Agamben K

**1NC

1NC General
The 1ACs instance of state reform is the invocation of the legal regulation of
violence their existential threats are spectacularized to normalize the state
of exception. The 1AC was not objective political discourse is militarized
and distorted to justify a state of exception the resulting global civil war
causes unending warfare and extinction
McLoughlin 12 [Daniel McLoughlin is a doctoral candidate in Philosophy at the University of
New South Wales, working on the political philosophy of Giorgio Agamben. Giorgio Agamben on
Security, Government and the Crisis of Law, Griffith Law Review, Volume 21, Issue 3, 2012,
msm]
One of the decisive effects of total war, according to Junger, was the tendency to demolish the difference between war and
peace or, in Agambens terms, between the emergency and normal conditions. Similarly, Agamben argues that we are
currently faced with the seemingly unstoppable progression of a global civil war.77 Although Agamben does not
explain what he means by this in State of Exception, he does flesh the idea out in Means Without Ends in two different
directions. The first of these is the emergence of the sovereign police.78 Modern political philosophy

has historically distinguished between the states right to use coercive

violence against its citizens and the sovereign right to go to war against
enemy states. This was accompanied by a distinction between the legal
regulation of violence within a states territory and the regulation of war
between states through

international

law .79 Within the contemporary political horizon, however,

states no longer declare war against one another, and war is disguised as a
police operation , in which the outright invasion of a sovereign state is
presented as an act of internal jurisdiction .80 This, for Agamben, confirms Carl
Schmitts assertion that every war in our time has become a civil war.81The second sense in which
Agamben deploys the idea of global civil war pertains not to the exercise of state violence, but to
contemporary forms of social regulation : state power is, he argues, now principally founded on
the control of appearance, and as a result social life has become the site of
a global civil war whose storm troopers are the media, whose victims are
all the peoples of the Earth .82 In this sense, civil war does not refer to a military
conflict being waged between two parties vying for control of the state, but
to contemporary forms of biopolitical regulation that seek to control the
forms of life within the state through the manipulation of public opinion .
is at stake
in it is the attempt to mobilise, for radical political ends, the language of
threat and war that so dominates contemporary political discourse. Agamben
argues that the voluntary creation of a permanent emergency has become an
essential practice of contemporary states , including the socalled democratic
While this description of contemporary social regulation as a civil war is rather metaphorical, what

ones.83 Here, the state of exception operates as a technique of government in

that the production and manipulation of a sense of emergency is used as a
tool of socio-political regulation . The generalisation of actual combat
through the development of the sovereign police plays a crucial role in the
normalisation of the state of emergency as a technique of government. War
plays an extraordinarily useful political role , as it helps to rally support for
the state and to quell opposition, and can aid in justifying policies and legal

measures that would not be acceptable without the sense of an immediate

and pressing danger .84 Invoking the language of warfare for political
problems that fall far short of actual warfare can also help to produce many of the
same political effects as the threat posed by combat, allowing for the total
mobilisation of social forces for a united purpose that is typical of
warfare .85 Indeed, since the period of total war, there has indeed been a continued and
extensive militarisation of political discourse , from the Cold War through to other so-called
wars (on poverty, drugs, terror and so on), and

the language of existential threat and

emergency is such extraordinarily common political currency that it is

deployed to frame all kinds of social and economic problems , from football
description of contemporary
social regulation as a form of civil war is an attempt to reappropriate this
hooliganism to famine, flood and child abuse.86 Agambens

kind of political language. The media spectacle of war (and war-like states
of emergency) presents the existence of a threat that authorises state action
to protect the population . For Agamben, however, the major threat that we face is
the political and economic status quo: the contemporary spectaculardemocratic form of world organisation actually runs the risk of being the
worst tyranny that ever materialized in the history of humanity, against
which resistance and dissent will be practically more and more difficult
and all the more so in that it that is increasingly clear that such an
organisation will have the task of managing the survival of humanity in an
uninhabitable world.87 The decisive conflict of our time is thus not that between states
or ideologies, or between state terrorism and the terrorism of non-state actors; rather, it is the conflict
between the forces preserving the political and economic status quo (the
state, mercantile economy and media) and a global populace whose
common interest in an inhabitable world is being profoundly endangered . This
rather lopsided civil war is being waged by those forces interested in the
preservation of the current order through modes of biopolitical regulation
that perpetuate prevailing forms of life and close down the possibility of the
alternatives emerging.
The state of exception leads to the creation of the camps genocide becomes
justified in the name of the sovereign
Agamben, 96 [Giorgio, PhD in philosophy and professor of philosophy at the European
Graduate School, University of Minnesota Press, Means without End: Notes on
Politics, Theory out of Bounds Volume 20 p.47-55, 1996,
http://monoskop.org/images/3/3c/Agamben_Giorgio_Means_without_end_notes_on
_politics_2000.pdf, 7/19/15]JRO
WHAT HAPPENED in the camps exceeds the juridical concept of crime to
such an extent that the specific political juridical structure within which those events took
place has often been left simply unexamined. The camp is the place in which the most absolute condition ln anana ever
to appear on Earth was realized: this is ultimately all that counts for the victors as well as for posterity. Here I will deliberately set out in the
opposite direction. Rather than deducing the definition of camp from the events that took place there, I will ask instead: What is a camp?

the camp not

as a historical fact and an anomaly that-though admittedly still with usbelongs nonetheless to the past, but rather in some sense as the hidden matrix and nonos of the political space in
What z:r its political-juridical structure? How could such events have taken place there? This will lead us to look at

which we still live. Historians debate whether the first appearance of camps ought to be identified with the campos de concentraciones that
were created in 1896 by the Spaniards in Cuba in order to repress the insurrection of that colony's population, or rather with the
concentration camps into which the English herded the Boers at the beginning of the twentieth century. What matters here is that in both
cases one is dealing with the extension to an entire civilian population of a state of exception linked to a colonial war. '" the

camps,

in other words,

were not born out of ordinary law~ and even less were they the product-as one might have
they were born out of the state of
exception and martial law. This is even more evident in the case of the Nazi Lager,
whose origin and juridical regime is well documented. It is well known that the juridical foundation of
internment was not ordinary law but rather the Schutzhaft (literally, protective custody),
which was a juridical institution of Prossian derivation that Nazi jurists sometimes
considered a measure of preventive policing inasmuch as it enabled the
"taking into custody" of individuals regardless of any relevant criminal
behavior and exclusively in order to avoid threats to the security of the state.
believed-of a transformation and a development of prison law; rather ,

The origin of the Schutzhaft, however, resides in the Prussian law on the state of siege that was passed on June 4, 1851, and that was
extended to the whole of Germany (with the exception of Bavaria) in 1871, as well as in the earlier Prussian law on

the
"protection of personal freedom" (Schutz der persiinlichen Freiheit) that was passed on February 12, 1850. Both
these laws were applied widely during World War I . One cannot overestimate the importance of
this constitutive nexus between state of exception and concentration camp
for a correct understanding of the nature of the camp. Ironically, the "protection"
of freedom that is in question in the Schutzhaji: is a protection against the
suspension of the law that characterizes the state of emergency . What is new here is
that this institution is dissolved by the state of exception on which it was
founded and is allowed to continue to be in force under normal
circumstances. The camp is the space that opens up when the state of exception
starts to become the rule. In it, the state of exception, which was essentially a
temporal suspension of the state of law, acquires a permanent spatial
arrangement that, as such, remains constantly outside the normal state of law .
When fIimmler decided, in March 1933, on the occasion of the celebrations of Hitler's election to the chancellorship of the Reich, to create a
"concentration camp for political prisoners" at Dachau, this camp was immediately entrusted to the SS and, thanks to the Schutzhaft, was
placed outside the jurisdiction of criminal law as well as prison law, with which it neither then nor later ever had anything to do. Dachau, as
well as the other camps that were soon added to it (Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Lichtenberg), remained virtually always operative: the
number of initiates varied and during certain periods (in particular, between 1935 and 1937, before the deportation of the Jews began) it

the
paradoxical status of the camp as space of exception: the camp is a piece of
territory that is placed outside the normal juridical order ; for all that, however, it
is not simply an external space. According to the etymological meaning of the term exception (ex-capere), what is
being excluded in the camp is captured outside, that is, it is included by virtue of
its very exclusion. Thus, what is being captured under the rule of law is first of all
the very state of exception. In other words, if sovereign power is founded on the
ability to decide on the state of exception, the camp is the structure in which
the state of exception is permanently realized. Hannah Arendt observed once that what comes to light
decreased to 7,500 people; the camp as such, however, had become a permanent reality in Germany. One ought to reflect on

in the camps is the principle that supports totalitarian domination and that common sense stubbornly refuses to admit to, namely, the
principle according to which anything is possible. It
exception- a space in

is only because the camps constitute a space of

which d1e law is completely suspended-that everything is truly

possible in them. If one does not understand this particular political-juridical structure of the camps, whose vocation is precisely to
realize permanently the exception, the incredible events that took place in them remain entirely unintelligible. The people who entered the
camp moved about in a zone of indistinction between the outside and the inside, the exception and the rule, the licit and the illicit, in which
every juridical protection had disappeared; moreover, if they were Jews, they had already been deprived of citizenship rights by the
Nuremberg Laws and were later completely denationalized at the moment of the "final solution." Inasmuch as

its inhabitants
stripped of every political status and reduced completely to naked
life, the camp is also the most absolute biopolitical space that has ever been
realized--a space in which power confronts nothing other than pure
biological life without any mediation. The camp is the paradigm itself of political space at the point in which
have been

politics becomes biopolitics and the homo sacer becomes indistinguishable from the citizen. The

correct question
regarding the horrors comn1itted in the camps, therefore, is not the question that
asks hypocritically how it could have been possible to commit such atrocious
horrors against other human beings; it would be more honest, and above all .more useful, to
investigate carefully how-that is, thanks to what juridical procedures and political devices-human beings
could have been so completely deprived of their rights and prerogatives to
the point that committing any act toward them would no longer appear as a
crime (at this point, in fact, truly anything had become possible). If this is the case, if the essence of the
camp consists in the materialization of the state of exception and in the
consequent creation of a space for naked life as such, we will then have to ad1nit to be facing a camp
virtually every ti1ne that such a structure is created, regardless of the nature of the crirnes co1nmitted in it and regardless of
the denomination and specific topography it might have. The soccer stadium in Bari
in which the Italian police temporarily herded Albanian illegal immigrants
in 1991 before sending them back to their countr y, the cycle-racing track in which the Vichy
authorities rounded up the Jews before handing them over to the Germans, the refugee camp near the Spanish border where Antonio
Machado died in 1939, as well as the zones d'attente in French international airports in which foreigners requesting refugee status are
detained will all have to be considered camps. In all these cases, an apparently anodyne place (such as the flotel Arcade near the Paris
airport) delimits

instead a space in which, for all intents and purposes, the normal rule of law
is suspended and in which the fact that atrocities may or may not be committed does not
depend on the law but rather on the civility and ethical sense of the police that
act temporarily as sovereign. This is the case, for example, during the four days foreigners may be kept in the zone d'attente
before the intervention of French judicial authorities. In this sense, even certain outskirts of the great postindustrial cities as
well as the gated communities of the United States are beginning today to look like camps, in
which naked life and political life, at least in determinate moments, enter a zone of absolute
indeterminacy. From this perspective, the birth of the camp in our time appears to be an event that marks in
a decisive way the political space itself of modernity. This birth takes place when the political system of
the modern nation-state-founded on the functional nexus between a determinate localization (territory) and a determinate
order (the state), which was mediated by automatic regulations for the inscription of life (birth or nation)- enters a period of
permanent crisis and the state decides to undertake the management of the
biological life of the nation directly as its own task. In other words, if the structure of
the nation-state is defined by three elements-territory, order, and birth-the rupture of the old
nomos does not take place in the two aspects that, according to Carl Schmitt, used to constitute it (that is, localization, Ortung, and order,
Ordnung), but rather at the site in which naked life is inscribed in them (that is, there where inscription turns birth into nation). There is

the camp is the

new hidden regulator of the inscription of life in the orderor, rather, it is the sign of the system's inability to
function without transforming itself into a lethal machine . It is important to note that
the camps appeared at the same time that the new laws on citizenship and
on the denationalization of citizens were issued (not only the Nuremberg IJaws on citizenship in the
Reich but also the laws on the denationalization of citizens that were issued by
almost all the European states, including France, between 1915 and 1933). The state of exception,
which used to be essentially a temporary suspension of the order , becomes now a new and stable spatial
arrangement inhabited by that naked life that increasingly cannot be
inscribed into the order. The increasingly widening gap between birth (naked life) and nationstate is the new fact of the politics of our time and what we are calling "camp" is this
disparity. roan order without localization (that is, the state of exception during which the law
is suspended) corresponds now a localization without order (that is, the camp as permanent
space of exception). The political system no longer orders forms of life and juridical norms in a detenninate space; rather, it
contains within itself a dislocating localization that exceeds it and in which
virtually every form of life and every norm can be captured . The camp intended as a
dislocating localization is the hidden matrix of the politics in which we still live, and we
must learn to recognize it in all of its metamorphoses. 1--he camp is the fourth and inseparable
something that no longer functions in the traditional mechanisms that used to regulate this inscription, and

element that has been added to and has broken up the old trinity of nation (birth), state, and territory. It is from this perspective that we
need to see the reappearance of camps in a form that is, in a certain sense, even more extreme in the territories of the former Yugoslavia.
What is happening there is not at all, as some interested observers rushed to declare, a redefinition of the old political system according to
new ethnic and territorial arrangements, that is, a simple repetition of the processes that culminated in the constitution of the European

nation-states. Rather, we note there an irreparable rupture of the old nomos as well as a dislocation of populations and human lives
according to entirely new lines of flight. That is why the camps of ethnic rape are so crucially important. If the Nazis never thought of
carrying out the "final solution" by impregnating Jewish women, that is because the principle of birth, which ensured the inscription of life
in the order of the nationstate, was in some way still functioning, even though it was profoundly transformed. This principle is now adrift: it
has entered a process of dislocation in which its functioning is becoming patently impossible and in which we can expect not only new
camps but also always new and more delirious norm.ative definitions of the inscription of life in the city. The camp, which is now firn1ly
settled inside it, is the new biopolitical nomos of the planet.

The alternative is to reject the 1ac in order to create the coming community
through whatever singularity
Robinson, 11 [Andrew, is a political theorist and activist at Ceasefire, Ceasefire, In
Theory Giorgio Agamben: destroying sovereignty, 1/21/11,
https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-giorgio-agamben-destroying-sovereignty/,
7/26/15]JRO
This imperative leads Agamben to construct an alternative account of
politics. Since sovereign power is based on the separation between bare life
and politically recognised life, its destruction requires overcoming the
division, constituting a form of bare (or biological) life which is also the site
for its own form of political life, or which is wholly exhausted in bare life and
does not require a supplementary political dimension. It must refuse any
external decision, any logic which splits bare life from something else, and
thereby take away the sovereign power to decide or ban. In other words, it
requires that bare life be autonomous and self-validating. Bare life must
claim the ability to value itself directly, without the mediation of
sovereignty. The overlap of this view with Deleuzian network-based critiques of
hierarchies, autonomist ideas of self-activity and self-valorisation, and antirepresentationalist strands of anarchism such as Immediatism is extensive, and helps
explain why Agambens concepts periodically pop up in insurrectionist texts.
Agamben proposes whatever-singularity as an alternative basis for political
action, which escapes the logic of sovereignty. Taken from Deleuze and Guattaris
thought, a singularity is something which is unique and which cant be
reduced to a measurement or representation. Agamben likes it because it
avoids his having to choose between universality and particularity.
Whatever in English has unfortunate overtones of indifference (whatever, talk to the
hand) which is not at all what Agamben means. Rather, he is referring to
something mattering whatever it is, always mattering regardless of what it is
as opposed to the sovereign decision to divide life into things which matter
and things which dont. A whatever-singularity is neither reducible to its
attributes nor expressible as an abstract generality such as universal
humanity; rather, it is something which has general value as it is, with all of its
attributes (and especially, as potentiality or possibility). It does not depend on any
standard of conformity or subjectification or normality, or on belonging to
the people or masses. It also denies that there is any particular essence
which makes people human instead, being human is a scattering of
singularities. Whatever-singularity is also a kind of being which people are assumed to
already have, which for instance motivates resistance to being normalised. In a sense,
this is a radicalised version of human rights discourse, since anyone, whatever
they are and whatever they do, is recognised as having a kind of autonomous
ethical value. This is fundamentally an ethics of letting be (with overtones of
being who you are). It entails doing away with normativity as usually defined,
with standards of good and evil which declare certain people to be valueless because of
some particularly heinous deviant act theyve committed (in contrast to the more
common approach of either contracting normativity to cover a smaller range of acts, or

altering it to focus on oppressive abuses). For instance, Agamben argues that ideas such
as guilt and responsibility are derived from legal thought and hence from sovereignty.
The ethical challenge Agamben poses is to still view every person and, in line with the
discussion in The Open, every animal as fundamentally valuable in their own life, as
having forms of life and particularity worthy of respect and autonomous existence,
regardless of how bad they are or what crimes they commit. In effect, Agamben aims to
take away, through choices in terms of language, ethics and philosophy, the threat
posed by others ethical judgements in constituting a person or being as
vulnerable. This does not remove human vulnerability per se, but does
remove the particular risk of being made into homo sacer. It does, however,
leave a particular ethical problem: are agents of sovereignty also to be treated as
whatever-singularities, or as the negation of all such singularities?
The coming community corresponds on a collective level to whateversingularity. It is related to the people to come, a concept Deleuze and Guattari
borrow from Bergson, and to messianic ideas of a coming liberation. Agamben refers to
the coming community as a form of social togetherness which is also a non-state and is
counterposed to the logic of sovereignty. The coming community is defined in Agamben
as a kind of post-consumerist condition, emerging from a passage through
current forms of life, such as the indifference of mass media images and of
commodities through which one can reshape ones identity. It passes through
and beyond such forms of life by radicalising their challenge to normativity and
sovereignty. It is not a hybrid space hybridity is already actualised in homo sacer and
the sovereign but rather, a negation, the un-man. It is based on whateversingularities in their antagonism with the state and sovereignty (hence it cannot seek
to seize state power). Agamben believes that whatever-singularities can form
communities without affirming representable conditions of belonging (such
as laws, norms, etc). It also does not rest on categories of identity (even the
identity of excluded or marginalised groups), which for Agamben, remain trapped
within old forms of politics which reproduce sovereignty (mainly because
the recognition of an identity is necessarily separate from the processes of
life which constitute it). In conditions of sovereignty, life has to separate itself
from the orders of subjects and objects, to free itself from biopower and
from hierarchical relations with living things, to become whatever-singularity
and to attain radical immanence. In Potentialities, Agamben argues for an almost
Buddhist stance of contemplative separation which preserves instead of deciding.
Agambens stance also has a revolutionary aspect. Rather than starting from
identity, Agambens ethical theory starts from the standpoint of bare life. In
Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben argues that the ethical standpoint from which
one should start is provided by the experience of concentration camp
inmates. More precisely, it should start from the standpoint of the most abject
sub-group of inmates, the so-called Musselmanner who were near death and
had lost the will to live, who hence embodied directly the idea of bare life. This
is because of a particular moment of inversion. The moment of catastrophe is taken also
to contain the moment where salvation becomes possible, with passage through the low
point of the current expansion of sovereignty acting as a transition to liberation. This is a
rather strange argument, but based on a viable observation: that only when the logic of
sovereignty is fully unfolded (only when we are faced with a giant tree instead of a
sapling) does the nature of the problem or the nature of what needs to be got rid of
become clear. This also means that, in Agambens view, liberation is ambiguously tied to
sovereignty, as its negation. In a sense, therefore, Agamben remains within a Marxist

model of historical becoming. Richard Day has expanded Agambens argument, claiming
that social networks of marginalised groups are already coming communities, and also
that the term should always be kept plural. He views the Marxist element in Agambens
thought as unhelpful, arguing that post-consumers are not the most likely source of the
coming communities. Another aspect of the coming community is that, on one level, it is
a very small shift. Inspired by Jewish theology and authors such as Walter Benjamin,
Agamben draws on messianic ideas of a total transformation of the existing world into a
different world through a small gesture, the addition of an aura, or a new way of seeing.
In a sense, everything stays as it is, and yet is rendered different by the removal of the
transcendent moment of sovereignty.

**2NC

Link

Asteroids
Their militaristic framing of asteroids as a natural and inevitable enemy
turns everything into a possible threat and strengthens the space defense
industry natural technological progression will solve the impact of
asteroids for future generations

Mellor 7 Lecturer in Science Communication in the Humanities Department at Imperial

College London (Felicity, Colliding Worlds: Asteroid Research and Legitimization of War in
Space, Sagepub, Social Studies of Science, 499(37), RG)

The asteroid impact threat was thus articulated within a narrative context that was closely aligned
to science fiction and was shared by both civilian scientists and defence experts . As Veronica
Hollinger (2000: 21617) has noted, traditional science fiction is driven by an Aristotelian plot characterized by a valorisation of the

and scientists act

by causing a series of events to unfold, from the approach of an asteroid
and recognition of the threat through attempts at technological mitigation to
resolution in salvation. These narratives configured asteroids as acting agents
in human affairs and brought to asteroid science a structure in which human
agents (and their technological proxies) solve the problem posed in the
narrative and in so doing achieve closure. Allusions to impact narratives implied a direction
and human-centredness to events that, once the narratives had been evoked, could not easily be
suppressed. Despite their attempts to distance themselves from the weapons scientists, the civilian scientists experienced a
logic of cause and effect. Impact narratives conformed to this traditional narrative logic: asteroids

narrative imperative that drew them towards the same technologized ends as those promoting SDI. A sense of narrative agency was

asteroids were no longer seen as

distant objects moving through empty
they were configured as proximate beasts, acting

evoked even in texts that were not primarily narratival. Crucially,

signifiers of the mathematically exacting Newtonian system, the
backdrop of

space.

Rather,

subjects that could turn against humanity at any moment . Thus in their many
popular books on the subject, the scientists described asteroids as belonging to a menagerie or a cosmic
zoo (Steel, 2000a: 120); they were menacing (Kring, 2000: 171) and had teeth (Clube & Napier, 1990:
154); they were

global killers

1995: 247) on the Earth;

(Lewis, 1997: 209) that could

they were the enemy

unleash ferocious assaults

(Steel,

(Steel, 2000a: 153). Likewise, in their paper in Nature, Chapman

The construction of asteroids as

the enemy was accompanied by a range of other militaristic metaphors . In the
& Morrison (1994: 33) stated that Earth resides in a swarm of asteroids.

popular books, asteroids became missiles, pieces of ordnance or stealth weapons (Lewis, 1997: 37), which bombard the Earth with
a death-dealing fusillade (Clube & Napier, 1990: 7). In a technical paper, too, they were construed as astral assailant[s]
(Simonenko et al., 1994: 929). Where the military and the politicians talked of rogue states, 27 the scientists talked of rogue

This analogy was further reinforced by the

construction of scenarios in which a small impact might be mistaken
asteroids

for

(Steel,

the

1995;

Ailor,

2004:

3).

detonation of a nuclear warhead .

One technical paper speculated on what would have

happened during the first Gulf War if an atmospheric explosion that had been caused by a meteor burning up over the Pacific had
actually occurred over Baghdad or Israel (Tagliaferri et al., 1994). The authors suggested that such an event would have been
mistaken for a missile detonation by the opposing state. In such scenarios, the actions of interplanetary bodies were not just
compared with those of rogue states but came to be identified with them. With the swarming asteroids filling space, space itself was
also resignified. What had been an abstract mathematical space became a narrative place, the location where particular and

Although the scientists continued to appeal to the

predictability of celestial dynamics it was this that would enable a
survey of near-Earth objects to identify any that might pose a threat they
contingent events occurred.

also noted that chaotic processes disturbed the orbits of comets and also, to a lesser degree, asteroids (for example, Yeomans &
Chodas, 1994; Milani et al., 2000). The inherent unpredictability of the orbits was enhanced by the current state of scientific
uncertainty.

These chaotic and uncertain processes were projected onto

space itself, construed as a place of random violence . In the popular books, the Solar
System became a dangerous cosmic neighbourhood (Sumners & Allen, 2000b: 3), a capricious, violent place (Verschuur, 1996:
217), a place of mindless violence (Verschuur, 1996: 18) and wanton destruction (Levy, 1998: 13). Even in a peer-reviewed paper,
Chapman (2004: 1) described space as a cosmic shooting gallery. Despite the agency attributed to the asteroids themselves, in the
narratives of technological salvation it was the human agents, acting through new technologies, who moved the narratives forward.

Through technology,
humans intervene in space and become agents of cosmic events . The scientists
Narrative progression was thus generated through an assumption of technological progress.

promotion of the impact threat shared this assumption of technological progress. Like the US Air Force study, their technical papers
on mitigation systems considered speculative technologies such as solar sails and mass drivers as well as more established explosive
technologies (for example, Ahrens & Harris, 1992; Melosh & Nemchinov, 1993; Ivashkin & Smirnov, 1995; Gritzner & Kahle, 2004).
Even those scientists who warned that it was too early to draw up detailed blueprints of interception technologies accepted the
narratival implication that there was a problem that needed addressing, that the problem could be addressed by human action, and
that this action would involve a technological solution. Technology, in this picture, was configured as inherently progressive. As
Morrison & Teller (1994: 1137) put it: The development of technology in the past few centuries has been towards increasing

Those scientists who argued

against the immediate development of mitigation technology shared with its
proponents a belief in the inexorable progress of technology . Future
generations, they argued, would be better equipped than we are at the moment
to meet the technological challenge of an impacting asteroid (for example, Ahrens
& Harris, 1992). In contrast to traditional astronomical systems, which passively watched the skies, asteroid detection
systems were to be surveillance systems that actively hunted the skies
for objects of human import. The Spaceguard Survey was predicated on a will to action in a way in which the
understanding and control of natural forces in an effort to improve human life.

earlier Spacewatch Survey was not. Similarly, when it fired its impactor at Comet Tempel 1, NASAs Deep Impact mission took a far
more active intervention in space than did earlier generations of probes. This was not far from Edward Tellers call for
experimentation with near-Earth objects to test defence technologies (Tedeschi & Teller, 1994; Teller, 1995), an idea dismissed at
the time as extreme by some civilian scientists (Chapman, 1998). Likewise, one of the recommendations of the 2004 Planetary
Defense Conference was that deflection techniques should be demonstrated on an actual asteroid (Ailor, 2004: 5). 28 The

technologization of space promoted in both the fictional works and the scientists
technical proposals, also formed an integral part of the imagery and
rhetoric that surrounded SDI, as its detractors highlighted when they re-named the project Star Wars.
SDI was always premised on a vision of space as a technologized theatre
of war .

In the hands of a technoenthusiast such as Edward Teller, SDI was configured as a space-based technological

space became a dynamic

arena through which our technologies would move , in which our
extravaganza with few limits. 29 In SDI, as in asteroid research and science fiction,

weapons would be placed , and across which our wars were to be

waged .

30 As discussed in the introduction to this paper, narrative is an inherently teleological form. In conventional

narratives, the action is moved towards closure by the heroes of the story. In the impact narratives, the heroes are technological
heroes set the task of saving the world. By drawing on these narratives and following the call for human agency inherent in the
narrative structure, the scientists implicitly accepted this role as a necessary one. Having shifted apocalypse from the realm of

the impact-threat scientists were able to position

themselves as
heroes
whose combined far-sightedness and
technological know-how would save us all . Emphasizing the role of the unacknowledged hero in a
nuclear politics to that of natural science,

foreword to a volume of conference proceedings, astronomer Tom Gehrels (2002: xiii) claimed: There is a beauty also in hazards,
because we are taking care of them. We are working to safeguard our planet, even if the world does not seem to want to be saved. In
a paper in another volume of conference proceedings, astrophysicist Eugene Levy was even more explicit about the scientists
expanded role: In the arms race, the motivating dynamic was a political one. A dynamic in which scientists and engineers provided
the technical tools, but, as a group, brought no special and unique wisdom to the table in making judgements about what to do. In

The adversary is not another nation; the calculus

is not one of political fears, anxieties, and motivations , for which we scientists have no
special expertise. Rather the adversary is the physical world . In assessing this adversary, we scientists
the present case, the dynamic is different.

have special and unique expertise. (Levy, 1994: 7; italics in original) Eclipsing the political dimension of the impact threat with their
appeals to the natural, the scientists appropriated for themselves a heroic role. This technological hero was a moral hero he would
warn us of the danger and save us despite ourselves. Thus the scientists frequently quoted Representative George Browns opening
statement to a Congressional hearing when he warned that if we were to do nothing about the impact threat, it would be the greatest
abdication in all of human history not to use our gift of rational intellect and conscience to shepherd our own survival and that of all

the issue of planetary defence became a moral

frame through which other threats of more human origin could also be
addressed. Increased knowledge and surveillance of asteroids, the scientists insisted, would help stop mistakes by the
life on Earth. 31 Through such claims,

military decision-makers by preventing the misidentification of asteroid airbursts as enemy nuclear warheads (Chapman &
Morrison, 1994: 39). At the same time,

destroying asteroids would provide us with a way

of using up those unwanted bombs . As John Lewis (1997: 215) put it: The net result of the asteroid
deflection is really a twofold benefit to Earth: a devastating impact would be avoided and there would be one less nuclear warhead on
Earth. Similarly, Duncan Steel saw the use of SDI technologies in asteroid missions such as Clementine II as a prime example of
beating swords into ploughshares (quoted in Matthews, 1997).

Corporate Fill-In
The 1AC allows the surveillance state to be replaced by corporations and
makes populations disposable in the name of security
Newman, PhD in Philosophy, 2009 (Saul, Edinburgh University Press,
Deleuze and New Technology edited by Mark Poster and David Savat,
2009, http://m.friendfeedmedia.com/85cb33b96067e4e2d7c410c3a862e28cf8c6fdbb, mmv)
Such techniques of control have the effect of positioning individuals as
continual subjects of risk and suspicion (Campbell 2004: 78-92): every young
person is potentially a thug or a criminal, every Muslim potentially a
terrorist. Control techniques are used not so much to identify a particular
individual, but rather to identify a future risk and to attach this risk to
certain types of individuals. Governments today, for instance, talk about
identifying children 'at risk' of delinquency or of posing a potential threat to
society - in some cases before they are even born! New surveillance technology is
even being developed which claims to be able to predict crimes and terrorist
attacks on public transport systems before they occur - CCTV recordings of
members of people on buses and trains are matched against computer files of
'suspicious' behaviour, triggering an alarm when they correspond. We see here the
automatic functioning of control technology - where computers rather than
judges, police and psychiatrists become the arbiters of the norm. Perhaps we
could say that whereas disciplinary societies constituted the subject as a fixed identity defining him according to rigid categories such as normal/abnormal, sane/mad societies of control seek to define the individual through a series of different, modulated
and overlapping states of risk, with indeterminate and shifting borders: being 'at risk' of
delinquency, terrorism (we see that the metaphor of the virus is now used to describe the
risk of terrorism spreading through Muslim communities, fuelled by those demonic
'radical preachers'), sickness, mental illness, Attention Deficit Disorder, drug abuse, and
so on. We are now all positioned as subjects of permanent risk, capable of certain
unpredictable and criminal behaviours at any time.
Biopolitics and Global Capitalism
In this paradigm, moreover, the body itself becomes the site of permanent
crisis and, thus, the target of control technologies. The body is policed,
monitored, controlled - and yet is seen as constantly threatened by obesity, smoking,
binge-drinking. Health standards such as the BMI (Body Mass Index) are
enforced with all the ferocity of Victorian moral codes. Our bodies particularly our genes - have become the source of all our pathologies, moral
failings and deviant behaviours: it is no longer our sexuality, as Foucault
maintained, but our DNA that is seen as the secret of our being. This obsession
with the body would be characteristic of what Foucault himself termed 'biopower' - a new
kind of power that functioned at the level of biological life, seeking to control its flows
and functions and to harness its vital forces. The emergence of this new political
technology coincided with developments, during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, in the biological, human and social sciences, and governmental

discourses - bodies of knowledge and political rationalities which took the

population and economic life as their proper domain. As Foucault says:
For the first time in history, no doubt, biological existence was reflected in
political existence; the fact of living was no longer an inaccessible substrate
that only emerged from time to time, amid the randomness of death and its
fatality; part of it passed into knowledge's field of control and power's sphere
of intervention. (Foucault 1979: 142)
It is within this paradigm of biopower that governments busy themselves
with health matters, with 'obesity epidemics', for instance; that they take an
interest in the health of individuals and the general population; that they
centralise medical information in large national databases. Biopower, and the
practice of biopoiitics, in this sense, can be seen as providing a general strategy of
coordination for the diffuse technologies of control. To put it simply, the general aim
of power today is the control of life itself. As Foucault showed, politics no
longer generally subscribes to the sovereign function of the power to kill,
the power to end life - although as we shall see, this sovereign function has
uncannily reappeared today at the heart of modern power regimes; rather,
power now functions to preserve and sustain life. Yet, as benign as this might
sound, it means that power now reaches deep into life itself , controlling,
monitoring and regulating its palpitations. Moreover, the destruction of life
in the name of preserving it functions as biopower's permanent and lethal
underside .4
Deleuze's notion of control as superseding discipline can only be understood against the
background of biopower/biopolitics. Already Foucault himself had charted a general
shift from disciplinary power to biopower: while disciplinary power was focused on the
individual, his body and his pathologies, biopower focuses on the population at
large, monitoring its movements, migrations and epidemics; measuring its
birth, mortality and longevity rates; assessing its economic output. It
produces a sort of globalising effect. Secondly, where disciplinary power sought to
enclose the individual within a physical or discursive space, biopower
presupposes a certain freedom of movement and choice - therefore requiring a
free-floating and modulated form of regulation and control (Foucault 2003). The
superseding of disciplinary power by biopower - a process accompanied by a frequent
overlapping between the two paradigms - seems to directly prefigure De1euze's
description of the emergence of the control society. Control societies seek an allencompassing control over life - both at the global level of populations, and
at the infinitesimal level of our biological substratum.
Moreover, the logic of biopolitical control coincides with and sustains the spread of
global capitalism and the unchallenged hegemony of the neo-liberal economic model.
Economic liberalism, as Foucault showed, was not a withdrawal of the state from
economic life - as traditional laissez-faire notions would have it - but rather a much more
complex interaction whereby the market is discursively constructed as an entity to be
shaped and guided through certain governmental rationalities and strategies (Foucault
2004; Gordon 1991 ). Moreover, within this paradigm, individuals are seen as
subjects to be regulated and policed through the market. In modern control
societies, this occurs through the construction of the subject as a consumer

who has a certain number of 'choices' defined by the market; and who is
subjected to constant advertising. The individual is thus policed through the market. As
Deleuze points out, control today takes place through marketing, and the individual is no
longer the individual but the 'dividual' who is inserted into an endless series of samples,
data and markets: 'marketing is now the instrument of social control and produces an
arrogant breed who are our new masters' (Deleuze 1995: 181).
This new breed of masters is none other than the corporation : an entity
which now has a global reach and achieves a planetary colonisation, turning the world
into a giant market. The corporation is the 'soul', as Deleuze would say, of
modern control societies. However, what we see is not simply the corporation
taking over from the government and displacing its traditional role of
service provider, but rather the corporation and the government melding
together and becoming indistinguishable. Public/private sector 'partnerships'
increasingly manage what were traditionally public services and infrastructure;
governments and government institutions today are run like corporations,
introducing private sector management techniques and free market mechanisms, and
subjecting employees to continual performance reviews.
Moreover, the economic and social dislocations wrought by neoliberal economic policies
require a more sophisticated form of social control: the workforce must be
disciplined, and industrial and political militancy must be discouraged - the
only acceptable form of freedom in modern neo-liberal societies is the
narrow consumerist freedom of the market. The destruction of traditional
working-class identities and communities due to retrenchment, downsizing
and outsourcing must be patched over with a new ideological conservatism one that stresses the dangers posed to community and family life from crime, drugs,
antisocial behaviour and the breakdown of discipline. The communitarian discourse of
New Labour in the UK - with its almost hysterical focus on 'law-and-order' issues - would
be an example of this, functioning as nothing more than a flimsy disguise for its ruthless
pursuit of Thatcherite economic policies. The spectre of crime or terrorism serves
as an ideological scapegoat here: society needs its enemies, as Foucault would
say, and the enemies of the control society - those who endanger our 'safety'
and 'security' - are constituted as the 'other' in opposition to which society
achieves an uncertain cohesion.

Cyber
Cyber war and our conceptions of it rely on a state of exception. We see
them as non-political wars. You cant see who attacks, and the attackers
cant see what they do. The wars are waged from the shadows. Sanctioned by
the law, but carried out beyond the law.
Gregory 11 The everywhere wargeoj_426 238..250 DEREK GREGORY Department of Geography, University of
British Columbia, 217-1984 West Mall, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada V6T 1Z2 E-mail: derek.gregory@geog.ubc.ca
This paper was accepted for publication in May 2011 The Geographical Journal, Vol. 177, No. 3, September 2011, pp. 238
250, doi: 10.1111/j.1475-4959.2011.00426.xTina
It is virtually impossible to determine how far the US was involved in the attack, though Gross (2011) believes there is now vanishingly little
doubt that the United States played a role in creating the worm. In any event, although

Stuxnet spread virally

far beyond its presumed target, its operational precision shows that cyber
warfare has developed far beyond the capacity proposed for the United
States by a USAF colonel who once urged the development of the ability to
carpet bomb in cyberspace. Not every attack has to be made with a laser-guided bomb, he argued, and since area

bombing against the Taliban had been so successful (sic) in Afghanistan he could not see what was wrong with its equivalent in cyberspace (Williamson 2008). He clearly had DDS attacks in mind, but he saw these as a deterrent a defensive capacity and recommended
the staging of live-fire exercises on the Internet to demonstrate the effect. His

model of deterrence assumed

that it is possible to identify the source of an attack, however, whereas the
problem of attribution combines with the practice of outsourcing to make
such a strategy in cyberspace at best ineffective and at worst misdirected.
Conven- tional notions of neutrality are compromised in cyber- space, and
presumably for those reasons the United States has preferred to develop
alternative modes of cyber defence. US Cyber Command was activated on 1 May 2010, and endorsing

Williamsons insistence that the time for fortresses on the Internet has passed, US Deputy Secretary of Defense William J. Lynn accepted
that a fortress mentality will not work. Cyberspace is an offense-dominated environment, he explained, and the United States cannot
retreat behind a Maginot Line of firewalls, or it will risk being overrun (Lynn 2010, 978). Public statements have emphasised
CYBERCOMs role in protecting digital infrastructure as a strategic national asset. The US military operates more than seven million
computer devices on 15 000 networks, and every hour there are hundreds and thousands of unautho- rised probes of Pentagon and
associated computer systems, but Lynn assured his audience that the Department of Defense had in place robust and layered cyber defences
that could detect, rebut and repair intrusions across the .mil domain (Lynn 2010). He floated the possibility of applying these capabili- ties
beyond the .mil and .gov domains to protect .com domains in the US defence industry. The com- mander of CYBERCOM has continued to
maintain that this is not about efforts to militarize cyberspace any more, I imagine, than the United States is mili- tarising its southern
border but for Hersh (2010) the prospect raised questions about where the battlefield begins and where it ends: If the military is
operating in cyberspace, does this include civilian computers in American homes? The question is a good one, but it needs to be directed
outwards as well as inwards. For the United States is also developing an offensive capacity in cyberspace, and the mission of CYBERCOM
includes the requirement to prepare to, and when directed conduct, full-spectrum military cyberspace opera- tions in order to enable
actions in all domains. This is a programmatic statement, and there are difficult con- ceptual, technical and operational issues to be
resolved. The concept of the cyber kill-chain has already made its appearance: software engineers at Lockheed Martin have identified seven
phases or border-crossings in cyberspace through which all advanced persistent intrusions must pass so that, con- versely, blocking an
attack at any one of them (dislo- cating any link in the kill-chain) makes it possible to turn asymmetric battle to the defenders advantage
(Croom 2011; Holcomb and Shrewsbury 2011). The

issues involved are also ethical and legal.

Debate has been joined about what constitutes an armed attack in
cyberspace and how this might be legally codified (Dipert 2010; Nakashima 2010), and
most of all about how to incorporate the protection of civilians into the
conduct of cyber warfare. In the borderless realm of cyberspace Hughes (2010, 536) notes that the
boundary between military and civilian assets and hence military and
civilian targets becomes blurred, which places still more pressure on the
already stressed laws of armed conflict that impose a vital distinction
between the two (Kelsey 2008). Pre- paring for offensive operations includes developing a pre-emptive precision-strike

capacity, and this is precisely why Stuxnet is so suggestive and why Shakarian (2011) sees it as inaugurating a revolution in military
affairs in the virtual realm. Far from carpet bombing cyberspace, Gross (2011) describes Stuxnet as a self-directed stealth drone that, like
the Predator and the Reaper, is the new face of twenty- first century warfare. Cyber

wars will be secret affairs, he

by technicians none of whom would ever have to look an enemy
in the eye. For people whose lives are connected to the targets, the results
could be as catastrophic as a bombing raid but would be even more
disorienting. People would suffer, but [they] would never be certain whom
to blame. I have argued elsewhere that the American way of war has changed since 9/11, though not uniquely because of it (Gregory
predicts, waged

2010), and there are crucial continuities as well as differences between the Bush and Obama administrations: The man who many
considered the peace candidate in the last election was transformed into the war president (Carter 2011, 4). This requires a careful telling,
and I do not mean to reduce the three studies I have sketched here to a single interpretative narrative. Yet there are connections between
them as well as contradictions, and I have indicated some of these en route. Others have noted them too. Pakistans President has remarked
that the war in Afghanistan has grave consequences for his country just as the Mexican drug war on US borders makes a difference to
American society, and one scholar has suggested that the United States draws legal authority to conduct military operations across the
border from Afghanistan (including the killing of bin Laden, codenamed Geronimo) from its history of extra-territorial opera- tions against
non-state actors in Mexico in the 1870s and 1880s (including the capture of the real Geronimo) (Margolies 2011). Whatever one makes of
this, one

of the most persistent threads connecting all three cases is the question of
legality , which runs like a red ribbon throughout the prosecution of late
modern war. On one side, commentators claim that new wars in the global South
are non-political, intrinsically predatory criminal enterprises, that cartels
are morphing into insurgencies, and that the origins of cyber warfare lie in
the dark networks of cyber crime; on the other side, the United States places
a premium on the rule and role of law in its new counterinsurgency
doctrine, accentuates the involvement of legal advisers in targeting
decisions by the USAF and the CIA, and even as it refuses to confirm its UAV
strikes in Pakistan provides arguments for their legality.

Death
Their extinction impacts are narcissistic and a myopic view of the finitude of
death it is nothing more than another phase in the process of generation
instead, we should expand our focus on zoe
Braidotti 7 [Rosi Braidotti is a Philosopher and Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University
as well as director of the Centre for the Humanities in Utrecht. BIO-POWER AND NECRO-POLITICS,
2007, http://www.springerin.at/dyn/heft_text.php?textid=1928&lang=en, msm]
Speaking from the position of an embodied and embedded female subject I

find the metaphysics of finitude

to be a myopic way of putting the question of the limits of what we call life. It is not
because Thanatos always wins out in the end that it should enjoy such conceptual high status.

Death is overrated . The

ultimate subtraction is after all only another phase in a generative process . Too
bad that the relentless generative powers of death require the suppression
of that which is the nearest and dearest to me, namely myself , my own vital
being-there. For the narcissistic human subject , as psychoanalysis teaches us, it is
unthinkable that Life should go on without my being there . The process of
confronting the thinkability of a Life that may not have me or any human
at the centre is actually a sobering and instructive process. I see this postanthropocentric shift as the start for an ethics of sustainability that aims at shifting the focus
towards the positivity of zoe .

Democracy
Democratic governance normalizes a state of exception and reduces subjects
to bare life
MCGOVERN 11 [Mark McGovern is a Program on the Global Demography of Aging Fellow at the
Department of Global Health and Population, and the Harvard Center for Population and Development
Studies. He obtained his Ph.D. in Economics from University College Dublin. The Dilemma of Democracy:
Collusion and the State of Exception, Studies in Social Justice, Volume 5, Issue 2, 213-230, 2011, msm]
The State of Exception The Significance of the State of Exception For Agamben the

state of exception is
crucial for understanding the paradigm of modern governance and
fundamental to the western political and legal tradition upon which the
character and practice of contemporary so-called democracies are based
(Agamben, 2005, p. 3). Indeed, Agambens argument is specifically designed to
challenge liberal conceptions of the origins and nature of the legitimacy of contemporary
democratic states

in late capitalism; namely that such legitimacy derives

from a tradition

of adherence to a set of legal norms

that are certain, predictable and guarantee a range of minimal

freedoms in opposition to the The Dilemma of Democracy 217 Studies in Social Justice, Volume 5, Issue 2, 2011
arbitrary exercise of governmental power. Rather than a genealogy of the contemporary liberal democratic state that
foregrounds the role of the social contract and of rights, Agamben sets out to explore what (following
Carl Schmitt) is understood as the basis of sovereignty, the

sovereign is he who decides on

the state of exception (Carl Schmitt, 1922, quoted in Agamben, 2005, p. 1). For Agamben the state of
exception is one that involves the suspension of law and of legal norms and the
exercise of arbitrary decision . He argues that it is pivotal for understanding the
nature of contemporary state practice and of lifting the veil on the
ambiguous zone [the] no-mans land between public law and political
fact (Agamben, 2005, pp. 1-2) for two main reasons. First, Agamben (2005) argues that the state of
exception is the original structure in which law encompasses living beings
by means of its own suspension (p. 3). For Agamben this is deeply historically embedded
in the western political tradition. Following Foucault, Agamben suggests this represents a
form of bio-political power but, unlike Foucault, he finds its origin predates the modern. Rather, the
inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original if concealed
nucleus of sovereign power the production of a bio-political body is the original activity of sovereign
power (Agamben, 1998, p. 6). What is distinctive about the modern state is that it places the
regulation of biopolitical life as explicit to its purpose and in so doing
bring[s] to light the secret tie uniting power and bare life (Agamben, 1998, p. 6). In
many ways identifying this lineage from the ancient to the modern is one of the key genealogical tasks of Agambens
work. It also provides the logic for his exploration of apparently obscure figures and archetypes (such as homo sacer and
the iustitium) found in ancient (particularly Roman) law as a means to explore the contemporary. Second,
Agamben holds that the state of exception as the voluntary creation of a
permanent state of emergency

(though perhaps not declared in the technical sense) has

become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including

socalled

democratic ones (Agamben, 2005, p. 3). Writing against the backdrop of the Global War on

Terror Agamben contends that the

state of exception is increasingly the dominant

paradigm of government in contemporary politics (Agamben, 2005, p. 3). Crucially too,

increasing reliance on the state of
exception as a technique of governance calls into question the (all too politically and
while he is at pains not simply to conflate the two, the

ideologically significant)

juxtaposition of totalitarianism and democracy as distinct

constitutional forms. The space between public law and political fact
opened up, for example, by the status of the detainee in Guantanamo Bay, and his reduction to the
condition of bare life, is one in which the state of exception appears as a
threshold of indeterminacy between democracy and absolutism (Agamben,
2005, p. 3). The State of Exception, the State of Necessity and the Intensification of State Power The state of
exception is also significant because it is the limit of the juridical order. Rather than being identified
as either inside or outside the juridical order (as different legal traditions would have it) Agamben wants to
deconstruct this 218 Mark McGovern Studies in Social Justice, Volume 5, Issue 2, 2011 simple topographical
opposition and to argue instead that the state of exception should be conceived as a threshold, or a zone of
indifference where inside and outside blur with each other. The suspension of the norm does
not mean its abolition and the zone of anomie that it establishes is not unrelated to the juridical order (Agamben,
2005, p. 23). This characterization of the state of exception as a zone of indistinction, an anomic space and a void of
law can provide a language through which to capture and represent state practices (such as that of collusion) that lie at
one and the same time apparently beyond and yet inextricably bound up with the juridical order. As well as providing an
evocative conceptualization of the fluid and indistinct character of the anomic space that is the state of exception,
Agambens analysis of two strands within western legal traditions, and their interaction with the changing character of
the state through the twentieth century, also provides important insights. One tradition (prevalent in France and
Germany) makes specific constitutional or legal provision for the regulation of the state of exception. The other (evident
in England and the USA) consists of states that prefer not to regulate the problem explicitly (Agamben, 2005, p. 10).
That said, Agamben (2005, p. 10) contends that the distinction between the two, clear in principle but hazier in
fact has

done little or nothing to prevent something like a state of exception

developing in all of the identified western state order s since the early twentieth century. Indeed,
the term state of exception, readily found in French and German legal traditions has its direct equivalent in the English
tradition; martial law or emergency powers. Justification for the state of exception and

the suspension of legal norms is invariably founded on arguments of necessity ;

that exceptional powers must be introduced, and rights suspended, so that
the democratic order may be preserved . Indeed such an argument can be seen
to lie at the heart of the terrorist experts democratic dilemma in posing the
question - what aspects of democracy must we give up in order to preserve
democracy? Legal concepts of necessity (that necessity creates its own law) can be
subject to a range of critiques. Perhaps the most persuasive is that, while claims of necessity tend to be
couched in objective terms they are always founded on a subjective decision. As Balladore-Pallieri notes (as cited in
Agamben, 2005) the concept of necessity is: An entirely subjective one, relative to the aim one wants to achieve. It may
be said that necessity dictates the issuance of a given norm, because otherwise the existing juridical order is threatened
with ruin; but there must be agreement on the point that the existing order must be preserved. (p. 30) Necessity

was presented as the underlying logic justifying the intensification of state

power through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This involved powers previously
evident only in a real state of siege (for example, an actual condition of war) becoming a
paradigm of governance in peacetime where a fictitious state of siege has
been enacted

(Agamben, 2005, p. 17). Agamben

sees the great conflagrations of the

twentieth century, particularly the two world wars, as pivotal in this build up of state power.
Based on the needs of wartime economies and characterized by the ever-encroaching power of the state over civilian life,
the The Dilemma of Democracy 219 Studies in Social Justice, Volume 5, Issue 2, 2011 transference of

wartime conditions to peacetime governance results in the normalization

of the state of exception (Agamben, 2005, p. 18). To illustrate the crucial role of wartime conditions in
generating this move toward the permanence of exceptional measures in the British case Agamben specifically cites the
Defence of the Realm Act (DORA). The DORA was introduced in August 1914 and did indeed massively expand the direct
power of the state over the lives of citizens. It also provided the template for the emergence of such exceptional
measures as a norm in peacetime Britain. This was even more obviously the case in Ireland.

Democracy requires a form of bare life to function. A body that is subjected

to the sovereign. This is democracys greatest contradiction and it must be
rejected.
Agamben 95. Giorgio Agamben, professor of philosophy at the University of Verona, Homo Sacer: Sovereign
Power and Bare Life, p 21 Stanford University Press Stanford California 1998 Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life
was originally published as Homo sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita, 1995 Giulio Einaudi editore Tina
The fact that, of the all the various jurisdictional regulations concerned with the protection of

individual freedom, it was habeas corpus that assumed the form of law and thus
became inseparable from the history of Western democracy is surely due to mere
circumstance. It is just as certain, however, that nascent Europ ean democracy thereby placed at the
center of its battle against absolutism not bios, the qualified life of the
citizen, but zo the bare, anonymous life that is as such taken into the
sovereign ban (the body of being taken . . . , as one still reads in one modern formulation of the
writ, by whatsoever name he may be called therein). What comes to light in order to be exposed apud Westminster is,
once again, the body of homo sacer, which is to say, bare life. This is modern democracys strength and, at
the same time, its inner

contradiction: modern democracy does not abolish sacred

life but rather shatters it and disseminates it into every individual body,
making it into what is at stake in political conflict . And the root of modern democracys
secret biopolitical calling lies here: he who will appear later as the bearer of rights and ,
according to a curious oxymoron, as the new sovereign subject (subiectus superaneus, in other words,
what is below and, at the same time, most elevated) can only be constituted as such through the repetition of the sovereign
exception and the isolation of corpus, bare life, in himself. If it is true that law needs a body in

order to be in force, and if one can speak, in this sense, of laws desire to
have a body, democracy responds to this desire by compelling law to
assume the care of this body. This ambiguous (or polar) character of democracy appears even more
clearly in the habeas corpus if one considers the fact that the same legal procedure that was originally intended to assure
the presence of the accused at the trial and, therefore, to keep the accused from avoiding judgment, turns in its new and
definitive form into grounds for the sheriff to detain and exhibit the body of the accused. Corpus is a two-faced being,
the bearer both of subjection to sovereign power and of individual liberties. This new centrality of the body in the sphere
of politico-juridical terminology thus coincides with the more general process by which corpus is given such a privileged
position in the philosophy and science of the Baroque age, from Descartes to Newton, from Leibniz to Spinoza. And yet in

political reflection corpus always maintains a close tie to bare life, even
when it becomes the central metaphor of the political community , as in Leviathan
or The Social Contract. Hobbess use of the term is particularly instructive in this regard. If it is true that in De homine he
distinguishes mans natural body from his political body (homo enim non modo corpus naturale est, sed etiam civitatis, id
est, ut ita loquar, corporis politicipars, Man is not only a natural body, but also a body of the city, that is, of the so-called
political part [De homine, p. i]), in the De cive it is precisely the bodys capacity to be killed that founds both the natural
equality of men and the necessity of the Commonwealth:

Totalitarianism and democracy are indistinguishable. Theyre simply means

of establishing and using bare life. Reject both.
Agamben 95. Giorgio Agamben, professor of philosophy at the University of Verona, Homo Sacer: Sovereign
Power and Bare Life, p 21 Stanford University Press Stanford California 1998 Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life
was originally published as Homo sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita, 1995 Giulio Einaudi editore Tina
The contiguity between mass democracy and totalitarian states, nevertheless, does not have the form of a sudden
transformation (as Lowith, here following in Schmitt's footsteps, seems to maintain); before impetuously coming to light
in our century, the river of biopolitics that gave homo sacer his life runs its course in a hidden but continuous fashion. It

is almost as if, starting from a certain point, every decisive political event
were double-sided: the spaces, the liberties, and the rights won by individuals in their
conflicts with central powers always simultaneously prepared a tacit but
increasing inscription of individuals' lives within the state order, thus
offering a new and more dreadful foundation for the very sovereign power
from which they wanted to liberate themselves . "The 'right' to life," writes Foucault,
explaining the importance assumed by sex as a political issue, "to one's body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of
needs and, beyond all the oppres sions or 'alienation,' the 'right' to rediscover what one is and all that one can be, this
'right'-which the classical juridical system was utterly incapable of comprehending-was the political response to all these
new procedures of power" (La volonte, p. 191). The fact is that

one and the same affirmation of

bare life leads, in bourgeois democracy , to a primacy of the private over

the public and of individual liberties over collective obligations and yet
becomes, in totalitarian states, the decisive political criterion and the
exemplary realm of sovereign decisions . And only because biological life and
its needs had become the politically decisive fact is it possible to understand
the otherwise incomprehensible rapidity with which twentieth-century
parliamentary democracies were able to turn into totalitarian states and
with which this century's totalitarian states were able to be converted ,
almost without interruption , into parliamentary democracies . In both cases,
these transformations were produced in a context in which for quite some
time politics had already turned into biopolitics, and in which the only real
question to be decided was which form of organization would be best
suited to the task of assuring the care, control, and use of bare life . Once
their fundamental referent becomes bare life, traditional political
distinctions (such as those between Right and Left , liberal ism and
totalitarianism , private and public ) lose their clarity and intelligibility and
enter into a zone of indistinction . The ex-communist ruling classes'
unexpected fall into the most extreme racism (as in the Serbian program of "ethnic cleansi ng")
and the rebirth of new forms of fascism in Europe also have their roots here.
Democracy has failed. The biopolitical obsession with preserving the
population will inevitably converge with Nazism.
Agamben 95. Giorgio Agamben, professor of philosophy at the University of Verona, Homo Sacer: Sovereign
Power and Bare Life, p 21 Stanford University Press Stanford California 1998 Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life
was originally published as Homo sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita, 1995 Giulio Einaudi editore page 13 Tinav
If anything characterizes modern democracy as opposed to classical democracy, then, it is that modern

democracy presents itself from the beginning as a vindication and liberation of zo, and that it is constantly
trying to transform its own bare life into a way of life and to find , so to speak, the
bios of zo. Hence, too, modern democracys specific aporia: it wants to put the freedom and
happiness of men into play in the very place bare life that marked their
subjection. Behind the long, strife-ridden process that leads to the
recognition of rights and formal liberties stands once again the body of the
sacred man with his double sovereign, his life that cannot be sacrificed yet
may, nevertheless, be killed. To become conscious of this aporia is not to belittle the conquests and
accomplishments of democracy. It is, rather, to try to understand once and for all why democracy, at the very
moment in which it seemed to have finally triumphed over its adversaries and reached its greatest height, proved
itself incapable of saving zo, to whose happiness it had dedicated all its
efforts, from unprecedented ruin. Modern democracys decadence and
gradual convergence with totalitarian states in post-democratic spectacular
societies (which begins to become evident with Alexis de Tocqueville and finds its final sanction in the analyses of
Guy Debord) may well be rooted in this aporia, which marks the beginning of
modern democracy and forces it into complicity with its most implacable
enemy. Today politics knows no value (and, consequently, no nonvalue) other than life,
and until the contradictions that this fact implies are dissolved, Nazism and
fascism which transformed the decision on bare life into the supreme
political principle will remain stubbornly with us. According to the testimony of Robert
Antelme, in fact, what the camps taught those who lived there was precisely that calling into question the quality of man
provokes an almost biological assertion of belonging to the human race (Lespce humaine, p. II)

Environment
The affs visions of climatic disaster inevitably bring about a climate
leviathan that has absolute control of a people for the purpose of saving the
planet
Mann and Wainwright 12. Joel Wainwright is a professor of geography at Ohio State University Geoff
Mann is professor of geography at Simon Fraser University, Climate Leviathan, Antipode Vol. 45 No. 1 Tina
Why call this Leviathan?

In the first place, climate Leviathan is a direct descendant

in the line from Hobbes original to Schmitts sovereign: when it comes to
climate, Leviathan will decide, and is constituted precisely in the act of
decision. It is the pure expression of a desire for, the recognition of the
absolute necessity of, a sovereignindeed, the first truly planetary
sovereignto seize command, declare an emergency and bring order to the
globe. If Agamben (2005:14) is correct that the declaration of the state of
exception has gradually been replaced by an unprecedented generalization
of the paradigm of security as the normal technique of government, then
the consolidation of climate Leviathan represents the rescaling of the
normal technique[s] to encompass planetary security, or the making
secure of planetary life. With this achievement the state of nature and the
nature of the state would enmesh perfectly. Geographically at least, climate Leviathan exceeds
its lineage, for it must somehow transcend the state-based territorial container fundamental to Hobbes and Schmitts
thought. Even for those states most committed to national autonomy, it is

increasingly clear that independent regulatory regimes are inadequate to

the global challenge of sharply reducing carbon emissions. This
contradictionrending deep fissures in the UNFCCC processmay lead, as
with other public good collective action problems, to the construction of a
nominally global frame which is in fact a political and geographical
extension of the rule of the extant hegemonic bloc, ie he capitalist global
North. But this is by no means certain, partly because climate change has broken the surface of elite consciousness at a
moment of global political- economic transition. Any realizable planetary climate Leviathan must be constructed with the
approval of a range of actors formerly excluded from global governance China and India most notably, but the list could
go on. Ensuring Chinas support for any binding carbon regulation complicates the role of capital in the Leviathan.5 We
conjecture that Leviathan could take two forms. On one hand, a variety of authoritarian territorial sovereignty, arguably
truer to Hobbes own vision, could emerge in nations or regions where political economic conditions prove amenable. We
name this possibility climate Mao, and discuss it below. On the other hand, we could see Leviathan

emerge as the means by which to perpetuate the extant rule of northern

liberal democratic capitalist states. Arguably the most likely scenario here is
that sometime in the coming decades the waning US-led liberal capitalist
bloc will endeavor to impose a global carbon regime that, in light of political
and ecological crisis, will brook no opposition in defense of a human future
for which it volunteers itself as the last line of defense . The pattern of
mobilization will likely be familiar, in which the United Nations or other
international fora serve as a means of legitimizing aggressive means of
surveillance and discipline . This could make the construction of climate Leviathan a key means by which
to salvage American international hegemonya prospect that, if anything, only increases the likelihood of its
consolidation.6 One might find, for example, the personification of this effort in John Holdren, Harvard physicist and
National Science Advisor to President Obama. Since his 2008 appointment, right-wing media have derided Holdren as a
harbinger of a climate police state. One website claims he has called for forced abortions and mass sterilization to save
the planet.7 Paranoid hyperbole, certainly, but the underlying critique is not entirely misplaced. Holdren was an early
visionary of what we call climate Leviathan. Consider these lines from the conclusion of Holdrens (1977) textbook on
resource management, in which he outlines a new sovereignty he calls Planetary Regime: Toward a Planetary
Regime:...Perhaps those agencies, combined with UNEP and the United Nations population agencies, might eventually be

developed into a Planetary Regimesort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment.
Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of
all natural resources . . . Thus the Regime could have the power to control pollution not only in
the atmosphere and oceans, but also in such freshwater bodies as rivers and lakes that

cross international
boundaries or that discharge into the oceans. The Regime might also be a logical central
agency for regulating all international trade, perhaps including assistance
from DCs to LDCs, and including all food on the international market. The
Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the
optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating
various countries shares within their regional limits. Control of population
size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime
would have some power to enforce the agreed limits (Ehrlich, Ehrlich and Holdren
1977:942943).

Hegemony
Hegemony is dead and we know it. Attempts to mask our weakness through
global power inevitably lead to violence and domination
Gulli 13. Bruno Gulli is a professor of history, philosophy, and political science at Kingsborough College in New
York, For the critique of sovereignty and violence,
http://academia.edu/2527260/For_the_Critique_of_Sovereignty_and_Violence, Tina
I think that

we have now an understanding of what the situation is: The

sovereign everywhere, be it the political or financial elite, fakes the
legitimacy on which its power and authority supposedly rest . In truth, they
rest on violence and terror , or the threat thereof. This is an obvious and
essential aspect of the singularity of the present crisis. In this sense, the
singularity of the crisis lies in the fact that the struggle for dominance is at
one and the same time impaired and made more brutal by the lack of
hegemony. This is true in general, but it is perhaps particularly true with
respect to the greatest power on earth, the United States, whose hegemony
has diminished or vanished. It is a fortiori true of whatever is called the
West, of which the US has for about a century represented the vanguard.
Lacking hegemony, the sheer drive for domination has to show its true face,
its raw violence. The usual, traditional ideological justifications for
dominance (such as bringing democracy and freedom here and there) have
now become very weak because of the contempt that the dominant nations
(the US and its most powerful allies) regularly show toward legality,
morality, and humanity. Of course, the so-called rogue states, thriving on corruption, do not fare any better
in this sense, but for them, when they act autonomously and against the dictates of the West, the specter of punishment,
in the form of retaliatory war or even indictment from the International Criminal Court, remains a clear limit, a
possibility. Not so for the dominant nations: who will stop the United States from striking

anywhere at will, or Israel from regularly massacring people in the Gaza

Strip, or envious France from once again trying its luck in Africa ? Yet, though still
dominant, these nations are painfully aware of their structural, ontological and historical, weakness. All attempts
at concealing that weakness (and the uncomfortable awareness of it) only heighten the
brutality in the exertion of what remains of their dominance. Although they rely on
a highly sophisticated military machine (the technology of drones is a clear instance of this) and on an equally
sophisticated diplomacy, which has traditionally been and increasingly is an outpost for military operations and global
policing (now excellently incarnated by Africom) ,

hegemony .

they know that they have lost their

Human Rights
Human rights are the platform for the destabilization of the resistance
against state violence they are intrinsically tied with security
Goldstein 7 [Daniel M. Goldstein is Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University, where he has
taught since 2005. A political and legal anthropologist, Prof. Goldstein studies the global meanings and
practices of security, democracy, and human rights. Human rights as culprit, human rights as victim: rights
and security in the state of exception, msm]

The discourses of security and human rights, in many ways perceived as inherently at odds
with one another, thus share a fundamental principle in the state of exception. At the
heart of both of these paradigms each in a sense seeking to define the
permissible at the conjuncture of state and civil society we find not the rule of law
but an exception to the rule, a back door through which limitless state
violence and the abrogation of basic rights re-enter supposedly democratic
society uncontested. And while human rights has received considerably more anthropological attention
than security, both paradigms constitute a set of practices and discourses that
in an era of global terrorism, preventive war, and the consolidation of
neoliberal democracy are distinctly transnational in scope and effect,
transcending the territorial and discursive space of the nation-state and
jointly serving to define the landscape of political domination and
resistance within and across nation-states today. But, as the ethnographic discussion below

suggests, the discourse of rights is vulnerable to critique from the security paradigm: given the states practical failures to
defend rights equitably across social groups and classes, and the fear and insecurity generated by the permanent state of
exception found within neoliberal democracy, rights themselves come under scrutiny, and in the quest for
security the

ability of human rights to serve as a platform for resistance

against state violence becomes debilitated.
The legal defense of human rights is bankrupt- action through the
government breaks the body down into its rights, thus stripping away
their humanity. They become subjects of the sovereign.
Amoore 08. Louise Amoore is with the Department of Geography at the University of Durham, Risk Before
Justice: When the Law Contests Its Own Suspension, Leiden Journal of International Law, 21, 2008 Tina

The claim to rights to privacy , bodily integrity, or human dignity, however,

faces particular difficulties in relation to risk technologies that dissect and
fragment the person into a series of risk factors. What happens to the legal
subject when risk visualizations extending from imaging devices such as Backscatter to the screened
visual displays of risk scores specifically divide and subclassify the body into
differential traits, characteristics, behaviours ? What are the limits of the citizens obligation to
reveal the elements, the prosaic daily intimacy of their lives? As Engin Isin has argued compellingly, the neurotic
citizen, once reduced to a species body, actively strips herself down in
order to calibrate itself to the anxieties and dangers of the border.54 Thus,
the very category of legal subject, or indeed of citizen, is exposed in its full
fragility. What happens to the body that cannot be verified, that does not calibrate to the mobile norm, or is not
recognized or is misrecognized under international law? In the contestation of risk technologies such as Backscatter, then,

the law once more confronts the making of its own categories. If it
recognizes only a a non- substantial, a thin personality, a public image that
seriously mis-matches peoples self-image,55 then legal intervention risks
mirroring the stripping-down and denuding strategies of the homeland
security state itself: Human rights break down the body into functions and

parts and replace its unity with rights . . . Encountering rights annihilates
and dismembers the body : the right to privacy isolates the genital area and
creates a zone of privacy around it; free speech severs the mouth and
protects its communicative but not its eating function, while free movement
does the same with legs and feet, but offers no right of abode .56 Put simply, the
abstractions that are made in the defence of peoples rights to privacy, just
as in the digitized imaging of the body, risk recognizing only a facsimile of a
person. The reduction of a person to their rights recognizes, as Douzinas
puts it, only the man of the rights of man, who appears without
differentiation or distinction in his nakedness and simplicity, united with all
others in an empty nature deprived of substantive characteristics.57
Certainly the nakedness of the stripped- down man in the rights of man is
not recognized in its full political difficulty by the continual redrawing of a
legal boundary. It is this redrawing that runs through most of the current legal appeals to privacy: the
infringement on privacy must be proportionate to the security threat; the
collection and use of personal data must be transparent; subjects must be
informed if they are on a no-fly list.58 Where someone is left to make a claim for recognition based
on corporeal difference I am pregnant; I have a prosthetic limb; I have a mastectomy they are rendered invisible,
slipping away from the juridical domain.

Language
Language was the first and a permanent state of exception, dividing the
semantic and the meaningless. Reject it.
Agamben 95. Giorgio Agamben, professor of philosophy at the University of Verona, Homo Sacer: Sovereign
Power and Bare Life, p 21 Stanford University Press Stanford California 1998 Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life
was originally published as Homo sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita, 1995 Giulio Einaudi editore Tina
Hegel was the first to truly understand the presuppositional struc ture thanks to which language is at once outside and
inside itselfand the immediate (the nonlinguistic) reveals itself to be nothing but a presup position of language.
"Language," he wrote in the Phenomenology of Spirit, "is the perfect element in which interiority is as external as
exteriority is internal" (see Phanomenologie des Geistes, pp. 527-29). We have seen that only the sovereign decision on the
state of exception opens the space in which it is possible to trace borders between inside and outside and in which
determinate rules can be assigned to determinate territories. In exactly the same way , only language as the

pure potentiality to signify, withdrawing itself from every concrete instance

of speech, divides the linguistic from the nonlinguistic and allows for the
opening of areas of meaningful speech in which certain terms correspond to
certain denotations. Language is the sovereign who , in a permanent state of
exception, declares that there is nothing outside language and that
language is always beyond itself . The particular structure of law has its
foundation in this presuppositional structure of human language. It
expresses the bond of inclusive exclusion to which a thing is subject because
of the fact of being in language, of being named. To speak [dire] is, in this sense, always to
"speak the law," ius dicere

Law
The 1ACs belief in law based solutions simply perpetuates and props up the
state of exception
Newman, PhD in Philosophy, 2009 (Saul, Edinburgh University Press,
Deleuze and New Technology edited by Mark Poster and David Savat,
2009, http://m.friendfeedmedia.com/85cb33b96067e4e2d7c410c3a862e28cf8c6fdbb, mmv)
How are we to understand the political nexus that allows this intersection to take place?
First, the discourse of 'security' itself must be rigorously analysed. 'Security' is
the word on everyone's lips today, from media outlets and politicians across the political
spectrum. The ability to provide security from terrorism is now the single
stamp of legitimacy for any government, and is considered the overriding
responsibility of the modern state. However, as Agamben shows - referring to
Foucault's work on eighteenth-century governmental discourses - 'security' consists
not in the prevention of crises and catastrophes, but rather in their
continual production, regulation and management. Therefore, by making
security central to modern governance, there is the danger of producing a
situation of clandestine complicity between terrorism and
counterterrorism, locked in a deathly embrace of mutual incitement
(Agamben 2002).
It is here also that the logic of the exception must be considered. For
Agamben, as well as for other theorists of sovereignty like Hobbes and Carl Schmitt,
sovereignty is conditioned by the exception - that is, the ability of the
sovereign to stand inside and outside the law at the same time. In other words,
in order to guarantee the law, the sovereign is not bound by the law but
stands outside it, having the power to suspend it through a unilateral
decision. In the words of Schmitt, the sovereign is 'he who decides on the state
of exception' (Carl Schmitt, cited in Agamben 2005: 1). The hidden secret of
sovereignty, then, is this radical indistinction between law and lawlessness,
between politics and violence. However, what was once the secret of political philosophy
has now become explicit. The state of the exception has become the rule. That is
to say, the intensification of control and surveillance techniques, coupled
with practices of extra-judicial detention and governments thumbing their
nose at constitutional checks and human rights norms, suggests a
normalisation of the state of exception. Governments in socalled liberal
democracies are operating in an increasingly extra-judicial way; the state of
exception is becoming the dominant paradigm of politics today (Agamben
2005: 1-31). However, we should be clear here that it is not simply that governments are
acting illegally or outside the law as such: rather sovereignty and law enter into a
'zone of indistinction' in which their limits become unclear - a kind of grey
zone in which sovereignty appears as law and law appears as sovereignty. For instance,
the practice of extra-judicial detention is still authorised through legislation - but here
the law appears in the form of its withdrawal. At the same time, we see the excessive
production of petty laws and restrictions that characterises the societies of
control, with governments working frenetically on their 'legislative
agendas'. Both instances signify a kind of crisis of the law - marked

simultaneously by its absence and its overabundance: the law , in other words,
can no longer protect us from sovereign power and operates today simply
as a vector for it.
The 'war on terrorism', then, has the effect of intensifying social control
measures, as well as revealing the sovereign state of exception through
which they are authorised. The 'war on terrorism' has to be seen as a kind of
total and permanent war: a war whose real purpose is not the defeat of some
shadowy terrorist enemy - the figure of the terrorist is itself constituted through
this war - but rather the global control and regulation of populations. 8 Capitalist
globalisation demands control, and this control is now articulated and
intensified through a permanent state of war. Here the promised freedom
and deregulation of the global free market find its ultimate answer in
increased restrictions and surveillance. As Jean Baudrillard says:
To the point that the idea of freedom, a new and recent idea, is already fading from
minds and mores, and liberal globalisation is coming about in precisely the opposite
form - a police state globalisation, a total control, a terror based on 'law-and-order'
measures. Deregulation ends up in a maximum of constraints and restrictions, akin to a
fundamentalist society. (Baudrillard 2002: 32)
Therefore our understanding of the society of control should include not
simply the subtle technologies that Deleuze speaks of, but also the whole
panoply of control measures we see today: everything from the permanent
detention of terrorist suspects, to the heightened policing of national
borders, forms a new paradigm of power and a new logic of politics that
must be critically analysed.
Appeals to the law authorize a militaristic world that culminates in necro
political destruction. Our only hope is mass movement to rise up collectively
against an oppressive government.
Gregory 11 The everywhere wargeoj_426 238..250 DEREK GREGORY Department of Geography, University of
British Columbia, 217-1984 West Mall, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada V6T 1Z2 E-mail: derek.gregory@geog.ubc.ca
This paper was accepted for publication in May 2011 Tina

The invocation of legality works to marginalise ethics and politics by making

available a seemingly neutral, objective language: disagreement and debate
then become purely technical issues that involve matters of opinion,
certainly, but not values. The appeal to legality and to the quasi-judicial
process it invokes thus helps to authorise a widespread and widening
militarisation of our world. While I think it is both premature and excessive to see this as a
transformation from governmentality to militariality (Marzec 2009), I do believe that Foucaults (2003) injunction
Society must be defended has been transformed into an unconditional imperative since 9/11 and that this involves an
intensifying triangulation of the planet by legality, security and war. We might remember that biopolitics, one

of the central projects of late modern war, requires a legal armature to

authorise its interventions, and that necropolitics is not always outside the
law. This triangulation has become such a common- place and provides such an established base-line for contemporary
politics that I am reminded of an inter- view with Zizek soon after 9/11 which for him marked the last war of the
twentieth century when he predicted that the new wars of the twenty-first century would

be distinguished by a radical uncertainty: it will not even be clear whether it

is a war or not (Deich- mann et al. 2002). Neither will it be nor is it clear where the
battlespace begins and ends. As I have tried to show, the two are closely connected. For this reason I am

on the streets of
Cairo and other Egyptian cities, just weeks after similar scenes in Tunisia. I hope
that the real, lasting counterpoint to 9/11 is to be found in those places, not in
Afghanistan, Pakistan or Iraq. For those events show that freedom and democracy
cannot be limited to the boastful banners of military adventurism, hung
from the barrels of guns or draped across warships, and that ordinary
people can successfully rise up against autocratic, repressive and corrupt
regimes: including those propped up for so long by the United States and its
European allies. Perhaps one day someone will be able to write about the
nowhere war and not from Europe or North America.
able to close on a less pessimistic note. As I drafted this essay, I was watching events unfold

Attempts to balance security and privacy only serve to justify the state. The
Law and legal reforms are constantly transformed and will always articulate
normative assumptions about the world.
Krasmann 12 Laws knowledge: On the susceptibility and resistance of legal practices to security matters Susanne
Krasmann University of Hamburg, Germany Theoretical Criminology 16(4) 379 394 The Author(s) 2012
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav p380-381Tina
Traditional problems in the relationship between law and security government

within this debate form a point of departure of critical considerations;

emergency government today, rather than facing the problem of gross
abuses of power , has to deal with the persistent danger of the exceptional
becoming normal (see Poole, 2008: 8). Law gradually adjusts to what is regarded as
necessary.3 Hence, law not only constrains, but at the same time also authorizes
governmental interference. Furthermore, mainstream approaches that try
to balance security and liberty are rarely able, or willing, to expose fully the
trade-offs of their normative presuppositions: [T]he metaphor of balance is
used as often to justify and defend changes as to challenge them (Zedner, 2005:
510). Finally, political responses to threats never overcome the uncertainty that
necessarily accompanies any decision addressing future events. To ignore this
uncertainty, in other words, is to ignore the political moment any such decision entails, thus exempting it from the
possibility of dissent. Institutional arrangements that enforce legislative control and enable citizens to
claim their rights are certainly the appropriate responses to the concern in question, namely that security gradually seizes
political space and transforms the rule of law in an inconspicuous manner. They establish political spaces

of dispute and provide sticking points against all too rapidly launched
security legislation, and thus may foster a culture of justification, as David
Dyzenhaus (2007) has it: political decisions and the exercise of state power are to be
justified by law, in a fundamental sense of a commitment to the principles
of legality and respect for human rights (2007: 137). Nonetheless, most of these
accounts, in a way, simply add more of the same legal principles and
institutional arrangements that are well known to us. To frame security as a public good
and ensure that it is a subject of democratic debate, as Ian Loader and Neil Walker (2007) for example demand, is a
promising alternative to denying its social relevance. The call for security to be civilized, though, once again echoes the
truly modern project of dealing with its inherent discontents. The limits of such a commitment to legality and a political
culture of justification (so termed for brevity) will be illustrated in the following section. Those normative endeavours will
be challenged subsequently by a Foucauldian account of law as practice. Contrary to the idea that law can be addressed as
an isolated, ideal body and thus treated like an instrument according to normative aspirations, the present account
renders laws reliance on forms of knowledge more discernable. Law is susceptible, in particular to
security matters. As a practice, it constantly transforms itself and, notably,
articulates its normative claims depending upon the forms of knowledge
brought into play. Contrary to the prevailing debate on emergency government, this perspective enables us, on
the one hand, to capture how certain forms of knowledge become inscribed into the law in a way that goes largely
unnoticed.

Nuclear
The use of nuclear discourse constitutes a construction of exceptional power
to be used only by the sovereign for their own ends.
Masco 12. Joseph Masco, Professor of Anthropology and of the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago, The
Ends of Ends, Anthropological Quarterly Volume 85, Number 4, Fall 2012, pg. Tina
Today we can see that in addition to the new weapons systems built at the end of the 1950s, there was also an important
political discovery crucial to the evolving cold War: namely, the universal utility of threat pro- liferation in US security
culture. The raw political value of existential threat as a motivating narrative

became a well-worn domestic strategy in the Us, one linking the missile gap of
the 1950s to the window of vulner- ability of the 1970s, to the strategic
defense initiative of the 1980s to the space based Pearl Harbor narratives
of the 1990s to the terrorist WMD discourses of the 2000s as illustrations of a
nuclear culture. In each of these cases, we can see how the bomb (as a consolidated form of existen- tial
threat) has been good for Americans to think with, becoming the basis for
building a nuclear state and a global military system but also for transforming raw military ambition into a necessary form of defense. but if the
bomb has been crucial to constituting US superpower status, it has also
produced a complex new domestic affective political domain, allowing
images of, and appeals to, existential threat to become a central means of establishing and
expanding a militarized national security culture.

Peace has become the exception, not the norm. The affs nuclear rhetoric reinscribes this state of exception and guarantees that peace remains and
extreme, ensuring that one day well push the big red button and succumb
to an atomic end.
Masco 12. Joseph Masco, Professor of Anthropology and of the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago, The
Ends of Ends, Anthropological Quarterly Volume 85, Number 4, Fall 2012, Tina
The constant slippages between crisis, expertise, and failure are now well established in an American political culture. The
cultural history of cold War nuclear crisis helps us understand why. Derrida (1984), working with the long running
theoretical discourse on the sublimity of death (which links Kant, Freud, and benjamin), describes the problem of the
nuclear age as the impossibility of contemplating the truly remainderless event or the total end of the archive. For him,
nuclear war is fabulously textual because until it occurs all you can do is tell stories about it, and because to write about
it is to politically engage in a form of future making that assumes a reader, thus performing a kind of countermilitarization and anti-nuclear practice. In the early 1960s, the US nuclear war policy was officially known

overkill, referencing the redundant use of hydrogen bombs to destroy targets (rosenberg 1983). This
overkill installs a new kind of biopower, which fuses an obliteration of the
other with collective suicide. The means to an end here constitutes an actual
and total end, making the most immediate problem of the nuclear age the
problem of differentiating comprehension from compensation in the
minute-to-minute assessment of crisis. This seems to be a fundamental
problem in Us national security culturean inability to differentiate the
capacity for war with the act itself, or alternatively to evaluate the logics of
war from inside war. Today, space is filled with satellites offering near perfect resolution on the surface of the
as

earth and able to transmit that data with great speed and precision to computers and cell phones, as well as early warning
systems, missiles, and drones. What we cannot seem to do is find an exterior viewpoint

on war itselfa perspective that would allow an assessment not only of the
reality of conflict but also of the motivations, fantasies, and desires that support and enable it. Indeed expert systems of all sortsmilitary, economic,
political, and industrialall seem unable to learn from failure and instead
in the face of crisis simply retrench and remobilize longstanding and
obviously failed logics. War, for example, is not the exception but the norm in

the US todaywhich makes peace extreme. so what would it take for Americans to consider
not only the means to an endthat is, the tactics, the surges, the preemptions, and surgical strikesbut also to reevaluate
war itself? What would it take to consider an actual end to such ends?

Reactionary Politics
Reactionary policies and revolutions reaffirm the state distinctions are
made and lines are drawn
Agamben, 96 [Giorgio, PhD in philosophy and professor of philosophy at the European
Graduate School, University of Minnesota Press, Means without End: Notes on
Politics, Theory out of Bounds Volume 20 p.42-43, 1996,
http://monoskop.org/images/3/3c/Agamben_Giorgio_Means_without_end_notes_on
_politics_2000.pdf, 7/19/15]JRO
Hence the contradictions and aporias that such a concept creates every time
that it is invoked and brought into play on the political stage. It is what
always already is, as well as what has yet to be realized; it is the pure source
of identity and yet it has to redefine and purify itself continuously according
to exclusion, language, blood, and territory. It is what has in its opposite pole the very essence
that it itself lacks; its realization therefore coincides with its own abolitio n; it
must negate itself through its opposite in order to be. (Hence the specific aporias of the workers' involvement that turns
toward the people and at the same time aims at its abolition.) The concept of people- brandished

each and every time as the bloody flag of reaction and as the faltering
banner of revolutions and popular fronts- always contains a more original
split than the one between enemy and friend, an incessant civil war that at
once divides this concept more radically than any conflict and keeps it
united and constitutes it more firmly than any identity . As a matter of fact, what Marx
calls class struggle -which occupies such a central place in his thought, even though he never defines it substantially-is
nothing other than this internecine war that divides every people and that shall come to
an end only when People and people coin- cide, in the classless society or in the messianic kingdom, and only when there
shall no longer be, properly speaking, any people.

Security
The drive for security results in the creation of threats to legitimate the
surveillance state
Newman, PhD in Philosophy, 2009 (Saul, Edinburgh University Press,
Deleuze and New Technology edited by Mark Poster and David Savat,
2009, http://m.friendfeedmedia.com/85cb33b96067e4e2d7c410c3a862e28cf8c6fdbb, mmv)
The reterritorialising effects of global capitalism also have a paradoxical effect on the
state itself. The modern state is undergoing a kind of convulsion, whereby on
the one hand its sovereignty is undermined - at least with respect to its control
over economic life - and yet on the other hand we have also seen an aggressive
reassertion of state sovereignty and power with the so-called 'war on
terrorism'. In the wake of September 1 1, and with the emergence of this
permanent global state of war, we have seen hitherto unthinkable control
and surveillance measures being implemented in the dubious name of
'security'. Liberal democracies have been taking on the characteristics of
totalitarian police states. While governments assure us that they are trying to
'strike the right balance between liberty and security', they have been
introducing legislation that undermines even the most basic civil liberties
such as the right to due process. The usual techniques and practices of control
have been intensified and given new impetus and consistency in the 'war on
terrorism'. The sophistication of technologies of control and surveillance find their
strange counterpart in a rediscovery of torture and the practice of permanent detention;5
the mise-en-scene of the control society is now to be found in the torture chambers of
Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
Is it still reasonable, then, to talk about the control society - have we not gone
back to a disciplinary or even a pre-disciplinary sovereign power; do the barbed wire
of the prison camp, and the electric shocks delivered by the military torturer
(now privately contracted of course), now not serve as the dominant symbols of
power in the twenty-first century? Has not the 'softness' of control been
replaced with the hardness and brutality of a now unlimited sovereign
power? I would argue instead that the two modalities of power have intersected, and
that the off-shore prison camps and extra-legal spaces of detention that have now
become emblematic of the 'war on terrorism' are actually a kind of obscene excrescence
of the society of control, symbolising - in an extreme form - the constraints and controls
that are already characteristic of contemporary society.6 And if Guantanamo Bay is
closing down, this is only because the techniques of detention, discipline and control
employed in such spaces are already infused - in more subtle ways - throughout the rest
of society'? Control and sovereign exceptionalism become indistinguishable
in the 'war on terrorism'.
How are we to understand the political nexus that allows this intersection to
take place? First, the discourse of 'security' itself must be rigorously
analysed. 'Security' is the word on everyone's lips today, from media outlets and
politicians across the political spectrum. The ability to provide security from
terrorism is now the single stamp of legitimacy for any government, and is

considered the overriding responsibility of the modern state. However, as

Agamben shows - referring to Foucault's work on eighteenth-century governmental
discourses - 'security' consists not in the prevention of crises and
catastrophes, but rather in their continual production, regulation and
management. Therefore, by making security central to modern governance,
there is the danger of producing a situation of clandestine complicity
between terrorism and counterterrorism, locked in a deathly embrace of
mutual incitement (Agamben 2002).

Terrorism
Their terror discourse normalizes a state of exception we are no longer
citizens but detainees of the war on terrorism kills agency and turns the
case - public discourse is militarized and replicates a violent pedagogy that
reinforces the death drive and causes extinction
GIROUX 3-30-15 [Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in
the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting
Professorship at Ryerson University. Terrorism, Violence, and the Culture of Madness,
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/30/terrorism-violence-and-the-culture-of-madness/, msm]
Chris Hedges crystalizes this premise in arguing that Americans now live in a society in which violence

is the habitual
response by the state to every dilemma, legitimizing war as a permanent
feature of society and violence as the organizing principle of politics .[1] Under
such circumstances,

militarized

malevolent modes of rationality now impose

neo

liberal regime on everyone, shattering

and hope. Amid the bleakness and despair, the

the values of a

viable modes of

agency , solidarity,

discourses of militarism , danger and war

now

fuel a war on terrorism that represents the negation of politics since all
interaction is reduced to a test of military strength war brings death and
destruction , not only to the adversary but also to ones side, and without
distinguishing between guilty and innocent.[2] Human barbarity is no longer
invisible, hidden under the bureaucratic language of Orwellian doublespeak . Its

conspicuousness, if not celebration, emerged in the new editions of American exceptionalism ushered in by the post 9/11 exacerbation of the
war on terror. In the aftermath of these monstrous acts of terrorism, there was a growing sense among politicians, the mainstream media,
and conservative and liberal pundits that history as we knew it had been irrefutably ruptured. If politics seemed irrelevant before the attacks
on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, it now seemed both urgent and despairing. But history cannot be erased, and those traditional
public spheres in which people could exchange ideas, debate, and shape the conditions that structured their everyday lives increasingly
continued to appear to have little significance or political consequence. Already imperiled before the aftershocks of the terrorists attacks,
democracy became even more fragile in the aftermath of 9/11. Almost fourteen years later, the

historical rupture
produced by the events of 9/11 has transformed a terrorist attack into a war
on terror that mimics the very crimes it pledged to eliminate . The script is now familiar.
Security trumped civil liberties as shared fears replaced any sense of shared
responsibilities. Under Bush and Cheney, the government lied about the war in Iraq,
created a torture state, violated civil liberties, and developed new
antiterrorist laws, such as the USA PATRIOT ACT. It imposed a state of emergency that
justified a range of terrorist practices, including extraordinary rendition and
state torture, which made it easier to undermine those basic civil liberties that protect individuals against invasive and potentially
repressive government actions.[3] Under the burgeoning of what James Risen has called the homeland security-industrial complex, state
secrecy and organized corporate corruption filled the coffers of the defense industry along with the corporate owned security industries
especially those providing drones who benefited the most from the war on terror.[4] This is not to suggest that security is not an important
consideration for the United States. Clearly, any democracy needs to be able to defend itself, but it cannot serve, as it has, as a pretext for
abandoning civil liberties, democratic values, and any semblance of justice, morality, and political responsibility. Nor can it serve as a
pretext for American exceptionalism and its imperialist expansionist goals. The philosopher Giorgio Agamben has

suggested rightly warned that under the so war on terrorism, the political landscape is
changing and that we are no longer citizens but detainees , distinguishable
from the inmates of Guantanamo not by an indifference in legal status, but
only by the fact that we have not yet had the misfortune to be incarcerated
or unexpectedly executed by a missile from an unmanned aircraft .[5] The
war on terror morphed into a legitimation for state terrorism as was made
clear under the willingness of the Obama administration to pardon the CIA

torturers, create a kill list, expand the surveillance state, punish whistleblowers, and use drones to
indiscriminately kill civiliansall in the name of fighting terrorists . Obama expanded the
reach of the militarized state and along with Democratic and Republican Party extremists preached a
notion of security rooted in personal fears rather than in a notion of social
security that rallied against the deprivations and suffering produced by war,
poverty, racism, and state terrorism. The war on terrorism extended the
discourse, space, location, and time of war in ways that made it unbounded and
ubiquitous making everyone a potential terrorists and the battlefield a
domestic as well as foreign location , a foreign as well as a domestic policy issue. Obama has
become the master of permanent war seeking to increase the bloated
military budgetclose to a trillion dollarswhile turning to lawless violence.translated into
unrestrained violent interventions from Libya to Syria and back to Iraq, including an
attempt to expand the war on ISIS in Syria and possibly send more heavy weapons to its client government
in Ukraine.[6] Fear became total and the imposition of punitive standards
included not only the bombing, abduction, and torture of enemy
combatants, but also the use of the police and federal troops for drug
interdictions, the enforcement of zero tolerance standards in public schools,
and the increasing criminalization of a range of social behaviors that
extended from homelessness to violating dress codes in school. Under the
regime of neoliberalism with its war-like view of competition, its celebration of self-interest, and its
disdain for democratic values and shared compassion for others, any notion of unity has been
contaminated by the fog of misguided patriotism, a hatred of the other now
privileged as an enemy combatant, and an insular retreat into mindless consumerism and the faux safety of
gated communities. With the merging of militarism , the culture of surveillance, and a neoliberal culture of cruelty,
solidarity and public trust have morphed into an endless display of violence
and the ongoing militarization of visual culture and public space .[7] The
war on terror has come home as poor neighborhoods are transformed into
war zones with the police resembling an occupying army. The most lethal expressions of
racism have become commonplace as black men and boys such as Eric Garner and Tamir Rice are repeatedly beaten, and killed by the
police.[8] As Jeffrey St. Clair has pointed out, one

index of how state terrorism and lawlessness

have become normalized is evident not only by the fact that the majority of
Americans support torture, even though they know it is totally ineffective
as a means of intelligence gathering, but also by the American publics
growing appetite for violence, whether it parades as entertainment or manifests itself in the growing demonization

and incarceration of black and brown youth, adults, Muslims, immigrants, and others deemed as disposable.[9] It should come as no
surprise that the one issue the top 2016 GOP presidential contenders agree on is that guns are the ultimate symbol of freedom in America, a
bellwether of individual liberty, a symbol of what big wants and shouldnt have.[10] Guns provide political theater for the new political
extremists and are symptomatic less of some cockeyed defense of the second amendment than willingness to maximize the pleasure of
violence and building a case for the use of deadly force both at home and abroad. As Rustom Bharacuha and Susan Sontag have argued in
different contexts, There is an echo of the pornographic in maximizing the pleasure of violence,[11] one that dissolves politics into
pathology.[12] Notions of democracy increasingly appear to be giving way to the discourse of revenge, domestic security, stupidity, and
war. The political reality that has emerged since the shattering crisis of 9/11 increasingly points to a set of narrow choices that are being
largely set by the jingoistic right wing extremists, the defense department, conservative funded foundations, and fueled by the dominant
media. War and violence now function as an aphrodisiac for a public inundated with commodities and awash in celebrity culture idiocy.
This surrender to the pleasure of violence is made all the more easy by the civic illiteracy now sweeping the United States. Climate change
deniers, anti-intellectuals, religious fundamentalists, and others who exhibit pride in displaying a kind of thoughtlessness exhibit a kind of
political and theoretical helplessness, if not corruption, that opens the door to the wider publics acceptance of foreign and domestic
violence. The current extremists

dominating Congress are frothing at the mouth to go

to war with Iran, bomb Syria into the twilight zone, and further extend the reach of
the American empire through its over bloated war machine to any country
that questions the use of American power. One glaring example can be
found in the constant and under analyzed televised images and stories of

homegrown terrorists threatening to blow up malls, schools, and any other

conceivable space where the public gathers. Other examples can be found in the militarized frothing
and Islamophobia perpetrated by the Fox News Network, made concrete by the an almost fever pitched bellicosity that informs the majority
of its commentaries and reactions to war on terror. Missing from the endless call for security, vengeance, and the use of state violence is the
massive lawlessness produced by the United States government through targeted drone attacks on enemy combatants, the violation of civil
liberties, and the almost unimaginable human suffering and hardship perpetrated through the American war machine in the Middle East,
especially Iraq. Also missing is a history of lawlessness, imperialism, and torture that supported a host of authoritarian regimes propped up
by the United States. Capitalizing

on the pent up emotions and needs of an angry and

grieving public for revenge, fueled by an unchecked Islamophobia, almost any reportage of a
terrorist attack throughout the globe, further amplifies the hyped-up
language of war, patriotism, and retaliation. Similarly, conservative talkingheads write numerous op-eds and appear on endless talk shows fanning the
fires of patriotism by calling upon the United States to expand the war
against any one of a number of Arab countries that are considered terrorist
states. For example, John Bolton, writing an op-ed for the New York Times insists that all attempts by the

Obama administration to negotiate an arms deal with Iran is a sign of weakness. For Bolton, the only way to deal with Iran is to launch an
attack on their nuclear infrastructure. The title of his op-ed sums up the organizing idea of the article: To Stop Irans Bomb, Bomb
Iran.[13] In the current historical moment, the language of indiscriminate revenge and lawlessness seems to be winning the day. This is a
discourse unconscious of its own dangerous refusal to acknowledge the important role that democratic values and social justice must play in
a truly unified rationale response, so as to prevent the further killing of innocent people, regardless of their religion, culture, and place of
occupancy in the world. Instead of viewing the current crisis as simply a new and more dangerous historical conjuncture that has nothing to
learn from the past, it is crucial for the American public to begin to understand how the past might be useful in addressing what it means to
live in a democracy at a time when democracy is not only viewed as an excess, but as a liability to the wishes and interests of the new
extremists who now control the American government. The anti-democratic forces that define American history cannot be forgotten in the
fog of political and cultural amnesia. State violence and terrorism have a long history in the United States, both in its foreign and domestic
policies, and ignoring this dark period of history means that nothing will be learned from the legacy of a politics that has indulged
authoritarian ideologies and embraced violence as a central measure of power, national identity, and patriotism.[14] At stake here is the
need to establish a vision of society and a global order that safeguards its most basic civil liberties and notions of human rights. Any struggle
against terrorism must begin with the pledge on the part of the United States that it will work in conjunction with international
organizations, especially the United Nations, a refusal to engage in any military operations that might target civilians, and that it will
rethink those aspects of its foreign policy that have allied it with repressive nations in which democratic liberties and civilian lives are under
siege. Crimes overlooked will be repeated and intensified just as public memory is rendered a liability in the face of the discourse of revenge,
demonization, and extreme violence. Many news commentators and journalists in the dominant press have taken up the events of

September 11 within the context of World War II, invoking daily the symbols of revenge, retaliation, and war. Nostalgia is now
used to justify and fuel a politics of in-security , fear , precarity , and
demonization . The dominant media no longer functions in the interests of a democracy. Mainstream media
supported Bushs fabrications to justify the invasion of Iraq and never apologized for such despicable actions. It has
rarely supported the heroic actions of whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Thomas Drake, John Kiriakou, Jeffrey
Sterling, and others.[15] Mainstream media has largely remained mute about the pardoning of those who tortured as a matter of state
policy. Against

an endless onslaught of images of jets bombing countries extending

the dominant media

from Syria and Iraq to Afghanistan and Gaza, amply supplied by the Defense Department,

connects the war abroad with the domestic struggle at home by presenting
numerous stories about the endless ways in which potential terrorists
might use nuclear weapons, poison the food supply, or unleash biochemical
agents on the American population . The increased fear and insecurity
created by such stories simultaneously serve to legitimatize
practices at home-including

a host of anti-democratic

a concerted attack on civil liberties , freedom of expression, and freedom of the

press,[16] and a growing sentiment on the part of the American public that people who suggest that terrorism is, in part, caused by
American foreign policy should not be allowed to teach in the public schools, work in the government, and even make a speech at a
college.[17] This legacy of suppression has a long history in the United States, and it has returned with a vengeance in academia, especially
for those academics, such as Norman Finkelstein and Steven G. Salaita, who have condemned Americas policies in the Middle East and the
governments support of the Israeli governments policies towards Palestinians.

Language itself has become

militarized fed by an onslaught of extreme violence

that now floods Hollywood films and the

violence that dominates American television. Hollywood blockbusters such as American Sniper glorify war crimes and produce demonizing
views of Islam.[18] Television programs such as Spartacus, The Following, Hannibal, True Detective, Justified, and Top of the Lake

violence
appears to provide one of the few outlets for Americans to express what has come to resemble
what could be construed as a spiritual release. Extreme violence, including
the sanctioning of state torture, may be one of the few practices left that allows the American
intensify the pleasure quotient for viewing extreme and graphic violence to an almost unimaginable degree. Graphic

people to feel alive , to mark what it means to be close to the register of

death in a way that reminds them of the ability to feel within a culture that
deadens every possibility of life. Under such circumstances, the reality of violence is
infantilized, transformed into forms of entertainment that produce and
legitimate a carnival of cruelty . The privatization of violence does more than maximize the pleasure quotient and
heighten macho ebullience, it also gives violence a fascist edge by depoliticizing a culture in which the reality of violence takes on the form
of state terrorism. Authoritarianism in this context becomes hysterical because it turns politics and neoliberalism into a criminal system
and keeps working towards the expansion of the realm of pure violence, where its advancement can proceed unhindered.[19] The
extreme visibility

of violence in American culture represents a willful pedagogy of

carnage and gore designed to normalize its presence in

American

society and to

legitimate its practice and presence as a matter of common sense . Moreover,

war making and the militarization of

public

discourse and public space

also

serve as an uncritical homage to a form of hyper-masculinity that operates

from the assumption that violence is not only the most important practice for
mediating most problems, but that it is also central to identity formation itself.
Agency is now militarized and almost completely removed from any notion of
civic values . We get a glimpse of this form of violent hyper-masculinity not only in the highly publicized brutality against women
dished out by professional football players, but also in the endless stories of sexual abuse and violence now taking place in frat houses across
America, many in some of the most prestigious colleges and universities. Violence

has become the DNA of

war making in the United States, escalating under Bush and Obama into a kind of war fever that
embraces a death drive. As Robert J. Lifton points out, Warmaking can quickly become
associated with war fever, the mobilization of public excitement to the point of a
collective experience with transcendence. War then becomes heroic, even mythic, a
task that must be carried out for the defense of ones nation , to sustain its special

historical destiny and the immortality of its people. ..War fever tends always to be sporadic and subject to disillusionment. Its underside is
death anxiety, in this case related less to combat than to fears of new terrorist attacks at home or against Americans abroadand later to
growing casualties in occupied Iraq.[20]

The war on terror is the new normal . Its adoration

and intensification of violence, militarization, and state terrorism reach

into every aspect of

American

life . Americans complain over the economic deficit but say little about the democracy

and moral deficit now providing the foundation for the new authoritarianism. A police presence in our major cities showcases the visible
parameters of the authoritarian state. For example, with a police force of 34,000 New York City resembles an armed camp with a force that
as Thom Hartman points out is biggerthat the active militaries of Austria, Bulgaria, Chad, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Kenya, and a
number of other countries.[21] At the same time, the Pentagon has given billions of dollars worth of military equipment to local police
forces all over America. Is it any wonder, that minorities of color fear the police more than the gangs and criminals that haunt their
neighborhoods? Militarism is one of the breeding grounds of violence in the United States and is visible in the ubiquitous gun culture, the
modeling of schools after prisons, the exploding incarceration state, the paramilitarization of local police forces, the burgeoning military
budget, and the ongoing attacks on protesters, dissidents, black and brown youth, and women. Under

the war on
terrorism, moral panic and a culture of fear have not only redefined public
space as the sinister abode of danger, death and infection and fueled the
collective rush to patriotism on the cheap, it has also buttressed a fear
economy and refigured the meaning of politics itself .[22] Defined as the
complex of military and security firms rushing to exploit the national
nervous breakdown,[23] the fear economy promises big financial gains for both the defense
department, and the anti-terrorist-security sectors, primed to terror-proof everything from trash cans and
water systems to shopping malls and public restrooms. The war on terrorism has been transformed into a new market, a consumer goods

for the hysterical war mongers and their acolytes in the media while making politics and extension of war. Fear is no longer an attitude
as much as it is a culture that functions

as the enemy of reason [while distorting]

emotions and perceptions, and often leads to poor decisions.[24] But the culture of
fear does more than undermine critical judgment and suppress dissent, as Don Hazen points out, it also: breeds more
violence, mental illness and trauma, social disintegration, job failure, loss of
workers rights, and much more. Pervasive fear ultimately paves the way for an

accelerating authoritarian society with increased

police power, legally codified oppression,

and repression reproduce rather than
address the most fundamental anti-democratic elements of terrorism. Instead of mobilizing fear, people need to
recognize that the threat of terrorism cannot be understood apart from the crisis of
democracy itself. The greatest struggle faced by the American public is not terrorism, but a struggle on behalf of justice, freedom,
invasion of privacy, social controls, social anxiety and PTSD.[25] Fear

and democracy for all of the citizens of the globe. This is not going to take place, as President Obamas policies will tragically affirm, by
shutting down democracy, eliminating its most cherished rights and freedoms, and deriding communities of dissent. Engaging terrorism
demands more than rage and anger, revenge and retaliation. American society is broken, corrupted by the financial elite, and addicted to
violence and a culture of permanent war.

The war on terror institutionalizes a permanent state of exception that

normalizes bare life among the population and justifies endless
interventions in the name of security turns the case
van Munster 4 [RENS VAN MUNSTER is Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International
Studies (DIIS) and teaches security studies at the Department of Political Science, University of Southern
Denmark. The War on Terrorism: When the Exception Becomes the Rule, ARTICLE in INTERNATIONAL
JOURNAL FOR THE SEMIOTICS OF LAW JANUARY 2004,
http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rens_Van_Munster/publication/226766473_The_War_on_Terroris
m_When_the_Exception_Becomes_the_Rule/links/00b7d5385a862d6ad2000000.pdf, msm]
1. INTRODUCTION Building upon the work of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, this article argues the

semiotics of the war on terrorism points at a significant shift in United States

discourses on security. This shift is best described as a move from defence to prevention or as a move from
deterrence to risk management. Whereas defence and the politics of threat are closely related to the rule-governed realm
of war, this article claims that the

framework of

war on terrorism takes place largely outside the

domestic or international

law and seems to consolidate something akin to a

permanent state of exception , in which distinctions such as

inside/outside, peace/war, friend/enemy and rule/exception are blurred
to the point of indistinction . Indeed, this article argues that the United States war on
terrorism is a particular form of governing an emergency , in which the United
States constitutes itself as the sovereign of the global order by exempting
itself from the

(international)

framework of law . In this process, the sovereign power

reduces the life of (some) people to that of homo sacer: life that can be killed
without punishment . The argument will proceed in four stages. The next section will discuss Agambens
essay Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998) in some detail, since it seems key to understanding the
exceptional mode of operation of the war on terrorism. Picking up on this, Section 3 will apply the framework of
Agamben to the war on terrorism, arguing that the United States security response to terrorism institutionalises the
state of exception as a permanent condition of the global order. Due to a shift in US politics of security, now informed by
a discourse on eventualities rather than actual events, the United States calls for a permanent military policing through
the mechanisms of prevention and pre-emption. Section 4 will argue that in this permanent state of exception, the
other, the enemy is encountered mainly as homo sacer. Section 5 concludes this paper. 2.

ZONES OF INDISTINCTION: SOVEREIGN POWER AND BARE LIFE This section seeks to elaborate Agambens treatise
on sovereign power and bare life as it seems key to grasping what is currently at stake in the war on terrorism. It will
begin with a discussion of the relation between sovereignty and the camp, arguing that the camp is characterised by a
permanent state of exception in which law 142 RENS VAN MUNSTER and chaos enter into a zone of indistinction. In
this zone of indistinction, the central figure one encounters is that of homo sacer, bare life stripped of all its value in the
sense that violence against him/her remains unpunished. Agambens writings on sovereign power, bare life and the
camp are based on his reading of Carl Schmitts definition of sovereignty. According to Schmitt, the kernel of sovereignty
lies in declaring the state of exception. The state of exception is constitutive of the juridical order in the sense that no
rule exists without an exception: Order must be established for juridical order to make sense. A regular situation must
be created, and sovereign is he who definitely decides if this situation is actually effective.3 Schmitt thus inverses the

traditional Hobbesian definition of sovereignty as the juridical sanctioned power to rule. Sovereignty is not established
after the state of nature; rather, the sovereign declaration of the state of exception simultaneously creates the state of
nature and the rule of law through the abandonment of life, reducing (some) subjects to bare life.4 Sovereign power thus
constantly reproduces what it claims to presuppose. That is, the social contract that brings the sovereign into being masks
the fact that sovereignty essentially operates through a ban: The originary relation of law to life is not application but
abandonment.5 First, the sovereign is characterised by the fact that he can exempt himself from the law. Second, in
doing so sovereign power excludes sacred life from the human-made juridical order in the sense that the latter can be
killed without punishment. Thus, the sovereign and homo sacer are the mirror images of the sovereign operation: the
sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect
to whom all men act as sovereigns.6 To put it simply: if the sovereign is defined by his capability to exempt himself
from the law, homo sacer is defined as the bearer of this sovereign ban. Hence, for Carl Schmitt sovereignty shows itself
not in a normal situation (or more accurately: it shows itself only in its potentiality) but in the state of exception, which
is the authentic self-definition of a political community in the sense that it both constructs and delimits political space.7
Although Agamben finds Schmitts definition of sovereignty useful, he identifies a third variation of order and
localisation besides the rule of law and the state of exception: To an order without localization (the state of exception, in
which law is suspended) there now corresponds a localization without order (the camp as the permanent space of
exception).8 For Agamben, the camp exemplifies the space that is opened up when the state of exception finds a more
permanent location: The camp is thus the structure in which the state of exception the possibility of deciding on which
founds sovereign power is realized normally[It] actually delimits a space in which the normal order is de facto
suspended and in which whether or not atrocities are committed depends not on the law but on the civility and ethical
sense of the police who temporarily act as sovereign.9 Originally, the camp was an exclusive, secret, space surrounded by
walls that divided social life within the political community from the bare life in the camps. However, according to
Agamben the space of the state of exception has transgressed the spatiotemporal boundaries of the camp. The exception
has become the rule: Today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the
West.10 Taking his cue from Michel Foucault, Agamben maintains that the sovereign right to take life

has become supplemented and permeated by a right to make life. In modern

societies the sovereign threat of death has been complemented with a concern
to take charge of biological life in order to make it more productive, fertile,
healthy, etc.11 Instead of threatening with death, biopolitics is a form of power that is concerned with the
correction, administration and regulation of populations. Seeking to take charge of life, it does not have to draw the line
that separates the enemies of the sovereign from his obedient subjects; it effects distributions around the norm.12 The
inclusion of pure life in politics, then, also marks a shift from law to the (statistical) norm in the sense that bare life is not
only, or not even first and foremost, produced in the sovereign process of taking life, but through the process of making
life, i.e. through the distribution of human life around a norm with the purpose of reducing lifes distance to this norm.
Although the incorporation of bare life in the political realm has made it possible to reduce, amongst others, famine and
mortality in the West, it has also given rise to caring practices such as racism and eugenics: What follows is a kind of
bestialization of man achieved through the most sophisticated political techniques. For the first time in historyit
becomes possible both to protect life and to authorize a holocaust.13 Agambens rendering of

sovereign power and bare life is driven by an ethical drive to lay bare the
juridico-political mechanisms of power that make it possible to commit acts
of violence that do not count as crime.14 While not denying the uniqueness of the suffering in the
Nazi concentration camps, Agamben discovers similar structures in contemporary society. He points out that camp-like
structures such as detention centres for illegal migrants, airport holding zones and humanitarian relief camps all
produce bare life in the sense that decisions on the life of people can be taken outside the normal framework of rule, but
which nevertheless are not completely illegal and without connection to that law. In the context of this paper, the
Guantanamo Bay detention centre for suspected terrorists is another case in point.15 However, as Edkins has noted,
Agamben has not inquired deeper into the politics of emergency or the politics of the ban in which the sovereign and
homo sacer are constituted as each others mirror image.16 Therefore, the following sections aim to provide insight into
the ways in which the American governance of the emergency of 9/11 constitute global American sovereignty on the one
hand and reduce political subjects to the naked life of homo sacer. 3. THE WAR ON TERRORISM AND THE
PRODUCTION OF AMERICAN SOVEREIGNTY A direct parallel, then, can be drawn between

Agambens notion of the camp as a zone of indistinction and the logic that informs
the United States war on terrorism. In addition to the physical emergence of camp-like structures such as the
detainment centres for suspected terrorists, it can be said that the war on terrorism operates
through the sovereign ban in the sense that it blurs the distinction between
inside/ outside, domestic politics/international relations, order/anarchy,
trust/fear police/military and friend/enemy. This section argues that the blurring
is brought about by a fundamental change in the United States politics of
security. Contrary to the pre-9/11 period, the starting point of post-9/11 security politics is prevention rather than
the defence against an actual threat: We must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of
todays adversariesTo forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if
necessary, act

pre-emptively.17 The semiotic shift from defence to prevention takes its point of departure in

the behavioural potentialities of states rather than their actual behaviour: [T]he United States can no longer solely rely
on a reactive posture as we have in the past. The inability to deter a potential attacker, the immediacy of todays threats,
and the magnitude of potential harm that could be unleashed by our adversaries choice of weapons, do not permit that
option. We cannot let our enemies strike first.18 Whereas anticipatory self-defence as it is understood in international
law still operates with an image of reactive violence, the war on terrorism replaces this picture

with that of proactive intervention: We must deter and defend against the threat before it is
unleashed.19 As such, prevention entails a move from danger to risk .20 The aim
is no longer to confront a concrete danger, but to intervene before threats
have fully emerged . Thus, preventive security is virtual security: it is one
step further away from danger in its potentiality, but at the same time it is
real, for the future increasingly determines present security choices.21 The
shift from defence to prevention, re-action to pro-action, deterrence to
intelligence, and events to eventualities is to be considered mainly on an
ontological level . Contrary to defence, prevention takes insecurity rather than
security as the underlying value of security politics : We are today a nation at risk to a
terrorist threat to America takes many forms, has many places to hide, and is
often invisible. Yet the need for homeland security is tied to our enduring vulnerability.22 While defence
new and changing threat. The

implies protection, safety and trust, prevention operates on the basis of permanent feelings of fear, anxiety and unease.

Security discourses, in other words, are increasingly dominated by the logic of risk
management , a logic which calls for the management and government of
potentialities of risky populations by means of (statistical) calculations and
proactive management rather than through the reactive management of real events and threats. The war
on terrorism cannot be pinpointed in spatiotemporal terms. The time and place of terrorism are of the terrorists
choosing. The success of terrorism lies in the provocation of fear and anxiety that result from the uncertainty regarding
the time and place of the next attack. Hence, all perceived dangers (anthrax, serial killers, illegal
immigration, etc.) can

be and are linked to terrorists. Fear is the rationale of the war

on terrorism in which, in the end, everything can become suspicious. The National Security Strategy (2002)
summarises it nicely: Thousands of dangerous killers, schooled in the methods of murder, often supported by outlaw
regimes, are now spread throughout the world like ticking time bombs, set to go off without warning.23 Victory is
remote and to protect the local homeland, security politics has to operate on a global level: to

be safe here means that the world has to be freed from terrorists
everywhere . In terms of its effects on the contours of the global order, the prevention doctrine
lays the basis for the United States exemption from international law and
other norms that govern conduct in international society. In this sense,
prevention invalidates the law without declaring international law openly
obsolete . Faced with a non-localisable and open-ended threat, the war on terrorism effectively
institutionalises a permanent state of exception in which the United States
reserves for itself the right to act unilaterally, while simultaneously
demanding compliance with the law from the other states . As Hardt and Negri argue:
Here therefore, is born, in the name of the exceptionality of the
intervention, a form of right that is really a right of the police [that] is
inscribed in the deployment of prevention, repression, and rhetorical force
aimed at the reconstruction of the social equilibrium.24 As such, the war on
terrorism replaces the current order with a smooth, infinite space of
endless surveillance, detection and prevention. Prevention produces
American sovereignty, but it is also produces bare life , life that is abandoned in the process
of constituting global American sovereignty. 4. THE WAR ON TERRORISM AND THE PRODUCTION OF BARE LIFE
In the war on terror, the figure of the terrorist embodies the bare life that is the

bearer of the sovereign ban. While the language of war might seem to elevate terrorism from the realm of
criminal justice (low politics) to that of war and international security (high politics), a closer look reveals that
terrorists are in fact not considered a legitimate party in the war. Rather, they

are criminalised and referred to as unlawful combatants . The distinction between

enemy combatant and unlawful combatant has much in common with the Schmittian distinction between enemy and foe.
While the first refers to the concrete other that constitutes an existential threat to the self, the foe refers to the
criminalised and morally degraded other, who should not only be defeated but utterly destroyed. Perhaps, it is in this
sense that one should make sense of the comment by the American Secretary of Defence, Donald
Rumsfeld, that

the goal of the war in Afghanistan was to kill rather than defeat
as many Taleban as possible.25 At any rate, the framing of the war on terrorism
as a war on behalf of civilisation itself denies that such values are presented
in the other.26 Thus Zizek argues that in the war on terrorism ...we cannot even imagine a neutral
humanitarian organization like the Red Cross mediating between the warring parties, organizing the exchange of
prisoners, and so on: one side of the conflict (the US-dominated global force) already assumes the role of the Red Cross
it perceives itself not as one of the warring sides, but as a mediating agent of peace and global order crushing rebellions
and, simultaneously, providing humanitarian aid to the local populations. Perhaps the ultimate image of the treatment
of the local population as Homo sacer is that of the American war plane flying above Afghanistan one is never sure
what it will drop, bombs or food parcels.27 As noted earlier, a second aspect in which the transformation of life into
bare life is visible in the war on terrorism concerns the status and treatment of detained suspects of terrorism. Although
many of the detainees have been taken into American custody during the armed conflict in Afghanistan, they are not
granted the prisoner of war status in the way it is required by the Geneva Conventions. Speaking of unlawful combatants,
the United States successfully keeps their detainment outside the realm of international regulation. In a parallel
movement, the fate of the detainees is also kept outside the jurisdiction of the national American criminal justice system
as a result of the extra-territorial location of the Guantanamo base where many detainees are held. While the suffering of
these detainees obviously is not comparable to the atrocities faced by inhabitants of the concentration camps, it is
nevertheless possible to detect the juridico-political structure of the state of exception (the camp) in detainment centres
such as the Guantanamo base, as detainees are stripped from all legal rights, while they remain subjected to the power
exercised over them.28 However, the biopolitical production of bare life does not just take place in the camp or the
immediate conflict in Afghanistan. In fact, the production of homo sacer is made possible

through bureaucratic techniques of risk management, enabled by new laws such as the
Patriot Act, that apply well beyond the theatres of military conflict. These techniques of bureaucratic
surveillance subject life to statistical methods by which norms of behaviour
are identified within the population according to the laws of probability .29 In
risk management, the subject is not encountered as a unique person with some
sort of indispensable inner singularity, but as an aggregate of risk factors, a
modulation that can be managed and tamed through continuous
monitoring. As Rose argues, risk management is not a question of instituting a regime in which each person is
permanently under the alien gaze of the eye of power exercising individualizing surveillance. It is not a matter of
apprehending and normalizing the offender ex post facto. Conduct is continually monitored and reshaped by logics
immanent within all networks of practice. Surveillance is designed in to the flows of everyday existence.30 Turning
individuals into dividuals, risk management reduces life to the naked life of

biographic profiles on the basis of which new collective identities or risk

classes are created.31 The aim of the Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening (CAPPS) system, for
instance, is to gather data about all passengers flying to the United States. On the basis of information about name, age,
address, passport, credit card number and previous travels, CAPPS classifies the potential dangerousness of all
travellers. It constructs three different risk classes/identities: green, yellow and red, with green meaning non-dangerous
and red meaning very dangerous. Muslim visitors from the Middle East are automatically assigned the yellow identity.32
However, surveillance is not just limited to foreigners entering the United States. The Terrorist Screening Center (TSC), a
joint initiative of the Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, the Intelligence Community, the FBI
and the State Department, seeks to install surveillance and data collection as a routine of every-day life within and
outside the United States. As Attorney General Ashcroft argues: The Terrorist Screening Center will provide one-stop
shopping so that every federal anti-terrorist screener is working off the same page whether its an airport screener, an
embassy official issuing visas overseas, or an FBI agent on the street.33 The result is that the differences between
inside/outside, police/military and FBI/CIA become increasingly blurred. On the one hand, there is an increasing
internalisation of external security in the form of domestic spying and data collection within the United States. On the
other hand, externalisation of internal security (policing beyond borders) is taking place in remote places such as
Afghanistan. Hence, Tom Ridges (Secretary of Homeland Security) remark, that the Terrorist Screening Center will
make it possible to put intelligence to immediate use at the front lines of the battle against terrorism misses the crucial
point that there are no clear front lines in the war on terror. Rather, the front is everywhere and no one can expect to be
exempted from the network of surveillance and inspection. In a sense, everybody is a suspect. The administration and
classification of biographical risk profiles does not work as an immediate exclusion (monitored subjects can freely move
around), but as a form of inclusive exclusion. That is, prevention does not perform its exclusive function in simple
binary terms of friend/foe, but fabricates the foe within the social order as potentially dangerous. The aim of

intervention is no longer the exclusion of dangerous elements, but to interfere on the actuarial basis of risk factors in
order to anticipate and prevent groupings from becoming dangerous. Through the inclusion of risk classes in a system of
control, the life of legal subjects is not reduced to that of homo sacer. Rather, the reverse is happening: the figure

of homo sacer dwells in everybody in the sense that all life is bare life until
class credentials prove otherwise the elevation from homo sacer to an
autonomous subject is only a secondary move. 5. CONCLUSION Following Agamben, this
paper has argued that the centrality of the state of exception and the sovereign ban
as the non-localisable foundation for the political order are crucial for
understanding the war on terrorism, the production of American
sovereignty and the production of bare life. Due to its emphasis on prevention, the war
on terrorism institutionalises the state of exception as a permanent aspect
of the global order . In it, American sovereignty is constituted in a Schmittian
sense as

much as bare life is subjected to technological processes of risk

identification, administration and assessment . Indeed, in the sense that prevention

calls for a system of social control that envelopes the entire globe, it is best
understood as a blurring of the boundaries between inside/outside,
domestic/international and peace/war . The dispersion of surveillance throughout domestic and
international society implies that heterogeneous factors and events such as place of birth, religion, travel records,
reading records, visa applications and immigration all become part of a cybernetics of control in which risk information
is intrinsic to all decisions made on these issues. Prevention, then, is not concerned with the production of something
good. Its aim is to repress anxiety through the development of new and better technologies of risk. It does not work
towards some utopian goal, but is guided by the principle of apocalypse: Risk society is a catastrophic society. In it the
exceptional condition threatens to become the norm.34 The semiotic shift from defence to prevention in American
security discourse, to conclude, implies that the freedom of human beings is in constantly constrained, restricted and
assessed. Hence, while the battle against terrorism is fought in the name of freedom and democracy, risk management
neutralises real democratic participation by classifying groups in categories that affect the chances and choices of people
in every-day life. To quote Agamben: A state which has security as its sole task and source of legitimacy is a fragile
organism; it can always be provoked by terrorism to become itself terroristic.

Framework

Framework
Their political education to create particular skills for a particular purpose
reduce us to particular roles within the political economy that denies
ontological indeterminacy and destroys our freedom to be
LEWIS 14 [Tyson E. Lewis is Associate professor of art education in the Department of art education and art history,
College of Visual Arts and Design, University of North Texas. THE POTENTIALITY OF STUDY: GIORGIO AGAMBEN
ON THE POLITICS OF EDUCATIONAL EXCEPTIONALITY, symploke Vol. 22, Nos. 1-2 (2014),
http://media.proquest.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/media/pq/classic/doc/3578313101/fmt/pi/rep/NONE?hl=&cit
%3Aauth=Lewis%2C+Tyson+E&cit%3Atitle=THE+POTENTIALITY+OF+STUDY
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%2BEvzyxh2V0eD4%3D#statusbar=1&zoom=110, msm]
Potentiality of Study To begin, I will offer a brief overview of Agambens theory of potentiality. This initial introduction
will provide the necessary backdrop for understanding the ontology of study. From De Anima, Giorgio Agamben argues
that Aristotle enables us to think two kinds of potential: generic and effective. A generic conceptualization of potentiality
explains how a child is able to grow up to be a particular type of person with a particular role in society (a statesman for
example). Through

education, the child suffers an alteration (a becoming

other ) through learning (Agamben 1999, 179) where the passage from the act
implies an exhaustion and destruction of potential (Agamben 2005, 136). It is precisely
this model of potentiality that currently informs discourses of what has been
called the learning society (Masschelein and Simons 2008) a social apparatus that
emphasizes investment into potentiality in order to fully actualize this
potential in the form of performance outcomes and human capital
development.

Here

the ontology of the child is structured according to the

strict logic of not yet: not yet an adult, not yet a citizen, not yet a
productive member of society . Thus the child must suffer an alteration
through learning that destroys the not yet in order to fully actualize a
latent potentiality for adulthood, citizenship, or productivity (i.e., transform the
not yet into the necessity of the must be of the professional, employable adult). To fully actualize
potentiality is to destroy it, transforming a contingency into a necessity . In this
schema, potentiality becomes subordinate to actuality it is in some senses what makes the
actual possible but also what must be eliminated in order for the passage to the act to be complete and for the child to
rightfully take his or her place within allotted order of things (either in relation to the economic, the political, or the
social). To

fulfill potentiality is to destroy it in the name of efficiency and

effectiveness, commanding and controlling the possibilities offered by

potentiality . The contingencies of potentiality are what must be sacrificed
in order for the child to learn x skills for x purposes predetermined in
advance by the social norms, traditions, and values which inform
educational practices . The result is a notion of the human as capable of
only a select few behaviors, skills, and actions easily assignable to a specific

function within the overall division of labor . In other words, the logic of
education as socialization is anchored in an ontology of generic potentiality
as a not yet that must be made manifest in measurably determinate,
socially useful, and economically manageable skillsets . Education, in this sense,
concerns deadlinesor lines that end with the death of potentiality. Tests are
therefore grave markers not markers of what has passed out of actuality but rather of what has passed into
actuality. Indeed, potentiality in this framework is more or less reduced to a series of possibilities
that can either be actualized or not actualized . The logic in such cases operates through the
function of the or which separates and divides potentiality into a series of discrete, functionally oriented, and exclusive
possibilities (you will either go to vocational school or college). 278 Opposed to the reductive notion of generic
potentiality underlying learning, Agamben argues that there is a second notion of potentiality in Aristotles work that can
be referred to as effective potentiality in that it represents a conservation of potential in the act and something like the
giving of potentiality to itself (2005, 136). This is the type of potentiality that interests Agamben the most. Those who
have knowledge are in potential, meaning that they equally have the capability to bring knowledge into actuality and not
bring knowledge into actuality. Agamben then gives the example of an architect who is in potential insofar as he has the
potential to not-build, the poet the potential to not-write poems (1999, 179). By conserving itself, potential remains
impotential (impotenza). Im-potentiality (which indicates the symbiotic relation between potential and impotential) is
not simply impotence, but is an active capability for not-doing or not-being. Agamben summarizes: im-potentiality is the
capability of the act in not realizing it (1998, 45) and thus permits human beings to accumulate and freely master
their own capacities, to transform them into faculties (2011b, 44). Rather than a stumbling block that must be
continually denied, repressed, or overcome, Joanne Faulkner argues that Agambens theory of im-potential refers not
simply to incapacity but rather to a being-able that abstains from doing (2010, 205) that permits a new relation to ones
own impotency. Rather than a simple lack or defi cit, im-potentiality is a privation in the sense that im-potentiality
means one has potential but prefers not to actualize it in any specifi c form. Thus, all theories of potentiality must also
and equally be theories of the impotential, for it is im-potential that enables freedom to fl ourishnot the freedom of I
will as a power of self-production according to economic imperatives or socially predetermined norms so much as an
ontological openness to new possibilities. In fact, it is the giving of potentiality to itself that is the experience of freedom.
Agamben writes, Here it is possible to see how the root of freedom is to be found in the abyss of potentiality. To be free
is, in the sense we have seen, to be capable of ones own impotentiality (1999, 183). What makes us human, according
to Agamben, is precisely the capability to not be, to remain im-potential. It is this paradoxical existence that opens history
to contingencyto the potential to act otherwise or to be otherwise. Evil in this sense is derivative of a fl ight from an
indetermining im-potentiality into the logic of pure or complete actualization for a predetermined end (transforming a
contingency into a necessity). It is a denial of the constitutive link between growth and impotence. Citing Agamben, Evil
is only our inadequate reaction when faced with this demonic element [our impotential], our fearful retreat from it in
order to exercisefounding ourselves in this fl ight some power of being (1993, 31-32). Thus to enable students to
experience their potential means that they must be given the chance to experience their impotence, their capability not
to be.

Education

as mere socialization through learning

measures what someone can do in

order to fulfill a particular role within the economy , yet for Agamben, this
obsession with assessment and verification Tyson E. Lewis The Potentiality of Study
symploke 279 of actualization in the learning society is itself a form of evil that
destroys our freedom to be rather than precisely because it denies our
ontological indeterminacy . His theory of im-potentiality enables us to think potentiality against the
logic of educational socialization, which reduces potentiality to a not yet that
actualizes itself in a must be. Indeed, impotentiality does not simply separate potentiality from
impotentiality (thus sacrifi cing contingency for necessity, possibility for impossibility), rather it recognizes that the
subject emerges precisely in the gap that separates and binds together opposite forces in the atopic space existing
between desubjectifi cation (an unnamed subject position) and subjectifi cation (recognizable within the order of things
and the partitioning of the sensible). Instead of separating potentiality into a series of mutually exclusive possibilities (to
be or not to be), potentiality holds possibilities together, returning them to a more primordially indeterminate state (to
be and not to be simultaneously). While Agamben draws our attention to the centrality of

im-potentiality within politics, ontology, and literary theory , he only makes a passing
gesture toward the theme of education. Yet this does not mean that education is unimportant for Agamben. Indeed, we
could think of education as the unthought potentiality of his own thinking.
The unthought briefly manifests itself in the aphorism On Study from the book The Idea of Prose. Briefl y summarized,

studying is an interminable and rhythmic activity that not only loses a

sense of its own end but, more importantly, does not even desire one (Agamben 1995,
64). The studier seems suspended in a state of oscillation between sadness

and inspiration, of moving forward and withdrawing from certain aims,

subjectification and desubjectification. Studying emerges as a kind of
impotential state of educational being that interrupts any notion of
educational growth or educational realization of latent potentialities.
Indeed, Agamben points out that studying and stupefying are closely connected. Stupidity here is not simply a lack of
knowledge but rather the experience of bewilderment in the face of the interminable or indeterminate manifestation of
im-potentiality as such. If we think of education as oriented towards the

measurability of determinate, reliable skillsets, studying suddenly appears

to be a useless activity, devoid of quantifiable significance in the life of the
student. To use Heideggerian language, study suspends any one in-in-order-to or
for-the-purpose-of which orient Dasein toward practical coping. Studying is a paradoxical
state between education for subjectifi cation and for desubjectifi cation,
between possibility and impossibility, between contingency and necessity . To
study is to undergo a certain inoperativity where we are, to appropriate a phrase from Thomas Carl Walls insightful
study of Agamben, exposed to all its[thoughts] possibilities (all its predicates) and yet are undestined to any one or
any set of them (1999, 152). Without a destiny or destination, the studier is a precarious, risky,

and indeterminate kind of life.

Policy Simulation is fake and neglects the actual process of policy
implementation
Claude, 88 Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs at the University of
Virginia (Inis, States and the Global System, 1988, pgs. 18-20)
This view

of the state as an institutional monolith is fostered by the notion of

sovereignty, which calls up the image of the monarch, presiding over his
kingdom. Sovereignty emphasizes the singularity of the state , its monopoly
of authority, its unity of command and its capacity to speak with one
voice. Thus, France wills, Iran demands, China intends, New Zealand promises and the Soviet
Union insists. One all too easily conjures up the picture of a single-minded
and purposeful state that decides exactly what it wants to achieve, adopts
coherent policies intelligently adapted to its objectives, knows what it is doing, does what it intends and always
has its act together. This view of the state is reinforced by political scientists
emphasis upon the concept of policy and upon the thesis that governments
derive policy from calculations of national interest. We thus take it for
granted that states act internationally in accordance with rationally
conceived and consciously constructed schemes of action, and we implicitly refuse to
consider the possibility that alternatives to policy -directed behaviour may have importance
alternatives such as random, reactive, instinctual, habitual and conformist behaviour. Our rationalistic
assumption that states do what they have planned to do tends to inhibit the
discovery that states sometimes do what they feel compelled to do, or what
they have the opportunity to do, or what they have usually done, or what
other states are doing, or whatever the line of least resistance would seem to
suggest. Academic preoccupation with the making of policy is accompanied
by academic neglect of the execution of policy . We seem to assume that once the
state has calculated its interest and contrived a policy to further that interest, the carrying out of policy is
the virtually automatic result of the routine functioning of the bureaucratic
mechanism of the state. I am inclined to call this the Genesis theory of public
administration, taking as my text the passage: And God said, Let there be light: and there
was light. I suspect that, in the realm of government, policy execution rarely follows so
promptly and inexorably from policy statement . Alternatively, one may dub it the Pooh-Bah/Ko-Ko
theory, honouring those denizens of William S. Gilberts Japan who took the position that when the Mikado ordered that something e done

it was as good as done and might as well be declared to have been done. In

the real world, that which a state

decides to do is not as good as done; it may, in fact, never be done. And what
states do, they may never have decided to do. Governments are not
automatic machines, grinding out decisions and converting decisions into actions. They are
agglomerations of human beings , like the rest of us inclined to be fallible , lazy, forgetful,
indecisive, resistant to discipline and authority, and

likely to fail to get the word or to heed it. As in other

large organizations, left and right governmental hands are frequently ignorant of each others activities, official spokesmen contradict each
other, ministries work at cross purposes, and the creaking machinery of government often gives the impression that no one is really in
charge. I hope that no one will attribute my jaundiced view of government merely to the fact that I am an Americanone, that is, whose
personal experience is limited to a governmental system that is notoriously complex, disjointed, erratic, cumbersome and unpredictable.
The United States does not, I suspect, have the least effective government or the most bumbling and incompetent bureaucracy in all the
world. Here

and there, now and then, governments do, of course perform prodigious feats
of organization and administration: an extraordinary war effort, a flight to the moon, a successful hostage-rescue
operation. More often, states have to make do with governments that are not
notably clear about their purposes or coordinated and disciplined in their
operations. This means that, in international relations, states are sometimes less dangerous, and sometimes less reliable, than one
might think. Neither their threats nor their promises are to be taken with absolute seriousness. Above all, it means that
we students of international politics must be cautious in attributing
purposefulness and responsibility to governments. To say the that the
United States was informed about an event is not to establish that the
president acted in the light of that knowledge; he may never have heard
about it. To say that a Soviet pilot shot down an airliner is not to prove that the Kremlin has adopted the policy of destroying all
intruders into Soviet airspace; one wants to know how and by whom the decision to fire was made. To observe that the representative of
Zimbabwe voted in favour of a particular resolution in the United Nations General Assembly is not necessarily to discover the nature of
Zimbabwes policy on the affected matter; Zimbabwe may have no policy on that matter, and it may be that no one in the national capital
has ever heard of the issue. We can hardly dispense with the convenient notion that Pakistan claims, Cuba promises, and Italy insists, and

it is essential
that we bear constantly in mind the reality that governments are never fully
in charge and never achieve the unity, purposefulness and discipline that
theory attributes to themand that they sometimes claim.
we cannot well abandon the formal position that governments speak for and act on behalf of their states, but

Framework alone is a reason to vote neg their approach side-steps

decision-making and kills deliberation only a new form of debate can
reclaim the political
Ian Beier MA in Communication Studies @ UNLV 2010 Cascading Simulation: A
Critical Perspective On Barack Obamas Foreign Policy During The 2008 Presidential
Election thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of
Arts in Communication Studies Department of Communication Studies Greenspun
College of Urban Affairs Graduate College University of Nevada, Las Vegas August 2010,
SHOUT OUT TO DR. IAN BEIER
This universal frame helps determine how the audience comes to understand their campaigns platforms because voters find value-laden
claims more persuasive than pragmatic considerations.45 This exclusionary function is an important component of political rhetoric
because it reveals one of the most important traits of persuasion. That is,

it is easiest to influence the opinion

of others when they perceive that there are no viable alternatives.

Rhetorical

scholar Keith Ericksons piece Presidential Spectacles: Political Illusionism and the Rhetoric of Travel is a prime example of presidential
rhetoric as spectacle. For Erickson, travel spectacle should be analyzed differently because the presentation is what grants the speech act
rhetorical power, not the content of the speech itself. Robert Schmull suggests visually absorbing images capture the publics imagination
better than lengthy speeches, making it much more likely that the audience remembers what they saw rather than what they heard.46 Here,
the travel spectacle is the text or rhetorical artifact. In this sense, Erickson suggests that form supersedes content, as the images of the
presentation function as ideological forms of pictorial power that possess the capacity to persuade, deceive, or otherwise influence
spectators . . . to justify and maintain certain forms of collective conduct.47 Understanding spectacle as primarily presentational rhetoric is
quite significant to rhetorical scholarship on presidential address and presidential campaigns. If speeches are only given to heighten the
rhetorical power of the image, then

the words used in these speeches only retain

rhetorical significance when they add to the publics collective memory of the
speech. Thus, presidential addresses, even when discussing particular policies, are largely ceremonial in nature because reliance

on images, as opposed to

informed dialogue, discourse, or

debate enables administrations

to side-step the public forum, avoid interactive decision making, and to

address spectators epideictically .48 The speaker is merely attempting to
align themselves with the values of the audience rather than call them to
action through active deliberation, as travel spectacles merely gratify affectively; in general, they do
not resolve issues because their reassurances are but substitutes for
achievement.49 The idea that travel merely glosses over controversy is particularly important in the context of presidential
campaigns, as it further signifies the notion that campaign orations are a hybrid of deliberative means and epideictic ends. Obviously, the
idea that spectacle creates rhetorical opportunities for manipulation pays homage to media criticism. However, Ericksons work is
important because it demonstrates how presidential scholarship reverses the presumptive agent-object relationship between the media and
the president prevalent in Baudrillards analysis. For Erickson, the president is the agent rather than the object of manipulation. Indeed,
there is quite a bit of doubt among rhetorical critics who question whether the media truly interrogates the content of its reports, as media
pundits see travel spectacles [as] not only newsworthy but functionally convenient, cost-effective visual attention- getters that simplify
complex political information.50 In essence, the travel spectacle

does the leg work of constructing

the story for the media. Here, the media coverage [of the travel spectacle] . . . fails to interpret or identify nascent signs
of White House manipulation51 because correspondents are rarely invested in the story enough to sit around Air Force One asking why
theyre writing these stories.52 Recent scholarship on the Bush administration demonstrates this claim, arguing that the passivity of the
media allows outright manipulation. As Kellner notes, in addition to cultivating right-wing media that broadcast their messages of the day
and intimidating the mainstream corporate media, the Bush administration has created fake media and bought conservative commentators
to push their policies.53 Examples include the administrations distribution of videos that are presented as local broadcasting54 and the
administrations planting of fake reporters who asked loaded questions at White House Press Conferences.55 Limiting the text to include
only the presentation of the speaker and their attempts to frame media coverage ignores the fact that the media does not simply replicate
the event. On its own, Ericksons method does not account for the dynamic relationship between the public, the media, and the candidate
during a presidential campaign because it presumes a static media that merely regurgitates the entirety of the event as directed by the
candidate. Taken to its logical extreme, this would mean that every media account would represent every picture and a full transcript of the
entire speech. However, there is no universalized media conglomerate.56 Newspapers and reporters have

political
preferences that, no matter how hard they try, appear in the way that they
report the news. In effect, the idea that the public receives the entirety of the
message is bizarrely incomplete because the only part of the public that has a pure representation of the event
are those taking the pictures and writing the stories. Not only is this a dangerously myopic way to view
travel spectacle in presidential speeches, but it becomes far less applicable in the
context of campaign rhetoric where there is an active and ongoing discursive
exchange between the public and the candidate. In presidential campaigns the candidates attention is on persuading the public to
vote for them. In this discussion, the media acts as a mediator between the two parties and not the primary target of rhetorical influence.
As a result of what Erickson sees as the

medias inability to interrogate its own messages , he

suggests that it is up to the rhetorical critic to reveal the inadequacies of travel
spectacle whenever they emerge in order to limit

presidential

abuses of power

and sustain a constructive relationship between the public and

the president.57 While

I do not find Ericksons demand that critics enact their research as social actors particularly compelling, his comments are still
insightful because they highlight readily observable elements of travel spectacle that critics should be able to identify. Erickson suggests
there are five core elements of the travel spectacle that are worthy of interrogation, arguing that critics should examine how spectacles:
favor visual over verbal eloquence, simplify complex political issues, narratively interpret presidential agendas, synoptically reify
presidential personae, and construct political realities. In all, political spectacle emerges from scholarship that sees the
presidency as a

rhetorically powerful position that can control public opinion

through defining political reality in terms of common beliefs and values . These
appeals are largely metaphorical in nature, where the persuasive value of presidential speech is largely determined by the speakers ability
to align their position within historical narratives that denote leadership. This is particularly important in the context of presidential
campaigns, as candidates utilize these deliberative arguments as an ingratiation strategy based on potentialities that appeal to voter
perceptions. Often times, this simulation of presidential leadership acts as a substitution for the candidates actual experience because the
visual enactment resonates within the mind of the public. Within this interaction between the candidate and the public, the media acts as a
passive transmitter of messages that the candidate can manipulate in order to maximize their appeal. Thus, the sound-byte culture
creates an rhetorical environment where the candidates framing of the issue invites criticism and interpretation. The next section outlines a
rhetorical hybrid between media and political spectacle grounded in the idea that both have significant roles in creating meaning in
contemporary political culture.

Our approach is key to understanding the state of exception. The aff is a

blind acceptance of the law, but our Framework is key to generating public
knowledge about sovereign brutality.
Kamalnath 13. Anthea J. Kamalnath, JD from the University College London, the first Advocacy Chair for the
United States National Committee for United Nations Women, first Choate Rosemary Hall Fellow of Rhetoric, tutor for

the Los Angeles Public Librarys Adult Literacy Program, shares awards for her public speaking with former President Bill
Clinton, [this may be on a blog, but our author is so qualified] United States of Exception,
http://antheakamalnath.wordpress.com/tag/agamben/ Tina

The only explanation for the sheer lack of discourse, let alone intelligent
discourse, in relation to the topic of the Obama administrations gross
expansion of executive powers and its support of unconstitutional
provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act 2012 (NDAA) is that
we are in a state of exception, characterized by anomie at best and idiocy at worst. Cicero said, There
can be war without tumult, but no tumult without war. President Obama signed the NDAA into law Dec 2011. The NDAA
is not a simple extension of the Patriot Act. The NDAA allows for indefinite detention of any person suspected of terrorism
or posing a threat to the executive, both American citizen and foreign national, without probable cause and with zero
promise of due process. Although the NDAA secures the end of Guantanamo Bay as a

detention center, it allows the executive to literally sign off on death

warrants shoot-to kill lists of suspected terrorists, some American, some
under 18. In the 1920s, German legal theorist Carl Schmitt coined the term state of exception, a moment in
government when there is a suspesion of the entire existing judicial order. Following the September 11th attacks, the
subsequent Patriot Act of 2001 and Guantanamo Bay , Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben elaborated on this historical
phenomenon with his books Homo Sacer and The State of Exception. I read the latter in college and it changed the
way I saw the world. For Agamben (and the tradition that produced him Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Jacques
Derrida), a state of exception is neither internal nor external to the juridicial

order, and the problem of defining it concerns a threshold, or a zone of

indifference, where inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather
blur with each other. It introduces a zone of anomie into the law in order to
make the effective regulation of the real possible. Agamben argues that this state of
exception was already codified in Roman law; the Roman iustitium, literally the suspension of the law, was an
archetypal state of exception. Iustititium gave the Roman Senate expansive powers in the face of threats to the Republic.
Iustitium was declared following the death of the sovereign, a legal manifestation of grief through suspension of the order:
Durkheims anomie. Grief is arguably dehumanizing; a state of exception is the reversal of the

human to the non-human, the fate of enemy combatants captured and

detained in Guantanamo Bay with no legal identity and no legal rights . The
National Defense Authorization Act is the final act of the state of exception: the no mans land of Guantanamao Bay has
been done away with, only to be brought home. The NDAA FY 2012 allowed the executive to kill an American citizen
without due process, without charging him with a crime, and to hide behind the shield of executive powers. And he did.

At any previous time in American history, a summary execution by the

executive without due process would have been considered cold-blooded
murder and an act of tyranny. Yet no one blinked an eye. This indifference
is not a normal condition for society; it is a pathological psychological state,
a social state of exception. I will never understand the vocal enthusiasm of those who claim they are
proud of our President, the NDAA undoes every decent thing President Obama has achieved in office. The
politcians will pontificate, the lawyers will legislate, but the people should
always pay attention.
Their framework is an attempt to put our movement in a camp. The
sovereign despises our mobility and uncontrollability
Parker 12. Simon Parker, professor in the centre for Urban Research (CURB) at the University of York, Between
Between the Reservation and the Camp: Neoliberal Governmentalities of Exceptional Urban Space,
http://academia.edu/3750825/Between_the_Reservation_and_the_Camp_Neoliberal_Governmentalities_of_Exceptio
nal_Urban_Space, Paper originally presented to the University of Manchester, Urban Rights GroupSeminar, 29 May
2012, Tina
As James Scott argues in Seeing Like a State, it

is important to understand why the state has

always been the enemy of people who move around . Nomads and
pastoralists...hunter gatherers, Gypsies, vagrants, homeless people,

itinerants, runaway slaves, and serfs have always been a thorn in the side of
states, and to this list one should certainly add enemy combatants affiliated
to non-state terror organisations, refugees, asylum seekers and
undocumented migrants. Efforts to permanently settle these mobile peoples
(sedenterization), Scott continues, seemed to be a perennial state projectperennial in
part because it so seldom succeeded (Scott 1998, 1). While this is true of certain counter-publics
who needed to be contained because they could not be expelled (for example indigenous peoples in the colonised
territories of the New World), for those with weak or repudiable claims to territorial residence a biopolitics

of
repulsion and expulsion has come to structure the exceptional spatiality of
an increasingly supra-national state security apparatus (Graham et al. 2007). As
Foucault reminds us, policed bodies have always been the subject of physical
separation and removal from the healthy body politica process that gave
rise to the physical, permanent institution of the prison, the clinic and the
asylum (Foucault 1977, 2001). In these heterotopic spaces, the suspension of civic rights gave
rise to a disciplinary order in which the state enjoyed qualitative and
quantitative control over the abject which had as its end the intensification
and extension of bare life (Agamben, 1998) and where law and moral order,
these most essential and fundamental aspects of the civic community, are
indefinitely suspended (Parker 2010). The camp therefore represents a
controlled space of the social dead the deferment of whose physical death is merely a question of
its manifestation and
recombination extends beyond annihilationist regimes of biopolitical
expediency or technical-administrative exigency (Goldhagen 1996). But

extinction and 'ethnic cleansing' into the banal spaces of the everyday
urban world where the twin space of controlled exceptionality and
exclusion--'the reservation'--also features strongly within more familiar landscapes of abjection.
We need analysis from the extremes to produce radical self-critique of the
American security state.
Masco 12. Joseph Masco, Professor of Anthropology and of the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago, The
Ends of Ends, Anthropological Quarterly Volume 85, Number 4, Fall 2012Tina

An anthropology of extremes requires a non-normative reading of culture

and history, an effort to push past consensus logics to interrogate what
alternative visions, projects, and futures are left unexplored at a given
historical moment. The rapidly evolving historical archive provides one opportunity for this kind of critique:
our understanding of the 20th century American security state is changing
with each newly declassified program and document, dramatically
reshaping what we know about US policy, military science, and threat
assessments since World War II. The corona photographs are a compelling illustration of the power of
the evolving national security archive. As the enormous military state apparatus that
constitutes the core of the American political and economic machine is
grudgingly opened to new kinds of conceptual interrogation, Americans
should seize the opportunity to learn about their own commitments,
political processes, and security imaginaries. Indeed, the national security
archive is one place where we can formally consider how the 20th century
balance of terror has been remade in the 21st century as a war on
terrorfollowing the affective politics, technological fetishisms, and
geopolitical ambitions that have come to structure US security culture. The
declassified cold War archive allows us to pursue an extreme reading of US security culture,
one committed to pushing past official policy logics at moments of

heightened emergency to consider how threat, historical contingency,

technological revolution, propaganda, and geopolitical ambition combine in
a specific moment of extreme risk. The first corona images, for example, constitute a moment when
administrators of the national security state had their own logics and fears negated in the form of direct photographic
evidence, opening a potential conceptual space for radical reassessment of their own ambitions, perceptions, and drives,
powerfully revealed in black and white photos as fantasy. We might well ask why the corona imagery (and

any number of similar moments when existential threat has objectively dissolved into mere projectionmost recently, the missing weapons of mass destruction used to justify the
Us invasion of Iraq in 2003) did not pro- duce a radical self-critique in the US.

State Bad
The affirmatives use of the law and connection to the state makes it
impossible for us to kritik the state. Well equate the state with goodness,
and support it regardless of how oppressive it is.
Hasnas 95 John, Hasnas Ph.D Philosophy Duke University Senior Research Fellow Georgetown University, 1995,
The Myth of the Rule of Law, Wis. L. Rev. 199 Tina

The problem with this suggestion is that most people are unable to understand what it could possibly mean. This

is
chiefly because the language necessary to express the idea clearly does not really exist.
Most people have been raised to identify law with the state. They cannot even conceive of
the idea of legal services apart from the government. The very notion of a free market in
legal services conjures up the image of anarchic gang warfare or rule by organized crime.
In our system, an advocate of free market law is treated the same way Socrates was
treated in Monosizea, and is confronted with the same types of arguments. The primary
reason for this is that the public has been politically indoctrinated to fail to recognize the distinction between order and
law. Order is what people need if they are to live together in peace and [*225] security. Law, on the other hand, is a
particular method of producing order. As it is presently constituted, law is the production of order

by requiring all members of society to live under the same set of stategenerated rules; it
is order produced by centralized planning. Yet, from childhood, citizens are
taught to invariably link the words "law" and "order." Political discourse
conditions them to hear and use the terms as though they were synonymous and to
express the desire for a safer, more peaceful society as a desire for "law and order." The
state nurtures this confusion because it is the public's inability to distinguish order from
law that generates its fundamental support for the state. As long as the public
identifies order with law, it will believe that an orderly society is impossible
without the law the state provides. And as long as the public believes this,
it will continue to support the state almost without regard to how
oppressive it may become . The public's identification of order with law makes it
impossible for the public to ask for one without asking for the other. There is clearly a
public demand for an orderly society. One of human beings'most fundamental desires is
for a peaceful existence secure from violence. But because the public has been
conditioned to express its desire for order as one for law, all calls for a more orderly
society are interpreted as calls for more law. And since under our current political
system, all law is supplied by the state, all such calls are interpreted as calls for a more
active and powerful state. The identification of order with law eliminates from public
consciousness the very concept of the decentralized provision of order. With regard to
legal services, it renders the classical liberal idea of a market-generated, spontaneous
order incomprehensible.

Impact

Bare Life
The impact is bare life in a state of exception- the construction of places
where the law no longer applies, and where lives are nothing more than
things to be sacrificed.
Federman and Holmes 11. Cary Federman, professor of justice studies at Montclair State University and
Dave Holmes, professor of health sciences at the University of Ottawa, Guantanamo Bodies: Law, Media, Biopower,
MediaTropes eJournal Vol III, No 1 (2011): Tina
Agamben asks, regarding Schmitts friend/enemy distinction: what is the structure of sovereignty

that it consists in nothing other than the suspension of the rule ? (Agamben, 1998,
17). For Agamben, the state of exception is not a state of chaos. The state of exception is the situation that results from
the suspension of the rules (Agamben, 1998, 18). What defines chaos is not excess but its

existence within a state. With the suspension of the law, the juridical orders validity (Agamben, 1998, 18)
is suspended, withdrawn, and abandoned; the outside and the inside collapse on each other. The sovereign has
now created and defined the very space in which the juridico-political
order can have validity (Agamben, 1998, 29). But the validity of the juridical order is,
at the same time, ambiguous. What is outside and what is inside now exist in
a zone of indistinction (Agamben, 1998, 19). Under these conditions, the state of exception
moves to the forefront of politics, redefining norms along the way . And in
this process of redefinition, the meaning of life for Agamben is clarified:
the status of the enemy is one of bare life . The state of exception implicated bare life within it
(Agamben, 1998, 83). What is bare life? Agamben writes that in Roman law, homo sacer is the one who is both sacred and
damned. Homo sacer can be killed but not sacrificed. The sovereign sphere is the sphere in which it is permitted to kill
without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice, and sacred lifethat is, life that may be killed but not
sacrificedis the life that has been captured in its sphere. (Agamben, 1998, 83; italics in original) In a world

bereft of nature, history, and a deity as a ground for ethics, life loses its
meaning as a thing-in-itself . The sovereign is the guarantor of the situation of life (Schmitt, 2005, 13).
But what does Schmitt mean by life? Agamben locates two meanings for life in modernity. The Greeks had no single term
to express what we mean by the word life (Agamben, 1998, 1). They used two distinct terms for life: zoe, which
expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings, and bios, which indicated the form or way of living
proper to an individual or a group (Agamben, 1998, 1). For Agamben, the central image (and producer) of life during a
time shrouded in the friend/enemy distinction is the concentration camp. The camp is a no mans land
between coma and death (Agamben, 1998, 161). The camp comes into existence as a
political concept when the state of exception is normalized. The camp is not
a temporary camp, a displacement camp for refugees on their way to
someplace else, but a permanent feature of the modern world, modern
politics, and of modern thought (Agamben, 1998, 174). It is a place to house the zoes of the world
(Agamben notes that in Greek, zoe has no plural; 1998, 1). Because it houses the exceptional, it is a
space of exception. When Heinrich Himmler created a concentration camp
for political prisoners, Agamben writes, he placed it outside the rules of
penal and prison law (Agamben, 1998, 169).

Extinction
Sovereign exception guarantees racist destruction of all life.
Gulli 13. Bruno Gulli, professor of history, philosophy, and political science at Kingsborough College in New York,
For the critique of sovereignty and violence,
http://academia.edu/2527260/For_the_Critique_of_Sovereignty_and_Violence, Tina
It is then important to ask the question of what power can alter this racism that, as Foucault says, first develops with colonization, or in
other words, with colonizing genocide (1997: 257). From its first development, we then get to a situation where, as I noted at the outset of
this paper, racist

violence becomes a global and biopolitical regime of terror , a

war between two main classes: the war of the political and financial elites
against the class of those who have been dispossessed to various degrees once
again, the violence of the 1% against the 99% . As Foucault says, this is a question of the
technique of power, more than of ideologies (as it was the case with the traditional type of racism),
because the sovereign elites, the State, are well aware of the urgency of the
struggle, the fact that, again, what is left to them is the raw use of the
violence that, as Walter Benjamin (1978) says, informs the law, domination without
hegemony. Especially at the present stage of the world, where information and knowledge make
it unnecessary and thus impossible for the General Intellect or common
understanding and reason to be governed, brutal domination and
potentially genocidal methods of repression seem to be the only instruments
left to a decaying and ruthless global ruling class. Then, the old sovereign
power of life and death implies the workings, the introduction and
activation, of racism (Foucault 1997: 258). Foucault makes the example of Nazi
Germany, where murderous power and sovereign power [were] unleashed
throughout the entire social body (p.259) and the entire population was exposed
to death (p.260). But this is today a common and global paradigm: The
sovereign right to kill (ibid.), from cases of police brutality in the cities to war
atrocities throughout the world, has become the most effective way to deal
with a population that refuses to recognize the false legitimacy of the
sovereign, the sovereign right to govern . What Foucault says of the Nazi
State but he acknowledges it applies to the workings of all States (ibid.)shows the terminal stage of
sovereign power: a desperate will to absolute domination no longer able to count on hegemony: We have an absolutely
racist State, an absolutely murderous State, and an absolutely suicidal State
(ibid.). This certainly shows the crisis of sovereignty as State power, but more broadly, in a globalized world, it shows the
crisis of the sovereign elites, who are facing a final solution . No one can blame them.
Their unintelligent worldview is bound to that . The hope is that they will not
destroy everything before they are gone. Yet, they will not go by themselves,
without the workings of an altering power, bound to inherit the earth . This is the
power of individuation, the dignity of individuation, whose workings are based on disobedience and care. It is the power of those who, in the
age of biopolitical terror, have nothing to sell except their own skins, (Marx 1977: 295), reversing the history of racist violence, of
conquest, enslavement, robbery, [and] murder (ibid.).

Genocide
Violence is increasing, and the aff is part and parcel with that system. The
impact is biopolitical cleansing on a global scale.
Gulli 13. Bruno Gulli, professor of history, philosophy, and political science at Kingsborough College in New York,
For the critique of sovereignty and violence,
http://academia.edu/2527260/For_the_Critique_of_Sovereignty_and_Violence, Tina

We live in an unprecedented time of crisis . The violence that characterized

the twentieth century, and virtually all known human history before that, seems to have entered
the twenty-first century with exceptional force and singularity . True, this century
opened with the terrible events of September 11. However, September 11 is not the beginning of
history. Nor are the histories of more forgotten places and people, the events that shape those histories, less terrible
and violent though they may often be less spectacular. The singularity of this violence, this
paradigm of terror, does not even simply lie in its globality , for that is something that
our century shares with the whole history of capitalism and empire, of which it is a part. Rather, it must be
seen in the fact that terror as a global phenomenon has now become selfconscious. Today, the struggle is for global dominance in a singularly new way,
and war regardless of where it happensis also always global. Moreover, in its
self-awareness, terror has become, more than it has ever been, an
instrument of racism. Indeed, what is new in the singularity of this violent
struggle, this racist and terrifying war, is that in the usual attempt to
neutralize the enemy, there is a cleansing of immense proportion going on .
To use a word which has become popular since Michel Foucault, it is a biopolitical cleansing. This is
not the traditional ethnic cleansing, where one ethnic group is targeted by a
state power though that is also part of the general paradigm of racism and
violence. It is rather a global cleansing, where the sovereign elites, the global
sovereigns in the political and financial arenas (capital and the political institutions), in all
kinds of ways target those who do not belong with them on account of their race,
class, gender, and so on, but above all, on account of their way of life and way of
thinking. These are the multitudes of people who, for one reason or the
other, are liable for scrutiny and surveillance, extortion (typically, in the form of overtaxation and fines) and arrest, brutality, torture, and violent death. The sovereigns
target anyone who, as Giorgio Agamben (1998) shows with the figure of homo sacer, can be killed
without being sacrificed anyone who can be reduced to the paradoxical and ultimately impossible
condition of bare life, whose only horizon is death itself. In this sense, the biopolitical cleansing is also immediately a
thanatopolitical instrument.

Alternative

Becoming Minor
The alternative is to become minor this produces a new form of politics
that challenges and disrupts the status quo
Newman, PhD in Philosophy, 2009 (Saul, Edinburgh University Press,
Deleuze and New Technology edited by Mark Poster and David Savat,
2009, http://m.friendfeedmedia.com/85cb33b96067e4e2d7c410c3a862e28cf8c6fdbb, mmv)
We can take from this that 'the people' is not simply a coherent or consistent
identity, but rather one that is highly fractured - one that contains within it
different modes of subjectification, different potential ways of being, and
different possibilities for political engagement. It is impossible to speak of
'the people' as a unified entity, or circumscribe it within the contours of a
national identity or a particular class or social group - this would only be considering the
people as a majority or a macropolitical unity. As Deleuze shows, we have to explore
the micropolitical potential of the people , its processes of becoming and its 'lines of flight'. The
same people who complain about crime in their 'communities' and call for
more CCTV cameras might also, in other circumstances, demonstrate against the WTO
or G8 summits, or against their government's involvement in the war in
Iraq. These examples are a case in point: one of the interesting things about the anti-war protests in 2003, as well as large antiglobalisation demonstrations, is that they are not identifiable in terms of the traditional models of politics. They are not
necessarily working-class or Marxist movements, for instance, but rather
are made up of people from all 'walks of life': white-collar office workers,
church groups, anarchists, trade unionists, ecologists, old people, people of
different ideological persuasions, and so on. This is perhaps what Deleuze means by
'becoming-minor': people disengage themselves from their established
identities and social roles, and form, in a completely contingent and
unexpected way, a new political entity. Yet this is a political identity that is at the same time beyond
representation - becoming something completely new. Minor politics is always an
event, and 'the people' is always an unpredictable subjectivity whose
potential we can never really know. A number of contemporary thinkers have
explored new ways of looking at radical political subjectivity . Ranciere, whom we have
already discussed, sees 'the people' as a place of political subjectification which
emerges through a fundamental disagreement or dispute (fa mesentente) between
an excluded part of society - illegal immigrants or the unemployed , for instance and the dominant socio-political order which they claim to be part of, thus
representing their struggle as universal, as embodying the interests of the
'whole of the community'. Ernesto Laclau sees 'the people' in terms of populist struggles, and as emerging in a
contingent way through the hegemonic formulation of what he calls 'chains of equivalence' (Laclau 2005). Alain Badiou, in a different way,
has tried to see the political

subject as emerging through the 'event' of politics - a

singular, unpredictable moment of rupture which de stabilises existing
conditions and identities and gives rise to a new, militant conception of truth (Badiou 2003). I do not have time to go
into their arguments in any great detail here, but these different ways of seeing politics centre around a number of common themes. First,

politics is always an event which emerges in a contingent way, and which

cannot be wholly accounted for or determined by pre-existing conditions .
Second, politics involves a kind of radical subjectification - a disengagement or, as
Badiou puts it, a 'subtraction' from ordinary everyday social roles, identities and
situations. For Ranciere, politics is a process of 'disidentification' which does not
rely on pre-existing identities and interests, but, rather, ruptures and

destabilises them and produces something new: 'any subjectification is a disidentification, removal
from the naturalness of place' (Ranciere 1999: 36). Third, radical politics constructs a certain
universality - it is something that goes beyond the logic of difference and
particularity. However, this universality is understood in a contingent way, and does not rely on essentialist concepts such as the
universal class (as in the Marxist notion of the proletariat) or a universal rational consensus (as in liberal discourse). These
themes of the event, dis identification and universality can help us to
construct a conception of politics relevant to the society of control . It is clear, for
instance, that a radical politics able adequately to resist the new globalised forms of
social control must itself embody some sort of universal or global
dimension. Yet this can be understood in a number of senses. First, radical politics can no longer be
confined to specific identities or embody the logic of pure particularity. The
model of identity politics prominent in the 1980s has reached its conceptual
and strategic limits: difference - and the assertion of a differential identity - is no
longer subversive in itself, as Foucault showed, and now seems to play into the hands
of a fully multicultural and hybridised global capitalism .10 Rather than a politics that claims
to represent a particular identity, Foucault advocated a localised form of politics, organised around
concrete struggles against particular sites of domination . Rather than a political vanguard
speaking for the masses, moreover, the politics of resistance was something to be engaged in
directly by those implicated in a specific situation of oppression - prisoners,
homosexuals, students. Deleuze, in a conversation with Foucault, said to him: 'You were the first ... to teach us something absolutely
fundamental: the indignity of speaking for others' (Foucault and Deleuze 1977: 209). However, perhaps

this model also

needs to be transcended - perhaps localised struggles need to situate themselves
on a global horizon, where links with other struggles can form in a
'rhizomatic' fashion (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 9). Indeed, if the disciplinary model of power
required a localised contestation of specific power relationships, then the
society of control - which implies a more globalised and free-floating form of power - requires a different
and more globalised mode of resistance . Moreover, radical political struggles can
no longer be confined to national spaces - they can no longer take place
solely within the representative institutions of the nation-state: rather, they
must appear (and, indeed, are appearing) on a global terrain - not only spatially, in the sense of
transcending national borders, but also conceptually, in the sense of taking globalisation
itself as the central political issue and the central site of contestation. The anti-globalisation
movement presents us with an initial model of this new form of politiCS .!l This
is a form of politics which transcends both the traditional Marxist model of class struggle, as well as the narrow politics of identity; it
brings together a variety of different identities and struggles - which would otherwise
have little in common - around the common terrain of contesting capitalist
globalisation. Moreover, this is a movement of 'transversal' struggles which are
not confined to national borders - activists not only travel to other countries
to take part in demonstrations, but also attempt to highlight, through
various forms of direct action, particular situations of oppression and
exploitation that might be going on in other parts of the world .12

Whatever Being
The alternative is to embrace whatever being
Shimakawa, 04 - [Karen, the Chair of performance studies at U.C. Davis, Penn State
University Press, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, New Series, Volume 18,
Number 2, pp. 149-160 (Article), The Things We Share: Ethnic Performativity and
Whatever Being, 2004,
http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.lib.umich.edu/journals/journal_of_speculative_philosophy/
v018/18.2shimakawa.pdf, 7/19/15]JRO
Giorgio Agambens whatever being offers a possible alternative way to conceive of
(communal) subjectivity that does not depend on stable political identity
categories for its integrity, without requiring one to dispense with
categories altogether. Unlike the common English parsing of whatever, Agambens use of the term
is differently nuanced: [whatever being] is not being, it does not matter which, but rather being such that it always
matters (Agamben 1993, 1).3 The impulse to include/be included is retained,
though not assigned to a particular or stable grounds of inclusion: such-and-such
being is reclaimed from its having this or that property, which identifies it as belonging to this
or that set, to this or that class (the reds, the French, the Muslims)and it is reclaimed not for another
class nor for the simple generic absence of any belonging, but for its being-such, for belonging itself
(12, emphasis in original). Belonging itself, according to Agamben, is a state of being that
acknowledges the (social and affective efficacy of the) desire for inclusion
while, at the same time, resisting the concretization of static categories
(defined racially, nationally, sexually, religiously, or otherwise) that would
afford not only inclusion, but also exclusion. What would it mean, Agamben asks, to acknowledge the
desire to belong to identity categories as that which binds us across the boundaries of such categories? To define subjectivity as being as
such, that is, at the level of the impulse to belong (belonging itself), rather than at the point of inclusion in an established social
category/community?4 It is important to emphasize that Agamben does not advocate a dissipation of belonging per se- his is not a
dismantled universalist/humanist leveling program. It is the Most Common that cuts off any real community, he writes; [whatever
being] is neither apathy nor promiscuity nor resignation (10), Instead, whatever

being constitutes a mode

of (prospective) subject formation that achieves some of Kristevas dejects ends
(that is, the rough articulation of a subject position) without producing a
concretized, jettisoned abject; and for those who might otherwise find themselves on the wrong side of that
(nationalizing/racializing) abjection equation, perhaps Agambens conception of being as such describes a strategic response to
abjection that does not simultaneously reaffirm its logic; that is,

it offers an alternative to abjection that

does not result in simply claiming a place at the dejects table. Indeed, Agamben articulates whatever
being in terms that are provocatively complementary to Kristevas: whereas Kristevas abject is simply a frontier, Agamben
situates whatever being precisely at the border or threshold between inside
and outside, a point of contact with an external space that must remain
empty since, in order to locate a recognized outside one must claim (even if only
implicitly) a particular inside the zone/community in/to which one belongs (and from which an outside is
distinguishable). Rather, he argues, the outside is not another space that resides beyond a determinate space it is, so to speak, the
experience of the limit itself (68). By locating subjects formation in whatever being, that is, in the impulse to belong, he creates a
concomitantly concretization-resistant zone of not-belonging. That is, just as Kristevas abject is less a particular object/concept than a
function (i.e., explusion/ differentiation), so Agambens outside is simply that which is implied by whatever being/belonging itself: the
impulse to not-belong otherwise/elsewhere (always resisting the temptation to locate that otherwise/elsewhere in concrete terms).
Whatever, in this sense, Agamben writes, is the event of an outside (67, emphasis in original). The

problem, of course, is
that we do not (yet) live in the world Agamben envisions; the event of an outside is affixed inevitably to a
geographical/social/political site, turning that event into an identity. How might artists, specifically Asian Pacific American artists,
contribute to Agambens project of reconceiving our notions of subjectivity, community, and exclusion? What relation does that event of
an outside bear to the identity-stratified culture in which we find ourselves? As noted above, for Asian Pacific Americans, a simple

denial of the materiality of that stratification results only in

erasure/assimilation to the hierarchies currently in place (just as an insistence on the
significance and uniqueness of a particular stratum may cement its place in those hierarchies). I want to argue that the
contingency, interactivity, and embodiedness of performance enables it to

negotiate this apparent impasse by asking: what would it mean for a subject who is marked as
marginal/abject to perform such an event of an outside?

AT: Lies

Legal Solutions Good

The apparent neutrality of the law is only a mask for its ability to create its
own exceptionstry or die for the alternative to form solutions outside of
the law.
Kohn 06. Margaret Kohn, assistant professor of political science at the University of Florida, Bare Life and the
Limits of the Law Theory and Event9:2, muse Tina
At this point it should be clear that Agamben would be deeply skeptical of the liberal call for more vigorous enforcement of
the rule of law as a means of combating cruelties and excesses carried out under emergency powers. His brief history of

the state of exception establishes that the phenomenon is a political reality that has proven
remarkably resistant to legal limitations . Critics might point out that this descriptive point, even
if true, is no reason to jettison the ideal of the rule of law . For Agamben, however, the link
between law and exception is more fundamental; it is intrinsic to politics
itself . The sovereign power to declare the state of exception and exclude
bare life is the same power that invests individuals as worthy of rights. The
two are intrinsically linked . The disturbing implication of his argument is that we cannot
preserve the things we value in the Western tradition (citizenship, rights, etc.) without
preserving the perverse ones . Agamben presents four theses that summarize the results of his
genealogical investigation. (1) The state of exception is a space devoid of law. It is not
the logical consequence of the state's right to self-defense, nor is it (qua
commissarial or sovereign dictatorship) a straightforward attempt to reestablish the norm
by violating the law. (2) The space devoid of law has a "decisive strategic relevance" for the juridical order. (3)
Acts committed during the state of exception (or in the space of exception)
escape all legal definition. (4) The concept of the force-of-law is one of the
many fictions, which function to reassert a relationship between law and
exception, nomos and anomie. The core of Agamben's critique of liberal legalism is captured powerfully,
albeit indirectly, in a quote from Benjamin's eighth thesis on the philosophy of history. According to Benjamin, ( t)he
tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of exception' in which
we live is the rule. We must attain a concept of history that accords with this
fact. Then we will clearly see that it is our task to bring about the real state of
exception, and this will improve our position in the struggle against fascism .
(57) Here Benjamin endorses the strategy of more radical resistance rather
than stricter adherence to the law. He recognizes that legalism is an anemic
strategy in combating the power of fascism . The problem is that conservative forces
had been willing to ruthlessly invoke the state of exception in order to
further their agenda while the moderate Weimar center-left was paralyzed;
frightened of the militant left and unwilling to act decisively against the
authoritarian right, partisans of the rule of law passively acquiesced to their
own defeat. Furthermore, the rule of law, by incorporating the necessity of
its own dissolution in times of crisis, proved itself an unreliable tool in the
struggle against violence. From Agamben's perspective, the civil libertarians' call for
uniform application of the law simply denies the nature of law itself. He
insists, "From the real state of exception in which we live, it is not possible
to return to the state of law. . ." (87) Moreover, by masking the logic of
sovereignty, such an attempt could actually further obscure the zone of
indistinction that allows the state of exception to operate. For Agamben,
law serves to legitimize sovereign power. Since sovereign power is

fundamentally the power to place people into the category of bare life, the
law, in effect, both produces and legitimizes marginality and exclusion.

Permutation
The perm fails the belief that you can come to political consensus or
compromise fails to understand how deeply entrenched the state is in the
ideologies of the status quo
Newman, PhD in Philosophy, 2009 (Saul, Edinburgh University Press,
Deleuze and New Technology edited by Mark Poster and David Savat,
2009, http://m.friendfeedmedia.com/85cb33b96067e4e2d7c410c3a862e28cf8c6fdbb, mmv)
These developments in the control society signify, I would suggest, a more
fundamental transformation in contemporary politics. What passes for
democracy in developed capitalist countries today is nothing but a gaudy
mediatised spectacle of spin-doctoring and endless opinion polls - a banal
reality show which masks the almost total ideological convergence between
the major parties and the lack of genuine political alternatives. Modern
politics is characterised by a kind of stifling ideological consensus: the
dominant political discourse today is that which announces the eclipse of
ideological conflicts between left and right, claiming to be 'post-ideological'
and to be about solving society's problems in a rational, 'common-sense' way
without the constraints of ideology. The idea of the social-democratic 'Third
Way', which claims to seek a 'middle road' between socialism and capitalism, and
which purports to represent the 'radical centre' of political opinion, would
be paradigmatic of the 'post-ideological' consensus. Of course we should
recognise that this so-called era of 'post-ideological' consensus simply
means that the ideology of the neo-liberal market has become so
entrenched, so sedimented, so accepted as economic orthodoxy on both sides,
that we no longer recognise it as ideology as such. The 'post-ideological'
consensus is simply a neo-liberal ideological consensus, and the so called
'Third Way' was never really a third way at all, but simply a way of
disguising the formal Left's capitulation to neo-liberalism by providing it
with some flimsy social democratic window dressing (Mouffe 2000: 93).
So far from this new consensus style of politics being a sign of the maturity of
modern democratic politics, it is a sign of its degradation and imminent
collapse. We are dealing here with a new mutation of politics, in which the
triumph of 'democratic consensus' coincides with, and is symptomatic of, the
complete eclipse of real politics. Indeed, Ranciere has suggested that the very
term 'consensus democracy' is a contradiction - one can either have
consensus or democracy - and has proposed instead to call it postdemocracy
(Ranciere 1999: 95). According to Ranciere, the global triumph of democracy during the
1990s, which came with the collapse of the Communist regimes, coincided with a kind of
shrinking of the political space: democracy has not only given up on the people on the idea of popular sovereignty - but this has also led, paradoxically, to an
erosion of the power of even the formal parliamentary mechanisms of
representation. Power in modern postdemocracies increasingly rests with
unelected and unaccountable experts, technocrats and committees.

Policy apparatus fails

Rosenzweig, 12 Copyright (c) 2012 I/S: A Journal of Law & Policy for the Information Society I/S: A Journal of
Law and Policy for the Information Society Fall, 2012 I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society 8
ISJLP 393 LENGTH: 7722 words NAME: Paul * BIO: * Principal, Red Branch Consulting PLLC; Carnegie Fellow in
National Security Journalism, Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University (2011); Professorial Lecturer in Law,
George Washington University. The author served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy in the Department of
Homeland Security from 2005-09. Portions of this article will appear in the forthcoming book Cyberwarfare: How
Conflicts in Cyberspace are Challenging American and Changing the World Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2012, Tina
IV. Conclusion If

the question about cyberspace is: "What is our policy making

apparatus most likely to misunderstand or get wrong?" the answer, I fear, is
quite a lot. Not because policy makers in Washington are ill-meaning, or venal, or even unintelligent.
But rather, I fear, because they are confronting a new reality to which they have yet to
adapt. The sausage making process of policy development inside sovereign
governments is slow and encrusted with hierarchical restrictions. It lacks
the pace and capacity to keep up with the ever-changing environment of the
Internet. Worse, policy makers continue to think of the Internet as just
another tool-sort of like a telephone, but quicker. But the things that
"everybody knows" are changing every day. Until we come to grips with the
ubiquity and rapidity of the Internet and the fundamental way in which the
Internet creates asymmetries that empower the individual to the
disadvantage of the nation-state, we won't really build good cyber policy. It's a
daunting task-but no easier for putting off to the future.

Separating our actions from the political sphere are key to stopping the
exceptional construction of bare life that authorizes genocide in the name of
the sovereign.
Agamben 05. Giorgio Agamben is the professor of Aesthetics at the University of Verona and author of ten
previous books. Chicago University Press 2005 State of Exception Tina
If it is true that the articulation between life and law, between anomie and nomos, that is produced by the state of
exception is effective though fictional, one can still not conclude from this that somewhere either beyond or before
juridical apparatuses there is an immediate ac- cess to something whose fracture and impossible unification are represented by these apparatuses. There are not first life as a natural biolog- ical given and anomie as the state of nature, and
then their implication in law through the state of exception. On the contrary , the very possi- bility of

distinguishing life and law, anomie and nomos, coincides with

their articulation in

the biopolitical machine . Bare life is a product of the machine and not
something that preexists it, just as law has no court in nature or in the divine mind. Life and law,
anomie and nomos, auctoritas and potestas, result from the fracture of something to which
we have no other access than through the fiction of their articulation and
the patient work that, by unmasking this fiction, separates what it had
claimed to unite. But disenchantment does not restore the enchanted thing to its original state: According to the
principle that purity never lies at the origin, disenchantment gives it only the possibility of reaching a new condition. To
show law in its nonrelation to life and life in its nonrelation to law means to
open a space between them for human action, which once claimed for itself
the name of politics. Politics has suffered a lasting eclipse because it has
been contaminated by law, seeing itself, at best, as constituent power (that
is, violence that makes law), when it is not reduced to merely the power to
negotiate with the law. The only truly political action, however, is that which
severs the nexus between vio- lence and law. And only beginning from the
space thus opened will it be possible to pose the question of a possible use of
law after the deac- tivation of the device that, in the state of exception, tied it
to life. We will then have before us a pure law, in the sense in which Benjamin speaks of a pure language and a
pure violence. To a word that does not bind, that neither commands nor
prohibits anything, but says only itself, would correspond an action as pure

means, which shows only it- self, without any relation to an end. And,
between the two, not a lost original state, but only the use and human praxis
that the powers of law and myth had sought to capture in the state of
exception.

Threats Real
Their impacts are constructed- theyre there to line the pockets of the
Trumanites.
Glennon 14Professor of International Law, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University Michael
Glennon National Security and Double Government, Harvard National Security Journal / Vol. 5, pg 1-114 Tina
The Trumanites propensity to define security in military and intelligence terms rather than political and diplomatic ones reinforces a
powerful structural dynamic. That dynamic can be succinctly stated: Overprotection

of national security
creates costs that the Trumanite network can externalize ; under-protection
creates costs that the network must internalize. The resulting incentive
structure encourages the exaggeration of existing threats and the creation
of imaginary ones . The security programs that emerge are, in economic terms, sticky
downeasier to grow than to shrink. The Trumanites sacrifice little when
disproportionate money or manpower is devoted to security. The operatives that they direct
do not incur trade-off costs.152 The Trumanites do, however, reap the benefits of that
disproportionalitya larger payroll, more personnel, broader authority,
and an even lower risk that they will be blamed in the event of a successful
attack.153 Yet Madisonian institutions incur the costs of excessive resources that flow to
the Trumanites. The President must submit a budget that includes the needed taxes. Members of Congress must vote for those taxes. A
federal agency must collect the taxes. When it comes to picking up the tab, Trumanites are nowhere to be seen. If national security
protection is inadequate, on the other hand, the Trumanites are held accountable. They are the experts on whom the Madisonian
institutions rely to keep the nation safe. They are the recipients of Madisonian largesse, doled out to ensure that no blame will be cast by
voters seeking retribution for a job poorly done. In

the event of a catastrophic attack, the buck

stops with the Trumanites. No Trumanite craves to be the target of a 9/11
commission following a catastrophic failure . Thus they have, as Jeffrey Rosen put it, an
incentive to exaggerate risks and pander to public fears154an incentive to
pass along vague and unconfirmed threats of future violence, in order to
protect themselves from criticism155 should another attack occur. Indeed, a
purely rational actor in the Trumanite network might hardly be expected
to do anything other than inflate threats . In this way, the domestic political
dynamic reinforces the security dilemma familiar to international relations students, the quandary that a
nation confronts when, in taking steps to enhance its security, it unintentionally
threatens the security of another nation and thus finds its own security
threatened when the other nation takes compensatory action.156 An inexorable and destabilizing
arms race is thereby fueled by seemingly rational domestic actors
responding to seemingly reasonable threats threats that they unwittingly
helped create.

Util
Consequentialism fails, especially in the context of the
surveillance/terrorism dilemma
Moscoso 11. Leopoldo A. Moscoso is a professor of political philosophy at the University of Madrid, Citizens,
Aliens and Suspects in an Age of the War on Terror: The Question of Emergency Powers in Western Post-Democracies,
ITALIAN JOURNAL OF PUBLIC LAW - VOL. 3 ISSUE 2/2011 Tina
Concerning the effects now, the study of the new manifestations of political violence

requires, on the one hand, reconsidering the problem of the rationality of action .
Observers are well aware that suicide-bombers attempts are not tactic they therefore cannot be
accounted for in terms of the calculation of any utility function . The balance
account of costs and benefits for the martyr is estimated, so to speak, sub
specie aeternitatis hence the enormous difficulties experts on violence
face to predict (not to say prevent) this type of episodes . On the other hand, terrorist
violence brings the observer back to the normative problem concerning the explanation/justification of political action
through its consequences. If some political actions may find a warrant in their

consequences, then the same principle might be applied when the time
comes for the validation of counter-terrorist measures . Provided that its
effects turned out to be as expected, would it be legitimate to vindicate the
war on terror exclusively on the grounds of its effects? The answer is clearly
negative as soon as other considerations are introduced, besides the
governments responsibilities with the physical security of its citizens . Even
under the threat of terror, societies have responsibilities with the humanity
of the single activist, with the humanity of the activists organizations, and
with the humanity of their original communities . The use of beneficial
effects/legitimate goals as an alibi to warrant the choice for immoral or
illegitimate means eliminates whatever restrictions might remain for the
party of violence to resort to the same scheme.

**Aff Answers

Alt Fails
No impact- they misrepresent the law it isnt monolithic or unreformable
Brnnstrm, 08 Leila,Lund University Law Faculty, How I learned to stop worrying and use the legal argument
A critique of Giorgio Agambens conception of law, NoFo 5 [April 2008] sage journals Tina
6. How Agamben creates a terrifying object called law In Agambens writings law is represented as a uniplanar
surface, even if a sophistication is present as the surface is twisted to the form of a Mbius strip (cf. Agamben 1998, 15,
37). Despite the twist, law is still represented as a homogeneous entity with a single border. The
twist in the surface represents that, in Agambens wording, law is outside itself (Agamben 1998, 15). A state of affairs he
claims instantiates itself in paradoxes like the im/possibility of legal creation ex nihilo and the im/possibility of the legal
regulation of legally banned situations for example legal codification of self-defense or the right of resistance against
unlawful law. The paradoxical structure of law is, in turn, claimed to explain how life, violence, and sovereignty are
simultaneously inside and outside the legal order. The paradoxes that Agamben enumerates

are however engendered in the first place by his understanding of law as a mystic,
monolithic , unilaterally productive, and ahistorical entity. As Agambens
reasoning suppresses temporality and depopulates the legal field, paradoxes
arise as a result of treating law as an object rather than a practice that is
performed. Behind the fear of law that Agamben shows when he says that an
unprecedented biopolitical catastrophe is awaiting us if we do not break
with the current politico-legal rationality, is a representation of law as an object
as a machine standing outside history and affecting the course of events. Foucault has argued that
if the state is abstracted and hypostatized as a cold-blooded monster or the instrument of class repression
it appears to be the driving force behind all sorts of effects, which leads to
the overvaluation of the state-problem and causes inflationary effects such
as statophobia. He reminds us that the state is nothing more than a flexible
bundle of juxtaposed practices (Foucault 2006, 112115). Similarly, law is not all too
powerful or all too powerless; it is a protean combination of law-producing
and reproducing practices and does not have an existence outside of that.
Agambens way of treating law as a point of departure rather than as a the
result of complicated social processes and as the origin of historical power relations rather than
their effects is somewhat ironic since the crux of his argument seems to be that law
does not have an independent life. His point, after all, is that the hold that law has over life can
be broken and what is ultimately at stake in the state of exception, in legal production and decision-making and in
biopolitical matters, is extrajudicial (cf. Agamben 2005, 11, 8788). NoFo 5 [April 2008] 43 41 Another example of such
overestimation of the legal point of view in Agambens work would be the overstatement of the differences between
incarcerated aliens and incarcerated citizens. Agambens black and white image of law has its

counterpart in his notion of bio-power as the controlling of the (increasingly blurred)

borderline between life and death. Bio-power is here reduced to a question of either/or, eradicating
all differentiation in the administration and management of life. It is all the more problematic as the control of the
borderline is construed as a legal matter which is particularly troubling as law is equaled to repression and the state is the
sole legal agent mentioned. The transposition of law and repression obscure the fact that some legal norms, rather than
immediately directing and appraising behavior, distribute competences or legal powers which allow legal subjects to
introduce changes in legal status through contract or other arrangements. Think for instance of the biopolitical effects of
patenting human genome or the markets for surrogacy motherhood or for human organs. Neither is bio-

power necessarily exercised by the state or even through legal action. As Lemke
appropriately points out, it is more and more the scientific consultants, economic
interest groups, and civil societal mediators that define the beginning, the
end and the value of life, in consensus conferences, expert commissions, and
ethical counsels (Lemke 2005, 11). Since Agamben seems to equate power and
repression it comes as no surprise that he cannot see that bio-power can be
exercised in ways radically different from those of the Nazi-regime. It is not
wholly accidental that the biopolitical decisions of market actors scenting
investment opportunities and those of us who quit smoking because we are acting in a biopolitically

responsible way, go unnoticed in Agambens story. Agamben

overestimates here, as elsewhere, the role

of law in a story where the (narrow and distorted) legal point of view tends to
substitute reality.41
The State is inevitable and the alt fails- four reasons.
Passavant, 07 [The Contradictory State of Giorgio Agamben, Paul, Associate Professor
of Political Science Ph.D., Wisconsin at Madison M.A., Wisconsin at Madison B.A.,
Michigan, p. Sage Publications] Tina
I have argued that Agamben has two competing theories of the state in play within his work. His first theory of the state
posits the state in a determined relation to the economy. From this position, he can more easily describe political change
as the economic forces determining the state bear within them the seeds of the coming community. This is a theory,
however, that disguises its reliance on a form of power to secure the conditions of possibility for a common relation to
communicability, and he does not address the consequences of the possible weakening of that form of powerthe
globalization of spectacular capitalfor the commonality that it enabled. If spectacular capital should weaken, on one
hand, or if it produces not commonality but polarities, on the other, then presumably the commonality that it theoretically
enabled would either wane with the weakening of this power formation or simply not exist. Agambens second

theory of the state posits the state as a determining force over human life.
Agamben establishes the state in this determining position by borrowing from Schmitts theory of sovereign decisionism.
Yet, in so doing, he erects a theoretical roadblock preventing passage to the

coming community. Although I have suggested that he has conceived of three

possible ways whereby subjects might decide to act to render this state power
inoperative or perform actions enabling the suspension of sovereign law and messianic passage beyond this
sovereign state, each of these three forms of political subjectivity fails to do the
theoretical work demanded of it. Bartlebys manifestation of a pure potentiality might render
inoperative modern state government as Foucault has described it by disrupting the linkages among the series of
institutions and subjects that the modern state relies upon to govern, but it is unclear how Bartleby would affect the
Schmittian unitary sovereign decision maker upon which Agamben bases his theory of the state in Homo Sacer. Agamben
also points to anomic 168 Political Theory Downloaded from ptx.sagepub.com at UNIV OF MICHIGAN on July 4, 2013
carnivals to suggest that states of emergency can become something more, and his theory of the gesture might contribute
to a description of how a carnival might become something politically revolutionary. This would require, however, forcing
the gesture into a relation of transcendence with regard to carnivalesque performancesan unacceptable move for a
theory that embraces immanence to the extent that Agamben does. It also misrepresents why the carnivalesque harbors
emancipatory political potential within it. Finally, Agamben indicates, through the example of the apostle Paul and the
remnant of those who faithfully adhere to messianic law, the possibility of active political subjects adequate to the
challenge of state sovereignty. This argument, however, contradicts his earlier positions embracing potentiality over the
acts emblematic of sovereign decisions, and an experience of being beyond any idea of law. It also, by relying on a
determinate situation to create the conditions of possibility for a successful speech act, occludes the forms of power
needed to maintain this situation against other ontological possibilities much as his first theory of passage beyond the
state of integrated spectacle did. This argument also begs the question of how this messianic community might relate to
that which remains other to its situation. That is, Agamben must address the very questions

that his ontological approach to state sovereignty intended to avoid

questions of power and otherness. In sum, Agamben remains haunted by the
very problems that motivated not only his critique of the state but also his
attempt to remove this inquiry from political philosophy to first
philosophy. 43 At the end of Agambens theory of the state, politics remains.
There are four implications of this critique for political theory and the state. First, the modern
state is poorly understood as transcendent, unitary, and sovereign. The state
encompasses a variety of institutions, many of which predate modernity.44 The Foucauldian
understanding of government, I suggested, is the practice by which articulations between these institutions are forged
and non-state institutions are joined to this chainand they are mobilized toward various purposes. The plural nature of
this ensemble is precisely what gives extension to the modern state.45

Second, if we treat the state as

an ensemble of institutions, then the concept of a state of emergency is

poorly suited to understanding our political present . Agamben rightly
criticizes the USA PATRIOT Act in State of Exception. This law, like most laws that are
passed in an ongoing legal system, amends a variety of other laws and sits on a
foundation created by these other laws, such as the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act
of 1996. The Antiterrorism Act created the possibility of attributing guilt by association since it criminalized the provision

of material support for Passavant / The Contradictory State of Giorgio Agamben 169 Downloaded from ptx.sagepub.com
at UNIV OF MICHIGAN on July 4, 2013 organizations that the administration deems terroristprovisions that the USA
PATRIOT Act builds upon.46 From this perspective, current policies are less exceptional,

unfortunately, and more a continuing development of a national security

state apparatus that has been built through legislation like the National Security Act of
1947, through discourse, and through the creation of stakeholders (the military-industrial complex).47 In other
words, another state formation is struggling to emerge through the ruin of
liberal democracy in the United States, and this emergence (and ruin) is
hastened by those who seek to enhance surveillance and presidential powers, while
diminishing the power of courts and legislative oversight as a response to
September 11, 2001.48 Th ird, any social formation is constituted by elements
of both contingency and determination . By emphasizing pure potentiality,
Agamben misses this and either cherishes the excessive quality of pure
potentiality to the neglect of the exigent needs of the present, or neglects
how the active political subjects he does defend are embedded within finite
commitments that necessarily persevere through the foreclosure of other
possibilities. Some contemporary political theorists concerned with injustice and the lack of democracy also
emphasize contingency, excess, and potentiality over determination, finitude, and acts.49 These theorists
correctly seek to disrupt oppressive patterns. Since politicshence political
changewould not be possible under conditions of absolute determination,
emphasizing contingency or excess makes sense. Yet reflection upon the retraction of certain
state services from places like the Bronx during the late 1970s permits us to see how neither justice nor democracy is
served by excessive economic duress or violence. Not only are these contingencies unjust, but also their incapacitating
effects prevent democratic practices of government where the latter necessarily presupposes some collective capacity to
direct and achieve collective purposes. State actions that mitigate chaos, economic inequality, and

violence, then, potentially contribute to the improved justice of outcomes and

democracy. Political theorists must temper celebrating contingency with a simultaneous consideration of the
complicated relation that determination has to democratic purposes.50 Fourth, the states institutions
are among the few with the capacity to respond to the exigency of human
needs identified by political theorists . These actions will necessarily be
finite and less than wholly adequate, but responsibility may lie on the side of
acknowledging these limitations and seeking to redress what is lacking in
state action rather than calling for pure potentiality and an end to the state.
We may conclude that claims to justice or democracy based on the wish to
rid ourselves of the state once and for 170 Political Theory Downloaded from ptx.sagepub.com at
UNIV OF MICHIGAN on July 4, 2013 all are like George W. Bush claiming to be an
environmentalist because he has proposed converting all of our cars so that
they will run on hydrogen.51 Meanwhile, in the here and now, there are
urgent claims that demand finite acts that by definition will be both divisive
and less than what a situation demands.52 In the end, the state remains. Let
us defend this state of due process and equal protection against its ruinous
other.
Agamben cant explain power relations within the law and no risk of their
impacts.
Ross, 12 Agambens Political Paradigm of the Camp: Its Features and Reasons Alison Ross is Lecturer in Critical
Theory in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University, Australia, Constellations
Volume 19, No 3, 2012, p. Blackwell PublicationsTina

The difficulty here is that Agamben, given the ahistoricity of his theory, is
unable to provide an account of why the state of exception has become a
problem at this particular point in time. Similarly, he claims that the law is
more likely to bring violence into play now, in the present historical

juncture, than ever before, a claim that pertains to questions of fact.

Agamben, however, cannot draw a link between the thesis concerning laws
constitutive violence and current circumstances because he pays no
attention to issues such as historical relationships between political
institutions and policing mechanisms, which disciplines like political
sociology deal with. Agambens ontological theses regarding the essence of
the law do not help in attending to the historical problem his theory needs to
be able to address: namely, to show the process by which the state of
exception has become the norm. More generally, it is difficult to see how
his commitment to such theses sheds any light on the workings of the law.
Agamben sees the purported legitimacy of law as a ruse of the liberal state ,
which in the social contract narrative claims legitimacy for law on account of its protection of otherwise vulnerable life. This position may usefully be compared
with Foucaults comments on the same topic. Foucault addresses the topic of laws legitimacy from two different angles. First, he sees in political philosophys
interest in the question of the features that qualifysovereign power as legitimate a tendency to avoid the crucial question of how legitimate power actually
operates. In this sense, the account he provides in his work on prisons of how laws violence manifests in penal institutions is a critique of the adequacy of the
theory of sovereignty to form an accurate picture of the complex forces and instruments involved in social organization.32 Second, in his 19789 lectures on
biopolitics, Foucault argues that liberalism is a government of life rather than the exercise of sovereignty over life and death. His analysis of the policy direction of
post-war German intellectuals is premised on the assumption that their activities were strategically meaningful. Their social integration and state building
initiatives were based on the goal of economic success. Even their power politics were staked on rapid economic growth.33 Foucaults analysis of liberalism
follows an injunction comparable to his focus on reformist manuals and prison plans in Discipline and Punish. Institutional practices do not function
independently of what people think about them. They are intelligible precisely because they embody strategically considered ends (even if these ends are not

The premise of
Agambens analysis, in contrast, renders power senseless. What possible
intelligible motives might Agambens sovereign have for wanting perpetual
and unlimited disposition over the physical existence of its subjects in the
manner of a Nazi camp warden? This question cannot be raised in
Agambens scheme. Moreover, it is precisely because the law is not as
Agambens analysis assumes an objective mechanism that could function
independently of what people think about it that he obscures how the
different ways in which the law is experienced as legitimate (e.g., in its
strategic deployment to realize specific ends) can affect its essential
nature. This renders Agambens thesis of the constitutive violence of the
law, if not unintelligible, at least inscrutable . Is it the way political institutions are shaped or the way human
individuals are conceptualized in legal doctrine that produces this state of affairs? The deficiencies of this perspective
can partly be found in the ontological nature of his framework, which thus
has very little to do with an inquiry into institutional features and practices . It
aims to pose questions regarding legal institutions and practices at the fundamental level of the forces or elements that drive history. His
fascination with the terminology of the exception as the incisive political
vocabulary for our times is a case in point. His use of this terminology marks
out extreme situations not as anomalous, but as if they had general
significance. This mode of argumentation necessarily looks past the task of
analyzing institutional functioning because it imports the grammar of such
functioning from the exceptional situation. iii. Agamben treats those
subject to law as totally passive bodies. His focus on the camp situation is
telling because this is the only situation where his doctrine seems to work : in
realized or contained by those strategies).34 C _ 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 428 Constellations, Volume 19, Issue 3, 2012

the extermination camp, action does not meet other actions, but bodies. Foucault insisted that this type of situation was not a relation of power, but one of

sociological models of social interaction differentiate the

study of social organization defined as actions influencing other actions
from situations of crude force. Since he is so often contemptuous of the
assumptions of liberalism, it is worth comparing Agambens position on this
question of force with that of liberalism. Classical liberal theory acknowledges the ultimate dependence of order on
submission to force.35 Similarly,

relations of force; it holds the unification of the aggregate force of society under a single coercive law to be the virtue of the state. The purpose of such force is the

there are limits on the capacity of force to decide

conflicts internal to this aggregate body. These limits are a central topic in
liberal political philosophy, which sees reliance on force to manage social
conflicts as a sign of the systems weakness: such reliance places
inflationary pressure on force, thus devaluing it. Force as it is understood and used in liberal political
protection of the members of its aggregate body. However,

theory is a differential quantity that has to present itself and be received as a quality, as authority, on the pain of dissipation. In The State and the Rule of Law,
Blandine Kriegel reads the history of theories of the state in these terms, emphasizing the perils of naked reliance on force pointed out in such theories. She notes,
for instance, that theorists of the state since Bodin have found the state that restrains itself in its use of force and its extension of powers more powerful than one
with unlimited powers.36 The question of force can also be approached from the perspective of other mechanisms that are important for social organization and
that presuppose the existence of distinct currencies that pertain to the different media of the social system. Liberal theory acknowledges the findings of political
sociology that describes how social order is constituted through, for instance, symbolic integration and economic instruments. Social integration and organization
take place in multiple dimensions or media: symbolic (cultural, ideological, etc.), C _ 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Agambens Political Paradigm of the Camp:
Alison Ross 429 economic, and political (participation in collective decisions at various levels).37 Talcott Parsons attempted to define the problem of social
interaction in terms of systems of action that use different symbolically generalized media of communication where action influences action. As part of this
approach, he maintained the importance of patterns of interaction in establishing and reinforcing expectations for the functioning of such media. When a cultural
system changes, this marks the introduction of a new pattern whose meaning is intelligible to and expected by social actors.38 In particular, Parsons was interested
to account for the interaction between social, cultural, and personality systems. These relationships are all bidirectional according to him; that is, these symbolic
systems are intelligible to agents whose action is susceptible to the actions of social and cultural systems of meaning.39 This approach is important not just
because of the elements it deploys to explain social organization, but because of the image it produces of such organization. I will return to this point in my
concluding remarks to this paper. The economic system is based on interactions in which actors select actions that will optimize their ends. They want to act in the
most profitable way [to achieve] the highest benefits when costs are substantial. In this system, the symbolic medium of money is ordered according to a specific
set of norms for its use and acquisition. Within the system, money is not replaceable by force. For instance, as a legitimate means for acquiring property, the use of

in the political
system, force is understood as an abortive way of managing conflicting goals
since it is susceptible to counter-action by the force of others. It thus fails to
make decisions that could bind everyone in a social system. The political
system uses forms of collective decision-making to maximize the realization
of actors specific goals. Legitimate political power is a general medium that
can make collectively binding and effective decisions in a way that force
cannot.41 Insofar as such mechanisms are effective, they are real; and they
need to be understood and analyzed in terms of their actual mechanics and
dynamics, not dismissed as masks.42 With these comments I do not intend to mount a defence of liberal political
money as a symbolic mechanism of exchange forbids as illegitimate the use of force for property acquisition.40 Similarly,

philosophy. Rather, I want to ask whether Agambens style of analysis allows things to be seen more clearly than they are in sociologically influenced liberal theory.
Agambens criticisms of law are directed to the potential he sees realized in the camps to hold life in a relation of exposure to pure force. Of course, the critical

we need to ask whether adopting

this stance helps us illuminate current political circumstances. Why, for
instance, does he choose to explain what happens in the camp as a potential
of liberal law, rather than as a degradation of liberal protections? 43 Additionally, how
stand he takes on law is explicable in terms of the ontological perspective he adopts, but

useful are categories crafted in the field of jurisprudence, which have their proper register of application within this field, for the purpose of describing what occurs

What makes the camp analogy especially unsuitable as a

paradigm for understanding the organization of a society is that the camp
population, unlike society, is not meant to have a future (and here one needs think of all those
things that are required for a society to have a future: from material production to symbolic identity, etc.). The murderous contempt
shown the camp inmate is simply not a viable option for a state.
in extreme situations like the camp?

Predictions Good
Even if predictions in the abstract are wrong, policy debates that predict
hypothetical outcomes and weigh evidence of the risk of those outcomes is
productive
Tetlock & Gardner 11 Philip Tetlock is a professor of organizational behavior at the Haas Business School at
the University of California-Berkeley, AND Dan Gardner is a columnist and senior writer for the Ottawa Citizen and the
author of The Science of Fear, received numerous awards for his writing, including the Michener Award, M.A. History
from York, "OVERCOMING OUR AVERSION TO ACKNOWLEDGING OUR IGNORANCE" July 11 www.catounbound.org/2011/07/11/dan-gardner-and-philip-tetlock/overcoming-our-aversion-to-acknowledging-ourignorance/Tina

The optimists are right that there is much we can do at a cost that is quite modest
relative to what is often at stake. For example, why not build on the IARPA tournament? Imagine a system for
recording and judging forecasts. Imagine running tallies of forecasters accuracy rates. Imagine advocates on
either side of a policy debate specifying in advance precisely what outcomes their desired
approach is expected to produce, the evidence that will settle whether it has done so, and
the conditions under which participants would agree to say I was wrong. Imagine pundits
being held to account. Of course arbitration only works if the arbiter is universally respected and it would be an enormous
challenge to create an analytical center whose judgments were not only fair, but perceived to be fair even by partisans dead
sure they are right and the other guys are wrong. But think of the potential of such a system to improve

the signal-to-noise ratio, to sharpen public debate, to shift attention from blowhards to
experts worthy of an audience, and to improve public policy . At a minimum, it would
highlight how often our forecasts and expectations fail, and if that were to deflate the
bloated confidence of experts and leaders, and give pause to those preparing some great
leap forward, it would be money well spent. But the pessimists are right, too, that fallibility, error, and
tragedy are permanent conditions of our existence. Humility is in order, or, as Socrates said, the beginning of wisdom is
the admission of ignorance. The Socratic message has always been a hard sell, and it still isespecially among practical
people in business and politics, who expect every presentation to end with a single slide consisting of five bullet points
labeled The Solution. We have no such slide, unfortunately. But in defense of Socrates, humility is the foundation of the
fox style of thinking and much research suggests it is an essential component of good judgment in our uncertain world. It
is practical. Over the long term, it yields better calibrated probability judgments, which should help you affix more
realistic odds than your competitors on policy bets panning out.

Rejection of expert prediction is a terrible idea.

Mesquita 11 Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is Silver Professor of Politics at New York University and a senior fellow at
the Hoover Institution B.A. from Queens, M.A. from Michigan, PhD from Michigan, "FOX-HEDGING OR KNOWING:
ONE BIG WAY TO KNOW MANY THINGS" July 18 www.cato-unbound.org/2011/07/18/bruce-bueno-de-mesquita/foxhedging-or-knowing-one-big-way-to-know-many-things/ Tina

Good predictionand this is my beliefcomes from dependence on logic and evidence to draw
inferences about the causal path from facts to outcomes . Unfortunately, government, business, and
the media assume that expertiseknowing the history, culture, mores, and language of a place, for instanceis sufficient
to anticipate the unfolding of events. Indeed, too often many of us dismiss approaches to prediction

that require knowledge of statistical methods, mathematics, and systematic research

design. We seem to prefer wisdom over science, even though the evidence shows that
the application of the scientific method, with all of its demands, outperforms experts
(remember Johan de Witt). The belief that area expertise, for instance, is sufficient to anticipate the future is, as Tetlock
convincingly demonstrated, just plain false. If we hope to build reliable predictions about human

behavior, whether in China, Cameroon, or Connecticut, then probably we must first

harness facts to the systematic, repeated, transparent application of the same logic
across connected families of problems. By doing so we can test alternative ways of thinking to uncover what
works and what doesnt in different circumstances. Here Gardner, Tetlock, and I could not agree more. Prediction
tournaments are an essential ingredient to work out what the current limits are to

improved knowledge and predictive accuracy. Of course, improvements in knowledge and accuracy will
always be a moving target because technology, ideas, and subject adaptation will be ongoing.

Reform Good
Incremental reform is key. Agambens theories dont help at all.
Colatrella, 09 Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, vol.9. no.1 Nothing Exceptional: Against Agamben,
Steven Colatrella University of Maryland University College, Europe, http://www.jceps.com/PDFs/09-1-05.pdf Tina

Conclusion: State Transformation without State of Exception In failing to

take into account the expropriation of the slave , the enclosure of the
commons, the expropriation of the peasantry and the burning of the witch ,
the occupation of the colonizeds lands, the IMF Structural Adjustment
Program and the repression needed to impose it against resistance, hasnt
Agamben also failed to provide his own theoretical framework with the tools
needed to explain the survival or death of the Jew in the Nazi camp , his own paradigmatic
example? If we find, as Isabella Clough-Marinaro has34, that the camps for Roma in Italy today are classic examples of homo sacer, right down to publicly exposed showers on concrete enclosures
surrounded by barbed wire, neednt we try to understand what these new horrors have to do with the rolling back of the welfare state in Europe?; with the attack on employment and wages?; with
the intensified exploitation that includes that of the undocumented immigrants and the public discourses demonizing them?; with the increased law and order regimes, campaigns against crime
that criminalize the Roma, the undocumented and other minorities that have allowed the Italian military to be deployed in the streets to keep an eye on the population; with the creation of such

Agamben, as Clough-Marinaro demonstrates, is

indispensable to help analyze the camps in the first place, but I would argue that he is of nearly no
scapegoats to divide the working class exactly at such a time of attack on hard-won social gains?

help

at all

to help us strategize about what to do about them, because he doesnt understand what any of it has

to do with class relations, relations of expropriation, exploitation and class struggle against these. And that means he cant understand what the latter has already accomplished and what it has yet

To understand this, we need to understand the welfare state itself as it has developed. To do that we need to
understand democracy, which in turn requires us to think about the state, as
Agamben calls on us to do, but to do so in a way that goes beyond the drama
of the state of exception to include the historical accomplishments of the
class struggle, particularly those other two categories, democracy and the welfare state. While this is not the place to enter into a full discussion of these issues, which I address
to accomplish.

elsewhere35, a brief summary of my argument on democracy is useful to make clear my differences with Agambens approach. Modern democracy is part of what Polanyi calls the double
movement36 of expropriation and the establishment of the self-regulating market and the efforts by society to defend itself from this process. Modern democracy is born from the English and
French Revolutions37, from the anti-slavery movement in the US, and from the labor and socialist movements in Europe38. Mass democratic movements that have furthered this process have
been fought either to retard the separation of the people from the land and access to means of production and subsistence, or to provide new guarantees of meeting these needs and providing

the commitment of ordinary people to

democracy comes from their need and desire to use it to do something;
democracy is an instrument of popular classes to defend and extend their
interests. If, as I have argued, citing various authors work to the point, the protection of individual rights,
avoidance of becoming homo sacer, and prevention of the state of exception
required material foundations, those material foundations have, in modern
times, required political protection . The modern democratic class struggle, the establishment of
democracy and its extension, remain, along with defending or reestablishing control of subsistence and means of production directly in the
hands of the people (the commons), the best means of avoiding the fate that Agamben warns us
about. This means that the too-facile dismissal of all legal, democratic or
constitutional protections, hard-won by generations of struggle, that appear
in his analysis that the state of exception is already unexceptional but rather
the rule, disarms the very efforts needed to protect us from the state power .
livelihood to those already expropriated and now exploited. Put differently,

The democratic movements have broken down the sterile and false separation between the oikos and the polis argued for by Hannah Arendt40, and the similar separations between everyday life
and social reproduction and public life, between zoe and bios. This is not by chance: slave plantations were private homes; the family enterprise studied by Marx was considered virtually an
extension of the owners household; the needs of working families for subsistence or health care, or the infant mortality rate, unwanted pregnancies and their impact on womens lives and the
mortality rate of women in childbirth were all considered private affairs, not public or political ones. It was the accomplishment of the modern workers and womens movements, of modern

Agamben sneeringly dismisses, indeed scarily demonizes

this accomplishment as biopolitics: What comes to light in order to be exposed apud Westminster is, once again, the body of homo
democracy, to change this state of affairs.

sacer, which is to say, bare life. This is modern democracys strength, and at the same time, its inner contradiction: modern democracy does not abolish sacred life but rather shatters it and
disseminates it into every individual body, making it into what is at stake in political conflict. And the root of modern democracys secret biopolitical calling lies here: he who will later appear as the
bearer of rights, and according to a curious oxymoron, as the new sovereign subjectcan only be constituted as such through the repetition of the sovereign exception and the isolation of corpus,
bare life, in himself. If it is true that law needs a body in order to be in force, and if one can speak, in this sense, of laws desire to have a body, democracy responds to this desire by compelling law

Agamben provides us with some of the most facile and

dangerous thinking, passing for profundity, imaginable: Once their fundamental referent becomes
bare life, traditional political distinctions (such as those between Right and Left, liberalism and totalitarianism, private and public)
lose their clarity and their intelligibility and enter into a zone of
indistinction. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p.122. This statement, with the word capitalism replacing the phrase bare life could have
been written by an adherent of the Third Internationals Third Period,
to assume the care of this body.41 39

whose disastrous policies helped bring about precisely the states of

exception Nazi victories that Agamben is concerned about. Agamben goes
on to argue, incredibly, that the very right of habeas corpus by requiring the sheriff
to exhibit the body of the accused undermines the liberty of the accused, an
interpretation unique in the thousand-year history of habeas corpus rights
whose defense has quite rightly underpinned many oppositions to Bush
administration tactics in the War on Terror, and whose history has recently been
provided a radical defense and materialist interpretation by Linebaugh already cited.
The long process of democracy compelling law to assume the care of the
body instead is the accomplishment of centuries of struggles by ordinary
people precisely to move the state out of the business of killing and into the
business of providing health care and education. This is what led Ernest Gellner to state, while overstating the case, "At
the base of the modern social order stands not the executioner but the professor The monopoly of legitimate education is now more important, more central than the monopoly of legitimate
violence.42 That the European social democratic welfare state coincided with the European Unions one great accomplishment, the end of wars between the nation-states of Europe should give us
pause for thought43. That the abolition of the death penalty followed these developments should make the relationship clear. What seals the argument is that the revived militarism, political
repression and demonization of unpopular minority groups in Europe follow upon the efforts directed by the EU Commission and signed on to by every EU member government to privatize,
liberalize markets, overcome workers resistance to flexible work organization, and impose neoliberal globalization44. The relationship between the democratic class struggle to defend
subsistence and basic needs and the defense of individual rights and limitation of state power should be clear. That it isnt should be attributed to an elitist, too-sophisticated by half approach to
the state, democracy and class struggle that appears radical but in fact undermines the very foundations of democracy and social welfare by not making these struggles an integral part of its

The movements for democracy, the class and gender struggles that
brought it about and have continued to try to extend it to more spheres of
life are, as Marx explained to the First International, not extensions of state
power, but partial transformations of the state from a police apparatus and
killing machine for the ruling class into a set of functions whose institutions
and cadre now concern themselves with caring for the needs of societys
members, with all the contradictions and flaws that studies of the welfare state have demonstrated but with all its benefits too: However, the more enlightened part of the working
analysis.

class fully understands that the future of its class, and, therefore, of mankind, altogether depends upon the formation of the rising working generation. They know that, before everything else, the

workers must be saved from the crushing effects of the present

system. This can only be effected by converting social reason into social
force, and, under given circumstances, there exists no other method of
doing so, than through general laws, enforced by the power of the state. In
enforcing such laws, the working class do not fortify governmental power.
On the contrary, they transform that power, now used against them, into
their own agency. They effect by a general act what they would vainly
attempt by a multitude of isolated individual efforts. Let us look briefly at two examples in which states of
exception were declared by democratically elected governments. In India, Indira Gandhis declaration of a state of emergency, while arguably overdetermined, came at a particular
children and juvenile

period characterized by a large strike movement by workers and resistance to policies of her son Sanjay involving two forms of enclosure: slum clearance expropriation of the poor from their
housing and forced sterilization46. The latter explicitly meets Agambens criteria for biopolitics in a democracy leading to a state of exception though strangely he does not cite it as an example
to strengthen his argument. This omission is perhaps due to the fact that, despite Indira Gandhis government being characterized by some policies favorable to the lower castes and the rural poor
at times, it can hardly be seen as a welfare state or an example of social democracy. That is, its entry into biopolitical policies- the forced sterilization campaign was purely repressive and not also

The end of the state of

emergency came about through normal democratic means, namely an
election that threw Gandhi out of office. Agamben, we might point out, has
no theory to address the ending of states of exception. Marx, again speaking for the First Internationals
a form of care of the body or social needs. It wasnt democratic enough, in other words, to be demonized by Agamben.

General Council defined the Lincoln administration as, the only example on record in which the Government fought for the peoples liberty, against a section of its own citizens.47 Agamben,
quite reasonably lists Lincolns suspension of Habeas Corpus during the Civil War as one of the historic states of exception declared by western liberal democracies that he sees as a precursor to
todays menaces. He is right, but in fact this goes to the heart of my argument against his approach. Three questions can be asked here: was the declaration of a state of emergency, as it were, or to
be more precise, the use of exceptional measures, in the actual and not just declared defense of the interests of the popular classes and democracy rather than subversive of these? Was there a real
emergency, in the sense that there was a plausible threat, not just to some lives and property say, but to the whole democratic order and survival of the society and of the interests of the popular
classes? And was the declaration temporary and withdrawn after a short time and when the emergency was over? I think that a plausible case can be made that the answer is yes to all three of
these, whereas in the case of say, the internment of the Japanese-Americans during World War II, which involved the expropriation of land and property from the victims, the answer would
certainly be no to the first two. But isnt all this just a social democratic argument, one that forgets the long history of proletarian attempts to establish direct democracy through the Paris
Commune, the Soviets, the Workers Councils? Didnt Marx also argue that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.?
Indeed, is this not why Negri and others have been drawn to a kind of photo-negative version of Schmitts state of exception the revolutionary moment in which the proletariat or the multitude
can rewrite both the material and the legal constitutions? The experience of recent and current movements and radical left governments in Latin America challenges the idea that a state of
exception is needed to carry out constitutional transformation. In Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and elsewhere, major changes are being carried out and new constitutions written48. These
experiences, despite great diversity in their proposals, debates and outcomes, as well as of course the national contexts in which they occur, have several common features. First, they involve an
alliance between an elected representative government and a mass movement that is itself quite diverse, but which is based on the working majority of the population; second they involve attempts
to meld traditional representation using existing institutions and various forms of direct democracy at the workplace, neighborhood, and municipality; third, the new constitutions result from a
large-scale discussion with serious input and participation from the grassroots and associations of all types; fourth, constitutional changes have been put to referenda votes, so it is the people, in an
expression of Rousseaus General Will, that can approve changes in which they participated both at the level of their associations and through representatives in drafting; fifth the changes affect the
material constitution the distribution of property, the rights of people to land or subsistence or income, as well as the legal apparatus; sixth, these movements typically involve movements of
exactly those groups historically designated as homo sacer: the indigenous people of the continent. These movements and governments are certainly not without their contradictions, particularly
regarding the role of the executive and relationship of leader to movement. But it would be a mistake to deny the autonomy, now greater, now lesser, of the movements from the heads of
government, even in Venezuela49. No state of exception has been used to impose these changes; rather the only risks of a state of exception have come during the coup attempt by the opponents of
President Chavez of Venezuela, with backing from the Bush Administration, and the recent coup in Honduras, overthrowing President Zelaya. The mass democratic, proletarian movement that has
opposed that coup testifies powerfully to the theses in this essay. Similarly, though in a very different context, the mass occupation of the capital Bangkok by pro-democracy demonstrators in
Thailand, largely farmers and urban workers, and the massacre they suffered at the hands of the military, the monarchy and the elites they protect, under martial law, again suggests that the lines
are increasingly clearly drawn between one set of class forces demanding democracy so as to use democratic government and their own organized movement to meet the needs of the majority, and
those who are willing to destroy civil liberties and democratic institutions if necessary, in order to impose and sustain neoliberal capitalist globalization and the inequalities it creates. Even the
examples from the region that do not easily fit this model, such as the Zapatista movement in Mexico and the radical democracy briefly created and crushed in Oaxaca have not been attempts at all
or nothing insurrections, but have seen themselves as part of larger processes needed to democratize Mexico. Can these approaches work where both traditional social democracy and the
revolutionary tradition of direct democracy have failed to fully transform the state from a machine for killing from a permanent state of exception into an instrument of the people to meet their
needs under their control?

The struggles of peoples who have resisted expropriation for 500

years deserve our patience as they work out how to deal with conditions that
Agamben has only interpreted for us. The point remains to change them.

The system is self-correcting. Using the law solves.

Cinneide, 08 Colm OCinneide, Senior Lecturer in Law, Faculty of Laws, University College London

Controlling
the Gorgon of state power in the state of exception: a reply to Professor Tushnet Colm Cambridge journals Tina
Are constitutional democracies therefore doomed to repeat a cycle of panic, overreaction, error and repentance over and
over, whenever emergencies recur? A pessimistic response would not be unfounded. The suggestion made by Schmitt,
Agamben and others that the liberal constitutional state reveals its true authoritarian face in times of emergency strikes a
chord of truth, especially when one considers Guantnamo Bay and the abuses associated with the current War on Terror
(Schmitt, 1932/2003; Agamben, 2005). However, I share some of Tushnets apparent

optimism that it is too easy to write off the resources of liberal democracy in
this way. I would nevertheless put forward an alternative account of how abuses of emergency
powers may be controlled in constitutional democracies. In the argument developed
below, I suggest that political

controls can prove effective to some degree in reining in the

excesses of emergency powers, despite their serious limitations, if they play out against the backdrop of
a constitutional culture where (a) the potential for abuse of emergency powers is recognised and (b) excessive violations of
rights rub sharply against the grain of the normative values embedded in this system. In other words, political processes
work best when energised by a surrounding constitutional culture that has absorbed the social learning of previous
errors, to borrow Tushnets phrase. The presence or absence of this culture, and the degree to which it is internalised
through the various layers of governance of constitutional democracies, will determine the extent to which the use of
emergency powers is controllable in practice. In contrast, the political dynamics discussed by Tushnet are ultimately of
less importance. Admittedly, to have any real impact, this constitutional culture needs to be

manifested through political processes: if it is confined to the back corridors

of the legal process, or to abstract national or supranational standards, then its impact will be muted
and easily disregarded in times of emergency. The political arena will be where
the key issues are ultimately determined. However, if this constitutional culture does not find
some expression outside political processes, then this also may not be sufficient: for the reasons already summarised,
political resistance to the logic of emergency powers is often too easily marginalised in the temporary panic of a crisis.
However, if this culture is manifested at both the legal and political level, the interplay between political and legal
processes may orient both towards a more questioning view of emergency powers. In addition, supranational frameworks
may play a role, potentially opening up avenues for challenging and ultimately constraining the abuse of special powers.
Taken together, as I argue in detail below, the trace elements of this constitutional culture

embedded in various national and supranational processes may limit the

horizon of possibilities available to governments in times of emergency,
and restrict what they can do with their emergency powers . Therefore, a key flaw in
Tushnets analysis is the excessively rigid dichotomy he draws between legal and political processes, with the former
largely dismissed as being of marginal impact. This dichotomy is problematic for two reasons. First, legal processes may
have more direct bite on the use of emergency powers than his analysis admits, despite their serious limitations. Recent
UK experience demonstrates this strongly, as does the experience of other European countries: legal processes on this side
of the Atlantic have proven since September 11 to be more than a thin reed, even if it would be grossly exaggerating to
describe them as a mighty oak. Secondly, legal and political processes are inextricably intertwined in contemporary
constitutional democracies. Often indirectly, legal processes help shape political processes, and thereby have a greater
impact on controlling the use of emergency powers than Tushnet allows for in his conceptual framework. Perhaps
Tushnets customary intellectual valorisation of the political over the legal has this time caused him to underplay the
potential impact of the latter. The shadow of legal controls plays an important role in shaping the constitutional culture
and therefore the horizon of possibilities within which political actors operate. Ultimately, it is the interplay of

legal, political and other processes and whether they combine to generate
this constitutional culture that governs the ability of constitutional
democracies to regulate the state of exception opened up by the invocation
of emergency powers.