AFF – All American

1AC
 1AC – Cards
The thesis of the 1AC – South Asian identity was (re)constructed by the hands
of the US military state. 9/11 cemented the static, unified image of the brown
Other – the terrorist, the feared.
Mishra 2013 [Sangay Mishra, Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Drew
University in New Jersey. Before joining Drew University, he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at
Lehigh University. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Southern
California in Los Angeles. He specializes in American politics and comparative immigration with a
focus on racial and ethnic politics and specifically studies the political behaviour of racial and
religious minority groups. He is currently finalizing a book manuscript tentatively titled Desis
Divided: Political Incorporation of South Asian Americans (under contract with the University of
Minnesota Press). His current research project focuses on the emerging patterns of interaction
between Muslim communities and the law enforcement agencies in the post‐9/11 period in
Southern California and the New York metropolitan area. “Race, Religion, and Political
Mobilization: South Asians in the Post‐9/11 United States”, 15 October
2013, https://doi.org/10.1111/sena.12034]
In the days and months following 11 September 2001, South Asians in the United States were
lumped together and racialized as ‘outsiders’ and ‘threatening’. The lumping of South Asians
existed alongside their differential targeting based on particular religious identities such as
Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh. The religious identity not only shaped and calibrated the racial hostility
against different South Asian groups but also framed their responses to racial attacks. The
primacy of religious identities in framing the group response to racial hostility made it difficult to
build broader panethnic solidarity, thereby challenging the existing understanding of the
dynamics of panethnic identity formation and mobilization. The foregrounding of religious
identity by different South Asian groups was, in fact, in broad consonance with the multicultural
institutional and ideological framework that provides institutional and discursive avenues for the
deployment of exclusive and immutable identities. The fatal attack on two elderly Sikhs at Elk
Grove, California in March 2011 evoked strong fears among South Asian communities in the
United States (see Lewis 2011). No one has been convicted in this case and the police have not
yet classified these killings as a hate crime, but there were strong speculations following the
incident that the two Sikhs were mistaken as Muslims that led to their killing. Similarly, the
killing of six Sikhs by a white supremacist gunman on 5 August 2012 at a Gurdwara (Sikh temple)
in Oak Creek, Wisconsin has shaken the Sikh and other South Asian communities and has
brought the trope of mistaken identity to the fore of public discussion (Mishra 2012). These
incidents symbolized the complex, multifaceted, and differential nature of racialization of South
Asians that will be explored in the course of this article. While incidents of racial hostility
against South Asians have a long history, the group has increasingly become the target of
suspicion, racial discrimination, and violent hate crimes in the aftermath of the 11 September
2001 terrorist attacks.1 Based on physical features and skin colour, they have been lumped
together and perceived as ‘strangers’, ‘outsiders’, and ‘terrorists’. The blanket targeting of South
Asians in the post-9/11 period was reflected in the following statement by a forty-five-year-old
Hindu Indian immigrant based in Los Angeles: Well, when they look at us they always think we
are from somewhere else . . . because of our skin colour; maybe they think that we are all
terrorists or something – I don’t know . . . they try to connect us to those people [terrorists] . . .
there are things that scared them.2 A pervasive sense of being the target of suspicion is
symptomatic of the position of South Asians in the United States. South Asians straddle between
the attributes of model minority and perpetual outsiders that define their positioning in the
racial order. This racial positioning renders them particularly vulnerable to hostile reactions such
as the ones that followed the September 11th attacks. The racial reaction after the attacks not
only magnified the latent processes of ongoing racialization of South Asians, but also pointed to
the deeper internal divisions within the community, particularly on the basis of religion and
nation of origin. These divisions were important lenses through which the South Asian
communities perceived and responded to the incidents of racial targeting in this period. A sixty-
five-year-old New York-based community activist of Indian origin (Hindu) underlined the
importance of these distinctions: There have been some incidents. . . . Because they mistake us
[Indians] . . . as if we could be terrorists. I think you must have heard about Kamal Haasan; he
was coming from Canada and they were not letting him enter into America.3 That was because
his name sounds like Muslim – Haasan. So he had problem, though he is an Indian Brahmin [a
Hindu from high caste]. This happens . . . even sometime they may mistake us as
Pakistanis.4 The multiple fissures within the South Asian community on different identity axes
are clearly identified in this statement.

Post-9/11 American policy targeted poor countries in the region, locked and
loaded up military training to fire down the “the terrorist”
Stohl 2002 [Rachel Stohl, Senior Analyst, Center for Defense Information, “Arming the Weak:
U.S. Post-Sept. 11 Arms Trade Policy”, September
2002, http://mstohl.faculty.comm.ucsb.edu/failed_states/2002/papers/RStohl.pdf, (´ᴥ`)]
Analysis Instead of the poor worldwide economic situation encouraging countries to spend
precious resources on other pursuits, the decrease in arms agreements has led to increased
competition between countries and manufacturers and has contributed to multinational
mergers and joint production ventures. Experts further believe that the United States is in no
danger of relinquishing its worldwide domination of the arms market, as countries will continue
to rely on the United States to upgrade existing U.S.-origin systems, train and provide support
services on existing systems, and sell munitions to use in previously purchased systems. There
are also further expectations that former Warsaw Pact countries as well as specific countries in
the Near East, Asia, and Latin America are the biggest targets for increased weapons sales in the
years to come. These conditions make the changes to U.S. export policy even more alarming, as
the United States is looking for new customers to continue its global domination of the arms
market. Military Training The United States is not just selling the military hardware, but is also
offering military training to allies in the “war” on terror. Military training is an important foreign
policy tool, used by many countries, in order to transfer political ideology to foreign
governments and military institutions, as well as establishing common military goals,
procedures, and mechanisms. The utilization of military training to build military and political
relationships is part of an emerging trend that began at the end of the Cold War. In the last
decade, the United States has trained more than 100,000 foreign police and soldiers
annually.Such training programs, which take place both within the United States and in about
150 countries around the world, range from English language training, counter-narcotics
strategies, and preparing forces for peacekeeping operations. As with all things since Sept. 11,
however, the focus of today’s military training program has shifted to focus on fighting
terrorism. Indeed, the Bush administration has proposed an increase of 13 percent for
International Military Education and Training (IMET) over this year’s budget and a 27 percent
increase for Foreign Military Financing (FMF) in addition to newly planned anti-terrorism
programs for foreign militaries. And, in the $27.1 billion Emergency FY’02 Supplemental
Appropriations Request, $100 million is allocated for defense articles, services, and
training. Since Sept. 11, the United States has offered military training to many countries victims
of terrorist activities, or struggling with the presence of terrorist networks. This training, often
disguised as counter-terrorist, is often really counter-insurgency training, such as in Nepal,
Colombia, and the Philippines. In March 2002, President George W. Bush emphasized the U.S.
reliance on training programs when he said, “we will not send American troops to every battle,
but America will actively prepare other nations for the battles ahead.” Just as the Bush
administration argues that selling weapons is crucial to developing allies, the same arguments
are applied to military training. But, while military training may be beneficial in the war on
terrorism, using U.S. military training to curb terrorism in countries that themselves have
negative human right records or are currently fighting internal wars may not be the most
prudent of strategies. The United States may further complicate internal situations where
government opposition groups are now classified as terrorist organizations, or where the war on
terror is being exploited to serve national interests. While the United States is strengthening its
military relationships in an effort to widen the coalition against terrorism, mechanisms to
monitor military training are becoming less transparent. In 1999, Congress passed a legislative
amendment sponsored by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-VT, prohibiting the training of foreign security
forces that violate human rights and requiring DoD to prepare an annual Foreign
Military Training Report (FMTR) on all military exercises and training involving foreign military
troops, including data from the previous year and estimates for the current year. However, since
its first edition, more and more sections of the report have become classified, making it
increasingly difficult for the public to obtain information on who is being trained, where they are
being trained, and for what purpose. In addition, Congress is currently debating further changing
or possibly eliminating reporting requirements on military training. Without public oversight of
U.S. military training programs, the U.S. military is accountable to no one but itself.
Analysis Terrorist threats are not new in many of the countries where the United States is
currently training military troops. Part of the emergency supplemental will help provide support
and training for those countries deemed by the United States as under direct terrorist threats,
including Afghanistan, Bahrain, Jordan, Nepal, Oman, Pakistan, Yemen, Georgia, Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, the Philippines, Djibouti, Ethiopia,
Kenya, Nigeria, Colombia, and Ecuador. While some of these countries have obvious ties to U.S.
efforts to stamp out al Qaeda, with others, the United States is gambling with the idea that
military training will buy allies in the long run. Military training in many instances promotes the
readiness, efficiency, and effectiveness of foreign military troops. However, it may only worsen
the situation in countries plagued by terror if human rights conditions are not implemented and
economic and social aid are not concurrently offered to help strengthen and promote internal
stability. including Afghanistan, Bahrain, Jordan, Nepal, Oman, Pakistan, Yemen, Georgia,
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, the Philippines, Djibouti,
Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Colombia, and Ecuador. While some of these countries have obvious
ties to U.S. efforts to stamp out al Qaeda, with others, the United States is gambling with the
idea that military training will buy allies in the long run. Military training in many instances
promotes the readiness, efficiency, and effectiveness of foreign military troops. However, it may
only worsen the situation in countries plagued by terror if human rights conditions are not
implemented and economic and social aid are not concurrently offered to help strengthen and
promote internal stability. Post-Sept. 11 Policy Changes Now that we have a picture of the
global arms market, we have a context in which to judge changes to U.S. export policy. Lifting
Sanctions Immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration proposed allowing
arms sales to countries currently ineligible to receive U.S. weapons because of sanctions due to
human rights violations, lack of democracy, involvement in acts of aggression, and nuclear
testing. Called the USA Patriot Act, the Bush administration had asked for 5-year general waivers
in mid-September as part of is anti-terrorism bill, which stated that notwithstanding other
provisions ofU.S. law, the United States can provide security assistance to any country if it would
help fight terrorism or promote international peace and security. Legally, U.S. arms sales are
determined in accordance with the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). Being
present on an ITAR list can prohibit a country from receiving U.S. military equipment or military
training. And, under current U.S. law – specifically Section 614 of the Foreign Assistance Act –
the Bush administration has more than enough “wiggle room” for the President to waive
existing regulations governing arms exports and sell weapons to whatever country he chooses,
regardless of their human rights or democratic practices. And, if a country doesn’t have any
restrictions placed upon through U.S. law or due to a UN arms embargo, the United States is
free to export weapons to those countries without violating any legal provisions. The final
version of the bill did not contain this provision, however, as the Bush administration met with
stiff domestic and international criticism for an across the board lifting of sanctions. As a result,
decisions to lift sanctions were made on a case-by-case basis, and to date, the number of
countries having their weapons bans lifted is only six. The countries that have had their
sanctions lifted are: Armenia, Azerbaijan, India, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Yugoslavia. While these
countries have been identified as key allies in the global war on terror, each has troubling recent
pasts, which led to them being placed on the list in the first place. Not only is each country is
involved in inter and intra-state conflicts, India and Pakistan have been criticized for their
evolving nuclear weapon’s programs, Pakistan’s military government attained power as a result
of a coup, Azerbaijan has been embroiled in disputes with Armenia, the stability of Tajikistan
remains questionable, and Yugoslavia remains unstable and a possible “hot spot” for future
conflict. Arming All “Allies” Even losing the universal lifting of sanctions, the Bush administration
remains undeterred and committed to arming potential allies in the war against terrorism with
U.S. weapons as quickly as possible. On the 6-month anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush
declared that the U.S. was willing to provide training and assistance to any government facing a
terrorist threat: “America encourages and expects governments everywhere to help remove the
terrorist parasites that threaten their own countries and peace of the world. If governments
need training, or resources to meet this commitment, America will help” (Federation of
American Scientists Arms Sales Monitoring Project, www.fas.gov/asmp).

This form of arms enforcement in the War on Terror marks the brown body for
death, arming the American Empire with the right to control the flow of life for
the brown body. The War on Terror locks the brown body in a chokehold of
necropolitical violence
Haritaworn et al 14 [Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman, Silvia Posocco, Jin Haritaworn is
Assistant Professor of Gender, Race and Environment at York University in Toronto; Adi
Kuntsman is Simon Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, UK; and Silvia Posocco is
Lecturer in the Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London,
Queer Necropolitics, Feb 3, 2014, https://books.google.com/books?
id=f0XIAgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=Queer+Necropolitics+Jin+Haritaworn,
+Adi+Kuntsman,
+Silvia+Posocco&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjhif37xrDjAhXwB50JHRwRBL8Q6AEIKjAA#v=onepa
ge&q=Queer%20Necropolitics%20Jin%20Haritaworn%2C%20Adi%20Kuntsman%2C%20Silvia
%20Posocco&f=false, (´ᴥ`)]
After the events of 9/11, it was clear that the technologies for the production of American
nationalism were many and diverse. It was constructed through various representations, not
only in the US but also from other nations and other nationals; within transnationality, the
discourses of American nationalism that circulate within networks and channels of
cosmopolitanism and of consumer culture were visible as never before. In the dominant media
representations after 9/11, we can see clearly the articulation of such a nationalism as defined
both by hegemonic state power, the investments of many inside and outside the US in the idea
of ‘America’ as a liberal state, and the productions and circulations of a transnational media and
consumer culture. Although these constructions of America are not new and have a long
history, their specificities, their reliance on consumer culture, as well as their racial and
gendered history, make them quite different from other nationalisms. As superpower and
policeman, multicultural nation as well as a site of hierarchical racial and gendered formations,
America, the nation-state, and American nationalism produce identities within many
connectivities in a transnational world, whether as an imperial power or as a symbol of freedom
and liberty. America is a signifier of many diverse meanings, but some of these meanings are
more hegemonic than others in particular sites and time periods. It is both the difficulty and the
necessity of identifying these hegemonic meanings that is my topic here, as I examine American
nationalism in the twenty-first century around the events of 9/11 as both exceptional from
nationalisms in other sites, and as exemplifying some normative ways in which all nationalisms
have come to be constructed also within transnational connectivities. In particular, I want to
discuss the ways in which America, as nation, became a site for the articulations of gender and
race after 9/11. Although these articulations were not all new, there were some specific
manifestations that revealed the dynamic relation between nation-state, nationalism, race and
gender. While race and gender have to be changing in order to work as the regulative
apparatuses of a powerful state, they also are connected to earlier technologies of race and
gender and thus must be understood in relation to questions of governmentality. We can
understand national subjects not as autonomous projects of resistance but as subjects that
emerge in relation to modern regulative and disciplinary institutions. Following the work of
scholars such as Tim Mitchell and Ann Stoler, I want to bring together histories of colonialism
with questions about governmentality to not only see how racialised and gendered subjects
emerge in relation to contexts of state power but also to examine how these subjects are
created within realms of social life that seem to be unrelated to state power (Mitchell, 1988;
Stoler, 1995, 2002). In particular, I want to connect American imperialism with the articulation in
the US of a group including ‘Middle Eastern men’, Muslims, and those who ‘look Middle Eastern
or Muslim’ as a racial and gendered category created by disciplinary power, racialised
nationalism and the geopolitics of the US state. In doing so, I argue that such a racial formation
resonates with US multicul- tural nationalism through consumer citizenship within a
transnational con- sumer and media culture. Nationalism thus does not emerge out of one
imaginary community but rather is produced through the changing specularity of consumer
culture and contingent community affiliations created by new and historical hierarchies of race
and gender and which extend beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. The issue of the
relationship between forms of governmentality and the state is a contentious one. Scholars such
as Nikolas Rose (1999) argue that there is not a clear link between the two since forms of power
are never that linear. Others such as Achille Mbembe use Agamben’s notion of ‘necropolitics’ to
argue that ‘necropower’, that is the ‘maximal economy now represented by the massacre’
characterised the new form of decentralised state power that pro- duces what he calls ‘death
worlds’ (Mbembe, 2003, pp. 11–40). If Rose’s notion of governmentality emerges in sites where
freedom marks the modern individual whose practices of making choices constitute modes of
regulation, such an individual can only emerge in dynamic relation to a site of unfreedom in
which the loss of ‘choice’ and the loss of ‘freedom’ is always a threat and thus acts as another
mode of regulation. Thus, it cannot be said that the governmentality of freedom and the
decentralised ‘death worlds’ of ‘necropolitics’ can be mapped onto first world and third
world/postcolonial sites respectively. Rather, they work together within a particular context,
through the imaginaries produced by consumer culture’s media worlds, the disciplinary and
biopolitical powers of states and of emergent nationalisms.1 In particular, media technologies of
various kinds, from radio and television to the internet, and their sounds and images that
pervade rural and urban areas, first worlds and third, have transformed the biopolitics and
necropolitics of power. Furthermore, the pow- ers of freedom, as Nikolas Rose calls them, that
produce modes of governmentality, are undertaken not simply with the sovereign right to kill,
but also through the right to save. Modes of humanitarianism, such as human rights regimes,
produce unequal subjects as well. To exclude any consideration of such subjects might lead us to
see them simply as oppositional to the state or even as decentralised forms of bio- or
disciplinary power. Though they might be in opposition to what Mbembe’s calls necropolitics,
they may not be in opposition to all forms of power that produce inequalities between the
Global North and the South. Rather, it is the interrelation between the sovereign right to kill and
the humanitarian right to rescue that constitutes modes of modern power, whether by states or
by other institutions of power. Thus even within colonial regimes, missionary discourses and
discourses of rescue, civilising the natives, education, health and reform proliferated not only to
create different cadres and classes of colonising and colonised subjects. Elsewhere I have argued
that within British colonialism in the nineteenth century, the freedom of the English woman
became constituted in relation to the unfreedom of the colonised woman (Grewal, 1996). The
practice of unveiling the ‘veiled woman’ or the woman in ‘purdah’ became a technology of
colonial power exercised both to ‘save’ and to destroy at the same time. Furthermore, saving
the veiled woman became a project of reform, undertaken by anti-colonial nationalists as well
as by colonial authorities. Thus one can argue that forms of governmentality produce
nationalisms and the practices of state power and that connection is especially visible within
contexts of imperi- alism. Especially in the ways in which colonial powers imposed and enabled
the emergence of modern subjects as humanists with the ‘white man’s burden’, as Rudyard
Kipling called it, of ‘civilising the natives’, modernity has been both hegemonic and biopolitical.
While some scholars of colonialism, for instance, have argued that ‘colonial modernity’, as
Dipesh Chakrabarty terms it, cannot be seen as seamless with the modernity of the colonial
powers (Chakrabarty, 1993), Ann Stoler has shown that the biopolitics of self-disciplining of the
Dutch in Indonesia cannot be dissociated from the sexual and racial politics of colonial rule and
the formation of a European self (Stoler, 1995).

Thus Rahul and I reject the American Empire and its War on Terror as a
reduction of Foreign Military Sales of arms
 
Our method is a proliferation of race, using whiteness to “freak itself” can be
turned like a gun to the head of white supremacy, utilizing white bodies to
undo the naturalized link between whiteness and privilege. Whiteness
shouldn’t be theorized as a static object, but as a machine; it can be freaked,
queered, and used against itself.
Saldanha 07 Arun Saldanha, professor of geography at the University of Minnesota,
Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race, University of Minnesota Press:
Minneapolis, MN, pg. 198
“In no real sense did the hippies become Indians or poor blacks, or prostitutes or tramps— or
only in a guilty disingenuous sense— but they found their own significance in what they took
these groups to be: a significance to be understood against the dominant society and with
respect to their own special awareness,” says the ethnographer Paul Willis. 11 Seeing blacks,
Mexicans, and Indians as more authentic, because relatively untouched by mainstream white
modernity, the counterculture transformed white modernity by appropriating some of that
authenticity. But it is that very appropriation that betrays white privilege and that spawns new
tropes of subcultural (and potentially racist) snobbism. A creative movement turning in on itself,
becoming paranoid and reactionary, is what Guattari called “microfascism.” Psychedelics clearly
turned microfascistic in Anjuna, accompanied as it was by arrogance, segregation, noise
pollution, corruption, exploitation, and psychosis. If whiteness is defined by its lines of flight,
microfascism becomes as interesting to the study of whiteness as Nazism. Psychedelics— travel,
music, drugs— is whiteness accelerating, whiteness stuttering: either a deeper entrenchment
into economic and cultural exploitation, or a shedding of privilege, at least here and now. On the
whole, the Goa freaks of Anjuna do not follow the lines of flight of whiteness to critique their
own position as whites. In this sense, they were hardly “freaking” the racial assemblage. Recall
the proposition of Rachel Adams and Leslie Fiedler of appropriating freak as a critical category:
[F]reaks cannot be neatly aligned with any particular identity or ideological position.
Rather, freak is typically used to connote the absence of any known category of identity....I am
drawn to freak because, like queer, it is a concept that refuses the logic of identity politics, and
the irreconcilable problems of inclusion and exclusion that necessarily accompany identitarian
categories. 12 A true freaking of whiteness would grasp its lines of flight not for fascism but for a
future where paler-skinned bodies have no privileged access to economic and cultural
capital and to happiness. Freaking whiteness is problem-based, coalition-led, and self-critical; it
would try to understand what biophysical and technological forces subtend it (computers, HIV,
floods, radiation). Humanism and cosmopolitanism are severely limited if the struggle against
racism is defined only in human terms. So: race should not be abandoned or abolished,
but proliferated. Race’s energies are then directed at multiplying racial differences, so as
to render them joyfully cacophonic. What is needed is anaffirmation of race’s virtuality. When
racial formations crumble and mingle like this, the dominance of whiteness in the global racial
assemblage is undermined as the faciality machine finds it increasingly difficult to take hold of
bodies. It is not that everyone becomes completely Brownian (or brown!), completely similar, or
completely unique. It is just that white supremacism slowly becomes obsolete as other racial
formations start harboring the same creativity as whites do now, linking all sorts of
phenotypes with all sorts of wealth and all sorts of ways of life (sedentary, touristic,
ascetic). When no racial formation is the standard, race acquires a very different meaning: The
race-tribe exists only at the level of an oppressed race, and in the name of the oppression it
suffers; there is no race but inferior, minoritarian; there is no dominant race; a race is defined
not by its purity but rather by the impurity conferred upon it by a system of domination. Bastard
and mixed-blood are the true names of race. 13 When no racial formation is clearly
hegemonic, perhaps there will be no need anymore for the term “race.” Although there
will always be phenotypical variation and relations of power, perhaps sometime in the
future they won’t be correlated at all. Unlikely, but possible. Until then, however, there seems
little point in trying to stop talking about race, as antiracists such as Paul Gilroy suggest we
do. 14 Race is creative, and we can heed its creativities against itself. Challenging the global
faciality machine encompasses the transformation not just of prejudice, tabloid journalism, and
Unesco, but of the pharmaceutical industry, farm subsidies, seismology, the arms trade, income
tax policy, and the International Monetary Fund. In contrast to what many antiracists and
advocates of political correctness prescribe, the sites where the most urgent battles are to be
fought are not culture and language, but trade and health. Freaking whiteness is no easy task. A
good start for social scientists, however, is to acknowledge the persistent materiality of race. It
is important that the real barriers to mobility and imagination that exist in different places be
taken into account. Cosmopolitanism has to be invented, not
imposed. Taking responsibility and activism will only follow from both understanding and
feeling the intensive differences that exist between many different kinds of bodies: between a
Jew and a black soldier, between a woman in the Sahel and a woman on Wall Street, between a
Peruvian peasant and a Chinese journalist.

Transnational affective politics are a prerequisite to reconsider political

strategies, especially in the context of IR and arms sales
Hall and Ross 2015 [Todd H. Hall and Andrew A.G. Ross, “Affective Politics after 9/11”,
2015, https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:7a4ee6b1-ebb9-4e08-b352-
acbadb4b77d6/download_file?safe_filename=Affective%2Bpolitics%2Bafter%2B9-
11.pdf&file_format=application%2Fpdf&type_of_work=Journal+article, (´ᴥ`)]
“Terrorism is not a more common event than deaths through cancer or traffic accidents… But it
feels different. That is the power of discourse.” And yet by emphasizing feeling, Croft also
describes the power of affect. While constructivists have pointed to the role of agents in shaping
the meaning of crises or critical junctures like 9/11, such accounts miss how the ascendancy of
particular discourses may be closely interrelated with their ability to articulate, channel, and
make sense of already existing affective responses. Moreover, by privileging more incremental
forms of socialization, constructivists also overlook both accelerated forms of affectively induced
normative change—for example, how anger and fear can rapidly eclipse prior concerns about
civil rights—and emergent forms of identity construction—such as the new constellations of
transnational sympathy engendered by the attacks. Placed against a backdrop of shared outrage
after 9/11, it is not difficult to comprehend how the “language of medieval conflict—of finding al
Qaeda and putting their ‘heads on sticks’… soon caught on around [the U.S.] government,
mustering aggression.”154 Discourses may be disembodied; their appeal is not. By amending
existing understandings of actorhood to include human affective experience, we can begin to
proffer a fuller accounting of the myriad consequences of 9/11. The 9/11 attacks generated a
high-intensity affective wave felt across the public and elite levels, domestically and
internationally. This shockwave rippled through a multitude of social practices that, in turn,
channeled public energy toward familiar symbols and recognizable forms of grief and outrage.
These affective responses also generated new demands and anxieties, spilled over to other
targets, and created windows of opportunity for strategies of affective calibration, manipulation,
and display. Affective dynamics were implicated in 9/11 not because terrorism is an exceptional
domain of “irrational” behavior but because it, like other political phenomena, involves the
experiences and concerns of actual human beings. Whereas IR theories tend to abstract and
simplify actorhood into something disembodied and cognitively-driven, the practice of
international politics remains inextricable from the biological, psychological, and social
characteristics of human actors. Across a wide variety of challenges and practices of interest to
IR scholars—from international conflicts to the many projects comprising global governance—
affective dynamics provide the potential for both stubborn intransigence and dramatic changes
in preferences, loyalties, and beliefs. These changes become, in turn, conditions of possibility for
a range of political strategies. International politics reflect our humanity; theories of
international relations should as well.

Analyzing race as a fixed justifies racial overdetermination rather than

challenging it. Binaristic approaches to identity can only diagnose the status
quo as it is rather than escape it.
Saldanha 07 [Arun Saldanha, professor of geography at the University of Minnesota,
Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race, University of Minnesota Press:
Minneapolis, MN, pg. 194]
My disagreement is not with Fanon’s and Martín Alcoff’s insistence on embodiment and
emotion, but with their reliance on a Hegelian notion of recognition to explain encounter.
Because of this they tend to treat white and nonwhite not only as a dyad, but as
almost naturally opposed entities. There is, then, little attention paid to the complicated
processes whereby some racial formations become dominant, that is, how racial formations
emerge from material conditions and collective interactions, which greatly exceed the
spatiality of self versus other. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of faciality is not based on an
intersubjective dialectics enlarged to world-historical scope. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari
strongly distance themselves from phenomenology and psychoanalysis. First of all, for them, it
isn’t consciousness but an abstract machine of faciality that arranges bodies into relations of
power. And second,faciality constantly invents new faces to capture deviant bodies, multiplying
possible positions far beyond any binaries such as black/white (though binarization can be an
important effect). That is precisely its strength. There are thousands of encounters, thousands of
trains. Deleuze and Guattari believe faciality’s imperialism arose with institutional Christianity.
Being imposed in lands populated by different phenotypes, faciality became a matter
of imperialist racialization. That faciality originated in Renaissance humanism and depictions of
Jesus seems a plausible if one-sided interpretation. It is less relevant than Deleuze and Guattari’s
unusual theory of contemporary racism: If the face is in fact Christ, in other words, your average
ordinary White Man, then the first deviances, the first divergence-types,
are racial: yellow man, black man, men in the second or third category. They are also inscribed
on the [white] wall [of signification], distributed by the [black] hole [of subjectivity]. They must
be Christianized, in other words, facialized. European racism as the white man’s claim has never
operated by exclusion, or by the designation of someone as Other: it is instead in primitive
societies that the stranger is grasped as an “other.” Racism operates by the determination of
degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man face, which endeavors to integrate
nonconforming traitsinto increasingly eccentric and backward waves, sometimes tolerating
them at given places under given conditions, in a given ghetto, sometimes erasing them from
the wall, which never abides alterity (it’s a Jew, it’s an Arab, it’s a Negro, it’s a lunatic . . .). From
the viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior, there are no people on the outside. There are
only people who should be like us and whose crime it is not to be. 5 For Anjuna’s psy-trance
parties, there were “no people on the outside.” Locals, domestic tourists, charter tourists, and
beggars would join the white Goa freaks on the dance floor, sometimes even in Nine Bar. In fact,
as with the United Colors of Benetton, it will be remembered that the rhetoric of PLUR
demonstrated faciality’s inclusiveness— the parties were supposed to be open to all. But
immediately, the faciality machine would place all bodies in relation to the Goa freak standard,
both spatiotemporally and subjectively, measuring their acceptability through increasingly
meticulous signs: sociochemical monitoring, scene savviness, chillum circles, sexual
attractiveness. Many nonfreaks felt uneasy being pigeonholed like this— especially domestic
tourists, who would retreat to the darker corners. The result was viscosity, bodies temporarily
becoming impenetrable— more or less. It would seem to me that to understand the intricate
hierarchies of racism, a framework that allows for gradual and multidimensional
deviances is preferable to a dialectical model. Faciality alsoexplains why after colonialism, with
television and tourism, there is scarcely place left for any “dark others.” Everyone is included;
everyone is facialized. At the same time, Euro-American ways of life continue to spread,
and White Man (Elvis Presley, Sylvester Stallone, David Beckham) remains the global
standard against which all other faces are forced to compete. What this account of racism has in
common with the Fanonian is that whiteness is the norm, even in our “post”-colonial
era. Where it differs, however, is that deviance is based not on lack
of recognition or negation or annihilation of the other, but on subtle machinic
differentiations and territorializations. The virtual structures behind racial formations don’t look
like formal logic (a/not-a); they continually differentiate as actual bodies interact and aggregate.

Affective encounters can be taken up to change pedagogy and epistemology

starting in this education sphere.
Youndell and Armstrong 11, Deborah and Felicity, “A politics beyond subjects: The
affective choreographies and smooth spaces of
schooling”, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S175545861100003X
In this paper we take up the theme of the ‘emotional geographies of education’ as we explore
the significance and workings of space, subjectivity and affectivity in everyday life in schools. We
bring together an ensemble of conceptual tools from Foucault, Butler and Deleuze and Guattari
to make sense of the ways that school spaces and subjects are constituted, to consider the
significance of affectivities in everyday school life, and to show how these unsettle the subjects
and spaces of the education assemblage. As we do this we offer the notion of affective
choreographies for engaging with emotional geographies in the context of education. Concerns
with the constitution of the subjects of schooling and the significance of affectivities and spaces
are not new to studies in education. An understanding of the subjectivated subject (Butler,
1997, Foucault, 1990) has underpinned a great deal of recent work in education concerned to
understand the constraints of identity and the possibilities for identities to be resisted
in educational settings (See, for instance, Davies et al., 2001; Harwood, 2006, Rasmussen,
2006, Renold, 2005, Youdell, 2006, Youdell, 2010a). More recently, Deleuze and Guattari’s work
has begun to be put to work in education. The idea of affectivities drawn from Deleuze and
Guattari (2008) has been taken up by education researchers to explore new possibilities for
thinking about pedagogy andpedagogic encounters (see Boler, 1999, Davies and Gannon,
2009, Hickey-Moody, 2009, Youdell, 2010a, Zembylas, 2007). Likewise, the idea of the
assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari, 2008) has been drawn on to understand the workings of
particular education disciplines and pedagogic practices as well as the wider field of education
policy and politics (See Hickey-Moody, 2009, Leahy, 2009, Tamboukou, 2008, Youdell,
2010a). Finally, conceptualizations of the constituted and constitutive nature of space
developed in cultural geography have been taken up in education to consider the interplay
between space and policy and practices (Armstrong, 2003,Gulson and Symes, 2007, Lipman,
2004). In this paper we build on this existing body of work, bringing these threads of analysis
together in order to explore the inter-relations of spaces, subjects and affects in everyday life in
schoolsthrough readings of two detailed representations of events in school life that have
troubled us. These events are separated by more than 30 years – the first is an autobiographical
account of a confrontation that took place on a canal tow-path during a school trip in 1976,
while the second is an ethnographic account of a tussle over seats on a sofa that took place in a
‘Special School’ in 2008. Neither of these accounts are offered as unmediated reflections of
‘real’ life, instead we recognize them as representations and interpretations in which we are
discursively, psychically, and affectively implicated (Pillow, 2003, Youdell, 2010b). Discussing
emotional geographies at a theoretical level allows us to at least appear to remain somewhat
detached – our stories are saturated with affectivities and attachments that we cannot remove
from their telling. Pillow (2003) has suggested the importance of telling and interrogating
discomforting accounts from our research in education and we take up this challenge here in
order to gain further insight into these incidents that have troubled us and in which we remain
implicated. As we do this we demonstrate how our collection of conceptual tools can be
deployed to interrogate the workings of space, subjectivity and affect in the minutiae of the
everyday of schooling and to understand the workings of the educational and social world more
widely…. In this paper we have sought to demonstrate how thinking
about subjectivities, affectivities and spaces together through the tools offered by Foucault,
Butler and Deleuze and Guattari can help us to understand practices of schooling. This approach
allows us to interrogate the ways that subjects are constituted as well as the ways that these are
unsettled both through the practices of subjectivated subjects and through the flows of
affectivities that exceed these subjects and the striations of space. Thinking about subjectivities
and flows of affectivities together allows us to demonstrate resignifications as well as the
emergence of smooth spaces that unsettle the education assemblage. As we have done this, we
have drawn on the notion of affective choreographies to help move our thinking from a focus on
the individual subject and body to a concern with bodies as amalgam and an analysis that
foregrounds collectivities and the event and so is anti-subjectivation. The stories we told and
explored here were ‘Canal’ and ‘Sofa’, not ‘Ezra’ and ‘Richard’. Engaging with ‘Canal’ and ‘Sofa’
through affective choreographies has allowed us to demonstrate the tacit collectivity of these
events; the demarcation of what bodies can and cannot do; and the way that affective
intensities exceed these demarcations. We have shown how affective choreographies are
simultaneously bound by and exceeding and unsettling discursive framings and the striations of
space – the bodies in ‘Canal’ and ‘Sofa’ act outside their part in the choreography; take up parts
in competing choreographies; and take lines of flight into smooth spaces. Deleuze and Guattari
(2008) suggest that we map the assemblage and find gaps between its rigid lines that offer lines
of flight and the emergence of smooth spaces. In our readings of ‘Canal’ and ‘Sofa’ we have
demonstrated how these rigid lines subjectivate particular sorts of subjects and demarcate what
is doable and what is undoable and we have also shown how affectivities exceed these
subjectivations and take lines of flight that scatter the education assemblage. This approach, we
want to suggest, enables us to interrogate the constraints of discourse and the subjectivation at
the same time as we think beyond the subjectivated subject and the striations of the
assemblage, thereby opening up new possibilities for a politics of becoming.
2AC
Case
 FW
We meet – The USfg is the people
Kilberg 14 (Andrew G. I. Kilberg, 8/19/2014, Attended the University of Virginia Law school
and was previously a Law Clerk toe the Supreme Court, “WE THE PEOPLE: THE ORIGINAL
MEANING OF POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY”, pg 1061-1063)

WE the People of the United States . . . do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United
States of America.”1 Thus, the Preamble to the United States Constitution tells us—upfront,
without reservation—that the creators of fundamental law are the People.2 The American
system of government rests on a theory of popular sovereignty. But what does popular
sovereignty mean? Who is the sovereign People?3 The answer at first may seem to be self-
evident. The United States is a nation. The People of the United States is the American people.
As the original pledge of allegiance written by Francis Bellamy says, “I pledge allegiance to my
flag and the republic for which it stands—one nation indivisible—with liberty and justice for
all.”4 There are fifty states, but as Justice Black remarked, it is a simple “fact that the States of
the Union constitute a nation.”5 If we are one nation, are we not also one people? The question
is not so open-and-closed, and the ultimate answer is not so simple. Indeed, the debate over the
identity of the People still rages. Often, the disagreement over the identity of the People is
obscured by an emphasis on the expressions of popular sovereignty, by a focus on the split in
the on-the-ground powers of governing between the federal government and the state
governments. Commentators, thus, often talk about “sovereignty” when they in fact mean the
parameters or boundaries of governmental power. 6 As Part II will demonstrate however, the
concept of popular sovereignty distinguishes between the exercise of power through the
branches of government and the fundamental, arbitrary power held by the sovereign people.
Nevertheless, other scholars have tackled the question of whose popular sovereignty head on.
We can split academics into two broad camps: nationalists and state-populists. Adherents of the
former insist that the People—and the only existing people—is a national people. Those in the
latter camp maintain that the several state peoples not only existed before the Constitution, but
also survived ratification. Although united in their belief that the People is a singular national
people, nationalists are divided by differing theories of how and when that singular people came
to be. Professor Beer has articulated a strict nationalist narrative. Simply put, the national
people as a body politic existed before the Constitution and it was this people that created the
Constitution.7 The national people hold fundamental sovereignty and have “divided the
attributes of sovereignty, that is, the various powers of governing, between the federal and the
state governments.”8 This division does nothing to shake the fact that the “American people . . .
were unitary.”9 Federalism is functional. Unlike Beer, Professor Amar concedes that America
before the Constitution was composed of “united states, not a unitary state; they were thirteen
Peoples, not (yet) one People.”10 It was the several state peoples who created the
Constitution.11 Yet through ratifying the Constitution, the “separate state Peoples agreed to
‘consolidate’ themselves into a single continental People.”12 A popular body politic rarely acts
in any practical sense. For Amar, however, ratification was one of “those rare metalegal
moments” where the state peoples reconstituted themselves as the American People.13 State-
populists contend that the Constitution did not destroy the state peoples as bodies politic, but
these scholars are divided by differing theories of how the federal government obtained its
power. According to one theory, the Constitution is “a compact among political societies.”14 As
Professor McDonald has explained, “national or local governments, being the creatures of the
states, could exercise only those powers explicitly or implicitly given them by the states; each
state government could exercise all powers unless it was forbidden from doing so by the people
of the state.”15 The state peoples delegated power to both the state and federal governments;
this is a theory of dual delegation from a single class of sovereigns.

Our theory of politics is the only one that opens space for individuals to actually
change the world around us
Claude 88 (Prof. of Gov. and Foreign Affairs, U of VA, States and the Global System, p. 18)
This view of the state as an institutional monolith is fostered by the notion of sovereignty, which calls up the image of the monarch,
presiding majestically over his kingdom. Sovereignty
emphasizes the singularity of the state, its monopoly of
authority, its unity of command and its capacity to speak with one voice. Thus, France wills, Iran
demands, China intends, New Zealand promises and the Soviet Union insists. One all too easily
conjures up the picture of a single-minded and purposeful state that decides exactly what it
wants to achieve, adopts coherent policies intelligently adapted to its objectives, knows what it
is doing, does what it intends and always has its act together. This view of the state is reinforced by political
scientists’ emphasis upon the concept of policy and upon the thesis that governments derive policy from calculations of national
interest. We
thus take it for granted that states act internationally in accordance with rationality
conceived and consciously constructed schemes of action, and we implicitly refuse to consider
the possibility that alternatives to policy-directed behavior may have importance – alternatives such
as random, reactive, instinctual, habitual and conformist behaviour. Our rationalistic assumption that states do what they have
planned to do tends to inhibit the discovery that states sometimes do what they feel compelled to do, or what they have the
opportunity to do, or what they have usually done, or what other states are doing, or whatever the line of least resistance would
seem to suggest. Academic preoccupation with the making of policy is accompanied by academic
neglect of the execution of policy. We seem to assume that once the state has calculated its
interest and contrived a policy to further that interest, the carrying out of policy is the virtually
automatic result of the routine functioning of the bureaucratic mechanism of the state. I am
inclined to call this the Genesis theory of public administration, taking as my text the passage: ‘And God
said, Let there be light; and there was light’. I suspect that in the realm of government, policy execution
rarely follows so promptly and inexorably from policy statement. Alternatively, one may dub it the Pooh-
Bah/Ko-Ko theory, honouring those
Black Politics
CP
 Consult

Should means desirable state

The New Oxford American Dictionary,
2005http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?entry=t183.e71063
1. used to indicate obligation, duty, or correctness, typically when criticizing someone's actions:
he should have been careful I think we should trust our people more you shouldn't have gone. 
• indicating a desirableor expected state:by now students should be able to read with a large
degree of independence. • used to giveor ask advice or suggestions: you should go back to bed
what should I wear? • (I should) used to give advice: I should hold out if I were you. 
Stick-Up
K
 Antiblackness
Only an approach that emphasized the formed nature of identity through
assemblage theory can map a line of escape from facial politics
Koerner 11 [Michelle Koerner, professor of women’s studies at Duke, “Lines of Escape: Gilles
Deleuze’s Encounter with George Jackson,” Genre, Vol. 44, No. 2 Summer 2011 pg. 161-64]

In “The Case of Blackness” Moten (2008b: 187) perceptively remarks, “What

is inadequate to blackness is already
given ontologies.” What if we were to think of blackness as a name for an ontology of becoming ? How
might such a thinking transform our understanding of the relation of blackness to history and its specific capacity to “think [its] way
out of the exclusionary constructions” of history and the thinking of history (Moten 2008a: 1744)? Existing
ontologies tend
to reduce blackness to a historical condition, a “lived experience,” and in doing so effectively
eradicate its unruly character as a transformative force. Deleuze and Guattari, I think, offer a
compelling way to think of this unruliness when they write, “What History grasps of the event is
its effectuation in states of affairs or in lived experience , but the event in its becoming, in its
specific consistency, in its self- positing as concept, escapes History” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 110). To
bring this relation between blackness and becoming further into the open—toward an affirmation of the unexpected insinuation of
blackness signaled by the use of Jackson’s line as an “event in its becoming”—a few more words need be said about Deleuze’s
method.

The use of Jackson’s writing is just one instance of a procedure that we find repeated throughout Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
where we constantly encoun- ter unexpected injections of quotations, names, and ideas lifted from other texts, lines that appear all
of sudden as though propelled by their own force. One might say they are deployed rather than explained or
interpreted; as such, they produce textual events that readers may choose to ignore or pick up
and run with. Many names are proposed for this method—“schizoanalysis, micropolitics, pragmat- ics, diagrammatism,
rhizomatics, cartography” (Deleuze and Parnet [1977] 2006: 94)—but the crucial issue is to affirm an experimental
practice that opposes itself to the interpretation of texts, proposing instead that we think of a
book as “a little machine” and ask “what it functions with, in connection with what other things
does it or does it not transmit intensities?” (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987: 4).8 Studying how Soledad Brother
functions in Deleuze’s books, connect- ing Jackson’s line to questions and historical issues that are not always explicitly addressed in
those books, involves one in this action. And further, it opens new lines where the intensities transmitted in Jackson’s book make a
claim on our own practice.

This method can be seen as an effort to disrupt the hierarchical opposition between theory and practice and to challenge some of
the major assumptions of Western Marxism. In an interview with Antonio Negri in the 1990s, Deleuze (1997: 171) clarifies that
he and Guattari have “remained Marxists” in their concern to analyze the ways capitalism has
developed but that their political philosophy makes three crucial distinctions with respect to
more traditional theoretical approaches: first, a thinking of “war machines” as opposed to state
theory; second, a “consideration of minorities rather than classes”; and finally, the study of social
“lines of flight” rather than the interpretation and critique of social contradictions. Each of these
distinctions, as we will see, resonates with Jackson’s political philosophy, but as the passage from Anti-
Oedipus demonstrates, the concept of the “line of flight” emerges directly in connection to Deleuze
and Guattari’s encounter with Soledad Brother.

The concept affirms those social constructions that would neither be determined by preexisting
structures nor caught in a dialectical contradiction. It names a force that is radically
autonomous from existing ontologies, structures, and historical accounts. It is above all for this reason
that Deleuze and Guattari insist that society be thought of not as a “structure” but as a
“machine,” because such a concept enables the thinking of the movements, energies, and
intensities (i.e., the lines of flight) that such machines transmit. The thinking of machines forces us not only to
consider the social and historical labor involved in producing soci- ety but also the ongoing potentials of constructing new types of
assemblages (agencement).

One of the key adversaries of this machinic approach is “interpretation” and more specifically
structuralist interpretations of society in terms of contradictions. According to Deleuze and Guattari ([1980]
1987: 293), structuralism persisted in the “submission of the line to the point” and as a result
produced a theory of subjectivity, and also an account of language and the unconscious, that could not think in
terms of movement and construction. Defining lines only in relation to finite points (the subject,
the signifier) produces a calculable grid, a structure that then appears as the hidden
intelligibility of the system and of society generally . Louis Althusser’s account of the “ideological State
apparatus” as the determining structure of subjectivity is perhaps the extreme expression of this gridlocked position (an example we
will come back to in a later section). Opposed to this theoretical approach, diagrammatism (to invoke one of the terms given
for this method) maps vectors that generate an open space and the potentials for giving consistency
to the latter.9 In other words, rather than tracing the hidden structures of an intolerable system,
Deleuze and Guattari’s method aims to map the ways out of it.

Demands to recognition of subjectivity inevitably ends in co-option, instead an

ethics of becoming allows resistance to faciality.
MacCormack, No Date Patricia MacCormack, Patricia is a researcher who has published in
the areas of continental philosophy (especially Deleuze, Guattari, Serres, Irigaray, Lyotard,
Kristeva, Blanchot, Ranciere), feminism, queer theory, posthuman theory, horror film, body
modification, animal rights/abolitionism, cinesexuality and ethics,
http://archeologia.women.it/user/quarta/workshops/spectacles2/patriciamaccormack.htm. No
Date.
Seyla Benhabib identifies three primary features needed in theorising a universal ethics. These features are that the ethics be:
"interactive not legislative, cognisant of gender [all] difference not gender [difference] blind, contextually sensitive and not situated
indifferent."(My parentheses)7 Ethics here does not predict its moral conclusion by claiming to be good or bad, rather ethics simply
demands an interactive consideration that predicts nothing about the situation before it is considered. Ethics is straightforward in its
ability to consider and be accountable for action based on the particularity of any situation. In this way there is as much potential for
a bad ethics as good, but there is no space for a blanket or legislative ethics which can divine its own future. The
flesh of the
other(s) must be considered to create an ethics of the other. Faciality adamantly refutes such an
ethic by forcing the flesh of the other into the machine of majoritarian subjectification and
stratification. The other is given a subjectivity that the majoritarian can identify; the other’s
body is legislated against by the facial machine of the dominant. The others subjectivity is then
placed, again legislatively, in the strata, where the strata position, not the flesh of the other,
proscribes the future of this minoritarian. A refusal to give an other a material body is no ethics
at all, because ethics must insist on the reality, rather than the imaginary or repudiated, flesh of
an other. Such an ethic does not demand assimilation, empathy or sympathy but merely and at
the least a willingness or openness to an impactful and grave belief in another’s flesh as having
the right to exist. Such an ethic considers the body of another without a need to know it. Moira
Gatens’ imaginary bodies encompass this idea, where she calls for Not only a politics of
difference – which seems the obvious register in which to analyse class, race and sex differences
– but also for an ethics of difference – which would be capable of acknowledging that different
forms of embodiment are themselves historical and open to change.8 I would add to this that an
ethics of difference demands an acknowledgement that different forms of embodiment are
exactly that, different, not only to our own bodies but to the systems by which dominant culture
understands a body. Acknowledgement here is adamantly not knowledge. Any
acknowledgement of bodies that calls for recognition, even of difference, is no ethics at all but
simply the first step toward co-option. It risks what Gatens herself claims is wrong with politics
as opposed to ethics, "in contemporary times body politics more commonly attempt to
incorporate ‘others’ by assimilation."(98) Any demand for recognition risks assimilation. Deleuze
and Guattari’s call to becoming, especially becoming-imperceptible makes such a demand
impossible, but, at the other end of the spectrum their horror of faciality is precisely due to its
forceful assimilation of all bodies to the dominant, in order that the face may or may not pass.
Facialisation is the politics of assimilation Gatens refuses as an ethic. The face does not implant or cover over the real body of an
other. It does not act like a Western dominant mask. The face is what brings the body of the other into existence at all for dominant
culture – without this re-cognitive tool culture cannot ‘see’ the other at all. When the other is facialised s/he is made visible only
within the dominant system and in the only manner the dominant system will allow. Deleuze and Guattari state, "When the faciality
machine translates formed contents of whatever kind into a single substance of expression, it already subjugates them to the
exclusive form of signifying and subjective expression."(179-80) The face subjugates the body and the self, to a singular mode of
comprehension and knowledge, and as a singular type of passable or un-passable subject. These two axes of signifier and subjectifier
are the pistons and cogs of the facial machine. The
signifier is the white wall or screen of the face and the
subjectifier is in the black holes of the face. Either can foreground and either be in the
background however they are not available individually or separately. They work as a machine.
The white wall of signification is pierced and probed by back holes of subjectification until an
assemblage of a face is evident. This assemblage entirely repudiates any potential for a body to
be unique, different or even itself. Rather, the body is hijacked into the face, and the face is
hijacked into dominant, what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘majoritarian’ ("a state of domination"
291) culture. No pure difference or remarkable subjectivity exists, only variants on the
majoritarian white-wall black-hole system. Some variants are minoritarian, marginalised through
a failure in one or another of the indices available, such as black instead of white or female
instead of male. Such variants decide where the face will be in the strata. Some faces may be
sacrificed. Others are beyond the capacity or scope of the majoritarian system and are
unrecognisable. Deleuze and Guattari state: "Faces are not basically individual: they define
zones of frequency or probability, delimit a field that neutralises in advance any expressions or
connections unnameable to the appropriate significations."(168) Hence the individuality of the faces in the
Faces of Australia series are not included for their individuality. The urge to statistically tally up the amount of ‘ethnic’ faces, of
‘female’ faces is redundant due to the clustering of majoritarian zones of frequency the faces assemble around. Like a series of
magnets, the white walls and black holes congress into what may appear an aboriginal or female face but is really an absolutely
predicted and predictable convergence of a possible subject. This is how we recognise the face. We re-cognise, re-comprehend what
we have always known to be potential in our introduction to new faces. All of the faces of Australia affirm their likeness to the
majoritarian face rather than their difference. They must have a face, this face, in order to speak their little narratives about
themselves. They must be facialised in order to enunciate. All of the stamp faces, black, white, child or adult, male or female, are
firstly divergent majoritarian faces. These are all white male majoritarian faces divided off or made minoritarian by their singular
indices of dividuation from the Christ face. Deleuze and Guattari point to historical representations of the Christ face as the prime
facial organiser. Christ inhabits the space between God and Man, but has less of a body than a fully facialised flesh. The face, penis
and wounds of Christ refuse to become flesh but rather remain signifying white-wall, black-hole machine. The shroud of Turin, the
pierced hands, the pierced brow adding new black-holes of subjectivity to the gossamer white wall affirm Christ as impossible but
absolutely mandatory. Elaine Scarry writes "The place of man and the place of God in the human generation that so dominates
Genesis are easy to separate from one another: the place of man is in the body; the place of God is in the voice."9 Where Levinas
takes God as the demand for ethical treatment of alterity, Deleuze and Guattari see "every stratum is a judgement of God."10
Judgement refutes ethics by predicting signification. Whether judgement is of a body or a war, ‘God’ for Deleuze and Guattari will
identify the item by its stratum not its specificity. Such judgement not only denies difference based on its unique value rather than
its paradigmatic value, but also refutes the possibility of change. Like subjectivity, the face must be singular, however its singular
representation occurs through the usually binary options available to it. Its singularity will then be stratafiable. Although the options
fall most often into two, the access to their definition and value remains isomorphic – they always exist in comparison with the
Christ face. Hence
the signification of black-or-white skin, of female-or-male face, of intellectual-or-
retarded capacity is read in the faces white walls, cemented and affirmed in the subject’s black
holes so that the face informs on the subject rather than the subject belying the face. A face’s
unity is only available through binaries, a white gay woman, a black straight man, a sane healthy
male, a sick insane female. Binary choices converge into the ‘individual’ face. The assemblage of
the face reflects the cementations of strata, which is why it is so akin to landscape. The
landscape of the face is rigid, changeable only in relation to a set of predictable variances. The
landscape is also toiled by a certain set of people, who own run and map the land. The land is
recognised in a certain way.

() - gratuitous violence is ahistorical.

Carter Biester Deane 18, college of social studies student at Wesleyan, “Prison Necropolitics”,
https://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3047&context=etd_hon_theses

Historian Neil Roberts’ criticism of social death raises similar concerns about agency. According to Roberts, accounts of flight from
slavery demonstrate the shortcomings of using social death to understand history. In defining social death, he curiously
replaces one of Patterson’s three elements, the susceptibility to gratuitous violence, with “powerlessness.”72
Powerlessness here implies a one-sided understanding of the relationship between the slave and master. For
Roberts, social death “denies the significance of psychology to freedom, rendering it unable to explain

how slaves are able to become free physically outside the actions and intentions of enslaving agents.”73 Accord to
Roberts, social death is inadequate to explain slave resistance , then, because it either denies the power

of the enslaved or fails to account for their experiences. Using the concept risks describing reality as “an inert state of social death.”74

() – ontologizing blackness destroys alt solvency and homogenizes black bodies.

David KLINE, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Religion at Rice University, 17 [“The
Pragmatics of Resistance: Framing Anti-Blackness and the Limits of Political Ontology,” Critical
Philosophy of Race, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2017, p. 51-69, Accessed Online through Emory Libraries]

Focusing on Wilderson, his absolute prioritization of a political onto-logical structure in which the law
relegates Black being into the singular position of social death happens, I contend, at the expense of two significant things that I am
hesitant to bracket for the sake of prioritizing political ontology as the sole frame of reference for both analyzing anti-Black racism
and thinking resistance within the racialized world. First, it short-circuits
an analysis of power that might reveal
not only how the practices, forms, and apparatuses of anti-Black racism have historically
developed, changed, and reassembled/reterritorialized in relation to state power, national
identity, philosophical discourse, biological discourse, political discourse, and so on—changes
that, despite Wilderson’s claim that focusing on these things only “mystify” the question of
ontology (Wilderson 2010, 10), surely have implications for how racial positioning is both thought and resisted in differing
historical and socio-political contexts. To the extent that Blackness equals a singular ontological position within a macropolitical
structure of antagonism, there is almost no room to bring in the spectrum and flow of social difference and contingency that no
doubt spans across Black identity as a legitimate issue of analysis and as a site/sight for the possibility of a range of resisting
practices. This bracketing of difference leads him to make some rather sweeping and opaquely abstract claims. For example,
discussing a main character’s abortion in a prison cell in the 1976 film Bush Mama, Wilderson says, “Dorothy will abort her baby at
the clinic or on the floor of her prison cell, not because she fights for—and either wins [End Page 58] or loses—the right to do so, but
because she is one of 35 million accumulated and fungible (owned and exchangeable) objects living among 230 million subjects—
which is to say, her will is always already subsumed by the will of civil society” (Wilderson 2010, 128, italics mine). What I want to
totalizing political ontology overshadowing
press here is how Wilderson’s statement, made in the sole frame of a
all other levels of sociality, flattens out the social difference within, and even the possibility of,
a micropolitical social field of 35 million Black people living in the United States. Such a
flattening reduces the optic of anti-Black racism as well as Black sociality to the frame of political
ontology where Blackness remains stuck in a singular position of abjection . The result is a
severe analytical limitation in terms of the way Blackness (as well as other racial positions) exists across
an extremely wide field of sociality that is comprised of differing intensities of forces and
relational modes between various institutional, political, socio-economic, religious, sexual, and
other social conjunctures. Within Wilderson’s political ontological frame, it seems that these conjunctures
are excluded—or at least bracketed—as having any bearing at all on how anti-Black power
functions and is resisted across highly differentiated contexts. There is only the binary
ontological distinction of Black and Human being; only a macropolitics of sedimented abjection.
 Bataille

Bataille celebrates and glorifies war for war’s sake—his ideas are the
foundation of fascism.
Wolin 2006 [Richard, Distinguished Professor of History at the City University of New York
Graduate Center, “Left Fascism: Georges Bataille and the German Ideology”,
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8675.1996.tb00037.x]

In the worldview of both Bataille and that of German young conservatives, war plays an
essential, positive role. It serves as a means of dissolving the principium individuationis: the
principle of a bourgeois subjectivity, on which the homogenous order of society - a world of
loneliness and fragmentation – depends. For, according to Bataille, “the general movement of
life is... accomplished beyond the demands of individuals.”32 It is in precisely this spirit that he
celebrates the non-utilitarian nature of “combat” or “war” as a type of aestheticist end in itself:
“Glory...expresses a movement of senseless frenzy, of measureless expenditure of energy, which
the fervor of combat presupposes. Combat it glorious in that it is always beyond calculation at
some moment.”33 For the same reasons, Bataille eulogizes those premodern “warrier societies
in which pure, uncalculated violence and ostentatious forms of combat held sway.”34 For under
such conditions, war was not made subservient to the vulgar ends of enterprise and
accumulation, as is the case for modern-day imperialism, but served as a glorious end in itself.
Yet in the early 1930s, it was precisely this aestheticist celebration of “violence for violence’s
sake,” or “war for war’s sake,” that Benjamin viewed as the essence of modern fascism. As he
remarks in a well known passage: “Fiat ars – pereat mundus,” says fascism, and, as Marinetti
admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense pereption that has been
changed by technology...Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for
the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can
experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of
politics which fascism is rendering aesthetic.35 In Bataille’s thought war serves as the harbinger
of a cultural transfiguration in which the primacy of self-subsistent subjectivity would be
replaced by the values of an “unavowable” or “ecstatic community”: that is, a community that
would no longer be governed by the goals of a “visual culture” – transparency, self-identity, etc.
– but instead, those of self-laceration, difference, and finitude. In fact this Bataille-inspired
program of an ecstatic community has been quite explicitly carried forth and explored in the
political writings of Maurice Blanchot (La Communaute inavouable; 1983) and Jean-Luc Nancy
(La Communaute desoeuvree; 1985).
Bataille believes human sacrifice is the ultimate form transgression- this proves
his alt is awful.
Pavlovski 2005 [Linda, editor for the database Enotes and of multiple academic collections,
“Bataille, Georges: Introduction,” Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism,
http://www.enotes.com/twentieth-century-criticism/bataille-georges]
Bataille sought “sovereignty” through loss of self, which is achieved through transgression and excess, notably through laughter,
religious ecstasy, sacrifice, eroticism, death, and poetry. Considering human sacrifice the ultimate transgression, Bataille was
fascinated by religious feast days that included rites of sacrifice. This fascination led Bataille to the work of the anthropologist Marcel
Mauss and to a particular interest in the cultures of the Aztecs and North American Indians. In their use of human sacrifice and
potlatch, respectively, Bataille saw an excessive, generous spirit which he admired. As a direct result of this, Bataille wrote an
unconventional theory of economics that promoted waste and excess, rather than acquisition. Believing that transgression existed
beyond mere words, Bataille constantly battled with the problem of writing the inexpressible. He often used a series of ellipsis points
to signify an impasse of expression. In his literary criticism Bataille praised those authors who used language to express transgression
and emotion; not surprisingly, Bataille especially admired Marquis de Sade's audaciously erotic works. Bataille was also influenced
by G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, and the proponents of surrealism. His work shows a remarkable mixture
of these influences, while advancing his own unique views. Bataille is probably best known for his erotic novels, particularly Histoire
de l'oeil (1928; The Story of the Eye), Le bleu du ciel (1945; The Blue of Noon), and Madame Edwarda (1937; The Naked Beast at
Heaven's Gate). These works share a fascinating blend of horror, fantasy, and eroticism. However, Bataille's other works also bear
witness to his obsession with these aspects of life. In La littérature et le mal (1957; Literature and Evil) Bataille searched for
transgression in the works of Charles Pierre Baudelaire, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Emily Brontë, and others. L'expérience intérieure
(1943; The Inner Experience) and Méthode de méditation (1947) outline Bataille's thoughts on mysticism, his search for inner
silence, and his fascination with images of unbearable pain coupled with ecstasy. In La part maudite (1949; The Accursed Share),
Bataille related his belief in excess to economics. Many of Bataille's influential essays have appeared in his journal Critique. Bataille's
last book, Les larmes d'Éros (1961; The Tears of Eros) is a study of the history of eroticism and violence. Containing shocking text and
photographic images, the book was banned in France upon its publication.

Bataille’s reasoning justifies atrocities and death.

Boldt-Irons 2000 [Leslie Anne, Associate Professor of French at Brock University, “Military
discipline and revolutionary exaltation: the dismantling of “l’illusion lyrique” in Malraux’s
L’Espoir and Bataille’s Le Bleu du Ciel,”, https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-
94640665/military-discipline-and-revolutionary-exaltation]

In 1933, Bataille contributed a review of Andre Malraux's novel La Condition humaine to the
ultra left-wing journal La Critique sociale. (1) In this article, Bataille questions the place that
revolution occupies in the larger and more general context of "human agitation." He asks, for
example, whether the convulsive movements of revolt, social upheaval, and revolution should
be situated outside of, or above, what is normally experienced as life in its quotidian expressions
of tenderness, enthusiasm or even hate. In the name of what authority, for example, might one
be justified in placing the fascination with pleasure, torture and possible death outside the limits
of acceptable social practice--extreme states often linked to revolutionary upheaval outside the
limits of acceptable social practice? Another way of situating the convulsion of revolutionary
movements--an approach clearly endorsed by Bataille--is to place it squarely within the
framework of any activity marked by agitation. From this perspective, the acts of torture and
murder would arise from an excitability or arousal similar in nature to that intensifying the fury
of the revolutionary impulse. This impulse, writes Bataille, is a means by which the proletariat--
who had for a long time been deprived of the possibility of attributing any value to suffering and
to life--is able to gain access to value itself, a value linked to states of excitation unsubordinated
to any simple political means or end. This value, and the state of agitation to which it is linked,
gives the proletariat both life and hope, for which even death in all its atrocity might be the
payment required
 Baudrillard

obfuscates larger social underpinnings for violence

Ahmed 96 - professor in race and culture studies University of London (Sara, “Beyond
Humanism and Postmodernism: Theorizing a Feminist Practice” Hypatia vol. 11 no 2 Spring)

Baudrillard’s use of transvetism suggests that his version of postmodernism works within the ideology of liberalism. Indeed, his
postmodern subject repeats rather than transforms the status of the subject under liberal
ideology, in its freedom from determination by regimes of truth and power to determine freely
the conspiracy of signs (one could add commodities to complete the analogy). Also in his text the circulation of
signs is reified; it is separated from social relations via the very stress on indetereminacy in fact,
Baudrillard’s postmodern version of signs as proliferating and neutralizing connects with the
very nature of money as a signifier which can only quantify, and as such idealizes the very
symbolic power of capital itself to displace the possibilities of value and utility. It is quite clear that
the signs in the postmodern world of the “simulacra” are not free-floating; they are attached to
determinate subject positions and invested interests via their status as commodities. This
attachment is most aptly reflected in the use of female bodies as vehicles for advertising products. A feminist reading of
Baudrillard, which may share the assumption that sexuality involves the textual negotiation of meanings, may want to
critique his model of sex as indeteremination by showing this model disassociates sexual
difference from the reproduction of power inequalities.

They court violence by questioning the reality of and solutions for those
threatened
Walsh ‘10
Sean Noah Walsh is a recent Ph.D in political science from the University of Florida. Starting in Fall 2010, he will be a
Lecturer of Political Theory at Florida International University. “Masters of Hyperreality: Injustice in the Discourse of
Deconstruction” - The Journal of Philosophy, Science & Law Volume 10, June 14, 2010
http://jpsl.org/archives/masters-hyperreality-injustice-discourse-deconstruction/
The effect of Derrida’s claim is to overlook the rare but nonetheless deleterious effects deconstruction can have in political life. In this essay, I examine the possibility of deconstruction to lead toward injustice. In
2008 the United States Supreme Court upheld a law designed to stem the sexual exploitation of children. Known as the Protect Act, the law prohibits solicitation of child pornography “whether the material turns
out to consist solely of computer-generated images, or digitally altered photographs of adults, or even if the offer is fraudulent and the material does not exist at all.” [11] I argue that the Protect Act represents an

Baudrillard’s
effect of deconstruction, an assault against the hierarchies of Platonic metaphysics. The distinction in this hierarchy, between visible objects and images is best embodied in Jean

concept of simulacra, a copy of something that never originally existed. The deconstruction represented by the Protect Act
denies substantive difference between simulacra and actual examples of child pornography. Additionally, I
argue that this gesture of deconstruction, precisely by displacing the metaphysical hierarchy between real and
imaginary children, endangers the former. In this case, deconstruction, embodied in the Protect Act provides a rational incentive to abuse real children. In at least
this exceptional instance, Derrida is wrong: deconstruction can be injustice. Esoteric as it often seems, deconstruction is not exclusive to the arcane sanctuary of the academy.
It has been popularized or, as Stanley Fish put it, by the beginning of the 1980’s deconstruction “had been appropriated, domesticated and commodified.” [12] Derrida alerts us to the importance, indeed, the
inescapability of discourse when he tells us, “There is nothing outside of the text.” [13] Coupled with Simon Critchley’s assertion that “the text deconstructs itself”, we find an important concept that has prolific
applications. [14] Deconstruction, and its various expressions in practice, is an important artifact of late modernism, and it becomes crucial, given the ubiquity of the text, that we understand the sometimes
unseen power associated with this apparatus of discourse. There are important political repercussions to the proliferation of deconstruction into arenas of power such as law. My analysis does not proceed by
admonishing deconstruction as a uniformly harmful practice. Catherine Zuckert argues that “Derrida may free his readers from the spectre of ‘totalization,’ but by virtue of the same argument, he deprives them of
the capacity to think, much less to act on their own behalf.” [15] In effect, Zuckert’s argument is that deconstruction robs us of the necessary grammar to normatively assess political life. Russell Berman goes even
further, suggesting, “deconstruction appears frighteningly naïve when it occasionally makes political claims, despite or rather because of its neo-Heideggarian extremism, which thrives on an unlimited
irresponsibility.” [16] Finally, Mark Lilla accuses Derrida of secluding deconstruction “in the eternal, messianic beyond where it cannot be reached by argument, and assumes that his ideologically sympathetic
readers won’t ask too many questions.” [17] Unlike these accounts, I do not condemn deconstruction as wholly reckless. Yet, I also differentiate my argument from those analyses that seem to promote
deconstruction as infallibly good. In an article entitled “Deconstruction is Justice”, Elisabeth Weber writes that, “questions of answering to the other’s call” would have been “unthinkable without the immense
contribution of Jacques Derrida’s writings.” [18] John McCormick, suggesting that Derrida had put himself in the position of Socrates on trial, concurs, “that the ceaseless questioning of force must be part of any
agenda that aspires to justice.” [19] In McCormick’s formulation on the questioning of force in the form of deconstruction is itself predicated on force, on the premise that it “must be.” Similarly, William Sokoloff,
while careful to recognize the subtle paradoxes that emerge from deconstruction, argues that exposing the ungrounded violence of institutions, “opens them to the possibility of new articulations grounded on less
arbitrary modes of authority. Authority is less arbitrary when it supports its own radical critique and affirms the contingent character of its foundation.” [20] That assertion, interestingly enough, attempts to prop
itself up as self-evident and conceal its own arbitrary foundations. A critical and reflexive authority might be equally violent, if not more so, than one whose foundations have the appearance of stability. In other
words, Sokoloff does not consider the possibility that institutions whose false foundations are laid bare are revealed as having no legitimate claim to authority. All that remains for such neurotic regimes might be
the most vulgar expressions of violence. At times, critics and supporters have tended toward exaggeration in either condemning deconstruction as unqualified evil, or praising it as the riddle of history solved. My
intervention in this debate proceeds from the premise that there may be circumstances in which some Platonic metaphysical categories ought to be preserved. Platonic hierarchies are heavily predicated on
reason and the use of rationality in order to promote or preserve justice. For instance, in The Laws, the Athenian Stranger counsels that if the hierarchy in which judges are considered superior to the masses
should collapse, the wrong kind of teaching will be promoted. Playwrights will have a disincentive to author edifying works, catering instead to the vulgar tastes of the masses. [21] At the core of Platonic
metaphysics is an understanding that the preservation, or dissolution, of hierarchies influences rational decision-making. Rather than become relegated as something to be refuted or overcome, I submit that its
concern for justice ought to bring Platonism into dialogue with deconstruction. [22] My aim is to offer an account of deconstruction that recognizes its potential for different kinds of normative consequences.
Deconstruction can bejustice, as it can be injustice. It follows that it can be a political chance for historical progress, provided such a thing is possible. In the following section I will describe the aim of
deconstruction and what it attempts to accomplish. Subsequently, I will provide relevant details of the Protect Act 2003 and, using Jean Baudrillard’s theories, I will elaborate the several categories of simulation
the law addresses. In the fourth section, I will argue that the Protect Act represents an example of deconstruction and more fully describe its potential for injustice. My argument is that by undermining the
Platonic metaphysical hierarchy privileging real objects over imaginary objects, the deconstructive operation accomplished by the Protect Act defeats itself, and provides a rational incentive for sexual predators to
harm actual children. II. A Performative Account of Deconstruction The term deconstruction is often synonymous with Jacques Derrida. This is understandable, given that Derrida essentially authored the term, but
also somewhat paradoxical, since the author is generally refused imperial jurisdiction over his or her writings in postmodern thought. Although deconstruction is inseparable from Derrida’s name, it would be a
curious error to give him absolute authority over its meaning. My confrontation with deconstruction proceeds from the premise that deconstruction is a discursive object. As Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe tell
us: The fact that every object is constituted as an object of discourse has nothing to do with whether there is a world external to thought, or with the realism/idealism opposition. An earthquake or the falling of a
brick is an event that certainly exists, in the sense that it occurs here and now, independently of my will. But whether their specificity as object is constructed in terms of ‘natural phenomena’ or ‘expressions of the
wrath of God’, depends upon the structuring of a discursive field. What is denied is not that such objects exist externally to thought, but the rather different assertion that they could constitute themselves as
objects outside any discursive condition of emergence. [23] The same must apply for deconstruction. We do not have extra-discursive access to the truth of deconstruction found at some Archimedean point.
There is deconstruction, which may be a certain set of operations that occur within a text, and then there is the discourse of deconstruction, the text in which our references to deconstruction are situated. We
never access the essential truth of deconstruction. Instead, discourse always arises to mediate between us and the noumenal world. For these reasons – because Derrida is not the exclusive author of the field of
deconstruction; because prior to any ultimate reality of deconstruction there is the discourse of deconstruction; and because the aim of this essay is to address the effects of deconstruction – the aim here is to
consider the ways in which deconstruction performs. For the purposes of this essay, I will avoid the futility of addressing what deconstruction is, focusing instead on what deconstruction does. I have chosen this
approach for two reasons. Firstly, attempting to delineate what deconstruction is tends to have the trappings of applying an essence, and that, it seems, is precisely what deconstruction attempts to defy.
Secondly, in order to attend to the political consequences, I would like to avoid wrangling over the multiform interpretations of Derridean prose, and will focus instead on what deconstruction has the potential to
do. “There is no being behind doing,” Nietzsche tells us. [24] “The deed,” he says, “is everything.” [25] With that in mind, I understand deconstruction to be an array of activities aimed at undermining the
hierarchies embedded within traditional Western metaphysics. These hierarchies are not naturally occurring formulations. Rather, they are produced in the course of philosophy and this production is concomitant
with the attempt to conceal the artificiality of their origins. As Rodolphe Gasche explains, “Deconstruction thus begins by taking up broached but discontinued implications – discontinued because they would have
contradicted the intentions of philosophy.”[26] Deconstruction exposes the artificial origins of metaphysical hierarchies, but not simply to leave them in place. Derrida argues that these hierarchies, represent a
form of hostile subjection. As he explains: To do justice to this necessity is to recognize that in a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-à-vis, but rather with a
violent hierarchy. One of the two terms governs the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), or has the upper hand. To deconstruct the opposition, first of all, is to overturn the hierarchy at a given moment. [27] For
example, Derrida assails the Platonic opposition between writing and speech, a hierarchy in which speech is clearly favored by Plato. In Pheaedrus, Plato describes the written word as an orphan that “trundles
about” aimlessly, which “always needs its father to help it.” [28] As Jonathan Culler notes, speech, in contrast with writing, is seen in Platonic philosophy as corresponding with the presence of the speaker and his
or her thought, and supposedly maintains a greater hold on reality. [29] Writing, by contradistinction, suffers from the absence of a speaker and the loss of proximity to the speaker’s thought. How does
deconstruction attempt to accomplish this aim of undermining metaphysical hierarchies? There is no one approach to deconstruction, which is, instead, multiple strategies. Because they rely on the texts and
discourses that are being deconstructed, it is probably fair to say that no two deconstructions are identical. However, the strategy most pertinent to this study centers on what Derrida referred to as
“supplementarity.” As Derrida explains, “the supplement is exterior, outside of the positivity to which it is super-added, alien to that which, in order to be replaced by it, must be other than it.” [30] The
supplement is an “inessential extra,” portrayed as foreign, as in the case of evil to good. [31] Evil is traditionally represented as superfluous, and existing outside of what is natural and good. But Derrida’s point is
that these supplements are crucial. Hardly inessential extras, supplements such as writing, or evil, or absence, are shown by deconstruction to be vital to their corresponding positive values – speech, good, and
presence. Evil, for example, is not a super-added foreign entity; rather, it is vital to delineating the concept of good. Writing is not a poor substitute for speech; it is a necessary condition of speech. In effect,
through re-reading the text, the deconstructionist is able to show that the subjugated term is necessary to the dominant term, rather than an extraneous supplement. The favored term depends on the
supplement. The aim of deconstruction, then, is to expose and undermine, or “overturn”, metaphysical hierarchies because one term is always subjugated by the other. With this ethos in mind, Platonic
metaphysics, replete with the signs of hierarchy, present an inviting target for the deconstructionist. Plato’s metaphysics are rich and complicated. Any attempt to comprehensively encapsulate them here would
fail. There is, however, a critical element germane to the discourse of deconstruction. In Plato’s thought there are clearly higher and lower forms of reality, and, accordingly, he offers a theory of reality that
privileges ideas over the material world and its corruptions. Reality is divided between the vulgar world of appearances, and the ethereality of the intelligible world. Ideas occupy the higher strata of the hierarchy,
where they maintain “a greater certainty and truth” than the crudeness of the visible world. [32] Situated at the penultimate stratum of reality are the Forms, which are “uncreated and indestructible”, the
intelligible essence of “‘things-in-themselves.’” [33] Beneath the Forms are their imperfect copies, or, as Plato says, “that which bears the same name as the form and resembles it but is sensible.”[34] By
contradistinction to the Forms, these copies, or visible objects, are both created and destructible. [35] They are the tangible objects ascertainable to sensory perception. At the nadir of reality, beneath even the
crude visible objects, are images. These are reflections, phantasms, or the mere “likenesses” of actual things. [36] A relevant and subtle distinction has to be made here. Visible objects include “the living creatures
about us and all the works of nature and human hands.” [37] Corporeal creatures, including human beings, are visible objects. Artifacts, such as drawings and sculptures, are also visible objects. Images, on the
other hand, are the reflections of visible objects. Therefore, while the painting of an artist, the material production generated by human hands is within the realm of visible objects, the image the painting portrays
is just that, an image. As Plato describes it, “Then what we call a likeness genuinely is in not genuinely being.” [38] A painting of a human being is a visible object – the canvas and paints reflect the effort of human
hands. The image of the human being within the paint is a mere reflection of a more real, human person. But Plato goes further in variegating truth, even within the category of images. In the dialogue between
Theaetetus and the Eleatic Stranger, it is said that those images that genuinely reflect visible objects, such as “images in water and in mirrors” bear greater truth than fictitious representations. [39] A sculpture or
painting of an actual event or person is superior to a work of art conceived purely in the imagination. Only the reviled sophists deny this and restrict their focus to “only about what comes from words.” [40] It is
against this metaphysical hierarchy that deconstruction intervenes. For Derrida in particular, Western metaphysics has privileged the concept of presence over absence despite the necessity of difference in order
for language, spoken or otherwise, to function. Absence, or spacing, is crucial and yet denied its fundamental importance by philosophy. Platonic philosophy, with its veneration of Forms, most keenly defined this
privileging of presence, in Derrida’s thought. He explains: All the concepts by which eidos or morphe could be translated and determined refer back to the theme of presence in general. Form is presence itself.
Formality is what is presented, visible, and conceivable of the thing in general. [41] Platonic metaphysics represents a hierarchy that assigns greater truth, and therefore reality to the higher strata. Plato
considered the Forms to be more real, and thus more present than the other levels of reality. But even at the lower levels of reality, visible objects maintain a greater reality than the phantasms of imagination. It is
against this kind of metaphysical hierarchy, and its privileging of presence, that deconstruction works to expose and undermine. As I will demonstrate, the supremacy of visible objects over images is precisely what
is called into question by a recent example of legal deconstruction. III. The Fugitive Apparition In 2004, prosecution began for Michael Williams, a Florida man who had been arrested and charged with pandering
child pornography over the Internet. Authorities claimed that Williams offered to distribute obscene images of children in a chat room exchange. Perhaps the most disturbing detail of the case is that the images
the defendant expressed willingness to distribute were purportedly of his own four-year old daughter. [42] Williams was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison under a new law, the Prosecutorial
Remedies and Other Tools to end the Exploitation of Children Today, also known as the Protect Act 2003. After a protracted legal battle, the Supreme Court, in United States v. Williams, upheld the validity of the
law used in the conviction of Williams. There was, however, a complication to the case of United States v. Williams. The images of his daughter did not exist. They never did exist. There simply were no such
images. Williams was arrested, prosecuted, and convicted for pandering a simulation. He pretended to possess what he did not, in fact, possess. While the Protect Act covers a wide range of activities pertaining to
the sexual exploitation of children, one particular provision was instrumental in the case. Section 504 of the Protect Act declares that child pornography includes: A visual depiction of any kind, including a drawing,
cartoon, sculpture, or painting, that – depicts a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct; and is obscene; or depicts an image that is, or appears to be, of a minor engaging in graphic bestiality, sadistic or
masochistic abuse, or sexual intercourse, including genital-genital, oral-genital, or oral-anal, whether between persons of the same or opposite sex. [43] Furthermore, in Section 503, the definition of child
pornography is expanded to include “computer generated” images or pictures “where such visual depiction is, or appears to be, of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct.” [44] Finally, an additional category
of objects are rendered illegal in Section 503, which states, “any material or purported material in a manner that reflects belief, or that is intended to cause another to believe, that material or purported material
is” child pornography. [45] Child pornography, which might generally be understood as images reflecting obscenity involving actual children, has long been illegal. The recently instituted Protect Act extends the
law to include various simulations of child pornography. Cartoons, computer generated images, and – under the provisions of Section 503 – the belief in non-existent images of child pornography are all provided
the same illegal status as depictions of actual children in pornographic acts. Furthermore, the Protect Act amends sentencing guidelines found in Title 18, United States Code so that actual and simulated child
pornography are both punishable by the same sentencing guidelines. [46] The penalties for both actual and simulated child pornography are effectively identical. The distinction between these simulations and

Baudrillard describes simulations of the late-modern epoch. He declares: Simulation is no

what I will classify as actual child pornography is best embodied in how

longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreality. The territory no
longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra – that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the
territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. [47] Put differently, a simulacrum is a copy of a thing that never existed in the first place. As Baudrillard says, “To simulate is to feign to have what
one doesn’t have.” [48] For Baudrillard, signs had been constructed in the Medieval world “to imitate nature” and then, at the onset of industrialism, to engage in the mass production of “exact replicas, infinitely
produced and reproduced by assembly-line processes and eventually automation.” [49] In late-modernism, the third “precession” of simulacra as Baudrillard refers to it, the mass production remains, but most of
the original objects copied in the industrial revolution have long vanished. In the third precession, Baudrillard says, “We are in simulation in the modern sense of the word, of which industrialization is but the final
manifestation.” [50] The simulations prohibited by the Protect Act belong to this order of simulation; they are copies of things that never existed in the first place. A painting, cartoon, sculpture, or computer
generated image of obscenities involving children are qualitatively different than a photograph or video of an actual child involved in sexual activity. A simulation, as the copy of a thing that never existed in the
first place, is not a recording of an actual child. The first of the simulations defined by the Protect Act, the use of computer generated images, is what is called ‘morphing.’ This practice involves, for example, taking
the nude image of an adult and grafting onto it the visage of a minor. Presumably, the original image of the minor was not sexually explicit, and only assumes the character of pornography after it has been grafted.
An argument that morphing involves sexualizing of an actual child is tenuous. Morphing takes two preexisting images to create an entirely new image. The actual minor was never involved, and only the entirely
new image of the minor is sexualized. Admittedly, it could be argued that if someone ever discovered that they had been the object of ‘morphing’ they might be embarrassed, humiliated, and perhaps even
traumatized. Yet a person could also be the object of morphing and never actually discover it. This is qualitatively different than the sort of injury that transpires in the production of actual child pornography, in
which it is virtually impossible to be abused and not realize it. The second simulation, cartoon drawings or animations, might never involve an actual human being beyond the imagination of the cartoonist or
animator. In a case where the cartoonist proceeds purely from inspiration, no actual child is endangered, and instead, the reasoning behind this provision of the Protect Act seems to be that the more diffuse
category of ‘children’ is what is being potentially endangered. The last of these simulations might be described best as non-existent images, or, put differently, ‘nothing’. It is important to remember that the
defendant in United States v. Williams did not actually have the material he offered to others on the Internet; he could not because they did not exist. His conviction was based on a simulation; the false claim that
he did possess them and was intent on distributing them was illegal. The law effectively makes it illegal to pander the distribution of the non-existent, the most imaginary of simulacrum. Despite siding with the
majority opinion in upholding the Protect Act, Chief Justice John Roberts voiced his concern over the provision against simulations, asking, “Let’s say a movie reviewer describes the film as just awful and containing
child pornography? Under the terms of the law, couldn’t the reviewer be prosecuted?” [51] In effect, the law makes it illegal to solicit or pander nothing so long as the nothing that was solicited or pandered was
represented as child pornography. The common denominator between these newly prohibited materials is that they do not contain authentic minors. Insofar as they can be said to be examples of child

in Baudrillard’s postmodern thought,

pornography, they are representations of representations. IV. The Rational Crisis of Simulacra In Platonic metaphysics, and perhaps even

there is a conspicuous grief over prospects for the loss of originality. Baudrillard laments, “It is all of metaphysics that is lost. No more mirror of being
and its appearances, of the real and its concept.”[52] Simulations and simulacra belong to a lower order of reality than visible things. Simulacra are less authentic than the things they purport to copy, meaning that
simulacra are less real than original objects. Hence, the cartoon drawing of a fictional child depicted in an obscene manner is less real than a photograph of an actual child. The drawing represents a likeness of a
visible thing that may have never existed, while the photograph more directly represents a visible thing. The Protect Act upsets this representation of reality, and is a consequence of deconstructive operations
within the apparatus of law. As part of his attack on Western metaphysics, Derrida contended that the Forms were the zenith of presence in Platonic thought. By contrast, images are the nadir of presence, and are
characterized instead by absence. Indeed, Derrida is correct in his assessment concerning this aspect of Platonic thought. In Timaeus, Plato writes that, “space, which is eternal and indestructible, which provides a
position for everything that comes to be, and which is apprehended without the senses by a sort of spurious reasoning and so hard to believe in.” [53] Space, or that which is absent, and images, which are the
least present kinds of reality occupy the lowest strata. They correspond to the least sophisticated knowledge, and they require the least amount of reason for comprehension. In fact, images are nothing more than
illusion, the shadows projected onto the wall of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. The shadows and likenesses appearing on the cave wall are referred to as “meaningless illusions” while the originals projecting the
shadows are described as “more real objects.” [54] While they are not the most real, the objects which are the source of the shadows possess more reality than the meaningless images on the wall. Derrida is not
wrong; Plato clearly privileges the Form over the image, and the present over the absent. Deconstruction attempts to dismantle this hierarchy and “brings low what was high.” [55] This is the effect of the Protect
Act; it is the visible symptom of deconstruction. The hierarchy between visible things and inferior likenesses are undermined because both categories are made illegal in reference to obscenity depicting children.
Simulation is given equal status to visible things. That which was lower, a cartoon, a computer-generated image, or nothing at all, is suddenly just as illegal as a photograph or video of an actual child. The effect of
this deconstruction is made most clear with reference to the pandering of nothing. If an offender attempts to procure what he or she wrongly believes is child pornography, then this is just as illegal as actually
having it. In effect, simulating, or feigning the possession of something when one really has nothing, is as illegal as having something. Presence and absence are given the same status. Of course a photograph or
video is also, as Walter Benjamin might teach us, a mechanical reproduction. [56] A photograph is not the immediacy of the real thing. Indeed, it should be acknowledged that photograph portraying the actual
event of child abuse is equivalent to a cartoon sketching of actual child abuse. Both are connected to an actual reprehensible event. But this is not the extent of what the Protect Act covers. Instead, the Protect Act
equates the photographic depiction of actual child abuse with a cartoon drawing of an event that never happened, a computer-generated image of a person that never existed, or a false claim concerning the
possession of an image. Furthermore, it directly attacks the hierarchical distinction Plato draws between those superior images that genuinely reflect reality, such as mirrors and water, and inferior, purely fictive
images. The privilege previously afforded to the status of depicting real children is revoked. [57] That which was previously high, has been brought lower, or at least to the same level as simulacra. Law, Derrida
explains, “is the element of calculation.” [58] Accordingly, the confrontation with law, in those cases when the law is actually given consideration, is predicated on the logic of consequences. Laws such as the
Protect Act proceed from the assumption that there is a link between the consumption of actual child pornography and the proliferation of simulations. If deconstruction undermines the greater metaphysical
seriousness of actual child pornography over simulations, what are the possible consequences? My response is that real children are potentially endangered because the rational disincentive to produce and
distribute actual child pornography is negated when simulations are just as illegal as the genuine article. The deconstructive operation at work in the Protect Act leaves no discernible legal differentiation between
simulated and actual child pornography. The hierarchy that once distinguished between them is dismantled. Now, they are brought to an equivalent status. Both are illegal. Given that simulations such as cartoons,
computer generated images, and ‘nothing’ are now illegal, an offender no longer has a legal option, outside of total suppression, for his or her erotic pursuits. Considering the inefficacy of harsh punishments in
eliminating incidents of child exploitation and abuse, the success of total suppression as a strategy, which seems to be the aim of the Protect Act, is highly improbable. Of course my argument presumes that the
erotic focus of an offender is diffuse. It presumes that an offender is not specifically interested in cartoon depictions of child pornography. In the case of that kind of subject, my argument is not applicable. But in a
case where an offender might have chosen simulations over actual child pornography because the first category was formerly legal, the Protect Act creates a disincentive to choose the simulation. If both
categories are merged into one by virtue of criminalization, and the offender is faced with the possibility of prison for both, then the risk may as well be taken in the interest for the more authentic article, actual
child pornography. [59] Presuming the category of simulations had been legally safe to a pedophile before the Protect Act, in the wake of the law, that category is now just as illegal as actual child pornography.
While actual duration of incarceration may vary, the result, in the case of actual child pornography and simulations still results in imprisonment, which is often a precarious and dangerous environment for sex
offenders. The deconstruction that occurs at the site of the law does not necessarily correspond to deconstruction in the erotic drives of a pedophile. Just because the law elevates simulations to the same status
of actual child pornography, does not mean that the offender has performed a similar discursive operation. Instead, given the formidable penalties now involved with both actual and simulated child pornography,
the market for simulations may decrease and the market for actual child pornography could conceivably increase. Presuming that some percentage of the population suppressed the desire for actual child
pornography, simulations, for this group, became a legal outlet. Without that legal outlet, the incentive to suppress the desire for actual child pornography is threatened. This presumption is hardly foreign to the
logic of the Protect Act. It explicitly complains that the production of simulations has been a strategy adopted by traffickers and consumers of child pornography to avoid prosecution. [60] The government
response is understandable, but dangerous. Posing the same punitive risk for soliciting actual child pornography or simulations, the Protect Act reduces the legal disincentive to exploit real children. This instance
of deconstruction potentially endangers real children at the expense of safeguarding simulations. The question that ought to confront us is exactly what justice is brought about by the deconstructive operation
represented by the Protect Act. Real children are exploited by actual child pornography. The primary object exploited by cartoons, computer generated images, and empty promises of pandering, is the rather
abstract category of childhood or children. The displacement of traditional metaphysics found in Section 504 of the Protect Act only seems to protect a formal idea of children rather than any real child. Despite
Derrida’s efforts against the presence of Form, and the corresponding valorization of reason it earns in Platonic thought, this event of deconstruction provides a rational incentive for a pedophile to endanger real
children. In this case, deconstruction hardly seems like justice. V. Concluding Remarks: The Labors of Injustice Derrida was right to point out the deconstructibility of law. Yet law, inasmuch as it can represent a
rereading of metaphysical text, can also be an expression of deconstruction. This does not mean that the law is undeconstructible, but it does mean that something undeconstructible has expressed itself through
the law that redresses metaphysical hierarchy. In terms of the Protect Act, the law is not a consequence of justice. Rather it is the consequence of injustice. It follows that if deconstruction can also be injustice,
then injustice must also be undeconstructible. This premise should seem familiar. In The Republic of Plato, Thrasymachus violently asserts that “’just’ or ‘right’ means nothing but what is to the interest of the
stronger party.” [61] Socrates responds by pointing out that sometimes the stronger mistake what is in their own best interest. The stronger compel the weaker to carry out orders that do not serve the interest of

the strong. In effect, the strong inflict injustice upon themselves. It would be a mistake to presume that every deconstruction is an
event of justice. It presumes that injustice is the dangerous supplement, alien and external to justice that could be eradicated with the purity of deconstruction. Furthermore, it portrays the
possibility of control over written language that neither Plato nor Derrida would endorse. The deconstruction ist is not a master of hyperreality . Just as Thrasymachus’

stronger party errs in its effort to obliterate injustice, and actually succeeds in creating it inadvertently,
deconstruction, insofar as it is a part of interhuman discourse, is prone to misunderstanding, miscommunication, and the numerous other species of human fallibility. A dialectical reading suggests that what justice

is compelled to acknowledge is injustice, and not necessarily law. Justice can only emerge as a viable concept by attending to its negation. Justice and law can be in
opposition, but this conflict is not necessary. Instead, it is justice and injustice that are necessarily in conflict. Derrida is right in saying that “law is not justice”
but stops short in identifying the important corollary that law is not injustice. [62] It becomes unclear as to why law as a category ought to be

the object of unyielding deconstruction. That is to say, it is not clear why “violence without ground” deserves to be equated with injustice. A law
prohibiting rape may be violence without ground, it may be a sedimented sign of authority, but it hardly seems to deserve to be
deconstructed

make suffering inevitable.

Kellner 89 [Phil. Chair @ UCLA, 1989, “Jean Baudrillard”,
https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/Baudrillard.pdf ]
Yet does the sort of symbolic exchange which Baudrillard advocates really provide a solution to the question of death? Baudrillard’s
notion of symbolic
exchange between life and death and his ultimate embrace of nihilism (see 4.4)
is probably his most un-Nietzschean moment, the instant in which his thought radically devalues
life and focuses with a fascinated gaze on that which is most terrible — death. In a popular
French reading of Nietzsche, his ‘transvaluation of values’ demanded negation of all repressive
and life- negating values in favor of affirmation of life, joy and happiness. This ‘philosophy of
value’ valorized life over death and derived its values from phenomena which enhanced, refined
and nurtured human life. In Baudrillard, by contrast, life does not exist as an autonomous source
of value, and the body exists only as ‘the caarnality of signs,’ as a mode of display of signification. His sign
fetishism erases all materiality from the body and social life, and makes possible a fascinated aestheticized fetishism of signs as the
primary ontological reality. This
way of seeing erases suffering, disease, pain and the horror of death
from the body and social life and replaces it with the play of signs — Baudrillard’s alternative.
Politics too is reduced to a play of signs, and the ways in which different politics alleviate or
intensify human suffering disappears from the Baudrillardian universe. Consequently Baudrillard’s theory spirals into a
fascination with signs which leads him to embrace certain privileged forms of sign culture and to reject others (that is, the
theoretical signs of modernity such as meaning, truth, the social, power and so on) and to pay less and less attention to materiality
(that is, to needs, desire, suffering and so on) a trajectory will ultimately lead him to embrace nihilism (see 4.4).

Baudrillard’s theory is necessarily self-defeating – they could win every

argument and it still doesn’t justify a ballot.
Merrin 01 (William, Prof. of School of Cultural Studies, Leeds Metropolitan University, “To play with phantoms: Jean
Baudrillard and the Evil Demon of the Simulacrum” Economy and Society Volume 30 Number 1)

The power of the simulacrum, therefore, may prove to be greater than Baudrillard realized. On a
personal level this is certainly the case. In a candid 1984–5 interview he reveals that his courtship of its demon became an unlivable
experience: ‘I stopped working on simulation. I felt I was going totally nuts’ (1993a: 105). The simulacrum, however, could not be so
easily disposed of. Despite his desire to ‘cast off this yoke of simulacres and simulation’ (1993a: 184), the ‘simulacrum’ has thrived,
becoming an idea popularly and irrevocably identified with Baudrillard. It
has, appropriately, exerted its simulacral
power to appear in the popular imagination as the real philosophy of Jean Baudrillard, eclipsing his
critique, and all other aspects of his work and career. Journalistic commentary and student texts are typical here in identifying the
simulacrum as Baudrillard’s sole approved project. Thus the problem of finding Baudrillard’s flat is turned into an obvious and banal
hook by one interviewer, who takes the opportunity to enquire whether ‘Baudrillard himself . . . might be a simulacrum’: Does he
really exist? (Leith 1998: 14). More importantly for Baudrillard, however, is the simulacral efficacy of doubling – the theoretical
strategy of employing simulation which, quite naturally, has a simulacral effect. The theory of simulation Baudrillard did not believe
in has now been realized: as the Japanese interviewer makes clear, the simulacrum has become reality. Volatized in, and as, the real,
its victory is the concept’s defeA2: once it is ‘true’, the simulacrum becomes a commonplace, robbed of its capacity to arouse the
world’s denial and thus its critical force: if there is nothing beyond the simulacrum then it is not even open to question but is simply
‘our absolute banality, our everyday obscenity’ (Zurbrugg 1997: 11). Hence Baudrillard’s emphasis upon the theoretical challenge of
the simulacrum. Once realized, unless – as Baudrillard hopes – it can itself be reversed against simulation, then this critical function
is lost. Opposing Baudrillard with the simulacrum – with its success – is, therefore, the most
effective means of critique. For his work is not wrong, but too true: the simulacrum has become reality and
this is his end; the game is over. It is, therefore, in the hyperdefence of Baudrillard that we find a means of leaving him behind.
With his success, Baudrillard disappears. If we want him to survive, we must condemn him as a nihilistic
proponent of the simulacrum and oppose him with an outraged, vituperic, moral appeal to
reality, as Kellner and Norris do; thereby restoring his work to life. For, if it is only in its contradiction that it can live as a
provocation and diabolical challenge, then once it is true this ends. Kellner and Norris, therefore, may yet prove to be Baudrillard’s
greatest defenders. Baudrillard, of all people, should have anticipated his disappearance, for the simulacrum’s demonic power rests
also in its attraction for, and hold over, humanity. Aristotle, for example, recognized this, writing of this instinctive pleas- ure of
imitation in man, ‘the most imitative of living creatures’ (1997: 5), while Nietzsche also speaks of ‘the delight in simulation’ and of its
effects in ‘explod- ing as a power that pushes aside one’s so-called “character”, 􏰝 ooding it and at times extinguishing it’ (1974: para.
361). One courts this demon, therefore, at one’s own risk, as it captivates and ovearwhelms our personality. As the author of the
Psalms cautioned the makers and worshippers of idols, ‘they that make them are like unto them: so is everyone who trusteth in
them’ (Barasch 1992: 20). The efficacy of simulation and the danger of disappearance are key themes in Roger Caillois’ influential
essay on animal mimicry and the mimetic instinct – no less powerful in insects than in man (Caillois 1984). The instinct of mimesis
parallels primitive magic, Caillois says, though it is a mimetic spell which is too strong for those who cast it. For the insects it is a spell
which has ‘caught the sorcerer in his own trap’ (1984: 27) – Phylia, for example, ‘browse among them- selves, taking each other for
real leaves’ (1984: 25). So, Caillois argues, simulation absorbs the simulator, leading to their mimetic ‘assimilation to the
surroundings’ with a consequent ‘psychasthenic’ loss of distinction, personality, and also, in a thanatophilic movement, the loss of
the signs of life itself (1984: 28, 30). Simulation, therefore, 􏰜 nally overwhelms the simulator: as Caillois warns in the epigram which
opens his article, ‘Take care: when you play with phantoms, you may become one’ (1984: 17). So Baudrillard’s game has the same
If the simulacrum has been realized; if simulation is now our everyday banality, then
result.
Baudrillard is condemned to a lifeless disappearance as a sorcerer trapped by his own magical
invocation, absorbed by his own simulation. Baudrillard may not believe in the ghost of the simulacrum, but he
himself becomes this very ghost. His game with phantoms ends, as Caillois knew it would, with his own phantasmatic
transformation, with his apparitional disappearance. But this is only fitting, for in the pact with the devil it is always your soul that is
the stake.

The alternative is worse and ahistorical.

Mattson 12 (Michelle, Rhodes College German politics and culture professor, “Rebels Without Causes: Contemporary
German Authors Not in Search of Meaning”, Monatshefte, 104.2, Summer, project muse)

I shall not venture to judge whether Baudrillard’s diagnosis of postmodern society is accurate, although it
appears that many of Germany’s current writers agree with him or were influenced by postmodern theories of late 20th-century
consumerist societies. I can, however, say in conclusion that it is not helpful or productive on either an
individual or social level in imagining ways of living in today’s world. As Steven Best points out: Baudrillard’s
radical rejection of referentiality is premised upon a one-dimensional, No-Exit world of self-referring simulacra. But, however,
reified and self-referential postmodern semiotics is, signs do not simply move in their own
signifying orbit. They are historically produced and circulated and while they may not
translucently refer to some originating world, they none the less can be socio-historically
contextualized, interpreted, and critiqued.(57) In other words, human beings generate the simulacra
in specific historical contexts that are subject to interpretation and challenge. Regardless of
how pervasively the media spin our reality, real people suffer and—occasionally [End Page 259]
prosper—because of political decisions made at the local, national, and international level.
Media images may overpower us, but they shouldn’t make us lose sight of the real
ramifications of political and economic development . Many critics have suggested that Baudrillard’s chief
accomplishment was to serve as an agent provocateur. In an interview with Mike Gane, Baudrillard himself saw his method of
reflection as “provocative, reversible, [ . . . ] a way of raising things to the ‘N’th power [ . . . ] It’s
a bit like a theory-fiction”
(Poster 331). One could argue that this is precisely the function of such novels and short stories as
the ones examined here: to provoke us. But to what end? Naters, Regener, and Hermann all write very
readable literature, and they challenge us to understand the world of the insipid, self-centered, and myopic characters that they
have created. It would indeed be a disservice to the authors to imply that they do not view their own characters with critical
distance. Thus, I am not suggesting that they believe their readers should emulate the characters they have created. They have not,
however, successfully demonstrated either why we should care about them or—more importantly—what we can learn from them.
 Cap
No root cause claims.
Bakker ‘09 (Karen Bakker (professor of geography at University of British Columbia). “Commentary.” Environment and
Planning, 2009. http://www.envplan.com/epa/editorials/a4277.pdf)

With this sort of example as inspiration, one hopes that scholars of neoliberal nature would take on Castree's task. Yet one can
anticipate refusals (and this pertains directly to Castree's two final questions, about the effects of nature's neoliberalization and their
evaluation). Some will argue that `neoliberalism' is constituted of a range of diverse, locally rooted practices, thereby justifying a
sector-specific, case-study approach for which attempts at terminological systematization are of little utility. This is, as Castree notes,
A more compelling argument is that the biophysical
an evasion rather than a convincing response.
characteristics of resources and associated resource economies differ so greatly that expedience
(and analytical rigour) demands a high degree of specialization. But the most fundamental
objection (and one that Castree overlooks) is that the chain of causality in the study of
environmental impacts arising from projects of neoliberalization is so attenuated, and the
confounding variables so numerous (particularly given the multiple scales of regulation and
resource production involved), that it is almost impossible to prove that the environmental
`impacts' we might identify do indeed arise from a particular strategy identified as neoliberal.

Only by tracing the various methods through which certain bodies have been
posited through history can we understand various forms of oppression
Grainger 2008 (Andrew David, Andrew David Grainger, Doctor of Philosophy, 2008, “The
Browning of the All Blacks: Pacific Peoples, Rugby, and the Cultural Politics of Identity in New
Zealand,” 2008, http://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/1903/8202/1/umi-umd-5398.pdf)
Before I begin, I would just like to offer a few comments on the relationships between and the social construction of the body and
‘race.’ First, an enormous amount of scholarship has traced the interconnections between racism and the body, showing how the
body has been central to the construction of the concept of race. It is not my intention to revisit this literature here (see instead
Jackson, 2006). However, it is perhaps important to highlight that my readings herein take the body as socially understood, with the
body treated as a discursive text. This is in keeping with how the body in social theory has come to been seen less as biologically
given and fixed than as both culturally and historically specific. The body is no longer considered ‘natural’ or as
trans(/a)historical, but rather as “a site where regimes of discourse and power inscribe themselves, a nodal
point or nexus for relations of juridical and productive power” (Butler, 1989, p. 601). Within this broad literature, bodily
identities are viewed as “inextricable from discourse” (Oates and Durham, 2004, p. 305; see Bordo, 1993; Butler,
1990, 1993; Foucault, 1978, 1980). Through language, image, narrative structure, and other forms of
discursive practice, the body is ‘produced’ and human activity actively organized (Smart, 1983). This is not to suggest that the
body necessarily lacks ‘physicality’ (that is, an ‘organic’ dimension), that biology is separate to the social, but rather that the body
“emerges with the social” (Evers, 2006, p. 233). The body is not ontologically distinct from the process of construction, yet
“closer analysis of the way in which individuals and groups manage their bodies, either as sets of social practices or system of signs,
or the ways in which states coerce bodies and insert them into relations of power, leaves little doubt that the body is a socially
constructed phenomenon” (Booth and Nauright, 2003). Put differently, in Butler’s (1990) terms: there is an ‘outside’ to what is
constructed by discourse, but this is not an absolute ‘outside’, an ontological thereness that exceeds or counters the boundaries of
discourse; as a constitutive ‘outside’, it is that which can only be thought in relation to that discourse, at and as its most tenuous
borders. (p. 8). While we often (mis)take the body as a ‘natural’ phenomenon (or, as prior to discourse), asserting it to be culturally-
constructed also means taking it as contingent, learned, and historically malleable. The meanings or attributes the body acquires are,
according to Butler (1989, p. 601), “in fact culturally constituted and variable.” As a consequence, and though it may sound
tautological, the body can be taken as a kind of embodied history. On one level this means we can ‘read’ or
‘interpret’ the body in much the same way as any historical ‘text.’ Indeed, until recently, the bulk of research within the sociology of
the body has concerned representational issues, examining what Turner (1994, p. viii) describes as “the symbolic significance of the
body as a metaphor of social relationships.” Research in this regard has been heavily influenced by the work of Michel Foucault, who
(arguably [see, Dudrick, 2005]), shifted the focus away from bodies per se to the discourses which shape and give bodies meaning. In
his seminal essay, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault positions the physical body as a “virtual text”
(Adair, 2001, p. 453), labeling the body as an “inscribed surface of events that are traced by language and
dissolved by ideas.” In this, Foucault points toward “a body that is given form through semiotic systems and written on by
discourse” (Adair, 2001, p. 453). Foucault elsewhere points to representational aspects, variously describing bodies as “foundations
where language leaves its traces” and “the writing pad[s] of the sovereign and the law.” Whereas the body was once thought of as a
predetermined, biological fact, Foucault instead gives
call to think of and critique the body as it is invested with meaning, to
consider, in particular, the way dimensions of social difference, such as class, race and gender, are (as
Foucault puts it) ‘inscribed’ on the body. Given impetus from Foucault, the wealth of recent theorizing on the body is
devoted to this idea of the body as written on and through discourse (Schildkrout, 2004). Following Foucault there have been
multiple, varied, and often conflicting, definitions and interpretations of what ‘inscription’ and ‘body’ actually mean. Generally
though, Foucault’s suggestion that the body is “a text upon which social reality is inscribed” (Schildkrout, 2004, p. 319) is taken in a
more metaphorical than literal sense, particularly within poststructuralist scholarship (for an exception, see Fleming, 2001). In
explaining this distinction, Brush (1998, p. 28) notes how inscription as a metaphor “is not superficial (despite the fact that
[inscription] may be read on the surface of the body).” Foucault, she argues, is instead saying something stronger: that “the
constitution of the body rests in its inscription; the body becomes the text which is written upon it and from which it is
indistinguishable” (p. 22). As Grosz (1994, p. 142) explains it, the different procedures of cultural inscription “do not
simply adorn or add to a body that is basically given through biology; they help constitute the very biological
organization of the subject.” If the body is—metaphorically—a site of inscription to various degrees for various theorists,
then it is in the sense that the body “has a determinate form only by being socially inscribed” (Grosz, 1987, p. 2). These bodily
inscriptions serve their most significant purpose in placing the body within a cultural matrix. At the moment at which the
body enters culture it becomes implicated in the play of power. Certain identifiable ‘characteristics’ relate
directly to power dynamics; as Grosz (1990) puts it, “power produces the body as a determinate type, with particular features, skills,
and attributes” (p. 149). In particular, power deploys discourses on and over bodies to constitute them as
particular bodies (normal/abnormal, superior/inferior etc); or, to follow from above, bodies are inscribed in diverse, and often
contradictory, ways. Otherness therefore emerges from the positioning, interpreting, and conferring of
meaning upon bodies. So, in this case, race may appear as an attribute yet it is only when inscribed by discourse that the
body’s specific meaning is determined. Obviously, the idea of race was initially founded upon visible bodily differences, and we have
come to regard these forms of observed difference as significant. That it has long since been discovered that there is no biological
basis for distinguishing among human groups along the lines of race means that what is critical is understanding how and why these
differences have come to matter; how have these “bodily schemas”, to borrow from Fanon, become established and how are they
reproduced? What is most salient in this regard is to acknowledge that ‘race’ “cannot be abstracted from the social and political
environment within which it is defined and lived” (Johnston, 2001, p. 72). Races, as Paul Gilroy notes, are not “simply expressions
of either biological or cultural sameness. They are imagined— socially and politically constructed” (1993, p. 20). The
meanings associated with inscribed bodies “are conditioned by the particular discursive formations in operation” (Tyner, 2004, p.
113). We need, therefore, to contextualize the act of racialization, “the process through which groups come to be designated as
different, and on that basis are subjected to differential and unequal treatment” (Dei and Kempf, 2006, p. 9). Race has to be
considered as a product of the meanings attributed to physical appearance at particular points
in time. As Miles (1993) writes, The visibility of somatic characteristics is not inherent in the characteristics themselves, but arise
from a process of signification by which meaning is attributed to certain of them. In other words, visibility is socially constructed in a
wider set of structural constraints (p. 87).