Blake Invitational 1 Kamiak nb aff

20 Scarsdale SB Aff

https://hsld.debatecoaches.org/Scarsdale/Bhatnagar+Aff

Aff Agonism

A community is both defined and destabilized by what it excludes – violence is the constitutive condition of any ethico-political order. We cannot escape that violence and participate even in our attempts to catalogue it. The task of politics is to search for a “lesser violence,” even though that’s never innocent.

Hagglund, Martin. 2006. “The Necessity of Discrimination: Disjoining Derrida and Levinas.” diacritics 34 (1): 40–71.

Ideal theory and abstract utopianism are self-defeating: we can criticize social injustices but the ultimate question is what sort of institutions organize and channel violence better.

Hagglund 2, Martin. 2006. “The Necessity of Discrimination: Disjoining Derrida and Levinas.” diacritics 34 (1): 40–71.

The solution is agonism: a politics that distinguishes the enemy from the adversary by the agonistic principle: the inclusion of all who accept the contestability of their own points of view. This constructs a polity despite the facts of pluralism and violence.

Chantal Mouffe 10, political theorist, 7-25-2010, "Chantal Mouffe: Agonistic Democracy and Radical Politics," Pavilion #15, http://pavilionmagazine.org/chantal-mouffe-agonistic-democracy-and-radical-politics/

So, the standard is consistency with the agonistic principle.

Only agonism accounts for the diversity of interpretations of our norms. Democratic citizenship has diverse forms, none of which can be privileged a priori.

Mouffe 2k, Chantal. "Wittgenstein, political theory and democracy." The Democratic Paradox 60 (2000): 79.

Offense:

Trials in courts are agonistic – they don’t aim at agreement. Trials are key to public discourse and accountability – without them, we could not understand how justice is achieved in the US, creating a lack of contention about law in regards to the people.

White 13 Chair Mary Jo White, The Importance of Trials to the Law and Public Accountability, November 14, 2013, US SEC

Falling under exchange theory, plea bargaining shuts down interactions and discussion in court rooms, focusing cases instead on negotiations to enforce personal interest.

Maynard Maynard, Douglas W. “The Structure of Discourse in Misdemeanor Plea Bargaining.” Law and Society Review, vol. 18, no. 1, 1984, pp. 75–104. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3053481.

Lots of analytics here and a few in the framing emoticon_smile

*20 Scarsdale SB Neg

https://hsld.debatecoaches.org/Scarsdale/Bhatnagar+Neg

Nothing disclosed

Nothing disclosed

21 Strake CL Aff

https://hsld.debatecoaches.org/Strake+Jesuit/Li+Aff

Aff Race Agamben

1AC

Part 1 is the Counter-Narrative

Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, March 10, 2012, Go to Trial: Crash the Justice System, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/opinion/sunday/go-to-trial-crash-the-justice-system.html

The woman was Susan Burton, who knows a lot about being processed through the criminal justice system. Her odyssey began when a Los Angeles police cruiser ran over and killed her 5-year-old son. Consumed with grief and without access to therapy or antidepressant medications, Susan became addicted to crack cocaine. She lived in an impoverished black community under siege in the “war on drugs,” and it was but a matter of time before she was arrested and offered the first of many plea deals that left her behind bars for a series of drug-related offenses. Every time she was released, she found herself trapped in an under-caste, subject to legal discrimination in employment and housing. Fifteen years after her first arrest, Susan was finally admitted to a private drug treatment facility and given a job. After she was clean she dedicated her life to making sure no other woman would suffer what she had been through. Susan now runs five safe homes for formerly incarcerated women in Los Angeles. Her organization, A New Way of Life, supplies a lifeline for women released from prison. But it does much more: it is also helping to start a movement. With groups like All of Us or None, it is organizing formerly incarcerated people and encouraging them to demand restoration of their basic civil and human rights.

Susan Burton’s story reveals the larger apparatus of the prison-industrial complex – the plea bargaining machine is just a tool of the state. Control society has allowed the prison industrial complex to manifest itself through the law in a way that discourages exercise of rights.

Alexander 12 Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, March 10, 2012, Go to Trial: Crash the Justice System, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/opinion/sunday/go-to-trial-crash-the-justice-system.html

But in this era of mass incarceration — when our nation’s prison population has quintupled in a few decades partly as a result of the war on drugs and the “get tough” movement — these rights are, for the overwhelming majority of people hauled into courtrooms across America, theoretical. More than 90 percent of criminal cases are never tried before a jury. Most people charged with crimes forfeit their constitutional rights and plead guilty. “The truth is that government officials have deliberately engineered the system to assure that the jury trial system established by the Constitution is seldom used,” said Timothy Lynch, director of the criminal justice project at the libertarian Cato Institute. In other words: the system is rigged. In the race to incarcerate, politicians champion stiff sentences for nearly all crimes, including harsh mandatory minimum sentences and three-strikes laws; the result is a dramatic power shift, from judges to prosecutors. The Supreme Court ruled in 1978 that threatening someone with life imprisonment for a minor crime in an effort to induce him to forfeit a jury trial did not violate his Sixth Amendment right to trial. Thirteen years later, in Harmelin v. Michigan, the court ruled that life imprisonment for a first-time drug offense did not violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. No wonder, then, that most people waive their rights. Take the case of Erma Faye Stewart, a single African-American mother of two who was arrested at age 30 in a drug sweep in Hearne, Tex., in 2000. In jail, with no one to care for her two young children, she began to panic. Though she maintained her innocence, her court-appointed lawyer told her to plead guilty, since the prosecutor offered probation. Ms. Stewart spent a month in jail, and then relented to a plea. She was sentenced to 10 years’ probation and ordered to pay a $1,000 fine. Then her real punishment began: upon her release, Ms. Stewart was saddled with a felony record; she was destitute, barred from food stamps and evicted from public housing. Once they were homeless, Ms. Stewart’s children were taken away and placed in foster care. In the end, she lost everything even though she took the deal.

Part 2 is the Camp

Modern politics and ethics are hopeless—all assume an idea that there is hope of change, but this ignores that the state is the ultimate sovereign and that rights are conditional. It controls itself, with the ability to apply arbitrary rules to anyone at any time.

Agamben 12 Giorgio Agamben (Italian continental philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception, form-of-life and homo sacer. The concept of biopolitics informs many of his writings). “Beyond Human Rights”. 2012. http://novact.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Beyond-Human-Rights-by-Giorgio-Agamben.pdf

“The reasons for such impotence lie not only in the selfishness and blindness of bureaucratic apparatuses, but also in the very ambiguity of the fundamental notions regulating the inscription of the native (that is, of life) in the juridical order of the nation-state. Hannah Arendt titled the chapter of her book Imperialism that concerns the refugee problem ‘The Decline of the Nation State and the End of the Rights of Man’. 2 One should try to take seriously this formulation, which indissolubly links the fate of the Rights of Man with the fate of the modern nation-state in such a way that the waning of the latter necessarily implies the obsolescence of the former. Here the paradox is that precisely the figure that should have embodied human rights more than any other – namely, the refugee – marked instead the radical crisis of the concept. The conception of human rights based on the supposed existence of a human being as such, Arendt tells us, proves to be untenable as soon as those who profess it find themselves confronted for the first time with people who have really lost every quality and every specific relation except for the pure fact of being human. In the system of the nation-state, so called sacred and inalienable human rights are revealed to be without any protection precisely when it is no longer possible to conceive of them as rights of the citizens of a state. This is implicit, after all, in the ambiguity of the very title of the 1789 Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, in which it is unclear whether the two terms are to name two distinct realities or whether they are to form, instead, a hendiadys in which the first term is actually always already contained in the second. That there is no autonomous space in the political order of the nation-state for something like the pure human in itself is evident at the very least from the fact that, even in the best of cases, the status of refugee has always been considered a temporary condition that ought to lead either to naturalization or to repatriation. A stable statute for the human in itself is inconceivable in the law of the nation-state.”

Being human is fundamentally conditioned by a potentiality to bear inhumanity. This distinction is reflected between zoe and bios. Zoe being life without legal protection, bios as qualified life with civil rights. As humans are reduced to inhumanity, it creates the zone of indistinction, the production of bare life.

Mills 05 Mills, Catherine. "Linguistic survival and ethicality: biopolitics, subjectivation, and testimony in Remnants of Auschwitz." (2005).

The question to be addressed, then, is how Agamben understands the distinction between the human and the inhuman. In this, he proposes that the human being exists as the nodal point for ‘‘currents of the human and inhuman.’’ He states that ‘‘human power borders on the inhuman; the human also endures the inhuman…. humans bear within themselves the mark of the inhuman…. their spirit contains at its very center the wound of non-spirit, non-human chaos atrociously consigned to its own being capable of everything’’ (Remnants, 77). Being human is fundamentally conditioned by an indefinite potentiality for being non-human, for being capable of everything and of enduring the inhuman. Being human is a question of enduring, of ‘‘bearing all that one could bear,’’ and surviving the inhuman capacity to bear everything. Thus, the distinction between the human and inhuman is itself constitutively unstable, since the inhuman is not only internal to the human being, but requires a certain endurance for the human being to remain human. This endurance takes the form of testimony. According to Agamben, testimony plays a constitutive role in the circulation of the human and inhuman, since remaining human is ultimately a question of bearing witness to the inhuman: ‘‘human beings are human insofar as they bear witness to the inhuman’’ (Remnants, 121). To endure the inhuman is to bear witness to it, and it is in this sense that Levi speaks of the Muselmann as the true witness, for the Muselmänner have endured the inhuman, borne more than they should ever have had to bear, and in doing so, remained fundamentally human. Correlatively, the survivors are human to the extent that they bear witness to an impossibility of bearing witness, that is, of being inhuman. Hence, testimony arises in the noncoincidental currents of the human and the inhuman, as the human being’s bearing witness to the inhuman. This means that the ethics of witnessing that Agamben develops can be understood as an ethics of survival, insofar as the human survives the in- human in testimony. Agamben notes that the currents of human and in- human that cross over within the human being indicate that ‘‘life bears with it a caesura that can transform all life into survival and all survival into life’’ (Remnants, 133). This clearly repeats the distinction between bios and zoe that Agamben argues is crucial to the operation of biopower in Homo Sacer. In that text, he argues that biopower operates through the disjuncture of bios and zoe, and the production of bare life as the excrescence of the failure of modern democracy to broach that disjuncture. Similarly, in Remnants, Agamben states that ‘‘biopower’s supreme ambition is to produce, in a human body, the absolute separation of the living being and the speaking being, zoe and bios, the inhuman and the human—survival’’ (Remnants, 156). Against Foucault, Agamben suggests that the definitional formula of biopower is not ‘‘to make live or let die,” but rather, to make survive, that is, to produce bare life as life reduced to survival through the separation of the human from the inhuman, or the speaking being from the living being.

And, this distinction is what opens up space for a zone of indistinction – a state where the worst atrocities imaginable are able to happen.

Edkins 2k Jenny Edkins (Department of International Politics, University of Wales). “Sovereign Power, Zones of Indistinction, and the Camp”. 2000.

The camp is exemplary as a location of a zone of indistinction. Although in general the camp is set up precisely as part of a state of emergency or martial law, under Nazi rule this becomes not so much a state of exception in the sense of an external and provi- sional state of danger as a means of establishing the Nazi state itself. The camp is "the space opened up when the state of exception begins to becomes the rule."17 In the camp, the distinction between the rule of law and chaos disappears: decisions about life and death are entirely arbitrary, and everything is possible. A zone of indistinction appears between outside and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit. What happened in the twentieth century in the West, and paradigmatically since the advent of the camp, was that the space of the state of exception transgressed its bound- aries and started to coincide with the normal order. The zone of indistinction expanded from a space of exclusion within the nor- mal order to take over that order entirely. In the concentration camp, inhabitants are stripped of every political status, and the arbitrary power of the camp attendants confronts nothing but what Agamben calls bare life, or homo sacer, a creature who can be killed but not sacrificed.18 This figure, an essential figure in modern politics, is constituted by and constitu- tive of sovereign power. Homo sacer is produced by the sovereign ban and is subject to two exceptions: he is excluded from human law (killing him does not count as homicide) and he is excluded from divine law (killing him is not a ritual killing and does not count as sacrilege). He is set outside human jurisdiction without being brought into the realm of divine law. This double exclusion of course also counts as a double inclusion: "homo sacer belongs to God in the form of unsacrificability and is included in the com- munity in the form of being able to be killed."19 This exposes homo sacer to a new kind of human violence such as is found in the camp and constitutes the political as the double exception: the ex- clusion of both the sacred and the profane.

Instead the judge should use their ballot as a means of pushing counter-narratives to unveil and demystify the power of the sovereign—it’s the hope that we have for meaningful change that spills over this debate round. The judge as critical educator has an obligation to question this.

Gundogdu 12 Ayten Gündoğdu (Department of Political Science, Barnard College-Columbia University). “Potentialities of human rights: Agamben and the narrative of fated necessity”. 2012. http://www.palgrave-journals.com/cpt/journal/v11/n1/full/cpt201045a.html

“In his analysis of biopolitical sovereignty, Agamben provides us with what might be called a counternarrative of Western politics with the explicitly stated goal of ‘unveiling’ or ‘unmasking’ what has become mystified, hidden, secret or invisible, particularly with the prevalence of contractarian accounts of political power (1998, p. 8; 2005, p. 88). Agamben describes this critical task in terms of ‘disenchantment’, or the ‘patient work’ of unmasking the fiction or myth that covers up and sustains the violence of sovereignty (2005, p. 88). What underlies this urge to demystify and unveil is a particular understanding of myth as a deceptive narrative naturalizing and legitimizing violence in the name of the preservation of life. I use the term ‘counternarrative’ to call attention to what Agamben's account aims to do6: This is a critical analysis, as Agamben himself insists, that does not offer ‘historiographical theses or reconstructions’ but instead treats some historical phenomena as ‘paradigms’ so as to ‘make intelligible a broader historical-problematic context;’ to do this, it proceeds at ‘a historico-philosophical level’ (1998, p. 11; 2009, p. 9). In that sense, it is not an account that claims historical accuracy or factual verifiability. This is a crucial point that is sometimes overlooked by Agamben's critics who call into question his inaccurate treatment of historical phenomena such as the concentration camps.7 In addition, ‘counternarrative’ draws our attention to the inventive dimensions of Agamben's endeavor; as one of his critics aptly (though disapprovingly) puts it, ‘Agamben does not discover a concealed biopolitical paradigm stretching back to fourth-century Athens; rather he invents one’ (Finlayson, 2010, p. 116). The invention of a counternarrative of Western politics involves literary devices (e.g. hyperbole), which aim to provoke the readers and persuade them to abandon any politics centered on modern concepts such as sovereignty, rights and citizenship (LaCapra, 2007; cf. de la Durantaye, 2009). In analyzing Agamben's account as a ‘counternarrative’, I aim to attend to the goals that it sets for itself. It is these goals – particularly the goal of freeing human potentialities from myths that render the contingent necessary and mask other possibilities – that provide the starting point for my critical engagement with Agamben. Instead of resorting to an ‘outside’ – whether this be an alternative historical account or another theoretical tradition – I aim to read Agamben on his own terms, and suggest that as he tries to free human potentialities from contractarian myths, he might be entrapping them in another myth that ends up casting the contingent as necessary. Agamben's counternarrative of Western politics aims to uncover what has become hidden or invisible with ‘our modern habit of representing the political realm in terms of citizens’ rights, free will, and social contracts’ (1998, p. 106). Its main target is the contractarian accounts of sovereign power. As he identifies the production of bare life as the originary or foundational activity grounding sovereign power (1998, pp. 6, 83), he particularly aims to question the social contractarian ‘myth’ that covers up sovereign violence (1998, p. 109). After unveiling the foundational myths of Western politics, Agamben concludes that we cannot effectively respond to ‘the bloody mystification of a new planetary order’ if we let these myths continue to obstruct our political imagination (1998, p. 12). With his counternarrative presenting a catastrophic view of the historical present – a view that emphasizes how exception has become the rule, camp has become the paradigmatic structure organizing political space, and we have all virtually become homines sacri (1998, pp. 38, 176, 111)

Thus, the standard and role of the ballot is to vote for the debater that best performatively and methodologically undermines the anthropological machine.

Prefer additionally:

1 Any attempt to make political change requires that the we take into account the state’s power to declare a state of exception. This begins with an analysis of bare life.

Edkins 2k Jenny Edkins (Department of International Politics, University of Wales). “Sovereign Power, Zones of Indistinction, and the Camp”. 2000.

This move of biological life to the center of the political scene in the West leads to a transformation of the political realm itself, one that effectively constitutes its depoliticization. That depoliticization takes place side by side with the politicization of bare life. Bare life is politicized and political life disappears. This irony is explained by the way the link forged in modernity between politics and bare life, a link that underpins ideologies from the right and the left, has been ignored. As Agamben says, "if politics today seems to be passing through a lasting eclipse, this is because politics has failed to reckon with this foundational event of modernity… Only a reflection that… interrogates the link between bare life and politics… will be able to bring the political out of its concealment. Any attempt to rethink the political space of the West must begin with an awareness of the impossibility of the classical distinction between private life and political existence and examine the zones of indistinction into which the oppositions that pro- duced modern politics in the West - inside/outside, right/left, public/private - have dissolved. Agamben proposes that "it is on the basis of these uncertain and nameless terrains, these difficult zones of indistinction, that the ways and forms of a new politics must be thought."21 In the zone of indistinction, a claim to a politically qualified life can no longer be effective as such.

2 Education has to be responsive to events of great violence since it plays a role in creating conditions that make it possible.

Giroux 04 Giroux, Henry A. "What might education mean after Abu Ghraib: Revisiting Adorno's politics of education." Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24.1 (2004): 3-22.

Adorno insists that crimes against humanity cannot simply be reduced to the behavior of a few individuals; rather, they speak in profound ways to the role of the state in propagating such abuses, the mechanisms employed in the realm of culture that silence the public in the face of horrible acts, and the pedagogical challenge that would name such acts as a moral crime against humankind, and so translate that moral authority into effective pedagogical practices throughout society so that such events never happen again. Of course, the significance of Adorno’s comments extend far beyond matters of responsibility for what happened at Abu Ghraib prison. Adorno’s plea for education as a moral and political force against human injustice is just as relevant today as it was following the revelations about Auschwitz and other death camps after World War II. As Roger W. Smith points out, while genocidal acts have claimed the lives of over sixty million people in the twentieth century, sixteen million of them have taken place after 1945.52 The political and economic forces fueling such crimes against humanity–-whether they are unlawful wars, systemic torture, practiced indifference to chronic starvation and disease, or genocidal acts—are always mediated by educational forces, just as the resistance to such acts cannot take place without a degree of knowledge and self-reflection about how to name these acts and how to transform moral outrage into concrete attempts to prevent such human violations from taking place in the first place. Education After Abu Ghraib In 1967, Theodor Adorno published an essay titled “Education After Auschwitz.” In it, he asserted that the demands and questions raised by Auschwitz had so barely penetrated the consciousness of people’s minds that the conditions that made it possible continued, as he put it, “largely unchanged.”53 Mindful that the societal pressures that produced the Holocaust had far from receded in post-war Germany and that, under such circumstances, this act of barbarism could easily be repeated in the future, Adorno argued that “the mechanisms that render people capable of such deeds”54 must be made visible. For Adorno, the need to come to grips with the challenges arising from the reality of Auschwitz was both a political question and a crucial educational consideration. Adorno recognized that education had to be an important part of any politics that took seriously the premise that Auschwitz should never happen again. As he put it: All political instruction finally should be centered upon the idea that Auschwitz should never happen again. This would be possible only when it devotes it- self openly, without fear of offending any authorities, to this most important of problems. To do this, education must transform itself into sociology, that is, it must teach about the societal play of forces that operates beneath the surface of political forms. Implicit in Adorno’s argument is the recognition that education as a critical practice could provide the means for disconnecting commonsense learning from the narrowly ideological impact of mass media, the regressive tendencies associated with hyper-masculinity, the rituals of everyday violence, the inability to identify with others, as well as from the pervasive ideologies of state repression and its illusions of empire. Adorno’s response to retrograde ideologies and practices was to emphasize the role of autonomous individuals and the force of self-determination, which he saw as the outcome of a moral and political project that rescued education from the narrow language of skills, unproblematized authority, and the seduction of common sense. Self-reflection, the ability to call things into question, and the willingness to resist the material and symbolic forces of domination were all central to an education that refused to repeat the horrors of the past and engaged the possibilities of the future. Adorno urged educators to teach students how to be critical, to learn how to resist those ideologies, needs, social relations, and discourses that led back to a politics where authority was simply obeyed and the totally administered society reproduced itself through a mixture of state force and often orchestrated consensus. Freedom in this instance meant being able to think critically and act courageously, even when con- fronted with the limits of one’s knowledge. Without such thinking, critical debate and dialogue degenerate into slogans, and politics, disassociated from the search for justice, becomes a power grab.

3 The conceptual framing the AC strives for shapes the way we perceive the world, which translates into productive discourse.

Sullivan 07 Sullivan, Shannon, and Nancy Tuana, eds. Race and epistemologies of ignorance. SUNY Press, 2007.

Let us turn now to the processes of cognition, individual and social, and the examination of the ways in which race may affect some of their crucial components. As examples, I will look at perception, conception, memory, testimony, and motivational group interest (in a longer treatment, differential group experience should also be included). Separating these various components is difficult because they are all constantly in interaction with one another. For example, when the individual cognizing agent is perceiving, he is doing so with eyes and ears that have been socialized. Perception is also in part conception, the viewing of the world through a particular conceptual grid. Inference from perception involves the overt or tacit appeal to memory, which will be not merely individual but social. As such, it will be founded on testimony and ultimately on the perceptions and conceptions of others. The background knowledge that will guide inference and judgment, eliminating (putatively) absurd alternatives and narrowing down a set of plausible con- tenders, will also be shaped by testimony, or the lack thereof, and will itself be embedded in various conceptual frameworks and require perception and memory to access. Testimony will have been recorded, requiring again perception, conception, and memory; it will have been integrated into a framework and narrative and from the start will have involved the selection of certain voices as against others, selection in and selection out (if these others have been allowed to speak in the first place). At all levels, interests may shape cognition, influencing what and how we see, what we and society choose to remember, whose testimony is solicited and whose is not, and which facts and frameworks are sought out and accepted. Thus at any given stage it is obvious that an interaction of great complexity is involved, in which multiple factors will be affecting one another in intricate feedback loops of various kinds. So an analytic separation of elements for conceptual isolation and clarification will necessarily be artificial, and in a sense each element so extracted bears a ghostly trail of all the others in its wake. Start with perception. A central theme of the epistemology of the past few decades has been the discrediting of the idea of a raw perceptual “given,” completely unmediated by concepts. Perceptions are in general simultaneously conceptions, if only at a very low level. Moreover, the social dimension of epistemology is obviously most salient here, since individuals do not in general make up these categories themselves but inherit them from their cultural milieu. “The influence of social factors begins at birth, for language is not reinvented by each individual in social isolation, nor could it be. Because language acquisition is socially mediated, the concepts we acquire are themselves socially mediated from the very beginning” (Kornblith 1994a, 97). But this means that the conceptual array with which the cognizer approaches the world needs itself to be scrutinized for its adequacy to the world, for how well it maps the reality it claims to be describing. In addition, it is not a matter of monadic predicates, reciprocally isolated from one another, but concepts linked by interlocking assumptions and background belief sets into certain complexes of ideation that by their very nature tend to put a certain interpretation on the world. So in most cases the concepts will not be neutral but oriented toward a certain understanding, embedded in subtheories and larger theories about how things work. In the orthodox left tradition, this set of issues is handled through the category “ideology”; in more recent radical theory, through Foucault’s “discourses.” But whatever one’s larger metatheoretical sympathies, whatever approach one thinks best for investigating these ideational matters, such concerns obviously need to be part of a social epistemology. For if the society is one structured by relations of domination and subordination (as of course most societies in human history have been), then in certain areas this conceptual apparatus is likely going to be shaped and inflected in various ways by the biases of the ruling group(s). So crucial concepts may well be misleading in their inner makeup and their external relation to a larger doxastic architecture. Moreover, what cognitive psychology has revealed is that rather than continually challenging conceptual adequacy by the test of disconfirm- ing empirical data, we tend to do the opposite—to interpret the data through the grid of the concepts in such a way that seemingly disconfirming, or at least problematic, perceptions are filtered out or marginalized. In other words, one will tend to find the confirmation in the world whether it is there or not.

Part 3 is the Crackdown

I affirm playing with the law by demanding the 6th amendment to “break the courts” as a method of self-abolishment of plea-bargaining and rendering the courts inoperative.

Alexander 12 Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, March 10, 2012, Go to Trial: Crash the Justice System, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/opinion/sunday/go-to-trial-crash-the-justice-system.html

AFTER years as a civil rights lawyer, I rarely find myself speechless. But some questions a woman I know posed during a phone conversation one recent evening gave me pause: “What would happen if we organized thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of people charged with crimes to refuse to play the game, to refuse to plea out? What if they all insisted on their Sixth Amendment right to trial? Couldn’t we bring the whole system to a halt just like that?”

Our advocacy solves – playing with the law through demanding the right to trial would CRUSH the legal system – it relies on the ability to plea off people and keep the caseload down.

Alexander 12 Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, March 10, 2012, Go to Trial: Crash the Justice System, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/opinion/sunday/go-to-trial-crash-the-justice-system.html

On the phone, Susan said she knew exactly what was involved in asking people who have been charged with crimes to reject plea bargains, and press for trial. “Believe me, I know. I’m asking what we can do. Can we crash the system just by exercising our rights?” The answer is yes. The system of mass incarceration depends almost entirely on the cooperation of those it seeks to control. If everyone charged with crimes suddenly exercised his constitutional rights, there would not be enough judges, lawyers or prison cells to deal with the ensuing tsunami of litigation. Not everyone would have to join for the revolt to have an impact; as the legal scholar Angela J. Davis noted, “if the number of people exercising their trial rights suddenly doubled or tripled in some jurisdictions, it would create chaos.” Such chaos would force mass incarceration to the top of the agenda for politicians and policy makers, leaving them only two viable options: sharply scale back the number of criminal cases filed (for drug possession, for example) or amend the Constitution (or eviscerate it by judicial “emergency” fiat). Either action would create a crisis and the system would crash — it could no longer function as it had before. Mass protest would force a public conversation that, to date, we have been content to avoid.

To “play with the law” is a means of escaping the dependency of the law. It is not that we try to solve it through the use of another law or right, but rather we exert ourselves past the constraints of the instrumentality of the law altogether and refuse to re-inscribe the narrative that the law can help us.

Mills 08 Mills, Catherine. "Playing with law: Agamben and Derrida on postjuridical justice." South Atlantic Quarterly 107.1 (2008): 15-36.

To return to my starting point, more can now be said of the idea of playing with law as if it were a disused object, that is, a toy. It is now possible to better appreciate the perceived revolutionary potential of play and of the toy. As we have seen, the toy brings to light the “temporality of history in its pure dierential and qualitative value.” That is, in making present “human temporality in itself, the pure dierential margin between the ‘once’ and the ‘no longer’” (IH, 72), the toy permits a release from continuous and linear time and the realization of and return to history, understood as the true homeland of humanity (IH, 104–5). In relation to law, we can now say that as a disused object the law has lost its use value in the realm of the politico- economic and has instead been relegated to the profane use that can be made of it by children. The characterization of its being in force without significance appears to locate the law within the diachronic element of the “‘once’ . . . ‘no longer,’” rather than within the synchrony of miniaturization. This is significant because it highlights the ritualistic dimension of law, which compensates for the disjuncture of past and present, Agamben argues, by reabsorbing diachrony into synchrony. Play, however, transforms synchrony into diachrony by breaking the tie between past and present. This production of a dierential margin in the dialectic of rite and play is the condition of history; it is that which allows for the now. As a toy and only as a toy, as an object of play, the rite of law contributes to the revelation of the essential historicity of the human. The ritualistic dimension of law is important for another reason as well. Agamben insists on the impossibility of the elimination of either diachronic or synchronic signication: in all games and rites, the one remains a stumbling block for the other, thereby preventing the attainment of a pure state of diachrony or synchrony. Thus, he writes, “at the end of the game,” the toy—the privileged signier of absolute diachrony – “turns around into its opposite and is presented as the synchronic residue that the game can no longer eliminate” (IH, 79). This implies that playing with law does not mean eliminating the law, for there is actually a sense in which the law is rescued from its own obsolescence in play. Rather than being maintained solely in a state of decay characterized by the simple lack of practico-economic value as law, it is given a new use. But this does not take the form of a resacralization of the law and restoration of transcendental meaning or force. Instead, the new use of law takes the form of its deactivation or deposition. Before saying more of this, it is worth cautioning against the phrase “at the end of the game” used above, for in what sense would the game in which humanity plays with law have an end? To construe the game of play- ing with law as having an end would in fact push Agamben’s conception of the messianic toward an identification with the eschatological, a conation that he explicitly resists in The Time That Remains.16 Thus, within his own characterization, it would be more accurate to insist on the endlessness of play. As with the activity of study with which it is intimately related in the paragraph in question, play is interminable; it has no end beyond pleasure. As Agamben writes in Idea of Prose, “Not only can study have no rightful end, it does not even desire one.”17 In fact, it is presumably the endlessness of play that allows for the non- instrumental appropriation of law and ultimately its deactivation in play; that is, the “free use” of law within play exceeds the constraints of instrumentality and gives onto a justice that Agamben identifies as akin to a condition in which the world can no longer be appropriated by law. In this way, the noninstrumentality and interminability of play ensure a passage to a justice that is irreducible to law. As Agamben writes, “The law—no longer practiced but studied—is not justice, but only the gate that leads to it. What opens a passage toward justice is not the erasure of law, but its deactivation and inactivity—that is, another use of law” (SE, 64). One of the questions that this raises is to what extent a deposed or deactivated law remains a law. In what sense is a deposed law still a law? Agamben suggests that it is this question of the status and meaning of law after its messianic fulfillment that motivates Benjamin’s reactions on Kafka, in which law “no longer has force or application” (SE, 63). However, this raises more questions than it answers, and in particular, it leaves open what a postjuridical justice arrived at through studious play might look like. We can be sure that what Agamben means by “justice” does not coincide with more standard jurisprudential conceptions as the proper application of law. Despite his concern with questions of law, though, the concept of justice has played a small part in Agamben’s work to date (at least if considered at an explicit textual level), and there is little overt indication of what it would amount to beyond this discussion in State of Exception. One point at which a (slightly) more extended consideration of justice does appear is in an early fragment in which Agamben defines justice as “the handing on of the Forgotten” and the “transmission of oblivion” (IP, 79). At rst glance, this does little to clarify the concept of justice that he employs, but it does point toward a path of elucidation.

The aff is a stance towards a new form of politics. Our method allows us to challenge the zone of indistinction and overcome the authority of the sovereign.

Mills n.d. Mills, Catherine (University of New South Wales) “Giorgio Agamben” IEP - http://www.iep.utm.edu/agamben/#H3

This damning diagnosis of contemporary politics does not, however, lead Agamben to a position of political despair. Rather, it is exactly in the crisis of contemporary politics that the means for overcoming the present dangers also appear. Agamben’s theorization of the “coming politics”—which in its present formulation is under-developed in a number of significant ways—relies upon a logic of “euporic” resolution to the aporias that characterize modern democracy, including the aporia of bare life (P 217). In Means without End, he argues for a politics of pure means that is not altogether dissimilar to that projected by Walter Benjamin, writing that “politics is the sphere neither of an end in itself nor of means subordinated to an end; rather, it is the sphere of a pure mediality without end intended as the field of human action and of human thought” (ME 117). In developing this claim, Agamben claims that the coming politics must reckon with the dual problem of the post-Hegelian theme of the end of history and with the Heideggerian theme of Ereignis, in order to formulate a new life and politics in which both history and the state come to an end simultaneously. This “experiment” of a new politics without reference to sovereignty and associated concepts such as nation, the people and democracy, requires the formulation of a new “happy life,” in which bare life is never separable as a political subject and in which what is at stake is the experience of communicability itself.

Plea bargaining is the key lynchpin allowing the courts to continue functioning – the 1AC forces the courts to become inoperative.

Walsh 17 (Dylan, “Why US Criminal Courts Are So dependent on Plea Bargaining”, the Atlantic, May 2nd)

Plea bargains were almost unheard of prior to the Civil War. Only in its aftermath, as waves of displaced Americans and immigrants rolled into cities and crime rates climbed, did appellate courts start documenting exchanges that resemble the modern practice. The plea became a release valve for mounting caseloads. Appellate courts “all condemned it as shocking and terrible” at the time, said Albert Alschuler, a retired law professor who has studied plea bargains for five decades. The courts raised a range of objections to these early encounters, from the secretiveness of the process to the likeliness of coercing innocent defendants. Pleas, wrote the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 1877, are “hardly, if at all, distinguishable in principle from a direct sale of justice.” The practice nonetheless continued, and, by the turn of the century, a minor economy had settled in its orbit. “Fixers” could be hired to arrange for alternatives to a prison sentence. Police regularly toured jails to “negotiate” with the inmates. One New York City defense attorney and friend to local magistrates loitered in front of night court hawking 10 days in jail for $300, 20 days for $200, and 30 days for $150. By the 1920s, as violations of the federal liquor prohibition flooded court dockets, 88 percent of cases in New York City and 85 percent in Chicago were settled through pleas. When the Supreme Court in 1969 finally heard a case concerning the legality of the issue, it unanimously ruled that pleas are constitutionally acceptable. They are “inherent in the criminal law and its administration,” the Court declared… In theory, abolishing the use of plea bargains wouldn’t take much: Prosecutors would simply stop offering deals. That would be that, though the massive influx of trials would jam courts. (Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, discussed defendants’ deliberately going to trial and “crashing the courts” as a form of resistance to mass incarceration.) But both sides of the debate agree the odds of this happening are infinitesimal. Even Alschuler, who throughout his career remained one of the staunchest critics of plea bargaining, admitted in 2013 that “the time for a crusade” had passed. Instead, he suggested people work to make the criminal-justice system “less awful.”

Plea bargains have been used as the tool of the sovereign in order to create zones of indistinction past the jurisdiction of the state.

Kretsedemas 11 Kretsedemas, Philip. The immigration crucible: Transforming race, nation, and the limits of the law. Columbia University Press, 2011.

One of the most compelling (and controversial) aspects of Agamben's argument about executive authority is how it traverses governments with radically different ideological orientations. In this regard, Agamben treats the expansion of executive authority as a political process that has become inextricably bound up with modern governance—and not to a particular ideological articulation of these governing practices. Agamben points out, for example, that the entire reign of the German Nazi party took place under the auspices of a "state of exception?' Even so, the Third Reich merely expanded on precedents concerning the use of executive authority that had been established by prior liberal democratic administrations (Agamben 2005, 14-16). The lesson to learn from this sequence of events is not that expanded executive authority necessarily leads to fascism, but rather that it is not unique to fascism. Executive authority can continue to expand, in a linear direction, even as the ideologies of governing administrations swing back and forth between liberal welfarism, neoliberalism, national socialism, democratic socialism, or even communism. Nevertheless, it can be argued that neoliberalism has left its own distinct mark on the ongoing transformation of executive authority. The expansion of executive authority under recent U.S. administrations has not only been characterized by a different kind of symbolic politics but also by real changes in the way this authority has been deployed. The executive order is still an important part of the arsenal of these administrations. Even so, many aspects of neoliberal restructuring have been channeled through the law rather than through executive orders. Notable examples include the legislative acts that deregulated the telecommunications industry, the financial sector, and the social service sector.23 This legislation was also guided by other more fluid negotiations—between the executive office, the legislature, and multinational corporations—which took place outside of a formal deliberative process that was open to public oversight. Just as the judicial system relies on informal plea bargains to expedite the formal sentencing process, the legislative system has always relied on backroom negotiations to expedite its deliberations. It is significant, however, that from the 1980s onward, these kinds of deliberations were pushed further outside the bounds of government. One of the primary vehicles for doing this is expanding the role of private corporations in shaping and implementing public policy. As Saskia Sassen has explained, these strategies do not literally transfer decision making authority from the public to the private sphere. Instead, they allow the government to privatize specific aspects of its own decision making—further removing these decisions from public oversight (Sassen 2007, 45-96). For example, government services may be contracted out to private corporations. But these corporations may be headed by individuals who formerly held government posts and who are involved in public-private sector planning projects that have been initiated by the executive office or by nongovernment agencies. As a result, the line between the public and private sector begins to blur. Furthermore, the network of bureaucrats, corporate heads, intellectuals, pundits, and others who craft neoliberal policies are partly embedded in the public sphere and are still capable of influencing public policy while remaining relatively independent of the regulations and authority structures of the public sector. This situation draws attention to another distinguishing feature of the expansion of executive authority under neoliberalism. Although neoliberal policies tend to expand the discretionary authority of the executive office, they do not expand only the authority of the executive office, and this process is not always centrally controlled by the executive office. The executive office is just one node within a chain of influence that extends into the corporate sector. Furthermore, the effect of deregulation and federal devolution is to create spaces of decision-making authority—which free the individual from binding legalities—that can be granted to a variety of private and public actors. Private corporations are given more freedom to relocate their manufacturing centers and recruit (and terminate) workers as needed; financial institutions are given more freedom to develop speculative investment strategies; state legislators and frontline case workers are given more discretion in interpreting and implementing welfare policy; and so forth. Quite often, the expansion of discretionary authority and the weakening of regulatory controls have been supported by acts of Congress. The net effect, however, is to grant more actors the ability to make decisions that are conditioned by the imperative of necessity—adapting one's decisions to unfolding contingencies rather than predefined rules and regulations. In this regard, neoliberalism can be said to convert the exceptional powers of the executive office into a normal feature of the law and dis-burses these powers to an unprecedented array of actors. Within the context of the government, the president remains the ultimate decider. But the expanded power of the presidency is also parceled out to others who have a share in the discretionary authority that the executive office wields over the law.

Plea bargaining feeds into a culture of sacrificing rights, propping up the state and fueling the anthropological machine

Weil 12 “Widespread Use of Plea Bargains Plays Major Role in Mass Incarceration” Wednesday, November 07, 2012 By Danny Weil http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/12556-overwhelming-use-of-plea-bargains-plays-major-role-in-mass-incarceration

The American judicial system has become one in which constitutional rights and protections are sacrificed through mendacity and deception to appeal to a cult of judicial efficiency and economy. The public has been lied to; plea bargaining does not make society safe or tackle the problem of crime itself. This is simply another necessary illusion that is funneled into the minds of the populace to rationalize the commodification of people for profit. The problem with all of this, as the late thinker Hannah Arendt noted in her New York Review of Books article "Lying in Politics," is that: "the trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods." In reality, the current criminal justice system has little to do with public safety, truth-telling or avoiding falsehoods. Many of those currently incarcerated and languishing in for-profit or government prisons include nonviolent drug offenders and those accused of parole-violation technicalities, such as not having a job or missing a parole officer appointment. In reality, Americans are locked up for crimes, such as writing bad checks or using drugs, that would rarely, if ever, produce prison sentences in other countries. The United States incarcerates 2.3 million criminals. The number of people on lockdown in America is more than that in any other nation. The modern criminal justice system primarily serves the interests of the increasingly privatized and financialized prison-industrial complex, which includes, among others, "tough on crime" politicians, seedy bail bondsmen, Wall Street-traded for-profit prison corporations, the drug-testing industry, police and corrections officers, and parole and prison officers' unions. It is well known, or should be, that California's "three strikes and you're out" provision was promoted by corrections officers because caging humans is not only good for business, it is the fiduciary responsibility of the for-profit prison-industrial complex corporations. It is no surprise, either, that the primary defenders of the criminalization of marijuana are police and corrections officers' unions because this is the bread and butter of their professions.

This is an impact magnifier – plea bargains allow prosecutors to incorporate more and more individuals into the for-profit prison system, with the burden falling on those blind by the sovereign power.

Weil 12 “Widespread Use of Plea Bargains Plays Major Role in Mass Incarceration” Wednesday, November 07, 2012 By Danny Weil http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/12556-overwhelming-use-of-plea-bargains-plays-major-role-in-mass-incarceration

Popular culture, disseminated by Hollywood movies and television series, depict plea bargains as a way of allowing those accused of a crime to escape justice and "get off easy." In reality, usually the opposite is true. Plea bargains allow prosecutors to bring charges against far more people than the legal system could process through a system of judicial trials. Thus, they create the material conditions for their own replication. Because less than 10 percent of criminal cases, federal and state, go to trial, plea bargains in effect allow the state to prosecute ten times more cases than they could handled at trial. Plea bargains are also essential for stocking for-profit prisons with a steady supply of "customers" for their corporate shareholders. Plea bargaining both enlists and perpetuates the principles of mass production, deception and mendacity, which in turn are applied quite readily in the whole of our system of criminal "justice." Plea bargaining has also become an essential element of both mushrooming prison growth and the racially disparate state of American prison populations, with the gravity of the burden falling on the backs of blacks and Latinos. Without plea bargaining, the explosion in prison populations of color, especially those of for-profit prisons, could never be possible.