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A2: Capitalism

Identity based politics are necessary to challenge capitalist modernity – critiques of capitalism that do not start from a politics of place only devalue all forms of localized action

A2: Biopolitics

The strategic reversibility of power opens up space for overturning biopolitics through making claims on the state

Campbell 98 [David, Prof of International Politics, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, p. 204-5]
The political possibilities enabled by this permanent provocation of power and freedom can be specified in more detail by thinking in terms of the predominance of the "bio-power" discussed above. In this sense, because the governmental practices of biopolitics in Western nations have been increasingly directed toward modes of being and forms of life—such that sexual conduct has become an object of concern, individual health has been figured as a domain of discipline, and the family has been transformed into an instrument of government— the ongoing agonism between those practices and the freedom they seek to contain means that individuals have articulated a series of counter-demands drawn from those new fields of concern. For example, as the state continues to prosecute people according to sexual orientation, human rights activists have proclaimed the right of gays to enter into formal marriages, adopt children, and receive the same health and insurance benefits granted to their straight counterparts. These claims are a consequence of the permanent provocation of power and freedom in biopolitics, and stand as testament to the "strategic reversibility" of power relations: if the terms of governmental practices can be made into focal points for resistances, then the "history of government as the 'conduct of conduct' is interwoven with the history of dissenting 'counter-conducts.' "39 Indeed, the emergence of the state as the major articulation of "the political" has involved an unceasing agonism between those in office and those they rule. State intervention in everyday life has long incited popular collective action, the result of which has been both resistance to the state and new claims upon the state. In particular, "the core of what we now call 'citizenship'... consists of multiple bargains hammered out by rulers and ruled in the course of their struggles over the means of state action, especially the making of war."40 In more recent times, constituencies associated with women's, youth, ecological, and peace movements (among others) have also issued claims on society.41 These resistances are evidence that the break with the discursive/ nondiscursive dichotomy central to the logic of interpretation undergirding this analysis is (to put it in conventional terms) not only theoretically licensed; it is empirically warranted. Indeed, expanding the interpretive imagination so as to enlarge the categories through which we understand the constitution of "the political" has been a necessary precondition for making sense of Foreign Policy's concern for the ethical borders of identity in America. Accordingly, there are manifest political implications that flow from theorizing identity. As Judith Butler concluded: "The deconstruction of identity is not the deconstruction of politics; rather, it establishes as political the very terms through which identity is articulated.

A2: Reject Alts

The notion of “individual rejection” is based on a view of subjectivity that has its roots in Enlightenment Romanticism – it deifies the heroic individual

Bleiker 2000 [Roland, Prof of International Relations, Popular Dissent, Human Agency, and Global Politics, p. 81-6]

There are various ways through which one could observe how, during the second half of the nineteenth century, ideas about popular dissent gradually turned into political practices that became highly significant in ever-more parts of the world. An illustrative example must suffice. The American romantic Henry David Thoreau is one of the authors who popularised the notion of radical resistance to government. Some have argued that his ideas were directly influenced by la Boe´tie.16 This claim is at best speculative. Thoreau’s close friend, the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, was certainly aware of la Boe´tie. The title of a poem and a notebook entry from early 1843 suggest that Emerson knew him, at least via a reading of Montaigne’s Essais.17 Thoreau’s writings, however, are silent about the Anti-One, and so are most of his biographers. 18 But this is, in some sense, secondary to the fact that the idea of popular dissent, initially articulated by la Boe´tie, came to shape a variety of discursive practices. Genealogies do not attempt to trace ideas back to an authentic starting point. They observe how sets of common values, norms and behaviours have emerged from a multitude of sources and directions. With or without drawing directly on the Anti-One, Thoreau almost literally re-articulated many of its key claims and then embedded them into a romantic world-view. His writings imply, like la Boe´tie’s, that any form of government rests upon popular consent, and if this consent is withdrawn, even the most authoritarian regime will crumble like a house of cards. Passive withdrawal, so-called civil disobedience, is enough to trigger this process. Writing in protest against slavery and the war with Mexico, Thoreau argues in 1848: [I]f one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I could name, – if ten honest men only, – aye, if one HONEST man, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. . . A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose.19 Thoreau’s concept of withdrawing consent is embedded in a theory of power that could literally have been lifted out of the Anti-One. His main focus, however, does not lie with the masses and their ability to overthrow a ruler. It is almost exclusively geared towards fighting for and protecting the autonomy of the individual. Thoreau exemplifies the crux of political Romanticism, a Self that is autonomous and has priority over everything else. This tendency to deify the individual has been interpreted in various ways. Carl Schmitt called it subjectified occasionalism, a situation in which the romantic ego, embedding the final authority, relegates the world and everything else into a mere occasion.20 Rene´ Girard talks of ‘romantic lies’ – illusions that consider the subject as the centre of everything. The romantic, he says, ‘wants to be persuaded that his desire is inscribed into the nature of things or, which amounts to the same, that he is the emanation of a serene subjectivity, the creation ex nihilo of a quasi-divine Self’.21 While Enlightenment thought had employed science and reason to restore certainty in the world, Romanticism anchored its world-view in a sovereign subject and an unbounded trust in the power of human agency. The overall quest, however, remained the same: to fill the vacuum that had opened up after the death of God. Thoreau argues that the state may have superior physical strength, but it can never interfere with an individual’s intellectual or moral senses. The state, ‘timid’ and ‘half-witted’, can inflict punishment upon one’s body, but this strategy is of no match to a Thoreau who proclaims that ‘I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest’.22 While reconstructing the night he spent in jail for refusing to pay taxes, Thoreau stresses that the thick walls of solid stone, the iron door and grating, indeed, the entire power of the state’s repressive apparatus could not reach him – a great waste of stone and mortar they were, he says.23 For romantics, nothing can touch the autonomous Self, not the prison, not the repressive state, not even the subtle power of societal customs. Awoke the romantic hero: the individual who rises to the occasion and challenges the repressive forces around ‘him’, the one who ‘stands resolutely and incorruptly against decadence, evil and deceit, until they are exposed for what they are’.24 It is, however, important to remember that the speculative idealism and the strong notion of human agency that is entailed in this deification of the Self was an important but not uncontested position within romantic thought. Other forms of Romanticism flourished at the same time. Consider, for example, the feminist Romanticism that evolved parallel to the canonical masculine one. This body of literature shared some of the above-mentioned themes, such as the hostility towards authority, a sense of identification with the victim, or a focus on emotions and the construction of subjectivities.25 But feminine forms of Romanticism also differed in various crucial aspects. Most women writers, such as Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft or Dorothy Wordsworth did not pursue the search for a visionary freedom beyond the confines of the state. Instead, they were concerned with the social constraints that had been imposed upon them. They employed the novel as a site of contestation, expressing the manner in which their female subjectivity was intertwined with and confined by concrete daily concerns, linked to such issues as family, community or female bodies.26 This contrast is well reflected in the work of Margaret Fuller, Thoreau’s contemporary and fellow Bostonian. Fuller clearly rejects the sense of autonomy and unboundedness that prevails in Thoreau’s Romanticism. For her, the discursive prison walls are much thicker than they are for Thoreau. It is, consequently, the social construction of femininity and masculinity that is the subject of her inquiries.27 Later parts of this book will return in detail to the themes opened up by Fuller and others. For the moment, however, the attention rests primarily with the dominant, masculine and activist heritage of Romanticism. This is not to suggest that this strain is more insightful or authentic than others, but to recognise that through its hegemonic status it has played a crucial role in shaping the formation of our contemporary consciousness. The right to refuse allegiance to a government that engages in acts of tyranny is a theme that resonates not just in romantic, but also in liberal discourses. Nancy Rosenblum, for example, interprets Thoreau’s Romanticism as a combination of heroic individualism and liberal democracy. She argues that Thoreau advances a libertarian agenda that constantly oscillates between a liberal concern for the public sphere and a radical romantic detachment from it.28 There are indeed parallels between liberalism and the la Boe´tiean tradition. The importance of the individual and a deep distrust towards government provides both of these strains of thought with an inherent antiauthoritarian core, at least in theory. But Thoreau also displays very strong anarchist traits. Disgusted with a state that endorses slavery and war, he wants to disengage altogether from this repressive institution, ‘withdraw and stand aloof from it effectually’.29 His two year stay at Walden Pond is, of course, the embodiment of this withdrawal, the classical Rousseauean return to nature. Implied in this withdrawal, and at times explicitly articulated, is a much deeper distrust towards the state, indeed, towards every societal organisation that controls the individual and ‘his’ mind. For Thoreau injustice is a necessary product of the machinery of government. An individual cannot be free as long as ‘he’ operates within the confines of the state. In some of his more combative moments, Thoreau assumes a passionate anarchist stance, declares war against the state and portrays government as a demonic force, a monster, ‘a semi-human tiger or ox, stalking over the earth with its heart taken out and the top of its brain shot away’.30 It is this anarchist element that sucks Thoreau right into the vortex of la Boetie’s legacy. But there are still several missing links between an individualistic anarchist revival of la Boe´tie and a theory of collective resistance. Romantic dissent focuses on the primacy of the perceiver and the poetisation of political practice. This pushes romantics, at least according to the influential opinion of Carl Schmitt, towards a situation in which conflicts are not addressed, but deferred, subjectified, transplanted into a higher realm of aesthetic imagination.31 Some even claim that romantic thought contains, by definition, a conservative core.32 One can argue with such an interpretations, and I shall do so later.

A2: Withdraw Alts

Withdrawal undermines possibilities for agency – transversal dissent always operates on the terrain of power exploiting the cracks within it

Bleiker 2000 [Roland, Prof of International Relations, Popular Dissent, Human Agency, and Global Politics, p. 213-4]

A tactic does not have the possibility of perceiving its adversary in a space that is distinct, visible and objectifiable. The space of tactic is always the space of the Other.7 This is to say that a tactical form of dissent, like shopping, cannot keep its distance from the object of the action. It always operates in the terrain of the opponent. Tactical actions leave their assigned places, enter a world that is too big to be their own but also too tightly woven to escape from. Because tactic does not have a specific target and cannot separate between the I and the Other, it can never conquer something, it can never keep what it wins. Tactic must always seize the moment and explore cracks that open up within existing discursive orders. It must constantly manipulate its environment in order to create opportunities for social change.8 It is through the concept of temporality that we can appreciate the ways in which tactical actions unleash their transformative and transversal potential. The causality entailed in a discursive understanding of human agency, as far as one can speak of causality in this diffused context, is always mediated through time. But temporality is a slippery concept, an experience that is, according to Gaston Bachelard, never pure.9 Tactical actions, de Certeau stresses, operate along ‘indeterminate trajectories’. This means, in a first instance, that tactic works discursively, that it transforms values and becomes visible and effective only through maturation over time. In a second instance, the indeterminacy of the trajectory refers to the fact that tactical actions defy the spatial logic established by the organising procedures of a particular political or economic system. Expressed in de Certeau’s somewhat idiosyncratic language, tactical actions cannot be perceived as a conventional succession of events in space. They evoke a temporal movement, one that focuses on the diachronic succession of points, rather than the figure that these points establish on a supposedly synchronic and achronic space. The latter view, de Certeau stresses, would make the mistake of reducing a ‘temporal articulation of places into a spatial sequence of points’.10 Tactical action contains transversal potential. The above mentioned refusal to buy milk bottled in non-reusable containers illustrates how tactical manifestations of human agency are not bound by the spatial logic of national sovereignty. The consumer who changes his/her shopping habits engages in an action that escapes the spatial controlling mechanisms of established political and economic boundaries. The effect of such a tactical action is not limited to a localised target, say, the supermarket. Over an extended period of time, and in conjunction with similar actions, such tactical dissent may influence globalised practices of production, trade, investment, advertisement and the like. The transversal manifestations that issue from such actions operate along an indeterminate trajectory insofar as they promote a slow transformation of values whose effects transgress places and become visible and effective only by maturation over time. Having introduced, through notions of discourse, tactic and temporality, the conceptual tools for a discursive understanding of human agency, the analysis now proceeds to examine how a specific everyday form of resistance may exert human agency in a cross-territorial manner. Language, and the dissident potential contained within it, will be the main focal point. Once more, the inquiry moves back and forth between domination and resistance, abstraction and dailiness, theory and practice, epistemology and ontology. While navigating through these circular mechanisms of revealing and concealing it is crucial to resist the temptation of endowing human agency with specific attributes. Rather, the task must revolve around theorising dissent in a way that recognises how the nature of human agency cannot be separated from how we perceive human action and its ability to shape global politics.

Withdrawal is absurd – there is no easy way out of discourses of domination. One has to challenge them from within

Bleiker 2000 [Roland, Prof of International Relations, Popular Dissent, Human Agency, and Global Politics, p. 269-70]

No political system, no matter how authoritarian, is ever able to dominate all aspects of a society. And no form of dissent, no matter how radical, is ever entirely autonomous from the political practices it seeks to engage or distance itself from. There is no easy way out of an existing web of power and knowledge. Poetic resistance, even if it contains transversal dimensions, cannot achieve success overnight. Indeed, a mere decade, which is the rough life span of the Prenzlauer Berg scene, can hardly be expected to do more than highlight the difficulties and contradictions entailed in breaking though a linguistically entrenched political order. It would have been naive, even absurd, to think that a group of disillusioned underground poets could escape the claws of power and lift themselves and their society into a state of perpetual emancipatory triumph. Linguistic dissent works slowly, by changing the way we speak and think about ourselves and the world we live in. The young poets of the 1980s were part of this constant process of reframing meaning. They may not have been the heroic freedom fighters they were sometimes taken to be, but their works and lives can shed light on the complexities that make up the increasingly cross-territorial interaction between domination and resistance. Some of their poetic engagements with daily life in East Germany will remain important, if only because they captured a certain zeitgeist, the spirit of a decaying regime. And, for better or for worse, the Prenzlauer Berg writers have triggered a series of controversies that led to considerable public debate. The best we can hope for, in a sense, is that the ensuing issues, difficult as they are, remain debated in a serious and sustained manner. It is through the creation of such a debate that the Prenzlauer Berg writers have transcended their immediate sphere of activity. By embarking on a self-conscious exploration of form, the poets of the 1980s have opened up opportunities to rethink the crucial relationship between language and politics in spaces that lie far beyond the gradually fading memory of East German wastelands.

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