1NC

Politics of Disaster
Giroux and Evans
Currently page 47
General
 Short Policy
They link on two levels the first is their securitization.
Their striving to create a more secure state disregards all
those that the state destroys. The second link is rhetoric
they use the debate space as an entertainment ground for
disaster which is disgusting

We dare to perceive and think differently from both neoliberal rule and the
increasingly stagnant and redundant left, which does little to counter it . The
world that we inhabit is systematically oppressive and tolerates the most
banal and ritualistic forms of violence. It educates us of the need for warfare;
it prizes, above all, the values of militarism and its conceptual apparatus of
civic soldierology. It sanctions and openly celebrates killings as if they are
necessary to prove our civilizations credentials. It takes pride, if not pleasure,
in punishing peoples of distinct racial and class profiles, all in the name of
better securing society. It promotes those within that order with
characteristics that in other situations would be both criminalized and
deemed pathological. 16 And it invests significantly in all manner of cultural
productions so that we develop a taste for violence, and even learn to
appreciate aesthetics of violence, as the normal and necessary price of being
entertained.

Their quick shot solution to violence is rooted in fear and

ensures a nonstop neoliberal trauma market their
spectacle of destruction ensures endless violence that
they can never solve

At the same time, under the interlocking regimes of neoliberal power,

violence appears so arbitrary and thoughtless that it lacks the need for any
justification, let alone claims to justice and accountability . It is truly as
limitless as it appears banal. All that matters instead is to re-create the very
conditions to further and deepen the crises of neoliberal rule. Violence, with
its ever-present economy of uncertainty, fear, and terror, is no longer merely
a side effect of police brutality, war, or criminal behavior; it has become
fundamental to neoliberalism as a particularly savage facet of capitalism. And
in doing so it has turned out to be central to legitimating those social
relations in which the political and pedagogical are redefined in order to
undercut possibilities for authentic democracy . Under such circumstances,
the social becomes retrograde, emptied of any democratic values, and
organized around a culture of shared anxieties rather than shared
responsibilities. The contemporary world, then the world of neoliberalism
creates the most monstrous of illusions, one that functions by hiding things in
plain sight. We see this most troublingly played out as its simulated
spectacles of destruction are scripted in such a way as to support the
narrative that violence itself is enjoying a veritable decline as a result of
liberal influence and pacification . Howard Zinn understood this perversion
better than most: I start from the supposition that the world is topsyturvy,
that things are all wrong, that the wrong people are in jail and the wrong
people are out of jail, that the wrong people are in power and the wrong
people are out of power, that the wealth is distributed in this country and the
world in such a way as not simply to require small reform but to require a
drastic reallocation of wealth. I start from the supposition that we dont have
to say too much about this because all we have to do is think about the state
of the world today and realize that things are all upside down.

The alt is to simply do the plan without any

representation of violence. Their game of violence means
that they will never solve the harms they claim. The alt
completely solves the affirmatives political games of
losers and winners. We do not call for a rejection of all
images of violence, but the affs whole speech is about
how they solve extinction and suffering.

Our critique begins from the realization that violence has become ubiquitous ,
settling like some all-enveloping excremental mist . . . that has permeated
every nook of any institution or being that has real influence on the way we
live now. 22 We cannot escape its spectre. Its presence is everywhere . It is
hardwired into the fabric of our digital DNA. Capitalism in fact has always
thrived on its consumption. There is, after all, no profit in peace . We are not
calling here for the censoring of all representations of violence as if we could
retreat into some sheltered protectorate. That would be foolish and
intellectually dangerous. Our claim is both that the violence we are exposed
to is heavily mediated, and that as such we are witness to various spectacles
that serve a distinct political function, especially as they either work to
demonize political resistance or simply extract from its occurrence (fictional
and actual) any sense of political context and critical insight. Moving beyond
the spectacle by making visible the reality of violence in all of its modes is
both necessary and politically important. What we need then is an ethical
approach to the problem of violence such that its occurrence is intolerable to
witness. Exposing violence is not the same as being exposed to it, though the
former too often comes as a result of the latter . The corrupting and punishing
forms taken by violence today must be addressed by all people as both the
most important element of power and the most vital of forces shaping social
relationships under the predatory formation of neoliberalism. Violence is both
symbolic and material in its effects and its assaults on all social relations,
whereas the mediation of violence coupled with its aesthetic regimes of
suffering is a form of violence that takes as its object both memory and
thought. It purges the historical record, denying access to the history of a
more dignified present, purposefully destroying the ability to connect forms of
struggle across the ages. Memory as such is fundamental to any ethics of
responsibility. Our critique of violence begins, then, as an ethical imperative.
It demands a rigorous questioning of the normalized culture of violence in
which we are now immersed. It looks to the past so that we may understand
the violence of our present. It looks to the ways that ideas about the future
shape the present such that we learn to accept a world that is deemed to be
violent by design. This requires a proper critical reading of the way violence is
mediated in our contemporary moment; how skewed power relations and
propagators of violence are absolved of any wider blame in a pedagogical
and political game that permits only winners and losers; how any act of
injustice is made permissible in a world that enshrines systemic cruelty.
Links
General
 Disposability
Their use of bodies simply as representations to win a
debate round is pure normalization and kills ethics

A case against artistic neutrality is likewise stressed by Slavoj iek: Imagine

a documentary that depicts the Holocaust in a cool, disinterested way as a
big industriallogistical operation, focusing on the technical problems involved
(transport, disposal of bodies, preventing panic among the prisoners to be
gassed). Such a film would either embody a deeply immoral fascination with
its topic, or it would count on the obscene neutrality of its style to engender
dismay and horror in spectators. 75 Hence, for iek, Bigelows claim to
political neutrality is not only absurd in light of the subject matter, which is by
nature deeply political, it is a mockery of the art of cinema, which cannot be
divorced from the political content it consciously chooses to screen: One
doesnt need to be a moralist, or nave about the urgencies of fighting
terrorist attacks, to think that torturing a human being is in itself something
so profoundly shattering that to depict its neutrality that is, to neutralize or
sanitize this shattering dimensionis already a kind of endorsement. . . . This
is normalization at its purest and most efficientthere is a little unease, but it
is more about the hurt sensitivity than about ethics, and the job has to be
done.
 Their Debate
Their pleasure in violence is routine in modern neoliberal
society they disregard images and normalize them in
activity

Spectacles of violence are powerful modes of public pedagogy that function,

in part, to fragment and alienate an active and engaged citizenry,
transforming it into a passive audience. Who is targeted tells us a great deal
about the strategic ambitions and rational underpinnings of the violence.
Contemporary neoliberal societies deal with spectacles of violence in a
particularly novel way. Unlike previous totalitarian systems that relied upon
the terror of secrecy, modern neoliberal societies bring most things into the
open. They continually expose us to that which threatens the fabric of the
everyday. Even the violent excesses of neoliberal societieswhich past
generations would surely have viewed as pathologically deranged are all
too easily repackaged for acceptable public consumption . While serial
murder, excessive torture, cruel and unusual punishment, secret detentions,
and the violation of civil liberties are deeply ingrained in the history of
Western imperial domination, in the contemporary moment they no longer
elicit condemnation, disgust, and shame. Rather, they have become
normalized celebrated evenin both popular culture and state policy. A
lack of public outcry in response to both reports of government torture and its
legimation by high-ranking government officials such as former vice president
Dick Cheney are surely linked to an explosion of coldblooded portrayals of
torture in the mainstream media, extending from the documentaries and
news that provide graphic detail of the activities of serial killers to more
highbrow fare such the highly acclaimed television drama 24, or the
Hollywood film Zero Dark Thirty, with their depictions of utterly unscrupulous
characters as admirable, almost heroic, figures. Whereas popular
representations of torture prior to 2001 were typically presented as acts of
atrocity, the post-9/11 climate has accepted such representations as common
fare, even those depictions of blatant human rights violations designed to
elicit the audiences respect. Todays screen culture thus contains within it
an echo of the pornographic in maximizing the pleasure of violence.
 Fiat
The aff is complicit in hyper-reality they view the world
through the fiat lens of simulation, models and empirical
examples. This turns the real world and their fiated world
into one giant game which the media exploits.
Andrew Robinson, philosopher, political theorist, columnist, Dec. 7th, 2012,
http://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-13/

The model of the code does not represent a prior social reality. It creates a new social reality, which
Hyperreality is a special kind of social reality in which a
Baudrillard terms hyperreality.
reality is created or simulated from models, or defined by reference to models
a reality generated from ideas. The term has implications of too much
reality everything being on the surface, without mystery; more real than
reality too perfect and schematic to be true, like special effects; and para-
reality, an extra layer laid over, or instead of, reality. It is experienced as more real
than the real, because of its effect of breaking down the boundary between real and imaginary. It is a real
without origin or reality, a reality to which we cannot connect.
Hyperreality differs from other
realities in that the division between reality and imaginary disappears. Reality
becomes a cybernetic game. It is as if, at a certain point of time, we left reality behind, and
never noticed until now. We can no longer tell the former reality from hyperreality, and we wouldnt know if
reality returned. Baudrillard does not suggest when this loss of reality happened, but it can be deduced
from his work fairly easily. The final loss of meaning happened at some point after the 1960s. Baudrillard
sees figures such as J.F.K. and Marilyn Monroe as still having symbolic force. One might tentatively situate
the transition in 1973 or 1979 at the point where neoliberalism takes root. Hyperreality
corresponds to the disappearance of intensity. It becomes something cool
stripped of intense affective energies and the power of the symbolic and of
fantasy. For instance, the hot commitment to labour is replaced by the cool execution of tasks. The
hot art and film of historical investment is replaced by the cool functional or machinational pleasure of
perfectly simulated fiction. Baudrillard is often misunderstood. He does not use the term cool in the
sense of fashionable or enjoyable. He is referring to the loss of heat. Heat is here a metaphor for intensity,
enjoyment (as opposed to pleasure), and emotional investment. To be cool is to be apathetic,
disillusioned, uncommitted.In
hyperreality, simulators seek to make all of reality
coincide with their models of simulation. The result is that the real is no
longer real. For instance, production is now primarily virtual the unreal circulation of values. Cinema
is getting closer to an absolute reality in all its naked obviousness. Functional arrangements seek to create
the greatest correspondence possible between the object and its function. Baudrillard terms such changes
Its
as expressions of an attitude to signs which is nave and paranoid, puritan and terrorist.
destruction of the gap between signs and their referents creates immense
social effects. For instance, ones experience of time collapses without
accumulation and a referent. Time is increasingly experienced as an eternal
present without end, rather than as a linear sequence.

The affirmatives insistence to play the fiat game

represents their role of the media.
Gerry Coulter teaches sociology at Bishop's University in Sherbrooke, Canada. He is the founding editor
of the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies., 2009, http://insomnia.ac/essays/baudrillard_on_gaming/
Some detractors treat electronic games as if they were a hard drug, but for Baudrillard (1979),1 the
games are merely the equivalent of soft drugs. Like drugs, games fascinate us as
much as they repel, and from the standpoint of Western reason, they arouse
intellectual ambivalence (Baudrillard, 2002b). The game does this by leading us into an
environment dominated by a mental surgery of performance -- a kind of "plastic surgery of perception"
when we are in the game, we are also protected from
(Baudrillard, 1993c, p. 49). Yet
"the brutalizing effects of rationality, normative socialization, and universal
conditioning" taking place in the social (Baudrillard, 1993c, p. 67). This is a very important
aspect of the ambivalence of digital games for Baudrillard -- they originate in a society that is increasingly
ambivalent about its future. The pleasure of the game is at best an uncertain and cool pleasure
artificial intensity surrounding the
(Baudrillard, 1988). Baudrillard (1979) pointed to the
playing of digital games, but he found this to be not unlike that surrounding a person watching
sports on television -- and every bit as unhealthy. But we are too concerned with health; the gamer worries
about boredom far more than obesity and death. It is better to be a gamer than a jogger in Baudrillard's
world! The jogger -- contrary to the delusional state he or she may be in -- struggles only to exhaust and
destroy the body (Baudrillard, 1993c). Joggers disappear in Baudrillard's world. The gamer, too, longs to
disappear, but in an ecstatic disappearance from which he or she is eternally reborn in the next game
(Baudrillard, 1990). The gamer fears only the dizziness induced by the connections -- the lassitude of
network man (Baudrillard, 1987). Gamers are viewed as immoral in the eyes of those who work to engage
the gamer is seduced by other possibilities and
all of society in the production game. But
attempts to turn away from the order of production to an order of reversibility
(Baudrillard, 1979). Reversibility for Baudrillard is the opposite of production, and gamers may be
Ambivalence, however, is a two-way street:
understood as an exemplary form of it.
Ironically, the gamer is worked very hard by the game into a frenzied state of
a will to mastery -- mastery of what amounts to nothing as the game he or
she masters becomes instantly obsolete (and soon "upgraded" or replaced by another new
game). Games, too, are victims of fashion, and there is no greater game than fashion (Baudrillard,
1993a).The
gamer exists on the margins of political economy and is
understood by some to be an example of the lan of the system in capturing
everyone. The gamer, however, attempts to gain an escape velocity from the system of political
economy. Some gamers feel their virtual worlds are the opposite of political economy and its hard
currencies on which they frown. The currency of the gamer is simulacra, and simulacra now exist in
abundance (Baudrillard, 1990). So with a nod to the political economist, we must recognize that the game
should not take so long to master that it would interfere with the next round of the production of games.
The flow
Like a drug that kills too many users, such a game would be against the interest of the system.
of games, like the flow of drugs, must not stop; the effects may be profitable
and brutal but not fatal. Baudrillard forces us to wonder, though, are gamers actually onto
something critics from outside of their realm miss? It seems a little too easy now for the political economist
-- and some players of that productivist game have survived into the 21st century -- to see the social
relations of the world outside of the game encompassing the world of the gamer. But as much as society
reaches inside the game (attempting to capture the gamer), the world of the game infects society outside
the game. Two Harvard researchers have recently released a study on how the "gaming generation" is
changing the workplace as much as the places of play (Beck & Wade, 2006). Games infect all
forms of entertainment today. The latest James Bond film (Casino Royale, a film stuffed with
special effects; Campbell, 2006) contains a chase scene of several minutes' duration. It takes place high
above the ground, between boom cranes, in a fantastic realm where the actors are placed in a field not
unlike a Super Mario Brothers game. Only an audience that grew up in the realm of games could truly
appreciate such a scene. Here the game seeps out into other areas of life. Perhaps it is by incorporating
game logic that the system now attempts to pull some people out of the game and into the movie theatre.
Attendance at films is in decline whereas game sales soar.
 Securitization
They link on two levels the first is their securitization.
Their striving to create a more secure state disregards all
those that the state destroys. The second link is rhetoric
they use the debate space as an entertainment ground for
disaster which is disgusting

We dare to perceive and think differently from both neoliberal rule and the
increasingly stagnant and redundant left, which does little to counter it . The
world that we inhabit is systematically oppressive and tolerates the most
banal and ritualistic forms of violence. It educates us of the need for warfare;
it prizes, above all, the values of militarism and its conceptual apparatus of
civic soldierology. It sanctions and openly celebrates killings as if they are
necessary to prove our civilizations credentials. It takes pride, if not pleasure,
in punishing peoples of distinct racial and class profiles, all in the name of
better securing society. It promotes those within that order with
characteristics that in other situations would be both criminalized and
deemed pathological. 16 And it invests significantly in all manner of cultural
productions so that we develop a taste for violence, and even learn to
appreciate aesthetics of violence, as the normal and necessary price of being
entertained.
 Political Affirmation
At this point they gotta link lol

Political affirmation is increasingly dissolved into pervasive nihilism as our

politics is increasingly reduced to the quest for mere survival. For if there is a
clear lesson, as New Yorkers now testify better than most, to living in these
times, it is precisely that the lights can go out at any given moment, without
any lasting concern for social responsibility. This is simply the natural order of
things (so we are told), and we need to adapt our thinking accordingly .
 Politics of Disaster
Constant upbringing of threat recreates the neoliberal
system

Under the regime of neoliberalism, especially in the United States, war has
become an extension of politics as almost all spheres of society have been
transformed into a combat zone or in some cases a killing zone. One only has
to look at Ferguson, Missouri, or the killing of Eric Garner in New York City to
see the extent to which this is being played out in communities throughout
the United States. When civilians in Ferguson and New York City
spontaneously organized to denounce a white policemans killing of an
unarmed black youth and a defenseless black man, the immediate response
was to militarize both areas with combat-style hardware and forces, including
snipers. Americans now find themselves living in a society that is constantly
under siege as narratives of endangerment and potential threats translate
into conditions of intensified civic violation in which almost everyone is spied
on and subjected to modes of state and corporate control whose power
knows few limits. War as a state of exception has become normalized . 7
Moreover, society as a whole becomes increasingly militarized ; political
concessions to public interest groups become relics of long abandoned claims
to democracy; and the welfare state is hollowed out to serve the interests of
global markets. Any collective sense of ethical imagination and social
responsibility toward those who are vulnerable or in need of care is now
viewed as a scourge or pathology. Within this mindset, interventions that
might benefit the disadvantaged are perversely deemed to be irresponsible
acts that prevent individuals from learning to deal with their own suffering
even though, as we know, the forces that condition their plight remain
beyond their control, let alone their ability to influence them to any degree.

Their language of carnage and disaster dont help in fact

the aff wont solve anything but will only force us to be in
an endless state of insecurity
Giroux and Evans
And yet, despite the horrors of the Century of Violence, our ways of thinking
about politics not only have remained tied to the types of scientific reductions
that history warns to be integral to the dehumanization of the subject, but
such thinking has also made it difficult to define the very conditions that
make a new politics possible. At the same time accelerating evolution of
digital communications radicalizes the very contours of the human condition
such that we are now truly image conscious, so too is life increasingly
defined and altered by the visual gaze and a screen culture whose omniscient
presence offers new spaces for thinking dangerously. This hasnt led,
however, to the harnessing of the power of imagination when dealing with
the most pressing political issues. With neoliberal power having entered into
the global space of flows while our politics remains wedded to out dated ways
of thinking and acting, even the leaders of the strongest nations now preach
the inevitability of catastrophe, forcing us to partake in a world they declare
to be insecure by design.
Specific
 Disease
The affs exploitation of diseased and wounded bodies is
dehumanizing and represents the worst of humanity.
Their images and use of universal symbols to win the
debate round makes a mockery of suffering that real
people face everyday.
Denis Kennedy, political theorist and author, Feb. 28, 2009, http://sites.tufts.edu/jha/archives/411
In the field,
the individualized ethic of personal relationships may predominate.
The media, however, one humanitarian has noted, shows nothing of human relationships
but reflections. (45) The marketed image sheds much of the specificity of the
relationship in favor of the universal. One observer calls this anonymous
corporeality: Generalities of bodiesdead, wounded, starving, diseased,
and homelessare pressed against the television screen as mass articles.
(46) Humanitarian images focus on universal symbolswomen and children,
suffering and destructionto cut across boundaries of comprehension. That
human beings have ethical obligations to each other as such requires
transcending kinship, nationality, and even acquaintance. But such images
deny the very particulars that make people something other than anonymous
bodies. These images do not dehumanize, as such, but humanize in a particular mode: a
mere, bare, naked, or minimal humanity is set up. (47)
 Econ
Simulacrums of economic collapse dehumanize people in
exchange for profits, and are what create the economic
downturns themselves.
Norman Macintosh - Accounting, Accountants & Accountability, p. 74, 2013,
Seen from a Baudrillardian perspective, accounting for financial instruments I
san extreme example of hyperreality in financial markets and a paradox of
self-reference. The market uses accounting earnings, as explained in the case
of earnings management, along with other information, to value a companys
stock and other securities. The prices of the securities then become the
underlyins that sustain the derivative prices, which determine the companys
earnings, as in figure 4.2.
 Marx
Even Marx himself exploits images to create his new
social order. Putting people back to work isnt the
solution, we need to collapse our current system.
Andrew Robinson, columnism, postmodern expert, political theorist, http://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-
theory-baudrillard-14/, Feb. 2013

Baudrillard is often misread as celebrating the end of reference and the triumph of self-referential
signs. It is easy to see how this misunderstanding came about, since he advocates outbidding the system
doesnt think its possible or desirable to go back to
in its own disintegration. He
production or fixed meanings. But the central point of his work is still anti-
capitalist. He sees the system as unable to provide anything referential or
emotionally meaningful. He sees it as a kind of totalitarian engine of
permanent mobilisation for the empty goal of its own reproduction. Even in
his fatalistic later works, he remains fiercely opposed to the code and the
system. Baudrillards critique of Marx is interesting, and I think largely valid .
What he puts in place of Marxs theory is, however, contentious. His recent work gives the impression of a
disillusioned Situationist seeking to find an alternative to revolution in a world where none is apparent. As
a result, he finds ways to read conformist mass practices as unconscious resistances, irrational systemic
system collapse with
functioning and implosion, and so on. Baudrillard is also too prone to conflate
liberation. There are scenarios of implosion which would not lead to liberation. One might, for instance,
think of climate change due to overconsumption as a scenario of system-collapse. This would bring about
the end of the code, but also possibly the end of humanity.
 Democracy
Democracy promotion is a lie and is a recycled version of
all other forms of oppression throughout history.
Baudrillard in 94 [Jean, The Illusion of the End p. 26-27]
all wastes must be recycled. Otherwise,they will
The ecological imperative is that
circle endlessly like satellites around the earth , which has itself returned to the state of a
lump of cosmic waste. What is happening with history is the foreshadowing of this dilemma: we can
either perish under the weight of non-degradable waste of the great empires,
the grand narratives, the great systems made obsolete by their own
gigantism, or else recycle all this waste in the synthetic form of heteroclite
history, as we are doing today in the name of Democracy and Human Rights, which
are never anything but the confused end-product of the reprocessing of all
the residues of history crusher residues in which all the ethnic, linguistic, feudal and ideological
phantoms of earlier societies float. Amnesia, anamnesis, the anachronistic revival of all the figures of the
Democracy itself )a
past royalty, feudalism. Through did they ever really disappear?
proliferating form, the lowest common denominator of all our liberal
societies), this planetary democracy of the rights of man, is to real freedom
what Disneyland is to the imaginary. In relation to the modern demand for
freedom, it offers the same characteristics as recycled paper.
 Terrorism
Terrorism discourse is founded on disaster porn.
Richard Pope, York University, 2007, http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article27b-
pope.html

Centred in the action of the bomb blast the film cuts to an office that overlooks the scene with its nameless
executives who never become protagonists in the diegesis and back to the action. A few seconds later
we rejoin these executives, whom are now even eating popcorn in taking in this scene from behind the
office window. One asks how many fire trucks can be counted, to which another says you guys, you guys,
suggesting that their questioning is getting in the way of proper spectatorship. Die Hard not only partakes
These executives, behind their
of the fantasy of terrorism, it does so in a reflexive manner.
window, clearly stand in for us, behind the screen. In front of these images
we, like these executives, feign a blas attitude (its nothing we havent seen before),
while attentively absorbing them along with popcorn . Part of the humour of Die Hard:
with a Vengeance is the way it exaggerates the nonchalance New Yorkers have to
threats of terrorism, but this indifference and so the reflexivity of this film
was only made possible through the interminable media discourse about
terrorism. Behind our blas attitude, this film suggests, lies enjoyment (and,
perhaps, the reason for seeing this film). When someone like Baudrillard confronts us
with our own enjoyment, we feign shock and horror. It is almost a law: those
that come closest to articulating and so potentially dissolving the kernel of
our enjoyment are the most vilified. Baudrillard, however, simply makes more
explicit that around which Hollywood has built countless narratives . Later in the
film the arch-terrorist, impersonating a city engineer, comes to survey the damage, and remarks: Holy
toledo! Somebody had fun. Indexing his own enjoyment, he is also, as the previous scene with the
executives makes clear, indexing our own. (The police officer with whom he converses himself references
the first attack on the World Trade Center: You were probably at the World Trades. You know what that
Though the US administration might not ponder to any degree the
mess was.)
enjoyment of terrorism, they do appreciate Hollywoods story-telling abilities,
routinely consulting them on likely terrorist targets and practices. But what
they are ultimately consulting, of course, is our enjoyment as intuited by
various Hollywood functionaries.

Their representations and coverage of terrorism is

another link. Terrorists can only exist if the media gives
them attention. It turns horrible events into a cruelty
theatre. Rejecting their media order is crucial to defeating
terrorism.
Andrew Robinson, philosopher, political theorist, columnist, Dec. 7th, 2012,
http://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-13/

The complicity between terrorists and the media is for Baudrillard central to
their power. Terrorism is a superconductive event it affects not simply
specific sites, but entire systems. It occurs in the non-places of the system,
such as airports the same spaces from which the world is now managed . It
opens the era of the transpolitical, in which terror replaces alienation. Terrorism is already in
some sense simulated terrorism, performed for the media. It is a special
effect. On some level, terrorism is isomorphic with the masses. It is non-representative, but of a similar
kind. We are all hostages, since were vulnerable to precarious risks outside our control, and used as
dissuasive arguments against others uses of power (against nuclear attacks, against a general strike and
so on). Terrorism radicalises and performs this hostage status. It tends ultimately to become a destruction
Like natural
of all meaning without objectives and goals, representation, solidarity and so on.
disaster, it is a subjectless subversion. Terrorism is not so much violent in
itself as the source of a violent spectacle, a theatre of cruelty. It returns to the level
of the pure symbolic challenge, counterposing this challenge to the systems models. It breaks down fixed
boundaries because terrorist, hostage, audience and power become inetrchangeable. For instance, it is
usually impossible to determine whether a mediatised terrorist figure (such as Baader, Che, Bin Laden,
Zarqawi, perhaps Saddam or Gaddafi) was murdered, committed suicide, or died in battle .
This
indeterminacy is part of the romanticism, the fascination of terrorism. (Getting
into arguments about what really happened is seen by Baudrillard as a trap which returns us to the field of
meaning). Terrorism is not simply state terrorism by groups without political power. State terrorism is
ultimately given its lifeblood by truth and meaning. It seeks a mobilisation against terrorism around the
values of truth, meaning and the code. Terorrism counterposes to it a superior, meaningless form of
violence. It counterposes an imaginary realm to the real, which carries implosion and destruction into the
seeks to provoke the system into an excess of reality
heart of the real and of power. It
which will cause it to collapse.

Their representations of third world countries, terrorism,

and the illusion of fighting terrorism are all what
reproduce it and guarantee systems of violence.
Jean Baudrillard, philosopher, bad ass, the spirit of terrorism, 20 03, pg. 11,
http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=385

The worst that can happen to global power is not to be attacked or destroyed, but to
suffer a humiliation. Global power was humiliated on September 11 because the
terrorists inflicted something the global system cannot give back. Military
reprisals were only means of physical response. But, on September 11, global power was
symbolically defeated. War is a response to an aggression, but not to a symbolic challenge. A symbolic
challenge is accepted and removed when the other is humiliated in return (but this cannot work when the
other is crushed by bombs or locked behind bars in Guantanamo ).
The fundamental rule of
symbolic obligation stipulates that the basis of any form of domination is the
total absence of any counterpart, of any return . [8] The unilateral gift is an act of power.
And the Empire of the Good, the violence of the Good, is precisely to be able to give without any possible
return. This is what it means to be in God's position. Or to be in the position of the Master who allows the
slave to live in exchange for work (but work is not a symbolic counterpart, and the slave's only response is
eventually to either rebel or die). God used to allow some space for sacrifice. In the traditional order, it was
always possible to give back to God, or to nature, or to any superior entity by means of sacrifice. That's
what ensured a symbolic equilibrium between beings and things. But today we no longer have anybody to
give back to, to return the symbolic debt to. This is the curse of our culture. It is not that the gift is
impossible, but rather that the counter-gift is. All sacrificial forms have been neutralized
and removed (what's left instead is a parody of sacrifice, which is visible in all the contemporary
instances of victimization).We are thus in the irremediable situation of having to
receive, always to receive, no longer from God or nature, but by means of a
technological mechanism of generalized exchange and common gratification.
Everything is virtually given to us, and, like it or not, we have gained a right to everything. We are similar
to the slave whose life has been spared but who nonetheless is bound by a non-repayable debt. This
situation can last for a while because it is the very basis of exchange in this economic order. Still, there
always comes a time when the fundamental rule resurfaces and a negative return inevitably responds to
the positive transfer, when a violent abreaction to such a captive life, such a protected existence, and such
This reversion can take the shape of an open act of
a saturation of being takes place.
violence (such as terrorism), but also of an impotent surrender (that is more
characteristic of our modernity), of a self-hatred, and of remorse, in other words, of all those negative
passions that are degraded forms of the impossible counter-gift.What we hate in ourselves --
the obscure object of our resentment -- is our excess of reality, power, and
comfort, our universal availability, our definite accomplishment, this kind of
destiny that Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor had in store for the domesticated
masses. And this is exactly the part of our culture that the terrorists find
repulsive (which also explains the support they receive and the fascination they are able to exert).
Terrorism's support is not only based on the despair of those who have been
humiliated and offended. It is also based on the invisible despair of those
whom globalization has privileged, on our own submission to an omnipotent
technology, to a crushing virtual reality, to an empire of networks and
programs that are probably in the process of redrawing the regressive
contours of the entire human species, of a humanity that has gone "global."
(After all, isn't the supremacy of the human species over the rest of life on earth the mirror image of the
domination of the West over the rest of the world?). This invisible despair, our invisible despair, is hopeless
since it is the result of the realization of all our desires.Thus,
if terrorism is derived from this
excess of reality and from this reality's impossible exchange, if it is the
product of a profusion without any possible counterpart or return, and if it
emerges from a forced resolution of conflicts, the illusion of getting rid of it as
if it were an objective evil is complete. [9] For, in its absurdity and non-sense, terrorism
is our society's own judgment and penalty.
 Warming
Environmental/Warming catastrophe reps discourages
individual actions to solve warming and makes us more
vulnerable to authoritarianism
Buell, 3 Professor of English at Cornell 2003 (Frederick, From Apocalypse to Way of Life) Looked at critically, then,
crisis discourse thus suffers from a number of liabilities. First, it seems to have become a
political liability almost as much as an asset. It calls up a fierce and effective opposition with its predictions; worse, its
more specific predictions are all too vulnerable to refutation by events. It also exposes environmentalists to being called
concern with crisis has all too often
grim doomsters and antilife Puritan extremists. Further,
tempted people to try to find a total solution to the problems involved a
phrase that, as an astute analyst of the limitations of crisis discourse, John Barry, puts it, is all too
reminiscent of the Third Reichs infamous final solution.55 A total crisis of society
environmental crisis at its gravestthreatens to translate despair
into inhumanist authoritarianism; more often, however, it helps keep merely
dysfunctional authority in place. It thus leads, Barry suggests, to the belief that only
elite- and expert-led solutions are possible .56 At the same time it depoliticizes
people, inducing them to accept their impotence as individuals ; this is something
that has made many people today feel, ironically and/or passively, that since it
makes no difference at all what any individual does on his or her
own, one might as well go along with it. Yet another pitfall for the full and sustained
elaboration of environmental crisis is, though least discussed, perhaps the most deeply ironic. A problem with deep
the worse
cultural and psychological as well as social effects, it is embodied in a startlingly simple proposition:
one feels environmental crisis is, the more one is tempted to turn ones back
on the environment. This means, preeminently, turning ones back on natureon
traditions of nature feeling, traditions of knowledge about nature (ones that range
from organic farming techniques to the different departments of ecological science), and traditions of
nature-based activism. If nature is thoroughly wrecked these days,
people need to delink from nature and live in postnature a conclusion that,
as the next chapter shows, many in U.S. society drew at the end of the millenium. Explorations of how
deeply nature has been wounded and how intensely vulnerable to and
dependent on human actions it is can thus lead , ironically, to further indifference
to nature-based environmental issues, not greater concern with them.
 Speaking for Others
They dehumanize the victims they attempt to protect and
reconstruct social hierarchies through their speaking on
behalf of the victims. Victims can speak for themselves,
and dont need to be victimized just so the heroic USFG
can swoop in and save them. Turns the aff.
Denis Kennedy, political theorist and author, Feb. 28, 2009, http://sites.tufts.edu/jha/archives/411
As for the victim,the legitimacy of humanitarianism is connected to considering
the other as a human being. Humanitarians are seen as victim-centered,
as advocates for the weak. However, the repeated use of the language and
imagery of the victim makes this exceptionally difficultit strips of all
human dignity the individual whom it is supposed to define. (65) Further, the almost
universal focus on women and children in positions of fragility reproduces particular social hierarchies. In
portraying the humanitarian subject as necessarily victimized, in speaking for
this victim, humanitarian images perpetuate a set of power relations where
the victim is a passive recipient of aid from the heroic aid organization . These
images thus elaborate the humanitarian narrative. More concerning still, there is evidence that
these images, interacting with common media portrayals, have been
absorbed into the Western consciousness. Benthall cites an Oxfam and EEC report on
Images of Africa which found that negative images were reinforcing stereotypes in schoolchildren of the
doomed and helpless continent of Africa. (66)
 State
They link through their use of the state - Corporate
America is a self-fashioned dreamland Disneyland built on
entertaining the masses through excessive uses of
disaster porn.
Darren Paul Hawes University of Essex, Literature, Film and Theatre Studies, Graduate Student,
http://www.academia.edu/2609683/Discuss_Jean_Baudrillards_concepts_of_simulacrum_and_hyper-
reality_using_one_or_more_literary_or_cinematic_text_of_your_choice, 2013

Simulacrum was by no means a new word coined by Jean Baudrillard in the 1960s. The Oxford English
dictionary dates the word to the late sixteenth century in meaning an unsatisfactory imitation or
What Baudrillard does in his essay, Simulacra and
substitute 1 .
Simulations , is use the term to discuss the context of the twentieth
Century, in particular theUnited States of America. In relating the self-
fashioned dreamland Disneyland to corporateAmerica, Baudrillard suggests
how things we believe to be false are there to hide the reality;there is no
reality anymore. With this essay it is my intention to explore and elucidate Baudrillards concepts
Simulacrum and Hyper-reality by suggesting how they are presenteven in childrens

stories written before the twentieth c entury with Lewis Carrols Alices Adventures in
Wonderland (1865) as my primary example. I shall also discuss the existenceof Baudrillard in twenty first
century cinema. By looking at the Matrix Trilogy (1999 2003I will concentrate on how Baudrillard s
concepts are used with the intention to create aHollywood blockbuster franchise whilst still remaining
thought provoking and pertaining tothe initial philosophy.
 Disorder
Representations of disorder prop up sovereign power
these spaces are considered exceptions to order, making
the manifestation of extreme violence to reassert power
an inevitability
Rajaram, Dept of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University, Budapest,
Hungary, in 6

[Prem Kumar,. Alternatives 31, Dystopic Geographies of Empire]

Foucault understands modern politics as a process of disciplining bodies , thereby

creating governable subjectivities. Specific power structures and relations
give to the body characteristics generally taken to be inherent to it (such
as sexuality). Giorgio Agamben adds to (or distorts) Foucaultian biopower with his conception

of homo sacer and the state of exception .16 Agamben focuses especially on
a by-effect of the creation of politicized or governable bodies: a remainder or
excess, a no-longer-human. The homo sacer is the bare or depoliticized life that is

distinguished from politicized forms of life , most clearly manifest in

the citizen. Indeed, Agamben argues that the bare life is an excess or by-
product of the production of politicized life . Politics for Agamben is an
ongoing process of clarification between inclusion and exclusion ,
between forms of life that the sovereign will protect and represent and those
it will not.17 Homo sacer thus emerges at the point where law
suspends itself.18 The colonial ordering of space through processes of
discipline centered on the body inaugurates a space of exception to which the
excess or remainder of the process of creating politicized subjects (or at least subjects perceptible under the
structure of recognition produced by the ordering of colonial space) is confined. The process of placing

outside is not a casting of the exception out of the norm but rather
holding the exception in thrall to the norm. This is a process of boundary
promulgation and boundary perturbation ,19 inaugurating a paradoxical juridico-political space

where boundaries denoting and separating an inside from an outside no longer function:
The space declared improper for politics is singled out and indicated
as the space of politics properly speaking . . . . Bare life, declared outside, is by the same token
factually singled out as the object, the inside, the territory par excellence of political action.20 The topography of

modern political space is best articulated in terms of a system where

the boundary between inside and outside collapses : The exception is situated in a
symmetrical position with respect to the example, with which it forms a system. Exception and example

constitute the two modes by which a set tries to found and maintain
its own coherence.21 This topography works as a system or set in
which the border loses its capacity to serve as an instrument or tool
of separation precisely because rule and exception, inside and
outside, are not distinct from each other, but exist in thrall to each
other. The dystopic geography of colonialism imagines putrid spaces.
Such imaginations or representation allow for the vindication of
processes of order and discipline that transform the space into
governable and exploitable place. Imaginations of dystopia contribute
to theorizations of the incidents of brutalization and violence. It does not
however account adequately for incidents of violence that appear to serve no clearly identifiable disciplinary purpose. Cocky
Hahns kick is directed not at one who is simply marginalized but one, in Derek Gregorys Agambenian terminology, placed
beyond the margins. 22 Indeed the kick is operative; it is an act of placing beyond.
 Rights
When humanity is reduced to rights and needs, they lose
their human dignity and ability and become less than
human and in desperate need of enlightened western
assistance.
Denis Kennedy, political theorist and author, Feb. 28, 2009, http://sites.tufts.edu/jha/archives/411
This is man, reduced to rights and needs. He [/she] appears without
differentiation or distinction, naked and simple. This is the man of the Rights
of Man, someone without history, desires or needs, an abstraction that has
as little humanity as possible, since he has jettisoned all those traits and
qualities that build human identity. (48) In reducing humanity to the lowest
common denominator, images of want and suffering jettison the humanity of
relationships, specificities, and experiences. Universal man is suddenly not
man after all.
 Media
Their role-playing as the media doesnt inform us of real
issues that need our attention, but distracts us from
questioning deep structural issues and gives the system a
free pass to oppress.
NIHARIKA CHUGH, philosopher, researcher, yahoo contributorhttp://voices.yahoo.com/baudrillard-zizek-
systematically-7659090.html?cat=4, 2011

To say that we exist in an era wherein the media environment is bursting at

its seams with images and information would perhaps be an understatement .
While television remains the predominant medium of information on significant world events,
telecommunications and the gigantic rise of the Internet have only further
added to the pervasion of mediatised realities. Technology then, as much as
global capitalism, has been instrumental and continues to be so in the dawn
of what Debord termed 'society of the spectacle'- 'a media and consumer
society, organised around the production and consumption of images,
commodities and staged events.' (Kellner 2003) As the fourth estate of journalism has
traditionally been accorded the ideals of acting as a mirror for social reality, the progression towards a
The
'society of the spectacle' naturally signals the emergence of a society with new kinds of 'realities'.
widespread popularity of reality TV, excessive focus on celebrity, and the blurring line
between news and entertainment, all stand testimony to a society obsessed
with mediated images, associating major events like 9/11 with images
repeated in the media's symbolic order rather than with deeper structural
issues. Such an idea seems ironic considering the explicitness of power
relations, politics, violence and individualism that marks contemporary
journalism - an explicitness disguised as truth which successfully manages to
convince the audience that the media is an 'objective, neutral witness .' (Taylor
2010, p.62) However, in the analysis of radical media theorists like Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj iek, it is
precisely this explicitness of 'reality' that exposes the thin veil of ideology between the 'real' and its media
'In terms of media content, ideology increasingly appears
representation:
explicitly on the surface but that very explicitness paradoxically serves as an
excuse not to confront the full ideological nature of the situation.' (Taylor 2010,
p.74) Baudrillard, too, suggests a similar 'explicitness without understanding' (Taylor & Harris 2008, p. 179)
resulting from exposure to an implosion of signs in the media processed industrially to align with
technology for the purpose of mass consumption. Based
on these counter-hegemonic
readings of mass media in the works of Baudrillard and iek , this essay will argue that
contemporary journalism contains systematically unacknowledged forms of
ideology which, in their seeming absence, paradoxically reinforce dominant
values of our time, while simultaneously minimizing potential for any logical
response to media events through an organized confusion created by an
environment cramped with what Baudrillard terms 'ob-scene' mediated
images of 'reality'. Such a study is crucial in order to comprehend the
burgeoning power of mediated images to determine politics, war, social
meaning and media events themselves, while failing, dangerously, to capture
any truth in the very 'reality' they seek to reproduce.
 Internet
The internet is one big example of hyper reality, and is
used to spread the elites version of reality hyper reality
allowing their images to be spread and believed no
matter how ridiculous they are.
Sean Joseph and Patrick Carney, philosopher,
http://www.continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/article/viewArticle/91, 2012
You know what? Even when we switch that Borges story around so its the real that disintegrated and not
the map, the storys fucking stupid. The only thing left is the long and drawn out metaphor of this fake ass
empire. Because today,the same motherfuckers who are always trying to flex their
power and take over other countries and people try day in and day out to
make the reality that we experience line up nicely with their models of
simulation. Its not a question about maps or territory though. Somethings gone, right? That
something is the charm that used to exist between a noun and a representation of the noun. That
something is the difference between a map and a territory, the thing that makes the map like a work of art
and the territory like a real place.
The difference disappeared because simulation
nowadays is not a mirror of the real world or broad in its missionits totally
nuclear and genetic, which means that the way it is formed is not obvious like
a drawing, but is more like fake ass DNA. Its in everything and impossible to
spot! Theres no longer a real thing and the concept of that thing as two
different pieces. Metaphysics is fucked. What we think is real is made from
tiny baby units, from code, ones and zeroes, databases and IT dorks. Reality
can be reproduced a trillion times if some ponytailed jabrony with HTML
experience wants it to be. And you can forget about reality now being something rational,
because theres nothing rational to measure it against. Its basically operationalreadymade
reality, if you will. Its just not fucking real, OK? Its hyperreal, the result of a
giant cancer that eats up everything in a hyperspace that doesnt have an
atmosphere. Michael Crichton might have been onto something.
 Identity Politics
The affirmative teams representations and use of identity
politics create a race to the bottom of suffering,
dehumanizing the victims, and demonizing cultures. They
make generalizations, and describe the worst possible
instances. The problems they outline cant be solved by a
wave of the magic fiat wand, they require an investigation
of colonialism, structural violence and patriarchy.
Rejecting their project is the first step to solve.
Ali Heller, Nigerian author, May 28, 2013, http://anywherethewindblows.com/~niger/?p=822
I accepted the request for an interview with some trepidation, knowing that in the West fistula has
gained a recent notoriety attracting the attention of donors, humanitarians,
and nonprofit organizations, but often doing so with stories that overlook
womens real and complicated experiences. In the world of foreign aid and
nonprofit fundraising, organizations are all too often engaged in a race-to-the-
bottom of suffering, fighting tooth and nail for a limited pot of money. Good-
hearted donors want their money to go the furthest, to make the most
difference. So, organizations championing fistula, cleft palette, leprosy, AIDS, domestic abuse,
malnutrition (the list goes on) engage in a battle of the superlative pitiable all
making one claim: Our victims are the most deserving; Our victims suffer the
most. And anyone with any basic understanding of economics could guess
what happens next, organizations compete for donors, reporters compete for
readers, and victims become more and more pitiable. A hungry child will no
longer do now the child must be on the verge of death. An abused woman
no longer merits attention now she must be the victim of savage, rifle gang
rape. Much like female genital cutting (or mutilation) a decade ago, fistula seems to be pulling ahead
in this race to the bottom. You see, fistula is at the confluence of several factors: young girls and
forced marriage (read: innocent and virginal and totally non-culpable), backwards cultural
practices encouraging birthing alone and at home, victimization by African
(and better yet, Muslim) men, and to top it off its about genitals. Fistula
becomes symbolic of the physical consequences of harmful culture on the
quintessentially innocent.Theres only one problem. A problem that when I
began my conversation with CNNs Morgan Windsor, I tried to be explicit
about. The problem is that while young girls who suffer dramatic
consequences of fistula, including abandonment and total social isolation,
exist, they arent typical they arent even the majority. Indeed, there is no
typical sufferer of fistula. Although it is compelling to think so, and
certainly helps forward the race to the bottom of suffering, fistula isnt
caused by early marriage. Approximately 15% of women (all women, placing
your mother, sister, wife, a stranger in Tegucigalpa or Timbuktu equally at
risk) will experience complications during labor. There are very few and very
inaccurate methods for guessing who these women will be. They arent
necessarily young. They arent necessarily African. These women are 15,
these women are 45; it is their first pregnancy and it is their twelfth; these
women are rural and urban; theyve fastidiously followed pre-natal care and
theyve never seen a doctor; they are educated and they are not; they live in
mansions and they barely get by. What differentiates a woman experiencing
obstetric complications in New York from a woman in rural Niger is her access
to care to emergency obstetric care. In the United States less than 1% of
women birth at home and 33% of women undergo cesarean sections. In
Niger, those numbers are over 80% and less than 1% respectively. As I tried
to explain to Ms. Windsor, we like to situate fistula as the consequence of
culture, oppressive patriarchy, neglectful families, and easily rightable
wrongs. But in reality, fistula (and many sicknesses) is more a result of
poverty, of legacies of colonization and post colonization, of geopolitical
priorities, of structural adjustment policies and structural violence. But those
are problems too big and too systemic for any yoga-a-thon to address.
 Medicine
Their insistence on using simulation means that even in
their fiated world, they dont have any solvency.
Sean Joseph and Patrick Carney, philosopher,
http://www.continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/article/viewArticle/91, 2012
One suggests a presence of something, the other, the absence of something. But its honestly more
complicated than that, because simulating isnt just pretending. Lets say you pretend
like youre really sick to get out of seeing somebody who is visiting town that
you kind of dont like. You get in bed, act all gross and sick, and you end up
seriously producing some of the symptoms because youre acting so hard . So,
pretending or dissimulating might mean youre full of shit, but it doesnt like challenge reality. The
difference, to somebody who knows the drill, is still clear; its just being masked. But full-blown
simulation, not just simply pretending, threatens the difference between true
and false because you start to like be sick, catch my drift? If youre simulating
being sick youll end up producing some true symptomsso its like, are
you sick or not sick? You cant be treated medically now as either sick or not.
Psychology and medicine cant do shit at this point because if all it takes is
intentionally showing some symptoms for them to come about, doesnt that
kind of mean that maybe every sickness could be faked? And if thats the case,
doesnt that mean that maybe the jury is still out on science? Thats an Arrested Development reference, if
youre not on my level. If it cant determine if youre really sick or not, then it doesnt mean shit.
Psychosomatics, which means the relationship between the mind and the body, not just a word in a
song by The Prodigy, gets pretty sketchy when thinking about illnesses. If we think
about this like Freud or something, you could say that the symptom being
exhibited moves from being organic to being unconscious. And somehow this
makes it more true, I think, which seems like total bullshit. Because why should simulation
stop at the portals of the unconscious? The work of the unconscious seems
like it could be produced just like any other symptom in classic medicine . Think
about how dreams fucking happen.
 Psychoanalysis
Simulation means that psychoanalysis has zero solvency.
When people can fake symptoms and those symptoms
become reality, it shows the utter uselessness of
psychoanalysis in a world of simulacrum.
Sean Joseph and Patrick Carney, philosophers,
http://www.continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/article/viewArticle/91, 2012
One suggests a presence of something, the other, the absence of something. But its honestly more
complicated than that, because simulating isnt just pretending. Lets say you pretend
like youre really sick to get out of seeing somebody who is visiting town that
you kind of dont like. You get in bed, act all gross and sick, and you end up
seriously producing some of the symptoms because youre acting so hard . So,
pretending or dissimulating might mean youre full of shit, but it doesnt like challenge reality. The
difference, to somebody who knows the drill, is still clear; its just being masked. But full-blown
simulation, not just simply pretending, threatens the difference between true
and false because you start to like be sick, catch my drift? If youre simulating
being sick youll end up producing some true symptomsso its like, are
you sick or not sick? You cant be treated medically now as either sick or not.
Psychology and medicine cant do shit at this point because if all it takes is
intentionally showing some symptoms for them to come about, doesnt that
kind of mean that maybe every sickness could be faked? And if thats the case,
doesnt that mean that maybe the jury is still out on science? Thats an Arrested Development reference, if
youre not on my level. If it cant determine if youre really sick or not, then it doesnt mean shit.
Psychosomatics, which means the relationship between the mind and the body, not just a word in a
song by The Prodigy, gets pretty sketchy when thinking about illnesses. If we think
about this like Freud or something, you could say that the symptom being
exhibited moves from being organic to being unconscious. And somehow this
makes it more true, I think, which seems like total bullshit. Because why should simulation
stop at the portals of the unconscious? The work of the unconscious seems
like it could be produced just like any other symptom in classic medicine . Think
about how dreams fucking happen. When somebody goes to court for murdering the balls out of somebody
and pulls the old Im cray cray defense, the court has somebody called an alienist (which sounds way
cooler than it actually is) to determine whether or not the person is indeed cray cray or not. Supposedly,
says the alienist, there are a bunch of symptoms that happen in a particular order to push somebody to
being fully batshit, and most stupid criminals arent smart enough to know that. When they fuck it up, the
alienist goes, No way. This dude is totally sane. But they established that shit in 1865 or something to try
to preserve the truth principle, which by now is completely fucking absent. That creepy ass ghost we call
simulation has itself murdered the balls out of truth, reference and maybe even objectivity. What is science
to do when somebody can just act loco and then theyre loco? IDK, and neither do you. Dont even get me
When somebody goes to court for murdering the balls
started on psychoanalysis here.
out of somebody and pulls the old Im cray cray defense, the court has
somebody called an alienist (which sounds way cooler than it actually is) to determine
whether or not the person is indeed cray cray or not. Supposedly, says the
alienist, there are a bunch of symptoms that happen in a particular order to
push somebody to being fully batshit, and most stupid criminals arent smart
enough to know that. When they fuck it up, the alienist goes, No way. This dude is totally sane.
But they established that shit in 1865 or something to try to preserve the truth principle, which by now is
completely fucking absent. That creepy ass ghost we call simulation has itself
murdered the balls out of truth, reference and maybe even objectivity. What
is science to do when somebody can just act loco and then theyre loco? IDK,
and neither do you. Dont even get me started on psychoanalysis here.
 War
War is a media spectacle that actually creates wars. Their
simulation has the potential to be translated into the real.
Steven Poole theguardian.com, Wednesday 7 March 2007 09.12 EST,
the war was conducted as a media spectacle.
Yet Baudrillard was pointing out that
Rehearsed as a wargame or simulation, it was then enacted for the viewing
public as a simulation: as a news event, with its paraphernalia of embedded
journalists and missile's-eye-view video cameras, it was a videogame. The
real violence was thoroughly overwritten by electronic narrative: by
simulation. Such had been Baudrillard's name for the defining problem of the age since the 1970s,
when he wrote that the Marxian problem of class struggle had been replaced, in
the "post-industrial" era, with the problem of simulation . He thus anticipated, by a
decade or two, later arguments about the nature of "virtual reality". Pop culture paid tribute to
The Matrix, about a near-
Baudrillard's prescience in Andy and Larry Wachowski's 1999 film
future Earth where human society is a simulation designed by malign
machines to keep us enslaved. Hacker hero Neo (Keanu Reeves) hides his contraband software
in a hollowed-out copy of one of the philosopher's books, and rebel chief Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne)
quotes Baudrillard's most famous formula: "Welcome to the desert of the real." Baudrillard was invited to
collaborate on the sequels, but declined. He later protested wryly that The Matrix had got him wrong:
"The most embarrassing part of the film is that the new problem posed by
simulation is confused with its classical, Platonic treatment ... The Matrix is
surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce."
Impacts
Solvency
 Aff gets coopted
Their claims of impending doom mean that capitalism has
already strangled the aff. The economy coopts the state

We live, however, in a different political moment. The state is no longer the

center of politics. Neoliberalism has made a bonfire of the sovereign
principles embodied in the social contract. Nor can we simply diagnose
twentyfirst-century forms of oppression and exploitation by relying on well-
rehearsed orthodoxies of our recent past . With power and its modalities of
violence having entered into the global space of flowsdetached from the
controlling political interests of the nation-state utilizing technologies far
beyond those imagined in the most exaggerating of twentieth-century fictions
the dystopian theorists of yesteryear prove to be of limited use . 25 The
virtues of political affirmation and confidence appear increasingly to have
fallen prey to formations of global capitalism and its engulfing webs of
precarity that have reduced human life to the task of merely being able to
survive. Individual and collective agencies are not only under siege to a
degree unparalleled at any other time in history, but have become
depoliticized, overcome by a culture of anxiety, in-security, commodification,
and privatization. More specifically, under neoliberal rule the vast majority
are forced to live a barely sustainable precariousness and to accept that our
contemporary society is naturally precarious. That the future is a terrain of
endemic and unavoidable catastrophe is taken as given in most policy circles.
Dystopia, in other words, is no longer the realm of scientific fictionas
suggested, for instance, by increasingly urgent recent climate reports
warning that the integrity of the planets diversitysustaining biosphere is
collapsing. It is the dominant imaginary for neoliberal governance and its
narcissistic reasoning.
Cap Stuff
 Disposable Futurism
The world of the aff is a world in which futures are
considered disposable and that the only way to survive is
to trust the system in which they participate in. This
world is rendered dead. Their claim that they are the only
option and that without them there is impending doom
recreates every form of violence

There is, however, more at stake here than the contemporary plight of those
millions forced to live in intolerable conditions . What we will argue throughout
this book is that contemporary forms of disposability are so abhorrent
precisely because they now shape disposable futures. The future now
appears to us as a terrain of endemic catastrophe and disorder from which
there is no clear escape except to continue to show allegiance to those
predatory formations that put us there in the first place. Devoid of any
alternative image of the world, we are requested merely to see the world as
predestined and catastrophically fated. Frederic Jamesons claim, then, that it
is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is the end of capitalism 32
is more than a reflection on the poverty of contemporary imaginations . It is
revealing of the nihilism of our times which forces us to accept that the only
world conceivable is the one we are currently forced to endure. A world that
is brutally reproduced and forces us all to consume its spectacles of violence,
and demands we accept that all things are ultimately built to be vulnerable.
In this suffocating climate, we are indoctrinated to imagine that the best we
can hope for is to be connected to some fragile and precarious life-support
systemthe neoliberal grid of credit, precarious insurance, and privilege
that may be withdrawn from us at any moment.
 Cap Stuff
THEIR CLAIM THAT THERE IS VIOLENCE THAT THEY CAN
EASILY SOLVE IS ROOTED IN THE NEOLIBERAL ECONOMY
OF SUFFERING AND ENSURES ENDLESS CAPITALISM AND
VIOLENCE

At the same time, under the interlocking regimes of neoliberal power,

violence appears so arbitrary and thoughtless that it lacks the need for any
justification, let alone claims to justice and accountability . It is truly as
limitless as it appears banal. All that matters instead is to re-create the very
conditions to further and deepen the crises of neoliberal rule. Violence, with
its ever-present economy of uncertainty, fear, and terror, is no longer merely
a side effect of police brutality, war, or criminal behavior; it has become
fundamental to neoliberalism as a particularly savage facet of capitalism. And
in doing so it has turned out to be central to legitimating those social
relations in which the political and pedagogical are redefined in order to
undercut possibilities for authentic democracy . Under such circumstances,
the social becomes retrograde, emptied of any democratic values, and
organized around a culture of shared anxieties rather than shared
responsibilities. The contemporary world, then the world of neoliberalism
creates the most monstrous of illusions, one that functions by hiding things in
plain sight. We see this most troublingly played out as its simulated
spectacles of destruction are scripted in such a way as to support the
narrative that violence itself is enjoying a veritable decline as a result of
liberal influence and pacification . Howard Zinn understood this perversion
better than most: I start from the supposition that the world is topsyturvy,
that things are all wrong, that the wrong people are in jail and the wrong
people are out of jail, that the wrong people are in power and the wrong
people are out of power, that the wealth is distributed in this country and the
world in such a way as not simply to require small reform but to require a
drastic reallocation of wealth. I start from the supposition that we dont have
to say too much about this because all we have to do is think about the state
of the world today and realize that things are all upside down.
Militarism/Destruction
 Militarism/Destruction
Endless militarism, cultural destruction, loss of ethics,
blab la bla
Giroux and Evans
Imagine a world where spectacles of violence have become so ubiquitous
that it is no longer possible to identify any clear civic, social, or ethical
qualities in the enforced social order. Imagine a world where those who live
on the margins of such a social order are condemned for their plight, while
those who control the political processes prosper from those very policies
that bring about social abandonment and human destruction . Imagine a
world where the technological promise of human connectivity is supplanted
by forms of surveillance that encourage citizens to actively participate in
their own inescapable oppression. Imagine a world that proclaims an end to
the brutality of colonialism, all the while continuing to consciously vilify,
target, incarcerate, and kill those of a different color. Imagine a world where
the forces of militarism have become so ingrained that they are inseparable
from the daily functioning of civic life. Imagine a world where the institutions
tasked with producing the most brilliant and publicly engaged minds are put
to the service of an uncompromising war machine . And imagine a world that
has lost all faith in its ability to envisagelet alone createbetter futures,
condemning its citizens instead to a desolate terrain of inevitable
catastrophe. The great tragedy of the current historical moment is that we
can imagine this world all too easily, for it is the picture of the world that
dominates the realities of our present condition. It is a world most people
experience on a daily basisa world that has become normalized and for
which there is no immediate alternativea world we understand as
neoliberalism.
Alternatives
Poetry
 Here you go Soren
The alt is poetry and radical imagination

The power and forcefulness of Freires works are to be found in the tensions,
conflicts, poetry, and politics that make it a project for thinking about
(non)violence meaningfully. Siding with the disempowered of history those
at the raw ends of tyrannyFreires work calls for a more poetic image of
thought that is a way of reclaiming power by reimagining the space and
practice of cultural and political resistance. His work thus represents a textual
borderland where poetry slips into liberation politics, and solidarity becomes
a song for the present begun in the past while waiting to be heard in the
future. Freire, no less trenchant in his critique of illegitimate rule, refuses to
dwell in hopelessness. His resistance is empowering because it is infused with
a fearless belief in peoples abilities and finds reasons to rejoice in the
transformative possibilities of living: The more radical the person is, the more
fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can
transform it. This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the
world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into a
dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the
proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he
or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side.
Reimagine
 Critique of Violence
Alt is green, link is yellow
Alt: Our alternative is to develop a critique of violence
which reflects our violent system of capital. We must fully
reject the aff and question anything that is presented by
an image of violence
Link: They link on their politics of disposability and their
individuality in which they see themselves as saviors. This
individuality means that the larger system crushes their
plan meaning they have no solvency
There is no greater task today than to develop a critique of violence adequate
to our deeply unjust, inequitable, and violent times. Only then might we
grasp the magnitude and depths of suffering endured on a daily basis by
many of the worlds citizens. Only then might we move beyond the conceit of
a neoliberal project, which has normalized violence such that its worst
manifestations become part of our cultural pastimes. And only then might
we reignite a radical imagination that is capable of diagnosing the violence of
the present in such a manner that we have the confidence to rethink the
meaning of global citizenship in the twenty-first century. Following on from
the enduring legacy and inspiration of Zinn and other cautionary voices of
political concern such as Paulo Freire, our critique begins from the supposition
that mass violence today must be understood by comprehending the ways in
which systemic cruelty is transformed into questions of individual pathology.
What is more, with the burden of guilt placed on the shoulders of the already
condemned, those whose lives are rendered disposable, we must question
more rigorously the imaginaries of violence, which instigate a forced
partaking in a system that encourages the subjugated to embrace their
oppression as though it were their liberation. Nowhere is this more apparent
today than in the doctrine of resilience which, as critiqued elsewhere, forces
us to accept our vulnerabilities without providing us with the tools for genuine
transformation of those systematic processes that render us insecure in the
first place. Neoliberalisms culture of violence is reinforced by what Zsuza
Ferge calls the individualization of the social, in which all traces of the
broader structural forces producing a range of social problems such as
widening inequality and mass poverty disappear. Under the regime of
neoliberalism, individual responsibility becomes the only politics that matters
and serves to blame those who are susceptible to larger systemic forces.
Even though such problems are not of their own making, neoliberalisms
discourse insists that the fate of the vulnerable is a product of personal issues
ranging from weak character to bad choices or simply moral deficiencies. This
makes it easier for its advocates to argue that poverty is a deserved
condition.
 Reimagine
Their game of violence means that they will never solve
the harms they claim. The alt is to completely reject the
affirmatives political games of losers and winners. We do
not call for a rejection of all images of violence, but the
affs whole speech is about how they solve extinction and
suffering. The alt is key to resolving violence. The alt is to
simply do the plan without any representation of violence

Our critique begins from the realization that violence has become ubiquitous ,
settling like some all-enveloping excremental mist . . . that has permeated
every nook of any institution or being that has real influence on the way we
live now. 22 We cannot escape its spectre. Its presence is everywhere . It is
hardwired into the fabric of our digital DNA. Capitalism in fact has always
thrived on its consumption. There is, after all, no profit in peace . We are not
calling here for the censoring of all representations of violence as if we could
retreat into some sheltered protectorate. That would be foolish and
intellectually dangerous. Our claim is both that the violence we are exposed
to is heavily mediated, and that as such we are witness to various spectacles
that serve a distinct political function, especially as they either work to
demonize political resistance or simply extract from its occurrence (fictional
and actual) any sense of political context and critical insight. Moving beyond
the spectacle by making visible the reality of violence in all of its modes is
both necessary and politically important. What we need then is an ethical
approach to the problem of violence such that its occurrence is intolerable to
witness. Exposing violence is not the same as being exposed to it, though the
former too often comes as a result of the latter . The corrupting and punishing
forms taken by violence today must be addressed by all people as both the
most important element of power and the most vital of forces shaping social
relationships under the predatory formation of neoliberalism. Violence is both
symbolic and material in its effects and its assaults on all social relations,
whereas the mediation of violence coupled with its aesthetic regimes of
suffering is a form of violence that takes as its object both memory and
thought. It purges the historical record, denying access to the history of a
more dignified present, purposefully destroying the ability to connect forms of
struggle across the ages. Memory as such is fundamental to any ethics of
responsibility. Our critique of violence begins, then, as an ethical imperative.
It demands a rigorous questioning of the normalized culture of violence in
which we are now immersed. It looks to the past so that we may understand
the violence of our present. It looks to the ways that ideas about the future
shape the present such that we learn to accept a world that is deemed to be
violent by design. This requires a proper critical reading of the way violence is
mediated in our contemporary moment; how skewed power relations and
propagators of violence are absolved of any wider blame in a pedagogical
and political game that permits only winners and losers; how any act of
injustice is made permissible in a world that enshrines systemic cruelty.

The alt is to reimagine the world to create radical

democracy united with politically liberating and poetic
alternatives
Giroux and Evans
This is a problem we unfortunately find evident in dominating strands of
leftist thought which continue to try to resurrect the language, dogmatism,
and scientific idealism of yesteryear. Rather than being mined for its insights
and lessons for the present, history has become frozen for too many on the
left for whom crippling orthodoxies and time-capsuled ideologies serve to
disable rather than enable both the radical imagination and an emancipatory
politics. There can be no twentieth-century solutions to twenty-first-century
problems, what is needed is a new radical imagination that is able to mobilize
alternative forms of social agency. It is therefore hoped that the book will
both serve as a warning against the already present production of our
disposable futures, and provide a modest contribution to the much needed
conversation for more radically poetic and politically liberating alternatives.
 Solves Affs Politics
The alt resolves the affs bad politics

There is an important point to stress here regarding the logics of brutality.

Violence is easily condemned when it appears exceptional. This also
unfortunately precludes more searching and uncomfortable questions.
Normalized violence, by contrast, represents a more formidable challenge,
requiring a more sophisticated and learned response. Exposing more fully
how these normalized cultures of cruelty shape the historic moment is the
main purpose of this work, as it is integral to the critical imagination and
those forms of political agency necessary for successfully living in a
nonviolent and civilian future.
 Solves Violence
The alt is crucial to resolving violence only peaceful non
government protests can real change

Zygmunt Bauman has taken this further by showing us how the most
appalling acts of mass slaughter have been perfectly in keeping with the
modern compulsion to destroy lives for more progressive times to come. 12
Acts of non-violence, in fact, are the exceptional moments of our more recent
history. They also confirm Hannah Arendts insistence that power and
violence are qualitatively different. 13 There is no doubt something truly
powerful, truly exceptional, to the examples set by Martin Luther King Jr.,
Rosa Parks, Mahatma Gandhi, and indigenous movements such as the
Zapatistas of Mexico, whose choice of non-violence as an insurgent strategy
reveals more fully the violence of oppressive contemporary regimes. Violence
easily deals with violence on its own terms. Carlos Marighella was wrong to
suggest otherwise. 14 What violence, however, cannot deal with, except by
issuing more violence, remains the power of a dignified response and
movements of collective resistance by those who refuse to get caught up in a
cycle of cruelty that corrupts every good intention . Frantz Fanon was most
clear in this respect. 15 Who are the wretched, after all, if not those who fail
to see that their recourse to violence only produces a mirror image of that
which was once deemed intolerable?
 Good with Cap
Disaster language is cap it creates endless cultural
destruction
Giroux and Evans
With this in mind, our decision to write this book was driven by a fundamental
need to rethink the concept of the political itself. Just as neoliberalism has
made a bonfire of the sovereign principle of the social contract, so too has it
exhausted its claims to progress and reduced politics to a blind science in
ways that eviscerate those irreducible qualities that distinguish humans from
other predatory animalsnamely love, cooperation, community, solidarity,
creative wonderment, and the drive to imagine and explore more just and
egalitarian worlds than the one we have created for ourselves. Neoliberalism
is violence against the cultural conditions and civic agency that make
democracy possible. Its relentless mechanisms of privatization,
commodification, deregulation, and militarization cannot acknowledge or
tolerate a formative culture and social order in which non-market values as
solidarity, civic education, community building, equality, and justice are
prioritized.
AT
Link
 AT No Link
This is not a random act of spectacle it is a strategy.
Their initial link will not stop here judge this is the start
of the year and you must reject them now so that they
learn not to use impacts like that again

When dealing with the vexing ethical dimensions of what it means to witness
aggression today, it is worth bearing in mind that there is no such thing as a
random act of political violence. A defining characteristic of such violence is
its public displaythe spectacle of its occurrence that through its very
performance makes a metaphysical claim such that the individual act relates
to a broader historical narrative. Being a witness as such means that we need
to understand more fully how the justification of violence is presented as a
matter of rational choice and the broader historical narrative in which this
reasoning must be situated. Violence is never unitary. There is always a
process. The images produced from the victimization and the trauma it
fosters resonate far beyond the initial acts perpetrated. The spectacle of
violence is therefore more than a mere aftereffect of the original act of
violation. Violence continues to occur in the imagination of the victims who
have been removed from the realm of moral subjects. 82 It haunts the
victim, forcing conformity to its modes of suffocation and despair . What is
more, the cycle continues through the imposition of uncontroversial claims
that sanction violence as retribution. This unending process offers no way out
of the dialectical tragedy. Indeed, as Fanon understood, the dialectic
arrangement is absolutely integral to the normalization of the violence and
perpetuates the (non)value of the lives that are all too easily forgotten as the
detritus and excess of such violence. So how might we emancipate ourselves
from the daily spectacles of violence we are forced to endure so that we dont
shamefully compromise with the oppressive forms of power?

Read VanLuvanee
AT You link
AT We Solve Cap
Impact
Alt
AT Cede the Political
 Cards for Giroux Aff
Surveillance is a key part of current dystopian politics

Dystopian politics has become mainstream politics as the practice of

disposability has intensified, and more and more communities are now
considered excess, consigned to zones of social abandonment , 29
surveillance, and incarceration. The expansive politics of disposability can be
seen in the rising numbers of homeless, the growing army of debt-ridden
students whose prospects remain bleak, those lacking basic necessities amid
widening income disparities, the surveillance of immigrants, the school-to-
prison pipeline, and the widespread destruction of the middle class by new
forms of debt servitude. 30 Citizens, as Gilles Deleuze foresaw, 31 are now
reduced to data, consumers, and commodities and as such inhabit identities
in which they increasingly become unknowables, with no human or civic
rights and with no one accountable for their condition.