Johnny 23' kritik (1NC shell)

[Lazzarone]

hillside over the sea. man sitting there on a cane seat . . . he is dressed in old-fashioned puttees green sport coat of English cut he has a sandy mustache stained with tobacco pale blue eyes . . . near him we now see several convulsed forms, the closest a few feet away outstretched hand clutching a handful of grass . . . the camera pans out convulsed corpses to the sky back to the man sitting there on his cane seat . . . the man takes a chicken sandwich out of a wicker lunch basket . . . "safe at last" he says and starts eating his sandwich . . . the man you see here is Doctor Lee . . . Doctor John Lee . . . he was a sensitive man and it lacerated him to walk streets and enter restaurants where he encountered living organisms manifesting wills different from and in some cases flatly antagonistic to his own . . . "the situation is little short of intolerable" . . . Rock Ape waiter there with the wrong wine . . . he was a timid man in a way you see and not able to fix the waiter with Mandrill eyes and ugly American snarl . . . "bring me red wine you hairy assed Rock Ape or I drink it from your throat!" . . . now the doctor was a man of independent means and could usually avoid such disturbing incidents but the possibility was always there . . . this disturbed him and he was a man who did not like to be disturbed . . . he decided to end the whole distasteful thing once and for all by turning everyone into himself . . . this he proposed to do by a virus an image concentrate of himself that would spread waves of tranquility in all directions until the world was a fit place for him to live . . . he called it the "beautiful disease" . . . his first attempts to activate the image meal failed . . . he realized of course that to administer a dead or weakened strain of the beautiful Lee virus would invite the disaster of mass inoculation . . . he had to be quite sure you understand . . . some of his "canine preparations" as he called test cases died in quite unpleasant ways that disturbed him for he was a humane man and did not like to be disturbed so these unworthy vessels only increased his resolve to make a better world . . . one day it occurred to him if perhaps the image meal were radioactive . . . he painted a culture of image meal with radium paint and put it in an iron box covered on the outside with layers of human skin and now he chuckled "let it steep" and made himself a cup of tea . . . he finished his tea and opened the box . . . "ladies and gentlemen of planet earth introducing 'Johnny 23'" . . . his cat hissed made an abortive attempt to walk on its hind legs and fell in convulsions . . . in its dying eyes he read an almost human hatred . . . he attributed the death of his cat to a short circuit of overburdened synapses occasioned by a too rapid conversion to the human condition . . . "now we must find a worthy vessel" . . . remember the good doctor was a humane man who did not like to harm anyone because it disturbed him to do so and he was a man who did not like to be disturbed . . . he had convinced himself that "Johnny 23" would simply remove from the planet hostile alien forces manifesting themselves through other people that this would come about through peaceful penetration in the course of which no lives would be lost . . . "Johnny 23" would simply make friends of everyone . . . the doctor was not a man who argued with himself . . . the first public appearance of "Johnny 23" demonstrated a miscalculation . . . worthy vessels clutched at an often imaginary mustache and fell in convulsions looking at some invisible presence black hate from dying eyes . . . "Johnny 23" was one hundred percent fatal . . . the good doctor had a spot of bother a narrow escape in fact when the worthy vessels found out who "Johnny 23" is . . . fortunately the epidemic was well advanced by that time and "Johnny 23" finished the job . . . he finishes his sandwich and licks the grease off his fingers . . . he puts a cigarette in a stained bone holder . . . he sits there smoking . . . it is very peaceful there on the hillside nothing to disturb him as far as the eyes can see he gets up folds his cane seat and walks down a path toward the sea . . . his boat is moored by the pier . . . it is a small boat and he can handle it alone . . . last awning flaps on the pier . . . last man here now.

_

We quote this full chapter from William S. Burroughs' novel, Exterminator! (1977. p52-4.) not as another debate card, but as a story for us to consider in relation to our lives and our participation in debate. While we don't wish to mock our interlocutors' advocacy, we're trying to recognize how we all engage in risky utopian discourse that ignores the disturbing implications of our own thoughts and actions. The above tale teaches us that sometimes our resolve to make a better world comes attached with a refusal to question ourselves. This may propagate the image concentrate which Doctor Lee called the 'beautiful disease'.

Likewise, current debating practices concentrate argument into commodity forms, such as pre-packaged cards and timed speeches, which neurotically fixate on the goal of winning to the detriment of debate's revolutionary potential. Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari discuss this in relation to literature in their book, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972. p132-4.) :

Strange Anglo-American literature: from Thomas Hardy, from D.H. Lawrence to Malcolm Lowry, from Henry Miller to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, men who know how to leave, to scramble the codes, to cause flows to circulate, to traverse the desert of the body without organs. They overcome a limit, they shatter a wall, the capitalist barrier. And of course they fail to complete the process, they never cease failing to do so. The neurotic impasse again closes - the daddy-mommy of oedipalization, America, the return to the native land - or else the perversion of the exotic territorialities, then drugs, alcohol - or worse still, an old fascist dream. Never has delirium oscillated more between its two poles. But through the impasses and the triangles a schizophrenic flow moves, irresistibly; sperm, river, drainage, inflamed genital mucus, or a stream of words that do not let themselves be coded, a libido that is too fluid, too viscous: a violence against syntax, a concerted destruction of the signifier, non-sense erected as a flow, polyvocality that returns to haunt all relations. How poorly the problem of literature is put, starting from the ideology that it bears, or from the co-option of it by a social order. People are co-opted, not works, which will always come to awake a sleeping youth, and which never cease extending their flame. As for ideology, it is the most confused notion because it keeps us from seizing the relationship to the literary machine with a field of production, and the moment when the emitted sign breaks though this "form of content" that was attempting to maintain the sign within the order of the signifier. Yet it has been a long time since Engels demonstrated, already apropos of Balzac, how an author is great because he cannot prevent himself from tracing flows and causing them to circulate, flows that split asunder the catholic and despotic signifiers of his work, and that necessarily nourish a revolutionary machine on the horizon. That is what style is, or rather the absence of style - asyntactic, agrammatical: the moment when language is no longer defined by what it says, even less by what makes it a signifying thing, but by what causes it to move, to flow, and to explode - desire. For literature is like schizophrenia: a process and not a goal, a production and not an expression.

Here again, oedipalization is one of the most important factors in the reduction of literature to an object of consumption conforming to the established order, and incapable of causing anyone harm. It is not a question here of the personal oedipalization of the author and his readers, but of the Oedipal form to which one attempts to enslave the work itself, to make of it this minor expressive activity that secretes ideology according to the dominant codes. The work of art is supposed to inscribe itself in this fashion between the two poles of Oedipus, problem and solution, neurosis and sublimation, desire and truth - the one regressive, where the work hashes out and redistributes the nonresolved conflicts of childhood, and the other progressive, by which the work invents the paths leading toward a new solution concerning the future of man. It is said that the work is constituted by a conversion interior to itself as "cultural object." From this point of view, there is no longer even any need for applying psychoanalysis to the work of art, since the work itself constitutes a successful psychoanalysis, a sublime "transference" with exemplary collective virtualities. The hypocritical warning resounds: a little neurosis is good for the work of art, good material, but not psychosis, especially not psychosis; we draw a line between the eventually creative neurotic aspect, and the psychotic aspect, alienating and destructive. As if the great voices, which were capable of performing a breakthrough in grammar and syntax, and of making all language a desire, were not speaking from the depths of psychosis, and as if they were not demonstrating for our benefit an eminently psychotic and revolutionary means of escape.

It is correct to measure established literature against an Oedipal psychoanalysis, for this literature deploys a form of superego proper to it, even more noxious than the nonwritten superego. Oedipus is in fact literary before being psychoanalytic. There will always be a Breton against Artaud, a Goethe against Lenz, a Schiller against Holderlin, in order to superegoize literature and tell us: Careful, go no further! No "errors for lack of tact"! Werther yes, Lenz no! The Oedipal form of literature is its commodity form. We are free to think that there is finally even less dishonesty in psychoanalysis than in established literature, since the neurotic pure and simple produces a solitary work, irresponsible, illegible, and nonmarketable, which on the contrary must pay not only to be read, but to be translated and reduced. He makes at least an economic error, an error in tact, and does not spread his values. Artaud puts it well: all writing is so much pig shit - that is to say, any literature that takes itself as an end or sets ends for itself, instead of being a process that "ploughs the crap of being and its language," transports the weak, the aphasiacs, the illiterate. At least spare us sublimation. Every writer is a sellout. The only literature is that which places an explosive device in its package, fabricating a counterfeit currency, causing the superego and its form of expression to explode, as well as the market value of its form of content.

_

Notice that the critical issue here is not the misinterpretation of content, but the reduction of all content to a restrictive format. No one in debate has pointed this out more relevantly than Gordon Mitchell. In his Fall 1998 article for Argumentation and Advocacy ('Pedagogical Possibilities for Argumentative Agency in Academic Debate'. v35. p43-4.), he explains how the sterile laboratory model of debate desensitizes participants to human suffering and enslaves our activity within a spectator-mentality :

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).

_

He goes on to connect this lack of argumentative agency to the danger that corporate or statist institutions may recruit debaters to legitimate insidious forms of social control (ibid. p44-5) :

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 milieu, 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?

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.

_

Mitchell comes close here to mentioning fascism. We define fascism as an ideal system of total power which emphasizes disciplinary regimentation and seeks to suppress all criticism. On the governmental level, this historically equates to ultra-conservative dictatorships which use left-wing propaganda, 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 & Guattari again, this time from their book, A Thousand Plateaus (1980. p214-5.) :

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 macrophysical level, to a rigid segmentarity and a particular mode of totalization and centralization. But fascism is inseparable from a proliferation of molecular forces 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. 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 segementarity, 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 segementarity 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 microformations 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.

_

Micro-fascism in debate has many facets - from paternalistic skools to unrepresentative framers to exclusionary ballots. One is right to immediately notice that we link to our own kritik. Here we are reading cards, appealing to a judge. But we're aware of these links, and we're self-critical. While we don't believe in the panacea of communication, we're adjacent to a debate machine that's continually recreated, one we hope will engender liberatory argument and experimental gaming. We offer a vision of what debate could be when we move beyond performance theater to real inorganization. Deleuze & Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (1972. p.309.) :

This reverse side is the "real inorganization" of the molecular elements: partial objects that enter into indirect syntheses or interactions, since they are not partial in the sense of extensive parts, but rather partial like the intensities under which a unit of matter always fills space in varying degrees (the eye, the mouth, the anus as degrees of matter); pure positive mulitiplicities where everything is possible, without exclusiveness or negation, syntheses operating without a plan, where the connections are transverse, the disjunctions included, the conjunctions polyvocal, indifferent to their underlying support, since this matter that serves them precisely as a support receives no specificity from any structural or personal unity, but appears as the body without organs that fills the space each time an intensity fills it; signs of desire that compose a signifying chain but that are not themselves signifying, and do not answer to the rules of a linguistic game of chess, but instead to the lottery drawings that sometimes cause a word to be chosen, sometimes a design, sometimes a thing or a piece of a thing, depending on one another only by the order of the random drawings, and holding together only by the absence of a link (nonlocalizable connections), having no other statutory condition than that of being dispersed elements of desiring-machines that are themselves dispersed.

_

One may ask, why are you still following the rules? Why aren't you doing a dadaist jig? Why aren't you vandalizing tournaments? Indeed, why haven't you exited debate? We wish to avoid being either generically avant-garde or generically anti-debate, and we know that one of the reasons debate rounds in 2005 look very different from rounds in 1985 is because kritiks won ballots. So we act to sneak explosive creativities through the back-door, using the appearance of a legitimate carded position in order to further illegitimate questions, to light those critical fires that may burn away some of the narrow-minded micro-fascisms of debate. Experimenting with new articulations requires a modest method of lodging oneself in collective assemblages, gently tipping them toward their own self-critique, without causing polarization, while avoiding the dis-empowering alternatives of either total rejection or pseudo-revolution. Deleuze & Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1980. p160-1.) :

You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn; and you have to keep small supplies of significance and subjectification, if only to turn them against their own systems when the circumstances demand it, when things, persons, even situations force you to; and you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality. Mimic the strata. You don't reach the BwO, and its plane of consistency, by wildly destratifying. That is why we encountered the paradox of those emptied and dreary bodies at the very beginning: they had emptied themselves of their organs instead of looking for the point which they could patiently and momentarily dismantle the organization of organs we call the organism. There are, in fact, several ways of botching the BwO: either one fails to produce it, or one produces it more or less, but nothing is produced on it, intensities do not pass or are blocked. This is because the BwO is always swinging between the surfaces that stratify it and the plane that sets it free. If you free it with too violent an action, if you blow apart the strata without taking precautions, then instead of drawing the plane you will be killed, plunged into a black hole, or even dragged toward catastrophe. Staying stratified - organized, signified, subjected - is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever. This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO. Connect, conjugate, continue: a whole "diagram," as opposed to still signifying and subjective programs. We are in a social formation; first see how it is stratified for us and in us and at the place where we are; then descend from the strata to the deeper assemblage within which we are held; gently tip the assemblage, making it pass over to the side of the plane of consistency. It is only there that the BwO reveals itself for what it is: connection of desires, conjunction of flows, continuum of intensities. You have constructed your own little machine, ready when needed to be plugged into other collective machines.

_

So we ask for your support not to certify that we're better debaters, but to assist us in plugging our kritik into the debate machine. You don't have to agree with us, but we hope you agree that two questions are worth discussing in this and future rounds:

How can we unhook ourselves from debate's micro-fascistic practices that nail us down to dominant reality? And how can problematizing the limitations inherent in the current format help mobilize support for new ideas, sowing the seeds of a people yet to come?

Finally, because we believe that insignificant events like debate rounds can entail life-changing experiences, even if this position becomes just another commodified kritik, perhaps it's still better to be a failed Foucault than a successful Doctor Lee. What's essential is trying to root out all forms of fascism in our everyday speech-acts as an ethical art of living. As Foucault explains in his preface to Anti-Oedipus (1972. pxiii-iv.) :

Last but not least, the major enemy, the strategic adversary is fascism (whereas Anti-Oedipus' opposition to the others is more of a tactical engagement). And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini - which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively - but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.

I would say that Anti-Oedipus (may its authors forgive me) is a book of ethics, the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a long time (perhaps that explains why its success was not limited to a particular "readership" : being anti-oedipal has become a life style, a way of thinking and living). How does one keep from being fascist, even (especially) when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant? How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism? How do we ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our behavior? The Christian moralists sought out the traces of the flesh lodged deep within the soul. Deleuze and Guattari, for their part, pursue the slightest traces of fascism in the body.

Paying a modest tribute to Saint Francis de Sales, * {*A seventeenth-century priest and Bishop of Geneva, known for his Introduction to the Devout Life} one might say that Anti-Oedipus is an Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life.

This art of living counter to all forms of fascism, whether already present or impending, carries with it a certain number of essential principles which I would summarize as follows if I were to make this great book into a manual or guide to everyday life:

Free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia.

Develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization.

Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.

Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force.

Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action.

Do not demand of politics that it restore the "rights" of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to "de-individualize" by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generator of de-individualization.

Do not become enamored of power.

_

[Lazzarone]

feel free to contribute any comments, questions, criticisms, possible extensions/insertions, possible refutations, random anecdotes, and so on. point out any spelling errors or contradictions, tell us what your 2ac would look like, ask for clarification on whatever isn't discernible, repost foucault's critique of polemics or other new link stories, etc. in short, let's workshop this bastard together.

.k (kevin.sanchez@gmail.com)

[MajereDB8]

Just a foreword: some of my comments will probably come across as overly cynical. Cynicism is perhaps the polar (molar? whoo bad pun :-P) opposite of Deleuze. So in good fun, here's my oppositional post for the week:

I think there's something crassly ironic about reading "cards" from Burroughs. Exterminator isn't one of his works that really highlights the cut-up, but I do wonder if placing such a work within the debate context addresses the objects brought up in the first D&G quote. Tracing the steps of the beat generation may be a personal step that helps someone become more artistic but is hardly creative. It feels almost generically avant garde. More importantly, this critique will likely be perceived as generically anti-debate. Look no further than the recent article in Harvard's campus magazine ridiculing "concept" teams. Trying to find a better world by mocking someone else's utopia may at best encourage the debate community to change, but at the expense of the project. Time after time, critical argumentation is introduced into debate, and crafty debaters co-opt the philosophies through community norms and strategies.

Additionally, it seems that trying to change debate (a structure) is problematic in the same sense as a state-centric debate. If there's "fascism inside you" and inside me, then traditional debate isn't the problem, it's a manifestation of people trying to change the world in a questionable manner. Issue 8 on Rhizomes.net has an excellent article by Kevin Wolfmeyer arguing for more radical literary politics that is understood as a "conduct" rather than a reading or consumption. I think that article more succintly and clearly explains what the bottom evidence suggests - that while debate can be viewed as a space where possibilities are infinite, we should also recognize that infinity, like the stars in the sky, cannot and should not be contained within one space. Debate in this framework is highly experimental - indeed, perhaps to such a degree that that the end point is not a finite decision.

[Joe-Miller]

Originally Posted by Lazzarone

feel free to contribute any comments, questions, criticisms, possible extensions/insertions, possible refutations, random anecdotes, and so on. point out any spelling errors or contradictions, tell us what your 2ac would look like, ask for clarification on whatever isn't discernible, repost foucault's critique of polemics or other new link stories, etc. in short, let's workshop this bastard together.

.k (kevin.sanchez@gmail.com)

I'm going to have to get back to this later tonight, when i have more time. I only got part way through this morning. But I got to say that this line was stronger than my morning coffee:

"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."

[zzibmezz]

This sounds like a hard one to pull off, and I'm sure there will be plenty of people ready to tear it down, but if you still think you can make it work after all the criticism, then I'd like to get in on that workshop.

E-mail - zzibmezz@netscape.net
AIM - zzibmezz

[bRubaie]

I've only read Anti-Oedipus, but if you'd like some more assistance of any kind, please let me know and I'll hop in.

[OverAllComa]

Um...link turn. By attempting to get the judge to vote for the K, the neg commodifies the authors as nothing more than excerpts of masterpieces that neither include their totality nor address all the aspects. Instead, they force you to recognize the parts they wish you to hear, the aspects they deem important. This is commodification of debate. K is a wash.

Next, the Neg tries to establish the Aff as inferior in knowledge and understanding about the nature of being. They also establish this difference as justification for voting on them. This establishes and reinforces knowledge-power differences a la Foucault. *Run Foucault Knowledge Power."

[nonunique]

Originally Posted by zzibmezz

This sounds like a hard one to pull off, and I'm sure there will be plenty of people ready to tear it down, but if you still think you can make it work after all the criticism, then I'd like to get in on that workshop.

E-mail - zzibmezz@netscape.net
AIM - zzibmezz

I'm pretty sure this IS the workshop...you contribute to a file/concept for the collective.

To Mr. Coma. I tend to agree with your turn. I'm pretty sure that D&G argue that the problem isn't cutting the masterpieces, but cutting them and portraying them as totally representative of the actual article. I think the metaphor is of mapping projections. Say I take the world and construct a map of it (thought), and then cut out pieces of that map (ideas) to "highlight". What I really have is a holey map (with large sections missing--unmapped)...so it is wrong to portray that as the complete map...but as long as I admit to the map's holeyness, I'm not misleading anyone. I'm pretty sure that is a D&G argument...it may be someone else, though.

[cjfernan]

Not understanding micro-fascism link argument. The critique suggests that the common conception of fascism as a top-down model is wrong, because the propoganda permeates at the lower levels even when the fascist hierarchy is gone. The questions:
1. What is the definition of "fascism" as articulated by D&G? The argument suggests that fascism is the distribution of propoganda that permeates through every segment of society. This can't possibly be right; regardless, as an aff, I'd challenge the definition from the outset.
2. How is "literature commodification" fascist?

[zzibmezz]

Originally Posted by nonunique

I'm pretty sure this IS the workshop...you contribute to a file/concept for the collective.

Oh...that sucks. Does that mean that we'll all be recieving a file after this is over?

[nonunique]

This is not my idea or project, so correct me if I'm wrong...but I'd say you walk away with:

1) a strong 1NC shell (regardless of the the strength of the argument itself).
2) a lengthy and cited discussion of its supporting and detracting arguments.

Those two are probably more valuable than any "file" you would receive. But chances are you'll get lucky and also get a few backup cards posted in their entirety (saving you the trip to the library).

[Lazzarone]

majere (the cynic),

well the burroughs isn't really a 'card' per se - i mean, it's the entire chapter, and it functions independently of the rest of the novel. and as you say, burroughs himself pioneered the 'cut-up' method, from which it wouldn't hurt debaters to learn a thing or two. (burroughs never really considered himself of 'the beat generation' either, but that's a chat for another time.)

to pre-empt, yes the kritik links to itself (but it's also aware of those links). the d&g quotation is quite explicit - every writer is a sell-out, and all writing is pigshit. literature transcends this, however, by 'fabricating a counterfeit currency' in order to sneak in explosive creativities through the back door. go ahead and judge the book by its cover; but if the work itself is good, then it'll destroy all your judgments through the process of reading. (this reminds me i should probably start that card a sentence of two before - i'll edit that now.)

this is what sets this kritik apart. there are those who'd generically kritik debate itself, as you say, and who'd advocate the destruction of debate. and there are those who'd run generic kritiks and leave unquestioned the micro-fascisms of debate itself. this kritik attempts to walk a third path - neither wildly destructive nor molarly pseudo-revolutionary, this kritik seeks to open debate to a wider range of argumentative possibilities. see the b. card on method : 'gently tip the assemblage'.

(applying the previously unquoted part of the primary link card, i'd say that) debate teams can be co-opted, but the work they deploy can't help but to wake sleeping youths and to kindle critical fires. this kritik doesn't try to 'change the world', but to manifest an anti-fascist art of living, and to advance a call for experimentation. cross-reference d&g's discussion of 'becoming-minority' (a.t.p., p292): "becoming-revolutionary remains indifferent to questions of a future and a past of the revolution: it passes between the two... "how to win the majority" is a totally seconadry problem in relation to the[se] advances[.]" ... and isn't this the point of burrough's 'johnny 23'? ... that it's better to be a failure than to be a successful doctor lee?

page 403 is also key - "yet men of war reappear, with many ambiguities: they are all those who know the uselessness of violence but who are adjacent to a war machine to be recreated, one of active, revolutionary counterattacks. workers also reappear who do not believe in work but who are adjacent to a work machine to be recreated, one of active resistance and technological liberation. they do not resuscitate old myths or achaic figuresl they are the new figures of a transhistorical assemblage (neither historical nor eternal, but untimely)[.]"

sorta like those who don't believe in the panacea of communication but who are adjacent to a debate machine to be recreated, one of liberatory argument and experimental gaming. this may seem like a contradiction, but as d&g remind us, no one has ever died from contradiction.

we'll need to card both page 292 and page 403, if anyone wants to have a go at that, as well as write a block to 'you link to your own link card'. (i haven't read the entire harvard article, nor the wolfmeyer article, but i'll get back to you.)

_____

overallcoma,

again, read the entire link card - commodification occurs through unthinkingly reproducing and reducing a work to a mere object of consumption, a 'minor expressive activity'. this is what occurs in typical debate rounds, even kritik rounds. why? because the dangers of commodification never get discussed. this kritik opens up a space for precisely that discussion (as does voting neg).

furthermore, this kritik doesn't use literature as an end in itself. the burroughs isn't really a card, for example, becuase it doesn't accomplish anything 'on the flow' - it's trying to get the listerner caught up in a story, a process. this kritik doesn't try to convince a judge that its cards accomplish the goal of winning the round; it's trying to 'plough the crap of being' a debater, to use the mere appearance of a legitimate carded debate position in order to ask illegitimate questions, to light critical fires that might burn away some of the narrow-minded, micro-fascisms of debate.

it's you, in fact, who want to turn the kritik debate into 'a wash' (your word), to sap it of any revolutionary potential, to serve the goal of winning the round. for you, commodification isn't a real world problem, but another argument on the flow that you want to turn to your advantage. it's us, on the other hand, who (in the words of zzibmezz) are going for "a hard one to pull off" which "plenty of people [will be] ready to tear down". to the extent we commodify, we're trying to fabricate a counterfeit currency, to gently push debate toward its own auto-critique.

no where does this kritik claim that the affirmative is "inferior in knowledge and understanding about the nature of being". we said the affirmative CASE may find itself repeating the tale of one doctor lee. perhaps it won't; we don't know for certain. again it's you who are feigning certainty, not us.

moreover, i find your use of foucault very disempowering. he never said all knowledge-power is bad, but that it's always dangerous. if any and all criticism can be single-handedly revoked because it may make the object of criticism feel 'inferior', then foucault could never have pointed the accusatory finger at french prison officials in his work with the g.i.p., for an example. nor could students point their fingers at those skool officials who oppress them, for another example. yes, we must always examine the fascists inside us, but as foucault states in the thesis card, this doesn't debilitate all critique - instead it impels us ferret our fascism wherever we may find it :

"do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action."

my question for you is, how do you think this position fails to meet this ethical standard? and what ways might this position be made to function differently? (... and i'd be more than happy to mail a hard copy of a file for everyone based on the work we do on this thread, though i think it'd be redundant since all the cards and concepts would already be printable directly from here.)

_____

cj,

it's not simply a matter of propaganda (which is an ideological concept), but of desire (which is a material concept). the definition of fascism that d&g are using is necessarily molecular, meaning it networks itself through skools, families, work places, prisons, asylums, neighborhoods, peer groups, debating societies, etc., before it's capable of resonating as a totalitarian state. fascism also must seek to repress all those critical, artistic, and/or revolutionary forces that would subvert its power - and this is where 'literature commodification' comes in. if we can reduce living arguments to dead cards, then we don't have to grapple with them in the real world, and we can remain as undisturbed as doctor lee. i still feel you won't be sufficiently pleased with this response, so write back, and i'll contribute more.

[cjfernan]

[quote=Lazzarone]majere (the cynic),

Originally Posted by Lazzarone

it's not simply a matter of propaganda (which is an ideological concept), but of desire (which is a material concept). the definition of fascism that d&g are using is necessarily molecular, meaning it networks itself through skools, families, work places, prisons, asylums, neighborhoods, peer groups, debating societies, etc., before it's capable of resonating as a totalitarian state.

Just to make this clear: When used in the IR sense, fascism is the ideology of using a highly centralized state government to achieve utopia. However, either d&g reject this characterization, or they seek to expand the reach of fascism (the two ideas aren't mutually exclusive, I realize)
Fascism is not a thing, but it's a process. Fascism is a matter of desire. If I try and apply the IR definition backwards, then fascism, as used by d&g, is the process (or desire) to achieve a totalitarianistic state.
If I have this right, then I have no problem with the definition. The 2NC overview would undoubtedly have to clarify this distinction. The next issue comes to the articulation of the link...

fascism also must seek to repress all those critical, artistic, and/or revolutionary forces that would subvert its power - and this is where 'literature commodification' comes in. if we can reduce living arguments to dead cards, then we don't have to grapple with them in the real world, and we can remain as undisturbed as doctor lee.

"We don't have to grapple with [living arguments] in the real world": I don't understand this sentence. I see d&g saying "oedipalization is one of the most important factors in the reduction of literature to an object of consumption conforming to the established order, and incapable of causing anyone harm." I read this to mean that cutting cards entrenches the status quo fascist order, not that cutting cards bastardizes the argument into non-meaning.

i still feel you won't be sufficiently pleased with this response, so write back, and i'll contribute more.

Hopefully, my skepticism helps crystalize the argument...
I'm also curious how you'd respond to the fascism good argument. After all, the purpose of fascism is to create utopia. The aff would never argue totalitarianism good, but that a powerful state actor is necessary within an international relations scheme and approach to policymaking.

[Lazzarone]

fascism isn't simply a term of international relations, but of governmentality generally, and government is a more complex and penetrating socio-political process than simply the policies of states. (that's how the card applies to most affirmatives, for instance - they're anti-fascist on a molar level while simultaneously unable to see the micro-fascisms that prop up state control.)

one needn't neglect to consider 'the ideology of using a highly centralized state government to achieve utopia' fascistic (you're right in saying they're not mutually exclusive definitions), but d&g argue that "there is no reason to define fascism by a concept of its own devising".

after all, there've been miltiary dictatorships that weren't most accurately described as fascist - stalinist russia, for example, which was a murderous bureaucracy few believed in. see, fascism implies an attribute of popular involvement - as daniel guerin writes of hitler's "unequaled, irreplaceable ability to penetrate every cell of society". did stalin have that? certainly stalin was beloved by many, but the masses reproduced the state ideologies half-heartedly. diehard fascism, on the other hand, is defined by its being a "mass movement", "a cancerous body rather than a totalitarian organism", which remains "inseparable from a proliferation of molecular focres in interaction" - hence the micro-fascism of compulsory skools, of oedipal familialism, of academic forensics, and so forth.

fascism is not only a simple desire for a totalitarian state, but any desire to wage war for even the future dream of such a state, and thus a disinterested love of the social machine and its repressions. think of the Klu Klux Klan : long after the overt legal sanction of white supremacy ended, the KKK continued to operate in secret and wield siginficant political power. it's still around today, in fact. far more common, however, are those who harbor white supremacist sentiments, who work in southern churches or on internet websites, for examples, and help to sustain the racist dreams of the KKK. perhaps this is why critical race theorists have taken to the term 'micro-racism' - white supremacy thus becomes a million tiny acts of injustice and terror where racism and fascism intersect and resonate together.

d&g also write (echoing virilio) that fascism is charaterized by a tendency toward suicidal collapse. and perhaps this is why coexistence was considered possible with the soviet union, but not nazi germany : "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 ... and the people cheered, not because they did not understand, but because they wanted that death through the death of others. ... 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 fuhrer 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? ..." ... 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 economists 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." - a.t.p, page 230-1.

the rest of that page is good too, but i got tired of typing, and all this seems to jive with your definition as well. so on to 'literature commodification'...

you write : ""We don't have to grapple with [living arguments] in the real world": I don't understand this sentence. I see d&g saying "oedipalization is one of the most important factors in the reduction of literature to an object of consumption conforming to the established order, and incapable of causing anyone harm." I read this to mean that cutting cards entrenches the status quo fascist order, not that cutting cards bastardizes the argument into non-meaning."

no, cutting cards reduces the argument (whatever its meaning) to dead representation, 'a minor expressive activity incapable of causing anyone harm'. this equates to the enslavement of the work within the oedipal 'form of content' (a 'card') - or literature as commodity consumption. the dominant discourses of academic debate entrench this practice: you ask, 'what does this card say?'

yet what happens "when language is no longer defined by what it says, even less by what makes it a signifying thing, but by what causes it to move, to flow, and to explode"? what happens when all in-round discourse doesn't (neurotically) fixate on the goal of winning, but (psychotically) cares about ploughing the crap of being for its own sake? what happens when a short story like 'johnny 23' carries one through a literary process, a trip? might this cause flows to circulate that split asunder the despotic signifiers of debate and nourish a revolutionary machine on the horizon? ... a.o., p137 :

"for either the artistic machine, the analytical machine, and the revolutionary machine will remain in extrinsic relationship that make them function in the deadening framework of the system of social and psychic repression, or they will become parts and cogs of one another in the flow that feeds one and the same desiring-machine, so many local fires patiently kindled for a generalized explosion - the schiz and not the signifier."

i contend that even so insignificant an event as a debate round can be a local fire patiently kindled for an artistic-analytical-revolutionary explosion, which is to say, even you can fight fascism. (your skepticism is appreciated, however...)

"I'm also curious how you'd respond to the fascism good argument."

i'm also curious what a 'fascism good'-argument would even look like?

[debater4523]

"we'll need to card both page 292 and page 403"

Which book is this from? I can help if you need somebody to type up anything from Anti-Oedipus but unfortunately I don't have a copy of ATP yet.

[Lazzarone]

yeah, they're both from 'a thousand plateaus', but there's plenty of work left undone in 'anti-oedipus' as well (see below).

foucault's critique of 'polemics' applies too, and deleuze reconceptualizes the role of the judge in 'essays: clinical and critical' (p128-135).

brainstorming and blocking answers to common arguments is what's needed most, however - 'framework good', 'you link to yourself', etc. - since an analytical grasp of the argument is crucial. suggestions regarding delivery and design are also helpful.

_

links -
debate as state-function : ATP, p375-6; ATP, p385-7.
fear of losing : ATP, p227.
monomanical clarity : ATP, p228.
impotent power : ATP, p229.
(also debate as game-show : www.ndtceda.com/archives/200209/0158.html ; www.ndtceda.com/archives/200209/0161.html.)

implications -
tribunals of guilt : AO, p269-71.
machinic enslavement : ATP, p458.
cruelty of signs : AO, p145.
state violence : ATP, p447-8.
being a cop : AO, p344-7.
war on unspecified enemy : ATP, p420-3.

alternatives -
becoming-minority : ATP, p471; ATP, p292.
singing : AO, p334.
deoedipalization : AO, p112.
outside thought : ATP, p376-8.
rebel : ATP, p403.

answers to... -
performative contradiction : AO, p14-5. ATP, p78-9.
reformism : AO, p277.
performativity : ATP, p77-8.

random items -
'international' : ATP,p435.
treating people as numbers : ATP, p390.
mental health : AO, p320-1.
humanism : AO, p225.
gay liberation : AO, p350-1.
terror without precedent : AO, p192.
anti-drugs : ATP, 282-6.
racism : ATP, p178.
nation-state system : ATP, p453-6.
private property : AO, p303.
generation gap : AO, p350.
consumption as last word of oedipus : AO, p312-4.

___

Unless we engage the forum in rigorous political questioning, institutions in debate will continue to endanger participants with paternalistic subjugation.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. 1972. (Anti-Oedipus. p319-20.)

Perhaps there is only one illness, neurosis, the Oedipal decay against which all the pathogenic interruptions of the process should be measured. Most of the modern endeavors - outpatient centers, inpatient hospitals, social clubs for the sick, family care, institutions, and even antipsychiatry - remain threatened by a common danger, a danger which Jean Oury has been able to analyze in depth: how does one avoid the institution's re-forming an asylum structure, or constituting perverse and reformist artificial societies, or residual paternalistic or mothering psuedo families? We do not have in mind the so-called community psychiatry endeavors, whose admitted purpose is to triangulate, to Oedipalize everyone - people, animals, things - to a point where we will witness a new race of sick people implore by reaction that they be given back an asylum, or a little Beckettian land, a garbage can, so they can become catatonic in a corner. But in a less openly repressive manner, who says that the family is a good place, a good circuit for the deterritorialized schizo? Such a thing would be very surprising, to say the least: "the therapeutic potentialities of the familial surrounds." The whole town, then, the whole neighborhood? What molar unit will constitute a sufficiently nomadic circuit? How does one prevent the unit chosen, even if a specific institution, from constituting a perverted society of tolerance, a mutual-aid society that hides the real problems? Will the structure of the institution save it? But how will the structure break its relationship with neuroticizing, perverting, psychoticizing castration? How will this structure produce anything but a subjugated group? How will it give free play to the process, when its entire molar organization has the function of binding the molecular process?


Oedipal structures like academic debate use segregation to induce fantasies in subjugated groups about their membership in the forum

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. 1972. (Anti-Oedipus. p103-4.)

There is no more an individual Oedipus than there is an individual fantasy. Oedipus is a means of integration into the group, in both the adpative form of its own reproduction that makes it pass from one generation to the next, and in its unadapted neurotic states that block desire at prearranged impasses. Oedipus also flourishes in subjugated groups, where an established order is invested through the group's own repressive forms. And it is not the forms of the subjugated group that depend on Oedipal projections and identifications, but the reverse: it is Oedipal applications that depend on the determinations of the subjugated group as an aggegate of departure and on their libidinal investments (from the age of thirteen I've worked hard, rising on the social ladder, getting promotions, being a part of the exploiters). There is therefore a segregative use of the conjunctive syntheses of the unconscious, a use that does not coincide with divisions between classes, although it is an incomparable weapon in the service of the dominating class: it is the use that brings about the feeling of "indeed being one of us," of being part of a superior race threatened by enemies from the outside. Thus the Little White pioneers' son, the Irish Protestant who commemorates the victory of his ancestors, the fascist who belongs to the master race.

Oedipus depends on this sort of nationalistic, religious, racist sentiment, and not the reverse: it is not the father who is projected onto the boss, but the boss who is applied to the father, either in order to tell us "you will not surpass your father," or "you will surpass him to find our forefathers." Lacan has demonstated in a profound way the link between Oedipus and segregation. Not, however, in the sense where segregation would be a consequence of Oedipus, subjacent to the fraternity of the brothers once the father is dead. On the contrary, the segregative use is a precondition of Oedipus, to the extent that the social field is not reduced to the familial tie except by presupposing an enormous archaism, an incarnation of the race in person or in spirit: yes, I am one of you.


Debate sovereigns (NFL, CEDA, ADA, etc.) over-code any liberational flows before they begin

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. 1972. (Anti-Oedipus. p199.)

All the coded flows of the primitive machine are now forced into a bottleneck, where the despotic machine overcodes them. Overcoding is the operation that constitutes the essence of the State, and that measures both its continuity and its break with the previous formations: the dread of flows of desire that would resist coding, but also the establishment of a new inscription that overcodes, and that makes desire into the property of the sovereign, even though he be the death instinct itself. The castes are inseparate from this overcoding, and imply the existence of dominant "classes" that do not yet manifest themselves as classes, but are merged with a State apparatus. Who is able to touch the full body of the sovereign? Here we have a problem of castes. It is overcoding that impoverishes the earth for the benefit of the deterritorialized full body, and that on this full body renders the movement of debt infinite. It is a measure of Nietzsche's force to have stressed the importance of such a movement that begins with the founders of the State, these artists with a look of bronze, creating "an oppressive and remorseless machine," erecting before any perspective of liberation an ironclad impossibility.


Signing a ballot as a traditional judgment enacts a symbolic death sentence, prohibiting new transformation

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. 1980. (A Thousand Plateaus. p107.)

Following Canetti's suggestions, we may begin from the following pragmatic situation: the order-word is a death sentence; it always implies a death sentence, even if it has been considerably softened, becoming symbolic, initiatory, temporary, etc. Order-words bring immediate death to those who recieve the order, or potential death if they do not obey, or a death they must themselves inflict, take elsewhere. A father's orders to his son, "You will do this," "You will not do that," cannot be separated from the little death sentence the son experiences on a point of his person. Death, death; it is the only judgment, and it is what makes judgment a system. The verdict. But the order-word is also something else, inseparably connected: it is like a warning cry or a message to flee. It would be oversimplifying to say that flight is a reaction against the order-word; rather, it is included in it, as its other face in a complex assemblage, its other component. Canetti is right to invoke the lion's roar, which enunciates flight and death simultaneously. The order-word has two tones. the prophet receives order-words just as much in taking flight as in longing for death: Jewish prophetism fused the wish to be dead and the flight impulse with the divine order-word.

Now if we consider the first aspect of the order-word, in other words, death as the expressed of the statement, it clearly meets the preceding requirements: even though death essentially concerns bodies, is attributed to bodies, its immediacy, its instantaneousness, lends it the authentic character of an incorporeal transformation. What precedes and follows it be an extensive system of actions and passions, a slow labor of bodies; in itself, it is neither action nor passion, but a pure act, a pure transformation that enunciation fuses with the statement, the sentence. That man is dead . . . You are already dead when you receive the order-word . . . In effect, death is everywhere, as that ideal, uncrossable boundary separating bodies, their forms, and states, and as the condition, even initiatory, even symbolic, through which a subject must pass in order to change its form or state. This is the sense in which Canetti speaks of "enantiomorphosis": a regime that involes a hieratic and immutable Master who at every moment legislates by constants, prohibiting or strictly limiting metamorphoses, giving figures clear and stable contours, setting forms in opposition two by two and requiring subjects to die in order to pass from one form to the other. It is always by means of something incorporeal that a body separates and distinguishes itself from another. The figure, insofar as it is the extremity of a body, is the noncorporeal attribute that limits and completes that body: death is the Figure. It is through death that a body reaches completion not only in time but in space, and it is through death that its lines form or outline a shape. There are dead spaces just as there are dead times. "If [enantiomorphosis is] practiced often the whole world shrivels. . . . Social prohibitions against metamorphosis are perhaps the most important of all. . . . Death itself, the strictest of all boundaries, is what is interposed between classes." In a regime of this kind, any new body requires the erection of an opposable form, as well as the formation of distinct subjects; death is the general incorporeal transformation attributed to all bodies from the standpoint of their forms and substances (for example, the body of the Party cannot come into its own without an operation of enantiomorphosis, and without the formation of new activists, which assumes the elimination of the first generation).

[cjfernan]

Fascism is dynamic, I understand that. My attempts to pidgeonhole this concept probably suggest my entrenchment in the status quo mentality. But here's my problem. If fascism is a desire (as stated, a "mass movement"), it has to be a desire TOWARDS SOMETHING. A singular ideal, goal, concept, maybe even a thing.
So, then I'll try and combine the idea of mass movements with your next sentence: "fascism is...any desire to wage war for even the future dream of such a state..."
Red flashing lights and bells are ringing in my head at this overly broad categorization, but I'll ignore that for the moment. This argument IS appealing on some level because of the construction of debate arguments: everything leads to nuclear war. While the aff may claim to "prevent" or "solve" such wars, the use of cards constructs an understanding of reality that justifies centralization of power (or at least furthers micro-fascist tendencies).
However, for fascism to survive, the concept must fester at the micro-level to drive the "war machine." In this sense, the totalitarianistic government that micro-fascism "creates" is more of a sham. Facism, unlike totalitarianism, isn't a pure transfer of power into the central government. Instead, the ideology must still be pervasive at a unit actor level (hence the term micro-fascism). That's where the alternative steps in to break down the fascist order.

Maybe my articulation is off quite a bit. In fact, I might be using my understanding of Foucault (though it's been some time since I've read about the Panoptican) as my leaping point in getting into this argument. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, I don't know.
Regardless if I get this right or wrong this time around (I'm sure kev will eventually straighten me out), from a debate perspective, the point is the same: the use of "fascism" by d&g seems (to me at least) to be radically different than the common understanding of the word. Thus, the 2NC overview would have to be explicitly clear on this departure.
Onto the commodification line of discussion...

You say: "...cutting cards reduces the argument (whatever its meaning) to dead representation, 'a minor expressive activity incapable of causing anyone harm'. this equates to the enslavement of the work within the oedipal 'form of content' (a 'card') - or literature as commodity consumption. the dominant discourses of academic debate entrench this practice: you ask, 'what does this card say?'"

Here, the aff would vehemently disagree with you. True, the aff cuts cards that may distort, or even completely destroy, the "original" meaning of the work (for instance, using IR writers to describe "realism good/bad"). However, the cards, the aff argues, retain meaning within the overall narrative of the 1AC. For instance, Mearsheimer never writes "Realism is good," but taking a paragraph here and combining it with Fareed Zakaria there, and, poof, the aff has an original writing that borrows from authors, but provides completely new meaning. This even holds true for 2AC responses on the line-by-line. The individual cards themselves are worthless, but only help illuminate the truth value of the overall policy story.

"i contend that even so insignificant an event as a debate round can be a local fire patiently kindled for an artistic-analytical-revolutionary explosion, which is to say, even you can fight fascism. (your skepticism is appreciated, however...)"
That debate is a powerful tool to sustain revolutionary potential is obvious. After all, whoever is reading this discussion will no doubt try to evaluate the merits of this argument within his or her thought process. Maybe there are good ideas, maybe bad. But the argument comes, people change a little.

Final thoughts: "i'm also curious what a 'fascism good'-argument would even look like?"
Well, I wrote this with a different idea of "fascism." But the overall idea is that the idea of a powerful state actor is good. Most philosophy acknowledges a need for government at some level, though are always skeptical of falling down the slippery slope of pure totalitarianism. I'll write about this later, since it might be nice to have some literature to fall back on...

[J. Gravatt]

count me in, sometimes my time is short but pm me and well talk

[Kritikman222]

same with me, tell me what you want, and I'll see if I can get it. PM me

[Papa Smurf]

Originally Posted by Lazzarone

"johnny 23"

feel free to contribute any comments, questions, criticisms, possible extensions/insertions, possible refutations, random anecdotes, and so on. point out any spelling errors or contradictions, tell us what your 2ac would look like, ask for clarification on whatever isn't discernible, repost foucault's critique of polemics or other new link stories, etc. in short, let's workshop this bastard together.

.k (kevin.sanchez@gmail.com)

about time.

[Lazzarone]

cj,

some restrict the definition of 'fascism' to certain european parties which gained political power after world war one. thus, fascism ended in 1945. perhaps this explains the term 'neo-fascism' as applying to contemporary organizations such as present-day nazis or haider's austrian freedom party.

{in 'introducing fascism and nazism', stuart hood and litza janz delinate 14 characteristics of fascism that i'd paraphrase as the following: (1) left-wing slogans supporting ultra-conservative policies, (2) anti-democratic statism, (3) anti-communism, (4) mass paramilitaristic parties, (5) militarism, (6) disciplinary training, (7) irrationalism, (8) nostalgia for a golden age, (9) anti-intellectualism, (10) rural romanticism, (11) machismo, (12) industrialism, (13) support from lower the middle-class, (14) scapegoated enemies.}

d&g's definition is inclusive of the strictest politico-scientific connotations while also incorporating fascism within a broader socio-political context. while i agree the definition risks including too much, it isn't the case that all roads 'lead to fascism'. d&g explicitly isolate fascism from totalitarian states that may appear fascistic at first glance, for example.

so your re-explanation was fine ('unit actor level', etc.), though i don't think it's necessary to deal with this in the 2nc unless asked for clarification.

you write : "True, the aff cuts cards that may distort, or even completely destroy, the "original" meaning of the work (for instance, using IR writers to describe "realism good/bad"). However, the cards, the aff argues, retain meaning within the overall narrative of the 1AC. For instance, Mearsheimer never writes "Realism is good," but taking a paragraph here and combining it with Fareed Zakaria there, and, poof, the aff has an original writing that borrows from authors, but provides completely new meaning. This even holds true for 2AC responses on the line-by-line. The individual cards themselves are worthless, but only help illuminate the truth value of the overall policy story."

again, the issue is not the distortion of content (of the 'original meaning') but the reduction of all content to a commodity *form*. a debater may tag mearsheimer as saying 'realism good' or 'realism bad', and yet either way debaters de-fang his arguments of any real bite. so it's not about distortion, but desensitization. it's about flattening works into 'minor expressions that secrete ideology' (e.g. 'realism good/bad'); it's about avoiding real world implications by reducing works to 'objects of consumption' (e.g. 'cards').

you write : "That debate is a powerful tool to sustain revolutionary potential is obvious."

unleashing this potential is what should propel this kritik.

[Lazzarone]

"If you want to talk to somebody honestly, as a human being ... [f]ind out what [their] dreams are. Just to find out - for no other reason. Because as soon as you lay your hands on a conversation to steer it, it's not a conversation anymore. It's a pitch. And you're not a human being; you're a marketing rep."

: salesman phil cooper (played by danny devito) in 'the big kahuna'.

_

debate rounds typically operate as two monologues (or 'pitches') competing for the same ballot. each team tests their skill at steering the conversation, defining the debate in their terms, selling the judge.

materialist criticism in debate, on the other hand, is essentially an attempt at honest conversation. like most kritiks, it grounds the debate in the actual discourse of its participants. unlike most kritiks, however, it attacks the formalism inherent in many of debate's dominant practices, asking : 'how can debaters breath life into an open-ended conversation that enriches all involved? how can debaters set their capacity for innovation in motion?'

contrary to those who see only the forum's shortages (too few programs, limited resources, too little time), perhaps it's more accurate to observe a surplus of intelligence, experience, knowledge, and desire that's unused yet full of potential. again, adopting an anti-fascist style challenges us to mobilize.

'toward what end?', you ask. here mikhail bakhtin offers us a 'carnevalesque vision of the world' (which hardt and negri invoke on pages 210-1 of 'multitude: war and democracy in the age of empire') :

"The carnevalesque is the prose that opposes the monologue and thus refuses to claim an already completed truth, producing instead contrast and conflict in the form of narrative movement itself. ... In a polyphonic conception of narrative there is no center that dictates meaning, but rather meaning arises only out of the exchanges among all the singularities in dialogue. Singularities all express themselves freely and together through their dialogues create the common narrative structures."

so you don't have to present a reformist solution which tries to discredit lines of thought as 'mere speculation' (that's what their perm will probably do). you can put the utterances of others in a context of wider discursive regimes without pretending to possess the ultimate word.

to experiment therefore entails a refusal to claim 'an already completed truth', an acknowledgement that 'there is no center that dictates meaning', and a willingness to follow the flow of conversation without laying your hands on it to steer. that's if you want to talk to somebody honestly.

[Lazzarone]

resourcefulidiot writes, "this K sounds as fun as my purple dildo"

(1) that sounds pretty fun?, (2) how carnivalesque!, (3) speaking of someone else who was really into purple dildos, here's a card from foucault...

_

Michel Foucault. 1984. ('Polemics, Politics, and Problemizations: An Interview'. The Foucault Reader. p381-3.)

I like discussions, and when I am asked questions, I try to answer them. It’s true that I don’t like to get involved in polemics. If I open a book and see that the author is accusing an adversary of “infantile leftism” I shut it again right away. That’s not my way of doing things; I don’t belong to the world of people who do things that way. I insist on this difference as something essential: a whole morality is at stake, the one that concerns the search for truth and the relation to the other.

In the serious play of questions and answers, in the work of reciprocal elucidation, the rights of each person are in some sense immanent in the discussion. They depend only on the dialogue situation. The person asking the questions is merely exercising the right that has been given him: to remain unconvinced, to perceive a contradiction, to require more information, to emphasize different postulates, to point out faulty reasoning, and so on. As for the person answering the questions, he too exercises a right that does not go beyond the discussion itself; by the logic of his own discourse, he is tied to what he has said earlier, and by the acceptance of dialogue he is tied to the questioning of other. Questions and answers depend on a game—a game that is at once pleasant and difficult—in which each of the two partners takes pains to use only the rights given him by the other and by the accepted form of dialogue.

The polemicist , on the other hand, proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will never agree to question. On principle, he possesses rights authorizing him to wage war and making that struggle a just undertaking; the person he confronts is not a partner in search for the truth but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is harmful, and whose very existence constitutes a threat. For him, then the game consists not of recognizing this person as a subject having the right to speak but of abolishing him as interlocutor, from any possible dialogue; and his final objective will be not to come as close as possible to a difficult truth but to bring about the triumph of the just cause he has been manifestly upholding from the beginning. The polemicist relies on a legitimacy that his adversary is by definition denied.

Perhaps, someday, a long history will have to be written of polemics, polemics as a parasitic figure on discussion and an obstacle to the search for the truth. Very schematically, it seems to me that today we can recognize the presence in polemics of three models: the religious model, the judiciary model, and the political model. As in heresiology, polemics sets itself the task of determining the intangible point of dogma, the fundamental and necessary principle that the adversary has neglected, ignored or transgressed; and it denounces this negligence as a moral failing; at the root of the error, it finds passion, desire, interest, a whole series of weaknesses and inadmissible attachments that establish it as culpable. As in judiciary practice, polemics allows for no possibility of an equal discussion: it examines a case; it isn’t dealing with an interlocutor, it is processing a suspect; it collects the proofs of his guilt, designates the infraction he has committed, and pronounces the verdict and sentences him. In any case, what we have here is not on the order of a shared investigation; the polemicist tells the truth in the form of his judgment and by virtue of the authority he has conferred on himself. But it is the political model that is the most powerful today. Polemics defines alliances, recruits partisans, unites interests or opinions, represents a party; it establishes the other as an enemy, an upholder of opposed interests against which one must fight until the moment this enemy is defeated and either surrenders or disappears.

Of course, the reactivation, in polemics, of these political, judiciary, or religious practices is nothing more than theater. One gesticulates: anathemas, excommunications, condemnations, battles, victories, and defeats are no more than ways of speaking, after all. And yet, in the order of discourse, they are also ways of acting which are not without consequence. There are the sterilizing effects. Has anyone ever seen a new idea come out of a polemic? And how could it be otherwise, given that here the interlocutors are incited not to advance, not to take more and more risks in what they say, but to fall back continually on the rights that they claim, on their legitimacy, which they must defend, and on the affirmation of their innocence? There is something even more serious here: in this comedy, one mimics war, battles, annihilations, or unconditional surrenders, putting forward as much of one’s killer instinct as possible. But it is really dangerous to make anyone believe that he can gain access to the truth by such paths and thus to validate, even if in a merely symbolic form, the real political practices that could be warranted by it. Let us imagine, for a moment, that a magic wand is waved and one of the two adversaries in a polemic is given the ability to exercise all the power he likes over the other. One doesn’t even have to imagine it: one has only to look at what happened during the debate in the USSR over linguistics or genetics not long ago. Were these merely aberrant deviations from what was supposed to be the correct discussion? Not at all—they were the real consequences of a polemic attitude whose effects ordinarily remain suspended.

_

given this underlining and bold-emphasis, anyone care to write a tag?


.k (hate-mail to : kevin.sanchez@gmail.com)


p.s. i caught a typo on the oft-cited internet version of this interview (http://foucault.info/foucault/interview.html); the phrase 'who is harmful' is missing the 'h' - so perhaps it's best to just quote 'the foucault reader' (or volume one of foucault's essential works).

p.p.s. in the interview, foucault goes on to contrast his form of critique from those who 'reject all possible solutions except the one valid one' - instead he prefers 'problematization'. this accurately marks the transition between the first and second wave of kritiks in debate - the first were rejectionist/utopian kritiks, such as anarchism, communism, objectivism, radical feminism, etc., and the second are rethinking kritiks (also referred to as kritiking), such as disciplinary power, post-humanism, normativity, etc.

when foucault says, "i have never tried to analyze anything whatsoever from the point of view of politics, but always to ask politics what it had to say about the problems with which it was confronted", he's explaining the impulse behind many 'we demand' affirmatives that refuse to adopt the role of the u.s. federal government while at the same time problematizing its policies.

yet there's a third wave of kritik which seek to problematize the dominant practices of debate itself. perhaps kritiks of this type were always around, especially in the early days of proving fiat illusory or in normativity rounds which broke down into confusion. this new wave, however, must also call for pragmatic experimentation with the real world possibilities offered by the forum. unlike performativity, these kritiks won't become walled in by the contest-round tournament structure, because they'll remain aware of its limitations and they'll continually criticize and try to transcend them. they'll have ethical qualms with reactivating polemics, in however symbolic a way, and they'll have their minds set on discussions that nourish the revolutionary machine on the horizon. in short, that's the purpose of this purple dildo.

[SMHDebate22]

i think it's hard to argue polemics bad and ask for a ballot for yourself at the same time. I'd argue against this: Permute: give aff the ballot and talk about the issues. Solves better because it can really get people talking that X team is giving up their ballot to get these ideas spread.

[Lazzarone]

thanks for raising this argument, because answering it is probably the most critical aspect in pulling this position off. the perm in particular is an inventive response. while i'd encourage others to weigh in on this too, here's a sketch toward dealing with the performative contradiction.

one might argue that to date debate has leveled the potency of an argument to its ability to win ballots... thus, if you want to see debate evolve more discussion-centered approaches, the more ballots this kritik wins, the better. if the kritik of polemics ever won a national tournament, for instance, then participants might begin to really take its criticisms seriously. the judge isn't voting to decide who best debated the round; they're voting to question the polemical structure itself and to amplify those concerns in the forum.

(1) we're consistent in that we're trying to provoke a rupture in the routine polemical order of business-as-usual, and winning ballots is currently the only way to pose that threat to the dominant discourse.

(2) we're not asking the judge to believe fully in what we say, nor are we asking them to declare our argument as the legitimate round-winner. we're simply trying to convince the judge that the forum urgently needs this argument to be considered in depth, and accruing ballots is a legitimate way to spread this criticism as widely as possible.

(3) this only illustrates the limitation of the current framework - an important argument is a priori excluded because it refuses to accept the reduction of all ideas to the binary logic of W/L. if it's a contradiction then it only further reveals the need to open up the forum to more argumentative possibilities, that is, more ways of playing the game.

(4) if we're 'just trying to win', there'd be easier ways than running this purple dildo... err this kritik.

(5) the polemicist mentioned by foucault in the above card feigns superiority by refusing to question their own discourse. on the other hand, we're trying to come as close as possible to a difficult truth together : the dangerous possibility that debate in its current form may sterilize the search for truth and social change and may validate fascistic political practices. so we concede that we may implicate ourselves as well - all the better, because this implicates polemical debate in the process and mitigates its in-round effects. we can't engage in the pretense that we're better than you if this kritik also operates as a self-criticism.

as for the perm itself ...

(1) cross-apply point 1 above. realistically, only after the argument begins winning rounds will debaters ask for cites, write blocks, consider running the argument themselves, and maybe even stop and think about the remote possibility that what you're saying may actually be true.

(2) conceding the round may violate tournament rules (for example, a.f.a. standards, article II, section 4 : http://www.americanforensics.org/documents/afacode.html) and get the team disqualified, thereby silencing their criticism (however unfairly).

(3) contrary to your suggestion, i don't think conceding the round would 'get people talking that X team is giving up their ballot' in the sense of provoking a collective rethinking. in the current mindset, i think most teams would simply say 'cool, a gimme' and move on. the project is to 'consolidate a people yet to come' (in the words of the last card in the shell), not to give up before things start to get interesting.

also, here's a card that tries to reconceptualize of the role of the judge and the ballot ...

in contrast to a traditional ballot that annuls the enrichment of liberatory combat, we ask for a decision that transcends this argumentative war of domination and helps to bring our kritik to life.

Gilles Deleuze. 1993. (Essays: critical & clinical. 'To Have Done with Judgment'. pp128, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135.)

"The bookish doctrine of judgment is moderate only in appearance, because it in fact condemns us to an endless servitude and annuls any liberatory process. ... Artaud presents this "body without organs" that God has stolen from us in order to palm off an organized body without which his judgment could not be exercised. The body without organs is an affective, intensive, anarchist body that consists solely of poles, zones, thresholds, and gradients. It is traversed by a powerful, nonorganic vitality. ... The way to escape judgment is to make yourself a body without organs, to find your body without organs. ... [A] body of justice in which the segments are dissolved, the differentiations lost, and the hierarchies thrown into confusion, a body that retains nothing but intensities that make up uncertain zones, that traverse these zones at full speed and confront the powers in them ... [C]ombat, combat everywhere; it is combat that replaces judgment. ... Combat is not war. War is only a combat-against, a will to destruction, a judgment of God that turns destruction into something "just." The judgment of God is on the side of war, and not combat. Even when it takes hold of other forces, the force of war begins by mutilating these forces, reducing them to their lowest state. In war, the will to power merely means that the will wants strength as a maximum of power or domination. ... Combat, by contrast, is a powerful, nonorganic vitality that supplements force with force, and enriches whatever it takes hold of. ... A decision is not a judgment, nor is it the organic consequence of a judgment: it springs vitally from a whirlwind of forces that leads us into combat. It resolves the combat without suppressing or ending it. ... What disturbed us was that in renouncing judgment we had the impression of depriving ourselves of any means of distinguishing between existing beings, between modes of existence, as if everything were now of equal value. But is it not rather judgment that presupposes preexisting criteria (higher values), criteria that preexist for all time (to the infinity of time), so that it can neither apprehend what is new in an existing being, nor even sense the creation of a mode of existence? Such a mode is created vitally, through combat, in the insomnia of sleep, and not without a certain cruelty toward itself: nothing of all this is the result of judgment. Judgment prevents the emergence of any new mode of existence. For the latter creates itself through its own forces, that is, through the forces it is able to harness, and is valid in and of itself inasmuch as it brings the new combination into existence. Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not judge. If it is so disgusting to judge, it is not because everything is of equal value, but on the contrary because what has value can be made or distinguished only by defying judgment. What expert judgment, in art, could ever bear on the work to come? It is not a question of judging other existing beings, but of sensing whether they agree or disagree with us, that is, whether they bring forces to us, or whether they return us to the miseries of war, to the poverty of the dream, to the rigors of organization."

_

p.s. the notion of 'combat' in the above card may strike some as odd, but remember foucault refers to the play of questions and answers as a game. this kritik isn't a rejection of a competitive debate, but an attempt to transcend the uniformity and limitations of the status quo framework.

p.p.s. thescu cut the b. card as a perm card, and i gave some responses to that in another thread (here, http://www.cross-x.com/vb/showpost.p...&postcount=161). trying to 'perm' this kritik might freshly link to the d&g above since you're trying to flatten a real world advocacy into something like a minor expressive activity that one can capture.