West coast debate
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- Resist the affirmative’s call to “do something” – this is just a way to justify status quo ideology
- 1NC Ideology Kritik 2/2
- Our alternative is to do nothing – this is essential to resist capitalism and avoid replicating the aff’s harms
Ideology K1NC Ideology Kritik 1/2The expansion of transportation infrastructure is always coopted for the benefits of elites – don’t buy the affirmative’s claim to benign justificationsDeath By Car, 9-29-2011, “Shove Affair,” http://www.deathbycar.info/tag/eisenhower/ Mainstream history insists that the United States got cars-first transportation because the people spontaneously demanded it. The masses saw the automobile, and insisted on re-building the nation to facilitate it. “Americans are having a love affair with the car,” so the story goes, is all anybody needs to know about the origins of the present. But here’s the thing: The peddlers of this tale never provide any serious evidence that this is how things actually happened. Why is that? Here at DbC, we hold that the reason nobody provides details in support of the “love affair” thesis is that it is impossible to do so, since popular demand has never, in fact, been the leading force in the shaping of transportation policy and infrastructure in America. All along, the actual reality has been corporate capitalist dictation of such policy and infrastructure. Consider, for instance, the words of Lucius D. Clay, “Eisenhower’s man” in the effort to ram through funding for the Interstate Highway System in the mid-1950s. Clay, at the time a member of General Motors’ Board of Directors, explained his actions as follows: We are indeed a nation on wheels and we cannot permit these wheels to slow down. Our mass industries must have moving supply lines to feed raw materials into our factories and moving distribution lines to carry the finished product to store or home. Moreover, the hands which produce these goods and the services which make them useful must also move from home to factory to store to home. Our highway system has helped make this possible. To me, the importance to the national economy of this modern highway system outweighs all other reasons why it should be built. All I can say is that 10 years from now we’ll have 80 million motor vehicles-and we better have the roads. Because if we don’t have the roads, we may not have the 80 million vehicles. And that, I think, would be very unfortunate for the whole country. If we don’t build the roads, we may not have the cars. Hardly the words of somebody operating in a situation where the masses are clamoring for more automobiles, is it? Resist the affirmative’s call to “do something” – this is just a way to justify status quo ideologyAdria Johnston, research fellow at Emory, December 2004, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, v. 9, i. 3, p. 259 The height of Zizek's philosophical traditionalism, his fidelity to certain lasting truths too precious to cast away in a postmodern frenzy, is his conviction that no worthwhile praxis can emerge prior to the careful and deliberate formulation of a correct conceptual framework. His references to the Lacanian notion of the Act (qua agent-less occurrence not brought about by a subject) are especially strange in light of the fact that he seemingly endorses the view that theory must precede practice, namely, that deliberative reflection is, in a way, primary. For Zizek, the foremost "practical" task to be accomplished today isn't some kind of rebellious acting out, which would, in the end, amount to nothing more than a series of impotent, incoherent outbursts. Instead, given the contemporary exhaustion of the socio-political imagination under the hegemony of liberal-democratic capitalism, he sees the liberation of thinking itself from its present constraints as the first crucial step that must be taken if anything is to be changed for the better. In a lecture given in Vienna in 2001, Zizek suggests that Marx's call to break out of the sterile closure of abstract intellectual ruminations through direct, concrete action (thesis eleven on Feuerbach--"The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it") must be inverted given the new prevailing conditions of late-capitalism. Nowadays, one must resist succumbing to the temptation to short-circuit thinking in favor of acting, since all such rushes to action are doomed; they either fail to disrupt capitalism or are ideologically co-opted by it. 1NC Ideology Kritik 2/2We’re at the endgame – unchecked growth will cause extinction, and no reform to ideology can save us. The only way out is full-blown revolution.Joel Kovel, Professor of Social Studies at Bard College, 2002, The Enemy of Nature, p. 5-6 As the world, or to be more exact, the Western, industrial world, has leapt into a prosperity unimaginable to prior generations, it has prepared for itself a calamity far more unimaginable still. The present world system in effect has had three decades to limit its growth, and it has failed so abjectly that even the idea of limiting growth has been banished from official discourse. Further, it has been proved decisively that the internal logic of the present system translates ‘growth’ into increasing wealth for the few and increasing misery for the many. We must begin our inquiry therefore, with the chilling fact that ‘growth’ so conceived means the destruction of the natural foundation of civilization. If the world were a living organism, then any sensible observer would conclude that this ‘growth’ is a cancer that, if not somehow treated, means the destruction of human society, and even raises the question of the extinction of our species. A simple extrapolation tells us as much, once we learn that the growth is uncontrollable. The details are important and interesting, but less so than the chief conclusion — that irresistible growth, and the evident fact that this growth destabilizes and breaks down the natural ground necessary for human existence, means, in the plainest terms, that we are doomed under the present social order, and that we had better change it as soon as possible if we are to survive. One wants to scream out this brutal and plain truth, which should be on the masthead of every newspaper and the station-identification of every media outlet, the leading issue before Congress and all governmental organ izations, the focus of every congregation and the centrepiece of every curriculum at all levels of education ... but is nothing of the kind. Our alternative is to do nothing – this is essential to resist capitalism and avoid replicating the aff’s harmsZizek, 2004 Slavoj Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, page 71-71 The stance of simply condemning the postmodern Left for its accommodation, however, is also false, since one should ask the obvious difficult question: what, in fact, was the alternative? If today’s ‘post-politics’ is opportunistic pragmatism with no principles, then the predominant leftist reaction to it can be aptly characterized as ‘principle opportunism’: one simply sticks to old formulae (defence of the welfare state, and so on) and calls them ‘principles’, dispensing with the detailed analysis of how the situation has changed – and thus retaining one’s position of Beautiful Soul. The inherent stupidity of the ‘principled’ Left is clearly discernable in it standard criticism of any analysis which proposes a more complex picture of the situation, renouncing any simple prescriptions on how to act: ‘there is no clear political stance involved in your theory’ – and this from people with no stance but their ‘principled opportunism’. Against such a stance, one should have the courage to affirm that, in a situation like today’s, the only way really to remain open to a revolutionary opportunity is to renounce facile calls to direct action, which necessarily involve us in an activity where things change so that the totality remains the same. Today’s predicament is that, if we succumb to the urge of directly ‘doing something’ (engaging in the anti-globalist struggle, helping the poor…) we will certainly and undoubtedly contribute to the reproduction of the existing order. The only way to lay the foundations for a true, radical change is to withdraw from the compulsion to act, to ‘do nothing’ – thus opening up the space for a different kind of activity. Directory: file -> fetch fetch -> 11 th Lit Semester 1 Final Study Guide!!! fetch -> Industrial Revolution Inventors fetch -> Analysis for Galveston Hurricane of 1900 fetch -> The Illuminators (Team 2) 1900 Galveston Hurricane Cycle a team Assignment fetch -> Team csi-utb ruth Reyes Jose Ferrer fetch -> Galveston Hurricane of 1900 Cycle a-teacher as a Problem Solver fetch -> Is Climate Change Starting a New Dust Bowl? Cycle A fetch -> What makes a storm a hurricane fetch -> The 1950s were the "Happy Days" because it was a time of economic prosperity, technology development, new entertainment, new fashion and family growth. The 1950s was a great time fetch -> Sputnik and The Dawn of the Space Age Download 1.5 Mb. Share with your friends:
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