Critique Goodies – Evazon 2013

Framework/Etc

Ontology 1 st

Ontology determines the results of political science inquiriesStanley ’12 Liam Stanley, “Rethinking the Definition and Role of Ontology in Political Science,” Politics, Vol. 32 (2), p. 93-99, 2012In contrast, ontology in political science concerns the implicit and simplifying assumptions about political ‘reality’ that underpin explanations of political phenomena. The analysis and discussion of ontological assumptions should therefore be considered a second-order endeavour. Consequently, ontology should not be defined as ‘the world as it actually is’ but

instead as ‘the world as political scientists assume it to be’. In order to explain the political world, it is necessary – whether implicitly or explicitly – to commit to a certain (ontological) view of what is possible in social reality. Thus, explanations, theories and approaches all contain ontological assumptions. Part of political science is the parsimony–complexity trade-off (see Hay, 2002, pp. 29–37). This trade-off is an epistemological concern since justifications for parsimony or complexity are often driven by the kind of knowledge desired. While rational choice researchers may be keen to make simplified ontological assumptions about utility-maximising actors in order to build more parsimonious explanations, some cultural anthropologists

disregard the idea of parsimonious explanations altogether in favour of contextually specific rich interpretations. However, even a cultural anthropologist will have to make some form of simplifying (ontological) assumption, perhaps that

culture and identity constitute social reality. No matter where placed on the parsimonious–complexity trade-off, ontological assumptions are logically simplifying to some extent. Lay explanations highlight the role of simplifying assumptions. For instance, a popular factor often given to explain the electoral success of Barack Obama is that of his excellent oratory skills and charisma. For this explanation to be possible it is assumed that actors’ personal skills and abilities can, in part, cause important political events. In other

words, it is committing to a position within the structure and agency debate. Ontological assumptions cannot be divorced from epistemological and methodological concerns. No ontologically neutral epistemological claims can be made: ‘to commit oneself to an epistemology is also to commit oneself to a position on a range of ontological issues’ (Hay, 2007, p. 117). The ‘directional dependence model’ (Hay, 2002) highlights this relationship. Showing this connection is

important for the argument made later on; that is, to commit to an epistemological position is to commit (implicitly) to an ontological position. As the ideal-type, the directional dependence model prescribes that ontological assumptions should logically precede epistemological and methodological assumptions creating a path of dependency, meaning that all three sets of assumptions are conceptually linked and realistic. Likewise, within this model it is deemed logically impossible to make an ontologically neutral epistemological decision due to this directional dependence. However, what this means in practice is rather simpler and different. For example, if a researcher were inclined to generate causal knowledge claims, possibly through the use of explanatory quantitative methods, then it would not be logical for this researcher then to assert that political reality is constituted through meaning and language. This model relates to the parsimony–complexity trade-off. The chances of creating a simplified generalisable explanation of politics (an epistemological assumption) is

increased if simplifying assumptions about social reality (an ontological decision) are made. Therefore, all political science explanations are underpinned by necessarily simplifying assumptions about the nature of reality, which in turn may emerge from epistemological choices. However, the literature problematically defines ontology as what exists in ‘reality’. This implies that ontological dualisms such as structure–agency may allow researchers some first-order analytical purchase. In contrast, a distinctively second-order definition of ontology would not make similar implications. Instead, ontological dualisms would be considered as useful heuristic devices for making sense of the assumptions behind existing explanations and approaches. This is consistent with what I have described as ‘second-order’ political science.

Epistemology 1 st

Epistemic commitments determine ontological outlooks and predictive results—prior critique is necessary to stave off banal instrumentality and institutional biasStanley ’12 Liam Stanley, “Rethinking the Definition and Role of Ontology in Political Science,” Politics, Vol. 32 (2), p. 93-99, 2012The literature says very little directly on the subject of how ontological assumptions emerge (Hay, 2005, p. 41). In many ways, this is unsurprising, particularly because it is not possible to conduct such an analysis without first committing to a series of ontological and epistemological assumptions (which I, of course, must also make in the remainder of the article). This inescapable irony is noted, but should not prevent the endeavour altogether because otherwise such discussions would not even be possible. Nevertheless, in regard to how political scientists make ontological assumptions some preliminary answers can be gathered from reading the literature from in between the lines. While the literature often rightly claims that ontological dualisms are perennial problematiques with no solution (Hay, 2006, p. 82; Jenkins, 2005, p. 6), they also tend somewhat paradoxically to offer conceptual refinements to these unsolvable dichotomies: e.g. structure–agency

(McAnulla, 2002), material– ideational (e.g. Marsh, 2009), mind–body (e.g. Jenkins, 2005). So, the question becomes, if ontological dualisms cannot be solved then why do political scientists seek to offer increasingly complex conceptualisations? It is presumably because such problematiques allow political scientists to reflect on their own assumptions, as well as the assumptions of others, and avoid making the simplistic structuralist or intentionalist mistakes of yesteryear. Such simplistic underpinnings should indeed be critiqued on the basis of unrealistically limiting the potential for human agency or failing to consider how structures favour certain actors and strategies. But the value of incrementally more complex conceptualisations is rarely justified through this. Furthermore, in tandem with the ideal-type of the directional dependence, this aspect of the literature also implies that ontological assumptions should emerge from engagement with philosophically oriented literature. Yet there is little reflection on whether this ideal-type accurately reflects academic practice and, more importantly, whether this would have any implications for foundations of their arguments. A second reading of the directional dependence model could also imply that ontological assumptions sometimes derive from epistemological decisions (Hay, 2006, p. 92). This is why the directional dependence model outlined earlier is important, because it

demonstrates how seemingly innocuous epistemological or methodological decisions can influence assumptions about social reality. If some ontological assumptions are inextricably tied up with epistemological decisions, then the next step should involve the analysis of the process that, in part, gives rise to epistemological assumptions. This section aims to do just that.

Epistemological decisions can influence or generate ontological assumptions. Colin Hay (Hay, 2006, p. 92) has shown the adverse affects of searching for generalisable knowledge (an epistemological decision) on the ontological assumptions and resulting

explanations of rational choice theory. Yet, the extent of epistemological decision-making extends beyond the understandable ambition to theorise politics. It is sometimes influenced by academic norms emerging from the discipline as well as regulatory and funding bodies. One possible criticism of the literature on ontology is that

it is irrelevant to the majority of political scientists who are driven by a ‘mundane instrumentality’ in which ‘what counts is what works’ (Bale, 2006, p. 102). Yet, this mundane instrumentality often manifests itself in the form of epistemological decisions, which may then influence ontological assumptions. Other researchers have made similar arguments, albeit not directly. For instance, Alan Bryman (2007) argues that the quantitative–qualitative ‘paradigm wars’ have been superseded by a certain ontological and epistemological pragmatism in which philosophical reflection is rendered obsolete in the pursuit of further funding and publications. When interviewing a number of leading social scientists Bryman (2007, p. 17) found that: ‘when asked about how far epistemological and ontological issues concerned them, most interviewees depicted themselves as pragmatists who felt it necessary to

put aside such issues to secure funding for their research interests and to publish their findings’. Meanwhile, Clare Donovan’s (2005)

analysis starts from the observation that nonpolitical scientists, who often impose inappropriate regulation in adjudicating the strength of research, regulate the discipline. The consequence, for Donovan,

is the rise of a ‘slave social science’ in which positivism, the epistemological approach most associated with natural

science, becomes dominant despite, perhaps, the misgivings some may have over its ontological ramifications. This suggests that ontological assumptions do not necessarily emerge from conscious deliberation with solutions

to philosophical dualisms but are inextricably linked to a number of factors including the (perceived) epistemological biases of regulatory and funding bodies.

Language 1 st

Linguistic decisions matter—they shape symbolic interaction with the worldBoshoff ’12 Anél Boshoff, “Law and Its Rhetoric of Violence,” International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, June 2012, 10.1007/s11196-012-9277-6Two assumptions underlie my argument. First, choice of words or legal terminology is never neutral. As Agamben

suggests, the choice of term implies a specific position taken both on the nature of a phenomenon and on the logic most suitable for understanding it [3]. Choosing the term is crucial and, in his words, it is ‘the proper poetic

moment of thought’.2 Second, legal terminology is a powerful ideological tool; it is not a way of describing the world, but rather, it is a way of making it. The capacity of language, and in this case specifically of legal language, to shape the vast symbolic landscape we live in, to draw the boundaries of what we regard as possible and impossible, to define the grid of our knowledge is, I will argue, often overlooked.3 From a semiological point of view the law is a system of signs that turns reality into speech, but, and this is what I want to argue, also turns speech into reality.

Language is prior to plan focus—structures reality and shapes political and ethical responsesBoshoff ’12 Anél Boshoff, “Law and Its Rhetoric of Violence,” International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, June 2012, 10.1007/s11196-012-9277-6The first question is whether rhetoric, or terminology, as the law calls it, really matters? Is it important, either on the level of institutional legal organisation or on the level of everyday singularity, to distinguish between the operative verbs: fighting poverty, addressing the problem of poverty, or, alleviating poverty? Is it necessary and possible to resist law’s use of metaphor? We have it from Aristotle that ‘[m]etaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else’ [10]. In semiology it is generally accepted that metaphoric thinking is

not only possible and widespread, but that it may in fact be impossible for us to think without metaphors. Reality is inevitably framed within systems of analogy and this enables one to see one concept in terms of another. The ubiquity of tropes reflects our fundamentally relational understanding of things. If ‘understanding’ is seen as a process of rendering what is unfamiliar familiar, the use of figures of speech is seen as essential to the process . On the question whether we can escape metaphor, Roland Barthes gave a definite no, ‘no sooner is a form seen than it must resemble something: humanity seems doomed to analogy’ [as cited in [11]]. Lakoff and Johnson explain a further feature of rhetoric as persuasive speech, which brings it closer to what we might call ‘ideology’, namely that it is for the most part invisible [12]. This implies that we are also mostly unaware of the symbolic influence and effect, or even the existence, of these persuasive and value-laden ‘figures of speech’. Chandler [13] explains: Such transparency tends to anaesthetize us to the way in which the culturally available stock of tropes acts as an anchor linking us to the dominant ways of thinking within our society. Our repeated exposure to, and use of, such figures of speech subtly sustains our tacit agreement with the shared assumptions of our society.23 Barthes goes much further than the innocence of Chandler’s ‘subtly sustaining tacit agreements’, and describes a semiological process whereby a sign is appropriated, emptied of historical meaning, and then purposely used to imply an emotively strong

but conceptually empty signification. This he calls mythology, or second-level signification. He describes the process as follows: [Myth] abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives

them the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, with any going back beyond what is immediately visible, it organises a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves .24 Barthes points out that the process of second-level signification (or producing so-called ‘myths’) is never without a motive, although the motive is often very

fragmentary. It plays on the analogy between the meaning and the concept, but this analogy is always partial, emotive and rather vague. Barthes goes so far as to say that a complete image/analogy would exclude myth: ‘[I]n general, myth prefers to work with poor, incomplete images, where meaning is already relieved of its fat, and ready for a signification, such as caricatures, pastiches, symbols, etc’.25 This point can be explained by taking a sideways step in the argument and looking, albeit briefly, at Susan Sontag’s illustration of the potent and harmful effects of the metaphors of violence and destruction, both on the body and on the body politic. In Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors [14], she aims at, in her words, ‘find[ing] a more “truthful” way of regarding illness … one most purified of, more resistant to metaphoric thinking’.26 Her main concerns are, first, that the controlling metaphors of illness (cancer, in particular, as that from which she suffered), are drawn from the language of warfare and, second, that illnesses, in turn, are used as metaphors in modern politico-legal discourse and that they thereby carry their melodramatic and simplistic rhetoric over into the public sphere. Sontag illustrates, from first-hand experience, the militaristic and distinctly paranoid flavour of current medical terminology. A few examples will suffice: Cancer cells do not simply multiply, they are ‘invasive’27 …Cancer cells ‘colonize’ from the original tumor to far sites in the body, first setting up tiny outposts whose presence is assumed, though they cannot be detected. Rarely are the body’s ‘defenses’ vigorous enough to obliterate a tumor … However ‘radical’ the surgical intervention, however many ‘scans’ are taken of the body landscape, most remissions are temporary; the prospects are that ‘tumor invasion’ will continue, or that rogue cells will eventually regroup and mount a new assault on the organism.28 Cancer treatment, likewise, suggests strategies of modern military combat. During radiotherapy patients are ‘bombarded’ with toxic rays and chemotherapy is quite literally chemical warfare.29 Cancer treatment inevitably also harms or even destroys healthy cells, thereby causing ‘collateral damage’, but strategically it is thought that nearly any damage to the body is justified for the greater good of saving the patient’s life. Like in war, the strategy often does not work and the patient has to be killed to be saved from the disease.30 Looking at it from the opposite direction, medical analogies have long been used to explain societal problems (symptoms) and to justify politico-legal intervention (treatment). Unlike earlier rhetorical use, she argues, where it was assumed that illness/disorder can in principle be managed or treated, modern diseases like AIDS and cancer are more loathsome and fatal and thus are to be attacked. Similarly, we no longer have localised unrest, political differences or regional instability—we have an all-out ‘global attack on civilization’31; an incurable and fatal illness, which must be destroyed before it destroys the world. No political view has a monopoly on the use

of this metaphor. In speeches on the “Jewish problem” throughout the 1930 s, European Jewry was repeatedly analogized to syphilis and to a cancer that must be excised—chillingly, the prescribed cure was a complete ‘surgical removal’, often also cutting out the healthy tissue around it.32 Winston Churchill remarked in 1929 that the Germans ‘transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia’.33 Trotsky, often seen as the most talented communist polemicist, described Soviet bureaucracy under Stalin as ‘a cancerous growth on the body of the working class’.34 In 1970 s USA John Dean explained Watergate to Nixon: ‘We have a cancer within—close to the Presidency—that’s growing’.35 Sontag argues, correctly in my view, that war-making and its associated vocabulary is often used in an inappropriate and harmful way, and often for purposes of mass ideological mobilization.36 It is a useful metaphor, or ‘myth’ in Barthes’s vocabulary, for ‘all sorts of ameliorative campaigns whose goals are cast as the defeat of an “enemy”’.37 She explains that in a capitalist society decisions and actions are normally subject to calculations based on self-interest and profitability. All-out war, however, is to some extent exempted from the language of realistic and practical decision making. It is regarded as an emergency situation where ‘normal’ rules and safeguards are suspended, an ‘Ausnahmenzustand’, in Schmitt’s words. It is a situation where no sacrifice is too much, not even sacrifice of the law itself. It is a rousing call-to-arms to fight an insidious enemy. The problem, however, is that in creating the analogy, in the process of ‘mythification’, the sign (war/fighting) is appropriated and separated from its historical context. But it nevertheless retains some confused and shapeless associations that sustain the fiction of a context-rich ‘factual situation’. It therefore seems possible, however absurd (if seen from ‘outside’ the system), for the ‘enemy’ to be an abstract notion, such as ‘world hunger’ or ‘international terror’, a notion so vague that ‘attacking it’ makes no sense. It also makes it appear possible for dealing with the huge complexities38 inherent in these problematic situations to be simplified to one-dimensional acts of ‘attack’ and to reach a definite and irreversible outcome, namely ‘destruction’.39 The question is whether it is possible, particularly for legal and political language, which is so prone to corrupt and ostentatious justifications, to be ‘purified’ of metaphor, or to, at least, show some resistance to metaphoric thinking. The question itself is highly problematic because it assumes that there is some form of ‘pure’, untainted or innocent meaning that can be excavated from under the ideological distortions, something akin to Habermas’s ‘ideal speech situation’ [15]. Unfortunately however, we are confronted with Foucault’s linguistic determinism where the dominant tropes within the discourse of a particular historical period determine what can be known—

constituting the basic episteme of the age [16]. Linguistic or semiotic frameworks create what Foucault calls the ‘conditions of possibility’. It

means that discourses, such as the legal discourse, have real effects in that they structure the possibility of what gets included and excluded in the debate and hence also of what gets done or remains undone. Seen like this, and as

pointed out earlier, language does not reflect reality, it does not even distort reality; it creates reality. What is more, the integrity of this process,

which is always essentially an historical meaning-making process, remains in doubt.

Facts Bad

Cold facts are worthless. We have to surpass matters of fact to make facts matter.Schlag ’13 Pierre Schlag, “Facts (The),” his blog, 1/28/2013, http://brazenandtenured.com/2013/01/28/facts-the/But let me explain about the facts. First, notice, that the most factish of facts (apologies to Latour) are actually factoids —trivial data bits shorn of any actual narrative. CNN had it down cold: “ America has had five presidents who ate fish for breakfast .” What , I ask you, could you possibly do with that qua fact? Still, Americans like facts. It was Joe Friday on Dragnet who first said, “all we want are the facts, ma’am.” Really? That’s all? I don’t think so. He was on a mission. He wanted facts on a mission. And we, the viewers, did too. So I have to say, as a preliminary matter, things already don’t look too good for the facts.

Indeed, the possibility that in their most prototypical factishisness, facts are nearly useless while in their most desirable state they are on a mission—well, that’s not an auspicious start. Things get worse. In law and social science

(that’s my domain limit here—I feel really cramped) facts generally function as poseurs. The facts, are nearly always posing as the truth about “what-is-actually-going-on.” Facts are frequently presented as “the-real-story” or “the bottom line.” One is no doubt supposed to conclude from this that “facts are facts”—that they are the veritable bedrock of truth. But notice that this doesn’t make any sense. Notice that the “bottom line” is an accounting metaphor . Consider that, “ the real story” is an oxymoron deliberately composed of both truth and fiction. Note that “what-is-actually-going-on” is a problematic state hanging precariously on the ungrounded and notoriously unreliable reality/appearance pair. All of this is to say, that

the appeal of “getting down to the facts,” (or some such thing) often rests on situating the facts in some initially alluring rhetorical space (e.g. “the real story” “the bottom line”) that turns out, upon further inspection, to be constructed of images , metaphors or fictions of questionable philosophical countenance . (See,

Nietzsche, On Lies and Truth in a Non-Moral Sense) Now, it’s not that these metaphors, images or fictions turn facts into non-facts. But still, I ask you: what could be more humbling to a fact then to learn that its appeal rests upon a fiction? Not only do facts frequently function as poseurs, but, when they are at their most factish, they’re often not all that interesting. Factish facts don’t really tell you much of anything you want to know. Imagine a party. Here are some exemplary factish facts: There were 19 people at the party. 9 were women. 10 were men. While the party was happening, gravity exercised a constant force of 32 feet per second/per second. Everyone standing stayed connected to the ground. Not the greatest narrative is it? And notice here that if you stick strictly to the facts (if you admit only of truly factish facts) adding more of these little items will not markedly improve your story line. (For you editors of university press books and law review articles,

please pay special attention here.) The only time facts are really interesting (remember law and social science is the domain

limit) is when they’re something more than just the facts . Go back to the party. Here’s another fact: Jill left the party with Tom. This fact is more interesting. Well, mildly so. With this sort of fact, you can start imagining possible implications (amorous, murderous, whathaveyou). But note that now we’re no longer talking about “just the facts.” We’re talking about facts with implications, facts with attitude. Why then are facts ever interesting? Well, ironically it’s because they’re not functioning as “just facts,” but something more.

IR Bad

IR scholarship is distorted by systemic certainty bias—contestation key to pragmatism and accuracyWidmaier and Park ’12 Wesley W. Widmaier, Susan Park, “Differences Beyond Theory: Structural, Strategic, and Sentimental Approaches to Normative Change,” International Studies Perspectives, Volume 13, Issue 2, pages 123–134, May 2012, DOI: 10.1111/j.1528-3585.2012.00459.xIn the security realm, Mitzen and Schweller (2011:2) have likewise argued against what they term the “uncertainty bias” in IR scholarship. While this bias treats opacity and a lack of certainty as a source of instability, they counter that “the problem does not seem to be uncertainty but certainty.” Highlighting the importance of “misplaced certainty as a

distinct and common pathway to war,” Mitzen and Schweller argue that misplaced certainty occurs “where decision makers are confident that they know each other’s capabilities, intentions, or both; but their confidence is unwarranted yet persists even in the face of disconfirming evidence.” Such tendencies could be seen, not least they note, in the convictions of senior US policymakers in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Mitzen and Schweller elaborate by suggesting that this stress on misplaced certainty may itself promise a restored pragmatic relevance to IR theory, “providing social theoretical underpinnings to the Classical Realist admonition of prudence.” In terms of the interplay of concerns for systemic trends and organizational

pathologies, this stress on misplaced certainty can itself highlight the overlooked interplay intellectual and everyday beliefs. For example, with respect to basic theories of organizational design, March and Olsen (1998:964–965) stressed the dangers of “competency traps” that lead agents to resist the modification of norms and impede the development of “new strategies,

procedures, or technologies.” Over time, they warned, policymakers can become “locked into a particular rule-based structure by virtue of developing familiarity with the rules and capabilities for using them.” Such tendencies build pressures for instability as “the accelerating development of competence with particular institutional arrangements and practices” runs counter to the “long-run obsolescence” of such practices in ways that engender “performance crises.” Moreover, to the extent that technocratic overconfidence in utilitarian efficiency obscures the need for popular consent, such performance crises can in turn inspire legitimacy crises. As Rorty (1987:245–246) argues, when policy debate becomes overly reliant on “the sterile jargon of ‘quantified’ social sciences (‘maximizes satisfaction’, ‘increases conflict’, etc.),

[policymakers] either tune out, or, more dangerously, begin to use the jargon in moral deliberation.” To the extent that popular consent derived from utilitarian performance and analytic argumentation can only last as long as policy keeps

“delivering the goods,” intellectual stability ironically might be said to cause policy instability and crisis.

AT: Specific Alt Key

The demand for specificity is ludicrous—smart critique is productive by itselfBogost ’13 Ian Bogost, “WELL, WHAT'S YOUR SOLUTION THEN? David Graeber on thinking about ideas,” 4/14/2013, http://www.bogost.com/blog/well_whats_your_solution_then.shtmlLately, it's common to see critique—even smart, detailed critique—answered with a crass dismissal: "Well, what's your solution then?" As if the very idea of raising a concern is invalid on its own. Among boosters, no critique is deemed valid without a complete alternative program. This David Graeber article is about much more than

just critique, but I enjoyed it for the following response to demands for programmatic solution: Normally, when you challenge the

conventional wisdom--that the current economic and political system is the only possible one--the first reaction you are likely to

get is a demand for a detailed architectural blueprint of how an alternative system would work, down to the nature of its financial instruments, energy supplies, and policies of sewer maintenance. Next, you are likely to be asked for a detailed program of how this system will be brought into existence.

Historically, this is ridiculous. When has social change ever happened according to someone's blueprint? It's not as if a small circle of visionaries in Renaissance Florence conceived of something they called "capitalism," figured out the details of how the stock exchange and factories would someday work, and then put in place a program to bring their visions into reality. In fact, the idea is so absurd we might well ask ourselves how it ever occurred to us to imagine this is how change happens to begin.

Specific proposals are ineffective—criticism creates shifts in the ‘climate of ideas’ which spills over to policy implementationJohn ’13 Peter John, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at University College London, “Political Science, Impact and Evidence,” Political Studies Review, Volume 11, Issue 2, pages 168–173, May 2013, DOI: 10.1111/1478-9302.12009Political scientists should not expect a direct causal impact on the actions of politicians and policy makers. They are more likely to influence the climate of ideas, which in turn can shape public policy. In

general, politicians and policy makers are hungry for ideas and want to see themselves at the forefront of new debates. In particular, they are interested in findings that they and their advisers cannot create for themselves. The techniques of advanced political science and debates within it are far from being arcane for they offer a new approach

and provide robust evidence about politics and policy. Political scientists should not aim to be like journalists, commentators or advisers as they will usually perform less well than these talented practitioners. By communicating in conferences, tweeting, blogging and public speaking they will find that politicians and civil servants will come looking for them as well as the other way round. The article reviews studies of the diffusion of ideas and the ways in which ideas influence politicians and other policy makers, which back up an indirect approach to impact. There are – broadly – two ways whereby impact can occur. I am going to call the first direct and the second indirect. The direct approach works like this. An academic I shall call A has a new idea or finding that is relevant. Academic A then mounts a frenzied campaign to convince others of the importance of this work, which involves making contact with journalists, writing to policy makers, emailing staff in think tanks and calling up people in the know. The academic summarises the conference or journal paper in easy-to-understand language and boils the research project down to a list of findings. Academic A accepts an invitation to talk on a local radio show, then takes a trip to London to attend an event and hands business cards round to those who stay for the drinks reception afterwards. Academic A decides to get to know key people in government and in the media. Over time this rising public figure starts to become one of the ‘great and good’, getting invited to talk at round tables and seminars. Academic A uses these venues to plug the research. This expert becomes a specialist adviser to a Select Committee of the House of Commons, and takes the opportunity to mention the research to the committee clerks and MPs. More media appearances and interviews follow. The indirect approach can happen in the following way. Academic B has a new idea or finding, but just gives the paper at conferences or gatherings, talks about it to friends and students, and gets on with the business of publishing it in a peer-reviewed journal. A PhD student tweets the main findings, which get re-tweeted. The idea circulates round expert circles and starts to diffuse, becoming common knowledge in overlapping academic circles and among the people who are linked into them. A researcher for a BBC Radio 4 magazine programme, who takes pride in following academic debates, notices the tweet, and clicks on the shortened URL to find the pdf of the paper. The researcher reads the title and abstract, hacks through the literature review, takes a deep breath when presented with the formal model,

skips a lot of the statistical analysis, then finds the discussion of the findings to be very interesting. After musing on the conclusion and rereading the abstract, the researcher thinks ‘I understand this now’. Nothing happens at this point, but the researcher is talking to a friend who works on another channel and they start a conversation about what is hot in various fields of activity. The ping pong continues for a bit, and then the first researcher says: ‘You know what – there is this academic's research’. The other researcher says: ‘you are right, I have seen something on that too. You could do a programme on it and take pot shots at government policy’. Next day there is a planning meeting for next year's schedule. The idea of the researcher gets piled in. Academic B is not aware of anything at this stage. The researcher drops the academic an email and asks for a phone call. This duly happens. The academic finds the conversation is rather like explaining something to a bright third-year undergraduate and the researcher's questions are easy to answer. Academic B puts the phone down and goes back to the emails. Then the programme is commissioned and then Academic B is duly invited to contribute. These hypothetical illustrations could take a different course. Academic A might in the end get invited to be an expert who helps commission the policy. Academic B might be a bit pompous and never get

invited on to the programme. But if the basic plausibility of the two scenarios is accepted then a few points follow. The first is that it is not straightforward to promote one's own work when there are so many competitors out there, such as other academics, experts and those working for pressure groups. Just because an idea is good or interesting, it does not follow that anyone is going to listen, no matter how well and vigorously it is argued for. The second – and more subtle – lesson is that the act of direct promotion of the research findings might put the recipients off the message. The most powerful impacts occur when people do not feel they are being persuaded, so the irony might be that the more academics try to plug their work, the less likely it is that those in public life

are going to be influenced by it. The third insight is that in public life there are people like journalists and researchers who get a buzz out of finding a new idea and presenting it to others in a way that is simplified and has their stamp on it. Their pay-off comes from turning a complex work of social science into something digestible, then selling it to other audiences. Tim Harford (2006), author of The Underground Economist, is a good example of

a journalist who adopts this approach. The fourth point is that ideas circulate in networks, which means that they can come from many sources, and so appear to be influential because they are being articulated by different kinds of people across linked networks. When the idea does not operate on its own, it can be accessed as the property of a group of scholars or experts and will be accepted more willingly as a consensus or emerging set of findings.

AT: Sil/Epistemic Pragmatism

Debating theoretical grounds produces practical relevance and is the condition of possibility for their analytical pragmatismReus-Smit ’12 Christian Reus-Smit, “International Relations, Irrelevant? Don’t Blame Theory,” Millennium: Journal of International Relations 40, 2012, pp. 526-541, SageFirstly, whether IR is practically relevant depends, in large measure, on the kinds of questions that animate our research. I am not referring here to the commonly held notion that we should be addressing questions that practitioners want answered. Indeed, our work will at times be most relevant when we pursue questions that policymakers and others would prefer left buried. My point is a different one, which I return to in greater detail below. It is sufficient to note here that being practically relevant involves asking questions of practice; not just retrospective questions about past practices – their nature, sources and consequences – but prospective questions about what human agents should do. As I have argued elsewhere, being practically relevant

means asking questions of how we, ourselves, or some other actors (states, policymakers, citizens, NGOs, IOs, etc.) should act.14 Yet our ability, nay

willingness, to ask such questions is determined by the metatheoretical assumptions that structure our research and arguments. This is partly an issue of ontology – what we see affects how we understand the conditions of action, rendering some practices possible or impossible, mandatory or beyond the pale. If, for example, we think that political change is driven by material forces, then we are unlikely to see communicative practices of argument and persuasion as potentially successful sources of change. More than this, though, it is also an issue of epistemology. If we assume that the proper domain of IR as a social science is the acquisition of empirically verifiable knowledge, then we will struggle to comprehend, let alone answer, normative questions of how we should act. We will

either reduce ‘ought’ questions to ‘is’ questions, or place them off the agenda altogether.15 Our metatheoretical assumptions thus

determine the macro-orientation of IR towards questions of practice, directly affecting the field’s practical relevance. Secondly, metatheoretical revolutions license new second-order theoretical and analytical possibilities while foreclosing others, directly affecting those forms of scholarship widely considered most practically relevant. The rise of analytical eclecticism illustrates this. As noted above, Katzenstein and Sil’s call for a pragmatic approach to the study of world politics, one that addresses real-world problematics by combining insights from diverse research traditions, resonates with the mood

of much of the field, especially within the American mainstream. Epistemological and ontological debates are widely considered irresolvable dead ends, grand theorising is unfashionable, and gladiatorial contests between rival paradigms appear, increasingly, as unimaginative rituals. Boredom and fatigue are partly responsible for this new mood, but something deeper is at work. Twenty-five years ago, Sil and Katzenstein’s call would have fallen on deaf ears; the neo-neo debate that preoccupied the American mainstream occurred within a metatheoretical consensus, one that combined a neo-positivist epistemology with a rationalist ontology. This singular metatheoretical framework defined the rules of the game; analytical eclecticism was unimaginable. The Third Debate of the 1980s and early 1990s destabilised all of this; not because American IR scholars converted in their droves to critical theory or poststructuralism (far from it), but because metatheoretical

absolutism became less and less tenable. The anti-foundationalist critique of the idea that there is any single measure of truth did not produce a wave of relativism, but it did generate a widespread sense that battles on the terrain of epistemology were unwinnable. Similarly, the Third Debate emphasis on identity politics and cultural particularity, which later found expression in constructivism, did not vanquish rationalism. It did, however, establish a more pluralistic, if nevertheless heated, debate about ontology, a terrain on which many scholars felt more comfortable than that of epistemology.

One can plausibly argue, therefore, that the metatheoretical struggles of the Third Debate created a space for – even

made possible – the rise of analytical eclecticism and its aversion to metatheoretical absolutes, a principal benefit of which is said to be greater practical relevance. Lastly, most of us would agree that for our research to be practically relevant, it has to be good – it has to be the product of sound inquiry, and our conclusions have to be plausible. The pluralists

among us would also agree that different research questions require different methods of inquiry and strategies of argument. Yet across this diversity there are several practices widely recognised as essential to good research. Among these are clarity of purpose, logical coherence, engagement with alternative arguments and the provision of good reasons (empirical evidence, corroborating arguments textual interpretations, etc.).

Less often noted, however, is the importance of metatheoretical reflexivity. If our epistemological assumptions affect the questions we ask, then being conscious of these assumptions is necessary to ensure that we are not fencing off questions of importance, and that if we are, we can justify our choices. Likewise, if our ontological assumptions affect how we see the social universe, determining what is in or outside our field of vision, then reflecting on these assumptions can prevent us being blind to things that matter . A

similar argument applies to our meta-ethical assumptions. Indeed, if deontology and consequentialism are both meta-ethical positions, as I suggested earlier, then reflecting on our choice of one or other position is part and parcel of weighing rival ethical arguments (on issues as diverse as global poverty and human rights). Finally, our epistemological,

ontological and meta-ethical assumptions are not metatheoretical silos; assumptions we make in one have a tendency to shape those we make in another. The oft-heard refrain that ‘if we can’t measure it, it doesn’t matter’ is an unfortunate example of epistemology supervening on ontology, something that metatheoretical reflexivity can help guard against. In sum, like clarity, coherence, consideration of alternative arguments and the provision of good reasons, metatheoretical reflexivity is part of keeping us honest, making it practically relevant despite its abstraction.

AT: Science = Truth

Science is not objective—it reflects particular social practices that must be understood for scientific conclusions to bear any meaningLaw ’12 Duncan Law, “Evidence-Based Belief and Practice,” Duncan Law’s blog, 7/31/2012, http://duncanlaw.wordpress.com/Relativism – whether it understands itself as anti-science, as a consequence of science, or both – is a common object of critique. The opposing flaw is also a serious one, however: this is the perspective that grounds science’s authority in an appeal to the way things are in the world, without seeing how this appeal must itself be understood as a social practice embedded in a complex system of social practices. For this approach, in Hegel –

and Marx’s – phrase, “the process vanishes in the result”: the mechanism by which truth-claims are arrived at is forgotten, and truth-claims are wielded as if they are the source of science’s social authority, rather than the result of that authority (as is in fact the case). These approaches, then, are dogmatic – they understand themselves as (and, in most practical contexts, are) pro-science, but they have an inadequate understanding of what science is, as a historically-specific set of social practices. Advocates of this perspective may be able to do science, but they are not able to adequately justify their findings, without relying on a tacit set of social norms that their dogmatism overtly denies. Many of the pugnacious contemporary advocates of science, like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, belong in this category.

AT: Objectivity k2 Action

Science is not coherent or monolithic—objectivity only complicates political actionInnerarty ’13 Daniel Innerarty, “Power and knowledge: The politics of the knowledge society,” European Journal of Social Theory February 2013 16: 3-16, doi:10.1177/1368431012468801On the other hand, the relationship between power and knowledge is much more complex than that assumed by the theory that power is subordinate to knowledge. At times, in fact, the exact opposite holds: expert knowledge is manipulated by those in power to justify previously adopted political decisions. In addition,

the world of experts is not generally peaceful or uncontroversial. At times, political conflicts reproduce the disputes that are taking place in the heart of the scientific community. Science is rarely able to resolve political disputes; instead, scientific controversies frequently add fuel to political disputes. Every expert has a counter-expert, which helps deprive scientific knowledge of its alleged certainty. Scientific opinion, far from putting an end to the debate, very often serves to increase the number of perspectives and consequences that must be taken into consideration. Thus begins the game with

experts on either side, making it clear to the public that, in the case of complex issues with political and social repercussions, scientific precision in no way ensures rational decisions.

AT: Predictions Solve Complexity/Science is Self-Correcting

It’s not a question of ‘having all the facts’—criticism is key to coping with uncertainty instead of trying to dream it awayInnerarty ’13 Daniel Innerarty, “Power and knowledge: The politics of the knowledge society,” European Journal of Social Theory February 2013 16: 3-16, doi:10.1177/1368431012468801Jasanoff uses the term ‘technologies of humility’ (2005: 373) to talk about an institutionalized way of thinking about the frontiers of human knowledge – that which is unknown, uncertain, ambiguous, and uncontrollable – acknowledging the limits on prediction and control. A

similar approach encourages us to consider the possibility of unforeseen consequences, to make explicit the normative features that are buried within technical decisions, to recognize the need for collective learning and multiple points of view. In this context, rather than the traditional image of a science that produces objective ‘hard’ facts, pushing back ignorance and telling politics what to do, we need a type of

science that will cooperate with politics in the management of uncertainty (Ravetz, 1987: 82). For this reason,

we must develop a reflexive culture of uncertainty that does not perceive non-knowledge as the outer limit of the yet-to-be investigated (Wehling, 2004: 101), but as an essential part of knowledge and science. We should not regard that which is not known, uncertain knowledge, the merely plausible, non-scientific forms of knowledge, and ignorance as imperfect phenomena but as resources (Bonss, 2003: 49).

There are times when, in the absence of undisputed and unambiguous knowledge, cognitive strategies must be developed in order to take action within the bounds of uncertainty. Among the most

important types of knowledge are risk assessment, management, and communication. We must learn to operate in an environment where the relationship between cause and effect is not clear, but fuzzy and chaotic.

AT: Big Words Bad/Ivory Tower

Exclusivist critique of social theory for its difficult jargon neutralizes the political and ideological tropes present in ‘ordinary’ languageZeus Leonardo, Associate Professor of Language and Literacy & Society and Culture at the UC-Berkeley Graduate School of Education, “Critical Social Theory and Transformative Knowledge: The Functions of Criticism in Quality Education,” Educational Researcher, Vol. 33, No. 6, Aug-Sep 2004, JSTORIdeology critique is not merely criticism. As used in common (i.e., uncritical) discourse, criticism is the deployment of commentaries for political purposes, usually indicative of a Leftist leaning teacher in the popular mind. In this sense, criticism establishes the superiority of the critic whose impunity the audience often fears. Here critical social theorists must take some responsibility when their main concern is to become the

"ultimate radical" rather than promoting dialogue. That said, mainstream audiences often mistake criticism for political agendas as opposed to engagement, as if only critics have an agenda. Criticism is (mis)construed as pessimistic, judged as a form of negativity, and not in the sense that Adorno (1973) once promoted. The teacher-as-critic may be perceived as aggressive if she teaches the idea that patriarchy is alive and well, as politically incorrect if she cites the white supremacist origins of the United States, and as homophiliac if she questions the soundness of heterosexual families. However, the teacher-as-critic

understands that criticism is at the center of a quality education that values debate, openness to different ideas, and commitment to democratic processes. Moreover, pedagogical interactions are never severed from wider social relations that need to be problematized. In this sense, criticism is more a search for emancipatory forms of knowledge and less a contrived condition to honor the critic . Criticism is positioned here as a central process in promoting a quality education even in the face of an uneven and unjust world. A language of critique is never simply about clarity, but is always bound up with a political project. The politics of clarity is particularly important in the reception of CST in education because of its dense theories and

descriptions, and therefore warrants some critical attention. Over the years, the issue of clarity has been a sore point in the

wider engagement of CST. But clarity is always a question of clarity for whom and for what? Clarity is too often an issue of conventions and a critique aiming solely for clarity takes for granted the reader's position (Giroux, 1995). This does not suggest that critique should aim consciously for vagueness and obfuscation. For confusion seems opposed to quality. It suggests that critique is not an issue of either clarity or complexity but both/and. Also, it implicates clarity as an ideological issue, rather than a merely rhetorical one (Lather, 1996). For example, an uncritical literacy program perpetuates the importance of clarity over political purpose and denies the fact that people's tastes and dispositions toward language are socially motivated. As a case in point, language learning frequently intersects issues of race, forming what Hopson (2003) calls the "the problem of the language line." Hopson combines Bourdieu's concept of linguistic

capital with Du Bois' thoughts on the "color line" and finds that language learning is never just about induction into mainstream schooling but a way to perpetuate linguistic racism, in this case through the hegemony of English (see also Macedo, Dendrinos, & Gounari, 2003). Criticism launched against the apparently muddy descriptions of CST tends to valorize ordinary language. It is not uncommon that mainstream educators charge that critical educational language is "elitist" or "exclusivist." Its highly academic discourse is not

only hard to understand, it seems to demand much previous knowledge from its readers. Though this particular criticism helps point to the

important project of widening the interest in CST, it also misses the mark because quality education is proportional to the depth of one's analysis, part of which is the engagement with theoretical discourse. It assumes problematically that ordinary language is sufficient and non-ideological (Gouldner, 1976; Aoki, 2000). The argument valorizes common language as transparent when compared to the supposed opacity of critical language. In fact, there is much in ordinary language that leaves one searching for a better mode of critique in terms of providing educators , teachers, and administrators discourses for a deeper engagement of school processes and hence a quality experience. It is for this reason that Said prefers the phrase "historical experience" because it is not esoteric (therefore accessible) but not without its theoretical moorings that a critical social theorist like Said (2000) proceeds to unpack. Likewise, CST in education works to build a language of depth hermeneutics and as such maintains its critical edge while at the same time fashioning it out of people's concrete lives or lived experiences.

AT Agonism

AT: Nietzschean Agonism – 2AC

You have Nietzsche on agonism backwards – affirming life means meeting us on the battlefield of argument instead of hiding behind the safe and familiar walls of ‘framework’ and priding yourself for your ascetic ability to work within limitsAcampora ‘2 Christa Davis Acampora, professor of philosophy at Hunter College of CUNY, “Of Dangerous Games and Dastardly Deeds,” International Studies in Philosophy, vol. 34, no. 3, Fall 2002II. Dastardly Deeds The so-called "Good Eris," described in "Homer's Contest," supposedly allowed the unavoidable urge to strive for

preeminence to find expression in perpetual competition in ancient Greek culture. In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche seeks to critique Christianity for advocating a kind of altruism, or selflessness, that is essentially self-destructive, and for perverting the urge to struggle by transforming it into a desire for annihilation . Read in light of

"Homer's Contest," Nietzsche's Genealogy enables us to better grasp his conception of the value of contest as a possible arena for the revaluation of values, and it advances an understanding of the distinctions Nietzsche draws between creative and destructive forms of contest and modes of competing within them. Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals, a Streitschrift—a polemic, a writing that aims to provoke a certain kind of fighting—

portrays a battle between "the two opposing values 'good and bad,' 'good and evil'." Nietzsche depicts slavish morality as that which condemns as evil what perpetuates the agon—namely, self-interest,

jealousy, and the desire to legislate values— but rather than killing off the desire to struggle, slavish morality manipulates and redirects it. Prevention of struggle is considered by Nietzsche to be hostile to life: an "order thought of as sovereign and universal, not as a means in the struggle between power-complexes but as a means of preventing all struggle in general —... would be a principle hostile to life, an agent of the dissolution and destruction of man, an attempt to assassinate the future of man, a sign of weariness, a secret path to nothingness" (GM II:11). "The 'evolution' of a thing, a custom, an organ is [...] a succession of [...] more or

less mutually independent processes of subduing, plus the resistances they encounter, the attempts at transformation for the purpose of defense and reaction, and the results of successful counteractions"(GM II:12). For Nietzsche, human beings, like nations, acquire their identity in their histories of struggles, accomplishments, and moments of resistance. The complete cessation of strife, for Nietzsche, robs a being of its activity, of its life. In the second essay of the Genealogy, Nietzsche identifies the notion of conscience, which demands a kind of self-mortification, as an example of the kind of contest slavish morality seeks: "Hostility, cruelty, joy in persecuting, in attacking, in change, in destruction—all this turned against the possessors of such instinct: that is the origin of the 'bad conscience'" (GM II:16). Denied all enemies and resistances, finding nothing and no one with whom to struggle except himself, the man of bad conscience: impatiently lacerated, persecuted, gnawed at, assaulted, and maltreated himself; this animal that rubbed itself raw against the bars of its cage as one tried to 'tame' it; this deprived creature... had to turn himself into an adventure, a torture chamber, an uncertain and dangerous wilderness — this fool, this yearning and desperate prisoner became the inventor of the 'bad conscience.' But thus began the gravest and uncanniest illness... a declaration of war against the old instincts upon which his strength, joy, and terribleness had reached hitherto (GM II:16). Bad conscience functions in slavish morality as a means of self-flagellation, as a way to vent the desire to hurt others once external expressions of opposition are inhibited and forbidden. "Guilt before God: this thought becomes an instrument of torture to him" (GM II:22). In that case, self-worth depends upon the ability to injure and harm oneself, to apply the payment of selfmaltreatment to one's irreconcilable account with God. It is the effort expended in one's attempt to make the impossible repayment that determines one's worth. xi The genuine struggle, that which truly determines value for the ascetic ideal is one in which one

destructively opposes oneself—one's value increases as one succeeds in annihilating oneself. Slavish morality is still driven by contest, but the mode of this contest is destructive. It mistakes self-inflicted suffering as a sign of strength. The ascetic ideal celebrates cruelty and torture—it revels in and sanctifies its own pain. It is a discord that wants to be discordant, that enjoys itself in this suffering and even grows more self-confident and triumphant the more its own presupposition, its physiological capacity for life decreases. 'Triumph in the ultimate agony': the ascetic ideal has always fought under this hyperbolic sign; in this enigma of seduction, in this image of torment and delight, it recognized its brightest light, its salvation, its ultimate victory (GM III:28). Slavish morality, particularly in the form of Pauline Christianity, redirects the competitive drive and whips into submission all outward expressions of strife by cultivating the desire to be "good" xii in which case being good amounts abandoning, as Nietzsche portrays it, both the structure of the contests he admired in "Homer's Contest" and the productive ways of competing within them. It does not merely redirect the goal of the contest (e.g., struggling for the glory of Christ rather than competing for the glory of Athens), rather how one competes well is also transformed (e.g., the "good fight" is conceived as tapping divine power to destroy worldly strongholds xiii rather than excelling them). In other words, the ethos of contest, the ethos of the agon is transformed

in slavish morality. Xiv III. Dangerous Games Moralities effect contests in two ways: 1) they articulate a structure through

which the meaning of human being (e.g., excellence, goodness, etc.) can be created and meted out, and 2) they

simultaneously cultivate a commitment to a certain way of competing within those structures. By cultivating not only a desire to win but a desire to compete well (which includes respect for one's competitor and the

institutions that sets forth the terms of the engagement), xv we can establish a culture capable of deriving our standards of excellence internally and of renewing and revaluing those standards according to changes in needs and interests of our communities. This is the legacy that Nietzsche strives to articulate in his "Homer's

Contest," one that he intends his so-called "new nobility" to claim. If the life of slavish morality is characterized by actions of annihilation and cruelty, Nietzsche's alternative form of valuation is marked by its activity of surmounting what opposes, of overcoming opposition by rising above (erheben) what resists , of striving continually to rise above the form of life it has lived. As a form of spiritualized striving, self-overcoming, must, like Christian agony, be self-directed; its aim is primarily resistance to and within oneself, but the agony—that is, the structure of that kind of

painful struggle—differs both in how it orients its opposition and in how it pursues its goals. Self-overcoming does not aim at self-destruction but rather at self-exhaustion and self-surpassing. It strives not for annihilation but for transformation, and the method of doing so is the one most productive in the external contests of the ancient Greeks: the act of rising above. Self-overcoming asks us to seek hostility and enmity as effective means for summoning our powers of development. Others who pose as resistances, who challenge and test our strength, are to be earnestly sought and revered. That kind of reverence, Nietzsche

claims, is what makes possible genuine relationships that enhance our lives. Such admiration and cultivation of opposition serve as

"a bridge to love" (GM I:10) because they present a person with the opportunity to actively distinguish himself, to experience the joy and satisfaction that comes with what Nietzsche describes as "becoming what one is." xvi This, Nietzsche

suggests, is what makes life worth living—it is what permits us to realize a certain human freedom to be active participants in shaping our own lives. xvii

Particularly true in the context of topicality which requires translation of an arbitrary set of signifiers into iron pillars of Truth – this will to mastery over the chaotic meaning of the resolution is true reactivitySpivak ’76 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Translator’s Preface to Of Grammatology, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976, p. xxii-xxivIt should by now be clear that Nietzsche's "suspicion of the value of truth . . . of meaning and of being, of `meaning of

being' " of the "concept of . . . the primary signified ," is intimately shared by Derrida. The other items on the two lists can be brought under one head: philosophical dis-course as formal, rhetorical, figurative discourse, a something to be deciphered. The end of this Preface will make clear how deeply Derrida is committed to such a notion. Here I shall comment on the implications of "the

decipherment of figurative discourse" in Nietzsche. As early as 1873, Nietzsche described metaphor as the originary process of what the intellect presents as "truth." "The intellect, as a means for the preservation of the individual, develops its chief power in dissimulation." 20 "A nerve-stimulus, first transcribed [übertragen]

into an image [Bild]! First metaphor! The image again copied into a sound! Second metaphor! And each time he [the creator of language] leaps completely out of one sphere right into the midst of an entirely different one ." (NW III. ii. 373, TF 178) In its simplest outline, Nietzsche's definition of metaphor seems to be the establishing of an identity between dissimilar things. Nietzsche's phrase is "Gleich machen" (make equal), calling to mind the German word "Gleichnis"—image,

simile, similitude, comparison, allegory, parable—an unmistakable pointer to figurative practice in general. "Every idea originates through equating the unequal." (NW III. ii. 374, TF 179) " What , therefore, is truth? A mobile army of

metaphors , metonymies, anthropomorphisms; . . . truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions , . . . coins which have their obverse effaced and now are no longer of account as coins but merely as metal." (NW III. ii. 374-75, TF 18o) I hold on here to the notions of a process of figuration and a process of forgetfulness. In this early text, Nietzsche describes the figurative drive as "that im-pulse towards the formation of metaphors, that fundamental impulse of man, which we cannot reason away for one moment—for thereby we should reason away man himself. . . . (NW III. ii. 381, TF 188) Later he will give this drive the name "will to power." Our so-called will to truth is a will to power because "the so-called drive for knowledge can be traced back to a drive to appropriate and conquer." 21 Nietzsche's sense of the inevitable forcing of the issue, of exercising power, comes through in his italics: " `Thinking' in primitive conditions (preorganic) is the crystallization of forms. . . . In our thought, the essential feature is fitting new

mate-rial into old schemas, . . . making equal what is new." 22 The human being has nothing more to go on than a collection of nerve stimuli . And, because he or she must be secure in the knowledge of, and therefore power over, the "world " (inside or outside), the nerve stimuli are explained and described through the categories of figuration that masquerade as the categories of "truth." These explanations and descriptions are "interpretations" and reflect a human inability to tolerate undescribed chaos —"that the collective character [Gesamtcharakter] of the world . . . is in all eternity chaos— in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms [human weaknesses—Menschlichkeiten]."23 As

Nietzsche suggests, this need for power through anthropomorphic defining compels humanity to create an unending proliferation of interpretations whose only "origin," that shudder in the nerve strings, being a direct sign of nothing, leads to no primary signified. As Derrida writes, Nietzsche provides an "entire thematics of active interpretations, which substitutes an incessant deciphering for the disclosure of truth as a presentation of the thing itself." (MP 19, SP 149) Interpretation is "the introduction of meaning" (or "deception through meaning"— Sinnhineinlegen), a making-sign that is a making-figure, for there is, in this thought, no possibility of a literal, true, self-identical mean-ing. Identification (Gleich-machen) constitutes the act of figuration. Therefore, "nothing is ever comprehended, but rather designated and distorted...." This extends, of course, to the identity between an act (effect) and its purpose (cause) : "Every single time something is done with a purpose in view, something fundamentally different and other occurs." (WM H. 59, 130; WP 301, 351) The will to power is a process of "incessant deciphering"—figurating, interpreting, sign-ifying through ap-parent identification. Thus, even supposing that an act could be isolated within its

outlines, to gauge the relationship between it and its "originating" consciousness, the critical glance must reverse (necessarily

nonidenticallv) this decipherment , follow the "askew path," read the act in its textuality . In this important respect, "without him [Nietzsche] the 'question' of the text would never have erupted, at least in the precise sense that it has taken today."24 In The

Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche reads the history of morality as a text. He interprets the successive meanings of systems of morality. "Pur-poses and utilities are only signs that a will to power has become master of something less powerful and has in turn imprinted the meaning of a function upon it [ihm von sich aus den Sinn einer Funktion auf geprägt hat; this image of Au f prägung—imprinting—`figuration' in yet another sense, is most

important in Nietzsche, and constantly recurs in this particular context]; and the entire history of a `thing', an organ, a custom can in this way be a continuous sign-chain of ever new interpretations and make-shift excuses [Zurechtmachungen] whose causes do not even have to be related to one another in a purely chance fashion."25 "All concepts in which an entire process is semiotically telescoped [Zusammenfasst] elude definition." (NW, VI. ii. 333, GM 8o) Derrida would, of course, suspend the entire notion of semiosis, put the sign under erasure. It is possible to read such a suspension into Nietzsche's "continuous sign-chains," without origin and end in "truth." And thus it is possible to discover an affinity between Derrida's practice in Of Grammatology and Nietzsche's interpretation of value systems as infinite textuality; and to see in Derrida's decipherment of the negative valuation of writing within the speech-writing hierarchy the mark of a Nietzschean "genealogy."

Critical Agonism Good

Agonism requires contestation of a sufficiently reflexive character that it allows even itself to be put to question; to stabilize debate along the lines of a static resolution is to put debate’s agonistic potential to deathSiemens ‘1 Herman W. Siemens, Department of Philosophy at Nijmegen University in The Netherlands, “Nietzshce’s agon with ressentiment: towards a therapeutic reading of critical transvaluation,” Continental Philosophy Review 34: 69-93, 2001, SpringerLinkNietzschean transvaluation is devoted to contesting and overcoming prevailing values in the name of life, its affirmation and elevation. As an agonal contest of values, transvaluative discourse challenges a given value or ideal by staging a confrontation with a representative persona or type , whose various attitudes and postures are then interrogated and evaluated from a standpoint in life as the highest value. The agon has important consequences for the way we understand Nietzsche’s textual confrontations, which can be used to introduce

a viable therapeutic reading. In the first place, the agon involves a symmetrical organisation or economy of power, presupposing a plurality of more-or-less equal antagonistic forces . 13 Agonal discourse is therefore contingent on the participation of a plurality of forces in a symmetrical contestation of values: transvaluation only occurs where “we” are drawn into critical contests, as an “agonal community” of readers who consent to the rules of play. Under these conditions, deference to Nietzsche or any single force is ruled out . Nietzsche’s judgements do of course claim authority, but not the incontrovertible authority of truth-claims delivered by a great master, healer or priest. They serve rather to “open play,” to provoke dispute and draw us into controversy ; like Zarathustra, Nietzsche would sooner have hated friends than command belief (EH pref. 4). Agonal authorship throws its own authority in the balance, to be won by purely human means of consensus: judgements and counter-values , together with the very standards of evaluation or judgement, are opened to contestation by a collective readership which would respond to the challenge it issues. In this light, agonal hermeneutics can accommodate at least one of Nietzsche’s counter-therapeutic impulses: the rejection of asymmetrical (saviour/priest-sinner; master-disciple) relationships voiced by

Zarathustra. Conclusive victory for any antagonist spells the death of the agon : since the agon precludes both conclusive defeat (destruction) and conclusive victory, it is repeatable and inconclusive in its very mode of being. As a consequence, the agon gives an open-ended, inconclusive orientation to transvaluative discourse. Despite its popular image, Nietzschean critique does not aim to destroy its opponents (life-negating values or attitudes – like ressentiment) and assert a single-handed victory (conclusive counter-values) over them. Instead, it serves to open and re-open the question of victory. 14 What would constitute the overcoming of life-negating values? What would be an affirmative practice beyond ressentiment? In this light, agonal hermeneutics addresses the most serious

threat to a therapeutic reading: the redemptive desire to destroy Christian-Platonic values. If it is declining forms of life that dream of annihilating [Vernichtung] antagonistic forces for the sake of peace , then the interests of ascending life , by contrast, require the empowerment of the antagonist , for the sake of continued conflict and growth. Nietzsche’s philosophy must therefore resist the lure of finality and the expedient of destroying its opponents. This does not exclude conflict altogether. The interests of “growing, struggling life” require that Nietzsche’s philosophy practise conflict or struggle in a form that (a)

empowers its opponents, 15 and (b) remains open-ended or inconclusive; that is, it must practice agonal conflict.

AT: You Destroy Debate

Debate is continually being destroyed; that’s precisely the nature of agonistic community that we should affirm. Siemens ‘1 Herman W. Siemens, Department of Philosophy at Nijmegen University in The Netherlands, “Nietzsche’s agon with ressentiment: towards a therapeutic reading of critical transvaluation,” Continental Philosophy Review 34: 69-93, 2001, SpringerLinkIf understood correctly, the open-ended, dynamic qualities of the agon also address the problem of closure at its most intractable: the demand that therapeutic discourse be non-directional or anti-teleological, in the interests of ascending life. Repeatability in the agon cannot be properly understood if we restrict ourselves to a historical perspective, or the perspective of the antagonists. At issue is not whether the agon is in fact repeated, and the kinds of institutional and financial infrastructure this requires. These historical/empirical questions presuppose that the agon is to be repeated, and this is a feature intrinsic to the agon as a

dynamic ordering of forces, a matter of its temporal character as a festival and a form of play. As Gadamer has argued, play cannot be adequately understood from the players’ perspectives, because it has its being independently of their consciousness, attitudes and intentions: “the mode of being of play is not such that there must be a subject who takes up a playing attitude so that the game can be played. Rather, the most original sense of play is the medial sense.” 16 In this sense, play acquires a structure of repetition that is radically impersonal and anti-teleological. Whatever the player’s intentions, their outcome is determined in the space of play or confrontation, so that the real subject of play is not the player, but play itself which holds the player in thrall (p. 106). From this perspective, the dynamics of play are freed from the players’ intentions, goals and efforts, which are themselves played out within a to-and-fro movement detached from any telos: “the movement which is play, has no goal which brings it to an end; rather it renews itself in constant repetition” (p. 103). This thought is fleshed out by Gadamer with reference to the puzzling temporality of (periodic) festivals.

17 The festival cannot be properly grasped from the usual perspective in successive time, as a historical event that was originally so and then came to be repeated with small variations at periodic intervals.

Rather, repetition or return is intrinsic to festivals – including agonal festivals – in their character as celebration. Since it belongs to the establishment of a festival, at its very origins, that it should be regularly celebrated, the festival is something that “only is insofar as it is always different [. . .] It has its being only in becoming and recurring” (p. 120). In this light, the open-ended repeatability of agonal discourse is not contingent on the self-restraint of antagonists able to hold back from destruction or absolute victory. Contestants cannot be relied on to avoid excess in the agon which, by its very nature, allows the temptation of hubris to compete with the warning of self-restraint – with uncertain results. This goes for Nietzsche as well, who is notoriously unrestrained at times.

According to Gadamer, however, the antagonists must be clearly distinguished from the agon itself, as the ‘subject’ of play in the medial sense. Whatever their attitudes or intentions, they are, as agonal players, subject to the to-and-fro dynamics of empowerment-disempowerment, an inconclusive, repeatable movement detached from any telos. If, as I suggest, the agon gives the temporal character of play and celebration to Nietzsche’s textual confrontations, then we can say: agonal discourse is a radically impersonal, non-directional and repeatable medium of thought; something that only is insofar as it is becoming. Individual teleologies are embedded in the anti-teleological medium of agonal exchange to which they give themselves; any bids for power, any attempts at closure are checked or undone by the vicissitudes of empowerment-disempowerment to which they are subject. Agonal hermeneutics thus ensures that Nietzsche’s therapeutic interests remain non-directional and open- ended, in line with the interests of ascending life, despite the temptations to closure that haunt his project.

AT: Positivism/Objectivity

Agonism requires that the game isn’t decided before it begins—frameworks reliant on absolute objectivity negate this by recasting the encounter as a question of right Siemens ‘1 Herman W. Siemens, Department of Philosophy at Nijmegen University in The Netherlands, “Nietzshce’s agon with ressentiment: towards a therapeutic reading of critical transvaluation,” Continental Philosophy Review 34: 69-93, 2001, SpringerLinkBut there is, it seems, a difficulty here. For it is hard to see how agonal discourse, if non-directional, can promote the interests of ascending life. How can a non-directional medium be in any sense orientated towards health? The answer I propose involves the feint of writing, that is, the emphatically fictive style of Nietzsche’s agonal confrontations. It was noted earlier how well the agon exemplifies the notion of ascending life

advocated in GS 370. Building on this observation, I propose that agonal discourse enacts the highest form of life for

Nietzsche (growth, fertility, conflict, excess). The agonal dynamic regulating his discourse serves to supplement the discursive critique of pathological, life-negating regimes with a performative challenge that anticipates or pre-figures the therapeutic telos of health – a productive and affirmative form of life. 18 The notion of fiction is important for two reasons. First, because it involves a particular vision, a possible form of life or health amongst others, not a normative concept of health enjoined upon all as a binding universal law or telos. The distance between teleology and fiction is measured by the difference between enclosing the horizon of the future, and playing with an open horizon. The agonal feint thus orients transvaluation towards health without subsuming it under goals or directives that would in fact promote the interests of declining life: the anti-teleology of fiction joins the anti-teleology of play. Fiction is also important in its performative aspect as the agonal dynamic of mutual empowerment-disempowerment enacted in Nietzsche’s texts. This agonal dynamic throws valuable light on certain features of Nietzsche’s thinking that resist discursive understanding; it also opens up an energetic dimension to Nietzsche’s texts essential to their therapeutic potential. A recurrent and highly problematic feature of Nietzsche’s critical and interpretative style is a characteristic movement of “saying and unsaying” (Blondel). This can take different forms: as an alternation of appropriation and alienation, 19 of dominating and freeing the other in turn, or Nietzsche’s tendency to limit his negations of the other through subsequent affirmation – to name a few. Common to all is a double-movement of “Absolutsetzung” and “Nicht-Absolutsetzung” 20 whereby Nietzsche contests a position and then retracts his contention, or opposes a claim only to undo his counter-claim. From a discursive point of view, all this is hard to make sense of, or simply incoherent. From a dynamic perspective in agonal contention,

however, it begins to make sense. The agon, as we have seen, precludes destruction of the opponent in favor of a practice of limited aggression (mutual disempowerment) predicated on mutual empowerment. If, as I am suggest- ing, Nietzsche’s textual confrontations are regulated by an agonal regime, then they are bound to unfold through a dynamic of mutual empowerment-disempowerment. Within this dynamic, “saying and unsaying” constitutes a coherent practice of limited aggression. At stake here is how we read Nietzsche: instead of isolating his judgements or interpretations from one another and identifying them with “contradictory” positions, we need to place them within an agonal “play of forces” that implicates us as readers, not just his chosen adversary, in a collective contestation of values.

AT Deliberative Democracy

Deliberative Democracy Bad

Deliberative democracy solves none of our criticism—its presumption of a neutral public sphere erases the way the terms of the debate are constituted by contingent and non-necessary power relationsMouffe 2k Chantal Mouffe, professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Westminster, “Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism,” Reihe Politikwissenschaft Political Science Series 72, December 2000, probably found on google scholarBesides putting the emphasis on practices and language games, an alternative to the rationalist framework also requires coming to terms with

the fact that power is constitutive of social relations. One of the shortcomings of the deliberative approach is that, by postulating the availability of a public sphere where power would have been eliminated and where a rational consensus could be realized, this model of democratic politics is unable to acknowledge the dimension of antagonism that the pluralism of values entails and its ineradicable character. This is why it is bound to miss the specificity of the political, which it can only envisage as a specific domain of morality. Deliberative

democracy provides a very good illustration of what Carl Schmitt had said about liberal thought: “In a very systematic fashion liberal thought evades or ignores state and politics and moves instead in a typical always recurring polarity of two heterogeneous sphere, namely ethics and economics”.30 Indeed, to the aggregative model, inspired by economics, the only alternative deliberative democrats can put forward is one that collapses politics into ethics. In order to remedy this serious deficiency, we need a democratic model able to grasp the nature of the political. This requires developing an approach, which places the question of power and antagonism at its very center. It is such an approach that I want to advocate and whose theoretical bases have been

delineated in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.31 The central thesis of the book is that social objectivity is constituted through acts of power. This implies that any social objectivity is ultimately political and that it has to show the traces of exclusion, which governs its constitution. This point of convergence – or rather mutual collapse – between objectivity and power is what we meant by “hegemony”. This way of posing the problem indicates

that power should not be conceived as an external relation taking place between two pre-constituted identities, but rather as constituting the identities themselves. Since any political order is the expression of a hegemony, of a specific pattern of power relations, political practice cannot be envisaged in simply representing the interests of pre-constituted identities, but in constituting those identities themselves in a precarious and always vulnerable terrain. To assert the hegemonic nature of any kind of

social order is to operate a displacement of the traditional relation between democracy and power. According to the deliberative approach, the more democratic a society is, the less power would be constitutive of social relations.

But if we accept that relations of power are constitutive of the social, then the main question for democratic politics is not how to eliminate power but how to constitute forms of power more compatible with democratic values. Coming to terms with the constitutive nature of power implies relinquishing the ideal of a democratic society as the realization of a perfect harmony or transparency. The democratic character of a society can only be based on the fact that no limited social actor can attribute to herself the representation of the totality and claim to have the “mastery” of the foundation. Democracy requires, therefore, that the purely constructed nature of social relations finds its complement in the purely pragmatic grounds of the claims to power legitimacy. This implies that there is no unbridgeable gap between power and legitimacy – not obviously in the sense that all power is automatically legitimate, but in the sense that: a)

if any power has been able to impose itself, it is because it has been recognized as legitimate in some quarters; and b) if legitimacy is not based on a aprioristic ground, it is because it is based on some form of successful power. This link between legitimacy and power and the hegemonic order that this entails is precisely what the deliberative approach forecloses by positing the possibility of a type of rational argumentation where power has been eliminated and where legitimacy is grounded on pure rationality.

The drive for consensus reproduces violent ideology and shuts down substantive debate, making each a rehearsal of what came before—innovation and creativity is possible not only when debate occurs over particular issues, but the conceptual frameworks undergirding themMouffe 2k Chantal Mouffe, professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Westminster, “Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism,” Reihe Politikwissenschaft Political Science Series 72, December 2000, probably found on google scholarOne of the key thesis of agonistic pluralism is that, far from jeopardizing democracy, agonistic confrontation is in fact its very condition of existence. Modern democracy’s specificity lies in the recognition and legitimation of conflict and the refusal to suppress it by imposing an authoritarian order. Breaking with the symbolic representation of society as an organic body – which was characteristic of the holist mode of social organization – a democratic society acknowledges the pluralism of values, the “disenchantment of the

world” diagnosed by Max Weber and the unavoidable conflicts that it entails. I agree with those who affirm that a pluralist democracy demands a certain amount of consensus and that it requires allegiance to the values, which constitute its “ethico-political

principles”. But since those ethico-political principles can only exist through many different and conflicting interpretations, such a consensus is bound to be a “conflictual consensus”. This is indeed the privileged terrain of agonistic confrontation among adversaries. Ideally such a confrontation should be staged around the diverse conceptions of citizenship, which correspond to the different interpretations of the ethico-political principles: liberal-conservative, social-

democratic, neo-liberal, radical-democratic, etc. Each of them proposes its own interpretation of the “common good”, and tries to implement a different form of hegemony. To foster allegiance to its institutions, a democratic system requires the availability of those contending forms of citizenship identification. They provide the terrain in which passions can be mobilized around democratic objectives and antagonism transformed into agonism. A well functioning democracy calls for a vibrant clash of democratic political positions. If this is missing there is the danger that this democratic confrontation will be replaced by a confrontation among other forms of collective identification, as it is the case with identity

politics. Too much emphasis on consensus and the refusal of confrontation lead to apathy and disaffection with political participation. Worse still, the result can be the crystallization of collective passions around issues, which cannot be managed by the democratic process and an explosion of antagonisms that can tear up the very basis of civility. It is for that reason that the ideal of a pluralist democracy cannot be to reach a rational consensus in the public sphere. Such a consensus cannot exist. We have to accept that every consensus exists as a temporary result of a provisional hegemony, as a stabilization of power, and that it always entails some form of exclusion. The idea that power could be dissolved through a rational debate and that legitimacy could be based on pure rationality are illusions, which can endanger democratic institutions. What the deliberative democracy model is denying is the dimension of undecidability and the ineradicability of antagonism, which are constitutive of the political. By postulating the availability of a non exclusive public sphere of deliberation where a rational consensus could be obtained, they negate the inherently conflictual nature of modern pluralism. They are unable to recognize that bringing a deliberation to a close always results from a decision which excludes other possibilities and for which one should never refuse to bear responsibility by invoking the commands of general rules or principles. This is why a perspective like “agonistic pluralism” which reveals the impossibility of establishing a consensus without exclusion is of fundamental importance for democratic politics. By warning us again of the illusion that a fully achieved democracy could ever be instantiated, it forces us to

keep the democratic contestation alive. To make room for dissent and to foster the institutions in which it can be manifested is vital for a pluralist democracy and one should abandon the very idea that there could ever be a time in which it would cease to be necessary because the society is now “well ordered”. An “agonistic” approach acknowledges the real nature of its frontiers and the forms of exclusion that they entail, instead of trying to disguise them under the veil of rationality or morality.

Deliberative democracy is incapable of resolving incommensurate social concernsMouffe 2k Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, Verso: New York, 2000, p. 45-46One of the implications of the argument presented above is the impossibility of establishing a rational consensus without exclusion. This raises several problems for the model of democratic politics, which has been receiving quite a lot of

attention recently under the name 'deliberative democracy' . No doubt, the aim of the theorists who advocate the different versions of such a model is commendable. Against the interest-based conception of democracy, inspired by economics and sceptical about the virtues of political participation, they want to introduce questions of morality and justice into politics, and envisage democratic citizenship in a different

way. However, by proposing to view reason and rational argumentation, rather than interest and aggregation of preferences, as the central issue of politics, they simply replace the economic model with a moral one which - albeit in a different way - also misses the specificity of the political. In their attempt to

overcome the limitations of interest-group pluralism, deliberative democrats provide a telling illustration of Schmitt's point that 'In a very systematic fashion liberal thought evades or ignores state and politics and moves instead in a typical, always recurring polarity of two heterogeneous spheres , namely ethics and economics, intellect and trade, education and property . '13

Deliberation’s presumption of a neutral discursive sphere conceals the work of power in legitimating political identity and the public/private distinction—we should instead affirm the necessity of violence within politicsMouffe 2k Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, Verso: New York, 2000, p. 98-101Besides putting the emphasis on practices and language-games, an alternative to the rationalist framework also requires coming to terms with the fact that power is constitutive of social relations. One of the shortcomings of the deliberative approach is that, by postulating the availability of a public sphere where power would have been eliminated and where a rational consensus could be realized, this model of democratic politics is unable to acknowledge the dimension of antagonism that the pluralism of values entails and its ineradicable character. This is why it is bound to miss the specificity of the political which it can only envisage as a specific domain of morality. Deliberative democracy provides a very good illustration of what Carl Schmitt had said about liberal thought: 'In a very systematic fashion liberal thought evades or ignores state and politics and moves instead in a typical always recurring polarity of two heterogeneous spheres, namely ethics and economics.'ll Indeed, to the aggregative model, inspired by economics, the only alternative deliberative democrats can oppose is one that collapses politics into ethics. In

order to remedy this serious deficiency, we need a democratic model able to grasp the nature of the political. This requires developing an approach which places the question of power and antagonism at its very centre. It is such an approach that I want to advocate and whose theoretical bases have been delineated in Hegemony and Socialist

Strategy.29 The central thesis of the book is that social objectivity is constituted through acts of power. This implies that any social objectivity is ultimately political and that it has to show the traces of exclusion which governs its constitution. This point of convergence - or rather mutual collapse - between objectivity and power is what we meant by 'hegemony'. This way of posing the problem indicates that power should not be conceived as an external relation taking place between two preconstituted identities, but rather as constituting the identities themselves. Since any political order is the expression of a hegemony, of a specific pattern of power

relations, political practice cannot be envisaged as simply representing the interests of preconstituted identities, but as constituting those identities themselves in a precarious and always vulnerable terrain. To assert the hegemonic nature of any kind of social order is to operate a displacement of the traditional relation between

democracy and power. According to the deliberative approach, the more democratic a society is, the less power would be constitutive of social relations. But if we accept that relations of power are constitutive of the social, then the main question for democratic politics is not how to eliminate power but how to constitute forms of power more compatible with democratic values. Coming to terms with the constitutive nature of power implies relinquishing the ideal of a democratic society as the realization of a perfect harmony or transparency. The democratic character of a society can only be given by the fact that no limited social actor can attribute to herself or himself the representation

of the totality and claim to have the 'mastery' of the foundation. Democracy requires, therefore, that the purely constructed nature of social relations finds its complement in the purely pragmatic grounds of the claims to power legitimacy. This implies that there is no unbridgeable gap between power and legitimacy - not obviously in the sense that all power is automatically legitimate, but in the sense that: (a) if any power has been able to impose itself, it is because it has been recognized as legitimate in some quarters: and (b) if legitimacy is not based in an aprioristic ground, it is because it is based in some form of successful power. This link between legitimacy and power and the hegemonic ordering that this entails is precisely what the deliberative approach forecloses by positing the possibility of a type of rational argumentation where power has been eliminated and where legitimacy is grounded on pure rationality.

Deliverative democracy’s dream of a politics without disagreement requires a social homogeneity which closes the space of the political and excludes those who cannot fit within the regulative ideal of rationalityMouffe 2k Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, Verso: New York, 2000, p. 104-105What the deliberative-democracy model is denying is the dimension of undecidability and the ineradicability of antagonism which are constitutive of the political. By postulating the availability of a non-exclusive public sphere of deliberation where a rational consensus could obtain, they negate the inherently conflictual nature of modern pluralism. They are unable to recognize that bringing a deliberation to a close always results from a decision which excludes other possibilities and for which one should never refuse to bear responsibility by invoking the commands of general rules or principles. This is why a perspective like 'agonistic pluralism', which reveals the impossibility of establishing a consensus without exclusion, is of fundamental importance for democratic politics. By warning us against the illusion that a fully achieved democracy could ever be instantiated, it forces us to keep the democratic contestation alive. To make room for dissent and to foster the institutions in which it can be manifested is viral for a pluralist democracy, and one should abandon the very idea that there could ever be a time in which it would cease to be necessary because the society is now 'well-ordered'. An 'agonistic' approach acknowledges the real nature of its frontiers and the forms of exclusion that they entail, instead of trying to disguise them under the veil of rationality or morality. Coming to terms with the hegemonic nature of social relations and identities, it can contribute to subverting the ever-present temptation existing in democratic societies to naturalize its frontiers and essentialize its identities. For this reason it is much more receptive than the deliberative model to the multiplicity of voices that contemporary pluralist societies encompass and to the complexity of their power structure.

Consensus Bad

Denying the paradox between unity and difference produces consensuses of imperialism—instead we should negotiate this paradox deconstructivelyMouffe 2k Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, Verso: New York, 2000, p. 92-93The second issue is another question that concerns the relation between private autonomy and political autonomy. As we have seen, both authors aim at reconciling the 'liberties of the ancients' with the 'liberties of the moderns' and they argue that the two types of autonomy necessarily go together. However, Habermas considers that only his approach manages to establish the co-originality of individual rights and democratic participation. He affirms that Rawls subordinates democratic sovereignty to liberal rights because he envisages public autonomy as a means to authorize private autonomy. But as Charles Larmore has pointed out, Habermas, for his part, privileges the democratic aspect, since he asserts that the importance of individual rights lies in their making democratic self-government possible.19 So we have to conclude that, in

this case again, neither of them is able to deliver what they announce. What they want to deny is the paradoxical nature of modern democracy and the fundamental tension between the logic of democracy and the logic of liberalism. They are unable to acknowledge that, while it is indeed the case that individual rights and democratic self-government are constitutive of liberal democracy - whose novelty resides precisely in the articulation of those two

traditions - there exists between their respective 'grammars' a tension that can never be eliminated. To be

sure, contrary to what adversaries like Carl Schmitt have argued, this does not mean that liberal democracy is a doomed regime. Such a tension, though ineradicable, can be negotiated in different ways. Indeed, a great part of democratic politics is precisely about the negotiation of that paradox and the articulation of precarious solutions. 20 What is misguided is the search for a final rational resolution. Not only can it not succeed, but moreover it leads to putting undue constraints on the political debate. Such a search should be recognized for what it really is, another attempt at insulating politics from the effects of the pluralism of value, this time by trying to fix once and for all the meaning and hierarchy of the central liberal-democratic values. Democratic theory should renounce those forms of escapism and face the challenge that the recognition of the pluralism of values entails. This does not mean accepting a total pluralism, and

some limits need to be put to the kind of confrontation which is going to be seen as legitimate in the public sphere. But the political nature of the limits should be acknowledged instead of being presented as requirements of morality or rationality.

Consensus Bad Fundamentalism

Democracy is meaningless without dissent—absolutist consensus shifts antagonisms into other, more brutal spheres of difference, creating fundamentalism and public apathyMouffe 2k Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, Verso: New York, 2000, p. 113-115But this is to miss a crucial point, not only about the primary reality of strife in social life, but also about the integrative role that conflict plays in

modern democracy. As I have argued through these essays, the specificity of modern democracy lies in the recognition and the legitimation of conflict and the refusal to suppress it through the imposition of an authoritarian order. A well-functioning democracy calls for a confrontation between democratic political positions, and this requires a real debate about possible alternatives. Consensus is indeed

necessary but it must be accompanied by dissent. There is no contradiction in saying that, as some would pretend. Consensus is

needed on the institutions which are constitutive of democracy. But there will always be disagreement concerning the way social justice should be implemented in these institutions. In a pluralist democracy such a disagreement should be considered as legitimate and indeed welcome. We can agree on the importance of 'liberty and equality for all', while disagreeing sharply about their meaning and the way they should be implemented, with the different configurations of power relations that this implies. It is precisely this kind of disagreement which provides the stuff of democratic politics and it is what the struggle between left and right should be

about. This is why, instead of relinquishing them as outdated, we should redefine those categories. When political frontiers become blurred, the dynamics of politics is obstructed and the constitution of distinctive political identities is hindered. Disaffection towards political parties sets in and it discourages participation in the political process. Alas, as we have begun to witness in many countries, the result is not a more mature, reconciled society without sharp divisions but the growth of other types of collective identities around religious, nationalist or ethnic forms of identification. In other words, when democratic confrontation disappears, the political in its antagonistic dimension manifests itself through other channels. Antagonisms can take many forms and it is illusory to believe that they could ever be eliminated. This is why it is preferable to give them a political outlet within an 'agonistic' pluralistic democratic system. The deplorable spectacle provided by the USA with the trivialization of political stakes provides a good example of the degeneration of the democratic public sphere. Clinton's sexual saga was a direct consequence of this new kind of bland, homogenized political world resulting from the effects of his strategy of triangulation. Sure, it allowed him to gain a second term by neutralizing his adversaries thanks to skilfully drawing on republican ideas that resonated with voters and articulating them with leftist policies on abortion and education. But at the cost of further impoverishing an already weak political public sphere. One should

realize that a lack of democratic contestation over real political alternatives leads to antagonisms manifesting themselves under forms that undermine the very basis of the democratic public sphere. The development of a moralistic discourse and the obsessive unveiling of scandals in all realms of life, as well as the growth of various types of religious fundamentalism, are too often the consequence of the void created in political life by the absence of democratic forms of identification informed by competing political values. Clearly the problem is not limited to the United States. A look at other countries where, because of

different traditions, the sexual card cannot be played in the same way as in the Anglo-American world shows that the crusade against corruption and shabby deals can play a similar role in replacing the missing political line of demarcation between adversaries. In other circumstances yet, the political frontier might be drawn around religious identities or around non-negotiable moral values, as in the case of abortion, but in all cases what this reveals is a democratic deficit created by the blurring of the left/right divide and the trivialization of the political discourse.

Consensus Bad Populism

Emptying the political leads to violent populist outbursts like the Tea PartyMouffe 2k Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, Verso: New York, 2000, p. 116Another, even more worrying consequence of the democratic deficit linked to the obsession with centrist politics is the increasing role played by populist right-wing parties. Indeed, I submit that the rise of this type of party should be understood in the context of the 'consensus at the centre' form of politics which allows populist parties challenging the dominant consensus to appear as the only anti-Establishment forces representing the will of the people. Thanks to a clever populist rhetoric, they are able to articulate many demands of the popular sectors scorned as retrograde by the modernizing elites and to present themselves as the only guarantors of the sovereignty of the people. Such a situation, I believe,

would not have been possible had more real political choices been available within the traditional democratic spectrum.

Third Way Bad—Inequality

Third-way reformism naturalizes social hierarchies and decimates radical political willMouffe 2k Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, Verso: New York, 2000, p. 14-15On the political level a similar phenomenon is to be found in the case of the 'third way' discussed in Chapter 5. I argue that it is a 'politics without adversary' which pretends that all interests can be reconciled and that everybody - provided, of course, that they identify with 'the project' - can be part of 'the people'. In order to justify acceptance of the current neo-liberal hegemony—while pretending to remain radical - the 'third way' mobilizes a view of politics which has evacuated the dimension of antagonism and postulates the existence of a 'general interest of the people' whose implementation overcomes the winners/losers form of resolution of conflicts. The sociological background of such a thesis is that the cycle of confrontational politics that has been dominant in the West since the French Revolution has come to an end. The left/right distinction is now irrelevant, since it was anchored in a social bipolarity that has ceased to exist. For theorists like Anthony Giddens, the left/right divide—which he identifies with old-style social democracy versus market fundamentalism - is an inheritance of 'simple modernization' and has to be transcended. In a globalized world marked by the development of a new individualism, democracy must become 'dialogic'. What we need is a 'life politics' able to reach the

various areas of personal life, creating a 'democracy of the emotions'. What is missing in such a perspective is any grasp of the power relations which structure contemporary post-industrial societies. There is no denying that capitalism has been radically transformed, but this does not mean that its effects have become more benign; far from it. We might have given up the idea of a radical alternative to the capitalist system, but even a renewed and modernized social democracy - which the third way claims to be - will need to challenge the entrenched wealth and power of the new class of managers if it wants to bring about a fairer and more accountable society. The kind of social unanimity which is the trademark of Blairism is only conducive to the maintenance of existing hierarchies. No amount of dialogue or moral preaching will ever convince the ruling class to give up its power. The state cannot limit itself to dealing with the social consequences of market failures.

Third Way Bad—Power

You can’t wish away incommensurability—third way politics accedes to hierarchies of power, making them invisible and more rigidMouffe 2k Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, Verso: New York, 2000, p. 110-112What is really the problem with the advocates of the 'radical centre' is, I believe, their claim that a left/right divide, a heritage of 'simple modernization', is not relevant any more in times of 'reflexive modernization'. By asserting that a radical politics today should transcend this divide and conceive democratic life as a dialogue, they imply that we now live in a society which is no longer structured by social division. Nowadays politics operates supposedly on a neutral terrain and solutions are available that could satisfy everybody. Relations of power and their constitutive role in society are obliterated and the conflicts that they entail reduced to a simple competition of interests that can be harmonized through dialogue. This is the typical liberal perspective that envisages democracy as a competition among elites, making adversary forces invisible and reducing politics to an exchange of arguments and the negotiation of compromises. I submit that to present such a view of politics as 'radical' is really disingenuous, and that instead of being conducive to more democracy the radical centrism advocated by New

Labour is in fact a renunciation of the basic tenets of radical politics. The central flaw of the attempt to modernize

social democracy by third way theorists is that it is based on the illusion that, by not defining an adversary, one can side-step fundamental conflicts of interests. Social democrats never made that mistake. As Mike Rustin points out, social democracy, in both its right- and left-wing variants, always had capitalism as one of its antagonists. and its task was to confront holistically the

systemic problems of inequality and instability generated by capitalism.2 The third way approach, on the contrary, is unable to grasp the systemic connections existing between global market forces and the variety of problems - from exclusion to environmental risks - that it pretends to tackle. Indeed, the main shortcoming of Giddens's analysis

is that he appears to be unaware of the drastic measures that would be required to put most of his proposals into practice. It is all very nice to announce that there should be 'no rights without responsibilities' or 'no authority without democracy', but how is one going to put such programmes into practice without profoundly challenging the existing structures of power and authority? Without calling for the sort of total overthrow of capitalism advocated by some Marxists, one can surely acknowledge that some form of anti-capitalist struggle cannot be eliminated from a radical politics aiming at the democratization of society, and that without the transformation of the prevalent hegemonic configuration little change will be possible.

Topicality Bad

Rational linguistic agreement is impossible—judging interpretations as ‘most reasonable’ is reflective of particular forms of life which excludes difference. Democracy entails reaching out to the other, not pushing them away.Mouffe 2k Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, Verso: New York, 2000, p. 64-66According to the contextualist approach, Iiberal-democratic institutions must be seen as defining one possible political 'language-game' -among others. Since they do not provide the rational solution to the problem of human coexistence, it is futile to search for arguments in their favour which would not be 'context-dependent' in order to secure them against other political language-games. By envisaging the

issue according to a Wingensteinian perspective, such an approach brings to the fore the inadequacy of all attempts to give a rational foundation to Iiberal-democratic principles by arguing that they would be chosen by rational individuals in idealized conditions like the 'veil of ignorance' (Rawls) or the 'ideal speech situation' (Haber- mas). As Peter Winch has indicated with respect to Rawls, 'The "veil of ignorance" that characterizes his position runs foul of Wittgenstein's point that

what is "reasonable" cannot be characterized independently of the content of certain pivotal "judgments" '7 For his pan, Richard Rorty - who proposes a 'neo-pragmatic' reading of Wittgenstein - has affirmed, taking issue with Apel

and Habermas, that it is not possible to derive a universalistic moral philosophy from the philosophy of language. There is nothing, for him, in the nature of language that could serve as a basis for justifying to all possible audiences the superiority of liberal democracy. He declares: 'We should have to abandon the hopeless task of finding politically neutral premises, premises which can be justified to anybody, from which to infer an obligation to pursue democratic politics.'8 He considers that envisaging democratic advances as if they were linked to progress in rationality is not helpful, and that we should stop presenting the institutions of liberal western societies as the solution that other people will necessarily adopt when they cease to be 'irrational' and become 'modern'. Following Wittgenstein, he sees the

question at stake as one not of rationality but of shared beliefs. To call somebody irrational in this context, he states, 'is not to say that she is not making proper use of her mental faculties. It is only to say that she does not seem to share enough beliefs and desires with one to make conversation with her on the disputed point fruitful.'9 Approaching democratic action from a Wittgensteinian point of view can therefore help us to pose the question of allegiance to

democracy in a different way. Indeed, we are led to acknowledge that democracy does not require a theory of truth and notions like unconditionality and universal validity but a manifold of practices and pragmatic moves aiming at persuading people to broaden the range of their commitments to others, to build a more inclusive community. Such a shift in perspective reveals that, by putting an exclusive emphasis on the arguments needed to secure the

Iegitimacy of liberal institutions, recent moral and political theorists have been asking the wrong question. The real issue is not to find arguments to justify the rationality or universality of liberal democracy that would be acceptable by every rational or reasonable person. Liberal democratic principles can only be defended as being constitutive of our form of life, and we should not try to ground our commitment to them on something supposedly safer. As Richard Flathman - another political theorist influenced by Wittgenstein - indicates, the agreements that exist on many features of liberal democracy do not need to be supported by certainty in any of the philosophical senses. In his view, 'Our agreements in these judgements constitute the language of our politics. It is a language arrived at and continuously modified through no less than a history of discourse, a history in which we have thought about, as we became able to think in, that language."10

Competing linguistic interpretations is insufficient for constructing inclusive debates—politics must be opened up to rearticulation on behalf of other forms of life—democratic ethos is a prior question to the application of a ruleMouffe 2k Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, Verso: New York, 2000, p. 67-69

The crucial idea provided by Wittgenstein in this field is when he asserts that to have agreements in opinions, there must first be agreement on the language used. And the fact that he stresses that those agreements in opinions are agreements in forms of life. As he says: So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false. It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in forms of life. 12 With respect to the question of 'procedures', which is the one that I want to

highlight here, this points to the necessity for a considerable number of 'agreements in judgements' to already exist in a society before a given set of procedures can work. Indeed, according to Wittgenstein, to agree

on the definition of a term is not enough , and we need agreement in the way we use it. He puts it in the

following way: 'if language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not only in definitions but also (queer as this may sound) in judgements'.12 This reveals that procedures only exist as complex ensembles of practices. Those practices constitute specific forms of individuality and identity that make possible the allegiance to the procedures. It is because they are inscribed in shared forms of life and agreements in judgements that procedures can be accepted and followed. They cannot be seen as rules

that are created on the basis of principles and then applied to specific cases. Rules, for Wittgenstein, are always abridgements of practices, they are inseparable from specific forms of life. The distinction between procedural and substantial cannot therefore be as clear as most liberal theorists would have it. In the case of justice, for instance,

it means that one cannot oppose, as so many liberals do, procedural and substantial justice without recognizing that procedural justice already presupposes acceptance of certain values. It is the liberal conception of justice which posits the priority of the right over the good, but this is already the expression of a specific good. Democracy is not only a matter of establishing the right procedures independently of the practices that make possible democratic forms of individual- ity. The question of the conditions of existence of democratic forms of individuality and of the practices and language-games in which they are constituted is a central one, even in a liberal-democratic society where procedures play a central role. Procedures always involve substantial ethical commitments. For that reason they cannot work properly if they are not supported by a specific form of ethos. This last point is very important, since it forces us to acknowledge something that the

dominant liberal model is unable to recognize, namely, that a liberal-democratic conception of justice and liberal-democratic institutions require a democratic ethos in order to function properly and maintain themselves. This is, for instance, precisely what Habermas's discourse theory of procedural democracy is unable to grasp because of the sharp distinction that Habermas wants to draw between moral-practical discourses and ethical-practical discourses. It is not enough to state as he now does, criticizing Apel, that a discourse theory of democracy cannot be based only on the formal pragmatic conditions of communication and that it must take account of legal, moral, ethical and pragmatic argumentation.

The objectivity of cold rule-application produces violent exclusion of other forms-of-life—agonistic democracy consists in fostering different interpretations of the rulesMouffe 2k Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, Verso: New York, 2000, p. 69-74My argument is that, by providing a practice-based account of Rationality, Wittgenstein in his later work opens a much more promising way for

thinking about political questions and for envisaging the task of a democratic politics than the rationalist-universalist framework. In the present conjuncture, characterized by an increasing disaffection towards democracy - despite its apparent

triumph - it is vital to understand how a strong adhesion to democratic values and institutions can be established and why rationalism constitutes an obstacle to such an understanding. It is necessary to realize

that it is not by offering sophisticated rational arguments and by making context-transcendent truth claims about the superiority of liberal democracy that democratic values can be fostered. The creation of democratic forms of individuality is a question of identification with democratic values, and this is a complex process that takes place through a manifold of practices, discourses and language-games. A Wittgensteinian approach in political theory could play an important role in the fostering of democratic values because it allows us to grasp the

conditions of emergence of a democratic consensus. As Wittgenstein says: Giving grounds, however, justifying the evidence, comes to an end - but the end is not certain propositions striking us immediately as true, i.e. it is not a kind

of seeing on our part; it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language-game.13 For him, agreement is

established not on significations (Meinungen) but on forms of life (Lebensform). It is Einstimmung, fusion of voices made possible by a common form of life, not Einverstand, product of reason - like in Habermas. This, I believe, is of

crucial importance and it not only indicates the nature of every consensus but also reveals its limits: Where two principles really do

meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and an heretic. I said I would 'combat' the other man. - but wouldn't I give him reasons? Certainly; but how far do they go? At the end of reasons comes persuasion.14 I take this emphasis on the limits of giving reasons to constitute an important starting point for elaborating an alternative to the current model of 'deliberative democracy' with its rationalistic conception of communication and its misguided search for a consensus that would be fully inclusive. Indeed, I see the 'agonistic pluralism' that I have been advocating15 as inspired by a Wittgensteinian mode of theorizing and as attempting to develop what I take to be one of his fundamental insights: grasping what it means to follow a rule. At this point in my argumentation, it is useful to bring in the reading of Wittgenstein proposed by James Tully because it chimes with my approach. Tully is interested in showing how Wittgenstein's philosophy represents an alternative worldview to the one that informs modern constitutionalism, so his concerns are not exactly the same as mine. But there are several points of contact and many of his reflections are directly relevant for my purpose. Of particular importance is the way he examines how in the Philosophical lnvestigations, Wittgenstein envisages the correct way to understand general terms. According to Tully, we can find two lines of argument. The first consists in

showing that 'understanding a general term is not a theoretical activity of interpreting and applying a general theory or rule in particular cases' .16 Wittgenstein indicates, using examples of signposts and maps, how I can always be in doubt about the way I should interpret the rule and follow it. He says, for instance: A rule stands there like a sign-post. - Does it show which direction I am to take when I have passed it; whether along the road or the footpath or cross-country? But where is it said which way I am to follow it; whether in the direction of its finger or (e.g.) in the opposite one?17 As a consequence, notes Tully, a general rule cannot 'account for precisely the phenomenon we associate with understanding the meaning of a general term: the ability to use a general term, as well as to question its accepted use, in various circumstances without recursive doubts' .18 This should lead us to abandon the idea that the rule and its interpretation 'determine meaning' and to recognize that understanding a general term does not consist in grasping a theory but coincides with the ability of using it in different circumstances. For

Wittgenstein, 'obeying a rule' is a practice and our understanding of rules consists in the mastery of a technique. The use of general terms is therefore to be seen as intersubjective 'practices' or 'customs' not that different from games like

chess or tennis. This is why Wittgenstein insists that it is a mistake to envisage every action according to a rule as an 'interpretation' and that 'there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call "obeying the rule" and "going against it" in actual cases'. 19 Tully considers that the wide-ranging consequences of this point are missed when one affirms, like Peter Winch, that people using general terms in daily activities are still following rules but that those rules are implicit or background understandings shared by all members of a culture. He argues that this is to

retain the view of communities as homogeneous wholes and to neglect Wittgenstein's second argument, which consists in showing that 'the multiplicity of uses is too various, tangled, contested and creative to be governed by rules'.20 For

Wittgenstein, instead of trying to reduce all games to what they must have in common, we should 'look and see whether there is something that is common to all' and what we will see is 'similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them' whose result constitutes 'a compli- cated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing', similarities that he characterizes as 'family resemblances'.21 I submit that this is a crucial insight which undermines the very objective that those who advocate the 'deliberative' approach present as the aim of democracy: the establishment of a rational consensus on universal principles. They

believe that through rational deliberation an impartial standpoint could be reached where decisions would be taken that are equally in the interests of all.22 Wittgenstein, on the contrary, suggests another view. If we

follow his lead, we should acknowledge and valorize the diversity of ways in which the 'democratic game'

can be played, instead of trying to reduce this diversity to a uniform model of citizenship. This would mean fostering a plurality of forms of being a democratic citizen and creating the institutions that would make it possible to follow the democratic rules in a plurality of ways. What Wittgenstein teaches us is that

there cannot be one single best, more 'rational' way to obey those rules and that it is precisely such a recognition that is constitutive of a pluralist democracy. 'Following a rule', says Wittgenstein, 'is analogous to obeying an order. We are trained to do so; we react to an order in a particular way. But what if one person reacts in one way and another in another to the order and the training? Which one is right?'23

This is indeed a crucial question for democratic theory. And it cannot be resolved, pace the rationalists, by claiming that there is a correct understanding of the rule that every rational person should accept. To be sure, we need to be able to distinguish

between 'obeying the rule' and 'going against it'. But space needs to be provided for the many different practices in which obedience to the democratic rules can be inscribed. And this should not be envisaged as a temporary

accommodation, as a stage in the process leading to the realization of the rational consensus, but as a constitutive feature of a democratic society. Democratic citizenship can take many diverse forms and such a diversity, far from being a danger for democracy, is in fact its very condition of existence. This will, of course, create conflict and it would be a mistake to expect all those different understandings to coexist without dashing. But this struggle will not be one between 'enemies' but among 'adversaries', since all participants will recognize the positions of the others in the contest as legitimate ones. Such an understanding of democratic

politics, which is precisely what I call 'agonistic pluralism', is unthinkable within a rationalistic problematic which,

by necessity, tends to erase diversity. A perspective inspired by Wittgenstein, on the contrary, can contribute to its formulation, and this is why his contribution to democratic thinking is invaluable.

AT: Rules k2 Democracy

Shared principles, like the value of debate as an activity, are key to agonistic discussion, but the terms and meanings of those principles must remain contested—when the ‘rules’ become frozen and timeless, debate loses its political characterMouffe 2k Chantal Mouffe, professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Westminster, “Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism,” Reihe Politikwissenschaft Political Science Series 72, December 2000, probably found on google scholarOnce the theoretical terrain has been delineated in such a way, we can begin formulating an alternative to both the aggregative and the deliberative model, one that I propose to call “agonistic pluralism”.32 A first distinction is needed in order to clarify the new perspective that I

am putting forward, the distinction between “politics” and “the political”. By “the political”, I refer to the dimension of antagonism that is inherent in human relations, antagonism that can take many forms and emerge in different type of social relations. “Politics”, on the other hand, indicates the ensemble of practices, discourses and institutions which seek to establish a certain order and organize human coexistence in conditions that are always potentially conflictual because they are affected by the dimension of “the political”. I consider that it is only when we acknowledge the dimension of “the political” and understand that “politics” consists in domesticating hostility and in trying to defuse the potential antagonism that exists in human relations, that we can pose what I take to be the central question for democratic politics. This question, pace the rationalists, is not how to arrive at a consensus without exclusion, since this would imply the eradication of the political. Politics aims at the creation of unity in a context of conflict and diversity; it is always concerned with the creation of an “us” by the determination of a “them”. The novelty of democratic politics is not the overcoming of this us/them opposition – which is an impossibility – but the different way in which it is established. The crucial issue is to establish this us/them discrimination in a way that is compatible with pluralist democracy. Envisaged from the point of view of “agonistic pluralism”, the aim of democratic politics is to construct the “them” in such a way that it is no longer perceived as an enemy to be destroyed, but an “adversary”, i.e. somebody whose ideas we combat but whose right to defend those ideas we do not put into question. This is the real meaning of liberal democratic tolerance, which does not entail condoning ideas that we oppose or being indifferent to standpoints that we

disagree with, but treating those who defend them as legitimate opponents. This category of the “adversary” does not eliminate antagonism, though, and it should be distinguished from the liberal notion of the competitor

with which it is sometimes identified. An adversary is an enemy, but a legitimate enemy, one with whom we have some common ground because we have a shared adhesion to the ethico-political principles of liberal democracy: liberty and equality. But we disagree on the meaning and implementation of those principles and such a disagreement is not one that could be resolved through deliberation and rational discussion. Indeed, given the ineradicable pluralism of value, there is not rational resolution of the conflict, hence its antagonistic dimension.33 This does not mean of course that adversaries can never cease to disagree but that does not prove that antagonism has been eradicated. To accept the view of the adversary is to undergo a radical change in political identity. It is more a sort of conversion than a process of rational persuasion (in the same way as Thomas Kuhn has argued that adherence to a new scientific paradigm is a conversion).

Compromises are, of course, also possible; they are part and parcel of politics; but they should be seen as temporary respites in an ongoing confrontation. Introducing the category of the “adversary” requires complexifying the notion of antagonism and distinguishing it from agonism. Antagonism is struggle between enemies, while agonism is struggle between

adversaries. We can therefore reformulate our problem by saying that envisaged from the perspective of “agonistic pluralism” the aim of democratic politics is to transform antagonism into agonism. This requires providing channels through which collective passions will be given ways to express themselves over issues, which, while allowing enough possibility for identification, will not construct the opponent as an enemy but as an adversary. An important difference with the model of “deliberative democracy”, is that for “agonistic pluralism”, the prime task of democratic politics is not to eliminate passions from the sphere of the public, in order to render a rational consensus possible, but to mobilize those passions towards democratic designs.

AT: Coalitions/Krishna

Political viability is a secondary issue behind the project of identifying a political adversary—otherwise too much ground is ceded to conservative elites, making social change ineffectualMouffe 2k Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, Verso: New York, 2000, p. 121-122Radical politics cannot be located at the centre because to be radical - as Margaret Thatcher, unlike Tony Blair, very

well knew - is to aim at a profund transformation of power relations. This cannot be done without drawing political frontiers and defining an adversary or even an enemy. Of course a radical project cannot be successful without winning over a wide variety of sectors. All significant victories of the left have always been the result of an alliance with important

sectors of the middle classes whose interests have been articulated to those of the popular sector. Today more than ever such an alliance is vital for the formulation of a radical project. But this does not mean that such an alliance requires taking the middle ground and trying to establish a compromise between neo-liberalism and the groups that it oppresses. There are many issues concerning the provision of decent public services and the creation of good conditions of life on which a broad alliance could be established. However, this cannot take place without the elaboration of a new hegemonic project that would put again on the agenda the struggle for equality which has been discarded by the advocates of neo-liberalism. Perhaps

the clearest sign of New Labour's renunciation of its left identity is that it has abandoned such a struggle for equality. Under the pretence of formulating a modern, post-social- democratic conception of equality, Blairites have eschewed the language of redistribution in order to speak exclusively in terms of inclusion and exclusion. In their view, the majority of people belong to the middle classes: the only exceptions are a small elite of very rich on one side,

and those who are 'excluded' on the other. This new social structure is what provides the basis for the 'consensus at the centre' that they are advocating. Here again we can see that their main tenet is that society is no longer structured through unequal power relations. By redefining the structural inequalities systematically produced by the market system in terms of 'exclusion' they eschew any type of structural analysis of their causes and side-step the fundamental question of what needs to be done to tackle them. As if the very condition for inclusion of the excluded did not require at the very least a new mode of regulation of capitalism which will permit a drastic redistribution and a correction of the profound inequalities which the neo-liberal long decade has brought about.

AT: Bahktin/Dialogical Exchange

Dialogical exchange ignores the antagonistic nature of social relations which makes progressive exchange possible—this results in a utopian project of communication that stifles differenceMouffe 2k Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, Verso: New York, 2000, p. 129-131The critique of the consensus approach elaborated in this collection of essays should not be understood as an endorsement of

the view widespread among some 'postmodern' thinkers that democratic politics should be envisaged as an 'endless conversation' in which one should constantly try to enter into dialogical relations with the 'Other'. To be sure, those who advocate such a view usually insist, as I do, on the need to acknowledge 'differences' and on the impossibility of complete

reabsorption of alterity. However, I think that in the end, like the deliberative model, they are unable to come to terms with 'the political' in its antagonistic dimension. This is not to underestimate their important divergences. While the deliberative democrats, with their emphasis on impartiality and rational consensus, tend to formulate the ends of democratic politics in the vocabulary of Kantian moral reasoning, the second view eschews the language of universal morality and envisages democracy not as a deontological but as an 'ethical' enterprise, as the unending pursuit of the recognition of the Other. To put it a bit schematically, we could speak of the opposition between moral-universalistic and ethical-particularistic approaches. The vocabulary of those who defend the 'ethical' perspective comes from a diversity of philosophical sources: Levinas, Arendt, Heidegger or even Nietzsche, and there are significant differences

among them; but what is missing in all of them - as in the deliberative approach - is a proper reflection on the moment of 'decision' which characterizes the field of politics. This has serious consequences, since it is precisely those decisions - which are always taken in an undecidable terrain - which structure hegemonic relations. They entail an element of force and violence that can never be eliminated and cannot be adequately apprehended through the sole language of ethics or morality. We need a reflection of the political proper. Let's be dear. I am not arguing that politics should be dissociated from ethical or moral concerns, but that their relation needs to be posed in a different way. I would like to suggest that this cannot be done without problematizing the nature of human sociability which informs most modern democratic political thinking. To grasp the shortcomings of the dominant view we need to go back to its origins: the period of the Enlightenment. A useful guide for such an enquiry is provided by Pierre Saint-Amand in The Laws of Hostility, a book where he proposes a political anthropology of the Enlightenment. 1 By scrutinizing the writings of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and Sade through the perspective developed by Rene Girard, he brings to the fore the key role played by the logic of

imitation in their conception of sociability while, at the same time, unveiling its repressed dimension. He shows how, in their attempt to ground politics on Reason and Nature, the Philosophes of the Enlightenment were led to present an optimistic view of human sociability, seeing violence as an archaic phenomenon that does not really belong to human nature. According to them, antagonistic and violent forms of behaviour, everything that is

the manifestation of hostility, could be eradicated thanks to the progress of exchange and the development of sociability. Theirs is an idealized view of sociability that only acknowledges one side of what constitutes the dynamics of imitation. Pierre Saint· Amand indicates how in the Encyclopedia human reciprocity is envisaged as aiming exclusively at the realization of the good. This is possible because only one part of the mimetic affects, those linked to empathy, are

taken into account. However, if one recognizes the ambivalent nature of the concept of imitation, its antagonistic dimension can be brought to light and we get a different picture of sociability. The importance

of Girard is that he reveals the conflictual nature of mimesis, the double bind by which the same movement that brings human beings together in their common desire for the same objects is also at the origin of their antagonism. Rivalry and violence, far from being the exterior of exchange, are therefore its ever-present possibility. Reciprocity and hostility cannot be dissociated and we have to realize that the social order will always be threatened by violence. By refusing to acknowledge the antagonistic dimension of imitation, the Philosophes failed to grasp the complex nature of human reciprocity. They denied the negative side of exchange, its dissociating impulse. This denial was the very condition for the fiction of a social contract from which violence and hostility would have been eliminated and where reciprocity could take the form of a transparent communication among participants. Although in their writings many of them could not completely elude the negative possibilities of imitation, they were unable to formulate conceptually its ambivalent character. It is the very nature

of their humanistic project - the ambition to ground the autonomy of the social and to secure equality among human beings - that led them to defend an idealized view of human sociability.

Violence UQ

AT: Pinker—General

Pinker never specifies what violence isLaws ’12 Ben Laws, “Against Pinker's Violence,” CTheory.net, 3/21/2012, http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=702 typo corrected in bracketsWhat is striking about a book dedicated to explaining the developments of violence across time is that [it] does not begin with any kind of formal definition -- there is a clear absence in fact. It is implicitly assumed that we the reader know exactly what constitutes a violent act . Pinker references a number of historical trends, events and literary sources that suggest the past was a remarkably vicious and brutal time to have lived -- the Greeks, Romans, the

Hebrew bible and early Christendom all feature to support this. But at no point does he extrapolate what kind of violence he is attempting to locate.

The 20th century was unprecedentedly violent in absolute termsLaws ’12 Ben Laws, “Against Pinker's Violence,” CTheory.net, 3/21/2012, http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=702Pinker subscribes to a certain voice of 'Truth', namely one which flights the steady decline of violence over time. Yet, if we take a 'perspectivist' stance in relation to matters of truth would it not be possible to argue the direct inverse of Pinker's historical narrative of violence? Have we in fact become even more violent over time? Each interpretation could invest a certain stake in 'truth' as something fixed and valid -- and yet, each view could be considered misguided . What would this alternative history look like? It could be equally as systematic ; it could be equally scientific, full of 'reasoned' argument and as enchanted with modernity, as Pinker's thesis. It could start by stating that in fact the devils of our nature have outmanoeuvred the angels. As evidenced by the multiple atrocities of the 20th century -- the only century where the world's great powers declared war on each other, twice. It is estimated that over 70 million combatants were armed and sent to fight in the First World War , and new advancements in technology allowed massive losses of life on an unprecedented scale. Some twenty years

later, World War II signalled the biggest conflict (in terms of death toll) to be historically recorded -- and

what separates it from other great historical wars is the sheer concentration of deaths (estimates of 60 million are common) in the space of only 6 years. Mines, bombs, nuclear warfare, increasingly accurate projectiles, gas and chemicals, jets and apaches effectively created an expanded spectrum of ways to inflict death from a greater distance .

AT: Pinker—Democratic Peace

Democracies have been terribly violentLaws ’12 Ben Laws, “Against Pinker's Violence,” CTheory.net, 3/21/2012, http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=702Pinker argues that a shift towards democratic rule and increased wealth in the west has directly correlated with the decrease in violence, but

John Gray counters that: The formation of democratic nation- states was one of the principal drivers of violence of the last century, involving ethnic cleansing in inter-war Europe, post-colonial states and the post-communist Balkans . Steadily-growing prosperity may act as a kind of tranquilliser, but there is no reason to think the increase of wealth can go on indefinitely -- and when it falters violence will surely return. In quite different ways, attacks on minorities and immigrants by neo-fascists in Europe, the popular demonstrations against austerity in Greece and the English riots of the past summer show the disruptive and dangerous impact of sudden economic slowdown on social peace . [4]

AT: Pinker—Foucault K

History is a matter of interpretation—Pinker’s reductionist account of violence conceals instances of violence excessive of classic explication and erases essential historical differencesLaws ’12 Ben Laws, “Against Pinker's Violence,” CTheory.net, 3/21/2012, http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=702 typo corrected in bracketsWhat do we achieve by placing our morality and values onto the Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, Victorians, Byzantines, Mayans etc? Is it attempting to compare the incomparable? But, is this not, how a misguided history [begins]? It assumes that 'words have kept their meaning , that desires still pointed in a single direction , and that ideas retained their logic , [and it ignores the fact that] the world of speech and desires has known invasions, struggles, plundering, disguises, ploys.' [8] Indeed, to comprehend and interpret the ideas of a period we have to stare into the face of the singularity of individual events -- without sating that tempting urge for finality, for grand themes across the evidence. To return to violence, which Pinker does not openly define, we can intuit (roughly) from his chapters that he means physical force

(murders, torture, hand-to-hand conflicts and assaults, rapes, conquests and wars) doled-out to others. Crucially, Pinker's undefined definition and approach to violence enables his quantification of it -- so that across centuries and millennia certain forms and intrusions of violence can be correlated, evaluated and (re)interpreted . It is this scientific quantification project and statistical reduction that forms the basis of his thesis. He will use graphs, charts and tables to reiterate a numbers game -- all echoing decrease. But what would it mean to be a violent Roman compared to a violent Victorian? And how can we begin to compare this to a violent modern man? To each historical period there must be a corresponding understanding and comprehension of exactly what it meant to be violent. If we look back at history through a modern lens we are destined to find horrific images at every turn: we see the alien, the depraved . For each historical age (and the hazy less-discussed boundaries in-between) we would have to resist the urge to look at violence so directly. By trying to look for answers in a straight line, we forget to turn. We reveal the all too 'rational' and 'reasoned' methods of our times. Pinker's science -- and science as a whole -- is not a value free practise ; the way he applies and defends his position is through the application of a science laden with his ideo-political position on the spectrum (statistics, logical argumentation, quantification and reasoning). To understand a specific period we would do better to locate those sources that surrounded, influenced and were affected by violence: perhaps we would assemble discordant fragments and a complex patchwork of effects and sociological trends. We would find that the nature of violence has not evolved on a stable or constant line. To validate such transformations our definition(s) of violence must also react and evolve in an equally intricate way. We might be hard-pressed to find instruments of physical torture

in the modern world (speaking in terms of the 'developed' west) and certain kinds of hand-to-hand punishment are rarer in our time. Yet it is a giant leap, though not an uncommon one, to draw overarching conclusions from such an observation. For while certain types of aggression may have decreased have we not created new forms and pathways for violence in lieu? These forms may often go beyond the realm of physicality; we need to be subtle and sensitive to these transitions , for we can be violent without causing direct physical pain. Pinker Responds Pinker published a list of responses to criticism targeted at his work; two interesting and relevant questions/answers are set-out below: Is economic inequality a form of violence? No; the fact that Bill Gates has a bigger house than I do may be deplorable, but to lump it together with rape and genocide is to confuse moralization with understanding. Ditto for underpaying workers, undermining cultural traditions, polluting the ecosystem, and other practices that moralists want to stigmatize by metaphorically extending the term violence to them. It's not that these aren't bad things, but you can't write a coherent book on the topic of "bad things." [9] What about metaphorical violence, like verbal aggression? No, physical violence is a big enough topic for one book (as the length of Better Angels makes clear). Just as a book on cancer needn't have a chapter on metaphorical cancer, a coherent book on violence can't lump together genocide with catty remarks as if they were a single phenomenon. Pinker executes the same processes in his response as his does in his book, namely, reasserting a reductive vision of what

it means to be violent -- an exercise in circularity. Incidentally, a book could not be written on non-physical forms of

cancer because cancer directly affects the body -- the riposte is that violence does not have to, and it indeed operates quite indirectly in this respect. But there is a pitfall in engaging with Pinker's dialogue, as our (and any other) response will ultimately fall-short, because he has set the guidelines and has created the validating conditions. We need to reject his framework entirely.

Reject Pinker’s linear history—his absolute understanding of science is an intersection of power/knowledge which replicates and exacerbates contemporary violence and ethical disregardLaws ’12 Ben Laws, “Against Pinker's Violence,” CTheory.net, 3/21/2012, http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=702 typo corrected in bracketsWe should create a position against Pinker's narrative -- for his thesis is, on these terms, violent. He effectively barricades wider forms of interrogation while also dismissing these voices as 'moralisation' or anti-science . It is a rejection that operates under the strict tenure of his relation in the power structure -- one that places a paramount on certain scientific/ technical truths. But 'truth is undoubtedly the sort of error that cannot be refuted because it was hardened into an unalterable form in the long baking process of history .' [10] A nuanced understanding of violence should question those so-called direct and logical historical accounts that lead us wearily to the modern day. Ultimately, Pinker will conclude that: Yet while this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, that species has also found ways to bring the numbers down, and allow a greater and greater proportion of humanity to live in peace and die of natural causes. For all the tribulations in our lives, for all the troubles that remain in the world, the decline of violence is an accomplishment we can savour, and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible.[11] Such a violent set of closing thoughts is set-out clearly,

but we should observe that this framing of the problem by Pinker is predominant and pervasive today. It serves as a justification and it systematically excludes. It should not be a surprise that this simplified conception of violence results in a linear thesis. We should see violence as an intense force that operates in a myriad of sophisticated ways, mediated over certain times and spaces . A virulent and destructive form of abuse is neglect, for the perpetrator carries a burden of care for the victim, who is heavily dependant, but fails to act it out. Neglect can injure a person for life (emotionally and physically), impairing development with devastating results, often self-harm and sometimes death. A person suffering from neglect may often forgo the chance to build personal relationships and live with independence or choice. By definition, there is no physicality involved in neglect, but who could deny the violent force of its effects? Pinker's thesis is an exact sample of neglect, the practise excludes and omits, it carries a burden of care, but by staring too directly it fails to see the vastness and enormity of the problem.

Generic Links

China Link – 1NC

Realist depictions of a rising Chinese threat freeze national identity and geopolitical space to encourage violence while disrupting trajectories towards cooperation and peaceLim ’12 Kean Fan Lim, “What You See Is (Not) What You Get? The Taiwan Question, Geo-economic Realities, and the “China Threat” Imaginary,” Antipode, Volume 44, Issue 4, pages 1348–1373, September 2012, DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2011.00943.xDespite the popularized discourses about globalization and geo-economic integration, states continue to prioritize national interests through reconfiguring their capacities (see eg Ross 1999; Sassen 2008; Sparke 2006). In this regard, the prospects of inter-state conflict continue to loom in the background of geo-economic processes aimed at broadening spaces of/for capital accumulation beyond national confines. Echoing Kant, Waltz (2000:8) argues that the natural state remains the state of war: “under the conditions of international politics, war recurs; the sure way to abolish war, then, is to abolish international politics”. As far as the past decade goes, Waltz's observation appears prescient—wars continue

to be waged between and within nation-states, with the primary aim of either destabilizing or fortifying a state's existential right. The US responses to the 9/11 terrorist attacks further reaffirms the realist assumption that in the absence of an overarching cosmopolitan state (or a sovereign state of states), the nation-state is responsible for security around and within its territorial borders. This entails different strategies, from building border walls and “scaling up” border control overseas (Cowen and Smith 2009) to pre-emptive attacks on and occupation of other states (Fallows 2006; Gregory 2004; Harvey 2003). National-level provision of normative security at the global scale is not a natural given, however. This authority rests on the moral contract of “citizenship”;

individuals, as citizens, assume the state is supposed to offer protection against “foreign” threats. As Scott and Carr (1986:83) put it: Let us characterize the responsibility the state owes to its citizenry as the obligation to manage international uncertainty in the best interest of the citizenry. The obligation, of course, is owed to the state's citizenry, but it gives purpose and direction to the state's foreign policy. It seems appropriate, then, to describe the state as the advocate of its citizen's interest in the international world. Inter-state relationships correspondingly should be regarded as relationships between advocates charged with pursuing the interests of their

respective clients; their citizenry. A state's threat-evaluation process becomes problematized when a geo-economic conception of security is adopted, because a foreign entity that is perceived to be a political

or military threat may simultaneously offer significant economic security to the domestic citizenry. Indeed, a geo-economic conception of security has probably become a necessity in the context of contemporary globalization of capital flows. As Strange

(1996) correctly observes, myriad economic actors have been encroaching upon the traditional sovereignty of territorial states in order to broaden their global influences. Acknowledging the intrinsic limitations of nation-based geopolitik, Beck (2005) argues that a cosmopolitan politics of “golden handcuffs”—one that recognizes the importance of international economic interdependency and the corresponding need to overcome national differences—could in fact better sustain national interests. Within East Asia, geo-economic strategizing offers a twist to Ross's (1999) geographically deterministic analysis of the regional power of balance—that the physical geographies of East Asia are likely to prevent conflict—because geo-economics “gets at the way in which a more or less geopolitical phenomenon (of imagining territory as a mode of political intervention and governance) is closely articulated with a whole series of economic imperatives, ideas and ideologies” (Sparke 1998:69). Then again, this does not mean that states are necessarily “retreating” vis-à-vis pressures from the global system of capitalism (paceStrange 1996; cf Sassen 2008). While Harvey and Scott (1989:222, 224) contend that developments in political economy are fundamentally reducible to a “stubborn logic of capitalism” shaped by the “real universal qualities of capitalism”, the influential role states undertake to contour the form of spaces of/for capitalist accumulation through geo-economic integration

indicates the necessary imbrication of state power in this “logic”. Capitalism, in other words, is not a hermetically sealed system; its geographical expressions are significantly constituted by fusions of state-driven geopolitics and variegated degrees of capitalist realism (cf Brenner 2004; Peck and Theodore 2007). The picture in East Asia is

certainly blurred when capitalist systemic pressures overlap state-centric geopolitical concerns. As

aforementioned, while it appears that the US government increasingly needs to collaborate with its counterpart in Beijing to enhance mutual economic security through encouraging and managing flows of capital, commodities and

people, the discursive constructions of a “China threat” have arguably become more amplified in the past few years than before. Cowen and Smith (2009:25) thus offer a plausible observation that the “geoeconomic conception of security underlines conflicts between the logics of territorial states and global economic flows , the proliferation of non-state and private actors entangled in security, and the recasting of citizenship and social forms”. The way US defense policymakers “see” China as a potential military

threat to Taiwan, which in turn “ legitimizes” defensive protection through arms sales , is particularly

instructive: it might actually contradict what China construes as “peaceful” coexistence and disrupt attempts by actors in China, Taiwan and the US to carve out integrated economic spaces. Indeed, a major component of US geopolitical strategy in East Asia is historically entwined with calculations within the

Taipei-based “Republic of China” (ROC; hereafter Taiwan) government that perceive China as an existential threat (this historical circumstance is elaborated in the third section). The US–ROC entwinement is illustrated in one of the “Six Assurances”1 the Reagan administration gave to the ROC government in July 1982, which states that the US “would not consult with China in advance before making decisions about U.S. arms sales to Taiwan”. This stance represents a provocation to the Chinese government, as it considers arms sales from foreign parties to Taiwan an intervention in its domestic affairs. The difference in view between China and the US over Taiwan thus allows us to develop Cowen and Smith's (2009:34) insight that: Where geopolitics can be understood as a means of acquiring territory towards a goal of accumulating wealth, geoeconomics reverses the procedure, aiming directly at the accumulation of wealth through market control. The acquisition or control of territory is not at all irrelevant but is a tactical option rather than a strategic necessity. To be sure, geopolitical

calculation is always available when deemed necessary. What, then, figures in the US geopolitical calculations of China today? Why are these calculations “deemed necessary” in spite of the systemic imperatives of capitalism that shape China–US and “China region” geo-economic integration? While I do not claim to offer definitive answers to these

questions, I believe that they have to be critically assessed in order to obtain a more incisive understanding of East Asian geopolitics and China's changing position in the global political economy . This will now be addressed in greater detail.

China Link

China threat mongering is dangerous, counterfactual, and hypocritical—hikes tensions and overwhelms potential for cooperationLim ’12 Kean Fan Lim, “What You See Is (Not) What You Get? The Taiwan Question, Geo-economic Realities, and the “China Threat” Imaginary,” Antipode, Volume 44, Issue 4, pages 1348–1373, September 2012, DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2011.00943.xThe identification of national-level threats is never straightforward; it is often effected on emotional rather than evidential grounds. Within the US, “Japan bashing” emerged during the 1980s vis-à-vis domestic fears of the waning economic competitiveness of the US and its seeming inability to confront a “flexible” post-Fordist future. More recently, the US decision in 2003 to attack Iraq on the premise that it possessed weapons of mass destruction proved ultimately groundless: no such weapons were found, while Iraq slipped into anarchy and arguably became a hotbed of terrorist activities only since (see Fallows 2006; Gregory 2004; Ó Tuathail 2004). Mandel (2008:40) thus rightly cautions how “[t]he political manipulation of enemy images by both government officials and members of the mass public clouds over the stark realities surrounding any international enemy predicament. Together, these patterns create both ambiguity and confusion in dealing with the enemy component of global threat”. In the

context of this paper, the critical question is whether a “China threat” imaginary is actually produced by forces beyond China; whether what you see is indeed what you get. Even though the US formally recognized the People's Republic of China (PRC) as a state in 1979, the recognition was arguably conditioned by latent suspicions. As Feldman (2007:np) puts it, the Reagan administration continued to “put little trust in Chinese promises to adhere to a peaceful solution” regarding Taiwan even as it prepared to sign the 1982 communiqué2 with China. This “little trust”, Feldman (2007) adds, explains why Reagan gave Taiwan “Six Assurances” and also inserted a secret memo in the National Security Files noting that Taiwan's defensive capabilities must be maintained at a level relative to China's. Reagan's legacy of “little trust” seems to have permeated subsequent policy considerations. In 1999, the Pentagon presented several scenarios in its “Asia 2025” study that portrayed China as the most significant threat to American interests in the Asia-Pacific by 2025. A decade on, the US Defense Secretary Robert Gates offers this analysis of China: In fact, when considering the military-modernization programs of countries like China, we should be concerned less with their potential ability to challenge the US symmetrically—fighter to fighter or ship to ship—and more with their ability to disrupt our freedom of movement and narrow our strategic options … Investments in cyber and anti-satellite warfare, anti-air and anti-ship weaponry, and ballistic missiles could threaten America's primary way to project power and help allies in

the Pacific—in particular our forward air bases and carrier strike groups (US Department of Defense 16 September 2009). Gates’ geographical imagination of China in this speech is predicated on two inter-related assumptions that exemplify a political realist “way of seeing”. First, China is not recognized as an “ally” of the US, although it is clear that the US is the key driver of such politics of recognition in the first place.

Furthermore, it appears that US military “protection” is a precondition to qualify as an “ally”, a logic which automatically casts states without such “protection” as suspect. Second, China's military-modernization process is ostensibly a “threat” because such efforts could, in Gates’ terms, “disrupt” the “strategic options” of the US in East Asia, even when it is entirely plausible that increased defense spending is to fulfil other valid purposes, such as replacing obsolete military equipment to address new threats by terrorists and maritime pirates, and enhancing remuneration packages for soldiers. Third, America wants to “project power” on its own terms, which is why it becomes “concerned” when so-called non-allies upgrade their defence technologies. This point is further reaffirmed in the Pentagon's 2010 

Quadrennial Defense Review: “lack of transparency and the nature of China's military development and decision-making processes raise

legitimate questions about its future conduct and intentions within Asia and beyond” (Pentagon 2010:60). However, the extent to which the questions are “legitimate” is clearly a unilateral legal-discursive construction of the US that reflects the enduring effect of political realism in US security thought. These assumptions collectively constitute what Bialasiewicz et al (2007; see also Lott 2004) call America's “performative” security strategy, through which perceived insecurities are constructed as ontological facts so that “mitigation” measures could be justified. A critical assessment of the motivations behind China's military modernization policies is thus necessary before it can be ascertained whether a “China threat” exists. First, while China is not recognized as a US “ally”, it does not justify its defense modernization

programs through anti-US rhetoric. For Chinese policymakers, it does appear that the critical issue is protection and consolidation of its existing territories (more on this in the third section). According to Luo Yuan, a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and senior researcher with the Academy of Military Sciences, “China is the only permanent member of the UN Security Council that has not achieved territorial integrity … We need to think more on how to preserve national integrity. We have no intention of challenging the US” (China Daily 4 March 2010). In terms of defense budget, China's increased 2010

budget, at around US$78 billion, pales in comparison to the proposed expenditure of the US of US$700 billion. Furthermore,

the request for China to be “transparent” in its defense policies is a double-standards practice which undermines the sovereign right of a country to devise its own policies, since the Pentagon is not the most “transparent” or accountable where its own policies—especially the supposed “right” to launch pre-emptive strikes—are concerned. If anything, then, the massive “power gap” between China and the US should suffice to allay

concerns about the former's so-called “threat” (cf Al-Rodhan 2007). Second, it is interesting that whilst not “allies” in name, the US and Chinese economies are inextricably intertwined as the Chinese government currently generates effective demand for US Treasury financial instruments and holds significant US dollar reserves. In

addition, China's growing geo-economic influence worldwide is contingent on a strategic investment of its foreign reserves, which means it has every economic incentive to ensure stability in the global monetary system (see discussion in Lim 2010). Within the US, however, it is possibly this very geo-economic integration with China (especially the US Treasury's increasing dependence on Chinese financial capital and China's importance as an

offshore outsourcing destination for US transnational corporations) which triggers suspicions of China's “intentions” and

which then generate certain reactive measures to deflect attention from the US economy's deep-seated problems. In an insightful analysis, Cohen and DeLong (2010:12–13) argue that the US has had a wonderful opportunity to create new “sectors of the future” because of the willingness of developing countries like China to lend it money; what was created, however, was a finance sector that almost bankrupted the economy and deepened the need for foreign backing to support its “quantitative easing” monetary solution. Because the need to borrow more money from abroad—and China is so far the biggest creditor—could lead to the end of the global politico-economic influence of the US, it is perhaps unsurprising that some political actors choose to politicize this phenomenon. As Waltz (2000:15) puts it, “With zero interdependence, neither conflict nor war is possible. With integration, international becomes national politics”.

Then again, if China has no plausible economic motivation to engage in military conflict with the US, the potential for conflict could be attributed to the unilateral and sustained willingness of the US to accede to Taiwan's arms purchase requests, in the knowledge that China views such arms sales as a clear show of support for what it considers its own province. Intriguingly, the US framing of its relations with Taiwan could actually be due to an implicit distrust of putative allies in the East Asian region. Cha (2010:158) theorizes post-World War II US geopolitical alliances with South Korea, Taiwan and Japan as a form of bilateral “powerplay” designed to suppress not only the Soviet threat, but also: to constrain anticommunist allies in the region that might engage in aggressive behavior against adversaries that could entrap the United States in an unwanted larger war. Underscoring the U.S. desire to avoid such an outcome was a belief in the domino theory—that the fall of one small country in Asia could trigger a chain of countries falling to communism. This strategy arguably applies in the present day, despite the demise of the Soviet Union and China's peaceful integration into the global political economy. For instance, Christensen (1999:50) sees US military presence in East Asia as resolving a “security dilemma” triggered by a tendency for one country, affected profoundly by “historically based mistrust”, to overreact to another country's acquisition of ostensibly defensive military equipment. What Christensen (1999) does not emphasize, however, is that the US is also a major exporter of such equipment, which makes the “powerplay” logic a doublethink ratiocination. This echoes Cowen and Smith's (2009:42) aforementioned caveat that “geopolitical calculation is always available when deemed necessary”. Even though the Cold War is officially over, Johnson's analysis (2005, in Asia Times Online) strongly suggests that the “powerplay” approach remains in full swing: Since the end of the Cold War in 1991, the United States has repeatedly pressured Japan to revise Article 9 of its constitution (renouncing the use of force except as a matter of self-defense) and become what US officials call a “normal nation”… America's intention is to turn Japan into what Washington neo-conservatives like to call the “Britain of the Far East”—and then use it as a proxy in checkmating North Korea and balancing China. Cha's (2010)“powerplay” thesis thus illustrates how collaborating with the US through bilateral alliances already implies subjugation to broader US interests, although the US need not necessarily view subjugation as non-threatening. Asymmetrical bilateral alliances (between a large power and a smaller “ally”), as Cha (2010:164) puts it, are actually “power instruments of control” through which “the larger patron enjoys a great deal of leverage”. Such alliances are preferred when larger powers do not want to lose power vis-à-vis smaller “allies”, which highlight the implicit distrust prior to alliance

formation. After all, as Bartelson (1995:164) writes, “[s]ecurity is not primarily an object of foreign policy; before security can be brought to function as such, it requires a prior differentiation of what is alien, other or simply outside the state and therefore threatens it”. Building on the insights of Johnson (Asia Times Online 2005) and Cha (2010), I will explore the implications of this “powerplay” strategy in the next section by focusing on how the geopolitical calculations of the US—exemplified through the unilaterally crafted TRA and sustained arms sales to Taiwan—could indirectly destabilize the “China region” and possibly even Sino-US geo-economic formations.

China Framework

Discourse about China shapes perceptions of future actions and constrains policy responsesJohnston ’13 Alastair Iain Johnston, The Governor James Albert Noe and Linda Noe Laine Professor of China in World Affairs at Harvard, “How New and Assertive Is China’s New Assertiveness?” International Security, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Spring 2013), pp. 7–48Why should policymakers and scholars worry about a problematic characterization of Chinese foreign policy? Putting aside the intellectual importance of accurately measuring the dependent variable in the study of a major power’s foreign policy, there are two good reasons. First, if

it persists, the new assertiveness meme could contribute to an emerging security dilemma in the U.S.-China relationship. “Talk” is consequential for both interstate and intrastate politics during intensifying security dilemmas and strategic rivalries. How adversaries are described reverberates in the domestic politics of both sides.3 The effect is often the narrowing of public discourse . As public discourse

narrows and as conventional wisdoms become habituated, it becomes more difficult for other voices to challenge policy orthodoxies.4 Similar to the “containment” meme in China,5 the new assertiveness meme or others similar to it

in the United States could, in the future, reduce the range of interpretations of Chinese foreign policy, potentially narrowing policy options available to decisionmakers (assuming this discourse becomes accepted by national security decisionmakers).

Global Warming Link

Climate science presupposes a metaphysical divide between humanity and nature that distorts its epistemic validity and political efficacyHead and Gibson ’12 Lesley Head, University of Wollongong, Australia, and Chris Gibson, University of Wollongong, Australia, “Becoming differently modern: Geographic contributions to a generative climate politics,” Progress in Human Geography, December 2012 vol. 36 no. 6 699-714There are a number of interconnected implications here for how we might think differently about climate change. First, emphasis on the moment of collision between two separate entities (the ‘impact’ of

‘humans’ on ‘climate’) has favoured historical explanations that depend on correlation in time and space, to the detriment of the search for mechanisms of connection rather than simple correlation (Head, 2008). This is particularly important to how we think about the future, since removal of the ‘human’ is presumably not our solution of first resort. As Hulme

(2010a: 270) argues, ‘it is as irrelevant as it is impossible to find the invisible fault line between natural and artificial climate’. Second, putting the significant explanatory divide between humans and nature requires the conflation of bundles of variable processes under the headings ‘human’, ‘climate’ and ‘nature’. For example ‘climatic processes’ can include everything from astronomical forcing at 100,000-year timescales to ENSO cycles of a decade or so, and trends that can be warming, cooling, wetting or drying. In practical terms, taking apart the climate monolith allows us to consider how mooted anthropogenic changes leading to future scenarios will take expression in and through existing patterns of weather and climatic variability (Hulme, 2008). Taking apart the human monolith forces us to consider exactly what the constituent practices of solutions might be. For the most part the deconstructive effort is yet to pervade physical geography and archaeology, where ‘human impacts’ – a conceptualisation that positions humans as outside the system under analysis, as outside nature – remains the dominant, if implicit, conceptualisation of the human-nature engagement over timescales of hundreds and thousands of years (Head, 2008). Nevertheless, this long-term perspective has provided a crucial underpinning to the identification of anthropogenic climate

change in the palaeoclimatic record. So, a key contradiction persists: we maintain dualistic ways of talking about things (human impacts, human interaction with environment, anthropogenic climate change, cultural landscapes, social-ecological systems), while the empirical evidence increasingly demonstrates how

inextricably humans have become embedded in earth surface and atmospheric processes.

Even if science could be 100% objective, translation into policy contexts carries socio-political challenges causing distortion and mis-translation Brace and Geoghegan ’11 Catherine Brace, University of Exeter, UK, and Hilary Geoghegan, University of Exeter, UK, “Human geographies of climate change: Landscape, temporality, and lay knowledges,” Progress in Human Geography, vol. 35, no. 3, pp. 284-302, June 2011, doi: 10.1177/0309132510376259At the heart of the ambiguities surrounding climate change are the differing definitions of the term used by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

(IPCC), respectively. The former defines climate change as ‘a change of climate that is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity, that alters the composition of the global atmosphere, and that is in addition to natural climate variability over comparable time periods’ (UNFCCC, 2010). In contrast, the IPCC definition of climate change

does not distinguish between natural variability and anthropogenic forcing. The real material consequences attributed to this lack of clarity are physical, social and political, including sea-level rise and loss of habitat as well as a stalemate in international dialogue on climate policy, lack of effective energy policy, loss of livelihoods and impacts on human health (see, for example, McMichael et al., 2003; Pielke, 2004;

Piguet, 2008). Definitional problems with the key phrase ‘climate change’ are compounded by unclear definitions of associated terms such as climate variation, climate fluctuation and climatic variability which, as Lars

(1993) argues, might not be a problem for a scientific community but creates difficulties when transferred

into a political or socio-economic context to construct – among other things – emissions targets, policy instruments, legal frameworks, treaties, regulations, taxes and subsidies (Leiserowitz, 2005; Osofsky, 2005). In light of this definitional ambiguity, climate change is, then, simultaneously a reality, an agenda, a problem and a context. It remains the source of much difficulty in the science, politics and cultures of climate change. For this reason in this paper we attempt a more open and inclusive formulation – climate and the ways it might change – that allows different ways of knowing to play a legitimate part in framing a relationship with landscape. This formulation draws on the epistemologies of the social sciences and humanities, and it is this approach that we explain in the next section.

Terminally implicating climate change in terms of threshold-crossings is a counterproductive totalization which conceals ongoing violence and constrains policy and local responsesCupples ’12 Julie Cupples, “Wild Globalization: The Biopolitics of Climate Change and Global Capitalism on Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast,” Antipode, Volume 44, Issue 1, pages 10–30, January 2012, DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2010.00834.xIn the first world, in both everyday and scientific discourse, climate change is frequently posited as a transcendent and teleological megahazard, caused by the prime movers greenhouse gases, which have the potential to wreak

havoc and undermine our way of life. While both scientists and ordinary people also talk about climate change in a range of tenses, it is often described in first world contexts as a future-oriented problem, as one which will affect future generations if we fail to act. For example, Giddens (2009:1) starts his recent book on climate change by describing it as something which has “potentially devastating consequences for the future”. A recent Bolivian blog states that Oxfam America made a serious mistake in its

recent report on indigenous peoples and climate change by “tensing its warnings in the future tense” (duderino 2009). It is apparent that the biophysical realities which we socially construct as climate change—rising sea levels, drought and flooding, intensified hurricanes, disappearing ice—are of course affecting millions of humans and nonhumans right now, in Bangladesh, the Sunderbans Islands, Tuvalu, Papua New Guinea and Central America. The repeated positing of climate change as a future-oriented problem constitutes an insidious erasure of those killed and displaced by climate-related disasters at the present time. Dominant approaches to climate change are clearly a key part of the neocolonial global order, in which the deaths of third world inhabitants in disasters are more acceptable, more justifiable, than the future potential deaths of first world people who haven't been born yet.4 However, such biopower,

like global war, as discussed by Hardt and Negri (2004:20), “must not only bring death but must also produce and regulate life”. Flusty (2004:7), who works his argument about globalization around the concept of de-coca-colonization, urges us to shift: our focus away from an external “sovereign” globalization-as-object to be grasped and wielded. Rather we must imagine a “nonsovereign” production of the global that is as increasingly immanent in, and emergent through our day-to-day thoughts and actions as it is in the mass

movement of capital, information and populations. According to Flusty, we don't need to think of globalization as an abstraction because it is embedded in everyday practices. We should therefore understand places, even those not deemed to be world cities, and the activities of everyday life as sites in which globality is constituted and from which it is extended, and marginalized groups of people around the world as practising revolutionary forms of insubordination even as they engage in exploitative labour practices in order to survive. Furthermore, such people are “really only excluded in part” from the global order because, as (potential) members of the multitude, they embody a “double character of poverty and possibility” (Hardt and Negri 2004:129, 153). An immanent approach to the climate change–global capitalism coupling is therefore crucial. I care about this thing we refer to as climate change but I refuse to understand it

as an environmental issue. Climate change is entangled with the contemporary dynamics of both capitalism and development and cannot be considered in isolation from such dynamics. This is one of the reasons why

conventional scientific structures are struggling to handle the deep scientific uncertainties which surround the probable effects of climate change (Mustafa 2009:469; see also Foss 2009). Deleuze and Guattari's (1987)

concept of the body without organs (BwO) is a more productive way to think about climate change as an immanent process. Such an approach enables us to retain our critique of global capitalism and the harmful and oppressive molar

forces it sets in motion, but it also facilitates an important focus on everyday biopolitical production and on the molecular and affective activities which break apart global orders. For Deleuze and Guattari (1987) the BwO is a body populated by multiplicities in a continual process of becoming. Climate change can only be understood in these terms. It is of course a vast concept involving glaciers, polar bears, light bulbs,

hurricanes, general circulation models, building materials, trade, gender, presidents, forests, celebrities, cities, conversations, TV programmes and movies, policy documents, meetings, cow flatulence, insurance, transport, activism, migration, food miles, beetles, malaria and many other heterogeneous elements which are always enrolling new actants. We do need to both expand and deconstruct the notion of climate change and although it could never be modelled, the BwO is one possible way to welcome and better incorporate into our discourse and action the molecular multiplicities which are part of the shifting practices, debates and policies

that surround climate change. The global climate model is a simplification of complex realities in order to make scientific prediction, while the BwO embraces the complexities, unpredictabilities and uncertainties, the flows and the disruptions. It might prevent us from developing problematic molar, modernist and localized desires to return to a world which we imagine to be less connected and provide a more effective response to those trying to attend to climate change while leaving neoliberalism intact. Such an approach might also relieve scientists of the problematic need to try and talk about climate change with one voice out of fear that they will be

outed as frauds or conspiracy theorists by so-called climate change skeptics.5 Drawing on the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari, I would much rather be schizophrenic than paranoid about climate change. An example of paranoia in climate change policy is the

emergence of what Hume (2009:103) has called “technocratic models-for-policy” and cites the example of how in 2005 Tony Blair exhorted scientists to come up with the level of warming that must be avoided and as a result we ended up with the 2° threshold around which a number of NGOs, including Greenpeace and Christian Aid, began to campaign.

Such a move reduces our capacity to act flexibly, collectively and ethically and to understand science as an ongoing fallible set of knowledge-making practices. It also leaves us ill prepared for the moments when schizophrenic forms of desire begin to subvert the coded and univocal 2° norm, which they surely will, because as Deleuze and Guattari's work has shown, capitalism “in its inevitable propensity to deterritorialize and decode” actually promotes schizophrenia (Holland 1999:94). A schizophrenic approach,

in contrast, would be far less doggedly attached to a fixed technocratic approach, and would be more open to local demands, desires and mobilities.

Global Warming Framework

1AC’s universalizing spatial grammar of ‘global warming’ makes policy responses and public engagement counterproductive—methodological investigation solves betterBrace and Geoghegan ’11 Catherine Brace, University of Exeter, UK, and Hilary Geoghegan, University of Exeter, UK, “Human geographies of climate change: Landscape, temporality, and lay knowledges,” Progress in Human Geography, vol. 35, no. 3, pp. 284-302, June 2011, doi: 10.1177/0309132510376259Climate has long been the domain of the natural scientist, often defined in purely physical terms. It is only relatively recently that natural scientists, such as Hulme, have started to suggest that climate is ‘a quantity wholly disembodied from its multiple and contradictory meanings’ (Hulme, 2008: 6) and called for the intervention of social scientists to understand more about human impacts and responses (Hulme, 2009; see Moser, 2010; Slocum, 2009). However, even a cursory glance at the pages of the journal Climatic Change, to take but one example, will show that this work has been ongoing for some time through research which attempts to describe, evaluate, quantify and model perceptions of climate change, understandings of risk and construction of policy (to name but three topics; see, for example, Berk and Schulman, 1995; Jaeger et al., 1993; Rayner and Malone, 1998; Smit et al., 1996). Although reconstructing the genealogy of climate change in the social sciences and humanities is not the work of this paper, it is notable that back in 1993 Jaeger et al. were able to identify work on the human dimensions of global climatic change, albeit at an early stage. More recently, Batterbury (2008) sketches out a history of work on global warming in anthropology dating from the mid-1990s. Nevertheless, despite the now substantial literature that is

informed by the methods, theories and epistemologies of social science, there is still a marked dearth of engagement with critical and cultural theories which bring a different sort of interpretative leverage 1 to questions about the human dimensions of climate change by focusing (broadly speaking) on the way space, power, identity and knowledge constitute social relations (exceptions, not all of which are focused on climate change but human-environment relations and knowledges more generally, are: Clark, 2000, 2005, 2007; Ingold, 2006; Ingold and Kurttila, 2000; Slocum, 2004, 2009). Recent sessions at the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) Annual Conference in 2009 on such topics as Cultural Spaces of Climate and Geographies of the Seasons confirm the salience of a more critical and contextual approach. Further, a recent special issue of the Journal of Historical Geography (Bravo, 2009; Daniels and Endfield, 2009; Hamblyn, 2009; Liverman, 2009) marks a trend in histories of science towards

histories of climate science and change. In addition to scholarly manoeuvres, there is now a demand (largely from scientists and policy-makers frustrated with the lack of public engagement and the concomitant failure of the deficit model 2 ) to understand what climate change means to so-called ‘ordinary’ people (Bostrom et al., 1994; Hanski, 2008; Lorenzoni et al., 2007; Manzo, 2010). The relative neglect of this theme lies, as Demeritt (2001a) notes, in the way that

the IPCC and other national and international scientific bodies have tended to see atmospheric emissions as a universal and global-scale problem affecting the climate system of the whole planet. The result has been that the scientific study of the problem has been decoupled from the social and political contexts of its material production and cognitive understanding (Agrawal and Narain, 1991).

Nevertheless, it is now recognized that environmental knowledges, including those surrounding climate change, need to be understood on a local scale. Researchers are slowly becoming more interested in publics for whom popular representations of melting polar ice caps and homeless polar bears have little currency and are far removed from actual (possibly minimal) experiences of climate or climate change (O’Neill

and Nicholson-Cole, 2009; Slocum, 2004; Wilbanks and Kates, 1999). Such climate knowledges also need to be more carefully calibrated with phenomena such as weather and the seasons which form part of the same lexicon but are far from synonymous. Thus, using ‘climate and the ways it may change’ in preference to ‘climate change’ enables a relational approach to emerge which: (1) does not insist on research participants being able to disentangle anthropogenic causes from natural causes of climate change; (2)

acknowledges the way an understanding of climate change is conjoined with other kinds of knowledge about the local environment; and (3) allows different ways of knowing to play a legitimate part in framing a culture of climate change. Thus lay knowledges of both climate and climate change are considered important in this formulation. Useful though recent work on the emerging cultures of climate change has been in identifying potentially fruitful directions for research which is more ‘grounded’, it is ironically the ‘ground’ that is missing from recent accounts. Landscape – a central tenet of cultural geography for over 80 years – is, curiously, elided. This is despite the claims of geographers

that geography is the natural home of research which takes a more interpretative approach to climate change while at the same time offering ‘a critical reading of the natural sciences . . . informed by a

spatially contingent view of knowledge’ (Hulme, 2008: 5; see also Demeritt, 2009; Harrison et al., 2004). In this paper, we show that there is now an opportunity to explore how individuals and communities understand climate and the ways it might change in the context of local landscapes and environmental challenges, researched as a lived experience with a unique set of geographies, lay knowledges, and participative practices. In so doing, we build on the work of Slocum (2004) and Hinchliffe (1996) among others who have examined local environmental knowledge in the context of everyday life. In this paper we foreground landscape as an organizing concept. We explore this in more detail in the next section, before moving on to look at the importance of future-orientated temporalities and lay knowledges to our focus on familiar landscape.

Critical investigation is key to crafting more responsible responses to climate changeHead and Gibson ’12 Lesley Head, University of Wollongong, Australia, and Chris Gibson, University of Wollongong, Australia, “Becoming differently modern: Geographic contributions to a generative climate politics,” Progress in Human Geography, December 2012 vol. 36 no. 6 699-714In this paper we identify and bring together several threads in recent human geography that could help shape debate on climate change in the social sciences and more broadly. Human and environmental geographers have a long history of contributing to climate change discussions, and

emphasising that climate vulnerability cannot be separated from underlying social and political dimensions

(e.g. Bohle et al., 1994). There are many geographic contributions to grounded studies of place, local diversity and the difference this makes to issues like adaptive capacity (Adger et al., 2005, 2009; Barnett and

Campbell, 2010). Increasing recognition of the social and cultural dimensions of climate change has led to greater (and perhaps belated) interest in the sociocultural research tradition in geography and cognate disciplines (e.g. Hulme, 2008; O’Brien, 2011). Our specific argument is that human geography’s combination of both deconstructive and empirical compulsions, found in co-existing emphases on critical theory and ethnographic type research methods that focus on material, embodied practices, provides a unique possibility to be both unsettling and generative/creative. We believe this is exemplified best in the ideas of Gibson-Graham (2006, 2008), whose work we use to think through how to reframe the politics of climate change in response to, and beyond,

modernity. Gibson-Graham (2008) identify three practices that assist us here and on which we attempt to build: ontological reframing to produce the ground of possibility; rereading to uncover or excavate the possible; creativity to generate actual possibilities where none formerly existed. Ontological reframing is undertaken by engaging critically with stubbornly persistent assumptions, norms and the taken-for-granted – then looking for ways to put together differently. We are keen here to consider how climate change can be reframed in this way by drawing attention to the persistence of the human/nature binary in climate change debates (section II). We subsequently explore how relational frameworks can contribute to the reframing, putting knowledge back together differently.

Rereading and creative generation then proceed through fine-grained studies of local voices and practices, including identifying vernacular capacities that could prove vital to climate change responses. It is these voices and practices that a modernist vision of problem and solution, scaled predominantly around the nation state, runs the risk of ignoring. We bring together geographic work on governance, scale and power that illuminates much more diverse pathways of agency (section III). Importantly, geographic work on relational scale and cross-scalar agency offers pathways to re-empower the local without reifying it as a

pregiven subset of the global. As Gibson-Graham (2008: 3) remind us, ‘to change our understanding is to change the world, in small and sometimes major ways’. A starting point is looking for productive or progressive spaces in unlikely places (Lewis, 2009), to crack open new ways to converse. Throughout the paper we draw on diverse examples where this can and might be done, using a refreshed conception of scale and power that avoids locking down territories as containers of action. In the process of becoming, and becoming understood as, a global problem, climate change has become recognised as a hybrid assemblage constituted as more-than-climate, comprising discourses, bureaucracies and texts as well as atmospheric gases (Demeritt, 2001; Hulme, 2008). The emerging critical analysis of climate-change-as-assemblage has much in common then with the critique of related concepts like neoliberalism (Castree 2008a, 2008b; Dean, 1999; Peck, 2004), modernity and the economy (Mitchell, 2002), colonialism (Anderson, 2007;

Thomas, 1994) and capitalism (Gibson-Graham, 1996, 2006). Such concepts have dominant, taken-for-granted meanings, but can be analytically revealed as constituted through practices and discourses – thus inviting critiques that destabilise them and offer alternatives. There is a key difference, however. The above scholarly critique has usually pulled the various threads of modern industrial capitalism apart in order to imagine how subsistence might be constituted differently, and with

more attention to social and ecological justice. The ontological status of categories such as neoliberalism, the economy, capitalism and colonialism has been challenged, in order to challenge their universalist power – in other words to contest and resist the concepts. Our approach to climate change is similar in epistemology but

different in intent. We want to contribute further to such deconstruction not to contest the concept of climate change, but

to suggest reconfigured responses. Indeed, we are concerned as are others that academic deconstruction of the climate change assemblage may run the risk of unwittingly buttressing reactionary sceptics and a range of vested interests. The step that has not yet been taken in relation to climate change is to go from the ontological reframing to the generative possibilities. We seek here to outline some possible directions.

AT: Warming’s bad for the 3 rd world

Paternalist frames of warming which emphasize humanitarian consequences for the third world are biopolitically pacifying and geopolitically stratifyingCupples ’12 Julie Cupples, “Wild Globalization: The Biopolitics of Climate Change and Global Capitalism on Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast,” Antipode, Volume 44, Issue 1, pages 10–30, January 2012, DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2010.00834.xThe accounts of the Atlantic Coast that we find in NGO and journalistic publications are on one level understandable and defensible as they aim

in part to call the first world, where most climate change emissions are produced, to account and action. These framings of indigenous peoples and climate change generated by NGOs do however also function as a kind of biopower, identified by

Foucault (1978) as a force which through particular technologies and forms of expertise defines, controls and regulates the life of populations in both oppressive and life-enhancing ways.2 Like other forms of

biopower enacted in modern societies, such framings contain pastoral dimensions, but they also perpetuate neocolonial fantasies of indigenous peoples as incapable of adapting to modernity and as doomed to disappear. For Hardt and Negri (2000:36), humanitarian NGOs such as Oxfam, which practise a kind of moral intervention are “immersed in the biopolitical context of the constitution of Empire” and as a result can be understood as “some of the most powerful pacific weapons of the new world order”. As well,

such accounts construe the human and nonhuman inhabitants of the Coast and their complex geographies, economies and ecologies as victims of the global, overlooking the creative tactics that are developed in the context of such challenges. Consequently, the global is mistaken for a force that is extraneously generated rather than one that also resides in and extends from these localities (Flusty 2004). There is no discernible or explicit attempt in such accounts to understand how such forms of biopower are contaminated by everyday forms of biopolitical production in the Miskito Keys themselves, or to consider how the subjects targeted by biopower “engage in creative

forms of biopolitics to resist this tendency” (Corva 2009:172; see also Hardt and Negri 2004). Hardt and Negri (2000:30)

conceptualize biopolitics as a life politics, the living development of productive labour in society which includes not just the communicative and the intellectual, but also the corporeal and the affective. This paper considers the conceptual gains that might accrue from tackling growing concerns about climate change in the so-called third world through a focus on everyday immanent biopolitical production, as it is developed in the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and Hardt and Negri (2000, 2004).3 While a number of recent publications have emphasized the need not to understand globalization in disempowering ways as something “out there” to which locals can merely react but rather as a messy, contingent and unpredictable process in which global power is frequently disrupted (Allen 2003; Flusty 2004; Hart 2002; Ong 1987; Tsing 2005), Hardt and Negri's Deleuzoguattarian inspired approach is particularly useful for my case study because of the emphasis it places on the immanent and biopolitical production of “new figures of subjectivity, in both their exploitation and their revolutionary potential” (Hardt and Negri 2000:29). In addition, Deleuze and Guattari's emphasis on becoming enables us to think beyond dominant approaches to climate change. Not only does it put capitalism more firmly in the

picture, but it also disrupts the concept of adaptation as something which people now need to do in response to climate change. Becoming is perhaps more useful than the concept of adaptation, commonly used in debates about climate change, because it captures how the becoming of both humans and nonhumans, in situations of economic exploitation and degraded environments, “is always in the process of adapting, transforming and modifying itself in relation to its environment” (Guattari 2008:90), forcing us to ask “not what something is, but what it is turning into, or might be capable of turning into” (Bruun Jensen and Rödje 2009:1).