1nc

1nc
The United States should adopt a default assumption of consent for
deceased organ donation.
Solves the case CP is what their gift of death ev is talking about
makes us recognize the false binary while avoiding the property rights
DA
Allowing compensation for organs necessarily shifts law toward
recognition of property rights in the body
Laurel R. Siegel 2K, JD candidate @ Emory University School of Law, Sumer 2000 REENGINEERING THE LAWS OF ORGAN TRANSPLANTATION, 49 Emory L.J. 917, lexis

Compensation systems would change the nature of altruistic organ donation. The theory states that people may be more willing to provide
organs if they receive compensation. n283 Several types of compensation systems have been proposed, each attacking the organ shortage in a slightly different way, but
with the same ultimate goal - to provide remuneration. Compensation systems require development of common law to
increase the property rights of individuals after death. Additionally, a compensation system
could only go into effect if NOTA and the 1987 UAGA amendments are repealed or amended. n284

NOTA, however, allows all other participants in the organ procurement and transplantation process, except the donor, to receive compensation. Arguably, the donor should receive compensation as well.
Compensation systems have several advantages. First, they help to make up for the organs wasted under the donative system. n285 Second, if a person sells his organs, there may be less emotion and tension
involved than if an altruistic donation was made out of love or guilt. n286 Primarily, dissatisfaction with the proposed compensation systems concerns the lack of the customary altruism. n287 Critics fear that
the lack of altruism would upset society as well as reduce the organ supply. n288 Selling organs would take away from the traditional notion of providing a generous act in the face of tragedy. n289 Allowing sales
of organs encroaches into a sacred area where such sales are controversial. The notion of profiting from the sales of body parts is repulsive to many. Critics of compensation systems have a serious concern with
coercion of the poor. n290 Destitute people, who otherwise might not chose to donate organs, might feel compelled to sell their organs. n291 Another concern involves the allocation of organs. Under a
compensation [*951] system, those who could afford organs would have a greater chance of receiving them. n292 Finally, allowing sales of organs could promote family strife due to pressure to sell organs. n293
a. Inter Vivos Market for Organs In an inter vivos organ market, organs would be considered an ordinary commodity to be sold for a profit. System regulators would have to decide where to draw the line - selling
non-essential organs such as kidneys versus selling essential organs such as the heart. The theory for such a system is based on the notion that all parties in the organ donation process are compensated, thus the
donor should be included as well. n294 Creating a market for organs may actually fail to increase the supply because otherwise altruistic donations may be curtailed. n295 It also risks offending many citizens and

A futures
market would allow healthy individuals during life to contract for the sale of their body tissue for
delivery after their death. n296 Under this regime, if the donor's organs are successfully harvested and transplanted, the donor's estate would receive payment. n297 Like the current
takes advantage of the poor who may not otherwise choose to donate or sell organs. b. Futures Market A less controversial version of a compensation system is a futures market.

donation system, people would sign donor cards, but unlike the current system, the donor or vendor would receive compensation. n298 Proponents of this system claim it avoids ethical problems. First, by not
using live donors, proponents claim it does not exploit the poor. n299 Second, the system does not deal with allocation so the [*952] rich will not have greater access to organs than the poor. n300 Third, people

This system requires creating and legally enforcing

property rights in the decedent's body. This system is only hypothetical and has not yet been attempted in any jurisdiction. If implemented in the current
will be selling their own organs, so relatives will not have to participate. n301

system, it would clearly violate NOTA, because it involves sales of organs. In addition, it might exploit the poor because only the poor would have incentive to sell their organs, unless the price was high enough for
moderately wealthy individuals to be interested. Even though the system does not deal with allocation, the poor will naturally be discriminated against because they may be unable to afford the organs if Medicaid
or other government assistance does not cover them. c. Death Benefits A death benefits system, while not market-based, is a third type of compensation system. Such a system would merely provide incentives
to relatives of the decedent in exchange for donating the decedent's organs. n302 Examples of incentives include estate tax deductions, funeral expense allow-ances, and college education benefits. n303 As
illustrated above, Pennsylvania is experimenting with a death benefits system in its newly enacted legislation. n304 Proponents argue that a death benefits system does not conflict with the current altruistic
system. n305 Proponents also assert that a death benefits system does not violate NOTA's prohibition of organ sales, because Congress did not intend to include this kind of compensation. n306 With respect to
the Pen-nsylvania law, proponents claim funeral expenses could be a reasonable expense exempted from the NOTA prohibition. n307 They claim that because money does not go directly to donors or beneficiaries,
the payment is not technically for organs. n308 Opponents claim that a death benefits system con-stitutes the sale of organs; indirect compensation is given in exchange for one's [*953] organs. This proposal, set
up as a pilot program administered by individual states, is promising. B. Suggestions First, solutions must be found for the problems of the current system, in which an outright market is inappropriate, but in
which incentive programs and public health education could serve as successful boosts to the organ supply. For the second stage, after technology alters the status and supply of organs, society can plan a solution
for the future. Only at that point could a full-fledged market be an acceptable, ethical medium to exchange organs. 1. The Current System As illustrated above, problems are inherent in the current organ
transplantation system. Society must cope with the problems as they exist today, using currently available technology and resources. The best way to address the immediate organ shortage is to administer pilot
programs providing incentives for organ donations, following the lead of Pennsylvania. Congress should propose an Amendment to NOTA that would allow the Department of Health and Human Services to
oversee pilot programs. Compensation would rise incrementally, beginning with small payments, such as funeral expenses or hospital bills. The prohibition of sales of organs should remain in place for live organs
because allowing sales of live organs jeopardizes existing life and brings into play many ethical issues. Thus, the amendment would only apply to organs of decedents. In addition to avoiding the ethical problems
inherent in a market for organs, allowing an incentive system would probably increase awareness of donation, increase actual donation, and fairly and tactfully compensate the donor. The approach is an important
bridge to the future when engineered organs will make compensation systems viable. Most importantly, more patients, who would otherwise die, will benefit from receiving life-saving organs. Organ donation
does not have to be perceived as a grim, avoidable topic; donating organs transforms death into a positive experience - essentially bestowing the gift of life. In addition to the pilot programs, governmental efforts
should focus on public health education. If the public is made more aware of the plight, the decision to donate organs would be made prior to death. This tactic would avoid difficult, uncomfortable situations for
families and doctors, which often prevent donation. Many states already have [*954] implemented organ donor awareness funds, funded through donations when renewing driver's licenses or filing taxes. n309
Similar programs must be established. Public health officials should talk to high school students about organ donation. Special task forces could explain the organ transplant system to people, in the form of
television commercials or advertisements in magazines. The erection of billboards with organ donation messages would implant the seed in people's minds. 2. The Future System The current solution only
affects organs from decedents. In the foreseeable future, technology will create live organs from existing cells and biodegradable scaffolds. When that occurs, the organ shortage will no longer be a problem. But in
order to have potentially unlimited organs, cell donation must occur. This may eventually be done individually at birth, but phased in by adults contributing to a generic pool. Will these donors be compensated for
their pre-organ donation? The donation of cells differs from a functioning organ and probably lies outside of organ transplantation laws. Most likely, providing compensation for this stage would be allowable and

allowing incentives
to donors is a sound idea. This can only become a reality if the common law develops, allowing a property
right in live tissue and organs. This will be established in the marketplace as long as common law
and statutory law do not prohibit sales.
beneficial. An individual donating his cells would face no risk to his health by donating. Fewer ethical issues are involved. Therefore, for the organ system of the future,

Wrecks biotech---imposes transaction costs that interfere with

research
Charlotte H. Harrison 2, Fellow in Medical Ethics, Harvard Medical School; J.D. 1984, Harvard Law
School; M.P.H. 2000, Harvard School of Public Health, ARTICLE: Neither Moore nor the Market:
Alternative Models for Compensating Contributors of Human Tissue, 28 Am. J. L. and Med. 77, lexis

To the American mind, one solution

owners of their body parts, and compensation
buyer and seller
obvious

is
people
deemed the legal
determined through a market between

to the ethical inadequacies of the current system

should be

market-based:

should be

"direct

with prices based on what people are willing to pay and accept." n51 This alternative, already implemented in occasional individual negotiations, n52 directly addresses some of the ethical problems just surveyed. It also

entails serious ethical complications of its own, including risks to the doctor-patient or researcher-subject relationship and other negative consequences for larger society. Examination of four major objections to the property-rights approach begins to suggest the
parameters of a more satisfactory alternative. [*86] A. Economic Inefficiency If one accepts the Moore court's assumption that the progress of biotechnology research is highly beneficial to society, it follows that the economic efficiency of such research should

the recognition of property rights

would
present the biotechnology industry with an unacceptable choice: either become mired in
costly and time-consuming transactions with numerous individual tissue sources, or risk
failing to secure clear title to the tissue samples on which patents and products may be
based
be carefully protected. Not only the Moore court, but other jurists and commentators have argued that

in every potentially useful tissue sample

n53

. n54

In an analogous context--involving intangible or intellectual property rather than tangible, personal property--Heller and Eisenberg have detailed the inefficiencies that can result from what they regard as excessive protection of individual

property rights in biomedical research. n55 In particular, they have argued that progress in biotechnology is unduly burdened by the existence of too many intellectual property rights in basic research tools. Heller and Eisenberg's analysis of this intellectual property
market serves to highlight, by analogy, problems that are likely to be exacerbated if individual tissue contributors are deemed to hold personal property rights in their blood and body parts. Heller and Eisenberg's argument takes its cue from Garrett Hardin's classic
analysis of the problems that arise when people hold property in common. n56 Hardin concluded that people tend to overuse such "commons property" (e.g., air or water) in a way that is ultimately tragic. Without the incentives of private property or the limits of
other social arrangements, each person's rational pursuit of self-interest leads to greater and greater exploitation of a common resource until the whole is exhausted or ruined. This, in Hardin's terms, is "the tragedy of the commons." n57 According to Heller and
Eisenberg, an opposite but similar tragedy of the "anti-commons" occurs when people hold too little in common--that is, when too many people have a private right to prevent others from using property of mutual interest. n58 In the biotechnology industry,
companies must strike a separate bargain with every party whose intellectual or tangible property might be needed to produce a commercial product. It would be better, Heller and Eisenberg suggest, if fewer such property rights were recognized. Often the rightsbearing parties are academic researchers, whom Heller and Eisenberg characterize as inefficient bargainers with limited competence in the field, cognitive biases that lead them to overvalue their assets and different strategic objectives from their industrial
negotiating partners. Heller and Eisenberg contend that negotiating with such parties absorbs undue time and resources from industry. n59 In understanding the implications of this view for human tissue transactions, it is important to separate concerns about
efficiency from differences in strategic or policy goals. The time-consuming nature of academic/industrial negotiations is often due, in part, to the substantive social values expressed in public technology policy. [*87] For example, existing federal policy seeks to
ensure that academic inventions made under federal grants and licensed exclusively to industry are actually used in the development of products. The rights are not merely to be held defensively (i.e., to prevent competitors from marketing a similar product) or
allowed to languish for too long in a company's portfolio if other projects take on greater commercial priority. n60 To implement this policy, universities commonly require their exclusive licensees to agree to "due diligence" commitments for the development and
marketing of products. These commitments can take time to negotiate and can conflict with companies' natural preference to control proprietary rights. n61 The conflict is rooted in a difference between public and private objectives rather than in mere inefficiency.
In addition, each party has a strategic interest in obtaining what it deems to be an acceptable financial return. Of course, both public and private parties may share a larger aim to promote the development of new and better healthcare products, and it is reasonable to
consider how the allocation of property rights affects that long-term goal. Individual tissue contributors may have interests analogous to those of government-funded researchers and licensors. In addition to financial considerations, these interests may include the
promotion of research on a disease or condition of concern to the contributor. In a market that serves the dual purposes of medical care and entrepreneurship, the extent of protection afforded to a tissue contributor's non-economic interests is a public policy

On grounds of economic efficiency

alone
criticism like Heller and Eisenberg's would likely be warranted if property rights were
extended to individual tissue contributors. If individuals sought to negotiate the terms under
which their body parts were made available for research, inefficiencies could result from
several factors tissue samples would be acquired either in clinical situations, in which
research uses might not yet have been considered, or in research projects at an early
stage of development, in which eventual commercial utility
could be hard to predict
the majority of such materials would never be used commercially
transaction costs for securing the rights to all samples
could be
prohibitive
question that goes beyond the scope of this article. It should be considered in conjunction with, but not subsumed by, concerns about financial returns and efficiency.
, however,

. Many

the

of such materials

is likely that

. n62 It

in such a way as to warrant a significant royalty. n63 In

these circumstances,

from their individual contributors

. This would likely be true whether contributors negotiated directly with companies or with intermediaries such as academic medical centers or private physician practices.

That prevents the spread of virulent environmental pathogens

Gerard A. Cangelosi 5, Prof of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences and Adjunct Prof of
Epidemiology and of Global Health at the University of Washington, PhD in Microbiology from UC Davis,
Nancy E. Freitag, PhD, Prof in the Dept of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Illinois
Chicago School of Medicine, and Merry R. Buckley, Ph.D. in environmental microbiology at Michigan
State University, From Outside to Inside: Environmental Microorganisms as Human Pathogens,
http://academy.asm.org/index.php/environmental-microbiology-ecology-evolution/553-from-outsideto-inside-environmental-microorganisms-as-human-pathogens

The key difference between environmental pathogens and other human pathogens is their
ability to survive and thrive outside the host. Their widespread occurrence in the environment makes them difficult to monitor and

control. Inroads have been made to understand the persistence of these organisms in the environment, the reservoirs they inhabit, the ways they exchange virulence factors, and

a great deal more research is needed. By grouping together phylogenetically diverse organisms
the umbrella of "environmental pathogens," it is hoped that the topic can gain the critical mass
needed for sustained progress. Colloquium participants examined other research needs for the field, including the diagnostic and environmental
their diversity, but
under

technologies that will be necessary for taking the next steps. It was agreed that because of the complex nature of studying organisms that can exist in the environment and in
human hosts, work in this area is best carried out in an interdisciplinary fashion with coordinated input from medical, molecular, and environmental microbiologists, specialists

The development of improved diagnostic

techniques is critical for accurate assessment of health risks and potential human or animal
population impact associated with environmental pathogens. If the impacts of these diseases are to be
effectively controlled, the techniques used to monitor and control infections by
environmental pathogensincluding interventions, exposure controls, drugs, and vaccines
require improvement. The processes surrounding drug and vaccine development must be tailored to the special problem of environmental pathogens,
in host responses, epidemiologists, ecologists, environmental engineers, and public health experts.

which often strike small numbers of individuals or individuals in less developed areas of the world and, therefore, offer less potential for drug development profit than more
common diseases. A challenge exists, therefore, in meeting the need for targeted, specific interventions, including development of drugs and vaccines for infections by
environmental agents, in the face of a lack of financial incentive for development of these tools.

1nc
a. Interpretation and violation---the affirmative should defend the
desirability of topical government action
Most predictablethe agent and verb indicate a debate about
hypothetical government action
Jon M Ericson 3, Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts California Polytechnic U., et al., The
Debaters Guide, Third Edition, p. 4

The Proposition of Policy: Urging Future Action In policy propositions, each

topic contains certain key elements, although they

have slightly different functions from comparable elements of value-oriented propositions. 1. An agent doing the acting ---The
United States in The United States should adopt a policy of free trade. Like the object of evaluation in a proposition
of value, the agent is the subject of the sentence. 2. The verb shouldthe first part of a verb phrase that urges
action. 3. An action verb to follow should in the should-verb combination. For example, should adopt here means to put a
program or policy into action through governmental means. 4. A specification of directions
or a limitation of the action desired. The phrase free trade, for example, gives direction and limits to the topic, which would, for
example, eliminate consideration of increasing tariffs, discussing diplomatic recognition, or discussing interstate commerce. Propositions of policy deal
with future action. Nothing has yet occurred. The

entire debate is about whether something ought to

occur. What you agree to do, then, when you accept the affirmative side in such a debate is to offer sufficient and compelling reasons for an
audience to perform the future action that you propose.

Legalize means to make lawful by judicial or legislative sanction

Business Dictionary No Date, "legalize",
www.businessdictionary.com/definition/legalize.html

legalize Definition To make enforceable, justifiable, or lawful by judicial or legislative sanction.

The term organ sale is narrower than valuable consideration

Susan H Denise 85, JD from the University of Virginia Law School, NOTE: REGULATING THE
SALE OF HUMAN ORGANS, SEPTEMBER, 1985, 71 Va. L. Rev. 1015, lexis
The Maryland

and Virginia prohibitions are worded more narrowly [*1031] than the federal
statute, which prohibits the transfer of organs "for valuable consideration." n129 Maryland
stipulates that "a person may not sell, buy, or act as a broker for profit in the transfer" of a human organ. n130 In
Virginia, it is "unlawful for any person to sell, to offer to sell, to buy, to offer to buy, or to procure
through purchase" a human organ. n131 By using the terms "buy" and "sell," these two statutes
may not prohibit a barter or exchange transaction . Thus, the breadth of transactions these legislatures
intended to prohibit is unclear.

A general subject isnt enoughdebate requires a specific point of

difference in order to promote effective exchange
Steinberg and Freeley 13, * David, Lecturer in Communication studies and rhetoric. Advisor
to Miami Urban Debate League. Director of Debate at U Miami, Former President of CEDA. And **
Austin, attorney who focuses on criminal, personal injury and civil rights law, JD, Suffolk University,
Argumentation and Debate, Critical Thinking for Reasoned Decision Making, 121-4

Debate is a means of settling differences, so there must be a controversy, a difference of opinion or a

conflict of interest before there can be a debate . If everyone is in agreement on a feet or value or policy,
there is no need or opportunity for debate; the matter can be settled by unanimous consent. Thus, for example, it would be
pointless to attempt to debate "Resolved: That two plus two equals four, because there is simply no controversy about this statement.

Controversy is an essential prerequisite of debate . Where there is no clash of ideas,

proposals, interests, or expressed positions of issues, there is no debate. Controversy invites decisive
choice between competing positions. Debate cannot produce effective decisions without
clear identification of a question or questions to be answered. For example, general argument may

occur about the broad topic of illegal immigration. How many illegal immigrants live in the United States? What is the
impact of illegal immigration and immigrants on our economy? What is their impact on our communities? Do they commit crimes? Do they take jobs
from American workers? Do they pay taxes? Do they require social services? Is it a problem that some do not speak English? Is it the responsibility of
employers to discourage illegal immigration by not hiring undocumented workers? Should they have the opportunity to gain citizenship? Does illegal
immigration pose a security threat to our country? Do illegal immigrants do work that American workers are unwilling to do? Are their rights as
workers and as human beings at risk due to their status? Are they abused by employers, law enforcement, housing, and businesses? How are their
families impacted by their status? What is the moral and philosophical obligation of a nation state to maintain its borders? Should we build a wall on
the Mexican border, establish a national identification card, or enforce existing laws against employers? Should we invite immigrants to become U.S.
citizens? Surely you

can think of many more concerns to be addressed by a conversation about the topic
area of illegal immigration. Participation in this debate is likely to be emotional and intense.
However, it is not likely to be productive or useful without focus on a particular question
and identification of a line demarcating sides in the controversy. To be discussed and
resolved effectively, controversies are best understood when seated clearly such that all
parties to the debate share an understanding about the objective of the debate. This
enables focus on substantive and objectively identifiable issues facilitating comparison of
competing argumentation leading to effective decisions. Vague understanding results
in unfocused deliberation and poor decisions, general feelings of tension without opportunity
for resolution, frustration, and emotional distress, as evidenced by the failure of the U.S. Congress to
make substantial progress on the immigration debate. Of course, arguments may be presented
without disagreement. For example, claims are presented and supported within speeches, editorials, and advertisements even without
opposing or refutational response. Argumentation occurs in a range of settings from informal to formal, and
may not call upon an audience or judge to make a forced choice among competing claims.
Informal discourse occurs as conversation or panel discussion without demanding a decision about a
dichotomous or yes/no question. However, by definition, debate requires "reasoned judgment
on a proposition. The proposition is a statement about which competing advocates will offer
alternative (pro or con) argumentation calling upon their audience or adjudicator to decide. The
proposition provides focus for the discourse and guides the decision process. Even when a
decision will be made through a process of compromise, it is important to iden tify the beginning positions of
competing advocates to begin negotiation and movement toward a center, or consensus position. It is
frustrating and usually unproductive to attempt to make a decision when deciders are unclear as
to what the decision is about. The proposition may be implicit in some applied debates (Vote for me!); however, when a vote or
consequential decision is called for (as in the courtroom or in applied parliamentary debate) it is essential that the proposition be
explicitly expressed (the defendant is guilty!). In academic debate, the proposition provides essential
guidance for the preparation of the debaters prior to the debate, the case building and
discourse presented during the debate, and the decision to be made by the debate judge after the
debate. Someone disturbed by the problem of a growing underclass of poorly educated, socially disenfranchised youths
might observe, Public schools are doing a terrible job! They' are overcrowded, and many teachers are poorly qualified in
their subject areas. Even the best teachers can do little more than struggle to maintain order in their classrooms." That same concerned
citizen, facing a complex range of issues, might arrive at an unhelpful decision, such as "We
ought to do something about this or, worse, Its too complicated a problem to deal with."
Groups of concerned citizens worried about the state of public education could join together to express their
frustrations, anger, disillusionment, and emotions regarding the schools, but without a focus for their
discussions, they could easily agree about the sorry state of education without finding
points of clarity or potential solutions . A gripe session would follow. But if a precise
question is posedsuch as What can be done to improve public education?then a more
profitable area of discussion is opened up simply by placing a focus on the search for a
concrete solution step. One or more judgments can be phrased in the form of debate propositions, motions for parliamentary
debate, or bills for legislative assemblies, The statements "Resolved: That the federal government should implement a program of charter schools in atrisk communities and Resolved; That the state of Florida should adopt a school voucher program" more

clearly identify specific ways

of dealing with educational problems in a manageable form, suitable for debate. They provide
specific policies to be investigated and aid discussants in identifying points of difference.
This focus contributes to better and more informed decision making with the potential for
better results. In academic debate, it provides better depth of argumentation and enhanced opportunity for reaping the educational benefits of participation. In the next section, we will consider the challenge of framing the proposition for

debate, and its role in the debate. To

have a productive debate, which facilitates effective decision

making by directing and placing limits on the decision to be made, the basis for
argument should be clearly defined. If we merely talk about a topic, such as "homelessness,
or abortion, Or crime, or global warming, we are likely to have an interesting discussion
but not to establish a profitable basis for argument. For example, the statement Resolved: That the pen is
mightier than the sword is debatable, yet by itself fails to provide much basis for dear argumen tation. If we take this statement to mean Iliad the written word is more effective than physical force for some purposes, we can identify a problem
area: the comparative effectiveness of writing or physical force for a specific purpose, perhaps promoting positive social change. (Note that loose
propositions, such as the example above, may be defined by their advocates in such a way as to facilitate a clear contrast of competing sides; through
definitions and debate they become clearly understood statements even though they may not begin as such. There are formats for debate that often
begin with this sort of proposition. However, in

any debate, at some point, effective and meaningful discussion

relies on identification of a clearly stated or understood proposition .) Back to the example of the written word
versus physical force. Although we now have a general subject, we have not yet stated a problem. It is still too
broad, too loosely worded to promote well-organized argument. What sort of writing are we concerned withpoems, novels, government

documents, website development, advertising, cyber-warfare, disinformation, or what? What does it mean to be mightier" in this context? What kind
of physical force is being comparedfists, dueling swords, bazookas, nuclear weapons, or what? A more specific question might be, Would a mutual
defense treaty or a visit by our fleet be more effective in assuring Laurania of our support in a certain crisis? The basis for argument could be phrased
in a debate proposition such as Resolved: That the United States should enter into a mutual defense treaty with Laurania. Negative advocates might
oppose this proposition by arguing that fleet maneuvers would be a better solution. This

is not to say that debates should

completely avoid creative interpretation of the controversy by advocates, or that good debates
cannot occur over competing interpretations of the controversy; in fact, these sorts of debates
may be very engaging. The point is that debate is best facilitated by the guidance provided by
focus on a particular point of difference, which will be outlined in the following discussion.

b. Vote neg
1. Preparation and clashchanging the topic post facto manipulates
balance of prep, which structurally favors the aff because they speak
last and permute alternativesstrategic fairness is key to engaging a
well-prepared opponent
Topical fairness requirements are key to meaningful dialogue
monopolizing strategy and prep makes the discussion one-sided and
subverts any meaningful neg role
Ryan Galloway 7, Samford Comm prof, Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, Vol. 28, 2007
Debate as a dialogue sets an argumentative table, where all parties receive a relatively fair opportunity to voice their position.

Anything that fails to allow participants to have their position articulated denies one side of the argumentative table a fair hearing.
The affirmative side is set by the topic and fairness requirements. While affirmative teams have recently resisted
affirming the topic, in fact, the topic selection process is rigorous, taking the relative ground of each topic as its central point of
departure. Setting the affirmative reciprocally sets the negative. The negative crafts approaches to the topic consistent
with affirmative demands. The negative crafts disadvantages, counter-plans, and critical arguments premised on the arguments that
the topic allows for the affirmative team. According to fairness norms, each side sits at a relatively balanced argumentative table.
When one side takes more than its share, competitive equity suffers. However, it also undermines the respect due

to the other involved in the dialogue. When one side excludes the other, it fundamentally denies the
personhood of the other participant (Ehninger, 1970, p. 110). A pedagogy of debate as dialogue takes
this respect as a fundamental component. A desire to be fair is a fundamental condition of a dialogue
that takes the form of a demand for equality of voice. Far from being a banal request for links to a disadvantage,
fairness is a demand for respect, a demand to be heard, a demand that a voice backed by literally
months upon months of preparation, research, and critical thinking not be silenced. Affirmative
cases that suspend basic fairness norms operate to exclude particular negative strategies. Unprepared,
one side comes to the argumentative table unable to meaningfully participate in a dialogue. They are
unable to understand what went on and are left to the whims of time and power (Farrell, 1985, p. 114).
Hugh Duncan furthers this line of reasoning: Opponents not only tolerate but honor and respect each other
because in doing so they enhance their own chances of thinking better and reaching sound decisions.

Opposition is necessary because it sharpens thought in action. We assume that argument, discussion, and talk, among free an
informed people who subordinate decisions of any kind, because it is only through such discussion that we reach

agreement which binds us to a common causeIf we are to be equalrelationships among equals must
find expression in many formal and informal institutions (Duncan, 1993, p. 196-197). Debate compensates
for the exigencies of the world by offering a framework that maintains equality for the
sake of the conversation (Farrell, 1985, p. 114). For example, an affirmative case on the 2007-2008 college topic
might defend neither state nor international action in the Middle East, and yet claim to be germane to
the topic in some way. The case essentially denies the arguments that state action is oppressive or that
actions in the international arena are philosophically or pragmatically suspect. Instead of allowing for the
dialogue to be modified by the interchange of the affirmative case and the negative response, the
affirmative subverts any meaningful role to the negative team, preventing them from offering
effective counter-word and undermining the value of a meaningful exchange of speech acts.
Germaneness and other substitutes for topical action do not accrue the dialogical benefits
of topical advocacy.

2. Substantive regulations that demarcate limits are necessary for

dialogue---refusal to tailor their identity claims to normative, public
stances shuts down the possibility for discussion and democratic
respect
John Dryzek 6, Professor of Social and Political Theory, The Australian National University,
Reconciling Pluralism and Consensus as Political Ideals, American Journal of Political Science,Vol. 50,
No. 3, July 2006, Pp. 634649

A more radical contemporary pluralism is suspicious of liberal and communitarian devices for reconciling difference. Such a
critical pluralism is associated with agonists such as Connolly (1991), Honig (1993), and Mouffe (2000),

and difference democrats such as Young (2000). As Honig puts it, Difference is just another word for what used to
be called pluralism (1996, 60). Critical pluralists resemble liberals in that they begin from the variety of ways it is
possible to experience the world, but stress that the experiences and perspectives of
marginalized and oppressed groups are likely to be very different from dominant groups. They also
have a strong suspicion ofliberal theory that looks neutral but in practice supports and serves
the powerful.
Difference democrats are hostile to consensus, partly because consensus decisionmaking (of the sort
popular in 1970s radical groups) conceals informal oppression under the guise of concern for all by disallowing dissent
(Zablocki 1980). But the real target is political theory that deploys consensus, especially deliberative and liberal theory. Young (1996,
12526) argues that the appeals to unity and the common good that deliberative theorists under sway of the consensus ideal stress
as the proper forms of political communication can often be oppressive. For deliberation so oriented all too easily equates

the common good with the interests of the more powerful, thus sidelining legitimate concerns of
the marginalized. Asking the underprivileged to set aside their particularistic concerns also
means marginalizing their favored forms of expression, especially the telling of personal stories
(Young 1996, 126).3 Speaking for an agonistic conception of democracy (to which Young also subscribes; 2000, 4951), Mouffe
states:
To negate the ineradicable character of antagonism and aim at a universal rational consensus that is the real
threat to democracy. Indeed, this can lead to violence being unrecognized and hidden behind appeals to
rationality, as is often the case in liberal thinking. (1996, 248)
Mouffe is a radical pluralist: By pluralism I mean the end of a substantive idea of the good life (1996, 246). But neither
Mouffe nor Young want to abolish communication in the name of pluralism and difference;
much of their work advocates sustained attention to communication. Mouffe also cautions against uncritical
celebration of difference, for some differences imply subordination and should therefore be challenged by a radical
democratic politics (1996, 247). Mouffe raises the question of the terms in which engagement
across difference might proceed. Participants should ideally accept that the positions of others are legitimate,
though not as a result of being persuaded in argument. Instead, it is a matter of being open to conversion due
to adoption of a particular kind of democratic attitude that converts antagonism into agonism,
fighting into critical engagement, enemies into adversaries who are treated with respect. Respect

here is notjust (liberal) toleration, but positive validation of the position of others. For

Young, a communicative
democracy would be composed of people showing equal respect, under procedural rules
of fair discussion and decisionmaking (1996, 126). Schlosberg speaks of agonistic respect as a critical
pluralist ethos (1999, 70).
Mouffe and Young both want pluralism to be regulated by a particular kind of attitude, be it respectful, agonistic, or even in

neither proposes unregulated pluralism as an

alternative to (deliberative) consensus . This regulation cannot be just procedural,
for that would imply anything goes in terms of the substance of positions . Recall
thatMouffe rejects differences that imply subordination. Agonistic ideals demand judgments about what is
worthy of respect and what is not. Connolly (1991, 211) worriesabout dogmatic assertions and denials of
identity that fuel existential resentments that would have to be changed to make
agonism possible. Young seeks transformation of private, self-regarding desires into public
appeals to justice (2000, 51). Thus for Mouffe, Connolly, and Young alike, regulative principles
for democratic communication are not just attitudinal or procedural; they also
refer to the substance of the kinds of claims that are worthy of respect . These authors
would not want to legislate substance and are suspicious of the content of any alleged consensus. But in retreating
from anything goes relativism, they need principles to regulate the substance of what
rightfully belongs in democratic debate .
Youngs (2000, 1651) case reasonable.Thus

Constraints on deliberation are necessary to re-found the political--an untamed agon eviscerates political action and judgment skills
Dana Villa 96, prof of political science, Amherst, Beyond Good and Evil: Arendt, Nietzsche, and the
Aestheticization of Political Action, Political Theory, Vol. 20, No. 2 (May, 1992), pp. 274-308

The representative thinking made possible by disinterested judgment is Arendts Kantian version of Nietzsche's perspectival
objectivity, the objectivity born of using more" and differ-em" eyes to judge/interpret a thing. There is, however, an obvious
and crucial

difference between perspectives represented through the free play of imagination and
the perspective seeing" that Nietzsche describes. For Nietzsche, the ability to view the world
aesthetically presupposes liberation from any residual sense that the link between signifier and
signified is in any way nonarbitrary. Having more and different eyes simply means the ability to
relativize all accepted meanings, to dissolve their apparent solidity in the free play of
signifiers.135 In Kant and Arendt, on the other hand, the free play of the imagination, the capacity for
representative thought, has the effect of focusing the judging agent's attention on the
publicly available aspects of the representation.' The representative nature of judgment
enables the transcendence of "individual limitations" and subjective private conditions, thereby freeing us
for the purely public aspect of the phenomenon.
The difference between genealogical "objectivity" and representative judgment, between the kind of aesthetic distance
endorsed by Nietzsche and [hat endorsed by Kant and Arcndt, is summed up by the contrast between Nietzsches
trope of seeing things from another planet" and the Kantian] Arendtian appeal to common sense,
the sensus communis.m Nietzschean aestheticism, in the form of perspectivism, has the effect of either
placing one beyond any community of interpretation (the genealogical standpoint) or denying
that a viable background consensus" exists, thereby robbing the public realm of
its fundamental epistemological precondition . There can be no arena of common
discourse, no genuinely public space, whcn the death of God leads to the advent of Weber's waning gods."Us
Lyotard expresses a similar thought when he links the discovery of an irreducible plurality of
incommensurable language games to the decline of the legitimizing metanarratives of modernity
. in such a situation, judgment and interpretation are inevitably aestheticized: we are left,
in Nietzsche's phrase, with the "yay and nay of the palate.""
For Kant, the significance and implications of aesthetic distance are quite opposite. As noted previously, he is struck by the public
character of the beautiful, despite the nonobjective quality of aesthetic tntpel'ience.I The impartiality of detached

aesthetic judgment, while not pretending to truth , guarantees that the object or ground of
aesthetic satisfaction will be communicable. This in turn reveals a quality of taste as judgment , which

is obscured by Nietzsche, and our own subjectivist notion of taste. Taste judgments of the disinterested sort
are characterized by a peculiar claim: the pure judgment of taste "requires the agreement of everyone, and he who describes
anything as beautiful claims that everyone ought to give approval to the object in question and describe it as beautiful? The

communicability of taste judgments leads Kant to posit the existence of a common

sense, a common feeling for the world." Indeed, Kant describes taste itself as a kind of sensus communism
The aesthetic distance achieved by representative thought thus points to the grounding of
judging insight in common sense, a point that Arendt emphasizes. "Common sense, she writes, discloses to
us the nature of the world insofar as it is a common world; we owe to it the fact that our strictly
private and "subjective" five senses and their sensory data can adjust themselves to a
nonsubjective and objective world which we have in common and share with
others.' The significance of Kanls theory oftaslejudgmcm for politics is that it shows how a nonfoundationalist
theory of judgment can in fact serve to strengthen rather than undermine our
sense of a shared world of appearances. Kant's analysis of taste judgment reveals how, in Arendt's words,
judging is one, if not the most, important activity in which this sharing-the-world-with-others comes to pass?"5 It does so by
highlighting the public-directed claim implicit in all pure judgments of taste, by showing how the expression of approval or
disapproval, satisfaction or dissatisfaction appeals to the common sense of ones judging peers. In matters of taste, one expects
agreement from everybody else."" Oriented toward agreement, relying on common sense, taste judgment emerges, contra Nietmhe,
as the activity through which the public world presences itself as appearance, as the activity through which a community decides
how this world, independently of its utility and all our vital interests in it, is to look and sound, what we will see and what men will
hear in
Kants theory of judgment thus opens a space between the false objectivism of Plato (political
judgment as a kind of episteme, as determinative judgment) and

the subjectivism that accompanies Nietzsches

endorsement of perspectival valuation. Taste judgments are valid, but their specific validity is to be
understood precisely in opposition to the "objective universal validity" that marks cognitive or practical judgments in the Kantian
sense. As Arendt says, its claims to validity can never extend further than the others in whose place the

judging person has put himself for his considerations? Taste judgments are crucially dependent on perspective, the "it
appears to me," on the simple fact that each person occupies a place of his own from which he looks upon and judges the world."

Nevertheless, they constantly return us to a world of appearances common to all its

inhabitants. Kants notion of taste judgment provides the perfect model for political judgment ,
in Arendts opinion, because it preserves appearance and perspective without abolishing
the world.
We can sum up the achievement of Kants theory of judgment by saying that it removes the spectre of the
subjectivism of perspectivism of taste, yet without recourse to objective or cognitive
grounds of validation. Lacking an objective principle, taste judgments are necessarily difficult, and where
their validity is questioned, it can be redeemed only by persuasive means. As Arendt says in The Crisis in Culture:
taste judgments (unlike demonstrable facts or truths demonstrated by argument) share with political opinions that they are
persuasive; the judging person as Kant says quite beautifully -can only woo the consent of everyone else in the hope of coming to
an agreement with him eventually."
Taste judgments are, in a word, redeemed deliberatively. Kant's conception of aesthetic

judgmentdeparting from the exchange of viewpoints necessary for representative thinking and
culminating in the persuasive exchange that accompanies the rendering of each judgmentis
thus, for Arendt, political through and through.51 It requires an ongoing process of exchange
and deliberation, one "without criteria," as Lyotard would say)
This is yet another reason why Kantian taste judgment is the appropriate model for Arendts account of political judgment, the
receptive side of virtuoso action. It reasserts the intersubjective nature of both appearances and
judgment while severing the links between the common or public and the universal.
Our capacity for judgment rests on our feeling for the world, and this requires neither a
transcendental ground for appearances nor universally valid criteria of argumentative rationality.
Practical questions emphatically do not admit of truth. Yet political judgment seen as a kind of
taste judgment nevertheless helps to tame the agon by reintroducing the connection
between plurality and deliberation , by showing how the activity of judgment can,
potentially, reveal to an audience what they have in common in the process of
articulating their differences. And what they have in common, contra Aristotle and contemporary
oommunitarians, are not purposes per se but the world. Debate, not consensus, constitutes the
essence of political life, according to Arcndtf" The conception of taste judgment proposed by Kant reopens

the space of deliberation threatened by an overly agonistic aestheticization of

action but in such a way that consensus and agreement are not the Isles of action
and judgment but, at best. a kind of regulative ideal .
The turn to Kant thus enables Arendt to avoid the antipolitical tendencies encountered in the actorcentered version of agonistic action. The meaning creative capacity of nonsovereign
action becomes importantly dependent on the audience , conceived as a group of
deliberating agents exercising their capacity for judgment . The judgment of appearances or the
meaning of action is seen by Arcndt as predicated on a twofold death of the author: the actor does not create meaning as the artist
does a work1 nor can the audience redeem the meaning of action through judgment unless the individuals who constitute it are able
to forget themselves. This is not to say that Arendts conception of political action and judgment extinguishes the self; rather, it is to
say that self-coherence is achieved through a process of self-disclosure that is importantly decentered for both actor and judge, for
the judging spectator is also engaged in the "sharing of words and deeds in his capacity as a deliberating agent. As Arendt reminds
us, By his manner of judging, the person discloses to an extent also himself, what kind of person he is, and this disclosure, which is
involuntary, gains in validity to the degree that it has liberated itself from merely individual idiosyncrasiesm
The agon is tamed, then, not by retreating from the aestheticization of action but by following its anti-Platonic impulse through to
the end. The "completion" of the theory of action by a Kant-inspired theory of judgment retains the focus on action as

something heroic or extraordinary, as beyond

good and evil. It does so, however, by shifting the emphasis from world- and self-creation to the
world-illuminating power of great" words and deeds, to [he beauty of such action. As a public
phenomenon, the beautiful can only be confirmed in its being by an audience animated by a care for the world. The difference
between Arendts aesthcticization of politics and Nietzsche's aestheticizatjon of life is nowhere clearer than in the connection that
Arendt draws between greatness and beauty in "The Crisis in Culture":
Generally speaking, culture indicates that the public realm, which is rendered politically secure by men ofaction, offers its space of
display to those things whose essence it is to appear and to be beautiful. In other words. culture indicates that an and politics. their
conflicts and tensions notwithstanding. are interrelated and even mutually dependent. Seen against the blckground of political
experiences and of activities which, if left to themselves, come and go without leaving any trace in the world, beauty is the
manifestation ofimpcrishability. The fleeting greatness of word and deed can endure to the extent that beauty is bestowed upon it
Mthout the beauty, that is, the radiant glory in which potential immortality is made manifest in the human world, all human life
would be futile and no greatness could endure.
Arendtian aestheticism, an aestheticism predicated on a love of the world and which admires great

action because it possesses a beauty that illuminates the world, is critically different from
Nietzschean aestheticism, the aestheticism of the artist. A persistent theme in Arendt's writing, one parallel to
her emphasis on the tension between philosophy and politics, concerns the conflict between art and politics.157 This conflict
does not emerge out of the phenomenology of art versus that of political action; as we have seen, Arendt thinks
both are importantly similar. Rather, the conflict centers on the mentality of the artist
versus that of the political actor. The artist is, according to Arendt, a species of homo faber, who
characteristically views the world in terms of means and ends . He is unable to conceive praxis
independently of poiesis: the work always retains priority over the activity itself. The result is that
performance is denigrated, action misconceived.
Nietzsche, of course, has even less use for homo faber than Arendt, who takes pains to voice her criticism not against making as such
but against the universalization ol'a particular attitude. Nevertheless, if we take an Arendtian perspective, it is clear that N ictzsche,
the artist-philosopher, must be counted among those who fall into the common error of regarding the state or govemmenl as a work
of art, as an expression of a form-giving will to power) The Republic stands as the initiator of the state as collective masterpiece,"
as artwork, trope. The fact that Plato launched this metaphor in terms of what Lacoue-Labarthe calls a mimetology, while
Nietzsche
repudiates again and again all metaphors of correspondence or adequation, does not alter their fundamental agreement: both regard
action not as essentially performance but as making.I59 Poiesis has a radically different connounion for Nietzsche, to be sure, but
the activity of self-fashioning and self-overcoming does not overturn the Platonic paradigm so much as bring it to closure. Nietzsche
may explode the notion of telos in its classical sense, but the model of the work retains its significance. Thus despite the importance
of his anti-Platonism to the project of dcconstructing the traditions model of action, his contribution to the thinking of plurality and
difference in apolitical way is subject to a crucial limitation. Thought essentially in terms of an aesthetics of

existence," in terms of a project of self-fashioning freed from any telos, the positively valorized notion of
difference proposed by Nietzsche remains poetic. Like the activity of the artist, it must be isolated from
the public, must be sheltered and concealed from it if it is to achieve adequate expression.J The poetic,
ultimately anti theatrical framework assumed by Nietzsche prohibits the Arendtian thought that under
certain very specific conditions, it is precisely the public realm which is constituted by
plurality and which enables the fullest, most articulated expression of difference .
CONCLUSION

Arendt resists the Habermasian temptation to seek quasi-transcendental standards of

agreement in a polytheistic" disillusioned age However, it is important to realize that her appeal to a Kantian notion of taste and
the sensus communis is not tantamount to an endorsement of the Aristotelian view of political community and judgment (her
comments linking tastejudgments to phroncsis notwithstanding).' Arendts Kantian, aeslheticizing turn has, unsurprisingly,
confused commentators, who note the highly attenuated character of community and the depoliticizcd notion of judgment in
Kant.M Arendt chooses Kantian formalism over Aristotelian concretencss because, while she wants to focus on the shared world of
appearance that is the public realm, she has no desire whatever to frame what we have in common in terms of purposes or ends. In
this regard, the problem with the Aristotelian notion of koinoru'a, as defined in book 3 of the Politics, is that it creates not a stage fot
action but a vehicle for teleological fulfillment."u Arendts appeal to the sensus oommunis self-consciously avoids the overly
substantive, local character of koinonia or Sittlichlteit. At the same time, it denies the false universalism of moralitat. Arendts

theory of judgment points not to the determinancy of phronesis, with its emphasis on context and
local practices, but to "the free reflexive discovery of rules in light of indeterminate,
transcendent ideas of community
The critique of Aristotelian/oommunitarian thinking is also applicable to the kind of postmodern relativism that we find in a thinker
like Lyotard. Like Arendt, Lyotard's conception of judgment is a curious mixture of Nietzschean, Aristotelian, and Kantian
elements) However, the postmodern " incredulity

towards metanarratives serves not only to deny the

possibility of any overarching metadiscourse that might render diverse language
games commensurable but to deny the possibility of a public space of discourse , at
least insofar as this space claims, implicitly, to synthesize perspectives and distance
interests. For Lyotard, discourse is essentially fragmented: All we can do is gaze in wonderment at the diversity
of discursive species, just as we do at the diversity of plant or animal speities."166 It is also incducibly interested: to speak is to
fight, in the general sense of playing, and speech acts fall within the domain of a general agonistic:s."'67 Given these assumptions, it
is not surprising that Lyotard feels that Kant has left our ability to judge "hanging, as it were, and turns to the will to power as an
explanation of this faculty.8 What we find in Lyotard is the false Nietzschean dichotomy between a

universal, metaphysically grounded metadiscourse and a fragmented, postmetaphysical

discursive realm in which public discourse/judgment reflects either local habit or the agonistic
ability to create new moves, impose new interpretations , generate new criteria all in the name
of the will to power. Arendt's appeal to taste judgment and a shared feeling for the world may be immensely
problematic, but it does serve to underline the falseness of this dichotomy.
One may grant that Arendl's aesthcticism avoids the trope of the fiction du polin'que, universalism, and postmodern pluralism. yet
still feel that her solution" is of dubious relevance to our situation. True, there is a distance and alienation built into the Kantian
idea of a community of taste that may make the Arendtian response to Enlightenment universalism more palatable to a postmodern
sensibility than the oven Aristotelianism of a Maclntyre or a Gadamer. Nevertheless, the withering away of

common sense" in the modern and postmodern ages would appear to relegate Arendt's modification of
Nietzschean aestheticism t0 the status of a rearguard action. The fragmentation of
contemporary life renders the idea of a common fooling for the world" more paradoxical , and
possibly less viable, than a recovery of ethos or the legislation of a proceduralist rationality.
"Hie simple answer to this objection is mat Arendt completely agrees. Her work stands not only as a comprehensive rethinking of the
nature and meaning of political action but as an extended mediation on how the energies
of modernity have worked to dissipate our feeling for the world, to alienate us from the worlti The last part of The Human Condition
equates modernity with world alienation: the reduction of Being to process, the subjeclification of the real, and finally, the triumph
of a laboring mentality all work to alienate man not from himself but from the world." Worldliness, presupposed by the sensus
communis, is not a distinguishing characteristic of the animal laboranst Similarly, Arendt would entirely agree with the

postmodernist who questions the possibility of circumscribing a particular realm of phenomena

in a world where boundaries are increasingly blurred. in her analysis of "the rise of the social in the modern age,
Arcndt identifies this blurring as the central movement of modernity."l Her work departs from the strongest possible
conviction that our reality is one in which stable boundaries and distinctions have been dissolved and
rendered virtually impossible.
The postmodernist will object that Arendtian aestheticism. unlike Nietzsche's, mourns the loss of the
world as an articulated, bounded whole. Nietzschean aestheticism is an affirmation of the Dionysian
capacity to destroy fixed identities, to dissolve Apollonian slampings into flux. Postmodern theory
affirms this aestheticism, exaggerating the immanent tendencies of postmodern reality in
the pursuit of an active (i.e., creative) nihilism: it has no time for guilty nostalgia. Arendtian aestheticism, in
contrast, stakes its hopes entirely on the rethematization of certain ontological dimensions of
human experience (action, the public world, and self), which this blurring obscures,
denatures, and makes increasingly difficult to articulate. The fetishistic quality of her

distinction making, her Kantian finickincss in delimiting the political: these attest to a deeply
rooted desire to preserve the possibility of meaning created by political action and
redeemed by political judgment.

The impact outweighsdeliberative debate models impart skills vital

to respond to existential threats
Christian O. Lundberg 10 Professor of Communications @ University of North Carolina, Chapel

Hill, Tradition of Debate in North Carolina in Navigating Opportunity: Policy Debate in the 21st Century
By Allan D. Louden, p. 311
The second major problem with the critique that identifies a naivety in articulating debate and democracy is that it presumes that
the primary pedagogical outcome of debate is speech capacities. But the democratic capacities built by debate are

not limited to speechas indicated earlier, debate builds capacity for critical thinking, analysis of
public claims, informed decision making, and better public judgment. If the picture of modem
political life that underwrites this critique of debate is a pessimistic view of increasingly
labyrinthine and bureaucratic administrative politics, rapid scientific and technological change outpacing
the capacities of the citizenry to comprehend them, and ever-expanding insular special-interest- and moneydriven politics, it is a puzzling solution, at best, to argue that these conditions warrant giving up
on debate. If democracy is open to rearticulation, it is open to rearticulation precisely because as the challenges of
modern political life proliferate, the citizenry's capacities can change, which is one of the
primary reasons that theorists of democracy such as Ocwey in The Public awl Its Problems place such a high
premium on education (Dewey 1988,63, 154). Debate provides an indispensible form of education in the modem
articulation of democracy because it builds precisely the skills that allow the citizenry to research and be
informed about policy decisions that impact them, to sort through and evaluate the evidence for
and relative merits of arguments for and against a policy in an increasingly information-rich
environment, and to prioritize their time and political energies toward policies that matter the
most to them.
The merits of debate as a tool for building democratic capacity-building take on a special
significance in the context of information literacy . John Larkin (2005, HO) argues that one of the primary
failings of modern colleges and universities is that they have not changed curriculum to match with
the challenges of a new information environment. This is a problem for the course of academic study in
our current context, but perhaps more important, argues Larkin, for the future of a citizenry that will need to make
evaluative choices against an increasingly complex and multimediated information
environment (ibid-). Larkin's study tested the benefits of debate participation on information-literacy skills and concluded that
in-class debate participants reported significantly higher self-efficacy ratings of their ability to navigate academic search databases
and to effectively search and use other Web resources:
To analyze the self-report ratings of the instructional and control group students, we first conducted a multivariate analysis of

it did not
matter which topic students had been assigned . . . students in the Instnictional [debate) group were
variance on all of the ratings, looking jointly at the effect of instmction/no instruction and debate topic . . . that

significantly more confident in their ability to access information and less likely to feel that they needed help to do so----These
findings clearly indicate greater self-efficacy for online searching among students who participated in (debate).... These results
constitute strong support for the effectiveness of the project on students' self-efficacy for online searching in the academic databases.
There was an unintended effect, however: After doing ... the project, instructional group students also felt more confident than the
other students in their ability to get good information from Yahoo and Google. It may be that the library research experience
increased self-efficacy for any searching, not just in academic databases. (Larkin 2005, 144)
Larkin's study substantiates Thomas Worthcn and Gaylcn Pack's (1992, 3) claim that debate in the college

plays a critical role in fostering the kind of problem-solving skills demanded by the
increasingly rich media and information environment of modernity . Though their essay was written in 1992
classroom

on the cusp of the eventual explosion of the Internet as a medium, Worthcn and Pack's framing of the issue was prescient: the
primary question facing today's student has changed from how to best research a topic to the crucial question of learning how to best
evaluate which arguments to cite and rely upon from an easily accessible and veritable cornucopia of materials.
There are, without a doubt, a number of important criticisms of employing debate as a model for democratic deliberation. But
cumulatively, the evidence presented here warrants strong support for expanding debate practice in
the classroom as a technology for

enhancing democratic deliberative capacities. The unique combination

of critical thinking skills, research and information processing skills, oral communication skills,

and capacities for listening and thoughtful, open engagement with hotly contested issues argues
for debate as a crucial component of a rich and vital democratic life. In-class debate practice both aids
students in achieving the best goals of college and university education, and serves as an unmatched practice for
creating thoughtful, engaged, open-minded and self-critical students who are open to the
possibilities of meaningful political engagement and new articulations of democratic life.
Expanding this practice is crucial, if only because the more we produce citizens that can actively
and effectively engage the political process, the more likely we are to produce revisions of
democratic life that are necessary if democracy is not only to survive, but to thrive. Democracy
faces a myriad of challenges, including: domestic and international issues of class, gender, and racial
justice; wholesale environmental destruction and the potential for rapid climate change; emerging
threats to international stability in the form of terrorism, intervention and new possibilities for great power
conflict; and increasing challenges of rapid globalization including an increasingly volatile global economic
structure. More than any specific policy or proposal, an informed and active citizenry that
deliberates with greater skill and sensitivity provides one of the best hopes for responsive and
effective democratic governance, and by extension, one of the last best hopes for dealing with the
existential challenges to democracy [in an] increasingly complex world.

Guidelines for dialogue are intersubjectively possible and are

necessary to cultivate democratic habits and political judgment---the
affirmatives rejection of normative constraints goes too far
Jean-Michel Heimonet 9, Professor of French, American Catholic U, THE SACRED: MYSTICISM
AND PRAGMATISM, THE MAJOR TRENDS IN CONTEMPORARY THEORY,
http://www.crvp.org/book/Series07/VII-6/chapter-6.htm

Beginning with Foucault these were concerned with carrying out an archeology of knowledge with a view to deciphering
the potential for restrictions native to, andreproduced by, Western culture since the classical age. Following the
same movement, through the concept of diffrence, Derrida (and at the same time Lacan) pointed out the internal
division of the subject between two contrary existential tendencies: the one, centrifugal and directed towards loss and death; the other,
centripetal and directed towards conservation and power. Then, in introducing his Leon at the Collge de France,

Barthes proclaimed the

explosive slogan: "All language is fascist." By this he meant that syntactical and grammatical conventions constitute a constricting structure
from which the writer could escape only by "cheating the language" in order to go beyond orthodox usage. What is essential in the text is no longer the
content or manifest sense, but the structure of musical and psychological associations which, like a slip of the tongue, manifest the deepest orientations
of the writer generally referred to as a Freudian or pleasure slip. This literary kamasutra or "science of the pleasures of language" which Barthes
already had developed in Le plaisir du texte complements on the level of rhetoric the work of Deleuze and Guatari on the psychoanalytic level.
Strongly influenced by the Nietzschean idea of "culture," the authors of LAnti-Oedipe call "writing" that "terrible alphabet" or "cruel system of signs"
engraved in the flesh of man who, by that very fact, loses his privileges as the ego scriptor and become a "Desiring machine."1 In this context Jean
Baudrillards prediction of the subjection of man to the position of a thing gains in force. In Les strategies fatales Baudrillard

writes: the
subject was beautiful only in itspride andarbitrariness, its limitless willful power, its transcendence as subject of power and of
history, or in the drama of its alienation . Without this one is pitiably deficient, the pawn of his own desires or image, incapable of
the insight which
of conscience, will and autonomy which

forming a clear representation of the universe and sacrificing himself in an attempt to revive the dead body of history.2 In sum,
would give birth to the revolt of May 1968 destroyed in one stroke the related ideas
had constituted the contribution of the Enlightenment; that is, the

ability of a subject, besieged by the irrational

forces of myth and religion, to give focus to a world in terms of his understanding and will. It is this
heritage of the Enlightenment which today is being reaffirmed. The urgency of this return to enlightened reason under the
auspices of the Kantian philosophy of the subject provides the principal themes for the last books of Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut. In La pense 68: essai

to warn against the dangerously

metaphysical process by which the thinkers of the last decade have practiced often without being aware of it
a systematic anti-humanism . Ironically, under the pretext of eliminating once and for all the
metaphysics of reason centered upon the subject , Foucault andDerrida have found themselves caught in
the spiral of metaphysical hyperbole. For the a priori identity they suppose between
knowledge and power leads them to place the human ideal beyond all kinds of meaning and in so doing to make it
inaccessible, in relation to which the individual can only renounce his or her autonomy.
In other words, in the end the excess of thought fascinated by the absolute becomes a form
of regression . Dispossessed of his attributes as a subject (that is, of knowledge and will) on both the
sur lanti-humanisme contemporain3 and Heidegger et les modernes,4 the intention is

speculative and the practical levels, and thus incapable of acting upon "the world," the modern man
is subjected to the transcendentalism of another lay, non theological religion , which leads him
to search his salvation no longer in the truth or efficacity of a satisfying answer, but in the effort
and tension of an endless questioning . It is as reaction to (in the chemical sense) and against (in the political sense) this
metaphysical hyperbole that one should interpret the desire of Ferry and Renaut to search for the conditions of a "nonmetaphysical humanism" capable of "conferring coherent philosophical status upon the promise of
freedom contained in the requirements (of the term humanism)."5 In a parallel manner Jrgen Habermas wishes to restore to
philosophy its true place and function as the "guardian of rationality." Rejecting the erroneous association between reason and
power, the author of Morale et communication6 attempts to show that the normative rules of linguistic

communication, inasmuch as they provide a universal basis for intersubjective

exchanges , constitute the best defense against an abuse of power. Although Barthes
deduces a fascist character for language from its normative function , Habermas tries to show that this same
function is, on the contrary, presupposed intuitively by every subject who takes part in a
process of communication. This

permits him to state the ethical principle of dialogue: "only those

norms can claim validity which are accepted . . . by all the persons participating in a practical discussion."7
Nonmetaphysical humanism and the ethics of communicative action agree that human activities
and relationships must be perceived no longer in terms of an ideal of inaccessible purity, but
from the pragmatic point of view where conditions of efficacity and utility are
understood on the basis of results in daily life.

Case

Politics Not Dead

Politics and dissent are alive and kicking---speed just requires
multiple understandings of political spheres
Roland Bleiker 2, professor of international relations at the University of Queensland, Politics After
Seattle: Dilemmas of the Anti-Globalisation Movement, conflits.revues.org/1057

Any protest action that draws sufficient media attention has the potential to engender a political
process that transcends its immediate spatial environment. It competes for the attention of global television audiences
and thus interferes with the struggle over values that ultimately shapes the world we live in. "A world united by Benetton slogans, Nike sweatshops and
McDonald's jobs might not be anyone's utopian global village," says Naomi Klein, "but its fibre-optic

cables and shared cultural

references are nonetheless laying the foundations for the first truly international people's
movement.31 But the recent wave of global protests is hardly the first international movement of
its kind. Nor is it as unproblematic as Klein suggests. For some the revolution of speed is too random to allow for
critical interference and, indeed, for human agency. Jean Baudrillard, for instance, believes that the
distinctions between reality and virtuality, political practice and simulation are blurred to the
extent that they are no longer recognisable.32 Our media culture, he says, has annihilated reality in stages, such that in the end
its simulating image bears no relation to any reality whatever : it is its own pure simulacrum. Television, the unproblematic transmission of the
hyperreal, has conditioned our mind such that we have lost the ability to penetrate beneath the manifest levels of surface.33 24 Patterns

of
global protest do not confirm the pessimistic views that Baudrillard and others
espouse. The blurring of reality and virtuality has not annihilated dissent. The fact
that televised images are hyperreal does not necessarily diminish their influence. Independently
of how instantaneous, distorted and simulated images of a protest action may be, they still
influence our perceptions of issues, and thus also our political responses to them. To accept the
logic of speed, then, is not to render political influence obsolete, but to acknowledge multiple
and overlapping spatial and temporal spheres within which political practices are
constantly being shaped and reshaped.

Debate Solves Collapse

Baudrillard is wrong---debate SOLVES collapse and oversaturation of
meaning
Turner 4 Bryan S. Turner, Dean of Social Sciences at Deakin University, Australia, Baudrillard for
Sociologists, in Forget Baudrillard?, 2004 edition, p. 80-83

While, as far as one can tell, Baudrillard was not influenced by Bells vision of the role of technology and the media in shaping postindustrialism, he
was influenced by Marshall McLuhans analysis (Gane 1991b:48) of the impact of new media on the transformation of modern culture, especially in
The Gutenberg Galaxy (McLuhan 1967). McLuhan was particularly sensitive to the idea that we live in a processed social world where human
beings live in a complete technostructure. This technological environment is carried with us as extensions of our own bodies, but McLuhan did not
adopt a pessimistic view of the age of anxiety, because his technological humanism (Kroker et al. 1984) and Catholic values committed him to the
idea of the immanence of reason and the hope of an escape from the labyrinth. Indeed, a global technological system could become the basis of a
universalistic culture. Although he was fully aware of the sensory deprivation which he associated with the impact of the mass media, he none the
less remained committed to the hope that these negative effects were not fatal. Baudrillard,

who as we have noted was deeply

influenced by McLuhans idea that the content of messages was relatively unimportant in
relation to their form, has embraced a very nihilistic position with respect to our processed
environment. Baudrillards pessimistic view of the fissure in the historical development of the modern is based on
his view of the masses. Baudrillards analysis of the masses is a product of the Situationist responses to the May events of 1968, when it
became increasingly obvious that the critical social movements of modern society would not be dominated by Marxist theory or directed by a
vanguard of the working class. The crisis of May 1968 had not been predicted by Marxism or by mainstream sociology, but they did validate the
claims of Situationists like Guy Debord in the journal Internationale Situationiste. However, if the crisis had been unanticipated by conventional
political analysis, then the sudden collapse of the students and workers movements of 1968 found no easy explanation in the framework of
mainstream social sciences. Baudrillards concept of the inexplicable nature of the mass depend a great deal on the unusual circumstances
surrounding the May events. By 1973 with the publication of The Mirror of Production (Baudrillard 1975), Baudrillard was already moving away
from an orthodox Marxist view of production, arguing that Marxism, far from being an external critique of capitalism, was merely a reflection or
mirror of the principal economistic values of capitalism. Instead

of engaging in the production of

meaning, a subversive, oppositional movement would have to challenge the system from the point of
view of meaninglessness. Subversion would have to rob the social system of significance. In taking this stand, Baudrillard
followed the Situationist claim that whatever can be represented can be controlled (Plant 1992:137). The mass events of 1968 offered a promise of
the nonrepresentational moment, the pure event of authenticity, which could not be explained, and therefore could not be manipulated.
Baudrillard, in dismissing Marxist theory as a means of representing events, sought to replace the idea of a mode of production with a mode of
disappearance. In taking this attitude towards modern social movements, Baudrillards argument also rests on the various meanings of the word
mass. Baudrillard is thus able to make allusions to the idea of physical substance, matter, the majority and the electrical meaning of earth. The
translators note to In the Shadow of the Silent Majority points out that faire masse can mean to form a majority and to form an earth. Baudrillard
argues by allusion that the mass absorbs the electrical charges of social and political movements; the mass thus neutralizes the electrical charge of
society. This use of allusion, parody and irony is typical of Baudrillards mode of analysis, which is a type of sociological poetics, a style which is
likely to make sociologists feel uncomfortable (Gane 199la:193). There is here also a continuity with the style of Dada and the Situationists. The
poetic and striking character of Baudrillards style has

no counterpart in professional social science ,

sociological fictions (1990a:15) are striking and challenging, but they are not
ultimately convincing. Arguments which depend on allusion, allegory and similar rhetorical devices are
decorative but they are not necessarily powerful. The notion of mass society already has a clearly worked out sociological
least of all in the British context. Baudrillards

critique. The idea of mass society might have been relevant in describing the new markets which were created in the post-war period with the
advent of innovative technologies, which had the immediate effect of lowering prices and making commodities available to a mass audience.
However, the trend of sociological analysis in the last two decades has been to assert that mass

audiences have been broken down

into more selectively constructed niches for more individualized products. It is controversial to argue that industrialization

necessarily produces a mass society, characterized by a common culture, uniform sentiments or an integrated outlook. The idea of a mass society
was often associated with the notion that the decline of individualism would produce a directionless mass as the modern equivalent of the
eighteenthcentury mob. Critical theorists like Adorno and Marcuse associated the massification of society with authoritarianism and a potential for

version of mass society is based on a particular view of the mass media

creating a hyperreality in which the real has been absorbed by the hyperreal; meaning has
imploded on itself. Although Baudrillards analysis of hyperreality is postcritical (Chen 1987), he does adopt in practice a critical
fascism. Of course, Baudrillards

position towards American civilization, which is the extreme example of massification. Rather like critical theorists, Baudrillard believes that the
(bourgeois) individual has been sucked into the negative electrical mass of the media age. However, sociological

research on
mass audiences shows that there is no ground for believing that media messages are
received, consumed or used in any standardized manner , and the majority of social
scientists working on culture have attempted to argue that cultural objects in the age of the mass media are
appropriated, transformed and consumed in diverse forms and according to various
practices (de Certeau 1984). In fact, sociologists, largely inspired by the Situationists, have argued that everyday life is
resistant to massification and that the concrete reality of everyday life-situations is the principal arena within which opposition to
massification can be expected. Everyday life was regarded by both Guy Debord and Henri Lefebvre (1991) as the foundation of authenticity.

Baudrillard, by arguing that criticism belongs to the period of modernism and not to the age of hyperreality, has ruled out
opposition to the system, at least at the level of public debate and formal politics.

AT: Meaning Doesnt Exist Info Overload

Their thesis overly generalizes the completeness of illusion and
hyper-reality since it is impossible to verify whether or not there
has been a total break from all past forms of social relations, we
should discount their claims that our representations are
meaningless.
TlMOTHY W. LUKE 91 [*], Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Power and politics

in hyperreality: The critical project of Jean Baudrillard. By: Luke, Timothy W., Social Science Journal,
03623319, 1991, Vol. 28, Issue 3, Ebsco
Baudrillard's critical project clearly outlines a fascinating and innovative appraisal of the often
confusing and contradictory tendencies in contemporary society that are usually labelled as
"postmodernity." Nonetheless, there are considerable weaknesses as well as great strengths in
Baudrillard's system of analysis. The tenacity of "reality" or "modernity" in several spheres of
everyday life, for example, often still overshadows "hyperreality." Thus, it seems that
Baudrillard's major flaw is mistaking a handful of incipient developments or
budding trends for a full-blown or completely fixed new social order. The total break
with all past forms of social relations cannot be verified either from within or from outside
of Baudrillard's frameworks. While he denies finding much systematicity in hyperreal capitalism
and sees the end of "production" and "power" in the rise of seduction, Baudrillard still clings to the
image of a powerful exploitative system in his call to the masses to recognize "that a system is
abolished only by pushing it into hyperlogic."( n21) This twist in his thinking raises important
questions. Why does a social order that no longer really exists need his theoretical intervention to
be transformed by mass resistance if it is not real, powerful or productive? Likewise, if the history
of power and production has ended, then why does Baudrillard envision today's best radical
opposition to capital and the state assuming the form of hyperconformity by pushing "the system"
into a hyperlogical practice of itself to induce the crisis that might abolish it?
On the other hand, Baudrillard's strategy of "hyperconformity," as a means of radical resistance,
does not seriously challenge the consumerist modes of domination intrinsic to
transnational corporate capitalism. Moreover, its ties to consumer subjectivity do not even begin to
address other possible strategies of resistance following lines drawn by gender, race, ethnicity,
language or ecology. Unlike Lyotard, he does not advance any new conceptions of postmodern
justice or articulate alternative principles to represent meaningful narratives about values in
hyperreality. Thus, Baudrillard also can be tarred with the brush of neoconservatism,
like many other postmodernist critics of society.( n22) Baudrillard tends to misplace the
concreteness of the relations that he is investigating, lumping everything into the category of
"seduction" which, in turn, totally subsumes such complex factors as power, production, sex, and
economy into one universal force. He claims somewhat contradictorily that "seduction . . . does
not partake of the real order." Yet, at the same time, "seduction envelops the whole real process of
power, as well as the whole real order of production, with this never-ending reversibility and
disaccumulation--without which neither power nor production would even exist."( n23) While
Baudrillard makes these claims, he never really demonstrates definitely how this all works with
carefully considered evidence.

Block

fw

Dahlberg
Lincoln Dahlberg 5, The University of Queensland, Center for Critical and Cultural Studies, Visiting
Fellow, The Habermasian public sphere: Taking difference seriously?, Theory and Society (2005) 34:111126
I believe this critique of power, transparency, and the subject is largely based upon a poor
characterization of Habermas position. There are three main misunderstandings that need to be
cleared up here, to do with power as negative, as able to be easily removed, and as able to be clearly
identied. First, Habermas does not dene power as simply negative and as therefore needing to
be summarily removed from the public sphere. The public sphere norm calls for coercion-free
communication and not power-free communication. Habermas emphasizes the positive power
of communicative interaction within the public sphere through which participants use words to do
things and make things happen.60 Communicative rationality draws on the force of better
argument to produce more democratic citizens, culture, and societies. Subjects are indeed
molded through this constituting power, but their transformation is towards freedom and
autonomy rather than towards subjugation and normalization. As Jeffrey Alexander points out, to
act according to a norm is not the same as to be normalized .61 The public sphere norm
provides a structure through which critical reection on constraining or dominating social
relations and possibilities for freedom can take place. As Chambers argues, rational discourse
here is about the endless questioning of codes, the reasoned questioning of normalization.62 This is
the very type of questioning critics like Lyotard, Mouffe, and Villa are engaged in despite claiming
the normalizing and repressive power of communicative rationality. These critics have yet to
explain adequately how they escape this performative contradiction, although they may not be too
concerned to escape it.63

The form of power that is to be excluded from discourse in the public sphere is that which limits
and disables democratic participation and leads to communicative inequalities. Coercion and
domination are (ideally) excluded from the public sphere, which includes forms of domination
resulting from the maldistribution of material and authoritative resources that lead to
discursive inequalities.
This emphasis on the ideal exclusion of coercion introduces the second point of clari- cation, that the
domination free public sphere is an idealization for the purposes of critique. Habermas is more than
aware of the fact that, as Nancy Fraser, Mouffe, and Young remind us, coercive forms of power,
including those that result from social inequality, can never be completely separated from the public
sphere.64 Claims that such power has been removed from any really-existing deliberative arena can only
be made by ignoring or hiding the operation of power. However, this does not mean that a reduction
in coercion and domination cannot be achieved. Indeed, this is precisely what a democratic politics
must do. To aid this project, the public sphere conception sets a critical standard for
evaluation of everyday communication . Chambers puts this nicely:
Criticism requires a normative backdrop against which we criticize. Crit-icizing the ways
power and domination play themselves out in discourse presupposes a conception of discourse in which
there is no [coercive] power and domination. In other words, to defend the position that there is a meaningful difference between talking and ghting, persuasion and coercion, and by extension, reason and
power involves beginning with idealizations. That is, it involves drawing a picture of undominated
discourse.65
However, this discussion of the idealizing status of the norm does notanswer claims that it invokes a
transparency theory of knowledge. Iwould argue that such claims not only fall prey to another performative contradiction of presupposing that the use of rational discourse can establish the impossibility of
rational discourse revealing truth and power but are also based on a poor reading of Habermas theory
of communicative rationality. This is the third point of clarication. In contrast to the metaphysics of

presence, the differentiation of persusion from coercion in the public sphere does not posit a
naive theory of the transparency of power, and meaning more generally. The public sphere
conception as based upon communicative rationality does not assume a Cartesian
(autonomous, disembodied, decontextualized) subject who can clearly distinguish between
persuasion and coercion, good and bad reasons, true and untrue claims, and then wholly re-move
themselves and their communications from such inuence. For Habermas, subjects are always
situated within culture. The public sphere is posited upon intersubjective rather than
subject-centered rationality. It is through the process of communicative rationality, and not
via a Cartesian subject, that manipulation, deception, poor reasoning, and so on, are identied
and removed, and by which meanings can be understood and communicated . In other words, it is
through rational-critical communication that discourse moves away from coercion or non-public
reason towards greater rational communication and a stronger public sphere. The circularity here is
not a problem, as it may seem, but is in fact the very essence of democratization: throughthe practice of
democracy, democratic practice is advanced.
This democratizing process can be further illustrated in the important and challenging case of social
inequalities. Democratic theorists (bothdeliberative and difference) generally agree that social inequalities
al-ways lead to some degree of inequalities in discourse. Thus, the ide-alized public sphere of full
discursive inclusion and equality requires that social inequalities be eliminated. Yet how is social
inequality to befullyidentied,letaloneeliminated? The idealization seems wholly in-adequate given

contemporary capitalist systems and associated social inequality. However, it is in the very
process of argumentation, even if awed, that the identication and critique of
social inequality, and thus of communicative inequality, is able to develop. Indeed,
public sphere deliberation often comes into existence when and where people become passionate about
social injustice and publicly thematize problems of social inequality. Thus the negative power of social
inequality as with other forms of coercion is brought to light and critique by the very discourse it is
limiting.
This is not to say that subjects are merely effects of discourse , that there are no critical social agents
acting in the process. It is not to say that
125 subjects within discourse cannot themselves identify negative forms of power, cannot reexively

monitor their own arguments, cannot rationally criticize other positions, and so on. They can,
and in practice do, despite the instability of meaning. The point is that this reasoning and
understanding is (provisionally) achieved through the subjects situatedness in discourse
rather than via a pre-discursive abstract subject. As Kenneth Baynes argues, it is through discourse that
subjects achieve adegree of reective distance (what we could call autonomy) from their
situations, enabling them to revise their conceptions of what is valuable or worthy of pursuit,
[and]to assess various courses of action with respect to those ends. 66 Democratic discourse
generates civic-oriented selves, inter-subjective meanings and understandings, and democratic
agreements that can be seen as the basis of public sovereignty. How-ever, the idea of
communicatively produced agreements, which in the public sphere are known as public opinions, has also
come under ex-tensive criticism in terms of excluding difference, criticism that I wantto explore in the
next section.
The ends of discourse: Public opinion formation

The starting point of discourse is disagreement over problematic validity claims.

However, a certain amount of agreement, or at least mutual understanding, is
presupposed when interlocutors engage in argumentation. All communication presupposes
mutual understanding on the linguistic terms used that interlocutors use the same terms in the
same way.67 Furthermore, in undertaking rational-critical discourse, according to Habermas formal
pragmatic reconstruction, interlocutors also presuppose the same formal conditions of
argumentation. These shared presuppositions enable rational-critical discourse to be
undertaken. However, as seen above, meaning is never fixed and understanding is always partial .
Understanding and agreement on the use of linguistic terms and of what it means to be reasonable,

reflexive, sincere, inclusive, non-coercive, etc. takes place within discourse and is an ongoing
political process.

Robinson
language and the theatre of debate within which it operates have
some positive potential --- the best way to break down transcendental
regimes like the state is to create a space for symbolic exchange in
which we can learn the process of argumentative refinement --- BUT
that requires some rules !!!!
Robinson 12 (Andrew, Political Theorist, Activist Based in the UK and research fellow affiliated to

the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ), University of Nottingham, Jean
Baudrillard: The Rise of Capitalism & the Exclusion of Death, March 30,
http://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-2/
Symbolic exchange or rather, its suppression plays a central role in the emergence of
capitalism. Baudrillard sees a change happening over time. Regimes based on symbolic exchange
(differences are exchangeable and related) are replaced by regimes based on equivalence (everything
is, or means, the same). Ceremony gives way to spectacle, immanence to transcendence. Baudrillards
view of capitalism is derived from Marxs analysis of value. Baudrillard accepts Marxs view that
capitalism is based on a general equivalent. Money is the general equivalent because it can be exchanged
for any commodity. In turn, it expresses the value of abstract labour-time. Abstract labour-time is itself an
effect of the regimenting of processes of life, so that different kinds of labour can be compared.

Capitalism is derived from the autonomisation or separation of economics from the rest of life.
It turns economics into the reality-principle. It is a kind of sorcery, connected in some way to
the disavowed symbolic level. It subtly shifts the social world from an exchange of death with the
Other to an eternal return of the Same. Capitalism functions by reducing everything to a regime
based on value and the production of value. To be accepted by capital, something must
contribute value. This creates an immense regime of social exchange. However, this social exchange has
little in common with symbolic exchange. It ultimately depends on the mark of value itself being
unexchangeable. Capital must be endlessly accumulated. States must not collapse. Capitalism thus
introduces the irreversible into social life, by means of accumulation. According to Baudrillard,

capitalism rests on an obsession with the abolition of death. Capitalism tries to abolish death
through accumulation. It tries to ward off ambivalence (associated with death) through value
(associated with life). But this is bound to fail. General equivalence the basis of capitalism is
itself the ever-presence of death. The more the system runs from death, the more it places
everyone in solitude, facing their own death. Life itself is fundamentally ambivalent. The
attempt to abolish death through fixed value is itself deathly . Accumulation also spreads to other
fields. The idea of progress, and linear time, comes from the accumulation of time, and of stockpiles of the
past. The idea of truth comes from the accumulation of scientific knowledge. Biology rests on the
separation of living and non-living. According to Baudrillard, such accumulations are now in crisis.
For instance, the accumulation of the past is undermined, because historical objects now have to be
concealed to be preserved otherwise they will be destroyed by excessive consumption. Value is produced
from the residue or remainder of an incomplete symbolic exchange. The repressed, market value, and
sign-value all come from this remainder. To destroy the remainder would be to destroy value. Capitalist
exchange is always based on negotiation, even when it is violent. The symbolic order does not know this
kind of equivalential exchange or calculation. And capitalist extraction is always one-way. It

amounts to a non-reversible aggression in which one act (of dominating or killing) cannot be
returned by the other. It is also this regime which produces scarcity Baudrillard here endorses
Sahlins argument. Capitalism produces the Freudian death drive, which is actually an effect of the
capitalist culture of death. For Baudrillard, the limit to both Marx and Freud is that they fail to theorise
the separation of the domains they study the economy and the unconscious. It is the separation which
grounds their functioning, which therefore only occurs under the regime of the code. Baudrillard also

criticises theories of desire, including those of Deleuze, Foucault, Freud and Lacan. He believes desire
comes into existence based on repression. It is an effect of the denial of the symbolic. Liberated
energies always leave a new remainder; they do not escape the basis of the unconscious in the remainder.
Baudrillard argues that indigenous groups do not claim to live naturally or by their desires they simply
claim to live in societies. This social life is an effect of the symbolic. Baudrillard therefore criticises the
view that human liberation can come about through the liberation of desire. He thinks that such a
liberation will keep certain elements of the repression of desire active. Baudrillard argues that the
processes which operate collectively in indigenous groups are repressed into the unconscious in
metropolitan societies. This leads to the autonomy of the psyche as a separate sphere. It is only after this
repression has occurred that a politics of desire becomes conceivable. He professes broad agreement with
the Deleuzian project of unbinding energies from fixed categories and encouraging flows and intensities.
However, he is concerned that capitalism can recuperate such releases of energy, disconnecting them so
they can eventually reconnect to it. Unbinding and drifting are not fatal to capitalism, because capitalism
itself unbinds things, and re-binds things which are unbound. What is fatal to it is, rather, reversibility.
Capitalism continues to be haunted by the forces it has repressed. Separation does not destroy the
remainder. Quite the opposite. The remainder continues to exist, and gains power from its

repression. This turns the double or shadow into something unquiet, vampiric, and threatening.
It becomes an image of the forgotten dead. Anything which reminds us of the repressed aspects
excluded from the subject is experienced as uncanny and threatening. It becomes the obscene, which is
present in excess over the scene of what is imagined. This is different from theories of lack, such as the
Lacanian Real. Baudrillards remainder is an excess rather than a lack. It is the carrier of the force of
symbolic exchange. Modern culture dreams of radical difference. The reason for this is that it
exterminated radical difference by simulating it. The energy of production, the unconscious, and
signification all in fact come from the repressed remainder . Our culture is dead from having broken

the pact with monstrosity, with radical difference. The West continues to perpetrate genocide on
indigenous groups. But for Baudrillard, it did the same thing to itself first destroying its own
indigenous logics of symbolic exchange. Indigenous groups have also increasingly lost the symbolic
dimension, as modern forms of life have been imported or imposed. This according to Baudrillard
produces chronic confusion and instability. Gift-exchange is radically subversive of the system. This
is not because it is rebellious. Baudrillard thinks the system can survive defections or exodus. It is
because it counterposes a different principle of sociality to that of the dominant system.
According to Baudrillard, the mediations of capitalism exist so that nobody has the opportunity to

offer a symbolic challenge or an irreversible gift. They exist to keep the symbolic at bay. The
affective charge of death remains present among the oppressed, but not with the properly symbolic
rhythm of immediate retaliation. The Church and State also exist based on the elimination of symbolic
exchange. Baudrillard is highly critical of Christianity for what he takes to be a cult of suffering, solitude
and death. He sees the Church as central to the destruction of earlier forms of community based on
symbolic exchange. Baudrillard seems to think that earlier forms of the state and capitalism retained
some degree of symbolic exchange, but in an alienated, partially repressed form. For instance, the
imaginary of the social contract was based on the idea of a sacrifice this time of liberty for the common
good. In psychoanalysis, symbolic exchange is displaced onto the relationship to the master-signifier. I
havent seen Baudrillard say it directly, but the impression he gives is that this is a distorted, authoritarian
imitation of the original symbolic exchange. Nonetheless, it retains some of its intensity and energy. Art,
theatre and language have worked to maintain a minimum of ceremonial power. It is the reason older
orders did not suffer the particular malaise of the present. It is easy to read certain passages in Baudrillard
as if he is bemoaning the loss of these kinds of strong significations. This is initially how I read
Baudrillards work. But on closer inspection, this seems to be a misreading. Baudrillard is nostalgic for
repression only to the extent that the repressed continued to carry symbolic force as a referential. He is
nostalgic for the return of symbolic exchange, as an aspect of diffuse, autonomous, dis-alienated social
groups. Death Death plays a central role in Baudrillards theory, and is closely related to symbolic
exchange. According to Baudrillard, what we have lost above all in the transition to alienated

society is the ability to engage in exchanges with death. Death should not be seen here in purely
literal terms. Baudrillard specifies early on that he does not mean an event affecting a body, but
rather, a form which destroys the determinacy of the subject and of value which returns things

to a state of indeterminacy. Baudrillard certainly discusses actual deaths, risk-taking, suicide and so on.
But he also sees death figuratively, in relation to the decomposition of existing relations, the death of the
self-image or ego, the interchangeability of processes of life across different categories. For instance,
eroticism or sexuality is related to death, because it leads to fusion and communication between bodies.
Sexual reproduction carries shades of death because one generation replaces another. Baudrillards
concept of death is thus quite similar to Bakhtins concept of the grotesque. Death refers to

metamorphosis, reversibility, unexpected mutations, social change, subjective

transformation, as well as physical death. According to Baudrillard, indigenous groups see
death as social, not natural or biological. They see it as an effect of an adversarial will, which
they must absorb. And they mark it with feasting and rituals. This is a way of preventing death
from becoming an event which does not signify. Such a non-signifying event is absolute disorder
from the standpoint of symbolic exchange. For Baudrillard, the wests idea of a biological, material
death is actually an idealist illusion, ignoring the sociality of death. Poststructuralists generally
maintain that the problems of the present are rooted in the splitting of life into binary
oppositions. For Baudrillard, the division between life and death is the original, founding
opposition on which the others are founded. After this first split, a whole series of others have
been created, confining particular groups the mad, prisoners, children, the old, sexual
minorities, women and so on to particular segregated situations . The definition of the normal
human has been narrowed over time. Today, nearly everyone belongs to one or another marked or
deviant category. The original exclusion was of the dead it is defined as abnormal to be dead.
You livies hate us deadies. This first split and exclusion forms the basis, or archetype,

for all the other splits and exclusions along lines of gender, disability, species, class, and
so on. This discrimination against the dead brings into being the modern experience of death.
Baudrillard suggests that death as we know it does not exist outside of this separation between
living and dead. The modern view of death is constructed on the model of the machine and the
function. A machine either functions or it does not. The human body is treated as a machine
which similarly, either functions or does not. For Baudrillard, this misunderstands the nature of life and
death. The modern view of death is also necessitated by the rise of subjectivity . The subject needs
a beginning and an end, so as to be reducible to the story it tells. This requires an idea of death as an
end. It is counterposed to the immortality of social institutions. In relation to individuals, ideas of
religious immortality is simply an ideological cover for the real exclusion of the dead. But institutions try
to remain truly immortal. Modern systems, especially bureaucracies, no longer know how to die

or how to do anything but keep reproducing themselves. The internalisation of the idea of the
subject or the soul alienates us from our bodies, voices and so on. It creates a split, as Stirner would
say, between the category of man and the un-man, the real self irreducible to such categories.
It also individualises people, by destroying their actual connections to others. The symbolic
haunts the code as the threat of its own death. The society of the code works constantly to
ward off the danger of irruptions of the symbolic. The mortal body is actually an effect of the split
introduced by the foreclosure of death. The split never actually stops exchanges across the categories.
In the case of death, we still exchange with the dead through our own deaths and our anxiety
about death. We no longer have living, mortal relationships with objects either. They are
reduced to the instrumental. It is as if we have a transparent veil between us . Symbolic
exchange is based on a game, with game-like rules. When this disappears, laws and
the state are invented to take their place. It is the process of excluding, marking, or barring
which allows concentrated or transcendental power to come into existence. Through splits,
people turn the other into their imaginary. For instance, westerners invest the Third World
with racist fantasies and revolutionary aspirations; the Third World invests the west with
aspirational fantasies of development. In separation, the other exists only as an imaginary object. Yet
the resultant purity is illusory. For Baudrillard, any such marking or barring of the other brings the
other to the core of society. We all become dead, or mad, or prisoners, and so on, through their
exclusion. The goal of survival is fundamental to the birth of power. Social control emerges

when the union of the living and the dead is shattered, and the dead become prohibited. The
social repression of death grounds the repressive socialisation of life. People are compelled to
survive so as to become useful. For Baudrillard, capitalisms original relationship to death has
historically been concealed by the system of production, and its ends. It only becomes fully visible
now this system is collapsing, and production is reduced to operation. In modern societies, death is
made invisible, denied, and placed outside society. For example, elderly people are excluded from
society. People no longer expect their own death. As a result, it becomes unintelligible. It keeps
returning as nature which will not abide by objective laws. It can no longer be absorbed through ritual.

Western society is arranged so death is never done by someone else, but always attributable to
nature. This creates a bureaucratic, judicial regime of death, of which the concentration camp is
the ultimate symbol. The system now commands that we must not die at least not in any old
way. We may only die if law and medicine allow it. Hence for instance the spread of health and safety
regulations. On the other hand, murder and violence are legalised, provided they can be reconverted into economic value. Baudrillard sees this as a regressive redistribution of death. It is
wrested from the circuit of social exchanges and vested in centralised agencies . For Baudrillard,
there is not a social improvement here. People are effectively being killed, or left to die, by a
process which never treats them as having value. On the other hand, even when capitalism
becomes permissive, inclusive and tolerant, it still creates an underlying anxiety about being
reduced to the status of an object or a marionette . This appears as a constant fear of being
manipulated. The slave remains within the masters dialectic for as long as his life or death
serves the reproduction of domination.

Baldwin
debate is an intellectual battlefield for supremacy. but were winning
that in order for the competition to be meaningful there needs to be a
set of guildelines. otherwise the aff has not captured a meaningful
victory because they have failed the challenge of the topic and ran
from negative engagement.
when achiles meets hector on the battlefield, they arrive with a set of
rules which they honor despite the fact that during the duel they both
lose themselves in the fury of battle and both experience symbolic
death
Their own Baldwin cards says that there has to be a balance between
the apolionian and Dionysian between equivalence and irruption --framework is the Apolonian frame within which the Dionysian
process of clash and engagement occur
Baldwin 12 (Jon Baldwin, lecturer in Critical and Contextual Studies at London Metropolitan

University, Potlatch Politics Baudrillards Gift, The International Journal of Baudrillard Studies,
Volume 9, Number 3 (October 2012)
[A]nything that cannot be exchanged or symbolically shared, Baudrillard writes, would break the
reciprocity and institute power (Baudrillard 1975: 79). The very definition of power is the act of
giving without being given (Baudrillard 1993: 40). To escape the world of things, to escape production,
to escape unilateral relations of power as so defined by Baudrillard, one should be like the primitives and
play potlatch on a geopolitical scale. This would be one sense of a potlatch politics. One must evoke the

symbolic, must seduce and provoke the unlimited reciprocity of the gift and counter-gift by
issuing a challenge by gift. Hence this notion is of strategic and critical value. We find these
notions of reversibility, reciprocity, and counter-gift throughout Baudrillards oeuvre. The system is to
be challenged within the realm of the symbolic. The system suppresses the symbolic and is itself
built upon the denial of the symbolic: one must therefore displace everything into the sphere of
the symbolic, where challenge, reversal and overbidding are the law (Baudrillard 1993: 36). One
must deny the system with a gift to which it cannot respond save by its own collapse and death.
Nothing, not even the system, can avoid the symbolic obligation, and it is in this trap that the
only chance of a catastrophe for capital remains (Baudrillard 1993: 36-7). The fact that this
strategic sentiment - Defy the system by a gift to which it cannot respond except by its own death and its
own collapse (Baudrillard 2002: 17) - is repeated virtually word for word twenty-five years later (in
relation to terrorism) reveals the prevalence and consistency of this aspect of Baudrillard. Hence the

only effective reply to [capitalist] power is to give it back what it gives you, and this is only
symbolically possible by means of death (Baudrillard 1993: 43). This is also the spirit of
terrorism which is the spirit of the gift: Terrorism is the act that restores an irreducible singularity to the
heart of a system of generalized exchange (Baudrillard 2002: 9). The death of the worker, the death of
the terrorist, the gift of death as an act of potlatch, as a challenge, as a duel, as a sacrificial

obligation cannot be successfully reciprocated by the system except by the very

return death (suicide) of the system. This, at least, is how Baudrillard reads the hypothesis of

the terrorist (Baudrillard 2002: 17). The unilateral gift from the terrorist attempts to over-power the
powerful, attempts to win the potlatch, attempts to win face, and attempts to win the contest of honour.
It is that power which humiliated you, so it too must be humiliated (Baudrillard 2002: 26). A pyrrhic
victory, some might say, but nevertheless an immediate symbolic victory, a victory over all power,
however powerful its authority may be (Baudrillard 1993: 38).

[bosu card ends]

The spirit of the gift, potlatch, and reversibility guide much of Baudrillards thinking on issues such as
theory, the media and the Gulf War. In terms of theory, thought should not be equivalent to or
complicit with reality, but a counter-gift, one must give back in the spirit of potlatch. It might be
significant to consider the mid to late 1970s study group comprising of Baudrillard, Foucault, Deleuze,
Guattari and others. Here Baudrillards position paper and polemic was so aggressive and his critique of
his French contemporaries so extreme that after heated debate the group disbanded (Kellner 1989: 132).
In broader terms of philosophical quarrels and theoretical debates as gift-exchange writ large Bourdieu
might be apt: nothing more resembles the struggles for honour among the Kabyle

than intellectual struggles. In many of those struggles, the apparent stake (to be right, to
triumph through reason) hides the stakes of the point of honour (Bourdieu 1994: 75). Here the
rational is subordinated to passion, honour and intellectual face .
In terms of the media, Baudrillard revises his condemnation of the power of the media as an irreversible form of communication without a response
(Baudrillard 1994: 84) and now interprets the silence of the masses not as passivity or alienation but as a counter strategy (Baudrillard 1994: 84).
This is an original response in the form of defiance and snubbing the unilateral gift of the mass media. The Gulf War, in terms of a geopolitical
exchange, was also not a reciprocal contest but unilateral and calculated. In On War, Clausewitz suggests that War is nothing but a duel on an
extensive scale (in McAleer 1994: 107). Greenberg writes that A study of the duel is a study of gifts (Greenberg 1998: 53), indeed a bullet is a gift
(Greenberg 1998: 74). The Gulf War, as was self-evident, was simply not a contest (let alone an honourable duel). It was a one-sided, profit driven,
brute face of democracy, made-for-TV exhibition of power with no response, featuring the unilateral gift of the smart bomb to Iraq.
From Symbolic Exchange and Death onwards, other examples and illustrative epithets for the irruption of the symbolic, reversibility, and counter-gift
are formulated and developed. There is the unanticipated otherness which cannot immediately be exchanged with an aspect of the same; the
heterogeneous, negativity and evil in the face of the homogeneous, the positive and the good; the singularity that it is not exchangeable (Baudrillard
2003: 73); the event - defined as having no equivalent; the impossibility of exchange; and from Bataille, a version of the accursed share. The broad
position in Baudrillard then, is one of distinction between the symbolic and semiological, between the gift and the commodity. We are always dealing, it
seems, in Baudrillard with two antagonistic principles: On the one hand: political economy, production, the code, the system, simulation. On the other
hand: potlatch, expenditure, sacrifice, death, the feminine, seduction (Baudrillard 1988: 79). The analysis and relationship of these antagonistic
principles, Charles Levin suggests, is precisely the attraction of Baudrillard as social philosopher: his appeal lies in his capacity to relate the
formalized abstractions of the civilised habitus to the mysteries of social being (Levin 1996: 81). Under the aegis of simulation, Baudrillard details the
extension, development, abstract systematisation, autonomy, structural determinism, homogeneity, and fulfillment of that which is governed by the
principle of equivalence and the semiological. All this is to the detriment of that which is governed by the symbolic. As well as this, he charts what he
sees as the inevitable return gift, interruption, disruption, intimacy, passion, haunting, antagonism, and indestructible logic of symbolic exchange
(Baudrillard 1993: 127).

Like Nietzsches foregrounding of the dynamic between Dionysus and Apollo, the antagonism and
dual between the irruption and passion of the symbolic against the principle of equivalence [even
in the form of what some might consider progressive such as the principle of equality in human rights,
democracy, law, etc.], is the wager Baudrillards work demands. We must venture that what haunts
the system is the symbolic demand (Baudrillard 1975: 147). Our bets should be cast with the gift as
inevitable, our very fate (Baudrillard 1997: 128). [D]eath does not gnaw at those who gamble writes
Bataille (Bataille 2001: 254).

Impact
Agonistic engagement must begin with a common point of stasis--pluralistic engagement allows us to channel violence into political
contestation
Brandon Turner 6, U Wisconsin-Madison Dept of Pol Sci, The Thrill of Victory, the Agony of Defeat:
The Nietzschean Vision of Contest,
www.lsu.edu/artsci/groups/voegelin/society/2006%20Papers/Brandon%20Turner.pdf

Agonistic democrats emphasize the role of the construction of identity/difference both external and internal to the democratic citizen
and suggest thatsince identity should be understood as fluid, other-positing, and constantly reshaping itself politics must be
understood as inescapably and inherently pluralistic. As a result, consensushowever it might be procuredis necessarily
incomplete, exclusionary, and potentially coercive. As consensus is reached, politics will always produce what Bonnie Honig calls remainders, which
proceduralists can account for only as independent, prepolitical, or apolitical artifacts.7 Consensus pushes dissenting identities and means of
expression to the margins of the political sphere without providing avenues of reentry consistent with the demands of authenticity.
To counter the tendency of democratic theorists, and political theorists generally, to minimize, marginalize, or attempt to cancel the possibility of
ineradicable difference and conflict, the agonists find new possibilities in the politics of the agon ( literally, competition or struggle also, the
root of agony). Agonistic politics is premised on conflict , dissonance, resistance, unceasing competition all of
which constitute what agonistic theorists believe to be the natural state of politics. Wolin defines politics (as opposed to the political) in precisely
this way: legitimized and public contestation, primarily by organized and unequal social powers, over access to the resources available to the public
authorities of the collectivitypolitics is continuous, ceaseless, and endless.8 These thinkers recall Hannah Arendts worries over the interplay
between truth and politics. For Arendt, the introduction of universal or objective truth (such as a procedurally-legitimated consensus) must bring about
the temporary suspension of the political sphere and likewise the suspension of freedom itself. Action and speech can only exist when their outcome
remains in question. The kind of truth sought after by philosophers since Plato only serves to cut off the possibility of action by cutting off the
uncertainty attached to it. Truth, in Arendts terms, is patently coercive and despotic: it necessarily eliminates the choices and possibilities that
comprise politics.9 Previously the connection between struggle and absolutes emerged in Nietzsches early essay Homers Contest, in which he
describes the original meaning of ostracism. Greek society, he points out, removed the greatest genius from the city because the undefeatable genius
represented the most dangerous threat to the continuation of the agon.10 The genius functions in the pre-Socratic Greek world as absolute truth
functions in Arendts thinking about politics: both deny the possibility of dissent and the continuing space for creation.
Agonists aim, therefore, to complicate the underlying binaries that work to preclude marginalized perspectives from reentering the political sphere:
us/them, identity/difference, home/foreign all must be problematized and destabilized if their contingent and artificially coercive nature is to be
revealed. To challenge these problematic consensuses, agonists

emphasize the need for new political spaces and for conflict and
struggle in the political sphere. For Mouffe, a well-functioning democracy calls for a vibrant
clash of democratic political positions, clashes which should normalize political strife and familiarize
citizens with a more democratic and less dangerous construction of Carl Schmitts friend/enemy
binary.11 Friends and enemies, like other us/them constructions, must be made fluid and temporary, since the aim of democratic
politics is to construct the them in such a way that it is no longer perceived as an enemy to be
destroyed, but as an adversary, that is, somebody whose ideas we combat but whose right to defend those ideas we do
not put into questionthis is the real meaning of liberal-democratic tolerance.12
Another way of describing the agonist project is through its particular vision of the paradox of politics.13 Writes Connolly of this paradox: The human
animal is essentially incomplete without social form; and a common language, institutional setting, set of traditions, and political forum for enunciating
public purposes are indispensable to the acquisition of an identity and the commonalities essential to life. But every form of social completion and
enablement also contains subjugations and cruelties within it. Politics, then, is the medium through which these ambiguities can be engaged and
confronted, shifted and stretched. It is simultaneously a medium through which common purposes are crystallized and the consummate means by
which their transcription into musical harmonies is exposed, contested, disturbed, and unsettled. A society that enables politics as this ambiguous
medium is a good society because it enables the paradox of difference to find expression in public life.14
The agonists key concern, then, is that the polity be aware of the incomplete nature of any social completion through an increased sensitivity to the
construction of identity/difference and the often invisible violence caused by (admittedly necessary) political consensus of any kind. The introduction of
the agon, then, implies that all social constructions are fair game: we must cultivate contestation (politics) everywhere in order to ensure the fluidity
required by the fact of pluralism. Though Honig, Mouffe, and Connolly take different routes to agonistic democracy (Honig through Arendt, Mouffe
through Wittgenstein, Connolly through Foucault and Nietzsche), they all three give similar recommendations on what an agonistic democracy should
look like: namely, more space. For Honig and Mouffe, this means multiplying the spaces in which politics is carried out, meaning both a proliferation of
physical spaces and mediums for political negotiation and a reconceptualization of the public/private distinction with an eye toward a more fluid
understanding of what counts and does not count as political. For Connolly, this means providing the individual the space necessary for free negotiation
of identity, a coercion-free zone in which one might arrive more autonomously at ones own notions of identity/difference.
Why involve Nietzsche at this point? First, because the agonists involve Nietzsche prominently at this point. For Connolly, Nietzsches pathos of
distance provides the basis for a fuller understanding of the fluidity of identity/difference construction, and for Honig Nietzsche urges the reclaiming of
a responsible subjectivity and the institutionalization of agonistic ostracism. Homers Contest figures heavily in both. Second, understanding
Nietzschethe father of post-modernismis instrumental in understanding the philosophical tradition of a politics of difference or diffrance, the
fountainhead of the agonistic wave.
Lastly, and most importantly, a proper conception of Nietzsches agon is essential in understanding just how far agonism has strayed from its vibrant
and terrible Greek origins. Contemporary democratic theory misuses and misunderstands the power and purpose of the agon, supposing it an
institution through which difference is rectified through its expression. In their formulation, the agon is the institution through which the ontological
claim for pluralism becomes a normative claim for tolerance. The answer to the question, Why tolerance? is simply: Because we are agonists. A look
at Nietzsche corrects this view in two ways: first, it suggests that from the fact of difference the claim for respect does not follow; and second, it reveals
that the agon is not an institution of respect. The

agon, in Nietzsches view, is the arena in which difference is felt,

experienced, lived. One comes to the agon, not out of respect, but out of a desire for disrespect: a desire to test oneself against another, to
order oneself vertically, hierarchically. This is the purview of the following essay. If Connolly believes that Foucault tames the problem of Nietzsches
heroic individualism, then my aim here is to expose the absurdity of an agon without heroes and the agon without Nietzsche.15

Homers Aesthetic Contest

The Homeric desire for contest arises, in

out of the prospect of the uninterrupted spectacle of a world of struggle and cruelty.16

In his early essay Homers Contest, Nietzsche gives his most sustained discussion of the Greek agon.

Nietzsches vision,
He praises the Greeks for their embrace of the inhumane aspects of humanity, an embrace that acknowledges that natural qualities and those called truly human are

The
Greeks here serve as a corrective to the flabby concept of modern humanity because they sanction the
earnest necessity to let their hatred flow forth fully.18 The Greeks are terrifyingly human.
Yet these Greeks shuddered at their own possibilities. Cruelty needed boundaries; efforts were needed to
control the proliferation of strife and death. If life was ruled only by the children of the Night:
strife, lust, deceit, old age, and death, then the realization of mans greatest danger might come
about: disgust with existencethe conception of this existence as a punishment and a penancethe belief
inseparably grown together.17 To be human, to act in this world as a human being, requires benevolence and cruelty, love and hate, the will to create and to destroy.

in the identity of existence and guilt.19 The Greeks reply to this quandaryworthy of Silenuswas to divide discord into good and evil forms.20 The
evil Eris was that form which pitted combatants against each other in battles of annihilation this in contrast to the good Eris, the one that, as
jealousy, hatred, and envy, spurs men to activity; not to the activity of fights of annihilation but to the activity of fights which are contests.21 Achilles
and Hector exchanged for Aeschylus and Euripides; Pericles for Socrates. From the beginning, then,

Nietzsche interprets the agon

as a channel for our destructive capacities.

Nietzsches agon exhibits a profoundly aesthetic dimension. His combatants are artists all of them: the poets Xenophanes, Homer, and Plato, the
musicians Pindar and Simonides, and the politicians Themistocles and Aristides.22 Artistic contests

enter as viable alternatives to

armed combat, and artists replace the warriors of old. Now the artist employs his craft against his fellow artists and the Greek knows the artist
only as engaged in a personal fight.23 The irresistible force of war is redirected into the artists object as it was previously routed from the warrior to
his enemy. In this way virtues are strengthened and greatness attained, because from war man emergesstronger for good and evil.24
The aesthetic dimension of Nietzsches agon warrants further examination. The Greek contest, as described in Homers Contest, shares potentially
instructive characteristics with Greek tragedy as described by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy. In Nietzsches understanding of tragedy, an opposition
is drawn between the Apollonian and Dionysian elements that coexist in the tragedian artist. The Apollonian is the element of boundaries, illusions,
and the principium individuationis it is the element of dreams through which the artist recreates the world in her own image.25 The Apollonian
artist is the sculptor who molds the raw materials of existence into a middle world between consciousness and the horror of the meaningless life as
the Greek Apollonians did in creating the Olympian god-world.26 To dream is to create a buffer against existence itself by forming lines and boundaries
between the dreamer and the shapeless chaos of the universe. Opposite this is the Dionysian element, the bringer of fervor and intoxication. Named
for the Greek god Dionysus god of wine and theatre the artist therein channels the primal, the primordial, the unified character of nature, for:
Under the charm of the Dionysian not only is the union between man and man reaffirmed, but nature which has become alienated, hostile, or
subjugated, celebrates once more her reconciliation with her lost son, manthe slave is a free man; now all the rigid, hostile barriers that necessity,
caprice, or impudent convention have fixed between man and man are broken. Now, with the gospel of universal harmony, each one feels himself not
only united, reconciled, and fused with his neighbor, but as one with him, as if the veil of maya had been torn aside and were now merely fluttering in
tatters before the mysterious primordial unity.27

The Apollonian and the Dionysian exist, then, as the two necessary aesthetic elements: as one
individuates, the other reunites; as one creates boundaries, the other transcends them; as one
orders, the other plays. Through a sublime unity of the two, the artist transcends existence if
but for a moment in an act of channeling what can only be described as primal humanity. Nietzsche

writes: Insofar as the subject is the artist, however, he has already been released from his individual will, and has become, as it were, the medium
through which the one truly existent subject celebrates his release in appearance. For to our humiliation and exaltation, one thing above all must be
clear to us. The entire comedy of art is neither performed for our betterment or education nor are we the true authors of the art world. On the contrary,
we may assume that we are merely images and artistic projections for the true author, and that we have our highest dignity in our significance as works
of art for it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justifiedOnly insofar as the genius in the act of artistic
creation coalesces with this primordial artist of the world, does he know anything of the eternal essence of art; for in this state he is, in a marvelous
manner, like the weird image of the fairy tale which can turn its eyes at will and behold itself; he is at once subject and object, at once poet, actor, and
spectator.28
The artist, at the moment of creation, transcends temporality and can behold herself as spectator (literally an out-of-body experience). To view
oneself as artistic phenomenon this is the purpose of the aesthetic and the only justification of existence. It is conceptually helpful to conceive of the
agon as aesthetic experience. Imagine

a wrestling match: it requires contestants, boundaries, and fervor.

Before the match can begin, boundaries must be drawn and the previously chaotic
landscape of the arena must be ordered and made concrete , an act of Apollonian
dreaming. The contestants pronounce this temporary suspension of reality this molding and
drawing of an unordered space into an ordered arena of contest through a set of
rules and boundaries . Once the illusion has been created, the contestants proceed to wrestle .
They come together in an act of primal physicality, struggling against each other with every ounce of their will. Both contestants wrestle from the same
instincts: the instinct to dominate and to exert power over an opponent, the instinct to philotimia (love of honor) and philonikia (love of victory).

Soon the boundaries drop away the technicalities that bound the fervor are forgotten in a
frenzy of contest as the combatants, the wrestling circle, and the arena and spectators are all caught in a moment
of exhilaration. The match is over winners and losers are declared, the contestants re-separate themselves and exit the arena. Existence
returns where an aesthetic thrill had appeared only moments before. If one can conceive of the agon in this way, it becomes clear that it
shares with the aesthetic experience the character of bounded fervor. If the combatant is the artist and the

aesthete is the warrior, then one might make further instructive correlations between Nietzsches conceptions of the aesthetic and agonistic. One might
come to understand how the Greeks poetized in order to conquer.29

2NC Predictability Bad Double-Turn

Breaking down predictability is self-defeating and impossible---pure
creativity requires the existence of constraints--- retaining some
degree of predictability enables creativity within those constraints
without pre-scripting every debate
Paul Armstrong 2k, Professor of English and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the State
University of New York at Stony Brook, Winter 2000, The Politics of Play: The Social Implications of
Iser's Aesthetic Theory, New Literary History, Vol. 31, No. 1, p. 211-223

Such a play-space also opposes the notion that the only alternative to the coerciveness of consensus must be to advocate the sublime powers of rulebreaking. 8 Iser shares Lyotard's concern that to privilege harmony and agreement in a world of heterogeneous language games is to limit their play
and to inhibit semantic innovation and the creation of new games. Lyotard's endorsement of the "sublime"-- the

pursuit of the "unpresentable" by

rebelling against restrictions, defying norms, and smashing the limits of existing paradigms--is
undermined by contradictions, however, which Iser's explication of play recognizes and addresses. The paradox of the
unpresentable, as Lyotard acknowledges, is that it can only be manifested through a game of representation . The
sublime is, consequently, in Iser's sense, an instance of doubling. If violating norms creates new games , this
crossing of boundaries depends on and carries in its wake the conventions and structures it oversteps. The
sublime may be uncompromising, asocial, and unwilling to be bound by limits , but its pursuit of what is
not contained in any order or system makes it dependent on the forms it opposes . [End Page 220]
The radical presumption of the sublime is not only terroristic in refusing to recognize the
claims of other games whose rules it declines to limit itself by . It is also naive and selfdestructive in its impossible imagining that it can do without the others it opposes. As a structure of
doubling, the sublime pursuit of the unpresentable requires a play-space that includes other, less radical games
with which it can interact. Such conditions of exchange would be provided by the nonconsensual
reciprocity of Iserian play.
Iser's notion of play offers a way of conceptualizing power which acknowledges the necessity and

force of disciplinary constraints without seeing them as unequivocally coercive

and determining. The contradictory combination of restriction and openness in how play deploys
power is evident in Iser's analysis of "regulatory" and "aleatory" rules. Even the regulatory rules, which set down the conditions participants submit
to in order to play a game, "permit

a certain range of combinations while also establishing a

code of possible play. .

. . Since

these rules limit the text game without producing it, they are regulatory but not prescriptive .

They do no more than set the aleatory in motion , and the aleatory rule differs from the regulatory in that it has no
code of its own" (FI 273). Submitting to the discipline of regulatory restrictions is both constraining and
enabling because it makes possible certain kinds of interaction that the rules cannot completely
predict or prescribe in advance. Hence the existence of aleatory rules that are not codified as part of the game itself but are the variable
customs, procedures, and practices for playing it. Expert

facility with aleatory rules marks the difference, for example, between
someone who just knows the rules of a game and another who really knows how to play it . Aleatory rules are
more flexible and open-ended and more susceptible to variation than regulatory rules, but they too are characterized by a

contradictory combination of constraint and possibility, limitation and

unpredictability, discipline and spontaneity.

CP

A2 PDCP
Severs sale---the CP is distinct
CIROD 6, Committee on Increasing Rates of Organ Donation, edited by James F. Childress, John

Allen Hollingsworth Professor of Ethics and Professor of Medical Education at the University of Virginia,
Director of the Institute for Practical Ethics & Public Life at the University of Virginia, PhD from Yale, and
Catharyn T. Liverman, Organ Donation: Opportunities for Action, p 10-11,

A
financial incentive is the provision of something of material value to motivate consent for organ
removal. For example, a direct payment could be made in exchange for the organ, with
the price for the organ determined by the free market or set by regulatory authorities. In either case, the
exchange of money for organs would constitute a purchase and sale. Alternatively,
financial incentives might be used to induce donations, just as the prospect of a tax deduction is
used to induce charitable contributions. Such incentives might be a cash payment usable for
any purpose; a cash payment earmarked for a specific purpose, such as funeral expenses or a charitable
contribution; or a material good or service , such as bereavement counseling or health insurance. The financial
The committee was asked to examine the use of financial and nonfinancial incentives to increase the supply of organs from deceased donors.

incentive could go to the donor before death or to the donors estate after death in exchange for the donors agreement to allow his or her organs to be
recovered after death. In situations in which the donors family makes the decision to donate, the incentive could go to the family.

Nonfinancial incentives to donate could take the form of community recognition or

preferential access to donated organs.

Severs legalize---the CP leaves existing bans in place

Mark S. Nadel 5, J.D., Attorney at the Federal Communications Commission, and Caroline A. Nadel,

M.D., consultant on medical informatics, Using Reciprocity To Motivate Organ Donations, Yale J Health
Policy Law Ethics. 2005 Winter; 5(1):293-325, https://www.lifesharers.org/articles/nadel.pdf

concern may be that a preference might be considered valuable consideration for an organ
donation, which arguably would violate the current law,130 but that seems very unlikely for two reasons.
First, as a technical matter, there would be no actual exchange of organ for value . The deceased
parties who actually donated their organs would not receive any compensation and those
who benefited from the preference would not have donated their organs.131 Second, prosecutors and legal counsel for UNOS already
seem to recognize that the ban on compensation for organ donors does not apply to the current
UNOS policy of rewarding live kidney donors (or paired partners) with a preference,132 and both should
regard this policy the same way.133 Still, to avoid any confusion, laws that now ban compensation for organs should be amended to add this form of
A third

reciprocity/insurance to the list already exempted from such bans.134

AT: CP Doesnt Solve

Presumed Consent engages the question of the relation between life
and death no less than does the Aff notion of Legalization both offer
up the gift of death. The Affs statement that you ought to affirm the
gift of death supersedes the differences between Presumed Consent
and Legalization, which proves you should vote Neg on the strength of
the Net Benefit even if they convince you that the Net Benefit alone
operates on a lower register than the mystery of death.
Scheper-Hughes votes neg (blue highlighting) proves were not
second level simulation
ScheperHughes 2k (Nancy ScheperHughes is Professor of Anthropology at the University of
California, Berkeley, The Global Traffic in Human Organs, Current Anthropology, Vol. 41, No. 2, April
2000, DOI: 10.1086/300123

Death is, of course, another key word in transplantation. The possibility of extending life through
transplantation was facilitated by medical definitions of irreversible coma (at the end of the 1950s)
and brainstem death (at the end of the 1960s), when death became an epiphenomenon of
transplantation. Here one sees the awesome power of the life sciences and medical technology
over modern states. In the age of transplant surgery, life and death are replaced with
surrogates, proxies, and facsimiles, and ordinary people have relinquished the power to
determine the moment of death, which now requires technical and legal expertise beyond their
ability (see Agamben 1998:165).7 Additionally, the new biotechnologies have thrown conventional
Western thinking about ownership of the dead body in relation to the state into doubt. Is the
Enlightenment notion of the body as the unique property of the individual still viable in light of
the many competing claims on human tissues and genetic material by the state and by commercial
pharmaceutical and biotechnology research companies (see Rabinow 1996, Curran 1991, Neves 1993)?
Can it exist in the presence of the claims of modern states , including Spain, Belgium, and, now,
Brazil to complete authority over the disposal of bodies, organs, and tissues at death? What kind
of state assumes rights to the bodies of both those presumed to be dead and those presumed to have given
consent to organ harvesting (see Shiva 1997, Berlinger and Garrafa 1996)? Since the passage of the new
compulsory donation law in Brazil, one hears angry references to the dead person as the state's body.
Certainly, both the family and the church have lost control over it. While most doctors have worked
through their own doubts about the new criteria for brain death, a great many ordinary people still resist
it. Brainstem death is not an intuitive or commonsense perception ; it is far from obvious to family
members, nursing staff, and even some medical specialists. The language of brain death is

replete with indeterminacy and contradiction . Does brain death anticipate somatic
death? Should we call it, as Agamben does, the death that precedes death (1998:163)? What
is the relation between the time of technically declared brain death and the deadline for harvesting usable
organs? In a 1996 interview, a forensic pathologist attached to the Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town,
where Christiaan Barnard experimented with the first heart transplants, vehemently rejected the medical
concept of brain death: There are only two organic states: living and dead. Dead is when the heart stops
beating and organs decompose. Braindead is not dead. It is still alive. Doctors know better, and
they should speak the truth to family members and to themselves. They could, for example, approach
family members saying, Your loved one is beyond any hope of recovery. Would you allow us to turn off
the machines that are keeping him or her in a liminal state somewhere between life and death so that we
can harvest the organs to save another person's life? Then it would be ethical. Then it would be an honest
transaction. Dr. Cicero Galli Coimbra of the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at the Federal
University of So Paulo, where he also directs the Laboratorio de Neurologia Experimental, has written

several scientific papers questioning the validity of the criteria established in 1968 by the Ad Hoc
Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death. During interviews
with me in 1998, Coimbra reiterated his claims, backed by his own research and his clinical work, that
brainstem death, as currently defined, is applied to a number of patients whose lives could be saved.
Moreover, he claims that apnea testing as widely used to determine brainstem death actually
induces irreversible brain damage. All the socalled confirmatory tests, he said, reflect nothing
more than the detrimental effects of doctorinduced intercranial circulatory arrest. Coimbra, who refused
anonymity, is a major critic of Brazil's new compulsory donation law, which he sees as an assault on his
clinical population of braintraumatized patients. The body may be defined as braindead for one

purposeorgan retrievalwhile still perceived as alive for other purposes including family ties,
affections, religious beliefs, or notions of individual dignity.8 Even when somatic death is
obvious to family members and loved ones, the perceptual shift from the dead bodythe recently
departed, the beloved deceased, our dearly departed brotherto the anonymous and
depersonalized cadaver (as usable object and reservoir of spare parts) may take more than the
pressured technical time allowed to harvest organs usable for transplantation . But as the
retrieval time is extended with new conservation methods, the confusion and doubt of family members
may increase. The gift of life demands a parallel giftthe gift of death, the giving over
of life before its normally recognized time. In the language of anthropology, brainstem death is social,
not biological, death, and every gift demands a return (Mauss 1966). To Coimbra and some
of his colleagues, brainstem death has created a population of living dead people. It has yet to be
embraced as common sense even in a great many industrialized societies, including Japan, Brazil, and the
United States (see Kolata 1995), let alone in countries where transplant surgery is still rare. And yet the
public unrest in Brazil following passage of the country's new presumedconsent law in 1997 is an
exception to the general rule of public apathy toward the state's assumption of control over the dead body.
Transplant surgeons often explain popular resistance in terms of a cultural time lag that prevents ordinary
people from accepting the changes brought about by new medical technologies. While the postmodern
state has certainly expanded its control over death (see Agamben 1998:11925) through recent
advances in biotechnology, genetics, and biomedicine, there are many antecedents to consider.
The Comaroffs (1992), for example, showed the extent to which British colonial regimes in Africa
relied on medical practices to discipline and civilize newly colonized peoples. The African

colonies became laboratories for experiments with medical sciences and public health practices.
And the medical experiments under National Socialism produced, through applied eugenics and
death sentencing, a concentrationcamp population of walking cadavers, living
dead people (Agamben 1998:136) whose lives could be taken without explanation or justification.
Agamben dares to compare these slave bodies to the living dead candidates for organ donation
held hostage to the machine in today's intensive care units.

AT: DA Impact Bad Death

Give people the choice to decide if disease is good or bad for them
Craig Paterson 3, Department of Philosophy, Providence College, Rhode Island A Life Not Worth
Living?, Studies in Christian Ethics, http://sce.sagepub.com
In determining whether a life is worth living or not, attention should be focused upon an array
of interests of the person, and these, for the competent patient at least, are going to vary considerably, since they will be

informed by the patients underlying dispositions, and, for the incompetent, by a minimal quality threshold. It follows that for competent patients,

Different
patients may well decide differently. That is the prerogative of the patient, for the only unpalatable
alternative is to force a patient to stay alive. For Harris, life can be judged valuable or not when the person assessing his
or her own life determines it to be so. If a person values his or her own life, then that life is
valuable , precisely to the extent that he or she values it. Without any real capacity to value, there can be no
value. As Harris states, . . . the value of our lives is the value we give to our lives. It follows that the primary injustice done to a
person is to deprive the person of a life he or she may think valuable . Objectivity in the value of human
life, for Harris, essentially becomes one of negative classification (ruling certain people out of consideration for value), allied positively to a
broad range of critical interests; interests worthy of pursuing friendships, family, life goals, etc. which
are subjected to de facto self-assessment for the further determination of meaningful value. Suicide,
a broad-ranging assessment of quality of life concerns is the trump card as to whether or not life continues to be worthwhile.

assisted suicide, and voluntary euthanasia, can therefore be justified, on the grounds that once the competent nature of the person making the
decision has been established, the thoroughgoing commensuration between different values, in the form of interests or preferences, is essentially
left up to the individual to determine for himself or herself.

Case

Debate Solves
Choosing to move beyond illusion is necessary for developing an
effective response against suffering and oppression --- instead
wordplay as a strategy, the preeminent role of politics should be to
reform the policymaking institutions that are behind the production
of simulation
Steven Best 97, Assoc Professor and Chair of Philosophy at U-Texas, El Paso and Douglas Kellner,
chair in the philosophy of education at UCLA, The Postmodern Turn, 1997, 112-113
Hence, we

subscribe to Debord's Hegelian-Marxian distinction between appearance and

reality and the need for critical thought to continue to probe behind
appearances. Whereas Baudrillard surrenders to the surface of the simulacrum, Debord
maintains a commitment to critical hermeneutics, attempting to get at the roots of
human suffering and oppression through analysis of the capitalist mode of production and reproduction.
Just as Marx discovered congealed human value in the commodity form, and from there identified the whole social basis of
exploitation, Debord critically deciphers the congealed image object, the spectacle; penetrates its reified surface; and

situates it within its context of social and historical relations . Although he maps out an
advanced stage of reification, Debord argues that no object is fully opaque or inscrutable, standing outside of a social context
that it cannot ultimately refer to, betray, and be interpreted against.
Where Debord's strategy reminds us of the ultimately antagonistic, con-flictual, and contradictory aspects of a social reality
open to critique and transformation, Baudrillard's radical rejection of referentiality is

premised upon a one-dimensional, No-Exit world of self-referring simulacra .

Baudrillard is right: "Reality" has become increasingly difficult to identify in "the empire of signs."
But however reified and self-referential postmodern semiotics is, signs do not simply move

in their own signifying orbit. They are historically produced and circulated,
and though they may not translucently refer to some originating world, they nonetheless can be
sociohistorically contextualized, interpreted, and criticized . Thus, even Warhol's
"Diamond Dust Shoes" and other paradigms of postmodern flatness, seemingly purely self-referential (see Jameson, 1991),
ultimately refer to a whole world, one, in this case, of advanced commodification and of the assimilation of art to media
culture and the market (see Chapter 4).
Through Debord's work, we can grasp a point of singular importance: Self-referentiality does not entail hyperreality. Signs,
images, and objects are not inscrutable and hermetic simply because they no longer stand within a classical space of
representation. It is not that one signifier brings us a "real" world and another doesn't but that one occludes a larger social
context more than does another, that contextualization may be more difficult in one case than in another. However selfreferential and abstract the signifiers, a critical hermeneutics can uncover their repressed or mystified social content and
social relations.13

Moreover, in a sense, Baudrillard's hyperreality is itself an illusion , the projection of a realerthan-real, constructed by the powers that be to obscure the deprivations, ugliness, and
oppressiveness of social reality. Critical hermeneutics can always uncover the constructedness of
the hyperreal, which is, after all, nothing more than a construct and model of the real; the
hyperreal can always be contextualized, deconstructed, and unmasked . Indeed,
the hyperreal is a challenge to critical hermeneutics to see precisely what realities

and interests lie behind it, how it is constructed, and what it is concealing and
mystifying and why.
Debord is right then to insist that "the spectacle is not [just] a collection of images, but a social
relation among people, mediated by images" (#4). While Debord did not provide as powerful an account of
postmodern media and signification as did Baudrillard, he correctly insists that the spectacle is "the other side of money"
(#34) and so of capitalist social relations. For Baudrillard, however, the sign develops according to its own autonomous
logic, and his one-sided analysis is decontextualizing and depoliticizing, serving to exonerate the "captains of consciousness"
and media moguls of the present.
While critical hermeneutics does not posit a Ding-an-sich discoverable beyond a historical horizon and unmediated by
ideology or language, it rightly tries to recover the distinction between reality and illusion as the
preliminary basis for a sociopolitical criticism. It is the work of the culture industry to erase this distinction, and
it should be the task of radical criticism to recover it, requiring a reconstructed notion of "representation." Though
Baudrillard cogently problematizes certain realist views of representation (e.g., those developed in the 17th century, which

see language as the "mirror of nature"; see Foucault, 1973; Rorty, 1979) or the realist fictions of our present-day media, he
wrongly rejects the illuminating potential of other forms of "representation," such as Jameson (1988, 1991) has attempted to
develop in his notion of "cognitive mapping." And while Baudrillard illuminates recent mutations in the sign brought on by
media and advertising (which Foucault has failed to consider; see Baudrillard, 1986), he mystifies media culture by severing
its dynamics from political economy and current political struggles.

To pass from the collapse of the classical episteme to the thesis of radical simulation and implosion,
from the fragmentation of meaning to the "end of meaning," is far too hasty a move and
obscures the ways in which we still can and must configure our world, not in an act of pictured
reflection but, rather, in a theoretical and critical analysis that attempts to grasp

the constitutive relations of society and to decode their ideological

operations. In a critical hermeneutics, the surface appearance of things is
unmasked to reveal not the "real" itself, which remains a dialectically mediated
category, but the social forces behind these appearances : the actors , groups , policy
makers , spin doctors, and institutions still identifiable and subject to a critically
informed resistance. This suggests that "simulation" can be critically
deconstructed and resolved into "dissimulation," an activity that reveals simulation to be
wholly constructed, serving the interests of specific social groups and hiding certain alternative
realities.

AT: Meaning Saturation

If they are right that our actions and intellects are poisoned by an
oversaturation with information, how do they propose to free us from
that? It is not just information that mattersthe context and content
of information is VITAL to our understanding and strategies of
resistance. The 1ACs seductive play undermines the ideological
commitments of information saturation because it explicitly refuses
to engage with them---they make the problem worse
Douglas Kellner 3, George F. Kneller Philosophy of Education Chair in the Graduate School of
Education at UCLA, Baudrillard: A New McLuhan?, Illuminations, 2003,
http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell26.htm

Undoubtedly, the media are playing an ever greater role in our personal and social lives, and have dramatically transformed
our economy, polity, and society in ways that we are only now becoming aware of. Living within a great transformation,
perhaps as significant as the transformation from feudalism to industrial capitalism, we are engaged in a process of dramatic
mutation, which we are barely beginning to understand, as we enter the brave new world of media saturation,
computerization, new technologies, and new discourses. Baudrillard's contribution lies in his calling attention to these
novelties and transformations and providing new concepts and theories to understand them.
Yet doubts remain as to whether the media are having quite the impact that

Baudrillard ascribes to them and whether his theory provides adequate concepts to analyze the complex
interactions between media, culture, and society today. In this section, I shall suggest that Baudrillard's media theory is
vitiated by three subordinations which undermine its theoretical and political usefulness and which raise questions as well
about the status of postmodern social theory. I shall suggest that the limitations in Baudrillard's theory can be
related to his uncritical assumption of certain positions within McLuhan's media theory and that therefore
earlier critiques of McLuhan can accurately and usefully be applied to Baudrillard. This critique will suggest that indeed
Baudrillard is a "new McLuhan" who has repackaged McLuhan into new postmodern cultural capital.
First, in what might be called a formalist subordination, Baudrillard, like McLuhan, privileges the form of media
technology over what might be called the media apparatus, and thus subordinates content, meaning, and the use
of media to its purely formal structure and effects. Baudrillard -- much more so than McLuhan who at least
gives some media history and analysis of the media environment -- tends to abstract media form and effects from

the media environment and thus erases political economy, media production, and
media environment (i.e. society

as large) from his theory. Against abstracting media form and effects
and effects of media should be carefully examined
and evaluated in terms of specific contexts. Distinctions between context and use, form
from context, I would argue that the use

and content, media and reality, all dissolve, however, in Baudrillard's one-dimensional
theory where global theses and glib pronouncements replace careful analysis and critique .
Baudrillard might retort that it is the media themselves which abstract from the concreteness of everyday, social, and
political life and provide abstract simulacra of actual events which themselves become more real than "the real" which they
supposedly represent. Yet even if this is so, media analysis should attempt to recontextualize media images
and simulacra rather than merely focusing on the surface of media form. Furthermore, instead of
operating with a model of (formal) media effects, I would argue that it is preferable to operate with a dialectical perspective
which posits multiple roles and functions to television and other media.
Another problem is that Baudrillard's formalism vitates the project of ideology critique, and against
his claims that media content are irrelevant and unimportant, I would propose grasping the dialectic of form and content in
media communication, seeing how media forms constitute content and how content is always formed or structured, while
forms themselves can be ideological, as when the situation comedy form of conflict/resolution projects an ideological vision
which shows all problems easily capable of being resolved within the existing society, or when action-adventure series
formats of violent conflict as the essence of reality project a conservative view of human life as a battleground where only the
fittest survive and prosper.[12] For a dialectical theory of the media, television would have multiple functions (and potential
decodings) where sometimes the ideological effects may be predominant while at other times time functions a medium like
television functions as mere noise or through the merely formal effects which Baudrillard puts at the center of his analysis.

Consequently, there is no real theory or practice of cultural interpretation in Baudrillard's media

(increasingly anti-)theory, which also emanates an anti-hermeneutical bias that denies the
importance of content and is against interpretation.[13] This brings us to a second subordination in

Baudrillard's theory in which a more dialectical position is subordinated to media essentialism and technological
determinism. For -- according to Baudrillard -- it is the technology of, say, television that determines its effects (one-way
transmission, semiurgy, implosion, extermination of meaning and the social) rather than any particular content or message

(i.e. for both Baudrillard and McLuhan "the media is the message"), or its construction or use within specific social systems.
For Baudrillard, media technology and semiurgy are the demiurges of media practices and effects, separated from their uses
by specific economic and political interests, individuals and groups, and the social systems within which they function.
Baudrillard thus abstracts media from social systems and essentializes media technology as dominant social forces. Yet
against Baudrillard, one could argue that capital continues to be a primary determinant of media form and content in neocapitalist societies just as state socialism helps determine the form, nature, and effects of technologies in certain state
socialist societies.
Baudrillard, like McLuhan, often makes essentializing distinctions between media like television or film, ascribing a
particular essence to one, and an opposed essence to the other. Yet it seems highly problematical to reduce apparatuses as
complex, contradictory, and many-sided as television (or film or any mass medium) to its formal properties and effects, or to
a technological essence. It is therefore preferable, for theories of media in the capitalist societies, to see the media as
syntheses of technology and capital, as technologies which serve specific interests and which have specific political and
economic effects (rather than merely technological ones). It is also preferable to see the dialectic between media and society
in specific historical conjunctures, to see how social content, trends, and imperatives help constitute the media which in turn
influence social developments and help constitute social reality.

For Baudrillard, by contrast, the media today simply constitute a simulated, hyperreal, and obscene
(in his technical sense) world(view), and a dialectic of media and society is shortcircuited in a new
version of technological determinism. The political implications of this analysis are that
constituting alternative media, or alternative uses or forms of existing media, is useless or worse
because media in their very essence for him militate against emancipatory politics or any project of
social transformation. Such cynical views, however, primarily benefit conservative
interests who presently control the media in their own interests -- a point to
which I shall soon return.

AT: Simulacra
Their theory of illusion is overstated: we are not lost in a world of
total illusion; instead, we understand that simulacra are produced by
concrete and contestable institutions---debate allows us to be effective
Mitchell Hobbs 7, Lecturer and PhD Candidate (Sociology and Anthropology), The University of
Newcastle, Australia, REFLECTIONS ON THE REALITY OF THE IRAQ WARS: THE DEMISE OF
BAUDRILLARDS SEARCH FOR TRUTH?, Fall, 2007,
http://www.tasa.org.au/conferences/conferencepapers07/papers/379.pdf
As has been noted by Barry Smart (2000) (and others), Baudrillards theorising, which has its roots
in neo-Marxism, eventually led him to the proposition that if current sociological critique was
incapable of ascertaining truth because reality was being superseded by de-contextualised images
(or, rather, signs), then a new system of social inquiry was needed, one capable of breaking out of
the endless cycle of simulacra and the intellectual inertia brought about by the meta-physical
dead end of capitalism. To this end, Baudrillard sought to employ a fatal strategy or fatal theory,
where he could highlight the deceptions of hyper-reality by pushing them into a more real than
real situation, to force them into a clear over-existence which is incompatible with that of the
real (Baudrillard cited in Smart, 2000:464). Accordingly, by claiming that the Gulf War did not
take place, Baudrillard was seeking to push our thinking of this event beyond the orthodox political
economic approach, in order to draw attention to the simulated nature of the news media and to
the antithetical consequences of this seemingly endless use and reproduction of images and
simplistic narratives deprived of socio-historic contexts.
2.2 BRIDGING THE REALITY GULF: FROM BAUDRILLARD TO KELLNER
Although Baudrillards work on simulation and simulacra is valuable in highlighting the
relationship between the mass media and reality, and, in particular, the ways in which media
content (images and narratives) come to be de-contextualised, his theses are per se
insufficient for the analysis of the contemporary mass media. For instance, as
media theorist and researcher Douglas Kellner (2003:31) notes, beyond the level of media
spectacle, Baudrillard does not help readers understand events such as the Gulf War, because he

reduces the actions of actors and complex political issues to categories of

simulation and hyper-reality, in a sense erasing their concrete
determinants.
Kellner, who like Baudrillard, has written extensively on media spectacles, including the Gulf Wars,
sees Baudrillards theory as being one-dimensional, privilege[ing] the form of media technology
over its content, meaning anduse (Kellner, 1989:73). In this regard, Baudrillard does not account
for the political economic dimensions of the news media, nor the cultural practices involved
with the production of news (Kellner, 1989:73-74). Thus, he suffers from the same technologically
deterministic essentialism that undermined the media theories of Marshall McLuhan, albeit in a
different form (Kellner, 1989:73-74). Although Kellner (2003:32) believes that Baudrillards pre1990s works on the consumer society, on the political economy of the sign, simulation and
simulacra, and the implosion of [social] phenomenon are useful and can be deployed within
critical social theory, he prefers to read Baudrillards later, more controversial and obscure, work as
science fiction which anticipates the future by exaggerating present tendencies.
In order to understand war and its relationship with the media in the
contemporary era it is, then, necessary to move beyond Baudrillards spectacular
theory of media spectacle. For although our culture is resplendent with images,
signs and narratives, circulating in a seemingly endless dance of mimicry (or, rather, simulacra),

there are observable social institutions and practices producing this semiotic
interplay.
Although all that is solid might melt into air (Marx and Engles, 2002:223), appearances and
illusions are not an end for sociological analysis, but are rather a seductive invitation

to further social inquiry. As the research of Douglas Kellner (1992; 1995; 2005) has shown,
when media spectacles are dissected by critical cultural analysis, re-contextualisation is possible.
Images and narratives can be traced back to their sources: whether they lie in Hollywood
fantasies or government spin. In short, by assessing the veracity of competing
texts , war (as understood by media audiences) can be re-connected to its antecedents
and consequences. Indeed, through wrestling with the ideological spectres of myth and
narrative, and by searching widely for critically informed explanations of

different events, the social sciences can acquire an understanding of the

truthfulness of media representations; of the authentic in a realm
bewildered by smoke and mirrors. As long as there are competing media voices on
which to construct a juxtaposition of truths, sociologists can, to a certain extent, force
the media to grapple with their own disparate reflections.