First, freedom of mobility is a ruse



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Framework

Disinterested Debate Bad

And, their framework ignores the way a disinterested debate space serves the ideological agenda of imperialism and oppression. We must create a revolution in debate to fight destruction of the planet.


Spanos, professor SUNY Binghampton, in ‘4

[William V., “Email to Joe Miller,” posted on Cross-x.com, November 18, 2004. Spanos was emailed to confirm whether or not an e-mail published on eDebate was in fact written by him. This was his response]

Dear Joe MIller, Yes, the statement about the American debate circuit you refer to was made by me, though some years ago. I strongly believed then –and still do, even though a certain uneasiness about “objectivity” has crept into the “philosophy of debate” — that debate in both the high schools and colleges in this country is assumed to take place nowhere, even though the issues that are debated are profoundly historical, which means that positions are always represented from the perspective of power, and a matter of life and death. I find it grotesque that in the debate world, it doesn’t matter which position you take on an issue — say, the United States’ unilateral wars of preemption — as long as you “score points”. The world we live in is a world entirely dominated by an “exceptionalist” America which has perennially claimed that it has been chosen by God or History to fulfill his/its “errand in the wilderness.” That claim is powerful because American economic and military power lies behind it. And any alternative position in such a world is virtually powerless. Given this inexorable historical reality, to assume, as the protocols of debate do, that all positions are equal is to efface the imbalances of power that are the fundamental condition of history and to annul the Moral authority inhering in the position of the oppressed. This is why I have said that the appropriation of my interested work on education and empire to this transcendental debate world constitute a travesty of my intentions. My scholarship is not “disinterested.” It is militant and intended to ameliorate as much as possible the pain and suffering of those who have been oppressed by the “democratic” institutions that have power precisely by way of showing that their language if “truth,” far from being “disinterested” or “objective” as it is always claimed, is informed by the will to power over all manner of “others.”This is also why I told my interlocutor that he and those in the debate world who felt like him should call into question the traditional “objective” debate protocols and the instrumentalist language they privilege in favor of a concept of debate and of language in which life and death mattered. I am very much aware that the arrogant neocons who now saturate the government of the Bush administrationjudges, pentagon planners, state department officials, etc. learned their “disinterested” argumentative skills in the high school and college debate societies and that, accordingly, they have become masters at disarming the just causes of the oppressed. This kind leadership will reproduce itself (along with the invisible oppression it perpetrates) as long as the training ground and the debate protocols from which it emerges remains in tact. A revolution in the debate world must occur. It must force that unworldly world down into the historical arena where positions make a difference. To invoke the late Edward Said, only such a revolution will be capable of “deterring democracy” (in Noam Chomsky’s ironic phrase), of instigating the secular critical consciousness that is, in my mind, the sine qua non for avoiding the immanent global disaster towards which the blind arrogance of Bush Administration and his neocon policy makers is leading.

Their Framework bad – Domination

____ The decision-making paradigm inherent in the traditional forms of political engagement engages in an unconscious exercise of power over the self which regulates discourse and produces for itself legitimate methods for engagement which rarely result in change.


Kulynych, 97, Winthrop U Prof of Polysci (Jessica, “Performing Politics: Foucault, Habermas, and Postmodern Participation, Polity, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Winter, 1997), 315-346, accessed Jstor)

While separately both Habermas and Foucault challenge the traditional understanding of participation, their combined insights further and irrevocably extend that challenge. Theoretical focus on the distinctions between Habermas and Foucault has all too often obscured important parallels between these two theorists. Specifically, the Habermas-Foucault debate has underemphasized the extent to which Habermas also describes a disciplinary society. In his descriptions of bureaucracy, technocracy, and system colonization, Habermas is also describing a world where power is productive and dispersed and where political action is constrained and normalized. Habermas, like Foucault, describes a type of power that cannot be adequately characterized in terms of the intentions of those who possess it. Colonization is not the result of conscious intention, but is rather the unintended consequence of a multitude of small adjustments. The gender and racial subtexts infusing the system are not the results of conscious intention, but rather of implicit gender and racial norms and expectations infecting the economy and the state. Bureaucratic power is not a power that is possessed by any individual or agency, but exists in the exercise of decisionmaking. As Iris Young points out, we must "analyze the exercise of power [in contemporary societies] as the effect of often liberal and humane practices of education, bureaucratic administration, production and distribution of consumer goods, medicine and so on."' The very practices that Habermas chronicles are exemplary of a power that has no definitive subject. As Young explains, "the conscious actions of many individuals daily contribute to maintaining and reproducing oppression, but those people are simply doing their jobs or living their lives, and do not understand themselves as agents of oppression."8 Colonization and bureaucratization also fit the pattern of a power that is not primarily repressive but productive. Disciplinary technologies are, as Sawicki describes, not... repressive mechanisms ... [that] operate primarily through violence ... or seizure ... but rather [they operate] by producing new objects and subjects of knowledge, by inciting and channeling desires, generating and focusing individual and group energies, and establishing bodily norms and techniques for observing, monitoring and controlling bodily movements, processes, and capacities.9 The very practices of administration, distribution, and decisionmaking on which Habermas focuses his attention can and must be analyzed as productive disciplinary practices. Although these practices can clearly be repressive, their most insidious effects are productive. Rather than simply holding people back, bureaucratization breaks up, categorizes, and systemizes projects and people. It creates new categories of knowledge and expertise. Bureaucratization and colonization also create new subjects as the objects of bureaucratic expertise. The social welfare client and the consumer citizen are the creation of bureaucratic power, not merely its target. The extension of lifeworld gender norms into the system creates the possibility for sexual harassment, job segregation, parental leave, and consensual corporate decisionmaking. Created as a part of these subjectivities are new gestures and norms of bodily behavior, such as the embarrassed shuffling of food stamps at the grocery checkout and the demeaning sexual reference at the office copier. Bodily movements are monitored and regularized by means of political opinion polls, welfare lists, sexual harassment protocols, flex-time work schedules, and so forth. Modern disciplinary power, as described by Foucault and implied by Habermas, does not merely prevent us from developing, but creates us differently as the effect of its functioning. These disciplinary techniques not only control us, but also enable us to be more efficient and more productive, and often more powerful. Focusing on the disciplinary elements of the Habermasian critique opens the door for exploring the postmodern character of Habermasian politics. Because Habermas does describe a disciplinary world, his prescription for contemporary democracy (discursive politics) ought to be sensitive to, and appropriate for, a disciplinary world. Foucault's sensitivity to the workings of disciplinary power is central to the articulation of a plausible, postmodern version of discursive politics. In the following discussion I will argue for a performative redefinition of participation that will reinvigorate the micro-politics demanded by Foucault, as well as provide a more nuanced version of the discursive politics demanded by Habermas.

Policy Not Key

____ Policy choices are not what shapes the forces of domination, but our mode of thought.


Burke, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at UNSW, Sydney, in ‘7 |Anthony, “Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason”, Back to Theory & Event, 10.2|

What I take from Heid\egger's argument -- one that I have sought to extend by analysing the militaristic power of modern ontologies of political existence and security -- is a view that the challenge is posed not merely by a few varieties of weapon, government, technology or policy, but by an overarching system of thinking and understanding that lays claim to our entire space of truth and existence. Many of the most destructive features of contemporary modernity -- militarism, repression, coercive diplomacy, covert intervention, geopolitics, economic exploitation and ecological destruction -- derive not merely from particular choices by policymakers based on their particular interests, but from calculative, 'empirical' discourses of scientific and political truth rooted in powerful enlightenment images of being. Confined within such an epistemological and cultural universe, policymakers' choices become necessities, their actions become inevitabilities, and humans suffer and die. Viewed in this light, 'rationality' is the name we give the chain of reasoning which builds one structure of truth on another until a course of action, however violent or dangerous, becomes preordained through that reasoning's very operation and existence. It creates both discursive constraints -- available choices may simply not be seen as credible or legitimate -- and material constraints that derive from the mutually reinforcing cascade of discourses and events which then preordain militarism and violence as necessary policy responses, however ineffective, dysfunctional or chaotic.





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