Baudrillard

Speaking out and raising awareness is playing into the hands of the system they criticize, because it is intended to maximize speech without creating change. Instead, we need to engage the system through passive resistance, not active opposition. Baudrillard in 81 [Jean, Simulacra and Simulation p. 84-86]

With one caution. We are face to face with this system in a double situation and insoluble double bind exactly like children faced with the demands of the adult world. Children are simultaneously required to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free and conscious, and to constitute them selves as submissive, inert, obedient, conforming objects. The child resists on all levels, and to a contradictory demand he responds with a double strategy; To the demand of being an object he opposes all the practices of disobedience, of revolt, of emancipation; in short, a total claim to subjecthood. To the demand of being a subject he opposes, just as obstinately, and efficaciously, an object's resistance, that is to say, exactly the opposite: childishness, hyperconformism, total dependence, passivity, idiocy: Neither strategy has more objective value than the other. The subject-resistance is today unilaterally valorized and viewed as positive-just as in the political sphere only the practices of freedom, emancipation, expression, and the constitution of a political subject are seen as valuable and subversive. But this is to ignore the equal, and without a doubt superior, impact of all the object practices, of the renunciation of the subject position and of meaning-precisely the practices of the masses-that we bury under the derisory terms of alienation and passivity. The liberating practices respond to one of the aspects of the system, to the constant ultimatum we are given to constitute ourselves as pure objects, but they do not respond at all to the other demand, that of constituting ourselves as subjects, of liberating ourselves, expressing ourselves at whatever cost, of voting, producing, deciding, speaking, participating, playing the game-a form of blackmail and ultimatum just as serious as the other, even more serious today. To a system whose argument is oppression and repression, the strategic resistance is the liberating claim of subjecthood. But this strategy is more reflective of the earlier phase of the system, and even if we are still confronted with it, it is no longer the strategic terrain: the current argument of the system is to maximize speech, the maximum production of meaning. Thus the strategic resistance is that of the refusal of meaning and of the spoken word-or of the hyperconformist simulation of the very mechanisms of the system, which is a form of refusal and of non- reception. It is the strategy of the masses: it is equivalent to re-turning to the system its own logic by doubling it, to reflecting meaning, like a mirror, without absorbing it. This strategy (if one can still speak of strategy) prevails today, because it was ushered in by that phase of the system which prevails. To choose the wrong strategy is a serious matter. All the movements that only play on liberation, emancipation, on the resurrection of a subject of history, of the group, of the word based on "consciousness raising," indeed a "raising of the unconscious" of subjects and of the masses, do not see that they are going in the direction of the system, whose imperative today is precisely the

overproduction and regeneration of meaning and of speech.

Strategic Passivity Overview They think theyre resisting the system by speaking out against it, but extend Baudrillard 81 who says it just aint so. Their efforts to make their voices heard, raise consciousness and so on, are not responsive, because the system is already configured to absorb this type of protest if speaking out could change the system itd be illegal. Also, speaking out and engaging the system is supporting its call for participation and involvement. They think theyre revolutionary, but in fact, theyre further granting the hegemony of the system that they criticize. Instead of speaking out, we need to embrace the opposite strategy, which is passivity and indifference to the system. When it is no longer recognized, it can no longer resist ironically, our political project, which ignores what they critique, is more effectively political than theirs. 2Nd Overview They miss some key points to our argument, so extend the Baudrillard 81 evidence and this analysis from the overview: First, their speech act is useless because the system absorbs protest without changing. If speaking out worked, the system wouldnt exist, because lots have spoken out before. Theirs wont make any difference, so they do nothing. Second, their speech act goes in the direction of the system, because it demands this form of engagement with it. Even if they disagree, this disagreement keeps the dominant discourse on center stage and unconsciously recognizes its dominance, which is a turn because they make what they criticize more powerful. Third, instead of speaking out, the correct strategy is strategic passivity, refusing to engage in criticism outside the system and instead using its own object practices against it by not participating in it at all. Dont enter the rigged game instead, refuse to play at all.

Zizek
This talks about how why radical change is only appreciated if it fails note that this is more of a response to radical change instead of a support for passivity (its a subtle difference, but you probably get what Im saying) note that this card is also technically only in the context of neoliberalism and democracy as thats Zizeks area of expertise Particularized demands for change, no matter how radical, are performed against the backdrop of the neoliberal-democratic order and are tolerated as long as they fail to fundamentally change hegemonic ideology. Slavoj Zizek, professor of philosophy at the university of Ljubljana, 2001, Repeating Lenin,
http://lacan.com/replenin.htm, accessed January 28, 2004
What are we to say to this? Again, the problem resides in the implicit qualifications which can be easily discerned by the "concrete analysis of the concrete situation," as Lenin himself would have put it. "Fidelity to the democratic consensus" means the acceptance of the present liberal-parlamentary consensus, which precludes any serious questioning of how this liberal-democratic order is complicit in the phenomena it officially condemns, and, of course, any serious attempt to imagine a society whose socio-political order would be different. In short, it means: say and write whatever you want - on condition that what you do does not effectively question or disturb the predominant political consensus. So everything is allowed, solicited even, as a critical topic: the prospects of a global ecological catastrophe, violations of human rights, sexism, homophobia, antifeminism, the growing violence not only in the far-away countries, but also in our megalopolises, the gap between the First and the Third World, between the rich and the poor, the shattering impact of the digitalization of our daily lives... there is nothing easier today than to get international, state or corporate funds for a multidisciplinary research into how to fight the new forms of ethnic, religious or sexist violence. The problem is that all this occurs against the background of a fundamental Denkverbot, the prohibition to think. Today's liberal-democratic hegemony is sustained by a kind of unwritten Denkverbot similar to the infamous Berufsverbot in Germany of the late 60s - the moment one shows a minimal sign of engaging in political projects that aim to seriously challenge the existing order, the answer is immediately: "Benevolent as it is, this will necessarily end in a new Gulag!" The ideological function of the constant reference to the holocaust, gulag and the more recent Third World catastrophes is thus to serve as the support of this Denkverbot by constantly reminding us how things may have been much worse: "Just look around and see for yourself what will happen if we follow your radical notions!" And it is exactly the same thing that the demand for "scientific objectivity" means: the moment one seriously questions the existing liberal consensus, one is accused of abandoning scientific objectivity for the outdated ideological positions. This is the point on which one cannot and should not concede: today, the actual freedom of thought means the freedom to question the predominant liberal-democratic "post-ideological" consensus - or it means nothing. Habermas designated the present era as that of the neue Undurchsichtlichkeit - the new opacity.1 More than ever, our daily experience is mystifying: modernization generates new obscurantisms, the reduction of freedom is presented to us as the arrival of new freedoms. In these circumstances, one should be especially careful not to confuse the ruling ideology with ideology which SEEMS to dominate. More then ever, one should bear in mind Walter Benjamin's reminder that it is not enough to ask how a certain theory (or art) declares itself to stay with regard to social struggles - one should also ask how it effectively functions IN these very struggles. In sex, the effectively hegemonic attitude is not patriarchal repression, but free promiscuity; in art, provocations in the style of the notorious "Sensation" exhibitions ARE the norm, the example of the art fully integrated into the establishment. One is therefore tempted to turn around Marx's thesis 11: the first task today is precisely NOT to succumb to the temptation to act, to directly intervene and change things (which then inevitably ends in a cul de sac of debilitating impossibility: "what can one do against the global capital?"), but to question the hegemonic ideological coordinates. If, today, one follows a direct call to act, this act will not be performed in an empty space - it will be an act WITHIN the hegemonic ideological coordinates: those who "really want to do something to help people" get involved in (undoubtedly honorable) exploits like Medecins sans frontiere, Greenpeace, feminist and anti-racist campaigns, which are all not only tolerated, but even supported by the media, even if they seemingly enter the economic territory (say, denouncing and boycotting companies which do not respect ecological conditions or which use child labor) - they are tolerated and supported as long as they do not get too close to a certain limit. This kind of activity provides the perfect example of interpassivity2: of doing things not to achieve something, but to PREVENT from something really happening, really changing. All the frenetic humanitarian, politically correct, etc., activity fits the formula of "Let's go on changing something all the time so that, globally, things will remain the same!"

This is probably slightly more relevant refusal to participate in First World mindsets and systems is a way to escape a system

Particularly in the context of human rights, todays reign of ethical decisionmaking amounts to nothing more than the right of First-World powers to intervene where it suits their interests and leave entire other populations condemned to violence and oppression. Fortunately, theres a way out of this deadlock the best thing we can do is to refuse to participate, to become like Bartleby the Scrivener who passively

refused involvement in the system. This is our act of self-censorship, and this evidence proves its comparatively better than appeals to human rights. Slavoj Zizek, Professor of Sociology at the Institute for Sociology, Ljubljana University, Fall 2005, online:
http://www.lacan.com/zizviol.htm, accessed October 15, 2005
So, to put it in the Leninist way: what today, in the predominant Western discourse, the "Human Rights of the Third World suffering victims" effectively mean is the right of the Western powers themselves to intervene - politically, economically, culturally, militarily - in the Third World countries of their choice on behalf of the defense of Human Rights. The reference to Lacan's formula of communication (in which the sender gets back from the receiver-addressee his own message in its inverted, i.e. true, form) is here up to the point: in the reigning discourse of humanitarian interventionism, the developed West is effectively getting back from the victimized Third World its own message in its true form. And the moment Human Rights are thus depoliticized, the discourse dealing with them has to change to ethics: reference to the pre-political opposition of Good and Evil has to be mobilized. Today's "new reign of Ethics," 10 clearly discernible in, say, Michael Ignatieff's work, thus relies on a violent gesture of depoliticization, of denying to the victimized other political subjectivization. And, as Ranciere pointed out, liberal humanitarianism a la Ignatieff unexpectedly meets the "radical" position of Foucault or Agamben with regard to this depoliticization: the Foucauldian-Agambenian notion of "biopolitics" as the culmination of the entire Western thought ends up getting caught in a kind of "ontological trap" in which concentration camps appear as a kind of "ontological destiny: each of us would be in the situation of the refugee in a camp. Any difference grows faint between democracy and totalitarianism and any political practice proves to be already ensnared in the biopolitical trap." 11 When, in a shift from Foucault, Agamben identifies sovereign power and biopolitics (in today's generalized state of exception, the two overlap), he thus precludes the very possibility of the emergence of political subjectivity. - However, the rise of political subjectivity takes place against the background of a certain limit of the "inhuman," so that one should continue to endorse the paradox of the inhumanity of human being deprived of citizenship, and posit the "inhuman" pure man as a necessary excess of humanity over itself, its "indivisible remainder," a kind of Kantian limit-concept of the phenomenal notion of humanity? So that, in exactly the same way in Kant's philosophy the sublime Noumenal, when we come too close to it, appears as pure horror, man "as such," deprived of all phenomenal qualifications, appears as an inhuman monster, something like Kafka's odradek. The problem with human rights humanism is that it covers up this monstrosity of the "human as such," presenting it as a sublime human essence. What, then, is the way out of this deadlock? Balibar ends with an ambiguous reference to Mahatma Gandhi. It is true that Gandhi's formula "Be yourself the change you would like to see in the world" encapsulates perfectly the basic attitude of emancipatory change: do not wait for the "objective process" to generate the expected/desired change, since if you just wait for it, it will never come; instead, throw YOURSELF into it, BE this change, take upon yourself the risk of enacting it directly. However, is not the ultimate limitation of Gandhi's strategy that it only works against a liberal-democratic regime which refers to certain minimal ethico-political standards, i.e., in which, to put it in pathetic terms, those in power still "have conscience." Recall Gandhi's reply, in the late 1930s, to the question of what should the Jews in Germany do against Hitler: they should commit a collective suicide and thus arouse the conscience of the world... One can easily imagine what the Nazi reaction to it would have been: OK, we will help you, where do you want the poison to be delivered to you? There is, however, another way in which Balibar's plea for renouncing violence can be given a specific twist - that of what one is tempted to call the Bartleby-politics. Recall the two symmetrically opposed modes of the "living dead," of finding oneself in the uncanny place "between the two deaths": one is either biologically dead while symbolically alive (surviving one's biological death as a spectral apparition or symbolic authority of the Name), or symbolically dead while biologically alive (those excluded from the socio-symbolic order, from Antigone to today's homo sacer). And what if we apply the same logic to the opposition of violence and non-violence, identifying two modes of their intersection? We all know the pop-psychological notion of the "passive-aggressive behavior," usually applied to a housewife who, instead of actively opposing her husband, passively sabotages him. And this brings us back to our beginning: perhaps, one should assert this attitude of passive aggressivity as a proper radical political gesture, in contrast to aggressive passivity, the standard "interpassive" mode of our participation in socio-ideological life in which we are active all the time in order to make it sure that nothing will happen, that nothing will really change . In such a constellation, the first truly critical ("aggressive," violent) step is to WITHDRAW into passivity, to refuse to participate Bartleby's "I would prefer not to" is the necessary first step which as it were clears the ground for a true activity, for an act that will effectively change the coordinates of the constellation.

This argues against Levinas, who believed that philosophy was not love of wisdom but wisdom of love basically, that your responsibility to the Other was to be loving aka altruism

Redemptive politics are self-defeating their call to action in the name of human rights and an infinite responsibility to the Other is overwhelming as a basis for political mobilization. Levinass ethic of infinite responsibility cannot be translated into the political. Jacob Schiff, Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago, 2003, online:
http://ptw.uchicago.edu/schiff03.pdf, accessed September 8, 2005
Redemptive politics, then, can serve good and bad ends, and this is reason enough to be suspicious of them. But even when they aim at something good, they are self-defeating because they work in two contradictory and mutually

reinforcing ways. On the one hand, redemptive politics serve as a powerful rallying cry--Never again genocide!--a cry that prods us into action and awakens us from passivity, indifference or ignorance to defeat genocide for all time. Redemptive politics were behind Raphael Lemkins efforts to criminalize genocide. He argued that [i]f the international community every hoped to prevent mass slaughter of the kind the Armenians had suffered [at Turkish hands in 1915]the worlds states would have to unite in a campaign to ban the practice (Powers, 2002: 19). Thus Lemkin universalized the Armenian tragedy and projected it into a boundless future. How could he, then, argue for anything but total eradication, total victory over genocide? The law behind Lemkins proposed ban was to rest upon universal repression, or what has become universal jurisdiction (ibid, 19-20; see Schabas, 2000)--in other words, universal responsibility. The intent behind the Genocide Convention was to insure that we never again look away, that we assume an absolute and infinite responsibility for eradicating that odious scourge. Accordingly, in 1979, President Carter insisted that we must forge an unshakable oath with all civilized people that never again will the world stand silent, never again will the world fail to act in time to prevent this terrible crime of genocide (in Power, 2002: xxi). President George H.W. Bush later expressed a similar sentiment (ibid). The redemptive language of never again! seems on its face to be a potentially powerful political tool. And yet its effects have been deeply disappointing. The reason might be connected to the second and conflicting way in which redemptive politics work--they overwhelm us. Is it any surprise, in the face of our responsibility to eradicate genocide, that we would behave precisely like the anti-Semite depicted by Jean-Paul Sartre? That, burdened with an agonizing and infinite responsibility (1948: 40), carrying the weight of the whole world on our shoulders (1956), we would follow the anti-Semite in his fear of the human condition, of his responsibility, and flee along with him (pp. 278, 53-4)? President Clintons rebuke of President Bush is haunting: If the horrors of the Holocaust taught us anythingit is the high cost of remaining silent and paralyzed in the face of genocide (Power, 2002: xxi). Yet that is exactly what has happened. Redemptive politics can make anti-Semites of us all.