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WELCOME TO NEW VEGAS

DUMAS DEBATE

WELCOME TO NEW VEGAS


Its not the destination that matters, but the journey. Its not about where you go, but how you got there. One day we reach our goal, and now point with pride to the long travels we undertook to reach it. IN fact, we were not even aware of traveling. But we got so far because we fancied at every point that we were at home. And it is only at the end that we realize the entire time we should have been singing. That the entire time we were traveling we should have been dancing. I remember driving through New Vegas, staring out the windows of the truck as we bumped down a dusty desert road. Vast expanses of nothingness surrounded me, cracked earth and red mesas blurred into a single waking dream. I could never really tell the exact moment when I fell asleep: when reality stopped being real, when rationality got turned off and the sky started to change colors. When the desert turned into oceans turned into people turned into laptop backlights turned into kaleidoscopic visions. I blink my eyes and the world clicks: Click. Now Im on the deck of the Titanic. Click. Now Im the president, addressing the people. Click. Now Im in a debate round on cross x. A voice whispers into my ear:this life which you dream must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more!1 It seems every time I wake from a dream I find myself in another nightmare; always waking up, never awakening. I open my mouth but the only words I can find on my tongue are already gone, a figment of a previous dream. Only a poem comes to my tongue, a poem that isnt mine, a poem I dreamt long ago if you were a gasping New Mexican wasteland I would learn how to irrigate, and Id dig it all myself Id dig it with my fingernails until they fell off and then Id use them as little shovels, Id drain lake after river after ocean to bring life to you and when it was all said and done, when I was finally satisfied by your satisfaction,
1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Demon parable

youd remind me how without thirst, there

WELCOME TO NEW VEGAS would be no pleasure in drinking. youd remind me of all of the animals and plants and earthly cycles that have been ruined by my actions. you would remind me of how a life full of thirst might be more meaningful than a life full of drinking.2

DUMAS DEBATE

In memoriam: deserts.

Hello: my name is debate, and Im depressed. I feel so bogged down by responsibilities as if I HAVE to act a certain way. Im not really sure why it has to be me, you know? I just want to have fun, I want to be free, but it seems like everyone is always breathing down my neck. You have to grow up to be a well respected man about town, you have to be important! You have to be tidy and proper! Be predictable, people will like you more. I think in the end it is all the same, just more and more responsibility thrown in my face. More and more things everyone tells me to do or say or be: they always tell me to drink, never be thirsty the say. They treat me like a wasteland: an emptiness, a void to be filled, a blank sheet to be drawn on. Welcome to New Vegas: hear me gasp. I see rounds every year: debaters pull recycled expando files on the same old shit. This round was Shawnee mission west; you can bet money they read the spending DA. South next round; same old ddev and wipeout blocks. SME MT round 3: the 1nc will be 3 Ts, The PIC, Wipeout, Nietzsche and politics. CCC after that; like I havent heard THAT T Bases twelve thousand times. Millard next round; expect the unexpected. Its the same routine, the same banal bullshit. Even when its wild and unpredictable its always part of the plan. Its all so rational, so calculated, so mechanical and it makes me so goddamn sick. It doesnt matter what happens, even if the plan is horrifying. For instance, if I say that tomorrow a gang banger is going to get shot, or a truck full of soldiers is gonna get blown up, no one panics because its all according to the plan.3 Dont trust whistles, nothing absurd: no garden walls. Debate has become a church full of stale air: welcome to the cult of the rational and the Good, the empire aligned against the forces of Evil and the insane. Anyone falling outside our plan: well, fuck em

2 Ego Treadmill, Anna Victoria, Connecticut, published in TeenInk 3 The Joker, The Dark Knight 4 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pg. 158=59, 1980

The judgment of God, the system of the judgment of God, the theological system, is precisely the operation of He who makes an organism, an organization of organs called the organism, because He cannot bear the BwO, because He pursues it and rips it apart so He can be first, and have the organism be first. The BwO howls:

WELCOME TO NEW VEGAS DUMAS DEBATE Theyve made me an organism! Theyve wrongfully folded me! Theyve stolen my body! The judgment of God uproots it from its immanence and makes it an organism, a signification, a subject. It is the BwO that is stratified. It swings between two poles, the surfaces of stratification into which it is recoiled, on which it submits to the judgment, and the plane of consistency in which it unfurls and opens to experimentation4 I remember my first debate round: the day I learned the rules. Ive been told to conform, told to become something Im not, a form I dont belong in, a body thats not mine. Little Gods are birthed on all sides: the ballot, the judge, the preference sheet. Dont want to read the K in front of that guy. Dont say fuck in front of her, shell knock your speaker points. Little body-snatchers throw me into alien forms. Little words instill death in me. I have been ordered, controlled, cataloged and filed like a footnote: footnote 233, they call me. "It's not up to you," said Kronman. "The discourse makes of you something. It makes of you something juridical. In your case, we just call it 233 for short." "For short?" I saw a glimmer of hope. 233 was merely a mnemonic device. "Then I don't really have to become 233?" I asked with renewed hope. "It's just a name, an address, a handle?" "You're not paying attention. We call you 233 for short. But once the work is finished, that's all you are: You are "233 for short.' You don't exist except in the mode of being-for-short. Think of it in Heideggerian terms. Not so much being-there. But rather being-for-short. Nothing else is left of you."5 They tell me Ill be-for-short, nothing but a footnote at the bottom of the latest wiki page. Round 5, UT. They tell me: You will be organized, you will be an organism, you will articulate your bodyotherwise youre just depraved. You will be signifier and signified, interpreter and interpretedotherwise youre just a deviant. You will be a subject, nailed down as one, a subject of the enunciation recoiled into a subject of the statement otherwise youre just a tramp.6

In memoriam: debate. First national tournament sophomore year: mall of America. Staring at the map which represents material reality, always representing but never being. Never doing, the stupid purple sharpie dot proclaims that I am here: but how can I ever be here if Im standing there. Moreover, how can I be standing there if I am here? I wander over to a map, desperate to find an exit and a breath of air not laced with pastries, coffee, perfume. He stared at it incredulously. His location was marked with a dot. That wasnt too confusing because the statement You are here, was rather explicit. He was more frightened by the virulent purple sharpie underneath it. It boldly proclaimed in capital letters OR AM I? The question stared at him, bored into his mind. The Pice de rsistance of his cultural encounter did nothing but provide his brain with the mental dynamite to blow up his locked door of cultivated normalcy. He stared around him more bewildered as if the surreal nature of his surroundings suddenly made sense. Sensory input collapsed upon sensory input in a giant blur of constant stimulation. Something that catered to every man-made sultry delight stretched out for him across the glass displays of the mall that made the mythic markets of civilizations long past, mundane mortuaries. It was city in the truest sense, its artificial existence. 7
5 - Pierre Schlag, Byron White Professor of Law at the University of Colorado, Summer 2004, Buffalo Law Review, 52 Buffalo L. Rev. 851 6 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pg. 158-159, 1980 7 Vincent Li, Mall Story

I am here. Am is an interesting word. How can I be here if I AM here, how can I be if I am? How can I be? <shouted> OR AM I?! <shouted>

WELCOME TO NEW VEGAS

DUMAS DEBATE

In memoriam: the map of the body.

When you will have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom. They you will teach him again to dance wrong side out as in the frenzy of dance halls and this wrong side out will be his real place.8 Wed like to think of ourselves sort of like starfish: not that my stomach comes out, but there are definitely some similarities. We speak of sea monsters, defying time and space. Our politics is of the brittlestarOf special interest is the information that the Brittlestar is a creature without a brain; it is simply a visualising apparatus, a metamorphosing optical system. As Barad forcefully notes, 'there is no res cogitans agonizing about the postulated gap (of Its own making) between itself and res extensa. There is no optics of mediation, no noumena/phenomena distinction, no question of representation' (Barad in press). Instead, the Brittlestar is the model of intraaction, constantly breaking off and regenerating its bodily boundaries as it enfolds bits of its environment within itself and expels parts of its own body into the surrounding environment. In this way, the Brittlestar cannot be said to exist as an autonomous entity positioned inside a spacetime frame of reference, neither that of a Euclidean container nor even that of a dynamical manifold specified by classical science. There is no pre-existent container or manifold within which the creature exists and moves along spacetime coordinates while its body is made and remade. Instead, the Brittlestar might be said to undergo what I would call a spatio-temporalisation, what Barad refers to as 'space-time-matter-in the making.9

In memoriam: organisms.

8 Antonin Artaud. 1947. Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings. To Have Done with the Judgment of God: A Radio Play University of California Press Berkeley Los Angeles ISBN 0-520-06443-7 (paperback). Retrieved from: http://ndirty.cute.fi/~karttu/tekstit/artaud.htm. 9 - Dorothea Olkowski Every One A Crowd, Making Room for the Excluded Middle Deleuze and Queer Theory . Edinburgh University Press, 2009, pg. 55-56

We speak of madness, and we speak madness: a language of Evil. You may ask us, What does the world of the critique look like? To that we respond HAVE YOU EVER DONE ACID? The question is self-defeating and without purpose: we are rather like an M.C. Escher piece, paradox stairs and monks traveling up and down at the same time, praying to a trickster-God. Wed rather stay as children forever, playing on beaches and

WELCOME TO NEW VEGAS DUMAS DEBATE drawing maps with starfish. We return debate in a regurgitated form: digested in the stomach of the brittlestar, in the stomachs of men who know how to leave, to scramble the codes, to cause flows to circulate, to traverse the desert of the body without organs. They overcome a limit, they shatter a wall, the capitalist barrier. And of course they fail to complete the process, they never cease failing to do so. The neurotic impasse again closes - the daddy-mommy of oedipalization, America, the return to the native land - or else the perversion of the exotic territorialities, then drugs, alcohol - or worse still, an old fascist dream. Never has delirium oscillated more between its two poles. But through the impasses and the triangles a schizophrenic flow moves, irresistibly; sperm, river, drainage, inflamed genital mucus, or a stream of words that do not let themselves be coded, a libido that is too fluid, too viscous: a violence against syntax, a concerted destruction of the signifier, non-sense erected as a flow, polyvocality that returns to haunt all relations.10

In memoriam: the political.

<SHOUT>In summary!</SHOUT> How much do you make in that death factory Severance owed in the chamber of revolvers Empty jails fall from my scalp Shake the globe and let me out If still I can remember the day That they took you from me Seems like I've been running from your trenchant memory Harp sickle will warn me when it's over 'Cuz if heaven breathes then someone trade places with me 'Cuz I dont want to tear feathers instead of rags When do I get to see the body preserved inside this grin Sewn in the lips where her last words Ill be damned - I can still hear her laughing Your angels have tangled their brass again The comfort of doubt still it keeps you thin And still I can remember the day
10 - Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pg. 132-134

That they took you from me Seems like I've been running from your trenchant memory Harp sickle will warn me when it's over

WELCOME TO NEW VEGAS Does your temperature ache Is your glass about to break Are you purple with current Will you now become the servant Gordian knots in the power lines Saucer fills to empty with pesticide Like the pharaohs of old Bury me in gold I'll make your son refuse to fight in the stalk home setting that we provide If your heart does cease to speak My fingernail choir will make your chalkboard sing11 We knew this day was coming, we prepared the eulogy:

DUMAS DEBATE

In memoriam: sanity.

But lets get back to this dead-end point between Leibniz and Spinoza, to their inability to imagine a politics of the empty sign and Cartesian coordinate, one day becoming revolutionarywhat Im calling the conjunction of deterritorialization processes. I think its impossible to sustain the sole promotion of the power sign for very long in the exclusive work of reality* unless you topple over into archaization. So you need to come to terms with the absurdity of the figure-signs deterritorializtion in its non-sense efficiency and logic. You need to come to terms with the fact that code surplus value is, ultimately, taken back under the wing of a super revolutionary alliance machine of deterritorialized signs that can double and master the set of all local power processes. To what extent is Spinozas God emptied of its substance? Is this not just another assemblage of figure-sign flows leading to radical desubstantialization? Permanent desubstantialization. It always has to happen all over again. Isnt the only way to eliminate Absolute Knowledge, the Great Other and all the rest to have codes be invaded by figure-sign cancer? The power sign - the sign-point is continuously deterritorialized, it never stops producing figure-signs, even trashy ones, and being axiomatized, evading signifying chains paired with significations, and all this through a pure logic of non-sense.12

11 Luciforms, Mars Volta 12 Guattari in 1970, The Anti-Oedipus Papers, pg. 262

We know its easy to get lost, but of all things to remember we must not forget ourselves. You are here, here in this room, here in the political, here in space, here in the ocean, here on the beaches, stick in hand, starfish staring into you: tides consuming you. We always have to begin on this beach, with ourselves, with the here: where you are. Artaud puts it well: all writing is so much pig shit - that is to say, any literature that takes itself as an end or sets ends for itself, instead of being a process that "ploughs the crap of being and its language,"

WELCOME TO NEW VEGAS DUMAS DEBATE transports the weak, the aphasiacs, the illiterate. At least spare us sublimation. Every writer is a sellout. The only literature is that which places an explosive device in its package, fabricating a counterfeit currency, causing the superego and its form of expression to explode, as well as the market value of its form of content.13 So come find us: well be out there in the desert, drawing maps in the sand dunes and holding funerals for starfish. Come visit us, we would like to be alone with some company rather than surrounded by ourselves. Dont worry about directions. Feel free to wander out there. It shouldnt be too hard to find us because We are deserts, said Deleuze but populated by tribes, flora and fauna. We pass our time in ordering these tribes, arranging them in other ways, getting rid of some and encouraging others to prosper. And all these clans, all these crowds, do not undermine the desert, which is our very ascesis; on the contrary they inhabit it, they pass through it, over it. In Guattari there has always been a sort of wild rodeo, in part directed against himself. The desert, experimentation on oneself, is our only identity, our single chance for all the combinations which inhabit us. (Deleuze and Parnet, 1977, 11) The individual here is explicitly seen as multiple and political, and the process of subjectification is presented as dynamic and continuing, never as something that has reached or could reach a satisfactory conclusion. For Deleuze and Guattari living is always a process of becoming, never of contemplating an achieved being.14

13 - Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pg. 132-134 14 Andrew Ballantyne, Tectonic Cultures Research Group at Newcastle University , "Deleuze and Guattari for Architects" 78-79

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