Octos—Neg vs uga dg 1NC

The aff’s the wrong response. Their movement calls to “destroy all vestiges of the male-dominated power structure, the State itself”, and that “Debate is an important site of knowledge production and critique.”

This is an ideology which curiously resembles Occupy. Claiming “debate space” as a site for organic, horizontalist politics sells out the possibility of institutional engagement in favor of the sphere of individual performance.

Marcus 2012 – associate book editor at Dissent Magazine (Fall, David, “The Horizontalists”, http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-horizontalists)
There is a much-recycled and certainly apocryphal tale told of an ethnographer traveling in India. Journeying up and down the Ganges Delta, he encounters a fisherman who claims to know the source of all truth. “The world,” the fisherman explains, “rests upon the back of an elephant.”

“But what does the elephant stand on?” the ethnographer asks.

“A turtle.”

“And the turtle?”

“Another turtle.”

“And it?”

“Ah, friend,” smiles the fisherman, “it is turtles all the way down.”

As with most well-circulated apocrypha, it is a parable that lacks a clear provenance, but has a clear moral: that despite our ever-dialectical minds, we will never get to the bottom of things; that, in fact, there is nothing at the bottom of things. What we define as society is nothing more than a set of locally constructed practices and norms, and what we define as history is nothing more than the passage of one set to the next. Although we might “find the picture of our universe as an infinite tower of tortoises rather ridiculous,” as one reteller admitted, it only raises the question, “Why do we think we know better?”

Since the early 1970s we have wondered—with increasing anxiety—why and if we know better. Social scientists, literary critics, philosophers, and jurists have all begun to turn from their particular disciplines to the more general question of interpretation. There has been an increasing uneasiness with universal categories of thought; a whispered suspicion and then a commonly held belief that the sum—societies, histories, identities—never amounts to more than its parts. New analytical frameworks have begun to emerge, sensitive to both the pluralities and localities of life. “What we need,” as Clifford Geertz argued, “are not enormous ideas” but “ways of thinking that are responsive to particularities, to individualities, oddities, discontinuities, contrasts, and singularities.”

This growing anxiety over the precision of our interpretive powers has translated into a variety of political as well as epistemological concerns. Many have become uneasy with universal concepts of justice and equality. Simultaneous to—and in part because of—the ascendance of human rights, freedom has increasingly become understood as an individual entitlement instead of a collective possibility. The once prevalent conviction that a handful of centripetal values could bind society together has transformed into a deeply skeptical attitude toward general statements of value. If it is, indeed, turtles all the way down, then decisions can take place only on a local scale and on a horizontal plane. There is no overarching platform from which to legislate; only a “local knowledge.” As Michael Walzer argued in a 1985 lecture on social criticism, “We have to start from where we are,” we can only ask, “what is the right thing for us to do?”

This shift in scale has had a significant impact on the Left over the past twenty to thirty years. Socialism, once the “name of our desire,” has all but disappeared; new desires have emerged in its place: situationism, autonomism, localism, communitarianism, environmentalism, anti-globalism. Often spatial in metaphor, they have been more concerned with where and how politics happen rather than at what pace and to what end. Often local in theory and in practice, they have come to represent a shift in scale: from the large to the small, from the vertical to the horizontal, and from—what Geertz has called—the “thin” to the “thick.”

Class, race, and gender—those classic left themes—are, to be sure, still potent categories. But they have often been imagined as spectrums rather than binaries, varying shades rather than static lines of solidarity. Instead of society, there is now talk of communities and actor networks; instead of radical schemes to rework economic and political institutions, there is an emphasis on localized campaigns and everyday practices. The critique of capitalism—once heavily informed by intricate historical and social theories—has narrowed. The “ruthless criticism of all,” as Karl Marx once put it, has turned away from exploitative world systems to the pathologies of an over-regulated life. As post-Marxists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe declared in 1985,

Left-wing thought today stands at a crossroads. The “evident truths” of the past—the classical forms of analysis and political calculation, the nature of the forces in conflict, the very meaning of the Left’s struggles and objectives—have been seriously challenged….From Budapest to Prague and the Polish coup d’état, from Kabul to the sequels of Communist victory in Vietnam and Cambodia, a question-mark has fallen more and more heavily over the whole way of conceiving both socialism and the roads that should lead to it.

In many ways, the Left has just been keeping up with the times. Over the last quarter-century, there has been a general fracturing of our social and economic relations, a “multiplication of,” what one sociologist has called, “partial societies—grouped by age, sex, ethnicity, and proximity.” This has not necessarily been a bad thing. Even as the old Left—the vertical Left—frequently bemoaned the growing differentiation and individuation, these new categories did, in fact, open the door for marginalized voices and communities. They created a space for more diversity, tolerance, and inclusion. They signaled a turn toward the language of recognition: a politics more sensitive to difference. But this turn was also not without its disadvantages. Gone was the Left’s hope for an emerging class consciousness, a movement of the “people” seeking greater realms of freedom. Instead of challenging the top-down structures of late capitalism, radicals now aspired to create—what post-Marxists were frequently calling—“spaces of freedom.” If one of the explicit targets of the global justice movement of the late 1990s was the exploitative trade policies of the World Trade Organization, then its underlying critique was the alienating patterns of its bureaucracy: the erosion of spaces for self-determination and expression. The crisis of globalization was that it stripped individuals of their rights to participate, to act as free agents in a society that was increasingly becoming shaped by a set of global institutions. What most troubled leftists over the past three or four decades was not the increasingly unequal distribution of goods and services in capitalist societies but the increasingly unequal distribution of power. As one frequently sighted placard from the 1999 Seattle protests read, “No globalization without participation!”

Occupy Wall Street has come to represent the latest turn in this movement toward local and more horizontal spaces of freedom. Occupation was, itself, a matter of recovering local space: a way to repoliticize the square. And in a moment characterized by foreclosure, it was also symbolically, and sometimes literally, an attempt to reclaim lost homes and abandoned properties. But there was also a deeper notion of space at work. Occupy Wall Street sought out not only new political spaces but also new ways to relate to them. By resisting the top-down management of representative democracy as well as the bottom-up ideals of labor movements, Occupiers hoped to create a new politics in which decisions moved neither up nor down but horizontally. While embracing the new reach of globalization—linking arms and webcams with their encamped comrades in Madrid, Tel Aviv, Cairo, and Santiago—they were also rejecting its patterns of consolidation, its limits on personal freedom, its vertical and bureaucratic structures of decision-making.

Time was also to be transformed. The general assemblies and general strikes were efforts to reconstruct, and make more autonomous, our experience of time as well as space. Seeking to escape from the Taylorist demands of productivity, the assemblies insisted that decision-making was an endless process. Who we are, what we do, what we want to be are categories of flexibility, and consensus is as much about repairing this sense of open-endedness as it is about agreeing on a particular set of demands. Life is a mystery, as one pop star fashionista has insisted, and Occupiers wanted to keep it that way. Likewise, general strikes were imagined as ways in which workers could take back time—regain those parts of life that had become routinized by work. Rather than attempts to achieve large-scale reforms, general strikes were improvisations, escapes from the daily calculations of production that demonstrated that we can still be happy, creative, even productive individuals without jobs. As one unfurled banner along New York’s Broadway read during this spring’s May Day protests, “Why work? Be happy.”

In many ways, the Occupy movement was a rebellion against the institutionalized nature of twenty-first century capitalism and democracy. Equally skeptical of corporate monopolies as it was of the technocratic tendencies of the state, it was ultimately an insurgency against control, against the ways in which organized power and capital deprived the individual of the time and space needed to control his or her life. Just as the vertically inclined leftists of the twentieth century leveraged the public corporation—the welfare state—against the increasingly powerful number of private ones, so too were Occupy and, more generally, the horizontalist Left to embrace the age of the market: at the center of their politics was the anthropological “man” in both his forms—homo faber and homo ludens—who was capable of negotiating his interests outside the state. For this reason, the movement did not fit neatly into right or left, conservative or liberal, revolutionary or reformist categories. On the one hand, it was sympathetic to the most classic of left aspirations: to dismantle governing hierarchies. On the other, its language was imbued with a strident individualism: a politics of anti-institutionalism and personal freedom that has most often been affiliated with the Right.

Seeking an alternative to the bureaucratic tendencies of capitalism and socialism, Occupiers were to frequently invoke the image of autonomy: of a world in which social and economic relations exist outside the institutions of the state. Their aspiration was a society based on organic, decentralized circuits of exchange and deliberation—on voluntary associations, on local debate, on loose networks of affinity groups.

If political and economic life had become abstracted in the age of globalization and financialization, then Occupy activists wanted to re-politicize our everyday choices. As David Graeber, one of Occupy’s chief theoretical architects, explained two days after Zuccotti Park was occupied, “The idea is essentially that “the system is not going to save us,” so “we’re going to have to save ourselves.”

Borrowing from the anarchist tradition, Graeber has called this work “direct action”: the practice of circumventing, even on occasion subverting, hierarchies through practical projects. Instead of attempting “to pressure the government to institute reforms” or “seize state power,” direct actions seek to “build a new society in the shell of the old.” By creating spaces in which individuals take control over their lives, it is a strategy of acting and thinking “as if one is already free.” Marina Sitrin, another prominent Occupier, has offered another name for this politics—“horizontalism”: “the use of direct democracy, the striving for consensus” and “processes in which everyone is heard and new relationships are created.” It is a politics that not only refuses institutionalization but also imagines a new subjectivity from which one can project the future into the present.

Direct action and horizontal democracy are new names, of course, for old ideas. They descend—most directly—from the ideas and tactics of the global justice movement of the 1990s and 2000s. Direct Action Network was founded in 1999 to help coordinate the anti-WTO protests in Seattle; horizontalidad, as it was called in Argentina, emerged as a way for often unemployed workers to organize during the financial crisis of 2001. Both emerged out of the theories and practices of a movement that was learning as it went along. The ad hoc working groups, the all-night bull sessions, the daylong actions, the decentralized planning were all as much by necessity as they were by design. They were not necessarily intended at first. But what emerged out of anti-globalization was a new vision of globalization. Local and horizontal in practice, direct action and democracy were to become catchphrases for a movement that was attempting to resist the often autocratic tendencies of a fast-globalizing capitalism.

But direct action and horizontal democracy also tap into a longer, if often neglected, tradition on the left: the anarchism, syndicalism, and autonomist Marxism that stretch from Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, and Rosa Luxemburg to C.L.R. James, Cornelius Castoriadis, and Antonio Negri. If revolutionary socialism was a theory about ideal possibilities, then anarchism and autonomism often focused on the revolutionary practices themselves. The way in which the revolution was organized was the primary act of revolution. Autonomy, as the Greco-French Castoriadis told Le Monde in 1977, demands not only “the elimination of dominant groups and of the institutions embodying and orchestrating that domination” but also new modes of what he calls “self-management and organization.”

With direct action and horizontal democracy, the Occupy movement not only developed a set of new tactics but also a governing ideology, a theory of time and space that runs counter to many of the practices of earlier leftist movements. Unlike revolutionary socialism or evolutionary social democracy—Marx’s Esau and Jacob—Occupiers conceived of time as more cyclical than developmental, its understanding of space more local and horizontal than structural and vertical. The revolution was to come but only through everyday acts. It was to occur only through—what Castoriadis obliquely referred to as—“the self-institution of society.”

The seemingly spontaneous movement that emerged after the first general assemblies in Zuccotti Park was not, then, sui generis but an elaboration of a much larger turn by the Left. As occupations spread across the country and as activists begin to exchange organizational tactics, it was easy to forget that what was happening was, in fact, a part of a much larger shift in the scale and plane of Western politics: a turn toward more local and horizontal patterns of life, a growing skepticism toward the institutions of the state, and an increasing desire to seek out greater realms of personal freedom. And although its hibernation over the summer has, perhaps, marked the end of the Occupy movement, OWS has also come to represent an important—and perhaps more lasting—break. In both its ideas and tactics, it has given us a new set of desires—autonomy, radical democracy, direct action—that look well beyond the ideological and tactical tropes of socialism. Its occupations and general assemblies, its flash mobs and street performances, its loose network of activists all suggest a bold new set of possibilities for the Left: a horizontalist ethos that believes that revolution will begin by transforming our everyday lives.

It can be argued that horizontalism is, in many ways, a product of the growing disaggregation and individuation of Western society; that it is a kind of free-market leftism: a politics jury-rigged out of the very culture it hopes to resist. For not only does it emphasize the agency of the individual, but it draws one of its central inspirations from a neoclassical image: that of the self-managing society—the polity that functions best when the state is absent from everyday decisions.

But one can also find in its anti-institutionalism an attempt to speak in today’s language for yesterday’s goals. If we must live in a society that neither trusts nor feels compelled by collectivist visions, then horizontalism offers us a leftism that attempts to be, at once, both individualist and egalitarian, anti-institutional and democratic, open to the possibilities of self-management and yet also concerned with the casualties born out of an age that has let capital manage itself for far too long. Horizontalism has absorbed the crisis of knowledge—what we often call “postmodernism”—and the crisis of collectivism—what we often call “neoliberalism.” But instead of seeking to return to some golden age before our current moment of fracture, it seeks—for better and worse—to find a way to make leftist politics conform to our current age of anti-foundationalism and institutionalism. As Graeber argued in the prescriptive last pages of his anthropological epic, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, “Capitalism has transformed the world in many ways that are clearly irreversible” and we therefore need to give up “the false choice between state and market that [has] so monopolized political ideology for the last centuries that it made it difficult to argue about anything else.” We need, in other words, to stop thinking like leftists.

But herein lies the problem. Not all possible forms of human existence and social interaction, no matter how removed they are from the institutions of power and capital, are good forms of social organization. Although it is easy to look enthusiastically to those societies—ancient or modern, Western or non-Western—that exist beyond the structures of the state, they, too, have their own patterns of hierarchy, their own embittered lines of inequality and injustice. More important, to select one form of social organization over the other is always an act of exclusion. Instituting and then protecting a particular way of life will always require a normative commitment in which not every value system is respected—in which, in other words, there is a moral hierarchy.

More problematically, by working outside structures of power one may circumvent coercive systems but one does not necessarily subvert them. Localizing politics—stripping it of its larger institutional ambitions—has, to be sure, its advantages. But without a larger structural vision, it does not go far enough. “Bubbles of freedom,” as Graeber calls them, may create a larger variety of non-institutional life. But they will always neglect other crucial avenues of freedom: in particular, those social and economic rights that can only be protected from the top down. In this way, the anti-institutionalism of horizontalism comes dangerously close to that of the libertarian Right. The turn to previous eras of social organization, the desire to locate and confine politics to a particular regional space, the deep skepticism toward all forms of institutional life not only mirror the aspirations of libertarianism but help cloak those hierarchies spawned from non-institutional forms of power and capital.

This is a particularly pointed irony for a political ideology that claims to be opposed to the many injustices of a non-institutional market—in particular, its unregulated financial schemes. Perhaps this is an irony deeply woven into the theoretical quilt of autonomy: a vision that, as a result of its anti-institutionalism, is drawn to all sites of individual liberation—even those that are to be found in the marketplace. As Graeber concludes in Debt, “Markets, when allowed to drift entirely free from their violent origins, invariably begin to grow into something different, into networks of honor, trust, and mutual connectedness,” whereas “the maintenance of systems of coercion constantly do the opposite: turn the products of human cooperation, creativity, devotion, love and trust back into numbers once again.”

In many ways, this is the result of a set of political ideas that have lost touch with their origins. The desire for autonomy was born out of the socialist—if not also often the Marxist—tradition and there was always a guarded sympathy for the structures needed to oppose organized systems of capital and power. Large-scale institutions were, for thinkers such as Castoriadis, Negri, and C.L.R. James, still essential if every cook was truly to govern. To only “try to create ‘spaces of freedom’ ‘alongside’ of the State” meant, as Castoriadis was to argue later in his life, to back “down from the problem of politics.” In fact, this was, he believed, the failure of 1968: “the inability to set up new, different institutions” and recognize that “there is no such thing as a society without institutions.”

This is—and will be—a problem for the horizontalist Left as it moves forward. As a leftism ready-made for an age in which all sides of the political spectrum are arrayed against the regulatory state, it is always in danger of becoming absorbed into the very ideological apparatus it seeks to dismantle. For it aspires to a decentralized and organic politics that, in both principle and practice, shares a lot in common with its central target. Both it and the “free market” are anti-institutional. And the latter will remain so without larger vertical measures. Structures, not only everyday practices, need to be reformed. The revolution cannot happen only on the ground; it must also happen from above. A direct democracy still needs its indirect structures, individual freedoms still need to be measured by their collective consequences, and notions of social and economic equality still need to stand next to the desire for greater political participation. Deregulation is another regulatory regime, and to replace it requires new regulations: institutions that will limit the excesses of the market. As Castoriadis insisted in the years after 1968, the Left’s task is not only to abolish old institutions but to discover “new kinds of relationship between society and its institutions.”

Horizontalism has come to serve as an important break from the static strategies and categories of analysis that have slowed an aging and vertically inclined Left. OWS was to represent its fullest expression yet, though it has a much longer back story and still—one hopes—a promising future. But horizontalists such as Graeber and Sitrin will struggle to establish spaces of freedom if they cannot formulate a larger vision for a society. Their vision is not—as several on the vertical left have suggested—too utopian but not utopian enough: in seeking out local spaces of freedom, they have confined their ambitions; they have, in fact, come, at times, to mirror the very ideology they hope to resist. In his famous retelling of the turtle parable, Clifford Geertz warned that in “the search of all-too-deep-lying turtles,” we have to be careful to not “lose touch with the hard surfaces of life—with the political, economic, stratificatory realities within which men are everywhere contained.” This is an ever-present temptation, and one that, in our age of ever more stratification, we must resist.

The impact outweighs—left unchecked, the Anthropocene threatens extinction and exacerbate every form of oppression—localism is a palliative which precludes relentless innovation and commitment to policy engagement. We’re not saying “state’s always good” or “only talk about the state”, but that the question of how to engage is one that can’t be ignored if we are to secure survival

Rowan 14—Wageningen University

(Rory, “Notes on politics after the Anthropocene”, from After the Anthropocene: Politics and geographic inquiry for a new epoch, Prog Hum Geogr February 7, 2014, dml)

The recent popularity of the Anthropocene within the social sciences, humanities, and arts relies in part on the fact that it answers a certain subterranean yearning for a framework in which to address macro-scale concerns after the eclipse of ‘globalization’, a term that seemed to slip off the critical agenda as it sank into the sediment of our political unconscious. The Anthropocene hence presents an opportunity for critical thinking to reconnect with macroscalar concerns in a way that escapes the ideological over-determinations of globalization while engaging with the deep ramifications of anthropogenic environmental change through an examination of the planet’s material processes. Whereas ‘the global’ suggests a relatively flat, anthropocentric conception of the Earth focused on the construction of social relations on the surface, ‘the planetary’, by contrast, points to a more complex, volumic, stratified understanding of an Earth constituted through dynamic geo-social entanglements. Accordingly, the Anthropocene creates opportunities to cast the planet itself as a key player in the drama of human politics rather than simply its stage.

This raises the question of what consequences an engagement with the planet has for political thought. What challenges might the Anthropocene present to political thought, and what forms of politics might be adequate to face them? In the space remaining I examine these questions with regard to three broad areas: the relationship between the scale and form of politics; the subject of the Anthropocene; and the relationship between technology and politics.

First, while it seems clear that the Anthropocene calls for thinking through the relationship between politics and the planet, it is important not to assume that a certain scale of politics maps naturally against a certain form of politics. More precisely, thinking about politics in planetary terms does not require a totalizing understanding of politics confined to technocratic dreams of a World State or reactionary Big Space geopolitics. How a planetary politics might be understood depends not simply on questions of scale (itself a social constituted and politically contestable concept) but on how the political is conceived. Hence, the Anthropocene marks an occasion to return to fundamental questions of political thought, but within an expanded conceptual horizon produced by a new planetary circumstance. To my mind the political is best understood as a terrain of contestation in which struggles take place on numerous fronts, across different geographic and temporal scales, the chance of successfully shaping social forces being increased if hegemonic alliances can be built across struggles. The Anthropocene potentially widens the scope of the political because understanding social forces as embedded in a dynamic relationship with geophysical forces opens up both as potential objects and sites of political struggle.

However, this is not to suggest that the scale of the challenges raised by the Anthropocene has no implication for the form of politics that might take shape in its wake. Indeed, the Anthropocene raises concerns of such vast geographic and temporal scope and depth that any response must involve questions of long-term planning, sustained funding, and significant transnational cooperation and collective organization that effectively render certain forms of politics inadequate. This is especially, perhaps uncomfortably, true of conceptions of politics widely celebrated on the critical Left that emphasize temporary occupations, local direct action, or horizontal and non-representational modes of organization. Yet the Anthropocene seems to demand that some of the problems the critical Left prefers to shy away from, such as representation and institutionalized power, need to be faced anew unless the future is to be ceded to ever more intensive forms of capitalist exploitation, environmental degradation, and the possibility of mass unemployment, escalating food insecurity, resource wars, and increasingly reactionary forms of identity politics. This is not to claim that politics should be constituted around macro-scale concerns alone, but that these must make up a key element of any politics that recognizes the significance of the Anthropocene.

Second, there is the question of the subject of the Anthropocene and its implications for politics, already the topic of heated debate. Some have advanced the term Capitalocene as an alternative to Anthropocene on the grounds that the historically specific set of social relations structured around capital accumulation mark a more accurate genesis of global climate change than the activity of a singular, universal humanity, or anthropos. This argument has much to commend it, at once insisting that the Anthropocene not become a depoliticizing meta-abstraction that conceals the constitutive fractures of sociopolitical relations and highlighting the dominant role that the historical development of the capitalist world economy has had in producing it. I am, nonetheless, apprehensive for two reasons. First, the concept of the Capitalocene seems to emphasize social relations internal to the human sphere when perhaps the most important aspect of the Anthropocene is that it allows the distinction between the social and the natural, the human and the inhuman to be muddied by way of their mutually constitutive intrusions. Second, even if it can be granted that capitalist social relations created the conditions for the Anthropocene, the Anthropocene’s effects will be universal, shaping all future human communities (although unevenly) regardless of what new forms of social relations may replace capitalism. Even if we regard the Anthropocene to be capitalogenic it has something of a universal address, affecting the lives of everyone even if ‘all’ are not responsible for it equally. In this light, anthropos can be understood not as a pre-constituted identity but rather as the object of political contestation in the struggle to define the terms of future human existence on the planet.

In signalling a crisis in our fundamental conceptual categories and our relation to the planet, the Anthropocene appears to raise that old political question: what is to be done? However, it also complicates this question, throwing ideas of agency into a new, problematic light. The question of what then is coupled with its more difficult, demanding twin: how is it to be done? This brings me to the third area of concern: technology. Any attempt to address the long-term, macro-scalar challenges that the Anthropocene presents must be willing to engage with the question of the relationship between politics and technology. This is not to evoke a simple means-ends discussion but to recognize that socio-political formations are bound up with specific technological platforms and energy regimes, so that any alternative future politics must make technology not only a tool but a crucial terrain of struggle. Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, authors of the recent #Accelerate manifesto, have been germane in questioning the critical Left’s knee-jerk reaction to the question of technology and the ease with which discussions slip into well-worn critiques of ‘enframing’, ‘instrumental reason’, and ‘apparatuses’ that exclusively address technology’s ‘great danger’ rather than its ‘saving power’ (Srnicek and Williams, 2013). The Anthropocene should not lead us to simply recoil in horror at the effects of industrialization or remain paralysed by the sense that technological progress can only make things worse. A more open debate about technology and climate politics does of course not mean cultivating a naive technophilia or uncritically accepting geo-engineering’s promise of sublime technical fixes, but rather acknowledging the key role technology must play in any attempt to secure a more socially just and ecologically sound future within the horizon of the Anthropocene. Facing trenchant socioecological challenges that afford neither clear exits nor ‘pure’ positions means jettisoning perspectives that reject technological intervention into complex environments in principle. The question then is not one of abandoning the critique of technology as such, or ignoring the interests served by particular technologies, but rather of making the subjectivities, relations, and forms of life that they might open or foreclose, produce, or negate, sites of political struggle. For example, a ‘progressive’ Leftist approach to the question of ‘climate technologies’ might require a program to establish rigorous institutional norms to effectively govern their use and a radical pluralization of the sites of decision-making and subjects empowered to decide – a difficult labour indeed. Yet the central point remains: political struggles need to be fought over technology rather than against technology. If technology is rejected or neglected as the object of political struggles, then our fate is left to the nostalgia of localist escapisms, the passivity of Leftist melancholia or the reactionary psychosis of Right-wing identity politics, all wholly compatible with the enormous adaptive capacities and increasingly catastrophic trajectory of capitalist economics.

Debate can be a productive space for inculcating the seeds of institutional change—but it must avoid questions of identity as an end in favor of contingent bonds centered around collectivist political engagement—our alternative is utilizing debate as a deliberative space to create policy change

Brown 95—prof at UC Berkeley (Wendy, States of Injury, 47-51)

The postmodern exposure of the imposed and created rather than discovered character of all knowledges—of the power-surtuscd, struggle-¶48¶produced quality of all truths, including reigning political and scientific ones—simultaneously exposes the groundlessness of discovered norms or visions. It also reveals the exclusionary and regulatory function of these norms: white women who cannot locate themselves in Nancy Hartsock’s account of women’s experience or women s desires, African American women who do not identify with Patricia Hill Collinss account of black women’s ways of knowing, are once again excluded from the Party of Humanism—this time in its feminist variant. ¶Our alternative to reliance upon such normative claims would seem to be engagement in political struggles in which there are no trump cards such as “morality” or “truth."Our alternative, in other words, is to struggle within an amoral political habitat for temporally bound and fully contestable visions of who we are and how we ought to live. Put still another way, postmodernity unnerves feminist theory not merely because it deprives us of uncomplicated subject standing, as Christine Di Stefano suggests, or of settled ground for knowledge and norms, as Nancy Hartsock argues, or of "centered selves and “emancipatory knowledge," as Seyla Bcnhabib avers. Postmodernity unsettles feminism because it erodes the moral ground that the subject, truth, and normativity coproduce in modernity. When contemporary feminist political theorists or analysts complain about the antipolitical or unpolitical nature of postmodern thought—thought that apprehends and responds to this erosion—they arc protesting, inter' aha, a Nictzschcan analysis of truth and morality as fully implicated in and by power, and thereby dplegitimated qua Truth and Morality Politics, including politics with passionate purpose and vision, can thrive without a strong theory of the subject, without Truth, and without scientifically derived norms—one only need reread Machiavelli, Gramsci, or Emma Goldman to see such a politics flourish without these things. The question is whether fnninist politics can prosper without a moral apparatus, whether feminist theorists and activists will give up substituting Truth and Morality for politics. Are we willing to engage in struggle rather than recrimination, to develop our faculties rather than avenge our subordination with moral and epistemological gestures, to fight for a world rather than conduct process on the existing one? Nictzschc insisted that extraordinary strengths of character and mind would be necessary to operate in thce domain of epistemological and religious nakedness he heralded. But in this heexcessively individualized a challenge that more importantly requires the deliberate development of postmoral and antirelativist political spaces, practices of deliberation, and modes of adjudication.¶49¶The only way through a crisis of space is to invent a new space —Fredric Jameson. “Postmodernism"¶Precisely because of its incessant revelation of settled practices and identities as contingent, its acceleration of the tendency to melt all that is solid into air. what is called postmodernity poses the opportunity to radically sever the problem of the good from the problem of the true, to decide “what we want” rather than derive it from assumptions or arguments about “who we are.”Our capacity to exploit this opportunity positively will be hinged to our success in developing new modes and criteria for political judgment. It will also depend upon our willingness to break certain modernist radical attachments, particularly to Marxism’s promise (however failed) of meticulously articulated connections betwreen a comprehensive critique of the present and norms for a transformed future—a science of revolution rather than a politics of oneResistance, the practice most widely associated with postmodern political discourse, responds to without fully meeting the normativity challenge of postmodernity. A vital tactic in much political w’ork as wrcll as for mere survival, resistance by itself does not contain a critique, a vision, or grounds for organized collective efforts to enact either. Contemporary affection for the politics of resistance issues from postmodern criticism’s perennial authority problem: our heightened consciousncss of the will to power in all political “positions” and our wrariness about totalizing analyses and visions. Insofar as it eschew’s rather than revisesthese problematic practices, resistance-as-politics does not raise the dilemmas of responsibility and justification entailed in “affirming” political projects and norms. In this respect, like identity politics, and indeed sharing with identity politics an excessively local viewpoint and tendency toward positioning without mapping, the contemporary vogue of resistance is more a symptom of postmodernity’s crisis of political space than a coherent response to it.Resistance goes nowhere in particular, has no inherent attachments, and hails no particular vision; as Foucault makes clear, resistance is an effect of and reaction to power, not an arrogation of it.¶What postmodernity disperses and postmodern feminist politics requires are cultivated political spaces for posing and questioning feminist political norms, for discussing the nature of “the good” for women. Democratic political space is quite undcrtheonzed in contemporary feminist thinking, as it is everywhere in latc-twentieth-ccntury political theory, primarily bccausc it is so little in evidence. Dissipated by the increasing tcchnologizing of would-be political conversations and processes, by the erosion of boundaries around specifically political domains¶50¶and activities, and by the decline of movement politics, political spaces are scarcer and thinner today than even in most immediately prior epochs of Western history. In this regard, their condition mirrors the splayed and centrifuged characteristics of postmodern political power. Yet precisely because of postmodernity’s disarming tendencies toward political disorientation, fragmentation, and technologizing, the creation of spaces where political analyses and norms can be proffered and contested is supremely important.¶Political space is an old theme in Western political theory, incarnated by the polis practices of Socrates, harshly opposed by Plato in the Republic, redeemed and elaborated as metaphysics by Aristotle, resuscitated as salvation for modernity by Hannah Arendt. jnd given contemporary spin in Jurgen Habermas's theories of ideal speech situations and communicative rationality. The project of developing feminist postmodern political spaces, while enriched by pieces of this tradition, necessarily also departs from it. In contrast with Aristotle’s formulation, feminist political spaces cannot define themselves against the private sphere, bodies, reproduction and production, mortality, and all the populations and issues implicated in these categories. Unlike Arendt’s, these spaces cannot be pristine, ratified, and policed at their boundaries but are necessarily cluttered, attuned to earthly concerns and visions, incessantly disrupted, invaded, and reconfigured. Unlike Habermas, wc can harbor no dreams of nondistorted communication unsullied by power, or even of a ‘common language,’* but wc recognize as a permanent political condition partiality of understanding and expression, cultural chasms whose nature may be vigilantly identified but rarely “resolved,” and the powers of words and images that evoke, suggest, and connote rather than transmit meanings.42 Our spaces, while requiring some definition and protection, cannot be clean, sharply bounded, disembodied, or permanent: to engage postmodern modes of power and honor specifically feminist knowledges, they must be heterogenous, roving, relatively noninstitutionalized, and democratic to the point of exhaustion.¶Such spaces are crucial for developing the skills and practices of postmodern judgment, addressing the problem of “how to produce a discourse on justicc . . . when one no longer relies on ontology or epistemology.”43 Postmodemity’s dismantling of metaphysical foundations for justice renders us quite vulnerable to domination by technical reason ¶51¶unless we seize the opportunity this erosion also creates to develop democratic processes for formulating postepistemelogical and postontological judgments. Such judgements require learning how to have public conversations with each other, arguing from a vision about the common (“what I want for us") rather than from identity (“who I am”),and from explicitly postulated norms and potential common values rather than false essentialism or unreconstructed private interest.44 Paradoxically, such public and comparatively impersonal arguments carry potential for greater accountability than arguments from identity or interest. While the former may be interrogated to the ground by others, the latter are insulated from such inquiry with the mantle of truth worn by identity-based speech. Moreover, postidentitypolitical positions and conversations potentially replace a politics of difference with a politics of diversity—differences grasped from a perspective larger than simply one point in an ensemble.Postidentity public positioning requires an outlook that discerns structures of dominance within diffused and disorienting orders of power, thereby stretching toward a more politically potent analysis than that which our individuated and fragmented existences can generate. In contrast to Di Stefano's claim that 'shared identity” may constitute a more psychologically and politically reliable basis for “attachment and motivation on the part of potential activists,” I am suggesting that political conversation oriented toward diversity and the common, toward world rather than self, and involving a conversion of ones knowledge of the world from a situated (subject) position into a public idiom,offers us the greatest possibility of countering postmodern social fragmentations and political disintegrations.¶Feminists have learned well to identify and articulate our "subject positions —we have become experts at politicizing the “I”that is produced through multiple sites ofpower and subordination. But the very practice so crucial to making these elements of power visible and subjectivity political may be partly at odds with the requisites for developing political conversation among a complex and diverse “we.” We may need to learn public speaking and the pleasures of public argument not to overcome our situatedness, but in order to assume responsibility for our situations and to mobilize a collective discourse that will expand them. For the political making of a feminist future that does not reproach the history on which it is borne, we may need to loosen our attachments to subjectivity, identity, and morality and to redress our underdeveloped taste for political argument.