Lauryn Hill- ‘i get Out’ I get out, I get out of all your boxes
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Case Neg Strats/CardsOtherness- The Affirmatives deployment of difference as something to be exchanged and economized within liberal taxonomies. We should tumble into the dark – away from the light of a redemptive epistemology in favor of rejecting using the Other as a tool of securitizationAkinbola, 07 (Akinbola E. Akinwumi, Within/Without the Locus of Otherness: Europe, Societal (In)security and the New Topicalities of Fear, January 2007, Finesse) For ‘We respect the fact that you are different’ read: ‘You people who are underdeveloped would do well to hang on to this distinction because it is all that you have left’. Nothing could be more contemptuous – or more contemptible – than this attitude, which exemplifies the most radical form of incomprehension that exists.1 The problem of security, as we know, haunts our societies and long ago replaced the problem of liberty.2 Patriotic, protectionistic claims of purity, beauty, comfort, order and exclusive bordering, purification or eradication of Others in [a] claimed space … are still common practice in our society.3 Jean Baudrillard’s reasoning is not geared towards security – in the classic sense, that is. His is, if you will, a counter-security visioneering. Yet, by offering critical insights into how the facticity of otherness structures both the political and the subject, Baudrillard creates a platform from which a well orbed counter-security argument can be built. Here, then, my take – but with appropriate appendages – is rooted in Baudrillard the thinker on otherness, not necessarily on Baudrillard the simulation or seduction theorist. While this surely has its place, my intention here is not to be for or against Baudrillard, but rather to move beyond popular angles on his work. My goal is to rethink those assumptions that guide current securitisms – much of which are, in fact, predicated upon a peculiar vision for the future. It is not even remotely a matter of charting the topography of contradictions a securitizing outlook produces but of asking: Why does it take on the form of light, absolute light that seeks to ward off “darkness”? “An absolute light – photographic in the literal sense – demanding not to be looked at but, rather, that we close our eyes to it and the inner darkness it enfolds”.4¶ As I see it Baudrillard’s thinking on otherness and the self/other dialectic that upholds the politics of identity can be useful for foregrounding what we might call the responsibility of security to desecuritization; that is, desecuritization’s encounter with the consequences of otherness.5 We have seen this logic at work in Baudrillard’s rather heady insistence on the indestructibility of the “other”, even when the sheer decidability of his position seems to be unfashionable. Adopting a perspective that largely unsettles identity (the architecture of alterity), Baudrillard maintains that “alterity cannot be grounded in a vague dialectic of One and the Other”.6 Otherness ceases to exist “when all becomes transparence and immediate visibility, when everything is exposed to the harsh and inexorable light of information and communication”.7 “It all comes”, as Baudrillard shows us, “from the impossibility of conceiving the Other – friend or enemy – in its radical othernessf, in its irreconcilable foreignness”.8 It all comes, too, from the deep structure of xenophobia and racism that exemplifies the discursive logic of European securitisms.9¶ To pull the philosophical trajectories together, we might do well to seek a fresh interpretation of “pseudo-currents” such as (societal) security. This would fare well in an age that is so naive about the grammatologies of securitization that dramatize the issue of difference. Indeed, the greatest move of securitization is to make its descent into the peremptory abyss of identity. But that is basically what it is – a tumble into the dark, not into the light of some redemptive epistemology, as it deploys the otherness of the other as a tool of securitization. Of course, this does little or nothing to outwit the multifocal diagonality of society (or what used to be known as society). There is, of course, a reason for this: this dramatizing process ensures otherness a “shadiness” of sorts. Yet, that is not all there is to it. Whether audaciously or surreptitiously, the present condition does exhaust the taxonomy of security, but not that of identity. Rather, insecurity, real or imagined, visibilizes the non-visible through violent juxtapositions, easily morphing into pervasive waves of crypto-terror, contributing to a fatalizing culture of exclusionism and further widening the inside/outside divide.10 In the following section I frame the structuring logic of my reflections. The 1ac plays into a liberal economy of exchange – judges “feel” an affective resonance from the comfort of the first world that goes nowhere and helps nobody outside of this space – this invests global communities destroyed by liberalism with an affective distance from the 1ac that precludes effective relationships with the world at large – turns their impactComaroff 9 [Ethnicity, Inc, The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London, John L. Comaroff is the Harold M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, Honorary Professor, University of Cape Town, and Research Professor, American Bar Foundation, Jean Comaroff is the Bernard E. and Ellen C. Sunny Distin¬guished Service Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, Director, Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, and Honorary Professor, University of Cape Town, 2009. Finesse] The short answer is that Ethnicity, Inc. may spawn violence of its own accord or it may come to insinuate itself into already-existing conflicts. It may also displace those conflicts into commerce, sublimating the exercise of force by directing it toward other sorts of transaction. The long answer, inevitably, is more complicated. In so far as the politics of iden-tity assumes diverse guises, it rarely reduces to a simple utility function: to equate ethno-belonging with the pursuit of brute power or unmediated interest—whether it be by means of law or war, combat or corporate enterprise—is to confuse its strategic with its existential dimensions. And to ignore the ways in which it intersects with other modes of social, ethical, and aesthetic being, thus to "elevat[e] physical into moral necessity" (Schiller (2004[1795]:28). Even when ethnicity presents itself as a causus belli, it cannot be taken at face value. "[T]he tendency to privilege [it] in the storyline of violent encounters by participants and spectators alike," writes Broch-Due (2005:6) of contemporary Africa, "should not VictimizationThe aff is a politics of sympathy that takes form as an empathetic witnessing of violence. Their project of affirmation is an attempt to make the liberal subject redeemable in the era of post-colonialism that reduces lived experience to a token to be traded in the market economy of the academyBerlant ‘98 (Lauren, George M. Pullman Professor, Department of English, University of Chicago, “Poor Eliza,” American Literature, Vol. 70, No. 3, No More Separate Spheres! (Sep., 1998), Duke University Press, pg. 635-668, Finesse) What distinguishes these critical texts are the startling ways they struggle to encounter the Uncle Tom form without reproducing it, declining to pay the inheritance tax. The postsentimental does not involve an aesthetic disruption to the contract sentimentality makes between its texts and readers -that proper reading will lead to better feeling and therefore to a better self. What changes is the place of repetition in this contract, a crisis frequently thematized in formal aesthetic and generational terms. In its traditional and political modalities, the sentimental promises that in a just world a consensus will already exist about what constitutes uplift, amelioration, and emancipation, those horizons toward which empathy powerfully directs itself. Identification with suffering, the ethical response to the sentimental plot, leads to its repetition in the audience and thus to a generally held view about what transformations would bring the good life into being. This presumption, that the terms of consent are transhistorical once true feeling is shared, explains in part why emotions, especially painful ones, are so central to the world-building aspects of sentimental alliance. Postsentimental texts withdraw from the contract that presumes consent to the conventionally desired outcomes of identification and empathy. The desire for unconflictedness might very well motivate the sacrifice of surprising ideas to the norms of the world against which this rhetoric is being deployed. What, if anything, then, can be built from the very different knowledge/experience of subaltern pain? What can memory do to create conditions for freedom and justice without reconfirming the terms of ordinary subordination? More than a critique of feeling as such, the postsentimental modality also challenges what literature and storytelling have come to stand for in the creation of sentimental national subjects across an almost two-century span. Three moments in this genealogy, which differ as much from each other as from the credulous citation of Uncle Tom's Cabin we saw in The King and I and Dimples, will mark here some potential within the arsenal that counters the repetition compulsions of sentimentality. This essay began with a famous passage from James Baldwin's "Everybody's Protest Novel," a much-cited essay about Uncle Tom's Cabin that is rarely read in the strong sense because its powerful language of rageful truth-telling would shame in advance any desire to make claims for the tactical efficacy of suffering and mourning in the struggle to transform the United States into a postracist nation. I cited Baldwin's text to open this piece not to endorse its absolute truth but to figure its frustrated opposition to the sentimental optimism that equates the formal achievement of empathy on a mass scale with the general project of democracy. Baldwin's special contribution to what sentimentality can mean has been lost in the social-problem machinery of mass society, in which the production of tears where anger or nothing might have been became more urgent with the coming to cultural dominance of the Holocaust and trauma as models for having and remembering collective social experience.20 Currently, as in traditional sentimentality, the authenticity of overwhelming pain that can be textually performed and shared is disseminated as a prophylactic against the reproduction of a shocking and numbing mass violence. Baldwin asserts that the overvaluation of such redemptive feeling is precisely a condition of that violence. Baldwin's encounter with Stowe in this essay comes amidst a general wave of protest novels, social-problem films, and film noir in the U.S. after World War Two: Gentleman's Agreement, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Best Years of Our Lives. Films like these, he says, "emerge for what they are: a mirror of our confusion, dishonesty, panic, trapped and immobilized in the sunlit prison of the American dream." They cut the complexity of human motives and self-understanding "down to size" by preferring "a lie more palatable than the truth" about the social and material effects the liberal pedagogy of optimism has, or doesn't have, on "man's" capacity to produce a world of authentic truth, justice, and freedom.21 Indeed, "truth" is the keyword for Baldwin. He defines it as "a devotion to the human being, his freedom and fulfillment: freedom which cannot be legislated, fulfillment which cannot be charted."22 In contrast, Stowe's totalitarian religiosity, her insistence that subjects "bargain" for heavenly redemption with their own physical and spiritual mortification, merely and violently confirms the fundamental abjection of all persons, especially the black ones who wear the dark night of the soul out where all can see it. Additionally, Baldwin argues that Uncle Tom's Cabin instantiates a tradition of locating the destiny of the nation in a false model of the individual soul, one imagined as free of ambivalence, aggression, or contradiction. By "human being" Baldwin means to repudiate stock identities as such, arguing that their stark simplicity confirms the very fantasies and institutions against which the sentimental is ostensibly being mobilized. This national-liberal refusal of complexity is what he elsewhere calls "the price of the ticket" for membership in the American dream.23 As the Uncle Tom films suggest, whites need blacks to "dance" for them so that they might continue disavowing the costs or ghosts of whiteness, which involve religious traditions of self-loathing and cultural traditions confusing happiness with analgesia. The conventional reading of "Everybody's Protest Novel" sees it as a violent rejection of the sentimental.24 It is associated with the feminine (Little Women), with hollow and dishonest capacities of feeling, with an aversion to the real pain that real experience brings. "Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty," he writes.25 The politico-sentimental novel uses suffering vampirically to simplify the subject, thereby making the injunction to empathy safe for the subject. Of course there is more to the story. Baldwin bewails the senti- mentality of Richard Wright's Native Son because Bigger Thomas is not the homeopathic Other to Uncle Tom after all, but one of his "children," the heir to his negative legacy.26 Both Tom and Thomas live in a simple relation to violence and die knowing only slightly more than they did before they were sacrificed to a white ideal of the soul's simple purity, its emptiness. This addiction to the formula of redemption through violent simplification persists with a "terrible power": it confirms that U.S. minorities are constituted as Others even to themselves through attachment to the most hateful, objectified, cartoon-like versions of their identities, and that the shamed subcultures of America really are, in some way, fully expressed by the overpresence of the stereotypical image. In the aff’s attempt to master and banish suffering, ressentiment is turned inward as feelings of guilt flourish. The drive to resolve the suffering of the world is rooted in a will to self-protection.Abbas 2010 /Asma, Professor and Division Head in Social Studies, Political Science, Philosophy at the Liebowitz Center for International Studies at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, Liberalism and Human Suffering: Materialist Reflections on Politics, Ethics, and Aesthetics, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pg. Pg. 68-71, Finesse/ We are told that the ascetic priest, in his role of the savior and shepherd of the sick and the suffering, had to have been sick himself. Nietzsche writes, “It cannot be the task of the healthy to nurse the sick and to make them well—the necessity of doctors and nurses who are themselves sick; and now we understand the meaning of the ascetic priest and grasp it with both hands.”51 The ascetic priest himself suffers, despite (or because of) adopting the role of the savior of all other sufferers. Nietzsche talks about the art of the ascetic priest, his skill at representation, at a few different places in the text. The very fact that he seeks out the suffering to claim dominion on is part of his art and mastery. His historical mission as savior, shepherd, and advocate stems out of his mastery of his suffering at all times. Not only has he been able to simply deaden his pain by subjecting himself to more, and effectively “reveling” in it, but he also has turned his ressentiment against itself, whereby he no longer seeks the answer, the agent, and the cause outside of himself. But this is accompanied by the notion of guilt and sin, with an immoderation that contradicts his labor, and an exchange of some illusions for others when the sufferer ceases to be intoxicated by fantasies and when suffering makes him apprehend the world in its not-too-flattering reality. It is at this point that, while the suffering is rid of the crutches of a contempt directed outward, the ascetic priest nestles his prescribed suffering in the crutches of contempt toward oneself, dissimulated by illusions and artifice. Nietzsche calls the ascetic priest “an artist in guilt feelings”52— the notions of guilt, sin, debt, suffering as punishment, all took form, were created, in the hands of the ascetic priest; they were the seeds and fruits of his labor. Furthermore, the transformation of the invalid into a sinner is the priceless and timeless masterpiece of the ascetic priest’s art, to which the multitudes have constant access and of which, at the same time, they are objects. It is this art that requires the ascetic priest to “evolve a virtually new type of preying animal out of himself, or at least he will need to represent it.” The priest would need to represent (or represent, darstellen) “a new kind of animal ferocity in which the polar bear, the supple, cold, and patient tiger, and not least the fox seem to be joined in a unity at once enticing and terrifying.”53 Accompanying this is his confidence in his art and ability to dominate the suffering at all times. In a sentence that is decidedly the crux of Michel Foucault’s Nietzschean lineage in thoughts on madness, science, therapy, and the exploration of the confessional roots of sexuality, Nietzsche writes, “He brings salves and balm with him, no doubt; but before he can act as a physician he first has to wound; when he then stills the pain of the wound he at the same time infects the wound—for that is what he knows to do best of all, this sorcerer and animal-tamer, in whose presence everything healthy necessarily grows sick, and everything sick tame.”54 The shepherd exists so long as the herd exists, which is why the ascetic priest has to constantly combat anarchy and the threat of disintegration of his flock posed by ressentiment. This is where Nietzsche tells us that the priest’s accomplishment of altering the direction of the ressentiment (a feat that Nietzsche deems to be the “supreme utility” of the ascetic’s art and the only “value of the priestly existence”)55 is rooted not in some selfless love of mankind but in an artful and strategic act of self-preservation on part of the ascetic priest. Here, three things loop back to themes put forth in this book’s Introduction—and give us clues to where the secret of the health and longevity of liberalism and its privileged subjects reposes. First, there is an aesthetic component—both in terms of artifice and of sense experience— to the suffering of any subject in liberal society. Second, the seeming simplicity and “barebones” nature of the framework of liberal justice is stilted upon feverish negotiations of the meaning of life and death. As the following excerpt suggests, the affixing of the suffering god in the Greek drama foretells the liberal drama that replaces a democracy of suffering with the drama that features singular notions of suffering, life, and death in principles of justice, no less Apollonian in incarnation than the late Dionysus (the Dionysus of the Twilight of the Idols rather than the Birth of Tragedy):56 We have now come to the insight that the scene [Scene] together with the action is basically and originally thought of only as a vision, that the single “reality” is the chorus itself, which creates the vision out of itself and speaks of that with the entire symbolism of dance, tone, and word. . . . The chorus sees how Dionysus, the god, suffers and glorifies himself, and thus it does not itself act. But in this role, as complete servants in relation to the god, the chorus is nevertheless the highest, that is, the Dionysian expression of nature and, like nature, thus in its frenzy speaks the language of oracular wisdom, as the fellow-sufferer as well as wise person reporting the truth from the heart of the world. . . . Dionysus, the essential stage hero and center of the vision is, according to this insight and to tradition, not really present in the very oldest periods of tragedy, but only imagined as present. That is, originally tragedy was only “chorus” and not “drama.” Later the attempt was made to show the god as real and then to present in a way visible to every eye the visionary figure together with the transfiguring setting. At that point “drama” in the strict sense begins. Now the dithyrambic chorus takes on the task of stimulating the mood of the listeners right up to a Dionysian level of excitement, so that when the tragic hero appeared on the stage, they did not see something like an awkward masked person but a visionary shape born, as it were, out of their own enchantment.57 This excerpt brings to light two distinct currents I find intertwined in my relation to Nietzsche’s work on suffering. The first includes his conceptions of the Dionysian and the Apollonian as they span his oeuvre, occurring together. The second involves the characters of the ascetic priest and the tragic artist that are developed more unevenly in different texts. It is difficult to do justice here to how I see these two currents evolve in relation to each other. Suffice it to say, for now, that considering them together is necessary for grasping Nietzsche’s critique of ressentiment. There is no way to regard ressentiment as a moral sickness and a sickness of Christian and liberal morality without seeing it as a political and aesthetic pathology and a pathology of Western liberal politics and aesthetics. So, the next time the Genealogy inspires a defensive reaction on the part of all of us who are the “sick” and the “memorious”58 within liberal capitalism, perhaps we must remember that the confessional is not the place to expel it. That is not where we will be saved. A real, honest look at the political economy of liberalism as embodied in liberal representation and its accompanying ubiquitous ascetic theater—where not even the Dionysian, as a redemptive impulse, is safe—will give us some clues to where and how the sins of liberal capitalism must be begun to be atoned for. The “new” drama that Nietzsche talks about signals to how liberalism reifies modes of suffering and action via the ritual personifications, objectifications, and subjectivations that suffuse our sensuous existence and our attempts at imaging ourselves and making this world thus. This drama thus demands different sensuousnesses, different performances, and different submissions. But, importantly for my purposes here, so do resistances to it. Bachmann’s Todesarten refer to the domain that opens up when the hegemonies of life and death, of health and vitality, demand us to be subjects in a particular way, where any challenge to these deaths can perhaps ultimately take the shape of suffering, and dying, differently. The ascetic’s self-preserving self-abnegation is the only undoing of the self liberalism knows—as it passes for the victim of its own contrived pathos and tragedies, forcing the rest of us to rise to the occasion to save it every time it proclaims a threat to itself (forgetting very quickly that its very raison d’etre was that it would save us from each other and ourselves). The ascetic priest combats suffering by placing a “monstrous valuation” on life, and it is his “evaluation of existence” that the priest demands obedience of in order for something to be put right.59 Needless to say, the very notion of putting right by deeds or anything else assumes compliance with what life and its rightness would be. It is this ideal of life and existence that gives the impression that the ascetic labor is one that chooses life and affirms life, as is believed by those who revere it—but the fact that it chooses to value a life that opposes and excludes “nature, world, the whole sphere of becoming and transitoriness” is, for Nietzsche, the reason why the ascetic’s labor is one rooted in the denial of life.60 Nietzsche locates this ascetic ideal in the “protective instinct of a degenerating life which tries by all means to sustain itself and to fight for its existence.”61 Nietzsche thus terms the ascetic ideal “an expedient,” and “an artifice for the preservation of life,” adding that “life wrestles in it and through it with death and against death.” The true substance of willing within an ascetic’s labor is characterized further—“a hatred of the human, and even more of the animal, and more still of the material; a horror of the senses, of reason itself; a fear of happiness and beauty, a longing to get away from all appearance, change, becoming, death, wishing, from longing itself—all this means a will to nothingness, an aversion to life.”62 Since the ascetic priest’s dominion rests on so little, and since his entire faith, will, power, interest relies on an ideal of merely existing and merely preserving, he does live fairly precariously but with hope! Regardless of his intentionality and sincerity, this denier of life willy-nilly ends up functioning as a life-conserving and “yes-creating” force. Any wonder, then, how, and on what terms, liberalism keeps preserving and renewing itself, and at what cost we preserve and renew ourselves as its willing, unwilling, wanted, and unwanted subjects? The 1AC’s invocation of black suffering into this round immures us to the same suffering. Their demand that the suffering be materialized through recitation is more obscene than the acts they criticize.Moten 03, [Fred, Poetic Optimist, “In the Break; The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition”, Pg. 16, Finesse]/ Only more obscene than the brutality unleashed at the whipping post is the demand that this suffering be materialized and evidenced by the display of the tortured body or end- less recitations of the ghastly and terrible. In light of this, how does one give expression to these outrages without exacerbating the indifference to suffering that is the consequence of the benumbing spectacle or con- tend with the narcissistic identification that obliterates the other or the prurience that too often is the response to such displays? This was the challenge faced by Douglass and the other foes of slavery, and this is the task I take up here. Therefore, rather than try to convey the routinized violence of slavery and its aftermath through invocations of the shocking and the terrible, I have chosen to look elsewhere and consider those scenes in which terror can hardly be discerned. . . . By defamiliarizing the familiar, I hope to illuminate the terror of the mundane and quotidian rather than exploit the shocking spectacle. What concerns me here is the diffusion of terror and the violence perpetrated under the rubric of pleasure, paternalism and property.3 Radical AlterityIdentity politics reinjects artificial alterity that is foundation of the systems they critique. Our fragmented and catastrophic form of politics is the only way to implode modernity’s assimilation machine. Noys 07 (Benjamin Noys (BSc, MA, DPhil) is Professor of Critical Theory at the University of Chichester, March 21st 2007, http://www.ballardian.com/crimes-of-the-near-future-baudrillard-ballard) The murder of Otherness, of alterity, produces a new obsession with it and its return in what Baudrillard describes as ‘the melodrama of difference’ (1993: 124-138). For Baudrillard this is particularly true of forms of identity politics and other proclamations of the ‘right to difference’. In fact this always reduces alterity to something negotiable and actually refuses radical alterity. We can see further evidence for this ‘melodrama of difference’ in the toleration and funding of so-called ‘transgressive’ art – for example, in the symptomatic fact that Charles Saatchi, who made his fortune in advertising (including for the British Conservative party), was the chief patron of the ‘Sensation’ exhibition of New British Art. In this case the ‘melodrama’ generates the requisite shock while also being used to market the singular ‘new’ achievements of British culture. Outside of the still relatively ‘high’ domain of art we could also consider the fashion for ‘extreme’ works in popular film. Since Se7en(1995), which explores the baroque tortures inflicted by a serial killer, a whole range of contemporary films have exploited the horror of torture: Ôdishon [Audition] (1999), Saw(2004), Saw II (2005), Creep (2004), Wolf Creek (2005), and Hostel (2006) (to mention only the most well-known). Often they are seen as a reaction against the postmodern irony that has been prevalent in horror film since Scream (1996). In a sense, though, they offer a meta-irony; to make a ‘true’ horror film rather than a pastiche is simply to pastiche the ‘true’ horror film. This is evident in the way in which recent explicit remakes of 1970s horror films, such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003; original 1974) and The Hills Have Eyes (2006; original 1977), have returned to negativity of the ‘original’ film only all the more effectively to simulate it. Any political negativity present in the original is lost through a focus on more and more precise representations of bodily suffering.¶ This then is a situation of administered alterity and the hypercritic responds not by withdrawing into a position of disgust, ressentiment, or resignation, as does Paul Virilio (2003). Neither do they simply celebrate this new body-shock art as revealing the obverse ‘truth’ of our mediatised culture. Instead they try to exceed both the new forms of simulated alterity and those forms of critique which rely on an alterity that has now disappeared. In fact despite the seeming pessimism of this analysis, in which every instance of alterity is ‘always-already’ simulated, Baudrillard insists on the ‘Other’s indestructibility’ (1993: 146) and the need to reconstitute the radical Other ‘starting with the fragments and tracing its broken lines, its lines of fracture’ (1993: 155). The very capacity of simulation to simulate alterity actually threatens to overwhelm it, with radical alterity now taking a viral or catastrophic form that permeates simulation. Of course what remains contentious is not only the extent to which we accept this analysis, presented quite explicitly as a fiction, but also the mechanism or mechanisms by which this reversal, implosion or catastrophe is supposed to, or is, taking place. Here we re-encounter the notion of crime, but this time a crime directed against the original crime and its cover-up. This is the exacerbative approach, not returning to ‘organic negativity’ or celebrating the ‘truth’ of negativity, but committing a new crime, which will exceed the original.¶ In Ballard’s fiction this articulation of excess literalises Baudrillard’s metaphor of crime. This is particularly true of the novel Super-Cannes, which begins with Paul Sinclair, an aviation journalist, and his young wife Jane, a doctor, travelling to the business park of Eden-Olympia on the Côte d’Azur. While Paul is recovering from the effects of a flying accident Jane’s role is to replace the previous doctor David Greenwood, who went on a killing spree before killing himself. Almost immediately they arrive they encounter the threatening psychiatrist Wilder Penrose and take up residence in Greenwood’s old villa. With time on his hands, and increasingly obsessed with the fate of Greenwood, Paul Sinclair begins to investigate the circumstances of the killings. He slowly uncovers evidence that suggests both a network of criminality in the business park and that Greenwood was deliberately executed. Although it comes as no surprise to the reader, there is deliberately little mystery in this novel, the psychiatrist Wilder Penrose is the orchestrating figure. Suffocated by the banality and conformity of the park, which is totally regulated and simulated, the executives who lived there had begun to fall ill with minor and persistent ailments. Penrose’s solution was ‘a controlled and supervised madness’ (2001: 251) through a secret therapy programme of crime.¶ The novel ‘stages’ both the danger of simulation leading to the internal collapse of a social system and the way in which those who manage the system recognise this risk and ‘re-inject’ alterity. Penrose’s crime programme is directed outside the park in the form of violent raids (ratissages) against the local Arabs and blacks, robberies, and also child prostitution. It was Greenwood’s role in administering this programme, and especially his recognition of his own paedophilic desires, which led to his attack on the park. As Paul discovers it was not actually a wild striking out but a deliberate attempt to both punish those responsible and to uncover the ‘therapy’ programme. The novel ends with Paul setting out to complete the task at which Greenwood fails – another crime to expose this surreptitious criminality. Certainly Ballard’s novel is a fiction and, despite the seriousness of its subject matter, not without humour. However, Ballard’s recent work also puts into play the necessity for an apocalyptic or catastrophic violence to exceed the regulated violence of contemporary culture (see Gasiorek, 2005: 202-214) – to literally blow apart the limits of the existing order. Again the only way to exceed licensed transgression is through an out-bidding by another hypertransgression.¶ This process recalls Baudrillard’s analysis of potlatch, the gift exchange of so-called ‘primitive’ societies, as a process of ‘continual higher bidding in exchange’ (1998: 194). The excess emerges out of the acceleration of this bidding beyond any hope of containment or return. In the same way Paul Sinclair’s crime answers, and out-bids, both the failed crime of David Greenwood and the organised criminality of Wilder Penrose. It also conforms to Baudrillard’s description of the terrorist act as ‘at the same time a model of simulation, a micro-model flashing with a minimally real event and a maximal echo chamber’ (1983: 114). It belongs to the order of simulation, as it will be spectacular and an object of media interest, as was Greenwood’s original crime. Also, it functions as a micro-model of dissident resistance against the organisation of alterity: the ‘real event’ here being the eruption of a ‘real’ alterity. Finally, as an echo chamber, it expands beyond the immediate context of the novel as fiction, resonating in the mediascape of contemporary culture. What is also crucial is that Ballard does not actually describe this act; it remains a virtual future left in all its potential ambiguity. Rather than provide another representation of radical alterity, bringing the crime back into simulation, Ballard’s novel marks its ‘presence’ in the form of an absence. The perfect crime of the murder of alterity and its simulation is ‘matched’ or out-bid by another crime that never occurs, and may not actually occur, in the fictional universe. This is very similar to the recent work of Baudrillard. Although he does not have the license of fiction for him the out-bidding of the perfect crime takes place in thought: ‘[o]ur only hope lies in a criminal and inhumane kind of thought’ (2001: 61). The substance of Baudrillard’s thought has, as we have seen, remained quite constant. Therefore I want to suggest that this ‘criminal and inhumane kind of thought’ for which he strives is rather more a question of form. Since what we might call Baudrillard’s ‘simulated sociology’ (the last great work beingSymbolic Exchange and Death (1976)), which at least mimicked existing academic forms, his work has increasingly been articulated through disruptive formal strategies. His use of aphorism, impressionistic or journalistic writing (the bête noir of academic writing), fragments, diaries, and so on, work towards a hypercritical writing, which is itself implosive or catastrophic. The reason for these strategies is, again, the refusal to simply stage or represent the ‘indestructible Other’. Instead the fragmentary form of his work circulates around it, registering its destabilising and implosive effects through writing. This is Baudrillard game of seduction: seducing simulated alterity into contact with the distortive ‘black hole’ of radical alterity. GenericThey are like Watergate, a façade that attempts to reinject morality into the political in order to conceal the fact that the political is irredeemably corrupt. The system manufactures opposition to simulate deliberative democracy and progressivism, like a cop masquerading as a Marxist revolutionary.Baudrillard 81 (Jean, Simulacra and Simulation: Political Incarceration, 1981, CP) Watergate. The same scenario as in Disneyland (effect of the imaginary concealing that reality no more exists outside than inside the limits of the artificial perimeter): here the scandal effect hiding that there is no difference between the facts and their denunciation (identical methods on the part of the CIA and of the Washington Post journalists). Same operation, tending to regenerate through scandal a moral and political principle, through the imaginary, a sinking reality principle. The denunciation of scandal is always an homage to the law. And Watergate in particular succeeded in imposing the idea that Watergate was a scandal - in this sense it was a prodigious operation of intoxication. A large dose of political morality reinjected on a world scale. One could say along with Bourdieu: "The essence of every relation of force is to dissimulate itself as such and to acquire all its force only because it dissimulates itself as such," understood as follows: capital, immoral and without scruples, can only function behind a moral superstructure, and whoever revives this public morality (through indignation, denunciation, etc.) works spontaneously for the order of capital. This is what the journalists of the Washington Post did. But this would be nothing but the formula of ideology, and when Bourdieu states it, he takes the "relation of force" for the truth of capitalist domination, and he himself denounces this relation of force as scandal - he is thus in the same deterministic and moralistic position as the Washington Post journalists are. He does the same work of purging and reviving moral order, an order of truth in which the veritable symbolic violence of the social order is engendered, well beyond all the relations of force, which are only its shifting and indifferent configuration in the moral and political consciences of men. All that capital asks of us is to receive it as rational or to combat it in the name of rationality, to receive it as moral or to combat it in the name of morality. Because these are the same, which can be thought of in another way: formerly one worked to dissimulate scandal - today one works to conceal that there is none. Watergate is not a scandal, this is what must be said at all costs, because it is what everyone is busy concealing, this dissimulation masking a strengthening of morality, of a moral panic as one approaches the primitive (mise en) scène of capital: its instantaneous cruelty, its incomprehensible ferocity, its fundamental immorality - that is what is scandalous, unacceptable to the system of moral and economic equivalence that is the axiom of leftist thought, from the theories of the Enlightenment up to Communism. One imputes this thinking to the contract of capital, but it doesn't give a damn - it is a monstrous unprincipled enterprise, nothing more. It is "enlightened" thought that seeks to control it by imposing rules on it. And all the recrimination that replaces revolutionary thought today comes back to incriminate capital for not following the rules of the game. "Power is unjust, its justice is a class justice, capital exploits us, etc." - as if capital were linked by a contract to the society it rules. It is the Left that holds out the mirror of equivalence to capital hoping that it will comply, comply with this phantasmagoria of the social contract and fulfill its obligations to the whole of society (by the same token, no need for revolution: it suffices that capital accommodate itself to the rational formula of exchange). Capital, in fact, was never linked by a contract to the society that it dominates. It is a sorcery of social relations, it is a challenge to society, and it must be responded to as such. It is not a scandal to be denounced according to moral or economic rationality, but a challenge to take up according to symbolic law. Democracy doesn’t exist – this card isn’t Baudrillard, AND it’s got stats – the public doesn’t influence policy any more – stop kidding yourselves and accept that the government doesn’t care what you think and getting more information doesn’t improve your chancesGilens and Page 14 (Martin Gilens, Professor of Politics at Princeton University, Benjamin Page, Gordon S. Fulcher Professor of Decision Making at Northwestern University, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FPPS%2FPPS12_03%2FS1537592714001595a.pdf&code=5250929e69c716700efbe7a12d05dd39) By directly pitting the predictions of ideal-type theories against each other within a single statistical model (using a unique data set that includes imperfect but useful measures of the key independent variables for nearly two thousand policy issues), we have been able to produce some striking findings. One is the nearly total failure of “median voter” and other Majoritarian Electoral Democracy theories. When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.¶ The failure of theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy is all the more striking because it goes against the likely effects of the limitations of our data. The preferences of ordinary citizens were measured more directly than our other independent variables, yet they are estimated to have the least effect. Nor do organized interest groups substitute for direct citizen influence, by embodying citizens’ will and ensur- ing that their wishes prevail in the fashion postulated by theories of Majoritarian Pluralism. Interest groups do have substantial independent impacts on policy, and a few groups (particularly labor unions) represent average citi- zens’ views reasonably well. But the interest-group system as a whole does not. Overall, net interest-group alignments are not significantly related to the preferences of average citizens. The net alignments of the most influential, business-oriented groups are negatively related to the average citizen’s wishes. So existing interest groups do not serve effectively as transmission belts for the wishes of the populace as a whole. “Potential groups” do not take up the slack, either, since average citizens’ preferences have little or no independent impact on policy after existing groups’ stands are controlled for.¶ Furthermore, the preferences of economic elites (as measured by our proxy, the preferences of “affluent” citizens) have far more independent impact upon policy change than the preferences of average citizens do. To be sure, this does not mean that ordinary citizens always lose out; they fairly often get the policies they favor, but only because those policies happen also to be preferred by the economically-elite citizens who wield the actual influence.¶ Of course our findings speak most directly to the “first face” of power: the ability of actors to shape policy outcomes on contested issues. But they also reflect—to some degree, at least—the “second face” of power: the ability to shape the agenda of issues that policy makers consider. The set of policy alternatives that we analyze is considerably broader than the set discussed seriously by policy makers or brought to a vote in Congress, and our alternatives are (on average) more popular among the general public than among interest groups. Thus the fate of these policies can reflect policy makers’ refusing to consider them rather than considering but rejecting them. (From our data we cannot distinguish between the two.) Our results speak less clearly to the “third face” of power: the ability of elites to shape the public’s preferences.49 We know that interest groups and policy makers themselves often devote considerable effort to shaping opinion. If they are successful, this might help explain the high correlation we find between elite and mass preferences. But it cannot have greatly inflated our estimate of average citizens’ influence on policy making, which is near zero.¶ What do our findings say about democracy in America? They certainly constitute troubling news for advocates of “populistic” democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes.¶ When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.¶ A possible objection to populistic democracy is that average citizens are inattentive to politics and ignorant about public policy; why should we worry if their poorly- informed preferences do not influence policy making? Perhaps economic elites and interest-group leaders enjoy greater policy expertise than the average citizen does. Perhaps they know better which policies will benefit everyone, and perhaps they seek the common good, rather than selfish ends, when deciding which policies to support.¶ But we tend to doubt it. We believe instead that— collectively—ordinary citizens generally know their own values and interests pretty well, and that their expressed policy preferences are worthy of respect.50 Moreover, we are not so sure about the informational advantages of elites. Yes, detailed policy knowledge tends to rise with income and status. Surely wealthy Americans and corporate executives tend to know a lot about tax and regulatory policies that directly affect them. But how much do they know about the human impact of Social Security, Medi- care, food stamps, or unemployment insurance, none of which is likely to be crucial to their own well-being? Most important, we see no reason to think that informational expertise is always accompanied by an inclination to transcend one’s own interests or a determination to work for the common good.¶ All in all, we believe that the public is likely to be a more certain guardian of its own interests than any feasible alternative.¶ Download 356.95 Kb. Share with your friends:
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