Three important notes about this file

Link Wall

No matter what the aff changes, selection inclusion ensures exclusion

Mitropoulos ‘6 (Culture Machine, Vol 8 (2006) Home About Log In Register Search Current Archives Reviews InterZone CSeARCH Cutting Democracy's Knot Angela Mitropoulos

Therefore, alongside the democracy of the market--and in relation to European premonitions of a globally extended constitution and citizenship--there is the democracy of the border. It is well known that the border, no matter how constantly it recomposes itself, entails processes of selective inclusion as well as exclusion. But, contrary to recent insistences that the border constitutes (according to Etienne Balibar, among others) the 'non-democratic' element of the demos, democracy no less than the market is the democratic element par excellence in the foundation of citizenship and politics. This is to say, there can be no democracy without the border. Even if that border is imagined as coextensive with the circumference of the planet itself, the border as a technology of inclusion-exclusion can still function, whether as the internal demarcation between 'passive' and 'active' forms of citizenship (which can be traced in the historically parallel trajectories of the granting of citizenship to more people alongside increasing stratifications within citizenship), or in the recourse to the revocation of citizenship itself, whose criteria and rulings have by no means disappeared but, today, proliferate. This is merely to note the formal operations of citizenship laws, without having touched on the casual operations of border technologies, as they are articulated through, say, the police checkpoints in the banlieues no less than in the demands that migrants (whether this status as a migrant is legal or semantic) must continually prove their belonging. In any case, without the border, there is neither demos nor kratos. This is why Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri can call, in the final chapters of Empire (2000), for a global citizenship under the sign of 'absolute democracy'. Yet, the diplomacy that might seemingly favour the proposition of democracy as an empty placeholder for the question of 'constituent power' fails to confront the politics of the demos and the kratos that invocations of democracy set to work, not least because diplomacy is already a technique of statecraft and a form of address that distinguishes and fuses kratos and demos.
Transportation discussion is key to reduce metropolitan fragmentation and prop up notions of community

Orfield 99- fellow at Brookings, law professor and director of the Institute of Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota (Myron, “Metropolitics: A regional agenda for community and stability,” Forum for Social Economics Volume 28, Issue 2, 1999)

In order to stabilize the central cities and older suburbs and prevent metropolitan polarization, there are six substantive and one structural reform that must be accomplished on a metropolitan scale. The reforms are interrelated and reinforce each other substantively and politically. The first three reforms are the most significant in terms of the socioeconomic stability of the core. They are (1) fair housing, (2) property tax-base sharing, and (3) reinvestment. Together, these reforms deconcentrate poverty, provide resource equity, and support the physical rebuilding necessary to bring back the middle class and private economy. The second three, (4) land planning/growth control (5) welfare reform/public works, and (6) transportation/transit reform, reinforce the first three and allow them to operate efficiently and sustainably. In addition, these reforms provide for growth that is balanced socioeconomically, accessible by transit, economical with governmental resources, and environmentally conscious. It is extraordinarily likely that these reforms can only be accomplished, administered, and sustained by an elected metropolitan government. Finally, a panoply of tax and public finance reforms should occur to overcome the perverse incentives created by generations of a highly fragmented, over-regulated local marketplace.

Impact Extensions

The process of community inclusion neutralizes difference and ensures exclusion

Morin ‘6 (Culture Machine, Vol 8 (2006) Putting Community Under Erasure: Derrida and Nancy on the Plurality of Singularities Marie-Eve Morin Department of Philosophy. 3-45 Assiniboia Hall. University of Alberta.

First, communities tend to neutralise differences by treating all members as brothers, that is, as the same. The other belongs to my community only insofar as he is like me, and the 'us' -- the group of those who belong together -- appears as a homogeneous group. It is because of this tendency to homogenise that fraternity can include apparent non-brothers (such as women) and that the fraternal community can present itself as universal. The woman gets included in fraternity when she becomes a brother for humanity, that is, when she is not (completely) woman anymore. Because 'man' is the archetype of humanity and 'brother' the archetype of the relation between siblings, the woman can become human or sibling only insofar as she resembles the archetypes of 'man' or 'brother'. Fraternity as a process of universalisation is a process of inclusion, but here 'to include' means to neutralise difference. Second, communities are inscribed in a field of opposition; they define themselves in an oppositional logic, by excluding 'them,' that is, those who do not belong, those who are not 'brothers,' not 'the same'. If I can identify my brothers, then by using the same criterion, I can also identify those who are not my brothers. All groups function in the same way: they define a criterion which functions as a wall erected around the group, a wall filled with certain type of openings that let only the right elements in. Of course, some criteria of appurtenance are more inclusive than others because they are shared by more people. But no matter how inclusive a group is, it is always possible to find elements that are excluded.

The creation of a mythical community is what allows for war

Norris ‘2K (Jean-Luc Nancy and the Myth of the Common Andrew Norris Constellations Volume 7, No 2, 2000.

Nancy, however, is deeply suspicious of this understanding of community. On his account, the move from the individual to the community will do us no good if the community is understood as being a subject of the same sort as the individual. In the end this will only produce a politics of identity in which different identities and interests are defined in opposition to one another. Though this is an implication of the communitarian argument that Sandel and Taylor do not emphasize, it is clearly recognized by Hegel, who argues that war is a fundamental possibility of political life, one that is not entirely regrettable. It is a fundamental possibility because the state is, vis-à-vis other states, an individual, “and individuality essentially implies negation. Hence even if a number of states make themselves into a family, this group as an individual must engender an opposite and create an enemy.”10 And it is not an absolute evil because war allows for the display of martial courage, in which the citizen transcends his limited position and becomes one with the universal in the form of the state.11 External conflict and its possible glorification is not the only or even the most pressing danger Nancy would associate with the politics of communal identity. He argues that conceiving of the community or the state as a subject entails that we understand the community to have an identity that is immanent to it, and that needs to be brought out, and put to work. In Nancy’s terminology, the community as subject necessarily implies the community as subject-work. If one’s “true” or “higher” or “more universal” self is found in one’s shared communal identity, it becomes the work of politics to acknowledge and bring forth that immanent communal identity. This will entail not merely conflict with other political identities, but the purification of one’s own community. To realize their political identity, Serbians must unite so as to become more “truly” Serbian; doing so requires that they slough off what is not truly Serbian. Put more bluntly, it requires that they cleanse their community of foreigners, and rid themselves of the influence of such. In Nancy’s terms, people like Milosevic seek to put community “to work.”

Personal complicity with community is the ultimate incentive for these acts of violence and genocide

Suzanne Uniacke, Prof. Philosophy @ U of Wollongong, June, ’99 (International Journal of Philosophical Studies Vol. 7, Iss. 2)

We bear responsibility for the outcome of another’s actions, for instance, when we provoke these actions (Iago); or when we supply the means (Kevorkian), identification (Judas), or incentive (Eve); or where we encourage another to act as he [or she] does (Lady Macbeth). Despite his disclaimer, Pilate cannot acquit himself entirely of the outcome of what others decide simply by ceding the judgment to them. In these examples agents are indirectly, partly responsible for the outcomes of what others do in virtue of something they themselves have done. But indirect, partial responsibility for what another person does can also arise through an agent’s non-intervention and be grounded in intention or fault; for example, when Arthur does not prevent Brian killing Catherine, because Arthur wants Catherine dead, or because Arthur simply cannot be bothered to warn her or call the police. Of course attributions of indirect, partial responsibility can be difŽ cult. And as far as absolutism is concerned, the relevant sense of ‘brings about’, outlined earlier, will sometimes be quite stretched where an agent is attributed with responsibility for what someone else does. All the same, by our non-intervention we can help bring about some things that are directly and voluntarily caused by others.29
Modernity isn’t the root cause of violence—it’s always proximately caused. The alternative leaves us unable to deal with any global problems.

Curtler 97 – PhD Philosophy, Hugh, “rediscovering values: coming to terms with postnmodernism” 44-7

The second and third concerns, though, are more serious and to a degree more legitimate. The second concern is that "reason is the product of the Enlightenment, modern science, and Western society, and as such for the postmodernists, it is guilty byassociation of allthe errors attributed to them, [namely], violence, suffering, and alienation in the twentieth century, be it the Holocaust, world wars, Vietnam, Stalin's Gulag, or computer record-keeping . . ." (Rosenau 1992, 129). Although this is a serious concern, it is hardly grounds for the rejection of reason, for which postmodernism calls in a loud, frenetic voice. There is precious little evidence that the problems of the twentieth century are the result of too much reason! On the contrary. To be sure, it was Descartes's dream to reduce every decision to a calculation, and in ethics, this dream bore fruit in Jeremy Bentham's abortive "calculus" of utilities. But at least since the birth of the social sciences at the end of the last century, and with considerable help from logical positivism, ethics (and values in general) has been relegated to the dung heap of "poetical and metaphysical nonsense," and in the minds of the general populace, reason has no place in ethics, which is the proper domain of feeling. The postmodern concern to place feelings at the center of ethics, and judgment generally—which is the third of their three objections to modern reason—simply plays into the hands of the hardened popular prejudice that has little respect for the abilities of human beings to resolve moral differences reasonably. Can it honestly be said of any major decision made in thiscentury that it was the result of "too much reason" and that feelings and emotions played no part? Surely not.Can this be said in the case of any of the concerns reflected in the list above: are violence, suffering, and alienation, or the Holocaust, Vietnam, Stalin's Gulag, or Auschwitz the result of a too reasonable approach to human problems? No one could possibly make this claim who has dared to peek into the dark and turbid recesses of the human psyche. In every case, it is more likely that these concerns result from such things as sadism, envy, avarice, love of power, the "death wish," or short-term self-interest, none of which is "reasonable."One must carefully distinguish between the methods ofthe sciences, which are thoroughly grounded in reason and logic, and the uses men and women make of science. The warnings of romantics such as Goethe (who was himself no mean scientist) and Mary Shelley were directed not against science per se but rather against the misuse of science and the human tendency to become embedded in the operations of the present moment. To the extent that postmodernism echoes these concerns, I would share them without hesitation. But the claim that our present culture suffers because of an exclusive concern with "reasonable" solutions to human problems, with a fixation on the logos, borders on the absurd.What is required here is not a mindless rejection of human reason on behalf of "intuition," "conscience," or "feelings" in the blind hope that somehow complex problems will be solved if we simply do whatever makes us feel good. Feelings and intuitions are notoriously unreliable and cannot be made the center of a workable ethic. We now have witnessed several generations of college students who are convinced that "there's no disputing taste" in the arts and that ethics is all about feelings. As a result, it is almost impossible to get them to take these issues seriously. The notion that we can trust our feelings to find solutions to complex problems is little more than a false hope.We are confronted today with problems on a scale heretofore unknown, and what is called for is patience, compassion (to be sure), and above all else, clear heads. In a word, what is called for is a balance between reason and feelings—not the rejection of one or the other. One need only recall Nietzsche's own concern for the balance between Dionysus and Apollo in his Birth of Tragedy. Nietzscheknew better than his followers, apparently, that one cannot sacrifice Apollo to Dionysus in the futile hope that we can rely on our blind instincts to get us out of the hole we have dug for ourselves.