Resolved means opening possibility for emotive or instrumental response.

Turner and Avison, ‘92 – Harvie Branscomb Chair and Professor of Sociology, Professor of Psychiatry
at Vanderbilt and Professor of Sociology at Western (R. Jay and William R. “Innovations in the
Measurement of Life Stress: Crisis Theory and the Significance of Event Resolution,” Journal of Health
and Social Behavior, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Mar., 1992), pp. 36-50)
Erikson’s (1959) formulation emphasizes the individual’s constant and active inter- course with the environment as crucial for development.
Problems are encountered and resolved, with varying degrees of success. Erikson’s use of the term resolved or resolution in
describing a successful crisis outcome does not seem to imply that the issue is solved or cleared up. Rather, it refers to
a temporary or- enduring positive decision or settling in relation to the personal meanings of the event.
For Erikson, a positive balance is achieved between alternative self attitudes that are experienced as senses
of how and who one is. The criteria for these senses are “a crisis, beset with fears, or at least a general anxiousness or tension, seems
to be resolved, in that the child suddenly seems to ‘grow together’ both psychologically and physi- cally” (Erikson 1959, p. 75). When
resolved, the individual may emerge from these engagements with a new skill, confidence, or other
enabling self attitude that is added to his or her repertoire of responses or coping mechanisms. This then
increases the probabil- ity of success in future encounters. The developmental process thus may involve a synthesizing of
new experiences into an evolving self perception and/or the accumulation of skills or strategies for
instrumental or emotional response. While Erikson specifically used the term “vulnerability” to characterize
the major corollary of crisis experiences, he implies a meaning that might better be described as openness-
openness to both harm and enhancement. This is evident from his contention that personality growth occurs through the
resolution of normative crises and hence that the disequilibria which characterize these crises offer potential for forward developmental leaps
as well as vulnerability.

The USFG doesn’t have just one referent- their definition empowers patriotic
nationalism and enables violence
Mayne, ’11 [Michael Mayne, PhD in Philosophy from University of Florida; “NOSTALGIA AND THE
POSTWAR AMERICAN SOCIAL”; 2011;
http://ufdcimages.uflib.ufl.edu/UF/E0/04/32/85/00001/mayne_m.pdf]ALo
With her ―theory of infantile citizenship, Lauren Berlant discusses an example of narratives in American culture based on a kind of placial
agency, empowered by the poetic theme of authentic individualism, and performed in rituals of ideological recognition. Berlant argues that
national discourse in the United States interpellates a narrative of citizenship by positing Washington D.C. as
―a place of national mediation, where a variety of nationally inflected media come into visible and sometimes incommensurate contact‖ (25).
Washington is more than a site of sublime relevance and a metonymical substitute for the United States; it
is a narrative that physically tests citizen competence. Americans who travel to Washington are ―playing at being
American in a drama that requires them to ―be capable not just of imagining, but of managing being American. This plot reflects the
―patriotic view of national identity, which seeks to use identification with the ideal nation to trump or subsume all other notions of
personhood‖ (27). The embedded significance of notions of personhood necessarily produces a need for these notions to be articulated, insofar
as these notions are significant. In
the way consumers are created by products, views of national identity
necessitate the existence of individuals to enact the drama of patriotic representation.49 The pilgrimage-to-
Washington narrative articulates notions of individuality, which situate ―personhood‖ in relation to the national body, a formulation that, via
reflection, occasions a pilgrimage to Washington. This narrative
simulates a ―the national body with a prefabricated
system that expediently concludes the pursuit to realize a notion of individuality.50 The individual
becomes patriotic. Ideological apparatuses are constitutionally impelled to seek out narratives as systems of promulgation. These
narratives, ―which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and, which, after long usage, seem to a
people to be fixed, canonical, and binding (Nietzsche 44), provide ideological apparatuses with requisite epistemological centers and, over time,
form a critical mass of recognition in social discourse. The
desire of subjects to fulfill basic requirements of
communicative action with an epistemological system that wards off the dread of entropy with signs
of structure and meaning diminishes their critical faculties. This desire empowers narratives like those
of national identity, which allows citizens/subjects to ―‗forget‘…their utopian political identifications
in order to be politically happy and economically functional (Berlant 29). Investment in such systems of
representation insures parameters, a field of doxa minus competing discourses, a tentative escape from
nihilism, and, ultimately, hope.51 The more subjects invest in these constructs and reflect their tenets in
individual practices, the more powerful these ideologies become. As they integrate their selves with
ideological systems, these individuals not only alienate themselves from their real conditions of
experience, this alienation and these systems of representation become their conditions of experience.

FW is an exclusionary praxis that makes ongoing eugenics and extermination

inevitable
Brown 11 (Rebecca Dosch Brown is the Program Coordinator of MN LEND (Leadership Education in
Neurodevelopmental and related Disabilities) and a Senior Academic Advisor at the University of
Minnesota, 10/03/11, “‘Screw normal’: Resisting the myth of normal by questioning media’s depiction
of people with autism and their families”, University of Minnesota, https://wayback.archive-
it.org/338/20111003144814/http://blog.lib.umn.edu/gara0030/iggds/Screw%20Normal_FINAL_Dosch%
20Brown.pdf)

The one societal need in our society that is often unacknowledged, silenced, and left unexamined is that
humans have, as Michalko quoted Cornel West, the “deep, visceral need to belong” (Michalko, 2002, p. 81) —
all of us struggle with full acceptance of ourselves and our desire to be seen as acceptable or welcome in a society that loves to label people.
The media creates walls between its ideals and the people it views as Others, such as when the media
views people with autism as “abnormal mysteries”. We are being taught that differences occurring from
autism are wrong, and sadly too many families depicted in the media perpetuate this negative view of
their own children. When thinking of “normal” henceforth, let‘s consider what Michalko wrote about society and his blindness. He
explained that, although society might have found ways technologically for him to participate (he is a
professor), he is still seen as “strange” because he is blind. He said the difference in his blindness must
be grappled with inside his being in “a space between nature and culture” and “normal and abnormal”
(2002, p. 83), and it is within this confusing, unmarked space where he has had to build his own identity. By
moving through the world with his “body of blindness,” Michalko has projected himself into the “social space,” just as my son must project his
own self, by moving through the social space with his ‘mind of difference‘; thus, society
reacts to people who have disabilities
who cannot live up to the mythical norms with “help,” “pity,” “ridicule,” “unease,” and “curiosity”
(2002, p. 88), and it results in an unequal power structure that creates treacherous terrain for all of us
who have been Othered. Michalko (2002) noted that mainstream Western society views all disabilities as
abnormal, and it thus approaches people with disability as tragic people who live lives “not worth
living”; they are seen as the Other, as objects of pity, both “vulnerable and fragile” (p.68). The
complexity, diversity, and range of differences of all human beings in this world are erased, denied, and
ignored under a banner of ‘sameness’ or ‘normalcy’ and those who cannot or will not conform are
silenced and lumped into the category of Other, and dealt with suspicion for not conforming to social
construction of what is acceptable in appearance, behavior, and experience. Eugenics, the academic Phil
Smith (2008) has concluded, is still very much present in societal attitudes toward disability . Eugenics
formalized “the Normal, a cultural landscape outlined in order to support the hegemony of its
inhabitants, a liberalist bourgeois class of white, able-bodied men” (P. Smith, p. 419). By silencing those with
perceived disabilities (or those with a particular perceived race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation,
etc.) and deeming them as lesser than ‘normal‘ humans—society is able to continue to deny that ‘being
normal‘ is actually a socially constructed myth (Michalko, 2002, p. 69). Phil Smith further pointed out that not
so long ago those who committed the war crimes by killing or sterilizing people they had deemed of
inferior intelligence in the Nazis T-4 project were consistently given less severe convictions and higher
acquittal rates (P. Smith, 2008, p. 421)—revealing, indeed, that as a society we devalue the lost lives of those
considered too different from the mythical norm, which we will demonstrate later is a devaluation of
human life very much alive in media depiction of autism. Society rarely has ears for the voices or rooms
reserved for those with differences who think otherwise, and it rarely realizes that indeed people with
differences also have value and critical roles to play in society. The media maintains this gaping silence as well.
Society, Michalko has argued, either expects those deemed “abnormal” will “get through” their differences by
adapting to the dominant rules, so as to be less noticed, or it expects them to “get out” by removing
themselves from view, by being silent and isolated (Michalko, 2002, p. 75); and some experts, doctors,
educators, and therapists make a sizable income from attempting to enforce these societal expectations
on families.

Cadavers DA – humanist limits on the topic prevent the destruction of subjectivities

Snaza and Weaver 15 (Nathan Snaza is a Director of the Bridge to Success Program and member of
the English Department at the University of Richmond, USA. John Weaver is a Professor of Curriculum,
Foundations & Reading at Georgia Southern University, “Posthumanism and Educational Research”,
University of Richmond, UR Scholarship Repository) AqN *modified for gendered language*
Planning, in a different way, takes us to ways the human understands itself in relation to machiniality. However smart a computer is, we are told, it is no match for
the human brain because it is materially limited by what it has been programmed (by a human) to do. What this difference amounts to is saying that computers
cannot "plan" beyond what a human has "planned" for them (Blade Runner, the Terminator movies, etc., are a symptom of our fear that this is not the case). In
both cases, we are told that the human—and the human alone—is capable of planning.

Moving into the educational context, the thing that the human plans above all else is the desired form
an educated human will take. As Rousseau wrote in Emile (1979): "remember that before daring to undertake the formation of a man, one must
have made oneself a man" (95). Those who are already "human" will control the educations of the young so that

they too become "human." The most important "learning outcome" (to use the language of
contemporary schooling) is that students become "humans" capable of participating in the global
economy as productive workers and consumers. The posthumanist challenge is to give up on planning in
order to actualize the kinds of potential indicated in a Spinozist immanent ethics: We don't know yet
what a body can do, nor do we know what we beings who are used to thinking of ourselves as "human"
are capable of. If giving up on planning seems too much a stretch at the moment, at the very least
posthumanist politics would require us to rethink what a democracy means by extending the
parameters of who and what is per- mitted to participate in and be part of a "public" and "public"
debate. According to Jane Bennett (2010, 101), publics do not exist naturally; they are invented,
configured, and reconfigured depending on the topic at hand. They are also not solely "human":
"Problems give rise to publics, publics are groups of bodies with the capacity to affect and be affected."
The newly sworn in mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, has proclaimed that the horse-drawn carriages in New York City are examples of animal cruelty. The
unionized represented by the Teamsters have fired back, citing all the different ways the horses are treated in humane ways, including, since a 2010 agreement, the
horses' entitlement to vacation days. In the middle of this public debate are the horses, who in many paradoxical ways have more "rights" than many who live in
New York City or anywhere (most work- ing Americas are not entitled to vacation days or suitable shelter). How the horses are treated, viewed, positioned, and
represented demonstrates how animals affect and are affected by public debates, even if this also dramatizes how the animals are systematically excluded from
participa- tion. If the mayor succeeds in banning carriages in the city, the futures of the drivers will be placed in doubt, but so will those of the horses. For Bennett
(2010, 108), what this kind of debate does is to create what she calls a "vital materialist theory of democracy" that "seeks to transform the divide between speaking
subjects and mute objects into a set of dif- ferential tendencies and variable capabilities." A
vital materialist theory of democracy
requires humans to plan differently, to account not only for the different human constituencies, but also
the nonhuman participants in public debates. This requirement will not only transform planning in
public settings; it will certainly make it more complex and multilayered in a way that goes beyond
humanist "democracy."

Affect DA – affective intensity underpins political engagement. Their disavowal of

affect creates a democratic model of distorted communication that leads to failed
politics.
Livingston, ‘12 [Alexander Livingston, Assistant Prof of Gov’t @ Cornell. postdoctoral fellow in the
department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, and a doctoral fellow at the Centre for
Ethics at the University of Toronto, “Avoiding Deliberative Democracy?: Micropolitics, Manipulation, and
the Public Sphere” Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 45, No. 3, 2012]
intellectualism and the visceral register The first step in exploring the potential of William Connolly’s reluctant theory of deliberative democracy
is to come to terms with the reasons why he thinks extant accounts of communicative politics are insufficient. Intellectualism, Connolly
argues, is the grand failing of deliberative democracy. In accusing deliberative democracy of intellectualism, he is not issuing a
by-now familiar criticism of deliberative rationalism. To say that deliberative democracy is guilty of intellectualism is not to say that it is blind to
questions of power, or identity, or difference—or at least it’s not only to say this—but rather that deliberative
models of
democracy are working with a faulty conception of thinking. They have been captured by what Gilles
Deleuze calls “the image of thought”—the idea that thinking is an autonomous, linguistically mediated
process of mind that is oriented toward coherence and truth (1994, 129–67). Deliberative thinking takes
place at one relatively transparent register where our reasons for action can be compared, reasoned
about, and revised through the force of the better argument. This image of thought is intellectualist
because it fails to see how thought is a layered process of neural, perceptual, and embodied activity not
reducible to conceptual ratiocination alone. “Attempts to give priority to the highest and conceptually
most sophisticated brain nodules in thinking and judgment,” Connolly argues, “may encourage those invested
in these theories to underestimate the importance of body image, unconscious motor memory, and
thought-imbued affect” (2002, 10). Against the intellectualist image of thought, Connolly argues that thinking is distributed
across multiple registers that make possible “visceral modes of appraisal” (1999, 27). It is these deep,
intensive, and reactive visceral modes of thinking and judgment that the deliberative image of thinking
overlooks. Disgust, for example, is a visceral response that makes your stomach turn. It seems to well up
inside you without your willing it. The values and beliefs of others can sometimes stimulate this kind of
feeling, say, if they present you with a defense of cloning, or euthanasia, or gay marriage, as the case
may be. You can’t always put your finger on what it is that strikes you as so disgusting and morally
contaminating about such proposals, but sometimes you just feel that they are plain wrong. We’re
unable to provide defensible reasons for our responses. Sometimes things just rub us the wrong way.
Connolly’s point is that visceral and embodied responses like disgust, shame, and hatred come to play a role in
political decision making—as they evidently do in political deliberations about matters such as cloning,
euthanasia, and gay marriage—and that a deliberative approach is poorly equipped to deal with them.
Deliberative democrats either require that these sorts of affective feelings are purged from the public
sphere as unfortunate distortions of real communication, or they suggest that they can be subject to
deliberation and argument just as any other sort of belief, interest, or prejudice can be. Connolly thinks that
both of these approaches are bound to fail. Visceral reactions are not conceptually sophisticated
thoughts and as such are not amenable to deliberation, argumentation, or verbal persuasion. The
exchange of validity claims alone is not enough to stop your stomach from churning when you think
about the right to die. Deliberative democrats need to learn “how much more there is to thinking than
argument” and to begin experimenting with alternative forms of political engagement (1999, 149). Because
political judgment is so often carried out at the level of this visceral or virtual register, deliberation
cannot provide a privileged or efficacious form of participation, justification, or transformation. To
corroborate these claims about the multiple registers of thinking, Connolly turns to recent findings in neuroscience that
suggest a more intimate relationship between reason, the emotions, and the body than the
intellectualist account assumes. Like some other political theorists, Connolly hopes that a closer engagement with neurology and
cognitive science will provide grounds for a more adequate account of subjectivity, reason, and ethics.3 The kind of thinking that intellectualists
privilege— sophisticated, conceptual, reflective, deliberative, and linguistically mediated thought—pertains to the activity of the largest part of
the brain, the cerebral cortex. It is through the rich and complex layers of neural activity in the cortex that we can perform intricate activities
like planning, speaking, reasoning, and arguing. What recent findings in neuroscience suggest, however, is that cortical activity is not
autonomous and is in fact in some ways subservient to the parts of the brain that control emotions, memory, and affect.4 In particular, the
cortex responds to information from the limbic system, the small curved part of the brain below the cortex that controls emotion and fine
motor movement. Made up of the basal ganglia, the hippocampus, and the amygdala, the limbic system enables the fast, intensive, and
reactive action of affects. The jolt of fear that makes one’s hair stand on end or the disgust that we feel in the pit of our stomachs is the work of
the part of the limbic system called the amygdala. The sort of reactions governed by this system are an evolutionary necessity for a species that
needs to appraise and respond to dangerous situations quickly and effectively without much cognitive expenditure. The decision to jump out of
the way of a speeding car needs to happen in a split second. It is not the sort of situation that allows you to deliberate about the relative merits
of your different options before acting. But this is not to say that the limbic system is entirely thoughtless. It is not concerned with
sophisticated, conceptual, and deliberative thinking, but its actions certainly are symbolically mediated or “thought imbued” in some sense (the
expression is Connolly’s). These
intense affective responses are not entirely biologically determined but instead
take a fair deal of cultural learning. The limbic system in a sense learns or records cultural standards of
what is dangerous and what is disgusting and then habituates them as automated response.5 Between
the cortex and limbic system there is a “feedback loop” of mutual influence through which these fast,
affective, “proto-thoughts” of the limbic system shape the slow, reflective thinking of the cortex (2002).
The existence of these intensive, instinctive elements moving below the register of reflective judgment
means that human reason is not pure and autonomous but rather is shaped in a complex way at the
neural level by the influence of the emotions and affects.6 David Hume, it would seem, was right to say that reason is
in fact the slave of the passions. And what this means for politics is that the emotions and affects that
shape and guide thinking are themselves deeply influenced by values and opinions that we may or may
not actually want to endorse. Racist, sexist, homophobic, and other ideological sentiments may lodge
themselves deeply into this “bodybrain- culture network” (2002). Where this is the case, valid and sound
argumentation is at a loss to dislodge them and the force of the better argument may be powerless to
persuade us to respect, tolerate, or trust each other in the ways that democratic cooperation require.
Connolly explains: Culturally preorganized charges shape perception and judgment in ways that exceed the
picture of the world supported by the models of calculative reason, intersubjective culture, and
deliberative democracy. They show us how linguistically complex brain regions respond not only to events in
the world but also, proprioceptively, to cultural habits, skills, memory traces, and affects mixed into our
muscles, skin, gut, and cruder brain regions. (2002, 36) This all culminates in a critique of deliberative
models of democracy: the inability of practical reason to influence these potentially dangerous or
hateful “culturally preorganized charges” points to its undoing.
truth testing does not apply in a moment when deliberative democracy under Trump
has become immoral and truth has broken down—there is nothing to test
Lever 2015. Annabelle Lever is Associate Professor of Normative Political Theory at the University of
Geneva, Switzerland. Her research focuses on democratic theory, privacy, sexual and racial equality and
intellectual property. She is the author of On Privacy (Routledge, 2011) and the editor of New Frontiers
in the Philosophy of Intellectual Property (Cambridge University Press, 2012). She is at work on a book,
tentatively called, A Democratic Conception of Ethics. “Democracy and epistemology : a reply to
Talisse”. Phil Papers.] VR

Talisse’s objections to philosopher kings and to ‘open’ but undemocratic societies do not seem to help us
here, because they do not illuminate the relative importance of truth and self-government to democracies, real or
ideal. Talisse’s argument for democratic institutions - as opposed to the best of the alternatives - turn on
the idea that we need to be able to ‘monitor’ our cognitive environment, in order to ensure that it
remains conducive to evidence-tracking and responsiveness, once it has reached that state. Platonic
kings are absolute monarchs, and so people may be unable to monitor, let alone to change, policies
that affect their access to truth and their ability to distinguish it from falsehood. So too, Talisse thinks, with any
arrangements that, however constitutional and liberal, fall short of democracy. Hence, he believes, our duties to track our cognitive
environment -and our interests in doing so - give us compelling reasons to favour democratic over
undemocratic governments. But this seems to overstate my epistemic reasons to support democracy,
even if we abstract from the question of whether these epistemic reasons would work if concerns for
justice, equality, freedom and self-government fail to persuade me. My faith in the epistemological qualities of my
environment may depend on what rights you have, rather than on the rights that I have myself. A commitment to moral and political equality,
after all, does not require us to suppose that we are all equally good at evaluating the epistemological quality of beliefs, let alone equally good
at creating epistemologically warranted beliefs. Consistent with the moral reasons to favour democratic over undemocratic governments, then,
I may think that we would do at least as well, epistemologically speaking, if
you had political rights and I did not; or if you
have two political votes, whereas I only have one. It is unclear why such beliefs would be unreasonable
or inconsistent with a concern for the procedural qualities of my government – with its accountability and
representativeness, for example. Nor is it clear why such beliefs must be at odds with the idea that democratic governments are legitimate in
the ways that alternatives are not. There is no particular reason to suppose that moral or political arguments for democracy must proceed via
claims about its epistemic superiority to other forms of government. So why, even if I am a convinced democrat, must I value political
accountability and representation for epistemic reasons? Why cannot I value them despite the problems that they pose to my pursuit of truth?
Talisse’s epistemic argument for democracy, then, needs further clarification of its assumptions about the content,
relationship and priority of moral and epistemic norms. Talisse is right that the epistemic warrant for our beliefs, in at least some cases, cannot
depend on the evidence we currently have, but on our reasons for thinking that we have had access to the relevant evidence. And Talisse is
right that we should therefore be concerned with the procedural as well as the substantive aspects of government, and of constitutions. But I
do not think he has shown that we must therefore favour democratic over undemocratic government
for epistemic reasons; nor why, or how, we are to do so once we doubt that democracy is morally
justified.

Can’t copy our style– presentation is indistinguishable from content– the PIC cannot
access the performance of the 1AC
Boshears 12 (Paul. “Against Paraphrase,” Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy by Graham
Harman. (Zero Books: 2012¶ PhD candidate at Europäische Universität für InterdisziplinäreStudien (the
European Graduate School) in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. rb)
Paul's research has been conducted in East Asia, West Africa, North America, andEurope. Boshears is currently occupied with the role of
learning in self-cultivation andthe affordances widespread digital publishing provides¶ Returning to the presentation of object-oriented thinking
and its relationships to Husserl and Heidegger initiated in section one of the book, section three attempts to bring together the threads: how do
style and content interact?
Style cannot be exhausted through an empirical cataloging of an author's works;¶
10¶ it cannot be paraphrased without creating something other than the objects an author creates.
Style is not simply the sum of its content, nor is it the result of the broader context of the author's
time and place. Style is a real thing, an object, and in our pursuit of what makes style, we are
frustrated by its wriggling free. Because we cannot have direct access to objects in themselves, only draw correlations about their
nature from our experiences of their sensual qualities, it typically requires a break in the habitual order of our relationships to the objects that
compose our lived experiences before we notice this fundamental tension at play. It is in these moments of breakage that a
fission is
possible, whereby our experience of the qualities of things as observers becomes so tense that we are
forced to reckon with the underlying withdrawing object that situates those associated qualities. In
these moments of fission, new objects are born.¶ 11¶ Harman contrasts the punctuatedness of fission—what he terms
“time”¶ 12¶ —with the smoothness of fusion—what he names “space.”¶ 13¶ All fissions lead to a fusion and all fusions
require a prior fission.¶ 14¶ The only contact between real objects—the observer—and the observed is
through sensual objects. Sensual objects are characterized by their style of performing their
particularity as¶ this¶ ¶ object¶ , not¶ that object over there¶ . This leads to a universe that churns,
constantly, with the generation of new objects as already existing objects are translated and/or
transduced in their relationships to other objects.¶ 15¶ Because these objects are unparaphrasable, the
sensual realm is fille dwith this constant production of objects stranger than they appear, a burbling
subterranean reality at work. Our best access to these objects comes through innuendo and allusion.¶ 16¶ Because
Lovecraft's literary style is marked by the gaps between unknowable objects and their sensible
qualities and accessible objects with a flurry of palpable surfaces, Harman presents an author whose
works speak to the pressing questions of our time.¶

Words have variable meanings that all depend on context – locking advocate into one
meaning prevents its empowering potential.
Winter 7 – University of Sheffield, UK (Christine Winter (2007): Knowledge and the curriculum:
Derrida,¶ deconstruction and ‘sustainable development’, London Review of Education, 5:1, 69-82)
Derrida opposes the assumption that language is representative of thought. He agrees¶ with the structural linguist, de Saussure, that meaning
is conveyed, not through a direct¶ correspondence between a word and a thing, but through a system of differences that¶ ascribes meaning
through ways in which the thing in question is different from other¶ things. ‘Coal’, for example, belongs to a group of words for non-renewable
energy, and¶our use of ‘coal’ to denote the combustible mineral mined from the ground is possible ¶ because of its distinction from other words
in the category, like gas and oil.¶ Derrida takes this idea further when he shows that the meanings of words are always¶ changing—a word
has a history, it twists and turns in its use—we can never fix to it a¶ particular meaning or predict the
meaning of the word we use (Derrida, 1974). He uses the¶ neologism differance to indicate that meaning is both differential
(according to its difference¶ to other words) and deferred (the word can never produce a ‘true’, fixed and stable meaning) (1982). To use the
word ‘sustainability’ again as an example—according to Derrida, the¶ meaning of the word should be allowed to unfurl—its meanings
should be allowed to reach¶ fruition and spill over—after all, the concept is
of unparalleled importance regarding the¶
future of the planet and the release of meanings may open up the possibility of something¶ better to
come. What does this first tenet mean, then, in the context of this paper? In the textbook,¶ concepts are presented as having clear, accurate,
authoritative and legitimate meaning until¶ they are encouraged to deconstruct—at this point it can be demonstrated that there is¶ more to
words than meets the eye, ‘that they exceed the boundaries they currently¶ occupy’. In spite of the aim of the textbook authors to pin down
and fix, for example, the¶ meaning of the terms ‘sustainable development’ and ‘resources’, it can be shown that the¶ language, under
deconstructive questioning, reveals more than it appears to reveal within¶ the text—the
meaning is always and already
emerging, has been influenced by its history of¶ meanings, is embedded within suppositions that have
influenced it and is wide open to an¶ ever-changing chain of meanings (Caputo, 1997). The textbook
tries to capture, tie up and,¶ in effect, fossilize the word and the world, denying its dynamism and its
responsibility to¶ open up to new ways of thinking and new ways of including the other that have
been overlooked and forgotten.

---Non unique and turn --- Imprecise language is inevitable; Rejecting specific terms
like advocate as objectionable solidifies their meaning and prevents linguistic re-
appropriation. We can use our reality to shape language and solve their offense.
Kidner 2000
David W, Nature and Psyche: Radical Environmentalism and the Politics of Subjectivity, pg 26-27

In the absence of a language that is sufficiently resonant with the natural world, we will have to make
do with what we have available; and this requires that we use words in a way that is self-critical,
inconsistent, and sometimes ironic. This will not be the postmodernist use of language that problematizes any nondiscursive structure; but rather one that
uncovers the naturalizing and legitimizing function of words so as to reveal the organic structures that they occlude. For example, in the sentence “the thug offered to rearrange my teeth,” the
denial of structure is obvious; but in the Easterbrook statement above, the word “reposition” is all to easily accepted as an “objective” description of what happened, or at least as one of many
equally valid descriptions. Similarly, words such as “pests,” “weeds,” or “development” also carry their own particular ideological baggage; and by pointing out their hidden implications we

in pointing out that language has

challenge the industrialist structures that they are part of, and so uncover the indigenous forms that lie beneath them. But

practical implications for the ecological fate of the world, we should not ignore the other side of this dialectic, for
language is itself affected by what frames it ideologically and physically . Just as those characteristics of nature that are difficult to
name tend to disappear physically from the world when we restructure it, it is equally true that what has been post physically tends to disappear linguistically and conceptually. While the first
part of this dialectic is accomplished through technological power, academia plays an important role in the second part. It is no coincidence, for example, that claims that nature is socially
constructed are usually made by writers who inhabit “overdeveloped” parts of the world such as Britain where wilderness has already been virtually eliminated; and the effect of such claims is

By making language consistent with this impoverished ecological

to deny the possibility of nature that transcends its current domesticated state.

reality and denying the possibility that is “beyond the text,” constructionism undermines any possible
role of language in pointing to and formulating states of ecosystemic health that are potential rather than
actual. In this case, the industrialist worldview becomes the only possible worldview; and the major task of environmental theory is to keep alive those ecological scenarios that do exceed
such industrialized views of nature.