Dr. Strangelove Neg ADI

8/7/2019 Dr. Strangelove Neg ADI

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Arizona Debate Institute 2009 2Holbrook/Nielson Dr. Strangelove Neg

2NC A2 Perm: Irony cant solve ................................................................................................18

2NC A2 Perm: Irony cant solve .................................................................................................18

Irony Turns Aff 1/3 .....................................................................................................................19

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Irony Turns Aff 2/3 .....................................................................................................................20

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Irony Turns Aff 3/3 .....................................................................................................................21

Irony Turns Aff 3/3 ......................................................................................................................21

Parody Bad ................................................................................................................................. 22

Parody Bad ...................................................................................................................................22

Parody Bad ................................................................................................................................. 24

Parody Bad ...................................................................................................................................24

Parody Fails ................................................................................................................................26

Parody Fails ..................................................................................................................................26

CP Real Politics .......................................................................................................................28

CP Real Politics .........................................................................................................................28


3/28


No Impact to Biopower

THE FORM OF GOVERNMENT IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE EXERCISE OF

BIOPOWERDEMOCRACIES AND LIBERAL RIGHTS PREVENT THE

GENOCIDAL EXCESS THAT THEIR EVIDENCE DESCRIBES

DICKINSON 2004 (Edward Ross, Univ of Cincinnati, Central European History Vol 37 No 1)

In an important programmatic statement of 1996 GeoffEley celebrated the fact that Foucaults ideas have

fundamentally directed attention away from institutionally centered conceptions ofgovernment and the state . . . and toward a dispersed and decentered notion of power and

its microphysics.48 The broader, deeper, and less visible ideological consensus on technocratic reason and the ethicalunboundedness of science was the focus of his interest.49 But the power-producing effects in Foucaults microphysical sense (Eley)

of the construction of social bureaucracies and social

knowledge, of an entire institutional apparatus and system of practice ( Jean Quataert), simply do not explain Nazi policy.50 The

destructive dynamic of Nazism was a product not so much of a particular modern set of

ideas as of a particular modern political structure, one that could realize the disastrouspotential of those ideas. What was critical was not the expansion of the instruments and disciplines of biopolitics, whichoccurred everywhere in Europe. Instead, it was the principles that guided how those instruments and disciplines were organized and

used, and the external constraints on

them. In National Socialism,biopolitics was shaped by a totalitarian conception of socialmanagement focused on the power and ubiquity of the vlkisch state. In democratic

societies, biopolitics has historically been constrained by a rights-based strategy of social

management. This is a point to which I will return shortly. For now, the point is that whatwas decisive was actually politics at the level of the state. A comparative framework can

help us to clarify this point.Other states passed compulsory sterilization laws in the 1930s indeed, individual states inthe United States had already begun doing so in 1907. Yet they did not proceed to the next steps adopted by National

Socialism mass sterilization, mass eugenic abortion and murder of the defective. Individual figures in, for example, the U.S. did

make such suggestions. But neither the political structures of democratic states nor their legal and

political principles permitted such policies actually being enacted. Nor did the scale of

forcible sterilization in other countries match that of the Nazi program. I do not mean tosuggest that such programs were not horrible; but in a democratic political context they did

not develop the dynamic of constant radicalization and escalation that characterized Nazi

policies.


4/28


Biopower Good (Violence and Oppression)

BIOPOWER IS NOT ALWAYS OPPRESSIVE AND VIOLENTMODERN WELFARE

STATES AND MEDICAL ADVANCES ARE ALSO BIOPOLITICALTHE SYSTEMSAVES LIVES

DICKINSON 2004 (Edward Ross, Univ of Cincinnati, Central European History Vol 37 No 1)

It is striking, then, that the new model of German modernity is even more relentlessly

negative than the old Sonderweg model. In that older model, premodern elites were

constantly triumphing over the democratic opposition. But at least there was an opposition;and in the long run, time was on the side of that opposition, which in fact embodied the

historical movement of modern- ization. In the new model, there is virtually a biopolitical

consensus.92 And that consensus is almost always fundamentally a nasty, oppressivething, one that partakes in crucial ways of the essential quality of National Socialism.

Everywhere biopolitics is intrusive, technocratic, top-down, constraining, limiting.Biopolitics is almost never conceived of or at least discussed in any detail as creatingpossibilities for people, as expanding the range of their choices, as empowering them, or

indeed as doing anything positive for them at all. Of course, at the most simple-minded

level, it seems to me that an assessment of the potentials of modernity that ignores theways in which biopolitics has made life tangibly better is somehow deeply flawed. To give

just one example, infant mortality in Germany in 1900 was just over 20 percent; or, in

other words, one in five children died before reaching the age of one year. By 1913, it was

15 percent; and by 1929 (when average real purchasing power was not significantly higherthan in 1913) it was only 9.7 percent.93 The expansion of infant health programs an

enormously ambitious, bureaucratic,medicalizing, and sometimes intrusive, social

engineering project had a great deal to do with that change. It would be bizarre to write ahistory of biopolitical modernity that ruled out an appreciation for how absolutely

wonderful and astonishing this achievement and any number of others like it really

was. There was a reason for the Machbarkeitswahn of the early twentieth century: manymarvelous things were in fact becoming machbar. In that sense, it is not really accurate to

call it a Wahn (delusion, craziness) at all; nor is it accurate to focus only on the

inevitable frustration of delusions of power. Even in the late 1920s, many social

engineers could and did look with great satisfaction on the changes they genuinely had thepower to accomplish.


5/28


Biopower Good (Prevents Rape)

BIOPOWER CAN BE GOODTHEIR IMPACT IGNORES THE WAYS THAT STATE

POWER CAN PREVENT VIOLENCE LIKE RAPE AND ABUSE

DICKINSON2004 (Edward Ross, Univ of Cincinnati, Central European History Vol 37 No 1)

In fact, even where social workers really were attempting to limit or subvert the autonomyand power of parents, I am not sure that their actions can be characterized only and

exclusively as part of a microphysics of oppression. Progressive child welfare advocates in

Germany, particularly in the National Center for Child Welfare, waged a campaign in the1920s to persuade German parents and educators to stop beating children with such

ferocity, regularity, and nonchalance. They did so because they feared the unintended

physical and psychological effects of beatings, and implicitly because they believedphysical violence could compromise the development of the kind of autonomous,

selfreliant subjectivity on which a modern state had to rely in its citizenry.96 Or, to give

another common example from the period, children removed from their families after

being subjected by parents or other relatives to repeated episodes of violence or rape werebeing manipulated by biopolitical technocrats, and were often abused in new ways in

institutions or foster families; but they were also being liberated. Sometimes some forms of

the exercise of power in society are in some ways emancipatory; and that is historicallysignificant.


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Biopower (Freedom and Liberty)

BIOPOWER EXPANDS FREEDOM AND LIBERTY


Uncoupling technocracy from discourse is not yet enough, however.We should also be

alive to the ways in which new social practices, institutions, and knowledge generated newchoices a limited range of them, constrained by all kinds of discursive and social

frameworks, but nonetheless historically new and significant. Modern biopolitics did

create, in a real sense, not only new constraints but also new degrees of freedom new

levers that increased peoples power to move their own worlds, to shape their own lives.Our understanding of modern biopolitics will be more realistic and more fruitful if we

reconceptualize its development as a complex process in which the implications of those

new choices were negotiated out in the social and discursive context. Again, in the earlytwentieth century many more conservative biopolitical

experts devoted much of their energy precisely to trying without any discernablesuccess to control those new degrees of freedom. For most social liberals and SocialDemocrats, however, those new choices were a potential source of greater social efficiency

and social dynamism. State policy reflected the constant negotiation and tension between

these perspectives.


7/28


Biopower k2 Democracy and Freedom

BIOPOLITICS ARE GOODBIOPOWER IS THE FOUNDATION OF DEMOCRACY,

ORDER, AND FREEDOM


At its simplest, this view of the politics of expertise and professionalization is certainly plausible. Historicallyspeaking, however, the further conjecture that this micropolitical dynamic creates authoritarian, totalitarian, orhomicidal potentials at the level of the state does not seem very tenable. Historically, it appears that the greatestadvocates of political democracy in Germany leftliberals and Social Democrats have been also the greatestadvocates of every kind of biopolitical social engineering, from public health and welfare programs through socialinsurance to city planning and, yes, even eugenics.102 The state they built has intervened in social relations to an(until recently) ever-growing degree; professionalization has run ever more rampant in Western societies; theproduction of scientistic and technocratic expert knowledge has proceeded at an ever more frenetic pace. And yet,from the perspective of the first years of the millennium, the second half of the twentieth century appears to be thegreat age of democracy in precisely those societies where these processes have been most in evidence. What ismore, the interventionist state has steadily expanded both the rights and the resources of virtually every citizen including those who were stigmatized and persecuted as biologically defective under National Socialism. Perhapsthese processes have created an ever more restrictive iron cage of rationality in European societies. But if so, itseems clear that there is no necessary correlation between rationalization and authoritarian politics; the oppositeseems in fact to be at least equally true.


8/28


Irony Fails (Empirically Proven)

The use of irony occurred and failed

Chaloupka 92 (William. Knowing Nukes : The Politics and Culture of the Atom,Minneapolis,

MN, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. p. 98 http://site.ebrary.com/lib/asulib/Doc?id=10194321&ppg=18)

Acknowledging the ironical contradictions at the heart of any objective world,

antinuclearists went giddy with code and symbol, purposely arraying each code against

itself. They took a position that only seemed to be a coherent, oppositional unit. The irony

of a "clean reaction" to the nuke a gentle and attractive lifestyle recalled Lockeancitizenship, but did so in a context of absurd, worldwide aggression and deterrence that

mocked the village model of a classical liberal politics. A context was appropriated that

would render every attempt at sincerity absurd, a resonating ensemble of contradictions sothoroughly designed that it could not have been naive or mistaken. The modesty could only

be ironic. The self-conscious joy at taking this perverse position has no doubt dimmed inantinuclear communities. The "failure" of the approach could be variously described. Oneexplanation is that "politics moved away" from the antinuke position, rendering moot the

sort of interpretation I am offering. Ferguson's description of the whole system moving

rightward, which I discussed earlier, invokes this type of explanatory device, one firmlylodged in a larger discursive construction that allows (then requires) the ranking of

positions within a fairly stable left-right continuum, granting an aura of reality to those

positions that is undeserved, even from within conventional "policy approaches." 36


9/28


Irony Fails

Irony can and does fail

Chaloupka 92 (William. Knowing Nukes : The Politics and Culture of the Atom,Minneapolis,MN, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. p. 99 http://site.ebrary.com/lib/asulib/Doc?

id=10194321&ppg=18)

It could be that the ironic simply went underground unrecognized but still present. John

Seery's reading of an antinuclear demonstration leaves open just such a possibility. Closely

reading the actions of demonstrators, he finds striking examples; a handicapped woman putsherself (in her wheelchair) in the way of the nuclear enterprise, and is arrested. As Seery

explains, that action has to be ironic, and is coherent, as well as potentially effective. 37 Seery is

unable, however, to interview the protester; it is his reading that preserves the ironic in this case.He does not consider the other possibilities that antinuclear politics could be naive, or that it

could (egotistically) take its own warnings as instrumental, rather than symbolic. Surely, this isbecause his reading of the demonstrator's actions grants them the dignity of an ironicinterpretation. But, at the same time, Seery knows that the ironic possibility is a fragile one;

"irony is difficult to interpret or to sustain. As a strategy of nonviolent political resistance, irony

carries with it no guarantees; it can fail. The Athenian court misread Socrates' irony. The Englishlargely misunderstood Jonathan Swift." 38 Seery hopes that the protesters he calls "the modern-

day gadflies of the nuclear age" will be better received, but the fragility of a politics of irony is

visible, even within his analysis.


10/28


Solvency Must Problematize the Bomb

The chaotic paradoxes of nukes must be problematized, instead of being caught up in the

antinuclearist claims we must move beyond in order to break away from the systems of

power


id=10194321&ppg=18)

The micro controls of the nuclear era are not the only form of power emerging at the end of

modernism. Therapeutic and disciplinary discourses play a social role; they are, in effect,

new agents that both constrain and produce contemporary political possibilities. These newpractices of power interact with thoroughly constituted, nuclear-age selves. In the mix,

there is a solution.The instability and perversity of the nuclear age no longer imply the fraudulence ofhumanity. The nuke is not a code of our failure; in a stunning reversal, it stands for

progress. The chaotic paradoxes of our time carry the mark of a specific, contemporary

control.The instability of nuclear discourse thus works in two directions. As long as nukes remain

unproblematic, both the repression of the deterrence paradox and the maintenance of micro

controls continue to function. From a post-1989 perspective, we can begin to understand

that we have been at an intermediate position, standing momentarily (if for a half century)between the pre-Hiroshima realm of military realism and modernism, on the one hand, and

on the other an emerging postmodern realm where reversibilities, literary production, and

the preeminence of pace (speed, communication, and image) fully and openly enter thepolitical realm. Thus, while the nuclear age sorted out its politics, systems of power

aggressively reinforced each other; antinuclearist claims validated nuclearism and vice

versa. More important than the ebb and flow of what only seemed to be an antagonism, anew status and revised techniques of power just began operating and establishing

themselves. This new power oppresses, to be sure, but it also acts positively and quietly,

diminishing the possibility that politics would survive at all. As the age of deterrence gives

way to the end of modernity, then, a struggle emerges, with the advanced methods ofpower encountering the new openings for politics. There are, no doubt, many points of

emergence at which this new struggle could be glimpsed. The example I address in this

chapter is perhaps too obvious and overt, but we could still understand the politics of the

freeze and Star Wars widely regarded as excessively simplistic and obvious in quite adifferent context, one in which they emerge as problematizing discourses, as characteristic

of their age as is Reagan.


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AT: Movements (Freeze)

Discourse of Freeze causes relations of domination


id=10194321&ppg=18)

We begin to engage the gap of meaning deconstructionists call the aporia when we

recognize that "freeze" is not just a description however multileveled but is also a

command. In a crime movie, the player with the gun (a criminal or a cop) hollers. In thecase of the nuclear freezers, a reversal is at hand; the gunless victim is hollering, hinting

that legions of reinforcements will be mobilized by the call, or perhaps reminding the bully

of the consequences his actions carry. In this sense, the command "freeze!" takescharge in even the least likely circumstances. It is an attempt at reversal that focuses

attention, and, one hopes, action, on the reversed term: namely, the relations of dominationembedded in nuclearism. More and more reverberations of the word "freeze" spin out, inthe kind of list deconstructionists assemble to undermine the clarity of words we assume

"mean something":

The Freeze movement got frozen

Chaloupka 92 (William. Knowing Nukes : The Politics and Culture of the Atom,Minneapolis,

MN, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. p. 72 http://site.ebrary.com/lib/asulib/Doc?

id=10194321&ppg=18)

Ironically, the freeze also confirmed nuclear criticism when it was stymied by another

literary device a strange end for a component of a supposedly "unspeakable" topic. As ishis now-familiar pattern, Ronald Reagan switched fables or, more precisely, added another

layer of fabulousness. The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which had almost universally

seemed a crackpot scheme in its earlier, "High Frontier" stage, responded so well to the

claims of freezers that it quickly subdued their movement. The "domination reversal"offered when the freeze demonstrated that simple, rhetorical adjustments might derail the

arms race was, in turn, itself reversed. In a pinch, Reagan doubled back, as would the

cinematic cowboy-heroes Reagan both worshipped and portrayed. 11 The most prominent

gun advocate ever to be president, a man who rose from being felled by a handgun-totingwould-be assassin only to wave off gun control as a fallen cowboy waves off the helpers

who rush to him, Reagan invoked a bigger gun control. 12 The "umbrella" or "Astrodome"metaphors SDI supporters evoked were easily "disproved," but have been much more

difficult to dislodge, perhaps because they mask a type of weaponry that is inevitable, even

if it is not now possible. In short, the freeze was itself frozen, finally, by a move moremythic and literary than technological.


12/28


NEG Strangelove Satire Fails

Dr. Strangelove didnt go far enough into satire, it didnt separate reality far enough from

the fiction and therefore made it hard for the satire to take the necessary effect

Linden 77 (George W. "Dr. Strangelove" and Erotic Displacement, Journal of Aesthetic Education,Vol. 11, No. 1 (Jan., 1977), pp. 63-83 Published by: University of Illinois Press Stable URL:

http://www.jstor.org/stable/331863 Accessed: 28/07/2009 20:19)

One reason for the ambivalent reaction of Americans to Dr. Strange- love was our

inability to unravel the relations between the reel world and the real one. It isprecisely this inability that provides much of the tension and force of the film. By the use

of constant cross-cutting to his basic three locations and by shifting to three styles, Kubrick

in- tensifies this tension. The plot of the film is the accelerating technological inevitabilityof modem society, an acceleration which has as its products social stupidity and ultimate

political impotence. Man, the real enemy, becomes subject to his infernal machines. Thecrazy logic of the cold war is carried to its inevitable conclusion: not merely the triggeringof the atom bomb, but the further "superdeterrent" of the diabolic doomsday machine.

Since the logic of the film was the logic of our lives, it is no wonder we had difficulty

separating one from the other. It is no wonder we had difficulty seeing the film as

funny.


13/28


Strangelove Satire Fails

The type of shots that the film uses neutralizes the effect because it brings the absurdity to

another level and therefore neutralizes the potential for fear to be used and only satire

exists

Linden 77 (George W. "Dr. Strangelove" and Erotic Displacement, Journal of Aesthetic Education,Vol. 11, No. 1 (Jan., 1977), pp. 63-83 Published by: University of Illinois Press Stable URL:

http://www.jstor.org/stable/331863 Accessed: 28/07/2009 20:19)

The increasing intensity of the mosaic of locations is accomplished by three different shiftsof film styles. One style is antiseptic, ironic counterpoint. This style dominates the

beginning of the film, most of the scenes in the War Room, and many of the exterior shots

of the bomber as it waltzes and eventually waddles to its target. The second style is bruterealism. It is this style that forces the audience to call on the real world in relation to the

reel one. The hectic excitement inside the wounded airplane is conveyed by the effect of ajerky, accelerating, hand-held camera. Similarly, the invasion of Burpelson Air Force Baseis shot in grainy newsreel texture. The camera movements are abrupt and shaky, as if they

were cuts from The Battle of San Pietro or some other dangerous documentary. The third

style consists of cool close-ups and minimum camera movement. Here the camera is used

as a window on "reality" and the actors are allowed to carry the scenes into exag-

gerated absurdity. The purpose of this exaggeration was to raise the film fromcomedy to satire, thus neutralizing its potent appeals to fear. Unfortunately for the

audience, the reality they were living was as absurd as the characters in the film.

Thus, the "neutralization" failed to take full effect. When reality itself is absurd, it is

doubtful that satire is possible.


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Strangelove Satire Fails

The Satire of Dr. Strangelove doesnt work when reality is absurd

Linden 77 (George W. "Dr. Strangelove" and Erotic Displacement, Journal of Aesthetic Education,Vol. 11, No. 1 (Jan., 1977), pp. 63-83 Published by: University of Illinois Press Stable URL:http://www.jstor.org/stable/331863 Accessed: 28/07/2009 20:19)

It is comforting to believe that our political leaders are honest, effective, and fully in

charge of any situation. The impotent general staff, the weak president, and the unrealistic

options in the War Room were no doubt intended as exaggerations. But how could one

regard them as satire when, in spite of constant protest from both the public and

Congress, the atrocity of Vietnam continued to accelerate? How could one regard

reality as different from the film when we had seen one secretary of defense after

another come on television with the news that the war would soon be over? How could

one regard reality as sane when one general after another had claimed we were "turning thecorner" and advised succeeding presidents to follow the same course, to apply more andmore bombing? If this was the quality of leadership and advice in reality,how could

the audience regard the same antics as absurd in the fi lm? The hardbitten combat

leader, Bat Guano, ig- norant and determined, was no doubt intended as an exaggeration.

Yet he was no more absurd than the major in Vietnam who said that "We had to destroythe village to save it." When General Ripper gives his order for his men to shoot anything

that moves, this seems to be exaggeration. But then one remembered the meaning of our

euphemism "free-fire zone": shoot anything that moves.General Turgidson's disbelief that the "stupid ruskies" could shoot down his planes is

absurd until we remember our own anxiety about sputnik. The intense concern over a

doomsday gap appears as a form of ultimate inanity, if not insanity, until we recallthat the United States is pockmarked by strategic missile silos inhabited by multiple-

headed hydras. Turgidson's advice to strike first-we will "get our hair mussed a bit" but

will only lose a few million people-seems incredible until we recall a retired Air Forcegeneral who ran for the second highest office in the land.7 The constant slippage of the

urgency of the conversation between President Muffley and Premier Kissoff seems funny.

After all, the great powers are run by reasonable, imper- sonal men. Then we remember

Premier Khrushchev pounding his shoe on a desk like a petulant child or PresidentKennedy becoming carried away by the enthusiasm of his own verbiage and declaiming,

"Ich bin ein Berliner."

The paranoid delusions and fantastic dialogue of General Jack Ripper were undoubtedlymeant to be the most gross exaggerations in the film. Yet anyone who followed the antics

of the Minute Men or other fanatics of the right wing could scarcely see much difference.

General Ripper appears as a gigantic put-on until one recalls the ram- bling incoherence ofGeneral "Teddy" Walker.8 In any case, my point is made. Many of the exaggerations in

Dr. Strangelove failed to estab- lish psychic distance, for they were not seen as

absurd. Our lived reality had become absurd. When reality becomes absurd,

absurdity loses reality.


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Satire of Strangelove is Reality

What was satirical in Strangelove is now standard in the Status Quo


Perhaps another reason for the intensity of our basal anxiety and the consequent ambiguity

of our response as an audience was the un- canny prescience displayed by the film. The

prophetic view of the future displayed by Strangelove has, in many unhappy respects,

come true. If, as has been said, the true artists are historians of the future, then one of their

tasks is to develop current possibilities so that their future actualities become apparent.

This was precisely what Kubrick and his fellow workers did. But because much of thismaterial came out of our unrealized unconscious, the viewers reacted to this content with

disease. The prophetic views of the future embodied in Dr. Strange- love have becomeuncomfortably close to total lived reality. Much of what was meant as satire has

become standard.


16/28


Dr. Strangelove Not a Satire

The music in Dr. Strangelove remove it from Satire


As for weaving music as a plot device or as shifting tonality, perhaps a couple of examples

will suffice. When music is used as a plot device, the aurals come to the foreground andthe visuals become subordinate. This occurs in Strangelove when Captain Mandrake

discovers the un- confiscated transistor radio. He innocently walks into General Ripper's

office and points out that if nuclear war had truly been declared, the radio would not beblaring its normal puerile music. Ripper immediately orders him to turn the radio off.

This brings Mandrake to the horrid realization of the actual situation, but before he can

take any effective action, Ripper confines him, thus revealing his hand (and his insanity).

As for the shifting of tonality, Kubrick uses the theme song, "When Johnny ComesMarching Home," as an accompaniment to the one uncontrolled bomber. At first, the tune

is played heavily, enhancing the menace of the accelerating situation and visuals. Then the

same tune is carried forward by harmonica. During this sequence, the visuals 73 arelightened and the wounded plane almost seems to dance in tune as it relentlessly swerves

forward.13 As the crippled bomber comes closer and closer to its final target of

opportunity, the same song reverses back to orchestral performance with muffled,accelerating drums. These subtle shifts in the aurals also determine subtle shifts in the

visuals, thus giving the union of the two more depth and texture. This master- ful

experimentation with the visual/aural relationships becomes the basis of 2001 and theultimate thematic substance of A Clockwork Orange.14

These remarks on the uses of music in Strangelove, will, I hope, free the reader's memory

and imagination. He can now see that the Zara- thustra theme (reduced on television to

advertising analgesics and other trivia) or the Strauss works are not accidental to thestructure of 2001. Certainly, he should see that the uses of "Singing in the Rain" as ironic

counterpoint or the music of divine Ludwig as a plot device in A Clockwork Orange are

not mere whim. They are simply further in- stances of the continued exploration of therelations of aurals and visuals that begins in full force in Dr. Strangelove. What these

reflec- tions suggest, however, is that there is a category to which Dr. Strange- love

conveniently and meaningfully belongs. At the risk of being ac- cused of falling intoauteurism I suggest that Dr. Strangelove can be best understood not as a comedy/satire, nor

as a war film, nor as an atom-bomb excursion, but as a difficult, subtle, and original

Stanley Kubrick film.


17/28


2NC A2 Perm: Irony cant solve

Irony cant work with those who take the issue seriously or who are too close to the issue

(i.e. people who focus on the seriousness of the pain of the event)

Chaloupka92 (William. Knowing Nukes : The Politics and Culture of the Atom,Minneapolis, MN, USA: University of MinnesotaPress, 1992. p. 99 http://site.ebrary.com/lib/asulib/Doc?id=10194321&ppg=18)

Joseph Gusfield offers another explanation for the demise of irony, reading its workings at a more personal level. At the end of his book

The Culture of Public Problems, in which he had dramatically reread the policy discourse surrounding drinking and driving, Gusfieldrecounts an incident where his analysis met a strong response from a practicing physician. The doctor argued that Gusfield's analysis

ignored the pain generated by alcohol-related accidents; Gusfield "justified his earmuffs" by describing his position as a "sociological

irony." 39 In one sense, a certain distance from events is necessary for the analysis of social events, he argues. This may well create a

tension with other impulses nobody wants to ignore the suffering of a victim injured for the least rational of reasons. But the ironist

requires a certain distance in order to make the familiar seem suddenly strange; the ironist doesn't (and couldn't) work in the clinic,alongside the physician.


18/28


2NC A2 Perm: Irony cant solve

Irony cannot work with those who act in a modest caring mood with the imaginary or real

victims of the bomb

Chaloupka 92(William. Knowing Nukes : The Politics and Culture of the Atom,Minneapolis, MN, USA: University of Minnesota

Press, 1992. p. 99 http://site.ebrary.com/lib/asulib/Doc?id=10194321&ppg=18)

Transposed to nuclearism, Gusfield's argument takes on some odd twists. On one hand, we begin to glimpse one reason for the

prominence of the "lifestyle" approach; faced with a crisis that is associated with mass (if future, imagined) suffering, people would

prefer to respond in a modest, caring mood, perhaps reacting as if we were already at the bedside of the victims. That impulse drivesmuch of the antinuclear position; in books, speeches, and films, we are asked to imagine (unimaginable) carnage, and to gauge our

reactions accordingly. The ironist cannot participate in such exercises, as Gusfield explains; "One cannot engage in irony without

assuming a distance and detachment from those being described." 40

Still, Gusfield is careful to explain the political dynamic underlying sociological irony. The inquiry he undertakes necessarily opens political

ground, when it examines the symbolic nature of authority and offers other interpretations. "To find alternative ways of seeing phenomena isto imagine that things can be otherwise. . . . This cannot but be a diminution of the legitimacy which authority gains from a belief in its

facticity." 41 This is in particular contrast with the view of irony expressed by Richard Rorty, for whom a "liberal irony" leads to

justifications of a political quietism. 42 This is a dramatic difference of opinion; two respected scholars, one a social scientist and the other a

philosopher closely attuned to the social sciences, examine and adopt irony as characteristic of their position, then come to very differentconclusions about its implications.


19/28


Irony Turns Aff 1/3

The Affirmative must provide an understanding of the human being that validates the

claims theyve made in this debate. The 1AC assumes that the actors involved in the drama

that is their advantage claims, the potential listeners to the normative statement of the plan,

and those who listen to their case respond as autonomus, rational liberal subjects. Therational subject is a myth, a master signifier used to avoid admitting a simple truth. In fact,

this way of speaking about the world actively demands that we become rational subjects

which is to say, the perfect cogs for bureaucratic management of life.

Schlag, Professor of Law University of Colorado, 1991 [Texas LR 69 1627]

Now, I think it is precisely because the reigning configuration of legal thought is embedded in regions and processes that are

obscured from the critical reaches of that same legal thought that this rhetoric has been so resilient. The rhetoric has beenstructured as a kind of forgetting of the forgetting, a repression of the repression. The rhetoric has been inscribed in the legalsubject--and that is what has been put off-scene, out of reach, beyond inquiry. In the same way, the problem of the subject has

been obscured in virtue of the legal thinkers' construction as a conscious sovereign individual subject, who does not even

recognize that the subject is a problem.

C. The Subject as ProblemBut the subject is a problem. We have already seen how the subject becomes a problem for various kinds of contemporarylegal thought and their projects. The problem arises as each school recognizes that its own intellectual architecture, its own

normative ambitions rest upon the presupposition of a subject -- a subject whose epistemic, ontological, and normative status isnow very much in question.

Now this is not simply an intellectual problem; it has political implications. The political implications are easy to describe.The constitution of legal thinkers and others as conscious sovereign individual subjects produces a politics that works perfectly

-- assuming that we do indeed [*1739] have conscious sovereign individual subjects situated to control the levers of the socialmachinery. n425

Once articulated, however, that vision fast becomes implausible. In the legal academy, this vision of social life is maintainedby an elite of legal thinkers who systematically confirm themselves in this vision by relentlessly rehearsing its aesthetic. They

seem to be either incapable or unwilling to recognize that this conventional aesthetic of social life is fast becoming unbelievable.Now, the resistance of legal academics to a reconsideration of the conventional aesthetic of the liberal subject is easy to

understand. If the liberal subject disappears from the scene, a number of very troublesome questions immediately surface: who(or what) is controlling the levers running the social machinery? n426 And if there's no one operating the levers, then what has

been the effect of all that good, admirable, serious, normative legal thought? n427As legal thinkers, we like to think we are doing good, normative legal work--advancing noble causes and the like -- but if the

liberal subject is no longer operating the levers, our work product can take on a different character. We may simply be rehearsingand reproducing the instrumentalist logic of bureaucratic practices. n428 Indeed, the main significance of noble normative workis in the rehearsal of a false aesthetic of social life--one which falsely represents instrumentalist strategies as within the control ofindividual subjects the unfolding of bureaucratic logic as the choices of individuals the discursive mechanisms of coercion as

normative dialogue.Now, there is nothing wrong with instrumental control in and of [*1740] itself. Indeed, instrumental control is often valued--it

bears names like efficiency, effectiveness, and wisdom. But the supposition that instrumental control is desirable presupposesthat there is an epistemically and normatively competent subject at the levers. And that is precisely what is being thrown in

question: if the subject is constituted by its discourses and its context, who or what is in charge? n42


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Irony Turns Aff 2/3

This isnt merely a link of omission the Affs claims rely on a vision of the person

rendered false by a Lacanian understanding of human behavior.

Caudill, Professor of Law Washington and Lee School of Law, 2003 [Cardozo Law Review24 2331]

Lacan credits Descartes for the emergence of the subject of science, "the Cartesian subject," n37 which desires certainty n38

"through the [*2338] exercise of his own reason." n39 Even in his famous method of doubt, Descartes confirmed his thinkingexistence, and Lacan analogizes this "annihilation of knowledge" to the fading subject of psychoanalysis n40 - fading in thesense that the fleeting certainty of cogito ergo sum requires constant repetition of that "mantra." n41 Moreover, Descartes'supposed suspension of confidence in all of his knowledge is too quickly "cured" by his confidence in a non-deceiving God, the

guarantor not only of his initial knowledge of his existence, but of his knowledge of Nature as well. n42Lacan sees two more analogies in Descartes' expansive method: (1) like the subject in psychoanalysis, Descartes' exercise of

reason to acquire knowledge is sustained by his faith in a subject-supposed-to-know (e.g., God for Descartes, or an analyst); and(2) like the modern subject of science, Descartes believed the truth of his knowledge "is guaranteed by something/someone

outside" the subject, like "science itself." n43 The split between knowledge and truth (represented by Descartes' doubt that whathe knew was true) is "sutured" in modern science to reduce truth to knowledge. God is allegedly replaced by "a real guarantee -

one that is rooted in either empirical facts, or a rationalist logic or mathematics." n44

Whereas the Cartesian subject is fundamentally divided between a certainty of thinking (knowledge) and an uncertainty of truthwhich can only be lifted through the introduction of a non-deceitful God, modern science has endeavored to solve the issue oftruth by advancing it as the inherent quality of proper scientific knowledge. n45

While modern scientific practices proceed "from the conviction that the [*2339]rational processes which organize all thingsworldly will ultimately reveal themselves to the conscious human mind," n46 Lacan (following Freud) emphasizes the subjectofthe unconsciou s - the subject who does not know, who is not in control. The notion that the determinative unconscious isstructured like a language has implications both for the question of the scientificity of psychoanalysis - since the object of inquiry

is structured - and for the critique of science as a discourse that is forgetful, that misrecognizes its status as a discourse. Lacan'scall for a return to subjectivity in modern science likewise has two meanings: first, a scientific psychoanalysis will be a science ofsubjectivity - a science that accounts for the operations of the unconscious in the subject; second, Lacan's critique of science isthat it "forecloses that which makes itself possible, for its own condition is the subject that writes and speaks, that enunciates and

forgets ... ." n47


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Parody Bad

the affirmatives use of parody reveals a deeply cynical orientation toward politics. Their

parodic performance is solely reactive it inscribes an ethic of cynicism that makes the

pursuit of effective alternatives impossible.

Harold 04 (Christine, Assistant Professor in the Department of Speech Communication at theUniversity of Georgia, [Pranking Rhetoric: Culture Jamming as Media Activism, CriticalStudies in Media Communication, Volume 21, Number 3, September, Available Online toSubscribing Institutions via Communication & Mass Media Complete, p. 192-193 // BATMAN]

As I have mentioned, a major limitation of the adbusters reliance on parody as a revelatorydevice is that this device has been enthusiastically embraced by marketers as well. This insistence on

revealing a hidden truth also becomes a problem for other reasons. Such an insistence disallows aforceful response to what it faces because it can only react. It is a rhetoric that resentfully tells its audience

Things are not as they should be without affirming possible alternatives. Saying no is itself an [end page

192] often satisfying alternative, but it is hardly one on which to build a lasting political movement.

The no-sayer is, in essence, yoked in a dialectic tug of war with the rhetoric it negates. Adbusters Blackspot

sneaker campaign, for example, may be more proactive than its subvertisements(Adbusters is, for example, proposing to build a clean factory in China should the

campaign succeed), but the rhetorical message is similar. It is mobilized, first and

foremost, by a desire to kick Phils ass. Second, then, because the no-sayer has not challenged theessential form of the binary, one can never negate adequately by its own, dialectical standards. A rhetoric that is

defined by negation must always encounter more boundaries that must be overcome. More transgression is always

required, which inevitably produces more cynicism and resentment. Certainly, saying no is sometimes a

crucial political strategy. However, I suggest that asceticism may not be an effectiveintervention into the scintillating world of consumer culture; and ironically, by ardently

pursuing the authentic realm out there, one plays ones role as consumer in the fullest

possible sense, endlessly chasing after something just beyond reach.

The desirability of their parodic performance must be evaluated based on its contributions

to stated political goals the absence of a real world benchmark dooms their

performance.

Molley Anne Rothenberg, Associate Professor of English at Tulane University, and Joseph Valente,

Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois, 1997[Performative chic: The fantasy of a performative politics, College Literature, Volume 24,Issue 1, February, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Academic Search Premier// BATMAN]

The recent vogue for performativity, particularly in gender and postcolonial studies, suggests that the desire for political potency hasdisplaced the demand for critical rigor.[1] Because Judith Butler bears the primary responsibility for investing performativity with itspresent critical cachet, her work furnishes a convenient site for exposing the flawed theoretical formulations and the hollow politicalclaims advanced under the banner of performativity. We have undertaken this critique not solely in the interests of clarifying

performativity's theoretical stakes: in our view, the appropriation of performativity for purposes to which it iscompletely unsuited has misdirected crucial activist energies, not only squandering resources but evenendangering those naive enough to act on performativity's (false) political promise.

It is reasonable to expect any practical political discourse to essay an analysis which links its proposedactions with their supposed effects, appraising the fruits of specific political labors before their seeds aresown. Only by means of such an assessment can any political program persuade us to undertake sometasks and forgo others. Butler proceeds accordingly: "The task is not whether to repeat, but how to repeat or, indeed to repeat,and through a radical proliferation of gender, to displace the very gender norms that enable repetition itself" (Gender Trouble 148).Here, at the conclusion to Gender Trouble, she makes good her promise that subjects can intervene meaningfully, politically, in thesignification system which iteratively constitutes them. The political "task" we face requires that we choose "how to repeat" gendernorms in such a way as to displace them. According to her final chapter, "The Politics of Parody," the way to displace gender normsis through the deliberate performance of drag as gender parody.


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Parody Bad

this personal purification anesthetizes collective political mobilizations their parodic

approach deflates social hope and pragmatic reforms necessary to fight injustice.

Nissim Calderon, Political Analyst and Literary Critic at Tel-Aviv University, 1999

[Books: Left Without A Society, Ha'aretz, September 10th

, Available Online via Lexis-Nexis// BATMAN]

Primarily, says Rorty, political life is a life of trial and error that exists for the involved individual - the agent - anddoes not exist for the individual who retreats from involvement - the observer. In many of the theories of"cultural studies," Rorty finds a systematic dogmatism, a lack of respect for reality and a move from a stateof involvement to a state of disgust and distancing. Therefore, in the book it is easy for him to repel attacks on himself, ifideas about which he himself had written earlier contributed to the relativism of parts of "cultural studies."

Rorty knew that these attacks would come, and they did. Philosopher Hilary Putnam wrote (in the Times Literary Supplement onMay 12 of this year) that philosophy is not a high platform from which it is possible to see everything, derive everything, demonstrateeverything. Even the philosophy he himself has written is not the platform from which he descends to political life. At most, he takesfrom his past an idea that he adapts so that it will be effective, and does not take another idea.

Rorty is at his best when he ridicules the bottomless political seriousness with which the American universities accepted the

abstract, or deathly systematical, meditations of a number of French philosophers. Foucault's brilliant writings, says Rorty,

are good for the private dimensions of our lives; they are good for the emotional and moral accounts wekeep with ourselves, but it is impossible to make politics out of them. (Foucault himself thought that there was nodistinction between the private and the political dimensions of life, while Rorty holds that there is such a distinction.) Many ofFoucault's students told themselves that everything is political: sex is politics, the clothes you wear arepolitics, and coffee with a friend, male or female, is a political act that is fraught with significance and criesout for interpretation. And the result, says Rorty, is that they neglected labor unions, despised parliament andlost interest in elections.

The most obvious proof of the political absurdity of the use of Foucault is the mystical fog that surrounds"cultural studies." Rorty, a zealous secularist, is especially sensitive to the substitutes for religion with which we provideourselves. When, together with Foucault, the cultural left stresses Western man's sense of sin, Rorty does not associate it with apolitical situation. He associates it with original sin.

The code words of common radical theory do not offer a real plan of action. Rorty sees them more as a kind ofpurifying incense. The politics of the body, of sex, of injury - all of these bring to mind Golgotha more than the

legislature. "The return of the repressed" is the snorting of ghosts whose faces have been covered withpsychiatric masks, and not a clear-sighted look at the past. Provocation, the joy of annoying, the fog ofwords, the sentimentality of the kicking at all of Western culture are all, as Rorty sees it, rites of mystification,largely self-mystification, for purposes of purification. This exorcism through words and theories affords theintellectual pathos, mythology, the self-image of the martyr crucified for the sins of the world. But byengaging in this, he distances himself greatly from political criticism that has any chance of changing reality.

And to this one must add the hatred of solidarity. There is no more evident manifestation of the loss of thesocial nature of the academic left than its systematic attack on the mechanisms of solidarity, of the ties thatbind individuals. It is no accident, says Rorty, that the academic left despises tax reforms, health plans,housing schemes. How much "transgression" is there in child support payments? Why should a Jesuitradical pay any attention to trivia like old-age insurance?

But these are not trivia; these are great things. It is not that a single mechanism of solidarity is foreign to thecultural left, but rather the idea of solidarity itself. It is suspicious of the glue that brings individuals together,

any glue; it is suspicious of society, any society. Seemingly, the cultural left offers the solidarity of theseparatist group within society - the Blacks, the homosexuals and today, even the Whites (in the United States,"White studies" have already sprung up) instead of the overall solidarity of a society. But the logic of fragmentationhas done its part: There immediately arises a need for a separate solidarity for Black homosexuals that isdistinct from the solidarity of Black heterosexuals. And of course Black heterosexual women are alsoentitled to split from the depressing narrative of the Black male.

As long as you are a "minority," your sense of solidarity is worthy of respect in the eyes of "critical theory."It is not by chance that we have not seen or heard in all the theoretical expanses of "cultural studies"anything about a single corner, a single distant land, where there is a solidarity of the majority, and there is areal need for this. It is not the majority which is a threat to "critical theory."


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Society is the threat from which the intellectuals are fleeing. For society, any society, creates solidarity ordestroys solidarity. When the left runs away from this process, it breaks its tools, says Rorty. Precisely thosewho identify "sadism and egotism" - Rorty repeats these two clear words many times - in society should be relying onthe need of human individuals to get close to one another, to make it clear to them that sadism is sadism. If

everything people can do together is disguised evil, what value is there to an attack on inequality? If all thathuman beings are capable of dreaming about is more oppressive power(they call this "theory without a Utopianpole"), why should they be offered a political dream, in which paradise does not descend to earth but apoliceman will go to jail if he hits a Black man?

Todd Gitlin has called this "the decline of the common dreams." Rorty calls this the left's relinquishment of America ashope. Without the White immigrants' dream of building on the new continent a new and more just world, there will never be amajority of Americans who will correct the injustices perpetrated in the United States. Lincoln, says Rorty, created forAmericans a tradition that many of them want to achieve, but the cultural left ridicules it. If Roosevelt's NewDeal is the "system" and Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" is also the system, and the demonstrationsthat stopped the war in Vietnam are again "the system," then there is no historical basis for the left's politicalstruggle in the United States.

Rorty's book is a clear call to the left not to become the enemy of nationalism. For nationalism, in the American case as in manyother cases, is a mechanism of solidarity, a mechanism for building a society. And it is not all of a piece. It is a struggle, it is not a

completed project. In the United States, there is a strong tension between a sadistic tradition of slavery and aliberating tradition of pluralism. When the left eradicates the difference between nationalism as a home forpeople who identify with one another and nationalism as the destruction of the other, it turns its back on anauthentic need of the majority of Americans.

When the left suspects every tradition of the majority of being corrupt, the left is saying that the achievementof a majority does not interest it. A majority is a mandate for building a society, but for the cultural left, amajority is reason for disgust. Without a majority, no political act is possible, and without wanting a majorityno political thought is possible.

Therefore, says Rorty, this is a left that has lost its political character. Not because it minimizes the importanceof politics, but because it relinquished hope. In our political tradition, this has a familiar name: In Joseph Haim Brenner'sterms, it is the relinquishing of the "nevertheless."

Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America," by Richard Rorty, Harvard University Press, 1998.

The American left, writes philosopher Richard Rorty, must choose: It must be either an intellectual sect thatdivorces itself from society, or a political movement within society. The lecture series that he collects in this book is acriticism from the left of the trends that have become dominant in American universities, especially in the humanities, and whichfrom there have also reached the Israeli academic world. In the United States, they are usually called "cultural studies;" elsewhere,these same trends have appeared under the heading of "critical theory," and they are linked to post-modernism (a motley cluster ofideas, which also comprises completely different streams of thought). Behind "cultural studies" and its heady terminology("transgression," "simulacrum," "phallocentrism," "logocentrism") Rorty finds an familiar old theme: the monk who is disgusted bysociety and flees from it into a closed monastery.


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helpful to take seriously culture jamming, and pranking in particular, as important components of rhetoricalhybrids, collections of tools that activists and scholars can utilize when intervening in the complex world ofcommercial discourse.


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CP Real Politics

As an alternative to the affirmatives parodic performance, we advocate material change.

What this means in the context of the affirmative is the creation of a political strategy that

aims to remedy the harms outlined in the 1ac.

James Bowman, movie critic with The American Spectator and The New York Sun, media criticwith The New Criterion, B.A. from Lebanon Valley College, and B.A./M.A. from Pembroke

College at the University of Cambridge, 2006[A Plague of Scandals, The New Criterion, April 30th, Available Online at http://www.jamesbowman.net/articleDetail.asp?pubID=1713,Accessed 01-21-2007 // BATMAN]

A poll result that I found even more fascinating turned up on a Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll in answer tothe question: "Do you think that you, personally, would be doing a better or worse job as president thanGeorge W. Bush is doing?" The Presidents approval rating on the same poll, taken at the end of February andbeginning of March, was 39 per cent, while 37 per cent thought that, in his position, they would be doing a better

job. If you add in the respondents who said "the same" or "no difference" always a popular choice amongthe faint-hearted but when it comes to questions that hint of partisanship the total of those who thoughtthey could do as well or better than their president at governing the country also stood at nearly half, or 47per cent.

You might think that a question like that would bring a person up short. All of us who follow politics and who

have strong opinions about it spend most of the time we devote to thinking or writing about the subjectsimply assuming that we could do a better job than the people we are thinking or writing about. Certainly, thevery act of writing implies a judgment and therefore a right and a competence to judge. But at some levelwe also know or ought to know that this is a dream world, existing only inside our heads. Not only havethose whom we judge been put into the dock by us, but their defense, such as it is, has also been conductedby us. We are judge, jury and executioner, not to mention arresting officer, principal witness and theattorneys for both the prosecution and the defense. If someone asks us, "So you think you could do better?"the only decent response is "No, I wouldnt presume."

This isnt just politeness or false modesty. It means that we recognize the limitations of the process by whichour opinions have been arrived it, and their insulation from the real-world pressures that are constantlybending and shaping the decision-making of those who exercise actual power and responsibility. It doesntmean that we dont still think were right and the guys or, as it may be, gals in power are wrong; itmeans we respect the difficulties the guys in power labor under and we, to put it bluntly, dont. The Fox pollquestion could be re-phrased in this way: Do you think that the leaders of the country are decent people,

acting in good faith to do the best they can with a fiendishly difficult job? The Fox poll revealed that ever-increasing numbers of us no longer believe that. Moreover, what we do believe is not just that the leaders arenot decent, not acting in good faith and woefully incompetent but that, so far from being fiendishly difficult,the job is so ridiculously easy that you would have to be a moron to screw it up.

This is the subtext of the Comedy Central, Jon Stewart approach to politics. The laughter that Mr Stewartelicits by raising an eyebrow or judiciously pausing before reeling off a one-liner amounts to an endorsementof the view that governing the country is a piece of cake and that President Bush is the "moron" that it tookto screw it up as even many mainstream journalists and respectable pundits are now willing to say. Richard Cohen of TheWashington Post is even more sweeping and includes the Democrats in the moronic category as well. "This country has a bunch of

fools for leaders," he writes. In other words, "Compared to me, everybody with any power in America is a fool."How big a fool do you have to be to believe something like that? Not only thou and I but anybody oranybody who isnt a halfwit himself could do the job better. Reduce the proposition to that formulationand it becomes self-discrediting, and yet fewer and fewer of us ever do so reduce it. We like too much theeffortless superiority of the sneering Mr Stewart, who doesnt need to argue or even to know anything to

issue that seductive invitation to join him in the exclusive circle of those who are entitled to assume that theyknow better.

The media are obviously well-practised at the same game, though they generally prefer to believe that thecountrys leaders are knaves rather than fools. Theres more entertainment value in the Stewartian pose ofeffortless superiority, but more honor for the media if they are able to cast themselves in the role ofInspector Javert, remorselessly exposing and hunting down anything that could conceivably be portrayed aswrong-doing on the part of our elected officials even if its only the failure to notify the media themselves in what the mediathemselves take to be a timely fashion of the Vice Presidents shooting accident in Texas. The fact that the White House press corps, in particular,couldnt see how utterly unlike a scandal that particular would-be scandal appeared to the rest of the world and polling throughout the week that itdominated the news showed that attitudes to Mr Cheney moved not a jot was a good indication of how far gone they are in the kind of malevolentself-righteousness and self-absorption that seems to make journalists so unpopular with their fellow citizens. This was nicely summed up by onereporter who asked the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, if it would have been worse of the Vice-Presidents victim had died.

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