UDL’s 1AC

UDL = Urban Debate League(s)

 1AC: Decadence in Debate
Contention 1 is Decadence in Debate
The debate community is closing itself off. Debate is dead and dying as national circuit
praxis shuts out low income, minority and female viewpoints, thus ensuring lasting
social homogeneity.
Hanes 07 - (RUSSELL T., A VOLUNTEER FOR THE NEW YORK AND SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA URBAN
DEBATE LEAGUES, "POPULARIZING DEBATE AN EQUITY STRATEGY", THE ROSTRUM – VOLUME 81
NUMBER 6) (T. Russell Hanes received his M.S. in Communication Studies from Portland State in 2006.
He has helped both the NY and southern California Urban Debate Leagues, winning the IMPACT
Coalition’s Legacy Award (2000) for volunteerism. He has helped organize three non-profit debate
workshops in Oregon, and he donated Debating Policies to the NFL community.) //Elmer

A better explanation is that the 1970s saw the emergence of the back-to-basics movement, which cut co-
curricular speech classes, hired new teachers of “basic” subjects while superannuating teachers of
“extras” such as art and debate, and generally denied the place of rhetoric in the liberal arts canon.
Programs folded, and never returned. The national circuit emerged in response to these events but did not cause
them, despite what Miller posits. Neither a new style nor a new format will address the root causes of
declining NFL membership. Miller blames the debate community for creating exclusionary norms
around the activity, which is unfair because many of the pressures that limit participation to a few well-to-do
schools were given to the debate community by inequalities in the education system as a whole. The
style of debate may affect which students participate —and increasing participation, especially minority
participation, is important to consider—but style does not affect how many schools participate. There
are substantive problems facing debate programs that no amount of new rules are capable of solving .
After all, the rules only determine what happens in the round, not what the school district and principal do
before the tournament. In other words, I believe Miller overestimates how many real world inequalities can be
rectified with a new debate style or theory . However, the question whether or not Miller’s particular diagnosis is true is less
relevant than his passion for raising these issues explicitly. He is at his strongest when he says that educational inequality is
something that debate coaches need to confront : that few under-funded public schools participate is a
real, moral challenge. Coaches of good faith may disagree about what an ideal debate round looks like, but all coaches can agree
that a student at a high school without an NFL program is at a serious educational disadvantage. The terrible
irony is that students most in need of engagement in education (through exciting extra-curricular activities
like debate) are the least likely to have such options available . What is needed from coaches is collective
action to address one of the substantive inequalities in education—to give more students the
opportunity to participate in the NFL through their school. Currently, only 9% of high schools are members of
the NFL. The current NFL strategy is passive, serving only schools that chose to join, which has lead to this situation. I think Miller underplays
how core a problem this is: reforming the community (making it more populist) is less urgent than expanding it (making it more populous ).
The new strategy must be active, bringing in new schools —horizontal proliferation—and helping small
programs grow bigger—vertical proliferation. This unified effort might use the “regional office” model being developed at
Western Kentucky University or the Urban Debate League model. Because small programs have fewer resources than established ones, and
because new schools are more likely to come from minority communities than current members, any new strategy must be, by definition, an
“equity” strategy. To be blunt, equity issues are survival issues for the debate community.
The attempts made by the urban debate league to open up the debate space are shut
out. UDL programs are relegated to the backburner even though they have proven
successful at increasing alternative methods and minority participation in the debate
space. All embrace of difference is violently repressed.
Warner and Bruschke 01 - (Dr. Ede Warner associate professor of communication and director of
debate and Dr. Jon Bruschke debate coach at CSU, Fullerton and an Associate Professor in the Human
Communication Studies Department) “GONE ON DEBATING:” COMPETITIVE ACADEMIC DEBATE AS A
TOOL OF EMPOWERMENT FOR URBAN
AMERICA http://commfaculty.fullerton.edu/jbruschke/Papers/Debate%20as%20a%20Tool%20of
%20empowerment.htm //Elmer

Given the possibilities an urban debate program presents, it is worth examining the practical possibilities
for a revitalization of urban debate. One thing is clear: Urban debate is under-utilized at present . Many
urban debate programs died in the late sixties and early seventies as the result of massive budget cuts.
As tax revenues diminished in educational coffers, debate programs, always treated as just one of the “extracurricular”
activities, got lost in efforts to stop the institutional bleeding by “doing more with less.” While college debate is
more vibrant, as early as 1975 major college debate organizations were acknowledging the lack of diversity in intercollegiate forensics. Little has
changed over the past twenty-five years; minority participation remains exceptionally low at the two major national
policy debate tournaments, the Cross Examination Debate Association championship and the National
Debate Tournament (Hill, 1997; Stepp, 1997) There has been some discussion about the reasons that current academic debate
fails to include participants of all stripes. Loge (1998) maintains that the perception of debate as a white activity is
one deterrent for black students. Hill (1997) argues that cultural communication differences hurt efforts
at motivating African-American participation. Cirlin (1997) contends that the style in academic debate
turns people off in general, and we need to consider sociological approaches to changing the nature of
the activity. Cirlin believes that the rapid rate of delivery, the extreme emphasis on research, and the technical nature of the “game” serve
to destroy the rhetorical usefulness of the event, he argues. However, Brand (1997) argues that criticism over format acts to shield
discussions about the benefits of forensic participation . We agree with Brand, and believe that one primary reason
for the lack of minority participation is that high schools remain segregated, and because race and class
lines overlap to a large extent the minority students attending impoverished high schools often simply
fail to have debate available to them. At the very least, there is not a conscious effort to encourage students ,
especially under-achieving students, to participate in debate . The advent of new Urban Debate Leagues demonstrates that when
debate opportunities exist in under-served high schools students tend to flock to them. Two seminal programs
that can provide a model for success exist in Detroit and Atlanta. Detroit has the longest running contemporary urban debate policy
league. Created in 1984, the Detroit Urban Debate League was initiated as part of a plan to expand opportunities for the city’s “Gifted and
Talented” (Ziegelmueller, 1998). In partnership with Wayne State University, the Detroit Urban League (UDL) offered summer scholarships and a
city league, culminated in a city championship. The program in Atlanta has been spearheaded by Emory University and has been tremendously
successful. Emory partnered with the Soros Foundation’s Open Society Institute (OSI) early in their efforts; based on the Emory experience, the
OSI has expanded its debate outreach programs and now sponsors Urban Debate Leagues in 10 different cities (including Detroit). One such
program exists in New York, which was able to generate a fifteen team league in it’s first year of existence. The program was a success in every
level: Traditionally
at-risk students reported marked improvements in school, the popularity of these
debate programs grew in each participating school, and some students received debate scholarships at colleges and
universities around the country. This season, OSI expanded the program to an additional fifteen schools and generated donations and sponsors
which offered first year UDL students the opportunity to continue instruction at summer camp. For example, the Universities of Iowa, Michigan,
and Northwestern all gave full scholarships to UDL students demonstrating financial need and competitive success.
The current model of debate, which forces debaters to assume the position of
spectators who can do nothing to influence politics, destroys the agency and political
praxis of participants.
Mitchell 98 - (Gordon, debate coach and professor), “pedagogical possibilities for argumentative
agency in academic debate,” argumentation and advocacy, 1998, pg. 43-44.) //Elmer

While an isolated academic space that affords students an opportunity to learn in a protected
environment has significant pedagogical value (see e.g. Coverstone 1995, p. 8-9), the notion of the academic
debate tournament as a sterile laboratory carries with it some disturbing implications, when the
metaphor is extended to its limit . To the extent that the academic space begins to take on characteristics of a
laboratory, the barriers demarcating such a space from other spheres of deliberation beyond the school
grow taller and less permeable. When such barriers reach insurmountable dimensions, argumentation in the academic setting
unfolds on a purely simulated plane, with students practicing critical thinking and advocacy skills in
strictly hypothetical thought-spaces. Although they may research and track public argument as it
unfolds outside the confines of the laboratory for research purposes, in this approach , students witness
argumentation beyond the walls of the academy as spectators , with little or no apparent recourse to directly participate
or alter the course of events (see Mitchell 1995; 1998). The sense of detachment associated with the spectator posture
is highlighted during episodes of alienation in which debaters cheer news of human suffering or
misfortune. Instead of focusing on the visceral negative responses to news accounts of human death and
misery, debaters overcome with the competitive zeal of contest round competition show a tendency to
concentrate on the meanings that such evidence might hold for the strength of their academic debate
arguments. For example, news reports of mass starvation might tidy up the "uniqueness of a
disadvantage" or bolster the "inherency of an affirmative case" (in the technical parlance of debate-speak). Murchland
categorizes cultivation of this "spectator" mentality as one of the most politically debilitating failures of contemporary education:
"Educational institutions have failed even more grievously to provide the kind of civic forums we need. In
fact, one could easily conclude that the principle purposes of our schools is to deprive successor
generations of their civic voice, to turn them into mute and uncomprehending spectators in the drama of
political life" (1991, p. 8). Complete reliance on the laboratory metaphor to guide pedagogical practice can result in the unfortunate
foreclosure of crucial learning opportunities. These opportunities, which will be discussed in more detail in the later sections of this piece,
center around the process of argumentative engagement with wider public spheres of deliberation. In the strictly preparatory model of
argument pedagogy, such direct engagement is an activity that is appropriately pursued following the completion of academic debate training
(see e.g. Coverstone 1995, p. 8). Preparatory study of argumentation, undertaken in the confines of the academic
laboratory, is conducted on the plane of simulation and is designed to pave the way for eventual
application of critical thinking and oral advocacy skills in "realworld" contexts. Such a preparatory pedagogy has a
tendency to defer reflection and theorization on the political dynamics of academic debate itself. For example, many textbooks
introduce students to the importance of argumentation as the basis for citizenship in the opening
chapter, move on to discussion of specific skills in the intervening chapters, and never return to the
obvious broader question of how specific skills can be utilized to support efforts of participatory
citizenship and democratic empowerment. Insofar as the argumentation curriculum does not forthrightly thematize the
connection between skill-based learning and democratic empowerment, the prospect that students will fully develop strong senses of
transformative political agency grows increasingly remote. The undercultivation of student agency in the academic field
of argumentation is a particularly pressing problem, since social theorists such as Foucault, Habermas
and Touraine have proposed that information and communication have emerged as significant media of
domination and exploitation in contemporary society . These scholars argue, in different ways, that new and particularly
insidious means of social control have developed in recent times. These methods of control are insidious in the sense that
they suffuse apparently open public spheres and structure opportunities for dialogue in subtle and often
nefarious ways. Who has authority to speak in public forums? How does socioeconomic status determine access to information and close
off spaces for public deliberation? Who determines what issues are placed on the agenda for public discussion? It is impossible to
seriously consider these questions and still hew closely to the idea that a single, monolithic, essentialized
"public sphere" even exists. Instead, multiple public spheres exist in diverse cultural and political milieux, and communicative
practices work to transform and reweave continuously the normative fabric that holds them together. Some public spaces are vibrant and full of
emancipatory potential, while others are colonized by restrictive institutional logics. Argumentation
skills can be practiced in
both contexts, but how can the utilization of such skills transform positively the nature of the public
spaces where dialogue takes place?
 1AC: Overthrow the status quo
Contention 3 is overthrowing the status quo
New methods of social control have infiltrated the debate sphere—while explicitly
open and liberating, implicitly, the status quo mode of debate praxis is being
compromised as it is colonized by the restrictive logic of institutions.
Mitchell 98. (gordon, debate coach and professor), “pedagogical possibilities for argumentative agency
in academic debate,” argumentation and advocacy, 1998, pg. 44-45.//Elmer

For students and teachers of argumentation, the heightened salience of this question should signal the
danger that critical thinking and oral advocacy skills alone may not be sufficient for citizens to assert
their voices in public deliberation. Institutional interests bent on shutting down dialogue and discussion
may recruit new graduates skilled in argumentation and deploy them in information campaigns designed
to neutralize public competence and short-circuit democratic decision-making (one variant of Habermas'
"colonization of the lifeworld" thesis; see Habermas 1981, p. 376-373). Habermas sees the emergent capacity
of capitalist institutions to sustain themselves by manufacturing legitimacy through strategic
communication as a development that profoundly transforms the Marxist political dynamic . By colonizing
terms and spaces of public dialogue with instrumental, strategically-motivated reasoning, institutions are said by
Habermas to have engineered a "refeudalization" of the public sphere. In this distorted space for public
discussion, corporations and the state forge a monopoly on argumentation and subvert critical
deliberation by members of an enlightened, debating public . This colonization thesis supplements the traditional Marxist
problematic of class exploitation by highlighting a new axis of domination, the way in which capitalist systems rely upon the strategic
management of discourse as a mode of legitimation and exploitation. Indeed,
the implicit bridge that connects
argumentation skills to democratic empowerment in many argumentation textbooks crosses perilous
waters, since institutions facing "legitimation crises" (see Habermas 1975) rely increasingly on recruitment and
deployment of argumentative talent to manufacture public loyalty .

Fascism is an ideal system of total power, which emphasizes disciplinary regimentation

and seeks to suppress all criticism. On the governmental level, this equates to ultra-
conservative dictatorships, but when we focus too much on the state, it can blind us to
the micro-political groups and gestures that sustain fascism in the here and now.
Deleuze and Guattari 80 – (A Thousand Plateaus (1980. p214-5.) Philosopher Professor at the
University of Paris VII)//Elmer

It is not sufficient to define bureaucracy by a rigid segmentarity with compartmentalization of contiguous

offices, an office manager in each segment, and the corresponding centralization at the end of the hall or
on top of the tower. For at the same time there is a whole bureaucratic segmentation , a suppleness of and
communication between offices, a bureaucratic perversion, a permanent inventiveness or creativity
practiced even against administrative regulations. If Kafka is the greatest theorist of bureaucracy, it is because he shows how,
at a certain level (but which one? it is not localizable), the barriers between offices cease to be "a definite dividing line"
and are immersed in a molecular medium (milieu) that dissolves them and simultaneously makes the
office manager proliferate into microfigures impossible to recognize or identify, discernible only when
they are centralizable: another regime, coexistent with the separation and totalization of the rigid segments.I0 We would even say that
fascism implies a molecular regime that is distinct both from molar segments and their centralization. Doubtless, fascism
invented the concept of the totalitarian State, but there is no reason to define fascism by a concept of its
own devising: there are totalitarian States, of the Stalinist or military dictatorship type, that are not
fascist. The concept of the totalitarian State applies only at the macropolitical level , to a rigid
segmentarity and a particular mode of totalization and centralization. But fascism is inseparable from a proliferation
of molecular focuses in interaction, which skip from point to point, before beginning to resonate together in the National Socialist State. Rural
fascism and city or neighborhood fascism, youth fascism and war veteran's fascism, fascism of the Left
and fascism of the Right, fascism of the couple, family, school, and office: every fascism is defined by a
micro-black hole that stands on its own and communicates with the others, before resonating in a great,
generalized central black hole.1 ' There is fascism when a war machine is installed in each hole , in every
niche. Even after the National Socialist State had been established, microfascisms persisted that gave it unequaled ability
to act upon the "masses." Daniel Guerin is correct to say that if Hitler took power, rather then taking over the
German State administration, it was because from the beginning he had at his disposal
microorganizations giving him "an unequaled , irreplaceable ability to penetrate every cell of society," in
other words, a molecular and supple segmentarity, flows capable of suffusing every kind of cell. Conversely,
if capitalism came to consider the fascist experience as catastrophic, if it preferred to ally itself with Stalinist totalitarianism, which from its point
of view was much more sensible and manageable, it was because the segmentarity and centralization of the latter was more classical and less
fluid. What makes fascism dangerous is its molecular or micropolitical power, for it is a mass movement: a
cancerous body rather than a totalitarian organism. American film has often depicted these molecular focal points; band,
gang, sect, family, town, neighborhood, vehicle fascisms spare no one. Only microfascism provides an answer to the global
question: Why does desire desire its own repression, how can it desire its own repression? The masses
certainly do not passively submit to power; nor do they "want" to be repressed, in a kind of masochistic
hysteria; nor are they tricked by an ideological lure. Desire is never separable from complex assemblages that necessarily tie
into molecular levels, from microforma-tions already shaping postures, attitudes, perceptions, expectations, semiotic systems, etc. Desire is
never an undifferentiated instinctual energy, but itself results from a highly developed, engineered setup rich in interactions: a whole supple
segmentarity that processes molecular energies and potentially gives desire a fascist determination. Leftist
organizations will not be
the last to secrete microfascisms . It's too easy to be antifascist on the molar level, and not even see the
fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both personal and collective. Four errors
concerning this molecular and supple segmentarity are to be avoided. The first is axiological and consists in believing that a little suppleness is
enough to make things "better." But microfascisms
are what make fascism so dangerous, and fine segmentations
are as harmful as the most rigid of segments. The second is psychological, as if the molecular were in the realm of the
imagination and applied only to the individual and interindividual. But there is just as much social-Real on one line as on the other. Third, the
two forms are not simply distinguished by size, as a small form and a large form; although it is true that the molecular works in detail and
operates in small groups, this does not mean that it is any less coextensive with the entire social field than molar organization. Finally,
the
qualitative difference between the two lines does not preclude their boosting or cutting into each other;
there is always a proportional relation between the two, directly or inversely proportional

Complicity with the systemic logic of institutionalized debate that actively chooses not
to push back against microfascisms is very dangerous—these microfascisms create
social war machines, social bodies that destroy everything perceived as a threat to
their sovereignty.
Deleuze and Guattari 80 - http://projectlamar.com/media/A-Thousand-Plateaus.pdf (A Thousand
Plateaus, 230-231) Philosopher Professor at the University of Paris VII)//Elmer

This brings us back to the paradox of fascism, and the way in which fascism differs from totalitarianism .
For totalitarianism is a State affair: it essentially concerns the relation between the State as a localized
assemblage and the abstract machine of overcoding it effectuates. Even in the case of a military dictatorship,
it is a State army, not a war machine, that takes power and elevates the State to the totalitarian stage .
Totalitarianism is quintessentially conservative. Fascism, on the other hand, involves a war machine. When fascism
builds itself a totalitarian State, it is not in the sense of a State army taking power, but of a war machine
taking over the State. A bizarre remark by Virilio puts us on the trail: in fascism, the State is far less totalitarian than it is suicidal. There is
in fascism a realized nihilism. Unlike the totalitarian State, which does its utmost to seal all possible lines of flight, fascism is constructed
on an intense line of flight, which it transforms into a line of pure destruction and abolition. It is curious that
from the very beginning the Nazis announced to Germany what they were bringing : at once wedding
bells and death, including their own death, and the death of the Germans. They thought they would
perish but that their undertaking would be resumed, all across Europe, all over the world, throughout
the solar system. And the people cheered, not because they did not understand, but because they
wanted that death through the death of others. Like a will to wager everything you have every hand, to stake your own death
against the death of others, and measure everything by "deleometers." Klaus Mann's novel, Mephisto, gives samplings of entirely ordinary Nazi
speeches and conversations: "Heroism was something that was being ruled out of our lives. ... In reality, we are not marching forward, we are
reeling, staggering. Our beloved Fiihrer is dragging us toward the shades of darkness and everlasting nothingness. How can we poets, we who
have a special affinity for darkness and lower depths, not admire him? . . . Fires blazing on the horizon; rivers of blood in all the streets; and the
frenzied dancing of the survivors, of those who are still spared, around the bodies of the dead!"32 Suicide
is presented not as a
punishment but as the crowning glory of the death of others. One can always say that it is just a matter
of foggy talk and ideology, nothing but ideology . But that is not true. The insufficiency of economic and political definitions of
fascism does not simply imply a need to tack on vague, so-called ideological determinations. We prefer to follow Faye's inquiry into the precise
formation of Nazi statements, which are just as much in evidence in politics and economics as in the most absurd of conversations. They
always contain the "stupid and repugnant" cry, Long live death!, even at the economic level, where the arms
expansion replaces growth in consumption and where investment veers from the means of production toward the means of pure destruction.
Paul Virilio's analysis strikes us as entirely correct in defining fascism not by the notion of the totalitarian State but by the
notion of the suicidal State: so-called total war seems less a State undertaking than an undertaking of a
war machine that appropriates the State and channels into it a flow of absolute war whose only possible
outcome is the suicide of the State itself. "The triggering of a hitherto unknown material process, one that is limitless and aimless. . . . Once
triggered, its mechanism cannot stop at peace, for the indirect strategy effectively places the dominant powers outside the
usual categories of space and time. . . . It was in the horror of daily life and its environment that Hitler finally found
his surest means of governing, the legitimation of his policies and military strategy; and it lasted right up
to the end, for the ruins and horrors and crimes and chaos of total war , far from discharging the repulsive nature of
its power, normally only increase its scope. Telegram 71 is the normal outcome: If the war is lost, may the nation perish. Here, Hitler
decides to join forces with his enemies in order to complete the destruction of his own people, by
obliterating the last remaining resources of its life-support system, civil reserves of every kind (potable
water, fuel, provisions, etc.)."33 It was this reversion of the line of flight into a line of destruction that already animated the
molecular focuses of fascism, and made them interact in a war machine instead of resonating in a State apparatus. A war machine that
no longer had anything but war as its object and would rather annihilate its own servants than stop the
destruction. All the dangers of the other lines pale by comparison.

Every step towards the fascist discourse that the Status Quo takes increases the
prospect of absolute annihilation. The state apparatus becomes a means of constant
violence against difference that compromises human agency.
Deleuze and Guattari 72. http://projectlamar.com/media/A-Thousand-Plateaus.pdf (Anti-Oedipus,
pg. 217-220) Philosopher Professor at the University of Paris VII)//Elmer

The city of Ur, the point of departure of Abraham or the new alliance. The State was not formed in
progressive stages; it appears fully armed, a master stroke executed all at once; the primordial Urstaat, the eternal model of
everything the State wants to be and desires. "Asiatic" production, with the State that expresses or constitutes its objective movement, is not a
distinct formation; it is the basic formation, on the horizon throughout history. There comes back to us from all quarters the discovery of
imperial machines that preceded the traditional historical forms, machines characterized by State ownership of property, with communal
possession bricked into it, and collective dependence. Every
form that is more "evolved" is like a palimpsest : it covers a
despotic inscription, a Mycenaean manuscript. Under every Black and every Jew there is an Egyptian, and a
Mycenaean under the Greeks, an Etruscan under the Romans. And yet their origin sinks into oblivion, a
latency that lays hold of the State itself, and where the writing system sometimes disappears. It is beneath
the blows of private property, then of commodity production, that the State witnesses its decline. Land enters into the sphere of private
property and into that of commodities. Classes appear, inasmuch as the dominant classes are no longer merged with the State apparatus, but
are distinct determinations that make use of this transformed apparatus. At first situated adjacent to communal property, then entering into the
latter's composition or conditioning it, then becoming more and more a determining force, private property brings about an internalization of
the creditor-debtor relation in the relations of opposed classes.61 But
how does one explain both this latency into which
the despotic State enters, and this power with which it re-forms itself on modified foundations, in order
to spring back more "mendacious," "colder," and more "hypocritical" than ever? This oblivion and this return. On
the one hand, the ancient city-state, the Germanic commune, and feudalism presuppose the great empires, and cannot be understood except in
terms of the Urstaat that serves as their horizon. On the other hand, the problem confronting these forms is to reconstitute the Urstaat insofar
as possible, given the requirements of their new distinct determinations. For
what do private property, wealth, commodities,
and classes signify? The breakdown of codes. The appearance, the surging forth of now decoded flows
that pour over the socius, crossing it from one end to the other . The State can no longer be content to
overcode territorial elements that are already coded, it must invent specific codes for flows that are
increasingly deterritorialized, which means: putting despotism in the service of the new class relations ;
integrating the relations of wealth and poverty, of commodity and labor; reconciling market money and
money from revenues; everywhere stamping the mark of the Urstaat on the new state of things. And
everywhere, the presence of the latent model that can no longer be equaled, but that one cannot help but imitate. The Egyptian's melancholy
warning to the Greeks echoes through history: "You Greeks will never be anything but children!" This
special situation of the State
as a category—oblivion and return—has to be explained. To begin with, it should be said that the primordial
despotic state is not a historical break like any other. Of all the institutions, it is perhaps the only one to appear fully armed in
thebrain of those who institute it, "the artists with a look of bronze." That is why Marxism didn't quite know what to make of it: it has no place
in the famous five stages: primitive communism, ancient city-states, feudalism, capitalism, and socialism.* It is not one formation
among others, nor is it the transition from one formation to another. It appears to be set back at a remove from
what it transects and from what it resects, as though it were giving evidence of another dimension, a cerebral ideality that is added to,
superimposed on the material evolution of societies, a regulating idea or principle of reflection (terror)
that organizes the parts and the flows into a whole. What is transected, superseded, or over-coded by
the despotic State is what comes before —the territorial machine, which it reduces to the state of bricks ,
of working parts henceforth subjected to the cerebral idea. In this sense the despotic State is indeed the
origin, but the origin as an abstraction that must include its differences with respect to the concrete
beginning. We know that myth always expresses a passage and a divergence (un ecart). The primitive territorial myth of the
beginning expressed the divergence of a characteristically intense energy—what Marcel Griaule called
"the metaphysical part of mythology," the vibratory spiral—in relation to the social system in extension that it conditioned,
passing back and forth between alliance and filiation. But the imperial myth of the origin expresses something else: the divergence of this
beginning from the origin itself, the divergence of the extension from the idea, of the genesis from the order and the power (the new alliance),
and also what repasses from filiation to alliance, what is taken up again by filiation. Jean-Pierre Vernant shows in this way that the imperial
myths are not able to conceive a law of organization that is immanent in the universe: they need to posit and internalize this difference between
the origin and the beginnings, between the sovereign power and the genesis of the world; "the myth constitutes itself within this distance, it
makes it into the very object of its narrative, retracing the avatars of sovereignty down through the succession of generations to the moment
when a supremacy, this time definitive, puts an end to the dramatic elaboration of the dunesteia."62 So that in
the end one no longer
really knows what comes first, and whether the territorial machine does not in fact presuppose a
despotic machine from which it extracts the bricks or that it segments in its turn. In a certain sense it is necessary
to say as much in regard to what comes after the primal State, in regard to what is resected by this State. It supersects what comes before, but
resects the formations that follow. There too it is like an abstraction that belongs to another dimension, always at a remove and struck by
latency, but that springs back and returns stronger than before in the later forms that lend it a concrete existence. A protean State, yet there has
never been but one State. Whence the variations, all the variants of the new alliance, falling nevertheless under the same category. For
example, feudalism not only presupposes an abstract despotic State that it divides into segments according to the regime of its private property
and the rise of its commodity production, but the latter induce in return the concrete existence of a feudal state in the proper sense of the term,
where the despot returns as the absolute monarch. For it is a double error to think that the development of commodity production is enough to
bring about feudalism's collapse—on the contrary, this development reinforces feudalism in many respects, offering the latter new conditions of
existence and survival—and that feudalism of itself is in opposition to the State, which on the contrary, as the feudal State, is capable of
preventing commodities from introducing the decoding of flows that alone would be ruinous to the system under consideration.* And in more
recent examples, we have to go along with Wittfogel when he shows the
degree to which modern capitalist and socialist
States take on the characteristic features of the primordial despotic State . As for democracies, how could one fail to
recognize in them the despot who has become colder and more hypocritical, more calculating, since he must himself count and code instead of
overcoding the accounts? It is useless to compose the list of differences after the manner of conscientious historians: village communes here,
industrial societies there, and so on. The differences could be determining only if the despotic State were one concrete formation among others,
to be treated comparatively. But
the despotic State is the abstraction that is realized—in imperial formations, to
be sure—only as an abstraction (the overcoding eminent unity). It assumes its immanent concrete
existence only in the subsequent forms that cause it to return under other guises and conditions.
 1AC: Demand
Contention 4 is our Demand
The United States federal government should increase federal funding for urban
debate programs and implement such programs in disadvantaged areas where they do
not currently exist.
The urban debate leagues have made progress but in order to really bring the debate
experience where it is truly needed, our movement needs government funding.
Roosevelt Institute 07 -(non-profit, non-partisan national network of campus-based student think
tanks. Its members conduct policy research on the pressing political issues facing our world)- The 25
Ideas Series Volume 1 • Issue 3 Urban Debate Programs for Minority and Disadvantaged
Youth http://rooseveltinstitution.org/publications/25ideas/2007_highered/_file/_renzelli_urban_debate
.pdf)//Elmer

In order to promote diversity in higher education, policymakers should increase state and federal funding for urban
debate programs and implement such programs in disadvantaged areas where they do not currently
exist. The United States government has been struggling to find ways to increase minority and low-
income representation in higher education; however, individual efforts, such as urban debate leagues,
are starting to break through barriers that keep students from attending college. In 1985, the first urban debate
programs were created in Chicago and Philadelphia. Since then, programs have emerged in sixteen major U.S. cities. These programs
have provided students with the tools necessary to succeed in school . Debate requires students to thoroughly
research both sides of a pressing issue and formulate ideas on how to address the issue. Additionally, students have the ability to advocate their
ideas in a competitive setting, which gives them real-world advocacy skills. Urban
debate programs are currently established
in seventeen major metropolitan areas in the United States, but are having trouble reaching all of the
students in their area due to a lack of funding and resources . In order for urban debate programs to
reach their full effectiveness, they should be implemented in all areas where there is a high percentage
of minority and lowincome students, and they should be supported with funding from the state and
federal government.

More UDL participants means more people engaged in an anti-fascist discourse on

radical democracy. This would open up the debate space as a place for democratic
organizing. The UDL movement represents not only an increase in debaters, but an
increase in forms of radical democracy in the debate space. By incorporating
alternative viewpoints, we can combat the static homogeneity of the Status Quo.
Voting aff is a means to fight micro-fascisms within debate.
Giroux 06 – (Giroux, Henry A. America On the Edge. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006. Print. - Henry
Armand Giroux (1943 – ) is currently Global Television Network Professor of English and Cultural Studies
at McMaster University in Canada. He is one of the foremost contemporary writers on critical pedagogy,
schooling, higher education, neo-liberalism and the condition of vulnerable young people. )//Elmer

In a world where high-stakes testing is a given,

it is crucial to invest in substantive efforts that help schools reach
accountability measures by improving the quality of teaching and learning . Urban Debate Leagues
represent one crucial and exciting way to improve an urban public school system's curriculum and its
academic ethos and norms. I am enormously impressed with the way that UDLs support teachers who seek to build
classrooms and schools that represent
student voice, formulate rigorous and critical investigations into pressing issues
of social concern, and prepare students to be active and engaged learners. The UDL movement
understands that we cannot afford to stifle the critical and creative impulses and passions of our
teachers and [end page 234] students. In UDLs, teachers and students who might otherwise fall through the cracks instead find an
outlet. In the words of Anthony Grobe, an English teacher at Cleveland Naval Academy in St. Louis, “Coaching energizes me after a long school
day. The passion and commitment of my debaters validate my work as a teacher. The after school practices are invigorating, the students are
excited about ideas. They work with each other in order to research and write about issues concerning their
lives.”10 The work of Urban Debate Leagues is also aligned with forms of assessment that enhance the
possibility for self- and social empowerment among children, forms of assessment that promote critical
modes of inquiry and creativity, as opposed to those that shut down self-respect and motivation by
instilling a sense of failure or humiliation. UDLs embody an effort to improve education by embracing assessments that get
students to reflect on their work and the work of others—as a measure of deliberation, critical analysis, and dialogue. The way that UDLs
approach the question of assessment makes it clear that accountability needs to be part of a broader
agenda for equity and must be understood within a notion of schooling that rejects learning simply as
the mastery of discrete skills and bodies of information . Despite the war against youth and efforts to dismantle the notion
and reality of quality public education, many young people and educators around the country are choosing to embrace a politics of hope.
Urban Debate Leagues and other local efforts to ignite student passion for substantive democracy as well as racial and economic justice
demonstrate that power as a form of domination is never absolute and that oppression always produces some
form of resistance. Fortunately, UDLs are adding their voices to a larger chorus as more and more young
people nationally and internationally are mobilizing and struggling to construct an alternative future in
which their voices can be heard as part of a broader movement to realize genuine democracy and social
justice. The message that appears to unite this generation of youth—and it is a message that resonates deeply with the UDL movement—is
that a more democratic and just world is possible. Such a world, however, can only be realized through the
collective struggles of many people willing to unite in their efforts to make real the possibilities and
promises of a truly democratic world order.

We can create a truly bottom up social revolution as methods to resist modern social
controls are used by our new, democratic urban debate leagues. Through our
discussion, we can shake up the institutional logic that exists in the debate space now
by breaking down the sexist, classist, and racist boundaries that ensure social
homogeneity. Our radical insurgency in the debate space can solve these examples of
microf-ascism.
White ‘92 – (Lucie White, Professor of Law @ Harvard Law School, Spring 1992, “Seeking the Face of
Otherness,” http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3576&context=clr Cornell
Law Review, 77 Cornell L. Rev. 1499)//Elmer

Felstiner and Sarat's work is part of a larger collective project undertaken by several legal scholars. Sally
Merry, for instance, has recently used Foucault's lens to produce a detailed account of how working class
people interact with the courts. 16 Regina Austin has applied the lens to the workplace. 17 Others are producing similar work.' 8 Of
this new work, Gerald L6pez's writings stand out. He uses the new conception of power to make visible
complex interactions between groups of poor people and the professionals who try to help them . 19 In this
work, he shows how power is indeed very fluid, even across the formidable barriers of race and class identit y.
This new meta-theory of power is especially important to progressive law teachers, scholars, and
advocates for at least two reasons. First, this lens is bringing forth a new body of situated microdescriptions of lawyering practice.
For the first time, these descriptions give us a substantial base of data that we may use to reflect on our work. This new data enables us to see
exactly how and when we deploy power within the routines of our own lawyering. With this new insight into what we do, we can begin to ask
why we do it and how we might change. We can begin to envision different habits- different ways of talking and paying attention-that may make
our deployments of power less disruptive of our clients' efforts to empower themselves. This kind of reflective reconstruction of our dayto-day
lawyering routines can make our practice, as progressive lawyers, more consistent with our aspirations of greater social justice.20 Thus,
the
descriptive project undertaken by Felstiner and Sarat makes possible a new field of critical reflection on advocacy
and pedagogy2 t-a "theoretics" of practice-the potential of which we are just beginning to explore. The second reason that
Foucault's picture of power is so important to progressive advocates is that it has opened up new
possibilities in the political practice of relatively disempowered groups . The conventional theory of
power reveals a dichotomized world of domination and subordination ; through such a lens, the hegemony of the
dominant class is virtually absolute. Not only does that class confine the actions of the subordinated, but it also
dictates their language, preferences, thoughts, dreams, and indeed most deeply held moral and political
intuitions. In American legal scholarship, Catharine MacKinnon has used this dichotomized picture of power with great skill to challenge
claims that women can experience authentic subjectivity in contemporary society.22 MacKinnon posed this challenge in an encounter with
Carol Gilligan at Buffalo Law School in 1984.23 In that exchange, MacKinnon argued that values of "caring" and "connection" that Gilligan and
other feminists sought to reclaim and celebrate are symptoms of women's subordinate position in a closed system of power.24 According to
MacKinnon, even women's feelings of sexual pleasure are suspect; these feelings, like every other feature of Woman, de- fine a colonized
subject, a being whose essence has been shaped by and for men. 25 Thus, as Angela Harris has demonstrated in her
critique of Catharine MacKinnon's work, 26 a conventional understanding of power locks women, and
indeed every subordinated group, in a discursive "prison-house" 27 from which there is no escape. Just as
the dominators can do nothing except wield their power, the subordinated can speak nothing except their masters' will .
No change is possible in this universe; indeed, even the most creative tactics of resistance or gestures of
solidarity reinforce the bonds of domination . This understanding of domination, designed to reveal injustice, leads
to two perverse results. First, it excuses those in the dominant class from attempting to reflect on or change
their own conduct, or to ally themselves with subordinate groups. Second, it reinforces in relatively
disempowered groups the very doubts about their feelings , capacities, and indeed human worth that
subordination itself engenders. Foucault's picture of power disrupts this closed circle of domination. By
showing that the dominators do not "possess" power, his picture makes possible a politics of resistance. It opens up space for a self-
directed, democratic politics among subordinated groups, a politics that is neither vanguard-driven
nor co-opted, as the politics of the colonized subject inevitably is. At the same time, and of more immediate
relevance to lawyers, this new picture of power makes possible a self-reflective politics of alliance and collaboration between professionals and
subordinated groups. Given
the new theaters of political action that Foucault's theory of power has opened
up, it is not surprising that it has stolen the stage in historical, cultural, and finally legal studies from
those who speak of power in more conventional terms . The Foucaultian picture of power makes insurgent politics
interesting again; it brings possibility back into focus, even in apparently quiescent times when resistance is visible only in the microdynamics of
everyday life.

Our reevaluation of debate is in itself solvency, our democratic hope can topple
microfascisms and integrate the homogeneous social sphere. In our new debate space,
we can create people who are free from tyranny.
Deleuze 69 - (the logic of sense, p. 49 – Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII)//Elmer
This paradox might be named Robinson's paradox. It is obvious that Robinson. on his desert island, could
reconstruct an analogue of society only himself. all at once. all the rules and laws which are reciprocally
even when they still have no objects. The conquest of nature is. on the contrary. progressive . partial. and
advances step step. whatsoever has all of its rules at once— - juridical. political, economic‘; laws
governing love and labor. kinship and marriage. servitude and freedom. life and death. But the conquest
of nature, without which it would no longer be a society. is achieved progressively, from one source of energy to another. from one
object to another. “as is why lair weighs with all its might, even before its is brown, and without ever its object exactly known . It is this
disequilibrium that makes revolutions possible . It is not at all the case that revolutions are determined by
technical progress. Rather. are made possible by this gap between the two series, which solicits realignments of the economic and
political totality in relation to the parts of the technical progress. There are therefore two errors which in truth are one and the same: the
error of reformism or technocracy. which aspires to promote or impose partial arrangements of social relations according to the
rhythm of technical achievements; and the error of totalitarianism. which aspires to constitute a totaliza- tion of the and the known. to the
rhythm of the totality existing at a given moment. The
technocrat is the natural friend of the dictator —computers and
dictatorship; but the revolutionary lives in the gap which separates technical progress from social totality.
and inscribes there his dream of permanent revolution This dream, therefore. is itself action, reality. and
an effective menace to all established order. it renders what it dreams about.

The way that we talk about teaching matters—how we debate shapes the way we
understand society. We must critically interrogate the assumptions made within this
round in order to create a debate space that allows us to actually take responsibility
for changing the world we occupy
Giroux 10 - (“Rethinking Education as the Practice of Freedom: Paulo Freire and the Promise of Critical
Pedagogy” Jan 3, 2010 http://www.truthout.org/10309_Giroux_Freire - Henry Armand Giroux (1943 – )
is currently Global Television Network Professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in
Canada. He is one of the foremost contemporary writers on critical pedagogy, schooling, higher
education, neo-liberalism and the condition of vulnerable young people)//Elmer

What Paulo made clear in "Pedagogy of the Oppressed ," his most influential work, is that pedagogy at its best is
about neither training, teaching methods nor political indoctrination. For Freire, pedagogy is not a method
or an a priori technique to be imposed on all students, but a political and moral practice that provides the
knowledge, skills and social relations that enable students to expand the possibilities of what it means to be
critical citizens, while expanding and deepening their participation in the promise of a substantive
democracy. Critical thinking for Freire was not an object lesson in test taking, but a tool for self-determination and civic engagement. For
Freire, critical thinking was not about the task of simply reproducing the past and understanding the
present. On the contrary, it offered a way of thinking beyond the present, soaring beyond the immediate
confines of one's experiences, entering into a critical dialogue with history and imagining a future that
did not merely reproduce the present. Theodor Adorno captures the spirit of Freire's notion of critical thinking by insisting that
"Thinking is not the intellectual reproduction of what already exists anyway. As long as it doesn't break
off, thinking has a secure hold on possibility. Its insatiable aspect, its aversion to being quickly and easily
satisfied, refuses the foolish wisdom of resignation.... Open thinking points beyond itself ."[5] Freire rejected
those regimes of educational degradation organized around the demands of the market, instrumentalized knowledge and the priority of training
over the pursuit of the imagination, critical thinking and the teaching of freedom and social responsibility. Rather
than assume the
mantle of a false impartiality, Freire believed that critical pedagogy involves both the recognition that
human life is conditioned not determined, and the crucial necessity of not only reading the world
critically, but also intervening in the larger social order as part of the responsibility of an informed
citizenry. According to Freire, the political and moral demands of pedagogy amount to more than the school
and classroom being merely the instrument of official power or assuming the role of an apologist for the
existing order, as the Obama administration seems to believe - given its willingness to give Bush's
reactionary educational policies a new name and a new lease on life . Freire rejected those modes of pedagogy that
supported economic models and modes of agency in which freedom is reduced to consumerism and economic activity is freed from any
criterion except profitability and the reproduction of a rapidly expanding mass of wasted humans. Critical
pedagogy attempts to
understand how power works through the production, distribution and consumption of knowledge
within particular institutional contexts and seeks to constitute students as informed subjects and social
agents. In this instance, the issue of how identities, values and desires are shaped in the classroom is the grounds of politics. Critical pedagogy
is thus invested in both the practice of self-criticism about the values that inform teaching and a critical self-consciousness regarding what it
means to equip students with analytical skills to be self-reflective about the knowledge and values they confront in classrooms. Moreover, such
a pedagogy attempts not only to provide the conditions for students to understand texts and different modes of intelligibility, but also opens up
new avenues for them to make better moral judgments that will enable them to assume some sense of responsibility to the other in light of
those judgments. Freire was acutely aware that what makes critical pedagogy so dangerous to ideological fundamentalists, the ruling elites,
religious extremists and right-wing nationalists all over the world is that, central to its very definition, is the task of educating students to
become critical agents who actively question and negotiate the relationships between theory and practice, critical analysis and common sense
and learning and social change. Critical
pedagogy opens up a space where students should be able to come to
terms with their own power as critically engaged citizens ; it provides a sphere where the unconditional
freedom to question and assert is central to the purpose of public schooling and higher education, if not
democracy itself. And as a political and moral practice, way of knowing and literate engagement,
pedagogy attempts to "make evident the multiplicity and complexity of history

And, our demand is the best way to create long lasting social change—we can
strategically reverse power relations from within the system.
Campbell 92 – (David Campbell, professor of international politics at the University of Newcastle,
1992, “Writing Security, p. 258-259)//Elmer

Recognizing the possibility of rearticulating danger leads us to a final question: what modes of being and
forms of life could we or should we adopt? To be sure, a comprehensive attempt to answer such a question is beyond the ambit
of this book. But it is important to note that asking the question in this way mistakenly implies that such
possibilities exist only in the future. Indeed, the extensive and intensive nature of the relations of power
associated with the society of security means that there has been and remains a not inconsiderable
freedom to explore alternative possibilities . While traditional analyses of power are often economistic
and negative, Foucault’s understanding of power emphasizes its productive and enabling nature. Even more
important, his understanding of power emphasizes the ontology of freedom presupposed by the existence of disciplinary and normalizing
practices. Put simply, there cannot be relations of power unless subjects are in the first instance free: the need
to institute negative and constraining power practices comes about only because without them freedom
would abound. Were there no possibility of freedom, subjects would not act in ways that required containment so as to effect order.37
Freedom, though, is not the absence of power. On the contrary, because it is only through power that subjects exercise their
agency, freedom and power cannot be separated. As Foucualt maintains: At the very heart of the power relationship, and
constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom. Rather than speaking of an essential
freedom, it would be better to speak of an “agonism” — of a relationship which is at the same time
reciprocal incitation and struggle; less of a face-to-face confrontation which paralyzes both sides than a permanent provocation.38
The political possibilities enabled by this permanent provocation of power and freedom can be specified in more detail by thinking in terms of
the predominance of the “bio-power” discussed above. In this sense, because the governmental practices of biopolitics in Western nations have
been increasingly directed towards modes of being and forms of life—such that sexual conduct has become an object of concern, individual
health has been figured as a domain of discipline, and the family has been transformed into an instrument of government—the ongoing
agonism between those pratices and the freedom they seek to contain means that individuals have articulataed a series of counterdemands
drawn from those new fields of concern. For example, as the state continues to prosecute people according to
sexual orientation, human rights activists have proclaimed the right of gays to enter into formal
marriages, adopt children, and receive the same health and insurance benefits granted to their straight
counterparts. These claims are a consequence of the permanent provocation of power and freedom in
biopolitics, and stand as testament to the “strategic reversibility” of power relations: if the terms of
governmental practices can be made into focal points for resistance s, then the “history of government as the ‘conduct
of conduct’ is interwoven with the history of dissenting ‘counterconducts,’” Indeed, the emergence of the state as the major
articulation of “the political” has involved an unceasing agonism between those in office and those they
rule. State intervention in everyday life has long incited popular collective action, the result of which has been both resistance to the state and
new claims upon the state. In particular, “the core of what we now call ‘citizenship’ . . .consists of multiple bargains hammered out by rulers and
ruled in the course of their struggles over the means of state action, especially the making of war.” In more recent times, constituencies
associated with women’s, youth, ecological, and peace movements (among others) have also issued claims on society.

Finally, democratic discourse combined with political action is key to stopping

authoritarianism.
Coburn ‘05 - (Elain Coburn, BA from University of Toronto. MA and PhD from Stanford University.
Assistant Professor of Global Communications (Review of Henry A. Giroux’s book, The Terror of
Neoliberalism:Authoritarianism and the Eclipse of Democracy. Published in The Journal for the Society of
Socialist Studies/ Etudes Socialistes: Le journal de la société des études socialistes. No.2.“Theme:
Neoliberalism and Authoritarianism.”)//Elmer

In his book, Giroux makes three central related arguments. His first point is theoretical or
methodological. Culture, as much as the material relations of production, is necessary to the reproduction of existing market societies.
Ideology matters and is, indeed, an essential component of the reproduction of neoliberal forms of
capitalism. Serious scholars of capitalism must take what Gramsci might have called ‘ideological materials’ – the press, but also, even
especially, the education system, churches, prisons – seriously as objects of study, since these are sites of capitalism’s reproduction and so also,
potentially, sites of resistance. Giroux’s second point is mainly descriptive and turns on his argument that the most accurate characterization of
the ideological superstructure and politics
in the United States today is “proto-fascist”, authoritarian - in a word,
“totalitarianism lite” (155). Steeped in religious fundamentalism, manipulating
fear and restricting basic freedoms in the
name of a new kind of “patriotic correctness” (19), the United States is profoundly dangerous, the “anti-
liberal, anti-democratic, and anti-socialistic” product of “failed democracy” (15). In short, the United States today
is not entirely unlike Nazi Germany - if, Giroux hastens to add, differing from the German case in historically specific, nontrivial ways. Giroux’s
third and final major argument, this time in a normative strain, insists on the privileged role that intellectuals must assume
in the struggle over proto-fascist forms of capitalism. Intellectuals are the acknowledged experts , as both
interpreters and actors, in the cultural realm that is, in Giroux’s view, so fundamentally relevant to politics. By engaging in
‘worldly’scholarship, that is, by undertaking research, writing and teaching in ways that are at once rigorous and resolutely, critically
‘engaged’ with contemporary problems (racism, poverty, etc.) intellectuals can hope to alter the cultural
landscape. In so doing, they throw a wrench into the workings of a new authoritarian political culture
that is never simply superstructural but rather essential to the ongoing reproduction of authoritarianism .
This last, normative point follows from Giroux’s first, theoretical claim: if authoritarianism is partly about specific political
cultures, successfully challenging authoritarianism depends in no small part upon the development of
an (imaginative?) democratic discourse and political action. Much of the book is devoted to developing these three
central related arguments in greater detail. Indeed, Giroux’s book is an example of the sorts of subjects and
approach that an ‘engaged intellectual’ might take, inside the classroom and also, presumably, in original
research.
 Add on: No More Nazis
Contention 2 is No More Nazis
Homogenous modern society excludes all heterogeneous elements that threaten the
social totality. It is founded on the principle that men are only worth the equivalent of
their productive capacity. We are willing to let the poor take out our garbage and clean
our streets, but have gone to great lengths to exclude them from both debate and
politics.
Bataille and Lovitt 79 – (Georges Bataille and Carl R. Lovitt, Winter 1979, “The Psychological
Structure of Fascism,” https://avantgardefascism.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/bataille-the-
psychological-structure-of-fascism1.pdf New German Critique, No. 16 (Winter, 1979), pp. 64-87)//Elmer

1. The Homogeneous Part of Society A psychological description of society must begin with that segment
which is most accessible to understanding - and apparently the most fundamental - whose significant
trait is tendential homogeneity.2 Homogeneity signifies here the commensurability of elements and the
awareness of this commensurability: human relations are sustained by a reduction to fixed rules based
on the consciousness of the possible identity of delineable persons and situations; in principle, all violence is
excluded from this course of existence. Production is the basis of social homogeneity.3 Homogeneous society is productive
society, namely useful society. Every useless element is excluded, not from all of society, but from its
homogeneous part. In this part, each element must be useful to another without the homogeneous activity
ever being able to attain the form of activity valid in itself. A useful activity has a common measure with another useful
activity, but not with activityfor itself. The common measure, the foundation of social homogeneity and of the
activity arising from it, is money, namely the calculable equivalent of the different products of collective
activity. Money serves to measure all work, and makes man a function of measurable products. According to the judgment of
homogeneous society, each man [person] is worth what he produces; in other words, he stops being an
existence for itself: he is no more than a function , arranged within measurable limits, of collective production (which makes
him an existence for something other than itself). But the homogeneous individual is truly a function of his personal
products only in artisanal production, where the means of production are relatively inexpensive and can be owned by the artisan.
In industrial civilization, the producer is distinguished from the owner of the means of production, and it is the latter who appropriates the
products for himself: consequently, it is he who, in modern society, is the function of the products; it is he - and not the producer - who founds
social homogeneity. Thus
in the present order of things, the homogeneous part of society is made up of those
men who own the means of production or the money destined for their upkeep or purchase . It is
exactly in the middle segment of the so-called capitalist or bourgeois class that the tendential reduction
of human character takes place, making it an abstract and interchangeable entity: a reflection of the homogeneous things the
individual owns. This reduction is then extended as much as possible to the so-called middle classes that variously benefit from realized profit.
But the industrial proletariat remains for the most part irreducible.
It maintains a double relation to homogeneous activity:
the latter excludes it - not from work but from profit . As agents of production, the workers fall within the
framework of the social organization, but the homogeneous reduction as a rule only affects their wage-earning activity; they are
integrated into the psychological homogeneity in terms of their behavior on the job, but not generally as men. Outside of the factory ,
and even beyond its technical operations, a laborer is, with regard to a homogeneous person (boss,
bureaucrat, etc.), a stranger, a man of another nature, of a non-reduced, non-subjugated nature.
In a homogeneous society, the state’s primary function becomes the maintenance of
that homogeneity and the violent repression of difference. All means are justified to
this end.
Bataille and Lovitt 79 – (Georges Bataille and Carl R. Lovitt, Winter 1979, “The Psychological
Structure of Fascism,” https://avantgardefascism.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/bataille-the-
psychological-structure-of-fascism1.pdf New German Critique, No. 16 (Winter, 1979), pp. 64-87)//Elmer

HI. The State In the contemporary period, social homogeneity is linked to the bourgeois class by essential
ties: thus the Marxist conception is justified whenever the State is shown to be at the service of a threatened
homogeneity. As a rule, social homogeneity is a precarious form, at the mercy of violence and even of
internal dissent. It forms spontaneously in the play of productive organization but must constantly be
protected from the various unruly elements that do not benefit from production , or not enough to suit
them, or simply, that cannot tolerate the checks that homogeneity imposes on unrest . In such conditions, the
protection of homogeneity lies in its recourse to imperative elements which are capable of obliterating
the various unruly forces or bringing them under the control of order . The state is not itself one of these
imperative elements; it is distinct from kings, heads of the army, or of nations, but it is the result of the modifications undergone
by a part of homogeneous society as it comes into contact with such elements . This part is an intermediary
formation between the homogeneous classes and the sovereign agencies from which it must borrow it obligatory
character, but whose exercise of sovereignty must rely upon it as an intermediary. It is only with reference to these sovereign
agencies that it will be possible to envision the way in which this obligatory character is transferred to a
formation that nevertheless does not constitute an existence valid in itself (heterogeneous), but simply an activity
whose usefulness with regard to another part is manifest. In practical terms, the function of the State consists of an interplay
of authority and adaptation. The reduction of differences through compromise in parliamentary practice
indicates all the possible complexity of the internal activity of adaptation required by homogeneity. But
against forces that cannot be assimilated, the State cuts matters short with strict authority . Depending on whether the State is
democratic or despotic, the prevailing tendency will be either adaptation or authority . In a democracy, the State
derives most of its strength from spontaneous homogeneity, which it fixes and constitutes as the rule . The
principle of its sovereignty - the nation -, providing both its end and its strength, is thus diminished by the fact that isolated individuals
increasingly consider themselves as ends with regard to the State, which would thus exist for them before existing for the nation. And, in this
case, personal life distinguishes itself from homogeneous existence as a value which presents itself as incomparable.

The ultimate goal of homogeneous society is the exclusion of dangerous,

heterogeneous elements such as poverty. In the pursuit of this goal, all action is
justified including the dehumanization, degradation, and eventual slaughter of the
poor and unworthy. The sadism of the state subverts all morality and even co-opts
utilitarian calculus in the preservation of its homogeneity.
Bataille and Lovitt 79 – (Georges Bataille and Carl R. Lovitt, Winter 1979, “The Psychological
Structure of Fascism,” https://avantgardefascism.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/bataille-the-
psychological-structure-of-fascism1.pdf New German Critique, No. 16 (Winter, 1979), pp. 64-87)//Elmer

Heterogeneous fascist action belongs to the entire set of higher forms. It makes an appeal to sentiments
traditionally defined as exalted and noble and tends to constitute authority as an unconditional
principle, situated above any utilitarian judgment . Obviously, the use of the words higher, noble, exalted does not imply
endorsement. Here these qualities simply designate that something belongs to a category historically defined as higher, noble, or exalted: such
particularized or novel conceptions can only be considered in relation to the traditional conceptions from which they derive; they are,
furthermore, necessarily hybrid, without any farreaching effect, and it is doubtless preferable, if possible, to abandon any representation of this
order (for what admissible reasons would a man want to be noble, similar to a representative of the medieval, military caste and absolutely not
ignoble, that is to say similar, in accordance with the judgment of history, to a man whose material destitution would have altered his human
character, made him something other?). Having formulated this reservation, the meaning of higher values must be
clarified with the help of traditional qualifiers . Superiority (imperative sovereignty10) designates the entire set of
striking aspects -affectively determining attraction or repulsion - characteristic of different human
situations in which it is possible to dominate and even to oppress one's fellows by reason of their age,
physical weakness, legal status, or simply of their necessity to place themselves under the control of one
person: specific situations correspond to diverse circumstances, that of the father with regard to his children, that of the military leader with
regard to the army and the civilian population, that of the master with regard to the slave, that of the king with regard to his subjects. To these
real situations must be added mythological situations whose exclusively fictitious nature facilitates a condensation of the aspects characteristic
of superiority. The
simple fact of dominating one's fellows implies the heterogeneity of the master , insofar as
he is the master: to the extent that he refers to his nature, to his personal quality, as the justification of
his authority, he designates his nature as something other, without being able to account for it rationally .
But not only as something other with regard to the rational domain of the common measure and the equivalent: the heterogeneity of the
master is no less opposed to that of the slave.
If the heterogeneous nature of the slave is akin to that of the filth to
which his material situation condemns him to live, that of the master is formed by an act excluding all
filth: an act pure in direction but sadistic in form . In human terms, the ultimate imperative value presents itself in the form of
royal or imperial authority in which cruel tendencies and the need, characterisitic of all domination, to realize and idealize order are manifest in
the highest degree. This
double character is not less present in fascist authority, but it is only one of the
numerous forms of royal authority, the description of which constitutes the foundation of any coherent
description of fascism. In opposition to the impoverished existence of the oppressed, political
sovereignty initially presents itself as a clearly differentiated sadistic activity . In individual psychology, it is rare for
the sadistic tendency not to be associated with a more or less manifest masochistic tendency. But as each tendency is normally represented in
society by a distinct agency, the sadistic attitude can be manifested by an imperative person to the exclusion of any corresponding masochistic
attitudes. Inthis case, the exclusion of the filthy forms that serve as the object of the cruel act is not
accompanied by the positioning of these forms as a value and, consequently, no erotic activity can be
associated with the cruelty. The erotic elements themselves are rejected at the same time as every filthy object and, as in a great
number of religious attitudes, sadism attains a brilliant purity. This differenciation can be more or less complete - individually, sovereigns
have been able to live power in part as an orgy of blood - but, on the whole, within the heterogeneous
domain, the imperative royal form has historically effected an exclusion of impoverished and filthy forms
sufficient to permit a connection with homogeneous forms at a certain level. In fact, as a rule, homogeneous
society excludes every heterogeneous element, whether filthy or noble; the modalities of the operation vary as
much as the nature of each excluded element . For homogeneous society, only the rejection of impoverished
forms has a constant fundamental value (such that the least recourse to the reserves of energy represented by these forms
requires an operation as dangerous as subversion); but, given that the act of excluding impoverished forms necessarily
associates homogeneous forms with imperative forms, the latter can no longer be purely and simply
rejected. To combat the elements most incompatible with it, homogeneous society uses free-floating
imperative forces; and, when it must choose the very object of its activity (the existence for itself in the
service of which it must necessarily place itself) from the domain that it has excluded, the choice inevitably falls
on those forces which have already proved most effective. The inability of homogeneous society to find in itself a reason for being and acting is
what makes it dependent upon imperative forces, just as the sadistic hostility of sovereigns towards the impoverished population is what allies
them with any formation seeking to maintain the latter in a state of oppression .
A complex situation results from the royal
person's modalities of exclusion: since the king is the object in which homogeneous society has found its
reason for being, maintaining this relationship demands that he conduct himself in such a way that the
homogeneous society can exist for him. In the first place, this requirement bears upon the fundamental heterogeneity of the
king, guaranteed by numerous prohibitions of contact (taboos); this heterogeneity, however, is impossible to keep in a free state. In no case may
heterogeneity receive its law from without, but its spontaneous movement can be fixed, at least tendentially, once and for all. Thus,
the
destructive passion (sadism) of the imperative agency is as a rule exclusively directed either toward
foreign societies or towards the impoverished classes , towards all those external or internal elements
hostile to homogeneity.

In its constant effort to exclude undesirable heterogeneous elements such as poverty,

homogeneous society resorts to the embrace of the royal sovereign – an entity that
uses bloody domination and repression of the underclasses to ensure the social
cohesion of its homogeneity. Homogeneity, in seeking to protect itself from the
dangers of heterogeneity, models that which it seeks to eliminate in the form of fascist
dictatorship.
Bataille and Lovitt 79 – (Georges Bataille and Carl R. Lovitt, Winter 1979, “The Psychological
Structure of Fascism,” https://avantgardefascism.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/bataille-the-
psychological-structure-of-fascism1.pdf New German Critique, No. 16 (Winter, 1979), pp. 64-87)//Elmer

X. Fascismas the Sovereign Form of Sovereignty Stirring up such apparently anachronistic phantoms
would surely be senseless if fascism had not , before our very eyes, reappropriated and reconstituted
from the bottom up - starting, as it were, with nothing - the very process described above for the
establishment of power. Until our times, there had only been a single historical example of the sudden
formation of a total power, namely the Islamic Khalifat. While both military and religious, it was principally royal, relying upon no prior
foundation. Islam, a form comparable to fascism in its meager human wealth, did not even have recourse to an established nation, much less a
constituted State. But it must be recognized that, for fascist movements, the existing State has first been something
to conquer, then a means or a frame,12 and that the integration of the nation does not change the schema of their formation. Just like early
Islam, fascism represents the constitution of a total heterogeneous power whose manifest origin is to be found in the
prevailing effervescence. In the first place, fascist power is characterized by a foundation that is both religious and
military, in which these two habitually distinct elements cannot be separated: it thus presents itself from
the outset as an accomplished concentration . It is true, however, that the military aspect is the predominant one. The affective
relations that closely associate (identify) the leader to the member of the party (as they have already been described) are generally analogous
to those uniting a chief to his soldiers. The
imperative presence of the leader amounts to a negation of the
fundamental revolutionary effervescence that he taps; the revolution, which is affirmed as a foundation
is, at the same time, fundamentally negated from the moment that internal domination is militarily
exerted on the militia. But this internal domination is not directly subordinated to real or possible acts of war: it essentially poses itself
as the middle term of an external domination of society and of the State, as the middle term of a total imperative value. Thus, qualities
characteristic of the two dominations (internal and external, military and religious) are simultaneously
implied: qualities derived from the introjected homogeneity, such as duty, discipline and obedience, and
qualities derived from the essential heterogegeity: imperative violence and the positioning of the chief
as the transcendent object of collective affectivity. But the religious value of the chief is really the fundamental (if not formal)
value of fascism, giving the activity of the militiamen its characteristic affective tonality, distinct from that of the soldier in general. The chief as
such is in fact only the emanation of a principle which is none other than that of the glorious existence of a nation raised to the value of a divine
force (which, superseding every other conceivable consideration, demands not only passion but ecstasy from its participants). Incarnated in
the person of the chief (in Germany, the properly religious term, prophet, has sometimes been used),
the nation thus plays the same role that Allah, incarnated in the person of Mahomet or the Khalif,13
plays for Islam. Fascism therefore appears first of all as a concentration and so to speak condensation of
power14 (a meaning actually indicated in the etymological value of the term). This general signification must furthermore be accepted in
several ways. The accomplished uniting of imperative forces takes place at the top, but the process leaves no social
fraction inactive. In fundamental opposition to socialism, fascism is characterized by the uniting of classes. Not that classes conscious
of their unity have adhered to the regime, but because expressive elements of each class have been
represented in the deep movements of adherence that led to the seizing of power. Here the specific type of
unification is actually derived from properly military affectivity, which is to say that the representative elements of the exploited classes have
been included in the affective process only through the negation of their own nature (just as the social nature of a recruit is negated by means
of uniforms and parades). This
process which blends the different social formations from the bottom up must be
understood as a fundamental process whose scheme is necessarily given in the very formation of the
chief, who derives his profound meaning from the fact of having shared the dejected and impoverished
life of the proletariat. But, as in the case of military organization, the affective value characteristic of impoverished existence is only
displaced and transformed into its opposite; and it is its inordinate scope that gives the chief and the whole of the formation the accent of
violence without which no army or fascism could be possible. XI. The Fascist State Fascism's
close ties with the impoverished
classes profoundly distinguish this formation from classical royal society, which is characterized by a more or less
decisive loss of contact with the lower classes. But, forming in opposition to the established royal unification (the forms of which dominate
society from too far above), the
fascist unification is not simply a uniting of powers from different origins and a
symbolic uniting of classes: it is also the accomplished uniting of the heterogeneous elements with the
homogeneous elements, of sovereignty in the strictest sense with the State. As a uniting, fascism is actually
opposed as much to Islam as it is to traditional monarchy. In fact Islam created from nothing, and that is why a form such as the State, which can
only be the result of a long historical process, played no role in its immediate constitution; on the contrary, the existing State served from the
outset as a frame for the entire fascist process of organic organization. This characteristic aspect of fascism permitted Mussolini to write that
"everything is in the State," that "nothing human or spiritual exists nor a fortiori does it have any existence outside of the State."15 But this
does not necessarily imply an identity of the State and the imperative force that dominates the whole of
society. Mussolini himself, who leaned toward a kind of Hegelian divinisation of the Stat e, acknowledges in
willfully obscure terms a distinct principle of sovereignty that he alternately designates as the people, the nation, and the superior personality,
but which must be identified with the fascist formation itself and its leader: "if the people .. . signifies the idea ... that is incarnated in the people
as the will of a few or even of a single person ... It has to do," he writes, "neither with race nor with a determined geographical region, but with
a grouping that is historically perpetuated, of a multitude unified by an idea that is a will to existence and to power: it is a self-consciousness, a
personality."16 The term personality must be understood as individualization, a process leading to Mussolini himself, and when he adds that
"this superior personality is the nation as State. It is not the nation that creates the State . ,"17 it
must be understood that he has:
1) substituted the principle of the sovereignty of the individualized fascist formation for the old
democratic principle of the sovereignty of the nation; 2) laid the groundwork for a conclusive
interpretation of the sovereign agency and the State. Nationalist-Socialist Germany - which, unlike Italy
(under the patronage of Gentile), has not officially adopted Hegelianism and the theory of the State as
soul of the world - has not been afflicted with the theoretical difficulties resulting from the necessity of
officially articulating a principle of authority : the mystical idea of race immediately affirmed itself as the imperative aim of the
new fascist society; at the same time it appeared to be incarnated in the person of the Fuhrer and his followers. Even though the conception of
race lacks an objective base, it is nonetheless subjectively grounded, and the necessity of maintaining the racial value above all others obviated
the need for a theory that made the State the principle of all value. The
example of Germany thus demonstrates that the
identity established by Mussolini between the State and the sovereign form of value is not necessary to
a theory of fascism. The fact that Mussolini did not formally distinguish the heterogeneous agency, the action of which he caused to
penetrate deeply into the State, can equally be interpreted as an absolute seizure of the State, and as a strained adaptation of the sovereign
agency to the necessities of a regime of homogeneous production. It is in the development of these two reciprocal processes that fascism and
the reason of State came to appear identical. Nevertheless, the
forms of life rigorously conserve a fundamental
opposition when they maintain a radical duality of principles in the very person of the one holding
power: the president of the Italian council and the German chancellor represent forms of activity
radically distinct from those of the Duce or the Fiihrer. Further, these two figures derive their fundamental power not from
their official function in the State, like other prime ministers, but from the existence of a fascist party and from their personal position at the
head of that party. In conjunction with the duality of heterogeneous and homogeneous forms, this evidence of the deep roots of power
precisely maintains the
unconditional supremacy of the heterogeneous form from the standpoint of the
principle of sovereignty.
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