at least in its unreconstructed Nietzschean form, seems inappropriate if not cruel (1995: 74).

She implies, in fact, that the demand exerted by those in pain may be no more than the demand to exorcise that pain through recognition: “all that such pain may long for – more than revenge – is the chance to be heard into a certain release, recognised into self-overcoming, incited into possibilities for triumphing over, and hence, losing itself” (1995: 74-75). Brown wishes to establish the political importance of remembering “painful” historical events but with a crucial caveat: that the purpose of remembering pain is to enable its release. The challenge then, according to her, is to create a political culture in which this project does not mutate into one of remembering pain for its own sake.

Indeed, if Brown feels that this may be “a pass where we ought to part with Nietzsche” (1995: 74), then Freud may be a more suit- able companion. Since his early work with Breuer, Freud’s writ- ings have suggested the (only apparent) paradox that remember- ing is often a condition of

forgetting. The hysterical patient, who is doomed to repeat in symptoms and compulsive actions a past she cannot adequately recall, is helped to remember that trau- matic past in order then to move beyond it: she must remember in order to forget and to forget in order to be able to live in the present.7 This model seems to us to be particularly helpful for the dilemma articulated by both Brown (1995) and Kilby (2002), insisting as it does that “forgetting” (at least, loosening the hold of the past, in order to enable the future) cannot be achieved without first remembering the traumatic past. Indeed, this would seem to be similar to the message of Beloved, whose central motif of haunting (is the adult woman, “Beloved”, Sethe’s murdered child returned in spectral form?) dramatises the tendency of the unanalysed traumatic past to keep on returning, constraining, as it does so, the present to be like the past, and thereby, disallow- ing the possibility of a future different from that past.

As Sarah Ahmed argues in her response to Brown, “in order to break the seal of the past, in order to move away from attach- ments that are hurtful, we must first bring them into the realm of political action” (2004: 33). We would add that the task of analys- ing the traumatic past, and thus opening up the possibility of political action, is unlikely to be achievable by individuals on their own, but that this, instead, requires a “community” of par- ticipants dedicated to the serious epistemic work of remembering and interpreting the objective social conditions that made up that past and continue in the present. The “pain” of historical injury is not simply an individual psychological issue, but stems from objective social conditions which perpetuate, for the most part, forms of injustice and inequality into the present.

In sum, Brown presents too stark a choice between past and future. In the example of Beloved with which we began this article, Paul D’s acceptance of Sethe’s experiences of slavery as distinct from his own, enable them both to arrive at new under- standings of their experience. Such understanding is a way of partially “undoing” the (effects of) the past and coming to terms with the locatedness of one’s being in the world (Mohanty 1995). As this example shows, opening up a future, and attending to the ongoing effects of a traumatic past, are only incorrectly under- stood as alternatives.

A second set of problems with Brown’s critique of identity poli- tics emerge from what we regard as her tendency to individualise social problems as problems that are the possession and the responsibility of the “wounded” group. Brown suggests that the problems associated with identity politics can be overcome through a “shift in the character of political expression and politi- cal claims common to much politicised identity” (1995: 75). She defines this shift as one in which identity would be expressed in terms of desire rather than of ontology by supplanting the lan- guage of “I am” with the language of “I want this for us” (1995: 75). Such a reconfiguration, she argues, would create an opportu- nity to “rehabilitate the memory of desire within identificatory processes...prior to [their] wounding” (1995: 75). It would fur- ther refocus attention on the future possibilities present in the identity as opposed to the identity being foreclosed through its attention to past-based grievances.

( ) The ALTERNATIVE is tomorrow today, reconceptualizing identity NOW through shared practices and conceptual frameworks of contingent identity formation. We should endorse community knowledge production in the present as a way to advance and not defer politics.  The negative is an

interruption of their feedback loop of their pathologically repeated grievances, which maybe has produced some ballots, but it is not productive for dynamic self-understanding and politics. 

BHAMBRA and MARGEE 2010  (Gurminder, prof of Sociology U of Warwick, and Victoria, U Brighton, “Identity Politics and the Need for a ‘Tomorrow’”, Economic and Policy Weekly, April 10, retrieved fromhttp://www.academia.edu/471824/Identity_Politics_and_the_Need_for_a_Tomorrow_ )AR DISTRICTS14

We suggest that alternative models of identity and community are required from those put forward by essentialist theories, and that these are offered by the work of two theorists, Satya Mohanty and Lynn Hankinson Nelson. Mohanty’s ([1993] 2000) post-positivist, realist theorisation of identity suggests a way through the impasses of essentialism, while avoiding the excesses of the postmodernism that Bramen, among others, derides as a proposed alternative to identity politics. For Mohanty ([1993] 2000), identities must be understood as theoretical constructions that enable subjects to read the world in particular ways; as such, substantial claims about identity are, in fact, implicit explana- tions of the social world and its constitutive relations of power. Experience – that from which identity is usually thought to derive – is not something that simply occurs, or announces its meaning and significance in a self-evident fashion: rather, experience is always a work of interpretation that is collectively produced (Scott 1991).

Mohanty’s work resonates with that of Nelson (1993), who similarly insists upon the communal nature of meaning or knowledge-making. Rejecting both foundationalist views of knowledge and the postmodern alternative which announces the “death of the subject” and the impossibility of epistemology, Nelson argues instead that, it is not individuals who are the agents of epistemology, but communities. Since it is not possible for an individual to know something that another individual could not also (possibly) know, it must be that the ability to make sense of the world proceeds from shared conceptual frameworks and practices. Thus, it is the community that is the generator and repository of knowledge. Bringing Mohanty’s work on identity as theoretical construction together with Nelson’s work on episte- mological communities therefore suggests that, “identity” is one of the knowledges that is produced and enabled for and by individu- als in the context of the communities within which they exist.

The post-positivist reformulation of “experience” is necessary here as it privileges understandings that emerge through the processing of experience in the context of negotiated premises about the world, over experience itself producing self-evident knowledge (self-evident, however, only to the one who has “had” the experience). This distinction is crucial for, if it is not the expe- rience of, for example, sexual discrimination that “makes” one a feminist, but rather, the paradigm through which one attempts to understand acts of sexual discrimination, then it is not necessary to have actually had the experience oneself in order to make the identification “feminist”. If being a “feminist” is not a given fact of a particular social (and/or biological) location – that is, being designated “female” – but is, in Mohanty’s terms, an “achieve- ment” – that is, something worked towards through a process of analysis and interpretation – then two implications follow. First, that not all women are feminists. Second, that feminism is some- thing that is “achievable” by men.3

While it is accepted that experiences are not merely theoretical or conceptual constructs which

can be transferred from one person to another with transparency, we think that there is some- thing politically self-defeating about insisting that one can only understand an experience (or then comment upon it) if one has actually had the experience oneself. As Rege (1998) argues, to privilege knowledge claims on the basis of direct experience, or then on claims of authenticity, can lead to a narrow identity poli- tics that limits the emancipatory potential of the movements or organisations making such claims. Further, if it is not possible to understand an experience one has not had, then what point is there in listening to each other? Following Said, such a view seems to authorise privileged groups to ignore the discourses of disadvantaged ones, or, we would add, to place exclusive respon- sibility for addressing injustice with the oppressed themselves. Indeed, as Rege suggests, reluctance to speak about the experi- ence of others has led to an assumption on the part of some white feminists that “confronting racism is the sole responsibility of black feminists”, just as today “issues of caste become the sole responsibility of the dalit women’s organisations” (Rege 1998). Her argument for a dalit feminist standpoint, then, is not made in terms solely of the experiences of dalit women, but rather a call for others to “educate themselves about the histories, the pre- ferred social relations and utopias and the struggles of the marginalised” (Rege 1998). This, she argues, allows “their cause” to become “our cause”, not as a form of appropriation of “their” struggle, but through the transformation of subjectivities that enables a recognition that “their” struggle is also “our” struggle. Following Rege, we suggest that social processes can facilitate the understanding of experiences, thus making those experi- ences the possible object of analysis and action for all, while recognising that they are not equally available or powerful for all subjects.

Chess Game Kritik

There are always two chess games going on. One is on the top of the table, the other is below the table. The latter is the one that counts, but the Americans don't know how to play that game." When you play a game you should understand the plan and the ideas that are hidden in the position. There are many general concepts and plans to be learned which can be applied in your games later on. Study standard plans and positional ideas to be able to use them. When you play without a plan you are going to lose. Your pieces are going aimlessly here and there and are not working together like a unit to achieve a common goal. Often the pawn structure can show you where you should play, at the kingside or at the queenside. However, there are many chess strategies you should learn to become a good player. And it takes time too. So be patient. You don't become a master overnight.

This game is a chess game. Just like the United States chess game in the Middle East. Where they are willing to give up a few pawns but they really want is pieces, they are willing trade some lame duck presidents. Because, what they really want the main characters out the building.

They’re willing to trade the pawn which says individuals right to privacy, don’t need that. The other guy who used to be a player, Mubarak, became a pawn. They want the queen Iran, that’s the big prize. So they move the rook Syria so they can strike against the queen. We need to think ahead of the game. Don’t think they are not playing that here too. We need to not only think about the next move, but the reaction to our reactionary move. We must be ahead of the game. Sometimes these should not be done in public, honestly were not the only ones watching these moves.

Chess with its spaces of closed off potential is the game of the state and the game of the aff, the neg takes a relational approach with Go, we arrange ourself in open space, holding the space and having no specific point of departure or arrivalLeach 2011 (Neil Leach, professor of Archaeology at the University of Southern California, “The War Machine vs. The State Apparatus | An analysis of Urban Growth and Practices” , July 1st 2011, http://nicfriend.com/the-war-machine-vs-the-state-apparatus-an-analysis-of-urban-growth-and-practices/)Deleuze describes the State Apparatus and the War Machine in terms of Game Theory, ANDbe obeying pure reason, in other words, yourself…” 6

The aff’s political theatre is a chessboard every piece over-identified with its own specific purposeBacevich 02 (Andrew, “American Empire The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy”, Andrew J. Bacevich, Sr. is a professor of international relations at Boston University and a retired career officer in the United States Army. He is a former director of Boston University's Center for International Relations (from 1998 to 2005), and author of several books, Harvard University Press, 2002)Few scholars specializing in American diplomatic history today accept such an outline of twentieth century ANDcommon vision and conform in practice to a strategic consensus of long standing.

They treat geopolitics as an infinite game of chess. We should not fear possible extinction in pursuing these lines of flight, the ballot should rather embrace these moments of zero-intensity inside extinction for the possibility of a new intensity to emerge Aima 09 (Rahel Aima is a student at Columbia University and writer/blogger, “In the beginning was the language, and the language was gravity”, http://killingdenouement.wordpress.com/2009/04/13/in-the-beginning-was-the-language-and-the-language-was-gravity/, April 13, 2009) In the beginning was the language, and the language was gravity. Before the ANDprimordial prison, we are finally irrational, ex-tinctual and free.?We have to stop playing Chess completely failure to do so causes non-redemptive destructionRobinson 8(Andre Robinson, political theorist and writer for Crossfire an online magazine, “In Theory Why Deleuze (still) matters: States, war-machines and radical transformation”, September 10th 2010, ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-deleuze-war-machine/)So what, in Deleuzian theory, is the alternative to the state? Deleuze ANDsocial movements are forced into conflict by the state’s drive to repress difference.The alternative is to blowup the chessboard with the queer war machineTuhkanen 08 Queer Guerrillas: on Richard Wright's and Frantz Fanon's dissembling revolutionaries The Mississippi Quarterly 0026-637X Tuhkanen, Mikko yr:2008 vol:61 iss:4 pg:615 -642 If Bigger momentarily circulates in the white economy as something of a counterfeit--he ANDterritory, perfectly visible yet unreadable to the colonizers' gaze. (10)

Ahmed Kritik (Race/Performance Affs)Your anti-racist performance is not action and only obscures material conditions of white supremacy

Ahmed ‘04Sara Ahmed, Visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies and Associate Editor of International Journal of Cultural Studies. “Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism.” Borderlands, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2004.50."This might sound like an argument about the performativity of race....... and indeed the claim that saying is doing can bypass that ways in which saying is not sufficient for an action, and can even be a substitute for action."

Your anti-racist speeches create a fantasy of transcendence that replicates white privilege

Ahmed ‘04Sara Ahmed, Visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies and Associate Editor of International Journal of Cultural Studies. “Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism.” Borderlands, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2004."52. My concern with the non-performativity of anti-racism has hence been to examine how sayings are not always doings, or to put it more strongly, to show how the investment in saying as if saying was doing can actually extend rather than challenge racism. ...... Or we could even say that anti-racist speech in a racist world is an ‘unhappy performative’: the conditions are not in place that would allow such ‘saying’ to ‘do’ what it ‘says’."

Declarations claiming to transcend whiteness and racism only obscure it

Ahmed ‘04Sara Ahmed, Visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies and Associate Editor of International Journal of Cultural Studies. “Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism.” Borderlands, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2004."This paper examines six different modes for declaring whiteness used within academic writing, public culture and government policy, arguing that such declarations are non-performative: they do not do what they say. ......  Declarations of whiteness could be described as ''unhappy performatives', the conditions are not in place that would allow such declarations to do what they say. "

DECLARATIVE COMMITMENTS PERTAINING TO RACISM DO NOT “SOLVE” RACISM

Ahmed ‘04Sara Ahmed, Visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies and Associate Editor of International Journal of Cultural Studies. “Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism.” Borderlands, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2004."My commentary on the risks of whiteness studies will involve an analysis of how whiteness gets reproduced through being declared, within academic texts, as well public culture. ...... As Mike Hill suggests: ‘I cannot know in advance whether white critique will prove politically worthwhile, whether in the end it will be a friendlier ghost than before or will display the same stealth narcissism that feminists of color labeled a white problem in the late 1970s’ (1997, 10). "

Churchill Kritik

The affirmative has chosen to utilize the federal government and framed their 1AC to focus on issues that can be resolved by strengthening tempered sovereignty. This continues the non-transgressive tradition of “hear no evil, see no evil”. Their failure to commit to unflinching Native struggle reproduces the colonial order and Native destruction. We should reject the aff and commit to Native land rights and absolute sovereignty as a First PriorityCHURCHILL 96 Ward; Creek and enrolled Keetoowah Band Cherokee; Former professor of Ethnic Studies @ the University of Colorado; From a Native Son: Selected Essays on Indigenism, 1985-1995; pp. 519-521

Leaving aside questions concerning the validity of various treaties, the beginning point for any ANDfirst priority for everyone seriously committed to accomplishing positive change in North America.

And, elaborating Indigenous struggle through the rubric of government policy strengthens colonial society and weakens Indigenous struggle – only unflinching praxis solvesWilderson 10 Frank B. III, Ph.D., Associate Professor at UC Irvine, former ANC member, Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, pages 167-168, og Clearly, Deloria draws here largely from the specificity of his own La-kota AND(the Slave), though there are essential differences between the two rubrics.