Alt Fails

The alt fails because it kills all political resistance and Agamben is wrong about being able to reform legal institutions Huysmans 8 (Jef, Chair in Security Studies, director of the Centre for Citizenship, Identities, Governance (CCIG) at the Faculty of Social Sciences, The Jargon of Exception On Schmitt, Agamben and the Absence of Political Society, International Political Sociology (2008) 2, p. 179)Deploying the jargon of exception and especially Agambens conception of the exception-being-the-rule for reconfiguring conceptions of politics in a biopolitical age comes at a serious cost, though. It inserts both a diagnosis of our time and a conceptual apparatus for rethinking politics that has no place for the category that has been central to the modern democratic tradition: the political significance of people as a multiplicity of social relations that condition politics and that are constituted by the mediations of various objectified forms and processes (for example, scientific knowledge, technologies, property relations, legal institutions). Even if one would argue that Agambens framing of the current political conditions are valuable for understanding important changes that have taken place in the twentieth century and that are continuing in the twenty first, they also are to a considerable extent depoliticizing. Agambens work tends to guide the analysis to unmediated, factual life. For example, some draw on Agamben to highlight the importance of bodily strategies of resistance. One of the key examples is individual refugees protesting against their detention by sewing up lips and eyes. They exemplify how individualized naked life resists by deploying their bodily, biological condition against sovereign biopolitical powers (for example, Edkins and Pin-Fat 2004:1517). I follow Adorno and others, however, that such a conception of bodily, naked life is not political. It ignores how this life only exists and takes on political form through various socioeconomic, technological, scientific, legal, and other mediations. For example, the images of the sewed-up eyelids and lips of the individualized and biologized refugees have no political significance without being mediated by public media, intense mobilizations on refugee and asylum questions, contestations of human rights in the courts, etc. It is these mediations that are the object and structuring devices of political struggle. Reading the politics of exception as the central lens onto modern conceptions of politics, as both Agamben and Schmitt do, erases from the concept of politics a rich and constitutive history of sociopolitical struggles, traditions of thought linked to this history, and key sites and temporalities of politics as well as the central processes through which individualized bodily resistances gain their sociopolitical significance.

Rejecting sovereignty exacerbates inequalities and prevents emancipationTara McCormack 10, Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Leicester, PhD in IR from the University of Westminster, Critique, Security and Power: The Political Limits to Emancipatory Approaches, p139, google booksCritics of critical and emancipatory theory have raised pertinent problems in terms both of the idealism of critical approaches and their problematic relationship to contemporary liberal intervention. Critical theorists themselves are aware that their prescriptions seem to be hard to separate from contemporary discourses and practices of power, yet critical theorists do not seem to be able to offer any understanding of why this might be. However, the limitations to critical and emancipatory approaches cannot be overcome by distinguishing themselves from liberal internationalist policy. In fact a closer engagement with contemporary security policies and discourse would show the similarities with critical theory and that both suffer from the same limitations. The limitations of critical and emancipatory approaches are to be found in critical prescriptions in the contemporary political context. Jahn is right to argue that critical theory is idealistic, but this needs to be explained why. Douzinas is right to argue that critical theory becomes a justification for power and this needs to be explained why. The reasons for this remain undertheorised. I argue here that critical and emancipatory approaches lack a fundamental understanding of what is at stake in the political realm. For critical theorists the state and sovereignty represent oppressive structures that work against human freedom. There is much merit to this critique of the inequities of the state system. However, the problem is that freedom or emancipation are not simply words that can breathe life into international affairs but in the material circumstances of the contemporary world must be linked to political constituencies, that is men and women who can give content to that freedom and make freedom a reality. Critical and emancipatory theorists fail to understand that there must be a political content to emancipation and new forms of social organisation. Critical theorists seek emancipation and argue for new forms of political community above and beyond the state, yet there is nothing at the moment beyond the state that can give real content to those wishes. There is no democratic world government and it is simply nonsensical to argue that the UN, for example, is a step towards global democracy. Major international institutions are essentially controlled by powerful states. To welcome challenges to sovereignty in the present political context cannot hasten any kind of more just world order in which people really matter (to paraphrase Lynch). Whatever the limitations of the state, and there are many, at the moment the state represents the only framework in which people might have a chance to have some meaningful control over their lives.

Agambens criticisms of sovereign power are too theoretical. He points out that sovereigns have the power to create exceptions but he doesnt prove that they willKretsedemas 8, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, (Philip, American Quarterly, Volume 60, Number 3, September)Ong asserts that there is always room for resistance to the forms of sovereign power described by Agambenas illustrated by the numerous immigrant rights mobilizations that have taken shape on the global stage (as well as the massive groundswell of support for the U.S. immigrant protests of 2006 and the resistance to illegal immigrant laws among many U.S. towns, cities, and states). Agamben provides a useful explanation of the defining tendencies and components of a particular kind of sovereign power, but this is best understood as an ideal-type theorization and not a literal account of how relations between the sovereign and subjected always play out in reality.

Perm

Permutation do bothwe can work within a dominant system and still resistMichel Foucault, biopower dude, 1980, Philosophy, Politics, and Culture, pg. 154FOUCAULT We must escape from the dilemma of being either for or against. After all, it is possible to face up to a government and remain standing. To work with a government implies neither subjection nor total acceptance. One may work with it and yet be restive. I even believe that the two things go together.

Cede the Political

The right fills inOrly Lobel 7, University of San Diego Assistant Professor of Law, The Paradox of Extralegal Activism: Critical Legal Consciousness and Transformative Politics, 120 HARV. L. REV. 937, http://www.harvardlawreview.org/media/pdf/lobel.pdfBoth the practical failures and the fallacy of rigid boundaries generated by extralegal activism rhetoric permit us to broaden our inquiry to the underlying assumptions of current proposals regarding transformative politics that is, attempts to produce meaningful changes in the political and socioeconomic landscapes. The suggested alternatives produce a new image of social and political action. This vision rejects a shared theory of social reform, rejects formal programmatic agendas, and embraces a multiplicity of forms and practices. Thus, it is described in such terms as a plan of no plan,211 a project of projects,212 anti-theory theory,213 politics rather than goals,214 presence rather than power,215 practice over theory,216 and chaos and openness over order and formality. As a result, the contemporary message rarely includes a comprehensive vision of common social claims, but rather engages in the description of fragmented efforts. As Professor Joel Handler argues, the commonality of struggle and social vision that existed during the civil rights movement has disappeared.217 There is no unifying discourse or set of values, but rather an aversion to any metanarrative and a resignation from theory. Professor Handler warns that this move away from grand narratives is self-defeating precisely because only certain parts of the political spectrum have accepted this new stance: [T]he opposition is not playing that game . . . . [E]veryone else is operating as if there were Grand Narratives . . . .218 Intertwined with the resignation from law and policy, the new bromide of neither left nor right has become axiomatic only for some.219 The contemporary critical legal consciousness informs the scholarship of those who are interested in progressive social activism, but less so that of those who are interested, for example, in a more competitive securities market. Indeed, an interesting recent development has been the rise of conservative public interest lawyer[ing].220 Although public interest law was originally associated exclusively with liberal projects, in the past three decades conservative advocacy groups have rapidly grown both in number and in their vigorous use of traditional legal strategies to promote their causes.221 This growth in conservative advocacy is particularly salient in juxtaposition to the decline of traditional progressive advocacy. Most recently, some thinkers have even suggested that there may be something inherent in the lefts conception of social change focused as it is on participation and empowerment that produces a unique distrust of legal expertise.

MARKED

222 Once again, this conclusion reveals flaws parallel to the original disenchantment with legal reform. Although the new extralegal frames present themselves as apt alternatives to legal reform models and as capable of producing significant changes to the social map, in practice they generate very limited improvement in existing social arrangements. Most strikingly, the cooptation effect here can be explained in terms of the most profound risk of the typology that of legitimation. The common pattern of extralegal scholarship is to describe an inherent instability in dominant structures by pointing, for example, to grassroots strategies,223 and then to assume that specific instances of counterhegemonic activities translate into a more complete transformation. This celebration of multiple micro-resistances seems to rely on an aggregate approach an idea that the multiplication of practices will evolve into something substantial. In fact, the myth of engagement obscures the actual lack of change being produced, while the broader pattern of equating extralegal activism with social reform produces a false belief in the potential of change. There are few instances of meaningful reordering of social and economic arrangements and macro-redistribution. Scholars write about decoding what is really happening, as though the scholarly narrative has the power to unpack more than the actual conventional experience will admit.224 Unrelated efforts become related and part of a whole through mere reframing. At the same time, the elephant in the room the rising level of economic inequality is left unaddressed and comes to be understood as natural and inevitable.225 This is precisely the problematic process that critical theorists decry as losers self-mystification, through which marginalized groups come to see systemic losses as the product of their own actions and thereby begin to focus on minor achievements as representing the boundaries of their willed reality. The explorations of micro-instances of activism are often fundamentally performative, obscuring the distance between the descriptive and the prescriptive. The manifestations of extralegal activism the law and organizing model; the proliferation of informal, soft norms and norm-generating actors; and the celebrated, separate nongovernmental sphere of action all produce a fantasy that change can be brought about through small-scale, decentralized transformation. The emphasis is local, but the locality is described as a microcosm of the whole and the audience is national and global. In the context of the humanities, Professor Carol Greenhouse poses a comparable challenge to ethnographic studies from the 1990s, which utilized the genres of narrative and community studies, the latter including works on American cities and neighborhoods in trouble.226 The aspiration of these genres was that each individual story could translate into a time of the nation body of knowledge and motivation.227 In contemporary legal thought, a corresponding gap opens between the local scale and the larger, translocal one. In reality, although there has been a recent proliferation of associations and grassroots groups, few new local-statenational federations have emerged in the United States since the 1960s and 1970s, and many of the existing voluntary federations that flourished in the mid-twentieth century are in decline.228 There is, therefore, an absence of links between the local and the national, an absent intermediate public sphere, which has been termed the missing middle by Professor Theda Skocpol.229 New social movements have for the most part failed in sustaining coalitions or producing significant institutional change through grassroots activism. Professor Handler concludes that this failure is due in part to the ideas of contingency, pluralism, and localism that are so embedded in current activism.230 Is the focus on small-scale dynamics simply an evasion of the need to engage in broader substantive debate? It is important for next-generation progressive legal scholars, while maintaining a critical legal consciousness, to recognize that not all extralegal associational life is transformative. We must differentiate, for example, between inward-looking groups, which tend to be self-regarding and depoliticized, and social movements that participate in political activities, engage the public debate, and aim to challenge and reform existing realities.231 We must differentiate between professional associations and more inclusive forms of institutions that act as trustees for larger segments of the community.232 As described above, extralegal activism tends to operate on a more divided and hence a smaller scale than earlier social movements, which had national reform agendas. Consequently, within critical discourse there is a need to recognize the limited capacity of small-scale action. We should question the narrative that imagines consciousness-raising as directly translating into action and action as directly translating into change. Certainly not every cultural description is political. Indeed, it is questionable whether forms of activism that are opposed to programmatic reconstruction of a social agenda should even be understood as social movements. In fact, when groups are situated in opposition to any form of institutionalized power, they may be simply mirroring what they are fighting against and merely producing moot activism that settles for what seems possible within the narrow space that is left in a rising convergence of ideologies. The original vision is consequently coopted, and contemporary discontent is legitimated through a process of self-mystification.

Sovereignty Good

Causes intervention and inequalityTara McCormack 10, Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Leicester, PhD in IR from the University of Westminster, Critique, Security and Power: The Political Limits to Emancipatory Approaches, p138, google booksIt seems clear that since the 1990s and the shift away from formal framework for international affairs in terms of formal sovereign equality and non intervention, weak and troubled states have become increasingly opened up to interference and intervention by great powers. There is no global political constituency in existence and the world order as it currently is one in which power is unevenly distributed. Shifting away from even formal prohibitions against intervention and formal sovereign equality simply gives more powerful states greater power. This cannot represent a step towards greater emancipation for the citizens of those states, in fact it represents an increasing lack of freedom. For contemporary critical theorists, there is a failure to understand that rights are not things in themselves that can create freedom. In certain concrete situations human rights can easily become their opposite, a system in which external powers become sovereign. For this reason, a critical approach must entail an engagement with the here and now and the exercise of contemporary power relations, but this is exactly what contemporary critical and emancipatory theorists are not doing.

A2 Bare Life

The concept of bare life is politically dangerous and neutralizes resistance

Negri and Casarino, 4 Italian Moral and Political Philosopher and Associate Professor Of Cultural Studies And Comparative Literature At The University Of Minnesota(Antonio and Cesare, "Its a Powerful Life: A Conversation on Contemporary Philosophy," Cultural Critique, No. 57, Spring, Project Muse)

AN: I believe Giorgio is writing a sequel to Homo Sacer, and I feel that this new work will be resolutive for his thoughtin the sense that he will be forced in it to resolve and find a way out of the ambiguity that has qualified his understanding of naked life so far. He already attempted something of the sort in his recent book on Saint Paul, but I think this attempt largely failed: as usual, this book is extremely learned and elegant; it remains, however, somewhat trapped within Pauline exegesis, rather than constituting a full-fledged attempt to reconstruct naked life as a potentiality for exodus, to rethink naked life fundamentally in terms of exodus. I believe that the concept of naked life is not an impossible, unfeasible one. I believe it is possible to push the image of power to the point at which a defenseless human being [un povero Cristo] is crushed, to conceive of that extreme point at which power tries to [End Page 173] eliminate that ultimate resistance that is the sheer attempt to keep oneself alive. From a logical standpoint, it is possible to think all this: the naked bodies of the people in the camps, for example, can lead one precisely in this direction. But this is also the point at which this concept turns into ideology: to conceive of the relation between power and life in such a way actually ends up bolstering and reinforcing ideology. Agamben, in effect, is saying that such is the nature of power: in the final instance, power reduces each and every human being to such a state of powerlessness. But this is absolutely not true! On the contrary: the historical process takes place and is produced thanks to a continuous constitution and construction, which undoubtedly confronts the limit over and over againbut this is an extraordinarily rich limit, in which desires expand, and in which life becomes increasingly fuller. Of course it is possible to conceive of the limit as absolute pow-erlessness, especially when it has been actually enacted and enforced in such a way so many times. And yet, isn't such a conception of the limit precisely what the limit looks like from the standpoint of constituted power as well as from the standpoint of those who have already been totally annihilated by such a powerwhich is, of course, one and the same standpoint? Isn't this the story about power that power itself would like us to believe in and reiterate? Isn't it far more politically useful to conceive of this limit from the standpoint of those who are not yet or not completely crushed by power, from the standpoint of those still struggling to overcome such a limit, from the standpoint of the process of constitution, from the standpoint of power [potenza]? I am worried about the fact that the concept of naked life as it is conceived by Agamben might be taken up by political movements and in political debates: I find this prospect quite troubling, which is why I felt the need to attack this concept in my recent essay. Ultimately, I feel that nowadays the logic of traditional eugenics is attempting to saturate and capture the whole of human realityeven at the level of its materiality, that is, through genetic engineeringand the ultimate result of such a process of saturation and capture is a capsized production of subjectivity within which ideological undercurrents continuously try to subtract or neutralize our resistance. CC: And I suppose you are suggesting that the concept of naked life is part and parcel of such undercurrents. But have you discussed all this with Agamben? What does he think about your critiques? AN: Whenever I tell him what I have just finished telling you, he gets quite irritated, even angry. I still maintain, nonetheless, that the conclusions he draws in Homo Sacer lead to dangerous political outcomes and that the burden of finding a way out of this mess rests entirely on him. And the type of problems he runs into in this book recur throughout many of his other works. I found his essay on Bartleby, for example, absolutely infuriating. This essay was published originally as a little book that also contained Deleuze's essay on Bartleby: well, it turns out that what Deleuze says in his essay is exactly the contrary of what Giorgio says in his! I suppose one could say that they decided to publish their essays together precisely so as to attempt to figure this limit that is, to find a figure for it, to give it a formby some sort of paradoxical juxtaposition, but I don't think that this attempt was really successful in the end. In any case, all this incessant talk about the limit bores me and tires me out after a little while. The point is that, inasmuch as it is death, the limit is not creative. The limit is creative to the extent to which you have been able to overcome it qua death: the limit is creative because you have overcome death.

A2 State of Exception

The K is CONTEXT DEFICIENT ignoring that the post-Iraq era evoked the largest global protest to the state of exception in the world. Maani 12 TruthDig, 5-11, http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/zombie_politics_dangerous_authoritarianism_or_shrinking_democracy_-_part_ii/P100/

I am not opposed to action, nor am I attempting to diffuse anything. I am simply pointing out that, contrary to your claims, the people as a whole have not acquiesced to most of the items you list. Indeed, you may remember that the run-up to the invasion of Iraq - even before it began - invoked the largest global protest in the history of the world: over 30 million people in 60 cities in 20 countries - including millions in the U.S. As for your other items: -The election fraud of 2000 with the illegal appointment of Bush II, the war criminal, to office by our SCOTUS. There was plenty of popular outrage over this - including in some of the corporate-controlled media you speak of. Expanded militarization of America. In this case, it is actually the media - including some MSM - who are LEADING the outrage. -Domestic survelliance of the populace. And again, not only popular outrage, but much of the MSM took this on in a major way. -The assassination of American citizens abroad accused of being terrorists or terrorists sympathizers. This, too, is being reported - and questioned - even in the MSM, though I would agree there seems to be too little outrage on the part of the general populace. -The enactment of the NDAA which empowers the our POTUS with life or death power over any citizen without due process of law. Although I am as mortally opposed to the NDAA as anyone, it really doesnt change anything that was in the AUMF of 2001, or the prior NDAAs. Still, you are right in this case that there has been precious little outrage re this. -The enactment of the US Patriot Act that effectively shredded the US Constitution. Actually, while the Patriot Act (and Patriot Act II) did indeed do damage to the Constitution, I would argue that the Military Commissions Act did far more, as it all but eviscerated both habeas corpus and posse comitatus, two of the most sacred and critical provisions. But there was, in fact, quite some backlash over the original Patriot Act. In most of these cases, there was in fact been outrage, including in some, if not much, of the MSM (to say nothing of the AM). And the rise of the TP and OWS (and particularly the national, even global, conversation about income inequality that OWS has generated (among other things)) are further proof that there is active - and effective, particularly vis-a-vis the public eye (media) - protest against some or many of the things that are occurring. When I talk of acquiescence, I am talking about WHOLESALE acquiescence; i.e., at very least a majority of the populace simply (as elisalouisa and SHE suggest) surrendering or submitting to a fascist State. However, although both of us may be frustrated by the fact that MORE people are not actively involved in protest, etc. - though, to be fair, even many of those who are not actively involved nevertheless support those who are, whether on the left or the right - I would still suggest that this country is nowhere NEAR becoming a fascist state, despite your punch-list items, and despite some of the seeming attempts by our plutocracy to fashion itself as a proto-fascist or fascist State. Again, this is by no means a call to simply sit on our hands and do nothing. And despite your frustration-derived claims about me, I have and will continue to quite actively protest both your punch-list items and many other things, and encourage others to do the same. However, they should do it because the things we are discussing are wrong and dangerous - NOT because the sum of those things somehow add up to fascism. They do not. Peace.

A2 Whatever Being

Whatever being is impossibleDaly, 04 (http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/daly_noncitizen.htm, The non-citizen and the concept of 'human rights', Frances Daly, Australian National University 2004).What it is that we might want a human potentiality to mean is, of course, a complex, difficult and open-ended issue. But it is important for us to ask whether a human potentiality must start from emptiness. Agamben repeatedly refers to the need to begin from a place of 'amorphousness' and 'inactuality', assuming that there is something that will necessarily follow from the simple fact of human existence but why should we assume this? What might constitute or form this potentiality is surely concerned with what is latent but as yet unrealized. For Agamben, there is nothing latent that is not already tainted by a sense of a task that must be done (Agamben, 1993: 43). There is no ability to achieve any displacement with what is present within values of community and justice, there is only an immobilizing nothingness that assumes a false essence, vocation or destiny. If the 'whatever' being that he contends is indeed emerging, and it possesses, as he argues, "an original relation to desire", it is worthwhile asking what this desire is for (Agamben, 1993: 10). If it is simply life itself, then it is not clear why this should be devoid of any content. Any process of emptying out, of erasing and abolishing, such as that which Agamben attempts, is done for a reason - it involves critique and rejection, on the basis, necessarily, that something else is preferable. But Agamben provides us with very little of what is needed to understand how we might engage with this option.

A2 Biopower Impact

Democracy checks biopower impactEdward Ross Dickinson 4, Associate Professor, History Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley, Central European History, Vol. 37 No. 1, p. 34-36And it is, of course, embedded in a broader discursive complex (institutions, professions, fields of social, medical, and psychological expertise) that pursues these same aims in often even more effective and inescapable ways.89 In short, the continuities between early twentieth-century biopolitical discourse and the practices of the welfare state in our own time are unmistakable. Both are instances of the disciplinary society and of biopolitical, regulatory, social-engineering modernity, and they share that genealogy with more authoritarian states, including the National Socialist state, but also fascist Italy, for example. And it is certainly fruitful to view them from this very broad perspective. But that analysis can easily become superficial and misleading, because it obfuscates the profoundly different strategic and local dynamics of power in the two kinds of regimes. Clearly the democratic welfare state is not only formally but also substantively quite different from totalitarianism. Above all, again, it has nowhere developed the fateful, radicalizing dynamic that characterized National Socialism (or for that matter Stalinism), the psychotic logic that leads from economistic population management to mass murder. Again, there is always the potential for such a discursive regime to generate coercive policies. In those cases in which the regime of rights does not successfully produce health, such a system can and historically does create compulsory programs to enforce it. But again, there are political and policy potentials and constraints in such a structuring of biopolitics that are very different from those of National Socialist Germany. Democratic biopolitical regimes require, enable, and incite a degree of self-direction and participation that is functionally incompatible with authoritarian or totalitarian structures. And this pursuit of biopolitical ends through a regime of democratic citizenship does appear, historically, to have imposed increasingly narrow limits on coercive policies, and to have generated a logic or imperative of increasing liberalization. Despite limitations imposed by political context and the slow pace of discursive change, I think this is the unmistakable message of the really very impressive waves of legislative and welfare reforms in the 1920s or the 1970s in Germany.90 Of course it is not yet clear whether this is an irreversible dynamic of such systems. Nevertheless, such regimes are characterized by sufficient degrees of autonomy (and of the potential for its expansion) for sufficient numbers of people that I think it becomes useful to conceive of them as productive of a strategic configuration of power relations that might fruitfully be analyzed as a condition of liberty, just as much as they are productive of constraint, oppression, or manipulation. At the very least, totalitarianism cannot be the sole orientation point for our understanding of biopolitics, the only end point of the logic of social engineering. This notion is not at all at odds with the core of Foucauldian (and Peukertian) theory. Democratic welfare states are regimes of power/knowledge no less than early twentieth-century totalitarian states; these systems are not opposites, in the sense that they are two alternative ways of organizing the same thing. But they are two very different ways of organizing it. The concept power should not be read as a universal stifling night of oppression, manipulation, and entrapment, in which all political and social orders are grey, are essentially or effectively the same. Power is a set of social relations, in which individuals and groups have varying degrees of autonomy and effective subjectivity. And discourse is, as Foucault argued, tactically polyvalent. Discursive elements (like the various elements of biopolitics) can be combined in different ways to form parts of quite different strategies (like totalitarianism or the democratic welfare state); they cannot be assigned to one place in a structure, but rather circulate. The varying possible constellations of power in modern societies create multiple modernities, modern societies with quite radically differing potentials.91