Narratives

Good

K2 Whiteness

Narratives are key to break down whiteness – it breaks down the unity of racist structures and allows other perspectives to appear – the very structures that allow whiteness to function invisibly. Burke 2012(Kevin J. Burke, PhD, in curriculum, teaching, and educational policy, “The Village in the City: Critical Race Theory, Schooling, and a Live”, Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, Volume 8. 2012, accessed 8/20/13, JK)Implicit in this border-making is the sense that the demarcation of space as included and excluded (inclusive and exclusive), people as internal or external, lies in a “moral virtue of one people’s claim to specific territory over that of others” (Garbutt 2006: 1). Such a construction of identity is rooted for Garbutt, in the notion of “autochthony” which denotes a local as being born of a land, in the process serving as an aid to collective forgetfulness for, say, how the land was appropriated. This allows for the “single unifying myth” (2) of the foundation of a space, a place outlined by “a founding forgetting” (3) whereby it becomes easy to mark outsiders foreign, alien, improbable and undesirabl e by erasing indigeneity from a place. Quite often that which we choose to (and choose not to) tell of these stories of place and self (and thus other) determines where the lines of demarcation fall. Work in genres such as memoir, autobiography, and narrative, Laing (2000)argues allow for interplay between “self-perception … [and] ‘other perception’” where “ these perceptions and the various social and cultural factors in which they are steeped may conflict with one another, creating potential and actual instabilities” (as cited in Versaci 2007: 48). Indeed a central tenet of “whiteness as an epistemological¶ a priori ¶ ” (Moreton-Robinson 2004: 75) turns on the ability to define an ‘other’ through the construction of insider and outsider status w here by “whiteness is defined by what it is not (animal or liminal)” (78). For Giannacopoulos (2007) this involves the dual action of appropriated indigenousness for the sake of re-positioning what and who is possible in a space. And out of that action, those positionings, come stories, narratives. Connelly and Clandinin (1990) see ‘narrative’ as “the study of the ways humans experience the world” (2). A notion that Daniell (1999) further refines, believing that stories (most particularly memoir and narrative) become “how individuals and groups engage in self-formation” (408). In the same vein, Brodkey (1996)sees critical auto ethnography as functioning similarly to “open up a space of resistance between the individual and the collective” at “contact zones” seen as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other” such that “social identities are the serious, impish, ridiculous, generous, wary, contradictory singular selves constructed and reconstructed” (28), here, in the de-racialised stories of a space and place.

K2 Borders/ Exclusion

Narratives solve exclusion – they allow new perspectives that conflict with dominant opinions and challenge the “single unifying myth” that supports exclusion by allowing for new social spaces. Burke 2012(Kevin J. Burke, PhD, in curriculum, teaching, and educational policy, “The Village in the City: Critical Race Theory, Schooling, and a Live”, Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, Volume 8. 2012, accessed 8/20/13, JK)Implicit in this border-making is the sense that the demarcation of space as included and excluded (inclusive and exclusive), people as internal or external, lies in a “moral virtue of one people’s claim to specific territory over that of others” (Garbutt 2006: 1). Such a construction of identity is rooted for Garbutt, in the notion of “autochthony” which denotes a local as being born of a land, in the process serving as an aid to collective forgetfulness for, say, how the land was appropriated. This allows for the “single unifying myth” (2) of the foundation of a space, a place outlined by “a founding forgetting” (3) whereby it becomes easy to mark outsiders foreign, alien, improbable and undesirable by erasing indigeneity from a place. Quite often that which we choose to (and choose not to) tell of these stories of place and self (and thus other) determines where the lines of demarcation fall. Work in genres such as memoir, autobiography, and narrative, Laing (2000)argues allow for interplay between “self-perception … [and] ‘other perception’” where “these perceptions and the various social and cultural factors in which they are steeped may conflict with one another , creating potential and actual instabilities ” (as cited in Versaci 2007: 48). Indeed a central tenet of “whiteness as an epistemological¶ a priori ¶ ” (Moreton-Robinson 2004: 75) turns on the ability to define an ‘other’ through the construction of insider and outsider status where by “whiteness is defined by what it is not (animal or liminal)” (78). For Giannacopoulos (2007) this involves the dual action of appropriated indigenousness for the sake of re-positioning what and who is possible in a space. And out of that action, those positionings, come stories, narratives. Connelly and Clandinin (1990) see ‘narrative’ as “the study of the ways humans experience the world” (2). A notion that Daniell (1999) further refines, believing that stories (most particularly memoir and narrative) become “how individuals and groups engage in self- formation” (408). In the same vein, Brodkey (1996) sees critical auto ethnography as functioning similarly to “open up a space of resistance between the individual and the collective” at “contact zones” seen as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other” such that “social identities are the serious, impish, ridiculous, generous, wary, contradictory singular selves constructed and reconstructed” (28), here, in the de-racialised stories of a space and place.

Bad

1NC Shell

Narrative fails to subvert the dominant paradigm – They recreate absolutismsClawson 98 (Mark, J.D. – Stanford, 22 Legal Stud. Forum 353)

These subjective identities give certain individuals solid ground upon which they can build a progressive framework of thought. But the narrowly defined identities of contemporary progressivism limit the possibility that those outside the narrow group of interest will share the agenda. One might hope that progressives could be somewhat open-minded. But as Stanley Fish has observed, "to say that one's mind should be open sounds fine until you realize that it is equivalent to saying that one's mind should be empty of commitments, should be a purely formal device." n165 Assuming that a broad base of progressive factions can mold diverse individuals-with distinct notions of identity-into a cohesive whole is simply asking the framework of progressive thought to do something that, in the end, it cannot. Contemporary narratives of identity seek to resolve the questions of authority that plague progressivism, but they lack the power that religion once held. In an earlier era, progressives could unite behind an over-arching paradigm that commanded them to "do as they would be done by." n166 Since widely shared cultural assumptions fueled the progressive agenda of early decades, slavery was vanquished and monopolies were crushed. But increasingly subjective narratives of identity command obeisance only within narrow spheres, not translating easily into the realities of other social worlds. The interpretation of the world facilitated by these narrow identitie s- including a well-defined course of future action-is accessible only to those who share their cultural assumptions . This interpretation may, in fact, challenge the social worlds established by other progressives. In the end, it seems that progressive narratives, like Frye's romances, end where they began, but with a difference. n167 Questions of authority and feelings of dissonance remain in the larger progressivism, but those who gain new identities now live in temporary worlds of absolutes.

Narratives support hegemonic structures- they link personal experience to universal unquestionable truth Ewick and Silbey 95 (Patricia Susan S. Law & Society Review, 00239216, 19, Vol. 29, Issue 2)

In the previous section, we discussed how narratives, like the lives and experiences they recount, are cultural productions. Narratives are generated interactively through normatively structured performances and interactions. Even the most personal of narratives rely on and invoke collective narratives — symbols, linguistic formulations, structures, and vocabularies of motive — without which the personal would remain unintelligible and uninterpretable. Because of the conventionalized character of narrative, then, our stories are likely to express ideological effects and hegemonic assumptions. [ 10] We are as likely to be shackled by the stories we tell (or that are culturally available for our telling) as we are by the form of oppression they might seek to reveal. In short, the structure, the content, and the performance of stories as they are defined and regulated within social settings often articulate and reproduce existing ideologies and hegemonic relations of power and inequality. It is important to emphasize that narratives do more than simply reflect or express existing ideologies. Through their telling, our stories come to constitute the hegemony that in turn shapes social lives and conduct " The hegemonic is not simply a static body of ideas to which members of a culture are obliged to conform" (Silberstein 1988:127). Rather, Silberstein writes, hegemony has "a protean nature in which dominant relations are preserved while their manifestations remain highly flexible. The hegemonic must continually evolve so as to recuperate alternative hegemonies ." In other

words, the hegemonic gets produced and evolves within individual , seemingly unique, discrete personal narratives. Indeed, the resilience of ideologies and hegemony may derive from their articulation within personal stories. Finding expression and being refashioned within the stories of countless individuals may lead to a polyvocality that inoculates and protects the master narrative from critique. The hegemonic strength of a master narrative derives, Brinkley Messick (1988:657) writes, from "its textual, and lived heteroglossia … [, s]ubverting and dissimulating itself at every … turn"; thus ideologies that are encoded in particular stories are "effectively protected from sustained critique" by the fact that they are constituted through variety and contradiction . Research in a variety of social settings has demonstrated the hegemonic potential of narrative by illustrating how narratives can contribute to the reproduction of existing structures of meaning and power. First, narratives can function specifically as mechanisms of social control (Mumby 1993). At various levels of social organization — ranging from families to nation-states — storytelling instructs us about what is expected and warns us of the consequences of nonconformity. Oft-told family tales about lost fortunes or spoiled reputations enforce traditional definitions and values of family life (Langellier & Peterson 1993). Similarly, bureaucratic organizations exact compliance from members through the articulation of managerial prerogatives and expectations and the consequences of violation or challenge (Witten 1993). Through our narratives of courtship, lost accounts, and failed careers, cultures are constructed; we "do" family, we "do" organization, through the stories we tell (Langellier & Peterson 1993). Second, the hegemonic potential of narrative is further enhanced by narratives' ability to colonize consciousness . Well-plotted s tories cohere by relating various (selectively appropriated) events and details into a temporally organized whole (see part I above). The coherent whole, that is, the configuration of events and characters arranged in believable plots, preempts alternative stories. The events seem to speak for themselves; the tale appears to tell itself. Ehrenhaus (1993) provides a poignant example of a cultural meta-narrative that operates to stifle alternatives. He describes the currently dominant cultural narrative regarding the United States's involvement in the Vietnam War as one that relies on themes of dysfunction and rehabilitation. The story, as Ehrenhaus summarizes it, is structured as a social drama which characterizes both the nation and individual Vietnam veterans as having experienced a breakdown in normal functioning only recently resolved through a process of healing. This narrative is persuasive because it reiterates and elaborates already existing and dominant metaphors and interpretive frameworks in American culture concerning what Philip Rieff (1968) called the "triumph of the therapeutic" (see also Crews 1994). Significantly, the therapeutic motif underwriting this narrative depicts veterans as emotionally and psychologically fragile and, thus, disqualifies them as creditable witnesses. The connection between what they saw and experienced while in Vietnam and what the nation did in Vietnam is severed. In other words, what could have developed as a powerful critique of warfare as national policy is contained through the image of illness and rehabilitation, an image in which "'healing' is privileged over 'purpose' [and] the rhetoric of recovery and reintegration subverts the emergence of rhetoric that seeks to examine the reasons that recovery is even necessary" (Ehrenhaus 1993:83). Constituent and distinctive features of narratives make them particularly potent forms of social control and ideological penetration and homogenization. In part, their potency derives from the fact that narratives put "forth powerful and persuasive truth claims — claims about appropriate behavior and values — that are shielded from testing or debate" (Witten 1993:105). Performative features of narrative such as repetition, vivid concrete details, particularity of characters, and coherence of plot silence epistemological challenges and often generate emotional identification and commitment. Because narratives make implicit rather than explicit claims regarding causality and truth as they are dramatized in particular events regarding specific characters, stories elude challenges, testing, or debate. Van Dijk (1993) has reported, for instance, that stories containing negative images and stereotypes of nonwhite persons are less subject to the charge of racism when they recount personal experiences and particular events. Whereas a general claim that a certain group is inferior or dangerous might be contested on empirical grounds, an individual story about being mugged, a story which includes an incidental reference to the nonwhite race of the assailant, communicates a similar message but under

the protected guise of simply stating the "facts." The causal significance or relevance of the assailant's race is, in such a tale, strongly implied but not subject to challenge or falsifiability. Thus representations, true and/or false, made implicitly without either validation or contest, are routinely exchanged in social interactions and thereby occupy social space. Third, narratives contribute to hegemony to the extent that they conceal the social organization of their production and plausibility . Narratives embody general understandings of the world that by their deployment and repetition come to constitute and sustain the life-world. Yet because narratives depict specific persons existing in particular social, physical, and historical locations, those general understandings often remain unacknowledged. By failing to make these manifest, narratives draw on unexamined assumptions and causal claims without displaying these assumptions and claims or laying them open to challenge or testing. Thus, as narratives depict understandings of particular persons and events, they reproduce, without exposing, the connections of the specific story and persons to the structure of relations and institutions that made the story plausible. To the extent that the hegemonic is "that order of signs and practices, relations and distinctions, images and epistemologies … that come to be taken-for-granted as the natural and received shape of the world and everything that inhabits it" (Comaroff & Comaroff 1991), the unarticulated and unexamined plausibility is the story's contribution to hegemony. The following two examples drawn from recent sociolegal research illustrate the ways in which legally organized narrativity helps produce the taken-for-granted and naturalized world by effacing the connections between the particular and the general. Sara Cobb (1992) examines the processes through which women's stories of violence are "domesticated" (tamed and normalized) within mediation sessions. Cobb reports that the domestication of women's stories of violence are a consequence of the organization of the setting in which they are told: within mediation, the storyteller and her audience are situated within a normative organization that recognizes the values of narrative participation over any substantive moral or epistemological code or standard. Being denied access to any external standards, the stories the women tell cannot therefore be adjudged true or compelling. The stories are interpreted as one version of a situation in which "multiple perspectives are possible." Cobb demonstrates how this particular context of elicitation specifically buries and silences stories of violence, effectively reproducing women's relative powerlessness within their families. With women deprived of the possibility of corroboration by the norms of the mediation session, their stories of violence are minimized and "disappeared." As a consequence, the individual woman can get little relief from the situation that brought her to mediation: she is denied an individual legal remedy (by being sent from court to mediation) and at the same time denied access to and connections with any collective understanding of or response to the sorts of violence acknowledged by the law (through the organization of the mediation process). Through this process, "violence, as a disruption of the moral order in a community, is made familiar (of the family) and natural — the extraordinary is tamed, drawn into the place where we eat, sleep and [is] made ordinary" (ibid., p. 19). Whereas mediation protects narratives from an interrogation of their truth claims, other, formal legal processes are deliberately organized to adjudicate truth claims. Yet even in these settings, certain types of truth claims are disqualified and thus shielded from examination and scrutiny. The strong preference of courts for individual narratives operates to impede the expression (and validation) of truth claims that are not easily represented through a particular story. Consider, for example, the Supreme Court's decision in the McClesky case (1986). The defendant, a black man who had been convicted of the murder of a police officer, was sentenced to death. His Supreme Court appeal of the death sentence was based on his claim that the law had been applied in a racially discriminatory way, thus denying him equal protection under the law. As part of McClesky's appeal, David Baldus, a social scientist, submitted an amicus brief in which he reported the results of his analysis of 2,000 homicide cases in that state (Baldus 1990). The statistical data revealed that black defendants convicted of killing white citizens were significantly more likely to receive the death sentence than white defendants convicted of killing a black victim. Despite this evidence of racial discrimination, the Court did not overturn McClesky's death sentence. The majority decision, in an opinion written by Justice Powell, stated that the kind of statistical evidence submitted by Baldus was simply not sufficient to establish that any racial discrimination occurred in this particular case. The court

declared, instead, that to demonstrate racial discrimination, it would be necessary to establish that the jury, or the prosecutor, acted with discriminatory purpose in sentencing McClesky.[ 11] Here, then, an unambiguous pattern of racial inequity was sustained through the very invocation of and demand for subjectivity (the jury's or prosecutor's state of mind) and particularity (the refusal to interpret this case as part of a larger category of cases) that are often embodied in narratives. In this instance, relative powerlessness and injustice (if one is to believe Baldus's data) were preserved, rather than challenged, by the demand for a particular narrative about specific concrete individuals whose interactions were bounded in time and space. In other words, the Court held that the legally cognizable explanation of the defendant's conviction could not be a product of inferential or deductive comprehension (Mink 1970; Bruner 1986). Despite its best efforts, the defense was denied discursive access to the generalizing, and authoritative, language of social logico-deductive science and with it the type of "truths" it is capable of representing. The court insists on a narrative that effaces the relationship between the particular and the general, between this case and other capital trials in Georgia. Further, the McClesky decision illustrates not only how the demand for narrative particularity may reinscribe relative powerlessness by obscuring the connection between the individual case and larger patterns of institutional behavior; it also reveals how conventionalized legal procedures impede the demonstration of that connection.[ 12] The court simultaneously demanded evidence of the jurors' states of mind and excluded such evidence. Because jury deliberations are protected from routine scrutiny and evaluation, the majority demanded a kind of proof that is institutionally unavailable. Thus, in the McClesky decision, by insisting on a narrative of explicit articulated discrimination, the court calls for a kind of narrative truth that court procedures institutionally impede. As these examples suggest, a reliance on or demand for narrativity is neither unusual nor subversive within legal settings. In fact, given the ideological commitment to individualized justice and case-by-case processing that characterizes our legal system, narrative, relying as it often does on the language of the particular and subjective, may more often operate to sustain, rather than subvert, inequality and injustice . The law's insistent demand for personal narratives achieves a kind of radical individuation that disempowers the teller by effacing the connections among persons and the social organization of their experiences. This argument is borne out if we consider that being relieved of the necessity, and costs, of telling a story can be seen as liberatory and collectively empowering. Insofar as particular and subjective narratives reinforce a view of the world made up of autonomous individuals interacting only in immediate and local ways, they may hobble collective claims and solutions to social inequities (Silbey 1984). In fact, the progressive achievements of workers' compensation, no-fault divorce, no-fault auto insurance, strict liability, and some consumer protection regimes derive directly from the provision of legal remedies without the requirement to produce an individually crafted narrative of right and liability.

Generic

Narratives cannot predict the outcome of the situation which kills all solvencyThomas J Kaplan 1993 “The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning” Duke University Press Page 181 The second objection to the use of narrativity suggests that narrative statements can never apply to the future. Analytical philosophers such as Arthur Danto have shown convincingly that the narrative structure can explain why events occurred at the same time that they describe what has occurred. In the process, however, narratives apply logically only to the past. 35 This is because in order for a sentence to be truly part of a narrative, the narrator must know something that the character he describes did not know—namely, how the story comes out in the end. A sentence like “The author of the Emancipation Proclamation was born in 1809” is thus quintessentially narrative. Nancy Hanks Lincoln could not have known at the time she gave birth to Abraham what the author of this sentence knew.

Narratives are too simplistic to be useful for understanding foreign policy.Dowdall 12{Jonathan Dowdall, works for the UK Joint Delegation at NATO, “Do Stories Help or Hinder Our Understanding of Foreign Affairs?”, Policymic, online at http://www.policymic.com/articles/3290/do-stories-help-or-hinder-our-understanding-of-foreign-affairs, accessed 07/09/13} A.S.Understandings of “narrative” vary, but the basic concept is that peoples’ understanding of the world can be broken down into the stories they tell. Stories and narrative are the cognitive means by which people understand events — the mental progressions along which we define ourselves, our beliefs, and our policies. This is a necessary “short-hand” technique for understanding the world. It helps a wider audience appreciate global issues and understand how to handle them. However, relying on narratives does have some drawbacks. An excellent speech by Tyler Cowen from 2009 explores this issue, and raises three reasons why relying too heavily on narrative can be dangerous. Firstly, narratives tend to be too simple. They fall into archetypes — such as “good vs. evil,” or “a battle.” The problem is, the world is rarely that simple, and this can have dangerous consequences. For example, after 9/11 the Bush administration created a very simple story: the War on Terror. It spoke of “bad guys” in the Middle East and “good guys” in the U.S. military who would stop them. Yet, the complexities of regional power dynamics, or modern perceptions of the U.S. in the Islamic world, or the basic discussion of whether intervention was even a good idea were lost in this narrative. It was a good, understandable story, but arguably bad policy. Another problem with relying on stories is that you can tell only so many. People will often use one particular narrative to justify a position and will then be unable to deviate from that view. For instance, you may argue that U.S. cooperation with Saudi Arabia must change because of that country’s harsh interpretation of Shariah law. Issues of oil reliance, or regional balance of power, or the like, cannot break this narrative in the viewer’s mind. Yet, the reality of the modern world is that it is multi-polar, interconnected, often morally ambiguous. States which execute “bad” laws are often simultaneously global trade partners, or fellow voters on a mutually beneficial UN resolution. There are usually a series of contradictory stories in any foreign policy issue, and this should urge caution about falling onto any single explanation. Finally, narrative can be too convincing. In short, good stories can manipulate us. Anyone who has listened to an impassioned speech — even if it is completely incorrect — will attest to the power of a good story to convince. Such manipulation has led to some of the worst crimes in

human history - such as anti-Semitic narratives about global wealth during the Holocaust. Clearly, if a narrative justifies an extreme position, we have to think very carefully about the stories we are using. GOP candidates calling for an invasion of Iran — which most other pundits declare a terrible foreign policy idea — certainly spring to mind. The conclusion? Narratives are a natural and necessary human mechanism for understanding the world, but they cannot be relied upon too heavily. Foreign policy is complex, and may require the practitioner to engage in deeper analysis, or to weigh up contradictory viewpoints simultaneously. Often, it will require a compromise that “ruins” any simple story. When news broke Monday of the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, the question many horrified Americans most wanted to answer was, “Who was the shooter?”

Individualistic approaches hinder effective public policy.Goss 07{Kristin A. Goss, assistant professor of public-policy studies and political science at the Sanford Institute of Public Policy, “Bad Public Policy Contributes To The Death Count”, published April 18 2007, Duke Sanford; school of public policy, online at http://news.sanford.duke.edu/news-type/commentary/2007/bad-public-policy-contributes-death-count, accessed 07/09/13} A.S.The assumption that we can make policy based on individual stories is dangerous because, for a variety of reasons, individual stories call our attention to factors that make those cases unique, not factors that tie them together. What ties these massacres together is guns. In the immediate aftermath of the Virginia Tech killings, before the gunman was publicly named, speculation swirled about his identity and motives. He was rumored to be, alternately, a lone gunman with no known ties to the university; a jealous boyfriend seeking revenge on his girlfriend; a disgruntled former student seeking revenge against the university; or a Chinese national possibly bent on harming America. Yesterday we learned that the gunman was a troubled 23-year-old South Korean national who was also a resident student at Virginia Tech. Important as that information may be to law-enforcement officers piecing together the crime, it’s hard to see how those details help us frame meaningful policy to prevent further shootings. Understanding an assailant’s motives or his place in the social order tells us very little about what to do next. And yet we persist in analyzing these massacres in terms of the unique stories of the individual perpetrators: the South Korean immigrant loner at Virginia Tech; the psychologically haunted milk-truck driver at the Amish school last year; the white supremacist at the California day-care center in 1999; the alienated “Trenchcoat Mafia” at Columbine High School eight years ago. Why do we understand these events as dark tales of deranged individuals? Part of the answer is that human beings need to make sense of senseless events, and narratives help us do so. The stories we construct tend to reassure us that such traumatic events won't happen to us -- that the event was an “isolated incident,” perpetrated by a “one nut” in circumstances that don’t apply to our lives. But there may be particular reasons why Americans, more than people from other nations, are especially likely to construct narratives that revolve around individuals as both villains and heroes. For one, individualism is deeply ingrained in our political culture -- the set of assumptions drummed into us by the nation-building stories we learned as schoolchildren and by the Constitution, which enshrines individual rights and liberties as the foundation of our democracy. Our individualistic political culture is nowhere more apparent than in debates over firearms. After all, our founding myths -- musket-bearing citizen militias overthrowing a distant tyrant, rugged frontiersmen who made the nation great -- revolve around guns. So does the Second Amendment to the Constitution. Our cultural predilection to understand public events in terms of individuals is reinforced by the news

media, which are in the business of constructing and selling narratives. By focusing on an individual, whether as hero or villain, journalists can condense complex information into a format, the dramatic story, that busy readers or viewers can quickly grasp. Good stories are good business. Yet recognizing the power of stories about heroes and villains does not mean that these stories are a solid foundation for public policy. The problem is nowhere more apparent than in the case of school shootings. In 2002 the U.S. Secret Service conducted a comprehensive analysis of all such shootings from 1974 through 2000 -- a total of 37 incidents, with 41 assailants. Among the report’s most striking findings: “There is no ‘profile’ of a school shooter; instead, the students who carried out the attacks differed from one another in numerous ways.” In other words, focusing on individual traits would have told us nothing about how to construct policies to prevent such shootings from happening in the future. Indeed, portraying public problems in terms of individual stories may actually hinder effective policy responses. In a 1990 study, the political scientist Shanto Iyengar, of Stanford University, found that, when news-media stories about poverty spotlight poor individuals, viewers are far likelier to hold the poor person responsible for his plight than when the media spotlight structural forces, such as unemployment in the manufacturing sector. A logical implication of this study is that focusing on individual woes may curtail important debates about collective solutions to poverty.

Rhetoric of personal stories is used to distract from actual evidence.McDonough 2000{John E. McDonough, associate professor at the Heller School at Brandeis University and former health committee chairman in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, “Using And Misusing Anecdote In Policy Making”, published 2000, Health Affairs, online at http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/20/1/207.full, accessed 07/09/13} A.S.These two encounters illustrate both the value and harm of relying on storytelling in making public policy. Stories can enable lawmakers to understand a legitimate need for policy change but just as readily can lead them to make bad policy decisions. Stories can bring to life drab data analyses, helping us to visualize problems and opportunities for change. But stories also can lead us down wasteful and dangerous paths and blind us to uncomfortable uncomfortable truths we would prefer to ignore, like the fact that there yet is no easy cure for breast cancer. It comes as no surprise, then, that almost as common as using narrative and anecdote in policy making is criticizing them. Former Minnesota state legislator Lee Greenfield often remarks that one compelling anecdote (true or false) at a crucial moment in a floor debate can vaporize a mountain of data and careful policy analysis.

Genealogy

Genealogy Good

Generic

Genealogical interrogation lays the groundwork for everyday activity and can create broad change.Medina 11Medina 11 (Jose Medina, October 2011, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt, Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance: Counter-Memory, Epistemic Friction, and Guerrilla Pluralism, 6/26/12,K.H.)

As Foucault puts it, ‚it is the coupling together of the buried scholarly knowledge and knowledges that were disqualified by the hierarchy of erudition and sciences‛ that gives strength to genealogical critique.34 What both of these forms of subjugated knowledges brings to the fore is the ‚historical knowledge of struggles, ‛ ‚the memory of combats, the very memory that had until then been confined to the mar-gins. ‛ 35 And this is exactly what the critical and transformative work of genealogical investigations consists in, according to Foucault: with the ‚coupling together of scholarly erudition and local memories,‛ genealogical investigations provide ‚a meticulous rediscovery of struggles and the raw memory of fights‛; ‚this coupling *<+ allows us to constitute a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of that knowledge in contemporary tactics.‛36 Genealogical investigations can unearth multiple paths from buried or forgotten past struggles to the present; and thus they can promote a critical awareness that things are as they are because of a history of past struggles that are hidden from view, which can have a great impact on how we confront our struggles in the present. As McWhorter’s genealogical investigations il-lustrate so well, ‚one consequence of that awareness is the recognition that today’s status quo was far from inevitable and need not persist into tomorrow. ‛37 Genea-logies are insurrections against hegemonic power/knowledge effects of discursive practices. Thus, for example, McWhorter’s genealogical account of racism in the US is ‚an intellectual assault on the power-effects of institutionalized, entrenched, and taken-for-granted academic, clinical, moralistic, and religious discourses about ra-cism.‛38 And it is important to note that the possibilities of critique that are opened up by unearthing marginalized past struggles benefit not only those whose expe-riences and lives have been kept in the dark, but the entire social body, which can now become critically conscious of the heterogeneity of histories and experiences that are part of the social fabric. This is why McWhorter’s genealogy of racism makes racial oppression relevant in novel and unexpected ways to a wide variety of groups and publics that can now relate to old struggles in new ways.39

Solves Oppression

The genealogical methodology is a system by which pluralism flourishes and is therefore preferable to any other methodology to solve the white exceptionalism in the squo. What genealogy does is it focuses on subjugated knowledges as well as mainstream ones and compares them therefore opening up an opportunity where racism can be nullified.Medina 11(Jose Medina, October 2011, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt, Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance: Counter-Memory, Epistemic Friction, and Guerrilla Pluralism, 6/26/12, K.H.)

The central goal of this paper is to show the emancipatory potential of the epistemological framework underlying Foucault’s work. More specifically, I will try to show that the Foucaultian approach places practices of remembering and for-getting in the context of power relations in such a way that possibilities of resistance and subversion are brought to the fore. When our cultural practices of remembering and forgetting are interrogated as loci where multiple power relations and power struggles converge, the first thing to notice is the heterogeneity of differently situ-ated perspectives and the multiplicity of trajectories that converge in the epistemic negotiations in which memories are formed or de-formed, maintained alive or killed. The discursive practices in which memory and oblivion are manufactured are not uniform and harmonious, but heterogeneous and full of conflicts and tensions. Foucault invites us to pay attention to the past and ongoing epistemic battles among competing power/knowledge frameworks that try to control a given field. Different 2 Ibid. 95. Foucault Studies, No. 12, pp. 9-35. 11 fields—or domains of discursive interaction—contain particular discursive regimes with their particular ways of producing knowledge. In the battle among power/ knowledge frameworks, some come on top and become dominant while others are displaced and become subjugated. Foucault’s methodology offers a way of exploiting that vibrant plurality of epistemic perspectives which always contains some bodies of experiences and memories that are erased or hidden in the mainstream frame-works that become hegemonic after prevailing in sustained epistemic battles. What Foucault calls subjugated knowledges3 are forms of experiencing and remembering that are pushed to the margins and rendered unqualified and unworthy of epistemic respect by prevailing and hegemonic discourses.

Solves Racism

Genealogies are specifically helpful in combating racism and hegemonic supremacy because of its ability to transform ideas based on perspectives.Medina 11(Jose Medina, October 2011, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt, Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance: Counter-Memory, Epistemic Friction, and Guerrilla Pluralism, 6/26/12,K.H.)

Subjugated knowledges remain invisible to mainstream perspectives; they have a precarious subterranean existence that renders them unnoticed by most people and impossible to detect by those whose perspective has already internalized certain epistemic exclusions. And with the invisibility of subjugated knowledges, certain possibilities for resistance and subversion go unnoticed. The critical and emancipa-tory potential of Foucaultian genealogy resides in challenging established practices of remembering and forgetting by excavating subjugated bodies of experiences and memories, bringing to the fore the perspectives that culturally hegemonic practices have foreclosed. The critical task of the scholar and the activist is to resurrect subju-gated knowledges—that is, to revive hidden or forgotten bodies of experiences and memories—and to help produce insurrections of subjugated knowledges.4 In order to be critical and to have transformative effects, genealogical investigations should aim at these insurrections, which are critical interventions that disrupt and interrogate epistemic hegemonies and mainstream perspectives (e.g. official histories, standard interpretations, ossified exclusionary meanings, etc). Such insurrections involve the difficult labor of mobilizing scattered, marginalized publics and of tapping into the critical potential of their dejected experiences and memories. An epistemic insur-rection requires a collaborative relation between genealogical scholars/activists and the subjects whose experiences and memories have been subjugated: those subjects by themselves may not be able to destabilize the epistemic status quo until they are given a voice at the epistemic table (i.e. in the production of knowledge), that is, until room is made for their marginalized perspective to exert resistance, until past epistemic battles are reopened and established frameworks become open to con-testation. On the other hand, the scholars and activists aiming to produce insurrec-tionary interventions could not get their critical activity off the ground if they did not draw on past and ongoing contestations, and the lived experiences and memo- 3 See esp. Michel Foucault, ‚Society Must Be Defended” (New York: Picador, 2003), 7-9. 4 See Foucault, ‚Society Must be Defended,” 9, where he introduces and explains the notion of ‚the insurrection of subjugated knowledges‛ that genealogical investigations should aim at. In sec-tion 1 I explain the relationship between critical genealogy and ‚the insurrection of subjugated knowledges. ‛ Medina: Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance 12 ries of those whose marginalized lives have become the silent scars of forgotten struggles.2

Unified histories = preserve those in power. Genealogical tellings of history can interrupt narratives that maintain racial superiority. Medina 11(Jose Medina, October 2011, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt, Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance: Counter-Memory, Epistemic Friction, and Guerrilla Pluralism, 6/26/12,K.H.)

Official histories are produced by monopolizing knowledge-producing prac-tices with respect to a shared past. Official histories create and maintain the unity and continuity of a political body by imposing an interpretation on a shared past and, at the same time, by silencing alternative interpretations of historical experien-ces. Counter-histories try to undo these silences and to undermine the unity and continuity that official histories produce. Foucault illustrates this with what he calls ‚the discourse of race war ‛ that emerged in early modernity as a discourse of resis-tance for the liberation of a race against the oppression of another, e.g. of the Saxons under the yoke of the Normans. Foucault argues that in Europe—and especially in England—‚this discourse of race war functioned as a counter-history‛8 until the end of the 19th Century, at which point it was turned into a racist discourse (aimed not at the liberation of an oppressed race, but at the supremacy of an allegedly superior race that views all others as an existential threat). In lecture IV of ‚Society Must Be Defended” Foucault sets out to analyze the ‚counterhistorical function ‛ of the race-war discourse in early modernity.9 Part of what the race-war discourse did was to retrieve the untold history of a people which could be used as a weapon against the official history that legitimized their oppression. This counter-history tapped into the subversive power of a silenced historical experience and reactivated the past to create distinctive knowledge/power effects: new meanings and normative attitudes were mobilized, so that what was officially presented as past glorious victories that legitimized monarchs and feudal lords as the rightful owners of the land to whom taxes were owed, now appeared as unfair defeats at the hands of abusive conquerors who became oppressors and had to be overthrown.

Solves Whiteness

In order to truly understand the concept of the black body we must view it in the historical perspective of racial experiences that constitute whitenessYancy 2005(George Yancy Associate Professor of Philosophy, Duquesne University works primarily in the areas of critical philosophy of race, critical whiteness studies, and philosophy of the Black experience. 2005 Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 19.4 (2005) 215-241 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_speculative_philosophy/v019/19.4yancy.html accessed 6/27/12)

To theorize the Black body one must "turn to the [Black] body as the radix for interpreting racial experience" (Johnson [1993, 600]). 1 It is important to note that this particular strategy also functions as a lens through which to theorize and critique whiteness; for the Black body's "racial" experience is fundamentally linked to the oppressive modalities of the "raced" white body. However, there is no denying that my own "racial" experiences or the social performances of whiteness can become objects of critical reflection. In this paper, my objective is to describe and theorize situations where the Black body's subjectivity, its lived reality, is reduced to instantiations of the white imaginary, resulting in what I refer to as "the phenomenological return of the Black body."2 These instantiations are embedded within and evolve out of the complex social and historical interstices of whites' efforts at self-construction through complex acts of erasure vis-à-vis Black people. These acts of self-construction, however, are myths/ideological constructions predicated upon maintaining white power. As James Snead has noted, "Mythification is the replacement of history with a surrogate ideology of [white] elevation or [Black] demotion along a scale of human value" (Snead 1994, 4). How I understand and theorize the body relates to the fact that the body—in this case, the Black body—is capable of undergoing a sociohistorical process of "phenomenological return" vis-à-vis white embodiment. The body's meaning—whether phenotypically white or black—its ontology, its modalities of aesthetic performance, its comportment, its "raciated" reproduction, is in constant contestation. The hermeneutics of the body, how it is understood, how it is "seen," its "truth," is partly the result of a profound historical, ideological construction. "The body" is positioned by historical practices and discourses. The body is codified as this or that in terms of meanings that are sanctioned, scripted, and constituted through processes of negotiation that are embedded within and serve various ideological interests that are grounded within further power-laden social processes. The historical plasticity of the body, the fact that it is a site of contested meanings, speaks to the historicity of its "being" as lived and meantwithin the interstices of social semiotics. Hence: a) the body is less of a thing/being than a shifting/changing historical meaning that is subject to cultural configuration/reconfiguration. The point here is to interrogate the "Black body" as a "fixed and material truth" that preexists "its relations with the world and with others"3 ; b) the body's meaning is fundamentally symbolic (McDowell 2001, 301), and its meaning is congealed through symbolic repetition and iteration that emits certain signs and presupposes certain norms; and, c) the body is a battlefield, one that is fought over again and again across particular historical moments and within particular social spaces. "In other words, the concept of the body provides only the illusion of self-evidence, facticity, 'thereness' for something fundamentally ephemeral, imaginary, something made in the image of particular social groups" (301).

Genealogy Bad

1NC

1. The genealogy method is bad – it is tied to archaic forms of knowledge production based off of exclusionary Greek thought and is an ineffective method for educational activities like debate.Magrini 2009 (Magrini, James, currently completing his Doctorate of Philosophy of Education, "Aligning Nietzsche's "Genealogical" Philosophy With Democratic Educational Reform" (2009).PhilosophyScholarship.Paper 12., ¶ http://dc.cod.edu/philosophypub/12, accessed 6/2/13, JK)

Since it is impossible to divorce Nietzsche’s understanding of truth from the values that ¶ underlie it, and, considering Nietzsche was ultimately a conservative with respect to his ¶ conception of a national system of education, e.g., Nietzsche’s conception stems from the ancient ¶ Greek ideal (where misogyny, culturally elitism , phallo-centricism, and logo-centricism ruled the ¶ day), and most particularly from the “virtue-ethics” of Aristotle, it is difficult to rectify ¶ Nietzsche’s view with any contemporary notion of a liberal, democratic education. In closing, ¶ while Nietzsche’s perspectivism has certain implications for a notion of education that embraces ¶ a multiplicity of perspectives for experiencing knowledge and eschews any and all notions of ¶ objective, authoritarian notions of truth with a capital “T,” it is Nietzsche’s antiquated valuesystem, which can never be divorced from his epistemology, that poses the problem of ¶ incorporating his views into the movement for educational reform in this contemporary age. If ¶ we read Nietzsche closely and attempt to remain true to his philosophy, it is impossible to square ¶ him completely with the current movement for equitable and just educational reform in this everchanging, heterogeneous landscape.

2. Genealogies fracture current movements and can be co-opted by multinational corporations – we need collectively organized resistance. McIvor 10 (David, Kettering Foundation, Nov. 8, 2010, “The Politics of Speed: Connolly, Wolin, and the Prospects for Democratic Citizenship in an Accelerated Polity,” Polity, Vol. 43, http://www.palgrave-journals.com/polity/journal/v43/n1/full/pol201023a.html - oliver g)

However, Shapiro does not seem to entertain the possibility that such desynchronization might instead bring about more intense class and cultural stratification. This will , it is true, make the recognition of “contending co-presences” more frequent , as the life experiences of the rich and “the rest” desynchronize . Yet it may also make the “continuous renegotiation” of these co-presences more difficult and hence less certain. At the very least, Shapiro does not demonstrate why social centrifugalism and the “disruptions of economic and cultural times” contain “democratic” potential, or why exactly they should be celebrated—aside from the fact that they open up our political and cultural identities to new sources of inspiration and agon. Yet if political action remains, in Weber's phrase, the “slow boring of hard boards,” and if democracy is essentially concerned with equality, then Shapiro's reluctance to provide strategies of negotiation for an accelerating, pluralizing world undercuts his own normative/political vision . 25 Shapiro also does not adequately address the Deweyan anxiety that in the absence of an organized public (or multiple organized publics), concentrated economic powers will exert undue influence over public policy . Social centrifugalism or fragmentation is a fact, but, as Sheldon Wolin puts it, “some fragments are less fragmented than others … multiculturalism and multinational corporations are not equivalences . ”26 In a society of vast inequality of power and privilege, where influence is concentrated in cultural and economic elites and

punishment and privation are meted out to an increasingly permanent underclass, fragmentation requires an accompanying strategy of organization. Otherwise centrifugalism will perversely support a system it supposedly disrupts . Social speed begets pluralization, but it remains to be seen whether it serves a pluralistic democracy.

Genealogy is an ineffective method of combatting whiteness because it misunderstands how power operatesGunder 10 (Michael, University of Aucklands, New Zealand, “Planning as the ideology of (neoliberal) space,” Planning Theory 9: 298, http://plt.sagepub.com/content/9/4/298 - oliver g)

For Foucault, ideology is neither negative nor positive, ideology is coexistent with knowledge as practised; it is the use of ideology which determines its positivity or nega- tivity for social purposes (Sholle, 1988). Foucault (1980: 131) argues that every ‘society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth: that is, the type of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true’, and genealogy is the tool through which we can examine this truth and see ‘how we govern ourselves and others through its production’ (McCarthy, 1990: 443). This regime of truth is beyond simple ideology critique, for Foucault (1980: 133) the ‘political question . . . is not error, illusion, alienated conscious- ness or ideology; it is truth itself’. Accordingly, Foucault admonishes us to move on from a concept of ideology, or hegemony, as it still maintains the concept of sovereignty, be it a sovereignty of the people, an idea, or that of government (Doxiadis, 1997). Foucault argues for a move away from a legitimizing source of power. This is an argument consis- tent with that of Deleuze (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983) to do away with the societal shap- ing hegemony, or power, of transcendental ideals (Smith, 2007; Wood, 2009). I agree with the desires of Foucault and Deleuze to do away with the striating nature of authority – sovereign, religious or undefined sublime ideal – to shape societal action and direction. To that end I support the research regime of Hillier (2005, 2007, 2008) to propose a Deleuzian-derived multiplanar theory of spatial planning and governance. But, and this is a big but, we still reside in a global culture steeped in transcendent ideals of a better world, a world shaped by ideology, and I would suggest that we will likely continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Further, for Zizek (1999: 66), Foucault’s abandonment ‘of the problematic of ideology entails a fatal weakness’, for Foucault’s theorizing cannot explain the ‘concrete mechanism of the emergence’ of power; that is , he cannot bridge ‘the abyss that separates micro-procedures from the spectre of Power’ itself and its very materialization of causal effect within the world. That is, Foucault fails to ‘theorize the generative principle of sociosymbolic forma- tions’ (Vighi and Feldner, 2007: 142). Hence, an engagement with striating ideology is crucial to engaging with an understanding of contemporary spatial planning , gover- nance and wider society as to what hegemonically defines THE accepted truth. Indeed, McCarthy (1990) actually attributes Foucault’s genealogical project of discourse analy- sis to this very ideological agenda, even though Foucault disavows himself from the very act of ideological critique.

Genealogy Bad - Generic

The genealogy method is bad – it is tied to archaic forms of knowledge production based off of exclusionary Greek thought and is a poor choice for education reform. Magrini 2009 (Magrini, James, currently completing his Doctorate of Philosophy of Education, "Aligning Nietzsche's "Genealogical" Philosophy With Democratic Educational Reform" (2009).PhilosophyScholarship.Paper 12., ¶ http://dc.cod.edu/philosophypub/12, accessed 6/2/13, JK)

Since it is impossible to divorce Nietzsche’s understanding of truth from the values that ¶ underlie it, and, considering Nietzsche was ultimately a conservative with respect to his ¶ conception of a national system of education, e.g., Nietzsche’s conception stems from the ancient ¶ Greek ideal (where misogyny, culturally elitism, phallo-centricism, and logo-centricism ruled the ¶ day), and most particularly from the “virtue-ethics” of Aristotle, it is difficult to rectify ¶ Nietzsche’s view with any contemporary notion of a liberal, democratic education. In closing, ¶ while Nietzsche’s perspectivism has certain implications for a notion of education that embraces ¶ a multiplicity of perspectives for experiencing knowledge and eschews any and all notions of ¶ objective, authoritarian notions of truth with a capital “T,” it is Nietzsche’s antiquated valuesystem, which can never be divorced from his epistemology, that poses the problem of ¶ incorporating his views into the movement for educational reform in this contemporary age. If ¶ we read Nietzsche closely and attempt to remain true to his philosophy, it is impossible to square ¶ him completely with the current movement for equitable and just educational reform in this everchanging, heterogeneous landscape.

Co-opted by Coorporation

Genealogies fracture current movements and can be co-opted by multinational corporations – we need collectively organized resistance. McIvor 10 (David, Kettering Foundation, Nov. 8, 2010, “The Politics of Speed: Connolly, Wolin, and the Prospects for Democratic Citizenship in an Accelerated Polity,” Polity, Vol. 43, http://www.palgrave-journals.com/polity/journal/v43/n1/full/pol201023a.html - oliver g)

However, Shapiro does not seem to entertain the possibility that such desynchronization might instead bring about more intense class and cultural stratification. This will, it is true, make the recognition of “contending co-presences” more frequent, as the life experiences of the rich and “the rest” desynchronize. Yet it may also make the “continuous renegotiation” of these co-presences more difficult and hence less certain. At the very least, Shapiro does not demonstrate why social centrifugalism and the “disruptions of economic and cultural times” contain “democratic” potential, or why exactly they should be celebrated—aside from the fact that they open up our political and cultural identities to new sources of inspiration and agon. Yet if political action remains, in Weber's phrase, the “slow boring of hard boards,” and if democracy is essentially concerned with equality, then Shapiro's reluctance to provide strategies of negotiation for an accelerating, pluralizing world undercuts his own normative/political vision.25 Shapiro also does not adequately address the Deweyan anxiety that in the absence of an organized public (or multiple organized publics), concentrated economic powers will exert undue influence over public policy. Social centrifugalism or fragmentation is a fact, but, as Sheldon Wolin puts it, “some fragments are less fragmented than others … multiculturalism and multinational corporations are not equivalences.”26 In a society of vast inequality of power and privilege, where influence is concentrated in cultural and economic elites and punishment and privation are meted out to an increasingly permanent underclass, fragmentation requires an accompanying strategy of organization. Otherwise centrifugalism will perversely support a system it supposedly disrupts. Social speed begets pluralization, but it remains to be seen whether it serves a pluralistic democracy.

Misunderstands Power

Genealogy is an ineffective method of combatting whiteness because Foucault misunderstands how power operatesGunder 10 (Michael, University of Aucklands, New Zealand, “Planning as the ideology of (neoliberal) space,” Planning Theory 9: 298, http://plt.sagepub.com/content/9/4/298 - oliver g)

For Foucault, ideology is neither negative nor positive, ideology is coexistent with knowledge as practised; it is the use of ideology which determines its positivity or nega- tivity for social purposes (Sholle, 1988). Foucault (1980: 131) argues that every ‘society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth: that is, the type of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true’, and genealogy is the tool through which we can examine this truth and see ‘how we govern ourselves and others through its production’ (McCarthy, 1990: 443). This regime of truth is beyond simple ideology critique, for Foucault (1980: 133) the ‘political question . . . is not error, illusion, alienated conscious- ness or ideology; it is truth itself’. Accordingly, Foucault admonishes us to move on from a concept of ideology, or hegemony, as it still maintains the concept of sovereignty, be it a sovereignty of the people, an idea, or that of government (Doxiadis, 1997). Foucault argues for a move away from a legitimizing source of power. This is an argument consis- tent with that of Deleuze (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983) to do away with the societal shap- ing hegemony, or power, of transcendental ideals (Smith, 2007; Wood, 2009). I agree with the desires of Foucault and Deleuze to do away with the striating nature of authority – sovereign, religious or undefined sublime ideal – to shape societal action and direction. To that end I support the research regime of Hillier (2005, 2007, 2008) to propose a Deleuzian-derived multiplanar theory of spatial planning and governance. But, and this is a big but, we still reside in a global culture steeped in transcendent ideals of a better world, a world shaped by ideology, and I would suggest that we will likely continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Further, for Zizek (1999: 66), Foucault’s abandonment ‘of the problematic of ideology entails a fatal weakness’, for Foucault’s theorizing cannot explain the ‘concrete mechanism of the emergence’ of power; that is, he cannot bridge ‘the abyss that separates micro-procedures from the spectre of Power’ itself and its very materialization of causal effect within the world. That is, Foucault fails to ‘theorize the generative principle of sociosymbolic forma- tions’ (Vighi and Feldner, 2007: 142). Hence, an engagement with striating ideology is crucial to engaging with an understanding of contemporary spatial planning, gover- nance and wider society as to what hegemonically defines THE accepted truth. Indeed, McCarthy (1990) actually attributes Foucault’s genealogical project of discourse analy- sis to this very ideological agenda, even though Foucault disavows himself from the very act of ideological critique.

Symbolic Violence

Good

Solves Latin America

Fanon’s philosophy of race has spurred major social movements already in Latin America, Latin Americans have already started to take their rights back and decolonialize their own centers. The pedagogy learned from his philosophies however are virtually unused in America, even by the left, and our education on issues of race and reclaiming it have been stunted.Frantz Fanon Foundation 2011 (Reflections from the Personal and from Latin America Today, “The Political-Pedagogical Force of Fanon and the Wretched of the Earth.”, Frantz Fanon Foundation, November 5th 2011, http://frantzfanonfoundation-fondationfrantzfanon.com/?p=1176, Accessed 7/4/13, JK)Today’s event is to commemorate the fifty years since Frantz Fanon’s passing and since the publication of his Wretched of the Earth. One way to celebrate not just the legacy and importance of Fanon, but his continuing presence, is to give testimony to how his thought, work, and praxis have impacted us and how they continue to live on today. That is, how they push in each of one of us forms of struggle, learning, unlearning and relearning, and transformation in our heads, in our souls and hearts, and on the ground.¶ It is from this perspective and stance that I wish to share some reflections with regard to the political-pedagogical force of Frantz Fanon in my own life and formation over the last 40 years, and in the context of the lived processes of decolonization and social transformation occurring in Latin America today.¶ My first political-pedagogical encounter with Fanon was in 1971, soon after the English translation of Wretched of the Earth became available. This text became the guiding tool to stimulate discussion and debate between the SDS-Students’ for a Democratic Society chapter I was involved with at the time and a cell of the Black Panthers.¶ Our collective reading of Fanon brought to the fore the constitutive role of race and dehumanization in colonial-imperial struggles, something that the traditional Left in the United States and elsewhere, neglected to see and consider in it’s thought and actions then, but also, one could argue, continues to be neglected in large part today. The text forced people to define their position and commitment; while many chose to negate Fanon’s admonishments, a few, like myself, found meaning in his arguments and consequence in his political-pedagogical challenge. I refer here not only to the unlearning and relearning required in decolonization and social transformation, but also the unlearning and relearning required in addressing white privilege and in working in alliance and co-struggle.¶ Fanon and the Wretched of the Earth pushed me to define my position, to begin to confront at the personal and socio-political levels the defining role of race, and move toward a commitment and stance that, over the years, has come to be crucial in defining and shaping my self and my life project.¶ My second political-pedagogical encounter with Fanon and this text was in the 1980s, in the context of collaborative work with the Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire. Others and myself were able to negotiate with Harvard University, where Paulo was at the time (living and teaching in exile), for him to spend a semester a year for three years at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst where I was finishing my doctorate and teaching. During this period, I had the privilege of working closely with Paulo, co-facilitating with him dialogic seminars with Puerto Rican activists, students, and community members where Wretched of the Earth was a central text.¶ It was through Paulo’s re-reading of Fanon, and in the context of understanding the colonial condition of Puerto Ricans in the U.S., that he began to rethink out loud his Pedagogy of the Oppressed. A rethinking reflected in his last books: Pedagogy of Hope and Pedagogy of Indignation in which he also comes to re-see Brazil as an African nation, but in which he much more clearly and directly dialogues with Frantz Fanon.¶ Those who have read Pedagogy of the Oppressed may recall Freire’s somewhat timid citing of Fanon. Here, Freire assumed that his “oppressed” and Fanon’s

“damnes” or “wretched of the earth” were one and the same. Yet the readings done in the context of the politics of US communities of color, and most specifically of Puerto Ricans as colonial subjects, and after an important lived experience in Guinea Bissau, pushed distinct political-pedagogical imperatives in Freire; the intertwine of race-racialization and dehumanization began to take on a new significance. This experience still remains vivid. For me, the simultaneous dialogue with Freire, Fanon and with the community remains a central pillar in my own political-pedagogical formation. Here, Fanon’s force as a pedagogue became much more apparent to me.¶ The third political-pedagogical encounter is much more recent and comes in the context of Latin America, and most specifically Ecuador, where I have lived for the past 17 years, accompanying social movements and the struggles and processes of and for change. In this place, Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth affords important lessons today not only for decolonization but also for, and in a related sense, rethinking the national question.¶ In 2008 Ecuador initiated a historic project of rethinking and refounding society, nation, and State. The formation of a national Constituent Assembly made up, not of political parties or elected party officials, but members of civil society interested in and committed to profound change, pushed forth a new radical Constitution that names a plurinational and intercultural State. In the surrounding debates and discussions, some of which I was privy to as an invitee to the Assembly and as a member of an unofficial advisory team to an Afroecuadorian assembly woman, the question of the national was central. The consideration of Afroecuadorians within the past and present national project was of particular significance given the fact that Afrodescendants had no official recognition in Ecuador until 1998; their humanity and existence was, beginning with the system of kidnapping and enslavement until very recent times, continually put in doubt and subject to negation.¶ In this context, Fanon and the Wretched of the Earth once again are of political-pedagogical utility. The reading and re-reading of this text affords ever-new insights on revolutionary projects, the national as question and project, and on decolonization as a continual process of learning, unlearning, relearning. Its reading, for example, by Afroecuadorian lawyers in a class I just recently taught on the application of Afro rights in light of the new Constitution and the plurinational intercultural State, was crucial in raising once again the concern of dehumanization and its interrelation with the structures of race, racism and racialization, constitutive elements of the coloniality of power still present. Photocopies of his text circulate among Afro leaders and activists, Fanon not as an “iconic” figure or referent, but again as a political-pedagogical guide, facilitator, and tool useful for “reading” and comprehending the struggles and processes of the present, where the past and future are, without a doubt, inextricably intertwined. As Fanon the pedagogue once said: “to unlearn that imposed and assumed through colonization and dehumanization, and the relearning to be men and women.” Fanon in this context is one of the elders.¶ It is the pedagogy of Frantz Fanon and Frantz Fanon as a pedagogue that I wish to recall today. A pedagogy and a pedagogical stance that, in essence and foundation, are of the decolonial; a decolonial pedagogy of sorts grounded in three key processes and components:¶ In affirmation and in articulation as a form of co-relationality that pushes a thinking and acting “from” and “with”; ¶ In humanization as liberation, as the constructing of a radically different collective existence -or “re-existence” as the Afrocolombian Adofo Albán has described it-, all of which point to decolonizing visions, philosophies, and practices of LIFE and living;¶ In collective hope and love, two components so central to Frantz Fanon’s work, so necessary for radical nation building, and so central to a decolonial project. ¶ In the fifty years since Fanon’s passing to the other side and since the first publication of the Wretched of the Earth, both continue to live on, challenging us to not give up, to not become complacent, and to take arms, albeit symbolic, social, political, epistemic, and most of all pedagogical ones. Fanon, the decolonial pedagogue, Fanon the elder whose words continue to guide and challenge us in the path to unlearn and relearn, to think and act from and with the struggles still present today for humanization, liberation, and decolonization.

NB: Ontological Denial DAMethods that ignore symbolic violence deny non-whites an ontology and put them in the “hellish zone of nonbeing”. This categorizes them as below-otherness, in need of our assistance in order to have any worth. Symbolic violence is key to stop this denial because it doesn’t wait for them to be recognized, the oppressed instead force themselves to be known. Ciccariello-Maher 2010(George, a Ph.D Candidate in political theory at the University of California, “Jumpstarting the Decolonial Engine: Symbolic Violence from Fanon to Chávez”, Project Muse, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v013/13.1.ciccariello-maher.html, 2010, accessed 7/4/13, JK)

In his seminal first book Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon sets out to analyze the structure of anti-Black racism and how best to confront it. Operating within-but-against a Hegelian framework (as he also operates within-but-against both psychoanalysis and phenomenology), Fanon identifies what he deems the fundamental barrier to inter-racial recognition: racialized subjects, according to Fanon, lack what he calls "ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man." 3 Black subjects are seen but not seen; they exist but they are not (human). This is what philosopher Lewis Gordon deems "the hellish zone of nonbeing," "a zone neither of appearance or disappearance." 4 Not only does this "below-Otherness" render politics—as publicity—impossible, but the same applies for ethics: "damnation means that the black (or better, the blackened) lives the irrelevance of innocence… the absence of a Self-Other dialectic in racist situations means the eradication of ethical relations. Where ethics is derailed, all is permitted."6 Racialization, put simply, creates a situation which lacks the necessary reciprocity for the Hegelian master-slave dialectic to operate.7 For equality to be contemplated, for the obligation to recognize the other to have any traction at all, racialized subjects must first seize access to ontology, storming the fortified heaven of being itself.¶ Turning more directly to Hegel's master-slave dialectic in an appendix to Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon concludes that, in the face of such ontological blockage, full humanity can only emerge through the effort to impose one's existence (as "subjective certainty") onto another (thereby converting it into "objective fact"). In this "quest of absoluteness," the resistance of the other yields desire, what Fanon calls "the first milestone on the road that leads to the dignity of the spirit."8 Desire, moreover, requires that I risk my life in conflict for the object of that desire, thereby pushing me beyond bare life and toward independent self-consciousness. Historically, however, the black slave has been granted her freedom by the former slaveholder, who "decided to promote the machine-animal-men to the supreme rank of men," and as a result access to full humanity—which can only appear by way of mutual and conflictual recognition—remained blocked:¶ "Say thank you to the nice man," the mother tells her little boy… but we know that often the little boy is dying to scream some other, more resounding expression…. The white man, in the capacity of master, said to the Negro, "From now on you are free." But the Negro knows nothing of the cost of freedom, for he has not fought for it… The former slave needs a challenge to his humanity, he wants a conflict, a riot. But it is too late. 9 ¶ Since there has been no reciprocity in the process, since blacks are denied access to ontology, they have not, according to Fanon, been able to follow the Hegelian path of turning away from the master and finding liberation in the object. Instead, lack of reciprocity leads the slave—in a gesture of internalized self-hatred—to turn toward the master and abandon the object,

but this effort at mutual recognition remains unrequited, as the master desires from the slave only work.10 We can already anticipate here the broad strokes of Fanon's theory of violence: for the racialized subject, self-consciousness as human requires symbolic violence, it requires the assertion of reciprocity within a historical situation marked by the denial of such reciprocity, and if necessary, the provocation of conflict through the assertion of alterity. 11 Only then will the slave be freed from this two-sided blockage of the dialectic, enforcing recognition (externally) onto the master while developing (internally) a degree of autonomy and self-confidence.¶ It is this very lack of ontological resistance which provokes an outburst by Fanon, one which bears within it the structure of his theory of violence. Under the objectifying gaze of a white woman and her son, Fanon responds by violently shouting:¶ "Kiss the handsome Negro's ass, madame!" Shame flooded her face. At last I was set free from my rumination. At the same time I accomplished two things: I identified my enemies and I made a scene. A grand slam. Now one would be able to laugh. The field of battle having been marked out, I entered the lists. 12 ¶ Why should the identification of the enemy cause such a seismic ontological shift? Because to discover an enemy, and to discover it clearly, was also to turn away from the master and discover something essential about oneself: as Fanon puts it, "I had incisors to test. I was sure they were strong."13 Since ontology had been denied, since there was no basis for the smooth operation of Hegel's dialectic of recognition, such a basis had to be created: "Since the other hesitated to recognize me, there remained only one solution: to make myself known." 14 Fanon's theory of symbolic ontological violence, then, could be summarized in these three words: making oneself known.¶ And to make himself known meant, in the context of ontological disqualification, to seize hold of the only identity available to him, the one imposed on him through precisely this same ontological disqualification: "I resolved, since it was impossible for me to get away from an inborn complex, to assert myself as a BLACK MAN."15 It is at this moment that Fanon, against the universal ache of every shred of his being, "buries himself in the black abyss" that he himself would criticize in no uncertain terms.16 Hence while Fanon is relentless in his criticism of especially the most essentialist forms of Negritude (especially that of Léopold Senghor17), he nevertheless insists on the dialectical necessity of a moment of black identity as the functional content of his early symbolic decolonial violence (a function to be replaced in Algeria by national consciousness). This dialectical necessity emerges most powerfully in Fanon's scathing and heartrending indictment of Sartre, who had reduced black identity to a merely antithetical moment in a preordained dialectical progression whose resolution was the proletariat. Fanon writes:¶ For once, that born Hegelian had forgotten that consciousness has to lose itself in the night of the absolute, the only condition to attain to consciousness of self… Jean-Paul Sartre, in this work, has destroyed black zeal. In opposition to historical becoming, there had always been the unforeseeable. I needed to lose myself completely in negritude… at the very moment when I was trying to grasp my own being, Sartre, who remained The Other, gave me a name and thus shattered my last illusion… Not yet white, no longer wholly black, I was damned. 18 ¶ Despite Sartre's best intentions, in subsuming black identity to a closed dialectic he had short-circuited the generativity of decolonial violence—its ability to re-build the colonized and force recognition on the colonizer—thereby blocking Fanon's access to being.19 Symbolic violence and the access to the equality of being that it promises passes—in a seeming paradox which is nevertheless held open for eventual dialectical resolution—through the realm of division and (in this case, black) identity.¶ But how can merely making oneself known constitute a violent act? Here we turn again to Gordon:¶ the blackened lives the disaster of appearance where there is no room to appear nonviolently. Acceptable being is nonexistence, nonappearance, or submergence… To change things is to appear, but to appear is to be violent since that group's appearance is illegitimate. Violence, in this sense, need not be a physical imposition. It need not be a consequence of guns and other weapons of destruction. It need simply be appearance.20¶ For racialized subjects, the very act of appearing, of making oneself known, is a violent act both for its ontological implications and for its inevitable

reception. That is, it constitutes a challenge to the prevailing structures of symbolic ontological violence—the walls of exclusion which divide being from non-being—and as a result of this disruption, black appearance historically appears as "violent" regardless of its content.21 And were it not perceived as such, for Fanon, then its ontological shock-value might dissipate, undermining the external element of its function.¶ And even when that content is nominally "violent," this often masks its ontological function. It is no accident that the Fanon of Black Skin, White Masks had thought it suitable to cite Sartre's The Respectful Prostitute and Richard Wright's Native Son on the same page. "A feeling of inferiority?" he asks himself, of himself: "No, a feeling of nonexistence," he responds. The only response to the immobility of not being able to bring oneself to kill the master is to "explode… to shatter the hellish cycle."22 Turning away from the master (the internal function of symbolic decolonial violence), in practice, often coincides with the realization that that most basic proof of human equality—vulnerability to death at the hands of another—also applies to whites. For this recognition to be put into practice often entails at least the threat of actual violence as the mechanism for enforced recognition (the external function). To the symbolic ontological violence of racialization, then, Fanon seems at first to respond in kind, with a violence which is equally symbolic in its function, but one which rather than determining being undoes the exclusionary barriers of ontology. This is a symbolic violence which operates toward the decolonization of being, 23 and which is utterly incommensurable in both its actual and (more fundamental) symbolic forms with the violence of the racist/colonizer.¶

Historical Materialism

Good

Pre-requisite – Generic

Gender and racial oppression are all products of a capitalism system – capitalism generates oppression to keep itself functional and exercise control. KOVEL 2002 [Joel Kovel, Alger Hiss Prof. At Bard, 2002 The Enemy of Nature, Zed Books, p. 123-125]If, however we ask the question of efficacy, that is, which split sets the others into motion, then priority would have to be given to class, for

the plain reason that class relations entail the state as an instrument of enforcement and control, and it is the state that shapes and organizes the splits that appear in human ecosystems. Thus class is both logically and

historically distinct from other forms of exclusion (hence we should not talk of ‘classism’ to go along with ‘sexism’ and ‘racism,’ and ‘species-ism’). This is, first of all, because class is an essentially [hu]man-made category, without root in even a mystified biology. We cannot imagine a human world without gender distinctions although we can imagine a world without domination by gender. But a world without class is eminently imaginable — indeed, such was the human world for the great majority of our species’ time on earth,

during all of which considerable fuss was made over gender. Historically, the difference arises because ‘class’ signifies one side of a larger figure that includes a state apparatus whose conquests and regulations create races and shape gender relations. Thus there will be no true resolution of racism so long as class society stands, inasmuch as a racially oppressed society implies the activities of a class-defending state.’0 Nor can gender inequality be enacted away so long as class society, with its state,

demands the super-exploitation of woman’s labour. Class society continually generates gender, racial, ethnic oppressions and the like, which take on a life of their own, as well as profoundly affecting the concrete relations of class itself. It follows that class politics must be fought out in terms of all the active forms of social splitting. It is the management of these divisions that keeps state society functional.

Embracing a methodology of anti-capitalism is a precursor to all action – without declaring war on capitalism, all forms of praxis are bankrupt and all revolutionary politics stifled.Katz 2k (Adam, English Instructor at Onodaga Community College. 2000. Postmodernism and the Politics of “Culture.” Pg. 127-128)Virno does recognize the danger that a politics predicated upon Exodus, by downgrading the “absolute enmity” implicit in the traditional Marxist assumption that class struggle in its revolutionary form issues in civil war, leads to the assumption that one is “swimming with the current” or is be-

ing driven “irresistibly forward” (1996, 203). A politics aimed at the estab lishment of liberated zones within capitalism under the assumption that the state will wither away without actually being “smashed” leads to the problematic one sees over and over again in postmodern cultural studies: “doing what comes naturally” as radical praxis. To counter this, Virno redefines the “unlimitedly reactive” “enmity” of the “Multitude” in terms of the “right to resistance” (206): What deserve to be defended at all costs are the works of “friendship.” Violence is not geared to visions of some hypothetical tomorrow, but functions to ensure respect and a continued existence for things that were mapped out yesterday. It does not innovate, but acts to prolong things that are already there: the autonomous expressions of “acting-in-concert” that arise out of general intellect, organisms of non-representative democracy, forms of mutual protection and assistance (welfare, in short) that have emerged outside of and against the realm of State Administration. In other words, what we have here is a violence that is conservational (206). The decisiveness of the question of absolute enmity becomes clear if we ask a rather obvious question: What distinguishes autonomous expressions from any privatized space (say, Internet chat rooms) that withdraws from the common in the name of friendships, mutual aid, or, for that matter, networks, gated communities, or whatever? In

short, nothing can lead more directly to the death of revolutionary politics than the assumption that the days of absolute enmity are over . Autonomous expressions neces sarily lead to the esoteric and the

singular as the paths of least resistance. Therefore (as in all Left-Nietzscheanisms), they take as their main enemy the programmatic and the decidable, transforming liberation into a pri vate, simulacral affair, regardless of their denunciations of capitalism. I will return to this issue in the next two chapters, but I want to conclude this

discussion by stressing that only theory and action that establish spaces that bring the common out into the open—before an outside (theory and judgment) so as to make visible the concentrated political-economic force of the ruling class—can count as a genuinely “new” politics .

Solves Language/ Identity

Historical materialism is an indispensable tool for the critical interrogation of language and identity—the affirmative risks being absorbed into the dominant cultural frameFoster '96 - prof. of sociology @ Univ. Oregon (John, "In Defense of History," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E. Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.185-193, RG)

The weaknesses of postmodernism—from an emancipatory perspective— thus far overshadow its strengths. Missing from Foucault's analysis, like that of postmodernism generally, is any conception of a counter-order to the disciplinary orders described. In the more extreme case of "textual postmodernists"—those

postmodernist thinkers like Derrida, as distinct from Foucault, who deny any reality outside the text—the political and historical weaknesses from a left perspective are even more glaring. By undermining the very concept of history —in any meaningful sense beyond mere story-telling—such theorists have robbed critical analysis of what has always been its most indispensable tool. 18 The denial within postmodernist theory of the validity of historical cri tique covers up what is really at issue: the denial of the historical critique of capitalism, leading to a convergence between left thought infected by Nietzsche and the dominant liberal "end of history" conception. The danger of such ahistorical or anti-historical views, as E.P. Thompson observed, is that one loses sight not of "reason in history" in some abstract sense, but rather of "the reasons of power and the reasons of money."19 Historical materialism at its best provides a way out of this dilemma. This is not to ignore the fact that Marxism—which has sometimes given rise to its own crude interpretations and historical travesties, as in the case of Stalinism—has frequently been identified with the kind of "totalizations" and "essentialisms" that postmodernist theorists have singled out. As Thompson pointed out in a 1977 essay on Christopher Caudwell, Marxism has sometimes relied on " 'essentialist' tricks of mind," the "tendency to intellectualize the social process"—"the rapid delineation of the deep process of a whole epoch." These are things that the historian (and social scientists in general) should guard against. But to abandon theory and historical explanation entirely in order to avoid "essentialism" and "foun dationalism" is a bit like throwing out the baby in order to keep the bathwater clean . Marx himself provided another model, actively opposing theory (even "Marxist" theory) that purported to be "suprahistorical." In his Theses on Feuerbach, he presented what still ranks as the most thorough- going critique of what he called the "essentialist" conception of human beings and nature. Indeed, historical materialism has long engaged in its own self-critique, precisely in order to expel the kinds of "essentialisms," "positivisms," and "structuralisms" that have intruded on the philosophy of praxis itself—-a self-critique that has produced the insights of theorists like Gramsci, Sartre, Thompson, and Raymond Williams.20 These thinkers distanced themselves from the positivistic "official Marxism" that grew out of the Second International and later turned into a caricature of itself in the form of Stalinism. Yet they held firm to the critique of capitalism and their commitment to the struggles of the oppressed. Moreover, these particular examples tell us that if what has sometimes been called "the postmodern agenda"—consisting of issues like identity, culture, and language —is to be addressed at all, this can only be accomplished within a historical context. And here one might openly wonder with Foucault "what difference there

could ultimately be between being a historian and being a Marxist." When placed within a more holistic historical materialist context— ani mated by the concept of praxis —the problems raised by postmodernism look entirely different. As David McNally says, "Language is not a prison-house, but a site of struggle." What the contributions in this volume have in common is the insistence that issues like language, culture, nationality, race, gender, the environment, revolution, and history itself are only effectively analyzed within a context that is simultaneously historical in character, materialist (in the sense of focusing on concrete practices), and revolutionary. Such analyses do not abandon the hope of transcending capitalism, nor of the notion of human progress as a possible outcome of historical struggles. It is said that Nicholas I, Czar of Russia, issued an order banning the word "progress." Today we no longer believe, in a nineteenth century sense, in automatic human progress, embodying some definite content—the idea that the Czar found so threatening. But this does not mean, as the philosopher Michael Oakeshott contended with respect to political activity in the 1950s, that we "sail a boundless and bottomless sea" that has "neither starting-point nor appointed direction" and that our only task is "to keep afloat on an even keel." History—as centuries of struggle and indeed progress suggest—is more meaningful than that. To abandon altogether the concept of progress, in the more general sense of the possibility of progres sive human emancipation, would only be to submit to the wishes of the powers that be. Such political disengagement by intellectuals on the left in the present epoch could only mean one thing: the total obeisance to capital.21 The irony of post-modernism is that while purporting to have transcended modernity, it abandons from the start all hope of transcending capitalism itself and entering a post-capitalist era. Postmodernist theory is therefore easily absorbed within the dominant cultural frame and has even given rise

recently to texts such as Postmodern Marketing, which attempts to utilize the insights of thinkers like Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, and Baudillard to market goods within a capitalist economy. Perhaps this will be the final destiny of postmodernist theory—its absorption by the vast marketing apparatus of the capitalist economy, adding irony and color to a commercial order that must constantly find new ways to insinuate itself into the everyday lives of the population. Meanwhile, historical materialism will remain the necessary intellectual ground for all those who seek, not to revel in the "carnival" of capitalist productive and market relations, but to transcend them.22

Solves Race

Historical Materialism allows us to interrogate the effects daily productive and material forces have on race relations. Only through examining capitalism can we understand why the aff impacts happen in the first place.Young ‘1 - professor of English @ University of Alabama (Robert, “The Linguistic Turn, Materialism and Race: Toward an Aesthetics of Crisis,” Callaloo, 24(1), Winter 2001, pp. 334-345, Project MUSE, RG)

Postmodernists reunderstand the subject, not as the rational cause of social meaning, but rather the effect of the articulation of various discursive practices. Roland Barthes makes this point clear in S/Z when he says, “ I is not an innocent subject, anterior to the text, one which will subsequently deal with the text as it would an object to dismantle or a site to occupy. This ‘I’ which approaches the text is already itself a plurality of other text, of codes which are infinite or, more precisely, lost” (10). Michel Foucault also points up the constructedness of the subject when he argues that: “The individual is not a pregiven entity which is seized on by the exercise of power. The individual, with his identity, is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces” (73-74). Perhaps the classic poststructuralist view of the subject, though, is found in Jacques Derrida. For Derrida, “The subject (in its identity with itself, or eventually in its consciousness of its identity with itself, its selfconsciousness) is inscribed in language, is a ‘function’ of language, becomes a speaking subject only by making its speech conform . . . to the system of the rules of language as system of differences, or at very least by conforming to the general laws of difference” (15).The view of the subject as a language construct has framed postmodern discourses of race. For example, Henry Gates argues that “Race has become a trope of ultimate, irreducible difference between culture . . . [and thus] Race is the ultimate trope of difference because it is so very arbitrary in its application” (Race 5). In the Signifying Monkey Gates develops his project of investigating rhetorical structures and privileges the mechanics of the meaning-making process and foregrounds the “materiality” and “willful play” of the signifier (59). Thus for Gates “blackness is produced in the text through a complex process of signification” and therefore “There can be no transcendent blackness, for it can not and does not exist beyond manifestations in specific figures” (237).Theorizing race as text has led to proclamations, such as the one by Anthony Appiah, that race is a fiction: “The truth is that there are no races” (Appiah 35). The politics of such a discourse is perhaps clearest in Kobena Mercer’s essay “‘1968’: Periodizing Politics and Identity,” where he, too, recognizes the meaninglessness of race and marks how “the [race] signifier itself became the site for the making and remaking of meanings” (430). Thus politics becomes a matter of semiotic freedom and democracy is seen as a “struggle over relations of representation” (Mercer 429) and not the relations of production. In short, what is offered as emancipation is not equal access to economic resources but the pleasure of disrupting dominant and oppressive meanings. While such discursive intervention is important, especially for an historically marginalized group, it is urgent to recognize that social change will come about not by emancipating signs from totalities but by displacing the relations of production, for although the relations of production do not evade, they nevertheless always exceed the fate of signs.Not only do such postmodern discourses reify culture, in what Kenan Malik calls “cultural formalism,” but in their anti-totality move and privileging of the logic of indeterminacy postmodernists suppress notions of causality. Postmodern discourses of race merely assert the constructedness of the (race) sign and bracket the political economy of race , and consequently the

text is set as the limit of intelligibility. In arguing for the “constructed-ness” of race but locating it textually there is a theoretical problem in accounting for the textual inscription of race or its extra-textual effects in daily life under capitalism (and we must account for extratextual effects because for people of color it is a matter of life and death).

Postmodernists are unable to explain why race has acquired its oppressive social meaning in the first place and across various localities—that is race is a translocal articulation. Reading race as essentially constructed but not accounting for its production, race is mystified and metaphysics is reintroduced; in fact, in a recent symposium on race and racism Howard Winant asserts that “Race remains a mysterious phenomenon”(7). Race is not a mystery as it operates today as a material practice in marking racially coded subjects for differential levels of surplus extraction and violence and it has an historical emergence. As Alex Callinicos indicates, “Racism as we know it today developed during a key phase in the development of capitalism as the dominant mode of production on a global scale—the establishment during the 17th and 18th centuries of colonial plantations in the New World using slave labour imported from Africa to produce consumer goods such as tobacco and sugar and

industrial outputs such as cotton for the world market” (11). As Eric Williams succinctly put it, “Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery” (7).While most postmodern discourses have moved away from ontologically based inquiries, a recent essay by Linda Alcoff attempts to (re)configure race as an “ontological” category. Her intervention opens the possibility for foregrounding the nexus between race and materialism. This possibility is quickly closed down as her discourse moves away from materialism and thus for Alcoff “Race is a particular, historically and culturally located form of human categorization . . .” (7). The question again is why? Why is race a form of human categorization? And is race identity really a matter of language games? And are these games essentially self-originating and autonomous? Of course not. These “games” are always already situated within and the effect of the

prevailing economic / political /cultural /ideological conditions. As Malik points out “Racial differentiation emerges out of real social and economic mechanisms” (10), and they are not ontologically pre-given.In other words, this human categorization is an historical articulation of racialized division of labor structuring asymmetrical access to surplus. Alcoff reduces thought about the real to the real itself and this articulates an empiricist idealism. Therefore what is really at stake here is not so much the question of ontology and the related question of objectivity—which puts one on the road to materialism—as much as it is the articulation of what Roy Bhaskar has called the “epistemic fallacy” and consequently the recuperation of experience. One must remember Alcoff’s original concern was not only to “validate hybrid identity or hybrid positionality against purist, essentialist accounts” but also to “take into account the full force of race as a lived experience” (9). Of course, as I also pointed out earlier, it is politically urgent to mark such experiences but an ontological reinscription of race reifies race and as such disables a transformative project—a project aimed at negating the deployment of race as a structure for exploitation. Under way, then, is the alliance of postmodern discourses, which de-essentializes identity, with this humanist identity. These two apparently antagonistic discourses are actually colluding in suppressing the political economy of race. The trajectory—from the postmodernist constructed identity to the humanist subject—may be clearly mapped out in a series of works by Gates.

K2 Politics

Historical Materialism is key to politics: The political subject they would create in lieu of abandoning traditional politics is a floating form of subjectivity that sustains the hegemony of transnational capitalism.Laura Bartlett Snyder, Doctoral Fellow in the English Department at Louisville, “An Introduction,” 2000, http://athena.louisville.edu/a-s/english/babo/snyder/bounintro.html, accessed 10/15/02This web site explores the ways postmodern theories of subjectivity facilitate global capitalism. The seed for this project was planted during “Deconstructed Selves, Postmodern Narratives,” a session at the 20th Century Lit. Conference.  I had just heard a paper on Crash so thoughts of cyborgs and strange postmodern desires were already mingling with a project topic that was due in my Theories of Interpretation seminar.  While Silvio Gaggi flashed slides of Cindy Sherman’s photography—the pictures of her well-groomed, appropriately feminized body, a 50’s starlet in juxtaposition with images of excrement, false eyelashes, cigarette butts--I

discovered my topic:  the ways that the postmodern notion of subjectivity--fluid, unfixed, transgressed boundaries--and the modern notion of subjectivity-stable, unified, coherent, preserved boundaries-are analogous to the evolution from classical to global/late capitalism. My theory: While the dissolution of boundaries in postmodern subjectivity may at first seem wildly radical, it actually facilitates the hegemony by interpellating the ideal subject of global capitalism, one who can manipulate fluid capital , produce/consume intangible data, and accept the dissolution of national boundaries for the purpose of exporting manufacturing work to 3rd world countries, for the purpose of global e-commerce, and for the formation of multinational corporations. 

Solves IR

Historical Materialism makes the socionomic a meaningful part of international relations and exposes the problematic assumptions of their behavioral and categorical models Halliday ’94 [Fred, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, ‘A Necessary Encounter: Historical Materialism and International Relations’ in Rethinking International Relations (Basingstoke: Macmillan), 47-73]

This prominence of classes as analytic tools has two immediate consequences for International Relations . First, it invests the major conflicts of international politics with a distinct socioeconomic character. Though it may be untrue to say, paraphrasing Marx, that all the history of International Relations has been one of class struggle, it has certainly been a major and at times decisive component. The competitive spread of the European empires, the outbreaks of the two world wars, the gold standard crisis of 1931, the OPEC price rises of 1971-73, the disputes over trade and interest rates within the Atlantic Alliance in the early 1980s, US-Japanese trade conflict in the 1990s -- all now appear as, in broad -63- terms, part of conflict between capitalist ruling classes, between old established capitalist powers and their new rivals, the latter produced by the development of capitalist social relations within their own countries. Many of the disputes that have marked twentieth century history became inter-imperialist and intercapitalist disputes, beyond their specific national, geographic and historical characteristics: as already noted, this issue of conflict between great powers, not the dynamics of 'North-South' relations was the main question addressed by Lenin and others, in the debate on imperialism before the First World War. Secondly, in this light, the debates that have flourished within International Relations for so long appear to be founded on some questionable premises. Since the state is not an independent entity, but is rather located in a particular socio-economic and class context, the debate on whether the state is losing power to non-state actors changes character. For the question now becomes not whether the state has recently, i.e. since 1945 or 1970, lost preeminence to non-state actors but how far the 'non-state' actors who have always affected the power and character of the state act through the state or through other channels. These non-state actors, i.e. classes, have always been there, but have exercised their power in a variety of ways. The question of how far the boundary between domestic and international politics has broken down also acquires a different significance; in capitalism classes have always operated internationally, from the bankers and trading companies of the sixteenth century onwards, and have in turn been affected domestically by changes in the international economic and political situation. 31 The primacy of classes therefore serves in a dual sense to place in question the concept of the 'nation-state': it shows, first, that the state itself is, to a considerable extent, a function of wider social forces, and secondly that the impermeability of domestic politics is an appearance which conceals a permanent, underlying, internationalisation of political and economic factors. In Marx's own writings, there is an interesting tension on this issue: his political instincts led him to emphasise the international character of the proletariat, the working class, and their aspiration and ability to organise on an international basis against their class enemies; yet his theory contained within it another suggestion, namely that it was not the working class, but the bourgeoisie, who -64- were the most international, since their education and culture on the one hand, and their very economic interests on the other, were such as to lead them to act more and more internationally. The subsequent history of capitalism has, as much as anything, been one in which the internationalisation of the ruling class has proceeded as fast as, or even faster than, that of the working class -- hence, as Jeff Frieden, Stephen Gill, Kees van der Pijl and others have shown, the EC (European Community), the Trilateral Commission, the Group of 7 and many others are examples of transnational élite coordination, for the better management of the economy, both national and international.

K2 Gender

Historical materialist analysis is a precondition to meaningful feminist critique—their arguments are mired in privilege and maintainince of the status quoStabile '96 - associate prof. in the Dept. of Mass Comm @ Univ. of Wisconsin (Carol A., "Postmodernism, Feminism, and Marx: Notes from the Abyss," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E. Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.144-, RG)

The defense of "rights," abstracted from historical, political, and eco nomic contexts, has weakened feminist politics and contributed to a general sense that feminism serves only narrow and privileged interests. Historical materialism offers the possibility of coalitions based on a broader understanding of the exploitative nature of capitalist relations of produc tion, enlisting women and men in struggles against family violence, further cuts to already severely diminished social programs, and , moreover, against the system that benefits from these ills. Furthermore, it proposes that women's liberation—if it is to include all women—is incompatible with capitalism. Historical materialism has the advantage of offering the kind of self-re-flexivity—so lacking in postmodernism and contemporary feminism—that I've tried to underscore

in this essay. It at once forces us to understand our theories, our practices, and our positions in relation to the dominant structure of power, and provides a much more effective basis for an under standing of the positions of both women and men within multinational capitalism and of contemporary shifts in these positions. Consider, for example, the debate about "family values." The conventional feminist argument is that the New Right's call for a return to family values is simply a backlash. On the one hand, this backlash is said to represent an attempt to reinstate a traditional version of the nuclear family in order to force women out of the labor force and back into the home. On the other hand, it is seen as a measure of the effectiveness of the feminist movement, insofar as women now have the "choice" of working. What disappears from view in these analyses is the fact that economic conditions have forced upon middle class women the dubious advantage of working one or more full-time jobs in addition to domestic labor, and that this social change benefits capitalism, and not individual men. Poor and working class women (many of them women of color) have long worked outside the home, although few of them would call their alienated and often desperate labor a matter of "choice." What is being represented as a gain for women simply means that middle class women are now being compelled by the necessities of capital ism to make the "choice" that has traditionally been available to poor and working class women. To argue that the debates about family values are intended to force women back into the domestic sphere overlooks the fact that there can be no return to the traditional nuclear family because it is no longer economically feasible. To argue that these debates about family values were provoked by feminist successes is to accept the ideological mystification that treats the economic mandates of capitalism as if they were free life-style "choices." I would like to believe that feminists are, in fact, committed to revolutionary social change, but there's another, less pleasant possibility to contemplate—one that points to the dangers of ignoring class position. It could be that many who call themselves feminists are interested only in maintaining their own class privilege or in gaining celebrity status. From that point of view, Marxism is a serious threat not only because it represents a challenge to the theoretical foundations of a postmodern feminism, but also because it reveals the historical, material, and class foundations of certain forms of knowledge. It is fairly clear how women such as Katie Roiphe, Naomi Wolf, and Camille Paglia

use feminism as a marketing strategy to promote their books, images, and careers, instead of promoting equality and social justice. But as long as so many feminists refuse to acknowledge their own privilege and the ways in which we all "benefit" from the exploitation of less-privi leged women and men, feminism in general will be in danger of becoming a professional strategy rather than a political project.

Historical Materialism > Epistemology

The affirmative focuses on the philosophy of the mind. The belief that their discourse and their transformative performance can change the world hides the fact that we must revolutionize the real world, not some mental one. Marx 84, Karl, philosopher and revolutionary , “The German Ideology” http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01b.htm) IG

[II. 1. Preconditions of the Real Liberation of Man] [...] We shall , of course, not take the trouble to enlighten our wise philosophers by explaining to them that the “liberation” of man is not advanced a single step by reducing philosophy , theology, substance and all the trash to “self-consciousness” and by liberating man from the domination of these phrases , which have never held him in thrall. Nor will we explain to them that it is only possible to achieve real liberation in the real world and by employing real means, that slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine and the mule and spinning-jenny, serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, and that, in general, people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity. “Liberation” is an historical and not a mental act , and it is brought about by historical conditions, the development of industry, commerce, agriculture, the conditions of intercourse...[There is here a gap in the manuscript] In Germany, a country where only a trivial historical development is taking place, these mental developments , these glorified and ineffective trivialities, naturally serve as a substitute for the lack of historical development , and they take root and have to be combated. But this fight is of local importance. [2. Feuerbach’s Contemplative and Inconsistent Materialism] In reality and for the practical materialist , i.e. the communist, i t is a question of revolutionising the existing world, of practically attacking and changing existing things. When occasionally we find such views with Feuerbach, they are never more than isolated surmises and have much too little influence on his general outlook to be considered here as anything else than embryos capable of development. Feuerbach’s conception of the sensuous world is confined on the one hand to mere contemplation of it, and on the other to mere feeling; he says “Man” instead of “real historical man.” “Man” is really “the German.” In the first case, the contemplation of the sensuous world, he necessarily lights on things which contradict his consciousness and feeling, which disturb the harmony he presupposes, the harmony of all parts of the sensuous world and especially of man and nature. To remove this disturbance, he must take refuge in a double perception, a profane one which only perceives the “flatly obvious” and a higher, philosophical, one which perceives the “true essence” of things. He does not see how the sensuous world around him is , not a thing given direct from all eternity, remaining ever the same , but the product of industry and of the state of society; and , indeed, in the sense that it is an historical product, the result of the activity of a whole succession of generations , each standing on the shoulders of the preceding one, developing its industry and its intercourse, modifying its social system according to the changed needs. Even the objects of the simplest “sensuous certainty” are only given him through social development, industry and commercial intercourse. The cherry-tree, like almost all fruit-trees, was, as is well known, only a few centuries ago transplanted by commerce into our zone, and therefore only by this action of a definite society in a definite age it has become “sensuous certainty” for Feuerbach.

Bad

NB: Cap

Ontology

Bad

1NCPrioritizing ontology and epistemology over specific policy formulations paralyzes problem solving measures ensuring short-term annihilation.Owen 2002[David Owen Millennium Journale of international studies 2002 “Re-Orientation Internatioal Relations: On Pragmatism, Pluralism and Practical Reasoning”]Commenting on the ‘philosophical turn’ in IR, Wæver remarks that ‘[a] frenzy for words like “epistemology” and “ontology” often signals this philosophical turn’, although he goes on to comment that these terms are often used loosely.4 However, loosely deployed or not, it is clear that debates concerning ontology and epistemology play a central role in the contemporary IR theory wars. In one respect, this is unsurprising since it is a characteristic feature of the social sciences that periods of disciplinary disorientation involve recourse to reflection on the philosophical commitments of different theoretical approaches, and there is no doubt that such reflection can play a valuable role in making explicit the commitments that characterise (and help individuate) diverse theoretical positions. Yet, such a philosophical turn is not without its dangers and I will briefly mention three before turning to consider a confusion that has, I will suggest, helped to promote the IR

theory wars by motivating this philosophical turn. The first danger with the philosophical turn is that it has an inbuilt tendency to prioritise issues of ontology and epistemology over explanatory and /or interpretive power as if the latter two

were merely a simple function of the former. But while the explanatory and/or interpretive power of a theoretical account is not wholly independent of its ontological and/or epistemological commitments (otherwise criticism of these features would not be a criticism that had any

value), it is by no means clear that it is, in contrast, wholly dependent on these philosophical commitments . Thus, for example, one need not be sympathetic to rational choice theoryto recognise that it can provide powerful accounts of certain kinds of problems, such as the tragedy of the commons in which dilemmas of collective action are foregrounded. It may, of course, be the case that the advocates of rational choice theory cannot give a good account of why this type of theory is powerful in accounting for this class of problems (i.e., how it is that the relevant actors come to exhibit features in these circumstances that approximate the assumptions of rational choice theory) and, if this is the case, it is a philosophical weakness—but this does not undermine the

point that, for a certain class of problems, rational choice theory may provide the best account available to us . In other words, while the critical judgement of theoretical accounts in terms of their ontological and/or epistemological sophistication is one kind of critical judgement, it is

not the only or even necessarily the most important kind. The second danger run by the philosophical turn is that because prioritisation of ontology and epistemology promotes theory-construction from philosophical first principles, it cultivates a theory-driven rather than problem-driven approach to IR. Paraphrasing Ian Shapiro, the point can be put like this: since it is the case that there is always a plurality of possible true descriptions of a given action, event or phenomenon, the challenge is to decide which is the most apt in terms of getting a perspicuous grip on the action, event

or phenomenon in question given the purposes of the inquiry; yet, from this standpoint, ‘ theory-driven work is part of a reductionist program’ in that it ‘dictates always opting for the description that calls for the explanation that flows from the preferred model or theory’.5 The justification offered for this strategy rests on the mistaken belief that it is necessary for social science because general explanations are required to characterise the classes of phenomena studied in similar terms. However, as Shapiro points out, this is to misunderstand the enterprise of science since ‘whether there are general explanations for classes of phenomena is a question for social-scientific inquiry, not to be

prejudged before conducting that inquiry’.6 Moreover, this strategy easily slips into the promotion of the pursuit of generality over that of empirical validity. The third danger is that the preceding two combine to encourage the formation of a particular image of disciplinary debate in IR—what might be called (only slightly tongue in cheek) ‘the Highlander view’—namely, an image of warring theoretical approaches with each, despite occasional temporary tactical alliances, dedicated to the strategic achievement of sovereignty over the disciplinary field. It encourages this view because the turn to, and prioritisation of, ontology and epistemology stimulatesthe idea that there can only be one theoretical approach which gets things right, namely, the theoretical approach that gets its ontology and epistemology right. This image feeds back into IR exacerbating the first and second dangers, and so a potentially vicious circle arises.

2. Ontological questioning is useless unless it is coupled with policy action – simply questioning takes away agency and makes us spectators to flawed politics instead of actors fixing the flaws. Rorty 98 (prof of philosophy at Stanford, Richard, 1998, “achieving our country”, Pg. 7-9)JFS

Such people find pride in American citizenship impossi ble, and vigorous participation in electoral politics pointless. They associate American patriotism with an endorsement of atrocities: the importation of African slaves, the slaughter of Native Americans, the rape of ancient forests, and the Vietnam War. Many of them think of national pride as appropriate only for chauvinists: for the sort of American who rejoices that America can still orchestrate something like the

Gulf War, can still bring deadly force to bear whenever and wherever it chooses. When young intellectuals watch John

Wayne war movies after reading Heidegger, Foucault, Stephenson, or Silko, they often become convinced that they live in a violent , inhuman, corrupt country. They begin to think of themselves as a saving remnant-as the happy few who have the insight to see through nationalist rhetoric to the ghastly reality of

contemporary America. But this insight does not move them to formulate a legislative program, to join

a political movement, or to share in a national hope. The contrast between national hope and national self-mockery and self-disgust becomes vivid when one compares novels like Snow Crash and Almanac of the Dead with socialist novels of the first half of the century-books like The Jungle, An American Tragedy, and The Grapes of Wrath. The latter were written in the belief that the tone of the Gettysburg Address was absolutely right, but that our country would have to transform itself in order to fulfill Lincoln's hopes.

Transfor mation would be needed because the rise of industrial capitalism had made the individualist rhetoric of America's first century obsolete. The authors of these novels thought that this rhetoric should be replaced by one in which America is destined to become the first cooperative commonwealth, the first classless society. This America would be one in which income and wealth are equitably distributed, and in which the government ensures equality of opportunity as well as individual liberty. This new, quasi-communitarian rhetoric was at the heart of the Progressive Movement and the New Deal. It set the tone for the American Left during the first six decades of the twentieth century. Walt Whitman and John Dewey, as we shall see, did a great deal to shape this

rhetoric. The difference between early twentieth-century leftist in tellectuals and the majority of their contemporary counter parts is the difference between agents and spectators. In the early decades of this century, when an intellectual stepped back from his or her country's history and looked at it through skeptical eyes, the chances were that he or she was about to propose a new political initiative. Henry Adams was, of course, the great exception-the great abstainer from ·politics. But William James thought that Adams' diagnosis of the First Gilded Age as a symptom of irreversible moral and political decline was merely perverse. James's pragmatist theory of truth was in part a reaction against the sort of detached spectators hip which Adams affected. For James, disgust with American hypocrisy and self-deception was pointless unless accompanied by an effort to give America reason to be proud

of itself in the future. The kind of proto- Heideggerian cultural pessimism which Adams cultivated seemed, to James, decadent and cowardly. "Democracy," James wrote, "is a kind of religion, and we are bound not to admit its failure. Faiths and utopias are the noblest exercise of human reason, and no one with a spark of reason in him will sit down fatalistically before the croaker's picture. "2

K2: Anthro

A pragmatic approach to the environment is key – anthropocentrism is inevitable as animals cannot speak for themselves, we have to judge events on a case-by-case basis – a blind focus on rejecting anthropocentrism is no better than just blindly accepting it. Parker 1996 (Kelly A. Parker, professor of philosophy, environmental studies, and liberal studies at Grand. Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan, “Environmental Pragmatism”, 1996, http://www.public.iastate.edu/~jwcwolf/Papers/Parker.pdf, accessed 9/8/13, JK)

The pragmatist would ask why we should be expected to pledge¶ allegiance to any of these flags a priori, and exclude the others.¶ Genuine value emerges at all of these focal levels. Indeed there will be¶

conflicts because of this, but the occurrence of such moral conflict is¶ not peculiar this approach. Antigone found that "family values¶ can tragically conflict with the values of the state; today's CEO likewise¶ finds that business values conflict with the value of an endangered¶ owl's habitat. Denying that one or the other sphere is worthy of¶ consideration may appear to prevent potential moral conflict from¶ arising, but only at the risk of serious moral blindness. Blind anthropocentrism has deplorable consequences for the non-human world,¶ but a blindly misanthropic ecocentrism is no less deplorable .¶

Again, pluralism is a fact encountered in experience. Value arises¶ in a variety of relationships among differing parts of the experienced¶ world. Each situation must be appraised on its own distinct terms. ¶ As before, the twin values of sustainability and diversity provide¶ reference points. Sometimes we rightly focus on the sustainability of¶ the whole system; sometimes on 'the unique value of an individual.¶ Sometimes the individual or the system is human and sometimes¶ it is not. From this perspective, environmental ethics can be seen as¶ continuous with other areas of ethics, a distinct but integral part of¶ value inquiry in general.¶ I have spoken of the experience of organisms-in-environments as¶ centrally important. Pragmatism is "anthropocentric" (or better,¶ "anthropometric")24 in one respect: the human organism is inevitably¶ the one that discusses value. This is so because human experience, the¶ human perspective on value, is the only thing we know as humans.¶ Many other entities indeed have experience and do value things.¶ Again, this is not to say that human whim is the measure of all things,¶ only that humans are in fact the measurers. This must be a factor in¶ all our deliberations about environmental issues. We can and should¶ speak on the others' behalf when appropriate, but we cannot speak¶ from their experience. We can in some sense hear their voices, but we¶ cannot speak in their voices. I see no way out of our own distinctively¶ human bodies. In this sense, the human yardstick of experience¶ becomes, by default, the measure of all things . Although the debate¶ over environmental issues is thus limited to human participants, this¶ is not inappropriate - after all, the debate centers almost exclusively¶ on human threats to the world. Wolves , spotted owls, and old growth forests are unable to enter the ethics debate except through¶ their human spokespersons, and that is perhaps regrettable. Far¶ better that they should speak for themselves! Lacking this, they do at¶ least have spokespersons - and these spokespersons, their advocates,¶ need to communicate their concerns only to other humans. To do¶ this in anthropic value categories is not shameful. It is, after all, the¶ only way to go.

Epistimology

Bad

1NC1. Prioritizing ontology and epistemology over specific policy formulations paralyzes problem solving measures ensuring short-term annihilationOwen 2002[David Owen Millennium Journale of international studies 2002 “Re-Orientation Internatioal Relations: On Pragmatism, Pluralism and Practical Reasoning”]Commenting on the ‘philosophical turn’ in IR, Wæver remarks that ‘[a] frenzy for words like “epistemology” and “ontology” often signals this philosophical turn’, although he goes on to comment that these terms are often used loosely.4 However, loosely deployed or not, it is clear that debates concerning ontology and epistemology play a central role in the contemporary IR theory wars. In one respect, this is unsurprising since it is a characteristic feature of the social sciences that periods of disciplinary disorientation involve recourse to reflection on the philosophical commitments of different theoretical approaches, and there is no doubt that such reflection can play a valuable role in making explicit the commitments that characterise (and help individuate) diverse theoretical positions. Yet, such a philosophical turn is not without its dangers and I will briefly mention three before turning to consider a confusion that has, I will suggest, helped to promote the IR

theory wars by motivating this philosophical turn. The first danger with the philosophical turn is that it has an inbuilt tendency to prioritise issues of ontology and epistemology over explanatory and /or interpretive power as if the latter two

were merely a simple function of the former. But while the explanatory and/or interpretive power of a theoretical account is not wholly independent of its ontological and/or epistemological commitments (otherwise criticism of these features would not be a criticism that had any

value), it is by no means clear that it is, in contrast, wholly dependent on these philosophical commitments . Thus, for example, one need not be sympathetic to rational choice theoryto recognise that it can provide powerful accounts of certain kinds of problems, such as the tragedy of the commons in which dilemmas of collective action are foregrounded. It may, of course, be the case that the advocates of rational choice theory cannot give a good account of why this type of theory is powerful in accounting for this class of problems (i.e., how it is that the relevant actors come to exhibit features in these circumstances that approximate the assumptions of rational choice theory) and, if this is the case, it is a philosophical weakness—but this does not undermine the

point that, for a certain class of problems, rational choice theory may provide the best account available to us . In other words, while the critical judgement of theoretical accounts in terms of their ontological and/or epistemological sophistication is one kind of critical judgement, it is

not the only or even necessarily the most important kind. The second danger run by the philosophical turn is that because prioritisation of ontology and epistemology promotes theory-construction from philosophical first principles, it cultivates a theory-driven rather than problem-driven approach to IR. Paraphrasing Ian Shapiro, the point can be put like this: since it is the case that there is always a plurality of possible true descriptions of a given action, event or phenomenon, the challenge is to decide which is the most apt in terms of getting a perspicuous grip on the action, event

or phenomenon in question given the purposes of the inquiry; yet, from this standpoint, ‘ theory-driven work is part of a reductionist program’ in that it ‘dictates always opting for the description that calls for the explanation that flows from the preferred model or theory’.5 The justification offered for this strategy rests on the mistaken belief that it is necessary for social science because general explanations are required to characterise the classes of phenomena studied in similar terms. However, as Shapiro points out, this is to misunderstand the enterprise of science since ‘whether there are general explanations for classes of phenomena is a question for social-scientific inquiry, not to be

prejudged before conducting that inquiry’.6 Moreover, this strategy easily slips into the promotion of the pursuit of generality over that of empirical validity. The third danger is that the preceding two combine to encourage the formation of a particular image of disciplinary debate in IR—what might be called (only slightly tongue in cheek) ‘the Highlander view’—namely, an image of warring theoretical approaches with each, despite occasional temporary tactical alliances, dedicated to the strategic achievement of sovereignty over the disciplinary field. It encourages this view because the turn to, and prioritisation of, ontology and epistemology stimulatesthe idea that there can only be one theoretical approach which gets things right, namely, the theoretical approach that gets its ontology and epistemology right. This image feeds back into IR exacerbating the first and second dangers, and so a potentially vicious circle arises.

2. Ontological questioning is useless unless it is coupled with policy action – simply questioning takes away agency and makes us spectators to flawed politics instead of actors fixing the flaws. Rorty 98 (prof of philosophy at Stanford, Richard, 1998, “achieving our country”, Pg. 7-9)JFS

Such people find pride in American citizenship impossi ble, and vigorous participation in electoral politics pointless. They associate American patriotism with an endorsement of atrocities: the importation of African slaves, the slaughter of Native Americans, the rape of ancient forests, and the Vietnam War. Many of them think of national pride as appropriate only for chauvinists: for the sort of American who rejoices that America can still orchestrate something like the

Gulf War, can still bring deadly force to bear whenever and wherever it chooses. When young intellectuals watch John

Wayne war movies after reading Heidegger, Foucault, Stephenson, or Silko, they often become convinced that they live in a violent , inhuman, corrupt country. They begin to think of themselves as a saving remnant-as the happy few who have the insight to see through nationalist rhetoric to the ghastly reality of

contemporary America. But this insight does not move them to formulate a legislative program, to join

a political movement, or to share in a national hope. The contrast between national hope and national self-mockery and self-disgust becomes vivid when one compares novels like Snow Crash and Almanac of the Dead with socialist novels of the first half of the century-books like The Jungle, An American Tragedy, and The Grapes of Wrath. The latter were written in the belief that the tone of the Gettysburg Address was absolutely right, but that our country would have to transform itself in order to fulfill Lincoln's hopes.

Transfor mation would be needed because the rise of industrial capitalism had made the individualist rhetoric of America's first century obsolete. The authors of these novels thought that this rhetoric should be replaced by one in which America is destined to become the first cooperative commonwealth, the first classless society. This America would be one in which income and wealth are equitably distributed, and in which the government ensures equality of opportunity as well as individual liberty. This new, quasi-communitarian rhetoric was at the heart of the Progressive Movement and the New Deal. It set the tone for the American Left during the first six decades of the twentieth century. Walt Whitman and John Dewey, as we shall see, did a great deal to shape this

rhetoric. The difference between early twentieth-century leftist in tellectuals and the majority of their contemporary counter parts is the difference between agents and spectators. In the early decades of this century, when an intellectual stepped back from his or her country's history and looked at it through skeptical eyes, the chances were that he or she was about to propose a new political initiative. Henry Adams was, of course, the great exception-the great abstainer from ·politics. But William James thought that Adams' diagnosis of the First Gilded Age as a symptom of irreversible moral and political decline was merely perverse. James's pragmatist theory of truth was in part a reaction against the sort of detached spectators hip which Adams affected. For James, disgust with American hypocrisy and self-deception was pointless unless accompanied by an effort to give America reason to be proud

of itself in the future. The kind of proto- Heideggerian cultural pessimism which Adams cultivated seemed, to James, decadent and cowardly. "Democracy," James wrote, "is a kind of religion, and we are bound not to admit its failure. Faiths and utopias are the noblest exercise of human reason, and no one with a spark of reason in him will sit down fatalistically before the croaker's picture. "2

K2: Anthro

A pragmatic approach to the environment is key – anthropocentrism is inevitable as animals cannot speak for themselves, we have to judge events on a case-by-case basis – a blind focus on rejecting anthropocentrism is no better than just blindly accepting it. Parker 1996 (Kelly A. Parker, professor of philosophy, environmental studies, and liberal studies at Grand. Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan, “Environmental Pragmatism”, 1996, http://www.public.iastate.edu/~jwcwolf/Papers/Parker.pdf, accessed 9/8/13, JK)

The pragmatist would ask why we should be expected to pledge¶ allegiance to any of these flags a priori, and exclude the others.¶ Genuine value emerges at all of these focal levels. Indeed there will be¶

conflicts because of this, but the occurrence of such moral conflict is¶ not peculiar this approach. Antigone found that "family values¶ can tragically conflict with the values of the state; today's CEO likewise¶ finds that business values conflict with the value of an endangered¶ owl's habitat. Denying that one or the other sphere is worthy of¶ consideration may appear to prevent potential moral conflict from¶ arising, but only at the risk of serious moral blindness. Blind anthropocentrism has deplorable consequences for the non-human world,¶ but a blindly misanthropic ecocentrism is no less deplorable .¶

Again, pluralism is a fact encountered in experience. Value arises¶ in a variety of relationships among differing parts of the experienced¶ world. Each situation must be appraised on its own distinct terms. ¶ As before, the twin values of sustainability and diversity provide¶ reference points. Sometimes we rightly focus on the sustainability of¶ the whole system; sometimes on 'the unique value of an individual.¶ Sometimes the individual or the system is human and sometimes¶ it is not. From this perspective, environmental ethics can be seen as¶ continuous with other areas of ethics, a distinct but integral part of¶ value inquiry in general.¶ I have spoken of the experience of organisms-in-environments as¶ centrally important. Pragmatism is "anthropocentric" (or better,¶ "anthropometric")24 in one respect: the human organism is inevitably¶ the one that discusses value. This is so because human experience, the¶ human perspective on value, is the only thing we know as humans.¶ Many other entities indeed have experience and do value things.¶ Again, this is not to say that human whim is the measure of all things,¶ only that humans are in fact the measurers. This must be a factor in¶ all our deliberations about environmental issues. We can and should¶ speak on the others' behalf when appropriate, but we cannot speak¶ from their experience. We can in some sense hear their voices, but we¶ cannot speak in their voices. I see no way out of our own distinctively¶ human bodies. In this sense, the human yardstick of experience¶ becomes, by default, the measure of all things . Although the debate¶ over environmental issues is thus limited to human participants, this¶ is not inappropriate - after all, the debate centers almost exclusively¶ on human threats to the world. Wolves , spotted owls, and old growth forests are unable to enter the ethics debate except through¶ their human spokespersons, and that is perhaps regrettable. Far¶ better that they should speak for themselves! Lacking this, they do at¶ least have spokespersons - and these spokespersons, their advocates,¶ need to communicate their concerns only to other humans. To do¶ this in anthropic value categories is not shameful. It is, after all, the¶ only way to go.

Pedagogy

Discourse

Predictions

Predictions Good

Scenario Planning Good

Predictions are necessary – even if they could be wrong, scenario planning helps reduce uncertainty and the alternative is policy paralysisWhitt 2009 [Richard, Washington Telecom and Media Counsel at Google, “Adaptive Policymaking: Evolving and Applying Emergent Solutions for U.S. Communications Policy”, Federal Communications Law Journal, vol. 61, issue 3, Questia]

Emergence Economics tells us that prognostication and planning are difficult, if not impossible, to get right. The inevitable personal limitations of information, perception, and cognition, coupled with a dynamic and unpredictable environment, makes failure far more common than success. Attempting long-range planning can also

clash with the adaptive principle of making contextual, evidence-based decisions. Still, appreciating this reality should not lead to decisional paralysis. Those making public policy must do what they can to peer into the fog and discern some patterns that can help shape analysis. There are a number of possible ways to project into the present and future, using a mix of reason and imagination, to solve problems. I will briefly touch on three that are based more on policy option scenarios rather than outfight predictions. Peter

Schwartz has devised what he calls "the art of the long view," which is premised on developing and using scenarios to help cabin uncertainty and improve decision making. (332) This multi-stage process involves (1) identifying a focal decision , (2) listing the key factors influencing the success or failure of that decision, (3) listing the driving forces (social, economic, political, environmental, and technological) that influence the key factors, (4) ranking the key factors and driving forces based on relative

importance and degree of uncertainty, (5) selecting the potential scenarios along a matrix, (6) fleshing out the scenarios,

(7) assessing the implications, and (8) selecting leading indicators and signposts. (333) An important takeaway here is that the use of scenarios can help identify the various environmental forces that can affect implementation of a policy decision, reducing to some degree the uncertainty that otherwise surrounds that process . Closer to the near-term, Richard Ogle talks about utilizing "the idea-spaces of the extended mind," which he identifies as including qualities like imagination, intuition, and insight. (334) As Ogle sees it, reason proceeds cautiously and looks backward, while the imagination and its allied capacities look more boldly forward. (335) More specifically, the Cartesian model of thinking is based on continuity, because logical and probabilistic reasoning

cannot abide gaps. (336) By contrast, creative breakthroughs typically involve leaps into the unknown. (337) Because the imagination is the mind's supreme faculty for dealing with the future, and it reaches places where reason cannot go, Ogle suggests ways to harness the imagination to improve one's decision-making abilities. (338) As Ogle quotes Einstein, "Logic will get you from A to B, imagination will take you everywhere." (339) Finally, Thomas Homer-Dixon argues for the necessity to develop a "prospective mind ... comfortable with constant change, radical surprise, and even breakdown." (340) He sees each of these as inevitable features of our world, requiring us

constantly to anticipate a wide variety of futures. "We need to exercise our imaginations so that we can challenge the unchallengeable and conceive the inconceivable." (341) He also argues : "Precise prediction is impossible because our complex and nonlinear world is full of unknown unknowns--things we do not know that we do not know."

(342) But a mind open to numerous possibilities is better equipped to anticipate and deal with change than a mind closed off to such possibilities.

Economic Predictions Good

Models are critical to good economic theory – net benefit is educationKrul 2010[PhD at Brunel University, Masters in Economic History from the London School of Economics, “How to Criticize and How Not to Criticize Positive Neoclassical Economics I: Models”, http://mccaine.org/2010/11/06/how-to-criticize-and-how-not-to-criticize-positive-neoclassical-economics-i-models/]

This does, however, raise some real questions which can be fruitfully used as points of criticism. The main

point is the necessity of understanding the nature of the predictive value that these models are supposed to have and that they are supposed to be judged by. As is well-known by now in philosophy of science, the actual factual outcomes which would constitute the empirical test for theories are underdetermined by theory: for any given factual case there is always more than one theory that can account for it. In practice it is therefore not easily possible to apply a simple methodology that ignores whatever the assumptions may be and builds a predictive model, and then compares it with rival predictive models for the purposes of empirical testing. There will never be agreement about to what extent reality matches with given such theories, as is shown by the long-term persistence of strong theoretical

divisions, whether between Marxists and neoclassical economists or more narrowly between Keyenesians and monetarists. It is almost impossible to determine a priori therefore at what level one should declare the problem to occur if the facts do not match the predictions of a model: maybe the data are wrongly gathered, or maybe the data are polluted by third variables affecting them, or maybe the model was wrongly constructed, or maybe the theory is incorrect. Which of these one thinks the most likely one in any given case tends to depend strongly in practice on the political and theoretical implications it would have and the degree to which they fit one’s preconceived idea of how the world works. As Friedman states: “Observed facts are necessarily finite in number; possible hypotheses infinite. If there is one hypothesis that is consistent with the available evidence, there are always an infinite number that are.”(4) Understanding this fact also allows us to understand the different uses to which modelling in neoclassical economics can be put (and not only in neoclassical economics). Because one cannot go directly from a model to reality to check whether the predictions hold true, the models function, as Uskali Mäki and others

have pointed out, as a model world. They are worlds in which the assumptions made hold true – worlds in which perfect information exists, profit is maximized, or whatever. This allows them to be judged on their theoretical virtues as a way of distinguishing one hypothesis about the known facts from another, in light of the above mentioned underdetermination.(5) These theoretical virtues, again, would be primarily those of parsimony and of elegance of explanation, as well as the manner in which it allows hitherto complicated matters to be formalized for ease of use. In such a way, this formalization can allow us to grapple better with complicated questions by distilling them into clearly defined elements when they would otherwise remain muddled. As Levins and Lewontin defend mathematical formalization in science: Mathematics is

used mostly in modeling in order to predict the outcomes of systems of equations. But is also has another use: educating the intuition so that the obscure becomes obvious. When we abstract from the reality of interest to create mathematical objects, we do this because some questions that would seem intractable can now be grasped immediately.

Reject their sweeping indicts of models – prefer the specificity and diversity of applied economic methods Krul 2010[PhD at Brunel University, Masters in Economic History from the London School of Economics, “How to Criticize and How Not to Criticize Positive Neoclassical Economics I: Models”, http://mccaine.org/2010/11/06/how-to-criticize-and-how-not-to-criticize-positive-neoclassical-economics-i-models/]

The role of assumptions in models can therefore be manifold, as manifold as the purpose of the models themselves. Models in economics will then namely be seen as having two major possible functions (there are also some

minor ones which I will not go into in detail): either they function as purely theoretical model worlds, and the purpose of the exercise is to elucidate some aspect hitherto unacknowledged about this model world,

thereby improving the precision of and knowledge about a given positive economic theory, or a model attempts to directly make a claim about real causes that operate in reality, by either making a predictive claim on the basis of the model’s abstraction of reality or by making a claim about the reality of the causal factor identified in the model. These two different approaches are both common in neoclassical economics and are not always properly differentiated by the economists themselves. Yet

they should attract accordingly different criticisms on their merits. Uskali Mäki again has described very well what the difference is between the ‘substitute systems’, as he calls the former type, and the ‘surrogate systems’, as he calls the

latter type: One kind of criticism attacks styles of inquiry that treat a model as a substitute system only, not even intending it as a means for gaining access to the real world. The alleged problem is that there is no

attempt. The other kind of criticism acknowledges a model being treated as a surrogate system, but blames it for failing in accessing the social world. The alleged problem is that there is a failed attempt. The history of economics exhibits both kinds of criticism. (7) In order to criticize neoclassical economics effectively, one must separate these two types of criticism. The unrealisticness of assumptions is warranted insofar as a given model’s identification of causes can, in the terminology of Mäki, be said still to resemble the real causes operating in the world; it is an empirical question whether this is the case or not, and therefore one that is very liable to the underdetermination problem identified above. However, there are also cases in which the unrealisticness is always unwarranted. There are several such cases. The most important one is the case in which either the model is only used to elucidate other models or assumptions in positive neoclassical economics, without making the attempt to connect it with the real world in any way, except highly indirectly – on the basis of the principle that most of neoclassical economics can be accepted as known and true, and therefore elucidating theoretical aspects of neoclassical economics’ assumptions is helpful. Here the model is then subject to the ‘so what?’ critique: even if it is true that a given model has certain properties as a thought experiment, it is still necessary to justify empirically the connection of the thought experiment to reality. However, there is obviously room for maneouvre here: as Mäki also points

out, what appears from a critic’s point of view as a substitute system can from the point of view of a practitioner appear as a surrogate system,

it just happens that the model discussed in a given paper is only remotely connected with the eventual application to reality. Again, there will be disagreement on the point of this being true or not, and the more remote the application to reality is, the greater the room for challenge. Very often in economic papers the models discussed make no hypothesis about reality at all, or when they do, the hypothesis makes an immediate and unjustified leap from the theoretical properties of the model to the theoretical properties of reality –

here is an excellent terrain for criticizing neoclassical economics, which seems especially prone to these errors. A slightly less significant but also relevant point of criticism for modelling in this context is the use of assumptions in models

for the purposes of tractability, including presentation for pedagogical purposes and the like. Here, it is of the utmost importance that such assumptions when unrealistic are as trivial and as irrelevant to the actual point of contention as possible. As Mäki has pointed out but perhaps not emphasized strongly enough, contrary to the habitual practice of many neoclassical economists, any unrealistic assumptions made for the purposes of tractability must not have any ontological implications. As his example goes: A few decades ago economists lacked the mathematical tools for dealing with increasing returns and monopolistic competition in a general equilibrium framework. This violated the ontological convictions of many economists working on development issues: these economists conceived of (major parts of) the economy as being governed by positive feedback mechanisms and market imperfections. In case a conflict between ontology and tractability is resolved in favor of tractability while suppressing ontology, the obvious suspicion is that the models that ensue are (or are to be) treated as substitute systems only.

Rejection Bad

Turn—rejecting strategic predictions of threats makes them inevitable—decision-makers will rely on preconceived conceptions of threat rather than the more qualified predictions of analystsFitzsimmons 2007 [Michael, Washington DC defense analyst, “The Problem of Uncertainty in Strategic Planning”, Survival, Winter 06-07, online]

But handling even this weaker form of uncertainty is still quite challenging. If not sufficiently bounded, a high degree of variability in planning factors can exact a significant price on planning. The complexity presented by great variability strains the cognitive abilities of even the most sophisticated decision- makers .15 And even a robust decision-making process sensitive to cognitive limitations necessarily sacrifices depth of analysis for breadth as variability and complexity grows. It should follow,

then, that in planning under conditions of risk, variability in strategic calculation should be carefully tailored to available analytic and decision processes. Why is this important? What harm can an imbalance between complexity and

cognitive or analytic capacity in strategic planning bring? Stated simply, where analysis is silent or inadequate , the personal beliefs of decision-makers fill the void . As political scientist Richard Betts found in a study of strategic sur- prise, in ‘an environment that lacks clarity, abounds with conflicting data, and allows no time for rigorous assessment of sources and validity, ambiguity allows intuition or wishfulness to drive interpretation ... The greater the ambiguity, the greater the impact of preconception s .’16 The decision-making environment that Betts

describes here is one of political-military crisis, not long-term strategic planning. But a strategist who sees uncertainty as the central fact of his environ- ment brings upon himself some of the pathologies of crisis decision-making. He invites ambiguity, takes conflicting data for granted and substitutes a priori scepticism about the validity of prediction for time pressure as a rationale for discounting the importance of analytic rigour . It is important not to exaggerate the extent to which data and ‘rigorous assessment’ can illuminate strategic choices. Ambiguity is a fact of life, and scepticism of analysis is necessary. Accordingly, the intuition and judgement of decision-makers will always be vital to strategy, and attempting to subordinate those factors to some formulaic,

deterministic decision-making model would be both undesirable and unrealistic. All the same, there is danger in the opposite extreme as well. Without careful analysis of what is relatively likely and what is relatively unlikely, what will be the possible bases for strategic choices? A decision-maker with no faith in prediction is left with little more than a

set of worst-case scenarios and his existing beliefs about the world to confront the choices before him. Those beliefs may be more or less well founded, but if they are not made explicit and subject to analysis and debate regarding their application to particular strategic contexts, they remain only beliefs and premises, rather than rational judgements. Even at their best, such decisions are likely to be poorly understood by the organisations charged with their implementation . At their worst, such decisions may be poorly understood by the decision-makers themselves.

A2 Menand

This evidence doesn’t apply—it doesn’t indict all predictions, just those that are made by pundits without evidenceMenand 2005 (Louis, The New Yorker, 10/5, lexis)

It was no news to Tetlock, therefore, that experts got beaten by formulas. But he does believe that he discovered something about why some people make better forecasters than other people. It has to do not with what the experts believe but with the way they think. Tetlock uses Isaiah

Berlin's metaphor from Archilochus, from his essay on Tolstoy, "The Hedgehog and the Fox," to illustrate the difference. He says: Low scorers look like hedgehogs: thinkers who "know one big thing," aggressively extend the explanatory reach of that one big thing into new domains, display bristly impatience with those who "do not get it," and express considerable confidence that they are already pretty proficient forecasters, at least in the long

term. High scorers look like foxes: thinkers who know many small things (tricks of their trade), are skeptical of grand schemes, see explanation and prediction not as deductive exercises but rather as exercises in flexible "ad hocery" that require stitching together diverse sources of information, and are rather diffident about their own forecasting prowess. A hedgehog is a person who sees international affairs to be ultimately determined by a single bottom-line force: balance-of-power considerations, or the clash of civilizations, or globalization and the spread of free markets. A hedgehog is the kind of person who holds a great-man theory of history, according to which the Cold War does not end if there is no Ronald Reagan. Or he or she might adhere to the "actor-dispensability thesis," according to which Soviet Communism was doomed no matter what. Whatever it is, the big idea, and that idea alone, dictates the probable outcome of events. For the hedgehog, therefore, predictions that fail are only "off on timing," or are "almost right," derailed by an unforeseeable accident. There are always little swerves in the short run, but the long run irons them out. Foxes, on the other hand, don't see a single determining explanation in history. They tend, Tetlock says, "to see the world as a shifting mixture of self-fulfilling and self-negating prophecies: self-fulfilling ones in which success breeds success, and failure, failure but only up to a point, and then self-negating prophecies kick in as people recognize that things have gone too far." Tetlock did not find, in his sample, any significant correlation between how experts think and what their politics are. His hedgehogs were liberal as well as conservative, and the same with his foxes. (Hedgehogs were, of course, more likely to be extreme politically, whether rightist or leftist.) He also did not find that his foxes scored higher because they were more cautious-that their appreciation of complexity made them less likely to offer firm predictions. Unlike hedgehogs, who actually performed worse in areas

in which they specialized, foxes enjoyed a modest benefit from expertise. Hedgehogs routinely over-predicted: twenty per cent of the outcomes that hedgehogs claimed were impossible or nearly impossible came to pass, versus ten per cent for the foxes. More than thirty per cent of the outcomes that hedgehogs thought were sure or near-sure did not, against twenty per cent for foxes. The upside of being a hedgehog, though, is that when you're right you can be really and spectacularly right. Great scientists, for example, are often hedgehogs. They value parsimony, the simpler solution over the more complex. In world affairs, parsimony may be a liability-but, even there, there can be traps in the kind of highly integrative thinking that is characteristic of foxes. Elsewhere, Tetlock has published an analysis of the political reasoning of Winston Churchill. Churchill was not a man who let contradictory information interfere with his idees fixes. This led him to make the wrong prediction about Indian independence, which he opposed. But it led him to be right about Hitler. He was never distracted by

the contingencies that might combine to make the elimination of Hitler unnecessary. Tetlock also has an unscientific point to make, which is that "we as a society would be better off if participants in policy debates stated their beliefs in testable forms"-that is, as probabilities-"monitored their forecasting performance, and honored their reputational bets." He thinks that we're suffering from our primitive attraction to deterministic, overconfident hedgehogs. It's true that the only thing the electronic media like

better than a hedgehog is two hedgehogs who don't agree. Tetlock notes, sadly, a point that Richard Posner has made about these kinds of public intellectuals, which is that most of them are dealing in "solidarity" goods, not "credence" goods. Their analyses and predictions are tailored to make their ideological brethren feel good-more white swans for the white-swan camp. A prediction, in this context, is just an exclamation point added to an analysis. Liberals want to hear that whatever conservatives are up to is bound to go badly; when the argument gets more nuanced, they change the channel. On radio and television and the editorial page, the line between expertise and advocacy is very blurry, and pundits behave exactly the way Tetlock says they will. Bush Administration loyalists say that their predictions about postwar Iraq were correct, just a little off on timing; pro-invasion liberals who are now trying to dissociate themselves from an adventure gone bad insist that though they may have sounded a false alarm, they erred "in the right direction"-not really a mistake at all.

A2 Expertism Bad

Rejecting expertism means you vote for Palin- this allows conservative, reactionary, uneducated masses to takeover democracy and swamp reason Lilla 2008Mark Lilla is a professor of humanities at Columbia University and a former editor of the Public Interest.WSJ 11-8-08 http://sec.online.wsj.com/article/SB122610558004810243.html?mod=article-outset-box

The die was cast. Over the next 25 years there grew up a new generation of conservative writers who cultivated none of their elders' intellectual virtues -- indeed, who saw themselves as counter-intellectuals. Most are well-

educated and many have attended Ivy League universities; in fact, one of the masterminds of the Palin nomination was once a Harvard professor. But their function within the conservative movement is no longer to educate and ennoble a populist political

tendency, it is to defend that tendency against the supposedly monolithic and uniformly hostile educated classes . They mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages . And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them . Back in the '70s, conservative intellectuals loved to talk about "radical chic," the well-known tendency of educated, often

wealthy liberals to project their political fantasies onto brutal revolutionaries and street thugs, and romanticize their "struggles." But "populist chic" is just the inversion of "radical chic," and is no less absurd, comical or ominous. Traditional conservatives were always suspicious of populism, and they were right to be. They saw elites as a fact of political life, even of democratic life. What matters in democracy is that those elites acquire their positions through talent and experience, and that they be educated to serve the public good. But it also matters that they own up to their elite status and defend the need for elites. They must be friends of democracy while protecting it, and themselves, from the leveling and vulgarization all democracy tends toward. Writing recently in the New York Times, David Brooks noted correctly (if

belatedly) that conservatives' "disdain for liberal intellectuals" had slipped into "disdain for the educated class as a whole," and worried that the Republican Party was alienating educated voters. I couldn't care less about the future of the Republican Party, but I do care about the quality of political thinking and judgment in the country as a whole. There was a time when conservative intellectuals raised the level of American public debate and helped to keep it sober. Those days are gone. As for political judgment, the promotion of Sarah Palin as a possible world leader speaks for itself. The Republican Party and the political right will survive, but the conservative intellectual tradition is already dead. And all of us, even liberals like myself, are poorer for it.

Utilitarianism

Good

1NC

1. Util is the only ethical system – sacrifice for the overall good is the only way to treat people equally. Cumminsky, ’96 (David, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bates College and Ph.D. from UM, “Kantian Consequentialism”, p. 145-146)

In the next section, I will defend this interpretation of the duty of beneficence. For the sake of argument, however, let us first simply assume that beneficence does not require significant self-sacrifice and see what follows. Although Kant is unclear on this point, we will assume that significant self-sacrifices are supererogatory.11 Thus, if I must harm one in order to save many, the individual whom I will harm by my action is not morally required to affirm the action. On the other hand, I have a duty to do all that I can for those in need. As a consequence I am faced with a dilemma: If I act, I harm a person in a way that a rational being need not consent to; if I fail to act, then I do not do my duty to those in need and thereby fail to promote an objective end . Faced with such a choice, which horn of the dilemma is more consistent with the formula of the end-in-itself? We must not obscure the issue by characterizing this type of case as the sacrifice of individuals for some abstract "social entity." It is not a question of some persons having to bear the cost for some elusive "overall social good ." Instead, the question is whether some persons must bear the inescapable cost for the sake of other persons. Robert Nozick, for example, argues that " to use a person in this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a separate person, that his is the only life he has. " 12 But why is this not equally true of all those whom we do not save through our failure to act? By emphasizing solely the one who must bear the cost if we act, we fail to sufficiently respect and take account of the many other separate persons, each with only one life, who will bear the cost of our inaction. In such a situation, what would a conscientious Kantian agent, an agent motivated by the unconditional value of rational beings, choose? A morally good agent recognizes that the basis of all particular duties is the principle that "rational nature exists as an end in itself" (GMM 429). Rational nature as such is the supreme objective end of all conduct. If one truly believes that all rational beings have an equal value, then the rational solution to such a dilemma involves maximally promoting the lives and liberties of as many rational beings as possible (chapter 5). In order to avoid this conclusion, the non-consequentialist Kantian needs to justify agent-centered constraints. As we saw in chapter 1, however, even most Kantian deontologists recognize that agent-centered constraints require a non-value-based rationale. But we have seen that Kant's normative theory is based on an unconditionally valuable end. How can a concern for the value of rational beings lead to a refusal to sacrifice rational beings even when this would prevent other more extensive losses of rational beings? If the moral law is based on the value of rational beings and their ends, then what is the rationale for prohibiting a moral agent from maximally promoting these two tiers of value? If I sacrifice some for the sake of others, I do not use them arbitrarily, and I do not deny the unconditional value of rational beings. Persons may have "dignity, that is, an unconditional and incomparable worth" that transcends any market value (GMM 436), but persons also have a fundamental equality that dictates that some must sometimes give way for the sake of others (chapters 5 and 7). The concept of the end-in-itself does not support the view that we may never force another to bear some cost in order to benefit others. If one focuses on the equal value of all rational beings, then equal consideration suggests that one may have to sacrifice some to save many.

2. Privileging ethics over political consequences dooms their ethical system and politics.Isaac, 02 [Jeffrey, Professor of Political Science and director of the Center for the Study of Democracy and Public Life at Indiana University, Dissent, “Ends, Means, and Politics”, Spring, ebsco]Power is not a dirty word or an unfortunate feature of the world. It is the core of politics. Power is the ability

to effect outcomes in the world. Politics, in large part, involves contests over the distribution and use of power. To ac- complish anything in the political world, one must attend to the means that are necessary to bring it about . And to develop such means is to develop, and to exercise, power. To say this is not to say that power is beyond moral- ity. It is to say that power is

not reducible to morality. As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught, an unyielding concern with moral goodness undercuts political responsibility. The concern may be morally laudable,

re- flecting a kind of personal integrity, but it suf- fers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that the purity of one’s intention does not ensure the achievement of what one intends. Ab- juring violence or refusing to make common cause with morally compromised parties may seem like the right thing; but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard to view them as serving any moral good beyond the clean con- science of their supporters; (2) it fails to see that in a world of real violence and injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of powerlessness; it is often a form of complicity in injustice . This is why, from the standpoint of poli- tics—as opposed to religion—pacifism is always a potentially immoral stand. In categorically re- pudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent injustices with any ef- fect; and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended consequences as it is about intentions ; it is the effects of action, rather than the motives of action, that is most significant. Just as the alignment with “good” may engender impotence, it is often the pur- suit of “good” that generates evil. This is the lesson of communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that one’s goals be sincere or idealistic; it is equally important, always, to ask about the effects of pursuing these goals and to judge these effects in pragmatic and histori- cally contextualized ways. Moral absolutism in- hibits this judgment. It alienates those who are not true believers . It promotes arrogance. And it undermines political effectiveness.

3. Extinction outweighs and should be evaluated before anything elseJonathan Schell 1982 Harold Willens Peace Fellow at the Nation Institute, The Fate of the Earth, page 95 http://www.colorado.edu/AmStudies/lewis/film/schell.pdf accessed 6/30/12

it is clear that at present, with some twenty thousand megatons of nuclear explosive power in existence, and with more being added every day, we have entered into the zone of uncertainty, which is to say the zone of risk of extinction. But the mere risk of extinction has a significance that is categorically different from , and immeasurably greater than that of any other risk , and as we make our decisions we have to take that significance into account. Up to now, every risk has been contained within the frame of life; extinction would shatter the frame. It represents not the defeat of some purpose but an abyss in which all human purposes would be drowned for all time. We have no right to place the possibility of this limitless, eternal defeat on the same footing as risks that we run in the ordinary conduct of our affairs in our particular transient moment of human history. To employ a mathematical analogy, we can say that although the risk of extinction may be fractional, the stake is, humanly speaking, infinite, and a fraction of infinity is still infinity. In other words, once we learn that a holocaust might lead to extinction we have no right to gamble, because if we lose, the game will be over, and neither we nor anyone else will ever get another chance. Therefore, although scientifically speaking, there is all the difference in the world between the mere possibility that a holocaust will bring about extinction and the certainty of it, morally they are the same, and we have no choice but to address the issue of nuclear weapons as though we knew for a certainty that their use would put an end to our species.

4. Utilitarianism inevitable – we constantly attempt to balance rights. Green, 02 – Assistant Professor Department of Psychology Harvard University (Joshua, November 2002 "The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth About Morality And What To Do About It", 314)Some people who talk of balancing rights may think there is an algorithm for deciding which rights take priority over which. If that’s what we mean by 302 “balancing rights,” then we are wise to shun this sort of talk. Attempting to solve moral problems using a complex deontological algorithm is dogmatism at its most esoteric, but dogmatism all the same. However, it’s likely that when some people talk about “balancing competing rights and obligations”

they are already thinking like consequentialists in spite of their use of deontological language . Once again, what deontological language does best is express the thoughts of people struck by strong, emotional moral intuitions: “It doesn’t matter that you can save five people by pushing him to his death. To do this would be a violation of his rights!”19 That is why angry protesters say things like, “Animals Have Rights, Too!” rather than, “Animal Testing: The Harms Outweigh the Benefits!” Once again, rights talk captures the apparent clarity of the issue and absoluteness of the answer. But sometimes rights talk persists long after the sense of clarity and absoluteness has faded. One thinks, for example, of the

thousands of children whose lives are saved by drugs that were tested on animals and the “rights” of those children. One finds oneself balancing the “rights” on both sides by asking how many rabbit lives one is willing to sacrifice in order to save one human life, and so on, and at the end of the day one’s underlying thought is as thoroughly consequentialist as can be , despite the deontological gloss . And what’s wrong with that? Nothing, except for the fact

that the deontological gloss adds nothing and furthers the myth that there really are “rights,” etc. Best to drop it. When deontological talk gets sophisticated, the thought it represents is either dogmatic in an esoteric sort of way or covertly consequentialist.

5. Util creates a unique value for life – predicting to stop future extinction episodes allows us to appreciate all lives and share a deep concern for the state of our world. The Co-Intelligence Institute, 2K2[“Fear and Empowerment Work,” http://www.co-intelligence.org/y2k_despairempowermt.html, accessed 3-2-2007, JT]Apocalyptic Y2K expectations can make us afraid, depressed and numb. Intense emotions like this can wipe us out -- to a point where we can't act effectively. But it turns out there is a gift hidden at the core of these emotions, a gift that gives us power. But first a bit of history.During the 1980s some peace activists realized that their fellow citizens were paralyzed by fear and powerlessness in the face of the threat of nuclear war. They observed people lost in denial, trying to go about their lives as if the threat didn't exist. Wanting to learn more about this phenomenon, these activists listened carefully to these haunted people -- and searched their own hearts, as well. They discovered that under everyone's denial was a deep caring for their lives, their children's future, and the fate of their world . From that insight, these activists developed a number of emotional and spiritual approaches to help people in groups break through their denial and despair to contact that deep caring. Once they got in touch with their shared feelings and stories and passion for life, such groups often found a new vitality and determination to do something about the problem. Buddhist scholar and systems thinker Joanna Macy, pioneer in this work, called it "despair and empowerment work." A number of people who were involved with that work a decade or more ago, are now evolving new forms which they are applying to threats such as ecological collapse and the socioeconomic collapse that could be triggered by the Y2K computer problem and our dependence on technology.

A2: Humans Not Special

People are a unique arrangement of molecules that have a value simply for being so unique, don’t buy any of their “we’re nothing special” arguments, we need to save as many lives as possible because once this arrangement is gone, it’s gone forever.Myers 2009 (PZ, Biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris, December 10th 2009, Science Blogs, http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/12/the_dead_are_dead.php, accessed 3/6/12, JK)

I have heard that first argument so many times, and it is facile and dishonest. We are not just "energy". We are a pattern of energy and matter, a very specific and precise arrangement of molecules in movement. That can be destroyed. When you've built a pretty sand castle and the tide comes in and washes it away, the grains of sand are still all there, but what you've lost is the arrangement that you worked to generate, and which you appreciated. Reducing a complex functional order to nothing but the constituent parts is an insult to the work. If I were to walk into the Louvre and set fire to the Mona Lisa , and afterwards take a drive down to Chartres and blow up the cathedral, would anyone defend my actions by saying, "well, science says matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed, therefore, Rabid Myers did no harm, and we'll all just enjoy viewing the ashes and rubble from now on"? No. That's crazy talk. We also wouldn't be arguing that the painting and the architecture have transcended this universe to enter another, nor would such a pointless claim ameliorate our loss in this universe. The rest of his argument is quantum gobbledy-gook. The behavior of subatomic particles is not a good guide to what to expect of the behavior of large bodies. A photon may have no rest mass, but I can't use this fact to justify my grand new weight loss plan; quantum tunnelling does not imply that I can ignore doors when I amble about my house. People are not particles! We are the product of the aggregate behavior of the many particles that constitute our bodies, and you cannot ignore the importance of these higher-order relationships when talking about our fate.

A2: Zimmerman

1. Every ethical system uses utilitarian calculus to some degree – makes at least some form of ontological damnation inevitable.

2. Extinction outweighs – it shatters the frame of life and makes any reconciliation with value impossible, that’s Schell. We need to live to fight another day.

3. Your evidence is missing a crucial part—the part that says you are wrong. Nuke war outweighs. Michael E. Zimmerman, Professor of Philosophy at Tulane, Contesting Earth’s Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity, 1994, pg 119-120 Heidegger asserted that human self-assertion, combined with the eclipse of being, threatens the relation between being and human Dasein. Loss of this relation would be even more dangerous than a nuclear war that might “bring about the complete annihilation of humanity and the destruction of the earth.” This controversial claim is comparable to the Christian teaching that it is better to forfeit the world than to lose one’s soul by losing one’s relation to God. Heidegger apparently thought along these lines: it is possible that after a nuclear war, life might once again emerge, but it is far less likely that there will ever again occur an ontological clearing through which such life could manifest itself. Further, since modernity’s one-dimensional disclosure of entities virtually denies them any “being” at all, the loss of humanity’s openness for being is already occurring. Modernity’s background mood is horror in the face of nihilism, which is consistent with the aim of providing material “happiness” for everyone by reducing nature to pure energy. The unleashing of vast quantities of energy in nuclear war would be equivalent to modernity’s slow-motion destruction of nature: unbounded destruction would equal limitless consumption. If humanity avoided nuclear war only to survive as contented clever animals, Heidegger believed we would exist in a state of ontological damnation: hell on earth, masquerading as material paradise. Deep ecologist might agree that a world of material human comfort purchased at the price of everything wild would not be a world worth living in, for in killing wild nature, people would be as good as dead. But most of them could not agree that the loss of humanity's relation to being would be worse than nuclear omnicide, for it is wrong to suppose that the lives of millions of extinct and unknown species are somehow lessened because they were never "disclosed" by humanity.

4. Extinction outweighs ontology – people will inevitably rise up, unless they all die before they can. Scratch Zimmerman, reverse it.Jonas ’96 (Hans, Former Alvin Johnson Prof. Phil. – New School for Social Research and Former Eric Voegelin Visiting Prof. – U. Munich, “Morality and Mortality: A Search for the Good After Auschwitz”, p. 111-112)With this look ahead at an ethics for the future, we are touching at the same time upon the question of the future of freedom. The unavoidable discussion of this question seems to give rise to misunderstandings. My dire prognosis that not only our material standard of living but also our democratic freedoms would fall victim to the growing pressure of a worldwide ecological crisis, until finally there would remain only some form of tyranny that would try to save the situation, has led to the accusation that I am defending dictatorship as a solution to our problems. I shall ignore here what is a confusion between warning and recommendation. But I have indeed said that such a tyranny would still be better than total ruin; thus, I have ethically accepted it as an alternative. I must now defend this standpoint, which I continue to support, before the court that I myself have created with the main argument of this essay. For are we not contradicting ourselves in prizing physical survival at the price of freedom? Did we not say that freedom was the condition of our capacity for responsibility—and that this capacity was a reason for the survival of humankind?; By tolerating tyranny as an alternative to physical

annihilation are we not violating the principle we established: that the How of existence must not take precedence over its Why? Yet we can make a terrible concession to the primacy of physical survival in the conviction that the ontological capacity for freedom, inseparable as it is from man's being, cannot really be extinguished , only temporarily banished from the public realm . This conviction can be supported by experience we are all familiar with. We have seen that even in the most totalitarian societies the urge for freedom on the part of some individuals cannot be extinguished, and this renews our faith in human beings. Given this faith, we have reason to hope that, as long as there are human beings who survive , the image of God will continue to exist along with them and will wait in concealment for its new hour. With that hope—which in this particular case takes precedence over fear—it is permissible , for the sake of physical survival, to accept if need be a temporary absence of freedom in the external affairs of humanity . This is, I want to emphasize, a worst-case scenario, and it is the foremost task of responsibility at this particular moment in world history to prevent it from happening. This is in fact one of the noblest of duties (and at the same time one concerning self-preservation), on the part of the imperative of responsibility to avert future coercion that would lead to lack of freedom by acting freely in the present, thus preserving as much as possible the ability of future generations to assume responsibility. But more than that is involved. At stake is the preservation of Earth's entire miracle of creation, of which our human existence is a part and before which man reverently bows, even without philosophical "grounding. " Here too faith may precede and reason follow; it is faith that longs for this preservation of the Earth (fides quaerens intellectum), and reason comes as best it can to faith's aid with arguments, not knowing or even asking how much depends on its success or failure in determining what action to take. With this confession of faith we come to the end of our essay on ontology.

A2: Non-Human Value

Extinction first: Nothing has value outside of an evaluating agent – the reason that they can claim that non-living things have value in the first place is because they ARE evaluating agents. Post-extinction, things may exist, but they will be valueless.Parker 1996 (Kelly A. Parker, professor of philosophy, environmental studies, and liberal studies at Grand. Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan, “Environmental Pragmatism”, 1996, http://www.public.iastate.edu/~jwcwolf/Papers/Parker.pdf, accessed 9/8/13, JK)

The last point I want to touch upon is one that many take to be¶ the most important issue in environmental ethics. It is often repeated¶ that the viability of environmental ethics depends on establishing the¶ intrinsic value of the non-human world. (Perhaps I should use the¶ term "inherent value." I'll deal with that momentarily.) The main¶ concern is that as long as the non-human world is seen as a stock of¶ resources having only instrumental value, there can be no genuine¶ "environmental ethic." To be morally considerable in a strong sense,¶ the non-human world must be more than useful. It must be valuable¶ in its own right¶ Pragmatism cuts this Gordian knot by denying that instrumental¶ value and intrinsic value are ever mutually exclusive. The being¶ of any existent thing, human or non-human, is constituted in its¶ relations with other things in a context of meaningful connections.¶ Thus anything that is good is both instrumentally valuable (it affects¶ some goods beyond itself) and intrinsically valuable (it is good for¶ what it is, a significant entity essential to the constitution of these¶ relations). We can indeed distinguish the two kinds of value, but¶ nothing can ever be instrumentally valuable without at the same time¶ possessing intrinsic value. Thus even the "last man" on earth, in¶ Richard Routley's classic scenario, would be doing something¶ morally wrong in wantonly destroying parts of the natural world.25¶ He would be annihilating intrinsically good pans of the field of¶ experience. He would be needlessly damaging not just those supposedly discrete things, but intrinsically good parts of himself and of¶ all other beings potentially or actually in the experiential web.¶ People may mean something else by "intrinsic value," however.¶ Callicott reserves the term "intrinsic value" for the goodness of something independent of any consciousness that might value it.26 This is¶ sometimes called the "inherent value" or "inherent worth" of natural¶ objects. Now, pragmatism would point out that where there is and¶ could in principle be no valuing agent, there is no conceivable experience - and hence no aesthetic or moral value at all. In a universe of¶ mere objects absent a valuing consciousness, things may have being¶ but not value. Perhaps intrinsic/inherent value is the contemporary¶ equivalent of the medieval concept of "ontological goodness" - then¶ in so far as it exists, everything is good in God's eyes. Or perhaps¶ whatever is, is good for some non-human consciousness other than¶ God. (These latter two cases conform to what Callicott identifies as¶ inherent value.) I respect both of these possibilities, but as a human¶ philosopher I cannot, and need not, comprehend them from the¶ inside. If there were no human agent there would after all be no¶ possibility (and no need) for the kind of environmental ethic we seek.¶ I do not know what it is like to be God, nor do I know what it is like¶ to be a bat. The concept of intrinsic/inherent value is thus either¶ meaningless, or else it reduces to the value of something that enters¶ into ecological relations that do not immediately affect any human¶ agent. All that is, however, does eventually, mediately, affect some¶ human agent. Its value can thus be cognized by humans, and its¶ moral considerability can be acknowledged and respected. The lesson¶ here, that we are connected at all points to our environments, and¶ they to us, is the Alpha and the Omega of pragmatic thought about¶ the environment.

Deontology