1nc – Ballot K

Next is the Ballot K:

Reject the affirmative’s call for the ballot –

It is a moment of interest convergence between the Affirmative and the judge – this
rhetorical alliance with alterity is a technology of political demand that repeats the
strategic attitude of the system it seeks to overturn. The guilt solidarity of the 1AC
masks the privilege that prevents the aff project from directly changing the lives they
invoke to warrant a ballot
Chow 93 – Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities @ Brown - 1993 (Rey, Writing Diaspora:
Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies, p. 16-17)
Why are "tactics" useful at this moment? As discussions about "multiculturalism,' "interdisciplinarity," "the third world intellectual," and other
companion issues develop in the American academy and society today, and as rhetorical claims to political change and
difference are being put forth, many deep-rooted, politically reactionary forces return to haunt
us. Essentialist notions of culture and history; conservative notions of territorial and linguistic
propriety, and the "otherness” ensuing from them; unattested claims of oppression and
victimization that are used merely to guilt-trip and to control ; sexist and racist reaffirmations of sexual and racial
diversities that are made merely in the name of righteousness— all these forces create new "solidarities" whose
ideological premises remain unquestioned. These new solidarities arc often informed by a
strategic attitude which repeats what they seek to overthrow. The weight of old ideologies being reinforced over
and over again is We need to remember as intellectuals that the battles we fight are battles of words. Those
who argue the oppositional standpoint are not doing anything different from their enemies and
are most certainly not directly changing the downtrodden lives of those who seek their survival in
metropolitan and nonmetropolitan spaces alike. What academic intellectuals must confront is thus not their
"victimization" by society at large (or their victimization-in-solidarity-with-the-oppressed), but the power,
wealth, and privilege that ironically accumulate from their "oppositional" viewpoint, and the
widening gap between the professed contents of their words and the upward mobility they gain
from such words. (When Foucault said intellectuals need to struggle against becoming the object
and instrument of power, he spoke precisely to this kind of situation .) The predicament we face in the West,
where intellectual freedom shares a history with economic enterprise, is that "if a professor wishes to denounce aspects of big business, ... he
will be wise to locate in a school whose trustees are big businessmen."28 Why
should we believe in those who continue
to speak a language of alterity-as-lack while their salaries and honoraria keep rising? How do we resist the
turning-into-propriety of oppositional discourses, when the intention of such discourses has been that of displacing and disowning the proper?
How do we prevent what begin as tactics—that which is "without any base where it could
stockpile its winnings" (de Certeau, p. 37)—from turning into a solidly fenced-off field, in the military
no less than in the academic sense?
 1nc – Case
Vote neg on presumption
[1] They have no intrinsic benefit to reading the 1AC within the debate space and thus
no reason to affirm their strategy
[2] Movements don’t spill up – competition means you ally yourself with people who
vote for you and alienate those who are forced to debate you ensuring the failure of
the movement
[3] The regurgitation of knowledge from the 1ac proves that it is not a departure from
the status quo, but rather gets coopted by academia

Advocacy ought to be tied to a political end. Self-formulation alone lapses into total
individualism that demolishes collective action.
Myers ’13 (Ella; Assistant Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies at the University of Utah, 2013, “Worldly Ethics: Democratic
Politics and Care for the World”, p. 44-45) *Edited for reading clarity

Unfortunately, Connolly is inconsistent in this regard, for he also positions Foucauldian self-artistry as [is] an “essential
preliminary to,” and even the necessary “condition of,” change at the macropolitical level.104 That is, although Connolly
claims that micropolitics and political movements work “in tandem,” each producing effects on the other,105 he sometimes privileges “ action
by the self on itself” as a starting point and necessary prelude to macropolitical change. This approach
not only avoids the question of the genesis of such reflexive action and its possible harmful effects but
also indicates that collective efforts to alter social conditions actually await proper techniques of the
self. For example, in a rich discussion of criminal punishment in the United States, Connolly contends that “today the micropolitics of desire in
the domain of criminal violence has become a condition for a macropolitics that reconfigures existing relations between class, race, crime and
punishment.”106 Here and elsewhere in Connolly’s writing the sequencing
renders these activities primary and secondary
rather than mutually inspiring and reinforcing.107 It is a mistake to grant chronological primacy to
ethical self-intervention, however. How, after all, is such intervention, credited with producing salient effects at the
macropolitical level, going to get off the ground, so to speak, or assuredly move in the direction of
democratic engagement (rather than withdrawal, for example) if it is not tethered, from the beginning, to
public claims that direct attention to a specific problem, defined as publicly significant and changeable ?
How and why would an individual take up reflexive work on the desire to punish if she were not already
attuned, at least partially, to problems afflicting current criminal punishment practices? And that
attunement is fostered, crucially, by the macropolitical efforts of democratic actors who define a public matter
of concern and elicit the attention of other citizens. 108 For reflexive self- care to be democratically
significant, it must be inspired by and continually connected to larger political mobilizations. Connolly
sometimes acknowledges that the arts of the self he celebrates are not themselves the starting point of collaborative action but instead exist in
a dynamic, reciprocal relation with cooperative and antagonistic efforts to shape collective arrangements. Yet the self’s relation with itself is
also treated as a privileged site, the very source of democratic spirit and action. This tendency to prioritize the self’s reflexive
relationship over other modes of relation defines the therapeutic ethics that ultimately emerges out of Foucault’s and,
to a lesser degree, Connolly’s work. This ethics not only elides differences between caring for oneself and caring
for conditions but also celebrates the former as primary or, as Foucault says, “ontologically prior.” An ethics centered
on the self’s engagement with itself may have value, but it is not an ethics fit for democracy.
Endorse the hard work of institutional reform – their sweeping claims lead to violence
and can’t engage materiality.
Condit ’15 (Celeste; 2/4/15; Ph.D. in Rhetorical Studies from the University of Iowa, B.S. in Speech from the University of Iowa,
Distinguished Research Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Georgia, awarded author; Quarterly Journal of Speech, Vol 101.
Issue 1. “Multi-Layered Trajectories for Academic Contributions to Social Change,”)

The theoriesof social change that dominated American Communication Studies at the close of the twentieth century
echoed those of the Western humanities. These theories spurred extensive thought about the performances of individual identity
and the relationship of identity to mass media and culture, and they probably had some laudable influence on the broader culture. They are,
however, inadequate to the evolving contexts I have described. One can sum up the most widely circulating theories of
social change among “critical social theorists” of the twentieth century in the following, admittedly simplified, statement:
There is an (evil) Totality (fill in the blank with one or more: patriarchy, whites, the West, the U.S., neo-
liberalism, global capitalism) that must be overturned by a Radical Revolution. We don't know the shape of
what will come after the Revolution, but The Evil is a construction of the Totality, so anything that comes
after will be better. All you need is … (fill in the blank: Love, Courage, Violence, etc.). For an example, read Slavoj Žižek's attack
on the evil Totality (“capitalism,”5 pp. 41/49), which requires the “excess” of violence named as “courage”6 (pp. 75, 78, 79), via “a leap”7 (p.
81), to eliminate “democracy” for a yet-to-be-imagined “new collectivity” (p. 85).8 The
resilience of this social theory identifies
it as a rhetorical attractor; a predispositional symbolic set that readily transmits emotive potency. To
appropriate Kenneth Burke's terms, the bio-symbolics of human political relationships readily create a “grammar”
and “rhetoric” in the form of a unified enemy that can be imagined as defeated in a singular battle, after
which, things in “our” tribe may be harmonious. To identify this fantasy theme in this way is to suggest that it may
not merely be the product of “Western” or “capitalist” imaginations, but rather that it arises from an intersection
of the structural characteristics of language systems and the nature of human biologies (which readily adopt both tribal social
cooperation and inter-tribal competition). Because neither biology nor symbolics are deterministic systems, this fantasy theme is avoidable,
even if it is powerfully attractive. Because both biology and symbolics are material, however, specific kinds of work are necessary in order to
avoid the lure of that predisposition. This point is crucial, because it invalidates the twentieth century (idealist) approaches to social change,
which envisioned a single (violent) leap away from the social as sufficient to create and maintain better worlds. Thus, when Žižek and others
urge us to “Act” with violence to destroy the current Reality, without a vision of an alternative, on the grounds that the
links between actions and consequences are never certain , we can call his appeal both a failure of imagination
and a failure of reality. As for reality, we have dozens of revolutions as models, and the historical record indicates
quite clearly that they generally lead not to harmonious cooperation (what I call “AnarchoNiceness” to gently mock the
romanticism of Hardt and Negri) but instead to the production of totalitarian states and /or violent factional strife. A
materialist constructivist epistemology accounts for this by predicting that it is not possible for symbol-using animals to exist in a symbolic void.
All symbolic movement has a trajectory, and if you have not imagined a potentially realizable alternative for that
trajectory to take, then what people will leap into is biological predispositions—the first iteration of which is the rule of
the strongest primate. Indeed, this is what experience with revolutions has shown to be the most probable
outcome of a revolution that is merely against an Evil. The failure of imagination in such rhetorics thereby
reveals itself to be critical, so it is worth pondering sources of that failure. The rhetoric of “the kill” in social theory in the
past half century has repeatedly reduced to the leap into a void because the symbolized alternative that the context of the
twentieth century otherwise predispositionally offers is to the binary opposite of capitalism, i.e., communism. That rhetorical option ,
however, has been foreclosed by the historical discrediting of the readily imagined forms of communism (e.g., Žižek9).
The hard work to invent better alternatives is not as dramatically enticing as the story of the kill: such labor is
piecemeal, intellectually difficult, requires multi-disciplinary understandings, and perhaps requires more creativity
than the typical academic theorist can muster. In the absence of a viable alternative, the appeals to Radical
Revolution seem to have been sustained by the emotional zing of the kill, in many cases amped up by the
appeal of autonomy and manliness (Žižek uses the former term and deploys the ethos of the latter). But if one does not
provide a viable vision that offers a reasonable chance of leaving most people better off than they are now,
then Fox News has a better offering (you'll be free and you'll get rich!). A revolution posited as a void cannot
succeed as a horizon of history, other than as constant local scale violent actions, perhaps connected by shifting networks we
call “terrorists.” This analysis of the geo-political situation, of the onto-epistemological character of language,
and of the limitations of the dominant horizon of social change indicates that the focal project for progressive Left
Academics should now include the hard labor to produce alternative visions that appear materially feasible.

The aff’s shift in epistemology can’t create political change – only institutional focus
secures it.
Kitchen ’10 (Nicholas; Deputy Director of the London School of Economics IDEAS US International Affairs Program; 2010, Review of
International Studies, “Systemic pressures and domestic ideas: a neoclassical realist model of grand strategy formation,” pg. 117-143)

Fundamentally the
state is made up of individuals. Individuals construct systems, institutions and bureaucracies;
individuals lead and follow; individuals make decisions. On what basis do individuals decide which ideas to hold? The first is the
quality of the idea itself - its internal coherence, its congruence with known realities. The second key to success resides in the speaker himself -
his intellectual status, his eloquence of advocacy. Thus the power of an idea to persuade others at any one moment in history
resides both in itself, and in the power of those who hold it. The causal effect of ideas on policies has tended to be
displaced onto the political effects of individuals in IR theory, so that the persuasiveness of ideas is assumed rather than
examined, and treated as constant.77 It is however, important to recognise that some ideas are 'better' than
others, and are more likely to progress into the policymaking arena, where institutional factors may then
come into play. This is not to deny the crucial role of forces exogenous to them that push certain ideas to heart of policymaking. Whilst
the degree to which ideas generate popular support may provide them with power mediated through public opinion, ideas can take a
shortcut to policy success if they have the backing of individuals and institutions that themselves have
power. The character of these 'couriers' of ideas that may be as important, if not more so, than anything intrinsic to the idea itself.78 At
the individual level then, neoclassical realism understands that the ideas held by powerful actors within the state
matter. Whilst the intrinsic power of a particular idea makes its progress into such positions more likely, the
ideas that will impact most upon foreign policy are those held by those in decision-making positions in the state
and those who directly advise them. Thus as Mead notes, 'It matters who the President is. If Theodore Roosevelt and not Woodrow
Wilson had been President when World War I broke out, American and world history might have taken a very different turn.'79 The second
location at which ideas may impact at the unit level occurs when individuals with shared ideas coalesce into
groups, organisations, and common practices within the state to form institutions that operate in both formal
and informal sectors of the policymaking process. The formation of institutions reflects the fact that ideas that are somehow
embedded in particular structures are possessed of greater power. Institutions can act as couriers for ideas in three
ways.80 'Epistemic communities' of experts have the policy-relevant knowledge to exert influence on the positions adopted by a wide range of
actors. The extent of the influence of such groups is dependent on their ability to occupy influential positions
within bureaucracies from where they may consolidate their power, thereby institutionalising the influence of the community.81
However, their ability to infiltrate bureaucratic posts will depend - at least in part - on the receptiveness of the
existing bureaucratic order to their ideas .82 A second means by which institutions act as couriers is by the encasing of ideas in
formal rules and procedures at the creation of the institution itself. Once they have become embedded in this way, those ideas with which the
institution was founded can continue to influence policy even though the interests or ideas of their creators may have changed. Thus, 'when
institutions intervene, the impact of ideas can be prolonged for decades or even generations.'83 In both of these
ways, 'ideas acquire force when they find organizational means of expression'.84 The third way in which ideas can
impact is through the structural arrangements institutions create. These structures set up road-blocks and through- routes which determine the
ease with which ideas can gain access to the policy process. Indeed, the
structure of the institutional framework may
determine the political and administrative 'viability' of particular ideas, that is, their ability to appeal to current conditions.
Institutional structure therefore ensures that policy- makers only have access to a limited set of ideas,
whether those are percolated up to them or searched for by them.85 In this way, the ideas that form what some refer to as 'strategic culture'
may provide a reliable guide to a state's likely reaction to shifts in the structure of the international system.86 Underlying both individuals and
institutions are the ideas contained in the broader cultural context within which the state is located. Ideas that are embedded in
social norms, patterns of discourse and collective identities become accepted , 'instinctual' parts of the social world
and are experienced as part of a natural objective reality.87 In this way cultural variables subconsciously set the limits and
terms of debate for both individuals and institutions, and so have 'a profound effect on the strategic behaviour of states.'88 Mediated
through institutions and individuals who are blinded to potential alternatives, ideas embedded in national culture
therefore have the potential to explain 'why some states act contrary to the structural imperatives of the
international system.'89 The power of ideas therefore rests on 'the ability of believers in ideas to alter the costs and benefits facing
those who are in a position to promote or hinder the policies that the ideas demand.'90 In the process of foreign policy 'engineering',
organisations and the ideas they espouse or represent vie with one another for dominance and autonomy.91 Decisions
taken reflect the process of formulating the choices to be presented.92 Throughout the process of making foreign policy powerful ideas -
whether that power resides in their couriers or is internal to the ideas themselves - are prevailing over weaker ideas.

Focusing on affect provides no resource for dealing with atrocities.

Richard Sherwin 15. New York Law School. “Too Late for Thinking: The Curious Quest for
Emancipatory Potential in Meaningless Affect and Some Jurisprudential Implications.” Law, Culture and
the Humanities. October 13. 1-13.
In the history of western culture we can point to three historic moments of epistemological de-centering. The Copernican revolution taught
humanity that we do not dwell at the center of the universe. The Freudian revolution taught us that the ‘‘I’’ is a lonely island besieged on all
sides by a raging sea of irrational, unconscious forces. Then quantum theory taught us that the universe is indeterminate: subject to uncanny
chance operations. Affect
theory, perhaps as an extension of the Darwinian evolutionary account of selective
adaptation, humbles rationalist pretensions further by subordinating mind to material, bio-chemical
processes. If thinking is always an after-thought, an after-the-fact construction, then we can never
reliably account for how we’ve actually been affected by things and others in the world around us. How
oppressive never to escape the grip of contingent social constructs . How depressing, if endless
deconstruction yields only more fragmentation. Surely something must abide, some Higgs Boson-like elementary particle
that can withstand deconstruction’s powerful blows. Is there anything real enough to withstand critique? Is there any basis left to hope for
emancipation from the destabilizing mutability of human fabrication? In Brian Massumi’s view, there is. As he puts it: “The world always already
offers degrees of freedom ready for amplification.”22 This takes us to the heart of the vitalist/ liberation impulse, namely: “escape from
crystallized power structures.”23 InMassumi’s writings, affect operates as a cipher – a black box into which he can
pack his emancipatory ideal.24 (“‘Affect’ is the word I use for ‘hope.’”25) What Massumi does not and perhaps cannot, or
simply does not care to do is formulate a coherent basis for political judgment . While he at some points expresses a
preference for “caring” and “belonging,”26 he offers no basis in affect theory for why those forms of behavior are
preferable to other perhaps more intense alternatives, such as “anger” and “shock,” which he also
embraces.27 But choices must be made. As Martha Nussbaum has noted, a society that cultivates conditions of
anger and disgust, for example, is different from one that promotes empathy, dignity, and love .28 Massumi is
enamored of the anti-structural,29 the spontaneous emergent process that Deleuze called “pure
immanence.” But with affective intensity as his ultimate value30 Massumi remains trapped in a double
bind. No critical judgment is forthcoming so long as intensity may be amplified .31 Because of this
Massumi cannot coherently critique manifestly oppressive political structures (such as futurism, Nazism,
and other intensity-fueled political regimes). How could he if the masses have opted to embrace such
regimes for the intensity they provide ? Massumi’s resistance to making judgments is consistent with his
theory, which minimizes to the vanishing point the human capacity for choice . For Massumi, the very
notions of ‘‘individual will’’ and ‘‘subjective reflection’’ are a fiction. (“There is no individual outside its own trans-
individual becoming.”32) Body is always conditioning mind – presumably without our conscious awareness. In the end, “events
decide.”33 What could human freedom mean under such conditions? The upshot is plain: in Massumi’s politics of
affect, human freedom loses its capacity to signify . Choices are a fiction, and in any event no apparent
normative basis exists for affirming, much less institutionalizing a preferred set of power structures .
Affective intensity lacks structure by definition . Indeed, that is its appeal. (“Intensity is a value in itself.”34) But as Anthony
Kronman has eloquently argued, without coherent structures, the legal, political, and cultural conditions
necessary for the meaningful exercise of freedom (including political judgment) are unlikely to emerge –
and if they do, they are unlikely to be sustainable.35 The latter point is borne out by the very political events that
Massumi identifies as exemplary of his theory . If the “Arab Spring” and the “Occupy Movement”36 illustrate
anything it is the effervescence of political action based on spontaneous intensity . In the absence of adequate political
structures, this kind of political action is destined to pass with the next day’s tide . The emancipatory cri du coeur that
can be heard echoing in the work of cultural theorists like Massumi may have landed on “trans-individual” affect as the intensive Higgs Boson
wave-particle of political science. Its indeconstructability promises freedom from subjective and cultural contingency – the prison house of
“crystallized power structures.” But there
is a price to be paid. The radical devaluation of reflective consciousness
produces a species of freedom that signifies nothing. Perhaps this is what it is like to embrace a Zeitgeist of “de-
humanism.”37 In Massumi’s politics of affect we can discern the impetus for ‘‘vitalist/liberation’’ ideology. As Ben Anderson writes: “There
is always already an excess [affect] that power must work to recuperate

but is destined and doomed to miss. It is that excess that is central to the creativity of bio-political production and thus the power of naked
life.”38 Affect in this sense is “a movement of creative production” that always eludes capture. And this is what conveys a sense of its
emancipatory power.39 The intensity of affect liberates us from bondage to contingent cultural entanglement. Corporeal ontology precedes
cultural epistemology. This move away from the centrality of cognition marks the demise not only of identity politics,
but of identity itself, perhaps even of psychology.40 Simply stated, affect theorists like Massumi romanticize the
unknowable “fluid materiality of excitable networks” as a way of disrupting familiar social and cultural
hierarchies.41 In so doing, they elevate raw process over social and cultural regimentation and subjugation. It
is the neurobiological equivalent of Rousseau’s primitive origin of society , an updated version of the Romantics’
myth of enchantment. If only questions about freedom and responsibility for shared values, justice included,
could be resolved by so simple an expedient as the vitalist/liberation category shift from human agency to
‘‘trans-individual affective process.’’ Much can be learned about the various forms of political violence that affective intensity has
assumed over the course of human history. But one needn’t take the historical path to discern trouble for Massumi’s
emancipatory project. One can start with neuroscience itself .42 Theorists like Massumi play down (as they must)
a variety of obstacles that stand in the way of affective emancipation : from the constraints of evolution to
the biological programming of the amygdala itself.43 Indeed, what constitutes ‘‘fearfulness,’’ for
example, depends upon programming the amygdala based on a habituated pattern of external stimuli .44
There are other problems as well. For instance, a great deal of uncertainty surrounds the question of how communication
occurs among different levels of the mind/body complex . As Steve Pile writes, for theorists like Massumi “affect is defined
in opposition to cognition, reflexivity, consciousness and humanness.”45 Feelings, on the other hand, occupy a space between non-cognitive
affect and highly socialized emotions. Feelings in this sense are pre-cognitive (“a response to transpersonal affects”).46 Our response to affects
personalizes them. Through feelings we associate affects with the subject who experiences them. For their part, emotions reflect a shift from
pre-cognitive subjectivity to the cognitive domain of socially constructed experience.47 Emotions, in this sense, are how I interpret what I’m
feeling through language and other representational or cultural symbolic practices. Affect
theorists like Massumi insist that my
choices and perhaps even my feelings may turn out to have nothing to do with the affect my body has
already processed without my knowing it . This view preserves the purity of affective intensity by keeping
it free of subjective or social significance. If you are in the ‘‘vitalist/liberation’’ camp of affect theory along with Massumi,
affect can never be symbolized, which means it can never be cognized . Affect, in this view, is always beyond
consciousness. It’s like the dark matter that makes up the universe: we know it’s there, we just can’t say
anything about it. The problem for ‘‘vitalist/liberation’’ theorists like Massumi is that they want to eat their cake and
have it too. Affects for them are ciphers – free-ranging radicals incapable of signifying . Yet, at the same
time, many of these same theorists engage in searing critiques of those “in power” who use mass media
along with other instrumentalities of affective manipulation for purposes of enhancing social or political control.48 The difficulty
is this: If affect is being actively engineered to manipulate people’s behavior – whether in the form of habits of
consumption, political judgments, or jury verdicts – it
is incumbent upon the theorists to account for how exactly this
manipulation is being carried out. As Pile cogently notes, how are the agents of affective manipulation able to
“know the unknowable” sufficiently well to control their course and impact in society? 49 Thrift’s recourse to
metaphors such as “pipes and cables” is hardly sufficient to bear the burden of scientific explanation.
Indeed, the nomenclature that has emerged to account for the engineering of affect – ranging from “affect
flow between bodies,” “transmissions,” and “contagion” 50 – all seem to suffer from the same fundamental
lack of explanatory power. If we cannot know what affects are, it stands to reason that we cannot know
how to control their flow and impact in society.

Expenditure fails.
Ashcroft 94 – Senior Lecturer in English at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
(Bill, “Excess” in De-Scribing Empire edited by Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson, p36-39, accessed 1-7-15 //Bozzles the Bozz-Dawg Bozz Bozz)

Another mode of post-colonial excess is one I want to call ‘supplementarity’. In his book The Accursed Share (1967), Bataille proposes a theory
of excess which stems from a general economy of energy. Thus ‘ifthe demands of the life of beings (or groups) detached
from life’s immensity defines an interest to which every operation is referred , the general movement of
life is nevertheless accomplished beyond the demands of individuals’ (Bataille 1967: 74). Bataille’s economy
hinges on the need for a system to use up that excess energy which cannot be used for its growth . Thus the
unproductiveness of luxury itself; the apparently meaningless expenditure of sacrifice ; the tradition of gift giving
called ‘potlatch’ which demands the maintenance of honour by the return of a greater gift, all maintain a system’s balance by
using up surplus wealth. Within this general economy the sexual act is a pre-eminent form of non-
utilitarian expenditure of energy, war is almost essential, while death itself is the ultimate moment of
‘luxury’ in the system. Bataille summed up his general economy with the resonant statement that ‘the sexual act is in time what the
tiger is in space’ (Bataille 1967:12). If we accept at least the general proposition of this transphenomenal and trans-discursive movement of
energy, we discover something very revealing about the imperial process. Imperial
power expends its excess wealth
through war (that is, military force such as that employed in colonial expansion) to create greater wealth
which is then diffused as luxury, further military expansion and so on. Though it is a centred system, it is
never a closed system: the dissipation of the excess always increases wealth . But when we look at the colonial
world we see that the excess of ‘luxury’ is ideally exported as high culture . Culture, and the nonproductive superstructure
which it supports is an extremely prodigal expenditure of surplus energy originally accumulated as wealth. As post-colonial theory has long
known, theexpenditure of surplus energy through cultural hegemony long outlasts the ‘luxury’ of war,
invasion, and annexation, and maintains the production of wealth which is always distributed
centripetally. In other words, cultural hegemony maintains the economy of wealth distribution. This process of transformation maintains
the system of imperial hegemony intact. An instance of this hegemony can be seen in the export of theory, and this of course works on its own
momentum long after the official end of imperialism. Thus, whereas surplus value creates wealth for the centre in a fairly obvious way, so the
cultural surplus works to the same end. Even when manifested in apparently subversive and heterogeneous
formations su

ch as post-structuralism (with its own ironic doctrine of the surplus of the sign ), this cultural surplus
works through language to defuse opposition and preserve the system of wealth creation. The middle term
in this startling congruence of culture and wealth is discourse itself because the idea of wealth, despite its very obvious materiality, is a
discursive formation, a production of language. Thus the general economy of imperialism is an economy of discourse .
The oppositionality of the post-colonial finds its greatest material success in the counterdiscursive. The point to be emphasized here is that
cultural hegemony is not simply an effect of economic control. As ‘luxury’, cultural formations are a part of the actual mechanism of that
control. As Stephen Slemon has argued (1989:5), this explains the contradiction (‘paradox’) which Linda Hutcheon sees in postmodern
‘subversion’ as it both inscribes and contests culturally certified codes of recognition and representation (Hutcheon 1988: x, xii). Postmodern
culture, art and theory ‘uses and abuses, installs and then subverts’ (3), the ‘conventions of discourse’ (xiii) which it sets out to challenge. When
we see postmodernism as a luxury which actually maintains the general economy of neo-colonial (or ‘late capitalist’) hegemony, we begin to
understand the contradiction of its dependence on, and independence from, that which made it possible. According to Bataille, true opposition
is best effected by the one who spurns the very system in which wealth has its meaning. This is of crucial significance to post-colonialism since,
whatever else it is, it manifests itself as opposition from the beginning of colonialism. The true luxury…of our times falls to the poverty-stricken,
that is, to the individual who lies down and scoffs. A genuine luxury requires the complete contempt for riches, the sombre indifference of the
individual who refuses work and makes his life on the one hand an infinitely ruined splendour, and on the other, a silent insult to the laborious
lie of the rich.… henceforth no one can rediscover the meaning of wealth, the explosiveness that it heralds, unless it is in the splendour of rags
and the sombre challenge of indifference. One might say, finally, that the lie destines life’s exuberance to revolt. (Bataille 1967:76–7) Post-
colonial excess is quintessentially the exuberance of life which is destined to revolt . But the most
effective revolt is the one which denies the system its power over representation . The implication of this is an
economy of discourse, and specifically, the discursive production of wealth. The irony of the individual who refuses to work, making his life ‘an
infinitely ruined splendour’ is not a consolation for the poor but a strategy for resisting the very process of representation in which the binarism
of wealth and poverty is created. The option of ‘lying down poverty stricken to scoff’ is not an invitation to accept defeat but to dismantle the
binarism itself. This ‘unproductiveness’ which denies the very system that classifies it as unproductive is indeed a ‘genuine luxury’ as Bataille
says, but paradoxically one which resists the mechanism of control. Where
postmodernism may fail because it continually
installs that which it attempts to subvert, the post-colonial may successfully resist when it simply
ignores, refuses, or sidesteps the system of representation which constitutes it as subject . Wilson Harris does
this, for instance, when he persistently refuses to be called a ‘theorist’ —he simply sidesteps that discourse into which the practice of
articulation itself can be so easily incorporated. However, such an end may also be accomplished less cataclysmically in the strategy of
appropriation (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 1989:38). This customarily describes the process of language adaptation but it also applies to theory
itself; the post-colonial subject is not only given a voice but the medium itself is changed in the process. The appropriation of that surplus
wealth represented by theory is therefore not just a cunning strategy, but one of a quite limited number of ways to recirculate the energy
stolen from the colonized world in the first place.

Sweeping psychological generalizations have no explanatory power for politics. They

represent the worst of non-falsifiable hindsight thinking.
Andrew Samuels 93. Training Analyst of the Society of Analytical Psychology, and a Science Associate
of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis. 1993. “The mirror and the hammer: depth psychology and
political transformation,” Free Associations: Psychoanalysis and Culture, Media, Groups, Politics, Vol. 3.
p. 545-593.

The paper is about the depth psychology of political processes, focusing on processes of political change. It
is a contribution to the
longstanding ambition of depth psychology to develop a form of political and cultural analysis that will, in
Freud's words, ‘understand the riddles of the world’ . It has to be admitted that there is an equally longstanding reluctance in the
non-psychological community to accept the many and varied ideas and suggestions concerning political matters that have been offered by
analysts of all persuasions. I do not believe this can all be put down to resistance. There
is something offensive above reductive
interpretations of complex socio-political problems in exclusively psychological terms . The tendency to
panpsychism on the part of some depth psychologists has led me to wonder if an adequate
methodology and ethos actually exists with which to make an engagement of depth psychology with the public sphere possible. By
‘politics’ I mean the arrangements within a culture for the organization and distribution of power,
especially economic power, and the way in which power is deployed to maintain the survival and enhance the quality of human life.
Economic and political power includes control of processes of information and representation as well as the use of physical force and
possession of vital resources such as land, food and water. On a more personal level, political power reflects the ability to choose freely
whether to act and what action to take in a given situation. ‘Politics’ refers to the interplay between the personal and public dimensions of
power. That is, there is an articulation between public, economic power and power as expressed on the personal, private level. This articulation
is demonstrated in family organization, gender and race relations, and in religious and artistic assumptions as they affect the life of individuals.
(I have also tried to be consistent in my use of the terms ‘culture’, ‘society’ and ‘collective’.)1 Here is an example of the difficulty with
psychological reductionism to which I am referring. At a conference I attended in London in 1990, a
distinguished psychoanalyst
referred to the revolutionary students in Paris in 1968 as ‘functioning as a regressive group’ . Now, for a large
group of students to be said to regress, there must be, in the speaker's mind, some sort of normative developmental starting point for them to
regress to. The social group is supposed to have a babyhood , as it were. Similarly, the speaker must have had in mind the
possibility of a healthier, progressive group process — what a more mature group of revolutionary students would have looked like. But
complex social and political phenomena do not conform to the individualistic, chronological, moralistic,
pathologizing framework that is often imported . The problem stems from treating the entire culture, or
large chunks of it, as if it were an individual or, worse, as if it were a baby. Psychoanalysts project a version of
personality development couched in judgemental terms onto a collective cultural and political process.
If we look in this manner for pathology in the culture, we will surely find it. As we are looking with a
psychological theory in mind, then, lo and behold, the theory will explain the pathology . But this is a
retrospective prophecy (to use a phrase of Freud's), twenty—twenty hindsight. In this psychoanalytic tautologizing
there is really nothing much to get excited about. Too much psychological writing on the culture, my own
included, has suffered from this kind of smug ‘correctness’ when the ‘material’ proves the theoretical
point. Of course it does! If we are interested in envy or greed, then we will find envy or greed in capitalistic organization. If we set out to
demonstrate the presence of archetypal patterns , such as projection of the shadow, in geopolitical relations, then, without a
doubt, they will seem to leap out at us . We influence what we analyse and so psychological reflection on culture and
politics needs to be muted; there is not so much ‘aha!’ as one hoped .