Neolib Addendum/Statephobia

1nc

1nc
The AFFs paranoiac fear of surveillance erodes our confidence
in the state in general
Harper 8 (David Reader in Clinical Psychology at UEL, The Politics of Paranoia:
Paranoid Positioning and Conspiratorial Narratives in the Surveillance Society, in
Surveillance & Society, Volume 5, Number 1, p. 1-32, http://www.surveillance-andsociety.org/articles5(1)/paranoia.pdf)
There is no escape since, as Gandy (1993, 2003) has demonstrated, panoptical surveillance is
mediated not only through direct visual and auditory means in physical space, but also
through all manner of electronic data-mining. Smail (1984) has noted how this experience of
continual surveillance leads inevitably to the inscription of anxiety into the lives of
those surveyed. However, since in most paranoid discourse, the Other has malevolent intent, the result is not only anxiety
but self-regulation and suspicion. In Sass's (1987) analysis of Daniel Schreber's paranoia he argued that, because of persecutory
child-rearing by his father, Schreber became a quintessentially panoptical being who experienced an internalized surveillance
thus watching himself watching himself watching himself watch (1987: 144). Such a comment concurs with that of Zizek (1992)

paranoia could be
seen as a system of governance, a psychic panopticon. Although surveillance seems common across
who sees in the concept of paranoia a kind of material superego which sees all and knows all. Thus

Western society, its specific forms may vary from society to society and so we should not be surprised that, for example, those
diagnosed as having paranoid delusions in the US are commonly preoccupied with the CIA whilst in Italy neighbours are a dominant
theme (Gaines, 1995). Moreover, although surveillance is a dominant theme in Western culture, the depiction of paranoia is varied
and contradictory and this offers, as we will see later, some clues to its construction. Recent work in surveillance studies has begun
to critique the view that surveillance is inherently a negative social force or even uniformly experienced as repressive (e.g. Lianos,
2003; Yar, 2003) and that, even in fictional representations, there is a more nuanced view possible (Albrechtslund & Dubbeld, 2005;

the increasingly endemic nature of surveillance (Murakami Wood, 2006; Lyon,

is not the only setting condition for paranoia and conspiracy culture. Another factor is that, in a postWatergate age, the public are much more sceptical of official accounts . This scepticism is
increased when we know that security and intelligence agencies have conspired in
the past and, no doubt, still do (Blum, 2003; Porter, 1992). One of the symptoms of a lack of
trust in the State and political debate is the increasing hold of conspiracy
theories. Conspiracy theories will always circulate in an age of fast transfer of information, highly complex and fast-moving
Marks, 2005). However,
2003)

events involving large numbers of people with only partial or ambiguous information. In the wake of the September 11 2001 attacks
many conspiracy theories have developed, for example that the Pentagon was hit by a missile, not a plane (Reynolds, 2006); that
the attacks were an inside job (Gillan, 2006) or that the World Trade Centre buildings were brought down by pre-planned controlled
explosions (Pope, 2006). These theories have gained ground - Gillan (2006) reports that a recent poll found that 36% of Americans
believed it very likely or somewhat likely that their government was involved in allowing the attacks or had carried them out

In a time of increased scepticism of official accounts , the tendency for

bureaucracies to cover-up their errors and mistakes can appear to be evidence for
conspiracy. As Robin Ramsay, editor of Lobster magazine puts it in situations where the shit is flying bureaucracies go into
itself.

cover-up mode automatically (2005: 33). Bronner (2006), for example, discusses how the chaos in the North American Aerospace
Defense Command (NORAD) was not adequately conveyed in the 9/11 Commission hearings (National Commission on Terrorist Acts

These unofficial narratives have become so widespread that the

US State department has developed guidance about misinformation which includes
post 9/11 internet conspiracy theories (State department, 2005), the media have published detailed rebuttals
Upon the United States, 2004).

of claims about the attacks (Popular Mechanics, 2005) and even George Bush felt the need to rebut them only two months after the
attacks: Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th; malicious lies that
attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists themselves, away from the guilty. (Bush, 2001)

Paranoia of government surveillance is affectively co-opted to

further neoliberal hollowing-out of the state

Anderson 12 (Ben Reader in the Department of Geography at Durham University,

Affect and biopower: towards a politics of life, Transactions of the Institute of
British Geographers, Volume 37, Issue 1, April 2012,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00441.x/pdf)

By affective condition I mean an affective atmosphere that predetermines how something in this case the state is habitually
encountered, disclosed and can be related to. Bearing a family resemblance to concepts such as structure of feeling (Williams
1977) or emotional situation (Virno 2004), an affective condition involves the same doubled and seemingly contradictory sense of
the ephemeral or transitory alongside the structured or durable. As such, it does not slavishly determine action. An affective
condition shapes and influences as atmospheres are taken up and reworked in lived experience, becoming part of the emotions that
will infuse policies or programmes, and may be transmitted through assemblages of people, information and things that attempt to

State-phobia obviously exists in complex coexistence

with other affective conditions. To give but two examples, note how Connolly (2008) shows how
existential bellicosity and ressentiments infuse the networks of think
tanks, media and companies that promote neoliberal policies . Or consider how
organise life in terms of the market.

Berlant (2008) shows how nearly utopian affects of belonging to a world of work are vital to the promise of neoliberal policies in the

state-phobia has and will vary as it is articulated

with distinct political movements. For example, the USA Tea Party phenomenon
is arguably animated by an intensified state-phobia named in the spectre
of Big Government and linked to a reactivation of Cold War anxieties
about the threat of Socialism. But the Tea Party also involves a heady combination of white entitlement
context of precariousness. In addition

and racism, affective-ideational feelings of freedom, and the pervasive economic insecurity that follows from economic crisis.

How, then, do we get from state-phobia to a logic of governing that purports

to govern as little as possible but actually intervenes all the way down
through permanent activity, vigilance and intervention (Foucault 2008, 246)?
State-phobia traverses quite different apparatuses, and changes across those
apparatuses. As Foucault puts it, it has many agents and promoters (2008, 76), meaning that it can no longer be
localised. It circulates alongside the concern with excessive government, reappears in different sites and therefore overflows
any one neoliberalising apparatus (2008, 187). Hinting to a genealogy of state-affects, Foucault differentiates it
from a similarly ambiguous phobia at the end of the 18th century about despotism, as
linked to tyranny and arbitrariness (2008, 76). State-phobia is different . It gives a push to the
question of whether government is excessive, and as such animates
policies and programmes that are based on extending the market form to
all of society . State-phobia is, on this account, both cause and effect of the
neoliberal identification of an economic-political invariant (2008, 111) across
disparate forms of economic intervention (including the New Deal, Keynesianism and Nazism).
Developing Foucaults brief comments on its inflationary logic (2008, 187), we can think of state-phobia as
being bound up with the anticipatory hyper-vigilance of paranoia (Sedgwick
2003). It is based on an elision of actuality that passes over what the state is actually doing to always find the
great fantasy of the paranoiac and devouring state (Foucault 2008, 188). In short,
neoliberalism is imbued with a suspicion of any state economic action that
is not wholly in the service of organising life around the market form .

Using the state to remedy injustices is necessary to prevent

the violence of neoliberalism
Ferguson 11 (James Professor of Anthropology at Stanford, The Uses of
Neoliberalism, in Antipode, Volume 41, Series 1, p. 166-184,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2009.00721.x/abstract)
If we are seeking, as this special issue of Antipode aspires to do, to link our critical analyses to the
world of grounded political strugglenot only to interpret the world in various ways, but also to change it
then there is much to be said for focusing , as I have here, on mundane , realworld debates around policy and politics, even if doing so inevitably puts
us on the compromised and reformist terrain of the possible , rather than
the seductive high ground of revolutionary ideals and utopian desires . But I
would also insist that there is more at stake in the examples I have discussed here than simply a slightly
better way to ameliorate the miseries of the chronically poor , or a technically superior method for

relieving the suffering of famine victims. My point in discussing the South African BIG campaign, for instance, is not really to argue
for its implementation. There is much in the campaign that is appealing, to be sure. But one can just as easily identify a series of
worries that would bring the whole proposal into doubt. Does not, for instance, the decoupling of the question of assistance from the
issue of labor, and the associated valorization of the informal, help provide a kind of alibi for the failures of the South African
regime to pursue policies that would do more to create jobs? Would not the creation of a basic income benefit tied to national
citizenship simply exacerbate the vicious xenophobia that already divides the South African poor, in a context where many of the
poorest are not citizens, and would thus not be eligible for the BIG? Perhaps even more fundamentally, is the idea of basic income
really capable of commanding the mass support that alone could make it a central pillar of a new approach to distribution? The
record to date gives powerful reasons to doubt it. So far, the technocrats dreams of relieving poverty through efficient cash
transfers have attracted little support from actual poor people, who seem to find that vision a bit pale and washed out, compared
with the vivid (if vague) populist promises of jobs and personalistic social inclusion long offered by the ANC patronage machine, and

My real interest in the policy proposals

discussed here, in fact, has little to do with the narrow policy questions to which they seek to
provide answers. For what is most significant, for my purposes, is not whether or not these are good
policies, but the way that they illustrate a process through which specific governmental
devices and modes of reasoning that we have become used to associating with a
very particular (and conservative) political agenda (neoliberalism) may be in the process of being
peeled away from that agenda , and put to very different uses . Any
progressive who takes seriously the challenge I pointed to at the start of this essay, the challenge of
developing new progressive arts of government, ought to find this turn of events of
considerable interest. As Steven Collier (2005) has recently pointed out, it is important to question
the assumption that there is, or must be, a neat or automatic fit between a
hegemonic neoliberal political-economic project (however that might be characterized), on
the one hand, and specific neoliberal techniques , on the other. Close attention to
particular techniques (such as the use of quantitative calculation, free choice, and price driven by supply and demand)
in particular settings (in Colliers case, fiscal and budgetary reform in post-Soviet Russia) shows that the relationship
between the technical and the political-economic is much more polymorphous and
unstable than is assumed in much critical geographical work, and that neoliberal technical
mechanisms are in fact deployed in relation to diverse political projects and social
norms (2005:2). As I suggested in referencing the role of statistics and techniques for pooling risk in the creation of social
democratic welfare states, social technologies need not have any essential or eternal
loyalty to the political formations within which they were first developed .
Insurance rationality at the end of the nineteenth century had no essential vocation
to provide security and solidarity to the working class; it was turned to that purpose
(in some substantial measure) because it was available , in the right place at the right time, to be
appropriated for that use. Specific ways of solving or posing governmental problems, specific institutional and
lately personified by Jacob Zuma (Ferguson forthcoming).

intellectual mechanisms, can be combined in an almost infinite variety of ways, to accomplish different social ends. With social, as

it is not the machines or the mechanisms that decide what

they will be used to do . Foucault (2008:94) concluded his discussion of socialist government- ality by

with any other sort of technology,

insisting that the answers to the Lefts governmental problems require not yet another search through our sacred texts, but a
process of conceptual and institutional innovation. [I]f

there is a really socialist governmentality, then

it is not hidden within socialism and its texts . It cannot be deduced from them. It must be
invented. But invention in the domain of governmental technique is rarely something
worked up out of whole cloth . More often, it involves a kind of bricolage (Le vi- Strauss 1966), a piecing
together of something new out of scavenged parts originally intended for some
other purpose. As we pursue such a process of improvisatory invention, we might begin by making an inventory of the parts
available for such tinkering, keeping all the while an open mind about how different mechanisms might be put to work, and what

If we can go beyond seeing in neoliberalism an evil

essence or an automatic unity, and instead learn to see a field of specific governmental
techniques, we may be surprised to find that some of them can be repurposed , and
put to work in the service of political projects very different from those usually associated with that word. If so, we may
find that the cabinet of governmental arts available to us is a bit less bare
kinds of purposes they might serve.

than first appeared, and that some rather useful little mechanisms may
be nearer to hand than we thought .

impact

turns case
No solvency --- the state is key for civil society to exist in the
first place --- their evidence is theoretical abstraction, and
TURN --- their politics leads to fascism

Villadsen & Dean 12 (Kaspar Associate Professor of Sociology at Copenhagen

Business School, and Mitchell Research Professor of Sociology at Newcastle
University and Professor of Public Governance at Copenhagen Business School,
State-Phobia, Civil Society, and a Certain Vitalism, in Constellations, Volume 19,
Issue 3, p. 401-420, September 2012,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cons.12006/full)
Rather than accepting the opposition of real productivity versus the merely
representative quality of the state, the relationship between these two should be
seen as one of interdependence there is no self-organized multitude
without state power . We contend that Hardt and Negri's conceptualization of power
allows them to eschew any consideration of to what extent the modern territorial
state provides the necessary conditions for civil society , even as they themselves
define it. Thus, through their use of Empire the virtual omnipresent logic of postmodern, post-binary, post-hierarchical, and
post-national forms of organizing they succeed in abandoning completely the state or system
of states as an enduring analytical problem and political issue . For them, all movements are
immediately subversive in themselves and do not require any sort of external assistance or social support to guarantee their

what are the implications of the multitude that

appears as a new form of civil society on steroids? The image of an unorganized
collective subject that momentarily expresses its creative political potential seems
to share characteristic features with extreme variants of eschatological
politics such as fascism , libertarian liberalism, or communism. This is no doubt why Hardt and
effectiveness.67 Second, and more disturbingly,

Negri seek to distinguish the multitude by stressing its capacity to maintain difference, so as not to dissolve it into the mindless
indifference of the mass or the fabricated unity of the people.68 Yet

this remains a purely theoretical

set of distinctions .

Their project fails practically and if it succeeded would cause

discrimination
Villadsen & Dean 12 (Kaspar Associate Professor of Sociology at Copenhagen
Business School, and Mitchell Research Professor of Sociology at Newcastle
University and Professor of Public Governance at Copenhagen Business School,
State-Phobia, Civil Society, and a Certain Vitalism, in Constellations, Volume 19,
Issue 3, p. 401-420, September 2012,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cons.12006/full)
The ontology of potentiality, when mobilized by Hardt and Negri and perhaps too by Rose seems to
privilege a world with less fixed structures, less universals, and accordingly less
state and hence a politics that is mobile, fluid, and nomadic . In both cases, what
we have is a set of transcendent set of truth claims about valued political action
that paradoxically emerge from an anti-foundationalist theory or analysis. These claims are
grounded in the will to resist we find in the multitude's lived experience or as the expression of an indomitable will to live. This
politics has little to do with practical engagement with specific problems using
an analysis of political forces and the resources available to achieve certain ends. As
such, there is a case to be made for examining the affinity of these contemporary radicals with the political romanticism of the
young revolutionaries who viewed the French Revolution simply as an organic expression of the free spirit.107 Conclusion: Risks and

We have indicated several urgent concerns related to the state-phobia of

influential post-Foucauldian positions. The rather one-sided privileging of civil society or its
proxies entails a number of risks. First, arguments for granting more space to the
diversity of civil society, for instance in the shape of ethico-political movements, run the risk of reifying and
solidifying differences of a social nature. Concepts of diversity or difference typically signify a
Potentials

diversity of lifestyles, personal values, community attitudes, ethnicities, etc. that should be respected, left to thrive and release their
innovative potentials. However, differences are not just there to be respected prior to their discursive mobilization; even for
Foucault, they are produced within different strategies and relations of power. This poses a serious problem for non-contextualized

identifying civil society as the site of ethical

practices or even instructive morals easily leads to the identification of some
Other that threatens to contaminate it: The simple family remedy of identifying civil society with ethical
fascinations with the diversity of civil society. Second,

life not only avoids confrontation with the uncivil nature of civil society, but opens the gate to the hunt for the Alien or the Other
deemed responsible for its deformations.108 While neither Rose nor Hard and Negri construct the state as Nietzsche's coldest of
all cold monsters or as Hobbes monstrous Leviathan, the state and the politics around it become a kind of occluded other. In Rose,

the universalizing logics of the social state are displaced by a vital politics that
opens new potentials of somatic individuality and self-creation . In Hardt and Negri, the
nation state could only be viewed as a reactive modern order that is today
irrelevant to the new vital forces of the multitude unleashed by immaterial
production.

turns gender oppression

Absent a focus on capital, feminisms critique is co-opted to
support more repressive living conditions
Fraser 13 (Nancy Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social
Science at the New School, How feminism became capitalism's handmaiden - and
how to reclaim it, in the Guardian, 10-14-13,
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/14/feminism-capitalisthandmaiden-neoliberal)
As a feminist, I've always assumed that by fighting to emancipate women I was building a better world more egalitarian, just and

ideals pioneered by feminists are serving quite different

ends. I worry, specifically, that our critique of sexism is now supplying the justification for
new forms of inequality and exploitation . In a cruel twist of fate, I fear that the movement for
free. But lately I've begun to worry that

women's liberation has become entangled in a dangerous liaison with neoliberal efforts to build a free-market society. That would

ideas that once formed part of a radical worldview are

increasingly expressed in individualist terms . Where feminists once criticised a
society that promoted careerism, they now advise women to "lean in". A movement
that once prioritised social solidarity now celebrates female entrepreneurs . A perspective
that once valorised "care" and interdependence now encourages individual advancement and meritocracy. What lies
behind this shift is a sea-change in the character of capitalism. The state-managed capitalism of the postwar
explain how it came to pass that feminist

era has given way to a new form of capitalism "disorganised", globalising, neoliberal. Second-wave feminism emerged as a critique
of the first but has become the handmaiden of the second. With the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that the movement for
women's liberation pointed simultaneously to two different possible futures. In a first scenario, it prefigured a world in which gender
emancipation went hand in hand with participatory democracy and social solidarity; in a second, it promised a new form of
liberalism, able to grant women as well as men the goods of individual autonomy, increased choice, and meritocratic advancement.
Second-wave feminism was in this sense ambivalent. Compatible with either of two different visions of society, it was susceptible to
two different historical elaborations. As I see it, feminism's ambivalence has been resolved in recent years in favour of the second,
liberal-individualist scenario but not because we were passive victims of neoliberal seductions. On the contrary, we ourselves

our critique of the "family wage":

the ideal of a male breadwinner-female homemaker family that was central to stateorganised capitalism. Feminist criticism of that ideal now serves to legitimate "flexible
capitalism". After all, this form of capitalism relies heavily on women's waged labour , especially
contributed three important ideas to this development. One contribution was

low-waged work in service and manufacturing, performed not only by young single women but also by married women and women

As women have
poured into labour markets around the globe, state-organised capitalism's ideal of
the family wage is being replaced by the newer , more modern norm apparently
sanctioned by feminism of the two-earner family . Never mind that the reality that
underlies the new ideal is depressed wage levels , decreased job security ,
declining living standards , a steep rise in the number of hours worked for wages
per household, exacerbation of the double shift now often a triple or quadruple
shift and a rise in poverty , increasingly concentrated in female-headed
households. Neoliberalism turns a sow's ear into a silk purse by elaborating a
narrative of female empowerment. Invoking the feminist critique of the family wage to justify exploitation, it
with children; not by only racialised women, but by women of virtually all nationalities and ethnicities.

harnesses the dream of women's emancipation to the engine of capital accumulation. Feminism has also made a second

In the era of state-organised capitalism , we rightly criticised

a constricted political vision that was so intently focused on class inequality that it
could not see such "non-economic" injustices as domestic violence, sexual assault
and reproductive oppression. Rejecting "economism" and politicising "the personal", feminists broadened the
political agenda to challenge status hierarchies premised on cultural constructions of gender difference. The result should
have been to expand the struggle for justice to encompass both culture and
economics. But the actual result was a one-sided focus on "gender identity" at
the expense of bread and butter issues . Worse still, the feminist turn to identity
contribution to the neoliberal ethos.

politics dovetailed all too neatly with a rising neoliberalism that wanted nothing
more than to repress all memory of social equality. In effect, we absolutised the critique
of cultural sexism at precisely the moment when circumstances required
redoubled attention to the critique of political economy. Finally, feminism contributed a third
idea to neoliberalism: the critique of welfare-state paternalism. Undeniably progressive in the era of stateorganised capitalism, that critique has since converged with neoliberalism's war on "the nanny
state" and its more recent cynical embrace of NGOs . A telling example is "microcredit", the programme
of small bank loans to poor women in the global south. Cast as an empowering, bottom-up alternative to the top-down, bureaucratic
red tape of state projects, microcredit is touted as the feminist antidote for women's poverty and subjection. What has been missed,
however, is a disturbing coincidence: microcredit has burgeoned just as states have abandoned macro-structural efforts to fight
poverty, efforts that small-scale lending cannot possibly replace. In this case too, then, a feminist idea has been recuperated by

A perspective aimed originally at democratising state power in order to

empower citizens is now used to legitimise marketisation and state
retrenchment . In all these cases , feminism's ambivalence has been resolved in
favour of (neo)liberal individualism . But the other, solidaristic scenario may still be alive. The current crisis
neoliberalism.

affords the chance to pick up its thread once more, reconnecting the dream of women's liberation with the vision of a solidary
society. To that end, feminists need to break off our dangerous liaison with neoliberalism and reclaim our three "contributions" for
our own ends. First, we might break the spurious link between our critique of the family wage and flexible capitalism by militating for
a form of life that de-centres waged work and valorises unwaged activities, including but not only carework. Second, we might
disrupt the passage from our critique of economism to identity politics by integrating the struggle to transform a status order

we might sever the bogus

bond between our critique of bureaucracy and free-market fundamentalism by
reclaiming the mantle of participatory democracy as a means of strengthening the
public powers needed to constrain capital for the sake of justice .
premised on masculinist cultural values with the struggle for economic justice. Finally,

turns lgbtq oppression

Neoliberalism depends on the nuclear family and binary
gender roles to extract profit --- only an economically equitable
society solves
Miles 14 (Laura UCU activist and SWP member, Transgender oppression and
resistance, in International Socialism, 1-9-14, Issue 141, http://www.isj.org.uk/?
id=944)
It is the material circumstances in which we are required to live under the capitalist
system which distort and limit everyones gender role and gender identity by
seeking to constrain us within a binary gender straitjacket in a system dominated by
the ideology of the nuclear family . As a result we are all alienated,25 to a greater or lesser extent, from

each other, from ourselves and from our true humanity. Trans people are highly motivated to resist that gender straitjacket, which
suggests that, while gender identity may not be fixed and unchanging, it is deeply rooted in us; otherwise trans people could
presumably be socialised out of our gender variant behaviour and identity. Everyone, after all, is showered in cot-loads of gender

in a saner and freer world

many different gender expressions and arrangements for living together could be possible
outside the nuclear family structure and the gender binary. The nuclear family is
crucial to capitalism for the continued accumulation of profit , as will be discussed
conformative reinforcement from the moment of birth. Conversely, this also suggests that

later. One of the greatest cruelties of capitalism for all oppressed people is that it possesses the practical and material potential for
our liberation from oppression. Yet by its pursuit of profit maximisation the ruling class is driven to deny the possibility of such
fulfilment to the vast majority of the worlds population. It follows from this approach that

for Marxists the trans

person is as much a social construction as the homosexual, traceable to a particular (but not the same)
historical period, mode of production, and material conditions. One of the problems with
essentialist views is that they ignore such changing material circumstances and tend to regard the ideas of a given period as having
always been just so, ie they are both idealist and ahistorical. On the contrary, Marx argued that ideas in society emerge from the
material circumstances of the production of goods and necessities and from the reproduction of labour power itself. As material

existence of considerable gender variant

desires and behaviour in very many societies , from pre-history to the present, is
well documented.26 Based on this evidence we can claim with some confidence that
transphobia has not always existed . It was the development from hunter-gatherer clan societies to
patrilinear class societies, and more recently the emergence of capitalism and the nuclear
family , which led to the increasing oppression of women, gays and transgender
people.
conditions change, so will the prevailing ideas. The

Issues of economic inequality are LGBT issues

EqualityMatters 13 (Luke Brinker, Debunking The Myth Of LGBT Affluence, in
EqualityMatters Blog, 7-12-13, http://equalitymatters.org/blog/201307120002)
Research shows that the stereotype of the LGBT community as overwhelmingly affluent has no basis in reality, but opponents of
marriage equality continue to push the myth that LGBT people are financially better off than heterosexuals. A July 10 column from
The Witherspoon Institute's Public Discourse blog asserted that the LGBT equality movement is nothing more than the pet project of
a comfortable, well-to-do population: With the distance and detachment born of time's passage, will historians of this sort note how
much the gay marriage movement has been centrally about acquiring government benefits and protecting the wealth of an
influential, prosperous, successful, urban elite during a time of deepening national inequality? [...] Today's historians find no
discrepancy in the LGBT community's use of civil rights language. Future historians and commentators may question this move,
especially since it favored a wealthy and successful interest group at a time when the lower middle class continued to lose ground,
with incomes and social mobility stagnating. They may marvel at this group's success in focusing the nation's media and cultural

the LGBT
community actually faces higher rates of poverty, homelessness, and economic
insecurity than do heterosexual Americans. A study released last month by UCLA's Williams Institute
apparatus on this issue while economic inequality deepened. [emphasis added] The column failed to mention that

highlighted the difficult economic circumstances confronted by many LGBT couples. Salon summarized some of the study's key
findings:

Contrary to dominant media narratives about gay affluence (the "New Normal," "Modern
the data on wealth, sexuality and gender identity portrays a

Family" and others spring to mind),

vastly different reality shaped by a nexus of gender, sexuality, race and geography. The differences between certain
groups are nuanced, but significant to track, advocates say. For example, the poverty rate for women in samesex couples is 7.6 percent compared to 5.7 percent for women in different-sex
couples. Poverty rates vary considerably between white gay men and gay men of color, with African-American men in same-sex
couples six times more likely to live in poverty than their white counterparts. [emphasis added] The report also found that a

40 percent of homeless and at-risk youth seeking services from homeless

agencies are LGBT. Beyond poverty and homeless, LGBT Americans face a host of other
economic challenges. As the Center for American Progress notes, employment discrimination is among the most
persistent problems: LGBT employees continue to face widespread discrimination and
harassment in the workplace. Studies show that anywhere from 15 percent to 43 percent of gay,
lesbian, and bisexual people have experienced some form of discrimination and
harassment in the workplace. Specifically, 8 percent to 17 percent of LGB workers report
being passed over for a job or being fired because of their sexual orientation; 10
percent to 28 percent received a negative performance evaluation or were passed
over for a promotion because they were LGB; and 7 percent to 41 percent of LGB
workers encountered harassment, abuse, or antigay vandalism on the job. Rates of
staggering

discrimination are especially high among people of color who identify as LGBT. Transgender workers in particular experience high

An astonishing 90 percent of transgender people report

some form of harassment or mistreatment on the job or report having taken action
such as hiding who they really are to avoid it . As with LGB employees, rates of employment discrimination
rates of employment discrimination.

are especially pronounced among transgender people of color. Additionally, a recent study by the Department of Housing and Urban
Development pointed to widespread housing discrimination against same-sex couples, with heterosexual couples more likely to
receive favorable responses to email inquiries about rental housing. Although some state laws and local ordinances ban housing
discrimination based on sexual orientation, there is no federal law prohibiting the practice. Groups like the National Organization for

data indicate
that issues of poverty and economic inequality are LGBT issues . Ignoring
this plain fact only reinforces crude stereotypes while advancing a divisive and
counterproductive discourse on matters of inequality .
Marriage (NOM) jump at opportunities to depict marriage equality supporters as wealthy, urban elites, but

turns racism
Ascribing identitarian understandings of race ignores how
neoliberalism is responsible for the ascriptive hierarchy of race
Reed 13 (Adolph Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania,
Marx, Race, and Neoliberalism, Published in the New Labor Forum, Volume 22,
Number 1, 2013, http://nlf.sagepub.com/content/22/1/49.full.pdf)
In this way, Changs perspective can be helpful in sorting out several important limitations in
discussions of race and class characteristic of todays left . It can also help to make
sense of the striking convergence between the relative success of identitarian
understandings of social justice and the steady , intensifying advance of
neolib eralism. It suggests a kinship where many on the left assume an enmity . The
rise of neoliberalism in particular suggests a serious problem with arguments that
represent race and class as dichotomous or alternative frameworks of political critique
and action, as well as those arguments that posit the dichotomy while attempting to
reconcile its elements with formalistic gestures , for example, the common race and
class construction. This sort of historical materialist perspective throws into relief a fundamental limitation of the
whiteness notion that has been fashionable within the academic left for roughly two decades: it reifies whiteness as a
transhistorical social category. In effect, it treats whitenessand therefore raceas existing prior to and above social context.10
Both who qualifies as white and the significance of being white have altered over time. Moreover, whiteness discourse functions as a
kind of moralistic expos rather than a basis for strategic politics; this is clear in that the program signally articulated in its name
has been simply to raise a demand to abolish whiteness, that is, to call on whites to renounce their racial privilege. In fact, its
fixation on demonstrating the depth of whites embrace of what was known to an earlier generations version of this argument as
white skin privilege and the inclination to slide into teleological accounts in which groups or individuals approach or pursue
whiteness erases the real historical dynamics and contradictions of American racial history. The whiteness discourse overlaps other

arguments that presume racism to be a sui generis form of injustice. Despite

seeming provocative, these arguments do not go beyond the premises of the racial
liberalism from which they commonly purport to dissent. They differ only in
rhetorical flourish , not content . Formulations that invoke metaphors of disease or
original sin reify racism by disconnecting it from the discrete historical
circumstances and social structures in which it is embedded, and treating
it as an autonomous force . Disconnection from political economy is also a crucial
feature of postwar liberalisms construction of racial inequality as prejudice or
intolerance. Racism becomes an independent variable in a moralistic argument that
is idealist intellectually and ultimately defeatist politically . This tendency to see racism as sui
generis also generates a resistance to precision in analysis. It is fueled by a tendency to inflate the language of racism to the edge
of its reasonable conceptual limits, if not beyond. Ideological commitment to shoehorning into the rubric of racism all manner of
inequalities that may appear statistically as racial disparities has yielded two related interpretive pathologies. One is a constantly
expanding panoply of neologismsinstitutional racism, systemic racism, structural racism, color-blind racism, post-racial
racism, etc.intended to graft more complex social dynamics onto a simplistic and frequently psychologically inflected racism/antiracism political ontology. Indeed, these efforts bring to mind [Thomas S.] Kuhns account of attempts to accommodate mounting
anomalies to salvage an interpretive paradigm in danger of crumbling under a crisis of authority.11 A second essentialist sleight-ofhand advances claims for the primacy of race/racism as an explanation of inequalities in the present by invoking analogies to
regimes of explicitly racial subordination in the past. In these arguments, analogy stands in for evidence and explanation of the
contemporary centrality of racism. Michelle Alexanders widely read and cited book, The New Jim Crow, is only the most prominent
expression of this tendency; even she has to acknowledge that the analogy fails because the historical circumstances are so
radically different.12 Rigorous pursuit of equality of opportunity exclusively within the terms of capitalist class relations has been

the view of racial

inequality as a sui generis injustice and dichotomous formulations of the relation of
race and class as systems of hierarchy in the United States are not only miscast but also
fundamentally counterproductive. It is particularly important at this moment to
recognize that the familiar taxonomy of racial difference is but one historically
specific instance of a genus of ideologies of ascriptive hierarchy that stabilize
capitalist social reproduction. I have argued previously that entirely new race-like
fully legitimized under the rubric of diversity. From the historical materialist standpoint,

taxonomies could come to displace the familiar ones . For instance, the
underclass could become even more race-like as a distinctive, essentialized
population, by our current folk norms, multiracial in composition, albeit most likely including in perceptibly greater frequencies
people who would be classified as black and Latino racially, though as small enough pluralities to preclude assimilating the group
ideologically as a simple proxy for nonwhite inferiors.13 This possibility looms larger now. Struggles for racial and gender equality
have largely divested race and gender of their common sense verisimilitude as bases for essential difference. Moreover,

versions of racial and gender equality are now also incorporated into the normative
and programmatic structure of left neoliberalism. Rigorous pursuit of equality of
opportunity exclusively within the terms of given patterns of capitalist class
relationswhich is after all the ideal of racial liberalismhas been fully legitimized
within the rubric of diversity. That ideal is realized through gaining rough parity in distribution of social goods and
bads among designated population categories. As Walter Benn Michaels has argued powerfully, according to that ideal, the society
would be just if 1 percent of the population controlled 90 percent of the resources, provided that blacks and other nonwhites,
women, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people were represented among the 1 percent in roughly similar

Given the triumph of racial liberalism, it is entirely

possible that new discourses of ascriptive difference might take shape that fit the
folk common sense of our time and its cultural norms and sensibilities . Indeed, the
explosive resurgence in recent years of academically legitimated determinist
discourses all of which simply rehearse the standard idealist tropes and circular
garbage in/garbage out faux scientific narrativesreinforce that concern . The undergirding
proportion as their incidence in the general population.14

premises of intellectual programs like evolutionary psychology, behavioral economics, genes and politics, and neurocriminology are
strikingly like straight-line extrapolations from Victorian race sciencealthough for the most part, though not entirely, scholars
operating in those areas are scrupulous, or at least fastidious, in not implicating the familiar racial taxonomies in their deterministic
sophistries. Some scholars imagine that epigeneticsa view that focuses on the interplay of genes and environment in producing

Recent
research purporting to find epigenetic explanations for socioeconomic inequality
already foreshadows a possible framework for determinist underclass narratives
that avoid the taints associated with biological justifications of inequality and
references to currently recognized racial categories.15 Ironically, some enthusiasts for this epigenetic
organisms and genotypesavoids determinism by providing causal explanations that are not purely biological.

patter expressly liken it to Lamarckian evolutionary theory, which stressed the heritability of characteristics acquired after birth, as
though this were insulation against determinism. As historian of anthropology George Stocking, Jr., and others have shown,
Lamarckian race theory was no less determinist than its Darwinian alternative, which posited strictly biological determinism. As

Lamarckians dependence on a vague sociobiological indeterminism

made it all the more difficult to challenge their circular race theories.16 In any event, narrow
approaches that reduce ascriptive ideology to reified notions of race/racism are not
at all up to the challenge posed by this new determinist turn.
Stocking notes,

Anti-discrimination fails to address racism without a focus on

racial reparations
Bruenig 14 (Matt, Glaring limits of the Civil Rights Act: We need to redistribute
wealth, in Salon, 4-14-14,
http://www.salon.com/2014/04/14/glaring_limits_of_the_civil_rights_act_we_need_to_
redistribute_wealth/)
Although the Civil Rights Act, the landmark legislation which just reached its 50th anniversary, made great strides in desegregating

economic discrimination is still widespread , and anti-discrimination

legislation alone can never rectify the economic damage inflicted upon blacks by
slavery and our Jim Crow apartheid regime. The Civil Rights Act was a mild reform, all things considered, but
the economy,

one conservatives fought with vigor and one many conservatives are still bitter about to this day. When the Civil Rights Act passed
in 1964, the primary purpose was to root out discrimination in public accommodations (like hotels and movie theaters) and in
employment. The former purposeeliminating public accommodations discriminationhas received renewed attention from
conservatives lately who find it to be an infringement on the rights of racist business owners to be racist. GOP favorite Rand Paul
expressed this view in 2010 and Catos Ilya Shapiro expressed it just a few months ago on MSNBC. These arent new concerns, of
course. One white Nashville resident interviewed at the time of passage said the same thing about the Civil Rights Act: I also think
that it is in violation to my civil rights if someone can say you must serve me. Nonetheless, it is telling that the embarrassment
attached to claiming it is the racists who are the real victims in all of this has sufficiently subsided within the mainstream
conservative movement that even GOP leaders are willing to reinvigorate the claim. I suppose thats par for the course for a
movement thats also pushed the evisceration of the Voting Rights Act and pursued an intentional campaign of voter suppression
that disproportionately targets blacks and other people of color. Despite the fevered conservative protests over the extensive reach
of the the Civil Rights Act, it has not totally succeeded in its aims. Lunch counters and hotels no longer outright ban blacks from

service, a relatively easy thing to root out. But academic studies show that employment decisions continue to be made upon racebased lines. For instance, in one 2003 study, a team of researchers sent nearly 5000 resumes to over 1,300 employment ads posted
in newspapers in Chicago and Boston. The resumes were totally fake and otherwise identical except that some had black-sounding
names on them while others had white-sounding names on them. The researchers found that the applications with white-sounding
names on them received call backs 50 percent more often than the applications with black-sounding names on them. As things
usually go with racist discrimination, it can be hard to pin down a particular given instance as motivated by racism, but the
aggregate numbers do not lie. Clearly, more progress needs to be made on the anti-discrimination front, but anti-discrimination,
even if it were entirely successful, would still never be enough to rectify the economic harms inflicted by centuries of slavery and
racial apartheid. One of the consequences of the racial caste system that characterized American society prior to 1960 is that

black families were prevented from accumulating economic wealth. Because wealth is the
kind of thing that is passed down generations and the kind of thing that grows and grows, this initial racist starting
point has opened up a yawning racial wealth gap that simply cannot be closed
without intentional policy aimed at doing so . In 2010, the median black family held
around $16,000 in wealth, while the median white family held around $130,000. And
this is not just a function of the fact that whites have higher incomes than blacks. Even when you control for
incomecomparing white and black families in the same income rangewhite
families are three times wealthier than black families . The racial wealth disparities hold up and down
the income ladder. As Thomas Pikettys groundbreaking book Capital in the 21st Century has detailed: wealth has a
tendency in a capitalist economy to concentrate into the hands of a few and travel
down generations through gifts and inheritances. Even if racism were wiped out
tomorrow and equal treatment became the norm, it would never cease being the
case that the average white person has more wealth than the average black
person . We could equalize everything else in society, and racial wealth inequality
plus all of the political power disparities that accompany such a thingwould continue into
perpetuity. Thus, those actually serious about righting the wrongs of enslavement and
Jim Crow apartheid must support more drastic leveling efforts . Beefed up antidiscrimination, which is both necessary and good, will not be enough. Ideally, we could
work towards reparations in the form of redistributing wealth along racial lines . With
that an unlikely possibility though, we can at least think about ways to redistribute wealth more generally from those with wealth to
those without it, something that would have a similar, albeit more attenuated, effect as reparations given who the wealthy and nonwealthy happen to be.

2nc neoliberalism
This broader state-phobia sanctions the permeation of
neoliberalism into the social
Noys 10 (Benjamin Professor of Critical Theory at the University of Chichester,
The Grammar of Neoliberalism, at Accelerationism Workshop at Goldsmiths
University, 9-14-10,
https://www.academia.edu/327085/The_Grammar_of_Neoliberalism)
It was the extinction of the Nazi state that made post-war Germany the ideal site to re-found the state in terms of the economic, in

neo-liberalism
solidifies a state-phobia, by arguing that the tendency of any intervention to a
state-controlled economy, planning, and economic interventionism will lead to Nazism or
totalitarianism . In a provocative series of formulations Foucault argues that this state phobia
permeates modern thought, aligning the critique of the spectacle (Debord) and one-dimensionality (Marcuse) with
Werner Sombarts proto-Nazi critiques of capitalism (113-4). Here we might say we can see the emergence of the
grammar argument, in the sense of a common phobia of the state that leaves us
vulnerable to historical re-inscription under the terms of neo-liberalism , or, as Foucault puts
it: All those who share in the great state phobia should know that they are following
the direction of the wind and that in fact , for years and years, an effective reduction of the
state has been on the way, a reduction of both the growth of state control and of a
statifying and statified governmentality. (191-2) What is the precise nature, then, of neo-liberalism? Of
course, the obvious objection to the anti-state vision of neo-liberalism is that neoliberalism itself is a continual form of state intervention , usually summarised in the phrase socialism
for the rich, capitalism for the poor. Foucault notes that neo-liberalism concedes this: neo-liberal government
intervention is no less dense, frequent, active, and continuous than in any other
system. (145) The difference, however, is the point of application . It intervenes on
society so that competitive mechanisms can play a regulatory role at every
moment and every point in society and by intervening in this way its objective will
become possible, that is to say, a general regulation of society by the market . (145)
Therefore, we miss the point if we simply leave a critique of neo-liberalism at the point
of saying neo-liberalism is as statist as other governmental forms. Instead, the necessity if to
analyse how neo-liberalism creates a new form of governmentality in which the state
performs a different function: permeating society to subject it to the economic. The
state intervention of neo-liberalism is Kantian; it is designed to act on the conditions of
the social to create the possibility of competition and enterprise . Neo-liberalism is opposed to
which legitimation was achieved through economic growth rather than in political terms. At the same time

the spectre of the passive consumer just as much as various forms of leftism and anarchism, instead it what to bring forth the
person of enterprise and production. At the same time, and Foucault traces the roots of German neo-liberalism in the followers of

this competition does not emerge naturally but only as an essence that has
to be constructed and formalised: neo-liberalism is Husserlian. Unlike in classical liberalism, we cannot free
Husserl,

market from the state and expect competition to emerge naturally. Instead, the state constantly intervenes to construct
competition at all levels, so that

action (121).

the market economy is the general index for all governmental

framework

2nc at: framework

Neoliberal state phobia is affective --- embedded in
communicative exchanges
Healy 13 (Stephen Senior Lecturer at School of Humanities and Languages at the
University of New South Wales, Affective Dissent, in Cosmopolitan Civil Societies:
An Interdisciplinary Journal, Volume 5, Number 2, 2013, p. 1-3,
https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/mcs/article/view/3186)
Much has been written about the affective dimensions of activism and dissent
(Hynes, Sharpe & Fagan 2007; Hynes, Sharpe & Greg2008; Hynes & Sharpe, 2010), of labour (Hardt & Negri, 2000; 2004) and even
of politics more broadly (Protevi 2009) although affective bio-politics per se has received only limited attention (but see: Anderson

counter the
affective regulation sustaining neoliberalism, both within and beyond activism. After a brief
2012). This account endeavours to address this deficit in order to suggest strategies that might be harnessed to

introduction to the analytic vocabulary employed in this article the rest of this section presents a brief review of recent work
addressing the intersection of affect and politics. The subsequent section further delineates the specific perspective on affective
bio-politics adopted here. This is followed by a discussion of recent accounts of affective politics and activism that informs an
ensuing discussion of further, more focused, affective contestationary strategies, which prefaces a short concluding section.

Affect, as understood here, is distinguished from the, typically, subjectively conceived notions of
emotion and feeling, with which it is associated, by its dependence on a sense of push in the
world (Thrift 2004, p. 64). This might be the pull and push of place (Duff 2010, p. 893), or of bodies or of other entities in those
places. Affect is, thus, relationally constituted and does not reside in an object or a body,
but surfaces from somewhere in-between (Adey 2008, p. 439), emerging as a relation between bodies,
objects, and technologies (Bissell 2010, p. 272). Affects, however, affect in the sense of pushing such
relationships in some directions rather than others and while they may, as Brennan (2004) argues, have
a biological basis affects are, and have been, widely employed to promote specific outcomes. Architecture provides an exemplary
example (e.g. Allen 2006; Adey 2008; Kraftl & Adey 2008) that Kraftl and Adey argue can both engender.. .new fields of virtual
potential.. .[and].. .simultaneously delimit, design(ate), and demarcate strict performative and often moral possibilities (2008, p.
226). While Thrifts microbiopolitics of the subliminal (2004, p. 68) is suggestive of mechanisms that might help explain how the
kinds of possibilities depicted by Kraftl & Adey (2008) are accomplished, broader ranging discussions of the dynamics of affective

emphasises macro-scale
dimensions to affective bio-politics , notably state-phobia a term that Foucault (2008, p. 76)

bio-politics are hard to come by. Anderson (2012) addresses this lacuna in an analysis that

coins for anti- statism while, echoing Thrift (2004), remaining optimistic regarding the political and ethical promise of work on the

problematized this
promise by arguing that affective life is imbricated in the working out of the
neoliberal problem of how to organise life according to the market (Anderson 2012, p. 40)
more thoroughly and intimately than Andersons emphasis upon macroscale affective phenomena suggests. This more
pervasive and intimate perspective on affective bio-politics is further pursued here
in order to explore and illuminate its contestationary potential . For while a more ubiquitous
perspective on affective bio-politics implies further challenges for contestationary politics, the delineation of these
dimensions to neoliberal government also has the potential to illuminate further
opportunities, and means, to counter neoliberalism. As a first step to identifying these opportunities, the rest of
dynamics of affective life (Anderson 2012, p. 29). The author (Healy 2012) has, however,

this opening section briefly surveys recent work on the intersection of affect and politics.

Uniquely true in the context of state-phobia --- they develop

the vocabulary that patterns our engagement with the world

Villadsen & Dean 12 (Kaspar Associate Professor of Sociology at Copenhagen

Business School, and Mitchell Research Professor of Sociology at Newcastle
University and Professor of Public Governance at Copenhagen Business School,
State-Phobia, Civil Society, and a Certain Vitalism, in Constellations, Volume 19,
Issue 3, p. 401-420, September 2012,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cons.12006/full)

Civil society and the state are key components of the

vocabulary by which politics has been discussed for several centuries in certain
societies. We propose that statements concerning such terms, in addition to serving analytical purposes,
constitute forms of action in definite political contexts. In this respect, Foucault's statements on the
State and Civil Society Foucault in Context

state cannot be properly understood without understanding their context, and, in order to do that, it is necessary that we
understand to and against whom or what they are addressed. Foucault's own work makes this methodological point in several
different ways. From the analytical perspective of his archaeology,10 statements should be understood not in terms of what they
signify, but in terms of what they do. They hence constitute a form of action that can only be understood within a field of dispersion
of statements, a discursive formation. The term discursive

practices captures this feature of

statements as a kind of action . From the perspective of his genealogies of power-knowledge, Foucault

employs a series of terms that emphasizes the intelligibility of statements and forms of knowledge as actions rather than as mere
semantic de-coding: strategy, programs of conduct, regimes of truth, and so forth.11 In this vein, Foucault speaks of his own work as

by questioning what is necessary and what is

contingent in the identities by which we have come to know ourselves and in the
relations of power in which we find ourselves , opens up possibilities of thinking and
acting differently.12 Quentin Skinner, starting in his classic paper, Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,
has made a similar point in a more straightforward way.13 For him, political thought cannot be understood
purely through the meaning of terms; it requires us to consider, following John Austin s
theory of the speech act, the form of action they perform . To understand what is meant by an utterance, it is
a critical ontology of ourselves and our present that,

necessary to understand the field of utterances of which it is a part, what Skinner regards as its context.14 While there are crucial
differences between Foucault's critical comments on the history of ideas, with its emphasis on authorial intention, and Skinner's

speech acts should be

understood as illocutionary, as forms of performance that seek and have definite
consequences. According to Skinner, the grasp of force as well as meaning is essential to the understanding of texts.16
Following this basic insight, we should regard attempts to overcome the state/civil society
binary as statements made in a particular context or in a field of dispersion of
statements.
attempt to recover intention by locating utterances in context,15 they both agree that

perm

2nc at: perm

Perm fails

Williams & Srnicek 13 (Alex Ph.D. student at the University of East London, and
Nick Ph.D. candidate in International Relations at the London School of Economics,
#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics, 5-14-13,
http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-anaccelerationist-politics/)
1. We believe the most important division in todays left is between those that hold to
a folk politics of localism , direct action, and relentless horizontalism, and those that
outline what must become called an accelerationist politics at ease with a
modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology. The former remains
content with establishing small and temporary spaces of non-capitalist social
relations, eschewing the real problems entailed in facing foes which are
intrinsically non-local, abstract, and rooted deep in our everyday infrastructure. The
failure of such politics has been built-in from the very beginning. By contrast, an
accelerationist politics seeks to preserve the gains of late capitalism while going further than its value system, governance
structures, and mass pathologies will allow.

Perm is ineffective
Williams & Srnicek 13 (Alex Ph.D. student at the University of East London, and
Nick Ph.D. candidate in International Relations at the London School of Economics,
#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics, 5-14-13,
http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-anaccelerationist-politics/)
12. We do not believe that direct action is sufficient to achieve any of this . The habitual
tactics of marching, holding signs, and establishing temporary autonomous zones
risk becoming comforting substitutes for effective success. At least we have
done something is the rallying cry of those who privilege self-esteem rather than
effective action. The only criterion of a good tactic is whether it enables significant success or not. We must be
done with fetishising particular modes of action . Politics must be treated as a set of dynamic systems,
riven with conflict, adaptations and counter-adaptations, and strategic arms races. This means that each individual type of political
action becomes blunted and ineffective over time as the other sides adapt. No given mode of political action is historically

there is an increasing need to discard familiar tactics as the

forces and entities they are marshalled against learn to defend and counter- attack
them effectively. It is in part the contemporary lefts inability to do so which lies
close to the heart of the contemporary malaise . 13. The overwhelming privileging of democracy-asprocess needs to be left behind. The fetishisation of openness, horizontality, and inclusion of
much of todays radical left set the stage for ineffectiveness. Secrecy, verticality, and exclusion
inviolable. Indeed, over time,

all have their place as well in effective political action (though not, of course, an exclusive one).

links

state fear
This state-phobia is transmitted affectively and produces an
atmosphere hostile to the state
Anderson 12 (Ben Reader in the Department of Geography at Durham University,
Affect and biopower: towards a politics of life, Transactions of the Institute of
British Geographers, Volume 37, Issue 1, April 2012,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00441.x/pdf)
Lets backtrack a little so we can open up the third relation between affect and biopower and understand how specific
affective atmospheres become part of neoliberalism understood as a
mobile logic of governing that migrates and is selectively taken up in diverse political contexts (Ong
2007, 3). In the 19781979 lectures, Foucault (2008) discusses the differences between European ordoliberalism and the
neoliberalism of Freedman and the Chicago School (albeit while recognising the imbrications of the two through individuals such as
Hayek). Each offers a different solution to the shared problem of how to enable the market. Briefly, ordoliberalism separates the

neoliberalism
enables the market through an absolute generalisa- tion of a specific form
of the market to domains that previously escaped its logic . On this understanding neoliberalism is neither a descriptive term nor an explanatory
concept, but rather the always provisional, always locally contested,
working out of a problem: how the overall exercise of political power can
be modelled on the principles of a mar- ket economy (Foucault 2008, 131). Common to
both types of liberalism is an ethos closely tied to a concern with the
[t]he irrationality peculiar to excessive government (2008, 323). Foucault terms
this collective affect state-phobia and describes it variously in terms of a
fear or anxiety regarding the state (2008, 77). For Foucault, state-phobia is only a secondary
market from society and intervenes on the latter to enable the former through a Vitalpolitik, while

sign or manifestation of a crisis of liberal governmentality (2008, 76). However, I think we can understand it slightly differently: as

an affective condition through which apparatuses emerge ,

intensify or otherwise change. On this understanding, transformations in ways of making live, and letting
one example of

die, and the emergence of new object-targets, are bound up with the organisation of affective life.

Fear of the state ignores how neoliberalism has rendered the

left unable to effect grassroots change

Villadsen & Dean 12 (Kaspar Associate Professor of Sociology at Copenhagen

Business School, and Mitchell Research Professor of Sociology at Newcastle
University and Professor of Public Governance at Copenhagen Business School,
State-Phobia, Civil Society, and a Certain Vitalism, in Constellations, Volume 19,
Issue 3, p. 401-420, September 2012,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cons.12006/full)
Governmentality, in short, is an analysis of the state and not something that lies
beyond it. It shows the conditions of experience of the state as that which confronts an external domain civil society to
which it must grant a measure of free action in order for government to function. It grows out of a diagnosis of the
present as one in which the state has come to be regarded as essentially despotic ,
the source of evil in the world, and as a repressive force that deforms our
subjectivity, from the inside as much as the outside, limiting our potentiality in the world. For Foucault,
this is a view shared not only by the ultra-left that seeks a violent overthrow of the
state, but also by variants of neoliberalism in the twentieth century. This view is rooted in the
anti-state eschatology of the nineteenth century, which has the notion of civil society at its core. In Foucault's context, to reject a
theory of the state was to reject a Marxist theory of the state and to take note of anti-institutional movements in both liberal

Today, any rejection of analyses conducted in

statist terms takes place in a changed context: in the context of the repeated mantra of governance
democracies and those opposed to state socialism.

theorists who speak of a shift from government to governance and of a hollowing out the state; against the backdrop of
conceptions of globalization that claim that global flows of trade, finance, information, and culture have undone the container of
the national state39; and in the presence of political analyses that claim that struggles directed toward the state have been
displaced by grassroots movements conducting sub-, micro-, and transversal politics underneath, across, and above the territorial
state. In short, to reject a theory of the state in favor of an analysis of local struggles in the 1970s marked a break with a prevailing

In our own time, to

dissolve the concept of the state has the opposite effect: it merely reinforces what
has become a kind of anti-political orthodoxy that has rendered the left a
meaningless term . This dissolution easily makes an accession to political agendas
fatally shaped by the militant intellectual and political thought collective of which Foucault was an early analyst to
neoliberalism.40
left intellectual problematic and an attempt to open up the discussion of government and state.

The binary between civil society and the state fails to account
for contemporary transformations in governance
Villadsen & Dean 12 (Kaspar Associate Professor of Sociology at Copenhagen
Business School, and Mitchell Research Professor of Sociology at Newcastle
University and Professor of Public Governance at Copenhagen Business School,
State-Phobia, Civil Society, and a Certain Vitalism, in Constellations, Volume 19,
Issue 3, p. 401-420, September 2012,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cons.12006/full)
Introduction We begin by making two observations on our present. First, many governments in contemporary
liberal and welfare states have, during the last 30 years, sought to limit the role of the state
in the delivery of what were formerly considered public services . They are concerned to
mobilize agents, movements, energies, and cultures outside of the state, and yet they are afraid that their programmatic attempts

This is evident in the cautious enchantment with local

communities or civil society across social, cultural, and health policies of advanced welfare
states.1 Whether civil society figures as the partner,zone, or source of government, these programs rest on
a hope in civil society a hope that it holds the solutions , innovative forces, or
instructive ethics essential for efficient and effective delivery of services that were
once the sole province of the welfare state . This movement and rationality gives Michel Foucault's
genealogy of what he called state-phobia a renewed pertinence. Second, over the same period, an anti-state attitude
spread throughout influential strands of social science, which made the state a nogo domain both analytically and normatively. This attitude was discernable among theorists of
to do so may stifle these non-state agents.

globalization and governance,2 as well as among those who celebrated the bottom up politics of plurality,3 life-politics,4 or the rise

strands of thought held that national and

welfare states were being displaced by a variety of non-governmental , transnational,
or international associations and by cultural movements as the central locus of
social and political steering and transformation . They claimed the state had been
hollowed out and that there is now governance without government. 5 For them, the
of communities, social movements, and social networks. These

state was losing its internal supremacy and external independence its legal and political sovereignty as well as its capacity for

What was embraced instead

was a newfound plenitude beyond the state and the world of nation-states , a realm of
creativity and value-based behavior and discussion, which constitutes civil society on a national ,
transnational, or even global scale.6 In this double process, civil society, once a key concept of
critical social theory, has been rendered instrumental in a way that poses a
serious challenge for any analytics that revolve around civil society and the
state . Here, we are not concerned with these academic diagnoses and policy approaches, but with those prominent intellectual
the effective management of what was previously considered the national economy.

positions that have sought to call into question and to think beyond the very terrain of state and civil society. In particular, inheritors
of Michel Foucault have claimed to have overcome the analytical dead-end of the traditional state/civil society binary. With reference
to his governmentality lectures,7 certain of his followers famously concluded: The

analytical language
structured by the philosophical opposition of state and civil society is unable to
comprehend contemporary transformations in modes of exercise of political

power.8 This is at the nub of our problem here. What is at stake in seeking to overcome the state/civil society binary, or indeed,
in viewing it as a binary in the first place? Can we escape from the positive valorization of civil society found in more mainstream

do attempts to overcome the state/civil society binary effect a dissolution

or deconstruction of the state only at the cost of reinventing a sphere external to
the state that is provided an analytical and normative privilege ? And how is it that
contemporary critical thought, which could be expected to hold a favorable stance on the achievements of the
social state, end up with a de facto anti-state attitude? We take as our examples two influential approaches
approaches? Or

that make common reference to the political thought of Michel Foucault: the neo-Marxist writings of Hardt and Negri, and their
associates, on Empire and multitude; and the self-described more modest analytics of Nikolas Rose and his colleagues. Our concern
here is not to show that contemporary versions of the withering away of the state are empirically mistaken, although we do hold

we are
concerned with the ways each of these radical positions proposes to dissolve or
abandon the theoretical framework of the state and to overcome the state/civil
society opposition. In the first section, we refine the problem with reference to Foucault's governmentality lectures and
that theoretical anti-statism is, to say the least, overdone and that it finds little warrant in Foucault. Rather,

the analytical and substantive implications that can be drawn from his approach. We are especially concerned to emphasize what
Quentin Skinner calls the context9 of Foucault's statements and the particular role the notion of state-phobia plays in them. In
the sections that follow, we outline the two approaches mentioned above in order to understand the intellectual and political
consequences of these contemporary attempts to dissolve the state/civil society binary and to stage something of an unexpected

they not only fail to evacuate the state/civil society

problematic, but also share surprising and so far little noticed similarities , the key to
which lies in the vitalism that undergirds their views on politics
rapprochement between them. We argue that

vitalism & biopolitics

The AFFs focus on vitalism and biopolitics attempts to achieve
a mobility beyond the state
Villadsen & Dean 12 (Kaspar Associate Professor of Sociology at Copenhagen
Business School, and Mitchell Research Professor of Sociology at Newcastle
University and Professor of Public Governance at Copenhagen Business School,
State-Phobia, Civil Society, and a Certain Vitalism, in Constellations, Volume 19,
Issue 3, p. 401-420, September 2012,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cons.12006/full)
Biopolitics becomes central albeit via different paths to both projects, underneath which we
find a common desire to discover a politics based on life and the living, on the
energetic, the creative, the vital, and the nomadic. In Hardt and Negri, this vitalism takes the
form of the lived experience of the global multitude that incarnates the will to be
against98; Rose, quoting Deleuze, asserts that we should oppose all that which
stands in the way of life being its own telos and that we should instead be in favor of life, of the
obstinate, stubborn, indomitable will to live.99 Both privilege a politics that indicates lines of flight
that are always in danger of becoming recuperated, organized, systematized, and programmed by systems of power and
domination. We can hardly miss the similarities to the expressive and diverse singularity of the multitude when Rose speaks of those
moments of minoring, of breaking away, creating something new within the most traditional political forms, as when new practices
of mobilization and protest are invented within the most organized forms of strikes, where new and mobile subjectivities form,
swarm, and dissipate in mass mobilizations, marches, and demonstrations.100 Where Hardt and Negri incarnate the vital in the
multitude, Rose discovers it in a certain nomadic attitude to forms of struggle and contestation, or even the vital self-creative forces
found in them. In spite of his complex reading of Canguilhem's vitalism,101 however, we might ask whether and to what extent Rose

Both approaches
claim to dissolve the traditional state/civil society binary to indicate a new kind of
politics beyond the state. However, they both oddly reinvent the traditional privilege
given to the inventiveness, creativity, and mobility found not in the rigidities of the state and
formal political organizations, but in a domain of energy, expression, and vitality that lies
beyond them, opposes them, or occasionally breaks forth inside them. While we might characterize the multitude as a kind
joins with Hardt and Negri in invoking the Deleuzian creative plenitude of a singular vitality.102

of hyper civil society, Rose's non-conventional communities and moments of minoring103 that can be found even in the

forms more closely resemble the quasi-natural

creativity and vitality of a liberal civil society
interstices of conventional political action and

AFF

at: demands on the state

Demands on the state is a hysterical politics that affirms the
hegemonic order
Lundberg 12 (Chris Professor of Rhetoric at UNC Chapel Hill, On Being Bound to
Equivalential Chains, in Cultural Studies, Volume 26, Issue 2-3,
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09502386.2011.647641#.VbpsdPlViko)
Transposed to the realm of political demands, this framing of demand reverses the
classically liberal presupposition regarding demand and agency . In the classical iteration and
contemporary critical theories that inherit its spirit, there is a presupposition that a demand is a way of
exerting agency, and that the more firmly that the demand is lodged , the greater the
production of an agential effect. The Lacanian framing of the demand sees the relationship as
exactly the opposite : the more firmly one lodges a demand the more desperately
one clings to the legitimate ability of an institution to fulfil it. Thus, demands ought to
reach a kind of breaking point where the inability of an institution or order to proffer
a response should produce a re-evaluation of the economy of demand and
desire. In analytic terms, this is the moment of subtraction, where the manifest content of the demand is stripped away and the
desire that underwrites it is laid bare. The result of this subtraction is that the subject is in a
position to relate to its desire, not as a set of deferrals, avoidances or transposition ,
but rather as an owned political disposition . As Lacan frames it, this is a dialectical process, where at each
moment the subject is either learning to reassert the centrality of its demands, or where it is coming to terms with the impotence of
the other as a satisfier of demands: But it is in the dialectic of the demand for love and the test of desire that development is
ordered . Clinical experience has shown us that this test of the desire of the Other is decisive not in the sense that the subject
learns by it whether or not he has a real phallus, but in the sense that he learns that the mother does not have it. (Lacan 1982b, p.
311) Thus, desire both has general status and a specific status for each subject. In other words, it is not just the mirror that produces
the subject and its investments, but the desire and sets of proxy objects that cover over this original gap. As Easthope puts it: Lacan
is sure that everyone's desire is somehow different and their own lack is nevertheless my lack. How can this be if each of us is just
lost in language passing through demand into desire, something from the real, from the individual's being before language, is
retained as a trace enough to determine that I desire here and there, not anywhere and everywhere. Lacan terms this objet petit a
petit a is different for everyone; and it can never be in substitutes for it in which I try to refind it. (Easthope 2000, pp. 9495)

The point of this disposition is to bring the subject to a point where they might
recogniz e and name their own desire, and as a result to become a political subject in
the sense of being able to truly argue for something without being dependent on
the other as a support for or organizing principle for political identity. This naming is not
about discovering a latently held but hidden interiority, rather it is about naming a practice of political
subjectivization that is not solely oriented towards or determined by the locus of the
demand, determined by the contingent sets of coping strategies that orient a subject towards others and a political order. As
Lacan argues, this is the point where a subject becomes a kind of new presence, or in the register of this essay, a new political
possibility: That the subject should come to recognize and to name his desire; that is the efficacious action of analysis. But it isn't a
question of recognizing something which would be entirely given . In naming it, the subject creates, brings forth, a new presence
in the world (Lacan 1988, pp. 228229). Alternatively, subjects can stay fixated on the demand, but in doing so they forfeit the
possibility of desire, or as Fink argues: later, however, Lacan comes to see that an analysis that does not go far enough in
constituting the subject as desire leaves him or her stranded at the level of demand unable to truly desire (Fink 1996, p. 90).

A politics defined by and exhausted in demands is

definitionally a hysterical politics . The hysteric is defined by incessant demands
on the other at the expense of ever articulating a desire which is theirs . In the Seminar on
What does this have to do with hysteria?

the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, for example, Lacan argues that the hysteric's demand that the Other produce an object is the support
of an aversion towards one's desire: the behavior of the hysteric, for example, has as its aim to recreate a state centred on the
object, in so far as this object, das Ding, is, as Freud wrote somewhere, the support of an aversion (Lacan 1997, p. 53). This

the hysteric
asserts their agency, even authority over the Other. Yet, what appears as unfettered
agency from the perspective of a discourse of authority is also simultaneously a
surrender of desire by enjoying the act of figuring the other as the one with the
exclusive capability to satisfy the demand . Thus the logic of as hysterics you demand a new
master: you will get it! At the register of manifest content, demands are claims for action and seemingly
economy of aversion explains the ambivalent relationship between hysterics and their demands. On one hand,

powerful, but at the level of the rhetorical form of the demand or in the register of
enjoyment, demand is a kind of surrender. As a relation of address hysterical demand is more
a demand for recognition and love from an ostensibly repressive order than a claim
for change. The limitation of the students call on Lacan does not lie in the end they sought, but in the fact that the
hysterical address never quite breaks free from its framing of the master . Here the
fundamental problem of democracy is not in articulating resistance over and against
hegemony, but rather the practices of enjoyment that sustain an addiction to
mastery and a deferral of desire . The difficulty in thinking hysteria is that it is both a politically
effective subject position in some ways , but that it is politically constraining from the
perspective of organized political dissent . If not a unidirectional practice of resistance, hysteria is at
least a politics of interruption: imagine a world where the state was the perfect and complete embodiment of a hegemonic order,
without interruption or remainder, and the discursive system was hermetically closed. Politics would be an impossibility, with no site
for contest or reappropriation and everything simply the working out of a structure. Hysteria is a site of interruption, in that hysteria
represents a challenge to our hypothetical system, refusing straightforward incorporation by its symbolic logic. But, stepping outside

hysteria is net politically constraining because the form of the

demand, as a way of organizing the field of political enjoyment requires that the
system continue to act in certain ways to sustain its logic . Thus, though on the surface
it is an act of symbolic dissent, hysteria represents an affective affirmation of a
hegemonic order , and therefore a particularly fraught form of political
subjectivization.
this hypothetical non-polity,