AC – Becoming Soil

Chapter One is The Realization

We’re on the road to nowhere – the squo attempt to preserve life is really
nothing but an infinitely continuous quest created by our own desire to more
and more of ourselves, this goal of survival is pointless and glorifies endless
reproduction of bodies that has no purpose.
Deleuze and Guattari 72 (Gilles and Felix, Anti-Oedipus, 1972, p. 107-109) SJCP//JG
the coextension of man and nature; a circular movement
Coextensiveness is another matter entirely,

by which the unconscious, always remaining subject;:produces and reproduces

itself. The unconscious does not follow the paths of a generation progressing (or regressing) from one body to another: your father, your father's
father, and so on. The organized body is the object of reproduction by generation; it is

not its subject. The sole subject of reproduction is the unconscious itself which
holds to the circular form of production. Sexuality is not a mean; in the service of generation; rather, the
generation of bodies is in the service of sexuality as an autoproduction of the
unconscious. Sexuality does not represent a premium for the ego, in exchange for its subordina- tion to the process of generation; on the
contrary, generation is the ego's solace, its prolongation, the passage from one body

to another through which the unconscious does no more than reproduce itself
in itself. Indeed, in this sense we must say the unconscious has always been an orphan-that is, it has engendered itself in the identity of nature
and man, of the world and man. The question of the father, the question of ?od, is what has become impossible, a matter of indifference, so true is It
that to affirm or deny such a being amounts to the same thing, or to live it or kill it: one and the same misconception (contresens) concerning the

It is Oedipus
nature of the unconscious. But psychoanalysts are bent on producing man abstractly, that is to say ideologically, for culture.

who produces man in this fashion, and who gives a structure to the false
movement of infinite progression and regression: your father, and your father's father, a snowball
gathering speed as it moves from Oedipus all the way to the father of the primal horde, to God and the Paleolithic age. It is Oedipus who makes us man,

The tone may vary, but the message remains

for better or for worse, say those who would make fools of us all.

basically the same: you will not escape Oedipus, your sole choice is between
the "neurotic outlet" and the "nonneurotic outlet."
We are stuck in the middle. In the middle of becoming, living, becoming
corpses. The restrictive identity of self-survival imprisons us in the body,
preventing any lines of flight or becoming creating the basis for the idyllic
melancholic subject.
Mark 98 (John, Gilles Deleuze: Vitalism and Multiplicity, p. 29-33) SJCP//JG

It's organisms that die, not life. Any work of art points a way through for life,
finds a way through the cracks. Everything I've written is vitalistic, at least I hope it is, and amounts to a theory of signs and
events. (N, 143) In thefinalpiece ofwork published before his death, a short article entitled "Immanence: a life ...'23 Deleuze presents a concise
statement of his philosophical concerns. Although he does not use the word Vitalism', the ideas presented here are undoubtedly vitalist in inspiration.

transcendental
The article begins by defining a transcendental field. That is to say the field which constitutes the basis of his philsophy:

empiricism. This field is defined as *[...] a pure a-subjective current of

consciousness, an impersonal prereflexive consciousness, a qualitative duration
of consciousness without self.24 Obviously, this 'pure' current of consciousness has links with the notions of impersonal,
indefinite discourse dealt with above. Pure immanence exists in opposition to the world represented and mediated through theframeworkof the
subject and the object. The notion of immanence goes to the heart of Deleuze's transcendental empiricism which embraces both vitalism and

It is not immanence to life, but the immanence

multiplicity: Pure immanence is A LIFE, and nothing else.

which is in nothing is itself a life . A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is sheer power, utter
beatitude. Insofar as he overcomes the aporias of the subject and the object Fichte, in his later philosophy, presents the transcendental field as a life
which does not depend on a Being and is not subjected to an Act: an absolute immediate consciousness whose very activity no longer refers back to a
being but ceaselessly posits itself in a life.25 To illustrate what he means by this use of the definite article, a life, Deleuze describes a scene in Dickens'
Our Mutual Friend, in which *a universally scorned rogue* is brought back to life. Those working to bring him out of his coma respond not to the
individual, but to a pre-individual power of life which is 'impersonal but singular nevertheless'. Deleuze also perceives the pre-individual nature of life in
young children: Very young children, for example, all resemble each other and have barely any individuality; but they have singularities, a smile, a
gesture, a grimace - events which are not subjective char- acteristics. They are traversed by an immanent life that is pure power and even beatitude
through the sufferings and weaknesses.26 Deleuze's problematising approach to the question of life and work derives in part from his vitalist

to free life from what

perspective. The act of writing itself is an attempt to make of life something more than personal, '[.**]

imprisons it' (N, 143). One of the aims of philosophy and art is to render visible the forces that have
captured life. Artists and philosophers may be frail individuals, but they are literally Vital' personalities by virtue of the excess of life that
they have seen, experienced or thought about: 'There's a profound link between signs, events, life and vitalism: the power of nonorganic life that can
be found in a line that's drawn, a line of writing, a line of music. It's organisms that die, not life' (N, 143). The writer comes into contact with things that
threaten to overwhelm the individual: [...] he possesses irresistible and delicate health that stems from what he has seen and heard of things too big for
him, too strong for him, suffocating things whose passage exhausts him while* nonetheless giving him the becomings that dominant and substantial
health would render impossible. The writer returns from what he has seen and heard with red eyes and pierced eardrums.27 Deleuze's vitalism is in
this way linked to his 'anti-humanism'. A sign is created when thought encounters 'non-organic life', the 'outside' as Deleuze sometimes calls it. Signs

the flux and indeterminacy of life. The sign is an expression of the pre-individual, of the flux of
are also an expression of

life where the constraints of identity have yet to be applied . Philip Goodchild has argued that
Deleuze's project represents a 'practical vitalism', which enables thought to come into contact with the power of life.28 The theme of vitalism in
Deleuze's work has also been taken up in some detail recently by Mireille Buydens in Sahara: Vesthitique de Gilles Deleuze (1990).29 Buydens argues

This fluid structure is that of

that Deleuze's 'tran- scendental' field is constituted by a 'swarm' of pre-individual singularities.

the rhizome or the multiplicity. Vitalism is a way of connecting with, of being in

the presence of, this pre-individual world of flux and becoming . Deleuze's vitalism is expressed
in his preference for verbs, particularly in the infinitive form, over nouns: 'Infinitives express becomings or events that transcend mood and tense' (N,
34). For Buydens, the theme of vitalism comes first and foremost from Bergson. She draws attention in particular to Bergson's Creative Evolution
(1911), where the '£lan vital' is described as a form of becoming, which 30 eludes analysis and the material forms in which it can be perceived. Buydens
also points to Nietzsche and Spinoza as thinkers who influence Deleuze in his development of vitalism. Ofcourse, the theme of vitalism requires a
discussion of Deleuze's reading of Bergson, and this will be dealt with in the following chapter. However, it is important to understand that other
thinkers, such as Nietzsche and Spinoza, help Deleuze to develop the question of vitalism. For example, Petra Perry claims that Deleuze's innovative
reading of Nietzsche in the 1960s enabled Deleuze, inhis subsequent work, to reactivate some of the debates generatedby turn-of-the-century vitalism
in France.31 Also, in the introductory chapter, 'The Life of Spinoza', in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (Spinoza: Philosophic pratique 1981) Deleuze
presents a portrait of a frail individual whose very individuality is the product of powerful lines of force. Spinoza's life was on one level startlingly
ascetic, undermined as it was by illness and characterised by a nomadic, property less existence. However, Spinoza was able to embrace an affirmative,
joyous conception of life. He pre-empts Nietzsche's distaste for resentment and bad conscience, the tendency to turn against life and to fight for one's
own enslavement. It is this latter tendency that marks Spinoza out as pre-empting the 'modern' question of fascism. In his Theological Treatise Spinoza
is preoccupied with the question of why people are apparently so willing to be separated from the positive force of life. Why do they submit so willingly

Why are they proud of their own

to the forces that imprison life? Why are the people so deeply irrational?

enslavement? Why do they fight'for* their bondage as if it were their freedom ?

Why is it so difficult not to win but to bear freedom? Why does a religion that invokes love and joy inspire war, intolerance, hatred, malevolence, and
remorse? (S:PP, 10) Ultimately, as Todd May claims, this is the question which makes all of Deleuze's work political.32 Theories of ideology and false
consciousness only recognise the injustices and oppressions we suffer against our will or because we are somehow duped into believing that they are
good for us. Deleuze, however, poses a question which is both much more direct and more subtle: why do we desire what oppresses us? This is one of
the aspects of Anti-Oedipus that Foucault so admires, when he talks of Deleuze and Guattari's attempt to tackle the problem of fascism: '[...] the
fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire die very thing that dominates and
exploits us* (AO, xiii). One never commences; one never has a tabula rasa; one slips in, enters in the middle; one takes up or lays down rhythms. (S:PP,

The
123) It is never the beginning or the end which are interesting; the beginning and end are points. What is interesting is the middle. (D, 39)

'indefinite life* that Deleuze talks of in his very last article Immanence: a life...'
takes place 'in the middle': 'This indefinite \^Jllft does not have moments, however close they might be, but only meantimes
[des entretemps]y between-moments.'33 Starting in the middle, becoming, constitutes a guiding principle in Deleuze's work: 'being is becoming*. As

Bergson points out, die intellect tends to spatialise, to immobilise the flux of life which is
being. In this way, perception of being is reduced and impoverished. For this reason, Bergson promotes the development of a philosophical
intuition. This is a problematising method which attempts to come to terms with the irreducible flux of being. In developing this Bergsonian perspective
Deleuze goes some way to creating an image of thought which is subde enough to seize theflowof life.34 This is also a question of the indirect,
impersonal 'style* that Deleuze develops: Tour writing has to be liquid or gaseous simply because normal perception and opinion are solid, geometric1
(N, 133). Deleuze also admits that the middle is the most comfortable place for him to be. It corresponds to his 'habit' of thinking of things in terms of
lines rather than points (N, 161). For Deleuze, the 'English' have a particular tendency to begin in the middle, whereas the 'French' are obsessed with
roots, beginnings and foundations: The English zero is always in the middle. Bottlenecks are always in the middle. Being in the middle of a line is the
most uncomfortable position. One begins again through the middle. The French think in terms of trees too much: the tree of knowledge, points of
aborescence, the alpha and omega, the roots and the pinnacle. (D, 39) In the later part of his career Deleuze continued to develop the question of that
which is in the middle with his work on Leibniz and the Baroque concept of the fold. Leibniz's 'monadic' conception of matter undermines distinctions

If matter is continuous and

between organic and inorganic matter, interior and exterior, and bodies and souls.

endlessly folded, it must express a concept of movement which is always in the

middle: Everything moves as if the pleats of matter possessed no reason in themselves. It is because the Fold is always between two folds, and
because the between-two-folds seems to move about everywhere: Is it between inorganic bodies and organisms, between organisms and animal souls,
between animal souls and reasonable souls, between bodies and souls in general? (LB, 13) The conjunction 'and' helps us to think in terms of the
middle, to escape the way is which thought is conventionally modelled on the verb 'to be'. 'And' is a tool for producing a sort of 'stammering' in thought
and language: it is the possibility of diversity and the destruction of identity. Multiplicity is not the sum of its terms, but is contained in the 'and': AND is

there's always a border, a

neither one thing nor the other, it's always in between, between two things; it's the borderline,

line of flight or flow, only we don't see it, because it's the least perceptible of
things. And yet it's along this line of flight that things come to pass, becomings
evolve, revolutions take shape.
 Chapter Two is The Overcoming
Death is an illusion because our bodies are always already dead and dying.
Thus, the aff advocacy: We make our passive affects active by a refusal to
prolong death and an embracement of becoming soil – we surrender and allow
ourselves to become and overcome the ignorance of life preservation rather
than hover in the endless static position of the fear of death. Surrender is key to
an embracement of change and becoming.
Chopra 5 (Deepak, M.D. Chairman and co-founder of the chopra center for wellbeing, The Absolute Break Between Life and
Death Is an Illusion, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deepak-chopra/the-absolute-break-betwee_b_4843.html) SJCP//JG

This interruption is imagined

What bothers people about losing the body is that it seems like a terrible break or interruption.

as going into the void; it is total personal extinction. Yet that perspective, which
arouses huge fears, is limited to the ego. The ego craves continuity; it wants
today to feel like an extension of yesterday . Without that thread to cling to, the journey day to day would feel
disconnected, or so the ego fears. But how traumatized are you by having a new image come to mind, or a new desire? You dip into the field of infinite

At that moment, you

possibilities for any new thought, returning with a specific image out of the trillions that could possibly exist.

aren’t the person you were a second ago. So, you are clinging to an illusion of
continuity. Give it up this moment and you will fulfill St. Paul’s dictum to die unto death. You will realize that you
have been discontinuous all along, constantly changing, constantly dipping into
the ocean of possibilities to bring forth anything new. Death can be viewed as a
total illusion because you are dead already. When you think of who you are in
terms of I, me, and mine, you are referring to your past, a time that is dead and
gone. Its memories are relics of time passed by. The ego keeps itself intact by repeating what it
already knows. Yet life is actually unknown, as it has to be if you are ever to conceive of new thoughts, desires,
and experiences. By choosing to repeat the past, you are keeping life from renewing

itself. Why wait? You can be as alive as you want to be through a process known as surrender. This is the next step in conquering death. So far
the line between life and death has become so blurry that it has almost
disappeared. Surrender is the act of erasing the line entirely. When you can see
yourself as the total cycle of death within life and the life within death, you
have surrendered – the mystic’s most powerful tool against materialism. At the threshold of the one reality, the mystic gives up all need
for boundaries and plunges directly into existence. The circle closes, and the mystic experiences himself as the one reality.
The 1AC deterritorializes educational spaces with our method, we break the
rules and attack the stagnation of debate. The role of the judge is to be a
rhizomatic educator who endorses our deterritorialization of the debate space
– this means breaking rules and refusing binaries as a performative action that
instigates becoming and adopts rhizomatic politics.
Allan Julie Allan (Rethinking Inclusive Education: The Philosophers of Difference in Practice) (Julie Allan is Head of the School of Education and
Professor of Equity and Inclusion. She is also Visiting Professor at the University of Borås in Sweden. Her work encompasses inclusive education,
disability studies and children’s rights and is both empirical and theoretical. She has a particular interest in educational theory and the insights offered
through poststructural and social capital analyses. Julie has been advisor to the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and the Dutch and Queensland
Governments and has worked extensively with the Council of Europe.)

Deterritorialization seeks to knock[s] existing understandings and ways of

acting into a different orbit or trajectory (Roy, 2004). Its purpose is to undo the
‘processes of continuous control and instantaneous communication ’ (Smith, 1998, p. 264).
It is a performative breaking of existing codes which is also a ‘making’ (Howard, 1998, p. 115). That is,
it is an escape, but in a positive sense, so that new intensities open up: The result is a return to a field of forces,

transversing the gaps, puncturing the holes, and opening up the new world order to a quite different and new world of the multiple
(Howard, 1998, pp. 123–124). Deterritorialization creates ‘chaosmos’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994), a term
coined by James Joyce and which Deleuze and Guattari considered an apt account of the effects of deterritorialization:
composed chaos, neither forseen nor preconceived’ (p. 204) and precipitating new
‘
ways of thinking and acting: ‘once one ventures outside what’s familiar and
reassuring, once one has to invent new concepts for unknown lands , then methods and
moral systems break down’ (Deleuze, 1995, p. 322). The potential areas for deterritorialization cannot be specified; rather it is a case
of being alert to opportunities to interrupt: This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum; experiment with the
opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight,
experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensitities segment by segment, have a small
Deterritorialization has the potential to
plot of new land at all times (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 161).
attack the rigid, striated – or territorialized – spaces of schooling, teacher education and
policy, replacing these with ones which are smooth and full of creative
possibilities. Within these newly created spaces ‘life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new paces,
switches adver- saries’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 500). These smooth spaces are depicted by Deleuze and Guattari (ibid) as
deterritorialization takes us from communication
‘holey space’ (p. 413), like Swiss cheese. Crucially,
– through ‘order-words’ (Deleuze and Parnett, 1987, p. 22), imperatives for others to act – to
expression.

Prefer our method of education, we foster inclusive norms that promotes

better learning and understandings of the world through debate as an activity,
and are willing to break the rules in order to preserve debate a space for social
change.
Koh HOW DO I REACH THESE KIDS?: AN AFFIRMATION OF POLYVOCAL DEBATE BY BEN KOH & REBAR NIEMI Posted
by NSD_Update | Sep 15, 2015 http://nsdupdate.com/2015/how-do-i-reach-these-kids-an-affirmation-of-polyvocal-debate-by-ben-
koh-rebar-niemi/
For as long as there has been debate, there has been the debate about what debate is. We are not against a discussion of what constitutes debate. In
fact we are absolutely for it. We argue that this is a crucial debate within debates. The question should not be “what is debate?” The proper question is
“what can debate do?” The constitutive feature of debate that we are most abstractly interested in is the precise one that is so often banished by
debate pundits – the possibilities of what it can do. We do not yet know what debate can do. All are welcome to accept the challenge of forcing debate

Debate is a process and a field, not a

into a linear and instrumental framework, but be warned it will certainly fail.

mechanism. This is the case for polyvocal debate. Our current definition (which is open to redefinition) is that debate should
be thought of as a complex assemblage of voices (the debaters, the judge, audiences, coaches, the authors
quoted, and so on), and that it is wrong to limit the possible voices or the possible

enunciations of those voices. Debate is always about multiple voices – multiple ways of
sensing/expressing. Even non-sense and non-expression have their own voices. This is not a paradigm. It is a hypothesis about the
system of relations that co-creates debate. The power and potential of polyvocal debate is not located in some far-off future. It is right here right now,
and it is also capable of contact with the outsides of one perspective on time and space. To paraphrase June Tyson – Don’t you know? It’s after the end

of the world. Within the system of relations composed by polyvocal debate, we always have the ability to ask “should we
believe in something in the first place?” as well as “if we believe it, what are its normative implications?” These
questions, in whatever form they take, are some of the most primal elements of debate. Restricting the scope of debate to only some of these
questions is a serious loss. More absurd is the justification for restriction based on the value of being able to ask and engage with these questions in the
first place. It is wrong to assume that chaos and doubt are bad. It is even worse to argue for a progressive fallacy that chaos and doubt can be removed
from debate without debate ceasing to be debate at all. Debate is not soccer, or chess, or playing the trumpet. Perhaps it can do similar things to those

activities, but if so it is because it does not feature the limits that define soccer or chess or playing the trumpet. It is apparently very easy to
make assumptions about what education is. Most often this is accomplished without citing a single theorist on the
subject of education OR a robust understanding of what education could be outside of “commonsensical” assumptions (which are less common and
relatable that they initially seem). As we often like to tell our students – read the literature. We call the kind of education that is often assumed
“banking-style education” after Paulo Friere. This is the notion that education is about accumulating knowledge. 100 facts are better than 99 facts.

People devalue education because they think of it only in these calculated terms .
To the banking conception, the end game of education would not be an increase
in self-respect, a commitment to social justice, or a development of
communication and empathetic powers. It would be the resume statement of
“things I’ve learned.” We must not buy into this conception of education . In debate,
the collaborative way voices intertwine builds a world of speech and frames it.
No debate performance can be perfectly reproduced. The judge’s interpretation
and voice are then added. The desire for absolutely objective or procedurally
exact judging is a desire for an impossibility. We should not be afraid of the
judge’s voice. We recognize it as one among many. Some judges speak loudly and have particular desires.
We do not begrudge them this. What is important is that they acknowledge that theirs is only

one voice among the many and one way of sensing among all sense and
nonsense. It is not a question of excluding the chaos or even controlling it, but
understanding the value in hearing the clash of multiple voices. For nowhere else in school are we given the vibrant opportunity to be as real in the

We must
academic space as is in debate; where we are able to read multiple arguments from multiple views from multiple bases.

encourage debate to be an outlet for the chaotic and doubtful elements of our
beliefs for it’s an opportunity to bridge debate’s separation from the real world
into our own world. Our lives aren’t always smooth unwavering stories. They are often a chaos that is
hard to grasp outside the lens of community. Polyvocal debate is inclusive and encouraging of this chaos, of the
hard questions and life changing moments of realization. A form of debate that acts as if it can omit doubt is not a true form of debate at all. This isn’t
just an argument for “unique educational value” in the banking-sense. Debate should not be thought of as an esoteric extracurricular designed to spice

Paradigms of debate that stop at the moment of rational justification

up the resume.

treat the issue of what world we create for ourselves as an unnecessary step, but
this conversation is what must happen in our lives and further what must
happen in debate. Polyvocal debate allows for this discussion. We should not just ask “is deontology true” but further “is it good for me
to believe in deontology” or util or contractarianism, etc. Rationality cannot be trusted to judge itself, but abandoning logic altogether isn’t necessary
just yet. It is too easy to take up one side or the other (only truth matters or only the good matters). Debate is harder. The tenets of logic and

justification can create questionable conclusions, and a truly valuable form of debate must allow us to criticize and
reevaluate these conclusions to live our lives to the fullest. We must be able to ask if beliefs empower or disempower our lives. We
always have the power to ask should we believe it or is it correct, and exercising this capacity is the practice of debate. There are two ways in which we
can understand and consider what we ought to believe – what is rationally justifiable, and what is good for us to believe for ourselves. In our lives we
cannot just ask “what do I think is true.” We must always end up asking “is it good for me to believe in what I believe?” This is how we must act in our
own lives outside of just the debate space. When we are faced with a difficult situation be it in our personal lives, work, etc., we are inevitably going to
be confronted with moments of seemingly undeniable hopelessness; where despite our best efforts and our thinking, we cannot justify or rationally see
a way to be happy or push ourselves through to the other side. Is it good for me to believe that no matter what I will do, that I will get a bad grade in
this class? Is it good for me to believe that I will fail in my work? Is it good for me to believe in hopelessness? Our answer is no. Our answer is that

debate helps you learn new questions as well as new answers. Again and again
we’ve heard the articles and arguments that collapse everything to the old
questions: education versus fairness, the rules versus innovation and expansion,
correct ways of being versus incorrect ones. Bizarrely there are some who like
to play with the same questions forever, perpetually flipping bits between one
and zero, never writing new code. We are tired of these questions. Perhaps
they would be enlivened by new voices . Polyvocality is the necessary and explosive generation of new questions.
The practice of debate is an educational activity because it is generative and
interrogative of voices. Use it for what it’s used for. Education can be praxis – where the abstraction of theory becomes lived
abstractness inside the fabric of everyday experience. Where a radical new way of thinking-feeling the world become possible. Where you don’t just
learn about quantum physics, but cry at how beautiful the expression of quantum interactions can be and feel blessed to be a part of them, and then

. Education is a becoming that is

teach them to your friends and family. But this is only part of what education is

necessarily political. Often times it is anti-reactionary or anti-conservative, not

because it includes some biased political position, but because it is impossible to
actually experience learning without it changing you – what you think is right and wrong, what you want
to do, and who you think of yourself as. On our view, this makes education necessarily anti-fascist (where
fascism is defined as the tendency to over-represent and prefer certain ways of being to others based on normative, intuitive, or ontological claims). No
matter your petty political affiliations, too many people in our world must attempt escape everyday, live as targets, suffer, and experience domination.
If education is not a force to help us address this, it is not a properly empathetic education. Even if the educational space of debate allows for slightly
more opportunities to escape the everyday and find new connections and places to dwell, this is a greater benefit to everyone than any obedience to
respectability politics, norms of conduct, or “correct ways of being” could ever achieve. This is how the world works. We should not abandon the cause
of empathy just because we can have that elsewhere. It’s not as if we should not care about others at certain times because we do so in others Debate
is foundationally about empathy. Arguments are only persuasive in the ability for their to be foster a shared experience of understanding. Judges vote
for arguments that have a particular effect on them – the effect of “being convincing.” Arguments that win send the judge on a path of becoming-
convinced. In order for this to happen, the debater must actually get through to the judge on some level, whether intuitively, emotively, via rhetoric,
the flow, or explanation. The best debating promotes empathy. Not empathy defined by biased terms – empathy defined by actual contact with actual
others, perspectives, and ways of expressing oneself. It is not that young people are in need of moral training or must be told what is right and wrong or
that debate should erase and conquer disagreement. Rather, it is that we should strive to learn to live with disagreement. For it is too simple and brute
to believe in a monovocal system of thought – that your language is the only Rosetta Stone to translate the world through. Debate must be a place to
see how to live with ourselves and live among others. If being the better debater means being the worse person, we should NOT endorse this
conception of better debating. There is no value to improving a debate related skillset that is not bracketed by being caring and affirming of the world.

The argument against education, methodology, and performance debates is that

these will somehow sacrifice an essential part of what makes debate debate. This
perspective is entirely wrongheaded. What a polyvocal understanding of debate
underscores is that what makes debate is multiple voices. Our belief is that it is possible to promote
incredible skill, learning, and growth in students and be better debaters while at the same time being better people. Debate is a field
where participants of all kinds create real experiences and real change. Students have the
ability to speak their individual truths and have real academic and personal conversation about what creates, sustains, and restricts their worlds – and

if the current “rules of debate” do not allow for that, we advocate breaking
those rules.
I dare you to read T – claims of fairness are how you marginalize the out group
and retrench power structures – impact turns fairness.
Delgado 92, Law Prof at U. of Colorado, 1992 [Richard, “Shadowboxing: An Essay On Power,” In Cornell Law Review, May]
We have cleverly built power's view of the appropriate standard of conduct
into the very term fair. Thus, the stronger party is able to have his/her way and
see her/himself as principled at the same time. Imagine, for example, a man's likely reaction to the
suggestion that subjective considerations -- a woman's mood, her sense of pressure or intimidation, how she felt about the man, her unexpressed fear
of reprisals if she did not go ahead-- ought to play a part in determining whether the man is guilty of rape. Most men find this suggestion offensive; it
requires them to do something they are not accustomed to doing. "Why," they say, "I'd have to be a mind reader before I could have sex with
anybody?" "Who knows, anyway, what internal inhibitions the woman might have been harboring?" And "what if the woman simply changed her mind
later and charged me with rape?" What we never notice is that women can "read" men's minds perfectly well. The male perspective is right out there
in the world, plain as day, inscribed in culture, song, and myth -- in all the prevailing narratives. These narratives tell us that men want and are entitled
[*820]  to sex, that it is a prime function of women to give it to them, and that unless something unusual happens, the act of sex is ordinary and
blameless. We believe these things because that is the way we have constructed women, men, and "normal" sexual intercourse. Yet society and law

The "objective"
accept only this latter message (or something like it), and not the former, more nuanced ones, to mean refusal. Why?

approach is not inherently better or more fair. Rather, it is accepted because it

embodies the sense of the stronger party, who centuries ago found himself in a
position to dictate what permission meant. Allowing ourselves to be drawn into
reflexive, predictable arguments about administrability, fairness, stability, and ease of
determination points us away from what  [*821]  really counts: the way in
which stronger parties have managed to inscribe their views and interests into
"external" culture, so that we are now enamored with that way of judging action. First, we read our values and preferences into the
culture; then we pretend to consult that culture meekly and humbly in order to judge our own acts.

Methodological pluralism is necessary.

Bleiker 14 – (6/17, Roland, Professor of International Relations at the University of
Queensland, “International Theory Between Reification and Self-Reflective Critique,”
International Studies Review, Volume 16, Issue 2, pages 325–327)

Methodological pluralism lies at the heart of Levine's sustainable critique. He

borrows from what Adorno calls a “constellation”: an attempt to juxtapose, rather than integrate, different perspectives. It is in this
spirit that Levine advocates multiple methods to understand the same event or phenomena. He writes of the need to validate
“multiple and mutually incompatible ways of seeing” (p. 63, see also pp. 101–102). In this model, a scholar oscillates back and forth

No single
between different methods and paradigms, trying to understand the event in question from multiple perspectives.

method can ever adequately represent the event or should gain the upper hand. But each
should, in a way, recognize and capture details or perspectives that the others
cannot (p. 102). In practical terms, this means combining a range of methods
even when—or, rather, precisely when—they are deemed incompatible. They can range

from poststructual deconstruction to the tools pioneered and championed by

positivist social sciences. The benefit of such a methodological polyphony is not just the
opportunity to bring out nuances and new perspectives. Once the false hope of a smooth synthesis has been
abandoned, the very incompatibility of the respective perspectives can then be used to identify the reifying

tendencies in each of them. For Levine, this is how reification may be “checked at the source” and this is how a
“critically reflexive moment might thus be rendered sustainable ” (p. 103). It is in this sense
that Levine's approach is not really post-foundational but, rather, an attempt to “balance foundationalisms against one another” (p.
14). There are strong parallels here with arguments advanced by assemblage thinking and complexity theory—links that could have
been explored in more detail.
 Chapter Three is The Basis
Subjectivity is the basis for ethics – it is a call for us to live life in a certain way,
so it requires a concept of a subject who can answer this call. The only ethical
claims that can be normative are ones that flow from the subject’s constitutive
instability – the ‘I think’ is not the ‘I am’. The ‘I think’ does not determine the
subject – it is merely its capacity. Thinking only affects a subject as a being in
time and so is not a transcendent feature.
Transcendent subject hood fails because of differentiation through time causes
instability.
Deleuze 68 [Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repitition. Translated by Paul Patton. 1968.] AA
Temporally speaking - in other words, from the point of view of the theory of time - nothing is more instructive than the difference between the Kantian and the Cartesian

Descartes's Cogito operated with two logical values: determination and undetermined existence. The
Cogito. It is as though

determination (I think) implies an undetermined existence (I am, because 'in order to think one must exist') - and
determines it precisely as the existence of a thinking subject: I think therefore I am, I am a thing which thinks. The
entire Kantian critique [is] amounts to objecting against Descartes that it is impossible for determination to bear directly upon the undetermined. The
determination ('I think') obviously implies something undetermined ('I am'), but nothing so far tells us
how it is that this undetermined is determinable by the 'I think': 'in the consciousness of myself in mere
thought I am the being itself although nothing in myself is thereby given for thought.'8 Kant therefore adds a third logical value: the

determinable, or rather the form in which the undetermined is determinable (by the deter mination). This third value suffices to make logic a transcendental
instance. It amounts to the discovery of Difference - no longer in the form of an empirical difference between two determinations, but in the form of a

transcendental Difference between the Determination as such and what it determines; no[t] longer in the form of
an external difference which separates, but in the form of an internal Difference which
establishes an a priori relation between thought and being. Kant's answer is well known: the form under which undetermined existence is
determinable by the 'I think' is that of time ...9 The consequences of this are extreme: my undetermined existence can be

determined only within time as the existence of a phenomenon, of a passive, receptive phenomenal subject
appearing within time. As a result, the spontaneity of which I am conscious in the 'I think' cannot

be understood as the attribute of a substantial and spontaneous being, but only as the
affection of a passive self which experiences its own thought - its own intelligence, that by virtue of which it can say I
The activity of
- being exercised in it and upon it but not by it. Here begins a long and inexhaustible story: I is an other, or the paradox of inner sense.

thought applies to a receptive being, to a passive subject which represents that activity to itself rather
than enacts it, which experiences its effect rather than initiates it, and which lives it like an Other within itself. To 'I think' and 'I am'
must be added the self - that is, the passive position (what Kant calls the receptivity of intuition); to the determination and
the undetermined must be added the form of the determinable, namely time. Nor is 'add' entirely the right word here, since it is rather a matter of establishing

the difference and interiorising it within being and thought. It is as though the I were fractured from one end to the other: fractured by the pure and empty
form of time. In this form it is the correlate of the passive self which appears in time. Time signifies a fault or a fracture in the I
and a passivity in the self, and the correlation between the passive self and the fractured I constitutes the discovery of the transcendental, the
Descartes could draw his conclusion only by expelling time, by reducing
element of the Copernican Revolution.

the Cogito to an instant and entrusting time to the operation of continuous creation carried out by God. More generally, the supposed identity of the I has
no other guarantee than the unity of God himself. For this reason, the substitution of the point of view of the 'I' for the point of view of 'God' = than is commonly supposed, so
long as the former retains an identity that it owes precisely tt. If the greatest tmttattve of transcendental philosophy was to introduce the form of time into thought as such,
then this pure and empty form in turn signifies indissolubly the death of God, the fractured I and the passive self. It is true that Kant did not pursue this initiative: both God and
the I underwent a practical resurrection. Even in the speculative domain, the fracture is quickly filled by a new form of identity - namely, active synthetic identity; whereas the
passive self is defined only by receptivity and, as such, endowed with no power of synthesis. On the contrary, we have seen that receptivity, understood as a capacity for
experiencing affections, was only a consequence, and that the passive self was more profoundly constituted by a synthesis which is itself passive (contemplation ontraction). ·
The possibility of receiving sensations or impressions follows from this. It is impossible to maintain the Kantian distribution, which amounts to a supreme effort to save the world
of representation: here, synthesis is understood as active and as giving rise to a new form of identity in the I, while passivity is understood as simple receptivity without
synthesis. The Kantian initiative can be taken up, and the form of time can support both the death of God and the fractured I, but in the course of a quite different understanding
of the passive self. In this sense, it is correct to claim that neither Fichte nor Hegel is the descendant of Kant - rather, it is Holderlin, who discovers the emptiness of pure time
and, in this emptiness, simultaneously the continued diversion of the divine, the prolonged fracture of the I and the constitutive passion of the self.10 Holderlin saw in this form
of time both the essence of tragedy and the adventure of Oedipus, as though these were complementary figures of the same death instinct. Is it possible that Kantian philosophy
should thus be the heir of Oedipus?

There are two models of the subject that can exist in relation to the time that
constitutes it: First, the melancholic subject – which stabilizes a subject’s
present and future by making it a projection of a static past, demanding
subjects conform to majoritarian modes of being. Second, the temporality of
the new – time introduces difference; subjects are always changing and open to
alternative modes of being in a way that precedes the past. We must reject the
false stability of melancholic subjectivity and embrace the production of new
modes of being.
Only a subject embracing the temporality of the new is a coherent model of
subjectivity. Any attempt to structure subjectivity in accordance to majoritarian
models always fail given the way subjects are constantly differentiating
throughout time. The only logical conclusion from this is that we embrace
subjectivity as difference – becoming.
Thus the ROB is a rejection of melancholic subjectivity in favor of the
temporality of the new. That’s key to education – majoritarian stabilized
schooling wrecks thought and is unethical.
Carlin and Wallin [Carlin, Matthew. Wallin, Jason. “Deleuze & Guattari, Politics and
Education.” Bloomsbury. 2014. Pg. 119-121] MK
As a social machine through which ‘labour power and the socius as a whole is manufactured’, schooling figures in the production of social territories that already anticipate a
certain kind of people (Guattari, 2009, p. 47). And what kind of people does orthodox schooling seek to produce but a ‘molar public’, or, rather, a public regulated in the abstract
image of segmentary social categories (age, gender, ethnicity, class, rank, achievement) (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987)? Such an aspiration is intimately wed to the territorializing
powers of the State, for as Deleuze and Guattari argue (1983), State power first requires a ‘representational subject’ as both an abstract and unconscious model in relation to

which one is taught to desire. As Massumi (2002) writes, ‘the subject is made to be in conformity with the
systems that produces it, such that the subject reproduces the system’ (p. 6). Where
education has historically functioned to regulate institutional life according to such
segmentary molar codes, its modes of production have taken as their teleological goal the production of a
‘majoritarian people’, or, more accurately, a people circuited to their representational self-similarity according to State thought. This is, in part, the
threat that Aoki (2005) identifies in the planned curriculum and its projection of an abstract essentialism upon a diversity of concrete educational assemblages (a school, a class,
a curriculum, etc.). Apropos Deleuze, Aoki argues that the standardization of education has effectively reduced difference to a matter of difference in degree. That is, in
reference to the stratifying power of the planned curriculum, Aoki avers that difference is always-already linked to an abstract image to which pedagogy ought to aspire and in
conformity to which its operations become recognizable as ‘education’ per se. Against political action then, orthodox educational thought conceptualizes social life alongside the
‘categories of the Negative’, eschewing difference for conformity, flows for unities, mobile arrangements for totalizing systems (Foucault, 1983, p. xiii). Twisting Deleuze, might

education aspires to invest desire in the production of a

we claim that the people are missing in education? That is, where

‘majoritarian’ or ‘molar’ public, the prospect of thinking singularities are stayed, not only through the paucity of
enunciatory forms and images available for thinking education in the first place, but further, through the

organization of the school’s enunciatory machines into vehicles of representation that repeat
in molarizing forms of self-reflection, ‘majoritarian’ perspective, and dominant circuits of desiring-investment. Herein, the impulse
of standardization obliterates alternative subject formations and the modes of counter-
signifying enunciation that might palpate them. Repelling the singular, the ‘majoritarian’ and
standardizing impulse of education takes as its ‘fundamental’ mode of production
the reification of common sense, or, rather, the territorialization of thought according to that which is given (that which everyone already
knows). Figuring in a mode ‘of identification that brings diversity in general to bear

upon the form of the Same’, common sense functions to stabilize patterns of social production by tethering them to molar orders of meaning
and dominant regimes of social signification (Deleuze, 1990, p. 78). As Daignault argues, in so far as it repels the anomalous by reterritorializing it within prior systems of
representation, common sense constitutes a significant and lingering problem in contemporary education (Hwu, 2004). Its function, Daignault alludes apropos Serres, is oriented

where the conceptualization of ‘public’ education is founded in

to the annihilation of difference. Hence,

common sense, potentials for political action through tactics of proliferation, disjunction,
and singularization are radically delimited and captured within prior territorialities of use (Foucault, 1983, p. xiii). The problem of this
common sense has yet to force us to think in a manner capable of subtracting desire
scenario is clear:

from majoritarian thought in lieu of alternative forms of organization and experimental

expression. In so far as it functions as a vehicle of ‘molarization’, reifying a common universe of reference for enunciation, the school fails to produce conditions for
thinking in a manner that is not already anticipated by such referential ‘possibilities’. Hence, while antithetical to the espoused purpose

of schooling, the majoritarian impulse of the school has yet to produce conditions for thinking
– at least in the Deleuzian (2000) sense whereupon thought proceeds from a necessary violence to those habits of repetition with which thought becomes contracted.

Prefer the standard additionally – general understandings of the relation

between norms, subjects, and the world are insufficient for ethics because
there is a gap between discursive regimes and real subjectivity. Only structures
of affect distinguish the subject from static concepts of it – it’s cruelly optimistic
to think we can fit into stable structures.
Schaefer 13 [Schaefer ’13. Schaefer, D. "The Promise of Affect: The Politics of the Event in Ahmed's The Promise of
Happiness and Berlant's Cruel Optimism." Theory & Event 16.2 (2013). Project MUSE. Web. LHP MK]
At a recent talk at the University of Pennsylvania, Lauren Berlant was asked a question about the relationship between her work—she had just finished a lecture on the theme of
flat affect in Gregg Araki's 2004 film Mysterious Skin—and the political. "Because I work on affect," she responded, "I think everything is realism" (Berlant: 2012). Like the dense
introductory segments of each of her chapters—thick but fast-moving genealogical waterslides—I think that unpacking statements like this from Berlant is best repaid by taking
them in a low gear. When Berlant maps her method as affect theory, she is suggesting that the works she examines in her capacity as a scholar of literature cannot be divorced
from the political-material contexts out of which they emerge, but at the same time must be recognized as incarnations of aparticular embodied iteration within this field.

Texts are produced by bodies that are both enmeshed in their political worlds and
trying to negotiate those worlds in their own distinct way. Everything we do is
realism: Berlant's textual objects of study are mediations, attempts to work something out,
exhibitions of tensed, embodied, affective realities .1 This is the promise of affect theory, the possibility
sliding together analytical tools used to pick apart both highly individuated and highly social
contact zones—bodies and histories—as incarnated realities. Affect theory wants to maintain
the insights of high theory, the doctrinaire approach that says "historicize everything," while at the
same time thinking of how bodies inject their own materiality into spaces. This means using language that enters the orbit of the
biological. In the introduction to their 1995 edited volume Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (later reprinted in Sedgwick's Touching Feeling)—one of the earliest
manifestoes of contemporary affect theory— Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank acerbically catalog what theory "knows today," first and foremost that 1: The distance of
[an] account from a biological basis is assumed to correlate near precisely with its potential for doing justice to difference (individual, historical, and cross-cultural), to
contingency, to performative force, and to the possibility of change (Sedgwick: 2003, 93). And 2: Human language is assumed to offer the most productive, if not the only

Affect theory in this vision is designed to explore[s]

possible, model for understanding representation (Sedgwick: 2003, 93).

the "crucial knowledges" of bodies outside a purely theoretical determination, outside

the traditional domains of humanist scholarship— reason, cognition, and language (Sedgwick: 2003,

114). Affect, for Lauren Berlant, is thus understandable as "sensual matter that is elsewhere to sovereign

consciousness but that has historical significance in domains of subjectivity " (Berlant: 2011, 53).
Affect theory is about how systems of forces circulating within bodies —forces not necessarily subsumable or
describable by language— interface with histories. It is about how discourses form ligatures with pulsing flesh-and-blood creatures. Two recent texts, Sara
Ahmed's The Promise of Happiness (2010) and Berlant's Cruel Optimism (2011), can be seen as developing this strand, and in particular, of indicating new ways of feeling out
politics through the membrane of affect theory. Both of these authors suggest that the repertoire of the analytics of power (Foucault: 1990) must be supplemented with
resources from the affective turn. Recent critiques of affect theory2 have focused on a branch of affect theory heavily informed by Gilles Deleuze's reading of Spinoza. In this
strand, affect is rendered as a set of ontological properties, as an ensemble of mutable attributes.3 Contemporary Deleuzians such as Brian Massumi4 and William Connolly5
have been targeted by these critics for their attempts at absorbing scientific research into the Spinozistic discourse of affect. But Spinoza and Deleuze are second-tier characters
in Ahmed and Berlant's work—which is perhaps why Ahmed situates herself in a lineage—stretching back to Sedgwick—that she calls "feminist cultural studies of affect"6

affect theory
(Ahmed: 2010, 13). Where the Deleuzian strands focuses on affect as the raw material of becoming, as the play of substances, Ahmed and Berlant locate

[is] as a phenomenological, rather than ontological enterprise. It is in the phenomenology of the political that Ahmed and Berlant ground
their projects. For Ahmed, this comes in the form of a new attention to happiness as an object of analysis. This does not mean a circumscribed exploration of happiness as a

Happiness is not autonomous, Ahmed argues,

thing, but rather programmatically asking the question "what does happiness do?" (Ahmed: 2010, 2).

but a relationship of evaluation that creates the horizon of the self. For Ahmed, the "near sphere" of the self is
constituted by a perimeter studded with "happy objects." This cluster of objects is what gives the
field of mobile operations of the self its shape . In this "drama of contingency," we "come to have our likes, which might even establish
what we are like" (Ahmed: 2010, 24). But for Ahmed, happiness as an affective field settling in proximity to bodies is not necessarily transparent in its shape or its function to the
self. Happiness often takes the form, she suggests, of a promise, of a deferred possibility. Taking the phenomenological tradition of Edmund Husserl as a springboard for a
discussion of time-consciousness, she suggests that happiness as a promise—from the Latin verb promittere, "to let go or send forth"—is an anticipation rather than a felt
presence (Ahmed: 2010, 38). Rather than simply an affect that circulates between bodies and objects, happiness is also a promise that is passed around. This analysis of the
promise of happiness underpins the genealogy Ahmed organizes in the opening chapter of the book: an exploration of the contemporary "happiness turn" in scholarship and the
"happiness industry" emerging in parallel in popular media marketplaces. This discourse, she suggests, moves happiness further away from its etymological origin point—in the
Middle English hap or fortune, cognate with "perhaps" and "happenstance"— suggesting chance to a sense of happiness as a scheme, a program that, if followed, leads to
ultimate good (Ahmed: 2010, 6). This sense of the promise of happiness is the elimination of contingency by guaranteeing the futurity of happiness: "The promise of happiness
takes this form: if you have this or have that, or if you do this or do that, then happiness is what follows" (Ahmed: 2010, 29). Happiness as a guarantee—a promise that circulates
through power-knowledge regimes—but one that defers happiness rather than making happiness present, is one of the mechanisms by which happiness is translated into the
skin of a political organism, an "affective community"—such as a family or a society. Through the promise of happiness, bodies are brought together by a shared expectation of
future comfort. But because this is a promise rather than immediate happiness, an interstice is formed between this promise and individual experiencing bodies— an interstice
that can either be full and complete or disconnected. The family, for instance, does not share a happiness, but a happiness deferred, a promise or image of happiness to-come
(Ahmed: 2010, 46). It is in this interstice, either blockaded or fluid, that Ahmed articulates the need for a politics of killing joy, of breaking down the promise of happiness as a
regime that demands fidelity without recourse. For Ahmed, the discourse of happiness is performative: it produces a politics of promise (or nostalgia) that suffocates alternative
promises and alternative explorations. Here Ahmed produces biographies of a range of "affect aliens," bodies that are called on to be silent and accept the happiness that has
been promised, while their actual desires and hopes are out of joint with the world around them: feminist killjoys, unhappy queers, melancholic migrants. The promise of
happiness, Ahmed suggests, must be interrupted to make room for emancipatory politics. "I am not saying that we have an obligation to be unhappy," she writes, "I am simply
suggesting that we need to think about unhappiness as more than a feeling that should be overcome" (Ahmed: 2010, 217). In the closing passage of the book she writes that
since "the desire for happiness can cover signs of its negation, a revolutionary politics has to work hard to stay proximate to unhappiness" (Ahmed: 2010, 223). Political change,
Ahmed contends, is paralyzed by the imperative to be happy, to stay within the narrow guidelines of happiness's promise. Where Ahmed's background is in a western
philosophical lineage that leads up to contemporary questions of affect, the immediate theoretical precursor of Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism is Kathleen Stewart's Ordinary
Affects (2007), which develops the notion of the "ordinary" as a felt reality. "Ordinary affects," Stewart writes, "are the varied, surging capacities to affect and to be affected that
give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences" (Stewart: 2007, 1f). Berlant is interested in particular in how the
ordinary comes to take the form of a sort of affective impasse, a set of felt relationships that cannot be moved through. Cruel Optimism is a focused study of a particular

Cruel optimism, she explains at the book's outset, refers to a relation that emerges
category of impasse, what she calls "cruel optimism."

"when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing . It might involve
food, or a kind of love; it might be a fantasy of the good life, or a political project " (Berlant: 2011, 1). Berlant

these attachments emerge, as a response to trauma or out of the ongoing

explores a range of situations where

pressures of the ordinary, in particular through the parameters of what she calls "genres of precarity," a range of aesthetic practices and styles—"mass
media, literature, television, film, and video"—that ... emerge during the 1990s to register a shift in how the older state-liberal-capitalist fantasies shape adjustments to the
structural pressures of crisis and loss that are wearing out the power of the good life's traditional fantasy bribe without wearing out the need for a good life (Berlant: 2011, 7).
Realism: texts always reflect an affective situation, a force field of desires, a labile contact zone between bodies and intersecting historical frames. Framing literary criticism

tracing the connective tissue between bodies and situations is what lets Berlant speak to
(broadly construed) as a practice of

the political uses of affect. She suggests that affect theory is a "another phase in the history of ideology theory," that it "brings us back to the encounter of
Affect—especially ordinary affect—is the
what is sensed with what is known and what has impact in a new but also recognizable way" (Berlant: 2011, 53).

missing link between discursive regimes and bodies , the arterial linkages through
which power is disseminated. "The present" is not an assemblage of texts and
knowledges, bloodless discursive inscriptions on the body, but a felt sense out of
which political circumstances emerge. "We understand nothing about impasses of the
political," she writes, "without having an account of the production of the present" (Berlant: 2011, 4). Cruel
optimism as a byproduct of political situations colliding with bodies plays out in ongoing, semistable routines, in ordinariness. This focus on the ordinary frames Berlant's
conception of the political as a slow-motion reaction rather than a series of staccato punctuations. This comes out, for instance, in her exhortation to move away from trauma
theory as a way of "describing what happens to persons and populations as an effect of catastrophic impacts" (Berlant: 2011, 9). Rather, Berlant suggests that trauma is only one
facet of the ordinary, a precursory event that yields new historical trajectories lived out in slow-motion. "Trauma," she writes, ... forces its subjects not into mere stuckness but
into crisis mode, where they develop some broad, enduring intuitions about the way we live in a now that's emerging without unfolding, and imagining a historicism from within
a discontinuous present and ways of being that were never sovereign (Berlant: 2011, 93). Rather than the instantiating event, Berlant is interested in the fallout of politics, the
long-running reverberations. It is in these interwoven aftermaths following in the wake of bodies that Berlant locates the tropic of cruel optimism. Optimism, she is careful to
point out, can "feel" any number of different ways, can come clothed in any number of affective orientations. "Because optimism is ambitious," she writes, "at any moment it
might not feel like anything, including nothing: dread, anxiety, hunger, curiosity, the whole gamut from the sly neutrality of browsing the aisles to excitement at the prospect of

Rather than a singularly identifiable feeling, optimism takes the

'the change that's gonna come'" (Berlant: 2011, 2).

phenomenological form of a "knotty tethering to objects, scenes, and modes of life that
generate so much overwhelming yet sustaining negation" (Berlant: 2011, 52). Optimism
binds bodies to "fantasies of the good life," to horizons of possibility that may or
may not be defeated by the conditions of their own emergence. Cruel optimism is
the outcome of this circumstance of tethering confused by itself, of Möbius-strip cycles of
ambition and frustration. The ordinary, precisely because of its complexity, can contain the intransigent contradictions of cruel optimism (Berlant: 2011,
53). It is the space of the rubble, the hovering dust, the shockwaves that follow the event rather than the piercing clarity of the punctum itself. Berlant is interested in the ways
that habits form out of situations of impossibility—for instance, in her reading of Gregg Bordowitz's documentary filmHabit (2001), about the body rituals that structure the daily
lives of a gay man living with AIDS and his partner in New York City in the 1990s. Bordowitz's work maps a crisis that reflects Berlant's delineation of the field of the political: with
the new availability of anti-retroviral drugs in the 1990s, AIDS ceased to be "a death sentence," and thus "turned fated life back into an ellipsis, a time marked by pill- and test-
taking, and other things, the usual" (Berlant: 2011, 58). For Berlant, the event is a rarity, and is only secondarily the zone of the political, which is itself constituted by ongoing
patterns of response and desire—slow-motion echoes producing new forms as they cross-cut and interfere with one another (Berlant: 2011, 6). In this sense, Berlant explains,
her work meshes with Sedgwick's queer reading of affect as the histories that make us desire in unexpected, perverse ways. "The queer tendency of this method," Berlant
writes, "is to put one's attachments back into play and into pleasure, into knowledge, into worlds. It is to admit that they matter" (Berlant: 2011, 123). Berlant sees the terrain of
the political emerging out of this tissue of affectively-embroidered histories. Although both Ahmed and Berlant write about the uses of affect as a phenomenological bridge to
the political, and the slipperiness of happiness or the good life—the way that pleasure can be wrapped up with a strain of unease— there is a distinction between their
respective scopes of inquiry. Where Ahmed's book is about frustration/promise/deferral, Berlant's is about addiction. When I asked my students to come up with examples of

cruel optimism, they brainstormed the following list: heroin, abusive relationships, candy, horcruxes. Each of these instances suggests a vital but
destructive need, an ambivalent compulsion—an addiction , where the tectonic plates of the body's affects shift in friction with
one another. Cruel optimism indexes these moments where a body desires and needs an arrangement

of the world that is also frustrating or corrosive . Politics is one of these zones of fractious attraction. Berlant writes, for instance, that
Intensely political seasons spawn reveries of a different immediacy. People imagine alternative environments where authenticity trumps ideology, truths cannot be concealed,

Politics produces fantasies, tethers that draw us forward

and communication feels intimate, face-to-face" (Berlant: 2011, 223).

to particular attachments in the form of images, narratives, bodily practices . But these fantasies
also contain the elements of their own frustration or refusal. President George W. Bush, for example, is able to use the
affective elements of statecraft (a practice which, Berlant assures us, is decidedly non-partisan) to create a façade that diverts attention from his flailing foreign and economic
policies (Berlant: 2011, 226). Berlant's focus in Cruel Optimism is on politics as a field of attachments, a skein of affectively pulsing tissues linking bodies together. "Pace Žižek,"
she writes, ... the energy that generates this sustaining commitment to the work of undoing a world while making one requires fantasy to motor programs of action, to distort
the present on behalf of what the present can become. It requires a surrealistic affectsphere to counter the one that already exists, enabling a confrontation with the fact that
any action of making a claim on the present involves bruising processes of detachment from anchors in the world, along with optimistic projections of a world that is worth our
attachment to it (Berlant: 2011, 263). Berlant looks at how politics pulls on bodies using the ligaments of affect, how politics becomes irresistible, even when it is self-frustrating.
Ahmed's focus is very different: she is interested in thinking through politics as the space of unhappiness and deferment. In a section of Chapter 5 entitled "The Freedom to Be
Unhappy," Ahmed writes that revolutionary practices may need to follow from the willingness to suspend happiness, to dissolve the imbricated promises of happiness that
produce hermetically sealed political systems. Affect aliens are forged in the pressure of unfulfilled or unfulfillable promises of happiness, sealed in a relationship of anticipation
pinned to the guarantee of ultimate good. Thus Ahmed writes that "any politics of justice will involve causing unhappiness even if that is not the point of our action. So much
happiness is premised on, and promised by, the concealment of suffering, the freedom to look away from what compromises one's happiness" (Ahmed: 2010, 196). The
revolutionary politics Ahmed wants to advance is willing to put happiness at risk, to dissolve promises of happiness. Ahmed is clear, though, that this is not to make politics
about unhappiness: It is not that unhappiness becomes our telos: rather, if we no longer presume happiness is our telos, unhappiness would register as more than what gets in
the way. When we are no longer sure of what gets in the way, then 'the way' itself becomes a question (Ahmed: 2010, 195). Neither happiness nor unhappiness is the telos of
revolutionary politics. Rather, Ahmed wants to connect the political back to the "hap" of happiness. Rather than a critique of happiness, I would suggest that the broader
channel of her project is best understood as a critique ofpromise. Thus she ends Chapter 5 with the later work of Jacques Derrida, indicating the need to keep politics open to
the event, to the unexpected possibilities to-come. She proposes a vision of happiness that "would be alive to chance, to chance arrivals, to the perhaps of a happening"
(Ahmed: 2010, 198). Where for Berlant the event is in the past, the ancestor of our tensed bodily habits today, for Ahmed, the event is ahead, the always-anticipated but
radically unknown future. There is also a complementarity to these books, a sense in which both come at the relationship between affect and the political from different sides of
the problem, but are nonetheless hurtling towards a common point of impact. Is Ahmed describing scenes where cruel optimism unravels under the internal pressure of a
frustrated promise? Is cruel optimism the deferral of happiness implicit in the temporal structure of the promise? These are not fully resolved or resolvable questions, in part
because Ahmed and Berlant roll their theoretical lens over such a wide range of circumstances. I would suggest that deepening the conversation between these approaches will
hinge in part on exploring the relationship between affect and time—a question that is surfaced by both of these texts but not resolved. Ahmed wants to play inside the
deconstructive thematics of the promise that allows us to view affect as a state of deferral. But Ahmed comes closest to Berlant when she writes that "[i]f we hope for
happiness, then we might be happy as long as we can retain this hope (a happiness that paradoxically allows us to be happy with unhappiness)" (Ahmed: 2010, 181). Is deferred
happiness really divided from happiness? What if fantasies—what Silvan Tomkins calls "images"7—are so crucial to the production of affect that to save and savor fantasies in
one's near sphere is "worth" their eventual frustration? What if a promise deferred is itself a form of happiness—even if the deferral turns out, in retrospect, to have been
endless? What happens while we wait? This is in no way to acquiesce to those situations, sketched by Ahmed in the inner chapters of the book, where promises are made that
produce affect aliens— investment in a community of promise that will never materialize as happiness. But it is to suggest that the economic flows of affect are more complex
than a simple binary of presence/deferment. There may be a clearer divergence in Berlant and Ahmed's respective emphases on the felt temporality of politics. Ahmed suggests
that political transformation happens by orienting us to the perhaps, towards an evental horizon constituted by uncertainty, rather than promise. Berlant seems more skeptical
about the possibility of untethering ourselves from an orientation to future happiness. As in her response to Žižek, she emphasizes the intransigence of fantasy, especially as a
conduit that can produce political energy. I wonder if Berlant's answer here points to a different way of resolving the problem of temporality hovering over Ahmed's work: what
if the dissolution of promise did not leave us at the mercy of a pure politics of hap, of chance, but opened us up to new horizons of hope—neither guaranteed nor radically
accidental? This dynamic interfaces with an equally provocative question lodged early on and left unresolved in Berlant's book: "I have indeed wondered," she writes in her
Introduction, "whether all optimism is cruel, because the experience of loss of the conditions of its reproduction can be so breathtakingly bad, just as the threat of the loss of x in
the scope of one's attachment drives can feel like a threat to living on itself" (Berlant: 2011, 24). In mapping affectively mediated politics, how do we assess the cruelty of hope?
What are the singular psychic costs of disappointment that must be risked or countenanced in the production of a politics without promise? These books are profoundly
important contributions advancing the still-new and in some ways still-tentative field of affect theory. They open up two distinct but interrelated methodological templates for
thinking through issues of globalization, race, gender and sexuality, media, philosophy, and religion: the thematics of frustration and of addiction in the moving affectsphere of
 affect theory offers a crucial set of resources for
the political. What both Ahmed and Berlant demonstrate is that

thinking through the relationship between bodies and discourses . The enterprise of thinking
politics, of mapping the enfolding of bodies by power, cannot move forward without affect.

Strategies of deterritorialization like what the aff does to the debate space are
key to solving capitalism – shown through schizoanalysis as a
deterritorialization of normalized forms of critique.
Deleuze and Guattari 72 (Gilles and Felix, Anti-Oedipus, 1972, p. 244-247) SJCP//JG
Yet it would be a serious error to consider the capitalist flows and the
schizophrenic flows as identical, under the general theme of a decoding of the flows of desire. Their affinity is great, to be
sure: everywhere capitalism sets in motion schizo-flows that animate "our" arts

and "our" sciences, just as they congeal into the production of "our own" sick,
the schizophrenics. We have seen that the relationship of schizophrenia to capitalism went
far beyond problems of modes of living, environment, ideology, etc., and that it
should be examined at the deepest level of one and the same economy, one
and the same production process. Our society produces schizos the same way it produces Prell shampoo or Ford cars, the
only difference being that the schizos are not salable. How then does one explain the fact that capitalist production is constantly arresting the
schizophrenic process and transforming the subject of the process into a confined clinical entity, as though it saw in this process the image of its own
death coming from within? Why does it make the schizophrenic into a sick person not only nominally but in reality? Why does it confine its madmen
and madwomen instead of seeing in them its own heroes and heroines, its own fulfillment? And where it can no longer recognize the figure of a simple

why does it keep its artists and even its scientists under such close
illness,

surveillance-as though they risked unleashing flows that would be dangerous

for capitalist production and charged with a revolutionary potential, so long as
these flows are not co-opted or absorbed by the laws of the market? Why does it form in
turn a gigantic machine for social repression-psychic repression, aimed at what nevertheless constitutes its own reality-the decoded flows? The answer-
as we have seen-is that capitalism is indeed the limit of all societies, insofar as it brings about the decoding of the flows that the other social formations
coded and overcoded. But it is the relative limit of every society; it effects relative breaks, because it substitutes for the codes an extremely rigorous
axiomatic that maintains the energy of the flows in a bound state on the body of capital as a socius that is deterritorialized, but also a socius that is

Schizophrenia, on the contrary, is indeed the absolute limit

even more pitiless than any other.

that causes the flows to travel in a free state on a desocialized body without
organs. Hence one can say that schizophrenia is the exterior limit of capitalism
itself or the conclusion of its deepest tendency, but that capitalism only
functions on condition that it inhibit this tendency, or that it push back or
displace this limit, by substituting for it its own immanent relative limits, which
it continually reproduces on a widened scale. It axiomatizes with one hand what it decodes with the other.
Such is the way one must reinterpret the Marxist law of the counteracting tendency. With the result that schizophrenia pervades the entire capitalist
field from one end to the other. But for capitalism it is a question of binding the schizophrenic charges and energies into a world axiomatic that always
opposes the revolutionary potential of decoded flows with new interior limits. And it is impossible in such a regime to distinguish, even in two phases,

The flows are decoded and

between decoding and the axiomatization that com es to replace the vanished codes.

axiomatized by capitalism at the same time. Hence schizophrenia is not the

identity of capitalism, but on the contrary its difference, its divergence, and its
death.
Inevitability means the perm is best
Wilson 2k John, Editor and Publisher of Illinois Academe. “How the Left can Win Arguments and Influence People” p 15-16
2000

Capitalism is far too ingrained in American life to eliminate . If you go into the
most impoverished areas of America, you will find that the people who live there are not seeking
government control over factories or even more social welfare programs; they're hoping, usually in vain, for a fair

chance to share in the capitalist wealth. The poor do not pray for socialism-they
strive to be a part of the capitalist system. They want jobs, they want to start
businesses, and they want to make money and be successful. What's wrong
with America is not capitalism as a system but capitalism as a religion. We worship the
accumulation of wealth and treat the horrible inequality between rich and poor as if it were an act of God. Worst of all, we allow the government to
exacerbate the financial divide by favoring the wealthy: go anywhere in America, and compare a rich suburb with a poor town-the city services, schools,

The aim is not to overthrow

parks, and practically everything else will be better financed in the place populated by rich people.

capitalism but to overhaul it. Give it a social-justice tune-up , make it more

efficient, get the economic engine to hit on all cylinders for everybody, and stop
putting out so many environmentally hazardous substances. To some people, this goal means
selling out leftist ideals for the sake of capitalism. But the right thrives on having an ineffective opposition. The Revolutionary Communist Party helps
stabilize the "free market" capitalist system by making it seem as if the only alternative to free-market capitalism is a return to Stalinism.

Prospective activists for change are instead channeled into pointless discussions
about the revolutionary potential of the proletariat. Instead of working to
persuade people to accept progressive ideas, the far left talks to itself (which
may be a blessing, given the way it communicates) and tries to sell copies of the
Socialist Worker to an uninterested public.
An unstable view of the subject is a prerequisite to deconstructing the color line
to overcome striation and discount structures of whiteness.
Saldanha 4 [Saldanha, Arun. “Reontologising Race: the Machinic Geography of Phenotype.” March 9, 2004.
Brackets for Grammar. LHP MK]

Every time phenotype makes another machinic connection, there is a stutter. Every time bodies are further entrenched in
segregat[ed]ion, however brutal, there [is] needs to be an affective investment of some sort. This is
the ruptural moment in which to intervene. Race should not be eliminated, but proliferated,
its many energies directed at multiplying racial differences so as to render them joyfully
cacophonic. Many in American critical race theory also argue against a utopian transcendence of race, taking from W E B Du Bois and pragmatism a reflexive,
sometimes strategically nationalist attitude towards racial embodiment (compare Outlaw, 1996; Shuford, 2001; Winant, 2004). What is needed is an

affirmation of race's creativity and virtuality: what race can be. Race need not be about order and oppression, it can be wild, far-from-
equilibrium, liberatory. It is not that everyone becomes completely Brownian (or brown!), completely similar, or completely unique. It is just that white supremacism becomes
strenuous as many populations start harbouring a similar economic, technological, cultural productivity as whites do now, linking all sorts of bodies with all sorts of wealth and
all sorts of ways of life. That is, race exists in its true mode when it is no longer stifled by racism. ––The race-tribe exists only at the level of an oppressed race, and in the name of
the oppression it suffers; there is no race but inferior, minoritarian; there is no domi- nant race; a race is defined not by its purity but rather by the impurity conferred upon it by
a system of domination. Bastard and mixed-blood are the true names of race'' (Deleuze and Guattari, [1980] 1987, page 379). In ``A thousand tiny sexes'', Grosz (1994b) follows
a well-known passage of Deleuze and Guattari to argue for non-Hegelian, indeed protohuman feminism that utilises lines of flight of the gender assemblage to combat

If we consider the great binary aggregates, such as the sexes or classes, it is

heterosexist patriarchy. ––

evident that they also cross over into molecular assemblages of a different nature , and that
there is a double reciprocal dependency between them. For the two sexes imply a multiplicity of molecular combinations
bringing into play not only the man in the woman and the woman in the man, but the relation of each to the animal, the plant, etc.: a thousand tiny sexes'' (Deleuze and
 molecularisation of race would consist in its breaking up into a
Guattari, [1980] 1987, page 213). Similarly, the

thousand tiny races. It is from here that cosmopolitanism should start: the pleasure, curiosity, and
concern in encountering a multiplicity of corporeal fragments outside of common-sense
taxonomies. ––We walk the streets among hundreds of people whose patterns of lips, breasts, and genital organs we divine; they seem to us equivalent and
interchangeable. Then something snares our attention : a dimple speckled with freckles on the cheek of a woman; a steel choker around the throat of
a man in a business suit; a gold ring in the punctured nipple on the hard chest of a deliveryman; a big raw fist in the delicate hand of a schoolgirl; a live python coiled about the

Signs of clandestine disorder in the uniformed and coded crowds''

neck of a lean, lanky adolescent with coal-black skin.

(Lingis, 2000, page 142). Machinism against racism builds upon a gradual, fragmented, and shifting sense

of corporeal difference, that of course extends far further than the street. Responsibility, activism, and antiracist
policy will follow only from feeling and understanding the geographical differentials that exist
between many different kinds of bodies: between a Jew and a black soldier, between a woman in the Sahel and a woman in Wall Street,
between a Peruvian peasant and a Chinese journalist . A machinic politics of race takes into account the real barriers to

mobility and imagination that exist in different places; cosmopolitanism has to be invented, not imposed. It may seem
that machinism is as utopian and open ended as Gilroy's transcendent antiracism. It is not,
because it is empirical, immanent, and pragmatic. The machinic geography of phenotype shows
that racism differs from place to place, and cannot be overcome in any simple way. It shows that white
supremacy can subside only by changing the rules of education , or the financial sector, or the arms trade, or the
pharmaceutical industry, or whatever. For machinic politics, the cultural studies pre- occupations with apology, recognition, politically correct language and reconsiliation, or else

A thousand tiny
cultural hybridity, pastiche, and ambivalence, threaten to stand in the way of really doing something about the global structures of racism.

races can be made only if it is acknowledged that racism is a material, inclusive series of
events, a viscous geography which cannot be `signified away'. Miscegenation, openness to strangers, exoticism in art, and
experimentations with whiteness can certainly help. But ultimately cosmpolitanism without critique and intervention remains complacent with its own comfortably mobile
position. In a word, ethics encompasses politics, and politics starts with convincing people of race's materiality.
ROB before theory
1.Jurisdiction – the ROB speaks specifically to this round and how the ballot
should be signed, while theory is about norm-setting which is out of the judge’s
jurisdiction because that is out of round
2.Offense – the ROB constrains what is and isn’t offensive so theory must be
contextualized to the framing or else it’s not offensive so you can’t vote on it
3.Theory speaks to a fair and educational space but my ROB evidence says that
those spaces can’t exist prior to the aff because they’re grounded in
antiblackness
4.Pedagogy – the ROB proves my pedagogy is good in debate space which
means it should come before theory since there’s no guarantee of norm-setting
but there is guarantee of pedagogical value
5.Scope – the ROB methodology makes descriptive claims about the world and
thus how to operate within that world which applies and can motivate action
outside of the debate space while theory only operates inside debate making
my ROB more valuable
6.Side Constraint – the kritik sets out a problem in society and the ROB
attempts to resolve it otherwise that societal bias can never be solved and
influences theory meaning it’s a side constraint on effective theory
Reject frameworks based in stable subjectivity:
[1] Kant attempts to attribute a transcendental feature that is intrinsic, but this
only captures the subject in a moment in time – that fails since the subject is a
process that engages through the idea of time.
[2] Things like reason might effect the subject, but they are always changing –
like our desires – the NC assumes a universal will through reason, but that’s
incoherent.
[3] They cannot cross-apply why agency is important as reasons to take out the
K because I also have an understanding an agency, but I critiques the way we
build agency – i.e subjects may have the ability to reason, but that does not
constitute the subject.
[4] No person upholds the conceptual structure of an agent. The link from the
structure of an agent to its motivation in people is not accounted for in practical
reason. Rather, the only way we can motivate individuals is to follow through
with their unfolding affects and desires --- this means the K is a prior question.