Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Apocalyptic Rhetoric Kritik
Apocalyptic Rhetoric Kritik
SHELL 1/4
THE AFFIRMATIVES APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC EXERTS BIOPOLITIAL
CONTROL OVER LIFE BY EXPOSING IT TO DEATH, USING THE IMAGE OF
APOCALYPSE TO JUSTIFY THE EXTERMINATION OF THOSE OBJECTS OF
POWER ISOLATED AS THREATS.
COVIELLO, assistant professor of English, 2000
[peter, Apocalypse From Now On, PG. 40-1, JC]
Perhaps. But to claim that American culture is at present decisively postnuclear is not to say that the
world we inhabit is in any way post-apocalyptic. Apocalypse, as I began by saying, changed - it did not
go away. And here I want to hazard my second assertion: if, in the nuclear mhm of yesteryear, apocalypse
signified an event threatening everyone and everything with (in Jacques Derrida's suitably menacing
phrase) "remainderless and a-symbolic destruction," then in the postnuclear world apocalypse is an affair
whose parameters are definitively local. In shape and in substance, apocalypse is defined now by the
affliction it brings somewhere else, always to an "other" people whose very presence might then be
written as a kind of dangerous contagion, threatening the safety and prosperity of a cherished "general
population." This fact seems to me to stand behind Susan Sontag's incisive observation, from 1989, that,
"Apocalypse is now a long running serial: not 'Apocalypse Now' but 'Apocalypse from Now On.'" The
decisive point here in the perpetuation of the threat of apocalypse (the point Sontag goes on, at
length, to miss) is that the apocalypse is ever present because, as an element in a vast economy of
power, it is ever useful. That is, though the perpetual threat of destruction - through the constant
reproduction of the figure of the apocalypse - the agencies of power ensure their authority to act on
and through the bodies of a particular population. No one turns this point more persuasively than
Michel Foucault, who in the final chapter of his first volume of The History of Sexuality addresses
himself to the problem of a power that is less repressive than productive, less life-threatening than ,
in his words, "life-administering." Power, he contends, "exerts a positive influence on life [and]
endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and
comprehensive regulations." In his brief comments on what he calls "the atomic situation,"
however, Foucault insists as well that the productiveness of modern power must not be mistaken for
a uniform repudiation of violent or even lethal means. For as "managers of life and survival, of
bodies and the race," agencies of modern power presume to act "on the behalf of the existence of
everyone." Whatsoever might be construed as a threat to life and survival in this way serves to
authorize any expression of force, no matter how invasive, or, indeed, potentially annihilating. "If
genocide is indeed the dream of modern power," Foucault writes, "this is not because of a recent return to
the ancient right to kill' it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the
race, and the large-scale phenomena of population." For a state that would arm itself not with the power
to kill its population, but with a more comprehensive power over the patters and functioning of its
collective life, the threat of an apocalyptic demise, nuclear or otherwise, seems a civic initiative that can
scarcely be done without.
SHELL 2/4
BIOPOLITICS NORMALIZES THE CREATION OF POPULATIONS AND THEIR
EXPOSURE TO DEATH. THIS ENSURES THE SOVERIEGN APPARTUSS RIGHT TO
KILL.
Stohler 95
[Anne, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Race and the Education of
Desire,
p. 81-82]
Biopower was defined as a power organized around the management of life, where wars were waged on
behalf of the existence of everyone, entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in
the name of the life necessity, massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life and that so many regimes
have been able to wage so many wars, causing so may to be killed. at stake is the biological existence of a
population. If genocide is indeed the dream of modem powers, it is because power is situated and exercised at the
level of life, the species, the race, and the large scale phenomena of the population. The sovereign right to kill
appears as an "excess" of biopower that does away with life in the name of securing it. How does this power
over life permit the right to kill, if this is a power invested in augmenting life and the quality of it? How is it
possible for this political power to expose to death not only its enemies, but even its own citizens. This is the point
where racism intervenes. "What inscribes racism in the mechanisms of the state is the mergence of biopower.. . .
racism inscribes itself as a fundamental mechanism of power that exercises itself in modern states" racist discourse
it is a "means of introduction a fundamental division between those who must live and those who must die. It
fragments the biological field it establishes a break inside the biological field, it establishes a break inside the
biological continuum of human beings by defining a hierarchy of races, a set of subdivisions in which certain
races are classified as "good." fit, and superior.& establishes a positive relation between the right to kill and
the assurance of life. It posits that the more you kill and let die, the more you will live." It is neither racism nor
that state that invented this connection, but the permanency of war-like relations inside the social body.
Racism now activates this discourse in a novel way, establishing a biological confrontation between "my life and
the death of others" The enemies are those identified as external and internal threats to the population. "Racism is
the condition that makes it acceptable to put certain people to death in a society of normalization" The murderous
function of the biopolitical state can only be assured by racism. which is indispensable to it. Racism will develop in
modem societies where biopower is prevalent and with colonizing genocide." How else, could a biopolitical state
kill civilizations if not by activating the themes of evolutionism and racism. War ''regenerates" one's own race.
In conditions of war proper, the right to kill and the affirmation of life productively converge. Discourse has
concrete effects; its practices are prescribed and motivated by the biological taxonomies of the racist state.
SHELL 3/4
ALTERNATIVE: VOTE NEGATIVE TO REJECT THE 1ACS RHETORICAL CONSTRUCTION
LEGITIMATING NUCLEAR STRATEGIC THOUGHT IN THE NAME OF APOCALYPTIC DANGER.
Taylor 2k7
[byran, associate prof. communications@ Colorado-boulder, the means to match their hatred: nuclear weapons,
rhetorical democracy, and presidential discourse, University of ColoradoBoulder, presidential studies quarterly,
vol. 37, no. 4, 667-692, JC]
This interdependency between security and rhetoric is further clarified in arguments conceptualizing nuclear
weapons as a legitimation crisis for the liberal-democratic nation-state (Deudney 1995, 209). Rosow (1989)
argues that traditional conceptualization of nuclear deterrence as a strategic issue obscures its status as "a
system of social relations" (564). In adopting this alternate perspective, Rosow argues, we may reclaim nuclear
weapons from official discourses that have sheared off from their necessary grounding inand authorization
bythe discourses of the nuclear life world: "[Strategic] debate scarcely touches on the experience of nuclear
deterrence as a cultural and political-economic production. . . . The result is a serious discontinuity between
the claims on which the validity of nuclear policy rests . . . and the actual effects of nuclear deterrence on the
material well-being and consciousness in the advanced capitalist West" (564). Rosow's argument establishes the
democratic status of nuclear weapons as a rhetorical problem: he conceptualizes nuclear deterrence as a discourse
composed of "interpretive claims" and imperative expressions and theorizes its mediation of both institutional
structures and forms of identity. Viewed in this light, we can recognize how, as artifacts, nuclear weapons clarify
a fundamental contradiction between their destructive potential and their legitimating cultural discourses:
"The same forces that are to produce peace and prosperity, i.e., science, knowledge, rationality, also produce
the tools for destroying the very civilization they are designed to protect and whose values and future they
embody."Richard Falk (1982, 9) has suggested the implications of this condition for a nuclear-rhetorical democracy:
"Normative opposition to nuclear weapons or doctrines inevitably draws into question the legitimacy of state
power and is, therefore, more threatening to governmental process than a mere debate about the property of
nuclear weapons as instruments of statecraft." As a result, Rosow concludes, changes in nuclear policy may
exacerbate inherent conflict between "the [cultural] consciousness of democratic citizenship" and the
legitimacy of the state (1989, 581). As the state increasingly rests its security on weapons systems requiring
centralized control and automated decision making, it becomes increasingly difficult to assert that the
legitimacy of those weapons arises from authentic popular consent. Fault lines in this hegemony are opened
when public rhetoric informs Americans about the international consequences of nuclear imperialism and
encourages their identification with negatively affected groups. In the post-Cold War era, Rosow predicted, it
will become increasingly difficult for the state to normalize nuclear weapons as a familiar and legitimate icon.
SHELL 4/4
RHETORICAL CRITICISM EXPOSES ASSUMPTIONS AND DISCOURSES WHICH PRECLUDE COOPERATIVE AND DEMOCRATIC POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT.
TAYLOR 2K7
[byran, associate prof. communications@ Colorado-boulder, the means to match their hatred: nuclear weapons,
rhetorical democracy, and presidential discourse, University of ColoradoBoulder, presidential studies quarterly,
vol. 37, no. 4, 667-692, JC]
Rhetorical scholars thus view speech in democracy as "the medium within which the ethical self-government
of autonomous individuals can be articulated with the imperatives of democratic governance" (Hicks 2002,
224). They reconceptualize ideals of deliberative democracy such as inclusion, equality, and reason to
rigorously assess their associated discursive practices. They raise questions about how these practices hail
citizens to participate in the democratic process as particular kinds of acting subjects, endow them with a
sense of entitlement and agency, mediate their understanding of others' interests and the effects of their
actions upon those interests, and develop their ability to not only competently reason together means do not
subvert democratic ends (Cloud 2004, 79). Of particular concern here is the hegemony in democracy of
"reason" as a framing standard (i.e., of rationality) and a conventional practice of accountability that
constrains deliberation through normalized assumptions concerning the source and range of legitimate
support for expression and the ontological status of political interests in relation to language (Welsh 2002). In
challenging those assumptions, rhetorical scholars rigorously critique the ethics and politics of self-described
democratic discourse. They ensure that it does not prematurely foreclose the expression of relevant interests
and that it encourages their patient and ethical cultivation as a resource for innovative transformation of self
and other. Finally, rhetorical scholars of democracy oppose corrosive discourse which forecloses the
possibility of achieving mutual identification between opponents and thus cooperation.
LINK - BIOTERRORISM
BIOTERRORISM SCENARIOS CREATE A DOCILE FORM OF POLITICAL
SUBJECTIVITY, EXPOSING LIFE TO POWER INCLUDING EXTERMINATION AND
LETTING DIE AND PRECLUDES POSITIVE POLITICAL SOLUTIONS TO ACTUAL
THREATS.
Spana 2k4
[monica sochoh, asst. professor of medicine at uPittsburgh, bioterrorism: us public health and a secular apocalypse, anthropology today, vol 20,
issue 5, p.8-13, oct 21, jc]
Bioterrorism scenarios permit explorations into governmentality the institutions, processes and practices
through which a population comprised of individuals is imagined, their conduct and well-being made meaningful,
their sense of self nurtured in specific ways, and their efforts directed to some purposes over others (Ferguson &
Gupta 2002; Foucault 1991[1978]). Bioterrorism scenarios are a symbolic structure through which a particular
kind of danger is construed, and particular social identifications and relationships are made, with manifest
political consequences (Campbell 1992, Weldes et al. 1999). As represented in official response scenarios,
bioterrorism is an amalgam of dangers against which the US population must be made secure the foreign
terrorist, the replicating pathogen, and the panicky public. Around this definition, new networks of
authorities in and out of government are coming together to protect the common good (cf. Trouillot 2001);
their interests some- times converge, at other times conflict. Bioterrorism scenarios through their authorship,
performance and dissemination help to generate new political subjectivities. Arange of authorities find
reinvigorated purpose in providing protection against bioterrorism. Political and military leaders reassert
the duty to safeguard America from foreign enemies. Law enforcement professionals find new purpose in the
goals of subverting terrorist attacks and containing disorderly publics. Medical and public health practitioners
fulfil oaths to provide protection against bodily harm for patients and populations the political boundaries of
which may shrink or expand, from the local to the national to the global. Present concern with bioter- rorism
may signal novel forms of biopower(Foucault 1980[1976]), where the task of governing becomes enhancing
the ability to fight off infection, i.e. building better emergency response systems at the institutional level
and better immune systemsat the individual level (cf. Martin 1994). While an evangelism of fear has been
cardinal for the constitution of many states identity, the apocalyptic mode[] has been conspicuous in the
catalog of American statecraft(Campbell 1992: 153). Bioterrorism imaginaries of professionals charged with
ensuring preparedness are apparently secular: bioscience, technology and medicine are among the forces invoked
to deliver the population from danger. Approaching counter-terrorism scenarios as non-religious, however,
risks obscuring the complexity of US culture and politics. Religious and secular apocalypticisms frequently
interpenetrate one another (Stewart & Harding 1999). Tens of millions of Americans, it is esti- mated, believe
that the endtime prophesied in the Book of Revelation is soon to be realized: biological weapons are singled out
by some as the means of final destruction.13The latest installment in the evangelical Left Behindseries the bestselling adult novels in the US presents a war-like Jesus in the Second Coming, an image that resonates with
President Bushs portrayals of military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq in terms of godly purpose.14 Whether and
why various publicsin the US (and else- where) embrace the vision of a bioterrorized future is an open question.
Prevalent in US popular culture, scenarios may constitute a modality of power through which current political
leaders produce consent for their counter-terrorist activities and professionals reproduce their expert status.
Mass culture effects, however, are uncertain, unstable and contradictory (Traube 1996). More ethnographic study is
thus needed to understand whether and under what condi- tions various publics internalize dominant images of
themselves as being at risk of bioattack, and as legiti- mately protected by current domestic and foreign policy and
professional practices (cf. Skidmore 2003). An additional ethnographic and political question is what role
bioterrorist narratives play in reinforcing apocalyptic sce- narios in the minds of individuals and groups
fantasizing about bringing them about. Bioterrorism scenarios embody ambitions of both antagonist and
protagonist. Thinking hopefully about a future notthreatened by bio- logical attacks is doubly difficult in the
current environ- ment: apocalyptic rhetoric of an incontrovertible, impending doom all too easily
overwhelm[s] the opti- mistic faith necessary for meaningful political action (OLeary 1998: 412).
WARREN 2K8
[becket, dawn of a newapocalypse: engagements with the apocalyptic
imagination in 2012 and primitvist discourse, http://www.ohiolink.edu/etd/send-pdf.cgi/warren%20beckett.pdf?
acc_num=bgsu1218993516.]
A recurring staring point to defining what apocalypse, and the concepts so derived, is to look at its etymology.
Jacques Derridas essay Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy, (which serves as a starting point
for much of the discussions of the apocalyptic character of post-modernity), begins with the assertion by Andr
Chouraqui that the Greek apokalupsis is a translation of the Hebrew gala. He expands upon the similarities thusly:
Apokalupt no doubt was a good word [bon mot] for gala. Apokalupt, I disclose, I uncover, I unveil, I reveal the
thing that can be a part of the body, the head or the eyes, a secret part, the sex or whatever might be hidden, a
secret thing, the thing to be dissembled, a thing that is neither shown nor said, signified perhaps but that cannot be or
must not first be delivered up to self-evidence (1984: 4). Keller finds the origins of the word apocalypse as
gendered in that the unveiling of Apo-Kalypso connotes the marital stripping of the veiled virgin The
moment of truth blinks with cosmic excitement (1996: 1). Taken together, these two explanations of the origin of
apocalypse reveal important aspects that are frequently overlooked in favor of spectacular destruction: the revelatory
aspect, that apocalypse is concerned with epistemological concerns to as great an extent as metaphysical or
ethical claims; and that construction, maintenance or subversion of gender roles are often, if not always at
stake within the apocalyptic imagination.
MOURNING DA
APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC FORCLOSES A POLITICS OF MOURNING AND TURNS
ENLIGHTENMENT IDEALS INTO THEIR HOLLOW DOUBLES, OFFERING ONLY
VIOLENCE, TURNING THE CASE.
WARREN 2K8
[becket, dawn of a newapocalypse: engagements with the apocalyptic
imagination in 2012 and primitvist discourse, http://www.ohiolink.edu/etd/send-pdf.cgi/warren%20beckett.pdf?
acc_num=bgsu1218993516.]
For Jay, what those engaged with the apocalyptic imagination are unable to mourn is Kristevan mother figure.
He contends It is thus tempting to interpret the apocalyptic moment in the critique of technological and
scientific hubris as a convoluted expression of distress at the matricidal underpinnings of the modernist
project, indeed of the entire human attempt to uproot itself from its origins in something we might call mother
nature (1994: 42). The inability to mourn is not just that of the mother or a matricidal impulse of modernity;
instead it is the inability to mourn the failure of the promises of the Enlightenment. We cannot mourn the
passing of Enlightenment ideals because its institutions, having largely failed to deliver its promises, continue
to move around like an animated corpse. To parallel Jays mourning of the loss of the mother, the
Enlightenment on its legs of liberal democracy and scientific knowing, prattles forth like a parent suffering
from severe dementia, offering abuse and little else. While some of the family knows that it is now in fact its
time, most are unwilling to let go of pleasant memories from the past.
RAINFOREST ABJECTION DA
APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC SUSTAINS A SENSE OF ABJECTION OR AN
INCLINATION TO EXPECT THE SYSTEMIC VIOLENCE AND ENVIRONMENTAL
DESTRUCTION.
WARREN 2K8
[becket, dawn of a newapocalypse: engagements with the apocalyptic
imagination in 2012 and primitvist discourse, http://www.ohiolink.edu/etd/send-pdf.cgi/warren%20beckett.pdf?
acc_num=bgsu1218993516.]
Jay finds this sullen disposition to be at the heart of the apocalyptic imaginary as a whole, and not merely its
postmodern variant (1994: 36). While Jay also finds the writings of Jean Baudrillard and Jean Francois Lyotard to
be indicative of this mode of thinking, the anglophone Anthony Giddens has written about this disposition in a way
that proves useful. Giddens finds the sense of foreboding which so many have noted as characteristic of the
current age (1990: 131) to be based upon the way in which risk has become globalized in the modern world.
He finds seven points that characterize the specific risk profile of modernity (ibid: 124): 1) risks intensity,
that there is a risk of nuclear war that could potentially end all human life on the planet; 2) contingent events
that can effect extremely large numbers of people; 3) the impact of human knowledge on the natural world,
particularly technologys impact on environmental conditions; 4) institutionalization of risk in global market
exchanges, of which the current global food crisis is representative; 5) the awareness of risk being risky, that
is uncertain; 6) this awareness is held by many people; 7) and that no expert can be completely proficient in
managing risk. Similar to this overwhelming position of risk, Keller identifies a feeling of pending apocalypse
existing within society as a cryptoapocalypse, a sort of Kristevan abjection within the subliminal margins of
human psyche. It makes people inclined to expect the burning of the rainforests by naturalizing feelings of
foreboding and inevitability, enabling their own numbed complicity in the economic system that is causing
the end of the world for so many Amazonian species (1996: 8). Taken together these factors help to explain the
sense of pending cataclysm that is identified with adopting the apocalyptic imagination, but it is only one
component.
For I.F. Clarke, the new apocalyptic fictions were not only nihilistic but also didactic because the discovery of the
new-found human capacity for creating the most genocidal instruments conceivable ... transformed the tale of the
Last Days into a most admonitory form of fiction that centres on the dangerous pursuit of super-weapons (21).
Apocalypse can therefore be an appropriate mode for writers keen to protest against complacent political
systems, harmful environmental policies, and reckless technological and scientific experimentation; the form
allows authors to extrapolate from current events and imagine a terrible future should certain actions be
taken. Even if social criticism is not the intention of the author, a disaster scenario that is the result of human
action (or, frequently, inaction) functions as a warning to readers. In this way, politics, technologies, ecological
issues and science may be construed as significant causative factors in either the end of the world or a world
very much worse than it is now.
ALT NO SOLVE
THE ALTERNATIVE CANNOT CHANGE DOMINANT NUCLEAR DISCOURSE ESPECIALLY IN
DEBATE.
SANDLIN 2K4
[Micahel, review of "people of the bomb: portraits of america's nuclear complex by hugh gusterson",
http://www.popmatters.com/books/reviews/p/people-of-the-bomb.shtml]
And today, more than ever, Livermore nuclear scientists are flush with taxpayer dollars. The Bush administration is
still pining for the warped Reagan dream of militarizing space, while "mini-nukes" are being developed to smoke
out state-less, spiderhole-dwelling warlords. Gusterson leaves us with the idea that US nuclear dominance-asdefense has become the reconstructed "natural" order of the day. The utopian dreams of anti-nuclear critics
like Gusterson, Jonathan Schell and many others, advocate worldwide abolition of nuclear weapons as the only
truly fail-safe policy. Although realistically, unless there's an unexpected Green Party putsch in Washington, this
country's dominant discourse on nukes and militarism will probably be, at best, limited to whether nuclear
weapons should function as deterrents or as pre-emptive instruments of global restructuring. Any heretical
dovish discourse calling for peacetime economic conversion of military industries, or faith-based multi-lateral
nuclear abolition, will likely be relegated to chicken-wired "free speech zones" and academic echo chambers.
INDIVIDUATION DA 1/2
THEIR INDIVIDUIZED RESPONSE TO THE 1AC IGNORES THAT THE INDIVIDUAL
IS ITSELF A PRODUCT OF THE POWER THEY CRITICIZE. THE ALT PRODUCES
QUALITATIVELY MORE VIOLENT CONSTRAINTS.
Shapiro 2007
[Steve, Gather, Foucault and Constraints on Individualism, 4-22-07 http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?
articleId=281474976965588, Accessed 7-8-09, JC]
Think of the amount of suffering that binds us within small deviations of relative constraints. Any biopolitical
means is already a constraint of individualism in itself, therefore any attempt other than the attempt of the
individual to end that constraint is already deviating that biopolitical limitation the individual. Attempting
to change a constraint will only lead to a greater biopolitical constraint over the individual. Any attempt to
end the suffering of the individual will only lead to more suffering. Essentially, this action is the
destruction of that constraint altogether, but a destruction of a constraint can be as devastating, if not
more devastating, than the status quo itself. The constraint cannot be destroyed by any means, it can only be
limited through use of power over the initiation of that constraint. What can seem like agonizing to one outside
the constraint can be a simple form of life for another within it. Changing that form of life tremendously
increases the power structures over the individuals within the constraint, further leading to power over that
individual's mind. Interference can devastate the mind of the individual, making the lifting of the constraint even
more difficult. In particular instances, it takes more exertion of power to deviate a system than to control
it. Breaking free in essence, is the only possible change that can be enacted by the individual as a means
of deviating the constraint. Examining the contextuality of the historical abstract can lead us to a possible nonbiopolitical deviation of the status quo. Instead of attempting the impossible, destroying the constraint altogether,
the individual can lift that constraint through the visualization of its context. Only when the individual discovers
the source of his suffering can he truly be free from that constraint.
INDIVIDUATION DA 2/2
THE ALTERNATIVE, BY RELYING ON YOUR INDIVIDUAL BALLOT TO EXPRESS
CRITICISM OF THE 1AC, SUSTAINS POWERS INDIVIDUATING FUNCTION TO
CREATE DOCILE INTELLECTUALS. NO ALT. SOLVENCY.
Pickett, Associate professor of Political Science at Chaldron State College, 2005
(Brent, On the Use and Abuse of Foucault For Politics pp. 24-25, 2005, AD:7-10-9, JC)
Foucault also describes the growth of an individualizing political rationality "whose role is to constantly ensure,
sustain, and improve the lives of each and every one."71 This rationality develops into a system that he calls
'pastoral power.' The issue in this system is the relationship between the leader and the led and how it is to
be conceptualized. Foucault traces the origins of pastoral power back to Hebraic and early Christian
writings, where the leader is the shepherd and the led are the sheep. According to these writings,
obedience is a virtue, and the knowledge about each individual sheep by the shepherd is essential. The
shepherd, who should be ever-watchful, must know what goes on in the soul of each one . This account is
contrasted with the Greek view that focused upon the relation between the city and the citizen. Instead of
the leader involving himself with individuals, he is to seek the unity and flourishing of the state as a whole.
It is not that the Greek view has been superseded by the Judeo-Christian one; instead the two have grown
together: "Our societies proved to be really demonic since they happened to combine those two gamesthe
city-citizen game and the shepherd-flock gamein what we call the modern states."72 Two elements are
pivotal to this combination. First, individuals must be governed by their own truth. We hold a certain
conception of ourselves and attempt to live in accordance with it. We think of our identities as something
deep and natural and hence relate to ourselves as the bearers of a truth. One principal mechanism through
which this is expressed is our sexuality. Again, this is seen as something natural and therefore as something
to which we ought to be true. If a man is not sure about the truth of his sex, he may go to a psychiatrist
who interprets what he says and explains his truth back to him. The conceptual preconditions of such a
relationship are, first, that there is a truth about one's sex, and second, that one may be incapable of
understanding that truth but that another, through one's confession, can. Self-awareness, selfdiscipline, and self-correction are at the heart of this conceptualization. It is simply a later instance of
Christian techniques of self-mortification, techniques which introduced this linkage between obedience,
knowledge of oneself, and confession.73 The second central element of this modern political rationality is the
fostering of individual lives in a way that adds to the strength of the state.74 Healthy, productive, docile
citizens are essential to that strength. This is, in one sense, the pinnacle of disciplinary power. The forces of
individuals must be maximized in a manner that adds to the outcome of the disciplinary institution itself .
The same is true with the state, supported by all of these various disciplinary practices within society, but in turn
supporting them. It is a network of power, beginning with the lowly but ubiquitous practices of discipline, the
techniques and strategies of bio-power, all producing the sort of individual who can live within the modern state
and who in turn maintains that state as it supports those disciplinary and bio-power practices and institutions.
Since modern power produces individuals, it is useless to attempt to subvert that power through an appeal
to individualism or an assertion of the rights of the individual. Through a historical analysis of the rationality
specific to the art of governing modern states, it is clear that those states have been both individualizing and
totalitarian from the very beginning.75 Hence Foucault's claim: "Opposing the individual and his
interests to it is just as hazardous as opposing it with the community and its requirement s."76 The liberal
individual, his normative intuitions, and the rights that he bears are the effects of power, and therefore the
liberal individual cannot be the basis for an attack on the modern power regime .
Instructive in terms of the capacity of biological weapons to inflict human suffering on an immense
scale, bioterrorism scenarios nonetheless invite elaborate fantasies as to the cataclysm that could
ensue. Playing one- dimensional roles in bioterrorism scenarios, members of the public usually
surface as mass casualties or hysteria- driven mobs who self-evacuate affected areas or resort to
violence to gain access to scarce, potentially life-saving antibiotics and vaccines. These images,
around which offi- cial response systems are being built the public as a problem to be managed
during a crisis preclude careful consideration of, and planning for, ways to solicit the cooperation of
an affected population. The emphasis is on crowd control rather than enhancing the peoples ability to
cope with a public health emergency. In addition, such images help skirt the difficult issue of how to
ensure a fair distribution of resources during an epidemic emergency, by perpetuating a more
simplistic notion of the natural volatility of people in grave peril. The apocalyptic mode of scenarios
comes at the cost of fatalism and questionable substantive claims such as those involving mass
responses to disaster. Scenarios also have positive, generative effects as well. They are a compelling
medium through which policy-makers and public health and safety professionals come to comprehend the
complex dangers posed by biological weapons. As deliberately staged interactions among disparate
communities, sce- narios temporarily embody a larger response system, one typically outside of individual
experience. The mayor sees the dilemmas of the hospital administrator who sees the dilemmas of the
emergency room physician who sees the dilemmas of the health department, and so on. Bioterrorism
scenarios foster acquaintances, social connections and understandings across disciplinary bound- aries . In
this respect, bioterrorism scenarios have been revelatory experiences for officials unaware of how public
health actually operates or what limited ability it has to deal with unforeseen events, given its historically low
pri- ority in government, or how a dysfunctional health care system bears directly upon security matters.
PERM SOLVENCY
ABSTRACT CRITICISM OF THE NUCLEAR PARADIGM IS MEANINGLESS
WITHOUT THE ASPIRATION TOWARDS CONSEQUENTIAL POLITICAL CHANGE.
PERM SOLVES BEST.
WARREN 2K8
[becket, dawn of a newapocalypse: engagements with the apocalyptic
imagination in 2012 and primitvist discourse, http://www.ohiolink.edu/etd/send-pdf.cgi/warren%20beckett.pdf?
acc_num=bgsu1218993516.]
When Derrida asks wouldnt the apocalyptic be a transcendental condition of all discourse, of all experience even,
of every mark or every trace (Derrida, Apocalyptic Tone, 1984: 27), and claims that the genre of written apocalypse
is an exemplary revelation of such a structure, Derrida is suggesting that all works that are concerned with
truth claims are in fact apocalyptic, in that their purpose is to reveal certain truths. To illustrate this central
point, he repeatedly distinguishes between end and closure. The apocalyptic imagination is concerned with
ends rather than closures, and one must be clear as to what is meant by end. Eschatology is the detailing of
the enactment of a teleology. The end concerning Derrida is the end meaning purpose, not the end of
purposes. Apocalypse forever ought not be conceived as destructive, but rather, deconstructive, or calling for
deconstruction to come. Derrida conceives deconstruction as problematizing, destabilizing, complicating and
bringing out the inherent paradoxes of that which it turns its attention to. Though it may sometimes be
characterized as apolitical or merely anesthetizing politics, Derrida at least sees the project of deconstruction
as much more consequential, and critical legal studies to be an exemplary enactment: in order to be
consistent with itself, not to remain enclosed in purely speculative, theoretical, academic discourses but rather
(with all due respect to Stanley Fish) to aspire to something more consequential, to change things (1992: 8). The
dig at Fish is particularly telling, in that while Fish acknowledges the constructed nature of law, he distances himself
from critical judgments against existing political- juridical systems because they at least work. This distancing
from criticism of meaningful things in favor of mere criticism of meaning is not a full enactment of
deconstruction for Derrida. Deconstruction attempts to end established interpretive ends, reveal those
meanings that have been obscured, and enact change.
AT: MOURNING/RAINFOREST DA
THE KRISTEVAN NOTION OF ABJECTION MYSTIFIES THE BODY AND SUBUMES
HOMOSEXUAL DESIRE AND THE PRIMITIVE OR ORIENTAL. THIS PROVES
THEIR IMPACT ANALYSIS NORMALIZES SYSTEMIC FORMS OF VIOLENCE
AGAINST SELECTED POPULATIONS. INTERNAL LINK TURNS THE DA.
CHRISTIAN 2K4
[laura, of housewives and saints: abjections, transgression, and impossible mourning in Poison and Safe, camera
obscura, 19.3]
In situating the concept of abjection, Kristeva summons [End Page 96] the image of an infant who, gagging on
a surfeit of milk, choking on the enigmatic signifiers of its mother's desire, vomits itself out, expelling itself,
abjecting itself with the same convulsive motion through which it establishes itself as provisionally and
tenuously separate from the mother's body. This process, coincident with what is known in classical Freudian
discourse as the primal repression, lays the psychic foundations for the separation between self and other, subject
and object, concomitantly establishing the conditions for the infant's entry into language. The return of the abject
is thus associated with various borderline phenomenathe collapse of bodily boundaries, as well as the
breakdown of structures of signification.
In a sense, one encounters the limits of Kristeva's concept of abjection precisely at the point where it promises
to be the most generative. As soon as Kristeva attempts to position this psychical mechanism of foreclosure
(forclusion) within a broader sociosymbolic system, her analysis succumbs to a mystification of the maternal
body as the universal locus of a presymbolic multiplicity of drives (the semiotic). Butler and others have
observed how Kristeva subsumes not only homosexual desire but that which is marked as "primitive" or
"Oriental" under the ultimately metaphysical category of the "maternal-feminine."6 Haynes's films trouble
this category, suggesting that the abject assumes different codings and is identified with different marginal
zones of social life in different sociohistorical contexts. When the abject erupts in Haynes's films, virtually
rending the fabric of the text, it is not simply equivalent to the return of the "demoniacal potential of the
feminine."7 It is always situated in a specific sociosymbolic economy.