1NC

1NC

T
A. Interpretation: Surveillance means mass surveillance.
Langmuir 63 (A. D. Langmuir, “The surveillance of communicable diseases of national
importance,” The New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 268, pp. 182–192, 1963.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJM196301242680405)
Surveillance, when applied to a disease, means the continued watchfulness over the distribution and
trends of incidence through the systematic collection, consolidation and evaluation of morbidity and mortality
reports and other relevant data. Intrinsic in the concept is the regular dissemination of the basic data and interpretations to all who
have contributed and to all others who need to know” [67.

Substantially is without material qualification
Black’s Law 91 (Dictionary, p. 1024)
Substantially - means essentially; without material qualification.

B. Violation: The aff curtails targeted surveillance
C. Reasons to prefer
1. Limits – They justify an infinite number of affirmatives – they allow for
thousands of different targeted mechanisms which makes it impossible for
the neg to prepare each individual target.
2. Topic Education – they foster discussions about targeted forms of
monitoring that detract us from learning about mass surveillance writ large
– kills predictable clash and core topic learning

T
A. Interpretation: Curtailing domestic surveillance necessitates elimination.
Ackerman 14 (Spencer, national security editor for Guardian US. A former senior writer for
Wired, “Failure to pass US surveillance reform bill could still curtail NSA powers,” October 3rd,
2014, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/03/usa-freedom-act-house-surveillancepowers)//ghs-VA
Two members of the US House of Representatives are warning that a failure

to pass landmark surveillance reform
will result in a far more drastic curtailment of US surveillance powers – one that will occur simply by the House
doing nothing at all. As the clock ticks down on the 113th Congress, time is running out for the USA Freedom Act, the first legislative
attempt at reining in the National Security Agency during the 9/11 era. Unless
in the brief session following November’s midterm elections, the

the Senate passes the stalled bill
NSA will keep all of its existing powers to

collect US phone records in bulk, despite support for the bill from the White House, the House of Representatives
and, formally, the NSA itself. But supporters of the Freedom Act are warning that the intelligence agencies and their congressional
allies will find the reform bill’s legislative death to be a cold comfort. On 1 June 2015, Section 215 of the Patriot Act will expire. The
loss of Section 215 will deprive the NSA of the legal pretext for its bulk domestic phone records dragnet. But it will cut deeper than
that: the Federal Bureau of Investigation will lose its controversial post-9/11 powers to obtain vast amounts of business records
relevant to terrorism or espionage investigations. Those are investigative authorities the USA Freedom Act leaves largely
untouched. Section 215’s expiration will occur through simple legislative inertia, a characteristic of the House of Representatives in
recent years. Already, the

House has voted to sharply curtail domestic dragnet surveillance, both by
ban the NSA from warrantlessly
searching through its troves of international communications for Americans’ identifying information.
passing the Freedom Act in May and voting the following month to

Legislators are warning that the next Congress, expected to be more Republican and more hostile to domestic spying, is unlikely to
reauthorise Section 215.

B. Violation: The aff is such a small reduction, not a curtailment because it
does not eliminate surveillance programs.
C. Reasons to prefer
1. Limits – They justify an infinite number of affirmatives – there are
thousands of ways the aff could tinker with the scope, target, or means of
any of the thousand surveillance programs which makes it impossible for
the neg to prepare.
2. Ground – Allows them to spike out of any disad by claiming that they’re
only a minor reduction. Forces us to rely on the worst forms of generic
argumentation.

DA
Boehner pushing a highway bill, it will pass but bipartisan support key
Pete Schroeder & Bernie Becker, 9-29-15, What bills can lame-duck Boehner move?
http://thehill.com/homenews/house/255221-all-eyes-on-lame-duck-boehner DOA: 9-29-15
At first glance, pushing through a big deal to extend highway funding could be the most plausible item on 
Boehner’s potential to­do list. As McConnell likes to put it, there’s no such thing as a Republican or Democratic 
road. Partly because of the bipartisan interest in infrastructure, there’s also reason to believe striking a major
highway deal wouldn’t be as controversial with Boehner’s conservative critics as reauthorizing the Export­
Import Bank or raising the debt limit. For starters, neither GOP leaders nor the House’s conservative upstarts were 
fans of the Senate highway bill, with three years of funding, that McConnell pushed through this summer. House 
Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R­Wis.) is currently 
 
 working to tie a major infrastructure 
package with a revamp of the U.S.’s international tax rules for business. Republicans on the committee said last
week that they’re also trying to permanently revive some expired tax provisions, commonly known as extenders, in 
such a deal. President Obama and other Democrats are against permanent extensions of the tax cuts, and McConnell 
has suggested that he thinks Ryan’s efforts aren’t really worth the time. That points to another question for Boehner:
Will he have a highway deal to advocate before leaving office at the end of October, or will Congress need another 
short­term extension? Boehner said when the Senate voted on its highway bill he was confident a longer­term 
 deal could be struck in the fall.  Now, 
 
 transportation advocates are hopin
 
 g he’s 
 
 able to seal the deal before he 
leaves Congress.

Plan will spark massive political fights – Dems and moderate Republicans
still want it, business lobbies, and Obama is perceived as flip-flopping
education debate kills bipartisanship
Ehrenfreund 15 – Max Ehrenfreund, Reporter at the Washington Post, Richard U. Light
Fellow at Yale University, 2015 (“A new bill could mark the beginning of the end of the Common
Core”, The Washington Post, January 15, Available Online at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/01/15/a-new-bill-could-mark-thebeginning-of-the-end-of-the-common-core/, accessed 7/8/15, KM)
Congress is set to rewrite the laws governing the nation's schools this year, and the Common Core might turn into a history lesson.

The Obama administration has quietly supported the national standards for students in
kindergarten through high school, developed with the support of the Gates Foundation by a group of state education
officials. Only a handful of states have refused to adopt the Core or have abandoned it, despite widespread frustration with the
standards among conservatives and educators. That could change with

legislation released Tuesday by Sen. Lamar

Alexander (R-Tenn.), the new chairman of the Senate's education committee. In a rebuke to the administration, Alexander's bill
implies that Obama's Education Department has overstepped its authority and gives states
more freedom to choose their own academic standards, among other things. "The department has become, in
effect, a national school board," Alexander said on the Senate floor Tuesday. Alexander still has to win enough
Democratic votes to break a filibuster and persuade Obama to sign the bill -- a tall order. The
business lobby supports the Common Core, along with many of the other policies that impose
sanctions on schools whose students fall short that are weakened in Alexander's bill, so many
moderate Republicans may be reluctant to support it. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Monday that any
bill must require annual testing, which is not mandatory in one of two drafts that Alexander's office released for discussion. If that is
the version that Congress passes, Obama

might not sign it.

Highway funding is key economic competitiveness
NEC ’14 [National Economic Council, AN ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF TRANSPORTATION
INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTMENT,
https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/economic_analysis_of_transportation_invest
ments.pdf]
Since the 1950s,

the Highway Trust Fund has been the primary federal source of funding for state
and local surface transportation projects. Every five to ten years, Congress authorized predictable levels of funding to states
and later local transit agencies for road, bridge, and transit projects. And over the last quarter-century, Congress has customarily taken stock on the
nation’s needs for transportation investment and has authorized multi-year funding increases of roughly 40 percent over the prior authorization to better
meet the needs of our communities and our economy. But

over the past few years, revenues that go into the Fund
haven't kept pace with the federal funding levels promised to states by Congress. As a result, the
Department of Transportation projects the Highway Trust Fund to be insolvent by the end of this summer. Soon afterwards, Congressional
authorities for the federal government to reimburse states and localities for spending on surface
transportation – including roads, highways, and transit– will expire. The President has called on Congress to
ensure the continuity of the Highway Trust Fund in the near-term, and to reauthorize transportation legislation on a long-term basis with substantially

In light of
the considerable funding uncertainty, states and localities are already pulling back from surface
transportation projects. Meanwhile, credit rating agencies are downgrading bonds 18 supported
by anticipated federal payments. 19 While complete data is not yet available, a Goldman Sachs analysis found that in previous
increased funding levels to give States, communities and businesses the certainty to invest, as many Congresses have done before.

years when Congress has balked at reauthorizing transportation funding, “uncertainty regarding federal funding has been associated with a temporary
slowdown in construction activity, and the slowdown would probably be more severe if payments were actually delayed or reduced.”20 This means that

Congress’s stalling may have already cost American jobs and slowed down projects. Appendix 1
provides a table of state specific data on the transportation system and suggests how federal funding delays might impact different states. As
suggested above, federal

spending on transportation is an important part of our national infrastructure
investment, because it traditionally provided a steady and multi-year funding source for major
capital projects – especially major road projects that link major economic centers, both regionally and nationally. 44 percent of all surface
transportation capital investment comes from federal funds and states with smaller populations tend to rely much more on federal funds. In 2011, the
latest year for which comprehensive data are available for federal, state, and local governments, the U.S. spent more than $215 billion on surface
transportation. Taken together, total spending as a share of GDP has been falling, from about 3 percent of GDP in 1962 to only 1.4 percent today.
That’s more than a 50 percent decline. And although total spending has generally been increasing in real dollar terms since the 1980s, it declined in
2010 and 2011. As

investments have declined, it has become widely recognized by government
agencies, state agencies, think tanks, stakeholders, and business groups that our infrastructure
is not keeping pace with the demands of a growing economy. Estimates of the needs for investment vary
significantly, as would be expected in any studies of such a large system. In a widely cited report, the American Society of Civil Engineers finds $125
billion per year is needed to maintain and repair our existing surface transportation system, while the National Surface Transportation Infrastructure
Financing Commission estimates $139 billion per year (in 2012 dollars). Both estimates are higher than actual capital spending in 2012, which was
$103 billion at federal, state, and local government levels. The Department of Transportation publishes an objective appraisal of the physical
conditions, operational performance, and financing mechanisms of highways, bridges, and transit systems based on both their current state and under

A strong
and efficient infrastructure network is critical to maintaining US competitiveness in a
global marketplace. However, in recent years, the United States has fallen considerably behind
other advanced countries when it comes to total transportation investment. These investment
flows show up in business leader evaluations of the United States as a place to do business. For
future investment scenarios. In the most recent Conditions and Performance (C&P) Report, DOT estimates we need $85 to $177 billion.

example, in the World Economic Forum’s latest Global Competitive Index, the US ranked 10th for 20 transportation, 18th for roads, and 19th for quality
of overall infrastructure—well below other advanced economies. We are well behind countries including Poland, Estonia, Hungary, Spain and Greece.

A collapse of economic leadership makes US unsustainable, great power
wars
Zalmay Khalilzad, February 8th, 2011, counselor at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies and president of Khalilzad Associates, “The Economy and National Security,”
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/259024/economy-and-national-security-zalmaykhalilzad?pg=3

Today, economic

and fiscal trends pose the most severe long-term threat to the United States’
position as global leader. While the United States suffers from fiscal imbalances and low economic growth, the
economies of rival powers are developing rapidly. The continuation of these two trends could lead to
a shift from American primacy toward a multi-polar global system, leading in turn to increased
geopolitical rivalry and even war among the great powers. The current recession is the result of a deep financial
crisis, not a mere fluctuation in the business cycle. Recovery is likely to be protracted. The crisis was preceded by the buildup over
two decades of enormous amounts of debt throughout the U.S. economy — ultimately totaling almost 350 percent of GDP — and
the development of credit-fueled asset bubbles, particularly in the housing sector. When the bubbles burst, huge amounts of wealth
were destroyed, and unemployment rose to over 10 percent. The decline of tax revenues and massive countercyclical spending put
the U.S. government on an unsustainable fiscal path. Publicly held national debt rose from 38 to over 60 percent of GDP in three
years. Advertisement Without

faster economic growth and actions to reduce deficits, publicly held national
debt is projected to reach dangerous proportions. If interest rates were to rise significantly, annual
interest payments — which already are larger than the defense budget — would crowd out other
spending or require substantial tax increases that would undercut economic growth. Even worse, if
unanticipated events trigger what economists call a “sudden stop” in credit markets for U.S. debt, the
United States would be unable to roll over its outstanding obligations, precipitating a sovereign-debt crisis
that would almost certainly compel a radical retrenchment of the United States internationally. Such
scenarios would reshape the international order. It was the economic devastation of Britain and
France during World War II, as well as the rise of other powers, that led both countries to relinquish their
empires. In the late 1960s, British leaders concluded that they lacked the economic capacity to maintain a presence “east of
Suez.” Soviet economic weakness, which crystallized under Gorbachev, contributed to their decisions to
withdraw from Afghanistan, abandon Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, and allow the Soviet Union to
fragment. If the U.S. debt problem goes critical, the United States would be compelled to
retrench, reducing its military spending and shedding international commitments. We face this domestic challenge while other
major powers are experiencing rapid economic growth. Even though countries such as China, India, and
Brazil have profound political, social, demographic, and economic problems, their economies are growing faster than ours,
and this could alter the global distribution of power. These trends could in the long term produce a
multi-polar world. If U.S. policymakers fail to act and other powers continue to grow, it is not a
question of whether but when a new international order will emerge. The closing of the gap
between the United States and its rivals could intensify geopolitical competition among major
powers, increase incentives for local powers to play major powers against one another, and
undercut our will to preclude or respond to international crises because of the higher risk of
escalation. The stakes are high. In modern history, the longest period of peace among the great
powers has been the era of U.S. leadership. By contrast, multi-polar systems have been unstable,
with their competitive dynamics resulting in frequent crises and major wars among the great powers.
Failures of multi-polar international systems produced both world wars. American retrenchment could
have devastating consequences. Without an American security blanket, regional powers could
rearm in an attempt to balance against emerging threats. Under this scenario, there would be a
heightened possibility of arms races, miscalculation, or other crises spiraling into all-out conflict.
Alternatively, in seeking to accommodate the stronger powers, weaker powers may shift their geopolitical posture away from the
United States. Either way, hostile

states would be emboldened to make aggressive moves in their
regions. As rival powers rise, Asia in particular is likely to emerge as a zone of great-power competition.
Beijing’s economic rise has enabled a dramatic military buildup focused on acquisitions of naval, cruise, and ballistic missiles, longrange stealth aircraft, and anti-satellite capabilities. China’s strategic modernization

is aimed, ultimately, at denying
the United States access to the seas around China. Even as cooperative economic ties in the region have grown,
China’s expansive territorial claims — and provocative statements and actions following crises in Korea and incidents
at sea — have roiled its relations with South Korea, Japan, India, and Southeast Asian states. Still,
the United States is the most significant barrier facing Chinese hegemony and aggression.
Advertisement Given the risks, the United States must focus on restoring its economic and fiscal

condition while checking and managing the rise of potential adversarial regional powers such as China.
While we face significant challenges, the U.S. economy still accounts for over 20 percent of the world’s
GDP. American institutions — particularly those providing enforceable rule of law — set it apart from all the
rising powers. Social cohesion underwrites political stability. U.S. demographic trends are healthier than those of any other
developed country. A culture of innovation, excellent institutions of higher education, and a vital sector
of small and medium-sized enterprises propel the U.S. economy in ways difficult to quantify.
Historically, Americans have responded pragmatically, and sometimes through trial and error, to work our way through the kind of
crisis that we face today. The policy question is how to enhance economic growth and employment while cutting discretionary
spending in the near term and curbing the growth of entitlement spending in the out years. Republican members of Congress have
outlined a plan. Several think tanks and commissions, including President Obama’s debt commission, have done so as well. Some
consensus exists on measures to pare back the recent increases in domestic spending, restrain future growth in defense spending,
and reform the tax code (by reducing tax expenditures while lowering individual and corporate rates). These are promising options.

The key remaining question is whether the president and leaders of both parties on Capitol Hill have
the will to act and the skill to fashion bipartisan solutions. Whether we take the needed actions is a choice,
however difficult it might be. It is clearly within our capacity to put our economy on a better trajectory. In
garnering political support for cutbacks, the president and members of Congress should point
not only to the domestic consequences of inaction — but also to the geopolitical implications.

CP
Counterplan Text: All 50 states should enter in a binding agreement to
decide individual state decisions over education.
Federal Standards on Education lower the bar – states Solve better
Lewin and Horn 15 (Tamar, Heather, Writiers for the
wirehttp://www.thewire.com/politics/2010/07/should-states-let-the-federal-government-seteducation-standards-for-schools/23660/, Should States Let the Federal Government Set
Education Standards for Schools?)
National Standards: Lowering the Bar The Boston Herald editorial board is outraged at
Massachusetts's predicted capitulation to the national standards, pointing out that the "three
sets of reviewers" claiming the standards were on par with the state's current ones were "hardly
independent." In fact, the review by Sandra Stotsky, formerly on the state's Board of Elementary
and Secondary Education and another participant in the Times Room for Debate discussion,
found that the national standards were below those in Massachusetts. "Do we really want
literature to be only 50 percent of assigned high school reading?" ask Herald editors. "Do we
really want to wait until fourth grade to have students sound out multi-syllable words? No, we
don't."

CP
Counter plan Text: The United States Federal Government should rename
FERPA and apply a due process basis for the Educational Rights and
Privacy Act’s regulation of domestic surveillance.
The discourse of the so called ‘nuclear family’ reinforces the dominant
family structure.
Weber, 01 (‘Understanding Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality; A Conceptual Framework’. Boston: McGraw Hill. LRP
Families are institutions where the ideas that bolster and justify the dominant
power structure are reinforced daily in an intimate setting . Conserva¬tive politicians and
political interest groups in the 1990s, for example, used the term "family values" to refer
to the political values that serve the interests of nu¬clear, heterosexual, White, middleand upper-class, Christian families—that is, those values that serve to reinforce the
dominant power structure. Political. Families are institutions where the public authority and
power of middle- and upper-class White, male heterosexuals are reinforced daily in a
vari¬ety of ways. When a man rapes or otherwise sexually assaults the child of a neighbor, for example, the
Ideological.

violation is typically seen as a crime and is often pur¬sued in the criminal justice system. When, however, the
same man rapes or other¬wise sexually assaults his own daughter, the rape is more often either not
chal¬lenged at all, treated as an issue for social services, or dealt with in therapy. The public power of

men (including their greater economic power) gives them power in the family, making it
especially difficult for women and children to success¬fully challenge the abuse of that
power either within the family or in the criminal justice system (cf. Herman 1992). Economic.
Families are institutions where goods and services are distributed to reinforce the
economic power of dominant groups. The family wage—a wage large enough to enable a
man to provide for his entire family—was extended at the end of the nineteenth century
to White men to lure them away from family farms and into factory work but was never
extended to men of color. It also served as a mechanism for exerting control over women by both denying
them access to wage work and by justifying lower wages for women (Hartmann 1997). Current tax laws
determining what part of income earned by individual workers will be re¬tained by the state are set by family
status. Married, heterosexual couples pay one rate, unmarried individuals pay another rate, and deductions and
tax credits accrue to parents with dependent children.

Even single words matter --- turns the case within their framework
Reeves 2005 (Richard, Lecturer – Annenberg School for Communication at the University of
Southern California “Words Matter in Politics”, The New Statesman, 1-24,
http://www.newstatesman.com/200501240022)

What's in a word? In politics, everything, argues Richard Reeves. Get the language right and you can
win arguments before they begin. US Republicans know this, but new Labour still has much to learn Words get a bad press. On both
sides of the principal divide in British politics - the one between the media and politicians - the use of language is a familiar target. Journalists accuse
politicians of spouting mere "rhetoric"; MPs on the Today programme suggest that their interlocutor is playing at "semantics". Politicians are said to be
all spin and no substance, hacks to be interested in the juiciest, rather than most apposite, quotations. Yet rhetoric and semantics are not the froth of
politics, but its most important ingredients. There can be no politics without words. And the precise meaning of words - for example, in the phrase "a
representative House of Lords" - is hardly a trivial matter. Labour - sorry, new Labour - is all too aware of the significance of words. "Language,"
Aristotle wrote in the Politics, "serves to declare what is advantageous and what is the reverse . . . It is the peculiarity of man . . . that he alone possesses
a perception of good and evil, of the just and unjust." In other words, what makes a political community ("a city", as Aristotle called it) is the shared
concepts of good and evil, right and wrong - and only through language can this sharing take place. This insight is as valuable in the modern world as in
antiquity. Those who worry about a United States of Europe can stop fretting: the absence of a common language prevents a commonly articulated
vision of Europe. The gap extends even to musical pitch. The note "A" is different in France, Germany and Britain, so musicians squabble when they
play together - a clear-cut case, surely, for EU harmonisation. By contrast, the US, which is a more diverse social, economic and cultural region than
Europe, has a sense of Americanness that depends vitally on linguistic unity. (Note that John Kerry's ability to speak French counted against him in last
year's election.) If a nation is defined, in the Cornell University professor Benedict Anderson's terms, as a shared "imagined community", the role of a

shared language in filling the imagination becomes clear. If language shapes who we are, it also helps to determine where we are going. As Norman
Fairclough, author of New Labour, New Language? says, words "do political work". Words do not simply express an already perfectly formed idea; they
often help to test, refine and develop an idea. Ideas and words are like a chicken and an egg. Labour's search for the right language is a good example of
the way language can determine political action. Early in 1996, for example, it looked as if "stakeholding" would be Labour's big idea. Popularised by
Will Hutton in his book The State We're In the previous year, it was at the heart of a speech by Tony Blair in Singapore. But, after a brief moment in the
sun, it was replaced by "rights and responsibilities" and then "the Third Way". Philip Gould, Blair's disciple and polling guru, argues that while "the
language of stakeholding has withered, the new approach underpinning it has prospered". But he underestimates the power of language. If Labour had
stuck with stakeholding, some of its policies would almost certainly have been different. In Singapore, Blair said: "It is surely time to assess how we
shift the emphasis in corporate ethos from the company being a mere vehicle for the capital market - to be traded, bought and sold as a commodity towards a vision of the company as a community of partnership in which each employee has a stake." It is not possible to square these words - a
"community . . . in which each employee has a stake" - with Labour's laissez-faire attitude in government to company law, structure and capital
financing. Another

critical intersection between language and politics is the way words "frame" an
issue in people's minds - often in ways which virtually predetermine their reaction . George Lakoff, a
US linguist and semi-hero in some Democratic circles, shows how brilliantly effective the Republicans have been at using language
frames. His latest book is entitled Don't Think of an Elephant!: and the point is, you can't. Once the word has been uttered, the
image of a big grey animal is unstoppably in your mind. The frame is in place. The Republicans understand this. Two of their most
effective framing devices are the relabelling of tax cuts as "tax relief" and the invention of the term "partial-birth abortion". The first
of these is a powerful metaphor. Once "relief" is added to tax, Lakoff points out, it becomes "an affliction. The person who takes it
away is a hero, and anyone who tries to stop him is a bad guy." The Republicans use the phrase repeatedly: some right-wing thinktanks have swear-boxes for anyone who says "tax cut". Soon the media followed suit, referring to the Republicans' "tax relief plan".
And once the Democrats were using it, the game was pretty much over. "Should we have tax relief?" is a question that contains its
own answer. Bush has similarly used the metaphor of not needing a "permission slip" to defend America - which frames the issue of
multinational talks in such a way as to suggest that anyone taking the UN seriously is clearly a schoolchild asking for teacher's sayso. (Someone in Michael Howard's office has clearly read Lakoff, because he, too, used the term recently. The trouble is that it is
American English, and no one knew what he was on about.) "Partial-birth abortion" refers to a rare procedure where the surgeon
partly delivers the baby but leaves the head in the womb while he removes the brain. But if it is so rare - 1 per cent of all abortions why all the right-wing fuss? "Because," as Lakoff notes, "it is the first step to ending all abortion. It puts out there a frame of abortion
as a horrendous procedure, when most operations ending pregnancy are nothing like this." Paul Chilton, in his Analysing Political
Discourse, calls these "ready-made moulds for the thinking of thoughts". So far British politicians - along with most US Democrats are amateurs at this stuff. Yet perhaps the best reframing in recent UK politics was by the left, in the successful rebadging of the Tory
community charge as a poll tax. Who could oppose a simple charge for something as lovely as a community? On the other hand, who
could support a tax on such a fundamental democratic right as the vote? When Conservative ministers started to slip up and refer to
"the poll tax" in media interviews, you knew the fight was over. Framing

is going on all the time, whether

consciously or not. Even apparently banal terms such as "welfare-dependent", "yobs" and (the current favourite)
"hard-working families" carry with them a heavy load of assumptions and implications. The political right
uses the term "nanny state" very effectively, with the frame carrying associations of bossiness, dependency and childishness. Once a
Labour politician defensively says "it's not a question of the nanny state, but of . . .", the rest of the sentence is almost not worth
bothering with. The

damage has been done. The choice of even single words can matter. As Chilton points
meanings of the words kill, murder, assassinate and execute can be defined "in terms of
stored frames in which different types of actor fill the agent and the victim roles , the killing is legal or
out, the

not legal", and so on. Similarly, the question of whether a person receiving treatment in a hospital is a "patient", "client", "user" or
"customer" is a hugely important semantic one. The

chosen frame carries a range of implications for where
power lies, how doctors should interact with people and how the success of medical institutions is defined.

K
The aff’s piecemeal criticism of surveillance is a kind of enjoyment,
precisely what maintains the larger structure of state control—repealing
surveillance laws can’t change the underlying structure of enjoyment so we
should instead overconform to reveal the obscene underside of the
surveillance fantasy
KRIPS 2010 (Henry, Professor of Cultural Studies and Andrew W. Mellon all Claremont Chair of
Humanities at Claremont Graduate University; “The Politics of the Gaze: Foucault, Lacan and Žižek”,
Culture Unbound, Volume 2, 2010)
It is clear that the film theoretic account of Foucault that Copjec uses, misrepresents Foucault’s concept of the panoptic gaze, and
that this misrepresentation, in turn, is responsible for her insistence upon a gap between the Foucauldian and Lacanian concepts of
the gaze. By correctly representing Foucault, I have closed this gap. A fortiori I have changed the exclusively conservative political
valence that, in virtue of its function as a disciplinary tool that supports the status quo, has come to be associated with the
panopticon. In particular, I allow that, like the Lacanian gaze, and depending on context, the Foucauldian gaze may have either
disruptive, Dionysian effects or conservative, Apollonian effects.5 Foucault’s

“practices of freedom” are one way of

thinking the possibility of disruptive effects. Rather than pursuing this line of thought at an abstract level, however, I
turn finally to Slavoj Žižek’s work, in particular his concept of overconformity, in order to show that, by reconceiving
the panoptic gaze along the lines that I have suggested, new political possibilities arise for opposing
modern regimes of surveillance.
Central to Žižek’s account of the modern state is the concept of “an obscene underside of the law ”, namely
widespread practices – petty tax evasion, speeding, walking on the grass, etc – which, although strictly speaking
illicit, are unofficially tolerated. This network of practices is sustained thanks to what Žižek calls an “ideological
phantasy” that keeps them an “open secret” – everyone knows about and participates in them in private, but no
one mentions them, let alone publicly flaunts participating in them. Such practices constitute points of failure of the law in so far as they
fall in an indeterminate zone in relation to legal categories: on the one hand, in so far as they are tolerated they are not straightforwardly illegal, but, on

rather
than undermining the law, the obscene underside of the law sustains it – the law is tol-erated
because of the little secret pleasures that people derive from its obscene underside. In Lacanian terms,
we may say that the obscene underside of the law is the set of necessary but repressed points of failure of
the legal system – in short, it is the symptom of the legal system. In particular, in the context of a legal state apparatus
that is held in place by a panoptic system of surveillance, the obscene underside of the law is a
liminal zone of high anxiety that, like the Emperor’s body under his new clothes, is obscenely
visible to each of his subjects in the privacy of their own visual field, yet must be shrouded in a
cloak of invisibility in the public realm. This is the site of the gaze. How are we to oppose such a
system, which seemingly coexists with, indeed depends upon its own systematic transgression? According to
Žižek, not by acts of resistance, since the system is readily able to accommodate, indeed depends
upon such acts.6
the other hand, neither are they legal; and as such, constitute a fundamental illegality at the heart of the legal system. Žižek’s point is that,

Instead, Žižek suggests opposition through acts of overconformity, which, rather than protesting let alone
breaking the law, insist upon it to the letter, even when ideological “common sense” suggests
otherwise. In particular, this means a refusal to turn a “blind eye” from manifestations of law’s
obscene underside. As Žižek puts it: “Sometimes, at least – the truly subversive thing is not to disregard
the explicit letter of Law on behalf of the underlying fantasies, but to stick to this letter against the fantasy
which sustains it….Is not an exemplary case of such subversion-through-identification provided by Jaroslav Hǎsek’s The
Good Soldier Schweik, the novel whose hero wreaks total havoc by simply executing the orders of his superiors in an overzealous
and all-too-literal way (Žižek 1997: 30, 22, 31).

What constitutes such strategies of overconformity in the context of a modern panoptic regime
of surveillance? Answer: openly/publicly sticking to the letter of the law by refusing the cloak of
invisibility that shrouds the law’s points of failure; in other words, by refusing to indulge what Žižek
calls “the ideological fantasy ”, orchestrating a direct encounter with the objet a qua gaze. To put it in
Žižek’s terms, it is a matter of “actively endorsing the passive confrontation with the objet a, bypassing
the intermediate role of the screen of fantasy” (Žižek 1997: 31). To be specific, it is matter of not merely saying but
also acting out publicly what everyone knows in private but dares not say: not merely
announcing in public that the Emperor is naked, but arresting him for indecent exposure. By
Lacanianizing Foucault, as I have done here, we are able to understand the logic behind such heterodox strategies for opposing
modern regimes of surveillance.

The aff’s political project is impossible—the plan stands in for a future
world without surveillance, but there is always some obstacle to our
political visions which will be met with violence and ultimately risks
extinction—examining the structure of desire and enjoyment rather than
projecting better political worlds is the only means of channeling the death
drive away from catastrophe
McGowan 2013 --- Associate Professor at the University of Vermont (Todd, Enjoying What We Don’t
Have, Project Muse)//trepka
There is no path leading from the death drive to utopia. The

death drive undermines every attempt to construct
a utopia; it is the enemy of the good society. It is thus not surprising that political thought from Plato onward has largely ignored
this psychic force of repetition and negation. But this does not mean that psychoanalytic thought concerning the death drive has only
a negative value for political theorizing. It

is possible to conceive of a positive politics of the death drive . The
previous chapters have attempted to lay out the political implications of the death drive, and, on this basis, we can sketch
what a society founded on a recognition of the death drive might look like . Such a recognition would not
involve a radical transformation of society: in one sense, it would leave everything as it is. In contemporary social
arrangements, the death drive subverts progress with repetition and leads to the widespread
sacrifice of self-interest for the enjoyment of the sacrifice itself . This structure is impervious to change and to
all attempts at amelioration. But in another sense, the recognition of the death drive would change everything.
Recognizing the centrality of the death drive would not eliminate the proclivity to sacrifice for
the sake of enjoyment, but it would change our relationship to this sacrifice. Rather than being
done for the sake of an ultimate enjoyment to be achieved in the future, it would be done for
its own sake. The fundamental problem with the effort to escape the death drive and pursue the good is that it leaves us
unable to locate where our enjoyment lies. By positing a future where we will attain the ultimate enjoyment (either through the
purchase of the perfect commodity or through a transcendent romantic union or through the attainment of some heavenly paradise),
we replace the partial enjoyment of the death drive with the image of a complete enjoyment to come. There is no question of fully
enjoying our submission to the death drive. We will always remain alienated from our mode of enjoying. As Adrian Johnston rightly

we
can transform our relationship to the impediments that block the full realization of our drive. We
can see the impediments as the internal product of the death drive rather than as an external limit. The enjoyment that the
death drive provides, in contrast to the form of enjoyment proffered by capitalism, religion, and utopian
politics, is at once infinite and limited. This oxymoronic form of enjoyment operates in the way that the concept does
in Hegel’s Logic. The concept attains its infinitude not through endless progress toward a point that
always remains beyond and out of reach but through including the beyond as a beyond
within itself. As Hegel puts it, “The universality of the concept is the achieved beyond, whereas that bad infinity remains
afflicted with a beyond which is unattainable but remains a mere progression to infinity.”2 That is to say, the concept
transforms an external limit into an internal one and thereby becomes both infinite and limited .
The infinitude of the concept is nothing but the concept’s own self-limitation. The enjoyment
that the death drive produces also achieves its infinitude through self-limitation. It revolves around a
points out, “Transgressively ‘overcoming’ the impediments of the drives doesn’t enable one to simply enjoy enjoyment.”1 But

lost object that exists only insofar as it is lost, and it relates to this object as the vehicle for the infinite unfurling of its movement.

The lost object operates as the self-limitation of the death drive through which the drive
produces an infinite enjoyment. Rather than acting as a mark of the drive’s finitude, the limitation that the lost object
introduces provides access to infinity. A society founded on a recognition of the death drive would be one that
viewed its limitations as the source of its infinite enjoyment rather than an obstacle to that
enjoyment. To take the clearest and most traumatic example in recent history, the recognition of the death drive in
1930s Germany would have conceived the figure of the Jew not as the barrier to the ultimate
enjoyment that must therefore be eliminated but as the internal limit through which
German society attained its enjoyment. As numerous theorists have said, the appeal of Nazism lay in its
ability to mobilize the enjoyment of the average German through pointing out a threat to that
enjoyment. The average German under Nazism could enjoy the figure of the Jew as it appeared
in the form of an obstacle, but it is possible to recognize the obstacle not as an external limit but
as an internal one. In this way, the figure of the Jew would become merely a figure for the
average German rather than a position embodied by actual Jews. Closer to home, one would
recognize the terrorist as a figure representing the internal limit of global capitalist society . Far
from serving as an obstacle to the ultimate enjoyment in that society, the terrorist provides a barrier where none
otherwise exists and thereby serves as the vehicle through which capitalist society attains its
enjoyment. The absence of explicit limitations within contemporary global capitalism necessitates such a figure: if
terrorists did not exist, global capitalist society would have to invent them. But recognizing the
terrorist as the internal limit of global capitalist society would mean the end of terrorism. This
recognition would transform the global landscape and deprive would-be terrorists of the
libidinal space within which to act. Though some people may continue to blow up buildings, they would cease to be
terrorists in the way that we now understand the term. A self-limiting society would still have real batt les to fight. There
would remain a need for this society to defend itself against external threats and against the cruelty of the natural universe. Perhaps
it would require nuclear weapons in space to defend against comets or meteors that would threaten to wipe out human life on the
planet. But it would

cease positing the ultimate enjoyment in vanquishing an external threat or
surpassing a natural limit. The external limit would no longer stand in for a repressed
internal one. Such a society would instead enjoy its own internal limitations and merely
address external limits as they came up. Psychoanalytic theory never preaches, and it cannot help us to
construct a better society. But it can help us to subtract the illusion of the good from our own society.
By depriving us of this illusion, it has the ability to transform our thinking about politics. With the
assistance of psychoanalytic thought, we might reconceive politics in a direction completely opposed to that articulated by Aristotle,
to whichZizalluded in the introduction. In the Politics, Aristotle asserts: “Every state is a community of some kind, and every
community is established with a view to some good; for everyone always acts in order to obtain that which they think good. But, if all
communities aim at some good, the state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims at
good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good.”3 Though later political thinkers have obviously departed from
Aristotle concerning the question of the content of the good society, few have thought of politics in terms opposed to the good. This
is what psychoanalytic thought introduces. If

we act on the basis of enjoyment rather than the good, this
does not mean that we can simply construct a society that privileges enjoyment in an overt way.
An open society with no restrictions on sexual activity, drug use, food consumption, or play in general would not be a more enjoyable
one than our own. That is the sure path to impoverishing our ability to enjoy, as the aftermath of the 1960s has made painfully clear.

One must arrive at enjoyment indirectly. A society centered around the death drive would not be a better society,
nor would it entail less suffering. Rather than continually sacrificing for the sake of the good, we would
sacrifice the good for the sake of enjoyment. A society centered around the death drive would
allow us to recognize that we enjoy the lost object only insofar as it remains lost.

The Alternative is to embrace Lacanian politics.
Lacanian politics are a genuine political alternative. If it is impossible to
fully represent the real, then we have no choice but to institutionalize the
Lack or design politics around doubt and uncertainty. This will result in
more radically democratic politics.
Stavrakakis, 99 (Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex,
pages p 96-98).

According to my reading, Bellamy, Butler and Lane are questioning the value of recognising the effects and the structural causality
of the real in society; instead of the political they prioritise politics, in fact traditional fantasmatic politics. This seems to be the kernel
of their argument: Even

if this move is possible—encircling the unavoidable political modality of the
real—is it really desirable, is it ethically and politically satisfactory? The fear behind all
these statements is common; it is that the stress on the political qua encounter with the
real precludes the possibility of presenting a more or less stabl e (present or future) ground for
ethics and democracy, that it undermines their universal character and the possibility of
any final reconciliation at either the subjective or the social level . Frosh is summarising
this fear à propos of the issue of human rights: ‘if humanism is a fraud [as Lacan insists] and there is no
fundamental human entity that is to be valued in each person [an essence of the psyche maybe?], one is left with no way of
defending the “basic rights” of the individual’ (Frosh, 1987:137). In the two final chapters of this book I shall argue that the reason

the ethics of the real
entails a recognition of the irreducibility of the real and an attempt to institutionalise
social lack. Thus it might be possible to achieve an ethically and politically satisfactory
institution of the social field beyond the fantasy of closure which has proved so
problematic, if not catastrophic. In other words, the best way to organise the social might be
one which recognises the ultimate impossibility around which it is always structured . What
behind all these fears is the continuing hegemony of an ethics of harmony. Against such a position

could be some of the parameters of this new organisation of the social in our late modern terrain? Ulrich Beck’s theory seems to be

contemporary societies are faced with the
return of uncertainty, a return of the repressed without doubt, and the inability of mastering the totality of the
real. We are forced thus to recognise the ambiguity of our experience and to articulate
an auto-critical position towards our ability to master the real. It is now revealed that although
repressing doubt and uncertainty can provide a temporary safety of meaning, it is
nevertheless a dangerous strategy, a strategy that depends on a fantasmatic illusion.
This realisation, contrary to any nihilistic reaction, is nothing but the starting point for a
new form of society which is emerging around us, together of course with the reactionary attempts to reinstate an
relevant in this respect. According to our reading of Beck’s schema,

ageing modernity: 96 ENCIRCLING THE POLITICAL Perhaps the decline of the lodestars of primary Enlightenment, the individual,
identity, truth, reality, science, technology, and so on, is the prerequisite for the start of an alternative Enlightenment, one which does

Lacanian
theory stands at the forefront of the struggle to make us change our minds about all
these grandiose fantasies? Beck argues that such an openness towards doubt can be learned from Socrates,
not fear doubt, but instead makes it the element of its life and survival. (Beck, 1997:161) Is it not striking that

Montaigne, and others; it might be possible to add Lacan to this list. In other words, doubt, which threatens our false certainties, can
become the nodal point for another modernity that will respect the right to err. Scepticism contrary to a widespread error, makes
everything possible again: questions and dialogue of course, as well as faith, science, knowledge, criticism, morality, society, only
differently...things unsuspected and incongruous, with the tolerance based and rooted in the ultimate certainty of error. (Beck,
1997:163) In that sense, what

is at stake in our current theoretico-political terrain is not the
central categories or projects of modernity per se (the idea of critique, science,
democracy, etc.), but their ontological status, their foundation. The crisis of their current

foundations, weakens their absolutist character and creates the opportunity to ground
them in much more appropriate foundations (Laclau, 1988a). Doubts liberate; they make things possible. First
of all the possibility of a new vision for society. An anti- utopian vision founded on the
principle ‘Dubio ergo sum’ (Beck, 1997:162) closer to the subversive doubtfulness of Montaigne than to the deceptive
scepticism of Descartes. Although Lacan thought that in Montaigne scepticism had not acquired the form of an ethic, he
nevertheless pointed out that Montaigne is truly the one who has centred himself, not around scepticism but around the living
moment of the aphanisis of the subject. And it is in this that he is fruitful, that he is an eternal guide, who goes beyond whatever may
be represented of the moment to be defined as a historical turning-point. (XI:223–4)

This is a standpoint which is

both critical and self-critical: there is no foundation ‘of such a scope and elasticity for a critical theory of society 97
ENCIRCLING THE POLITICAL (which would then automatically be a self-critical theory) as doubt’ (Beck, 1997:173). Doubt, the
invigorating champagne of thinking, points to a new modernity ‘more modern than the old, industrial modernity that we know. The
latter after all, is based on certainty, on repelling and suppressing doubt’ (ibid.: 173). Beck asks us to fight for ‘a modernity which is
beginning to doubt itself, which, if things go well, will make doubt the measure and architect of its self-limitation and selfmodification’ (ibid.: 163). He

asks us, to use Paul Celan’s phrase, to ‘build on inconsistencies’. This will be
a modernity instituting a new politics, a politics recognising the uncertainty of the
moment of the political. It will be a modernity recognising the constitutivity of the real in
the social. A truly political modernity (ibid.: 5). In the next two chapters I will try to show the way in which
Lacanian political theory can act as a catalyst for this change . The current crisis of
utopian politics, instead of generating pessimism, can become the starting point for a
renewal of democratic politics within a radically transformed ethical framework.

Case

Criminality
First status quo solves they just apply due process to an already passed
legislation. Circumvention DA prevents any real due process
New regulations solve the Aff- IDEA proves
Center for Parent information and resources 12
http://www.parentcenterhub.org/repository/details-dueprocess/ September 2012
Before launching into a close look at the due process hearing, it’s helpful to know that states
organize their due process systems in two different ways: one-tier, or two-tier. In a onetier system, the SEA or another state-level agency is responsible for conducting due process
hearings, and an appeal from a due process hearing decision goes directly to court. In a
two-tier due process system, the school district is responsible for conducting due process
hearings, and an appeal from a due process hearing is to a state-level review hearing
before appealing to court. There are differences in the timelines for issuing decisions and
rights of appeal for each of these systems. Some stats on tiered systems | According to the
findings of the Study of State and Local Implementation and Impact of the Individuals with
Disabilities Education Act (SLIIDEA): 57% of the nation’s school districts use a one-tiered
system (hearings held only at the state level), 43% use the two-tiered (hearings at the local
level, with right to appeal to state-level hearing officer or panel). (O’Reilly, 2003) The public
agency’s procedural safeguards notice will provide information about the type of due process
system used in the state. The notice should identify the agency that is responsible for
conducting hearings (e.g., the school district, the SEA, or another state-level agency or entity).
Back to top Organization of IDEA’s Due Process Provisions IDEA’s due process provisions
are as follows: Impartial due process hearing (§300.511); Hearing rights (§300.512);
Hearing decisions (§300.513); Finality of decision, appeal, and impartial review
(§300.514); and Timelines and convenience of hearings and reviews (§300.515). All of these
provisions are available in IDEA’s Regulations on the Due Process Hearing. Back to top
What’s a due process hearing, and what happens there? There are times when the disputing
parties have been unable or unwilling to resolve the conflict themselves, and so they proceed to
a due process hearing. There, an impartial, trained hearing officer hears the evidence and
issues a hearing decision. During a due process hearing, each party has the opportunity to
present their views in a formal legal setting, using witnesses, testimony, documents, and
legal arguments that each believes is important for the hearing officer to consider in order to
decide the issues in the hearing. Since the due process hearing is a legal proceeding, a party
will often choose to be represented by an attorney. Important point: The party requesting the
hearing can only raise the issues included in the due process complaint filed under §300.508(b),
unless the other party agrees otherwise. [§300.511(d)]

The Ethical justifications for the Aff are built on western notions of
humanity which give Institutions moral qualities. This is a false illusion
built on ideas of assimilation-Curry’13
{Tommy J; Texas A&M; In the Fiat of Dreams; Academia; accessed 8/21/15}AvP
Traditionally we have taken ethics to be, as Henry Sidgwick’s claims, "any rational procedure by which we
determine what individual human beings 'ought'—or what is right for them—or to seek to realize by
voluntary action.”i This rational procedure is however at odds with the empirical reality the ethical
deliberation must concern itself with. To argue, as is often done, that the government, its citizens, or white people

should act justly, assumes that the possibility of how they could act defines their moral disposition. If a white
person could possibly not be racist, it does not mean that the possibility of not being racist, can be taken to mean that
they are not racist. In ethical deliberations dealing with the problem of racism, it is common practice to attribute
to historically racist institutions, and individuals universal moral qualities that have yet to be demonstrated.
This abstraction from reality is what frames our ethical norms and allows us to maintain, despite history or
evidence, that racist entities will act justly given the choice. Under such complexities, the only ethical
deliberation concerning racism must be anti-ethical, or a judgment refusing to write morality onto immoral entities.
In the post-structuralist era, post-colonial thinking about racism specifically, and difference/otherness generally, has
given a peculiar ameliorative function to discourse and the performance of “other-ed” identities. In this era, the
dominant illusion is that discourse itself , an act that requires as its basis the recognition of the “other” as
“similar,” is socially transformative—not only with regard to how the white subject assimilates the similitude
of the “other-ed,” but as an actual activity gauged by the recognition by one white person or by a group of white
people in any given scenario, is uncritically accepted and encouraged as anti-racist politics.. In actuality such
discourse appeals, which necessitate—become dependent on—(white) recognition, function very much like the
racial stereotype, in that the concept of the Black body being the expression and source of experience and
phenomena (existential-phenomenological-theorization) is incarcerated by the conceptualization created the
discursive catalyst yearning to be perceived by the white thing seeing the Black. Such appeals lend
potentiality-hope-faith to the already present/demonstrated ignorance-racism-interest of the white individual, who
in large part expresses the historical tone/epistemology of their racial group’s interest. When morality is defined,
not by the empirical acts that demonstrate immorality, but the racial character of those in question, our ethics
become nothing more than the apologetics of our tyrannical epoch.

Governments must weigh consequences.
Harris, Spring 1993/1994 (Owen – editor and founder of the National Interest, Senior Fellow at
the Centre for Independent Studies, Power and Civilization, The National Interest, p. LexisNexis)
Performance is the test. Asked directly by a Western interviewer, “In principle, do you believe
in one standard of human rights and free expression?”, Lee immediately answers, “Look, it is
not a matter of principle but of practice.” This might appear to represent a simple and rather
crude pragmatism. But in its context it might also be interpreted as an appreciation of the
fundamental point made by Max Weber that, in politics, it is “the ethic of responsibility” rather
than “the ethic of absolute ends” that is appropriate. While an individual is free to treat human
rights as absolute, to be observed whatever the cost, governments must always weigh
consequences and the competing claims of other ends. So once they enter the realm of
politics, human rights have to take their place in a hierarchy of interests, including such basic
things as national security and the promotion of prosperity. Their place in that hierarchy will
vary with circumstances, but no responsible government will ever be able to put them always
at the top and treat them as inviolable and over-riding. The cost of implementing and
promoting them will always have to be considered.

Survival is a pre-requisite to evaluate all other rights.
Nye 1986 (Joseph S. – professor of government at the Kennedy School of Government at
Harvard university, former chair of the National Security Council Group on Nonproliferation of
Nuclear Weapons, Nuclear Ethics, p. 65)
The equal access approach assumes that each generation would wish to make the tradeoffs
for themselves. The current generation cannot avoid imposing some risks upon the future. As
Derek Parfit argues, the risk does not do injustice to identifiable persons, since they do not
yet exist. Later the harm may become real. Nonetheless, if the risks are kept low and values
are successfully preserved, the gamble benefits a next generation, who then make their own
decisions about risks and benefits to be passed on to further generations. Keeping risks to

the survival of the species at a low level is essential to a sense of proportionality. Survival is
not an absolute value, but it is important because it is a necessary condition for the
enjoyment of other values. The loss of political values may (or may not) be reversed with
the passage of time. The extinction of the species would be irreversible. Thus
proportionality requires that we rate survival very highly, but it does not require the absence
of all risk. Proportionality in risks is easier to judge if we think in terms of passing the future to
our children and letting them do the same for their children rather than trying to aggregate
the interests of centuries of unknown (and perhaps nonexistant) people at this time. While
the contemplation of species extinction—or what Schell calls “double death”—may reduce
the meaning of life to some people in the current generation, that is a value to be judged
against others in assessing the risks that are worth running for this generation. It is not a
cause of injustice to a future generation.

Must weigh consequences – moral absolutism is complicit in massive
injustice.
Isaac 2 (Jeffrey C., Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Dissent Magazine, 49(2), “Ends, Means,
and Politics”, Spring, Proquest)
As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught, an
unyielding concern with moral goodness undercuts political responsibility. The concern may be morally
laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that
the purity of one’s intention does not ensure the achievement of what one intends. Abjuring violence or
refusing to make common cause with morally compromised parties may seem like the right thing; but if
such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard to view them as serving any moral good beyond the clean
conscience of their supporters; (2) it fails to see that in a world of real violence and injustice, moral purity
is not simply a form of powerlessness; it is often a form of complicity in injustice. This is why, from the
standpoint of politics--as opposed to religion--pacifism is always a potentially immoral stand. In
categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent injustices with any
effect; and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended consequences as it is about intentions;
it is the effects of action, rather than the motives of action, that is most significant. Just as the alignment
with “good” may engender impotence, it is often the pursuit of “good” that generates evil. This is the lesson
of communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that one’s goals be sincere or idealistic; it is
equally important, always, to ask about the effects of pursuing these goals and to judge these effects in
pragmatic and historically contextualized ways. Moral absolutism inhibits this judgment. It alienates those
who are not true believers. It promotes arrogance. And it undermines political effectiveness.

Blackness doesn’t exist as an “identity” rather it is a structural position
created from the middle passage- Pak’12
{Yumi; philosophy prof ; "Outside Relationality: Autobiographical Deformations and the
Literary Lineage of Afro-Pessimism in 20th and 21st Century African American
Literature.”; Accessed 7/13/15}AvP
Because the four authors I examine focus intensively on untangling and retangling the nexus of race, gender, and sexuality in
autobiographical narratives, this project originally relied most heavily on the frameworks provided by queer theory and performance
studies, as the structural organization and methodology behind both disciplines offered the characteristic of being “‘inter’ – in
between… intergenric [sic], interdisciplinary, intercultural – and therefore inherently unstable” (“What is Performance Studies
Anyway?” 360). My abstract ideation of the dissertation was one which conceptualized the unloosening of the authors’ respective
texts from the ways in which they have been read in particular genres. Yet the investigative progression of my research redirected
me to question the despondency I found within Toomer, Himes, Baldwin and Jones’ novels, a despondency and sorrow that seemed
to reach beyond the individual and collective purportedly represented in these works. What does it mean, they seem to speculate,
to suffer beyond the individual, beyond the collective, and into the far reaches of paradigmatic structure? What does it mean to exist
beyond “social oppression” and veer instead into what Frank B. Wilderson, III calls “structural suffering” (Red, White & Black 36)?

Briefly, Wilderson utilizes what he calls Frantz Fanon’s splitting of “the hair[s] between social oppression and structural suffering”; in

Others may
paradigmatic slave,

other words, Wilderson refutes the possibility of analogizing blackness with any other positionality in the world.

be oppressed, indeed, may suffer experientially, but only the black, the
suffers structurally. Afro-pessimism, the theoretical means by which I attempt to answer this query, provides the

integral term and parameters with which I bind together queer theory, performance studies, and autobiography studies in order to
propose a re-examination of these authors and their texts.

elements of American history,

The structural suffering of blackness

seeps into all

culture, and life, and thus I begin my discussion with an analysis of Hortense Spillers’

To theorize
blackness is to begin with the slave ship, in a space that is in actuality no place. 7 In discussing the
transportation of human cargo across the Middle Passage, Spillers writes that this physical theft of bodies
was “a willful and violent (and unimaginable from this distance) severing of the captive body
from its motive will, its active desire” (Spillers 67). She contends here that in this mass gathering and transportation,
what becomes illuminated is not only the complete and total deracination of native from soil, but rather the evisceration
of subjectivity from blackness, the evacuation of will and desire from the body; in other words, we see that
even before the black body there is flesh, “that zero degree of social
conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography” (67).
Black flesh, which arrives in the United States to be manipulated and utilized as slave bodies, is “a
primary narrative” with its “seared, divided, ripped-apartness, riveted to the ship’s hole, fallen, or ‘escaped’
overboard” (67). These markings – “lacerations, woundings, fissures, tears, scars, openings, ruptures, lesions, rendings,
concept of an American grammar in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.”

punctures of the flesh” – are indicative of the sheer scale of the structural violence amassed against blackness, and from this
beginning Spillers culls an “American grammar” that grounds itself in the “rupture and a radically different kind of cultural
continuation,” a grammar that is the fabric of blackness in the United States (67, 68). As Wilderson observes, “ Africans

went into the ships and came out as Blacks” (Red, White & Black 38). In other words, in the same
moment they are (re)born as blacks, they are doomed to death as slaves . This rupture,
I argue, is evident in the definitions of slavery set forth by Orlando Patterson in his seminal volume, Slavery and Social Death: natal
alienation, general dishonor and openness to gratuitous violence. The captive body, which is constructed with torn flesh, is laid
bare to any and all, and it is critical to note here that Patterson, in line with Afro-pessimists, does not align slavery with labor. The

what defines him/her as such is that as a dishonored and violated object, the
master’s whims for him/her to work, or not work, can be carried out without ramifications.
slave can – and did – work, but

Rather, the slave’s powerlessness is heightened to the greatest possible capacity, wherein s/he is marked by social death and the
“permanent, violent domination” of their selves (Patterson 13). Spillers’ “radically different kind of cultural continuation” finds an
articulation of the object status of blackness in the United States, one which impugns the separation of “slave” and “black.” As Jared
Sexton and Huey Copeland inquire, “[h]ow might it feel to be… a scandal to ontology, an outrage to every marker of the human?
What, in the final analysis, does it mean to suffer?” (Sexton and Copeland 53). Blackness functions as a scandal to ontology
because, as Wilderson states, black

suffering forms the ethical backbone of civil society. He writes,
[c]hattel slavery did not simply reterritorialize the ontology of the African. It also created the Human out of
cultural disparate identities from Europe to the East… Put another way, through chattel slavery the world gave birth and
coherence to both its joys of domesticity and to its struggles of political discontent, and with these joys and struggles, the Human
was born, but

not before it murdered the Black, forging a symbiosis between the
political ontology of Humanity and the social death of Blacks. (Red, White & Black 20 – 21) Again,
the African is made black, and in this murder both ontological and physical, humanity gains its coherence. It is not my intention (nor
of other Afro-pessimists) to argue that violence has only ever been committed against black individuals and communities in the
United States, or in the world, but rather that the structural

suffering that defines blackness, the violence
has no
horizontal equivalent and, indeed, provides the logical ethos of existence for all othered
subjectivities; by this I mean that all other subjects (and I use this word quite intentionally) retain a body
and not the zero degree of flesh. As Sexton writes, “we might say of the colonized: you may lose your
enacted against blackness to maintain its positioning outside of civil society, that demarcates the black as slave,

motherland, but you will not ‘lose your mother’ (Hartman 2007)” (“The Curtain of the Sky” 14). This is precisely why Sexton offers
the succinct definition of Afro-pessimism as “a political ontology dividing the Slave from the world of the Human in a constitutive
way” (“The Social Life of Social Death” 23). Furthermore, Afro-pessimists contest the idea that the modern world is one wherein the

price of labor determines the price of being equally for all people. In this capitalistic reading of the world, we summon blacks back
into civil society by utilizing Marxism to assume “a subaltern structured by capital, not by white supremacy” (“Gramsci’s Black Marx”
1). While it is undeniable, of course, that black bodies and labor were used to aid in the economic growth of the United States, we
return again to the point that what

defines enslavement is accumulation and fungibility,
alongside natal alienation, general dishonor, and openness to gratuitous violence; the slave,
then, is not constituted as part of the class struggle. 8 While it is true “that labor power is exploited
and that the worker is alienated in it,” it is also true that “workers labor on the commodity, they are
not the commodity itself is, their labor power is” (Red, White & Black 50). The slave is, then, invisible within this
matrix, and, to a more detrimental effect, invisible within the ontology of lived subjects entirely. The slave cannot be defined as loss
– as can the postcolonial subject, the woman, or the immigrant – but can only be configured as lack, as there is no potential for
synthesis within a rubric of antagonism. Wilderson sets up the phrase “rubric of antagonism” in opposition to “rubric of conflict” to
clarify the positionality of blacks outside relationality. The former is “an irreconcilable struggle between entities, or positions, the
resolution of which is not dialectical but entails the obliteration of one of the positions,” whereas the latter is “a rubric of problems
that can be posed and conceptually solved” (Red, White & Black 5). He continues, “[i]f

a Black is the very antithesis

of a Human subject… then his or her

paradigmatic exile is not simply a function of repressive practices on the part of
institutions” (9). Integrating Hegel and Marx, and returning to Spillers, Wilderson argues that within this grammar of suffering, the
slave is not a laborer but what he calls “antiHuman, against which Humanity establishes, maintains, and renews its coherence, its
corporeal integrity” (11). In contrast to imagining the black other in opposition to whiteness, Wilderson and other Afro-pessimists
theorize blackness as being absent in the dialectic, as “anti-Human.”

Their political discourse fails to account for structural blackness.
Wilderson 10
(Frank, Red, Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms pg 35-36)

Black slavery is foundational to modern Humanism’s ontics because “freedom”
is the hub of Humanism’s infinite conceptual trajectories. But these trajectories
only appear to be infinite. They are finite in the sense that they are predicated
on the idea of freedom from... some contingency that can be named, or at
least conceptualized. The contingent rider could be freedom from patriarchy,
freedom from economic exploitation, freedom from political tyranny (for example,
taxation without representation), freedom from heteronormativity, and so on. What I
am suggesting is that first, political discourse recognizes freedom as a

structuring ontologic and then it works to disavow this recognition by
imagining freedom not through political ontology—where it rightfully began—but
through political experience (and practice); whereupon it immediately loses its
ontological foundations. Why would anyone do this? Why would anyone start off
with, quite literally, an earth-shattering ontologic and, in the process of meditating on
it and acting through it, reduce it to an earth reforming experience? Why do Humans

take such pride in self-adjustment, in diminishing, rather than intensifying, the
project of liberation (how did we get from ’68 to the present)? Because, I contend, in
allowing the notion of freedom to attain the ethical purity of its ontological
status, one would have to lose one’s Human coordinates and become Black .
Which is to say one would have to die.¶ For the Black, freedom is an
ontological, rather than experiential, question. There is no philosophically credible
way to attach an experiential, a contingent, rider onto the notion of freedom when one
considers the Black—such as freedom from gender or economic oppression, the kind of
contingent riders rightfully placed on the non-Black when thinking freedom. Rather,
the riders that one could place on Black freedom would be hyperbolic —though
no less true—and ultimately untenable: i.e., freedom from the world, freedom from
humanity, freedom from everyone (including one’s Black self). Given the reigning
episteme, what are the chances of elaborating a comprehensive, much less

translatable and communicable, political project out of the necessity of freedom as an
absolute? Gratuitous freedom has never been a trajectory of Humanist thought,

which is why the infinite trajectories of freedom that emanate from
Humanism’s hub are anything but infinite—for they have no line of flight
leading to the Slave.

i Henry Sidgwick, The Method of Ethics (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1981), 1.