1NC

1
Interpretation and violation- the aff should be a topical defense of the resolution
This interpretation is grammatically correctResolved before a colon reflects a legislative forum
Army Career College 13 # 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.

USFG should means governmental action

Ericson et al 3 Jon M. Ericson, James J. Murphy, and Raymond Bud Zeuschner, Ericson is the dean emeritus of
the College of Liberal Arts at California Polytechnic State University. He served as president of the Northern
California Forensic Association (ncfa) and is a member of the forensics honor societies Pi Kappa Delta and Delta
Sigma Rho. He founded the American Issues debate tournaments on value questions while he was the director of
forensics at Stanford University, The Debaters Guide, Third Edition,
http://hs.stdoms.org/ourpages/auto/2009/10/28/44705084/DebaterGuide.pdf

In policy propositions, each

topic contains certain key elements , although they have slightly different functions from the comparable elements of
value-oriented propositions. 1. An agent to do the actingThe U nited S tates in The United States should adopt a policy of free trade. Like
the object of evaluation in a proposition of value, the agent is usually the subject of the sentence. 2. The verb should the first part
of a verb phrase that urges an action. 3. An action verb to follow should in the should-verb combination. For example, should adopt here
means to put a program or policy into action through governmental means . 4. A specification of directions or a limitation of the
action desired. The phrase free trade, for example, gives direction and limits to the topic, which would, for example, eliminate consideration of increasing tariffs,
discussing diplomatic recognition, or discussing interstate commerce. Propositions

of policy deal with future action . Nothing has yet occurred.

The entire debate is about whether something ought to occur. What you agree to do, then, when you accept the affirmative side in such a
debate is to offer sufficient and compelling reasons for an audience to perform the future action that you propose.

This promotes a model of debate, as dialogue- normative restrictions are key to its
potential
Galloway 7 DINNER AND CONVERSATION AT THE ARGUMENTATIVE TABLE: RECONCEPTUALIZING DEBATE AS AN ARGUMENTATIVE DIALOGUE, Ryan Galloway, Assistant Professor
and the Director of Debate at Samford University, Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, Vol. 28 (2007)
Taking the resolution as an invitation to a dialogue about a particular set of ideas would preserve the affirmative
teams obligation to uphold the debate resolution. At the same time, this approach licenses debaters to argue both
discursive and performative advantages. While this view is broader than many policy teams would like, and certainly more limited than many

critical teams would prefer, this

approach captures the advantages of both modes of debate while maintaining the stable
axis point of argumentation for a full clash of ideas around these values. Here, I begin with an introduction to the dialogic model,

which I will relate to the history of switch-side debate and the current controversy. Then, I will defend my conception of debate as a dialogical exchange. Finally, I
will answer potential criticisms to the debate as a dialogue construct. Setting the Argumentative Table: Conceptualizing Debate as a Dialogue Conceiving debate as a
dialogue exposes a means of bridging the divide between the policy community and the kritik community. Here I will distinguish between formal argument and
dialogue. While formal argument centers on the demands of informal and formal logic as a mechanism of mediation, dialogue tends to focus on the relational aspects
of an interaction. As such, it emphasizes the give-and-take process of negotiation. Consequently, dialogue emphasizes outcomes related to agreement or consensus
rather than propositional correctness (Mendelson & Lindeman, 2000). As

dialogue, the affirmative case constitutes a discursive act that

anticipates a discursive response. The consequent interplay does not seek to establish a propositional truth , but
seeks to initiate an in-depth dialogue between the debate participants. Such an approach would have little use for rigid rules of logic or
argument, such as stock issues or fallacy theory, except to the point where the participants agreed that these were functional approaches. Instead, a dialogic approach
encourages evaluations of affirmative cases relative to their performative benefits, or whether or not the case is a valuable speech act. The move away from formal
logic structure toward a dialogical conversation model allows for a broader perspective regarding the ontological status of debate. At the same time, a dialogical
approach challenges the ways that many teams argue speech act and performance theory in debates. Because there are a range of ways that performative oriented
teams argue their cases, there is little consensus regarding the status of topicality. While some take topicality as a central challenge to creating performance-based
debates, many argue that topicality is wholly irrelevant to the debate, contending that the requirement that a critical affirmative be topical silences creativity and
oppositional approaches. However, if

we move beyond viewing debate as an ontologically independent monologuebut as an invitation to

dialogue, our attention must move from the ontology of the affirmative case to a consideration of the case in light of
exigent opposition (Farrell, 1985). Thus, the initial speech act of the affirmative team sets the stage for an emergent
response. While most responses deal directly with the affirmative case, Farrell notes that they may also deal with metacommunication regarding the process of
negotiation. In this way, we may conceptualize the affirmatives goal in creating a germ of a response (Bakhtin, 1990) whose completeness bears on the possibility
of all subsequent utterances. Conceived as a dialogue, the affirmative speech act anticipates the negative response. A failure

to adequately encourage, or
anticipate a response deprives the negative speech act and the emergent dialogue of the capacity for a complete
inquiry . Such violations short circuit the dialogue and undermine the potential for an emerging dialogue to gain
significance (either within the debate community or as translated to forums outside of the activity). Here, the
dialogical model performs as a fairness model , contending that the affirmative speech act, be it policy oriented,
critical, or performative in nature, must adhere to normative restrictions to achieve its maximum competitive and
ontological potential.

Two net benefitsFirst, Fairness- They justify arbitrarily changing the question of the debate to an
infinite number of potential frameworks, destroying predictable limits and ensuring
the Aff always wins. The community chooses resolutionally divided ground because
it is balanced and educational. Arguments that arent linked to the plan are
amorphous and unstable. A narrow, mutually agreed-upon understanding of the
topic is a pre-requisite to meaningful research and strategy.
This is a pre-condition to debate
Shively 00 Partisan Politics and Political Theory, Ruth Lessl, Assistant Prof Political Science at Texas A&M, p.
181-2

The requirements given thus far are primarily negative. The

ambiguists must say no tothey must reject and limitsome ideas

and actions. In what follows, we will also find that they must say yes to some things. In particular, they must say yes to the idea of rational per- suasion. This
means, first, that they must recognize the role of agreement in political contest , or the basic accord that is necessary to discord. The
mistake that the ambiguists make here is a common one. The mistake is in thinking that agreement marks the end of contestthat
consen- sus kills debate. But this is true only if the agreement is perfectif there is nothing at all left to question or
contest. In most cases, however, our agreements are highly imperfect. We agree on some matters but not on others, on generalities but not on

specifics, on principles but not on their applications, and so on. And this kind of limited agreement is the starting
condition of contest and debate . As John Courtney Murray writes: We hold certain truths; therefore we can argue about
them. It seems to have been one of the corruptions of intelligence by positivism to assume that argument ends when agreement is reached. In a basic sense, the
reverse is true. There can be no argument except on the premise, and within a context, of agreement. (Murray 1960, 10) In other words, we cannot argue
about something if we are not com- municating: if we cannot agree on the topic and terms of argument or if we have
utterly different ideas about what counts as evidence or good argument. At the very least, we must agree about what it is that is being
debated before we can debate it . For instance, one cannot have an argument about euthanasia with someone who
thinks euthanasia is a musical group. One cannot successfully stage a sit-in if ones target audience simply thinks everyone is resting or if those doing
the sitting have no complaints. Nor can one demonstrate resistance to a policy if no one knows that it is a policy. In other words,
contest is meaningless if there is a lack of agreement or communication about what is being contested. Resisters, demonstrators, and
debaters must have some shared ideas about the subject and/or the terms of their disagree- ments. The participants and the
target of a sit-in must share an under- standing of the complaint at hand. And a demonstrators audience must know what is being resisted. In short, the contesting of
an idea presumes some agreement about what that idea is and how one might go about intelligibly contesting it. In other words,

contestation rests on some

basic agreement or harmony.

Second decision-making skillsStasis fostered by topical advocacy creates rigorous testing

Galloway 7 DINNER AND CONVERSATION AT THE ARGUMENTATIVE TABLE: RECONCEPTUALIZING DEBATE AS AN ARGUMENTATIVE DIALOGUE, Ryan Galloway, Assistant Professor
and the Director of Debate at Samford University, Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, Vol. 28 (2007)

Germaneness and other substitutes for topical action do not accrue the dialogical benefits of topical advocacy. A
Sirens Call: Falsely Presuming Epistemic Benefits In addition to the basic equity norm, dismissing the idea that debaters defend the
affirmative side of the topic encourages advocates to falsely value affirmative speech acts in the absence of a
negative response. There may be several detrimental consequences that go unrealized in a debate where the
affirmative case and plan are not topical. Without ground, debaters may fall prey to a sirens call, a belief that certain
critical ideals and concepts are axiological, existing beyond doubt without scrutiny . Bakhtin contends that in dialogical
exchanges the greater the number and weight of counter-words, the deeper and more substantial our
understanding will be (Bakhtin, 1990). The matching of the word to the counter-word should be embraced by proponents
of critical activism in the activity, because these dialogical exchanges allow for improvements and modifications
in critical arguments. Muir argues that debate puts students into greater contact with the real world by forcing them to read a great deal of information
(1993, p. 285). He continues, [t]he constant consumption of material...is significantly constitutive. The information grounds the issues under discussion, and the
process shapes the relationship of the citizen to the public arena (p. 285). Through

the process of comprehensive understanding, debate

serves both as a laboratory and a constitutive arena. Ideas find and lose adherents. Ideas that were once considered
beneficial are modified, changed, researched again, and sometimes discarded altogether. A central argument for open
deliberation is that it encourages a superior consensus to situations where one side is silenced. Christopher Peters contends,
The theory holds that antithesis ultimately produces a better consensus, that the clash of differing, even opposing interests
and ideas in the process of decision making...creates decisions that are better for having been subjected to this trial
by fire (1997, p. 336). The combination of a competitive format and the necessity to take points of view that one does
not already agree with combines to create a unique educational experience for all participants. Those that
eschew the value of such experience by an axiological position short-circuit the benefits of the educational
exchange for themselves, their opponents, as well as the judges and observers of such debates.

Switch-side debate fosters critical thinking skills

Harrigan 8 AGAINST DOGMATISM: A CONTINUED DEFENSE OF SWITCH SIDE DEBATE, Casey
Harrigan, University of Georgia, Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, Vol. 29 (2008)

Switch side debate (SSD)

is an argumentative model that requires students to debate both the affirmative and negative
sides of the resolution over the course of a multiple- round tournament. In practice, SSD requires that debaters arguments are
frequently divorced from personal conviction; in many cases students are required by the topic to take a position and argue vigorously on
behalf of views that they disagree with. Debaters with ideological beliefs are thrust into the position of the Devils Advocate ,
assuming the side of the opposition and needing to understand the arguments of the opposing view well enough to argue on
their behalf. Instead of approaching the debate topic from the perspective of personal belief, students often choose
arguments from a strategic and competitive perspective . Because of SSD, the purpose of debate is not to
convince others to accept a certain argument as preferable or true, but rather to choose the strongest and most
intellectually rigorous position that has the greatest chance of prevailin g under scrutiny (and thus earning a competitive
victory). Policy debate, an activity with few formal rules and requirements, developed this norm of arguing both sides of a topic for
pragmatic, pedagogical, and social reasons. Practically, the contemporary format of tournament contests would be much more difficult to maintain
if the tournament directors were not able to require that an equal number of competitors debate on the affirmative and negative in any given round. Were students free
to choose their own sides, it seems likely that debaters who held strong views for or against the statement of the resolution would choose to debate exclusively on that
side. Given the generally liberal leanings of the debate community and inevitable biases in topic construction, an unequal division between the sides would be
unavoidable (Cripe, 1957). This would make pairing debate rounds much more difficult, if not impossible. While such pragmatic justifications for SSD are persuasive,
they are admittedly secondary to the greater consideration of pedagogy. Although it is certainly true that debate is a game and that its competitive elements are
indispensable sources of motivation for students who may otherwise be apathetic about academic endeavors, the

overwhelming benefits of contest

debating are the knowledge and skills taught through participation. The wins and losses (and somewhat-cheesy trophies), by and large,
are forgotten with the passage of time. However, the educational values of debate are so fundamental that they eventually become
ingrained in the decision-making and thought processes of debaters, giving them a uniquely valuable durability .
To this end, SSD is essential. The benefits of debating both sides have been noted by many authors over the past fifty
years. To name but a few, SSD has been lauded for fostering tolerance and undermining bigotry and dogmatism (Muir,
1993), creating stronger and more knowledgeable advocates (Dybvig and Iversion, 2000), and fortifying the social forces of
democracy by guaranteeing the expression of minority viewpoints (Day, 1966). Switching sides is a crucial element of debates
pedagogical benefit; it forms the gears that drive debates intellectual motor. Additionally, there are social benefits to the practice of requiring students to debate both
sides of controversial issues. Dating back to the Greek rhetorical tradition and the tension between Plato and the Sophists, great

value has been placed on

the benefit of testing each argument relative to all others in the marketplace of ideas. Like those who argue on behalf of the
efficiency-maximizing benefits of free market competition, it is believed that arguments are most rigorously tested (and conceivably refined and
improved) when compared to all available alternatives . Even for beliefs that have seemingly been ingrained in consensus opinion or in cases
where the public at-large is unlikely to accept a particular position, it has been argued that they should remain open for public discussion and
deliberation (Mill, 1975). Along these lines, the greatest benefit of switching sides, which goes to the heart of contemporary debate, is its
inducement of critical thinking. Defined as reasonable reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do (Ennis, 1987), critical
thinking learned through debate teaches students not just how to advocate and argue , but how to decide as well.
Each and every student, whether in debate or (more likely) at some later point in life, will be placed in the position of
the decision-maker. Faced with competing options whose costs and benefits are initially unclear, critical thinking is necessary to
assess all the possible outcomes of each choice, compare its relative merits, and arrive at some final decision about which
choice is preferable. In some instances, such as choosing whether to eat Chinese or Indian food for dinner, the importance of making the correct decision is minor.

For many other decisions, however, the implications of choosing an imprudent course of action are potentially grave .
Although the days of the Cold War are over, and the risk that the next Pearl Harbor could be compounded by hydrogen (Ehninger and Brockriede, 1978) is greatly
reduced, the

manipulation of public support before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 points to the continuing necessity of
training a well- informed and critically-aware public (Zarefsky, 2007). In the absence of debate-trained critical thinking,
uninformed politicians and manipulative leaders would be much more likely to draw the country, and possibly the
world, into conflicts with incalculable losses in terms of human well- being. As Louis Rene Beres writes, with such learning, we
Americans could prepare...not as immobilized objects of false contentment, but as authentic citizens of an endangered planet (2003). Thus, it is not surprising that

critical thinking has been called the highest educational goal of the activity (Parcher, 1998). While arguing from

conviction can foster limited critical thinking skills, the element of switching sides is necessary to sharpen debates
critical edge and ensure that decisions are made in a reasoned manner instead of being driven by ideology.
Debaters trained in SSD are more likely to evaluate both sides of an argument before arriving at a conclusion and are less
likely to dismiss potential arguments based on prior beliefs (Muir, 1993). In addition, debating both sides teaches conceptual flexibility ,
where decision- makers are more likely to reflect upon the beliefs that are held before coming to a final opinion (Muir,
1993). Exposed to many arguments on each side of an issue, debaters learn that public policy is characterized by
extraordinary complexity that requires careful consideration before action. Finally, these arguments are confirmed by
the preponderance of empirical research demonstrating a link between competitive SSD and critical thinking
(Allen, Berkowitz, Hunt and Louden, 1999; Colbert, 2002).

Political simulation creates a deliberative active-learning environment

Hanghoj 8 PLAYFUL KNOWLEDGE An Explorative Study of Educational Gaming, Thorkild Hanghj, PhD
Dissertation
Institute of Literature, Media and Cultural Studies University of Southern Denmark, 2008,
http://static.sdu.dk/mediafiles/Files/Information_til/Studerende_ved_SDU/Din_uddannelse/phd_hum/afhandlinger/2
009/ThorkilHanghoej.pdf

The two preceding sections discussed how Dewey views play as an imaginative activity of educational value, and how his assumptions on creativity and playful

dramatic rehearsal , which assumes that

social actors deliberate by projecting and choosing between various scenarios for future action. Dewey uses the concept
actions represent a critique of rational means-end schemes. For now, I will turn to Deweys concept of

dramatic rehearsal several times in his work but presents the most extensive elaboration in Human Nature and Conduct: Deliberation is a dramatic rehearsal (in
imagination) of various competing possible lines of action... [It]

is an experiment in finding out what the various lines of possible

action are really like (...) Thought runs ahead and foresees outcomes, and thereby avoids having to await the instruction of actual failure
and disaster. An act overtly tried out is irrevocable, its consequences cannot be blotted out. An act tried out in imagination is not final or fatal .
It is retrievable (Dewey, 1922: 132-3). 85 This excerpt illustrates how Dewey views the process of decision making (deliberation) through the
lens of an imaginative drama metaphor. Thus, decisions are made through the imaginative projection of outcomes, where
the possible competing lines of action are resolved through a thought experiment. Moreover, Deweys compelling use of the drama metaphor also implies that
decisions cannot be reduced to utilitarian, rational or mechanical exercises, but that they have emotional, creative and personal qualities as well. Interestingly, there are
relatively few discussions within the vast research literature on Dewey of his concept of dramatic rehearsal. A notable exception is the phenomenologist Alfred Schutz,
who praises Deweys concept as a fortunate image for understanding everyday rationality (Schutz, 1943: 140). Other attempts are primarily related to overall
discussions on moral or ethical deliberation (Caspary, 1991, 2000, 2006; Fesmire, 1995, 2003; Ronsson, 2003; McVea, 2006). As Fesmire points out, dramatic
rehearsal is intended to describe an important phase of deliberation that does not characterise the whole process of making moral decisions, which includes duties and
contractual obligations, short and long-term consequences, traits of character to be affected, and rights (Fesmire, 2003: 70). Instead, dramatic rehearsal should be
seen as the process of crystallizing possibilities and transforming them into directive hypotheses (Fesmire, 2003: 70). Thus, deliberation can in no way
guarantee that the response of a thought experiment will be successful. But what it can do is make

the process of choosing more intelligent

than would be the case with blind trial-and-error (Biesta, 2006: 8). The notion of dramatic rehearsal provides a valuable perspective for
understanding educational gaming as a simultaneously real and imagined inquiry into domain-specific scenarios.
Dewey defines dramatic rehearsal as the capacity to stage and evaluate acts, which implies an irrevocable difference between acts that are tried out in
imagination and acts that are overtly tried out with real-life consequences (Dewey, 1922: 132-3). This description shares obvious similarities with games as they
require participants to inquire into and resolve scenario-specific problems (cf. chapter 2). On the other hand, there is also a striking difference between moral
deliberation and educational game activities in terms of the actual consequences that follow particular actions. Thus ,

when it comes to educational

games, acts are both imagined and tried out, but without all the real-life consequences of the practices, knowledge
forms and outcomes that are being simulated in the game world. Simply put, there is a difference in realism between the dramatic rehearsals of everyday life and in
games, which only play at or simulate the stakes and 86 risks that characterise the serious nature of moral deliberation, i.e. a real-life politician trying to win a
parliamentary election experiences more personal and emotional risk than students trying to win the election scenario of The Power Game. At the same time,

the

lack of real-life consequences in educational games makes it possible to design a relatively safe learning
environment , where teachers can stage particular game scenarios to be enacted and validated for educational purposes. In this sense, educational games
are able to provide a safe but meaningful way of letting teachers and students make mistakes (e.g. by giving a poor political
presentation) and dramatically rehearse particular competing possible lines of action that are relevant to particular educational goals (Dewey, 1922: 132). Seen from
this pragmatist perspective, the educational

value of games is not so much a question of learning facts or giving the right

answers, but more a question of exploring the contingent outcomes and domain-specific processes of problembased scenarios.

These skills are the lynchpin of solving all existential global problems
Lundberg 10 Tradition of Debate in North Carolina in Navigating Opportunity: Policy Debate in the 21st
Century, Christian O. Lundberg, Professor of Communications @ University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2010,
p311

The second major problem with the critique that identifies a naivety in articulating debate and democracy is that it presumes that the primary pedagogical outcome of
debate is speech capacities. But the democratic capacities built by debate are not limited to speechas indicated earlier, debate

builds capacity for

critical thinking , analysis of public claims, informed decision making , and better public judgment. If the picture of

modem political life that underwrites this critique of debate is a pessimistic view of increasingly labyrinthine and bureaucratic administrative politics, rapid scientific
and technological change outpacing the capacities of the citizenry to comprehend them, and ever-expanding insular special-interest- and money-driven politics, it is a
puzzling solution, at best, to argue that these conditions warrant giving up on debate. If democracy is open to rearticulation, it is open to rearticulation precisely
because as the challenges of modern political life proliferate, the citizenry's capacities can change, which is one of the primary reasons that theorists of democracy
such as Ocwey in The Public awl Its Problems place such a high premium on education (Dewey 1988,63, 154). Debate

provides an indispensible form

of education in the modem articulation of democracy because it builds precisely the skills that allow the citizenry to
research and be informed about policy decisions that impact them, to son rhroueh and evaluate the evidence for and
relative merits of arguments for and against a policy in an increasingly infonnation-rich environment, and to prioritize their time and political
energies toward policies that matter the most to them. The merits of debate as a tool for building democratic capacity-building take
on a special significance in the context of information literacy. John Larkin (2005, HO) argues that one of the primary failings of modern colleges and universities is
that they have not changed curriculum to match with the challenges of a new information environment. This is a problem for the course of academic study in our
current context, but perhaps more important, argues Larkin, for the future of a citizenry that will need to make evaluative choices against an increasingly complex and
multimediatcd information environment (ibid-). Larkin's study tested the benefits of debate participation on information-literacy skills and concluded that in-class
debate participants reported significantly higher self-efficacy ratings of their ability to navigate academic search databases and to effectively search and use other Web
resources: To analyze the self-report ratings of the instructional and control group students, we first conducted a multivariate analysis of variance on all of the ratings,
looking jointly at the effect of instmction/no instruction and debate topic . . . that it did not matter which topic students had been assigned . . . students in the
Instnictional [debate) group were significantly more confident in their ability to access information and less likely to feel that they needed help to do so----These
findings clearly indicate greater self-efficacy for online searching among students who participated in (debate).... These results constitute strong support for the
effectiveness of the project on students' self-efficacy for online searching in the academic databases. There was an unintended effect, however: After doing ... the
project, instructional group students also felt more confident than the other students in their ability to get good information from Yahoo and Google. It may be that the
library research experience increased self-efficacy for any searching, not just in academic databases. (Larkin 2005, 144) Larkin's study substantiates Thomas Worthcn
and Gaylcn Pack's (1992, 3) claim that debate

in the college classroom plays a critical role in fostering the kind of problemsolving skills demanded by the increasingly rich media and information environment of modernity. Though their essay was

written in 1992 on the cusp of the eventual explosion of the Internet as a medium, Worthcn and Pack's framing of the issue was prescient: the primary question facing
today's student has changed from how to best research a topic to the crucial question of learning how to best evaluate which arguments to cite and rely upon from an
easily accessible and veritable cornucopia of materials. There are, without a doubt, a number of important criticisms of employing debate as a model for democratic
deliberation. But cumulatively, the

evidence presented here warrants strong support for expanding debate practice in the classroom as
enhancing democratic deliberative capacities . The unique combination of critical thinking skills,
research and information processing skills, oral communication skills, and capacities for listening and thoughtful,
open engagement with hotly contested issues argues for debate as a crucial component of a rich and vital
democratic life. In-class debate practice both aids students in achieving the best goals of college and university education, and serves as an
unmatched practice for creating thoughtful, engaged, open-minded and self-critical students who are open to the possibilities of
meaningful political engagement and new articulations of democratic life. Expanding this practice is crucial , if only because the more we
produce citizens that can actively and effectively engage the political process, the more likely we are to produce
revisions of democratic life that are necessary if democracy is not only to survive, but to thrive. Democracy faces a
myriad of challenges , including: domestic and international issues of class, gender, and racial justice; wholesale
environmental destruction and the potential for rapid climate change; emerging threats to international stability in the form of
terrorism, intervention and new possibilities for great power conflict; and increasing challenges of rapid globalization including
an increasingly volatile global economic structure. More than any specific policy or proposal, an informed and active
citizenry that deliberates with greater skill and sensitivity provides one of the best hopes for responsive and
effective democratic governance, and by extension, one of the last best hopes for dealing with the existential challenges
to democracy [in an] increasingly complex world.
a technology for

2
The cultural turn evoked by post-strategies attempts to break part any material
analysis through the use of discursive analysis despite their attempts to
incorporate materialism it remains culturalist and stuck within the paradigm of
capitalism.
Ebert and Zavarzadeh in 2008(Teresa L., English, State University of New York, Albany, Masud, prolific writer and expert on class
ideology, Class in Culture, p. 27-29)

On the theoretical level, the attacks on labor focused on the material logic: the question that Sumner H. Slichter had raised,
namely that the U.S. was "shifting from a capitalistic community to a laboristic one-that is to a community in which employees rather than
businessmen are the strongest single influence." This second cultural front developed new arguments for the legitimacy,

permanence, and transhistorical moral and social authority of capitalism as an economic regime that was seen as
the condition of possibility for human freedom. This is what, for example, F. A. Hayek's writings did. Not only did they provide the grounds for a
Neoliberal economics that marginalized Keynesianism, but they also offered an ethics and a philosophy for capitalism (The Fatal Conceit: The
Errors of Socialism). In a subsequent move, post-theory ("post" as in postcolonialism, postrnarxism, poststructuralism, etc.) translated

Neoliberal economies into a new philosophy of representation that made discourse the primary ground of
social reality. Discourse was not simply a "text" in its narrow sense but the ensemble of the phenomena in and through which social
production of meaning takes place, an ensemble that constitutes a society as such. The discursive is not. therefore, being conceived as a
level nor even as a dimension of the social, but rather as being co-extensive with the social.. .. There is nothing specifically social
which is constituted outside the discursive, it is clear that the non-discursive is not opposed to the discursive as if it were a matter of "'1'0 separate
levels. History and society are an infinite text. (Laclau, "Populist Rupture and Discourse" 87) Class in post-theory was turned into a

trope whose meanings are wayward and indeterminate-a metaphor for a particular language game (Jenks,
Culture 4). This move has de-materialized class by hollowing out its economic content and turning its
materialism into "a materiality without materialism and even perhaps without matter" (Derrida, "Typewriter
Ribbon" 281). This de-materializing has taken place through a network of "post" interpretive strategies: Such as
"destruction" (Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology 22- 23); "deconstruction" (Derrida, "Letter to a Japanese Friend");
"schizoanalysis" (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 273-382); "reparative reading" (Sedgwick,
Touching Feeling 123-151), "cultural logic" (Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism); "performativity"
(Butler, Gender Trouble); "immaterial labor" (Hardt and Negri, MultItude), and "whatever (qualunque)" (Agamben, The Coming
Community). The goal of both the populist and the theoretical campaigns against the labor movement-which capital
often referred to as "socialistic schemes" (Fones- Wolf 52}---has been the blurring of class lines by depicting class
antagonisms as cultural differences, and to persuade people that, as Wallace F. Bennett, chairman of the National Association of
Manufacturers put it, "We are all capitalists" (quoted in Fones-Wolf 70-73). In other words, as far as capitalism is concerned,
there are no class differences in the U.S. and what makes people different are their values, lifestyles, and
preferences. We call this obscuring of class relations by cultural values and the play of language the "cultural
turn." The term "cultural turn" is often used to designate a 'particular movement in social and cultural inquiries that acquires analytical
authority in the 1970s and is exemplified by such books as Hayden White's Metahistory and Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures ,
both of which were published in 1973. White describes history writing as a poetic act and approaches it as essentially a linguistic (tropological)
practice (Metahistory ix). The view of history and social practices as poiesis-which is most powerfully articulated in Heidegger's
writings and is re-written in various idioms by diverse authors from Cleanth Brooks through Jacques Derrida to Giorgio Agamben- constitutes

the interpretive logic of the cultural turn. Geertz's argument that culture is a semiotic practice, an ensemble of texts (Interpretation
of Cultures 3- 30), canonizes the idea of culture as writing in the analytical imaginary. The cultural tum is associated by some
critics with the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, whose cultural activism they assume energized rebellion against
"scientific" social and cultural inquiries and ushered in the cultural tum with its linguistic reading of culture and emphasis on the subjective
(Bonnell and Hunt, ed., Beyond the Cultural Turn 1-32). Other critics have also related the cultural tum to the radical

activism of the post-1968 era and to postmodemism as well as to a tendency among radical intellectuals , as
Larry Ray and Andrew Sayer put it, to approach language no longer as reflecting "material being" but to read it (in
Heidegger's words) as the "house of being" (Culture and Economy after the Cultural Turn I). These and similar explanations of
the cultural tum are insightful in their own terms. However, "their own terms" are not only historically narrow

but are conceived within the very terms that they seem to critique: they are, in other words, accounts of the
cultural tum from within the cultural tum. As a result, in spite of their professed interest in material analysis,
their interpretations, like the writings of the cultural tum, remain culturalist. They too analyze culture in
cultural terms-that is, immanently. Culture cannot be grasped in its own terms because its own terms are
always the terms of ideology. Therefore to understand culture, one needs to look "outside."

Capitalism promotes a dehumanizing alienation that kills value to life This

prevents authentic relationships with others turns the aff
Gasper 10 [Phil Gasper, philosophy professor in Madison, Wisconsin, "Capitalism and Alienation," International
Socialist Review, isreview.org/issue/74/capitalism-and-alienation]cd

Capitalism is a system that endlessly promises people happy and self-fulfilled lives . In the United States this vision
even has a name: the American Dream. But when we look around us, reality falls far short. We see this reflected in
everything from divorce rates, child abuse, domestic violence, alcoholism, drug abuse, stress, mental illness, and
general feelings of isolation and frustration that so many people experience. Rather than achieving self-realization
and living meaningful and fulfilling lives, many people experience some degree of alienation, and the ones that
dont are quite likely engaged in some form of self-deception, perhaps sustaining a sense of meaning and self-worth
only with the help of illusions about themselves or their circumstances. Quite a few thinkers, including existentialist philosophers like
Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, have argued that alienation is an unavoidable feature of the human condition, but this is not Marxs view. Instead, Marx argues
that alienation

is largely a product of class society in general and of capitalism in particular, and that we could end a
society characterized by pervasive alienation if we radically reorganized our economic system. Marxs most detailed
discussion of alienation is in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, which he wrote in 1844 but which were not published until the 1930s. In this work, Marx
focuses on what he calls alienated labor, because he sees alienation at work as the central form of alienation. This
is based on the assumption that the need to engage in free, creative labor is a central part of human nature. Its
precisely because capitalism systematically frustrates that need, that it is an alienating system. One of Marxs main claims in
the 1844 Manuscripts is that for most people most of the time, work is a frustrating, unpleasant experience. Thats something that most
of us would agree with. In fact its such a commonplace that there are endless popular songs about waiting for the
weekend or Saturday night to arrive. Theres even a national restaurant chain named for the relief people feel when they get out of work at the end of
the week. (By contrast, no one has opened an eatery named TGI Monday.) When Marx was writing in the 1840s, he was thinking primarily of the monotonous
brutality of factory labor. But what

Marx wrote about blue-collar work in the mid-nineteenth century remains true of much
white-collar work at the beginning of the twenty-first . In her book The Overworked American, the sociologist Juliet Schor reports the
following: Thirty percent of [American] adults say that they experience high stress nearly every day; even higher
numbers report high stress once or twice a week Americans are literally working themselves to deathas jobs
contribute to heart disease, hypertension, gastric problems, depression, exhaustion, and a variety of other ailments.
Now a lot of people think that this is an unavoidable necessity, because work is intrinsically unpleasant. But Marxs
argument is that it doesnt have to be this way. Work can beor could bemeaningful, creative and self-expressive.
And if it were like that for us all or most of the time, then our lives could be fulfilling and satisfying. The problem is that
under capitalism work doesnt have these characteristics for most people. Marx emphasizes two reasons why
capitalism robs workers of all life content. The first is that it is an economic system that accentuates the division
of labor, breaking production into a series of smaller and smaller, more specialized tasks, each performed by a
different kind of worker, because this will increase profitability. As a result, the individual laborers are appropriated by a one-sided
function and annexed to it for life, depriving them of the well-rounded variety of powers and activities that they need to be full human beings. The second
reason why capitalism generates alienation is that it is an economic system in which a small minority controls the
means of production, and in which most people can survive only by selling their own labor power . Workers under
capitalism have to work for someone else. As a consequence, Marx argues that work has little or no intrinsic worth for the worker as he puts it,
it is not the satisfaction of a need but a mere means to satisfy needs outside itself. More generally, we find our lives dominated by impersonal powers, from
labyrinthine bureaucracies to economic forces, which we are unable to control, even though they are ultimately human creations. In The German Ideology, Marx and
Engels describe alienation as the positing of social activity, the consolidation of our product as a real power over us, growing out of our control. Capital describes
the conditions of wage labor as alienated from labor and confronting it independently, and of capital as an alienated and independent social might, which stands
over against society as a thing. But if we could abolish capitalism and replace it with a society in which workers collectively and democratically control production,
then work itself could be transformed into an activity that we would find rewarding for its own sake. It would become a way of exercising our individual creativity and

talents, and of contributing to the common good not only a means of life but lifes prime want, as Marx put it in Capital. While

capitalism continues,
will continue to be alienated. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx discusses various aspects of this alienation. First,
workers are alienated from their product. What they produce does not belong to them, and the particular
characteristics of what they produce are of little concern to them. All that matters is that they get paid a wage.
Second, workers under capitalism are alienated from their own productive activity. They typically have no control
over that activity, and it doesnt express their own goals or projects. Third, workers are alienated from what Marx
(following Feuerbach) calls their species-being, in other words from those qualities that make them distinctively human.
What distinguishes humans from other species is our capacity to engage in free, conscious, and creative work. But
alienated labor reduces humans to the level of animals. Earlier philosophers had seen the distinctive characteristic of
humans as our capacity for rational thought. But for Marx it is the application of rational, conscious thought to
productive activity that distinguishes us from other creatures . As he says in The German Ideology, Men can be distinguished from animals
however, labor

by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of
subsistence. Unlike

other species, we can step back from activity we perform to remain alive (our life activity),
consciously assess it, and improve it. As Marx says, The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from this
activity. By contrast, a human beings activity is not a determination with which he immediately fuses. Unlike other
animals, the human being makes his life activity an object of his will and consciousness. But under capitalism,
labor doesnt get the opportunity to exercise this distinctively human ability. Thats why Marx says that in his human functions [i.e.
work], [man] is nothing more than animal. He adds that alienated labor estranges man from his own body, from nature as it exists
outside him, from his spiritual essence, his human existence. The final aspect of alienated labor is that, as a consequence of these other
forms of alienation, workers are alienated from each other. Marx writes: the proposition that man is estranged from his
species-being means that each man is estranged from the others and that all are estranged from mans essence.

The alternative is to reject the aff in favor of historical materialism historical

materialism links social praxis to a decisive judgment on capitalist oppression.
Lukacs in 67 (George, Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic. He is a founder of the tradition of Western Marxism. He contributed
the ideas of reification and class consciousness to Marxist philosophy and theory, and his literary criticism was influential in thinking about
realism and about the novel as a literary genre. He served briefly as Hungary's Minister of Culture as part of the government of the short-lived
Hungarian Soviet Republic, History and Class Consciousness) <224-225>

Historical materialism has, therefore, a much greater value for the proletariat than that of a method of historical research.
It is one of the most important of all its weapons. For the class struggle of the proletariat signifies at the same time the
awakening of its class consciousness. And this awakening followed everywhere from an understanding of the
true situation, of the actually existing historical connections. And it is this that gives the class struggle of the proletariat its
special place among other class struggles, namely that it obtains its sharpest weapon from the hand of true science, from its
clear insight into reality. Whereas in the class struggles of the past the most varied ideologies , religious, moral and
other forms of 'false consciousness' were decisive, in the case of the class struggle of the proletariat, the war for the
liberation of the last oppressed class, the revelation of the unvarnished truth became both a war-cry and the
most potent weapon . By laying bare the springs of the historical process historical materialism became, in
consequence of the class situation of the proletariat, an instrument of war. The most important function of historical
materialism is to deliver a precise judgement on the capitalist social system, to unmask capitalist society .
Throughout the class struggle of the proletariat, therefore, historical materialism has constantly been used at every point, where, by means
of all sorts of ideological frills, the bourgeoisie had concealed the true situation, the state of the class struggle; it has been used to focus
the cold rays of science upon these veils and to show how false and misleading they were and how far they
were in conflict with the truth. For this reason the chief function of historical materialism did not lie in the
elucidation of pure scientific knowledge, but in the field of action . Historical materialism did not exist for its
own sake, it existed so that the proletariat could understand a situation and so that, armed with this
knowledge, it could act accordingly.

4
UQ individual survival, extinction looms
Korstanje et al. 9/2014 (Dr. Maximiliano Korstanje (University of Palermo, Argentina), Dr. Peter Tarlow (Texas A&M
University, Texas, USA), Dr. Geoffrey Skoll (Profesor Emeritus, Buffalo State College, New York, USA). Disasters in Postmodern Times: The
2011 Japan Earthquake. Volume 11, Number 3 (September, 2014) ISSN: 1705-6411. International Journal of Baudrillard Studies
http://www.baudrillardstudies.com/contents/volume-eleven-number-three/korstanje/)

there exists an almost irreversible tendency to conceive of the external world as dangerous, catastrophic, and/or
chaotic. This tendency is a product of a changing values and a cosmic vision that appeared for the first time in modernity. The current situation is despite
the political rhetoric, that no one really seeks a solution to potentially catastrophic problems, but rather stresses
individual survival. Lasch argues that in a narcissistic culture that elevates the I it is hard to understand the future of
the we. Modern culture shows a lack of interest in the past and lacks a sense of tradition. In a narcissistic culture, the past only represents a trivial form of commercialization and exchange. At the same time, fear has been
converted into a way for therapists to make money. Moderns have subordinated all of their inhibitions to the company and are incapable of satisfying their own needs. Personal self-fulfillment is
presented as the maximum measure of success in a narcissistic society. There exists an entire cultural critique that holds that psychological
therapy tends to indoctrinate the lower classes into upper class goals, such as personal development and self-control.
Modern society and its productive system appeal to a division of social relations and subsuming them before
technical and expert dominance (Lasch, 1999)
According to C. Lasch (1999),

This has real world impacts - opens the door to opportunist and works AGAINST
the elimination of anti-black violence
Gupta 12/30/14 (Arun Gupta, co-founder of The Indypendent and the Occupied Wall Street Journal. Is the
Anti-Police Violence Movement a New Chapter in the Black Freedom Struggle?
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Is-the-Anti-Police-Violence-Movement-a-New-Chapter-in-the-BlackFreedom-Struggle-20141230-0019.html)
The movement also needs to progress beyond racial reductionism. While it is rooted in history of state violence against Blacks, Native
people and Hispanics, racial identity doesnt confer an advantage in organizing. Succumbing to slogans that Black or
Brown people must lead the struggle opens the door for opportunists. Organizers need to be immersed in existing
struggles, but identity matters less than knowing how to organize and build unity without abandoning key
principles or goals. Already a few groups with little connection to the anti-police violence struggle are positioning
themselves as mediators between City Hall and the streets. Some other organizations now in the spotlight are more
about personal power than collective transformation. Racial reductionism is also used against the left. Defenders of
the NYPD point out it is only 51 percent white, but in its present form it would remain a racist institution if it were
100 percent people of color.
The anti-police brutality movement looks to have staying power if for no other reason than inequality and segregation
will continue to intensify in the United States and the police will enforce that order. But to be successful it will have to
shift from a focus on the police to the social system that demands the violence the police mete out.

5
Counter-advocacy: We endorse the 1ac absent rage
The valorization of rage as a political feeds into a cycle of endless violence
Wenning 9
(Mario Wenning holds a PhD and is an Assistant professor of philosophy @ the University of
Macau, The Return of Rage, Parrhesia No. 8 pg. 89-99, Accessed via GMU Libraries, Last
Accessed 9/22/14) ELJ
The valorization of erotic emotions and virtues over thymotic ones is as old as philosophy itself. Aristotle already insists that the virtuous person cultivates mildness of
temper the even tempered person confesses to be calm and not carried away by his feelings, but to be cross only in the way, at the things, and for the length of time

Compassion is introduced as an antidote to revenge. The virtuous character

does not lose the control that is necessary to provide for a self-sufficient emotional
economy, which is the precondition for achieving a life that is marked by wisdom, even-temperedness, and justice. Senecas influential work on rage, De
ira, which was immensely influential for Christian and humanist ethics, calls for a Stoic
control of the dangerous affect. The general suspicion against the destructive consequences of this aggressive emotion is not limited to the
European tradition. Confucius already warns his students to let a sudden fit of anger make you
forget the safety of your own person or even that of your parents, is that not misguided
judgment? 16 Daoism and ZenBuddhism promote meditative practices and compassion to overcome our fixation on the need of being angry with ourselves
and the world surrounding us. More recently, Martha Nussbaum argued that we should aim to
understand how to channel emotional development in the direction of a more mature and
inclusive and less ambivalent type of love. 17 According to Nussbaum, anger should at best operate as a tool of compassion.
Acts of punishment are then seen as merciful rather than vindictive because they aim at the
good of the victim. These representative examples illustrate that the erotization of the psyche replaced what is
regarded as archaic forms of militancy that, it is contended, mistakenly suggest that honor, pride
and craving for recognition (and the rage that results from the violation of these) has been
considered to be more important than a concern for justice, equality and compassion. We might
that reason dictates. 15

think that the dislike of negative emotions in general and potentially aggressive ones in particular results from an insight into the misfortunes these emotions bring

Revenge, then, is undesirable because it tends to be too costly in producing long term
damages. Hegel, for example, reminds us in the Philosophy of Right of the infinite chain of
violence, the economy of pay-back that results from blind vengeance and selfadministered
acts of justice. 18 The excesses of rage can easily lead to tragic repetitions of an original act
of violence that might be impossible to get out of. Honor killings often lead to new honor killings rather than the
about.

reestablishment of justice and the fight against terror breed more terrorists.

Case
Competing role of the ballot is who best politically engages institutions. The role of
the survivor-activist in debate is to engage the political. This is not a form of
humanitarian distance but a third perspective challenging the limits of political
expression and providing the best model for responsible activism and critique
Murphy 2014 (Laura T. Murphy , Asst. Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, (2014): The
New Slave Narrative and the Illegibility of Modern Slavery, Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave
Studies, DOI: 10.1080/0144039X.2014.977528)
Whether these identificatory schemes actually mobilize readers to action beyond a mere momentary empathy is debateable. Elaine Scarry remarks that those generous
imaginings of others are difficult to attain and inadequate to the task of ensuring rights.89 There is the risk, in promoting this sentimental education that structures of
power that have marginalized the voices of the enslaved will be replicated, that the armchair activist will merely feel a false or fleeting affinity for those who suffer
around the world, that such imaginative identifications more often reiterate the com- fortable distance between a Western, privileged us and an underdeveloped
suffering other. There is the problematic basic premise that the most widely circulated human rights narratives are written specifically for American and British
audiences by people who are largely not of those cultures, and that their stories thus become spectacles of otherness, sedimenting notions of natural difference and
inequality. Hartman

argues that this kind of humanitarian distance has historically led even the abolitionist to feel for himself
instead of for those whom this exercise in imagination presumably is designed to reach .90 It is clear, despite these anxieties, that the NGOs,
lawyers and political figures who encourage the publication of these narratives believe, with Rorty, that a sentimental education leads to significant shifts in public opinion (or at least a donation). They seek out and mobilize the firstperson narrative precisely because the kinds of detail-oriented, fact-based, research-heavy reports they otherwise produce lack the human face that has proven so often to generate empathy among donors.91 The authors of the new
slave narratives themselves also often inscribe their expectations for a sentimental education into their narratives. Bok, Lloyd, Nazer and Beah all end their narratives with accounts of the powerful influence of their storytelling on
others. Bok recalls his early experience on the lecture circuit, I not only managed to get the audiences to understand what I was saying. I was able to move them,92 and he celebrates the fact that his testimony played a role in getting
the American Pre- sident to speak out against Sudan for the first time ever.93 Lloyd reflects on a presen- tation she gave with the clients of her Girls Education Mentoring Service programme, which she indicates was all about
survivor voices, survivor achievements, survivor lea- dership that acted as a stunning affirmation that offers a rebuttal to all the people who didnt believe in us, in me, in any girl who has been sexually exploited.94 The slave
narrators describe themselves as human rights ambassadors and their narratives are often characterized by this optimistic purposiveness. In the process of resisting the spectacle, the bodily detail, the flesh and blood, in writing
narratives that at times seem underwhelmingly sober and distant, however, the narrators revise the curriculum for the sentimental education. If we consider these autobiographies as guides to the legibility of modern slavery, as
instruction manuals in the interpretation of the signs of modern slavery, then the new slave nar- ratives can be understood as teaching the reading lessons necessary for an informed sentimental education. Through these narratives, a
powerful imaginative identification is attempted, as the use of the first-person I of the enslaved speaker in the narrative is shared with the identity of the audience in the practice of reading. As Bok recalled, Simply by telling what
happened to me I could make an emotional connection with the audience. My feelings became their feelings. My passion became theirs.95 The power of his nar- rative lies in his having experienced slavery and his willingness to
share that experi- ence, even partially, with an audience. Even as the narrators turn away from explicit scenes of their own pain, the first-person narrative works to make readers feel impli- cated in the suffering of the narrator so that
they are mobilized against suffering. Readers recognize the humanity of the other through imagining themselves in the sur- vivors position, however imperfect the identification may be. However, when the narrators employ the
strategies of displacement described here, which, instead of providing bodily evidence, prove that the narrators individual experience is representative of a much larger group of suffering humans (whether they be other sexually
exploited children, or all the estimated 30 million enslaved people, or perhaps even the whole of suffering humanity), they effect an identification displacement as well. While Scarry warns us that it is nearly impossible for humans to
imagine vast numbers of others, the new slave narrative attempts to bridge the gulf between the single human face of slavery and all those who remain enslaved.96 As Bok described it, To them, slavery had been something that
happened in a far-off place in Africa they rarely gave a moments thought to. After my speech, slavery had become a person they had seen, a young Sudanese whose hand they had actually shaken.97 This synechdocal expansion links
the survivors singular experience to the entire concept of slavery, and through that identificatory process the reader, too, is connected to all those suffering under bondage. This strategic displacement promotes a sense of world

At the same time, their narratives provide readers with

interpretative lenses that make their experiences legible not merely as victims or exploited masses but as survivoractivists. Here, a third level of identification is produced. As the narrator becomes an activist in the narrative, readers
are not only interpellated as humans who suffer, but they are also privileged to identify with the one who can
eradicate suffering. Joseph Slaughter calls the humanitarian the third actor in the drama of suffering, between both the violator and the victim as well as between the one who suffers
citizenship and responsibility that exceeds the bounds of the personal identifi- cation with the solitary narrator who suffers.

and the one who reads of suffering.98 This intermediary position transforms and reroutes that pathetic force into a metonymical relation between the reader and huma- nitarian figure who is an
exemplary extension of our better angels.99 In third-person narratives of suffering or in narratives of humanitarians called to aid others, the identi- fication is with the one who responds to

the role of survivor activist

unites the slave and the liberator, the victim and the humanitarian, in one identity
This slave-liberator identification allows the reader
to empathize with the beneficent and responsible citizen servant while still eliding the distance between the reader
and the one who suffers It continues to foreground the suffering inherent in slavery and makes a claim to the
responsibility we all have as global citizens to respond
it defies the slave-liberator dichotomy
It marks the survivors narrative as the source of the greatest expertise on the subject
and thus provides a model for responsible activism and engagement that is not top-down from the distant
abolitionist perspective but from one who has been slave, witness and liberator himself or herself. The new slave
narrative represents an avenue through which survivors challenge the limits of political expression, combat the
structures that maintain slaverys illegibility and promote social justice activism among the reading public. Read in
this light, the new slave narrative challenges us to transform our critical reading practices into the NGO avant la lettre
that Wai Chee Dimock describes, which employs analytic and political powers derived from the transhistorical,
transnational, non-governmental potentials of scholarship.100 The time, cultures and conventions of the new slave nar- rative are our own and reading generically unveils the
contexts and political ideologies from which human rights conventions emerge. These narratives empower us as readers and scholars to engage in
contemporary political discourse through our practices of close reading. Through that scholarship, we amplify
the challenges marginalized people make against the normative rhetorics to which they are subject . Critical
readings can be a source of that necessary and incessant pressure of culture and the world- wide activities of
suffering, with the saviour figure who inserts himself between violence and the violated. In the new slave narrative,
Slaughter describes, but instead

is not located in the in- between of the humanitarian that

. While the reader is instructed to imagine

the greatest depths of bondage with the narrators, they are quickly brought to what is often figured in humanitarian literature as the greatest height the saviour.

. More crucially,

slavery and the abolitionist movements that seek to eradicate it.

that so often characterizes both

literature on human rights thinking and practice that Slaughter describes, and can have real (though likely less measurable) influence on the
way forced labourers around the world are read and regarded.

These types of tactical claims in a debate round are dangerous - results in the
inevitability of anti-black death and flawed scholarship
Curry Forthcoming (Tommy J. Curry, Texas A&M University, Department of Philosophy, Faculty Member. Black Studies, Not
Morality: Anti-Black Racism, Neo-Liberal Cooptation, and the Challenges to Black Studies Under Intersectional Axioms. (Forthcoming in
Emerging Voices of Africana: Disciplinary Resonances, Third World-Red Sea Press, ed. Michael Tillotson.
https://www.academia.edu/8160498/_Draft_Black_Studies_Not_Morality_Anti-Black_Racism_NeoLiberal_Cooptation_and_the_Challenges_to_Black_Studies_Under_Intersectional_Axioms)

There is a mythology at work in how Black people think about the utilization of knowledge against the structures of
racism and white supremacy that result in the inevitability of anti-Black death. In the academy and the concentric
communities that center scholarly knowledge as the basis of discourse, there is a practice among various levels of students
that de-radicalize the potential of these criticisms to make meaningful change in the structures and mentality
of all those involved. The Black undergraduate and graduate student lacking the professional credentials to assert their opinion as
true, or insightful, as the product of scholarly research, utilizes mimicry to convince the listener of the rightness of
their position. In taking on, or parroting, the radical literature of their heroes and heroines, they strive to transform the insights of
these/ their professors, lawyers, activists into a new morality. This morality seeks to escape any practical debates about the
construction and constructing of a new world, or new consciousness. For these students, repeating the sacred texts of
high intellectuals; the manipulators of post-structural texts/postcolonial discourse/psychoanalytic theories of death, life, power, gender, the Black woman,
capitalism, bare life, vestibularity, and of course race, seek to convince the world that as disciples of these texts, they (the poor, the Black,
the female, the marginalized student) in fact do hold the key to understanding the world beneath them, as they are now elevated to the
realms of theory, from the perspectives of their gods who reside in the Ivory tower.
The mistake
in understanding the ineffectiveness of their theories to transform the world is
fundamentally rooted in the actuality of the world before them Despite the radicality
the (revolutionary)
ideas,
of the proposed theory, there is an apriori belief by the radical (Black) theorist that the
oppressor class
are
able to be persuaded, convinced, and transformed
through their own capacities and recognition of the other realities suffered by the oppressed. There is an erroneous
belief that Black theory can be understood, acted upon, recognized by a person that can understand
the perspective of the representative of the oppressed speaking to them
For the people who are actually oppressed, materially oppressed, silenced, or
the Black male who is killed/dead and cannot speak, but only be spoken about by the academics who use his
death as a symbola catalystof conversation with whites, this belief does not exist. But for this group,
who are the representatives of the oppressed
this belief is substantiated
by an ancient faith in reason and the modern hope of discourse.
Black theorists make

the (new) content,

and the (existential) ethicality

, be they: white, bourgeois, or male; the people the theory is directed towards,

in fact moral people

, or a newly emerged person that can now

understand,

. Why is this case? What is it in the act of critiquing whites, the bourgeoisie, or men that make

the oppressed believe fundamentally that these groups can change?

Black theorists

and their parrots,

that merely act as sleeping dictionaries, or in the case of Black men, talking monkeys

A Black intellectual socialized to imitate white theories and by effect the pre-established semiotics that signify intellect as the basis of their discourse with whites
under the banner of radicality, pessimism or anti-racist realism is of the greatest concern. In its brute reality, this discursive replication was the primary concern of
Carter G. Woodsons The Miseducation of the Negro (1933). Contrary to the pop culture summation of Woodsons 1933 work, Woodson was not primarily concerned
with the general education of Blacks by whites, Woodson was concerned with the highly educated Negro, who in studying the ideas founded upon white
understandings of philosophy, economics, law, and religion, sought to apply this knowledge to the Black community. The educated Negro have the attitude of
contempt toward their own people because in their own as well as in their mixed schools Negroes are taught to admire the Hebrew, the Latin and the Teuton and to
despite the African (Woodson, 1933, p.1). Woodsons comment upon the disciplinary/civilizational basis of theory, is profound, despite being almost a century old.
The highly educated Negro, the same culprit of E. Franklin Fraziers Failure of the Negro/Black Intellectual, seeks to distant themselves from the Black community
who remain mere objects of study. Seeing themselves as ontologically different from the other-Black-objects they study, these Black theorist(s) speak to white
gatekeepers and members of their own intellectual class who reward them for the adamancy and spread of the ideas offered as morality. By claiming to be enlightened
and spreading truth the post-structural/intersectional theorist need not know about the actual conditions of the people they speak of, they need only present these
bodies and their conditions through the theories accepted by their particular discipline and/or disciplinary community. Black Study effectively becomes the process of
confining/distorting/revising Black life to fit theory. As Ahmed reminds us, facts require explanations, and all explanations, even bad ones, presume a configuration
of concepts, which we provisionally call 'theory,' In other words, theory is not simply a desirable but a necessary relation between facts and their explanations (1994,
p.34). It is when this theory is considered to be ontologicalfundamental and necessary to the facts they seek to explainthat they become apriori and ideological. It

is this paradigm from which the theory we concern ourselves with, and its effect upon the actual study of Black people, are placed at odds with Black Studies. Since
the ontological claim is apriori, it dismisses the need for the study of Black life since it takes the relation between the facts of Black existence and theories proposed to
be necessary to the Black bodies observed. The truth concerning Blackness thereby becomes revelation of some constant unchanging principle within Blackness rather
than the study of structures, historically conditioned and dynamic, upon Black peoples. This

bourgeois fanaticism voids the world of actual

Black people and replaces them with Black subjects found wanting for knowledge, recognition, and the politics
of the Black theorist-observer.

Claims that the aff best performatively and methodologically works for eliminating
anti-black violence within a debate round is dangerous, resulting in the inevitability
of anti-black death.
Curry Forthcoming (Tommy J. Curry, Texas A&M University, Department of Philosophy, Faculty Member. Black Studies, Not
Morality: Anti-Black Racism, Neo-Liberal Cooptation, and the Challenges to Black Studies Under Intersectional Axioms. (Forthcoming in
Emerging Voices of Africana: Disciplinary Resonances, Third World-Red Sea Press, ed. Michael Tillotson.
https://www.academia.edu/8160498/_Draft_Black_Studies_Not_Morality_Anti-Black_Racism_NeoLiberal_Cooptation_and_the_Challenges_to_Black_Studies_Under_Intersectional_Axioms)

There is a mythology at work in how Black people think about the utilization of knowledge against the structures of
racism and white supremacy that result in the inevitability of anti-Black death. In the academy and the concentric
communities that center scholarly knowledge as the basis of discourse, there is a practice among various levels of students
that de-radicalize the potential of these criticisms to make meaningful change in the structures and mentality
of all those involved. The Black undergraduate and graduate student lacking the professional credentials to assert their opinion
as true, or insightful, as the product of scholarly research, utilizes mimicry to convince the listener of the rightness
of their position. In taking on, or parroting, the radical literature of their heroes and heroines, they strive to transform the
insights of these/ their professors, lawyers, activists into a new morality. This morality seeks to escape any practical debates
about the construction and constructing of a new world, or new consciousness. For these students, repeating the
sacred texts of high intellectuals; the manipulators of post-structural texts/postcolonial discourse/psychoanalytic theories of death, life,
power, gender, the Black woman, capitalism, bare life, vestibularity, and of course race, seek to convince the world that as disciples of
these texts, they (the poor, the Black, the female, the marginalized student) in fact do hold the key to understanding the world
beneath them, as they are now elevated to the realms of theory, from the perspectives of their gods who reside in the
Ivory tower. The mistake
in understanding the ineffectiveness of their theories to transform the world is
fundamentally rooted in the actuality of the world before them Despite the radicality
the (revolutionary)
ideas,
of the proposed theory, there is an apriori belief by the radical (Black) theorist that the
oppressor class
are
able to be persuaded, convinced, and transformed
through their own capacities and recognition of the other realities suffered by the oppressed. There is an erroneous
belief that Black theory can be understood, acted upon, recognized by a person that can understand
the perspective of the representative of the oppressed speaking to them
For the people who are actually oppressed, materially oppressed, silenced, or
the Black male who is killed/dead and cannot speak, but only be spoken about by the academics who use his
death as a symbola catalystof conversation with whites, this belief does not exist. But for this group,
who are the representatives of the oppressed
this belief is substantiated
by an ancient faith in reason and the modern hope of discourse. A Black intellectual socialized to imitate white theories and by effect
Black theorists make

the (new) content,

and the (existential) ethicality

, be they: white, bourgeois, or male; the people the theory is directed towards,

in fact moral people

, or a newly emerged person that can now

understand,

. Why is this case? What is it in the act of critiquing whites, the bourgeoisie, or men that make

the oppressed believe fundamentally that these groups can change?

Black theorists

and their parrots,

that merely act as sleeping dictionaries, or in the case of Black men, talking monkeys

the pre-established semiotics that signify intellect as the basis of their discourse with whites under the banner of radicality, pessimism or anti-racist realism is of the
greatest concern. In its brute reality, this discursive replication was the primary concern of Carter G. Woodsons The Miseducation of the Negro (1933). Contrary to
the pop culture summation of Woodsons 1933 work, Woodson was not primarily concerned with the general education of Blacks by whites, Woodson was concerned
with the highly educated Negro, who in studying the ideas founded upon white understandings of philosophy, economics, law, and religion, sought to apply this
knowledge to the Black community. The educated Negro have the attitude of contempt toward their own people because in their own as well as in their mixed
schools Negroes are taught to admire the Hebrew, the Latin and the Teuton and to despite the African (Woodson, 1933, p.1). Woodsons comment upon the
disciplinary/civilizational basis of theory, is profound, despite being almost a century old. The highly educated Negro, the same culprit of E. Franklin Fraziers
Failure of the Negro/Black Intellectual, seeks to distant themselves from the Black community who remain mere objects of study. Seeing themselves as ontologically
different from the other-Black-objects they study, these Black theorist(s) speak to white gatekeepers and members of their own intellectual class who reward them for
the adamancy and spread of the ideas offered as morality. By claiming to be enlightened and spreading truth the post-structural/intersectional theorist need not know
about the actual conditions of the people they speak of, they need only present these bodies and their conditions through the theories accepted by their particular
discipline and/or disciplinary community. Black Study effectively becomes the process of confining/distorting/revising Black life to fit theory. As Ahmed reminds us,
facts require explanations, and all explanations, even bad ones, presume a configuration of concepts, which we provisionally call 'theory,' In other words, theory is

not simply a desirable but a necessary relation between facts and their explanations (1994, p.34). It is when this theory is considered to be ontologicalfundamental
and necessary to the facts they seek to explainthat they become apriori and ideological. It is this paradigm from which the theory we concern ourselves with, and its
effect upon the actual study of Black people, are placed at odds with Black Studies. Since the ontological claim is apriori, it dismisses the need for the study of Black
life since it takes the relation between the facts of Black existence and theories proposed to be necessary to the Black bodies observed. The truth concerning Blackness
thereby becomes revelation of some constant unchanging principle within Blackness rather than the study of structures, historically conditioned and dynamic, upon
Black peoples. This

bourgeois fanaticism voids the world of actual Black people and replaces them with Black subjects
found wanting for knowledge, recognition, and the politics of the Black theorist-observer.

There is nothing innocent about the alternatives position in relation to power

failing to confront the complex and contradictory situation, in favor of retreat
naturalizes imperial metaphysics and eliminates any subversive potential strategy or
hope in challenging social death
Mitchell 2014 (Nick Mitchell, Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside. A Riff on the Concept of the (Critical Ethnic Studies) Intellectual.
Antiracism Inc.: Intersections. 10/30/2014 - http://acc.english.ucsb.edu/ACGCC%2014-15/Mitchell%20-%20CESA%20-%20Intellectual.pdf)

the intellectual
with
a sense of heroic
even
messianic, potentiality one in which the gap between the intellectual and the leader collapsed This collapse was
inevitable result of a philosophy of struggle that insisted on the inseparability of representation in
the curricular structures of the university with representation in politics and privileged the intellectual as
capable of holding these two
in
proximity
As knowledge and power came to be understood as reflective of one another,

in these inaugural moments of Ethnic Studies could not but be cathected

and as

, occasionally

an

perhaps

the domain of legitimated knowledge

(i.e.

forms of representation

the most intimate

the figure

(Chiang 2009). The racialized intellectuals body plays a crucial role in stabilizing such a representational calculus insofar as it can be said to

double as the person doing the representing and the group being represented (Chow 2002), whether that group is understood as a natal community or one constituted by explicit political solidarity (Third World peoples, women of color, etc.).

But the movements for Ethnic Studies were not the sole origin of such an investment in the figure of the intellectual-as-representative-of-racialized-community as much as they opened up a space for the radical reinterpretation of the

the
historic mandate for the black intellectual to be a race leader, has been encompassing enough to accommodate
efforts that cross the political spectrumto say nothing of a great deal of intra-elite conflict between black
intellectuals themselves on the questions of what equality and liberation ought to look like and how they might
be achieved. But it is an elitism that, while always contested, has never strayed far from the fraught and problematic consensus that singular male leadership (Edwards 2012, 10) constitutes a
intellectual as a figure of race leadership that, as Erica Edwards (2012, 11) writes, had solidified as a classed and gendered concept. The elitism, in the context of Black Studies, of what Joy James (1997, 6) calls

necessary precondition for black empowerment. The patriarchal implications that underwrite such an understanding of the intellectual as leader rely on an implicit analogy between the race and the bourgeois family in which the latter

Since the naturalization of this intellectualprivileging analogy gives it a taken-for-granted quality, it can reproduce itself by way of habits, concepts, and
frameworks that give it a more innocuous appearance. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the now commonsense invocation of black community such that the latter
provides an idealized, naturalized asymmetry of power and privilege that obtains between the leader and the led, the speaker and the spoken for.

supplies as an idealized, univocal conglomeration of collective interests (Reed 1999a, 134), a community that can be invoked as such because it is not internally riven by socially structured differences.

What all of this suggests is that the critical Ethnic Studies intellectual does not simply intervene into or transform
epistemologies; but that her position as intellectual is the complicated outcome of historically sedimented
epistemologies and relations of power. It suggests, moreover, that our theories of intellectual work are
problematically incomplete if we do not confront the extent to which we are made by that which we seek to
oppose. There is nothing about our position in the academy, however marginal, that is innocent of power, nor
is there any practice that will afford us an exteriority to the historical and geopolitical determinations of the
place from which we speak, write, research, teach, organize, and learn. No longer can Ethnic Studies stake its
institutional life on the promise that it will be a site for the production of organic intellectuals intellectuals who,
rather than working to consolidate the hegemonic order of things, represent an emergent and potentially
revolutionary class.
Rather, it is from here, from within a particular position of and in complicity, from within constitutive
contradiction, that our work necessarily begins. This lesson seems particularly important to stress in a context such as Ethnic Studies, where
the intellectuals investment in her own work is performed in and routed through the belief that such work can, or at least should, be of world-transformative value,
and where the political orientation of intellectual work is regularly utilized as an implicit, if not explicit, criterion for evaluating what work is and isnt valuable.

What kind of intellectual practitioner is produced, we need to ask, when the political is situated as a normative
figure in this way? If critique is to be for Ethnic Studies a field-defining practice, it is also necessarily a site where
our most extravagant fantasies about the meaning and possibilities of intellectual work are staged. Indeed, critique opens
powerfully onto scenes that narrativize the power of knowledge through individual and collective transformation, onto scenes in which the intellectual knowingly
moves away from complicity in order to adopt, knowingly once again, a position of oppositionality to dominant modalities of power.

2NC

PIC
Rage fails
Stone 4 (Alison Stone works for the Institute for Environment, and is a professor of Philosophy and Public Policy
at Lancaster University, Essentialism and Anti-Essentialism in Feminist Philosophy, Journal of Moral Philosophy
1.2, 2004, Accessed via GMU Libraries, Last Accessed 9/22/14) ELJ
An objection immediately arises to this strategic essentialist position. Any political strategy is effective only inasmuch as it allows agents to recognize and intervene into the real social events,

it seems reasonable to think that a strategy can be effective, in

this sense, only insofar as it embodies an accurate understanding of the character of social
processes. This implies that a strategy of affirming fictitious commonalities among women will fail to facilitate
effective action given a world where women do not really have any common social characteristics
or locations. Rather, such a strategy appears destined to mislead women into fighting against
difficulties which are either non-existent or more likelyreally affect only some privileged subgroup of women. This objection can be resisted,
however, as it (implicitly) is by Denise Riley in Am I That Name? . Riley claims that it is compatible to suggest that women dont
existwhile maintaining a politics of as if they existed since the world behaves as if they unambiguously did. 15 In other
processes and forces which make up the social field. But

words, for Riley, the fiction that women share a common social experience is politically effective because the social world actually does treat women as if they comprise a unitary group. Riley

this false idea informs and

organizes the practices and institutions that shape womens experiences , so that thosevery different
experiences become structured by essentialist assumptions. A strategy of affirming fictitious commonalities therefore will
be effective given this world in which (false) descriptive essentialist assumptions undergird
womens social existence. Rileys argument has a problem, though: she cannot consistently maintain both that
womens social experience is fully diverse and that this experience is uniformly structured
by essentialist assumptions. If essentialism informs and organizes the structures that shape womens social experience, then this experience will be organized according to
certain shared models and will acquire certain common patterns and features. More concretely, the idea that women are a
homogeneous group will structure social institutions so that they position all women homogeneously, leading to (at least
considerable areas of) shared experience. Thus, Riley (and other strategic essentialists)may be right that essentialist constructions are socially influential, but they cannot,
consistently with this, also maintain that descriptive essentialism is false. Furthermore, it is not obviously true that any uniform set of
essentialist constructions informs all social experience. These constructions may all identify
women as a homogeneous group, but they vary widely in their account of the context of womens
homogenous features. Consequently, these constructions will influence social structures in correspondingly varying directions, against which no counter-affirmation of
accepts that women are not a unitary group and that the socially prevalent idea that they are unified is false. Nevertheless,

common experience can be expected to be effective Strategic essentialists, then, have attempted to resuscitate essentialism by arguing that it can take a merely political and non-descriptive form.

this attempt proves unsuccessful, because one cannot defend essentialism on strategic
grounds without first showing that there is a homogeneous set of essentialist assumptions that exerts a coherent influence on womens social experiencewhich amounts to defending
essentialism on descriptive grounds(as well). Advocates of essentialism therefore need to show that it accurately
describes social reality. Here, though, critics can retort that essentialism is descriptively false, since women do not
But

even share any common mode of construction by essentialist discourses. Yet this retort reinstates the problem of anti-essentialism: its paralysing effect on social criticism and political activism.
Strategic essentialism has not resolved this problem, for it has not stably demarcated any merely political form of essentialism from the descriptive essentialism which critics have plausibly
condemned as false and oppressive.

Cap

O/v

Turns the affPost-modernist epistemology cause societal inaction by denying

individual agency and value to lifehistorical-material epistemology is far superior.
Skeggs, Professor at Goldsmiths, University of London, 1991
[Beverley, Postmodernism: What Is All the Fuss about? British Journal of Sociology of Education, accessed date: 4-29-12 y2k]

This inability

to theorise any form of power other than the local, presents particular problem for understanding the
role of the state . Most postmodern theorists rely on Foucault's idea that systems of knowledge codify techniques and
practices within localised contexts. Whilst Foucault can be exceedingly useful for understanding the role of education in the reproduction
of techniques of discipline and surveillance (Foucault, 1977; Ball, 1990) his analysis is less suited to any centralising apparatus .
The state simply becomes a multitude of local sites of micro-power: the imposition of the Education Reform Act in England and
Wales, and the responses to it, cannot be accounted for in postmodern terms alone. Educational research, or any ethnography, that attempts
to understand the words and deeds of others is redundant for postmodernists. The world, according to postmodernists, is
opaque; it is all lived on the surface. There is nothing that hides behind its surface appearances. It is not a case of people saying what they
mean-rather they don't mean anything-for there is not any meaning to be had; we are all just living simulcra, so it doesn't matter .
Even Jameson (1981) conceives of the social totality, not as an entity that can in any sense be experienced directly, but as an absent cause
inaccessible to us except in textual form. There is a complete absence of lived experience-other than that of the author-in post- modern accounts.

The methodology of play and gamesmanship suggested by Lyotard is an aimless epistemology . The concept of the multiple
subject that postmodernists use is derived from a post-structuralist reworking of psychoanalysis. Althusser (1977) conceived of the subject as the
site of intersection of a whole overdetermined welter of ideological discourses, noting the spurious nature of unity over the effectively
interpellated subject. Foucault articulates the demotion of the subject from constitutive to constituted status. In relation to education, as early as
1981, Walkerdine sug- gested that we occupy a nexus of subjectivities in her examination of the construction of gendered identity. Jameson
(1984) argues that the decentred, floating, fragmentary subject becomes the ideal target for advertising conceived as a system which no longer
offers a 'magical' sanctuary from 'real' cares and needs, but provides instead an endless succession of vacatable positions for the 'desiring
machines' which replace the repressed and alienated workers of the previous epoch. Whilst this may be theoretically useful, Shusterman (1988,
TCS) argues that it can also be de-politicising; we cannot generate a general or even personal ethic from our functional role if we inhabit a
plurality of inadequately integrated roles both collectively and individually. For instance, Lyotard argues that we inhabit such a motley

variety of language-games and are shaped by so many forms of discourse that we can no longer say definitively who
we are. Shusterman (1988) suggests that by denying the self's very existence and agency , intellectuals seek to legitimate
political and social inaction , unjustifiable and unhappy complacency , even responsibility for their own lives and
certainly the lives of others . Rather than referring to the modernist concept of alienated otherness, the postmodern questioning of
binary oppositions and exclusions leads to the devel- opment of a play of differences: multiplicitous, heterogeneous and
plural. To some theorists this offers liberating effects because, if the centre is seen as a construct and a fiction rather than a fixed and
unchangeable reality, the legiti- macy of it comes under scrutiny (Hutcheon, 1989). The concepts of otherness and difference are also
useful for understanding racism as Bhabha and Hall show below. However, it can be de-politicising: to equate women with
otherness deprives the feminist struggle of any kind of specificity: what is repressed is not otherness but specific,
historically constituted agents . Owens (1988, B&R) pro- motes a utopian vision of a concept of difference without opposition; this
leads Callinicos (1989) to award him first prize for the silliest argument for being so politically naive. Habermas (1987) accuses postmodernists
of being neo-conservatives. As Kellner (1988, TCS) points out, the

postmodern world is devoid of meaning ; it is a universe of

nihilism where theories float in a void, unanchored in any secure harbour or mooring. Meaning requires depth, a
hidden dimension, an unseen substratum; in postmodern society, however, everything is explicit, transparent, obscene. This is
summed up by Kroker & Cook's (1988) description of politics, written, of course, in the postmodern mode: Politics becomes the flashing anus of
promises of the better world constantly present as the carousel becomes the succession of white strobelike flashes and as the waste system runs
into the now of party

Post-modern epistemology results in extinctionengaging with the material reality

is necessary for survival.
Morris, Emeritus professor of anthropology at Goldsmiths College at the University of London, 1997

[Brian, In Defence of Realism and Truth Critical reflections on the anthropological followers of Heidegger Critique of Anthropology
September 1997 vol. 17 no. 3 313-340, SAGEpub, accesed date: 4-28-12 y2k]

Post-modernist scholars exclaim with some stridency, the dissolution, the erasure or the end of truth, reason,
history, nature, the self, science and philosophy - misleadingly identifying all these terms with conceptions
that are transcendental, ahistoric and absolutist. They thus appear to see nothing between the so-called gods eye
point of view, a transcendental perspective beyond time and space, and local - supposedly fragmented, undecidable and
indeterminable - discourses (Hollinger, 1994: 81). In the process, a sense of common humanity , of human
capacities , of human praxis , of human- history is lost. There is no sense of a human life-world - an infinitive
surrounding world of life common to all people, as Husserl expressed it (1970: 139), that is prior and distinct both from cultural world views and
transcendentalism. Yet the postmodernists nevertheless recoil from the theoretical implications of their own rather prophetic declarations, and
with equal emphasis proclaim that their theory does not entail either linguistic (cultural) idealism or relativism (Flax, 1995: 155; Hollinger,
1994: 98). They could hardly do otherwise, for outside the groves of academia, and their reified and scholastic discourses, the natural and social
worlds are experienced as a reality, and we experience also a shared humanity that is not reducible to the fragmented discourses of local cultures.
What exists, and how the world is constituted, depends, of course on what particular ontology or world view (to use Diltheys
term) is

being expressed, although in terms of social praxis the reality of the material world is always taken for granted for human
survival depends on acknowledging and engaging with this world. As Marx expressed it, we are always engaged in a
dialogue with the real world (1975: 328). It is important then to defend a realist perspective, one Marx long ago described as
historical materialism . It is a metaphysics that entails the rejection both of contemplative materialism (the assumption that there is a direct
unmediated relationship between consciousness [language] and the world) and constructivism. The latter is just old-fashioned idealism in modern
guise, the emphasis being on culture, language and discourses, rather than on individual perception (Berkeley) or a universal cognition (Kant).
This approach may also be described as dialectical naturalism (Bookchin, 1990), transcendental or critical realism (Bhaskar, 1978: 25; Collier,
1994), or constructive realism (Ben-Zeev, 1995: 50) - recognizing the significant social and cognitive activity of the

human agent , but acknowledging the ontological independence and causal powers of the natural world. As Mark Johnson simply puts it:
How we carve up the world will depend both on what independent of us, and equally on the referential scheme we
bring to bear, given our purposes, interests, and goals (1987: 202). Our engagement with the world is thus always
mediated. Equally important is the fact that we are always, as Marx put it, engaged in a dialogue with the material world .

Link
The affirmatives framing of the ballot in the name of subjective empowerment and
structuring the debate in terms of primacy on social location takes part in a legacy
of progressivism that has been co-opted and grafted onto the dominate
managerialism of status quo capitalism
Standish 97 [Paul Standish, Institute for Education and Lifelong Learning, University of Dundee, Heidegger and
the Technology of Further Education. Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 31, No. 3, 1997]
Contemporary further education has been shaped by a strange alliance of forces. Predominant amongst these has been what
might be called the new managerialism with its vocabulary of efficiency and effectiveness, choice and markets .
This has been linked to a limited extent and somewhat incongruously with a certain legacy of progressivism. Slogans of
1960s child-centred primary education - learning through doing, group work, experiential learning, integration - have been grafted
onto the dominant managerialism in such a way that lecturing staff of apparently contrary political and pedagogical
persuasions have been `brought on board'. This new progressivism has been formed by a confluence of ideas from a
variety of sources, some specifically concerned with the education of adults: the notions of empowerment and the
pedagogy of oppression derived from Paolo Freire; the humanistic psychology of Carl Rogers; the identification of experience as
a defining characteristic of adult education in the `andragogy' of Malcolm Knowles. Change has been the order of the day and
this has gone hand in hand with the provision of a new style of initial and in-service education and training, the latter typically involving short
and specifically targeted courses or training days. In the eyes of the new management this type of staff development is crucial to success. New
social circumstances necessitate changes in the traditional attitudes and expectations of staff. New learning methods (capitalising on
information technology) make

possible the more efficient use of resources. Staff must come to see themselves not as
lecturers, nor even as teachers in any conventional didactic sense, but as facilitators of learning. Proponents of this
new further education have constructed an over-simplified picture of traditional further education as a target. This is
a picture of subject specialists with little commitment to students, where facts are presented in a non-interactive way
and learners are thought of as passive receptacles. It is necessary to dispense with this crude caricature of bad
practice, an easy target which ultimately does not serve the case for a new further education well. Not that the
existence of bad traditional practice should be denied: entrenched attitudes, lack of commitment to widened access,
impatience with the new types of student, and nostalgia about `standards' have stood in the way of the real
opportunities that changing conceptions of further education and new technology provide. New management has
exaggerated these failings, however, to smooth the path for the changes it seeks to introduce .

The aff gets it wrong Capitalist consumer culture relies on counter-culture

difference as a marketing strategy This makes them complicit with American
exceptionalism - Turns solvency
Sznaider and Winter 3 [Natan Sznaider, Associate Professor of Sociology at the Academic College of TelAviv, and Rainer Winter, sociologist, Professor of Media Theory and Cultural Studies and Director of the Institute of
Media and Communication Studies at the University of Klagenfurt, Global America? The Cultural Consequences of
Globalization, 2003 Liverpool University Press, Introduction, Pg. 2-3]cd
The increasing popularity of the idea of globalization in sociology is connected to the fact that many of todays problems cannot be grasped adequately on the level of
nation states, but only through the analysis of global (transnational) processes. In this way, the influence of Hollywood, McDonalds or Burger King fast food and
Nike sports shoes and accessories refers to global processes of production, circulation and reception of cultural commodities, where there is no doubt that American
products dominate. In one critical interpretation, a

culture-ideology of consumerism (Sklair 1998) has been analysed, which aims to

include as many social groups and cultural identities as possible worldwide . Participation in consumption does not
take place in a Fordistic scenario whereby cultures become more uniform and standardized, as Max Horkheimer and Theodor
W. Adorno believed in their famous theory of the culture industry (1972). Rather the (global) market actually demands differences which are
the basis for the development of marketing strategies. Critics believe that flexible and mobile organizations offer every
Western social group the very consumer commodities that they demand to develop and to express their identity in

the framework of the politics of identity (Hardt and Negri 2000: 152ff.). Even counter-cultures are deeply integrated into the
transnational consumer world, which penetrates into our everyday lives. According to Fredric Jameson (1998: 64), evolving
within this consumerism there are developing forces that are North American in origin and result from the
unchallenged primacy of the USA today and thus the American way of life and American mass media culture.
His interpretation suggests that the new world culture is dominated by the USA.

1NR
Their rev gets crushed
Flaherty 5 http://cryptogon.com/docs/pirate_insurgency.html USC BA in International Relations, researcher in
political affairs, activist and organic farmer in New Zealand In order to understand the national security implications
of militant electronic piracy, an examination of conventional insurgency against the American Corporate State is
necessary.

Any violent insurgency against the ACS is sure to fail and will
only serve to enhance the state's power . The major flaw of violent insurgencies, both cell based (Weathermen
Underground, Black Panthers, Aryan Nations etc.) and leaderless (Earth Liberation Front, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, etc.) is
that they are attempting to attack the system using the same tactics the ACS has already mastered: terror and
psychological operations. The ACS attained primacy through the effective application of terror and psychological operations. Therefore, it has far
more skill and experience in the use of these tactics than any upstart could ever hope to attain.4 This makes the
ACS impervious to traditional insurgency tactics. - Political Activism and the ACS Counterinsurgency Apparatus The ACS
employs a full time counterinsurgency infrastructure with resources that are unimaginable to most would be
insurgents. Quite simply, violent insurgents have no idea of just how powerful the foe actually is . Violent insurgents
typically start out as peaceful, idealistic, political activists. Whether or not political activists know it, even with very mundane levels of political
THE NATURE OF ARMED INSURGENCY AGAINST THE ACS

activity, they are engaging in low intensity conflict with the ACS. The U.S. military classifies political activism as low intensity conflict. The scale of warfare (in
terms of intensity) begins with individuals distributing anti-government handbills and public gatherings with anti-government/anti-corporate themes. In the middle of
the conflict intensity scale are what the military refers to as Operations Other than War; an example would be the situation the U.S. is facing in Iraq. At the upper right
hand side of the graph is global thermonuclear war. What is important to remember is that the military is concerned with ALL points along this scale because they
represent different types of threats to the ACS. Making distinctions between civilian law enforcement and military forces, and foreign and domestic intelligence
services is no longer necessary. After September 11, 2001, all

national security assets would be brought to bear against any U.S.

insurgency movement. Additionally, the U.S. military established NORTHCOM which designated the U.S. as an active military
operational area. Crimes involving the loss of corporate profits will increasingly be treated as acts of terrorism and could garner
anything from a local law enforcement response to activation of regular military forces. Most of what is commonly referred to as
political activism is viewed by the corporate state's counterinsurgency apparatus as a useful and necessary component of political control. Letters-to-the-editor...
Calls-to-elected-representatives... Waving banners... Third party political activities... Taking beatings, rubber bullets and tear gas from riot police in free speech
zones... Political activism amounts to an utterly useless waste of time, in terms of tangible power, which is all the ACS understands. Political activism is a cruel guise
that is sold to people who are dissatisfied, but who have no concept of the nature of tangible power. Counterinsurgency

teams routinely monitor

these activities, attend the meetings, join the groups and take on leadership roles in the organizations. It's only a matter of time
before some individuals determine that political activism is a honeypot that accomplishes nothing and wastes their time. The corporate state knows that some small
percentage of the peaceful, idealistic, political activists will eventually figure out the game. At this point, the clued-in activists will probably do one of two things;
drop out or move to escalate the struggle in other ways. If the clued-in activist drops his or her political activities, the ACS wins. But what if the clued-in activist
refuses to give up the struggle? Feeling powerless, desperation could set in and these individuals might become increasingly radicalized. Because

the
corporate state's counterinsurgency operatives have infiltrated most political activism groups, the radicalized
members will be easily identified, monitored and eventually compromised/turned, arrested or executed. The ACS wins again.

Ensures massive genocidal backlash- only a political space can solve

Emery 7 Phd, Kathy, The Limits of Violent Resistance, For the Western Edition, August 27, 2007
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/Emery/westernedition/Sept07WestEd.pdf

The August 15th editorial for SF Bayview concluded that the only way to stop gentrification in the Bayview is to
go to war. Through all our marching and complaining and testifying at City Hall, our City Fathers still arent listening. At this point, sadly, I dont think for a
minute that anything is going to change if we continue to go the Martin route. I think we need to channel Malcolm and the Panthersand

start making some moves instead of making some noise. I need some soldiers on my side, and as much as I am sure that there are people who
are willing to protest, I need some people next to me who are willing to go to war. By any means necessary. To me, the really sad thing, is that the
editorialist, Ebony Sparks, believes that there are only two routes or means of opposition to the dominant/white power
structurethat pursued by Martin Luther King Jrs Southern Christian Leadership Conference or that pursued by
Malcolm X and West Coast Black Panther Parties. Sparks apparently lumps the very different strategies employed by SNCC (Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee) and CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) into those employed by the SCLC and NAACP. She also assumes that marching,
and complaining and testifying is what constitutes the full range of tactics employed by the SCLC . This could not be
further from the truth. While I am completely sympathetic and share Sparks impatience with the lack of people power in the Bay Area, I think she does not
appreciate the severe limitations and ramifications of violent resistance to the powers-that-be. In fact, any attempts
to resist gentrification violently would be used as an excuse to make all the undesirable Bayview residents
disappear that much more quickly . The state, especially in the era of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act, can
out-gun, out-infiltrate, and out-manipulate any individual or group of people. To go to war with City Hall is
to attack it at its strongest point, a suicidal Picketts Charge, if you will.

Debate as a dialogue ensures all parties receive a fair opportunity

Galloway 7 DINNER AND CONVERSATION AT THE ARGUMENTATIVE TABLE: RECONCEPTUALIZING DEBATE AS AN ARGUMENTATIVE DIALOGUE, Ryan Galloway, Assistant Professor
and the Director of Debate at Samford University, Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, Vol. 28 (2007)

Debate as a dialogue sets an argumentative table, where all parties receive a relatively fair opportunity to voice
their position. Anything that fails to allow participants to have their position articulated denies one side of the argumentative table a fair hearing. The
affirmative side is set by the topic and fairness requirements . While affirmative teams have recently resisted affirming the topic, in fact,
the topic selection process is rigorous, taking the relative ground of each topic as its central point of departure. Setting the affirmative reciprocally
sets the negative . The negative crafts approaches to the topic consistent with affirmative demands . The negative
crafts disadvantages, counter-plans, and critical arguments premised on the arguments that the topic allows for the
affirmative team. According to fairness norms, each side sits at a relatively balanced argumentative table. When
one side takes more than its share, competitive equity suffers . However, it also undermines the respect due to the other
involved in the dialogue. When one side excludes the other, it fundamentally denies the personhood of the other
participant (Ehninger, 1970, p. 110). A pedagogy of debate as dialogue takes this respect as a fundamental component . A
desire to be fair is a fundamental condition of a dialogue that takes the form of a demand for equality of voice. Far
from being a banal request for links to a disadvantage, fairness is a demand for respect , a demand to be heard, a demand
that a voice backed by literally months upon months of preparation, research, and critical thinking not be silenced.
Affirmative cases that suspend basic fairness norms operate to exclude particular negative strategies . Unprepared,
one side comes to the argumentative table unable to meaningfully participate in a dialogue. They are unable to understand
what went on... and are left to the whims of time and power (Farrell, 1985, p. 114). Hugh Duncan furthers this line of reasoning: Opponents not only
tolerate but honor and respect each other because in doing so they enhance their own chances of thinking better and
reaching sound decisions. Opposition is necessary because it sharpens thought in action. We assume that argument, discussion,
and talk, among free an informed people who subordinate themselves to rules of discussion, are the best ways to decisions of any kind, because it is only through such
discussion that we reach agreement which binds us to a common cause...If we are to be equal...relationships among equals must find expression in many formal and
informal institutions (Duncan, 1993, p. 196-197). Debate

compensates for the exigencies of the world by offering a framework that

maintains equality for the sake of the conversation (Farrell, 1985, p. 114). For example, an affirmative case on the 2007-2008
college topic might defend neither state nor international action in the Middle East, and yet claim to be germane to the topic in
some way. The case essentially denies the arguments that state action is oppressive or that actions in the international
arena are philosophically or pragmatically suspect. Instead of allowing for the dialogue to be modified by the interchange of the affirmative case
and the negative response, the affirmative subverts any meaningful role to the negative team, preventing them from offering effective
counter-word and undermining the value of a meaningful exchange of speech acts.