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2NC A2: Economy ImpactEconomic crisis rhetoric causes a self-fulfilling prophecy – rhetoric and framing circumscribes the possibilities for political actionHanan 10 (Joshua Stanley, PHD communication studies, professor of communication at Temple University (“Managing the Meltdown Rhetorically: Economic Imaginaries and the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008” dissertation The University of Texas at Austin) “Economic crisis rhetoric” describes the art of mitigating or exacerbating crises in capitalism through discourse. Since at least the Great Depression there has existed an awareness in the public sphere that the language used to discuss the economy impacts the economy’s actual performance.12 In The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes coined the term “animal spirits” to refer to the seemingly emotional and affective nature of economic markets.13 According to Keynes—one of the most respected economists of all time—the economy was as much a product of language as it was about concrete fundamentals. Because the economy was ultimately held together by confidence—“an immaterial device of the mind”—the way public officials spoke about the economy could play a powerful role in how the economy was actually experienced.14 During the current economic crisis the Keynesian perspective that confidence shapes the economy has become increasingly mainstream.”15 Early in 2009, for example, Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter speculated that Barack Obama’s greatest challenge as president would be to “talk” Americans out of the ongoing economic recession.16 Suggesting that the biggest obstacle facing the nation is essentially a crisis of confidence, Alter argues that the president can only restore popular faith in the economy (and, by extension, the economy itself) through the strategic use of language: What's a president to do? If he starts in with the happy talk, he sounds like John McCain saying "the fundamentals of the economy are strong," which is what sealed the election for Obama in the first place. But if he gets too gloomy, he'll scare the bejesus out of the entire world. The balance Obama strikes is to say that things will get worse before they get better, but that they will get better. Now he must convince us that's true. While Alter’s comments serve as the latest proof of rhetoric’s compelling power to affect the economy’s material performance, in the discipline of communication studies there has been little research exploring the role of language in mitigating and exacerbating capitalist crises.17 This lack of scholarship is unfortunate given that in contemporary communication studies one of the central assumptions is that under late capitalism rhetoric has become increasingly central to all social life.18 In a globalized and mass mediated society increasingly defined by “immaterial production,”19 rhetoric is central to how human beings make sense of the world and how they direct their actions toward particular objectives.20 In this respect, there is every reason to believe that rhetoric functions similarly in the context of economic crises and the purpose of this literature review is to substantiate the basis for making such claims. 2NC A2: Environment/WarmingApocalyptic environmental rhetoric causes eco-authoritarianism and political apathy – turns the case Buell 3 (Frederick, cultural critic on the environmental crisis and a Professor of English at Queens College and the author of five books, From Apocalypse To Way of Life, pages 185-186) Looked at critically, then, crisis discourse thus suffers from a number of liabilities. First, it seems to have become a political liability almost as much as an asset. It calls up a fierce and effective opposition with its predictions; worse, its more specific predictions are all too vulnerable to refutation by events. It also exposes environmentalists to being called grim doomsters and antilife Puritan extremists. Further, concern with crisis has all too often tempted people to try to find a “total solution” to the problems involved— a phrase that, as an astute analyst of the limitations of crisis discourse, John Barry, puts it, is all too reminiscent of the Third Reich’s infamous “final solution.”55 A total crisis of society—environmental crisis at its gravest—threatens to translate despair into inhumanist authoritarianism; more often, however, it helps keep merely dysfunctional authority in place. It thus leads, Barry suggests, to the belief that only elite- and expert-led solutions are possible.56 At the same time it depoliticizes people, inducing them to accept their impotence as individuals; this is something that has made many people today feel, ironically and/or passively, that since it makes no difference at all what any individual does on his or her own, one might as well go along with it. Yet another pitfall for the full and sustained elaboration of environmental crisis is, though least discussed, perhaps the most deeply ironic. A problem with deep cultural and psychological as well as social effects, it is embodied in a startlingly simple proposition: the worse one feels environmental crisis is, the more one is tempted to turn one’s back on the environment. This means, preeminently, turning one’s back on “nature”—on traditions of nature feeling, traditions of knowledge about nature (ones that range from organic farming techniques to the different departments of ecological science), and traditions of nature-based activism. If nature is thoroughly wrecked these days, people need to delink from nature and live in postnature—a conclusion that, as the next chapter shows, many in U.S. society drew at the end of the millenium. Explorations of how deeply “nature” has been wounded and how intensely vulnerable to and dependent on human actions it is can thus lead, ironically, to further indifference to nature-based environmental issues, not greater concern with them. But what quickly becomes evident to any reflective consideration of the difficulties of crisis discourse is that all of these liabilities are in fact bound tightly up with one specific notion of environmental crisis—with 1960s- and 1970s-style environmental apocalypticism. Excessive concern about them does not recognize that crisis discourse as a whole has significantly changed since the 1970s. They remain inducements to look away from serious reflection on environmental crisis only if one does not explore how environmental crisis has turned of late from apocalypse to dwelling place. The apocalyptic mode had a number of prominent features: it was preoccupied with running out and running into walls; with scarcity and with the imminent rupture of limits; with actions that promised and temporally predicted imminent total meltdown; and with (often, though not always) the need for immediate “total solution.” Thus doomsterism was its reigning mode; eco-authoritarianism was a grave temptation; and as crisis was elaborated to show more and more severe deformations of nature, temptation increased to refute it, or give up, or even cut off ties to clearly terminal “nature.” Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad view -> Essay writing guidelines Download 2.21 Mb. 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