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1NC to SP1 1 Education – especially secondary education – guarantees the reproduction of capitalist modes of production Whitehead 14 (Patrick Whitehead. 21 Feb. 2014. Whitehead is a professor of psychology at Albany State University and has a P.h.D. in phenomenological psychology. “Schooling as and Ideological State Apparatus.” Academia.edu. https://www.academia.edu/7908351/Schooling_as_an_Ideological_State_Apparatus)[PM] While the apt management of a classroom may be a useful component of Classroom Management qua William Chandler Bagley (who authored the 1903 text of the same name), it is by no means the chief impetus; this privilege is left to “social efficiency.” Spring (2011), historian of American education, explains that “[u]nder the doctrines of social efficiency, the ideal was to socialize students for cooperation in large-scale organizations where each individual would be performing a specialized task” (239). One might see the benefit of maintaining predictable order in a classroom, which is a project of behavioral management, but this takes a back-seat to the socio-corporational indoctrination that typifies modern education qua classroom management. For the remainder of this section, “Classroom Management” will refer to the method of training students in “social efficiency”. If this conception of our schooling fails to incite controversy, perhaps a few more examples are in order. Spring continues: Classroom Management became a standard teacher training text… between 1907 and 1927. Bagley believed that the primary role of the school is to build good industrial habits of the type needed on the assembly line. …everything was reduced to rigid routine. Bagley stated that the expert observer could immediately gauge the efficiency of the teacher by “the manner in which lines pass to and from the room.” (p. 259) It should be noted that Bagley was not the only progenitor of ideas concerning schooling in the early twentieth century. Dewey’s “progressive education” represents an alternative to classroom management. However, Dewey’s laboratory school at the University of Chicago was tasked with the same ideal of social efficiency represented in the other popular texts at the time. It is little surprise that his process-oriented, problem-centered approach did not win esteem as the most socially efficient. One final example should serve to further demonstrate the purpose of social efficiency as the guiding philosophy of contemporary education. William Lewis, also writing at the beginning of the twentieth-century, has argued that “the high school’s largest service is to the best possible training for economic efficiency, good citizenship, and full and complete living for all its pupils” (in Spring 2011, p. 239). He goes on to explain that this may be most expediently brought about by extricating from the curriculum the superfluous disciplines of literature, poetry, algebra, and foreign languages - though these, he admits, may be offered as electives (p. 240). If it has been assumed that the focus of schooling is on learning broadly conceived, then the alternative emphasis of social efficiency may seem disconcerting. Indeed, some may remain reluctant (and, perhaps, indignant) to see the parallels to the contemporary project of schooling. There might even be the claim that the emphasis on social efficiency must represent a pre-war and pre-depression American education, and this would be accurate. This, however, does not mean that it does not also represent twenty-first century education. Should readers find themselves among the skeptics, consider the following explanation of the appeal of schooling and see if it can easily be placed either in this century or the beginning of this century past: “most of the world’s policy leaders promote education as an economic solution for unemployment and improved living conditions. Students often consider schooling as the key to their economic future” (Spring 2011, p. 236). This sounds much like the contemporary political debate concerning unemployment and underemployment, despite coming to us from the early twentieth century. Thus far, two things have been demonstrated. First, the original incentive behind of American schooling has been that of social efficiency, which may be understood as the training in being a good corporate or factory worker (bureaucrat or machine, respectively; below); this is still the case with contemporary schooling. Second, this training in “social efficiency” has been packaged and sold to Americans as the single most important opportunity in life. The explanations provided to enhance the attractiveness of this final point include, but are not limited to: increasing intelligence, establishing oneself, investing in a future, the right thing to do (that is, as an ethical obligation), and, as pernicious as it is mundane, simply ‘that which comes next’ as in the anonymously assumed sequence of life. In this regard, schooling is the paramount system for ensuring the status of the American capitalist economy. And this is no secret! “Students often consider schooling as the key to their economic future.” The only thing misleading about this is that it is not the students’ economic futures that are guaranteed, but the investors and owners of the corporations that will enjoy the future patronage and wage-labor of students. Despite lip-service paid to student-centered interests, which includes the eminent and edifying value of education, the purpose is for guaranteeing the reproduction of existing capitalistic means of production. This is the conception of the school as an Ideological State Apparatus (ISA; Althusser, 1970; or, more accurately, Ideological Corporate Apparatus, as the fiscal power has increasingly moved from the public to the private sector; Deleuze, 1992, p. 7; See Boyles, 2012) because it satisfies Althusser’s (1970) definition of ISAs. “All ideological State apparatuses, whatever they are, contribute to the same result: the reproduction of the relations of production, i.e. of capitalist relations of exploitation” (p. 154). Hegemony eats itself---capitalism causes international conflict---hegemony fails and only incites broader violence Ashley Smith 2016 – (member of the International Socialist Review editorial board, “The asymmetric world order,” International Socialist Review #100, Spring 2016, http://isreview.org/issue/100/asymmetric-world-order)//a-berg We have entered a new epoch of world imperialism. Its flashpoints fill the daily news. The United States and China are jockeying for hegemony in Asia. In Eastern Europe, Russia and the United States have locked themselves in a new Cold War. These powers are also backing opposing sides in the spiraling interstate conflict in the Middle East. Such rivalry disproves the Kaustkyan contention at the beginning of the twentieth century that the world had reached a new stage of capitalism, in which the ruling classes of the world, save for minor exceptions, have united for the peaceful exploitation of the world’s workers and resources. The neoliberal boom from the early 1980s through 2008 is the principal cause of this new imperial rivalry. It reorganized the tectonic plates of the world economy. States like China have become new centers of capital accumulation. Inevitably these have become increasingly assertive in the world system bringing them into conflict with its hegemonic power, the United States, which has suffered a relative decline in the wake of economic, imperial, and political crises. All of this has produced a new asymmetric multipolar world order. The United States remains the world’s only superpower. But it now faces a potential global rival in China and a host of regional ones from Russia to Brazil. It also confronts conflicts between various rising states that it is no longer able to control. The long-term global slump of the world system and China’s recent slowdown will only exacerbate tensions between the various powers. Each corner of the world is in play, from the Americas to Asia, Europe, Africa, and even the Artic and Antarctica. The Obama administration has made it abundantly clear that, in its words, “American global leadership remains indispensable.”1 But its relative decline has forced it to adjust its imperial strategy. While attempting to extricate the United States from ground wars in the Middle East and Central Asia and retreat to a policy of balancing between the region’s powers, Obama has tried to reorient American power to confront Russia in Eastern Europe, and most importantly, to carry through his pivot to Asia to contain China’s rise as a regional and prospective global power. All of this augurs increasing conflict within the world system. Capitalism breeds interimperial rivalry The classical Marxist theory of imperialism remains the best way to analyze these developing rivalries. Vladimir Lenin outlined the basic argument in his pamphlet Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Nikolai Bukharin developed it in a more systematic form in his book, Imperialism and World Economy. Phil Gasper summarizes and defends their theory on page 69 in this issue of ISR. In essence, they argue that capitalism’s logic of competition drives corporations beyond the national economy in search for resources, markets, and labor throughout the world. Each capitalist state builds huge military arsenals to enforce their corporations’ claims in the system. Thus economic competition between capitals produces imperial competition between states for the division and redivision of the world. These rivalries can trigger war between the great powers. The victors of these conflicts attempt to enforce a new hierarchy among the capitalist states. Some sit atop, others below them, and those at the bottom suffer national oppression, either directly through colonial rule or indirectly through political and economic subjection to the dictates of the most powerful states. But such hierarchies, Lenin and Bukharin argue, are never permanent. Capitalism’s law of uneven development, which Leon Trotsky developed further into a law of uneven and combined development, constantly upsets the interstate order. Old powers atrophy, new capitalist powers rise, and they come into conflict as each attempts to order the system to the advantage of its capitalist class. The classical Marxists developed their theory in a polemic against their contemporary, Karl Kautsky, who argued that capitalism could produce ultra­imperialism, in which the capitalist powers could unite in the peaceful and cooperative exploitation of the world’s laboring population. His theoretical wishful thinking was disproved by the entire twentieth century, and the emerging rivalries of the twenty-first century. We have witnessed a history of phases of interimperial conflict. First was the classical period of imperialism, when the great powers in a multipolar order conducted an epic scramble for colonial empires, divided up the world, and detonated two world wars. The triumph of the United States and the USSR from that fratricidal catastrophe produced the bipolar order of the Cold War. With the collapse of the Soviet empire, imperialism and interim­perial rivalry did not come to an end. It was replaced by a unipolar moment before that succumbed to today’s asymmetric multipolar world order. The unipolar moment In their influential book, The Making of Global Capitalism, Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin overgeneralize the unipolar moment, believing that America’s global dominance—which they see as persistent and unchallengable—invalidates Lenin and Bukharin’s theory.2 The United States did indeed seek to secure a unipolar world order and prevent the rise of any peer competitors. It succeeded for a time until the neoliberal boom and America’s own crises undermined its hegemony. It developed a grand strategy to incorporate and subordinate all the world’s states into the political, economic, and military structures it had created in its Cold War bloc. As the Nosferatu of American imperialism, Zbigniew Brzezinski, argued in his book, The Grand Chessboard, “The three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.”3 The United States was successful in this project in the 1990s. The American capitalist class restructured its economy restoring its relative economic dominance over Japan and Germany. It tried to integrate its former Cold War rivals in its imperium. It had already struck an alliance with China in the 1970s; during the 1990s it tried to transform it into an export-processing platform for American as well as international capital. It, along with its allies, imposed neoliberal structural adjustment on Russia and gobbled up its empire in Eastern Europe, admitting many of the newly independent states into the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance (NATO). The United States used various international bodies like the UN to politically assimilate states that had been in the Russian or nonaligned camp. It intensified its use of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, as well as the newly christened World Trade Organization (WTO), to crack open state-controlled capitalist economies and subject them all to an American-overseen neoliberal economic order whose rule book was deregulation, privatization, and globalization. The unipolar moment did not bring peace or the promised peace dividend. Instead the United States maintained its massive military apparatus and used it to enforce its informal neoliberal empire against so-called rogue states like Iraq and North Korea; it took upon itself the task of being the world’s policeman to impose order on so-called failed states like Somalia and Haiti; and it brandished its vast armada to intimidate any and all from challenging its rule.

STEM education reform naturalizes the zombie economics of capitalism---their uniqueness and solvency arguments are manufactured by an economic elite in order to maintain class power. Ajay Sharma 16 – (Ph.D, Associate Prof., Dept. of Educational Theory and Practice at University of Georgia, “STEM-ification of Education,” Journal for Activist Science & Technology Education, Volume 7, Issue 1, May 2016)//a-berg In fact, even if we do not rely on international comparisons and just focus on the workforce requirements for the U.S. economy, it is clear that the fears of a “skills gap” are overblown and without much basis. First, quality wise science and engineering graduates from universities in the United States rank better than graduates from nations, such as China and India, that are supposedly threatening its economic and industrial superiority (Gereffi, et. al., 2008; Loyalka, et. al., 2014). Second, the supply of science and engineering graduates is more than enough for what the United States economy needs. In fact, U.S schools and colleges supply qualified science and engineering graduates far in excess of the demand (Xie & Killewald, 2012). For instance, only one out of every two STEM graduates are employed in a STEM job, and computer science and engineering departments in US universities produce 50% more graduates than are hired (Salzman, Kuehn, & Lowell, 2013). Similarly, researchers find that the real reasons behind recruitment of foreign workers in the tech industry have little to do with labor shortages but with the capitalist imperative to reduce labor costs and get “indentured” workers (Matloff, 2013). A well regarded review of research on the “skills gap” issue from the National Bureau of Economic Research, therefore, concluded: Overall, the available evidence does not support the idea that there are serious skill gaps or skill shortages in the US labor force. The prevailing situation in the US labor market, as in most developed economies, continues to be skill mismatches where the average worker and job candidate has more education than their current job requires. Persistent, high levels of unemployment reflect the fact that job seekers still outnumber available job openings. While it is certainly true that a bigger supply of cheaper labor would be useful to employers, it is not clear that such a situation would be useful for the country as a whole, and any claims to that effect should be examined carefully. (Capelli, 2014; pp. 46-47). Thus, it is evident that the rationale of “skills gap” for the current push for STEM education in United States public education has no life to it. And yet, it continues to animate the public discourse and provide legitim1acy to current STEM initiatives. What gives? In the next section, using the trope of zombies I present a historical context to the recurrence of the “skills gap” threat in different garbs over the decades in the United States, and in the section that follows, with the help of conceptual ideas borrowed from post-structuralism and actornetwork research, I offer an explanation for the “skills gap” ‘crisis’ and its recurrence in different garbs over the decades in the United States. STEM-FICATION OF EDUCATION AS A ZOMBIE REFORM Once in an interview Ulrich Beck used the term ‘zombie concepts’ or ‘zombie categories’ to refer to “‘living dead’ ideas, such as nation-state, which govern our thinking but are not really able to capture the contemporary milieu” (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002). Ever since, the use of this term has been broadened by social scientists to include theories that appear alive and important to supporters but in fact fail when matched with available evidence and current scholarship. For instance, John Quiggin (2012) has written extensively about ‘zombie economics’ – the dead ideas, such as market liberalism, the great moderation and the efficient markets hypothesis, that the great recession of 2008 was supposed to have disproved and killed for all times to come, but we find that they somehow continue to dominate the policy world. Scholars have also found zombie ideas in other disciplinary fields, such as sciences (Moles and Ollerton, 2016) and education (Kern, 2013). The idea that public education is not living up to its core purpose to support the demands of the nation’s economy also qualifies as a zombie idea that resurrects itself to haunt public education every few years with unnerving regularity. As we saw in last section, the notion that the U.S industry is being harmed because of the existence of a “skills gap” for which public education is to be blamed has little merit, and yet it not only survives but also dominates the thinking of nation’s economic, political and policymaking elite. Just a few years earlier, the putative failure of the public education system was seen reincarnated as the reason why the U.S was facing a ‘gathering storm’ in terms of competition to its industrial prowess from rising nations like China and India. These fears were given a concrete, actionable shape by the publication of a very influential report, Rising above the gathering storm, from the Committee on Prospering in the Global Economy of the 21st Century (2007). This report led to the legislation of America COMPETES (Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science) Act that was passed with broad and a rather unusual bipartisan support in the Congress and got prompt presidential approval in 2007. Through this legislation politicians and policymakers committed substantial financial and political capital in support of revitalization of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education in the nation. Of course, then as now, there was little evidence that the putative poor quality of education in public schools is to be blamed for the ‘gathering storm’ that bedeviled the imaginations of economic elite and policymakers (Salzman and Lowell, 2007). A couple of decades ago in 1980s, the public schools were blamed for the perceived loss to Japan of unchallenged pre-eminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation. A Nation at Risk, a report from the National Commission on Excellence in Education (1983) constituted by Ronald Reagan warned, Our nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world … the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur – others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments. (p. 2) As Owens (2015) concludes, “Unfortunately, for the next thirty years, the report became an example of dogma on a national scale, leading to the notion that the American public school system was an utter failure” (p. 27). This threat was used to usher an unprecedented influence over public education by business groups through the standards and accountability movement that still shows no signs of abating. Again, the fact that this perceived threat had little basis in reality was revealed by the following confession of one of the members of the commission that wrote the report: In order to be more effective some alarming language had to be used. That was immediately there, it was understood that we have to say things in an alarming kind of way – even to the point where the statistics may not have been quite correct. (Sommer as cited in Owens, 2015; p. 28). Going further back one finds that in 1960s following Soviet Russia’s Sputnik success fears of Russian dominance in space and technology were used to usher sweeping changes in the science curricula (DeBoer, 1991). Of course, as the historians recall that the blaming and shaming of public schools by business groups has been going on for more than a century. For instance, Cuban (2004) reports that “the skills-deficit argument first appeared in the late 19th century, when industrial leaders also were deeply concerned about global competition, at that time from German and British manufacturers” (p. 238). Here again we see the zombie idea that the public schools offer poor education that hurts the industry being let loose up to haunt public education and thus force it to change in ways that benefit the material interests of the economic elite. WHY IS THIS ZOMBIE IDEA SO HARD TO KILL? Given the relatively long history of the involvement of industry in public education and its ability to influence the purposes of education, it is fair to say that the state as well as the general public has largely accepted the claim made by big business that it is indeed “a major “consumer” of the education “product” as well as an investor in the education system through philanthropic and tax dollars” (President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, 2011; p. 12). Thus, any position taken by the business community becomes important in shaping the education policy of the state. In a democracy discursive legitimacy is critical for a perspective to influence policymaking. This legitimacy to the narrative espoused by big business on schools and their role in economy and the resulting STEM initiatives come from their close alignment with the neoliberal discourse that has lately become so dominant and hegemonic both in society at large as well as public education system. Taking a Foucauldian standpoint, I see neoliberalism as a discourse of governmentality that seeks to elevate individualized, market-based competition and exchange as the central and most desirable governing principle for organizing human action and social life, even in areas usually considered non-economic, such as education (Foucault, 2008). Since 1970s, the economic elite in the United States as well as in most develop nations have selectively used this discourse to protect and enhance their material interests. Or as Harvey (2005) alleged that neoliberalism has always been “a project to achieve the restoration of class power” (p. 16). Neoliberalism has profoundly impacted schools and the education they offer by reconstituting schools as service providers, parents and students as consumers and education as an investment that a student makes to enhance her capital (Engel, 2000; Hursh, 2007; Lakes & Carter, 2011). Naturally, then such a discourse (a) legitimizes the business elite’s view of students as ‘products’ to be ‘consumed’ by them, (b) lends credence to any claims made by them as to ‘defects’ in the ‘products’ churned out by schools of the nation, and (c) positions STEM education as the only rational educational reform for schools to adopt. Legitimation by a dominant discourse is definitely important for a claim to have any purchase among policymakers. But, what is also critical is the material support that keeps such claims in constant circulation both in the mainstream media as well as the policy world. Discursive legitimacy and material power tend to go hand-in-hand in democratic societies. In an interesting and influential paper on oligarchy in the United States, Winters and Page (2009) used the data on the US distributions of income and wealth to show how wealthiest Americans are in a position to exert far greater political influence than average citizens, and can exercise their material power to dominate policy in certain key areas. This exercise of material power is usually hidden from public view because, as Bowen (2015) suggests the discourse of liberal democracy in nations like the United States, “serve to mystify the more material relations of power that lurk under the surface of democratic institutions” (p. 53). If we demystify the STEM education reform and the “skills gap” crisis, we can discern the material power of the economic elite in action in: (a) composition of national committees, such as the one that drafted Rising above the Gathering Storm report in 2007, that get to frame and normalize the problems facing public education and the solutions to overcome them; (b) having direct access to policymakers, usually through groups like the Business Roundtable (Edmund, 2005); (c) framing of the issues in public media through steady dissemination of press releases and specially prepared reports (Miller, 2011); (d) advising elected officials on STEM educational policy (Jost, 1991); and (e) direct investment in STEM education reform, such as by major chemical, pharmaceutical, technology, and aerospace corporations (“STEM: Growing our next”, 2016).

The collapse of capitalism is inevitable---it will happen soon, the aff’s predictions are wrong, and the impact is extinction---only the alt solves. Wolfgang Streeck 16 – (Emeritus Director of the Max-Planck-Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne, How Will Capitalism End?: Essays on a Failing System, p. 1-15) Capitalism has always been an improbable social formation, full of conflicts and contradictions, therefore permanently unstable and in flux, and highly conditional on historically contingent and precarious supportive as well as constraining events and institutions. Capitalist society may be described in shorthand as a 'progressive' society in the sense of Adam Smith 1 and the enlightenment, a society that has coupled its 'progress' to the continuous and unlimited production and accumulation of productive capital, effected through a conversion, by means of the invisible hand of the market and the visible hand of the state, of the private vice of material greed into a public benefit.' Capitalism promises infinite growth of commodified material wealth in a finite world, by conjoining itself with modern science and technology, making capitalist society the first industrial society, and through unending expansion of free, in the sense of contestable, risky markets, on the coat-tails of a hegemonic carrier state and its market -opening policies both domestically and internationally. 3 As a version of industrial society, capitalist society is distinguished by the fact that its collective productive capital is accumulated in the hands of a minority of its members who enjoy the legal privilege, in the form of rights of private property, to dispose of such capital in any way they see fit, including letting it sit idle or transferring it abroad. One implication of this is that the vast majority of the members of a capitalist society must work under the direction, however mediated, of the private owners of the tools they need to provide for themselves, and on terms set by those owners in line with their desire to maximize the rate of increase of their capital. Motivating non-owners to do so- to work hard and diligently in the interest of the owners - requires artful devices - sticks and carrots of the most diverse sorts that are never certain to function - that have to be continuously reinvented as capitalist progress continuously renders them obsolescent. The tensions and contradictions within the capitalist political-economic configuration make for an ever-present possibility of structural breakdown and social crisis. Economic and social stability under modern capitalism must be secured on a background of systemic restlessness4 produced by competition and expansion, a difficult balancing act with a constantly uncertain outcome. Its success is contingent on, among other things, the timely appearance of a new technological paradigm or the development of social needs and values complementing changing requirements of continued economic growth. For example, for the vast majority of its members, a capitalist society must manage to convert their ever-present fear of being cut out of the productive process, because of economic or technological restructuring, into acceptance of the highly unequal distribution of wealth and power generated by the capitalist economy and a belief in the legitimacy of capitalism as a social order. For this, highly complicated and inevitably fragile institutional and ideological provisions arc necessary. The same holds true for the conversion of insecure workers - kept insecure to make them obedient workers - into confident consumers happily discharging their consumerist social obligations even in the face of the fundamental uncertainty oflabour markets and employment.' In light of the inherent instability of modern societies founded upon and dynamically shaped by a capitalist economy, it is small wonder that theories of capitalism, from the time the concept was first used in the early 1800s in Germany" and the mid-1800s in England/ were always also theories of crisis. This holds not just for Marx and Engels but also for writers like Ricardo, Mill, Sombart, Keynes, Hilferding, Polanyi and Schumpeter, all of whom expected one way or other to see the end of capitalism during their lifetime." What kind of crisis was expected to finish capitalism off differed with time and authors' theoretical priors; structuralist theories of death by overproduction or underconsumption, or by a tendency of the rate of profit to fall (Marx), coexisted with predictions of saturation of needs and markets (Keynes), of rising resistance to further commodification oflife and society (Polanyi), of exhaustion of new land and new labour available for colonization in a literal as well as figurative sense (Luxemburg), of technological stagnation (Kondratieff), financial-political organization of monopolistic corporations suspending liberal markets (Hilferding), bureaucratic suppression of entrepreneurialism aided by a worldwide trahison des clercs (Weber, Schumpeter, Hayek) etc., etc." While none of these theories came true as imagined, most of them were not entirely false either. In fact, the history of modern capitalism can be written as a succession of crises that capitalism survived only at the price of deep transformations of its economic and social institutions, saving it from bankruptcy in unforeseeable and often unintended ways. Seen this way, that the capitalist order still exists may well appear less impressive than that it existed so often on the brink of collapse and had continuously to change, frequently depending on contingent exogenous supports that it was unable to mobilize endogenously. The fact that capitalism has, until now, managed to outlive all predictions of its impending death, need not mean that it will forever be able to do so; there is no inductive proof here, and we cannot rule out the possibility that, next time, whatever cavalry capitalism may require for its rescue may fail to show up. A short recapitulation of the history of modern capitalism serves to illustrate this point. 10 Liberal capitalism in the nineteenth century was confronted by a revolutionary labour movement that needed to be politically tamed by a complex combination of repression and co-optation, including democratic power sharing and social reform. In the early twentieth century, capitalism was commandeered to serve national interests in international wars, thereby converting it into a public utility under the planning regimes of a new war economy, as private property and the invisible hand of the market seemed insufficient for the provision of the collective capacities countries needed to prevail in international hostilities. After the First World War, restoration of a liberal-capitalist economy failed to produce a viable social order and had to give way in large parts of the industrial world to either Communism or Fascism, while in the core countries of what was to become 'the West' liberal capitalism was gradually succeeded, in the aftermath of the Great Depression, by Keynesian, state-administered capitalism. Out of this grew the democratic welfare-state capitalism of the three post-war decades, with hindsight the only period in which economic growth and social and political stability, achieved through democracy, coexisted under capitalism, at least in the OECD world where capitalism came to be awarded the epithet, 'advanced'. In the 1970s, however, what had with hindsight been called the 'post-war settlement' of social-democratic capitalism began to disintegrate, gradually and imperceptibly at first but increasingly punctuated by successive, ever more severe crises of both the capitalist economy and the social and political institutions embedding, that is, supporting as well as containing it. This was the period of both intensifying crisis and deep transformation when 'late capitalism', as impressively described by Werner Sombart in the 1920s, 11 gave way to neoliberalism. Crisis Theory Redux Today, after the watershed of the financial crisis of 2008, critical and indeed crisis-theoretical reflection on the prospects of capitalism and its society is again en vogue. Does Capitalism Have a Future? is the title of a book published in 2013 by five outstanding social scientists: Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian and Craig Calhoun. Apart from the introduction and the conclusion, which are collectively authored, the contributors present their views in separate chapters, and this could not be otherwise since they differ widely. Still, all five share the conviction that, as they state in the introduction, 'something big looms on the horizon: a structural crisis much bigger than the recent Great Recession, which might in retrospect seem only a prologue to a period of deeper troubles and transformations: 12 On what is causing this crisis, however, and how it will end, there is substantial disagreement- which, with authors of this calibre, may be taken as a sign of the multiple uncertainties and possibilities inherent in the present condition of the capitalist political economy. To give an impression of how leading theorists may differ when trying to imagine the future of capitalism today, I will at some length review the prospects and predictions put forward in the book. A comparatively conventional crisis theory is probably the one offered by Wallerstein (pp. 9-35), who locates contemporary capitalism at the bottom of a Kondratieff cycle (Kondratieff B) with no prospect of a new (Kondratieff A) upturn. This is said to be due to a 'structural crisis' that began in the 1970s, as a result of which 'capitalists may no longer find capitalism rewarding'. Two broad causes are given, one a set of long-term trends 'ending the endless accumulation of capital', the other the demise, after the 'world revolution of 1968', of the 'dominance of centrist liberals of the geoculture' (p. 21 ). Structural trends include the exhaustion of virgin lands and the resulting necessity of environmental repair work, growing resource shortages, and the increasing need for public infrastructure. All of this costs money, and so does the pacification of a proliferating mass of discontented workers and the unemployed. Concerning global hegemony, Wallerstein points to what he considers the final decline of the U.S.-centred world order, in military and economic as well as ideological terms. Rising costs of doing business combine with global disorder to make restoration of a stable capitalist world system impossible. Instead Wallerstein foresees 'an ever-tighter gridlock of the system. Gridlock will in turn result in ever-wilder fluctuations, and will consequently make short-term predictions - both economic and political - ever more unreliable. And this in turn will aggravate ... popular fears and alienation. It is a negative cycle' (p. 32). For the near future Wallerstein expects a global political confrontation between defenders and opponents of the capitalist order, in his suggestive terms: between the forces of Davos and of Porto Alegre. Their final battle 'about the successor system' (p. 35) is currently fomenting. Its outcome, according to Wallerstein, is unpredictable, although 'we can feel sure that one side or the other will win out in the coming decades, and a new reasonably stable world-system (or set of world-systems) will be established: Much less pessimistic, or less optimistic from the perspective of those who would like to see capitalism dose down, is Craig Calhoun, who finds prospects of reform and renewal in what he, too, considers a deep and potentially final crisis (pp. 131-61). Calhoun assumes that there is still time for political intervention to save capitalism, as there was in the past, perhaps with the help of a 'sufficiently enlightened faction of capitalists' (p. 2). But he also believes 'a centralized socialist economy' to be possible, and even more so 'Chinese-style state capitalism': 'Markets can exist in the future even while specifically capitalist modes of property and finance have declined' (p. 3). Far more than Wallerstein, Calhoun is reluctant when it comes to prediction (for a summary of his view see pp. 158-61 ). His chapter offers a list of internal contradictions and possible external disruptions threatening the stability of capitalism, and points out a wide range of alternative outcomes. Like Wallerstein, Calhoun attributes particular significance to the international system, where he anticipates the emergence of a plurality of more or less capitalist political-economic regimes, with the attendant problems and pitfalls of coordination and competition. While he does not rule out a 'large-scale, more or less simultaneous collapse of capitalist markets ... not only bringing economic upheaval but also upending political and social institutions' (p. 161), Calhoun believes in the possibility of states, corporations and social movements re-establishing effective governance for a transformative renewal of capitalism. To quote, The capitalist order is a very large-scale, highly complex system. The events of the last forty years have deeply disrupted the institutions that kept capitalism relatively well organized through the postwar period. Efforts to repair or replace these will change the system, just as new technologies and new business and financial practices may. Even a successful renewal of capitalism will transform it ... The question is whether change will be adequate to manage systemic risks and fend off external threats. And if not, will there be widespread devastation before a new order emerges? (p. 161) Even more agnostic on the future of capitalism is Michael Mann ('The End May Be Nigh, But for Whom?: pp. 71-97). Mann begins by reminding his readers that in his 'general model of human society', he does 'not conceive of societies as systems but as multiple, overlapping networks of interaction, of which four networks - ideological, economic, military and political power relations - are the most important. Geopolitical relations can be added to the four .. : Mann continues: Each of these four or five sources of power may have an internal logic or tendency of development, so that it might be possible, for example, to identify tendencies toward equilibrium, cycles, or contradictions within capitalism, just as one might identify comparable tendencies within the other sources of social power. (p. 72) Interactions between the networks, Mann points out, are frequent but not systematic, meaning that 'once we admit the importance of such interactions we are into a more complex and uncertain world in which the development of capitalism, for example, is also influenced by ideologies, wars and states' (p. 73). Mann adds to this the possibility of uneven development across geographical space and the likelihood of irrational behaviour interfering with rational calculations of interest, even of the interest in survival. To demonstrate the importance of contingent events and of cycles other than those envisaged in the Wallerstein-Kondratieff model of history, Mann discusses the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession of 2008. He then proceeds to demonstrate how his approach speaks to the future, first of U.S. hegemony and second of 'capitalist markets'. As to the former, Mann (pp. 83-4) offers the standard list of American weaknesses, both domestic and international, from economic decline to political anomy to an increasingly less effective military- weaknesses that 'might bring America down' although 'we cannot know for sure: Even if U.S. hegemony were to end, however, 'this need not cause a systemic crisis of capitalism'. What may instead happen is a shift of economic power 'from the old West to the successfully developing Rest of the world, including most of Asia. This would result in a sharing of economic power between the United States, the European Union and (some of) the BRICS, as a consequence of which 'the capitalism of the medium term is likely to be more statist' (p. 86). Concerning 'capitalist markets' (pp. 86-7), Mann believes, pace Wallerstein, that there is still enough new land to conquer and enough demand to discover and invent, to allow for both extensive and intensive growth. Also, technological fixes may appear any time for all sorts of problems, and in any case it is the working class and revolutionary socialism, much more than capitalism, for which 'the end is nigh: In fact, if growth rates were to fall as predicted by some, the outcome might be a stable low-growth capitalism, with considerable ecological benefits. In this scenario, 'the future of the left is likely to be at most reformist social democracy or liberalism. Employers and workers will continue to struggle over the mundane injustices of capitalist employment [ ... ] and their likely outcome will be compromise and reform .. .' Still, Mann ends on a considerably less sanguine note, naming two big crises that he considers possible, and one of them probable - crises in which capitalism would go under although they would not be crises of capitalism, or of capitalism alone, since capitalism would only perish as a result of the destruction of all human civilization. One such scenario would be nuclear war, started by collective human irrationality, the other an ecological catastrophe resulting from 'escalating climate change'. In the latter case (pp. 93ff.), capitalism figures - together with the nation state and with 'citizen rights', defined as entitlements to unlimited consumption - as one of three 'triumphs of the modern period' that happen to be ecologically unsustainable. 'All three triumphs would have to be challenged for the sake of a rather abstract future, which is a very tall order, perhaps not achievable' (p. 95). While related to capitalism, ecological disaster would spring from 'a causal chain bigger than capitalism' (p. 97). However, 'policy decisions matter considerably', and 'humanity is in principle free to choose between better or worse future scenarios- and so ultimately the future is unpredictable' (p. 97). The most straightforward theory of capitalist crisis in the book is offered by Randall Collins (pp. 37-69) - a theory he correctly characterizes as a 'stripped-down version of (a] fundamental insight that Marx and Engels had formulated already in the 1840s' (p. 38). That insight, as adapted by Collins, is that capitalism is subject to 'a long-term structural weakness: namely 'the technological displacement of labor by machinery' (p. 37). Collins is entirely unapologetic for his strictly structuralist approach, even more structuralist than Wallerstein's, as well as his mono-factorial technological determinism. In fact, he is convinced that 'technological displacement of labor' will have finished capitalism, with or without revolutionary violence, by the middle of this century - earlier than it would be brought down by the, in principle, equally destructive and definitive ecological crisis, and more reliably than by comparatively difficult-to-predict financial bubbles. 'Stripped-down' Collins's late-Marxist structuralism is, among other things, because unlike Marx in his corresponding theorem of a secular decline of the rate of profit, Collins fails to hedge his prediction with a list of countervailing factors,' 3 as he believes capitalism to have run out of whatever saving graces may in the past have retarded its demise. Collins does allow for Mann's and Calhoun's non-Marxist, 'Weberian' influences on the course of history, but only as secondary forces modifying the way the fundamental structural trend that drives the history of capitalism from below will work itself out. Global unevenness of development, dimensions of conflict that are not capitalism-related, war and ecological pressures may or may not accelerate the crisis of the capitalist labour market and employment system; they cannot, however, suspend or avert it. What exactly does this crisis consist of? While labour has gradually been replaced by technology for the past two hundred years, with the rise of information technology and, in the very near future, artificial intelligence, that process is currently reaching its apogee, in at least two respects: first, it has vastly accelerated, and second, having in the second half of the twentieth century destroyed the manual working class, it is now attacking and about to destroy the middle class as well - in other words, the new petty bourgeoisie that is the very carrier of the neocapitalist and neoliberal lifestyle of 'hard work and hard play', of careerism-cum-consumerism, which, as will be discussed infra, may indeed be considered the indispensable cultural foundation of contemporary capitalism's society. What Collins sees coming is a rapid educational work by machinery intelligent enough even to design and create new, more advanced machinery. Electronicization will do to the middle class what mechanization has done to the working class, and it will do it much faster. The result will be unemployment in the order of 50 to 70 per cent by the middle of the century, hitting those who had hoped, by way of expensive education and disciplined job performance (in return for stagnant or declining wages), to escape the threat of redundancy attendant on the working classes. The benefits, meanwhile, will go to 'a tiny capitalist class of robot owners' who will become immeasurably rich. The drawback for them is, however, that they will increasingly find that their product 'cannot be sold because too few persons have enough income to buy it. Extrapolating this underlying tendency', Collins writes, 'Marx and Engels predicted the downfall of capitalism and its replacement with socialism' (p. 39), and this is what Collins also predicts. Collins's theory is most original where he undertakes to explain why technological displacement is only now about to finish capitalism when it had not succeeded in doing so in the past. Following in Marx's footsteps, he lists five 'escapes' that have hitherto saved capitalism from self-destruction, and then proceeds to show why they won't save it any more. They include the growth of new jobs and entire sectors compensating for employment losses caused by technological progress (employment in artificial intelligence will be miniscule, especially once robots begin to design and build other robots); the expansion of markets (which this time will primarily be labour markets in middle-class occupations, globally unified by information technology, enabling global competition among educated job seekers); the growth of finance, both as a source of income ('speculation') and as an industry (which cannot possibly balance the loss of employment caused by new technology, and of income caused by unemployment, also because computerization will make workers in large segments of the financial industry redundant); government employment replacing employment in the private sector (improbable because of the fiscal crisis of the state, and in any case requiring ultimately 'a revolutionary overturn of the property system' [p. 51]); and the use of education as a buffer to keep labour out of employment, making it a form of 'hidden Keynesian ism' while resulting in 'credential inflation' and 'grade inflation' (which for Collins is the path most probably taken, although ultimately it will prove equally futile as the others, as a result of demoralization within educational institutions and problems of financing, both public and private). All five escapes closed, there is no way society can prevent capitalism from causing accelerated displacement of labour and the attendant stark economic and social inequalities. Some sort of socialism, so Collins concludes, will finally have to take capitalism's place. What precisely it will look like, and what will come after socialism or with it, Collins leaves open, and he is equally agnostic on the exact mode of the transition. Revolutionary the change will be - but whether it will be a violent social revolution that will end capitalism or a peaceful institutional revolution accomplished under political leadership cannot be known beforehand. Heavy taxation of the super-rich for extended public employment or a guaranteed basic income for everyone, with equal distribution and strict rationing of very limited working hours by more or less dictatorial means a la Keynes' 4 - we are free to speculate on this as Collins's 'stripped-down Marxism' does not generate predictions as to what kind of society will emerge once capitalism will have run its course. Only one thing is certain: that capitalism will end, and much sooner than one may have thought. Something of an outlier in the book's suite of chapters is the contribution by Georgi Derluguian, who gives a fascinating inside account of the decline and eventual demise of Communism, in particular Soviet Communism (pp. 99-129). The chapter is of interest because of its speculations on the differences from and the potential parallels with a potential end of capitalism. As to the differences, Derluguian makes much of the fact that Soviet Communism was from early on embedded in the 'hostile geopolitics' (p. 110) of a 'capitalist world-system' ( 111). This linked its fate inseparably to that of the Soviet Union as an economically and strategically overextended multinational state. That state turned out to be unsustainable in the longer term, especially after the end of Stalinist despotism. By then the peculiar class structure of Soviet Communism gave rise to a domestic social compromise that, much unlike American capitalism, included political inertia and economic stagnation. The result was pervasive discontent on the part of a new generation of cultural, technocratic and scientific elites socialized in the revolutionary era of the late 1960s. Also, over-centralization made the state-based political economy of Soviet Communism vulnerable to regional and ethnic separatism, while the global capitalism surrounding it provided resentful opponents as well as opportunistic apparatchiks with a template of a preferable order, one in which the latter could ultimately establish themselves as self-made capitalist oligarchs. Contemporary capitalism, of course, is much less dependent on the geopolitical good fortunes of a single imperial state, although the role of the United States in this respect must not be underestimated. More importantly, capitalism is not exposed to pressure from an alternative political-economic model, assuming that Islamic economic doctrine will for a foreseeable future remain less than attractive even and precisely to Islamic elites (who are deeply integrated in the capitalist global economy). Where the two systems may, however, come to resemble each other is in their internal political disorder engendered by institutional and economic decline. When the Soviet Union lost its 'state integrity', Derluguian writes, this 'undermined all modern institutions and therefore disabled collective action at practically any level above family and crony networks. This condition became self-perpetuating' (p. 122). One consequence was that the ruling bureaucracies reacted 'with more panic than outright violence' when confronted by 'mass civic mobilizations like the 1968 Prague Spring and the Soviet perestroika at its height in 1989', while at the same time 'the insurgent movements ... failed to exploit the momentous disorganization in the ranks of dominant classes' (p. 129). For different reasons and under different circumstances, a similar weakness of collective agency, due to de-institutionalization and creating comparable uncertainty among both champions and challengers of the old order, might shape a future transition from capitalism to post-capitalism, pitting against each other fragmented social movements on the one hand and disoriented political-economic elites on the other. My own view builds on all five contributors but differs from each of them. I take the diversity of theories on what all agree is a severe crisis of capitalism and capitalist society as an indication of contemporary capitalism having entered a period of deep indeterminacy - a period in which unexpected things can happen any time and knowledgeable observers can legitimately disagree on what will happen, due to long-valid causal relations having become historically obsolete. In other words, I interpret the coexistence of a shared sense of crisis with diverging concepts of the nature of that crisis as an indication that traditional economic and sociological theories have today lost much of their predictive power. As I will point out in more detail, below, I see this as a result, but also as a cause, of a destruction of collective agency in the course of capitalist development, equally affecting Wallerstein's Davos and Porto Alegre people and resulting in a social context beset with unintended and unanticipated consequences of purposive, but in its effects increasingly unpredictable, social action. '5 Moreover, rather than picking one of the various scenarios of the crisis and privilege it over the others, I suggest that they all, or most of them, may be aggregated into a diagnosis of multi-morbidity in which different disorders coexist and, more often than not, reinforce each other. Capitalism, as pointed out at the beginning, was always a fragile and improbable order and for its survival depended on ongoing repair work. Today, however, too many frailties have become simultaneously acute while too many remedies have been exhausted or destroyed. The end of capitalism can then be imagined as a death from a thousand cuts, or from a multiplicity of infirmities each of which will be all the more untreatable as all will demand treatment at the same time. As will become apparent, I do not believe that any of the potentially stabilizing forces mentioned by Mann and Calhoun, be it regime pluralism, regional diversity and uneven development, political reform, or independent crisis cycles, will be strong enough to neutralize the syndrome of accumulated weaknesses that characterize contemporary capitalism. No effective opposition being left, and no practicable successor model waiting in the wings of history, capitalism's accumulation of defects, alongside its accumulation of capital, may be seen, with Collins, '6 as an entirely endogenous dynamic of self-destruction, following an evolutionary logic moulded in its expression but not suspended by contingent and coincidental events, along a historical trajectory from early liberal via state-administered to neoliberal capitalism, which culminated for the time being in the financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath. For the decline of capitalism to continue, that is to say, no revolutionary alternative is required, and certainly no masterplan of a better society displacing capitalism. Contemporary capitalism is vanishing on its own, collapsing from internal contradictions, and not least as a result of having vanquished its enemies - who, as noted, have often rescued capitalism from itself by forcing it to assume a new form. What comes after capitalism in its final crisis, now under way, is, I suggest, not socialism or some other defined social order, but a lasting interregnum - no new world system equilibrium ala Wallerstein, but a prolonged period of social entropy, or disorder (and precisely for this reason a period of uncertainty and indeterminacy). It is an interesting problem for sociological theory whether and how a society can turn for a significant length of time into less than a society, a post-social society as it were, or a society lite, until it may or may not recover and again become a society in the full meaning of the term. ' 7 I suggest that one can attain a conceptual fix on this by drawing liberally on a famous article by David Lockwood to distinguish between system integration and social integration, or integration at the macro and micro levels of society. An interregnum would then be defined as a breakdown of system integration at the macro level, depriving individuals at the micro level of institutional structuring and collective support, and shifting the burden of ordering social life, of providing it with a modicum of security and stability, to individuals themselves and such social arrangements as they can create on their own. A society in interregnum, in other words, would be a de-institutionalized or under-institutionalized society, one in which expectations can be stabilized only for a short time by local improvisation, and which for this very reason is essentially ungovernable. Contemporary capitalism, then, would appear to be a society whose system integration is critically and irremediably weakened, so that the continuation of capital accumulation - for an intermediate period of uncertain duration - becomes solely dependent on the opportunism of collectively incapacitated individualized individuals, as they struggle to protect themselves from looming accidents and structural pressures on their social and economic status. Undergoverned and undermanaged, the social world of the post-capitalist interregnum, in the wake of neoliberal capitalism having cleared away states, governments, borders, trade unions and other moderating forces, can at any time be hit by disaster; for example, bubbles imploding or violence penetrating from a collapsing periphery into the centre. With individuals deprived of collective defences and left to their own devices, what remains of a social order hinges on the motivation of individuals to cooperate with other individuals on an ad hoc basis, driven by fear and greed and by elementary interests in individual survival. Society having lost the ability to provide its members with effective protection and proven templates for social action and social existence, individuals have only themselves to rely on while social order depends on the weakest possible mode of social integration, Zweckrationalitiit. As pointed out in Chapter 1 of this book, and partly elaborated in the rest of this introduction, I anchor this condition in a variety of interrelated developments, such as declining growth intensifying distributional conflict; the rising inequality that results from this; vanishing macroeconomic manageability, as manifested in, among other things, steadily growing indebtedness, a pumped-up money supply; and the ever-present possibility of another economic breakdown;'9 the suspension of post-war capitalism's engine of social progress, democracy, and the associated rise of oligarchic rule; the dwindling capacity of governments and the systemic inability of governance to limit the commodification of labour, nature and money; the omnipresence of corruption of all sorts, in response to intensified competition in winner-take-all markets with unlimited opportunities for self-enrichment; the erosion of public infrastructures and collective benefits in the course of commodification and privatization; the failure after 1989 of capitalism's host nation, the United States, to build and maintain a stable global order; etc., etc. These and other developments, I suggest, have resulted in widespread cynicism governing economic life, for a long time if not forever ruling out a recovery of normative legitimacy for capitalism as a just society offering equal opportunities for individual progress- a legitimacy that capitalism would need to draw on in critical moments - and founding social integration on collective resignation as the last remaining pillar of the capitalist social order, or disorder. 20

The alternative is to reject the affirmative in favor of an ongoing class war against the bourgeoisie---only revolutionary praxis can create a bridge between action in the present and communism in the future---your role as an educator is to align with the dismantling of capitalism. Dave Hill 2016 – (Faculty of Health, Social Care and Education, Chelmsford Campus, Anglia Ruskin University, TRANSFORMATIVE EDUCATION, CRITICAL EDUCATION, MARXIST EDUCATION: POSSIBILITIES AND ALTERNATIVES TO THE RESTRUCTURING OF EDUCATION IN GLOBAL NEOLIBERAL/NEOCONSERVATIVE TIMES, Knowledge Cultures; Woodside 4.6 (2016): 159-175)//a-berg We Marxists seek to serve and advance the interests of the working class. We, as teachers, as educators, are working class, too, we sell our labor power to capitalists and to the apparatuses of the capitalist state, such as schools and universities. We have to consistently and courageously challenge the dominant ideology, the hegemony of the ruling class, the bourgeoisie, the capitalist class. We are in a battle for dominance of our ideas; there are 'culture wars' between different ways of looking at/interpreting the world. We have to contest the currently hegemonic control of ideas by the capitalist state, schools, media, and their allies in the religions. But the situation we face is not just a war of ideas, an ideological war: it is also an economic class war, where the social and economic conditions and well-being of the working class are threatened and undermined by the ruling class and its capitalist state (Campagna, 2013). David Blacker (2013) goes even further, and argues that contemporary and future capitalist onslaughts will result in deaths for 'superfluous' workers and sections of the non-working industrial reserve army (such as elderly people, for example the 13,000 extra deaths of old people in the winter months in the UK due to lack of affordable heating). If we sit and do nothing, if their ideas are not contested, then capitalism will continue to rule, to demean, to divide, to impoverish us, and the planet. At certain times in history, and in certain locations, the disjunction - the gap, the difference - between the material conditions of workers' existence on the one hand, our daily lived experience, and, on the other hand, what the newspapers and the media and the imam and the priest and the rabbi say/ preach, that gap becomes so stark, so obvious, that workers' subjective consciousness changes. This is particularly likely when workers with more advanced revolutionary consciousness succeed in bringing about a widespread and more evenly distributed consciousness amongst the class as a whole. At this moment - now - in some countries in the world, the gap between the 'official' ideology that 'we are all in together' and that 'there is no alternative' (to austerity), or, in schools and universities faced by commodification and managerialism and (pre)-privatization - that gap becomes so large that the ruling party, and the ruling capitalist class, and capitalism itself, loses legitimacy. And so, as in Greece now, and in Portugal, in Spain, in Turkey and Brazil, the USA and the UK, and in other countries such as Britain and India, we Marxists are necessary. Necessary in leading and developing changes in consciousness, a change in class consciousness, and in playing a leading role in organizing for the replacement of capitalism. Programme In 1938, in 'The Transitional Programme', Trotsky addressed the types of programmes moving the discussion beyond the minimum programme (minimum acceptable reforms, such as those to protect and improve existing rights and entitlements, such as rights at work, social and political rights)) and the maximum programme (socialist revolution, with the type of society ultimately envisaged by Marx, a socialist non-capitalist/ post-capitalist society) that were advanced by late nineteenth and early twentieth century social democrats and by communists of the 3rd international and articulated a new type of programme: the transitional programme. Trotsky, with a distinct resonance to today's struggles, wrote: The strategic task of the next period - prerevolutionary period of agitation, propaganda and organization - consists in overcoming the contradiction between the maturity of the objective revolutionary conditions and the immaturity of the proletariat and its vanguard (the confusion and disappointment of the older generation, the inexperience of the younger generation. It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demand and the socialist program of the revolution. This bridge should include a system of transitional demands, stemming from today's conditions and from today's consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat. Classical Social Democracy, functioning in an epoch of progressive capitalism, divided its program into two parts independent of each other: the minimum program which limited itself to reforms within the framework of bourgeois society, and the maximum program which promised substitution of socialism for capitalism in the indefinite future. Between the minimum and the maximum program no bridge existed. And indeed Social Democracy has no need of such a bridge, since the word socialism is used only for holiday speechifying. The Comintern has set out to follow the path of Social Democracy in an epoch of decaying capitalism: when, in general, there can be no discussion of systematic social reforms and the raising of the masses' living standards; when every serious demand of the proletariat and even every serious demand of the petty bourgeoisie inevitably reaches beyond the limits of capitalist property relations and of the bourgeois state. Trotsky continued, Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living offthe slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right leftto the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is leftto the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment, "structural" as well as "con junctural," the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period. [...] The question is not one of a "normal" collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. "Realizability" or "unrealizability" is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery (Trotsky, 1938). Conclusion The 'decay, demoralisation and ruin' Trotsky speaks of, are, for many millions of workers' families - including what in the USA and elsewhere are called 'middle class' workers - an everyday reality in this current era of capitalism, neoliberal capitalism, or 'immiseration capitalism'. This immiseration is apparent through the rich as well as the poor worlds. The precise organisation and characteristics of the resistance to the depredations is a matter for strategic and tactical considerations, relating to the current balance (strength, organisations, (dis)-unity) of class forces in specific local and national contexts. What is clear, though, is that the problematic regarding capitalism, for Marxist activists and educators, is not just to reform it, welcome though such reforms, such as 'minimum programme' are, and active in campaigning for and to protect such reforms we must be. But, regarding capitalism, our task is to replace it with democratic Marxism. As teachers, as educators, as cultural workers, as activists, as intellectuals, we have a role to play. We must play it.

� Case The aff’s figuration of education as production of human capital facilitates a post-fordist futurity that harvests black and brown bodies for return on investments Gill-Peterson 2015 [Julian, Assistant Professor of English and Children's Literature at the University of Pittsburgh | “The Value of the Future: The Child as Human Capital and the Neoliberal Labor of Race,” Women's Studies Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 1/2, (Spring/Summer 2015)] Ten9Eight is in part a racial uplift film for a multicultural era, in which the celebration of ostensible legal equality and the cultural relativism of ethnicity authorize rigid competition between assimilating immigrant groups and the exceptional isolation of African Americans (see Chow 2002 and Sexton 2008). While the students in Ten9Eight are all African American, Latino, or recent immigrants, the communities and families of the black competitors incur the most diegetic pathologization. Melodra- matic and stereotyped tales of drugs, alcohol, prison, sexual abuse, foster care, homelessness, teen pregnancy, and the specter of death govern their biographies. In the face of this cultural pathology, an individual narrative of overcoming is rehearsed: Ten9Eight unambiguously suggests that start- ing businesses is the only way for black children to break a pattern derivative of the Moynihan report. As with Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s The Negro Family (United States Department of Labor 1965), systemic inequalities and the planned maldistribution of life chances by race can be criticized as a moral wrong, but their actionable field of remedies is simultaneously confined to the private sphere of individual improvement. The will to overcome and disavow the signifier "inner city" in places like Baltimore, Chicago, New York City, and Washington, DC returns again and again in Ten9Eight. One competitor, JaMal Wills, explains that he wants to win the competition because he "doesn't want to end up dead.” Rather than understanding these narratives of black childhood only as representations of a purely ideological devaluation, a cultural ruse for the neoliberal states institutionalized racial exploitation, an analysis of the proposed labor function of the film s children maps the new social contract for which they are targeted as human capital. Not for nothing do Ten9Eighť s promotional materials emphasize that Thomas Friedman of the New York Times said, Obama should arrange for this movie to be shown in every classroom in America" (qtd. in Ten9Eight: Shoot for the Moon 2014). There is an ideological conceit in Friedmans suggestion, since the film is not addressed to every classroom but rather targets under the category of "inner city" the black and brown bodies whose futurity is of so little value to the nation that public investment in their education or communities is absolutely out of the question. Still, Friedmans proposition is also symptomatic of a mode of investment in the productivity of children whose dispersed strategies cohere through the calculating force of what we habitually signify in using the terms "race," "gender," and "class." The value of the future contracted through neoliberal child labor assigns risk and speculates on the future of kids as the incorporation of race, gender, and class - economic coefficients that materialize as the growing bodies of children. Ten9Eight suggests that the racialization of labor and investment might be understood as originary of American neoliberalisms reason, its political economization of life s growth from infancy to adulthood through childhood. Under this neoliberal social contract childhood becomes a form of futures trading. The phrase is not métonymie, but emphasizes that capitalism does not mobilize subjects with a preexisting race, gender, or class; rather, it is a subjectification machine that reorganizes human life into those categories. As with UNCF, Ten9Eight transforms black and brown children into human capital by restaging education as an entrepreneurial labor. In his 1978-79 collected lectures, The Birth of Biopolitics, Michel Foucault (2007) turns likewise to the child as his example in diagramming American neoliberalism. What distinguishes American neoliberalism, according to Foucault, is its theory of human capital, a theory that permits "the extension of economic analysis into a previously unexplored domain," the social (219) - once Annies shelter. American neoliberalism reproaches political economy for ignoring the centrality of labor to the production of capital, but unlike Marx, it makes labor into capital (224). Human capital makes Homo economicus into an entrepreneur of the self, taking the self as its basic resource, projected into the future through potential wages. This enterprising self represents a theory not of labor power but what Foucault calls "capital-ability" (225). When neoliberal economists began to define human capital in the 1950s and 1960s they argued that all human behavior could be analyzed in economic terms by adapting theories of utility max- imization from Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham. Gary S. Becker, one of human capitals major proponents, worked over his career on economic analyses of racial and gendered discrimination, crime and punishment, marriage, divorce, and child-rearing, which he summed up in the title of his Nobel Prize lecture (Becker 1992): "An Economic Way of Looking at Life." The economic rationalization of human life also worked to discredit state projects to reduce inequality or combat poverty, especially where they accounted for race and gender. By making human value and its return a factor of private investment in the individual, human capital rendered unreasonable alternate modes of economic redistribution, particularly those both public and based on social justice. Becker s Treatise on the Fam- ily , for instance, argues that a sexual division of labor, where women stay at home investing in the human capital of children while men work, is more efficient than equal pay for equal work (1981, 22-23). Becker also argued that state programs aimed at redressing racialized economic inequality were less effective than a color-blind and competitive labor market (1957, 129). Within this framework the theory of human capital deploys the child to recalculate the value of the future in terms of private investment. The theory’s scriptural basis is a passage in Smiths Wealth of Nations on "fixed capital" ([1776] 1909, 225), capital held as stock for the enhancement of the production, but not the circulation, of commodities. According to Smith, there are four types of fixed capital: machines, buildings, land, and "the acquired and useful abilities of all the inhabitants and members of a society" (228). This last form becomes human capital. Smith continues: "The acquisition of such talents, by the maintenance of the acquirer during his education, study, or apprenticeship, always costs a real expense, which is a capital fixed and realized, as it were, in his person. Those talents, as they make a part of his fortune, so do they likewise that of the society to which he belongs. The improved dexterity of a workman may be considered in the same light as a machine or instrument of trade which facilitates and abridges labour, and which, though it costs a certain expense, repays that expense with a profit" (228). Human capital names a production cost that enhances the quality of workers, repaid with a surplus in future output. As Foucault emphasizes, the theory of human capital is less preoccupied with innate capacities than with acquiring new skills. Education was hence the first target of economists: in one classic essay, Jacob Mincer (1974) calculates the increase to workers' salaries from additional years of schooling through regression formulas. Yet human capital is also dependent on childhood, understood as the critical period of development, and for this reason Foucault turns his attention to the child in The Birth of Biopolitics . Through "the inversion of the relationships [sic] of the social to the economic" (2007, 240), in his words, "we thus arrive at a whole environmental analysis, as the Americans say, of the child’s life which it will be possible to calculate, and to a certain extent quantify, or at any rate measure, in terms of the possibilities of investment in human capital" (230). Foucault does not broach race in this lecture. Yet the theory of human capital might be understood as a global strategy for rationalizing American racism, consolidating work on "discrimination coefficients" (Becker 1957, 6) and the rational value of crime (1968) to explain ostensibly irrational, nonproductive human behavior. In Becker s work on family economics, he understands what he calls "the price of children" (198 1, 93) in opposition to the Malthusian anxiety about fertility, according to which children are valuable in quantitative terms. Becker suggests that it is instead "the interaction between quantity and quality" that explains parental investment in children, and he points to Anglo-American history, where, as quantitative income, education, and health increased toward the end of the nineteenth century, the amount of children born declined sharply, a trend repeated after the postwar baby boom (106-7). Becker reads these demographic trends as parents concentrating their resources more efficiently to invest in the increased quality of each child born. A child in whom more time and money is invested from birth will eventually yield greater returns on human capital, obviating the need for more kids. Although it leads to a color-blind conclusion, race is far from absent in Becker s formulas. The child is not a tabula rasa for him; rather, "rates of return on human capital are more sensitive to endowments" than other commodities (113-14). An "endowment" might be as ambiguous as personality or attractiveness, but it also includes "the sex, race, ability, age, allocation of time, social background, and many other characteristics of children 3 ' ( 120). Race is a primary coefficient of American human capital, affecting the average base value of children's bodies, as well as the rate of return on investment, something of which parents are conscious. "Families usually must commit most of their investments," Becker suggests, "before they know much about their children's market luck" (119). Human capital hence turns childhood into futures trading for parents, who have to specu- late on the effect of endowments like race and gender on their investments. This framework rationalizes racism in taking the perspective of the abstract parents who always "maximize their utility by choosing optimal investments in the human and nonhuman capital of children" (136). In this calculus, as Becker puts it, "discrimination against minorities not only reduces their income but also the effect of their family background on income" (137), thus lowering the value of their future. As an example, he argues, "Black families should be less stable than white families, if only because blacks are much poorer and black women earn much more relative to black men than white women do to white men" (231; emphasis added); not surprisingly, he cites the Moynihan report as evidence. Black families both would have less money to invest in the human capital of their children and would expect less of a return than white families, reducing their incentive to make investments, and by analogy reducing the state s incentive to do the same. Becker suggests that taxes levied for "public education and other programs to aid the young may not significantly benefit them because of compensating decreases in parental expenditures" (153). Since children are assumed to be property of parents, if the state steps in to redistribute inequality through public education parents will invest less in human capital to compensate. Given that human capital rationalizes investment as a private practice, even though race and gender are under- stood as coefficients their value remains private, so that the conversion of education and other forms of care into labor becomes the only way to address endemic inequality. This genealogy of human capital contextualizes Ten9Eighťs otherwise presumptuous claim: if children of color have almost no public value to the United States, then it becomes reasonable, even "rational," for them to shoulder the labor of their own education by covering its cost through entrepreneurship. Not only does the state have no motivation to invest in the future of black and brown kids but also the cost of public education is so risky for the nonwhite contestants in Ten9Eight that they must bear it in competition to prove their future value to the nation. In this light, Foucault’s definition of American neoliberalism misses the originary force of racialization in evaluating human life s course by monetizing the grow- ing body of the child. And while Foucault adds that the return on invest- ment in human capital is "the child's salary when he or she becomes an adult" (2007, 260), thirty-five years later, in a digital economy the salary of the child is not necessarily only bound to adulthood. Childhood is also futures trading because increasingly children are generating revenue streams during childhood as supplements to or substitutes for future salaries, particularly through a digital economy of social media and mobile phones that decomposes children into data aggregates of likes, consumer interests, tastes, and attitudes that can be bundled and exchanged. In this form of child labor, a feminized, stylized whiteness in social media juxtaposes itself to Ten9Eight. Consider the "haul" video. On YouTube haul videos are usually included as a recurring segment on channels devoted to fashion or beauty. In a haul video, the host presents her shopping from the day. Clothes are not usually modeled but taken out of the bag, held up to the camera, and presented with commentary on how to wear them, what they go with, why they are good for this season, or how cheap they are. In a viral video con- temporaneous with Ten9Eight , Blair, or "juicystar07," who has hosted her channel since 2008, presents "Forever 21 Haul" (2009). Blair is sixteen at the time and emphasizes that she works two service industry jobs to buy the clothes and makeup she features. In this video, which has to date about 1.75 million views, she intersperses items for winter from Forever 21 with appeals to her viewers to follower her on Twitter and watch her other vlog posts. The haul video exemplifies the role of digital labor in childhood as futures trading because it produces value through what is otherwise a purely social activity: style. It is an example of how consumption is pro- duction, considering that its identification with a store is free advertising (as is this essay unfortunately). YouTube also generates profit through views, quantifying attention as a capacity of users: at the point of 1.75 mil- lion views, Blair is paid a percentage of the ad revenue that YouTube pulls in from her video. (I had to watch a thirty-second ad to see Blair s video on YouTube, so I was also compelled to produce value through attention within the once ostensibly nonmarket activity of thinking and writing.) Finally, the haul video foregrounds the collapse of labor and consumption: many, like Blair s, are about saving money. She, for instance, is most proud of a six-dollar pair of jeans on clearance. It is fair, further, to speculate that the jeans were made by the hands of a girl or young woman whose value to the global economy is calculated very differently from Blair s, in a factory in Southeast Asia (Hicken 2012). The juxtaposition of children in these contemporary forms of child labor is not incidental: on the one hand, there is the black child, often a boy, on the threshold of social or biological death; on the other hand, there is the cheery, suburban white girl to whom futurity accrues easily. As Ten9Eight dramatizes, the privatization of public education requires that its investment risk be devolved onto children through entrepreneurship of the self, particularly for black and brown bodies that have almost no public value to the nation, save for programs like UNCF. The YouTube haul videos produced by white girls add that even investment in the ideologically valuable child as human capital cannot wait until adulthood to begin demanding returns, not even for the white Annie of reproductive futurism: surplus value must be extracted through digital labor below the threshold of inhumanity attached to "child labor" by Progressive Era reformers, Western feminism, and human rights discourse (see Macleod 1998, 107-20). The white girl is called upon to produce surplus value online through gendered rehearsals of consumption, which cultivate human capital as good style. No longer a dramatic inhumanity, child labor in its digital form passes quietly under the radar because it is fully socialized ģ. it happens without calling itself work. Side by side, Ten9Eight and the haul video underscore how neoliberal child labor has served to intensify stratifications of race, gender, and class by recontracting how value is added to and produced by human life. These calculations of human capital far outrun the child figure given by Edelman. Even Blair is no Annie; if her style channel is akin to Annie s virtuosic labor of singing and dancing, Blair still works two jobs to pay for her clothes. Moreover, the fact that a black boy s or girls value remains so low to the nation that walking down the street is enough reason to incur murder at the hands of a police officer or civilian who will not be held responsible, a fact painfully repeatedly demonstrated, underscores the insidiousness of Beckers economic rationalization of American racism. Still, Ten9Eight remains the celebrated solution to the racialized dimension of human capital, the outcome of a total privatization of race that has restricted politics to the narrowest economy possible. To understand the contemporary arrangement of child labor beyond industrial forms, in which the value of the future has to be calculated as it arrives, and in which labor both consists of entrepreneurship of the self while also reaching digital simulation online, what we might pursue is a materialism of the child that does not need to "fuck Annie." The demands on American children today, violently maldistributed by race, class, and gender, call upon a materialism that understands the child as more than a Symbolic figure underwriting reproductive ideology. The child today is the focus of a broader unequal distribution of wealth, the perpetuation of debt, the extension of work to all life-building activities, and the implosion of public education and welfare. In a sense, the child is as central to capital as it was during Fordism, but the contours of that centrality have changed with the value of the future. A materialism of the child that dispenses with the imperative of affirming no future at all will be left with the more complex task of working toward something other than the labored austerity offered by Ten9Eight or YouTube celebrity. It remains to be seen if Better Futures can be unyoked from its trademark.

Reproductive futurism culminates in a homonationalist consolidation of empire where imperial wars secure the future through the extermination of deviant communities of color Schotten 2015 [C. Heike, Associate Professor of Political Science and an affiliated faculty in Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston "Homonationalist Futurism:“Terrorism” and (Other) Queer Resistance to Empire." New Political Science 37.1 (2015): 71-90.] In queer theory, No Future has largely been read as making an argument regarding the constitutive heteronormativity of the social order. Edelman names this heteronormativity “reproductive futurism” and argues that it inevitably dooms homosexuals—branded as non-reproductive sexual nihilists—to instantiating society’s death drive. I contend, however, that No Future can be understood more generically as a work of political theory, especially given that Edelman explicitly describes its subject matter—reproductive futurism—as “the logic within which the political itself must be thought.”14 Identifying this political theory, however, requires some appropriation, given that, ultimately, Edelman is more concerned with Lacan than politics. Reading with and into the text, then, I propose three modifications of the psychoanalytic politics Edelman advances in No Future in order to more fully appropriate it for political theorizing.15 The first is to insert a distinction between the “futurism” and “reproductive futurism” he discusses, the latter being understood as a specific version of the former. Put simply, futurism is synopsized by the “presupposition that the body politic must survive,”16 the putatively apolitical article of faith in the necessary continuity of politics as such. “[E]very political vision,” Edelman claims, is “a vision of futurity.”17 More specifically, reproductive futurism is characterized by “a set of values widely thought of as extrapolitical: values that center on the family, to be sure, but that focus on the protection of children.”18 The iconographic signifier of reproductive futurism is the child; its mantra, “Whitney Houston’s rendition of the secular hymn, ‘I believe that children are our future,’ a hymn we might as well simply declare our national anthem and be done with it.”19 Reproductive futurism is the apolitical imperative that the present be held in service to the children’s future adulthood: [W]e are no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of a future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child. That figural Child alone embodies the citizen as an ideal, entitled to claim full rights to its future share in the nation’s good, though always at the cost of limiting the rights “real” citizens are allowed. For the social order exists to preserve for this universalized subject, this fantasmatic Child, a notional freedom more highly valued than the actuality of freedom itself, which might, after all, put at risk the Child to whom such a freedom falls due.20 Whether discussing the survival of the body politic (futurism) or the future as symbolized by the child (reproductive futurism), Edelman is clear that the presuppositions of both are deemed apolitical, although that is precisely what makes them “so oppressively political.”21 For the presuppositions of (reproductive) futurism are the very terms of politics as such. To participate in politics at all, even in protest or dissent, requires that one “submit to the framing of political debate—and, indeed, of the political field—as defined by the terms of ...reproductive futurism: terms that impose an ideological limit on political discourse as such.”22 This is how and why Edelman says that there is no future for queers: politics itself designates “queers” as futureless. By definition, politics seeks to install an order of sameness through the ideological (re)production of a future that promises a seamless plenitude of meaning. Rather than acknowledge the impossibility of such an achievement, however, this failing is instead foisted onto a person, people, or set of forces that instantiate that impossibility in their very existence. These unforgivable obstacles to futurism’s achievement are “queers”: “the queer dispossesses the social order of the ground on which it rests: a faith in the consistent reality of the social ... a faith that politics, whether of the left or of the right, implicitly affirms.”23 Defined as non-reproductive sexual nihilists, the positioning of queers as culture’s self-indulgent, sex-obsessed death drive thus functions to secure the health, happiness, and adult normality of heterosexually reproducing humanity. While this persuasive reading of heteronormativity and homophobia has generated the most critical enthusiasm for No Future, I want to argue that reproductive futurism is neither exhaustive of the political nor futurism’s exclusive form. However hegemonic, reproductive futurism is only “one of the forms” this “calamity” might take.24 For clearly one can invest in the future as signified by any number of possible oppressive and unattainable ideals: not only the child, but also, for example, Christ, security (for example Hobbes), or the American way. As Edelman himself observes, “The Child, in the historical epoch of our current epistemological regime, is the figure for this compulsory investment in the misrecognition of figure.”25 Futurism itself, however, he calls “the substrate of politics.”26 My second proposed modification follows from the first, its mandate being to situate Edelman’s political theory more distinctly within history.27 In this regard, suspicious reader John Brenkman helpfully provides the political theory references missing from No Future, noting that “modern critical social discourse, whether among the Enlightenment’s philosophes, French revolutionaries, Marxists, social democrats, or contemporary socialists and democrats” all engage in the kind of future-wagering Edelman describes as definitively political.28 Historically, Brenkman is correct—futurism is a distinctively modern phenomenon that must be tethered to, among other things, the advent of industrial capitalism, colonialism, and the rise of the nation-state. This second modification makes clear that, in naming futurism, Edelman has identified a fundamental baseline of modernity and the workings of modern politics. However, Brenkman’s concern is less with history than the fact that Edelman seems to foreclose the possibility of such critical discourse by consigning it to the same status as the discourse of the Catholic Church and the religious Right. While Brenkman’s point is well-taken, it is already Edelman’s. For, whether liberal or conservative, Left or Right, communist or fascist, every modern political theory is invested in the repetition and reproduction of the social order, cast as a future aspirational ideal, to which the present is held hostage. This is as true of conservative movements as of radical or revolutionary ones—modern politics as such is defined by its investment in reproducing an order of sameness at the expense of the difference of now.29 Tavia Nyong’o has argued that Edelman’s reading of homophobia operates as a kind of nostalgia for a political moment already past, a moment when homosexuality really did pose an ominous and spectral threat to the social order, but does so no longer.30 However—and this is the third modification I wish to assert—the “queer” of No Future is by no means a crudely identitarian homosexual subject, nor is the child solely emblematic of procreation and childrearing. Edelman would agree with at least part of this point. He insists there is “nothing intrinsic to the constitution of those identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, transsexual, or queer” that “predisposes them to resist the appeal of futurity, to refuse the temptation to reproduce, or to place themselves outside or against the acculturating logic of the Symbolic.”31 And indeed, it is not difficult to find examples of gay reproductive futurism, the most obvious being the movement for “marriage equality.” As former Human Rights Campaign (HRC) President Joe Solmonese puts it: “The fight for marriage equality for samesex couples is quite possibly the most conventional, family-friendly equal rights struggle ever.” He continues, “History bends not only toward fairness and equality, but also toward common sense. Marriage strengthens couples and families, who in turn help strengthen their communities, one at a time—leading ultimately to a stronger, more robust nation.”32 Mixing nationalism into a gay progress narrative of ever-expanding equality and familial inclusion, Solmonese here writes the playbook for reproductive futurism’s political palatability. Tellingly, Andrew Sullivan’s earlier praise of gay marriage is even more explicit on this count, invoking the importance of the future’s promise not just in the name of the children, but more specifically for gay children, who must be saved from having otherwise been born into futurelessness: More important, perhaps ... its [marriage’s] influence would be felt quietly but deeply among gay children. For them, at last, there would be some kind of future; some older faces to apply to their unfolding lives, some language in which their identity could be properly discussed, some rubric by which it could be explained— not in terms of sex, or sexual practices, or bars, or subterranean activity, but in terms of their future life stories, their potential loves, their eventual chance at some kind of constructive happiness. They would be able to feel by the intimation of a myriad examples that in this respect their emotional orientation was not merely about pleasure, or sin, or shame, or otherness (although it might always be involved in many of those things), but about the ability to love and be loved as complete, imperfect human beings. Until gay marriage is legalized, this fundamental element of personal dignity will be denied a whole segment of humanity. No other change can achieve it.33 As we can see, even when the Child is gay, its salvific promise is neither diverted nor diluted. It simply straightens out the queer threat potentially posed by bent children.34 Dangling the lure of “constructive happiness” before the eyes of youths for whom not sugarplums but sex parties dance in their heads, Sullivan here offers up the gay version of reproductive futurism, paternalistically reassuring us that a life of sex for sex’s sake is the meaningless, self-indulgent, anti-civilizational existence every good moralizer ever told us it was. Taken together, Sullivan and Solmonese helpfully illustrate the fact that Edelman’s argument is, in the end, not really about identity and not even about gay people (or, for that matter, straight people). Futurism is a logic that transcends the specifics of heterosexuality and homosexuality, and “queer” in Edelman’s vocabulary does not necessarily—or, perhaps, even primarily, anymore, as Nyong’o suggests—stand in for gay and lesbian people. But, to return to my third modification, this also means that the child is not irrevocably tied to the existence, reproduction, or raising of “historical children.”35 In other words, even as the non- or anti-identity politics of Edelman’s figure of queerness is increasingly evident, he neglects to establish the similarly and necessarily nonidentitarian iconography of the future he inscribes (which also returns us to my first proposed modification, the distinction between futurism and reproductive futurism). The queer as homosexual and the Child as historical child may be concrete, daily exemplars of (certain ubiquitous if not exclusive versions of) heteronormativity. However, understood as a specific form of a more generalized futurist logic, it becomes clear that the child cannot simply be equated with reproduction, child-bearing, and child-rearing, just as the “queer” cannot simply mean “homosexual” in Edelman’s temporal sense. The child, along with the queer, is a crucial space for political and historical concretization of Edelman’s radical but otherwise unduly narrow political project. Puar: Terrorism, Homonationalism, and US Sexual Exceptionalism The HRC’s language of nationhood and the non-exclusivity of the child as futurist icon are the places to begin pushing Edelman’s queer theory toward an explicit engagement with the politics of race, nation, and US empire. For Solmonese’s statement is not simply the rhetoric of reproductive futurism. It is also the language of homonationalism, a term Jasbir Puar has coined to document the “transition under way in how queer subjects are relating to nation-states, particularly the United States, from being figures of death (in other words, the AIDS epidemic) to becoming tied to ideas of life and productivity (in other words, gay marriage and families).”36 Homonationalism is an abbreviated combination of the words “homonormative” and “nationalism,” the former term borrowed from Lisa Duggan, who describes “the new homonormativity” as a political realignment of the late 1990s/early 2000s in which gay rights became compatible with certain neoliberal, anti-statist, conservative, American nationalist viewpoints.37 Combining homonormativity with nationalism, then, Puar augments Nyong’o’s critique, arguing that the assimilation of certain gay and lesbian subjects into the mainstream of American normalcy, respectability, and citizenship has entailed the “fleeting sanctioning of a national homosexual subject”38 who is “complicit with heterosexual nationalist formations rather than inherently or automatically excluded from or opposed to them.”39 One effect of homonationalism in the post-9/11 context of the “War on Terror” is the perverse sexualization or “queering” of Arabs and Muslims (and all those held to be such) in the figure of the “terrorist,” a figure of monstrosity, excess, savagery, and perversion. To be clear, Puar is not suggesting that the “terrorist” is the new queer. Rather, she is arguing that “queerness is always already installed in the project of naming the terrorist; the terrorist does not appear as such without the concurrent entrance of perversion, deviance.”40 Neither an identity nor a defining behavioral activity (for example, homosexuality), Puar elaborates queerness as a biopolitical tactic that functions to define and divide populations through processes of racialization, a “management of queer life at the expense of sexually and racially perverse death in relation to the contemporary politics of securitization, Orientalism, terrorism, torture, and the articulation of Muslim, Arab, Sikh, and South Asian sexualities.”41 In this view, “the contemporary U.S. heteronormative nation actually relies on and benefits from the proliferation of queerness.”42 Homonationalism, as a biopolitics of queerness, functions to discipline and (re)produce homosexuality as white, American, patriotic, and upwardly mobile while designating people of color, immigrants, and Arabs and Muslims as both heterosexual and yet dangerously “queer”—as “terrorists” or “failed and perverse” bodies that “always have femininity as their reference point of malfunction, and are metonymically tied to all sorts of pathologies of the mind and body—homosexuality, incest, pedophilia, madness, and disease.”43 As is evident, queerness in Puar’s account veers from any simple conflation with gay and lesbian subjectivity; as she says, “Race, ethnicity, nation, gender, class, and sexuality disaggregate gay, homosexual, and queer national subjects who align themselves with U.S. imperial interests from forms of illegitimate queerness that name and ultimately propel populations into extinction.”44 The happily married couples that populate the HRC’s literature and website, then, would be the homonational, or properly queer; the “monster terrorist fag” abjected into existence through torture at Abu Ghraib or Guanta´namo, detained indefinitely in any of the US’s many illegal prisons, surveilled incessantly in mosques and cafes, and stigmatized as suffering from arrested development by the psychologizing literature of security studies, would be the improperly queer.45 Puar’s point is that these queernesses go together and require one another, much as, I think, Edelman can be seen to be arguing that the child and the queer go together and require one another. What Puar concretizes, however, in theorizing queerness as a “process of racialization”46 is not simply the analytic point that “queer” and “homosexual” are distinct but, more importantly, the urgently political point that the abjected or improper queer who stands outside the social order and is in effect antagonistic to it is, in this contemporary moment, much more likely to be a Muslim or someone perceived as “looking like” a Muslim to the American gaze than, let us admit it, the newly engaged same-sex couples thronging state houses in Minnesota, Connecticut, and Colorado (much less the “homosexual” figure of queerness in No Future). Understanding queerness as a process of nationalization and racialization also concretizes and expands the understanding of heteronormativity or, in Edelman’s words, the future. For the terrorist in Puar’s analysis resists or denies a future that is symbolized and defined not only or simply by the child, but also by the American nation and secular Christianity. As she says, “In the political imagination, the terrorist serves as the monstrous excess of the nation-state.”47 Post-9/11, Puar notes that this terrorist threat is undeniably linked with Islam, which often serves as its “explanation.”48 As she observes, Islam signifies, to the ostensibly secular and modern US, both “excess” and “savagery”: “Religious belief is thus cast, in relation to other factors fueling terrorism, as the overflow, the final excess that impels monstrosity—the ‘different attitude toward violence’ signaling these uncivilizable forces.”49 Puar’s reading suggests that Islam threatens the futurist temporality of American empire. Cast as retrograde, backward, and frozen in pre-modern religiosity, Islam threatens the progress narrative of US imperial wars which are alleged to bring ever-greater freedom, not only to women and homosexuals, but also to uncivilized, savage, and undemocratic people(s) and nations around the world.50 Finally, then, it is important to note that as Islam has been queered or come to signify queerness, it does so in two ways: first, through the phobic association of Islam with terrorism; and, second, through the racist and Orientalist conflation of Islam with homophobia, anti-feminism, and sexual backwardness more generally. Putting Puar’s analysis in an Edelman-esque frame, we might say that the figure of the “terrorist” who threatens national goals, progress, hope—indeed, the nation’s very existence—can be cast as the excessive, anti-social, future-denying figure of the “queer” in Edelman. Or, we might say that just as the domain of normativity has expanded to include some gay people, correspondingly, the domain of (inassimilable) queerness also has shifted. Puar’s analysis of the collusion “between homosexuality and U.S. nationalism”51 as producing two figures, the homonormative patriot and the queer terrorist, notes them as, on the one hand, the embodiment and normative achievement of the social order and, on the other hand, the dissolution and destruction of that social order.52 No longer designating “the homosexual” per se, “queer” names the monstrously raced and perversely sexualized Arab/Muslim/terrorist Other that threatens the American social and political order, an order that (some) properly gay and lesbian subjects can now, through their incorporation into normative American national life, inhabit and reproduce. In sum, we have a theorization of “queer” wherein the sexually backward Muslim is led by the irrationality and violence of her/his religion to annihilate those who serve and protect freedom for all. In this analysis of “the sexually exceptional homonational and its evil counterpart, the queer terrorist of elsewhere,”53 the “terrorist” is to the HRC what, in Edelman’s analysis, the queer is to the child.54 Edelman and Puar: Theorizing Resistance Puar’s theorization of homonationalism is a significant contribution to queer theory and an essential corrective to Edelman’s otherwise historically and racially unmarked analysis of (reproductive) futurism. Her work allows us to critique futurism in ways that are responsive to the specificities of its racial and national workings, consequences gapingly unattended to by him. While Edelman deftly parses the logic of power in terms of futurism’s hegemony, he fails fully to unpack its coercive force by focusing solely on futurism’s relationship to an exceedingly narrow version of non-reproductive homosexuality. Although he claims that the theory of politics he explicates in No Future is indifferent to race, arguing that “the fascism of the baby’s face ... subjects us to its sovereign authority as the figure of politics itself ... whatever the face a particular politics gives that baby to wear— Aryan or multicultural, that of the thirty-thousand-year Reich or of an ever expanding horizon of democratic inclusivity,”55 what is clear is that the reproductive futurism he critiques is symptomatic of a very specific bourgeois class culture within the imperial US, a culture that garners his criticism only insofar as it is bound up with heteronormativity.56 By contrast, Puar’s demand that we focus our attention on the racial and nationalized logics of queerness(es) and the unexpected complicities between queers, nationalism, and empire remains only suggestive of futurism’s determinative role, never naming it specifically. Now, this is likely because Puar neither endorses nor conceptualizes futurism as a useful diagnosis of modern politics, just as Edelman may very much wish to privilege (white male homo) sexuality in his psychoanalysis of futurism. However, I suggest that authorial intentions—both Puar’s and Edelman’s—be respectfully disregarded, not only because we have become savvy to the multiple begged questions inherent in any invocation of authorial intention, but also because more than our scholarly work is at stake when it comes to forging critical resistance to US imperial power. Indeed, while the net effect of Edelman’s analysis is that only white gay men are considered the deathly threat portended by queerness in No Future, 57 if we return to his definition of “queer” and insist on distinguishing between futurism and reproductive futurism, we note that “queer” designates anyone who fails to abide by the rules of social temporality—that is, anyone who sacrifices the future for the sake of the present. As such, futurism’s ruthless machinations stigmatize all sorts of populations as emblematic of the death and destruction of the social order. This broad array of misfits and perverts may include some gay, lesbian, and queer people. It necessarily also includes the “terrorist” and “Muslim” whom Puar argues are biopolitical targets of abjected queerness. This analysis also suggests that temporality is a crucial axis of determination regarding all “enemies” of the social order, a notion that links Edelman’s political theory to other important work in radical queer politics. For example, in her definitive essay, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?,” Cathy Cohen argues for a re-thinking of marginal positionality in terms of one’s relation to power rather than in terms of a binary categorization of queer vs straight. She cites the examples of the prohibition of slave marriages and the long history of obsession with black women’s reproductive choices in the US as examples of ostensibly heterosexual people inhabiting positions outside the bounds of normative sexuality because of race, class, and property status. In arguing for a more capacious, intersectional queer politics that is accountable not simply to the question of who is and is not heterosexual but, more broadly, to the question of what each of our relationships with and proximity to power may be, Cohen writes: As we stand on the verge of watching those in power dismantle the welfare system through a process of demonizing the poor and young—primarily poor and young women of color, many of whom have existed for their entire lives outside the white, middle-class heterosexual norm—we have to ask if these women do not fit into society’s categories of marginal, deviant, and “queer.” As we watch the explosion of prison construction and the disproportionate incarceration rates of young men and women of color, often as part of the economic development of poor white rural communities, we have to ask if these individuals do not fit society’s definition of “queer” and expendable. Cohen’s understanding of “queer” as a kind of non- or anti-normativity based on one’s proximity to power might also be understood in terms of futurism and its flouting by “deviants.” For, if the key characteristic of queerness is a temporal one, then having “too many” babies is just as much a threat to America’s future as not having any at all—it just depends on which queers we are talking about (not only Reagan’s welfare queen, but also recall the manufactured election-year discourse about “anchor babies”).59 Naming these explicitly makes futurism a useful tool to diagnose the contemporary political moment from a radical queer perspective that does not fetishize sexuality as either the primary domain of subordination or the sole focus of political struggle and resistance.

The affirmative’s Pro-America political orientation renews the temporal distinction between domestic peace and foreign conflict that is fundamental to U.S. nationalism. Affirmations of hegemonic control create a racialized relationship of spectatorship that disavows the interrelation between war within the international sphere and police violence. The impact is the disappearance of the mass violence of border militarization and an anti-black prison regime. Loyd, 11 - Jenna M., (“American Exceptionalism, Abolition and the Possibilities for Nonkilling Futures,” In Inwood, Joshua, and James Tyner, eds. Non-Killing Geographies. Honolulu: Center for Global Nonkilling, 103-126) There are several problems with this nationalist frame. Not only does organization for war blur sharp temporal distinctions between war and peace, it also blurs what are often thought of as spatially discrete spaces of domestic peace and foreign conflict. Further, the myth of exception shrouds the everyday, unexceptional organization and deployment of state violence on the domestic front through policing the presence and actions of people. In practice these lines are blurry, but they must be constantly renewed—discursively (e.g. media, think tanks) and materially (e.g. border fortification)—because these categories are so fundamental to national identity and to the state’s claims to singularly decide who may use force. This chapter focuses on American exceptionalism and specifically on analyzing the geopolitical imaginations of this national ideology. How do exceptionalist understandings of domestic and foreign space work to reproduce US nationalism and war-making abroad and to obscure state violence practiced domestically? By the term geopolitical imaginations, I mean understandings of places and their interrelations that inform the discursive production of meaning. The reproduction of such discourses through representations and everyday practices of identity making, statecraft and governance thereby have material effects in the world, informing and undergirding the often violent reproduction of national spaces and international relations (Bialasiewicz et al., 2007). I build on Judith Butler’s (2009) Frames of War, in which she theorizes antiviolence, from a critical geographic perspective. Butler’s essays were written as the US waged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. US practices of torture revealed by the Abu Ghraib photos and the practice of indefinite detention in Guantánamo provoked a crisis in national identity centering on the nation’s claims to democracy, freedom, and the rule of law. The temporizing frame of wartime emergency serves to legitimate such violent practices, while simultaneously obscuring how these practices were developed historically and how frequently they have been deployed (Puar 2007). Geopolitical imaginations constitute some of the most durable “frames of war.” A critical understanding of how these imaginative geographies work to sustain global power and hierarchies, including the fraught racializing line of whose lives are grievable, is imperative for cultivating a “‘nonmoralized’ sense of responsibility” within shared conditions of precarious life (Butler 2009: 177). While a good deal of critical attention has analyzed how racialized geopolitical imaginations inform and sustain popular support for war-making, there has been much less attention to how racialized imaginations of the domestic sphere also shape understandings of defense, security and organization for violence. The infapolitical line dividing who will count as human (who is grievable in Butler’s terms) from those whose lives are not grievable is a geopolitical struggle engaged not simply through external or Orientalist logics of foreignness, but also through the cultivation of internal enemies. For example, the abstract depictions of US war-making on the nightly news are not separate from racialized depictions of crime. Each set of depictions creates a racialized relationship of spectatorship that fosters viewers’ “material complicity” in state violence, while “dematerializing” its effects and erasing the interrelation between police violence and war-making (Feldman, 2004). Criticism of American exceptionalism that focuses on US war-making and empire building abroad, but ignores the systemic practices of state violence domestically, reproduces exceptionalist lens undergirding US state violence wherever it is practiced. What disappears in plain sight is the mass violence of border militarization responsible for the deaths of thousands of migrants and a US prison system whose population of 2.3 million people rivals that of the nation’s fourth largest city, Houston, Texas. In the US, “governing through crime” builds on and ratifies anti-Black racism, while also serving to police and thereby constitute gender and sexual difference (Subdury, 2005; Incite!, 2006). Yet, the centrality of confronting anti-Black racism is not frequently understood as fundamental to also ending Native colonization and genocide and war (Smith, 2006; Smith, 2010). This makes challenging the systematic, domestic practices of state violence, a site where its exercise is most hegemonic, fundamental to undermining the legal categorizations that create race and structure grievability. This chapter proceeds in four parts. First, it briefly traces Judith Butler’s discussion of making antiviolent political interventions. Next, develops an analysis of the dominant geographic imagination shaping American exceptionalism. It then provides an example of the interrelation between postCold War domestic and foreign politics, which work to perpetuate and obscure practices of US state violence. It shows how the naturalization of antiBlack racism and legitimacy afforded to state punishment have created a normalized system of state violence in the form of mass imprisonment. Fi- nally, the chapter concludes by returning to Judith Butler’s politics of antiviolence with a consideration of the politics of abolition. Economic collapse now avoids extinction – causes smooth transition to sustainable localized economies Alexander 14 (Samuel, lecturer at the Office for Environmental Programs, University of Melbourne, Australia, and author of Entropia: Life Beyond Industrial Civilisation, PhD, AND Jonathon Rutherford, “The Deep Green Alternative,” http://simplicityinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/The-Deep-Green-Alternative.pdf)

As industrial civilisation continues its global expansion and pursues growth without apparent limit, the possibility of economic , political, or ecological crises forcing an alternative way of life upon humanity seems to be growing in likelihood ( Ehrlich and Ehrlich, 2013 ). That is, if the existing model of global development is not stopped via one of the pathways reviewed above, or some other strategy, then it seems clear enough that at some point in the future, industrial civilisation will grow itself to death (Turner, 2012) . Whether ‘collapse’ is initiated by an ecological tipping point, a financial breakdown of an overly indebted economy, a geopolitical disruption, an oil crisis, or some confluence of such forces, the possibility of collapse or deep global cr isis can no longer be dismissed merely as the intellectual playground for ‘doomsayers’ with curdled imaginations. Collapse is a prospect that ought to be taken seriously based on the logic of limitless growth on a finite planet , as well as the evidence of existing economic , ecological, or more specifically climatic instability. As Paul Gilding (2011) has suggested, perhaps it is already too late to avoid some form of ‘great disruption’. Could collapse or deep crisis be the most likely pathway to an alternat ive way of life? If it is , such a scenario must not be idealised or romanticised. Fundamental change through crisis would almost certainly involve great suffering for many, and quite possibly significant population decline through starvation, disease, or w ar. It is also possible that the ‘alternative system’ that a crisis produces is equally or even more undesirable than the existing system. Nevertheless, it may be that this is the only way a post -­‐ growth or post -­‐ industrial way of life will ever arise. The Cuban oil crisis, prompted by the collapse of the USSR, provides one such example of a deep societal tr ansition that arose not from a political or soc ial movement , but from sheer force of circumstances ( Piercy et al , 2010 ) . Almost overnight Cuba had a large proportion of its oil supply cut off, forcing the nation to move away from oil -­‐ dependent, industrialised modes of food production and instead take up local and organic systems – or perish. David Holmgren (2013) has recently published a deep and provocativ e essay, ‘Crash on Demand’, exploring the idea that a relatively small anti -­‐ consumerist movement could be enough to destabilise the global economy which is already struggling. This presents one means of bringing an end to the status quo by inducing a volun tary crisis, without relying on a mass movement. Needless to say, should people adopt such a strategy, it would be imperative to ‘prefigure’ the alternative society as far as possible too, not merely withdraw support from the existing society. Again, one must not romanticise such theories or transitions . The Cuban crisis , for example, entailed much hardship . B ut it do es expose the mechanisms by which crisis can induce significant societal change in ways that , in the end, are not always negative. In the face of a global crisis or breakdown, therefore, it could be that elements of the deep green vision (such as organic agriculture, frugal living, sharing, radical recycling, post -­‐ oil transportation, etc.) come to be forced upon humanity, in which c ase the ques tion of strategy has less to do with avoiding a deep crisis or collapse (which may be inevitable) and more to do with negotiating the descent as wisely as possible . This is hardly a reliable path to the deep green alternative, but it presents itself as a p ossible path. Perhaps a more reliable path could be based on the possibility that, rather than impos ing an alternative way of life on a society through sudden collapse , a deep crisis could provoke a social or political revolution in consciousness that ope ns up space for the deep green vision to be embraced and implemented as some form of crisis management strategy . Currently, there is insufficient social or political support for such an alternative, but perhaps a deep crisis will shake the world awake. Ind eed, perhaps that is the only way to create the necessary mindset . After all, today we are hardly lacking in evidence on the need for radical change (Turner, 2012), suggesting that shock and response may be the form the transition takes , rather than it being induced through orderly, rational planning , whether from ‘top down’ or ‘from below’ . Again, this ‘non -­‐ ideal’ pathway to a post -­‐ growth or post -­‐ industrial society could be built into the other strategies discussed above, adding some realism to strat egies that might otherwise appear too utopian. That is to say, it may be that only deep crisis will create the social support or political will needed for radical reformism, eco -­‐ socialism, or eco -­‐ anarchism to emerge as social or political movement s capable of rapid transformation. Furthermore, it would be wise to keep an open and evolving mind regarding the best strategy to adopt, because the relative effectiveness of various strategies may change over time, depending on how forthcoming crises unfold. It was Milton Friedman ( 1982: ix ) who once wrote : ‘ only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change . When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.’ What this ‘collapse’ or ‘crisis’ theory of change su ggests, as a matter of strategy, is that deep green social and political movements should be doing all they can to mainstream the practices and values of the ir alternative vision . By doing so they would be aiming to ‘prefigure’ the deep green social, econo mic, and political structures, so far as that it is possible, in the hope that deep green ideas and systems are alive and available when the crises hit. Although Friedman obviously had a very different notion of what ideas should be ‘lying around’, the rel evance of his point to this discussion is that in times of crisis, the politically or socially impossible can become politically or socially inevitable (Friedman, 1982: ix); or, one might say, if not inevitable, then perhaps much more likely. It is someti mes stated that every crisis is an opportunity – from which the optimist infers that the more crises there are, the more opportunities there are. This may encapsulate one of the most realistic forms of hope we have left.

Heg fails and is terminally unsustainable – your authors are biased and paid off. Shlapak, Senior International Policy Analyst at RAND Corporation, 3/20/2015 David A., “Towards a More Modest American Strategy”, Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, Volume 57 Issue 2, Pgs. 59-78, The Unipolar Moment Is Over Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the world has experienced a situation unparalleled in the Westphalian era, and quite possibly since the heyday of Rome's dominance. For the past two decades, the United States has stood alone as the world's only remaining true great power.1 Even if this status did not afford the United States the ability to have its way at every turn, US primacy gave the country a freedom of strategic action – and particularly of military action – all but unseen in modern history. This unipolar moment, however, has been profoundly ahistorical, and was always fated to end. Whether we ascribe this to reversion to the norm, systemic rebalancing or the rise of a challenger, there can be little doubt that unquestioned US dominance is a tide that is ebbing. The analogy to the post-war economic system is instructive, if some-what depressing. In 1945, the United States was the only great power whose economy had not been devastated by the Second World War. America took advantage of this deeply aberrant circumstance not only to construct a domestic economy whose prosperous coat-tails its citizens still ride, but also to rebuild much of a shattered world. Perhaps most importantly, the United States used its economic dominance to put in place international institutions and arrangements that, almost seven decades later, remain the foundation of a global trade and financial order that has served the rest of the world as well as it has served America. The norms and structures established during the era of US economic hegemony ignited and sustained not just the revitalisation of Europe and Japan, but the rise of the ‘Asian tigers’ and other new economies, the success of which spelled the doom of American dominance itself. The relative decline of the US economy, in other words, was not only the inevitable result of an inescapable historical process – the world's recovery from the cataclysm of global war – but also the deliberate outcome of how the United States chose to use its unrivalled power. There is nothing to suggest that the United States’ time as the sole military great power will leave such a constructive legacy. This may, to some extent, be inevitable. The contemporary international economic order is broadly understood to be a positive-sum system, one in which the well-being of all participants can simultaneously increase. Conversely, the global security environment is typically seen as zero-sum; one actor's power gain must entail losses for others. This makes it very difficult to impose durable rules of the road for security interactions. Sadly, the residuum of US dominance may go beyond the absence of a positive inheritance – it may, in fact, be negative. America used its power to intervene in sometimes capricious ways, promulgated a doctrine of preventive and pre-emptive warfare, and warned the world at large that ‘either you are with us or you are with the terrorists’.2 America's ‘war on terror’ was in many quarters interpreted as a war on Islam, and the botched campaign in Afghanistan, among other consequences, has contributed to destabilising nuclear-armed Pakistan. The 2003 invasion of Iraq overthrew a reprehensible dictator but left behind a country in violent disarray, and created an opportunity for Iran to expand its regional influence. Afghanistan will not emerge from a decade-plus of US-led war as a secular democracy. American power could not keep down the price of oil, nudge Israel and Palestine towards a legitimate peace process (let alone a lasting peace) or halt genocides in Rwanda, Sudan and elsewhere. It did not stop North Korea from building a nuclear weapon, nor does it seem to be dissuading Iran from at minimum developing the capability to pursue one. While the world may not be worse off for America's exercise of its enormous power over the past 20-odd years, it is not at all clear that it is better off. Nor has America's military pre-eminence paid dividends at home. Including future costs for veterans’ medical care and disability payments, a Harvard study concluded that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will wind up costing the US between $4 and $6 trillion.3 Over 6,700 American service members have lost their lives in the two wars, with another 51,000 wounded in action.4 Disputes over the appropriate uses of US military muscle have contributed to the polarisation of American political life. There is also little evidence that the roughly $12trn the United States has spent on its military since the end of the Cold War has propelled the economy forward. During that span, the years when defence spending as a percentage of GDP was at its lowest were those that experienced the greatest economic growth.5 Some analyses have concluded that the ‘multiplier effect’ of defence spending – the total impact on the economy of every dollar expended on the military – is actually less than one (meaning GDP increases by less than a dollar for every one the Pentagon spends), and far lower than that of other forms of government spending.6 Meanwhile, the United States in 2012–13 had a larger defence budget than the next eight biggest military spenders combined.7 While it can certainly be argued that no other nation has global responsibilities like America's, that gap is still remarkable. Strategy looks out, not in Military strength, however, is not the same as ‘leadership’. All parties to the official debate about the future of national security appear to agree on an expansive definition of America's role in the world. The administration's 2012 guidance gave the game away with its title, ‘Sustaining US Global Leadership’. In his prefatory remarks to that document, President Barack Obama commits the country to a future with an ‘even stronger’ military that ‘preserves American global leadership [and] maintains military superiority’, and asserts that we live ‘in a changing world that demands our leadership’.8 This belief is bipartisan. In a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in July 2012, then-candidate Mitt Romney said: I do not view America as just one more point on the strategic map, one more power to be balanced. I believe our country is the greatest force for good the world has ever known, and that our influence is needed as much now as ever. And I am guided by one overwhelming conviction and passion: This century must be an American Century.9 The world is indeed complicated and messy, but this does not mean that it demands American global leadership. The world has always been complicated and messy; the human tendency to see our own time as uniquely problematic inevitably distorts our perspective. Even were the contemporary scene uniquely complex, it would not put a premium on US power. Furthermore, it is not clear that America's supremacy has begotten a world that is safer, more stable, or more affluent. There is no coherent first-principles argument that a world led by a militarily dominant United States is inherently more peaceful or prosperous than some possible alternative. There is also a frequently overlooked difference between being the world's greatest military power and being its leader. China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Russia, Egypt and Iran – seven countries who together account for nearly half of the planet's population – almost certainly do not see themselves as being led in any meaningful way by the United States. While the US does have great influence in the world, this flows less from its military prowess – employment of which has been frustrated at least as often as it has been successful – than from the strength of its economy, the creativity of its people and the example it provides of an enduring, pluralistic democracy. Each of these is threatened by an overbearing and excessively militarised approach to the world. There can likewise be little doubt that the United States’ recent security policy has undermined the nation's claim to moral leadership. Abu Ghraib, ‘extraordinary rendition’, the wildly unpopular invasion of Iraq, the use of torture in the ‘war on terror’, the noxious surveillance state revealed by recent leaks and the controversy surrounding Washington's lethal use of drones will long haunt America's reputation. It should be remembered, meanwhile, that threats to the Department of Defense (DoD)’s institutional interests are not the same as threats to American security. If US global ‘leadership’ is a commodity of questionable value, and military pre-eminence of questionable utility in attaining it, the argument for maintaining superiority indefinitely must hinge on the number and severity of threats the nation confronts.10 And, indeed, a wide array of such challenges are frequently cited as justifying – even demanding – dominance. The 2012 defence guidance, for example, warns of ‘violent extremists’ with ‘the potential to pose catastrophic threats that could directly affect our security and prosperity’.11 The catastrophic dangers are not specified; it is simply assumed that the reader will accept their existence. Threats to the so-called ‘global commons’ – the maritime, electronic and orbital lines of communication through which the world's trade and finances flow – are also cited as major dangers, although again, who is endangering them, to what extent and to what ends is not publicly explained.12 Current planning should not necessarily be the baseline for future strategy. There is an implicit but foundational assumption behind much of the discussion about the DoD's future: that the status quo is the standard against which all changes should be measured and, for the most part, resisted. This thinking is akin to looking outside during a thunderstorm and concluding that everyone should always keep their umbrellas open. Today's military is the product of an aberration The long-term status quo, from the republic's founding to the Second World War, was to field minimal armed forces, except in times of emergency. Even the more recent narrative, from the end of the Cold War to the events of 11 September 2001 – which, by the way, a larger, more powerful military could not have prevented – is one of reductions in size and budgets. Today's military is, again, the product of an aberration – a pro-found deviation from the nation's traditional approach to addressing its security concerns. The first step toward properly shaping the military the nation needs for the future is, in fact, to return to the old normal. In November 2011, all four then-service chiefs testified before Congress on the potential consequences of sequestration. Air Force General Norton Schwartz said that ‘dire consequences’ would ensue if the Pentagon were asked to absorb budget cuts ‘far beyond’ those envisioned by the Budget Control Act.13 Admiral Jonathan Greenert warned of ‘severe and irreversible’ damage to the navy resulting from budget cuts.14 General James Amos cautioned against ‘significant risk’ arising from cuts in Marine Corps end strength, while Army Chief of Staff General Ray Odierno said that further cuts would be ‘catastrophic to the military’ and subject the nation to ‘an unacceptable level of strategic and operational risk’.15 The latter argument in particular confuses the interests of the armed forces and the Department of Defense with those of the nation. A chain of logic, analysis and argument must be articulated to legitimately connect reductions in defence spending with ‘dire consequences’ for American security. Those links have not been forged. Instead – and whatever the good intentions of those involved – the Pentagon has developed a set of practices that are heavily biased toward maintaining the status quo. The services, inevitably seeking, among other things, to protect their budgets and force structures, dominate the process by which a set of scenarios and analytic approaches are created. These are then used to derive requirements for those same force structures and budgets. It cannot be surprising that such a circular approach does little to produce new and innovative thinking. The United States remains, in essence, a continental power buffered by two oceans that, while not as functionally large as they once were, substantially insulate it from the troubles of the rest of the world. This, among other things, means that since 1945 every American war save one has been a war of choice, and the ultimate value of fighting each has been questionable. Stalemate in Korea and defeat in Vietnam did little to materially affect the well-being of the United States as a whole, though the disagreements over the wisdom of the latter tore at the fabric of the country. Victories in Grenada, Panama, Kuwait and Kosovo arguably brought few direct benefits to the United States. The costs in money and blood of the Iraqi and Afghan adventures have already been described; there seems little doubt that the US would have been far better off not fighting the first one at all and prosecuting the second very differently. Some of these conflicts were virtuous attempts to undo unprovoked aggression or rescue threatened populations, and the intangible results in terms of stability and humanitarianism may have made them worthwhile. But that does nothing to alter the fact that of these wars, from Korea through Iraq, only one – the first phase of the Afghan conflict – was waged in response to a direct threat to the safety and security of the American people. The others were optional. One of the responsibilities of strategy is to place limits on ambition, which means above all seeking to distinguish the things that one cannot tolerate from those one would prefer not to happen. Happily free by virtue of geography from the danger of invasion, the sole national-security absolute for the United States is the requirement to prevent, with the highest possible degree of confidence, a nuclear attack on the homeland by a wellarmed state adversary. No other contingency, including a nuclear attack with a single terrorist weapon or one or two crude intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), presents a truly existential threat. Maintaining a robust deterrent against this catastrophe – absent reductions in global nuclear arsenals sufficient to make the danger disappear – is and must remain the primary mission of US armed forces.

No solvency—existing federal and state programs are sufficient but the aff can’t mobilize the private sector Garcia 3/23 [Antonio, Principal Systems Engineer, GRA Quantum | “Addressing the Cybersecurity Talent Shortage” RSA Conference, 3/23/17 | https://www.rsaconference.com/blogs/addressing-the-cybersecurity-talent-shortage ] Numerous examples demonstrate the success of vocational training programs and apprenticeships in meeting current and future workforce needs. In Germany, for example, students split their time between the classroom and the workplace, developing an academic foundation upon which they build relevant and in-demand skills and experiences. As a result, youth unemployment is low, and German companies have access to a robust pipeline of highly skilled workers. Critics may argue that, due to educational and governmental bureaucracy, this model will not keep up with the pace of technological innovation. However, vocational training programs and apprenticeships have proven highly responsive to constantly changing market needs. There is also evidence that an adaptive program could be implemented in the United States. In North Carolina, for example, curricula are updated four times in the past two decades in response to input and feedback from private-sector partners. This averages to a curriculum change every five years and demonstrates the potential for educational institutions to quickly adapt to rapid technological change and emerging industry needs. The effectiveness and responsiveness of these programs are the result of close partnerships between the private sector, educational institutions, and governments. In Austria, government and businesses not only work together to design curricula for the workplace and the classroom but they also share the burden of the program costs. Provincial and federal governments fund classroom training, and companies bear the costs of company-based training, including apprenticeship compensation. This is the key cultural difference that must be addressed for vocational training programs and apprenticeships to succeed in the United States. In the United States, a partial foundation for robust vocational training programs and apprenticeships is composed of existing federal initiatives and state educational institutions and programs. The missing piece is the private sector. Companies must discard their fear of employee attrition and take an active, shared role in the development of cybersecurity talent. From committing resources to support students to encouraging professionals to teach or mentor, the private sector must be willing to invest in developing the next generation of cybersecurity professionals. Abroad, in countries like Austria and Germany, and at home, in states like North Carolina, the outcomes of a more active and generous collaboration are attractive. Graduates are prepared for sustainable careers and are empowered to continue improving their skills throughout their careers, and employers meet their workforce needs.

1NC to SP2 1 The affs comprehensive sex ed expands the religious divide between the public and private sphere. Their approach just greases the wheels of an exploitive secular state. The only way out is a radical ideological break. Rasmussen 2010 (mary lou, Faculty of Education, Monash University, “Secularism, religion and ‘progressive’ sex education,” Sexualities, 13: pg. 699-711) This article engages contemporary debates about the notion of secularism, outside of the field of education. I draw on these debates to consider how ‘progressive’ scholars in sex education in the USA draw on and reinscribe religious/secular divides. For the purposes of this article sex education is understood as incorporating elements of what is also known as sexualities education, and sex and relationships education. Thus sex education, in the school context, is not understood as a specifically scientific or biological endeavour but as a field of knowledge that necessarily engages issues of values, cultural and religious diversity, and sexual difference. ‘Progressives’ in the context of this article are scholars who would argue for a comprehensive sex education that is often marked by some basic assumptions: that many young people are sexually active and therefore may be at risk of unplanned pregnancy and/or sexually transmitted infections; that not all young people are heterosexual identified; that sex education should be underpinned by expert knowledges; that young people are autonomous subjects with the right to be informed in order to make educated decisions about sex. There has been much interrogation of how conservatives have framed sex education debates (Irvine, 2004; Luker, 2006; Mayo, 2004). My aim in this article is twofold: first, I identify the arguments, prejudices and attachments of scholars who advocate a ‘progressive’ sex education; second, I consider how approaches that are rights based, child-centred, scientifically endorsed and embracing of diverse sexualities align with certain secular logics. I am not arguing that this alignment is intrinsically problematic, but I do want to underscore the secular affinities that saturate progressive sex education. I want to be clear that this study of secularism in sex education is not motivated by a desire to return to a more ‘conservative’ sex education, though in a sense my desire to put forward this disclaimer speaks to the sensitive nature of the problem I wish to investigate. Secularism in sex education is a topic worthy of further investigation, but in scrutinizing secularism, there is a danger that one is immediately cast as a conservative. This phenomenon has recently been discussed by Saba Mahmood in a piece entitled Is Critique Secular1 where she notes that for some, to inquire into normative assumptions about history, temporality, or regnant language ideologies endemic to secular discourse is to commit a grave intellectual and political error, one easily dismissed as ‘conservative’. (Mahmood, 2008) Particularly in the contemporary US context, where religious battles have played such a significant role in debates about sex education, there may be some scepticism about the value of an inquiry into secularism. There may be a concern that such a critique of secularism might misfire and result in further reinforcing the arguments of those on the political and religious ‘right’ who already strive to highlight the shortcomings of secularism. While I am keenly aware of these concerns, I pursue this study of secularism because I think that it can assist in complicating the theoretical frames currently utilized in scholarship on sex education. It is also a deliberate move away from ‘progressive’ arguments that advocate for more secularism in sex education. This study is also prompted by my own unease with a range of secular certainties that continue to emerge in scholarship on sex education. I will identify and interrogate some of these certainties throughout this article. In order to undertake such an inquiry I will first consider some theorizing on the notion of secularism outside of education, then turn to a discussion of secularism within the field of sex education. I conclude with a consideration of how sex education is often framed within increasingly pluralistic societies with strong traditions of secularism. What is secularism? Because the secular is so much part of our modern life, it is not easy to grasp it directly. I think it is best pursued through its shadows, as it were. (Asad, 2003) How secularism is understood in liberal democracies has been the subject of much recent debate. Following Talal Asad, I am not going to offer up a precise definition of secularism. As Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini point out in the introduction to their edited collection, Secularisms, there is no one true narrative of secularism, but ‘questioning what is meant by secular and what is meant by religious . . . might lead to new support for secularism and, perhaps, to new secularisms, but could also lead to new relations to religion’ (Jakobsen & Pellegrini, 2008). While Jakobsen and Pellegrini do not subscribe to the idea of one pure definition of secularism, they do endeavour to outline a familiar story about secularism: secularism is central to the Enlightenment narrative in which reason progressively frees itself from the bonds of religion and in so doing liberates humanity. This narrative poses religion as a regressive force in the world, one that in its dogmatism is not amenable to change, dialogue, or non-violent conflict resolution. This Enlightenment narrative separates secularism from religion and through this separation claims that secularism, like reason, is universal (in contrast to the particularism of religion). However, this narrative also places secularism in a particular historical tradition, one that is located in Europe and grows out of Christianity. (2008: 2) This story of a liberal and rational secularism, as told by Jakobsen and Pellegrini, situates secularism as an antidote to religion. This insight, while not new, highlights a continuing style of thought within and outside education. I am not arguing that this is what secularism is, it is not so easily defined. Rather, I am suggesting that this how secularism is often perceived. The emergence of common assumptions about the existence of secular reason is the object of Saba Mahmood’s scrutiny in her discussion ‘Is Critique Secular?’ (Mahmood, 2008). In response to Mahmood’s argument, Charles Taylor (2008), writes that for Mahmood ‘Secular reason is a language that everyone speaks, and can argue and be convinced in . . . religious reason either comes to the same conclusions as secular reason, but then it is superfluous; or it comes to contrary conclusions, and then it is dangerous and disruptive. This is why it needs to be sidelined.’ I find Mahmood and Taylor’s discussion of secularism’s epistemic frame very helpful in the context of this article because it helps me to think differently about the relationship between secularism and sex education. Such logic demands new ways of conceptualizing, and sometimes (but not always) opposing, religious arguments on the subject of sex education. To put it another way, how might I understand religious reasoning on sex education, using a frame that eschews the authority of secular reason? Rasmussen 701 Other aspects of secularism are considered by Talal Asad in his influential work, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (2003); an anthropological study of secularism, considering different political formations of secularism and how these have been shaped in different historical and national contexts. In this text he argues that ‘A secular state does not guarantee toleration; it puts into play different structures of ambition and fear’ (Asad, 2003: 7, 8). For Asad it is important to dispel the belief that liberalism somehow ensures tolerance of diverse perspectives (2003: 8). For him, these guarantees of tolerance are always bounded by certain secular logics. For instance, he points out that within the frame of secularism ‘[t]he only option religious spokespersons have . . . is to act as secular politicians do in a liberal democracy’ (Asad, 2003: 187). To be ‘reasonable’, is, at the outset, to accept the grounds set out by secularism. Secularism, religion and sex education In considering formations of the secular, Talal Asad also draws attention to how the notion of secular reason is also bound to the concept of agency in quite specific ways. He writes that agency can only be understood if it is properly contextualized because the notion of agency is continuously ‘made and remade’ according to differing secular and religious desires and ‘connection with ideas of responsibility and consciousness, are crucial to revisions in our understanding of the religious – and therefore of the secular’ (Asad, 2003: 99). Notions such as responsibility (to ourselves, to young people, to partners, to family, to society) are crucial in arguments within and about sex education. Responsibility is inextricably related to how we envisage our capacity to act (agency). And, the way this capacity to act (responsibly) is envisioned is continuously being made and remade according to the speaker and their perspective. It is also important to note that religious and secular perspectives on sex education are incredibly diverse, there is not a definitive Muslim, Christian, secular or queer perspective, and these perspectives can be and are intermingled. In imagining how sex education might be thought differently, it is valuable to foreground the diverse perspectives that inform this field of inquiry. There is, I argue, a secular form of agency underpinning some progressive research on sex education, yet the logic underpinning this continuous articulation of secular agency is less considered. Rather, the focus has been, at least in progressive discourse, on how one might achieve a sex education that produces certain sorts of agentic subjects; young people who can evaluate information given to them, and, hopefully, act on it in a responsible fashion. One example of such an approach can be seen in Catherine Ashcraft’s discussion of how popular culture might inform sex education. For Ashcraft (Ashcraft, 2003), popular culture texts, when read against deliberately dominant or progressive scripts, can create a space for young people to explore ‘conflicting emotions, feelings and experiences that defy certainty. . . We must attend to this complexity if we want teens to make responsible decisions about sex when faced with the complicated, real-life contexts in which these on-the-spot decisions most often occur’ (2003: 66). Sex education, as envisaged by Ashcraft, helps young people to make responsible decisions (exercise agency) by assisting them in examining their own internal feelings that defy certainty. Ashcraft draws on the work of Gateskill (1994 cited in Aschcraft, 2003) who argues that it is ‘not possible to develop yourself in such ways if you are attuned to following rules and codes that don’t give your inner world enough importance’ (Gateskill, cited in Aschcraft, 2003: 66). For Ashcraft, it is the ‘inner world’ that needs to be prioritized in relation to developing young people as agentic sexual subjects. Asad argues the need to challenge what he perceives as secular the idea that ‘a proper understanding of agency requires us to place it in a framework of a secular history of freedom from all coercive control, a history in which everything can be made, and pleasure always innocently enjoyed’ (2003: 73). For Asad, the configuration of agency as something that comes from within, necessarily subjugates those external knowledges that declare a certainty about issues such as sexual pleasure. My goal here is not to argue that either form of agency should be privileged within sex education. Sexual freedoms, and the capacity to act as responsible sexual subjects, are two things on which there is little agreement. Rather, I am underscoring the fact that progressive arguments that suggest young people resist rules and codes in determining sexual behaviour are properly understood as reflecting an affinity with certain formations of secular agency. The focus of Asad is primarily on the influence of secularism on Muslims, and in convincingly demonstrating the diverse ways in which secular logic and sensibilities have developed over time to ‘other’ Muslims. What I am arguing is that secular logic can also operate in relation to other non-secular perspectives. However, the relationship between Muslims and secularism is clearly not the same as the relationship between Christians and secularism, especially within the US context, and I want to avoid making simplistic parallels between Islam and Christianity. Yet the interrelationship between Christianity and secularism is also often fraught, and this is apparent in debates about sex education. While the relationship between Christianity and secularism can be difficult, it is also important to note that Christianity still holds a particular moral authority in places like the USA, and this is apparent in the manifestation of curricula such as Abstinence-Only sex education. While it is tempting to argue that such discourse is unscientific or illiberal (see later in this article), such critiques fail to bring to the fore tensions within and among different religious and secular perspectives that make claims in relation to sex education. It is also important to note that in places like the USA, the UK, Canada and Australia, the dominance of particular Christian perspectives is partially secured by secular logics, where secularism is sometimes, but not always, aligned with Christianity. In seeking to account for the relationship between certain manifestations of Christian religion, culture and liberalism Wendy Brown argues that within liberalism there are ‘a set of interrelated juridical and ideological moves in which religion and culture are privatised and the cultural and religious dimensions of liberalism are disavowed’ (Brown, 2006: 169). Secularism might declare it is neutral Rasmussen 703 in relation to religion, but such claims are blind to secularisms’ cultural and religious underpinnings. Secularism cannot be separated from certain types of religious prejudices, despite rhetoric to the contrary. Paradoxically, Christianity relies on secularism for its dominance, at the same time as some Christians rail against the evils of secular humanism. While the place of Christianity within places like the USA is certainly contested, religious and moral perspectives formed outside liberal and Christian traditions, and which might question these assumptions, are always already ‘irrational’. My focus here is on understanding how religion is framed in progressive discourse on sex education. This is recognition that secularism’s normativity does not equate to any one religious perspective, even as certain religions are undoubtedly more alienated by secularism’s norms. Secular norms in sex education In an article ‘Sexual politics, torture and secular time’, Judith Butler argues that in the field of sexual politics sexual radicalism often becomes a ‘privileged site’ associated with ‘the sphere of modernity’ (2008: 2). Which prompts one to consider how ‘sexual progressives’, in arguing their cause, may construct hegemonic conceptions of progress [that] define themselves over and against a premodern [religious] temporality that they produce for the purposes of their own self legitimation. And, their intense focus on sexual health is heteronormative- risk based and scientific approaches obfuscates moral difference and forecloses queer possibilities. Doing away with a purely secular approach is key. Rasmussen 2010 (mary lou, Faculty of Education, Monash University, “Secularism, religion and ‘progressive’ sex education,” Sexualities, 13: pg. 699-711)

Politically, the questions, what time are we in? are all of us in the same time? and specifically, who has arrived in modernity and who has not? (Butler, 2008) Butler’s focus is on the relationship between modernity, secularism and anti- Islamic practices. In the context of this article, modernity is conceptualized as a certain style of thought which is associated with particular relationships to truth, scientificity and religion within the field of sex education. I am endeavouring to highlight how certain secular affinities coagulate to produce ‘progressive’ discourses in the field of sex education. This study of the structure of ‘progressive’ research in sex education is partially motivated by my own experience of living in Australia, a place where sex education is marked by strong associations with sexual health – particularly within schoolbased sex education. This association between health and sex education, at least according to some religious groups in the Australian context, is problematic because it does not make distinctions between different values and refuses distinctions between the value of heterosexuality and homosexuality. Thus religious schools in Australia develop their own sex education curricula, which is quite distinct from the one that is taught in state schools. In stating this, my aim is not is not to develop a universal sex education, but rather to illustrate that in the US and Australian contexts, different groups feel that certain types of sex education are hegemonic and prejudiced toward or against certain religious perspectives. In studying sex education through the lens of secularism I identify and analyse some of these tensions. Here, my focus is specifically on those who would argue for more ‘scientifically accurate’ sex education, while also critiquing religious excess in sex education. In a recent article on abstinence-only sex education in the USA, Leslie Kantor, John Santelli, Julien Teitler and Randall Balmer rail against the US government’s support for sex education programmes that restrict the content that teachers are allowed to cover in sex education classes. For Kantor et al. (2008) such programmes are problematic because information used in this curricula ‘is not scientifically accurate, particularly information about the efficacy of condoms and contraception, gender, sexual orientation, and the risks of sexual activity’ (2008: 11). What is striking about such a claim in the context of this article is the assumption that the credibility of how issues such as sexual orientation and risk are framed in the curriculum is principally an issue of scientificity. Kantor and colleagues may seek to criticize abstinence-only sex education on scientific grounds because they feel that there is much expert knowledge that they can cite to support their argument. However, this tendency to utilize scientific credibility against abstinence-only education obfuscates the moral dilemmas that are clearly central to the production of such curricula. The authors are keenly aware that the religious right has been influential in the construction of abstinence-only curricula and a section of their article explicitly addresses this fact. But while the authors are aware of this influence, they go on to conclude that ‘abstinence programs must be reviewed for accuracy’ (Kantor et al., 2003: 15). Who is the audience of articles such as this that debate the accuracy of sex education curricula? My suspicion is that such an article seeks to prove the inaccuracy of religious influence on sex education to other like-minded readers, readers who might also be convinced by the weight of a scientific argument – a key strategy of legitimation within modernity. In a similar vein, Felicity Mebane, Eileen Yam and Barbara Rimer, in an article about journalism on virginity pledges, claim their research is motivated by the conviction that government policies on sex education should be informed, at least in part, by scientific evidence. While we recognize that multifaceted debates involving teens, sex and pregnancy often must take into account several potentially conflicting considerations, including religious and political, we argue that all discussions of sex education alternatives should include at least a reference to the related research on public health impacts. (Mebane et al., 2006: 585) The arguments advanced in these articles are predicated on the belief that citing and disseminating scientific evidence related to the effectiveness of certain of strategies within sex education will effect a movement away from unscientific sex education. Such tactics underscore the value of science in informing sex education. Religious perspectives are seen as unscientific, and therefore superfluous within such discourse. But such an argument fails to engage certain conservative religious claims in relation to sex education. While some progressive scholars in sex education avoid this engagement, sex education teachers and education bureaucrat must Rasmussen 705 register the influence of the religious right on sex education curricula and they ignore the weight of such opinion at their peril. Perhaps a more effective tactic might be for progressive scholars to consider the diversity of religious influences that inhabit the American landscape and to consider how a sex education curriculum might better reflect this diversity, replete with contradictory positions. Another well-respected North American scholar who studies the issue of sex education is Cris Mayo. I turn to Mayo’s (2006) work because it specifically grapples with philosophical issues in sex education from a progressive context, and because many of Mayo’s arguments have been significant in informing my own scholarship in the field of sex education. Mayo’s article is germane to the field of sex education because it focuses on how schools deal with sexual diversity within and outside formal sex education curricula. In this piece, Mayo draws our attention to the uneven nature of the liberal relationship to the separation between church and state. When liberals discuss religion, they often assume that the central question is the relation between the religion and the state. They neglect the broad effect that religious and quasi-religious laws, regulations and practices have on queer2 people, on nonbelievers (two subjects that do not completely overlap). Maybe even more problematically, liberals argue about religion as if there were a wall of separation that they can graciously invite religious people over from time to time. (Mayo, 2006: 477) I think it is a great mistake to attempt any reconciliation [between religion and liberalism] and would much prefer that liberalism happily cede the soul to the religious authority and fully maintain its responsibility for the citizen. Any commingling of religion and liberalism has only been to the detriment of queer people and attempts to make the disagreements between the two seem less weighty only make current efforts to improve actual queer lives harder. (Mayo, 2006: 478) She compellingly argues that a look at the history of sex education in the USA makes it clear that there is a strong religious influence on the formation of sex education and that this influence is testament to the inconsistency with which separations between religion and the state are applied. In the second quotation, Mayo argues that the commingling of religion and the state is therefore problematic for queer people and consequently liberals might think twice before ‘graciously inviting’ religious types into the public arena. For Mayo ‘the normalization of the relation between liberalism and religion’ contributes to what she terms as ‘the perversification of queer citizenship’ (2006: 477). There are good reasons for theorists such as Mayo to be concerned that ‘queer youth’ are often denied a sense of futurity by forms of sex education ‘intent on educating youth away from queerness’ (2006: 471). I strongly share these concerns. What I am less sure about is the value of holding on to secular assumptions in order to argue for a more progressive form of sex education. For Mayo ‘liberal theory and the liberal state need to provide more support for queer possibilities’ (2006: 487), and this can be achieved in part by diminishing the influence of religion. My concern with this manoeuvre is that it endeavours to reinstate a separation between religion and the state, a separation that Mayo herself concedes is highly permeable. Can we concur with Mayo when she suggests that queers will be better off if liberals help to reduce the commingling of religion and the state when she also suggests that liberalism does draw its moral center from religion and has thus far been unable to acknowledge that part of this moral center involves preference for heterosexuality to the point of dislike of homosexuality? (2006: 470. Italics in original) If Mayo is correct that liberalism is already bound up in certain types of religious truths, truths it is ‘unable to acknowledge’ – then it seems questionable whether liberalism is truly secular (at least insofar as secularism is understood as a separation of religion and state). And if liberalism is not truly secular, where does this leave those who would advocate for queer rights by arguing against the commingling of religion and liberalism? I am trying to highlight a tension in Mayo’s argument – a desire for a less religiously infused liberalism, appears alongside recognition of liberalism’s inability to recognize its own moral truths. There is something of a paradox inherent in Mayo’s desire for liberalism to become less religious, when the religious underpinning of liberalism is always, already refuted. The association between modernity and sexual progressivism, referred to in Butler’s discussion of secular time (mentioned earlier), is also apparent in Mayo’s discussion on the deficiencies of liberalism in responding to the needs of queer children. However, in reading Mayo’s comment it is also important to consider that these comments were addressed to a largely US audience at a time of sustained attacks on programmes designed to support gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans identified young people. Mayo goes on to argue that: While liberal theorists debate whether or not some cultures should continue to exist after the conditions for their flourishing have been obliterated by modernization, the queer community and queer kids exist because of modernization: it is possible to live outside of marriage, to support oneself, to form new kinds of communities. Arguably, queer communities are populated by paradigmatically modern citizens, and, as much as one may tire of citing dire statistics and want instead to point to innovations and resiliency among queer youth, it remains a fact that liberal theory and the liberal state need to provide more support for queer possibilities, through education and other institutions, and to recognize the particular challenge to traditional family forms, autonomy, and sexuality that queer youth bring. (Mayo, 2006: 487) ‘Queer youth’ is characterized as ‘paradigmatically modern’ and therefore in need of support from the liberal state. In the foregoing context Mayo situates the survival of those who are not modern, like queer kids, as somehow occupying a different field Rasmussen 707 of politics to those others being obliterated by modernization. Using the language of modernity in arguing for the rights of queer kids situates discussions about young people and sexuality alongside broader debates where ‘sexual radicals’ are somehow separate from others who are situated outside what Butler (2008) terms ‘the sphere of modernity’. If queers are paradigmatically modern, as Mayo suggests, then who does not qualify as modern? This is not a call to desist from arguing the importance of more support for ‘queer possibilities, through education and other institutions’ (Mayo, 2006: 487). But in advocating for more ‘queer possibilities’ it is also important to interrogate how ‘progressive’ arguments are framed in the field of sex education. Do we really want to use associations with modernity as lever to demand more support for queer youth? Religious excess in sex education I now further consider some of the different ways in which religion is problematized in relation to sex education debates. In the way that these debates are shaped there has been a sense that one must be secular, or religious. I argue further that the focus on religion (especially on the religious right) as problematic in progressive discourse on sex education has become an important strategy utilized by those who support secular sex education. The repeated critique of the religious right leaves aside more difficult questions about how sex education might deal with diverse value positions in a highly pluralistic society. I am not denying that the religious right have been incredibly influential in the battles over sex education in the USA. What I am arguing is that the intense and understandable focus on their influence, to the exclusion of other sorts of religious influences, structures scholarly debate on issues related to sex education in a particular way. In framing the debate as a battle, and in researching it using this frame, secular/ religious binaries continue to be reinstantiated, and, I would argue, the secular assumptions that underpin research on sex education continue to go uninterrogated. Judith Levine’s (2003) Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex and Kristin Luker’s (2006) When Sex Goes to School: Warring View on Sex – and Sex Education – Since the Sixties and Janice Irvine’s Talk About Sex: The Battles Over Sex Education in the United States (2004) are three texts that seek to analyse sex education using the rhetoric of battle. One reviewer on the cover of Levine’s book advertises it as a ‘cogent and passionate critique of the war against young people’s sexuality’. In the Afterword to her text the association between sex and war is complete. Levine writes Sexual peril is real, just as terrorism is real. But the kind of ‘protection’ that is mobilized by fear, the kind that purports to keep the young safe by locking them in their rooms, ignorant and scared to death – policies like abstinence-only education – will not protect them. Like the U.S.A. Patriot Act, such policies offer only illusory security, because they do nothing to stop the wellsprings of danger. Ironically or intentionally, those wellsprings are the very ignorance and terror we’re instilling in kids, whereas the means of their self-defense are knowledge and courage, as well as rights and respect, political and sexual citizenship. (Levine, 2003) In the rhetoric of terror, mobilized by Levine, it appears that security against peril can be guaranteed via sex education, which, if comprehensive, might also be equated with a liberatory form of sexual and political citizenship. Such a formulation puts a lot of faith in the capacity of a secular sex education to protect all children as well as instilling courage, rights and respect. One might also perceive Levine’s formulation of this conflict: the linking of sexual peril and terrorism. Thus Christian and Islamic fundamentalisms become intertwined as a monolithic other that might be defeated by insistence on secular protections. For Levine, democracy is served when schools are non-sectarian and individual rights are upheld. Wendy Brown (2006), in her text Regulating Aversion, seeks to underscore some of the shortcomings of such a framing of justice. She points to a paradox within liberalism in which Nonliberal societies and practices, especially those designated as fundamentalist, are depicted not only as relentlessly and inherently intolerant but as potentially intolerable for their putative rule by culture or religion and their concomitant devaluation of the autonomous individual – in short, their thwarting of individual autonomy with religious or cultural commandments. (Brown, 2006: 166) Brown’s critique specifically focuses on those who are cast as fundamentalist and outside ‘nonliberal societies’. She suggests that tolerance has become synonymous with certain understandings associated with liberalism; these understandings situate those who would prioritize religion or culture over the rights of the individual as necessarily intolerant. To my mind, such an argument must also be applicable to those within liberal societies who espouse different forms of fundamentalism. Which is not to say that fundamentalism should be privileged over liberalism, but rather to recognize that certain formations of secular liberalism have a tendency to situate religion as illiberal and intolerable, while simultaneously failing to reckon with their own intolerance of religion. Brown goes on to argue that Out of this equation, liberalism emerges as the only potential rationality that can produce the individual, societal and governmental practice of tolerance, and, at the same time, liberal societies become the broker of what is tolerable and intolerable . . . the intolerance associated with fundamentalism is equated with the valorization of culture and religion at the expense of the individual, an expense that makes such orders intolerable from a liberal vantage point. (Brown, 2006: 166) What I am concerned about in the production of scholarship on sex, sexuality and sex education in the context of schooling is that religion does not become secularism’s other. Similarly, Judith Butler, in the ‘Afterword’ to Bodily Citations: Religion and Judith Butler, warns against ‘smug secularism’ while underscoring Rasmussen 709 the importance of those within the Catholic Church who continue to struggle against ‘paralyzing judgements’ that have papal authority (Butler, 2006). If sex education is to have relevance to young people it must reflect and engage the diverse contexts from which these young people come, even when these contexts cannot be easily reconciled. Which is not to say that young people should only be exposed to one set of values, according to their religious, sexual or ethnic identification. Rather, I argue that secularism, like religion, is steeped in particular value judgements about what constitutes a quality sex education. Conclusions: Freedom and secularism In debates about sex education, discussions of how diverse value positions might be effectively represented have become increasingly rigid, especially in places such as the USA where there have been ongoing vociferous conflicts about school-based sex education. Though in places such as Australia, where these conflicts have been, arguably, less fraught, the bifurcation of sexual and religious perspectives is also apparent. In writing about the relationship between religion and secularism, Janet Jakobsen argues: In the traditional view, religious repression is the root of sexual regulation and hence freedom from religion is the answer to the problem. This traditional view plays into the larger Enlightenment narrative in which freedom from religion brings about human liberation. In contrast to this view, however, I argue that our problem is as much secular freedom as it is religious regulation. (Jakobsen, 2005) Secular freedom continues to be a dominant trope within the field of sex education. In failing to do away with this trope, I think that those who would advocate for a progressive sex education do themselves a disservice. As Ann Pellegrini notes in her discussion of Hell Houses3 in the Southern USA (2007) ‘by dismissing arguments that are not articulated in the terms with which we are familiar, we overlook the very places where politics comes to matter most: at the deepest levels of the unconscious, in our bodies, through faith, and in relation to the emotions’ (Pellegrini, 2007). In this article I am keen to prompt a reconsideration of how secularism and religion interrelate in debates about sex education. It is recognized that there are many tensions between conservative religiosity and more ‘secular’ perspectives on sex and gender, within and outside the Judaeo- Christian tradition. Though it is also true to say that within different religious and secular traditions, the positions on sex and gender are also incredibly diverse, making it meaningless to try and produce a definitive Muslim, Christian, secular or queer perspective. The answer to this diversity is not recourse to a ‘simple culturalism’ founded on the idea that there are discrete communities with discernable borders. By accepting that communities are neatly bounded one might then move to ‘resolve’ tensions between these diverse ‘communities’ (Butler, 2008: 1). Such an approach inevitably overlooks diversity within groups and the permeable borders between groups. Instead we might ‘let a thousand conflicts of interpretation bloom . . . questions, loud and clear, remain intrinsic goods’ (Butler, 2006: 289).

Secularism coheres divinity to whiteness the dialectics of lordship push colonial subjects into zones of non-being naturalizing violene in this death world Craun 13 [Dustin Craun writer, community organizer, an anti-racist educator and a communications strategist. "Exploring Pluriversal Paths Toward Transmodernity: From the Mind-Centered Egolatry of Colonial Modernity to Islam’s Epistemic Decolonization through the Heart." Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 11.1 (2013): 9.//Blackmagic] Here, I will look at the work of Nelson Maldonado-Torres, as it relates to the construction of the overrepresentation of Man. According to him, from the beginning of global modernity the ego conquiro emerges as the “paradigm of war,”29 and becomes the central facet of human life. In his book Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity, Maldonado-Torres centrally argues that since 1492 European modernity has become, …inextricably linked with the experience of the warrior and conqueror and the modern colonization, racism, and other forms of social and geopolitical dynamics in the modern world can be understood in terms of the naturalization of the paradigm of war.30 It is within this paradigm of existence where war has become naturalized that, according to Maldonado-Torres, ethics as applicable to Western Man are replaced by what he calls the “death ethic of war,”31 or the “non-ethics of war.”32 As a radical project of “de-colonial love,”33 Maldonado-Torres uses Emanuel Levinas, Frantz Fanon, and Enrique Dussel as philosophers of the “de-colonial reduction” while making his own theoretical contributions towards a “philosophy of liberation.”34 He chooses to use these three philosophers together because, Levinas, Fanon, and Dussel respond critically to the realities of war as they encounter them in the context of Nazism, French imperialism, intolerable Eurocentrism, and the menace of U.S. Americanism and its salvific mission of freedom, all of which are preceded if not tied to each other by a long history of racialization and colonization that goes back to at least 1492.35 I think Maldonado-Torres’ understanding of the “paradigm of war” has made an important philosophical contribution to our understanding of Man. Most important to my discussion here are the first of two chapters on Frantz Fanon at the center of the book titled, “God and the Other in the Self-Recognition of Imperial Man.”36 In the anti-black colonial world in which Fanon was writing, the Manichean opposition characterized for him “modern/colonial thinking and power”37—a modern/colonial world where the pathological became normal as the colonial and racist context in which he lived in its totality was “a metaphysical transformation of the world.”38 In this transformed world “Imperial Man” would hold itself up as God, while its colonial subjects would be relegated to the realm of “non-being.” It is here that the “non-beings” of colonialism would experience the “colonial death world” which would become, the ethical limit of human reality. It is a context in which violence and war are no longer extraordinary, but become instead ordinary features of human existence. This perverse expression of the conversion of the extraordinary into the ordinary represents a “limit” situation, or perhaps even a post-limit situation in the sense that the excess of abnormality goes beyond its climax and begets another reality in which it comes to define the normal.39 As the status of “non-being” had become normal, the question then became how did the white colonizers recognize themselves as the ‘supreme beings at the center of the universe.’ While Fanon did not take up a serious analysis of white consciousness until The Wretched of the Earth,40 to address his argument pertaining to white consciousness Maldonado-Torres begins with a discussion of the “dialectics of lordship and bondage.” Here Maldonado-Torres, taking his lead from Fanon,41 discusses Hegel’s understanding of the “struggle for recognition” which, “takes the form of a dialectic whose terms are those of lordship and bondsman, or master and slave.”42 In this discussion he points out that while the slave must look to the master for recognition, and thus his humanity, “In an Imperial World lordship is the position of a privileged self that does not even turn toward the slave to achieve recognition.”43 The ultimate question then, that also has relevance for us today, is If the master/slave dialectic is not overcome by other forms of Spirit but remains a constant explicative factor of human relations defined by the experience of imperialism and colonialism, then we must ask how is it that the master, who in the colonial relation does not look for recognition from the slave, achieves recognition and sustains his position as master?44According To Suha Sabbagh, it was not until Wretched of the Earth that Fanon focused on this understanding of white consciousness, but it is through this text that we understand that, The West was able to do without the recognition of the ‘non-whites’ because it has created an image of this native as an inferior entity within the confines of Western discourse. Against the other, Western positional superiority and identity could be established.45 It is here through the continuous Manichean production of negative and positive images that the picture of the self and the Other is constructed. According to Maldonado- Torres, this “imperial self-assertion” is constructed through what he calls “the positive.”46 This positive image of the self— or what I call white benevolent innocence47— is taken to its height in the imperial world where, “In empire, God becomes the privileged other who alone can provide authentic recognition to the imperial self.”48 So in this construction, consciousness of God becomes knowledge of the superior self, and thus the making of God in the image of man, as in the imperial Christian form, which takes on great significance in the production of the modern/colonial self. As Maldonado- Torres understands, in one of his many important contributions to the theory, this form of recognition produces the “egolatry” of Imperial man. He writes, A logic of sub-alteration is contained in the process of recognition of Imperial Man. God recognizes Man, Man takes the shape of God, and then others come to be seen as the very incarnation of evil. This logic does not respond so much to interests in the conciliation with nature as, more fundamentally, to interests in the subordination of other human beings. Modern imperial man is no pagan. He does not divinize nature, but rather becomes himself God with the sole purpose of enslaving others. Idolatry becomes egolatry, a perverse egolatry that works in the function of the rejection of otherness. At the end, narcissism becomes homicidal, and the command “Thou shall not kill” is transformed into a project of identity based on the principle “I kill, therefore I am.49 Despite secularism becoming the center of Western life, according to Maldonado- Torres, Imperial Man through race, the nation-state, and free market capitalism, is able to sustain, “the position of the master as the one and only lord.”50 Despite the shift from a religious center to a mostly secular space, the production of Western/white lordship is still produced through a constant bombardment of Manichean images of the West and the non-West. This expunging of religion prevents any forms of meaningful queer activism—rather the state utilizes queer identity to legitimize violence against the amorphous “terrorist” other Carling, 2016 (Alan, prof. of social sciences @ University of Bradford, UK “The Social Equality of Religion or Belief” pg. 202-203) The strategizing by OutRage! and Peter Tatchell against the Church of England's official opposition to same-sex marriage clearly demonstrates the continuing concern of queer activism with the manifestation of reli- gious homophobia. What is less clear, though, is the underlying rationale underpinning these interventions, or their relevance to contemporary lesbian and gay politics. It is often said that responses to religion have been grounded in an intuitive and hard-line queer secularism motivated by the desire to expurgate any and all expressions of reli- gion from the public sphere, on the assumption that "religion is a priori opposed to homosexuality [and is] inherently and intrinsically at the forefront of anti-]qt?i' world-making" (Puar 2014: 205). The highly oppositional stance towards religious belief taken today by much queer- informed thinking is understandable, of course, given the oppression and cruelty historically inflicted on queers as a direct consequence of faith-based bigotry. However, as an increasing number of writers have shown, an unreflective secularism can also create new injustices and close down important strategic opportunities for transforma- tive queer activism. First, it has been increasingly accepted by scholars that secu- larist thinking has had the effect of silencing the lived experiences of people of faith and in doing so weakened their efforts to transform religious organizations into more inclusive communities, accepting of lives, from within. For instance, as Hunt (2002: 9) notes, too often with activists, like "[m]any in the lesbian/gay community see gay Christian activists as dupes and masochists engaged in a neurotic and meaningless struggle. Some go further and scorn the believer's activism as an obstacle to the building of a distinctive gay spirituality...that is distinct from a limited Christian one." Only more recently has concerted effort been made to draw attention to and interrogate the dynamics of queer religiosity and to recognize its signifi-cance to strategies aimed against religious homophobia (Cooper and Snowden 2014; Cheng 2011). Secondly, a growing number of post-co- lonial queer writers have also explored how an unbending and unre- flective secularism has contributed to the complicity of queer activism in the manipulation by some Western nations of the cause of lesbian and gay equality to justify racist and neo-imperialist political strategies, such as immigration control and the 'War on Terror', espe- cially through the construction of Islam as a faith movement intrin- sically opposed to Western queer lives. Jasbir Puar (2014) has famously termed this phenomenon "homonationalism". Attentiveness to these concerns about the effects of an often taken- for-granted queer secularism suggests the need for a more nuanced and sophisticated position on religious belief and the homophobia it can reproduce, which is equipped to challenge the oppressive impli- cations of faith-based bigotry while avoiding co-option to new injus- tices against people of faith. With this in mind, I want to return in this Chapter to a seam of queer scholarship, primarily from the United States, which has tried to push activism away from an unbending queer secularism' and towards a more-sharply focused queer politics of 'disestablishment' The alternative is a Queerthinking of Religion-a metaphysical intervention into their homosecularist project- by injecting spirituality into educational spaces we can break down violent binaries. Scherer 2017 (Bee, Professor of Religious Studies and Gender Studies @ CCCU, UK, “Queerthinking Religion: Queering Religious Paradigms,” The Scholar and Feminist Online, Issue 14.2) Value-neutral evaluation of “religion/faith” manifesting in cultural/religious, morally protean embodied practices also allows us to challenge another binary in form of the dualistic construction of “queer” and/vs. “religion”: the idea that “bad religion” is persecuting the “good queers.” Challenging the myth of the good religion should be balanced by challenging the myth of the per se ethical superiority of any (member of any) marginalized group. Being the victim of aphallophobia (sexism, homo-/bi-phobia, transphobia) does not render anyone into a saint. Hence, with all the queering, troubling and subverting it might be worth to ask the question of the possibility of (post-)queer ethics or ethics after queering. 4. Queerthinking Religion: Queering Religious Paradigms Notwithstanding the queer impulse to subvert phallic religions’ institutional, oppressive power, the recent decades and years have seen an increasing academic interest in the spiritual needs, expressions and practices of queer subjects themselves.[26] And, while queer spiritual yearnings and needs spawned some queer-inclusive/-embracing religious practices,[27] in the contemporary societal discourses on Human Rights, in particular in the Global North, Religious rights and LGBTIQ rights are still topical dichotomies,[28] exhibiting productive and genealogical dynamics.[29] This inimical discursive current is aided by the above-mentioned idiosyncrasy of the very type of identity politics, which attributes an implicit value to different characteristics and affords religious convictions a priori protection, even when they are harmfully discriminatory. For example, in North-America, institutionalized religion in the form of conservative Christianities is almost invariably seen as incompatible with queer liberation and LGBTIQ subjectivities: religious (here: Christian) cultural codes form vestigial governmental structures by (re-)erecting the spiritual phallus; in this way they play an important part of queerophobic oppression and soul murder. LGBTIQ Christians are hence viewed as suffering from ‘Stockholm syndrome.’ As Johansson puts it: If they deny the responsibility of the Church for the soul murder that it has committed upon homosexuals, individually and collectively, through aeons of intimidation and oppression, then they are acting as the accomplices of a criminal psychopath, and when the magnitude of the crime that institutional Christianity has perpetrated is revealed to the world, they—and the Church—will suffer unparalleled dishonor.[30] I propose calling the particular form of homonormativity which antithetically constructs itself to religion and faith and vocally demands belligerent secularism from its LGBTIQ subjects “homosecularism”. In the consequence of counter-Christian homosecularism, Queer Christians, Theologians and Religionists are left in an uncomfortable position to justify their allegiance to or interest in—per se—’anti-LGBTIQ’ religion. For scholars of religion, the possible coping strategies include the recluse to the academic Ivory Tower or the biographically more challenging option of becoming queer academics-cum-activists. Most Christian Queer Theologians appear to have invented themselves as the latter. Once the freedom to practice a religion cannot be construed to imply the freedom to oppress the religiously abject or ‘other’, the allegedly essential oppositionality of LGBTIQ identities and religions (as their oppressors) might be bridged by thinking about and asserting spiritual needs and rights as part of a (secondary) Human Rights discourse for queer subjects, lest to a priori cut off the religious/spiritual from the array of possible identitarian expressions for LGBTIQs. In its possibly most explicit form, Harry Hay’s inception of the Radical Faeries caters for this.[31] The ensuing dynamic can lead to the creation of inclusive spiritual places; it expresses itself in multiple ways: as creating new queer spiritual spaces (e.g. LoveSpirit Festival[32] ) or claiming a queer space even in queerophobic religious contexts and, by doing so, subverting queerophobic institutions; as heightening queer spiritual visibility; as queer appropriation of religious modernisms (science, rationalism discourse) and postmodern spiritualities. Queer religious scholar-cum-activist pragmatism can mean supporting those theologies, which open up institutional religious discourses while avoiding queer retrospect utopias—à la Boswell.[33] Queer spiritual re-empowerment consists of the jouissant reclaiming of religious agency for informed, individual empowerment. Empowered spiritual choices can form an agentive foundation for a queer-religious dialogue with the religious phallus—those forms of religion, which are most invested in the wielding of societal power and exclusion. The onus falls on any organized religion in the focus of a (Foucauldian and post-Foucauldian) discourse analysis critique to do some honest soul- (and phallus!-) searching in regards to the past and the present religious oppression and violence—without trying to deflect blame or obscure the past; the trust of LGBTIQ subjects embroidered into the dichotomist[n discourse of LGBTIQ rights vs. religion can only be advanced by sincere steps towards repent (in Christian terms) and reform on the side of the religious institutions and organizations; for example, exactly such an act of repent was demanded on January 7th, 2016 by 105 senior Anglicans from the Anglican communion[34] yet to no avail: on the contrary, the Anglican communion appears to have reverted to a firm anti-LGBT stance by punishing the US Episcopal Church “over its stance on same-sex marriage and homosexuality.”[35] Queer-religious relations can be approved above all by firmly basing religious practice on the “human principle”—the principle, which puts the embodied person above any abstract doctrine and establishes concrete compassion and love-in-action above abstract ideas. Any such dialogue also asks from queer subjects to dare compassion and forgiveness—after succeeding in self-compassion and self-forgiveness!—despite any potential residual spiritual wounds LGBTIQ people might individually or collectively bear. In that way, an empowered spiritual choice can become the instrument to healing. Within this process, the re-spiritualization of queerness becomes part of the queer resistance to neo-liberal homonormativity, which expresses itself in late-capitalist; consumerist; and, also, hedonistic homosecularism. Moving beyond these alignments, it appears to me that a successful queer re-spiritualization will need to be preceded by individual value shifts from materialist egotism to living a (post/)queer ethics of embodied compassion-in-action (and—activism). A queerthought spiritual and/or religious identity can naturally draw meaning and jouissance from a “spiritual awakening” (to use, again, religious—namely Theo-Christian—language), which aims at (and performs) an empowered LGBTIQ spiritual embodiment. For me, claiming the responsibility for this empowerment naturally results in an urgent social activist impulse: the queering of religious paradigms. The new approach to the messy relationship of queerness and religion suggested in this paper departs from the necessary problematizing of the key concepts involved. While questioning the endless extendibility of the term, I propose taking “queer” as a form of intersectional resistance. I further make the argument to rethink religion as value-neutral and morally protean and, in consequence, to challenge religion’s position in the hierarchy of rights. Instead I propose “bodily integrity” as strong principle of societal—legal and ethical—evaluation, while leaving intact the complexity of the embodied religious Self. Finally I argue to move beyond troubling towards the nurturing the embodied subject: queer embodied spirituality and ethics as fruitful and joyful compassion-in-action/activism can successfully move beyond homosecularism translating spiritual yearning into forms of belonging, which resist neoliberal homonormativity.

Metaphysics come first- ignoring the religious foundations of sex ed makes serial policy failure inevitable and empowers extremism. Rasmussen 2017 (Mary, Professor of Sociology, Australian National University Gender, Sexuality, Sex Education, Queer Theory, Reproduction, “Faith, Progressive Sexuality Education, and Queer Secularism: Unsettling Association,” pg. 130-132) For those who do not agree with the message, speaking back to this style of pedagogy can be a difficult task. This performance of sexual exceptionalism left me wondering about the shared pleasures to be found in characterizing certain types of people as backward—which isn’t to say that homophobia is unproblematic. Progressive sexuality education, when it is underpinned by sexual exceptionalism and/or queer secularism, is not that far removed from Ballard’s gig. It inadvertently, teaches young people lessons about who is like “us”—and, by virtue of curricular absences—who is not like “us”—the “us” being sexual progressives. Complex entanglements of sexuality, secularism, and Christianity in the USA are examined by Jakobsen and Pellegrini in Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance ( 2004 ). Arguing against calls “for a stricter enforcement of the separation of church and state” (12), Jakobsen and Pellegrini point out that American secularism is not really that secular (13). Divisions between church and state are blurred by the public expressions of religiosity by political figures (every President must affirm their religiosity), by the celebration of religious holidays, and, by the affirmation aforded religious rituals—marriage being a prime example. Given this reading of the US context, Jakobsen and Pellegrini argue for m ore public space for secularism. … We want the freedom not to be religious and the freedom to be religious differently. And we want both these positions to count as the possible basis for moral claims and public policy. ( 2004 : 12–13) Th is take on secularism and religion is integral to thinking sexuality education otherwise. Such a style of thought might perceive marriage equality as not distinct from religious discourse, but something deeply infused with religious overtones, thereby refusing the characterization of queer and religion as necessarily separate. Sexuality educators might engage young people in conversations about the value of marriage from diverse religious and secular perspectives—recognizing that both formations are interwoven with moral claims. Such an approach does not discount the important work of identifying and interrogating legal, economic, physical, and political violence experienced by “sexual others” (Puar 2007 : 10) and by “religious others” within and outside the USA. Th is approach may not be perceived as distinct from Lesko’s call for open inquiry. To my mind, what distinguishes this approach is its explicit engagement of religion, race, and culture as pertinent to public discussions of sexuality education—but not with a view to demonstrating, once again, how backward religious people are (see Ballard). Apprehending the ways in which debates about “the political and the religious, the public and the private” (1–3) structure sexuality education also requires an examination of how specific notions of sexual freedom are conditioned by liberalism and post structural feminism (Scott 2009 ). Freedom in sexuality education has been associated with the production of autonomous and agentic sexual subjects (Corngold 2013 ). To this end, Josh Corngold has endeavored to articulate a vision of sexuality education that promotes young people’s minimalist autonomy, explicitly including cultural, religious, and ethnic attachments as part of his conception of autonomy. He writes: the conception of minimalist autonomy that I have begun to outline here is not so strong that it requires persons to foreswear close and enduring connections to faith, family, community, and tradition, neither is it so weak that it condones habitual deference or servility. To assert that someone could still count as an autonomous agent whose life decisions and aspirations are largely dictated or controlled by others is to depart grossly from the ordinary usage of the concept. An individual certainly need not abnegate all loyalties, allegiances, and i interpersonal ties that bind in order to be considered autonomous. Th is person must, however, be willing and able, after duly considering various alternatives, to make key judgments and life decisions for him- or herself. ( 2013 : 473) At the heart of Corngold’s approach is the autonomous individual, who can, ideally, with the help of schools, parents, and peers “sift through and critically examine discrepant messages to which they are exposed” (465). It is possible to see here a characterization of the sexuality educator’s role as to encourage young people “to enact self-determined goals and interests” (Mahmood 2005 : 10). Saba Mahmood perceives such ideas of autonomy and self-determination as central to liberal and progressive feminist thought. Mahmood doesn’t seek to diminish the transformative power of liberal and feminist discourses of autonomy (13), but she is critical of the imaginings of freedom that underpins such discourses. Drawing on liberal theorists distinctions between positive and negative freedom to illustrate the shape of freedom within this imaginary, she writes: I n short, positive freedom may be best described as the capacity for self-mastery and self-government, and negative freedom as the absence of restraints of various kinds on one’s ability to act as one wants. … Liberalism’s unique contribution is to link the notion of self-realization with individual autonomy. (Mahmood 2005 : 10–11) (my emphasis) Feminism and liberalism, in this formulation, prioritize “the ability to autonomously ‘choose’ one’s desires no matter how illiberal they may be” (Mahmood 2005 : 12). Similarly, within the context of sexuality education there is a prioritization of the right of young people to make their own choices (Corngold 2013) , even if those choices sometimes might not be perceived as wise or healthy choices (Whitehead 2005) . In this imagining of sexual freedom, religion and belief can play a part in sexual decision-making, but they are only admissible when they are seen as compatible with the cultivation of autonomous decision-making, within the progressive-secular imaginary. Th is is because custom and tradition, and one might add religion and belief, are seen to impinge on sexual freedom, insofar as they may counter self- sovereignty. Within Corngold’s vision for sexuality education, custom and tradition, and religion and belief are acceptable, as long as they are not perceived as contrary to self-sovereignty/autonomy. Such conceptualizations of self-sovereignty are, Mahmood argues, apparent in the work of poststructural feminist critiques that have “highlighted the illusory character of the rationalist, self-authorizing, transcendental subject”, which secures its authority by “performing a necessary exclusion of all that is bodily, feminine, emotional, and intersubjective (Butler 1999; Gatens 1996; Grosz 1994)” ( 2005 : 13, 14). In the passage below, Mahmood teases out some of her concerns she has with how notions of autonomy and poststructural feminism have produced their own norms:

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1.The 1ac posits the inclusion of gay and trans people into sex ed curriculum as a radical departure from the logics of sexual managerialism in abstinence-only education. But logics of sexual inclusivity and multiculturalism only provide the basis for entrance into administrative and professionalized fields that treat sexuality as an object of study. The framework of “inclusion” serves to create qualifying criteria for minoritized participation and to adjudicate more nuanced inclusions and exclusions. The aff, in its desire for recognition and visibility, has merely reproduced institutional logics that produce knowledge of sexuality-as-power. Ferguson 2012 (Roderick A. Ferguson, “The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference” | University of Minnesota Press, 2012. pp. 209-212) [NJ] Administering Sexuality; or, The Will to Institutionality THE PRECEDING CHAPTERS have dealt with the ways in which race, nationality, and gender have been maneuvered by hegemonic affirmation. This chapter turns to sexuality's journey in power's latest mode. In particular, it looks at sexuality to ask, What changes does a mode of difference undergo in administrative contexts? The chapter poses this question about minority difference and administration out of a belief that "the administrative" defines more than discrete institutions but an entire historical ethos involving the state's deployment of rights and capital's interest in difference. We might think of sexuality's engagement with the twists and turns of administration as archival power's latest affair with minority culture and difference. As such, sexuality inherits the universe of problems outlined in the preceding chapters, a universe established out of power's negotiations with the upheavals of the student movements around race and gender. With sexuality's entrance into power's archive, the histories of the gay and lesbian movement were brought into the purviews of institutional consideration, representation, and management. As power sought to institutionalize race and gender, power in this moment works to determine how best to subject queer sexuality to its managerial calculus. In this sense, sexuality's particular "institutional passage from the private to the public"! yields special revelations about the metastases of affirmation, recognition, and legibility. The contemporary administrative ethos has special bearing on how we conceptualize sexuality as an object of knowledge and as a historical formation. First, it means that sexuality at this historical juncture is a mode of difference that resonates with administration and with power's archival and managerial project. Hence, queer sexuality is not so radically eccentric and extravagant that it is insulated from the hail of power. Second, conceptualizing sexuality as a mode of difference entangled in administrative discourses and systems means that we should exploit and elaborate all the ways to enter a text, even the ones whose main doorways seem tried and true. And so, let us begin with The History of Sexuality. Worrying over Affirmation: The History of Sexuality The world in which queer sexuality finds itself is characterized by the most spectacular affirmations in the form of rights, benefits, and visibility. To address these technologies and effects of affirmation, we might revisit Foucault's ground-breaking text to appreciate the mechanisms of sexuality's confirmation and excitation in this era of power. We can begin to assemble such a critique by reviewing Michel Foucault's theorizations of power and sexuality, by ruminating a little on well-trodden territory. In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, he re-theorizes power as a potentially productive rather than exclusively negative force. Power is not only that which says "no." For Foucault, power is also that which says, "Yes, tell me more. Yes, say that. Say that and say much more than that." Power is that which speaks in the affirmative. Foucault elaborates on this aspect of power and its appeal to subjects in an interview titled "Truth and Power": If power were never anything but repressive, if it never did anything but to say no, do you really think one would be brought to obey it? What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn't only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. 2 By linking power and knowledge through their affirmative properties, Foucault argues that the modern subject invites power, in part, because of power's productive qualities, because power can "induce pleasure, form knowledge, and produce discourse." The History of Sexuality was originally titled, in the French version, La volonte de savoir (The will to know). This distinction is significant beyond the semantic differences of what American and French publishers consider to be a more marketable name. The French title reminds us that, for Foucault, sexuality was not an object to analyze in and of itself but a reason to assess the productive and discursive nature of power-power realized through knowledge as well as power realized through the desire for knowledge. Moreover, for Foucault, sexuality also refers to manifestations and mutations of power. It is this sense of sexuality-as-power that we must retain in an analysis of institutionality and administration, particularly as they concern the American academy. Examining sexuality as an artifact of power and knowledge serves a way of assessing the forms of power elaborated by things academic in the current historical moment. The critical scholarship on the contemporary university theorizes power as emanating from capital's encampment within the university and its culmination in administrative arrangements within university settings. According to Bill Readings, for instance, the crisis of the university can be seen in the increased ascendancy of the administrator and the resulting displacement of the scholar/professor. Applying Jacques Barzun's The American University: How It Runs, Where It Is Going as an unfortunately prophetic text, Readings states: "The central figure of the University is no longer the professor who is both scholar and teacher but the provost to whom both these apparatchiks and the professors are answerable."3 Readings rightfully identifies the contemporary university as one that has prepared the way for the administrator who was once student and professor, this version of the liberal individual tailor-made for the academy's latest mode. In this narrative of maturation, the student becomes a professor who evolves into the administrator and assumes stewardship of the university in its most recent historical incarnation. In possessing a greater degree of influence, force, and power than the scholar, the administrator has the kind of managerial and economic profile appropriate for the contemporary moment of globalization. Readings thus addresses the rhetorical power of the category of "excellence" deployed by administrators as an institutional mode in the late twentieth century and beyond, a rhetorical power that allows administrators to situate the university within the international scene, within a global economy that gives more and more attention to administration to facilitate the union of market forces and knowledge.4 In its latest iteration, the American academy confirms an observation that Weber once made. "Bureaucratization," he said, "is occasioned more by intensive and qualitative enlargement and internal deployment of the scope of administrative tasks than by their extensive and quantitative increase ... In the modern state, the increasing demands for administration rest on the increasing complexity of civilization and push towards bureaucratization."5

2.“Child protection” discourse produces an innocence/guilt binarism that criminalizes queer students and queer students and students of color, and obscures and extends the carceral logic of surveillance and punishment in school Meiners 16 (Erica, Bernard J. Brommel Distinguished Research Professor at Northeastern Illinois University, “For the Children?” https://muse.jhu.edu/book/48228 //AB) These theorized examples of how representations and tropes of the child are deployed across contemporary carceral landscapes remind us that decarceration and movements against the prison-industrial complex involve labor beyond closing prisons and opening the doors of other supposedly democratic institutions that have locked out too many. Abolition work also requires that we intimately reassess the foundational building blocks of how civic society is understood—family and child—to demonstrate how these supposedly neutral or private categories are used to require and extend the carceral apparatus. With the perpetual façade of authenticity that places children outside history, the child redefines the category of innocence and simultaneously protects this concept from critical engagement. Innocence is a racialized, gendered, sexualized, and flexible construct, but the symbolic child is able to mask these genealogies and distract audiences from seeing the histories of power and other political and economic forces that literally “stage manage” and permit us to read the body. The symbolic child also shores up the intertwined logics of punishment and protection. Child protection centers interpersonal violence while obscuring state violence and the ties that suture these together. Adults’ feelings about the child and the child’s familial ties—as evidenced in the last example, anti-bullying legislation— are used to support more punishment and policing, responses that perpetuate the conditions that actively create more structural and interpersonal harm. Protection and innocence and consent are central to discussions about children and are the foundation of other structures, namely our justice system. The bright lines within our system used to ascertain and identify are innocence and consent. If these categories are “lost” for children, can this also affect wider justice frameworks? Despite these critiques, the categories of adult, childhood, and juvenile are used daily to shape people’s life pathways. As 14 year olds are transferred to adult court, seven- and eight year olds are moved into juvenile detention, men and women over the age of 18 are consigned to long prison terms, and those female, queer, and non-gender-conforming are targeted for containment and sexual surveillance, it desperately matters who is viewed (or not) as innocent or disposable. My work in movements is a crisp reminder that there are no pure places for organizing, research, and movement building. Yet, the analysis in this article clearly highlights that the construct of the child is being remade and deployed right now. It is not possible to wait until the dust settles before engaging. If anti-prison campaigners cannot reframe the terms of the debate—that is, deconstruct the centrality of white supremacy, capitalism, or heteropatriarchy or reshape the relentless focus on interpersonal violence over state violence—there should at least be a recognition of how these constructs are embedded and masked. Though campaigners and scholars have critically deconstructed deficient tropes such as “family values,” “child protection” has received less scrutiny. To leave no one behind, we must shift the organizing focus away from individuals and begin to scrutinize what categories such as the child mask. Such politics enable anti-prison organizers to move outside pro-prison expansion and policing narratives that overwhelmingly revolve around the child and “innocence.” Parallel work is to meticulously and rigorously understand meanings in particular contexts. As queer theorist Eve Sedgewick (1990, 27) did in relation to the categorization of the homosexual, we must ask who benefits from a classification, who does not, and why: “Repeatedly to ask how certain categorizations work, what enactments they are performing and what relations they are creating, rather than what they essentially mean, has been my principal strategy.” Deconstructing the uses of the symbolic child in contemporary incarceration offers insights into the most central questions in justice work today—specifically, those surrounding tensions between reform work and structural, systematic changes. This has material impacts on the lives of many, including children. These practices require a more rigorous analysis that links this exactness to actions. For example, if children selectively can access rehabilitation, does that require adults to be constructed as static and therefore only targeted and eligible for incapacitation? Does rehabilitation require a normativity—sexual, developmental, or economic? If we cannot distinguish the construction of the child from histories and practices of child-saving that create bureaucratic and intimate surveillance systems, what are the local, narrow moves possible for those who work in schools, detention centers, and courts? The time and space to ask these questions are not always available before actions are taken, but they eventually become available later. Abolition work requires that this scrupulous labor be a central part of our movement work.

3.We don’t want gay cops, politicians and CEOs – the politics of assimilation is a device used to withdraw from the struggle for liberation The Mary Nardini Gang 2010 (Mary, criminal queers from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Toward the Queerest Insurrection, 2010, https://itsgoingdown.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/toward_the_queerest_insurrection_read.pdf) If history proves anything, it is that capitalism has a treacherous recuperative tendency to pacify radical social movements. It works rather simply, actually. A group gains privilege and power within a movement, and shortly thereafter sell their comrades out. Within a couple years of stonewall, affluent-gay-white-males had thoroughly marginalized everyone that had made their movement possible and abandoned their revolution with them. It was once that to be queer was to be in direct conflict with the forces of control and domination. Now, we are faced with a condition of utter stagnation and sterility. As always, Capital recuperated brick-throwing street queens into suited politicians and activists. There are logcabin-Republicans and “stonewall” refers to gay Democrats. There are gay energy drinks and a “queer” television station that wages war on the minds, bodies and esteem of impressionable youth. The “LGBT” political establishment has become a force of assimilation, gentrification, capital and state-power. Gay identity has become both a marketable commodity and a device of withdrawal from struggle against domination. Now they don’t critique marriage, military or the state. Rather we have campaigns for queer assimilation into each. Their politics is advocacy for such grievous institutions, rather than the annihilation of them all. “Gays can kill poor people around the world as well as straight people!” “Gays can hold the reigns of the state and capital as well straight people!” “We are just like you”. Assimilationists want nothing less than to construct the homosexual as normal - white, monogamous, wealthy, 2.5 children, SUVs with a white picket fence. This construction, of course, reproduces the stability of heterosexuality, whiteness, patriarchy, the gender binary, and capitalism itself. If we genuinely want to make ruins of this totality, we need to make a break. We don’t need inclusion into marriage, the military and the state. We need to end them. No more gay politicians, CEOs and cops. We need to swiftly and immediately articulate a wide gulf between the politics of assimilation and the struggle for liberation.

Comprehensive sex ed is an assimilatory tactic of cisheteropatriarchy – the progressive narrative of inclusion envelops deviant subjects into a neoliberal restructuring of the nuclear family, which only permits the biopolitical management of trans and gender non-conforming subjects. Shannon 16 (Barrie Shannon, PhD Candidate at the School of Humanities and Social Science, University of Newcastle, Newcastle, Australia. “Comprehensive for who? Neoliberal directives in Australian ‘comprehensive’ sexuality education and the erasure of GLBTIQ identity,” Sex Education, 2016)[discourse modified]* Sameness, ‘homonormativity’ and GLBTIQ erasure Harris and Farrington (2014) and Riggs and Due (2013) critique the discourses of ‘sameness and homogeneity’ which permeate contemporary sexuality education, particularly in relation to the way in which GLBTIQ people are portrayed as the same as heterosexual people. This sameness is provided as a justification for queer people to deserve legitimacy, respect and representation within the curriculum. The underlying assumption is ‘that they [GLBTIQ people] want nothing more than to assimilate to the standards and limitations dictated by heterosexual hegemony’ (Peterson 2013, 489). This practice of assimilation, which avoids critique, is somewhat of a litmus test for those who can be deemed eligible for social citizenship. Halberstam (2003) has observed a similar trend in queer activism and representation more broadly. The dominant narrative of the ‘gay and lesbian community is used as a rallying cry for fairly conservative social projects aimed at assimilating gays and lesbians into the mainstream life of the nation and the family’ (Halberstam 2003, 314). Halberstam (2003) critiques the placement of GLBTIQ people into the dominant heteronormative temporality consisting of birth, marriage, reproduction and death, dominantly portrayed as the ‘natural’ or universally desirable human lifespan. Riggs and Due (2013) demonstrate this point in their exploration of how the topic of same-sex families is broached in Australian classroom discussions. Although Australian sexuality education curricula are often well-meaning in their attempts to include same-sex families, they appear ‘typically through a guise of liberal equality that enshrines heterosexuality as the norm against which non-heterosexual people are measured’ (Riggs and Due 2013, 102). Though it is important that sexuality education curricula emphasise the notion that queer families should be viewed as ‘normal’, and certainly treated as legal and societal equals, the constitution of the ‘normal’ family in this context evades interrogation. A lack of critical attention to the normative ‘family’ entrenches several assumptions about families and the expected social and economic roles of each family member. Peterson (2013, 487) writes that the family is seen to be the ‘primary organising feature of social, civil, cultural, and economic life’. The portrayal of the family, however, is ‘predicated on persistent and unidentified, heteronormative assumptions and conscriptions’ (Peterson 2013, 487), such as dominant modes of economic participation, cultural reproduction, and childbirth and child-rearing (Peterson 2011). The family itself is often presented as intertwined with seemingly ‘natural’ biological processes. Focuses on ‘reproductive biology tend to reinforce a normatively gendered and naturalised understanding of parenthood, gender, and familial responsibilities … [which] link these social understandings to biology’ (McNeill 2013, 836). Existing on the periphery of this normative and ‘natural’ model, GLBTIQ families are implicitly burdened with the ‘need to somehow prove their ‘sameness’ with heterosexuals in order to gain social credibility and legitimacy’ (Peterson 2013, 489). Wilton (1996) notes that the ‘sameness’ test is often enforced on GLBTIQ people in same-sex relationships and their families, in the form of gendered assumptions or questions about their roles in their own relationships and in public life. Examples provided by Wilton (1996) often relate to confusion about who fulfils gendered expectations as arbitrary as the completion of domestic duties, or each partner’s ‘role’ during sexual intercourse. Peterson (2013, 488) thus warns that ‘individuals and relationships that exist outside the family’s designated bounds are at risk of being deemed undesirable, unworthy of support, and even pathological’. The ability to prove this sameness, or at least appear to be doing so, is a privilege that cisgendered queer people enjoy that gender non-conforming or transgender people do not. Virtually all representations of the nuclear family include a complementarity of typical male and female gender roles, from which children are offered a ‘balance’ of normative gender expression. Consequently for transgendered [transgender]* people who display visual and social transgressions of traditional gender roles, it may not be possible to be reconciled into the traditional family model at all. Transgendered [transgender]* and gender non-conforming people and their families therefore face continued exclusion and discrimination within and outside of the GLBTIQ rights movement (Jauk 2013). Elliott (2014) alleges that liberationist activisms and the queering of structural institutions are actively discouraged through the employment of neoliberal discourses. The tenets of ‘good’ neoliberal citizenship are the ability ‘to be self-managing, self-responsible, and desiring of self-advancement – and to conform to, rather than challenge, existing institutional arrangements’ (Elliott 2014, 212). Sexuality and its consequences are expected to be personally managed and kept private, therefore preventing any meaningful open dialogue about the social aspects of sex, sexuality and gender expression. Sexual autonomy in decision-making and interpersonal relationships is encouraged in neoliberal sexuality education. McAvoy (2013, 495) agrees in this sense that ‘sex education that prioritises the value of autonomy reifies inequality’. Elliott (2014, 222) eloquently rebukes the notion of sexual autonomy by stating that ‘we are not invulnerable, autonomous agents… we are intimately linked with others, a fact that should be acknowledged and unpacked in the sex education classroom as well as in public policy and government discourse’. If we accept Elliott’s (2014) argument that we are ‘intimately linked with others’, it follows that we should look to shape a curriculum that acknowledges and celebrates the actual lived experiences of young people; sexuality in the classroom must emphasise personhood and mutuality if it is to be relevant and effective. This is especially important for young GLBTIQ people whose identities are subject to erasure under a heterosexualised and gendered curriculum, and whose capability to feel ‘intimately linked’ with the world around them is diminished. REYHA fails at the state and local level – Uneven implementation, self-censorship, cursory teaching, and circumvention via abstinence-based education – Mauro and Joff 2007 (Diane di, and Carole, March 2007, “The Religious Right and the Reshaping of Sexual Policy: An Examination of Reproductive Rights and Sexuality Education,” p. 82-83. Sexuality Research & Social Policy Journal of NSRC Vol. 4, No. 1, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226245635_The_religious_right_and_the_reshaping_of_sexual_policy_An_examination_of_reproductive_rights_and_sexuality_education -cDr) Impact in the classroom. Abstinence-only curricula typically rely on misleading, inaccurate, and incomplete information by which to warn youth of the dangers of any and all sexual activity. Even more significantly—and indicative of the interest to promote social change in tune with a conservative agenda—is the inclusion in such curricula of information regarding traditional gender roles and male-female relationships. Examples are plentiful in this regard: the inclusion of gender-stereotypic information about male-female differences (e.g., Males desire casual sexual activity from any and all women whereas women agree to sexual activity to get love); an emphasis on traditional gender roles as the norm within marriage (e.g., Will the wife work after marriage or will the husband be the sole breadwinner?); and the normalizing of heterosexuality (SIECUS, 2003).At present, the continuing and compelling mobilization of conservative and religious forces opposing comprehensive sexuality education continues to dominate the political arena, especially at the local level. In their most extreme actions, these forces rely on perpetuating a far-reaching climate of fear, ignorance, and intimidation in the class-room and in the community, whereas at a more moderate end, they employ increasingly subtle strategies to undermine other types of educational efforts. In either case, the result includes an uneven development and implementation of programs, self-censorship in the classroom, a blanding of the curriculum, and a cursory teaching of only those topics regarded as safe and uncontroversial. Self-censorship in the schools occurs through the outsourcing of instruction; for example, schools increasingly are hiring consultants from outside organizations to teach sexuality education so that should controversy erupt, any ensuing public attention can be diverted away from the school itself. An increase is also evident in legislated teaching via state law in opposition to homosexuality and abortion, especially in schools in southern states (SIECUS, 2003). In the end, given such tactics and increasingly hostile environments, many school districts find it much easier to implement an abstinence-only education curriculum, thereby circumventing controversy and opposition and, in the process, gaining access to government funding. Exporting abstinence-only abroad. “The United States is using its unparalleled influence to export abstinence-only programs that have proven to be an abject failure in its own country” (Human Rights Watch, 2005, p. 5).The abstinence-only policies of the U.S. government—based on the framework established in its domestic legislation for sexuality education—have become part and parcel of all U.S. global HIV-prevention efforts, regardless of the position or views of its international partners. For instance, the United States Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria Act of 2003 focused on 14 coun-tries in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean that have been severely affected by AIDS, requiring “the expenditure of 33 percent of HIV prevention funds on abstinence-only programs that exclude consideration of other approaches to HIV prevention” (Human Rights Watch, 2005, pp. 8–9).Nowhere has such policy exportation been more keenly promoted than in Uganda, whose government has been heralded for its success in dramatically decreasing the prevalence of HIV in Ugandans9in the 1990s via a comprehensive public-education approach known as ABC: Abstain, Be Faithful, and Use Condoms. Yet recent analyses indicate that Uganda’s success cannot be solely attributed to ABC. For one, the Uganda government did not implement abstinence-only education on a large scale until2001, when the United States began intently promoting these programs internationally. More significantly, the decline in HIV has been credited to the government’s comprehensive approach to HIV prevention, which has been in place for more than a decade and has emphasized a range of strategies, including positive behavior change, high-level political leadership, condom use, and widespread HIV testing—all of which no doubt contributed to dimin-ishing HIV prevalence in the country. “Nothing in the demographic or historical records suggests that abstinence education as conceived by the United States is what con-tributed to Uganda’s HIV prevention success” (Human Rights Watch, 2005, p. 7; Cohen, 2003). Moreover, at the 2005 Annual Retrovirus Conference in Boston, Massachusetts, a presentation on research from the Rakai district in Uganda indicated that condom use, coupled with premature death among those infected more than a decade ago with the AIDS virus—not the ABC approach—was responsible for the decline in HIV infection (Russell, 2005).

1NC to SP3 1 Biopolitics is only possible because of labor-power, the potential for work, the faculty for value of any body, life itself is the possibility of productivity. Paolo Virno 2004 – (Professor at The University of Rome and one of those bonkers Italian dudes, “A Grammar of the Multitude, For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life”, pg.81-84) But let us get to the point here. The capitalistic production relation is based on the difference between labor-power and effective labor. Labor power, I repeat, is pure potential, quite distinct from its correspondent acts. Marx writes: “When we speak of capacity for labour, we do not speak of labour, any more than we speak of digestion when we speak of capacity for digestion” (Capital, Volume 1: 277). We are dealing here, however, with a potential which boasts of the extremely concrete prerogatives of commodities. Potential is something non-present, non-real; but in the case of labor-power, this non-present something is subject to the laws of supply and demand (Virno, Il ricordo: 121-3). Capitalists buy the capacity for producing as such (“the sum of all physical and intellectual aptitudes which exist in the material world”), and not simply one or more specific services. After the sale has occurred, capitalists can use as they please the commodity which has been acquired. “The purchaser of labour-power consumes it by setting the seller of it to work. By working, the latter becomes in actuality what previously he only was potentially “(Capital, Volume 1: 283). Labor which has actually been paid out does not simply reimburse the capitalist for the money spent previously in order to assure the other’s potential for working; it continues for an additional period of time. Here lies the genesis of surplus-value, here lies the mystery of capitalistic accumulation. Labor-power incarnates (literally) a fundamental category of philosophical thought: specifically, the potential, the dynamis. And “potential,” as I have just said, signifies that which is not current, that which is not present. Well then, something which is not present (or real) becomes, with capitalism, an exceptionally important commodity. This potential, dynamis, non-presence, instead of remaining an abstract concept, takes on a pragmatic, empirical, socioeconomic dimension. The potential as such, when it still has not been applied, is at the core of the exchange between capitalist and worker. The object of the sale is not a real entity (labor services actually executed) but something which, in and of itself, does not have an autonomous spacial-temporal existence (the generic ability to work). The paradoxical characteristics of labor-power (something unreal which is, however, bought and sold as any other commodity) are the premise of biopolitics. In order to understand it, however, we must go through another step in the argument. In the Grundrisse Marx writes that “the use value which the worker has to offer to the capitalist, which he has to offer to others in general, is not materialized in a product, does not exist apart from him at all, thus exists not really, but only in potentiality, as his capacity” (Grundrisse: 267; Virno’s italics). Here is the crucial point: where something which exists only as possibility is sold, this something is not separable from the living person of the seller. The living body of the worker is the substratum of that labor-power which, in itself, has no independent existence. “Life,” pure and simple bios, acquires a specific importance in as much as it is the tabernacle of dynamis, of mere potential. Capitalists are interested in the life of the worker, in the body of the worker, only for an indirect reason: this life, this body, are what contains the faculty, the potential, the dynamis. The living body becomes an object to be governed not for its intrinsic value, but because it is the substratum of what really matters: labor-power as the aggregate of the most diverse human faculties (the potential for speaking, for thinking, for remembering, for acting, etc.). Life lies at the center of politics when the prize to be won is immaterial (and in itself non-present) labor-power. For this reason, and this reason alone, it is legitimate to talk about “bio-politics.” The living body which is a concern of the administrative apparatus of the State, is the tangible sign of a yet unrealized potential, the semblance of labor not yet objectified; as Marx says eloquently, of “labor as subjectivity.” The potential for working, bought and sold just like another commodity, is labor not yet objectified, “labor as subjectivity.” One could say that while money is the universal representation of the value of exchange—or rather of the exchangeability itself of products—life, instead, takes the place of the productive potential, of the invisible dynamis. The non-mythological origin of that mechanism of expertise and power which Foucault defines as bio-politics can be traced back, without hesitation, to the mode of being of the labor-power. The practical importance taken on by potential as potential (the fact that it is bought and sold as such), as well as its inseparability from the immediate corporeal existence of the worker, is the real foundation of bio-politics. Foucault mocks libertarian theoreticians like Wilhelm Reich (the heterodox psychiatrist), who claims that a spasmodic attention to life is the result of a repressive intention: disciplining the body in order to raise the level of productivity of labor. Foucault is totally right, but he is taking aim at an easy target. It is true: the government of life is extremely varied and articulated, ranging from the confinement of impulses to the most unrestrained laxity, from punctilious prohibition to the showy display of tolerance, from the ghetto for the poor to extravagant Keynesian incomes, from the high-security prison to the Welfare State. Having said this, we still have to address a crucial question: why is life, as such, managed and controlled? The answer is absolutely clear: because it acts as the substratum of a mere faculty, labor-power, which has taken on the consistency of a commodity. It is not a question, here, of the productivity of actual labor, but of the exchangeability of the potential to work. By the mere fact that it can be bought and sold, this potential calls into question the repository from which it is indistinguishable, that is, the living body. What is more, it sheds light on this repository as an object of innumerable and differentiated governmental strategies. One should not believe, then, that bio-politics includes within itself, as its own distinct articulation, the management of labor-power. On the contrary: bio-politics is merely an effect, a reverberation, or, in fact, one articulation of that primary fact—both historical and philosophical—which consists of the commerce of potential as potential. Bio-politics exists wherever that which pertains to the potential dimension of human existence comes into the forefront, into immediate experience: not the spoken word, but the capacity for speaking as such; not the labor which has actually been completed, but the generic capability of producing. The potential dimension of existence becomes conspicuous only, and exclusively, under the guise of labor-power. In this potential we see the compendium of all the different faculties and potentials of the human animal. In fact, “labor-power” does not designate one specific faculty, but the entirety of human faculties in as much as they are involved in productive praxis. “Labor-power” is not a proper noun; it is a common noun. Their analysis misses the position of the subject within the social division of labor Nina Power 10 – (Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Roehampton University, “Potentiality or Capacity?- Agamben's Missing Subjects,” Theory & Event; Baltimore 13.1, 2010 ProQuest) Discussions of the link between practice and action in European thought in recent years have come to resemble something of a merry-go-round, circulating between optimistic ontologies and pessimistic diagnoses, celebrations of passivity and predictions of activity. Changes in the nature of work and attempts to keep up with, diagnose or explain various forms of social resistance have seen the re-emergence of a curious pantheon of outsider literary figures - Kafka's Josephine the Mouse Singer, Melville's Bartleby, the Bible's Job.1 Work and its refusal are embodied in these troubled symbols of aesthetic excess (Josephine just wants to sing, not work like the other mice), obstinate potentiality (Bartleby's "I would prefer not to") and Job (the progressive withdrawal of all meaningful things and attachments). There is something minimal in all these figures, reduced to their ability to merely persist or to refuse in the last resort. We are reminded a little of Marx's early claims regarding "a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society... a total loss of humanity" which can only redeem itself through "the total redemption of humanity."2 But there is a crucial difference between Marx's universal class and these isolated, broken figures: the collective dimension is absent. Has contemporary philosophy become so withdrawn from organized struggle that it can only conceive of transformations in the attitude to work by recourse to minimal individuals? The last line of Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street may be "Ah, Bartleby! Ah humanity!" but this is more like a sigh of despair than a radical loss presaging redemption, political or otherwise. Is this all we can hope for? It is arguable that transformations in work and the composition of labor have made older, classically Marxist analysis seem outmoded, or at least in need of radical overhaul, but contemporary thought seems to have opted for two extreme responses: the radically pessimistic (or minimalist) or the baselessly optimistic. If Agamben falls into the former camp, then Hardt and Negri represent the latter with their concept of the multitude: The contemporary cooperative productive capacities through which the anthropological characteristics of the multitude are continually transcribed and reformulated, cannot help revealing a telos, a material affirmation of liberation.3 Just as it is altogether too quick to see the "material affirmation of liberation" in the exploitation of basic human capacities in work, it is altogether too slow to see in the obstinacy of a Bartleby the only response to sovereign domination. Agamben plays a central role in this recent "minimizing" turn, turning to an older Aristotelian concept of "potentiality" to explore, albeit paradoxically, the primacy of inactivity. In his discussion of Bartleby, he notes: "Our ethical tradition has often sought to avoid the problem of potentiality by reducing it to the terms of will and necessity... Bartleby is capable only without wanting."4 Agamben shares Heidegger's distaste for 'activity' and "will," deeming such concepts insuperably metaphysical. He thus demeans, unintentionally perhaps, the real forces at work in labor; Hardt and Negri, on the other hand, see all too clearly the politically productive elements of labor but miss crucial steps and antagonisms in the relation between production and emancipation. In the case of Hardt and Negri, this is perhaps a consequence of their affirmative ontology which sees potential everywhere. Agamben's paradoxical treatments of potentiality, on the other hand, seem to leave room only for reduced or promissory subjects. "The messianic concept of the remnant" may well permit "more than one analogy to be made with the Marxian proletariat"5 but only as "the unredeemable that makes salvation possible,"6 the part "with all due respect to those who govern us" that "never allows us to be reduced to a majority or a minority."7 There are other, far less deferential ways of conceiving of political opposition - do we need to say that all activity is necessarily metaphysical? Agamben's Aristotelian conception of potentiality entails, in the highest instance, "that potentiality constitutively be the potentiality not to (do or be)," which suggests that even if potential is realized, it is realized only by its lack of activity. Agamben may see parallels between this lack of activity and the class that exhibits the "total loss of humanity," but the "redemption" that Marx and Agamben see must be understood quite differently. "Redemption" for the early Marx is the simultaneous supersession of private property coupled with the recovery of humanity; it is not the paradox of being saved "in being unsavable" as Agamben concludes his discussion of man and animal in The Open.8 Whilst Agamben's position could be easily criticized from the standpoint of a more orthodox Marxism that would stress the historically conditioned nature of human potential and the necessity to think through forms of organization from within shifts in the nature of work, this is not the primary route this paper will take. In order to stay closer to Agamben's Aristotelianism, it is more productive to compare him to a thinker for whom questions of linguistic capacity and politics are also central, and also stem from a certain complex relation to naturalism, namely Paolo Virno. The paper will, via a reading of Agamben's Aristotelian conception of praxis and potentiality alongside Virno's work on the relation between language and labour, indicate the constitutive reasons why Agamben's notion of the subject as potentiality can only gesture towards collectivity and organisation, and why Virno's more nuanced conception of "capacity", which draws upon both rationalist and naturalist theories of the subject might form a more relevant alternative. It is by identifying the exploitation of those universal features of mankind, "the collective, social character which belongs to intellectual activity" as Virno puts it,9 that we can identify the possibilities for struggle inherent, yet not obvious, in the common. The struggle is no longer that of sovereign and subject, but of a different "constitutional principle": "the multitude does not converge into a volonté génerale for one simple reason: because it already has access to a general intellect."10 What Virno posits is a rethinking of human nature on the basis of "the history of capitalism."11 Agamben cannot fully perform this, despite gestures here and there towards an understanding of the historically specific nature of changes in exploitation of basic human capacities, because he cannot allow himself to admit any form of collective nature, however minimal, due to his Heideggarian suspicion of anything that looks like a philosophical anthropology, a humanism or a Marxism comprised of a theory of activity. Agamben's subjects are therefore 'missing' because he neither sees what it is in the human that is currently exploited, nor does he get beyond the Aristotelian-Heideggerian belief that inactivity is more important than action.

Their self-imposed apathy is a form of conditioned pessimism, a narcissistic identification with failure that prevents broader action Samuel Burgum 2015 – (PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Warwick, “The branding of the left: between spectacle and passivity in an era of cynicism,” Journal for Cultural Research, Volume 19, Issue 3) Rather than the Situationist spectacle, then, I argue that the reason those on the left are rendered post-politically impotent to bring about change is not because we are deceived, but because we enact apathy despite ourselves. In other words, the relationship between the resistive subject and ideology is not one of false consciousness, but one of cynicism: we are not misdirected by shallow spectacles, but instead somehow distracted by our cynical belief that we are being “distracted”. In this section, I begin by outlining the concept of cynicism as it has been theorised by Peter Sloterdijk and Slavoj Žižek. This then leads us to an analysis of the cynical position adopted by Brand’s critics, which I argue actually demonstrates more political problems on the part of the left than those suggested by Brand himself.¶ For Sloterdijk, cynicism is an attitude that emerges right at the centre of the enlightenment project, where, in contrast to a modernist illumination of truth, “a twilight arises, a deep ambivalence” (1987, p. 22). Rather than the promised heightened consciousness of science that would allow us to see the hidden essential truths behind appearances, the very conception of truth as unconcealedness (aletheia)3 instead creates a widespread mistrust and suspicion of every appearance. Subsequently, “a new form of realism bursts forth, a form that is driven by the fear of becoming deceived or overpowered … everything that appears to us could be a deceptive manoeuvre of an overpowering evil enemy” (Sloterdijk, 1987, p. 330). The surface becomes suspect and the subject therefore retreats from all appearances: judging them to be spectacles that are seeking to oppress through falsity. The result is cynicism.¶ Subsequently, this leads Sloterdijk to his well-known paradoxical definition of cynicism as “enlightened false consciousness” which he describes as a “modernized, unhappy consciousness on which enlightenment has laboured both successfully and in vain … it has learned its lessons in enlightenment, but it has not, probably was not able to, put them into practice” (1987, p. 5). In other words, in the search for a higher consciousness behind appearances, the subject is paradoxically “duped” by their very suspicion of being duped. Furthermore, because the subject thinks they “know” that appearances are just a mask, they disbelieve the truth when it does appear. Like the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes, they fancy themselves to know what is right in front of their eyes (that the emperor is nude and vulnerable) yet they choose “not to know” and don’t act upon it (they still act as if the emperor is all-powerful). As such,¶ cynical reason is no longer naïve, but is a paradox of enlightened false consciousness: one knows the falsehood very well, one is well aware of a particular hidden interest hidden behind the ideological universality, but still one does not renounce it. (Žižek, 1989, p. 23)¶ The audience to the parade of power can see that the emperor is not divine – just a fragile human body like the rest of us – yet they cynically choose not to know and objectively retain his aura. They congratulate themselves on “knowing” that Brand is a trivial spectacle, yet they choose to remain apathetic towards his calls for action.¶ As such, the dismissive reaction to Brand reveals a regressive interpassive tendency of the left to subjectively treat ourselves as “enlightened” to authentic politics and yet objectively render ourselves passive. In a kind of defence mechanism, the left believes that it¶ can avoid becoming the dupe of the latest fashion or advertising trend by treating everything as a matter of fashion and advertising, reassuring ourselves as we flip through television channels or browse through the shopping mall that at least we know what’s really going on. (Stanley, 2007, p. 399)¶ The critics disbelieve Brand, distrusting his motives and seeing him as inauthentic, yet they continue to “believe” objectively in their own marginalisation. As such, the cynical left believe they are dismissing shallow spectacle in the direction of a stronger authentic radicalism, yet what their “doing believes” is the maintenance of their apathetic position. More precisely, it maintains the attitudes of left melancholy and anti-populism.¶ The problem of “left melancholy” points towards the forever-delayed search for authenticity on the part of a cynical left that is in mourning. Coined by Walter Benjamin (1998), the concept points towards “the revolutionary who is, finally, attached more to a particular political analysis or ideal – even to the failure of that ideal – than to seizing possibilities for radical change in the present” (Brown, 1999, p. 19). Suffering from a history of defeat and embarrassment, the left persist in a narcissistic identification with failure, fetishising the “good old days” and remaining faithful to lost causes. As Benjamin himself points out, the cynical kernel of this attitude is clear, as “melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge … but in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its consumption in order to redeem them” (1998, p. 157). In other words, the sentiment is a deliberate self-sabotage that takes place even before politics proper has a chance to begin or “the paradox of an intention to mourn that precedes and anticipates the loss of the object” (Žižek, 2001, p. 146).¶ This then leads us to the second problem of leftist cynicism: anti-populism. As a result of melancholia, the left has developed the bad habit of prejudging all instances of popular radical expression (such as Brand’s) as necessarily flawed. However, to return to Dean again, she points out that this aversion to being popular and successful is a defining feature of a contemporary left, who prefer to adopt an “authentic” underdog position in advance than take risks towards political power. As she argues, “we” on the left see “ourselves” as “always morally correct but never politically responsible” (Dean, 2009, p. 6) prepositioned as righteous victims and proud political losers from the outset. What this cynicism towards instances of popular radicalism ultimately means, therefore, is that any concern for authenticity is ultimately a regressive one, a defence mechanism for a left that “as long as it sees itself as defeated victims, can refrain from having to admit is short on ideas” (Dean, 2009, p. 5). Such an attitude means never risking potential failure and residing in the safety of marginal righteousness.¶ It is the contention here, therefore, that both melancholia and anti-populism can be seen in the cynical reaction to Brand’s radicalism. Somewhat ironically, Brand (2013) even recognised these problems himself when he wrote in his New Statesman piece that¶ the right seeks converts while the left seeks traitors … this moral superiority that is peculiar to the left is a great impediment towards momentum … for an ideology that is defined by inclusiveness, socialism has become in practice quite exclusive.¶ Automatically, then, the left denounce Brand and self-proclaimed “radical left-wing thinkers and organisers” bitterly complain how he is getting so much attention for the arguments they have been making for years (for example, Park & Nastasia, 2013). The left maintain distance and label Brand trivial, yet such a distance only renders these critiques even more marginal and prevents them from becoming popular, effective or counter-hegemonic.¶ As Žižek has pointed out, the political issue of cynicism is “not that people ‘do not know what they want’ but rather that cynical resignation prevents them from acting upon it, with the result that a weird gap opens up between what people think and how they act”, adding that “today’s post-political silent majority is not stupid, but it is cynical and resigned” (2011, p. 390). In terms of Brand, this blanket cynical melancholy is typical of the left’s distrust of anything popular, rendering them “like the last men” whose “immediate reaction to idealism is mocking cynicism” (Winlow & Hall, 2012, p. 13). Proponents of a radical alternative immediately adopt caution with the effect of forever delaying change, holding out for that real and authentic (unbranded) struggle and therefore denying it indefinitely. The collapse of capitalism is inevitable---it will happen soon, the aff’s predictions are wrong, and the impact is extinction---only the alt solves. Wolfgang Streeck 16 – (Emeritus Director of the Max-Planck-Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne, How Will Capitalism End?: Essays on a Failing System, p. 1-15) Capitalism has always been an improbable social formation, full of conflicts and contradictions, therefore permanently unstable and in flux, and highly conditional on historically contingent and precarious supportive as well as constraining events and institutions. Capitalist society may be described in shorthand as a 'progressive' society in the sense of Adam Smith 1 and the enlightenment, a society that has coupled its 'progress' to the continuous and unlimited production and accumulation of productive capital, effected through a conversion, by means of the invisible hand of the market and the visible hand of the state, of the private vice of material greed into a public benefit.' Capitalism promises infinite growth of commodified material wealth in a finite world, by conjoining itself with modern science and technology, making capitalist society the first industrial society, and through unending expansion of free, in the sense of contestable, risky markets, on the coat-tails of a hegemonic carrier state and its market -opening policies both domestically and internationally. 3 As a version of industrial society, capitalist society is distinguished by the fact that its collective productive capital is accumulated in the hands of a minority of its members who enjoy the legal privilege, in the form of rights of private property, to dispose of such capital in any way they see fit, including letting it sit idle or transferring it abroad. One implication of this is that the vast majority of the members of a capitalist society must work under the direction, however mediated, of the private owners of the tools they need to provide for themselves, and on terms set by those owners in line with their desire to maximize the rate of increase of their capital. Motivating non-owners to do so- to work hard and diligently in the interest of the owners - requires artful devices - sticks and carrots of the most diverse sorts that are never certain to function - that have to be continuously reinvented as capitalist progress continuously renders them obsolescent. The tensions and contradictions within the capitalist political-economic configuration make for an ever-present possibility of structural breakdown and social crisis. Economic and social stability under modern capitalism must be secured on a background of systemic restlessness4 produced by competition and expansion, a difficult balancing act with a constantly uncertain outcome. Its success is contingent on, among other things, the timely appearance of a new technological paradigm or the development of social needs and values complementing changing requirements of continued economic growth. For example, for the vast majority of its members, a capitalist society must manage to convert their ever-present fear of being cut out of the productive process, because of economic or technological restructuring, into acceptance of the highly unequal distribution of wealth and power generated by the capitalist economy and a belief in the legitimacy of capitalism as a social order. For this, highly complicated and inevitably fragile institutional and ideological provisions arc necessary. The same holds true for the conversion of insecure workers - kept insecure to make them obedient workers - into confident consumers happily discharging their consumerist social obligations even in the face of the fundamental uncertainty oflabour markets and employment.' In light of the inherent instability of modern societies founded upon and dynamically shaped by a capitalist economy, it is small wonder that theories of capitalism, from the time the concept was first used in the early 1800s in Germany" and the mid-1800s in England/ were always also theories of crisis. This holds not just for Marx and Engels but also for writers like Ricardo, Mill, Sombart, Keynes, Hilferding, Polanyi and Schumpeter, all of whom expected one way or other to see the end of capitalism during their lifetime." What kind of crisis was expected to finish capitalism off differed with time and authors' theoretical priors; structuralist theories of death by overproduction or underconsumption, or by a tendency of the rate of profit to fall (Marx), coexisted with predictions of saturation of needs and markets (Keynes), of rising resistance to further commodification oflife and society (Polanyi), of exhaustion of new land and new labour available for colonization in a literal as well as figurative sense (Luxemburg), of technological stagnation (Kondratieff), financial-political organization of monopolistic corporations suspending liberal markets (Hilferding), bureaucratic suppression of entrepreneurialism aided by a worldwide trahison des clercs (Weber, Schumpeter, Hayek) etc., etc." While none of these theories came true as imagined, most of them were not entirely false either. In fact, the history of modern capitalism can be written as a succession of crises that capitalism survived only at the price of deep transformations of its economic and social institutions, saving it from bankruptcy in unforeseeable and often unintended ways. Seen this way, that the capitalist order still exists may well appear less impressive than that it existed so often on the brink of collapse and had continuously to change, frequently depending on contingent exogenous supports that it was unable to mobilize endogenously. The fact that capitalism has, until now, managed to outlive all predictions of its impending death, need not mean that it will forever be able to do so; there is no inductive proof here, and we cannot rule out the possibility that, next time, whatever cavalry capitalism may require for its rescue may fail to show up. A short recapitulation of the history of modern capitalism serves to illustrate this point. 10 Liberal capitalism in the nineteenth century was confronted by a revolutionary labour movement that needed to be politically tamed by a complex combination of repression and co-optation, including democratic power sharing and social reform. In the early twentieth century, capitalism was commandeered to serve national interests in international wars, thereby converting it into a public utility under the planning regimes of a new war economy, as private property and the invisible hand of the market seemed insufficient for the provision of the collective capacities countries needed to prevail in international hostilities. After the First World War, restoration of a liberal-capitalist economy failed to produce a viable social order and had to give way in large parts of the industrial world to either Communism or Fascism, while in the core countries of what was to become 'the West' liberal capitalism was gradually succeeded, in the aftermath of the Great Depression, by Keynesian, state-administered capitalism. Out of this grew the democratic welfare-state capitalism of the three post-war decades, with hindsight the only period in which economic growth and social and political stability, achieved through democracy, coexisted under capitalism, at least in the OECD world where capitalism came to be awarded the epithet, 'advanced'. In the 1970s, however, what had with hindsight been called the 'post-war settlement' of social-democratic capitalism began to disintegrate, gradually and imperceptibly at first but increasingly punctuated by successive, ever more severe crises of both the capitalist economy and the social and political institutions embedding, that is, supporting as well as containing it. This was the period of both intensifying crisis and deep transformation when 'late capitalism', as impressively described by Werner Sombart in the 1920s, 11 gave way to neoliberalism. Crisis Theory Redux Today, after the watershed of the financial crisis of 2008, critical and indeed crisis-theoretical reflection on the prospects of capitalism and its society is again en vogue. Does Capitalism Have a Future? is the title of a book published in 2013 by five outstanding social scientists: Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian and Craig Calhoun. Apart from the introduction and the conclusion, which are collectively authored, the contributors present their views in separate chapters, and this could not be otherwise since they differ widely. Still, all five share the conviction that, as they state in the introduction, 'something big looms on the horizon: a structural crisis much bigger than the recent Great Recession, which might in retrospect seem only a prologue to a period of deeper troubles and transformations: 12 On what is causing this crisis, however, and how it will end, there is substantial disagreement- which, with authors of this calibre, may be taken as a sign of the multiple uncertainties and possibilities inherent in the present condition of the capitalist political economy. To give an impression of how leading theorists may differ when trying to imagine the future of capitalism today, I will at some length review the prospects and predictions put forward in the book. A comparatively conventional crisis theory is probably the one offered by Wallerstein (pp. 9-35), who locates contemporary capitalism at the bottom of a Kondratieff cycle (Kondratieff B) with no prospect of a new (Kondratieff A) upturn. This is said to be due to a 'structural crisis' that began in the 1970s, as a result of which 'capitalists may no longer find capitalism rewarding'. Two broad causes are given, one a set of long-term trends 'ending the endless accumulation of capital', the other the demise, after the 'world revolution of 1968', of the 'dominance of centrist liberals of the geoculture' (p. 21 ). Structural trends include the exhaustion of virgin lands and the resulting necessity of environmental repair work, growing resource shortages, and the increasing need for public infrastructure. All of this costs money, and so does the pacification of a proliferating mass of discontented workers and the unemployed. Concerning global hegemony, Wallerstein points to what he considers the final decline of the U.S.-centred world order, in military and economic as well as ideological terms. Rising costs of doing business combine with global disorder to make restoration of a stable capitalist world system impossible. Instead Wallerstein foresees 'an ever-tighter gridlock of the system. Gridlock will in turn result in ever-wilder fluctuations, and will consequently make short-term predictions - both economic and political - ever more unreliable. And this in turn will aggravate ... popular fears and alienation. It is a negative cycle' (p. 32). For the near future Wallerstein expects a global political confrontation between defenders and opponents of the capitalist order, in his suggestive terms: between the forces of Davos and of Porto Alegre. Their final battle 'about the successor system' (p. 35) is currently fomenting. Its outcome, according to Wallerstein, is unpredictable, although 'we can feel sure that one side or the other will win out in the coming decades, and a new reasonably stable world-system (or set of world-systems) will be established: Much less pessimistic, or less optimistic from the perspective of those who would like to see capitalism dose down, is Craig Calhoun, who finds prospects of reform and renewal in what he, too, considers a deep and potentially final crisis (pp. 131-61). Calhoun assumes that there is still time for political intervention to save capitalism, as there was in the past, perhaps with the help of a 'sufficiently enlightened faction of capitalists' (p. 2). But he also believes 'a centralized socialist economy' to be possible, and even more so 'Chinese-style state capitalism': 'Markets can exist in the future even while specifically capitalist modes of property and finance have declined' (p. 3). Far more than Wallerstein, Calhoun is reluctant when it comes to prediction (for a summary of his view see pp. 158-61 ). His chapter offers a list of internal contradictions and possible external disruptions threatening the stability of capitalism, and points out a wide range of alternative outcomes. Like Wallerstein, Calhoun attributes particular significance to the international system, where he anticipates the emergence of a plurality of more or less capitalist political-economic regimes, with the attendant problems and pitfalls of coordination and competition. While he does not rule out a 'large-scale, more or less simultaneous collapse of capitalist markets ... not only bringing economic upheaval but also upending political and social institutions' (p. 161), Calhoun believes in the possibility of states, corporations and social movements re-establishing effective governance for a transformative renewal of capitalism. To quote, The capitalist order is a very large-scale, highly complex system. The events of the last forty years have deeply disrupted the institutions that kept capitalism relatively well organized through the postwar period. Efforts to repair or replace these will change the system, just as new technologies and new business and financial practices may. Even a successful renewal of capitalism will transform it ... The question is whether change will be adequate to manage systemic risks and fend off external threats. And if not, will there be widespread devastation before a new order emerges? (p. 161) Even more agnostic on the future of capitalism is Michael Mann ('The End May Be Nigh, But for Whom?: pp. 71-97). Mann begins by reminding his readers that in his 'general model of human society', he does 'not conceive of societies as systems but as multiple, overlapping networks of interaction, of which four networks - ideological, economic, military and political power relations - are the most important. Geopolitical relations can be added to the four .. : Mann continues: Each of these four or five sources of power may have an internal logic or tendency of development, so that it might be possible, for example, to identify tendencies toward equilibrium, cycles, or contradictions within capitalism, just as one might identify comparable tendencies within the other sources of social power. (p. 72) Interactions between the networks, Mann points out, are frequent but not systematic, meaning that 'once we admit the importance of such interactions we are into a more complex and uncertain world in which the development of capitalism, for example, is also influenced by ideologies, wars and states' (p. 73). Mann adds to this the possibility of uneven development across geographical space and the likelihood of irrational behaviour interfering with rational calculations of interest, even of the interest in survival. To demonstrate the importance of contingent events and of cycles other than those envisaged in the Wallerstein-Kondratieff model of history, Mann discusses the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession of 2008. He then proceeds to demonstrate how his approach speaks to the future, first of U.S. hegemony and second of 'capitalist markets'. As to the former, Mann (pp. 83-4) offers the standard list of American weaknesses, both domestic and international, from economic decline to political anomy to an increasingly less effective military- weaknesses that 'might bring America down' although 'we cannot know for sure: Even if U.S. hegemony were to end, however, 'this need not cause a systemic crisis of capitalism'. What may instead happen is a shift of economic power 'from the old West to the successfully developing Rest of the world, including most of Asia. This would result in a sharing of economic power between the United States, the European Union and (some of) the BRICS, as a consequence of which 'the capitalism of the medium term is likely to be more statist' (p. 86). Concerning 'capitalist markets' (pp. 86-7), Mann believes, pace Wallerstein, that there is still enough new land to conquer and enough demand to discover and invent, to allow for both extensive and intensive growth. Also, technological fixes may appear any time for all sorts of problems, and in any case it is the working class and revolutionary socialism, much more than capitalism, for which 'the end is nigh: In fact, if growth rates were to fall as predicted by some, the outcome might be a stable low-growth capitalism, with considerable ecological benefits. In this scenario, 'the future of the left is likely to be at most reformist social democracy or liberalism. Employers and workers will continue to struggle over the mundane injustices of capitalist employment [ ... ] and their likely outcome will be compromise and reform .. .' Still, Mann ends on a considerably less sanguine note, naming two big crises that he considers possible, and one of them probable - crises in which capitalism would go under although they would not be crises of capitalism, or of capitalism alone, since capitalism would only perish as a result of the destruction of all human civilization. One such scenario would be nuclear war, started by collective human irrationality, the other an ecological catastrophe resulting from 'escalating climate change'. In the latter case (pp. 93ff.), capitalism figures - together with the nation state and with 'citizen rights', defined as entitlements to unlimited consumption - as one of three 'triumphs of the modern period' that happen to be ecologically unsustainable. 'All three triumphs would have to be challenged for the sake of a rather abstract future, which is a very tall order, perhaps not achievable' (p. 95). While related to capitalism, ecological disaster would spring from 'a causal chain bigger than capitalism' (p. 97). However, 'policy decisions matter considerably', and 'humanity is in principle free to choose between better or worse future scenarios- and so ultimately the future is unpredictable' (p. 97). The most straightforward theory of capitalist crisis in the book is offered by Randall Collins (pp. 37-69) - a theory he correctly characterizes as a 'stripped-down version of (a] fundamental insight that Marx and Engels had formulated already in the 1840s' (p. 38). That insight, as adapted by Collins, is that capitalism is subject to 'a long-term structural weakness: namely 'the technological displacement of labor by machinery' (p. 37). Collins is entirely unapologetic for his strictly structuralist approach, even more structuralist than Wallerstein's, as well as his mono-factorial technological determinism. In fact, he is convinced that 'technological displacement of labor' will have finished capitalism, with or without revolutionary violence, by the middle of this century - earlier than it would be brought down by the, in principle, equally destructive and definitive ecological crisis, and more reliably than by comparatively difficult-to-predict financial bubbles. 'Stripped-down' Collins's late-Marxist structuralism is, among other things, because unlike Marx in his corresponding theorem of a secular decline of the rate of profit, Collins fails to hedge his prediction with a list of countervailing factors,' 3 as he believes capitalism to have run out of whatever saving graces may in the past have retarded its demise. Collins does allow for Mann's and Calhoun's non-Marxist, 'Weberian' influences on the course of history, but only as secondary forces modifying the way the fundamental structural trend that drives the history of capitalism from below will work itself out. Global unevenness of development, dimensions of conflict that are not capitalism-related, war and ecological pressures may or may not accelerate the crisis of the capitalist labour market and employment system; they cannot, however, suspend or avert it. What exactly does this crisis consist of? While labour has gradually been replaced by technology for the past two hundred years, with the rise of information technology and, in the very near future, artificial intelligence, that process is currently reaching its apogee, in at least two respects: first, it has vastly accelerated, and second, having in the second half of the twentieth century destroyed the manual working class, it is now attacking and about to destroy the middle class as well - in other words, the new petty bourgeoisie that is the very carrier of the neocapitalist and neoliberal lifestyle of 'hard work and hard play', of careerism-cum-consumerism, which, as will be discussed infra, may indeed be considered the indispensable cultural foundation of contemporary capitalism's society. What Collins sees coming is a rapid educational work by machinery intelligent enough even to design and create new, more advanced machinery. Electronicization will do to the middle class what mechanization has done to the working class, and it will do it much faster. The result will be unemployment in the order of 50 to 70 per cent by the middle of the century, hitting those who had hoped, by way of expensive education and disciplined job performance (in return for stagnant or declining wages), to escape the threat of redundancy attendant on the working classes. The benefits, meanwhile, will go to 'a tiny capitalist class of robot owners' who will become immeasurably rich. The drawback for them is, however, that they will increasingly find that their product 'cannot be sold because too few persons have enough income to buy it. Extrapolating this underlying tendency', Collins writes, 'Marx and Engels predicted the downfall of capitalism and its replacement with socialism' (p. 39), and this is what Collins also predicts. Collins's theory is most original where he undertakes to explain why technological displacement is only now about to finish capitalism when it had not succeeded in doing so in the past. Following in Marx's footsteps, he lists five 'escapes' that have hitherto saved capitalism from self-destruction, and then proceeds to show why they won't save it any more. They include the growth of new jobs and entire sectors compensating for employment losses caused by technological progress (employment in artificial intelligence will be miniscule, especially once robots begin to design and build other robots); the expansion of markets (which this time will primarily be labour markets in middle-class occupations, globally unified by information technology, enabling global competition among educated job seekers); the growth of finance, both as a source of income ('speculation') and as an industry (which cannot possibly balance the loss of employment caused by new technology, and of income caused by unemployment, also because computerization will make workers in large segments of the financial industry redundant); government employment replacing employment in the private sector (improbable because of the fiscal crisis of the state, and in any case requiring ultimately 'a revolutionary overturn of the property system' [p. 51]); and the use of education as a buffer to keep labour out of employment, making it a form of 'hidden Keynesian ism' while resulting in 'credential inflation' and 'grade inflation' (which for Collins is the path most probably taken, although ultimately it will prove equally futile as the others, as a result of demoralization within educational institutions and problems of financing, both public and private). All five escapes closed, there is no way society can prevent capitalism from causing accelerated displacement of labour and the attendant stark economic and social inequalities. Some sort of socialism, so Collins concludes, will finally have to take capitalism's place. What precisely it will look like, and what will come after socialism or with it, Collins leaves open, and he is equally agnostic on the exact mode of the transition. Revolutionary the change will be - but whether it will be a violent social revolution that will end capitalism or a peaceful institutional revolution accomplished under political leadership cannot be known beforehand. Heavy taxation of the super-rich for extended public employment or a guaranteed basic income for everyone, with equal distribution and strict rationing of very limited working hours by more or less dictatorial means a la Keynes' 4 - we are free to speculate on this as Collins's 'stripped-down Marxism' does not generate predictions as to what kind of society will emerge once capitalism will have run its course. Only one thing is certain: that capitalism will end, and much sooner than one may have thought. Something of an outlier in the book's suite of chapters is the contribution by Georgi Derluguian, who gives a fascinating inside account of the decline and eventual demise of Communism, in particular Soviet Communism (pp. 99-129). The chapter is of interest because of its speculations on the differences from and the potential parallels with a potential end of capitalism. As to the differences, Derluguian makes much of the fact that Soviet Communism was from early on embedded in the 'hostile geopolitics' (p. 110) of a 'capitalist world-system' ( 111). This linked its fate inseparably to that of the Soviet Union as an economically and strategically overextended multinational state. That state turned out to be unsustainable in the longer term, especially after the end of Stalinist despotism. By then the peculiar class structure of Soviet Communism gave rise to a domestic social compromise that, much unlike American capitalism, included political inertia and economic stagnation. The result was pervasive discontent on the part of a new generation of cultural, technocratic and scientific elites socialized in the revolutionary era of the late 1960s. Also, over-centralization made the state-based political economy of Soviet Communism vulnerable to regional and ethnic separatism, while the global capitalism surrounding it provided resentful opponents as well as opportunistic apparatchiks with a template of a preferable order, one in which the latter could ultimately establish themselves as self-made capitalist oligarchs. Contemporary capitalism, of course, is much less dependent on the geopolitical good fortunes of a single imperial state, although the role of the United States in this respect must not be underestimated. More importantly, capitalism is not exposed to pressure from an alternative political-economic model, assuming that Islamic economic doctrine will for a foreseeable future remain less than attractive even and precisely to Islamic elites (who are deeply integrated in the capitalist global economy). Where the two systems may, however, come to resemble each other is in their internal political disorder engendered by institutional and economic decline. When the Soviet Union lost its 'state integrity', Derluguian writes, this 'undermined all modern institutions and therefore disabled collective action at practically any level above family and crony networks. This condition became self-perpetuating' (p. 122). One consequence was that the ruling bureaucracies reacted 'with more panic than outright violence' when confronted by 'mass civic mobilizations like the 1968 Prague Spring and the Soviet perestroika at its height in 1989', while at the same time 'the insurgent movements ... failed to exploit the momentous disorganization in the ranks of dominant classes' (p. 129). For different reasons and under different circumstances, a similar weakness of collective agency, due to de-institutionalization and creating comparable uncertainty among both champions and challengers of the old order, might shape a future transition from capitalism to post-capitalism, pitting against each other fragmented social movements on the one hand and disoriented political-economic elites on the other. My own view builds on all five contributors but differs from each of them. I take the diversity of theories on what all agree is a severe crisis of capitalism and capitalist society as an indication of contemporary capitalism having entered a period of deep indeterminacy - a period in which unexpected things can happen any time and knowledgeable observers can legitimately disagree on what will happen, due to long-valid causal relations having become historically obsolete. In other words, I interpret the coexistence of a shared sense of crisis with diverging concepts of the nature of that crisis as an indication that traditional economic and sociological theories have today lost much of their predictive power. As I will point out in more detail, below, I see this as a result, but also as a cause, of a destruction of collective agency in the course of capitalist development, equally affecting Wallerstein's Davos and Porto Alegre people and resulting in a social context beset with unintended and unanticipated consequences of purposive, but in its effects increasingly unpredictable, social action. '5 Moreover, rather than picking one of the various scenarios of the crisis and privilege it over the others, I suggest that they all, or most of them, may be aggregated into a diagnosis of multi-morbidity in which different disorders coexist and, more often than not, reinforce each other. Capitalism, as pointed out at the beginning, was always a fragile and improbable order and for its survival depended on ongoing repair work. Today, however, too many frailties have become simultaneously acute while too many remedies have been exhausted or destroyed. The end of capitalism can then be imagined as a death from a thousand cuts, or from a multiplicity of infirmities each of which will be all the more untreatable as all will demand treatment at the same time. As will become apparent, I do not believe that any of the potentially stabilizing forces mentioned by Mann and Calhoun, be it regime pluralism, regional diversity and uneven development, political reform, or independent crisis cycles, will be strong enough to neutralize the syndrome of accumulated weaknesses that characterize contemporary capitalism. No effective opposition being left, and no practicable successor model waiting in the wings of history, capitalism's accumulation of defects, alongside its accumulation of capital, may be seen, with Collins, '6 as an entirely endogenous dynamic of self-destruction, following an evolutionary logic moulded in its expression but not suspended by contingent and coincidental events, along a historical trajectory from early liberal via state-administered to neoliberal capitalism, which culminated for the time being in the financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath. For the decline of capitalism to continue, that is to say, no revolutionary alternative is required, and certainly no masterplan of a better society displacing capitalism. Contemporary capitalism is vanishing on its own, collapsing from internal contradictions, and not least as a result of having vanquished its enemies - who, as noted, have often rescued capitalism from itself by forcing it to assume a new form. What comes after capitalism in its final crisis, now under way, is, I suggest, not socialism or some other defined social order, but a lasting interregnum - no new world system equilibrium ala Wallerstein, but a prolonged period of social entropy, or disorder (and precisely for this reason a period of uncertainty and indeterminacy). It is an interesting problem for sociological theory whether and how a society can turn for a significant length of time into less than a society, a post-social society as it were, or a society lite, until it may or may not recover and again become a society in the full meaning of the term. ' 7 I suggest that one can attain a conceptual fix on this by drawing liberally on a famous article by David Lockwood to distinguish between system integration and social integration, or integration at the macro and micro levels of society. An interregnum would then be defined as a breakdown of system integration at the macro level, depriving individuals at the micro level of institutional structuring and collective support, and shifting the burden of ordering social life, of providing it with a modicum of security and stability, to individuals themselves and such social arrangements as they can create on their own. A society in interregnum, in other words, would be a de-institutionalized or under-institutionalized society, one in which expectations can be stabilized only for a short time by local improvisation, and which for this very reason is essentially ungovernable. Contemporary capitalism, then, would appear to be a society whose system integration is critically and irremediably weakened, so that the continuation of capital accumulation - for an intermediate period of uncertain duration - becomes solely dependent on the opportunism of collectively incapacitated individualized individuals, as they struggle to protect themselves from looming accidents and structural pressures on their social and economic status. Undergoverned and undermanaged, the social world of the post-capitalist interregnum, in the wake of neoliberal capitalism having cleared away states, governments, borders, trade unions and other moderating forces, can at any time be hit by disaster; for example, bubbles imploding or violence penetrating from a collapsing periphery into the centre. With individuals deprived of collective defences and left to their own devices, what remains of a social order hinges on the motivation of individuals to cooperate with other individuals on an ad hoc basis, driven by fear and greed and by elementary interests in individual survival. Society having lost the ability to provide its members with effective protection and proven templates for social action and social existence, individuals have only themselves to rely on while social order depends on the weakest possible mode of social integration, Zweckrationalitiit. As pointed out in Chapter 1 of this book, and partly elaborated in the rest of this introduction, I anchor this condition in a variety of interrelated developments, such as declining growth intensifying distributional conflict; the rising inequality that results from this; vanishing macroeconomic manageability, as manifested in, among other things, steadily growing indebtedness, a pumped-up money supply; and the ever-present possibility of another economic breakdown;'9 the suspension of post-war capitalism's engine of social progress, democracy, and the associated rise of oligarchic rule; the dwindling capacity of governments and the systemic inability of governance to limit the commodification of labour, nature and money; the omnipresence of corruption of all sorts, in response to intensified competition in winner-take-all markets with unlimited opportunities for self-enrichment; the erosion of public infrastructures and collective benefits in the course of commodification and privatization; the failure after 1989 of capitalism's host nation, the United States, to build and maintain a stable global order; etc., etc. These and other developments, I suggest, have resulted in widespread cynicism governing economic life, for a long time if not forever ruling out a recovery of normative legitimacy for capitalism as a just society offering equal opportunities for individual progress- a legitimacy that capitalism would need to draw on in critical moments - and founding social integration on collective resignation as the last remaining pillar of the capitalist social order, or disorder. 20

The alternative is to reject the affirmative in favor of an ongoing class war against the bourgeoisie---only revolutionary praxis can create a bridge between action in the present and communism in the future---your role as an educator is to align with the dismantling of capitalism. Dave Hill 2016 – (Faculty of Health, Social Care and Education, Chelmsford Campus, Anglia Ruskin University, TRANSFORMATIVE EDUCATION, CRITICAL EDUCATION, MARXIST EDUCATION: POSSIBILITIES AND ALTERNATIVES TO THE RESTRUCTURING OF EDUCATION IN GLOBAL NEOLIBERAL/NEOCONSERVATIVE TIMES, Knowledge Cultures; Woodside 4.6 (2016): 159-175)//a-berg We Marxists seek to serve and advance the interests of the working class. We, as teachers, as educators, are working class, too, we sell our labor power to capitalists and to the apparatuses of the capitalist state, such as schools and universities. We have to consistently and courageously challenge the dominant ideology, the hegemony of the ruling class, the bourgeoisie, the capitalist class. We are in a battle for dominance of our ideas; there are 'culture wars' between different ways of looking at/interpreting the world. We have to contest the currently hegemonic control of ideas by the capitalist state, schools, media, and their allies in the religions. But the situation we face is not just a war of ideas, an ideological war: it is also an economic class war, where the social and economic conditions and well-being of the working class are threatened and undermined by the ruling class and its capitalist state (Campagna, 2013). David Blacker (2013) goes even further, and argues that contemporary and future capitalist onslaughts will result in deaths for 'superfluous' workers and sections of the non-working industrial reserve army (such as elderly people, for example the 13,000 extra deaths of old people in the winter months in the UK due to lack of affordable heating). If we sit and do nothing, if their ideas are not contested, then capitalism will continue to rule, to demean, to divide, to impoverish us, and the planet. At certain times in history, and in certain locations, the disjunction - the gap, the difference - between the material conditions of workers' existence on the one hand, our daily lived experience, and, on the other hand, what the newspapers and the media and the imam and the priest and the rabbi say/ preach, that gap becomes so stark, so obvious, that workers' subjective consciousness changes. This is particularly likely when workers with more advanced revolutionary consciousness succeed in bringing about a widespread and more evenly distributed consciousness amongst the class as a whole. At this moment - now - in some countries in the world, the gap between the 'official' ideology that 'we are all in together' and that 'there is no alternative' (to austerity), or, in schools and universities faced by commodification and managerialism and (pre)-privatization - that gap becomes so large that the ruling party, and the ruling capitalist class, and capitalism itself, loses legitimacy. And so, as in Greece now, and in Portugal, in Spain, in Turkey and Brazil, the USA and the UK, and in other countries such as Britain and India, we Marxists are necessary. Necessary in leading and developing changes in consciousness, a change in class consciousness, and in playing a leading role in organizing for the replacement of capitalism. Programme In 1938, in 'The Transitional Programme', Trotsky addressed the types of programmes moving the discussion beyond the minimum programme (minimum acceptable reforms, such as those to protect and improve existing rights and entitlements, such as rights at work, social and political rights)) and the maximum programme (socialist revolution, with the type of society ultimately envisaged by Marx, a socialist non-capitalist/ post-capitalist society) that were advanced by late nineteenth and early twentieth century social democrats and by communists of the 3rd international and articulated a new type of programme: the transitional programme. Trotsky, with a distinct resonance to today's struggles, wrote: The strategic task of the next period - prerevolutionary period of agitation, propaganda and organization - consists in overcoming the contradiction between the maturity of the objective revolutionary conditions and the immaturity of the proletariat and its vanguard (the confusion and disappointment of the older generation, the inexperience of the younger generation. It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demand and the socialist program of the revolution. This bridge should include a system of transitional demands, stemming from today's conditions and from today's consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat. Classical Social Democracy, functioning in an epoch of progressive capitalism, divided its program into two parts independent of each other: the minimum program which limited itself to reforms within the framework of bourgeois society, and the maximum program which promised substitution of socialism for capitalism in the indefinite future. Between the minimum and the maximum program no bridge existed. And indeed Social Democracy has no need of such a bridge, since the word socialism is used only for holiday speechifying. The Comintern has set out to follow the path of Social Democracy in an epoch of decaying capitalism: when, in general, there can be no discussion of systematic social reforms and the raising of the masses' living standards; when every serious demand of the proletariat and even every serious demand of the petty bourgeoisie inevitably reaches beyond the limits of capitalist property relations and of the bourgeois state. Trotsky continued, Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living offthe slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right leftto the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is leftto the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment, "structural" as well as "con junctural," the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period. [...] The question is not one of a "normal" collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. "Realizability" or "unrealizability" is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery (Trotsky, 1938). Conclusion The 'decay, demoralisation and ruin' Trotsky speaks of, are, for many millions of workers' families - including what in the USA and elsewhere are called 'middle class' workers - an everyday reality in this current era of capitalism, neoliberal capitalism, or 'immiseration capitalism'. This immiseration is apparent through the rich as well as the poor worlds. The precise organisation and characteristics of the resistance to the depredations is a matter for strategic and tactical considerations, relating to the current balance (strength, organisations, (dis)-unity) of class forces in specific local and national contexts. What is clear, though, is that the problematic regarding capitalism, for Marxist activists and educators, is not just to reform it, welcome though such reforms, such as 'minimum programme' are, and active in campaigning for and to protect such reforms we must be. But, regarding capitalism, our task is to replace it with democratic Marxism. As teachers, as educators, as cultural workers, as activists, as intellectuals, we have a role to play. We must play it.

� Case 1. The 1AC’s method of refusal assumes an individualized neoliberal subjectivity. The refusal of potentiality does not free them from neoliberal discourses of citizenship and productivity, rather their articulation of agency as individual empowerment lends moral authority to neoliberalism and precludes interdependent agency and collective action. Rowe 9 [Aimee Carrillo Rowe Assistant Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Iowa “Subject to Power—Feminism Without Victims” Women's Studies in Communication Volume 32, Number 1. Spring 2009] Power operates, according to critical theorist Giorgio Agamben, through the process of sovereignty wherein the state's capacity to wield power, to create rules, is ironically only made possible through its exclusion from the site of power wherein the rule applies,^^ This process operates as the sovereign exception simultaneously empowers the state, or the subject of power, to create the rule and be excluded from its reach. In relation to the subject of feminism, who likewise may be inaugurated through this process of sovereign exceptionalism, we must attend to the consequences of power and empowerment, inclusion and exclusion, from those power dynamics, if we are to avoid reproducing the logics and practices of ruling that feminism seeks to dismantle. More recently, Aiwha Ong argues that this process of exceptionalism becomes a potentially divisive force within neoliberal discourses of citizenship,^' This is to suggest that the subject is never comprehended or evaluated on her own terms, but rather her value is adjudicated by nation-state and transnational discourses and policies, legal practices, and market forces. Aimee Carrillo Rowe 25 These insights call us to question the risks at stake in individualized articulations of the subject, founded upon the subject's sovereign status, for the processes of ruling and adjudicating upon which they rely and through which they gain power. Thus, to consider the relationship between sovereignty and power is one task that remains undertheorized within our efforts to theorize power within any articulation of feminism. If power feminism is to seek to rearticulate and redeploy power, it must attend to power's multiple and often overlooked sources of authority. The image on Ong's book cover captures this quality of power: a well-dressed East Asian woman with a shopping bag in her hand walks past an East Asian street vending woman, balancing baskets of food, hoisted at the end of a long pole, upon her shoulders. Neoliberalism adjudicates the value of each of these "third world women," the image suggests, quite differently. Neoliberal citizens are mobile individuals who possess human capital or expertise are highly valued and can exercise citizenship; nation-state citizens, who are judged not to have such tradable competence or potential, in turn, become devalued. If our feminism is sutured through notions of individual empowerment that seeks a mode of power "not dependent" on others— and yet which is ironically quite extensively dependent upon them—it is underwritten and hence lends moral authority to neoliberalism as a mode of inclusion and exclusion that is founded in exceptionalism. The impact is global war and state-organized human capture. Rodriguez 2008 (Dylan Rodriguez is Professor and Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside, Excerpt “Warfare and the Terms of Engagement” from Abolition Now! 12/17/2008 http://www.revolutionbythebook.akpress.org/warfare-and-the-terms-of-engagement/ We are collectively witnessing, surviving, and working in a time of unprecedented state-organized human capture and state-produced physical/social/psychic alienation, from the 2.5 million imprisoned by the domestic and global US prison industrial complex to the profound forms of informal apartheid and proto-apartheid that are being instantiated in cities, suburbs, and rural areas all over the country. This condition presents a profound crisis—and political possibility—for people struggling against the white supremacist state, which continues to institutionalize the social liquidation and physical evisceration of Black, brown, and aboriginal peoples nearby and far away. If we are to approach racism, neoliberalism, militarism/militarization, and US state hegemony and domination in a legitimately “global” way, it is nothing short of unconscionable to expend significant political energy protesting American wars elsewhere (e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.) when there are overlapping, and no less profoundly oppressive, declarations of and mobilizations for war in our very own, most intimate and nearby geographies of “home.” This time of crisis and emergency necessitates a critical examination of the political and institutional logics that structure so much of the US progressive left, and particularly the “establishment” left that is tethered (for better and worse) to the non-profit industrial complex (NPIC). I have defined the NPIC elsewhere as the set of symbiotic relationships that link political and financial technologies of state and owning class social control with surveillance over public political discourse, including and especially emergent progressive and leftist social movements. This definition is most focused on the industrialized incorporation, accelerated since the 1970s, of pro-state liberal and progressive campaigns and movements into a spectrum of government-proctored non-profit organizations. It is in the context of the formation of the NPIC as a political power structure that I wish to address, with a less-than-subtle sense of alarm, a peculiar and disturbing politics of assumption that often structures, disciplines, and actively shapes the work of even the most progressive movements and organizations within the US establishment left (of which I too am a part, for better and worse): that is, the left’s willingness to fundamentally tolerate—and accompanying unwillingness to abolish—the institutionalized dehumanization of the contemporary policing and imprisonment apparatus in its most localized, unremarkable, and hence “normal” manifestations within the domestic “homeland” of the Homeland Security state. Behind the din of progressive and liberal reformist struggles over public policy, civil liberties, and law, and beneath the infrequent mobilizations of activity to defend against the next onslaught of racist, classist, ageist, and misogynist criminalization, there is an unspoken politics of assumption that takes for granted the mystified permanence of domestic warfare as a constant production of targeted and massive suffering, guided by the logic of Black, brown, and indigenous subjection to the expediencies and essential violence of the American (global) nation-building project. To put it differently: despite the unprecedented forms of imprisonment, social and political repression, and violent policing that compose the mosaic of our historical time, the establishment left (within and perhaps beyond the US) does not care to envision, much less politically prioritize, the abolition of US domestic warfare and its structuring white supremacist social logic as its most urgent task of the present and future. Our non-profit left, in particular, seems content to engage in desperate (and usually well-intentioned) attempts to manage the casualties of domestic warfare, foregoing the urgency of an abolitionist praxis that openly, critically, and radically addresses the moral, cultural, and political premises of these wars. Not long from now, generations will emerge from the organic accumulation of rage, suffering, social alienation, and (we hope) politically principled rebellion against this living apocalypse and pose to us some rudimentary questions of radical accountability: How were we able to accommodate, and even culturally and politically normalize the strategic, explicit, and openly racist technologies of state violence that effectively socially neutralized and frequently liquidated entire nearby populations of our people, given that ours are the very same populations that have historically struggled to survive and overthrow such “classical” structures of dominance as colonialism, frontier conquest, racial slavery, and other genocides? In a somewhat more intimate sense, how could we live with ourselves in this domestic state of emergency, and why did we seem to generally forfeit the creative possibilities of radically challenging, dislodging, and transforming the ideological and institutional premises of this condition of domestic warfare in favor of short-term, “winnable” policy reforms? (For example, why did we choose to formulate and tolerate a “progressive” political language that reinforced dominant racist notions of “criminality” in the process of trying to discredit the legal basis of “Three Strikes” laws?) What were the fundamental concerns of our progressive organizations and movements during this time, and were they willing to comprehend and galvanize an effective, or even viable opposition to the white supremacist state’s terms of engagement (that is, warfare)? This radical accountability reflects a variation on anticolonial liberation theorist Frantz Fanon’s memorable statement to his own peers, comrades, and nemeses: Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity. In the underdeveloped countries preceding generations have simultaneously resisted the insidious agenda of colonialism and paved the way for the emergence of the current struggles. Now that we are in the heat of combat, we must shed the habit of decrying the efforts of our forefathers or feigning incomprehension at their silence or passiveness. Lest we fall victim to a certain political nostalgia that is often induced by such illuminating Fanonist exhortations, we ought to clarify the premises of the social “mission” that our generation of US based progressive organizing has undertaken. In the vicinity of the constantly retrenching social welfare apparatuses of the US state, much of the most urgent and immediate work of community-based organizing has revolved around service provision. Importantly, this pragmatic focus also builds a certain progressive ethic of voluntarism that constructs the model activist as a variation on older liberal notions of the “good citizen.” Following Fanon, the question is whether and how this mission ought to be fulfilled or betrayed. I believe that to respond to this political problem requires an analysis and conceptualization of “the state” that is far more complex and laborious than we usually allow in our ordinary rush of obligations to build campaigns, organize communities, and write grant proposals. In fact, I think one pragmatic step toward an abolitionist politics involves the development of grassroots pedagogies (such as reading groups, in-home workshops, inter-organization and inter-movement critical dialogues) that will compel us to teach ourselves about the different ways that the state works in the context of domestic warfare, so that we no longer treat it simplistically. We require, in other words, a scholarly activist framework to understand that the state can and must be radically confronted on multiple fronts by an abolitionist politics. 2.Their recuperative project aligns the far left with the far right by using the politics of refusal as a platform for futurist human discourse of inclusion Edelman 2013 (Edelman, Fletcher Professor of English Literature at Tufts University | “Occupy Wall Street: ‘Bartleby’ Against the Humanities.” History of the Present, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring 2013) Pg 99-118) Melville’s story, which invites us to read it as the narrator’s advertisement for himself, as a flattering display of the insight and feeling induced in the smug man of business (self-described as “eminently safe” [60]) by his en- counter with the “strangest” (59) of scriveners, offers an implicit critique of this dominant corporate framing of the humanities. Faced, you’ll remember, with Bartleby’s intransigence, his refusal either to perform his job or to vacate the of face he occupies, the lawyer, unwilling to evict the copyist or to have him “collared by a constable” (91)—a scruple apparently foreign to many in positions of power today—determines to give up the chambers he rents and locate his of ces elsewhere. But what the lawyer himself is too tender to do, he leaves to those who come after. And sure enough, his former landlord, urged to action by his new tenants on discovering that Bartleby comes with the of ce, has the scrivener removed as a vagrant and sent to the prison called “the Tombs.” There, preferring not to dine, and aloof from every community, Bartleby, referred to as “the silent man,” dies quietly a few days later, as if maintaining to the very end his preference for the negative. In the wake of this death, the lawyer, far from heartless throughout his ordeal and open to anything that might have reconciled the scrivener to normative life, feels compelled in the name of that norm itself to positivize Bartleby’s negation, to turn it to a profit, by making both it and Bartleby speak to a universal “hu- manity.” He assuages the guilt he carries for the part he played in Bartleby’s fate (recall his words on abandoning Bartleby to the empty Wall Street of ce: “something from within me upbraided me” [91]), by attributing Bartleby’s eccentricity, which he’ll portray as a type of “derange[ment]” (97), to the heightening of Bartleby’s sensitivities during his time in the Dead Letter Of- ce. The never-to-be-delivered letters he imagines as causing the scrivener’s despair—a despair evinced in the preference not to copy the letters of the law— nd their answer, their redemptive counterpart, when the man of busi- ness turns to writing and becomes, with his tale of Bartleby, a man of letters himself. We might say he produces “Bartleby” to make Bartleby disappear, to eliminate the rupture, the negative preference, at odds with social totality and to make Bartleby, in his singularity, merely a copy of the human. Much as the corporate humanities do, and as Occupy Wall Street does as well in appropriating the scrivener to its cause, he turns the resistance to human community, the preference not to be integrated into the order of sociality, into yet another instrument of social affirmation. But the story in which Melville sets before us the story told by the lawyer, though it coincides letter for letter with the story produced by the lawyer himself, resists, as does the scrivener, such an erasure of what resists. Contrary to Lauren Klein’s assertion, our political obligation in the context of Bartleby is not “to think about the possibilities of what [the person who resists] might stand for,” but rather to interrogate the politics of making him “stand for” something in the first place. Bartleby, with his persistent iterations of what Gilles Deleuze describes as his “formula,” speaks to the tension between standing for something and engaging in an act.20 To stand for something is always to accede to a logic of social exchange that consolidates its gural economy as a totalized eld of meaning. But an act, by breaking from the framework of legibility itself, denies the closure that such a framework imposes in the form of its own self-evidence. By refusing to submit to the regulative norms of community and communication, the act insists on something else, on a preference that negates what is. Far from a socially compliant mode of sympathetic imagination, it com- pels a violent encounter with something radically unimaginable, inspiring, in turn, the mimetic violence of communitarian self-assertion. The lawyer at rst may vacillate before Bartleby’s unyielding, “I would prefer not to,” but he recalls a more choleric response by one of his employees: “‘Prefer not, eh?’ gritted Nippers—“I’d prefer him, if I were you, sir,’ . . . ‘I’d prefer him; I’d give him preferences, the stubborn mule!’” After telling Nippers, in response to this outburst, “I’d prefer that you withdraw for the present,” the lawyer succumbs to self-consciousness about his unintended choice of words: “Somehow, of late, I had got into the way of involuntarily using the word ‘prefer’ upon all sorts of not exactly suitable occasions. And I trembled to think that my contact with the scrivener had already and seriously affected me in a mental way. And what further and deeper aberration might it not yet produce?” (81). The aberration of Bartleby’s speech act, with its indifference to social norms, condenses itself for the lawyer in that single word: prefer. That word, however, not only begins to obtrude on the lawyer’s own speech, but also makes its way into that of his other copyists, too. When one of them observes to his boss, for example, “I was thinking about Bartleby here, and I think that if he would but prefer to take a quart of good ale every day, it would do much towards mending him,” the lawyer responds with a certain excitement: “So you have got the word, too” (81). But the employee fails to recognize what word the lawyer means, and when nally made to understand, he replies in a way that sunders the logic by which words and meanings are bound: “Oh, prefer? Oh yes—queer word. I never use it myself. But, sir, as I was saying, if he would but prefer—” (82). This verbal contagion that saps the sovereignty of meaning in linguistic exchange defines the queerness of the word that comes to epitomize Bartleby’s queerness, a queerness the story disposes us to see in its illegible materialty as a dangerous textual preference. Perhaps that explains why at one point the lawyer describes the effects produced by Bartleby’s phrase in terms that explicitly frame it in Sodomitical terms: “For a few moments I was turned into a pillar of salt” (69). In The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida touches brie y on Melville’s tale. After noting that the scrivener’s famous phrase “says nothing, promises nothing, neither refuses nor accepts any- thing,” he calls it a “singularly insignificant statement [that]remind some of a nonlanguage.”21 In this context the word “insignificant” denotes a resistance to signification that makes Bartleby’s phrase, from the vantage point of the social order of meaning, an affront to the notion of value. Infecting linguistic communication with this element of “non-language,” it reifies the queerness of language as iterative machine and in doing so it gestures toward some- thing else at work in language, something that communal norms of meaning and value seek to foreclose: the queerness that every regime of “what is” must construe as what is not, as the nothing, the negativity, or the preference for negation that threatens the normative order, whose name is always human community. And it’s not just the Right that pits human community against the queer threat to its future; the Left, and many who call themselves “queer,” embrace that position too. That’s how Left and Right acquire political legibility and come to share the political terrain; it’s even what makes them, in this sense at least, effectively interchangeable. Though each has a different vision of the human community it aims to procure, both aspire to realize the coherence of a social collectivity. Thus Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, writing from the Left in Empire, the global bestseller they published in 2000, see in Bartleby what they characterize as “the absoluteness of refusal,” which they then align with the “hatred of authority” and the “refusal of voluntary servitude.” But their admiration for this queer refusal of the norm can only go so far. Such refusal may be, as they put it, “the beginning of a liberatory politics, but it is only a beginning. . . . What we need is to create a new social body, which is a project that goes well beyond refusal. . . . Beyond the simple refusal, or as part of that refusal, we need also to construct a new mode of life and above all a new community.”22 Here sounds the doxa whose chorus aspires to incorporate us all: wealthy sponsors of the corporate humanities and neo-Marxist critics of global empire; the protestors of Occupy Wall Street and Wall Street’s CEOs alike. Bartleby, in his utter refusal to mean for communitarian ends, can possess no value except as a proof of negativity’s insufficiency. Hence the lawyer who authors Bartleby’s tale, unlike Melville who authors the lawyer’s, must conscript the copyist to the cause of the human by making his resistance make sense. His distance from community and his absence of anything “ordinarily human” must prove in the end his hypersensitivity to the pathos of the human and even his longing for a uto- pian “community” where “good tidings” and “hope” on their “errands of life” can neither be errant nor erring. Like Hardt and Negri, the lawyer, that is, must refuse “the absoluteness of refusal,” forcibly wrenching Bartleby from the queerness of preferring not to accede to normative reason and sense. To appreciate the complex politics of these multiple negations of the queer as negation, and to conclude this discussion by bringing it back to the Occupy movement once more, let me place beside Hardt and Negri’s text an editorial from the politically conservative Daily Oklahoman of Oklahoma City. Published in the Sunday edition of the paper on November 6, 2011, the editorial, which bore the title “Goal Remains Fuzzy for Occupy Protestors,” appeared four days before the public reading of “Bartleby” on Wall Street. But this editorial identified Bartleby with the Occupy movement in advance, intending that identification to discredit the movement and Bartleby both. Allow me to quote at length: “I would prefer not to.” So sayeth Bartleby, the intransigent copyist in a classic Herman Melville short story. To every request to earn his pay, to move on, to do something—anything— Bartleby would reply, “I would prefer not to.” . . . “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” is a study in petulant behavior met with inexplicable patience by Bartleby’s employer. The story of Wall Street today is one of petulance met with inexplicable patience by authorities dealing with the “Occupy This” movement that’s spread from lower Manhattan around the country. Ask the occupiers what they hope to accomplish. They’d prefer not to tell you. Perhaps they don’t really know. Who’s in charge? They’d prefer not to tell you. Everyone is in charge. Nobody is. What good does it do to hang around a park, beat drums and occasionally march to a designated site? They’d prefer not to say. It’s the doing, not the point of it, that matters. Some occupiers have done their best to incite police reaction to their doings, all the better for news footage of how The Man is cracking the heads of the innocent. . . . . . . The “Occupy This” movement’s story is still being written. The childish and sometimes violent behavior of its participants is still being met with inexplicable patience. . . . The people will express their intolerance for lawlessness at the ballot box. That’s exactly where the movement could have beaten its drums, in the way the tea party did. It preferred not to. Ah anarchy! Ah enough already! 23 The specter of anarchy, of radical lawlessness, of acts that have no point, however little connection it bears to the Occupy protests themselves, is refused in defense of an implicit ideal of the integrated “social body,” the harmonious community endorsed by Hardt and Negri’s text as well. Unlike Hardt and Negri, though, the author of the editorial fully acknowledges the force of Bartleby’s queerness and draws a reasonable conclusion about where resistance to reason must lead. If the Left would normalize Bartleby as a crucial step toward a “new community,” then the Right perceives, correctly, his threat to community as such. And it recognizes something else that the Left too frequently ignores as well: that the Bartlebys of the world don’t ask to be liked and the queer remains whatever a given order cannot accept. All progressivism in politics, all gradualist normalization, aspires, in the end, to the very same thing that moves the radical Right: the elimination of the queer; not, however, by resorting to the violence of or outside the law, but by constructing a community from whose total embrace no one would be excluded. No one except those Bartlebys excluded through forcible inclu- sion, eliminated by being turned into pillars of the collectivity they resist. Consider, in this context, “Occupy Bartleby,” a post that appeared on a left-leaning blog in response to the Oklahoman’s editorial. With the inten- tion of defending the Occupy movement and Bartleby at once, the author of the blog post offers a rival interpretation of the tale: “The point the editorial seems to make is that the protestors are as strange as Bartleby, but that misses the main message of the story. It’s a simplistic reading. The real point is that Bartleby’s protest, like the Occupier’s protest, actually represents a sane and human reaction to an indifferent world dictated by the greed of Wall Street.”24 For all the difference in their political viewpoints and their approaches to Melville’s story, the editorial and the blog post pray side-by- side to the gods of the “sane” and the “human.” The left-wing blogger denies Bartleby’s strangeness to enshrine him at the heart of community, while the right-wing author, alert to that strangeness, rejects him for the community’s good. Both would eliminate the queerness that doesn’t worship the gods of the polis, recalling the indictment of Socrates that led to his date with a hemlock cocktail for “refusing to recognize the gods recognized by the state” and “corrupting the youth.”25 This reproductive futurity forwards contradictory narratives of disability as vector for incapacity and opportunity for biocapitalist intervention. The impact is the pathologization, withering and abandonment of queer kids of color Fritsch 16 [Kelly Fritsch, Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Women and Gender Studies Institute and Technoscience Research Unit, University of Toronto. Fritsch holds a doctorate in Social and Political Thought from York University and is co-editor of Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late Capitalist Struggle, “Cripping Neoliberal Futurity: Marking the Elsewhere and Elsewhen of Desiring Otherwise”, Feral Feminisims Untimely Bodies: Futurity Resistance, and Non-Normative Embodiment, Issue 5, Spring 2016] Fighting for the Children Edelman’s contention is that reproductive futurism disavows all that threatens to end the future, particularly emphasizing the role of the queer as that which “names the side of those not ‘fighting for the children,’ the side outside of the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism” (2004, 3). While the Child represents the heteronormative future, the queer can only signify “the negativity opposed to every form of social viability” (2004, 9) and thereby threatens the social order because the queer “raises the spectre of, not just a worse future, but precisely ‘no future’” (White 2013, 23). Edelman calls on queers to embrace the negative and to “fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized” (2004, 29), suggesting that the ethical value of queerness is precisely in “accepting its figural status as resistance to the viability of the social” (2004, 3). For Edelman, queers who seek gay marriage, military service, or adoption thus “jump on the bandwagon of reproductive futurism” (McRuer 2008) and reproduce “the conditions of queer abjection” (White 2013, 23). Instead, Edelman calls on queers to “acquiesce to the charge that we are society’s worst nightmare and to embrace our figuration as the negative force working against the social order” (McRuer 2008), for “queerness can never define an identity; it can only disturb one” (Edelman 2004, 17). Edelman thus provocatively asks: “while not seeking to refute the lies that pervade [...] familiar right-wing diatribes [about our capacity to destroy society], do we also have the courage to acknowledge, and even embrace, their correlative truths?” (2004, 22). While asserting that his anti-social strategy “promises, in more than one sense of the phrase, absolutely nothing” (2004, 5) and further noting that his project is “impossible” (2004, 4), he does argue that embracing queer negativity “can have no justification if justification requires it to reinforce some positive social value; its value, instead, resides in its challenge to value as defined by the social, and thus in its radical challenge to the very value of the social itself” (2004, 6). For “queerness exposes the obliquity of our relation to what we experience in and as social reality, alerting us to the fantasies structurally necessary in order to sustain it and engaging those fantasies through the figural logics, the linguistic structures, that shape them” (2004, 6-7). Edelman suggests that queerness is what can challenge “futurism’s unquestioned good” (2004, 7) and also resist the idea that if there is no baby there is no future, and that without a future, social organization, collective reality, and life itself is undone (2004, 13). Edelman asserts “that we do not intend a new politics, a better society, a brighter tomorrow” and choose instead to “not choose the Child” and “insist that the future stop here,” for the future is “is mere repetition and just as lethal as the past” (2004, 31). Commenting on Edelman’s negation of the future, Jose Esteban Muñoz writes in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity: “When I negotiate the ever-increasing sidewalk obstacles produced by oversized baby strollers on parade in the city in which I live, the sheer magnitude of the vehicles that flaunt the incredible mandate of reproduction as world- historical virtue, I could not be more hailed” (2009, 92) by the queer imperative to not fight for the children. Yet Muñoz also notes: “As strongly as I reject reproductive futurity, I nonetheless refuse to give up on concepts such as politics, hope, and a future that is not kid stuff” (2009, 92), for “all children are not the privileged white babies to whom contemporary society caters” (2009, 94). Muñoz further elucidates: “Racialized kids, queer kids, are not the sovereign princes of futurity. Although Edelman does indicate that the future of the child as futurity is different from the future of actual children, his framing nonetheless accepts and reproduces this monolithic figure of the child that is indeed always already white” (2009, 95). In addition to McRuer’s critique of the Child as always already able-bodied, other queer and disability studies scholars have echoed Munoz’s critique. For example, Kafer writes that “this always already whiteness is a whiteness framed by and understood through regimes of health and hygiene” whereby racialized and queer kids cast out of reproductive futurity “have been and continue to be framed as sick, as pathological, as contagious,” marking the co-constitution of race, class, and disability as delimiting reproductive futurity (2013, 32). This conclusion is also echoed in the work of Mel Chen (2011) and Deborah Cohler (2014). Kafer and Muñoz agree that “it is important not to hand over futurity to normative white reproductive futurity” (Muñoz 2009, 95), for “[t]he dominant model of futurity is indeed ‘winning,’ but that is all the more reason to call on a utopian political imagination that will enable us to glimpse another time and place: a ‘not-yet’ where queer youths of colour actually get to grow up” (96). Indeed, Muñoz comments that “[t]he way to deal with the asymmetries and violent frenzies that mark the present is not to forget the future. The here-and-now is simply not enough” (2009, 96), leading Kafer to suggest that the task at hand is to “imagine disability and disability futures otherwise” (2013, 34). Following Muñoz (2009) and Kafer (2013), it is important to fight for the future, but to do so requires addressing the ways by which neoliberal futurity depends upon both negating the futures of disability while also promoting particular inclusions of disability. Thus, while the ableism that underlies the ways in which Kafer’s future is written on her body and the ways in which disabled lives are not tractable, these accounts do not mark the ways in which neoliberal futurity promotes and capacitates certain disabled lives so as to affirm particular forms of biocapitalism and inclusion that have implications for the way in which disability can become in the world. It is not enough then, to invest in the neoliberal biocapitalist forms of enhanced futures of disabled people. Rather, it is imperative to turn away from the myth of the future that forecloses the possibility of other worlds. In 2014, Kristin Nelson’s radio documentary told the story of Paige Cunliffe, a 21-year- old woman living in Ontario, Canada who became developmentally disabled after a bout of meningitis at the age of 13 months. For most of Paige’s life her mother Pam was her primary caregiver, but Pam found that she was no longer able to care fulltime for Paige once Paige became an adult. After waiting on a list to be placed in a group home for over 10 years, Paige was instead placed in a long-term nursing care home. Paige was not alone in this placement; between 2008-2012 in Ontario, over 5000 people with developmental disabilities under the age of 65 were admitted to long-term care homes. While long-term care is designed for people who require 24/7 care, most of the residents of long-term care facilities are elderly patients who are not ideal peers for a social and energetic 21-year-old such as Paige. Within the care home, there are few activities available that suit Paige’s needs and interests and, with a caretaker-to-resident ratio of 1:11, Pam notes that Paige is often left sitting alone in soiled clothing for hours. The waiting list for a group home in Ontario includes over 12,000 developmentally disabled people. In a group-home setting, Paige would be with peers, engaged in activities, and have a worker-to-resident ratio of 1:3. With such a long list, Nelson notes that Paige may be living with the very sick and the elderly for up to 20 years. However, Paige’s withering, like the withering experienced by many disabled people, is not simply a story about a lack of material resources that would allow for the flourishing of disabled lives. Rather, withering and flourishing are not simply a matter of resources (personal or state) but also invoke forms of futurity that privilege only certain forms of the future for disability and disabled people. Disabled people who can be easily accommodated, included, enhanced, and capacitated by forms of biocapitalism are much more likely to thrive. Such thriving, however, must still contend with the way in which neoliberal futurity is embedded within the logic of the suffering disabled child who is not expected to grow up. Paige’s withering, then, is related to the enhancement of others; simply capacitating Paige within the context of neoliberal futurity does not address the myriad ways in which disability functions within neoliberal economies. The ambiguity by which neoliberal futurity mobilizes the suffering disabled child as both a site of no future and a site of enhancement marks disability as contested terrain. Through the examples traced in this article, neoliberal futurity is deployed slightly differently. For Clarence, there can be no future for her disabled children. For Cure SMA, disability produces only a diminishing and dependent child with no future, so it is imperative to invest in a biocapitalist future that can overcome SMA. Jerry’s Kids are presented as having no future, even when confronted with grown-up renegades. The telethon and contemporary fundraising initiatives encourage a hope and investment in processes of enhancement and cure as the only possible future for disability. For Rapp, there is no future for particular disabled children, but there is hope in having another child. The MWF marks disabled children as having no future, but gives the child hope for life today, which is utilized for medical compliance that might prolong the child’s life. With all this focus on the child, it is no wonder that Paige is an unanticipated adult: while there now exists a vaccine to prevent Paige’s condition, it is too late for Paige to receive the future promised by this vaccine (Nelson 2014). Paige is not asking for anything that the telethon, fundraisers, or the MWF can provide—Paige did not die and Paige cannot overcome her condition. There are compelling reasons to follow Edelman towards negating the Child and the future when thinking through the forms of neoliberal futurity open to disability. Consider, for example, if embracing the withering of Paige opens possibilities that are not readily apparent when advocating for a future, especially a future that is entrenched in cure and enhancement? Is there a way to read Paige as failure, dysfunction, loss, tragedy, or suffering so as to avoid turning her into a form of difference that can be capacitated or simply left to wither? There are good reasons to embrace Paige’s suffering as a way of affirming that the tractable futures available to some disabled adults are not enough. Suffering can be mobilized as a way to highlight the ways in which not all forms of disability can be easily accommodated or adapted by neoliberal forms of capacitation. Using suffering to draw attention to forms of withering that some disabled people experience can be a helpful political strategy, but must be used with caution given the historical mobilization of suffering as a way to mark disabled lives as those not worth living. A politics of suffering is one way to bridge queer and crip theory to highlight the differential ways in which not all disabled people suffer equally, thus exposing the structural forces at play in the capacitation and withering of disabled bodies. Some disabled people are capacitated in ways that are counterproductive to radically refiguring the world, whereas others are debilitated through violent processes that should not be celebrated. There is no one way to experience suffering, nor can we reduce or trivialize particular instances of suffering. Although it is not possible to entirely escape the frame in which disability-related suffering has been historically shaped and mobilized to render lives as not worth living, shared social experiences of suffering can push us to think more critically about the ways in which suffering is mobilized and to whose benefit. However, as this article has shown, disability cannot operate in a full negation of the figure of the Child or unequivocally embrace “no future,” as disability is always already embedded in the production of the future as a future of technological and medical advances—a future to be found through the saving grace of biocapitalism. The future is accessible, happy, hopeful, and inclusive, even when it is not (Fritsch 2013). Disability, through neoliberal biocapitalist processes of capacitation and withering, participates in the formation of the figure of the Child, and is thus an important site of contestation. The aff may be a pre-requisite but it is not a complete politics – their method of study cannot defend or sustain itself which guarantees backlash and re-appropriation. Ford 17 – (Derek R., Prof of Education at DePauw University, PhD Syracuse, “Studying like a communist: Affect, the Party, and the educational limits to capitalism,” Incorporating ACCESS, Volume 49, 2017 - Issue 5, Pages 452-461)//a-berg Studying is, like the crowd event, a beautiful moment of encounter, the opening up of the possible, the breeding ground of the new. While studying one is disindivuated, swaying between subjectification and desubjectification, between being this and being that. The studier resists classification, preferring not to actualize any predicate. And like the crowd event, I contend, studying isn’t politics, it is only the occasion for politics, a necessary but insufficient educational logic for the struggle against capitalist production relations and for the common. Without something more, studying can retreat from impotentiality into impotence, and, on the other hand, it can be actualized into something reactionary. To illustrate these possibilities, I will turn to two examples. The first example is of studying as hacking, when one takes some thing or process, enters into and disrupts it. Hacking is an intervention that directs something toward other ends and uses, detaching it from its attachments to other objects and processes, potentially opening it up to the unforeseen and unforeseeable. In this way, hacking is a transgression and the hacker is an outlaw, one who literally lives by transgressing the lawful order that dictates propriety (who can do what with what). Lewis and Friedrich (2016) bring up the Anonymous collective, which has ‘repurposed websites and servers to expose particular contradictions and injustices in the capitalist system’ (p. 244). Not only their actions, but Anonymous’ very mode of organization is subversive in that anyone can join. Membership in the collective is not predicated upon any particular identity or a commitment to a specific end. Anonymous are ‘pirates who steal back private code for common use, and in this sense open up the world of code to unanticipated mutations’ (ibid). One of Anonymous’ first major actions was a swarm attack on the Church of Scientology for their efforts to censor online criticism of the Church. In addition to sending all-black faxes to their fax machines (to use up ink), Anonymous members coordinated a Google bomb attack by linking ‘scientology’ to a host of other words, like ‘dangerous’ and ‘cult,’ to influence (redirect) any Google searches for scientology. Through distributed denial-of-service attacks, in which multiple computers attack the infrastructure of root nameservers, Anonymous hackers have shut down a host of websites, from the Department of Justice (in response to the DoJ’s takedown of a file-sharing network) to the International Association of Chiefs of Police (as part of a national day of action against police brutality). While hacking is indeed a reappropriation of code and a repurposing of the networked infrastructure of contemporary capitalism, there is nothing inherently revolutionary about hacking. For as many Anonymous actions that have supported revolutionary political movements, there have been others that have arguably hindered such movements. Consider Anonymous’ intervention in the ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings as a case in point. Anonymous sought to support the uprisings by attacking government websites and publicizing the private information of government officials who were opposing or repressing the protests. Yet in addition to attacking the governments of Egypt and Tunisia, which were indeed repressing popular revolts, Anonymous also attacked the government of Syria, which was battling a range of forces, including those associated with al-Qaeda and its splinter group, Daesh, or the Islamic State in Syria. The situation in Syria was much different than in Egypt or Tunisia, as the government retained popular support and immediately engaged in a series of serious reforms, including the drafting of an entirely new constitution (see Glazebrook, 2013). Indeed, it could be said that in Syria, the government was the progressive force. Or consider a spin-off of Anonymous, Ghost Squad, which shut down the official website of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the next week attacked the website of Black Lives Matter (before tweeting, ‘All lives matter!’). Regardless of one’s position on these issues, conflicts, nation-states, and so on, it is clear from these few examples that hacking doesn’t have a politics and that, as an act of studying, it is not inherently against capitalist production relations. The second example that I turn to here is meant to illustrate the potential apolitical impotence of studying, and it brings us more directly into conversation with Dean. In the last chapter of Lewis’ (2013) On Study, he turns to the early stages of the Occupy Wall Street movement to articulate the ‘im-potential political dimension to studying’ (p. 150). Lewis celebrates the beginning stage of Occupy Wall Street as a form of collective, public studying, especially in its absence of concrete demands. While the mainstream press and politicians were anxious to hear what the protesters were demanding so they could issue a response accordingly, the occupation ‘spent most of its time preferring not to commit to any one demand over and above any other’ (p. 152). Rather than actualize political polemics and demands, articulating them into proposals that could then be evaluated, occupiers produced a rupture within the received order of political struggle. The occupation actively resisted the drive to achieve results and instead conducted an ongoing study of politics, suspending the pursuit of measureable outcomes; engaging in protest as not protest. As a result, efforts to grade Occupy falter, for there were no pre-established criteria with which to evaluate it. Occupy celebrated horizontalism, leaderlessness, inclusivity, and the absence of hierarchical structures. Neither an undifferentiated mass nor an agglomeration of individuals, the occupiers formed a state of exception where dichotomies and divisions were left idle, the homeless the middle class, and a host of other intermediary grounds (including students) met in an atopic space and time to study the sublime art of discussing across differences and living across class divisions. What emerged was precisely the question (and not the answer) of inclusion and exclusion facing not only OWS but the contemporary learning society as such. (p. 159) This state of exception was exemplified in the slogan, ‘We are the 99%!’ The 99% was a kind of nonidentity, ‘a totally generic yet absolutely irreducible singularity’ (p. 157), as Lewis puts it. ‘We are the 99%!’ took a quantity and transformed it into an indefinable quality, a way of grouping people without resorting to predicates and already-established identities. Just precisely who the 99% were (or are), was never fully delineated, couldn’t quite be accounted for. The question was left open for collective study. A major problem with this ongoing collective study, however, is that there was nothing to defend it or to sustain it. Capital and its state weren’t studying, but were rather gearing up to unleash a wave of repression that would eventually undo the occupation. The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund has released several sets of documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests that detail the dense network of surveillance and repressive efforts that included offices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security, the New York Stock Exchange, the Federal Reserve, universities and colleges, major corporations, local police forces, and local governments, as well as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and the US Marshals Service (Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, 2012, 2016). In this case, repression opened the door to reabsorption, as many Occupiers entered the non-profit industrial complex, or even started their own business ventures to profit from their activism. Occupying and hacking represent study as embryonic political praxis, the enactment of educational logics that are potentially antagonistic to capitalist production relations and capital’s logic of learning. Whereas capitalism demands that everything—even that which opposes it—be actualized so that it can be subsumed within its circuits of productivity, occupying and hacking interrupt this seemingly ceaseless process, opening up the world and subjectivity to the possibility of being otherwise than. Studying is therefore, I proffer, the educational activity of the crowd, a way to pedagogically bring forth the beautiful moment. This is a crucial element of struggle but, as Dean insists, it isn’t properly a politics; it is merely an opening for politics. Writing again explicitly about political movements, Dean (2016) contends: The beautiful in-between of infinite potentiality can’t last forever. People get tired. Some want a little predictability, reliable food sources, shelter, and medical care. Others realize they’re doing all the work… The crowd isn’t an alternative political arrangement; it’s the opening to a process of re-arrangement. (p. 142) The question, then, is how to seize upon this opening and carry it forward into a real revolutionary movement. How, in other words, to make the encounter take hold, how to make it take off in a desirable direction? These are questions that, while they should always be open to study, have to be answered, at least provisionally and contingently. Or else the market and its advertising agencies will come knocking with an endless list of glossy, high-definition answers. Or, alternatively, the state will come knocking down doors, guns drawn and handcuffs aplenty. The encounter won’t take hold and the possibility of the new will be foreclosed as the crowd is dispersed through redirection, exhaustion, or repression. Agamben’s ontological rendering of political events is reductive – their analytical tunnel vision prevents nuanced understandings of power which can actualize resistance. Andrew Robinson, January 21, 2011 “Giorgio Agamben: destroying sovereignty,” http://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-giorgio-agamben-destroying-sovereignty/)//a-berg My main concern with Agamben’s theory arises from some degree of scepticism regarding the assumption that political issues have an ontological status. Agamben’s work has become strongly resonant and fashionable for a very clear reason: he is talking about issues which speak to the problems of the moment, which seem to communicate directly with issues such as Guantanamo Bay, ‘anti-terror’ laws, attacks on civil liberties, and the global ‘war on terror’. It is a good thing that theorists are giving serious attention to these issues, and the social logics of states are clearly tied-up in them. The difficulty is the question of whether these issues really operate on the deep ontological or structural level which Agamben assumes. Political events are taken to express ontological rather than contingent phenomena (or more generously to Agamben, perhaps the contingencies reveal ever-present potentialities). Sovereignty has always been what it is (i.e. Auschwitz), but it has unfolded cumulatively according to its own logic. But can sovereignty ‘unfold’ of its own accord, as if the entire political context derives from it? I feel there is a fundamental problem with Agamben’s work, and that of several other continental theorists, which stems from an unduly reductive, single- (or at most double-)agent account of social forces, in which sovereignty is treated as a determining instance from which the rest of modern social life follows (akin to the role of capitalism in Marxist theory, but with capitalism replaced by sovereignty). Agamben explains the current situation mainly through the unfolding of a single dynamic, that of sovereignty. This underestimates the extent to which the state’s unfolding is restricted and inflected by other powerful social forces. For instance, there are cases where state power is constrained from the outside by the power of social movements (such as various discussions of society against the state, from Clastres to works on Latin American social movements), or by forces such as transnational capital (as much of the scholarship on globalisation argues); cases where the state is ‘in society’ and fuses with it, becoming at least partly dependent on social movements, as discussed by comparativists such as Joel Migdal; and cases where a ‘historical bloc’ of local class forces contributes to the formation and direction of the state, as in neo-Gramscian analysis. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Agamben is wrong about sovereignty. The fact that states are constrained by or even hybridised with other social forces does not necessarily preclude them having their own logic or dynamic. To argue by analogy, capitalists always seek to make profits, even if sometimes they have to rely on local kinship networks to secure profits, or pay off local leaders to access resources. The profit motive is inherent to capitalist motivation, even when this motivation enters into hybrid combinations. Similarly, it is quite plausible that Agamben’s account of sovereignty describes something inherent in the functioning of states. But nevertheless, the question of whether, to what extent, and how the state is able to actualise sovereignty becomes dependent on its location among other social forces. If it is suddenly acting more thoroughly on this logic, then it is quite possible that it has not simply evolved cumulatively, but has either grown stronger relative to other forces, has ‘seceded’ from them and become unconcerned about its effects on them, or is benefiting from an enabling context which lets it unfold its own dynamic in an unconstruained way. In other times and places, states have either been forced to permit or unable to prevent the expansion of rights such as habeas corpus. It is particularly paradoxical that the state is acting in a more unconstrained way with regard to sovereignty at precisely the moment when it has lost important powers to global capital. Is global capital actually permitting, or even encouraging, the unfolding of sovereignty? Is sovereignty becoming more apparent because the cathartic outlet of interstate conflict has declined? Are states acting up because they fear their own loss of power to transnational networks, from social movements to armed opposition groups? Is the state becoming less afraid of powerful ‘included’ groups such as organised labour and the professions, which would otherwise make it hesitant to risk deploying sovereignty? Is the discourse of sovereignty reappearing in force because the state needs to redefine its own role to survive the decay of other narratives (such as the state-as-arbiter and the state-as-distributor)?

1NC to Gibson-Graham 1 The separation of God from the polis has led to a time of failed conditions. The need for God has been replaced by supposedly enlightened self-legislation. Post-modern secularists practice a form of self-mutilation by denying that which is present alongside them. The refusal of a future beyond our immanent social order is a violent denial that takes being-towards-death as the only authentic future we may have. Blond 98 [Phillip is at Peterhouse, Cambridge and is a research student completing his PhD in Theology in the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. He previously held a prize fellowship in philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. He has published articles on phenomenology, aesthetics and theology. This is his first published volume. He is currently working on a monograph on theology and perception, ed. Post-secular philosophy: Between philosophy and theology. Psychology Press, 1998. p 1-2] We live in a time of failed conditions. Everywhere people who have no faith in any possibility, either for themselves, each other, or for the world, mouth locutions they do not understand. With words such as ‘politics’, they attempt to formalise the unformalisable and found secular cities upon it. They attempt to live in the in-between and celebrate ambiguity as the new social horizon, always however bringing diversity into accord with their own projections. Always and everywhere, these late moderns make competing claims about the a priori, for they must be seen to disagree. Indeed such thinkers feel so strongly about the ethical nature of their doubt that they argue with vehemence about overcoming metaphysics, about language and the dangers of presence. Since God is committed to presence, they assume that theology is no longer an option sustainable by serious minds.2 These secular scholars accept without question the philosophical necessity of their position (they are happy autonomous creatures these atheists), even though with a certain magnanimity of gesture they might concede in an informal discussion that God could perhaps exist in some possible world, but they tell us in all likelihood it is not this one. To an external observer such gestures might suggest that these minds are grasping for enemies in a world that they are no longer sure of. But of course such external positions are now no longer considered possible. Blind [ignorant] to the immanence3 of such a world, unable to disengage themselves from whatever transcendental schema they wish to endorse,these secular minds are only now beginning to perceive that all is not as it should be, that what was promised to them—self-liberation through the limitation of the world to human faculties—might after all be a form of self-mutilation. Indeed, ever since Kant dismissed God from human cognition and relegated access to Him to the sphere of practical ethics and moral motivation, human beings have been very pragmatic indeed. They have found value in self-legislation and so see no reason for God. For after all, they now maintain, there can be no moral realism, the good cannot possess any actuality outside the conditional and conditioning nature of the human mind. Nor apparently, according to these late moderns, can a transcendent value escape any of the contemporary surrogates—language, pragmatics, power—which transcendental thinking has engendered in order to preserve itself. These proxies, which are viewed as the ruling a prioris of the day, supposedly determine or foreclose upon any other possibility. No, their advocates say, ‘your values are ancillary to this, in respect of this discernment everything else is subordinate, this is the prior discourse that secures our descriptions, and we, we who ascertained this, we are the authors and judges of this world and there is no other’. Perhaps unsurprisingly this state of affairs is viewed as a cause of much joy and self-affirmation And what a world it is that is so blithely affirmed. Every day in the contemporary polis new beings are unearthed, new subjectivities are claimed as excluded, with fresh litigations being initiated on their behalf for mutual and communal benefit. The pious speak righteously to each other about the Other, about how they are keeping faith with the world, about the need to be vigilant against the illegitimacy of hierarchies. For we are told there can be no discrimination in this secular city. In this polis the lowest has become the highest, and equality names itself as the only value that cannot be devalued. However, without true value, without a distinction between the better and the worse, of course the most equal and the most common will hold sway. Of course the lowest common denominator will be held up to be the foundation of human civic life. What yardstick then for such a society, what measure do the public who must measure themselves require? If they themselves now realise, as some do, that human beings cannot (and indeed must not), provide their own calibration, where do they look? Not surprisingly, most still attempt a modern solution; either they seek the path of immanence or they accept the necessity of a transcendental methodology. The latter turn away from the world as if it were too fearful a thing to confront, and seek safety in allying the formal conditions of thought with those of behaviour; whereas the former, too convinced by the hopelessness of their position, deduce themselves to be avid powerless creatures, and as beings who desire nothing but the affect of their own potency they throw themselves into the void, embracing the anonymity therein as if it were a true destiny and a real proof of their ultimate autonomy. Those who seek to refrain from such extremes of philosophical candour do so by turning away and celebrating and debating their own immanent social order. They will deny that the preceding positions mark the outermost boundaries of their own possibilities. They will speak of thinking beyond these binaries, and not consider the possibility that these oppositions might merely think them. In consequence, though these creatures of perspicacity and unconcealment speak almost endlessly about difficulty, inherent paradox and suddenly discovered aporia, they cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the conditions that gave rise to their world. Oscillating without resolution or recognition between transcendental hope and immanentist conjecture, they lack a perception of their position. Holding the middle of a lie, they feel profoundly comfortable with themselves and even more so with their enemies Always and everyday those trapped in such worlds practise the violence of denial. They deny that any world or order might precede them; through turning away from the transcendent they violate that which is present alongside and before them, and with the intoxicating compulsion of ressentiment they complete it all with the refusal of a future, taking being-towards-death (Sein zum Tode) as the definitive mark of the only subjectivity to come. Death, they say, is the only future that both you and I can authentically have as individuals. As they sadly ponder the reality of their own deaths (no doubt by casting themselves into the role of the tragic), these thinkers return almost unthinkingly to the positivism that has authored their whole lives: ‘After all beyond one’s life how could one know anything else?’ Or they might say, with a smile accompanied by a slight incline of the neck, ‘no other possibility has ever made itself known to me’. Happy in their respective oppositions, they will indeed be, until their deaths, unaware of that which they never sought to address

The affirmative misreads history. The “crisis of capitalism” is not rooted in a labor-capital relationship, or even capitalocentrism, but rather the lack of transcendent reason and the secularist locus of corporeality. Genovese 97 (Eugene, PhD in history from Columbia University, historian and professor, “Secularism in the General Crisis of Capitalism”, The American Journal of Jurisprudence, pg. 196-197) The Marxists were right: the twentieth century has been a century of the "general crisis of capitalism," even if they erred badly on the nature of that crisis, which has been primarily a crisis of the spirit engendered by the loss of faith in God and a transcendent law. Still, the Marxist critique of capitalism had much in common with the critique offered in Rerum Novarum, much as did the critique offered by the organic conservatives of nineteenth-century Europe and by the southern slaveholders in our own country. Communists, Fascists, and conservatives of various stripes were all responding to a palpable breakdown of social order, to a crisis of authority-not merely of this or that authority, but the very principle of authority, which implies, as Benito Mussolini pithily observed, the acceptance of hierarchy. The Marxists, most notably the Communists, sought to storm the heavens with their doctrine of "class truth," which, however incoherently, they tried to ground in what they aptly called "objective reality." Marxists, who denied the existence of God and who deified man, proclaimed themselves the instruments of objective and scientifically verifiable historical laws. They saw their duty ("historical task") as the establishment of an egalitarian social order free of exploitation and oppression, even if it cost tens of millions of lives. Now, how could people who saw themselves as the liberators of the human race hold human life so cheaply? How could Mao Tse-tung cheerfully say that China would win a nuclear war since it could afford the loss of 300,000,000 or so of its own people, and that if that war destroyed Italy, among other countries, so be it. (For some inexplicable reason, Palmiro Togliatti, the head of the Italian Communist Party, found Mao's cheerfulness a bit hard to take.) Marx espoused a materialist interpretation of history, which retains much of value when not swallowed whole, but he superimposed upon it a wildly illusory philosophy of humanity according to which, unrestrained by God and His law, man makes himself and, in effect, becomes his own god. Marx, who was no fool, took the measure of human frailty, but, like Rousseau, he treated depravity as a product of oppressive social relations, which could be overthrown by political action and replaced by social relations that freed men to realize their human potential. Rejecting the Christian doctrines of original sin and inherent human depravity, Marx believed that, once freed, men would naturally choose the path of cooperation and brotherhood. But the hardheaded Marx never doubted that brotherhood could not arise without a level of economic production that would remove the temptation to exploit EUGENE D. GENOVESE others. Hence, the ultimate success of his revolutionary program rested on the assumption that socialism, by freeing men from exploitation, would far outstrip capitalism not through a more equitable distribution of goods but through a level of productivity that would transform socialism into communism and realize the ideal of "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." Alas, the great socialist experiments have collapsed, after snuffing out tens of millions of lives and instituting unspeakably brutal and tyrannical regimes. Ironically, they collapsed in the wake of a systemic economic failure, for they could not produce the material abundance they had confidently promised. And perhaps worse, they exposed themselves as even more deeply corrupt, in the most mundane sense, than the capitalist societies. Josef Stalin, shortly before his death, prophesied a "radiant future for the peoples," but he left a society in which one ruling elite had replaced another, taking it off the top and leaving the people to take the hindmost-a society that his successors, despite some honest efforts, found impossible to reform. We shall never understand the full extent of the tragedy without an appreciation of the quality of the revolutionaries who made it possible. It is true that the social-democratic and purportedly Marxist Second International breathed a good deal of fatalism--of reliance upon the inexorable working of the objective laws of capitalist accumulation-but the revolutionary wing that emerged as Leninist or Communist placed political struggle above economic exigencies. The dominant form of Marxism after the Bolshevik Revolution gave primacy to the struggle for state power. It called its own version of determinism "dialectical" and thereby sought to escape from a palpable contradiction. Nothing was fated except the outcome-the inevitable triumph of communism. We ought not to forget that, if the Communists killed more people than have yet been counted, they also offered their own lives in untold numbers. The Communist movement, like the Fascist and Nazi movements, had wave after wave of revolutionary martyrs-people who, not being postmodernists, believed that there are things in life worth dying for, that they were creating a better world for their children, that history would honor as well as absolve them. It is perilous to toss Fascism, Nazism, and Communism into a pot labeled totalitarianism, for in some essential ways they were different, notably in their economic systems and in the ideals to which they appealed. But each totalitarianism was militantly anti-Christian and essentially atheistic, even if the German churches prostituted themselves to the Nazis, and the Catholic Church forced Mussolini into concessions he intended to withdraw when he got the chance. Each movement and regime denied transcendent truth and held the Decalogue in contempt. Each answered a boastful "yes" to 198 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF JURISPRUDENCE (1997) 1 Dostoyevsky's haunting question, "If God does not exist, is not everything lawful?" For each, the will of the Fuehrer or Party became the highest law of the land, subject to no external restraints. Each viewed the church, and, indeed, all institutions that claimed a measure of autonomy, as a threat to its absolute power. Critics have plausibly identified Marxism as the bastard child of liberalism, as well as the father of Fascism and Nazism. The identification aims to condemn liberalism as inherently totalitarian, and it too easily can descend to a mere slander on liberalism. The large element of truth in the identification may be found in the extent to which liberalism and assorted totalitarianisms have built on the secularism of the Enlightenment and its deification of man-on what Eric Voegelin characterized as neo-Gnosticism. Still, those inclined to make such a sweeping condemnation of the Enlightenment and liberalism might consider that any ideology, carried to its logical conclusion, will end in one or another kind of tyranny. In fairness, let us acknowledge that liberals have generally had the wit to prefer decency and good sense to the relentless pursuit of logic. The secular origins of our present disorder nonetheless require review. A large and impressive scholarship is steadily demonstrating that the creeping secularization which emerged in force during the eighteenth century and swept Europe and America in the nineteenth century was propelled less by scientific challenges than by a theological sea change that overwhelmed the Protestant churches. As orthodox Protestants protested, their churches capitulated to demands for the repudiation of revelation and scriptural authority and the doctrines of original sin, human depravity, the divinity of Christ, and much more. Jesus, demoted from the Second Person of the Trinity became a professor, presumably tenured, of moral philosophy. In our own country, Thomas Jefferson set an appalling example by rewriting the Gospels to leave out everything he did not like. Not surprisingly, what he did not like turned out to be most of what believers consider essential.

Their nihilistic discourse treats life as a given reducing all beings to epistemic investigation which destroys all value to life and nature Cunningham 3 (Conor, Conor Cunningham is a doctor of theology and teacher of divinity at the University of Cambridge. His previous academic interests have included the study of Law, Social Science and Philosophy, and he was among the original contributors to Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology. He also has a doctorate in overly complex writing and confusion, “A Genealogy of Nihilism”, pg. 174-175) DH The lateralisation referred to renders being existentially neutral. This is indeed the advent of a given. It is a given that will soon fully immanentise itself, ignoring any pietist-voluntarist veto. In a sense it was the voluntarism of the late middle ages that conceived God’s power in such a manner that creation became so little. But it is the reduction of creation, under the subjection of divine fiat, that in an inverted sense allows creation a residual independence. Creation is so little that it escapes all relations with divinity.8 Such a strange consequence is reflected in the development of logical possibilities independent of God’s essence. A veneration of the a priori follows. The nothingness of creation, which is a reflection of divine omnipotence, eludes a need for causality because it is nothing. Logical possibilities are in a sense this emptiness turned back onto, and into, itself until an immanent plenitude is composed. Aprioricity is an expression of this immanent realisation. There is now no place left for transcendence to occur (except as a private belief which is completely immanentisable). We ‘moderns’ continually betray the operation of a given within our discourse. It is this given which re-enacts the logic of the fall: to have a-part of the world apart from God. This given expands to include all creation and here lies the foundation for the development of a negative plenitude which issues from the sides of this virulent immanence. What this immanence effects, in its very self articulation, is an absence of immanence, in the sense that all particularity will suffer erasure, as it is made to disappear, or vanish (as we saw with both Kant and Hegel). Any description that modern discourse proffers will enact such a disappearance. Let us see why. An example may help. If we describe a leaf, looking to modern discourse to provide such a description, we will see nothing. We will see nothing but the disappearance of the leaf as, and at, the utterance of every ‘word’. The leaf will always be subordinated to structures and substructures.9 The leaf will never be seen or said. Any apparent sightings will be but nominal–noumenal formalities, that is, epiphenomenal results of concepts or ideas. (Here we witness a line running from Scotus to Descartes and from Descartes to Kant, no doubt with significant differences remaining.) The leaf is carried away through its discursive subordination to the structures and sub-structures of systems of explanatory description. By explanatory description is meant that a particular entity will be explained away by the descriptions its being suffers, for it will be reduced to a list of predicates, properties and so on. The inherently excessive nature of a being will be ignored. Chapter 10 discusses this excess.)10 Any difference we find in a being, or in the leaf, will fail to register, except at the virtual level of data. To seek to describe this leaf, of course, involves a somewhat arbitrary selection and separation. Why this leaf, why a leaf, and why stop or begin at a leaf? We must decide, somewhat arbitrarily, to separate a leaf from a branch, a branch from a tree, and a tree from all existent materiality. We will see that the nihilistic form of modern discourse will be unable to provide criteria for this selection and will be unable to provide real difference, individuation, specificity and so on. There can, it seems, only be a Heraclitean stasis which merely registers arbitrary expressions of its unitary–plurality (whole–parts). The leaf, which is there, is not a real leaf, but simply a formal distinction, arbitrarily but successfully constructed, or, more accurately, generated by systems of explanatory description. (These can be formal, conceptual, idealistic, empirical, yet they all tend to be diacritical. By this is meant that all difference is nominal, ontologically speaking.) René Guénon argues that finitude is indefinite, a consequence of which is that it remains susceptible to perpetual multiplicity. For the indefinite is analytically inexhaustible, and according to Guénon Hell is the passage of this division.11 Indeed Hell can be thought of as a bad infinite, one which is ‘otherworldly’, offering a false asceticism, because the object of every desire disappears into the infinite night of this multiplicity. In this way desire is forbidden ‘intercourse’. And Hell is the black night of this dissolution; the very loss of the immanent under the reign of quantity.12 What would the opposite look like? It would look like the immanent – a leaf; an appearance that could not be subordinated to knowledge systems, for its visibility would be anchored in the Divine essence as an imitable example of that transcendent plenitude. It would be an imitability located in the Son, as Logos. We could then speak of cells, molecules, and so on. In nihilistic discourse even the cells of a leaf are further reduced, methodologically, ad infinitum (ad nauseum). This is the place of Heaven – a place which is one of this world, of the immanent. For only through the mediation of immanence by transcendence can the immanent be. The form of this discourse of epistemic disappearance is analogous to the internal–external infinitude of a Spinozistic attribute. Every description literally takes the place of that which it describes; reducing it to nothing, except the formal difference of an epistemic signification. This is also analogous to the nothing which resides outside Derrida’s text – a nothingness which comes within the text in the form of the effected disappearance.13 The intelligibility, the signification, rests on this internal–external nothingness.14 The aforementioned leaf is carried away by the wind of systemic description. As a result we will have nothing as something. It is possible to argue that systemic erasure is the basis of modern knowledge – in all its postmodern guises. The truth of this argument will not really become apparent until Chapter 10. For the moment let us tentatively, yet somewhat insufficiently, endeavour to develop an understanding of this disappearance; a disappearance referred to as a ‘holocaust’, because every being which falls under such description is lost, and every trace erased.15 Such a term is not completely satisfactory but it does help to some degree in expressing the idea being developed in this chapter. (Chapter 10 argues that the argument presented here is not wholly fair, and that the situation may actually be somewhat more complicated.)What we may begin to realise is that the form of nihilism’s discourse is complicit with a certain ‘holocaust’. It will speak a ‘holocaust’. But how can one speak a holocaust?16 We do so if when we speak, something (or someone) disappears, or if our speech is predicated only on the back of such an erasure. We have to think of those who are ‘too many to have disappeared’. They must have been made to disappear; we may be able to discern three noticeable moments in modern discourse which encourage the speaking of a ‘holocaust’.17 The first moment is when the systemic description effects a disappearance. This is accomplished by placing what is described outside the divine mind, rendering it ontologically neutral – a given rather than a gift. The notion of a given allows for the invention of such neutrality. That which ‘is’ becomes structurally amenable to experimentation, dissection, indefinite epistemic investigation.18 For the first time there is something which can render the idea of detached, de-eroticised, study intelligible. There is now an object which is itself neutral, the structural prerequisite for ‘objectivity’. This ‘holocaust’ is the a priori of modern knowledge. The second moment comes when modern discourse describes the initial disappearance, the first moment. Consequently, the first moment, the event of disappearance, disappears. Modernity will ask us ‘what can it mean to disappear’? Any ‘hole’ is filled up, every trace erased.19 More obviously, but with greater caution and difficulty, we see modern discourse describe the disappearance of a ‘number-too-great’ to disappear, in terms that are completely neutral. It is unable to describe this dia-bolic (meaning to take apart) event in a way that is different from its description of the aforementioned leaf.20 The loss of countless lives can only be described in neutral terms, however emotionally.21 But discourse is predicated on a nothing to which every entity is reduced.22 (For example, a human is reduced to its genes, while consciousness is reduced to chemicals, atoms and so on.) Our knowledge of a ‘holocaust’ causes that ‘holocaust’ to disappear (like leaves from a tree in a garden fire: kaustos). We see the disappearance of a ‘holocaust’ as it is erased by its passage through the corridors of modern description: sociology, psychology, biology, chemistry, physics, and so on. All these discourses speak its disappearance.23 ‘Holocaust’, ice-cream, there can be no difference except that of epistemic difference, which is but formal. Both must be reducible to nothing; the very possibility of modern discourse hangs on it. In this sense all ‘holocausts’ are modern. The structures, substructures, molecules and the molecular all carry away the ‘substance’ of every being and of the whole (holos) of being. The third moment comes upon the first two. We see modernity cause all that is described to disappear, then we see this disappearance disappear.24 In this way a loss of life, and a loss of death is witnessed. It is here that we see the last moment. If we think of a specific holocaust, the historical loss of six million Jews during the Second World War, we see that the National Socialist description of the Jews took away their lives and took away their deaths. For those who were killed were exterminated, liquidated, in the name of solutions. The Jews lose their lives because they have already lost their deaths.25 For it is this loss of death that allows the Nazis to ‘remove’ the Jews. That is to say, if the Jews lose their deaths then the Nazis, by taking their lives, do not murder. This knowledge, that is National Socialism, will, in taking away life, take away the possibility of losing that life (death becomes wholly naturalised). This must be the case so that there is no loss in terms of negation. In this way National Socialism emulates the ‘form’ of nihilistic discourse. There is nothing and not even that. There is an absence and an absence from absence. (This isthe form Nietzsche’s joyous nihilism took.) So we will not have a lack which could allow the imputation of metaphysical significance: The mass and majesty of this world, all That carries weight and always weighs the same Lay in the hands of others; they were small And could not hope for help and no help came: What their foes liked to do was done, their shame Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride And died as men before their bodies died.26 W. H. Auden, ‘The Shield of Achilles’ The life that is lost is always lost before its death. They who lose their life are already lost in terms of epistemic description. When their life is ‘physically’ lost it is unable to stop the disappearance of that life, and the death of that life. So the living-dead are always unable to die; death is taken away from them before their life, in order that their life can be made to disappear without trace and without ‘loss’. Thus, the living are described in the same manner as the dead. Modern discourse cannot, it seems, discriminate between them. In some sense, it takes a loss of life and a loss of death to engender ‘holocaust’. For it is this which forbids the registration of any significance – any significant difference between life and death. ‘Modern’ description has no ability to speak differently about lost lives, because before any physical event ‘dissolution’ has already begun to occur (all that remains is for the bodies to be swept away). The preparation is carefully carried out so that a ‘nonoccurrence’ can occur. The fundamental, and foundational neutrality in modern discourse is here extremely noticeable. Its inability to speak significantly, to speak ‘real’ difference, carries all peoples and persons away. In ‘modern’ death there are no people, no one dies. Here we see the de-differentiating effect of nihilism. Bodies come apart as different discourses carry limbs away. This cool epistemic intelligibility of a Dionysian frenzy fashions whole systems of explanatory description.

The alternative is a theological intervention into public education- our research project develops a global consciousness that resists the secular imagination. It’s a moral imperative- metaphysical orientations must shift away from the positivism of sociology BURDZIE 2014 (STANISŁAW, Asst. Prof of Sociology @ Warmia and Mazury University, “Sociological and Theological Imagination in a Post-secular Society” Polish Sociological Review No. 186 pg. 179-193) Throughout the 19. century the emerging social sciences waged a war with religious authorities similar to the war in which natural sciences won their autonomy and legitimacy some two centuries earlier. 1 Although this conflict resulted in their victory, the social sciences were not able to fully break apart with concepts, language, and methods that theology had applied previously to analyze the same area of study. While I will be speaking of ‘sociology’ and ‘theology’, both of these terms are con- strued very broadly. In fact, theologians today are generally willing to adopt a broader definition of their discipline than they used to, and some will go as far as to under- stand it as any attempt to interpret society in terms of a comprehensive cognitive framework ( see Crockett 2011: 15 ). At the same time, it is also increasingly difficult to speak of ‘sociology’ as a unified discipline, and sociological theories and research as distinct from social theories and research. Patrick Baert and Felipe da Silva argue that today ‘it makes more sense to talk about social theory rather than sociological theory. Sociological theory suggests a discipline-bound form of theorizing—theory for sociological research. Sociological theory never existed in this pure form anyway’ ( 2010: 287 ). Sociology is a very diverse intellectual field, and some of the criticism presented below will be less valid in regar d to more interpretative approaches within sociology. Yet, many—perhaps most—sociologists will agree there exists something 1 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 8th conference of the European Sociological As- sociation in Lisbon, 2009, and published in Polish in Studia Socjologiczne (2/2010). This is an expanded and revised version. The author acknowledges several a nonymous reviewers who o ffered valuable comments, and financial support from the Foundation for Polish Science (Program START). 180 STANISŁAW BURDZIEJ what C. W. Mills famously called ‘sociological imagination’: a distinct sensibility, a set of questions and basic principles of addressing them. Therefore, rather than speaking of theology and sociology as two distinct disciplines, I prefer to speak of theological and sociological imaginations (or, as J. Orme Mills does, of the sociological and the theological ‘mind’; Mills 2004: 3 ). The first part of this article analyzes symptoms of an emerging consciousness of the ways in which the implicit rivalry between sociological and theological imagination influenced both disciplines. First, I will look into the frontal attack on sociology by John Milbank, Anglican theologian and representative of the so-called Radical Orthodoxy. In his Theology and Social Theory ( 1990 ) he claimed that all that sociology has to say about society is already present within theology. Theology also—from its own perspective—deals with the social; its pretense to the status of science is no less substantiated than this of the social sciences. Therefore, says Milbank, theology should reclaim the lost ground, and reject the baggage of sociological and psychological theories that it had adopted to its own harm. I will also analyze less radical ways, in which other theologians would like to reshape the relations between their discipline and the social sciences. Second, I will focus on the increasing appreciation of the theological perspec- tive among some social scientists. Several of them propose a post-secular sociology, suggesting that both disciplines open towards each other. This shift should be under- stood in the context of a post-modern turn in sociology and humanities in general, which questions the positivist paradigm, prevalent until recently, and blurs the dis- ciplinary boundaries. Here, the recent post-secular turn of Jürgen Habermas, and recent writings of Zygmunt Bauman, seem to propose new, and radically different patterns of relations between sociological and theological or religious interpretations. While Bauman ignores the boundaries between the two perspectives, both in terms of language and the selection of research problems, Habermas suggests ‘translating’ religious content/message into a secular language in search of precious/worthy truths that only religious communities managed to preserve. In this article, however, I ex- plore a third way, which maintains disciplinary boundaries and the specific perspective of each discipline, while advocating a new conceptualization of the relation between the sociological and theological imagination. Sources of the Secularist Paradigm within Sociology As sociologist of religion José Casanova ( 2005 ) observed, all of classic sociologists: Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim or—to a lesser de- gree and with certain reservations—Max Weber implicitly accepted the idea that modern process of rationalization was accompanied not merely by a ‘disenchant- ment’ of the world—that is emancipation of various spheres of human life from the area of the sacred, but by something more—an irreversible decline of religion in general. Casanova rightly pointed to the fact that none of these classical sociolo- gists laid out a ‘theory’ of secularization in a systematic way, and that it was never tested empirically. As a matter of fact, then, it was never a theory. Attempts to verify certain hypotheses were made after the World War II, partly (but not only) by scholars from the so-called Catholic or religious sociology. It turned out that to reasonably discuss the secularization thesis it has to be narrowed down to a set of falsifiable hypotheses. Casanova identified three basic meanings of the world ‘secu- larization’. First, it can mean an inevitable decline of religious belief and the replace- ment of religious explanations by scientific ones. Second, the term also denotes the process of differentiation of the religious sphere from other spheres of life, which liberate themselves from the shadow of the ‘sacred canopy’ of religion. Third, it de- scribes the privatization of religious life, which means that religious belief and prac- tice disappear from the public sphere and become invisible to traditional research methods. In sociology of religion the secularization theory in its first, most ideologically laden version was repudiated quite long ago ( Bell 1977 ; Berger 1999 ; Stark 1999 ). In its second, most neutral meaning, it is widely accepted today and provokes little controversy. Secularization thesis in the third meaning was reconstructed to denote privatization as a historical process, present in certain particular periods or national settings, and not a universal or a one-way phenomenon. Casanova himself argues that since the beginning of the 1980s religion in many places have again become public. In this article I concentrate on the first of the three meanings of secularization. While its first and most vulgar version in its explicit form disappeared, the question remains how deep are the ideological roots of the secularization paradigm within the sociological theory. To put it differently: to what extent the ‘sociological imagination’ remains a continuation and, at the same time, a contestation of the ‘theological imagination’? For C. W. Mills ( 2000 ) the former’s task was to help one to understand broader, social processes in which an individual biography is involved. His basic premise was that ordinary men ‘cannot cope with their personal troubles in such ways as to control the structural transformations that usually lie behind them’ ( Mills 2000: 4 ). Job loss, divorce, experience of war, and other existential problems are to be seen against the backdrop of global processes in the labor market, the transformation of the functions of family and marriage, or long-term trends in international relations. Only taking into account the importance of this social context will the people be able to ‘provide themselves with adequate summations, cohesive assessments, comprehensive orientations’ ( Mills 2000: 8 ). The main goal of sociology, as Mills envisioned, was ‘to make clear the elements of contemporary uneasiness and indifference’ ( 2000: 13 ). It is easy to see, that it is religion which has traditionally performed—and for many performs until today—exactly this function. While religion places an individual within a larger, cosmic and sacred plan, interpreting individual failures and successes through the categories of sin and grace, the sociological imagination tries to explain individual biographies through their social conditioning, and structural changes within society. The stake is similar in both perspectives: the religious imagination seeks to protect the integrity of the otherwise chaotic, at times helplessly brutal world through its reference to a good God; the sociological im agination tries to sustain a belief that the social world is a coherent whole, which can be described and explained. While the 182 STANISŁAW BURDZIEJ former rests on a theodicy (an attempt to reconcile the idea of a good God with the reality of evil world), the latter—on a ‘sociodicy’—an attempt to rationally explain the roots of the social ‘evil’ (as structural problems, tensions etc.) (see Morgan and Wilkinson 2001 ). Two distinguished sociologists of religion, Rodney Stark and William S. Bain- bridge ( [1987]1996 ), the founders of the economic theory of religion, clearly saw the inevitable tension between their theories and religious explanations. In their intro- duction to the seminal Theory of Religion they wrote: [...] it is hypocritical to imply that work such as we present is without implications for religious faith. [...] by attempting to explain religious phenomena with out reference to actions taken by the supernatural, we assume that religion is a purely human phenomenon, the causes of which are to be found entirely in the natural world. [...] Furthermore, when we contrast many faiths and seek human causes for variations among them, we at least imply that none possesses the re vealed truth. Orthodox clergy have no difficulty seeing at a glance that work such as ours is potentially inimical to faith. On this question we believe the orthodox clergy show better judgment than do many liberal clergy who seem so eager to embrace social science. ( Stark and Bainbridge 1996: 22–23 ) Unfortunately, few other sociologists have been that frank. Janusz Mucha, while paraphrasing Lewis A. Coser’s Letter to a Young Sociolo- gist wrote: ‘Although it is hard today to believe that ‘truth will set us free’ one has to hope that our research effort will contribute to the development of humanity’s self-consciousness, to a self-conscious s ocial planning, to the blossoming of human dignity’ ( 2009: XXVI ). Hardly could one find a more telling example of a situation, in which research problems become moral imperatives. This passage is by no means a unique feature of radical sociologists—to a certain degree it characterizes the whole of sociological enterprise. Already towards the end of the 19. century Albion Small and George E. Vincent ( 1894: 77 ) confessed in their handbook to the emerging new academic discipline that ‘Sociology was born of the modern ardor to improve society’. This ardor has not gone until today, although most of social scientists try hard to mitigate it. Not always are they successful. Let me provide just one example, although countless others could be found. In his Transformation of Intimacy ( 1993 ) Anthony Giddens describes the birth of modern sexuality. In his view, what is today widely practiced becomes ‘normal’, but ‘normality’ here is understood in a normative, not only statistical sense. He falls into the trap of what Roberto Cialdini ( 2001 ) called the principle of social proof. Giddens ( 1993 ) frequently crosses the border between description and value-judgment, as when he writes that the decline of perversion was an important achievement of the freedom of expression in liberal democracies: ‘Vic- tories have been won, but the confrontations continue, and freedoms that have been achieved could still plausibly be swept away on a reactionary tide’ ( 1993: 33 )Abit further we read: ‘heterosexuality is no longer a standard by which everything else is judged’ ( Giddens 1993: 34 ). It probably is not, but we cannot be sure what Giddens is trying to say here: whether that there is an ob jectively observable increase in social ac- ceptance for homosexual behavior, or if it his desire to see such a transformation. One fears Giddens himself does not differentiate these two separate dimensions clearly enough. 183 Secular Biographies Individual biographies of early sociologists may prove to be the key factor in tracing the origins of the secularist paradigm in sociology. Comte’s ( 1974 [1896] ) ambition to establish a religion of Humanity, with sociologists as priests, was responsible for much of suspicion towards the nascent discipline. Comte himself could be described as a ‘secular Catholic’: he viewed religion as a necessary source of social order and in a particularly explicit way tried to incorpo rate the Catholic doctrine, which he gener- ally highly valued, into his system of positive philosophy. Later sociologists could be better characterized, according to the famous—although often misinterpreted (see Swatos and Kivisto 1991 )—self-description of Max Weber (in a letter to Ferdinand Tönnies on February 19, 1909) as ‘religiously unmusical’. Durkheim came from a rab- binic family, but abandoned Judaism and became atheist. Nevertheless, in the later period of his activity he developed an idea of a global civil religion, which he called ‘the cult of man’, ‘religion of humanity’ or the ‘religion of law’. The main function of this ‘secular religion’ was civic education through the public school system (Wallace 1977). He was probably most explicit about the normative tasks of the discipline he helped establish: ‘We must discover the rational substitutes for these religious notions that for a long time have served as the vehicle for the most essential moral ideas’ (quoted in: Coser 1977: 137 ). In other words, sociology was to be a moral science, although not by choice—as a self-proclaimed competitor of religion—but out of necessity, in the face of decline of traditional, i.e. religious foundations of the social order. Unlike in France, where most sociologists were declared atheists, early sociologists in Great Britain, Germany and the United States were often associated with Protes- tant social movements. In America, many among the first-generation sociologists had theological education. Eight well known scholars, including William G. Sum- ner and William I. Thomas, started their career as ministers. John Brewer ( 2007) claims that great religious diversity meant no single minister could come to national prominence unless he crossed the borders of his denomination. Therefore, inspired by optimistic postmillennialism, many pastors became engaged in reform movements, which opened a path to social recognition and wider audience. Gradually, postmil- lennial eschatology, which hoped to establish God’s Kingdom on Earth even before the Second Coming, was secularized and opene d up possibilities for a ‘Christian soci- ology’, understood as a rational and scientific method to eliminate social evil. Much of this enthusiasm is evident in books such as J. H. W. Stuckenberg’s (1880) Christian Sociology . Institutes and summer schools of Christian sociology were affiliated with many theological seminars (see Henking 1993 ). Austin Harrington, analyzing the work of German philosopher Hans Blumenberg (2008: 21) suggests, that social sciences needed this mediation of religious reform movements to establish themselves within the academia. Sociological conversion, however, was often accompanied by the scho lar’s personal departure from institu- tionalized religion. Albion Small, who remained deeply religious until the end of his life, is one of the few exceptions here. This individual reorientation was accompa- nied by institutional secularization of sociology ( Brewer 2007 ). This process is well 191 No one can pull himself up out of the bog of uncertainty, of not being able to live, by his own exertions; nor can we pull ourselves up, as Desca rtes still thought he could, by a cogito ergo sum , by a series of intellectual deductions. Meaning that is self-made is in the last analysis no meaning. Meaning that is the ground on which our existence as a totality can stand and live, cannot be made but only received. ( Ratzinger 2004: 73 ) In the wake of the constructivist turn on social sciences, social scholars are now much more ready to openly admit they are guided by a moral philosophy, or that their work is interpretation. Sociology of knowledge, especially, revealed the socially constructed character of the sociological project and undermined its claim to scientific objectivism and neutrality. Yet much of sociological research is still done as if this turn never happened. What is problematic then is not the inherent qualities of the sociological imagination, but the extent to which it has permeated our contemporary societies. Western societies—with their tec hnocratic policies, instrumentality in social relations, social authority of science and their tolerant ignorance of the metaphys- ical and the religious—have in a number of ways institutionalized this sociological imagination. If sociology wants to remain faithful to its original critical vocation, it is perhaps time that it seriously looks into various ‘crypto-theologies’ underlying much of sociological thinking. Conclusion In the market of interpretations, sociology has driven out theology, and more broadly, the religious worldview as a legitimate point of view in matters social. Increasing reflexivity of the social sciences, however, gradually led them to discover certain ideological premises deeply rooted in their f oundations. Secularization theory is one of these premises. When critical ‘sociolog y of sociology’ laid bare these assumptions, a number of scholars set to rethink the relationship between the theological and the sociological imagination. What could such a post-secular approach in sociology mean? Keenan ( 2002: 282 ) writes that liberation from the secularist straightjacket will bring about new research directions and insights. More and more scholars come to understand that sociology and theology (or, more broadly, religion) offer perspectives that differ significantly, but may meet in certain points. Nevertheless, I claim that the postmodern rapproche- ment between sociology and theology throug h the blurring of disciplinary boundaries, which Keenan seems to suggest and Bauman’s work to illustrate, is not a step in the right direction. What I am not suggesting, either, is that sociology should give up certain re- ductionism, which is a necessary precondition of any methodological purity. Should sociology stop talking about anomy, dysfunction, deviation, social control, and replace these terms and concepts with original sin, sin, guilt, punishment, salvation, weakness of human nature? By no means. Sociology remains a legitimate way of perceiving (i.e. describing and interpreting) social reality, but it has to realize that it is a project rivaling—and to a degree based on—earlier, particularly religious, interpretations. What is needed is a more modest sociology, conscious of its ideological origins, ready to recognize its limits, and—what is equa lly important—allow place for other per- spectives in the analysis of social reality. Religion is just one of them, albeit perhaps the most important, but there are others: literature, philosophy, art—all these are ways to describe and interpret social life that have valuable insights to offer.

To redefine manifestations of capital, engagement in an analysis of spiritual capital is necessary to understand further workings of capitalism Baker et al. 2011 (Chris Baker, foundation and University of Chester Religion and Urbanization, religion and public policy, civil society, political philosophy, Peter Stokes Leicester Castle Business School - DMU Business Management and Organization Studies, Jessica Lichy IDRAC Research, Lyon digital society, online consumer behavior, international marketing management, culture, business models, “Values, Beliefs and Attitudes in the Era of Late Capitalism: A Consideration of the Re-Emergence and RePositioning of Faith and Spirituality as Spiritual Capital in the Workplace,” pg. 5-8) Meanwhile, recent work outlining the role of religion and ethics in relation to economics includes the work of global economists such as Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen. Stiglitz is keen to give an account of moral economic growth; namely growth that is 1) sustainable in the sense that it aims not only at increasing living standards today, but also for those generations which will come after, 2) ensure that the benefits of growth are shared equitably and 3) these two principles guiding economic growth create a more tolerant society informed by social justice and solidarity (2005). His model of economic growth lies at the heart of what French President Nicholas Sarkozy has called ‘a new form of capitalism based on moral values’ (2008). Sen, meanwhile, underscores that it depends heavily on transactions and payments that lie largely outside the markets, including welfare payments, education and health care. These are aspects of human development that contribute greatly to the human capital available to businesses and which are not based on private ownership and property rights, but purely on citizenship. He therefore advocates the creation of an economy ‘based on social values that we can defend ethically’ (2009). This overview of the re-emergence of religion in political and economic life in the West (i.e. the postsecular) brings us to the second plank in our argument in respect to exploring the relationship between religion, spirituality and business practice. This is the idea of spiritual capital, which, we suggest, is an important contributor to other forms of capital within business, including both financial and human forms. The emergence of the concept of spiritual capital owes its origins to the prevalence of social capital theory as the major theoretical tool that has driven social policy within both the US and Europe. Although there are several traditions of social capital theory (for example, James Coleman and Pierre Bourdieu (see Baker and Miles Watson 2008 for extended discussion), it is the tradition as developed by Robert Putman since the late 1990s which has dominated political debate. This could be because his thesis is relatively simple to understand, is backed up by impressive rafts of empirical data from a wide variety of sources, and proposes that social capital is innate within networks, rather than individuals. Putnam, through work carried out in Italy and the States, proposes that social capital is generally in decline within Western economies. He suggests that ‘…social capital refers to connections among individuals – social networks, and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them’ (Putnam, 2000: 19). More recently Putnam and others have distinguished between bonding social capital which describes intra-group networking, bridging social capital describing horizontal linkages to other groups, and linking social capital describing vertical relationships to centres of resources and power. For this article we shall be using definitions derived from a UK context based on qualitative research with religious groups engaged in civil renewal and urban regeneration conducted by the William Temple Foundation (WTF). These definitions see an inextricable link between religious and spiritual capital, as aspects of human activity and experience that make an important contribution to social capital. WTF’s formulation of the term religious capital is ‘the practical contribution to local and national life made by faith groups’ (Baker and Skinner, 2006:9). This is a more corporate and communitarian in emphasis than, for example, Bourdieu’s definition which sees religious capital as a resource which may serve an individual in a competition for status. Spiritual capital on the other hand, ‘energises religious capital by providing a theological identity and worshipping tradition, but also a value system, moral vision and a basis for faith’ (Baker and Skinner, 2006:9). WTF’s definition of spiritual capital thus stresses the ‘why’ of faith-based participation, not simply the ‘how’. The emphasis on the ‘why’ helps deepen the somewhat functionalist discourse on faith groups’ contributions to civil society. It also draws attention to the emerging research interests as to the role of secular or immanent forms of spirituality (sometimes referred to as ‘secular spiritual’ capital) which are surfacing in disciplinary discourses associated with health care, social care and planning (see Baker and Miles Watson, 2008; Gilbert, 2011; Holloway, 2005; Sandercock, 2010) and which refer to the importance of acknowledging the motivational role of ethics, values and visions for change within vocational and professional development. We are therefore now widening the definition of this motivational (or ‘why’) dimension of spiritual capital derived from religious based settings, to raise questions as to the deeper values and beliefs that individuals within business communities, and the communities themselves, might possess. Thus a modified definition of spiritual capital for deployment as a conceptual and analytical tool within the business environment reads thus: Spiritual capital is the set of values, ethical standpoints and visions for change held by both individuals, groups and institutions. It is shaped not only by systems and practices of belief, but also by engagement with wider sets of relationships (broadly defined) and the sense of meaning and purpose derived from work-based and other activities (sometimes referred to as the ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ of a business). Spiritual capital is often the source of motivation for other forms of capital (e.g. social capital and its emphasis on the importance of trust and norms as the basis for conducting any form of progressive or enhancing human activity). It includes the following features: •Belief in including answering to higher or deeper moral orders, expressed in commitment to such values as truth, self-knowledge, right action, and purpose in life including as wider meanings (how beliefs inform values) Sense of being part of or connected to wider relationships extending to belief in wider communities including nationally and internationally (where we fit in). •The sense of a job as meaning and potential (what we do). So far, we are suggesting that the emergence of the concept of the postsecular has opened up a new series of ‘spaces’ by which to evaluate the salience of spiritual capital as a means of redefining the importance of norms, values, attitudes and beliefs in public life. We now address the specific ways in which our definition of spiritual capital potentially reflects current shifts towards more ethical, sustainable and responsible forms of business development and management. The emergence of a heightened state of post secularism and spiritual capitalism across wider society has created a series of interesting changes and effects within academic and practitioner realms of business and management. However, as a consequence of the dominance and influence of modernism and capitalism for much of the twentieth century, there has been a tendency to paint organizational life, and especially corporate forms, as being pre-occupied with a range of objectified performance metrics such as profit, turnover and market share. In normative management discourse these are often termed the ‘hard’ aspects of the organization. These dimensions and their effective management are vital in the running of any operation but it is equally recognised that it is important to pay due attention to what are called the ‘soft’ factors in business. These include human resources management, namely motivation, vision setting, talent, and corporate culture management (Massa, 2011; Stokes, 2011). It is primarily within this latter ‘soft’ realm that the contemporaneously resurgent issues and discussions of faith, spiritual capital and beliefs tend to be located. Much of the debate has taken place through attempts to understand, encourage and engender ‘strong’ corporate cultures. Historically, business and management corporate cultures have been highlighted as a crucial aspect of change management situations and they are extensively commented on in general management and change literature (Mayo, 1946; Deal and Kennedy, 1982; Schein, 1990; Kono and Clegg, 1998; Johnson and Duberley, 2011). The notion of ‘managing (corporate/organizational) culture’ and, indeed, the very concept of ‘culture’ nevertheless remains complex. In its broadest sense, culture incorporates an extensive sphere of influences and commentaries and extends to issues of taste and judgement, associated with intellectual, artistic and social dimensions. In relation to organization and management, culture is commonly linked to the values, beliefs, atmospheres, customs and practices, goals and missions that operate in every organization (Clegg, Kornberger and Pitsis, 2011: 263-298; Stokes, 2011). Each individual and organization will possess particular nuances and patterns of culture. In the predominant paradigm of mainstream and normative writings, corporate culture is discussed as something that managers need to grasp, construct, guide and control so that it can assist in the achievement of higher production, effectiveness and performativity. In these literatures, behaviour that is perceived as ‘undesirable’, ‘bad’ or, alternatively expressed, ‘resistance’ is addressed through proposals to manage, change and transform corporate and organizational cultures. From this rationalistic perspective, individuals or groups who act or comment against the culture are seen as resistant and problematic (Jermier, Knights, and Nord, 1994; Ashcraft, 2005; Linstead, Fulop and Lilley, 2009: 93-122). In contrast to normative and managerial approaches, critical management perspectives challenge the view that culture is a fixed and delineated entity with clear boundaries that can be controlled by managers. From a ‘critical approaches’ perspective, culture is more likely to be viewed as an ephemeral, organic and socially constructed concept rather than an ontologically solid and tangible object (Clegg, Kornberger and Pitsis, 2011; Linstead, Fulop and Lilley, 2009). From a critical perspective, culture in organizations is more likely to be better portrayed as evolving patterns of behaviour, shifting power alliances, emergent discourses, narratives and identities rather than being fixed in nature (Alvesson, 2002; Badham, Garrety, Morrigan and Zanko, 2003; Parker 2000; Rhodes and Parker, 2008; Sköld 2009). Within the realm of the academic discipline of organization and management studies, we have already alluded to the growing commentary on topics that refer to the managerial and modernistic representations of the ‘soft’ sides of management. As part of this search, the last 50 years or so has seen an increasing preoccupation with enhancing and promoting notions of ‘meaning’ and ‘identity’ in work lives through a wide range of topics including: faith, values, religion, spirituality, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility (CSR), responsible management, sustainability, well-being, values, compassion, commitment, work-life balance, transformational leadership and business ethics (Elizur, 1996; Jaakson, 2010; Mostovicz, Kakabadse, and Kakabadse, 2011; Opdebeeck and Habisch, 2011; Russell, 2001). It is beyond the scope of the current paper to be able to present and scrutinise all these developments. Suffice to say that one of the key unifying themes of many of these approaches is the recognition that extant understandings of human behaviour at work are a ‘work-in-progress’ project rather than ‘complete and comprehensive’ in the current post-capitalist, post-colonial and post-industrial developed economic contexts (Mele and Sanchez-Runde, 2011). The contention of this paper, in paying attention in a more concerted manner to the concept of values, beliefs and attitudes, is that in an apparent post-capitalist and post secular phase of history it is important to examine and analyse the degree to which religious belief and faith is playing a role in organizational life. Clearly, there will be a range of organizational settings in which religion can be seen to play a central role. These might include for example, certain charities such as Christian Aid or the Salvation Army. And indeed historically, it is significant to indicate the establishment of worker villages and communities under the Quaker auspices of, for example, Cadbury’s or other corporate collectives such as Port Sunlight under Lord Leverhulme or Saltaire under Titus Salt. However, in most current British business organizational settings, faith and religion are not generally topics that are brought into discussions of development, identity and purpose. This may well contrast with other national contexts – see for example the commentary by Payne (2010) on United States organizational life. Equally, we should not overlook the kindred philanthropic work of the likes of George Soros in Eastern Europe or Bill Gates in Africa. There is therefore scope to conduct research, certainly in the UK that examines these under-explored aspects of organizational cultures. This call for more studies and application reflects those appeals by a range of authors in alternative English-speaking domains (see, for instance, Wong 2011) on the role of spirituality in psychiatry training in Australia and Khasawneh (2011) in relation to higher education institutions, and Smith and Malcolm (2010) in relation to spirituality in the National Health Service.

� Case The aff reinvests in the same myth of human community that provides legibility to the Right—the construction of a new multitude and social fabric is enacted through the assimilation of queerness’s radical negativity. Edelman 13 [Lee. professor of English at Tufts University. “Occupy Wall Street: “Bartleby” Against the Humanities.” History of the Present, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring 2013), pp. 99-118. SH] This verbal contagion that saps the sovereignty of meaning in linguistic exchange defines the queerness of the word that comes to epitomize Bartleby’s queerness, a queerness the story disposes us to see in its illegible materialty as a dangerous textual preference. Perhaps that explains why at one point the lawyer describes the effects produced by Bartleby’s phrase in terms that explicitly frame it in Sodomitical terms: “For a few moments I was turned into a pillar of salt” (69). In The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida touches briefly on Melville’s tale. After noting that the scrivener’s famous phrase “says nothing, promises nothing, neither refuses nor accepts anything,” he calls it a “singularly insignificant statement [that] reminds one of a nonlanguage.”21 In this context the word “insignificant” denotes a resistance to signification that makes Bartleby’s phrase, from the vantage point of the social order of meaning, an affront to the notion of value. Infecting linguistic communication with this element of “nonlanguage,” it reifies the queerness of language as iterative machine and in doing so it gestures toward something else at work in language, something that communal norms of meaning and value seek to foreclose: the queerness that every regime of “what is” must construe as what is not, as the nothing, the negativity, or the preference for negation that threatens the normative order, whose name is always human community. And it’s not just the Right that pits human community against the queer threat to its future; the Left, and many who call themselves “queer,” embrace that position too. That’s how Left and Right acquire political legibility and come to share the political terrain; it’s even what makes them, in this sense at least, effectively interchangeable. Though each has a different vision of the human community it aims to procure, both aspire to realize the coherence of a social collectivity. Thus Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, writing from the Left in Empire, the global bestseller they published in 2000, see in Bartleby what they characterize as “the absoluteness of refusal,” which they then align with the “hatred of authority” and the “refusal of voluntary servitude.” But their admiration for this queer refusal of the norm can only go so far. Such refusal may be, as they put it, “the beginning of a liberatory politics, but it is only a beginning. . . . What we need is to create a new social body, which is a project that goes well beyond refusal. . . . Beyond the simple refusal, or as part of that refusal, we need also to construct a new mode of life and above all a new community.”22 Here sounds the doxa whose chorus aspires to incorporate us all: wealthy sponsors of the corporate humanities and neo-Marxist critics of global empire; the protestors of Occupy Wall Street and Wall Street’s CEOs alike. Bartleby, in his utter refusal to mean for communitarian ends, can possess no value except as a proof of negativity’s insufficiency. Hence the lawyer who authors Bartleby’s tale, unlike Melville who authors the lawyer’s, must conscript the copyist to the cause of the human by making his resistance make sense. His distance from community and his absence of anything “ordinarily human” must prove in the end his hypersensitivity to the pathos of the human and even his longing for a utopian “community” where “good tidings” and “hope” on their “errands of life” can neither be errant nor erring. Like Hardt and Negri, the lawyer, that is, must refuse “the absoluteness of refusal,” forcibly wrenching Bartleby from the queerness of preferring not to accede to normative reason and sense. To appreciate the complex politics of these multiple negations of the queer as negation, and to conclude this discussion by bringing it back to the Occupy movement once more, let me place beside Hardt and Negri’s text an editorial from the politically conservative Daily Oklahoman of Oklahoma City. Published in the Sunday edition of the paper on November 6, 2011, the editorial, which bore the title “Goal Remains Fuzzy for Occupy Protestors,” appeared four days before the public reading of “Bartleby” on Wall Street. But this editorial identified Bartleby with the Occupy movement in advance, intending that identification to discredit the movement and Bartleby both. Allow me to quote at length: “I would prefer not to.” So sayeth Bartleby, the intransigent copyist in a classic Herman Melville short story. To every request to earn his pay, to move on, to do something—anything— Bartleby would reply, “I would prefer not to.” . . . “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” is a study in petulant behavior met with inexplicable patience by Bartleby’s employer. The story of Wall Street today is one of petulance met with inexplicable patience by authorities dealing with the “Occupy This” movement that’s spread from lower Manhattan around the country. Ask the occupiers what they hope to accomplish. They’d prefer not to tell you. Perhaps they don’t really know. Who’s in charge? They’d prefer not to tell you. Everyone is in charge. Nobody is. What good does it do to hang around a park, beat drums and occasionally march to a designated site? They’d prefer not to say. It’s the doing, not the point of it, that matters. Some occupiers have done their best to incite police reaction to their doings, all the better for news footage of how The Man is cracking the heads of the innocent. . . . . . . The “Occupy This” movement’s story is still being written. The childish and sometimes violent behavior of its participants is still being met with inexplicable patience. . . . The people will express their intolerance for lawlessness at the ballot box. That’s exactly where the movement could have beaten its drums, in the way the tea party did. It preferred not to. Ah anarchy! Ah enough already! 23 The specter of anarchy, of radical lawlessness, of acts that have no point, however little connection it bears to the Occupy protests themselves, is refused in defense of an implicit ideal of the integrated “social body,” the harmonious community endorsed by Hardt and Negri’s text as well. Unlike Hardt and Negri, though, the author of the editorial fully acknowledges the force of Bartleby’s queerness and draws a reasonable conclusion about where resistance to reason must lead. If the Left would normalize Bartleby as a crucial step toward a “new community,” then the Right perceives, correctly, his threat to community as such. And it recognizes something else that the Left too frequently ignores as well: that the Bartlebys of the world don’t ask to be liked and the queer remains whatever a given order cannot accept. All progressivism in politics, all gradualist normalization, aspires, in the end, to the very same thing that moves the radical Right: the elimination of the queer; not, however, by resorting to the violence of or outside the law, but by constructing a community from whose total embrace no one would be excluded. No one except those Bartlebys excluded through forcible inclusion, eliminated by being turned into pillars of the collectivity they resist. Consider, in this context, “Occupy Bartleby,” a post that appeared on a left-leaning blog in response to the Oklahoman’s editorial. With the intention of defending the Occupy movement and Bartleby at once, the author of the blog post offers a rival interpretation of the tale: “The point the editorial seems to make is that the protestors are as strange as Bartleby, but that misses the main message of the story. It’s a simplistic reading. The real point is that Bartleby’s protest, like the Occupier’s protest, actually represents a sane and human reaction to an indifferent world dictated by the greed of Wall Street.”24 For all the difference in their political viewpoints and their approaches to Melville’s story, the editorial and the blog post pray side-byside to the gods of the “sane” and the “human.” The left-wing blogger denies Bartleby’s strangeness to enshrine him at the heart of community, while the right-wing author, alert to that strangeness, rejects him for the community’s good. Both would eliminate the queerness that doesn’t worship the gods of the polis, recalling the indictment of Socrates that led to his date with a hemlock cocktail for “refusing to recognize the gods recognized by the state” and “corrupting the youth.”25 The corporate humanities, by contrast, serve the gods of the state quite well, transforming Socrates and Bartleby into poster boys for democracy, social responsibility, the triumph of the human spirit, until the humanities classroom can start to seem like a Unitarian church. But another relation to the humanities persists by virtue of preferring not to. Operating not for the good of the state or the cohesion of any community, this queerness dwells on the fractures that make the social a site of dissension and attends to the discontinuities that turn the aesthetic against itself. Rather than affirming the putative “richness” and plurality of meaning, it empties meaning of authority without, in the process, denying its power. Power without authority, in fact, is its object of analysis, even when it focuses on its own analytic force. This queerness, this materiality that never resolves into relation, bespeaks the nonhumanity inseparable from the assertion of the human and the “nonlanguage,” the negativity, that linguistic sense drowns out. If it teaches, it teaches us nothing—or, more precisely, the place of that nothing, that non, in the politics of the human and, therefore, the place of the humanities in the performance of every politics. Like the poet, in Sir Philip Sidney’s words, this humanities “nothing affirmeth,” but its queerness inheres in the force with which it stubbornly affirms this nothing, insisting, thereby, with Bartleby, on its preference for the negative, which is also to say, its preference for what the governing orders, the circuits of opinion, the frameworks of collective reality make invisible, impossible, and, to that extent, unthinkable. Reproductive futurism culminates in a homonationalist consolidation of empire where imperial wars secure the future through the extermination of deviant communities of color Schotten 2015 [C. Heike, Associate Professor of Political Science and an affiliated faculty in Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston "Homonationalist Futurism:“Terrorism” and (Other) Queer Resistance to Empire." New Political Science 37.1 (2015): 71-90.] In queer theory, No Future has largely been read as making an argument regarding the constitutive heteronormativity of the social order. Edelman names this heteronormativity “reproductive futurism” and argues that it inevitably dooms homosexuals—branded as non-reproductive sexual nihilists—to instantiating society’s death drive. I contend, however, that No Future can be understood more generically as a work of political theory, especially given that Edelman explicitly describes its subject matter—reproductive futurism—as “the logic within which the political itself must be thought.”14 Identifying this political theory, however, requires some appropriation, given that, ultimately, Edelman is more concerned with Lacan than politics. Reading with and into the text, then, I propose three modifications of the psychoanalytic politics Edelman advances in No Future in order to more fully appropriate it for political theorizing.15 The first is to insert a distinction between the “futurism” and “reproductive futurism” he discusses, the latter being understood as a specific version of the former. Put simply, futurism is synopsized by the “presupposition that the body politic must survive,”16 the putatively apolitical article of faith in the necessary continuity of politics as such. “[E]very political vision,” Edelman claims, is “a vision of futurity.”17 More specifically, reproductive futurism is characterized by “a set of values widely thought of as extrapolitical: values that center on the family, to be sure, but that focus on the protection of children.”18 The iconographic signifier of reproductive futurism is the child; its mantra, “Whitney Houston’s rendition of the secular hymn, ‘I believe that children are our future,’ a hymn we might as well simply declare our national anthem and be done with it.”19 Reproductive futurism is the apolitical imperative that the present be held in service to the children’s future adulthood: [W]e are no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of a future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child. That figural Child alone embodies the citizen as an ideal, entitled to claim full rights to its future share in the nation’s good, though always at the cost of limiting the rights “real” citizens are allowed. For the social order exists to preserve for this universalized subject, this fantasmatic Child, a notional freedom more highly valued than the actuality of freedom itself, which might, after all, put at risk the Child to whom such a freedom falls due.20 Whether discussing the survival of the body politic (futurism) or the future as symbolized by the child (reproductive futurism), Edelman is clear that the presuppositions of both are deemed apolitical, although that is precisely what makes them “so oppressively political.”21 For the presuppositions of (reproductive) futurism are the very terms of politics as such. To participate in politics at all, even in protest or dissent, requires that one “submit to the framing of political debate—and, indeed, of the political field—as defined by the terms of ...reproductive futurism: terms that impose an ideological limit on political discourse as such.”22 This is how and why Edelman says that there is no future for queers: politics itself designates “queers” as futureless. By definition, politics seeks to install an order of sameness through the ideological (re)production of a future that promises a seamless plenitude of meaning. Rather than acknowledge the impossibility of such an achievement, however, this failing is instead foisted onto a person, people, or set of forces that instantiate that impossibility in their very existence. These unforgivable obstacles to futurism’s achievement are “queers”: “the queer dispossesses the social order of the ground on which it rests: a faith in the consistent reality of the social ... a faith that politics, whether of the left or of the right, implicitly affirms.”23 Defined as non-reproductive sexual nihilists, the positioning of queers as culture’s self-indulgent, sex-obsessed death drive thus functions to secure the health, happiness, and adult normality of heterosexually reproducing humanity. While this persuasive reading of heteronormativity and homophobia has generated the most critical enthusiasm for No Future, I want to argue that reproductive futurism is neither exhaustive of the political nor futurism’s exclusive form. However hegemonic, reproductive futurism is only “one of the forms” this “calamity” might take.24 For clearly one can invest in the future as signified by any number of possible oppressive and unattainable ideals: not only the child, but also, for example, Christ, security (for example Hobbes), or the American way. As Edelman himself observes, “The Child, in the historical epoch of our current epistemological regime, is the figure for this compulsory investment in the misrecognition of figure.”25 Futurism itself, however, he calls “the substrate of politics.”26 My second proposed modification follows from the first, its mandate being to situate Edelman’s political theory more distinctly within history.27 In this regard, suspicious reader John Brenkman helpfully provides the political theory references missing from No Future, noting that “modern critical social discourse, whether among the Enlightenment’s philosophes, French revolutionaries, Marxists, social democrats, or contemporary socialists and democrats” all engage in the kind of future-wagering Edelman describes as definitively political.28 Historically, Brenkman is correct—futurism is a distinctively modern phenomenon that must be tethered to, among other things, the advent of industrial capitalism, colonialism, and the rise of the nation-state. This second modification makes clear that, in naming futurism, Edelman has identified a fundamental baseline of modernity and the workings of modern politics. However, Brenkman’s concern is less with history than the fact that Edelman seems to foreclose the possibility of such critical discourse by consigning it to the same status as the discourse of the Catholic Church and the religious Right. While Brenkman’s point is well-taken, it is already Edelman’s. For, whether liberal or conservative, Left or Right, communist or fascist, every modern political theory is invested in the repetition and reproduction of the social order, cast as a future aspirational ideal, to which the present is held hostage. This is as true of conservative movements as of radical or revolutionary ones—modern politics as such is defined by its investment in reproducing an order of sameness at the expense of the difference of now.29 Tavia Nyong’o has argued that Edelman’s reading of homophobia operates as a kind of nostalgia for a political moment already past, a moment when homosexuality really did pose an ominous and spectral threat to the social order, but does so no longer.30 However—and this is the third modification I wish to assert—the “queer” of No Future is by no means a crudely identitarian homosexual subject, nor is the child solely emblematic of procreation and childrearing. Edelman would agree with at least part of this point. He insists there is “nothing intrinsic to the constitution of those identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, transsexual, or queer” that “predisposes them to resist the appeal of futurity, to refuse the temptation to reproduce, or to place themselves outside or against the acculturating logic of the Symbolic.”31 And indeed, it is not difficult to find examples of gay reproductive futurism, the most obvious being the movement for “marriage equality.” As former Human Rights Campaign (HRC) President Joe Solmonese puts it: “The fight for marriage equality for samesex couples is quite possibly the most conventional, family-friendly equal rights struggle ever.” He continues, “History bends not only toward fairness and equality, but also toward common sense. Marriage strengthens couples and families, who in turn help strengthen their communities, one at a time—leading ultimately to a stronger, more robust nation.”32 Mixing nationalism into a gay progress narrative of ever-expanding equality and familial inclusion, Solmonese here writes the playbook for reproductive futurism’s political palatability. Tellingly, Andrew Sullivan’s earlier praise of gay marriage is even more explicit on this count, invoking the importance of the future’s promise not just in the name of the children, but more specifically for gay children, who must be saved from having otherwise been born into futurelessness: More important, perhaps ... its [marriage’s] influence would be felt quietly but deeply among gay children. For them, at last, there would be some kind of future; some older faces to apply to their unfolding lives, some language in which their identity could be properly discussed, some rubric by which it could be explained— not in terms of sex, or sexual practices, or bars, or subterranean activity, but in terms of their future life stories, their potential loves, their eventual chance at some kind of constructive happiness. They would be able to feel by the intimation of a myriad examples that in this respect their emotional orientation was not merely about pleasure, or sin, or shame, or otherness (although it might always be involved in many of those things), but about the ability to love and be loved as complete, imperfect human beings. Until gay marriage is legalized, this fundamental element of personal dignity will be denied a whole segment of humanity. No other change can achieve it.33 As we can see, even when the Child is gay, its salvific promise is neither diverted nor diluted. It simply straightens out the queer threat potentially posed by bent children.34 Dangling the lure of “constructive happiness” before the eyes of youths for whom not sugarplums but sex parties dance in their heads, Sullivan here offers up the gay version of reproductive futurism, paternalistically reassuring us that a life of sex for sex’s sake is the meaningless, self-indulgent, anti-civilizational existence every good moralizer ever told us it was. Taken together, Sullivan and Solmonese helpfully illustrate the fact that Edelman’s argument is, in the end, not really about identity and not even about gay people (or, for that matter, straight people). Futurism is a logic that transcends the specifics of heterosexuality and homosexuality, and “queer” in Edelman’s vocabulary does not necessarily—or, perhaps, even primarily, anymore, as Nyong’o suggests—stand in for gay and lesbian people. But, to return to my third modification, this also means that the child is not irrevocably tied to the existence, reproduction, or raising of “historical children.”35 In other words, even as the non- or anti-identity politics of Edelman’s figure of queerness is increasingly evident, he neglects to establish the similarly and necessarily nonidentitarian iconography of the future he inscribes (which also returns us to my first proposed modification, the distinction between futurism and reproductive futurism). The queer as homosexual and the Child as historical child may be concrete, daily exemplars of (certain ubiquitous if not exclusive versions of) heteronormativity. However, understood as a specific form of a more generalized futurist logic, it becomes clear that the child cannot simply be equated with reproduction, child-bearing, and child-rearing, just as the “queer” cannot simply mean “homosexual” in Edelman’s temporal sense. The child, along with the queer, is a crucial space for political and historical concretization of Edelman’s radical but otherwise unduly narrow political project. Puar: Terrorism, Homonationalism, and US Sexual Exceptionalism The HRC’s language of nationhood and the non-exclusivity of the child as futurist icon are the places to begin pushing Edelman’s queer theory toward an explicit engagement with the politics of race, nation, and US empire. For Solmonese’s statement is not simply the rhetoric of reproductive futurism. It is also the language of homonationalism, a term Jasbir Puar has coined to document the “transition under way in how queer subjects are relating to nation-states, particularly the United States, from being figures of death (in other words, the AIDS epidemic) to becoming tied to ideas of life and productivity (in other words, gay marriage and families).”36 Homonationalism is an abbreviated combination of the words “homonormative” and “nationalism,” the former term borrowed from Lisa Duggan, who describes “the new homonormativity” as a political realignment of the late 1990s/early 2000s in which gay rights became compatible with certain neoliberal, anti-statist, conservative, American nationalist viewpoints.37 Combining homonormativity with nationalism, then, Puar augments Nyong’o’s critique, arguing that the assimilation of certain gay and lesbian subjects into the mainstream of American normalcy, respectability, and citizenship has entailed the “fleeting sanctioning of a national homosexual subject”38 who is “complicit with heterosexual nationalist formations rather than inherently or automatically excluded from or opposed to them.”39 One effect of homonationalism in the post-9/11 context of the “War on Terror” is the perverse sexualization or “queering” of Arabs and Muslims (and all those held to be such) in the figure of the “terrorist,” a figure of monstrosity, excess, savagery, and perversion. To be clear, Puar is not suggesting that the “terrorist” is the new queer. Rather, she is arguing that “queerness is always already installed in the project of naming the terrorist; the terrorist does not appear as such without the concurrent entrance of perversion, deviance.”40 Neither an identity nor a defining behavioral activity (for example, homosexuality), Puar elaborates queerness as a biopolitical tactic that functions to define and divide populations through processes of racialization, a “management of queer life at the expense of sexually and racially perverse death in relation to the contemporary politics of securitization, Orientalism, terrorism, torture, and the articulation of Muslim, Arab, Sikh, and South Asian sexualities.”41 In this view, “the contemporary U.S. heteronormative nation actually relies on and benefits from the proliferation of queerness.”42 Homonationalism, as a biopolitics of queerness, functions to discipline and (re)produce homosexuality as white, American, patriotic, and upwardly mobile while designating people of color, immigrants, and Arabs and Muslims as both heterosexual and yet dangerously “queer”—as “terrorists” or “failed and perverse” bodies that “always have femininity as their reference point of malfunction, and are metonymically tied to all sorts of pathologies of the mind and body—homosexuality, incest, pedophilia, madness, and disease.”43 As is evident, queerness in Puar’s account veers from any simple conflation with gay and lesbian subjectivity; as she says, “Race, ethnicity, nation, gender, class, and sexuality disaggregate gay, homosexual, and queer national subjects who align themselves with U.S. imperial interests from forms of illegitimate queerness that name and ultimately propel populations into extinction.”44 The happily married couples that populate the HRC’s literature and website, then, would be the homonational, or properly queer; the “monster terrorist fag” abjected into existence through torture at Abu Ghraib or Guanta´namo, detained indefinitely in any of the US’s many illegal prisons, surveilled incessantly in mosques and cafes, and stigmatized as suffering from arrested development by the psychologizing literature of security studies, would be the improperly queer.45 Puar’s point is that these queernesses go together and require one another, much as, I think, Edelman can be seen to be arguing that the child and the queer go together and require one another. What Puar concretizes, however, in theorizing queerness as a “process of racialization”46 is not simply the analytic point that “queer” and “homosexual” are distinct but, more importantly, the urgently political point that the abjected or improper queer who stands outside the social order and is in effect antagonistic to it is, in this contemporary moment, much more likely to be a Muslim or someone perceived as “looking like” a Muslim to the American gaze than, let us admit it, the newly engaged same-sex couples thronging state houses in Minnesota, Connecticut, and Colorado (much less the “homosexual” figure of queerness in No Future). Understanding queerness as a process of nationalization and racialization also concretizes and expands the understanding of heteronormativity or, in Edelman’s words, the future. For the terrorist in Puar’s analysis resists or denies a future that is symbolized and defined not only or simply by the child, but also by the American nation and secular Christianity. As she says, “In the political imagination, the terrorist serves as the monstrous excess of the nation-state.”47 Post-9/11, Puar notes that this terrorist threat is undeniably linked with Islam, which often serves as its “explanation.”48 As she observes, Islam signifies, to the ostensibly secular and modern US, both “excess” and “savagery”: “Religious belief is thus cast, in relation to other factors fueling terrorism, as the overflow, the final excess that impels monstrosity—the ‘different attitude toward violence’ signaling these uncivilizable forces.”49 Puar’s reading suggests that Islam threatens the futurist temporality of American empire. Cast as retrograde, backward, and frozen in pre-modern religiosity, Islam threatens the progress narrative of US imperial wars which are alleged to bring ever-greater freedom, not only to women and homosexuals, but also to uncivilized, savage, and undemocratic people(s) and nations around the world.50 Finally, then, it is important to note that as Islam has been queered or come to signify queerness, it does so in two ways: first, through the phobic association of Islam with terrorism; and, second, through the racist and Orientalist conflation of Islam with homophobia, anti-feminism, and sexual backwardness more generally. Putting Puar’s analysis in an Edelman-esque frame, we might say that the figure of the “terrorist” who threatens national goals, progress, hope—indeed, the nation’s very existence—can be cast as the excessive, anti-social, future-denying figure of the “queer” in Edelman. Or, we might say that just as the domain of normativity has expanded to include some gay people, correspondingly, the domain of (inassimilable) queerness also has shifted. Puar’s analysis of the collusion “between homosexuality and U.S. nationalism”51 as producing two figures, the homonormative patriot and the queer terrorist, notes them as, on the one hand, the embodiment and normative achievement of the social order and, on the other hand, the dissolution and destruction of that social order.52 No longer designating “the homosexual” per se, “queer” names the monstrously raced and perversely sexualized Arab/Muslim/terrorist Other that threatens the American social and political order, an order that (some) properly gay and lesbian subjects can now, through their incorporation into normative American national life, inhabit and reproduce. In sum, we have a theorization of “queer” wherein the sexually backward Muslim is led by the irrationality and violence of her/his religion to annihilate those who serve and protect freedom for all. In this analysis of “the sexually exceptional homonational and its evil counterpart, the queer terrorist of elsewhere,”53 the “terrorist” is to the HRC what, in Edelman’s analysis, the queer is to the child.54 Edelman and Puar: Theorizing Resistance Puar’s theorization of homonationalism is a significant contribution to queer theory and an essential corrective to Edelman’s otherwise historically and racially unmarked analysis of (reproductive) futurism. Her work allows us to critique futurism in ways that are responsive to the specificities of its racial and national workings, consequences gapingly unattended to by him. While Edelman deftly parses the logic of power in terms of futurism’s hegemony, he fails fully to unpack its coercive force by focusing solely on futurism’s relationship to an exceedingly narrow version of non-reproductive homosexuality. Although he claims that the theory of politics he explicates in No Future is indifferent to race, arguing that “the fascism of the baby’s face ... subjects us to its sovereign authority as the figure of politics itself ... whatever the face a particular politics gives that baby to wear— Aryan or multicultural, that of the thirty-thousand-year Reich or of an ever expanding horizon of democratic inclusivity,”55 what is clear is that the reproductive futurism he critiques is symptomatic of a very specific bourgeois class culture within the imperial US, a culture that garners his criticism only insofar as it is bound up with heteronormativity.56 By contrast, Puar’s demand that we focus our attention on the racial and nationalized logics of queerness(es) and the unexpected complicities between queers, nationalism, and empire remains only suggestive of futurism’s determinative role, never naming it specifically. Now, this is likely because Puar neither endorses nor conceptualizes futurism as a useful diagnosis of modern politics, just as Edelman may very much wish to privilege (white male homo) sexuality in his psychoanalysis of futurism. However, I suggest that authorial intentions—both Puar’s and Edelman’s—be respectfully disregarded, not only because we have become savvy to the multiple begged questions inherent in any invocation of authorial intention, but also because more than our scholarly work is at stake when it comes to forging critical resistance to US imperial power. Indeed, while the net effect of Edelman’s analysis is that only white gay men are considered the deathly threat portended by queerness in No Future, 57 if we return to his definition of “queer” and insist on distinguishing between futurism and reproductive futurism, we note that “queer” designates anyone who fails to abide by the rules of social temporality—that is, anyone who sacrifices the future for the sake of the present. As such, futurism’s ruthless machinations stigmatize all sorts of populations as emblematic of the death and destruction of the social order. This broad array of misfits and perverts may include some gay, lesbian, and queer people. It necessarily also includes the “terrorist” and “Muslim” whom Puar argues are biopolitical targets of abjected queerness. This analysis also suggests that temporality is a crucial axis of determination regarding all “enemies” of the social order, a notion that links Edelman’s political theory to other important work in radical queer politics. For example, in her definitive essay, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?,” Cathy Cohen argues for a re-thinking of marginal positionality in terms of one’s relation to power rather than in terms of a binary categorization of queer vs straight. She cites the examples of the prohibition of slave marriages and the long history of obsession with black women’s reproductive choices in the US as examples of ostensibly heterosexual people inhabiting positions outside the bounds of normative sexuality because of race, class, and property status. In arguing for a more capacious, intersectional queer politics that is accountable not simply to the question of who is and is not heterosexual but, more broadly, to the question of what each of our relationships with and proximity to power may be, Cohen writes: As we stand on the verge of watching those in power dismantle the welfare system through a process of demonizing the poor and young—primarily poor and young women of color, many of whom have existed for their entire lives outside the white, middle-class heterosexual norm—we have to ask if these women do not fit into society’s categories of marginal, deviant, and “queer.” As we watch the explosion of prison construction and the disproportionate incarceration rates of young men and women of color, often as part of the economic development of poor white rural communities, we have to ask if these individuals do not fit society’s definition of “queer” and expendable. Cohen’s understanding of “queer” as a kind of non- or anti-normativity based on one’s proximity to power might also be understood in terms of futurism and its flouting by “deviants.” For, if the key characteristic of queerness is a temporal one, then having “too many” babies is just as much a threat to America’s future as not having any at all—it just depends on which queers we are talking about (not only Reagan’s welfare queen, but also recall the manufactured election-year discourse about “anchor babies”).59 Naming these explicitly makes futurism a useful tool to diagnose the contemporary political moment from a radical queer perspective that does not fetishize sexuality as either the primary domain of subordination or the sole focus of political struggle and resistance.

Their politics replicate the neoliberal individual and fail to challenge capitalism. Engel 10 - (Antke Engel is director of the Institute for Queer Theory situated in Hamburg and Berlin, Journal #17 - June 2010, "Desire for/within Economic Transformation", http://www.e-flux.com/journal/17/67418/desire-for-within-economic-transformation/, DOA: 7-17-2017) //Snowball I see two problems here in Gibson-Graham’s attempts to cultivate subjects of communal economies. One is that they lose sight of their declared aim to think in terms of complex interdependencies, which would necessarily demand analyzing the politics of subjects as not only constitutive of new economic relations, but also of existing late modern, neoliberal discourses and power relations that promote self-responsibility, team-building, and independence from state support. The focus of attention falls on the development of a self that is engaged in community enterprises, is poor-but-happy, and functions as a self-activated, positive thinking being who forsakes global perspectives of social justice or the damnation of capitalism, but creates alternative economies posing no threat to profit-oriented structures. However, the absence of doubt with regard to whether this self fits all too well into the creation of a divided world of non-profit survival and capitalocentric rule, remains questionable. The other problem that results from stabilizing established power relations lies in a delight over difference that neglects the difference of conflict, contradiction, competition, privilege, or antagonistic political views or interests. Energies for building community economies are understood to be fruitful when there is “no militant advocacy, no talk of struggle against a despised capitalism.”30 Furthermore, conflicts internal to being-in-common, but which jeopardize togetherness, are presented as a result of the “psychic difficulties of relinquishing established economic identities,” which can be overcome once a new perspective is achieved whereby one is open “to the humanity of others, to the possibility of being other than she was, to participating with those most different from herself (in her own antagonistic worldview) in constructing a community economy.”31 Attempts to scale the affirmative up and incite broader resistance will be met with suppression Taylor ‘13 (Bron, Professor of religion and nature, environmental ethics, and environmental studies at the University of Florida, and a fellow of the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, Germany, 2013, “Resistance: Do the Ends Justify the Means?” in "State of the World 2013: Is Sustainability Still Possible?", International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, Vol. 15 Issue: 1. Pgs. 311-313.) Modern societies are unduly celebratory of their achievements when they have amnesia about what has been lost and by whom. With an understanding of the tragic aspects of this history and recognition that these very processes are ongoing, it is clear that dramatic actions to halt these processes and engage in restorative justice and healing where possible are morally obligatory. This does not mean, however, that the revolutionary prescription of the Deep Green Resistance activists — attacking the energetic infrastructure of industrial civilization — is warranted. Indeed, the claim that this could cause the collapse of industrial civilization is fanciful. Natural disasters (including those intensified or worsened by human activities) demonstrate that as long as energy is available, large-scale societies will rebuild. Even if resisters were to disrupt the system significantly, not only would the system’s rulers rebuild, recent history has shown that they would increase their power to suppress resisting sectors. Moreover, as many radical activists have acknowledged in interviews — even those who have supported sabotage — the more an action risks or intends to hurt people, the more the media and public focus on the tactics rather than the concerns that gave rise to the actions. This means that the most radical tactics tend to be counterproductive to the goal of increasing awareness and concern in the general public. When accessing the effectiveness of resistance, it is also important to address how effective authorities will be at preventing and repressing it. The record so far does not lead easily to enthusiasm for the most radical of the tactics deployed thus far. Authorities use tactics that are violent or can be framed as such to justify to the public at large spying, infiltration, disruption, and even violence against these movements. Such repression typically succeeds in eviscerating the resistance, in part because as people are arrested and tried, some will cooperate with the prosecution in return for a reduced sentence. More than half of those arrested did just that during what Federal authorities dubbed “operation backfire,” which led to the arrests and conviction of more than two dozen Earth Liberation Front saboteurs who had been involved in arson cases. One of the leaders, facing life in prison under post-9/11 terrorism laws, committed suicide shortly after his arrest, while several others became fugitives. The individuals convicted drew prison terms ranging from 6 to 22 years. The noncooperating activists, and those for whom terrorism enhancements had been added to the arson charges, drew the longest terms. As if this were not devastating enough to the resistance, broader radical environmental campaigns that were not using such radical tactics ebbed dramatically in the wake of these arrests. This was because movement activists who were friends and allies of those arrested rallied to provide prison support, which then took their time and resources away from their campaigns. But it was also because the resistance community was divided over whether (and if so, how) to support the defendants who, to various degrees, cooperated with investigators. Given this history, it makes little sense to base strategy and tactics on such an unlikely possibility that communities of resistance will ever be able to mount a sustained campaign to bring down industrial civilization, even if that were a desirable objective. The envisioned alternative to this objective — creating or, in the view of many activists, returning to small-scale, egalitarian, environmentally friendly lifestyles — would not be able to support the billions of people currently living on Earth, at least not at anything remotely like the levels of materialism that most people aspire to. So the most radical of the resistance prescriptions would quite naturally lead to strong and even violent counter-resistance.13 These ideologies, explicitly or implicitly, make unduly optimistic assumptions about our species, including about our capacity to maintain solidarity in the face of governmental suppression, as well as about the human capacity for cooperation and mutual aid. To expect such behavior to become the norm may be conceivable, and it may be exemplified by some small-scale societies, but it is not something to be expected universally, let alone during times of social stress intensified by increasing environmental scarcity. So despite the accurate assessment about the ways agricultural and industrial societies have reduced biocultural diversity, there is little reason to think that the most radical resistance tactics would be able to precipitate or hasten the collapse of such societies. Nor is there much evidence that such tactics would contribute to more-pragmatic efforts to transform modern societies. In contrast, there is significant evidence that these sorts of tactics have been and are likely to remain counterproductive. Discourse and pedagogy must engage the existing economy – wishing away policy discussion fails because neoliberalism is institutionally entrenched Jones and Spicer 09 (Campbell, Senior Lecturer in the School of Management at U of Leicester, Andre, Associate Professor in the Dept of Industrial Relations @ Warwick Business School U of Warwick, Unmasking the Entrepreneur, pgs. 22-23) The third strand in our proposed critical theory of entrepreneurship involves questions of the 'extra-discursive' factors that structure the context in which these discourses appear. The result of privileging language often results in losing sight of political and economic relations, and for this reason, a turn to language and a concomitant disavowal of things extra-discursive have been roundly criticised (Ackroyd and Fleetwood, 2000; Armstrong, 2001; Reed, 1998,2000,2009). An analysis of discourse cannot alone account for the enduring social structures such as the state or capitalism. Mike Reed has argued that a discursive approach to power relations effectively blinds critical theorists to issues of social structures: Foucauldian discourse analysis is largely restricted to a tactical and localised view of power, as constituted and expressed through situational-specific 'negotiated orders', which seriously underestimates the structural reality of more permanent and hierarchal power relations. It finds it difficult, if not impossible, to deal with institutionalised stabilities and continuities in power relations because it cannot get at the higher levels of social organisation in which micro-level processes and practices are embedded. (Reed, 2000: 526-7) These institutional stabilities may include market relations, the power of the state, relations like colonialism, kinship and patriarchy. These are the 'generative properties' that Reed (1998: 210) understands as 'mak(ing) social practices and forms - such as discursive formations - what they are and equip(ing) them with what they do'. Equally Thompson and Ackroyd also argue that in discourse analysis 'workers are not disciplined by the market, or sanctions actually or potentially invoked by capital, but their own subjectivities' (1995: 627). The inability to examine structures such as capitalism means that some basic forms of power are thus uninvestigated. Focusing solely on entrepreneurship discourse within organisations and the workplace would lead to a situation where pertinent relations that do not enter into discourse are taken to not exist. Such oversights in discursive analyses are that often structural relations such as class and the state have become so reified in social and mental worlds that they disappear. An ironic outcome indeed. Even when this structural context is considered, it is often examined in broad, oversimplified, and underspecified manners. This attention to social structure can be an important part of developing a critical theory of entrepreneurship, as we remember that the existing structural arrangements at any point are not inevitable, but can be subjected to criticism and change. In order to deal with these problems, we need to revive the concept of social structure. Thus we are arguing that 'there exist in the social world itself and not only within symbolic systems (language, myths, etc.) objective structures independent of the consciousness and will of agents, which are capable of guiding and constraining their practices or their representations' (Bourdieu, 1990: 122). Objective still means socially constructed, but social constructions that have become solidified as structures external to individual subjects. Examples of these structures may include basic 'organising principals' which are relatively stable and spatially and historically situated such as capitalism, kinship, patriarchy and the state. Some entrepreneurship researchers, particularly those drawing on sociology and political science, have shown the importance of social structure for understanding entrepreneurship (see for example Swedberg, 2000). Refuse their ethical criteria—it insulates protest from accountability and trades off with collective struggle Chandler 7 – Researcher @ Centre for the Study of Democracy, Chandler. 2007. Centre for the Study of Democracy, Westminster, Area, Vol. 39, No. 1, p. 118-119 This disjunction between the human/ethical/global causes of post-territorial political activism and the capacity to 'make a difference' is what makes these individuated claims immediately abstract and metaphysical – there is no specific demand or programme or attempt to build a collective project. This is the politics of symbolism. The rise of symbolic activism is highlighted in the increasingly popular framework of 'raising awareness'– here there is no longer even a formal connection between ethical activity and intended outcomes (Pupavac 2006). Raising awareness about issues has replaced even the pretense of taking responsibility for engaging with the world – the act is ethical in-itself. Probably the most high profile example of awareness raising is the shift from Live Aid, which at least attempted to measure its consequences in fund-raising terms, to Live 8 whose goal was solely that of raising an 'awareness of poverty'. The struggle for 'awareness' makes it clear that the focus of symbolic politics is the individual and their desire to elaborate upon their identity – to make us aware of their 'awareness', rather than to engage us in an instrumental project of changing or engaging with the outside world. It would appear that in freeing politics from the constraints of territorial political community there is a danger that political activity is freed from any constraints of social mediation(see further, Chandler 2004a). Without being forced to test and hone our arguments, or even to clearly articulate them, we can rest on the radical 'incommunicability' of our personal identities and claims – you are 'either with us or against us'; engaging with those who disagree is no longer possible or even desirable. It is this lack of desire to engage which most distinguishes the unmediated activism of post-territorial political actors from the old politics of territorial communities, founded on struggles of collective interests (Chandler 2004b). The clearest example is old representational politics – this forced engagement in order to win the votes of people necessary for political parties to assume political power. Individuals with a belief in a collective programme knocked on strangers' doors and were willing to engage with them, not on the basis of personal feelings but on what they understood were their potential shared interests. Few people would engage in this type of campaigning today; engaging with people who do not share our views, in an attempt to change their minds, is increasingly anathema and most people would rather share their individual vulnerabilities or express their identities in protest than attempt to argue with a peer. This paper is not intended to be a nostalgic paean to the old world of collective subjects and national interests or a call for a revival of territorial state-based politics or even to reject global aspirations: quite the reverse. Today, politics has been 'freed' from the constraints of territorial political community – governments without coherent policy programmes do not face the constraints of failure or the constraints of the electorate in any meaningful way; activists, without any collective opposition to relate to, are free to choose their causes and ethical identities; protest, from Al Qaeda, to anti-war demonstrations, to the riots in France, is inchoate and atomized. When attempts are made to formally organize opposition, the ephemeral and incoherent character of protest is immediately apparent.

1NC to De-Schooling 1 The separation of God from the polis has led to a time of failed conditions. The need for God has been replaced by supposedly enlightened self-legislation. Post-modern secularists practice a form of self-mutilation by denying that which is present alongside them. The refusal of a future beyond our immanent social order is a violent denial that takes being-towards-death as the only authentic future we may have. Blond 98 [Phillip is at Peterhouse, Cambridge and is a research student completing his PhD in Theology in the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. He previously held a prize fellowship in philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. He has published articles on phenomenology, aesthetics and theology. This is his first published volume. He is currently working on a monograph on theology and perception, ed. Post-secular philosophy: Between philosophy and theology. Psychology Press, 1998. p 1-2] We live in a time of failed conditions. Everywhere people who have no faith in any possibility, either for themselves, each other, or for the world, mouth locutions they do not understand. With words such as ‘politics’, they attempt to formalise the unformalisable and found secular cities upon it. They attempt to live in the in-between and celebrate ambiguity as the new social horizon, always however bringing diversity into accord with their own projections. Always and everywhere, these late moderns make competing claims about the a priori, for they must be seen to disagree. Indeed such thinkers feel so strongly about the ethical nature of their doubt that they argue with vehemence about overcoming metaphysics, about language and the dangers of presence. Since God is committed to presence, they assume that theology is no longer an option sustainable by serious minds.2 These secular scholars accept without question the philosophical necessity of their position (they are happy autonomous creatures these atheists), even though with a certain magnanimity of gesture they might concede in an informal discussion that God could perhaps exist in some possible world, but they tell us in all likelihood it is not this one. To an external observer such gestures might suggest that these minds are grasping for enemies in a world that they are no longer sure of. But of course such external positions are now no longer considered possible. Blind [ignorant] to the immanence3 of such a world, unable to disengage themselves from whatever transcendental schema they wish to endorse,these secular minds are only now beginning to perceive that all is not as it should be, that what was promised to them—self-liberation through the limitation of the world to human faculties—might after all be a form of self-mutilation. Indeed, ever since Kant dismissed God from human cognition and relegated access to Him to the sphere of practical ethics and moral motivation, human beings have been very pragmatic indeed. They have found value in self-legislation and so see no reason for God. For after all, they now maintain, there can be no moral realism, the good cannot possess any actuality outside the conditional and conditioning nature of the human mind. Nor apparently, according to these late moderns, can a transcendent value escape any of the contemporary surrogates—language, pragmatics, power—which transcendental thinking has engendered in order to preserve itself. These proxies, which are viewed as the ruling a prioris of the day, supposedly determine or foreclose upon any other possibility. No, their advocates say, ‘your values are ancillary to this, in respect of this discernment everything else is subordinate, this is the prior discourse that secures our descriptions, and we, we who ascertained this, we are the authors and judges of this world and there is no other’. Perhaps unsurprisingly this state of affairs is viewed as a cause of much joy and self-affirmation And what a world it is that is so blithely affirmed. Every day in the contemporary polis new beings are unearthed, new subjectivities are claimed as excluded, with fresh litigations being initiated on their behalf for mutual and communal benefit. The pious speak righteously to each other about the Other, about how they are keeping faith with the world, about the need to be vigilant against the illegitimacy of hierarchies. For we are told there can be no discrimination in this secular city. In this polis the lowest has become the highest, and equality names itself as the only value that cannot be devalued. However, without true value, without a distinction between the better and the worse, of course the most equal and the most common will hold sway. Of course the lowest common denominator will be held up to be the foundation of human civic life. What yardstick then for such a society, what measure do the public who must measure themselves require? If they themselves now realise, as some do, that human beings cannot (and indeed must not), provide their own calibration, where do they look? Not surprisingly, most still attempt a modern solution; either they seek the path of immanence or they accept the necessity of a transcendental methodology. The latter turn away from the world as if it were too fearful a thing to confront, and seek safety in allying the formal conditions of thought with those of behaviour; whereas the former, too convinced by the hopelessness of their position, deduce themselves to be avid powerless creatures, and as beings who desire nothing but the affect of their own potency they throw themselves into the void, embracing the anonymity therein as if it were a true destiny and a real proof of their ultimate autonomy. Those who seek to refrain from such extremes of philosophical candour do so by turning away and celebrating and debating their own immanent social order. They will deny that the preceding positions mark the outermost boundaries of their own possibilities. They will speak of thinking beyond these binaries, and not consider the possibility that these oppositions might merely think them. In consequence, though these creatures of perspicacity and unconcealment speak almost endlessly about difficulty, inherent paradox and suddenly discovered aporia, they cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the conditions that gave rise to their world. Oscillating without resolution or recognition between transcendental hope and immanentist conjecture, they lack a perception of their position. Holding the middle of a lie, they feel profoundly comfortable with themselves and even more so with their enemies Always and everyday those trapped in such worlds practise the violence of denial. They deny that any world or order might precede them; through turning away from the transcendent they violate that which is present alongside and before them, and with the intoxicating compulsion of ressentiment they complete it all with the refusal of a future, taking being-towards-death (Sein zum Tode) as the definitive mark of the only subjectivity to come. Death, they say, is the only future that both you and I can authentically have as individuals. As they sadly ponder the reality of their own deaths (no doubt by casting themselves into the role of the tragic), these thinkers return almost unthinkingly to the positivism that has authored their whole lives: ‘After all beyond one’s life how could one know anything else?’ Or they might say, with a smile accompanied by a slight incline of the neck, ‘no other possibility has ever made itself known to me’. Happy in their respective oppositions, they will indeed be, until their deaths, unaware of that which they never sought to address

Their nihilistic discourse treats life as a given reducing all beings to epistemic investigation which destroys all value to life and nature Cunningham 3 (Conor, Conor Cunningham is a doctor of theology and teacher of divinity at the University of Cambridge. His previous academic interests have included the study of Law, Social Science and Philosophy, and he was among the original contributors to Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology. He also has a doctorate in overly complex writing and confusion, “A Genealogy of Nihilism”, pg. 174-175) DH The lateralisation referred to renders being existentially neutral. This is indeed the advent of a given. It is a given that will soon fully immanentise itself, ignoring any pietist-voluntarist veto. In a sense it was the voluntarism of the late middle ages that conceived God’s power in such a manner that creation became so little. But it is the reduction of creation, under the subjection of divine fiat, that in an inverted sense allows creation a residual independence. Creation is so little that it escapes all relations with divinity.8 Such a strange consequence is reflected in the development of logical possibilities independent of God’s essence. A veneration of the a priori follows. The nothingness of creation, which is a reflection of divine omnipotence, eludes a need for causality because it is nothing. Logical possibilities are in a sense this emptiness turned back onto, and into, itself until an immanent plenitude is composed. Aprioricity is an expression of this immanent realisation. There is now no place left for transcendence to occur (except as a private belief which is completely immanentisable). We ‘moderns’ continually betray the operation of a given within our discourse. It is this given which re-enacts the logic of the fall: to have a-part of the world apart from God. This given expands to include all creation and here lies the foundation for the development of a negative plenitude which issues from the sides of this virulent immanence. What this immanence effects, in its very self articulation, is an absence of immanence, in the sense that all particularity will suffer erasure, as it is made to disappear, or vanish (as we saw with both Kant and Hegel). Any description that modern discourse proffers will enact such a disappearance. Let us see why. An example may help. If we describe a leaf, looking to modern discourse to provide such a description, we will see nothing. We will see nothing but the disappearance of the leaf as, and at, the utterance of every ‘word’. The leaf will always be subordinated to structures and substructures.9 The leaf will never be seen or said. Any apparent sightings will be but nominal–noumenal formalities, that is, epiphenomenal results of concepts or ideas. (Here we witness a line running from Scotus to Descartes and from Descartes to Kant, no doubt with significant differences remaining.) The leaf is carried away through its discursive subordination to the structures and sub-structures of systems of explanatory description. By explanatory description is meant that a particular entity will be explained away by the descriptions its being suffers, for it will be reduced to a list of predicates, properties and so on. The inherently excessive nature of a being will be ignored. Chapter 10 discusses this excess.)10 Any difference we find in a being, or in the leaf, will fail to register, except at the virtual level of data. To seek to describe this leaf, of course, involves a somewhat arbitrary selection and separation. Why this leaf, why a leaf, and why stop or begin at a leaf? We must decide, somewhat arbitrarily, to separate a leaf from a branch, a branch from a tree, and a tree from all existent materiality. We will see that the nihilistic form of modern discourse will be unable to provide criteria for this selection and will be unable to provide real difference, individuation, specificity and so on. There can, it seems, only be a Heraclitean stasis which merely registers arbitrary expressions of its unitary–plurality (whole–parts). The leaf, which is there, is not a real leaf, but simply a formal distinction, arbitrarily but successfully constructed, or, more accurately, generated by systems of explanatory description. (These can be formal, conceptual, idealistic, empirical, yet they all tend to be diacritical. By this is meant that all difference is nominal, ontologically speaking.) René Guénon argues that finitude is indefinite, a consequence of which is that it remains susceptible to perpetual multiplicity. For the indefinite is analytically inexhaustible, and according to Guénon Hell is the passage of this division.11 Indeed Hell can be thought of as a bad infinite, one which is ‘otherworldly’, offering a false asceticism, because the object of every desire disappears into the infinite night of this multiplicity. In this way desire is forbidden ‘intercourse’. And Hell is the black night of this dissolution; the very loss of the immanent under the reign of quantity.12 What would the opposite look like? It would look like the immanent – a leaf; an appearance that could not be subordinated to knowledge systems, for its visibility would be anchored in the Divine essence as an imitable example of that transcendent plenitude. It would be an imitability located in the Son, as Logos. We could then speak of cells, molecules, and so on. In nihilistic discourse even the cells of a leaf are further reduced, methodologically, ad infinitum (ad nauseum). This is the place of Heaven – a place which is one of this world, of the immanent. For only through the mediation of immanence by transcendence can the immanent be. The form of this discourse of epistemic disappearance is analogous to the internal–external infinitude of a Spinozistic attribute. Every description literally takes the place of that which it describes; reducing it to nothing, except the formal difference of an epistemic signification. This is also analogous to the nothing which resides outside Derrida’s text – a nothingness which comes within the text in the form of the effected disappearance.13 The intelligibility, the signification, rests on this internal–external nothingness.14 The aforementioned leaf is carried away by the wind of systemic description. As a result we will have nothing as something. It is possible to argue that systemic erasure is the basis of modern knowledge – in all its postmodern guises. The truth of this argument will not really become apparent until Chapter 10. For the moment let us tentatively, yet somewhat insufficiently, endeavour to develop an understanding of this disappearance; a disappearance referred to as a ‘holocaust’, because every being which falls under such description is lost, and every trace erased.15 Such a term is not completely satisfactory but it does help to some degree in expressing the idea being developed in this chapter. (Chapter 10 argues that the argument presented here is not wholly fair, and that the situation may actually be somewhat more complicated.)What we may begin to realise is that the form of nihilism’s discourse is complicit with a certain ‘holocaust’. It will speak a ‘holocaust’. But how can one speak a holocaust?16 We do so if when we speak, something (or someone) disappears, or if our speech is predicated only on the back of such an erasure. We have to think of those who are ‘too many to have disappeared’. They must have been made to disappear; we may be able to discern three noticeable moments in modern discourse which encourage the speaking of a ‘holocaust’.17 The first moment is when the systemic description effects a disappearance. This is accomplished by placing what is described outside the divine mind, rendering it ontologically neutral – a given rather than a gift. The notion of a given allows for the invention of such neutrality. That which ‘is’ becomes structurally amenable to experimentation, dissection, indefinite epistemic investigation.18 For the first time there is something which can render the idea of detached, de-eroticised, study intelligible. There is now an object which is itself neutral, the structural prerequisite for ‘objectivity’. This ‘holocaust’ is the a priori of modern knowledge. The second moment comes when modern discourse describes the initial disappearance, the first moment. Consequently, the first moment, the event of disappearance, disappears. Modernity will ask us ‘what can it mean to disappear’? Any ‘hole’ is filled up, every trace erased.19 More obviously, but with greater caution and difficulty, we see modern discourse describe the disappearance of a ‘number-too-great’ to disappear, in terms that are completely neutral. It is unable to describe this dia-bolic (meaning to take apart) event in a way that is different from its description of the aforementioned leaf.20 The loss of countless lives can only be described in neutral terms, however emotionally.21 But discourse is predicated on a nothing to which every entity is reduced.22 (For example, a human is reduced to its genes, while consciousness is reduced to chemicals, atoms and so on.) Our knowledge of a ‘holocaust’ causes that ‘holocaust’ to disappear (like leaves from a tree in a garden fire: kaustos). We see the disappearance of a ‘holocaust’ as it is erased by its passage through the corridors of modern description: sociology, psychology, biology, chemistry, physics, and so on. All these discourses speak its disappearance.23 ‘Holocaust’, ice-cream, there can be no difference except that of epistemic difference, which is but formal. Both must be reducible to nothing; the very possibility of modern discourse hangs on it. In this sense all ‘holocausts’ are modern. The structures, substructures, molecules and the molecular all carry away the ‘substance’ of every being and of the whole (holos) of being. The third moment comes upon the first two. We see modernity cause all that is described to disappear, then we see this disappearance disappear.24 In this way a loss of life, and a loss of death is witnessed. It is here that we see the last moment. If we think of a specific holocaust, the historical loss of six million Jews during the Second World War, we see that the National Socialist description of the Jews took away their lives and took away their deaths. For those who were killed were exterminated, liquidated, in the name of solutions. The Jews lose their lives because they have already lost their deaths.25 For it is this loss of death that allows the Nazis to ‘remove’ the Jews. That is to say, if the Jews lose their deaths then the Nazis, by taking their lives, do not murder. This knowledge, that is National Socialism, will, in taking away life, take away the possibility of losing that life (death becomes wholly naturalised). This must be the case so that there is no loss in terms of negation. In this way National Socialism emulates the ‘form’ of nihilistic discourse. There is nothing and not even that. There is an absence and an absence from absence. (This isthe form Nietzsche’s joyous nihilism took.) So we will not have a lack which could allow the imputation of metaphysical significance: The mass and majesty of this world, all That carries weight and always weighs the same Lay in the hands of others; they were small And could not hope for help and no help came: What their foes liked to do was done, their shame Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride And died as men before their bodies died.26 W. H. Auden, ‘The Shield of Achilles’ The life that is lost is always lost before its death. They who lose their life are already lost in terms of epistemic description. When their life is ‘physically’ lost it is unable to stop the disappearance of that life, and the death of that life. So the living-dead are always unable to die; death is taken away from them before their life, in order that their life can be made to disappear without trace and without ‘loss’. Thus, the living are described in the same manner as the dead. Modern discourse cannot, it seems, discriminate between them. In some sense, it takes a loss of life and a loss of death to engender ‘holocaust’. For it is this which forbids the registration of any significance – any significant difference between life and death. ‘Modern’ description has no ability to speak differently about lost lives, because before any physical event ‘dissolution’ has already begun to occur (all that remains is for the bodies to be swept away). The preparation is carefully carried out so that a ‘nonoccurrence’ can occur. The fundamental, and foundational neutrality in modern discourse is here extremely noticeable. Its inability to speak significantly, to speak ‘real’ difference, carries all peoples and persons away. In ‘modern’ death there are no people, no one dies. Here we see the de-differentiating effect of nihilism. Bodies come apart as different discourses carry limbs away. This cool epistemic intelligibility of a Dionysian frenzy fashions whole systems of explanatory description. The alternative is a theological intervention into public education- our research project develops a global consciousness that resists the secular imagination. It’s a moral imperative- metaphysical orientations must shift away from the positivism of sociology BURDZIE 2014 (STANISŁAW, Asst. Prof of Sociology @ Warmia and Mazury University, “Sociological and Theological Imagination in a Post-secular Society” Polish Sociological Review No. 186 pg. 179-193) Throughout the 19. century the emerging social sciences waged a war with religious authorities similar to the war in which natural sciences won their autonomy and legitimacy some two centuries earlier. 1 Although this conflict resulted in their victory, the social sciences were not able to fully break apart with concepts, language, and methods that theology had applied previously to analyze the same area of study. While I will be speaking of ‘sociology’ and ‘theology’, both of these terms are con- strued very broadly. In fact, theologians today are generally willing to adopt a broader definition of their discipline than they used to, and some will go as far as to under- stand it as any attempt to interpret society in terms of a comprehensive cognitive framework ( see Crockett 2011: 15 ). At the same time, it is also increasingly difficult to speak of ‘sociology’ as a unified discipline, and sociological theories and research as distinct from social theories and research. Patrick Baert and Felipe da Silva argue that today ‘it makes more sense to talk about social theory rather than sociological theory. Sociological theory suggests a discipline-bound form of theorizing—theory for sociological research. Sociological theory never existed in this pure form anyway’ ( 2010: 287 ). Sociology is a very diverse intellectual field, and some of the criticism presented below will be less valid in regar d to more interpretative approaches within sociology. Yet, many—perhaps most—sociologists will agree there exists something 1 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 8th conference of the European Sociological As- sociation in Lisbon, 2009, and published in Polish in Studia Socjologiczne (2/2010). This is an expanded and revised version. The author acknowledges several a nonymous reviewers who o ffered valuable comments, and financial support from the Foundation for Polish Science (Program START). 180 STANISŁAW BURDZIEJ what C. W. Mills famously called ‘sociological imagination’: a distinct sensibility, a set of questions and basic principles of addressing them. Therefore, rather than speaking of theology and sociology as two distinct disciplines, I prefer to speak of theological and sociological imaginations (or, as J. Orme Mills does, of the sociological and the theological ‘mind’; Mills 2004: 3 ). The first part of this article analyzes symptoms of an emerging consciousness of the ways in which the implicit rivalry between sociological and theological imagination influenced both disciplines. First, I will look into the frontal attack on sociology by John Milbank, Anglican theologian and representative of the so-called Radical Orthodoxy. In his Theology and Social Theory ( 1990 ) he claimed that all that sociology has to say about society is already present within theology. Theology also—from its own perspective—deals with the social; its pretense to the status of science is no less substantiated than this of the social sciences. Therefore, says Milbank, theology should reclaim the lost ground, and reject the baggage of sociological and psychological theories that it had adopted to its own harm. I will also analyze less radical ways, in which other theologians would like to reshape the relations between their discipline and the social sciences. Second, I will focus on the increasing appreciation of the theological perspec- tive among some social scientists. Several of them propose a post-secular sociology, suggesting that both disciplines open towards each other. This shift should be under- stood in the context of a post-modern turn in sociology and humanities in general, which questions the positivist paradigm, prevalent until recently, and blurs the dis- ciplinary boundaries. Here, the recent post-secular turn of Jürgen Habermas, and recent writings of Zygmunt Bauman, seem to propose new, and radically different patterns of relations between sociological and theological or religious interpretations. While Bauman ignores the boundaries between the two perspectives, both in terms of language and the selection of research problems, Habermas suggests ‘translating’ religious content/message into a secular language in search of precious/worthy truths that only religious communities managed to preserve. In this article, however, I ex- plore a third way, which maintains disciplinary boundaries and the specific perspective of each discipline, while advocating a new conceptualization of the relation between the sociological and theological imagination. Sources of the Secularist Paradigm within Sociology As sociologist of religion José Casanova ( 2005 ) observed, all of classic sociologists: Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim or—to a lesser de- gree and with certain reservations—Max Weber implicitly accepted the idea that modern process of rationalization was accompanied not merely by a ‘disenchant- ment’ of the world—that is emancipation of various spheres of human life from the area of the sacred, but by something more—an irreversible decline of religion in general. Casanova rightly pointed to the fact that none of these classical sociolo- gists laid out a ‘theory’ of secularization in a systematic way, and that it was never tested empirically. As a matter of fact, then, it was never a theory. Attempts to verify certain hypotheses were made after the World War II, partly (but not only) by scholars from the so-called Catholic or religious sociology. It turned out that to reasonably discuss the secularization thesis it has to be narrowed down to a set of falsifiable hypotheses. Casanova identified three basic meanings of the world ‘secu- larization’. First, it can mean an inevitable decline of religious belief and the replace- ment of religious explanations by scientific ones. Second, the term also denotes the process of differentiation of the religious sphere from other spheres of life, which liberate themselves from the shadow of the ‘sacred canopy’ of religion. Third, it de- scribes the privatization of religious life, which means that religious belief and prac- tice disappear from the public sphere and become invisible to traditional research methods. In sociology of religion the secularization theory in its first, most ideologically laden version was repudiated quite long ago ( Bell 1977 ; Berger 1999 ; Stark 1999 ). In its second, most neutral meaning, it is widely accepted today and provokes little controversy. Secularization thesis in the third meaning was reconstructed to denote privatization as a historical process, present in certain particular periods or national settings, and not a universal or a one-way phenomenon. Casanova himself argues that since the beginning of the 1980s religion in many places have again become public. In this article I concentrate on the first of the three meanings of secularization. While its first and most vulgar version in its explicit form disappeared, the question remains how deep are the ideological roots of the secularization paradigm within the sociological theory. To put it differently: to what extent the ‘sociological imagination’ remains a continuation and, at the same time, a contestation of the ‘theological imagination’? For C. W. Mills ( 2000 ) the former’s task was to help one to understand broader, social processes in which an individual biography is involved. His basic premise was that ordinary men ‘cannot cope with their personal troubles in such ways as to control the structural transformations that usually lie behind them’ ( Mills 2000: 4 ). Job loss, divorce, experience of war, and other existential problems are to be seen against the backdrop of global processes in the labor market, the transformation of the functions of family and marriage, or long-term trends in international relations. Only taking into account the importance of this social context will the people be able to ‘provide themselves with adequate summations, cohesive assessments, comprehensive orientations’ ( Mills 2000: 8 ). The main goal of sociology, as Mills envisioned, was ‘to make clear the elements of contemporary uneasiness and indifference’ ( 2000: 13 ). It is easy to see, that it is religion which has traditionally performed—and for many performs until today—exactly this function. While religion places an individual within a larger, cosmic and sacred plan, interpreting individual failures and successes through the categories of sin and grace, the sociological imagination tries to explain individual biographies through their social conditioning, and structural changes within society. The stake is similar in both perspectives: the religious imagination seeks to protect the integrity of the otherwise chaotic, at times helplessly brutal world through its reference to a good God; the sociological im agination tries to sustain a belief that the social world is a coherent whole, which can be described and explained. While the 182 STANISŁAW BURDZIEJ former rests on a theodicy (an attempt to reconcile the idea of a good God with the reality of evil world), the latter—on a ‘sociodicy’—an attempt to rationally explain the roots of the social ‘evil’ (as structural problems, tensions etc.) (see Morgan and Wilkinson 2001 ). Two distinguished sociologists of religion, Rodney Stark and William S. Bain- bridge ( [1987]1996 ), the founders of the economic theory of religion, clearly saw the inevitable tension between their theories and religious explanations. In their intro- duction to the seminal Theory of Religion they wrote: [...] it is hypocritical to imply that work such as we present is without implications for religious faith. [...] by attempting to explain religious phenomena with out reference to actions taken by the supernatural, we assume that religion is a purely human phenomenon, the causes of which are to be found entirely in the natural world. [...] Furthermore, when we contrast many faiths and seek human causes for variations among them, we at least imply that none possesses the re vealed truth. Orthodox clergy have no difficulty seeing at a glance that work such as ours is potentially inimical to faith. On this question we believe the orthodox clergy show better judgment than do many liberal clergy who seem so eager to embrace social science. ( Stark and Bainbridge 1996: 22–23 ) Unfortunately, few other sociologists have been that frank. Janusz Mucha, while paraphrasing Lewis A. Coser’s Letter to a Young Sociolo- gist wrote: ‘Although it is hard today to believe that ‘truth will set us free’ one has to hope that our research effort will contribute to the development of humanity’s self-consciousness, to a self-conscious s ocial planning, to the blossoming of human dignity’ ( 2009: XXVI ). Hardly could one find a more telling example of a situation, in which research problems become moral imperatives. This passage is by no means a unique feature of radical sociologists—to a certain degree it characterizes the whole of sociological enterprise. Already towards the end of the 19. century Albion Small and George E. Vincent ( 1894: 77 ) confessed in their handbook to the emerging new academic discipline that ‘Sociology was born of the modern ardor to improve society’. This ardor has not gone until today, although most of social scientists try hard to mitigate it. Not always are they successful. Let me provide just one example, although countless others could be found. In his Transformation of Intimacy ( 1993 ) Anthony Giddens describes the birth of modern sexuality. In his view, what is today widely practiced becomes ‘normal’, but ‘normality’ here is understood in a normative, not only statistical sense. He falls into the trap of what Roberto Cialdini ( 2001 ) called the principle of social proof. Giddens ( 1993 ) frequently crosses the border between description and value-judgment, as when he writes that the decline of perversion was an important achievement of the freedom of expression in liberal democracies: ‘Vic- tories have been won, but the confrontations continue, and freedoms that have been achieved could still plausibly be swept away on a reactionary tide’ ( 1993: 33 )Abit further we read: ‘heterosexuality is no longer a standard by which everything else is judged’ ( Giddens 1993: 34 ). It probably is not, but we cannot be sure what Giddens is trying to say here: whether that there is an ob jectively observable increase in social ac- ceptance for homosexual behavior, or if it his desire to see such a transformation. One fears Giddens himself does not differentiate these two separate dimensions clearly enough. 183 Secular Biographies Individual biographies of early sociologists may prove to be the key factor in tracing the origins of the secularist paradigm in sociology. Comte’s ( 1974 [1896] ) ambition to establish a religion of Humanity, with sociologists as priests, was responsible for much of suspicion towards the nascent discipline. Comte himself could be described as a ‘secular Catholic’: he viewed religion as a necessary source of social order and in a particularly explicit way tried to incorpo rate the Catholic doctrine, which he gener- ally highly valued, into his system of positive philosophy. Later sociologists could be better characterized, according to the famous—although often misinterpreted (see Swatos and Kivisto 1991 )—self-description of Max Weber (in a letter to Ferdinand Tönnies on February 19, 1909) as ‘religiously unmusical’. Durkheim came from a rab- binic family, but abandoned Judaism and became atheist. Nevertheless, in the later period of his activity he developed an idea of a global civil religion, which he called ‘the cult of man’, ‘religion of humanity’ or the ‘religion of law’. The main function of this ‘secular religion’ was civic education through the public school system (Wallace 1977). He was probably most explicit about the normative tasks of the discipline he helped establish: ‘We must discover the rational substitutes for these religious notions that for a long time have served as the vehicle for the most essential moral ideas’ (quoted in: Coser 1977: 137 ). In other words, sociology was to be a moral science, although not by choice—as a self-proclaimed competitor of religion—but out of necessity, in the face of decline of traditional, i.e. religious foundations of the social order. Unlike in France, where most sociologists were declared atheists, early sociologists in Great Britain, Germany and the United States were often associated with Protes- tant social movements. In America, many among the first-generation sociologists had theological education. Eight well known scholars, including William G. Sum- ner and William I. Thomas, started their career as ministers. John Brewer ( 2007) claims that great religious diversity meant no single minister could come to national prominence unless he crossed the borders of his denomination. Therefore, inspired by optimistic postmillennialism, many pastors became engaged in reform movements, which opened a path to social recognition and wider audience. Gradually, postmil- lennial eschatology, which hoped to establish God’s Kingdom on Earth even before the Second Coming, was secularized and opene d up possibilities for a ‘Christian soci- ology’, understood as a rational and scientific method to eliminate social evil. Much of this enthusiasm is evident in books such as J. H. W. Stuckenberg’s (1880) Christian Sociology . Institutes and summer schools of Christian sociology were affiliated with many theological seminars (see Henking 1993 ). Austin Harrington, analyzing the work of German philosopher Hans Blumenberg (2008: 21) suggests, that social sciences needed this mediation of religious reform movements to establish themselves within the academia. Sociological conversion, however, was often accompanied by the scho lar’s personal departure from institu- tionalized religion. Albion Small, who remained deeply religious until the end of his life, is one of the few exceptions here. This individual reorientation was accompa- nied by institutional secularization of sociology ( Brewer 2007 ). This process is well 191 No one can pull himself up out of the bog of uncertainty, of not being able to live, by his own exertions; nor can we pull ourselves up, as Desca rtes still thought he could, by a cogito ergo sum , by a series of intellectual deductions. Meaning that is self-made is in the last analysis no meaning. Meaning that is the ground on which our existence as a totality can stand and live, cannot be made but only received. ( Ratzinger 2004: 73 ) In the wake of the constructivist turn on social sciences, social scholars are now much more ready to openly admit they are guided by a moral philosophy, or that their work is interpretation. Sociology of knowledge, especially, revealed the socially constructed character of the sociological project and undermined its claim to scientific objectivism and neutrality. Yet much of sociological research is still done as if this turn never happened. What is problematic then is not the inherent qualities of the sociological imagination, but the extent to which it has permeated our contemporary societies. Western societies—with their tec hnocratic policies, instrumentality in social relations, social authority of science and their tolerant ignorance of the metaphys- ical and the religious—have in a number of ways institutionalized this sociological imagination. If sociology wants to remain faithful to its original critical vocation, it is perhaps time that it seriously looks into various ‘crypto-theologies’ underlying much of sociological thinking. Conclusion In the market of interpretations, sociology has driven out theology, and more broadly, the religious worldview as a legitimate point of view in matters social. Increasing reflexivity of the social sciences, however, gradually led them to discover certain ideological premises deeply rooted in their f oundations. Secularization theory is one of these premises. When critical ‘sociolog y of sociology’ laid bare these assumptions, a number of scholars set to rethink the relationship between the theological and the sociological imagination. What could such a post-secular approach in sociology mean? Keenan ( 2002: 282 ) writes that liberation from the secularist straightjacket will bring about new research directions and insights. More and more scholars come to understand that sociology and theology (or, more broadly, religion) offer perspectives that differ significantly, but may meet in certain points. Nevertheless, I claim that the postmodern rapproche- ment between sociology and theology throug h the blurring of disciplinary boundaries, which Keenan seems to suggest and Bauman’s work to illustrate, is not a step in the right direction. What I am not suggesting, either, is that sociology should give up certain re- ductionism, which is a necessary precondition of any methodological purity. Should sociology stop talking about anomy, dysfunction, deviation, social control, and replace these terms and concepts with original sin, sin, guilt, punishment, salvation, weakness of human nature? By no means. Sociology remains a legitimate way of perceiving (i.e. describing and interpreting) social reality, but it has to realize that it is a project rivaling—and to a degree based on—earlier, particularly religious, interpretations. What is needed is a more modest sociology, conscious of its ideological origins, ready to recognize its limits, and—what is equa lly important—allow place for other per- spectives in the analysis of social reality. Religion is just one of them, albeit perhaps the most important, but there are others: literature, philosophy, art—all these are ways to describe and interpret social life that have valuable insights to offer.

� Case The 1AC’s demand upon the state initiates an intelligible political project that compels a subjectification of queerness to speak and identify as citizens of the social. Their de-schooled communities interiorize discipline on the level of identity. Baedan 12’ [baedan, 2012, “baedan”, The Anarchist Library, 26-27] ER The agent responsible for effecting their destruction has been given many names:… global extermination of meaning… gravediggers of society… whatever refuses to allow parents to cherish their children… homosexuals… the death drive and the Real of jouissance…. So [queerness] knots together these threats to reproductive futurism. No political catachresis, such as Butler proposes, could forestall the need to constitute, then, such a category of [queerness]. For even though, as Butler suggests, political catachresis may change over time the occupants of that category, the category itself… continues to mark the place of whatever refuses intelligibility. And so the question that is posed concerns the refusal of intelligibility. Contemporary arrangements of power have abolished the silence that once accompanied the dark ineffable desires of queerness and destruction. Rather than an injunction against speech, the power of biopolitical democracy is specifically to make us speak. Cybernetic relationships ensure that each of us as a speaking subject has the ability to name ourselves, aestheticize ourselves, deploy blogs and social networks and avatars to represent ourselves. The contemporary function of power can be understood as one unending move toward intelligibility—one of moving what had been blind spots into new subjects to be marketed; new identities to be surveilled. We are captured by the state every time we make ourselves intelligible. Whether demand, political subject, or formal organization, each intelligible form can be recuperated, represented, or annihilated. Our project then must proceed in the recognition of the paradox that its being made truly intelligible—even by us, even to us—would be its defeat. We must seize the possibility of a life neither constrained by nor produced through the omnipresence of capital and state. It is precisely by the fact that words fail to describe it and programs fail to bring it about that we can know this life. As such, any imperative to put this ineffable project into words must be understood as a compromise of what must be an uncompromising project. There is no language which can make our intentions comprehensible to the social order. Any move toward such comprehensibility would be a betrayal of the specific antagonistic character of our project against that social order. Camatte elaborates on this point: This is a revolution of life itself, a search for another way of living. Dialogue should be concerned only with the plans and ideas for realizing this desire. No dialogue can take place between the social order and those who are to overthrow it. If dialogue is still seen as a possibility, then this would be an indication that the movement is faltering. Underlying all this is a profoundly important phenomenon: all human life from the very beginning of its development within capitalist society, has undergone an impoverishment. More than this, capitalist society is death organized with all the appearances of life. Here it is not a question of death as the extinction of life, but death-in-life, death with all the substance and power of life. The human being is dead and is no more than a ritual of capital … but to those great number of smugly complacent people, who live on empty dramas and fantasies, this demand, this passionate need, just seems irrational, or, at best, a paradise that is by definition inaccessible. And so a queerness which opposes society must embody the death drive of what has become death-in-life, the intrinsic negation of a social order predicated on the use of life for its ends. In this project, we have nothing to gain by speaking the language of, or making demands to, the existent power structures. It is specifically these structures’ ability to comprehend antagonism that makes intelligibility synonymous with recuperation. Such [queers] would insist on the unintelligible’s unintelligibility, on the internal limit to signification and the impossibility of turning Real loss to meaningful profit in the Symbolic without its persistent remainder: the inescapable Real of the death drive. As embodiments of unintelligibility, of course, they must veil what they expose, becoming, as figures for it, the means of its apparent subjection to meaning. But where Butler… conduces to futurism’s logic of intelligibility by seeking no more than to widen the reach of what it allows us to grasp, where she moves, by way of the future, toward the ongoing legitimation of social form through the recognition that is said to afford “ontological certainty and durability” [queerness], though destined, of course, to be claimed for intelligibility, consents to the logic that makes it a figure for what meaning can never grasp. Demeaned, it embraces de-meaning as the endless insistence of the real that the symbolic can never master for meaning now or in the future. Here Edelman invokes the Lacanian concept of the Real, or that which escapes articulation through symbolic structures. The Real is the indescribable and unnameable characteristic of our lived experience. The Real is the irreducible essence of revolt, pleasure, conspiracy and joy which comprises our project and which continually evades representation by politicians or surveillance by police apparatuses. To the contrary, Intelligibility offers two options: legitimization and democratic inclusion, or delegitimization and repression. Reproductive futurism culminates in a homonationalist consolidation of empire where imperial wars secure the future through the extermination of deviant communities of color Schotten 2015 [C. Heike, Associate Professor of Political Science and an affiliated faculty in Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston "Homonationalist Futurism:“Terrorism” and (Other) Queer Resistance to Empire." New Political Science 37.1 (2015): 71-90.] In queer theory, No Future has largely been read as making an argument regarding the constitutive heteronormativity of the social order. Edelman names this heteronormativity “reproductive futurism” and argues that it inevitably dooms homosexuals—branded as non-reproductive sexual nihilists—to instantiating society’s death drive. I contend, however, that No Future can be understood more generically as a work of political theory, especially given that Edelman explicitly describes its subject matter—reproductive futurism—as “the logic within which the political itself must be thought.”14 Identifying this political theory, however, requires some appropriation, given that, ultimately, Edelman is more concerned with Lacan than politics. Reading with and into the text, then, I propose three modifications of the psychoanalytic politics Edelman advances in No Future in order to more fully appropriate it for political theorizing.15 The first is to insert a distinction between the “futurism” and “reproductive futurism” he discusses, the latter being understood as a specific version of the former. Put simply, futurism is synopsized by the “presupposition that the body politic must survive,”16 the putatively apolitical article of faith in the necessary continuity of politics as such. “[E]very political vision,” Edelman claims, is “a vision of futurity.”17 More specifically, reproductive futurism is characterized by “a set of values widely thought of as extrapolitical: values that center on the family, to be sure, but that focus on the protection of children.”18 The iconographic signifier of reproductive futurism is the child; its mantra, “Whitney Houston’s rendition of the secular hymn, ‘I believe that children are our future,’ a hymn we might as well simply declare our national anthem and be done with it.”19 Reproductive futurism is the apolitical imperative that the present be held in service to the children’s future adulthood: [W]e are no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of a future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child. That figural Child alone embodies the citizen as an ideal, entitled to claim full rights to its future share in the nation’s good, though always at the cost of limiting the rights “real” citizens are allowed. For the social order exists to preserve for this universalized subject, this fantasmatic Child, a notional freedom more highly valued than the actuality of freedom itself, which might, after all, put at risk the Child to whom such a freedom falls due.20 Whether discussing the survival of the body politic (futurism) or the future as symbolized by the child (reproductive futurism), Edelman is clear that the presuppositions of both are deemed apolitical, although that is precisely what makes them “so oppressively political.”21 For the presuppositions of (reproductive) futurism are the very terms of politics as such. To participate in politics at all, even in protest or dissent, requires that one “submit to the framing of political debate—and, indeed, of the political field—as defined by the terms of ...reproductive futurism: terms that impose an ideological limit on political discourse as such.”22 This is how and why Edelman says that there is no future for queers: politics itself designates “queers” as futureless. By definition, politics seeks to install an order of sameness through the ideological (re)production of a future that promises a seamless plenitude of meaning. Rather than acknowledge the impossibility of such an achievement, however, this failing is instead foisted onto a person, people, or set of forces that instantiate that impossibility in their very existence. These unforgivable obstacles to futurism’s achievement are “queers”: “the queer dispossesses the social order of the ground on which it rests: a faith in the consistent reality of the social ... a faith that politics, whether of the left or of the right, implicitly affirms.”23 Defined as non-reproductive sexual nihilists, the positioning of queers as culture’s self-indulgent, sex-obsessed death drive thus functions to secure the health, happiness, and adult normality of heterosexually reproducing humanity. While this persuasive reading of heteronormativity and homophobia has generated the most critical enthusiasm for No Future, I want to argue that reproductive futurism is neither exhaustive of the political nor futurism’s exclusive form. However hegemonic, reproductive futurism is only “one of the forms” this “calamity” might take.24 For clearly one can invest in the future as signified by any number of possible oppressive and unattainable ideals: not only the child, but also, for example, Christ, security (for example Hobbes), or the American way. As Edelman himself observes, “The Child, in the historical epoch of our current epistemological regime, is the figure for this compulsory investment in the misrecognition of figure.”25 Futurism itself, however, he calls “the substrate of politics.”26 My second proposed modification follows from the first, its mandate being to situate Edelman’s political theory more distinctly within history.27 In this regard, suspicious reader John Brenkman helpfully provides the political theory references missing from No Future, noting that “modern critical social discourse, whether among the Enlightenment’s philosophes, French revolutionaries, Marxists, social democrats, or contemporary socialists and democrats” all engage in the kind of future-wagering Edelman describes as definitively political.28 Historically, Brenkman is correct—futurism is a distinctively modern phenomenon that must be tethered to, among other things, the advent of industrial capitalism, colonialism, and the rise of the nation-state. This second modification makes clear that, in naming futurism, Edelman has identified a fundamental baseline of modernity and the workings of modern politics. However, Brenkman’s concern is less with history than the fact that Edelman seems to foreclose the possibility of such critical discourse by consigning it to the same status as the discourse of the Catholic Church and the religious Right. While Brenkman’s point is well-taken, it is already Edelman’s. For, whether liberal or conservative, Left or Right, communist or fascist, every modern political theory is invested in the repetition and reproduction of the social order, cast as a future aspirational ideal, to which the present is held hostage. This is as true of conservative movements as of radical or revolutionary ones—modern politics as such is defined by its investment in reproducing an order of sameness at the expense of the difference of now.29 Tavia Nyong’o has argued that Edelman’s reading of homophobia operates as a kind of nostalgia for a political moment already past, a moment when homosexuality really did pose an ominous and spectral threat to the social order, but does so no longer.30 However—and this is the third modification I wish to assert—the “queer” of No Future is by no means a crudely identitarian homosexual subject, nor is the child solely emblematic of procreation and childrearing. Edelman would agree with at least part of this point. He insists there is “nothing intrinsic to the constitution of those identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, transsexual, or queer” that “predisposes them to resist the appeal of futurity, to refuse the temptation to reproduce, or to place themselves outside or against the acculturating logic of the Symbolic.”31 And indeed, it is not difficult to find examples of gay reproductive futurism, the most obvious being the movement for “marriage equality.” As former Human Rights Campaign (HRC) President Joe Solmonese puts it: “The fight for marriage equality for samesex couples is quite possibly the most conventional, family-friendly equal rights struggle ever.” He continues, “History bends not only toward fairness and equality, but also toward common sense. Marriage strengthens couples and families, who in turn help strengthen their communities, one at a time—leading ultimately to a stronger, more robust nation.”32 Mixing nationalism into a gay progress narrative of ever-expanding equality and familial inclusion, Solmonese here writes the playbook for reproductive futurism’s political palatability. Tellingly, Andrew Sullivan’s earlier praise of gay marriage is even more explicit on this count, invoking the importance of the future’s promise not just in the name of the children, but more specifically for gay children, who must be saved from having otherwise been born into futurelessness: More important, perhaps ... its [marriage’s] influence would be felt quietly but deeply among gay children. For them, at last, there would be some kind of future; some older faces to apply to their unfolding lives, some language in which their identity could be properly discussed, some rubric by which it could be explained— not in terms of sex, or sexual practices, or bars, or subterranean activity, but in terms of their future life stories, their potential loves, their eventual chance at some kind of constructive happiness. They would be able to feel by the intimation of a myriad examples that in this respect their emotional orientation was not merely about pleasure, or sin, or shame, or otherness (although it might always be involved in many of those things), but about the ability to love and be loved as complete, imperfect human beings. Until gay marriage is legalized, this fundamental element of personal dignity will be denied a whole segment of humanity. No other change can achieve it.33 As we can see, even when the Child is gay, its salvific promise is neither diverted nor diluted. It simply straightens out the queer threat potentially posed by bent children.34 Dangling the lure of “constructive happiness” before the eyes of youths for whom not sugarplums but sex parties dance in their heads, Sullivan here offers up the gay version of reproductive futurism, paternalistically reassuring us that a life of sex for sex’s sake is the meaningless, self-indulgent, anti-civilizational existence every good moralizer ever told us it was. Taken together, Sullivan and Solmonese helpfully illustrate the fact that Edelman’s argument is, in the end, not really about identity and not even about gay people (or, for that matter, straight people). Futurism is a logic that transcends the specifics of heterosexuality and homosexuality, and “queer” in Edelman’s vocabulary does not necessarily—or, perhaps, even primarily, anymore, as Nyong’o suggests—stand in for gay and lesbian people. But, to return to my third modification, this also means that the child is not irrevocably tied to the existence, reproduction, or raising of “historical children.”35 In other words, even as the non- or anti-identity politics of Edelman’s figure of queerness is increasingly evident, he neglects to establish the similarly and necessarily nonidentitarian iconography of the future he inscribes (which also returns us to my first proposed modification, the distinction between futurism and reproductive futurism). The queer as homosexual and the Child as historical child may be concrete, daily exemplars of (certain ubiquitous if not exclusive versions of) heteronormativity. However, understood as a specific form of a more generalized futurist logic, it becomes clear that the child cannot simply be equated with reproduction, child-bearing, and child-rearing, just as the “queer” cannot simply mean “homosexual” in Edelman’s temporal sense. The child, along with the queer, is a crucial space for political and historical concretization of Edelman’s radical but otherwise unduly narrow political project. Puar: Terrorism, Homonationalism, and US Sexual Exceptionalism The HRC’s language of nationhood and the non-exclusivity of the child as futurist icon are the places to begin pushing Edelman’s queer theory toward an explicit engagement with the politics of race, nation, and US empire. For Solmonese’s statement is not simply the rhetoric of reproductive futurism. It is also the language of homonationalism, a term Jasbir Puar has coined to document the “transition under way in how queer subjects are relating to nation-states, particularly the United States, from being figures of death (in other words, the AIDS epidemic) to becoming tied to ideas of life and productivity (in other words, gay marriage and families).”36 Homonationalism is an abbreviated combination of the words “homonormative” and “nationalism,” the former term borrowed from Lisa Duggan, who describes “the new homonormativity” as a political realignment of the late 1990s/early 2000s in which gay rights became compatible with certain neoliberal, anti-statist, conservative, American nationalist viewpoints.37 Combining homonormativity with nationalism, then, Puar augments Nyong’o’s critique, arguing that the assimilation of certain gay and lesbian subjects into the mainstream of American normalcy, respectability, and citizenship has entailed the “fleeting sanctioning of a national homosexual subject”38 who is “complicit with heterosexual nationalist formations rather than inherently or automatically excluded from or opposed to them.”39 One effect of homonationalism in the post-9/11 context of the “War on Terror” is the perverse sexualization or “queering” of Arabs and Muslims (and all those held to be such) in the figure of the “terrorist,” a figure of monstrosity, excess, savagery, and perversion. To be clear, Puar is not suggesting that the “terrorist” is the new queer. Rather, she is arguing that “queerness is always already installed in the project of naming the terrorist; the terrorist does not appear as such without the concurrent entrance of perversion, deviance.”40 Neither an identity nor a defining behavioral activity (for example, homosexuality), Puar elaborates queerness as a biopolitical tactic that functions to define and divide populations through processes of racialization, a “management of queer life at the expense of sexually and racially perverse death in relation to the contemporary politics of securitization, Orientalism, terrorism, torture, and the articulation of Muslim, Arab, Sikh, and South Asian sexualities.”41 In this view, “the contemporary U.S. heteronormative nation actually relies on and benefits from the proliferation of queerness.”42 Homonationalism, as a biopolitics of queerness, functions to discipline and (re)produce homosexuality as white, American, patriotic, and upwardly mobile while designating people of color, immigrants, and Arabs and Muslims as both heterosexual and yet dangerously “queer”—as “terrorists” or “failed and perverse” bodies that “always have femininity as their reference point of malfunction, and are metonymically tied to all sorts of pathologies of the mind and body—homosexuality, incest, pedophilia, madness, and disease.”43 As is evident, queerness in Puar’s account veers from any simple conflation with gay and lesbian subjectivity; as she says, “Race, ethnicity, nation, gender, class, and sexuality disaggregate gay, homosexual, and queer national subjects who align themselves with U.S. imperial interests from forms of illegitimate queerness that name and ultimately propel populations into extinction.”44 The happily married couples that populate the HRC’s literature and website, then, would be the homonational, or properly queer; the “monster terrorist fag” abjected into existence through torture at Abu Ghraib or Guanta´namo, detained indefinitely in any of the US’s many illegal prisons, surveilled incessantly in mosques and cafes, and stigmatized as suffering from arrested development by the psychologizing literature of security studies, would be the improperly queer.45 Puar’s point is that these queernesses go together and require one another, much as, I think, Edelman can be seen to be arguing that the child and the queer go together and require one another. What Puar concretizes, however, in theorizing queerness as a “process of racialization”46 is not simply the analytic point that “queer” and “homosexual” are distinct but, more importantly, the urgently political point that the abjected or improper queer who stands outside the social order and is in effect antagonistic to it is, in this contemporary moment, much more likely to be a Muslim or someone perceived as “looking like” a Muslim to the American gaze than, let us admit it, the newly engaged same-sex couples thronging state houses in Minnesota, Connecticut, and Colorado (much less the “homosexual” figure of queerness in No Future). Understanding queerness as a process of nationalization and racialization also concretizes and expands the understanding of heteronormativity or, in Edelman’s words, the future. For the terrorist in Puar’s analysis resists or denies a future that is symbolized and defined not only or simply by the child, but also by the American nation and secular Christianity. As she says, “In the political imagination, the terrorist serves as the monstrous excess of the nation-state.”47 Post-9/11, Puar notes that this terrorist threat is undeniably linked with Islam, which often serves as its “explanation.”48 As she observes, Islam signifies, to the ostensibly secular and modern US, both “excess” and “savagery”: “Religious belief is thus cast, in relation to other factors fueling terrorism, as the overflow, the final excess that impels monstrosity—the ‘different attitude toward violence’ signaling these uncivilizable forces.”49 Puar’s reading suggests that Islam threatens the futurist temporality of American empire. Cast as retrograde, backward, and frozen in pre-modern religiosity, Islam threatens the progress narrative of US imperial wars which are alleged to bring ever-greater freedom, not only to women and homosexuals, but also to uncivilized, savage, and undemocratic people(s) and nations around the world.50 Finally, then, it is important to note that as Islam has been queered or come to signify queerness, it does so in two ways: first, through the phobic association of Islam with terrorism; and, second, through the racist and Orientalist conflation of Islam with homophobia, anti-feminism, and sexual backwardness more generally. Putting Puar’s analysis in an Edelman-esque frame, we might say that the figure of the “terrorist” who threatens national goals, progress, hope—indeed, the nation’s very existence—can be cast as the excessive, anti-social, future-denying figure of the “queer” in Edelman. Or, we might say that just as the domain of normativity has expanded to include some gay people, correspondingly, the domain of (inassimilable) queerness also has shifted. Puar’s analysis of the collusion “between homosexuality and U.S. nationalism”51 as producing two figures, the homonormative patriot and the queer terrorist, notes them as, on the one hand, the embodiment and normative achievement of the social order and, on the other hand, the dissolution and destruction of that social order.52 No longer designating “the homosexual” per se, “queer” names the monstrously raced and perversely sexualized Arab/Muslim/terrorist Other that threatens the American social and political order, an order that (some) properly gay and lesbian subjects can now, through their incorporation into normative American national life, inhabit and reproduce. In sum, we have a theorization of “queer” wherein the sexually backward Muslim is led by the irrationality and violence of her/his religion to annihilate those who serve and protect freedom for all. In this analysis of “the sexually exceptional homonational and its evil counterpart, the queer terrorist of elsewhere,”53 the “terrorist” is to the HRC what, in Edelman’s analysis, the queer is to the child.54 Edelman and Puar: Theorizing Resistance Puar’s theorization of homonationalism is a significant contribution to queer theory and an essential corrective to Edelman’s otherwise historically and racially unmarked analysis of (reproductive) futurism. Her work allows us to critique futurism in ways that are responsive to the specificities of its racial and national workings, consequences gapingly unattended to by him. While Edelman deftly parses the logic of power in terms of futurism’s hegemony, he fails fully to unpack its coercive force by focusing solely on futurism’s relationship to an exceedingly narrow version of non-reproductive homosexuality. Although he claims that the theory of politics he explicates in No Future is indifferent to race, arguing that “the fascism of the baby’s face ... subjects us to its sovereign authority as the figure of politics itself ... whatever the face a particular politics gives that baby to wear— Aryan or multicultural, that of the thirty-thousand-year Reich or of an ever expanding horizon of democratic inclusivity,”55 what is clear is that the reproductive futurism he critiques is symptomatic of a very specific bourgeois class culture within the imperial US, a culture that garners his criticism only insofar as it is bound up with heteronormativity.56 By contrast, Puar’s demand that we focus our attention on the racial and nationalized logics of queerness(es) and the unexpected complicities between queers, nationalism, and empire remains only suggestive of futurism’s determinative role, never naming it specifically. Now, this is likely because Puar neither endorses nor conceptualizes futurism as a useful diagnosis of modern politics, just as Edelman may very much wish to privilege (white male homo) sexuality in his psychoanalysis of futurism. However, I suggest that authorial intentions—both Puar’s and Edelman’s—be respectfully disregarded, not only because we have become savvy to the multiple begged questions inherent in any invocation of authorial intention, but also because more than our scholarly work is at stake when it comes to forging critical resistance to US imperial power. Indeed, while the net effect of Edelman’s analysis is that only white gay men are considered the deathly threat portended by queerness in No Future, 57 if we return to his definition of “queer” and insist on distinguishing between futurism and reproductive futurism, we note that “queer” designates anyone who fails to abide by the rules of social temporality—that is, anyone who sacrifices the future for the sake of the present. As such, futurism’s ruthless machinations stigmatize all sorts of populations as emblematic of the death and destruction of the social order. This broad array of misfits and perverts may include some gay, lesbian, and queer people. It necessarily also includes the “terrorist” and “Muslim” whom Puar argues are biopolitical targets of abjected queerness. This analysis also suggests that temporality is a crucial axis of determination regarding all “enemies” of the social order, a notion that links Edelman’s political theory to other important work in radical queer politics. For example, in her definitive essay, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?,” Cathy Cohen argues for a re-thinking of marginal positionality in terms of one’s relation to power rather than in terms of a binary categorization of queer vs straight. She cites the examples of the prohibition of slave marriages and the long history of obsession with black women’s reproductive choices in the US as examples of ostensibly heterosexual people inhabiting positions outside the bounds of normative sexuality because of race, class, and property status. In arguing for a more capacious, intersectional queer politics that is accountable not simply to the question of who is and is not heterosexual but, more broadly, to the question of what each of our relationships with and proximity to power may be, Cohen writes: As we stand on the verge of watching those in power dismantle the welfare system through a process of demonizing the poor and young—primarily poor and young women of color, many of whom have existed for their entire lives outside the white, middle-class heterosexual norm—we have to ask if these women do not fit into society’s categories of marginal, deviant, and “queer.” As we watch the explosion of prison construction and the disproportionate incarceration rates of young men and women of color, often as part of the economic development of poor white rural communities, we have to ask if these individuals do not fit society’s definition of “queer” and expendable. Cohen’s understanding of “queer” as a kind of non- or anti-normativity based on one’s proximity to power might also be understood in terms of futurism and its flouting by “deviants.” For, if the key characteristic of queerness is a temporal one, then having “too many” babies is just as much a threat to America’s future as not having any at all—it just depends on which queers we are talking about (not only Reagan’s welfare queen, but also recall the manufactured election-year discourse about “anchor babies”).59 Naming these explicitly makes futurism a useful tool to diagnose the contemporary political moment from a radical queer perspective that does not fetishize sexuality as either the primary domain of subordination or the sole focus of political struggle and resistance.

The 1AC’s critique of schooling fails to understand the carceral schooling industrial complex that situates the prison regime as the condition of possibility of schooling and education. The “radical” pedagogy of the 1AC is capable of justifying, defending, and tolerating a genocidal prison regime through its investment in the production of “free” and self-governing citizen/subjects with their methodology. In other words, their freedom requires the reproduction of the unfreedom of those held captive by the state. Rodríguez 10 - Professor and Chair of Ethnic Studies @ UC Riverside [Dylan Rodríguez, “The Disorientation of the Teaching Act: Abolition as Pedagogical Position,” Radical Teacher, Number 88 (Summer 2010) The global U.S. prison regime has no precedent or peer and has become a primary condition of schooling, education, and pedagogy in every possible site. Aside from its sheer accumulation of captive bodies (more than 2.5 million, if one includes children, military captives, undocumented migrants, and the mentally ill/disordered),1 the prison has become central to the (re)production and (re)invention of a robust and historically dynamic white supremacist state: at its farthest institutional reaches, the prison has developed a capacity to organize and disrupt the most taken-for-granted features of everyday social life, including “family,” “community,” “school,” and individual social identities. Students, teachers, and administrators of all kinds have come to conceptualize “freedom,” “safety,” and “peace” as a relatively direct outcome of state-conducted domestic war (wars on crime, drugs, gangs, immigrants, terror, etc.), legitimated police violence, and large-scale, punitive imprisonment. In what follows, I attempt to offer the outlines of a critical analysis and schematic social theory that might be useful to two overlapping, urgent tasks of the radical teacher: 1) to better understand how the prison, along with the relations of power and normalized state violence that the prison inhabits/produces, form the everyday condition of possibility for the teaching act; and 2) to engage a historically situated abolitionist praxis that is, in this moment, primarily pedagogical. A working conception of the “prison regime” offers a useful tool of critical social analysis as well as a theoretical framework for contextualizing critical, radical, and perhaps abolitionist pedagogies. In subtle distinction from the criminological, social scientific, and common sense understandings of “criminal justice,” “prisons/ jails,” and the “correctional system,” the notion of a prison regime focuses on three interrelated technologies and processes that are dynamically produced at the site of imprisonment: first, the prison regime encompasses the material arrangements of institutional power that create informal (and often nominally illegal) routines and protocols of militarized physiological domination over human beings held captive by the state. This domination privileges a historical anti-black state violence that is particularly traceable to the latter stages of continental racial chattel slavery and its immediate epochal aftermath in “post-emancipation” white supremacy and juridical racial segregation/apartheid—a privileging that is directly reflected in the actual demography of the imprisoned population, composed of a Black majority. The institutional elaborations of this white supremacist and anti-black carceral state create an overarching system of physiological domination that subsumes differently racialized subjects (including whites) into institutional routines (strip searching and regular bodily invasion, legally sanctioned torture, ad hoc assassination, routinized medical neglect) that revise while sustaining the everyday practices of genocidal racial slavery. While there are multiple variations on this regime of physiological dominance—including (Latino/a, Muslim, and Arab) immigrant detention, extra-territorial military prisons, and asylums—it is crucial to recognize that the genealogy of the prison’s systemic violence is anchored in the normalized Black genocide of U.S. and New World nation-building.2 Second, the concept of the prison regime understands the place of state-ordained human capture as a modality of social (dis)organization that produces numerous forms of interpersonal and systemic (race, class, gender, sexual) violence within and beyond the physical sites of imprisonment. Here, the multiple and vast social effects of imprisonment (from affective disruptions of community and extended familial ties to long-term economic/geographic displacement) are understood as fundamental and systemic dimensions of the policing and imprisonment apparatus, rather than secondary or unintended consequences of it.3 Third, the prison regime encompasses the multiple knowledges and meanings that are created around the institutional site and cultural symbol of “the prison,” including those that circulate in popular culture and among the administrative bureaucracies and curriculum of schools. Given this conception of the prison regime as a far-reaching and invasive arrangement of social power, state violence, and human domination, we might better be able to understand the significance of everyday routines of school-based discipline that imply the possibility of imprisonment as the punitive bureaucratic outcome of misbehavior, truancy, and academic failure. What, then, is the condition of “teaching” in the context of a prison regime that is so relentless in its innovation and intrusiveness? We might depart from another critical premise: that the prison (jail, detention center, etc.) cannot be conceptualized as a place that is wholly separate or alienated from the normalized intercourses of civil society or “the free world.” Speaking more precisely to the concerns raised by this issue of Radical Teacher, the massive carceral-cultural form of the prison has naturalized a systemic disorientation of the teaching act, so that teaching is no longer separable from the work of policing, juridical discipline, and state-crafted punishment. Thus, I do not think the crucial question in our historical moment is whether or not our teaching ultimately supports or adequately challenges the material arrangements and cultural significations of the prison regime—just as I believe the central question under the rule of apartheid is not whether a curriculum condones or opposes the spatial arrangements of white supremacy and intensified racist state violence. Rather, the primary question is whether and how the act of teaching can effectively and radically displace the normalized misery, everyday suffering, and mundane state violence that are reproduced and/or passively condoned by both hegemonic and critical/counterhegemonic pedagogies. I am arguing that our historical conditions urgently dictate that a strategic distinction must be drawn between liberal, social justice, critical, and even “radical” pedagogies that are capable of even remotely justifying, defending, or tolerating a proto-genocidal prison regime that is without precedent or peer, on the one hand, and those attempts at abolitionist pedagogy that—in an urgent embracing of the historical necessity of innovation, improvisation, and radical rearticulation— are attempting to generate new epistemic and intellectual approaches to meaning, knowledge, learning, and practice for the sake of life, liberation, and new social possibilities. I am concerned with addressing a pedagogical tendency that artificially separates the teacher-student relation and “the school” from “the prison.” Such strategic distinctions are useful for delineating the ways that multiple pedagogical epistemes (including otherwise critical and radical ones) operate from the a priori notion that prisons and policing serve necessary, peace-and-safety making, and “good” social functions that are somehow separable or recuperable from their historical primacy to socioeconomic/class repression, American apartheid, racial slavery, indigenous land displacement and cultural genocide, and white supremacist colonization.9 In other words, what might happen to the disoriented teaching act if it sere re-oriented against the assumptive necessity, integrity, and taken-for-grantedness of prisons, policing, and the normalized state violence they reproduce? Schooling Regime The structural symbiosis between schools and the racist policing/prison state is evident in the administrative, public policy, and pedagogical innovations of the War on Drugs, “Zero Tolerance,” “No Child Left Behind,” and the school-based militarizations of the “school to prison (and military) pipeline.”10 Angela Y. Davis has suggested that “when children attend schools that place a greater value on discipline and security than on knowledge and intellectual development, they are attending prep schools for prison.”11 These punitive iterations of an increasingly carceral schooling industrial complex, however, represent a symptomatic reflection of how the racist state—and white supremacist social formation generally—are producing new categories of social identities (and redefining older ones) that can only be “taught” within a direct relationship to the regulatory mechanisms and imminent (state) violence of the prison industrial complex and the U.S. prison regime. (Even while some are relatively privileged by the institutional logics of relative de-criminalization, their bodily mobility and academic progression are contingent on the state’s capacity to separate and “protect” them from the criminalized.) There are, at first, categories of social subjects that are apprehended and naturalized by the school-as-state—gifted and talented, undocumented, gang affiliated, exceptional, at-risk, average—who are then, by ontological necessity, hierarchically separated through the protocols of pseudo-standardized intelligence quotient, socioeconomic class, race, gender, citizenship, sexuality, neighborhood geography, etc. This seemingly compulsory, school-sited reproduction of the deadly circuits of privilege and alienation is anything but new, and has always been central to the routines of the U.S. schooling regime, particularly in its colonialist and post-emancipationist articulations.12 The idea of the U.S. prison apparatus as a regime, in this context, brings attention to how prisons are not places outside and apart from our everyday lives, but instead shape and deform our identities, communities, and modes of social interaction. I have written elsewhere that the prison regime is an apparatus of power/violence that cannot be reduced to a minor “institution” of the state, but has in fact become an apparatus that possesses and constitutes the state, often as if autonomous of its authority.13 Here, I am interested in how this regime overlaps with and mutually nourishes the multiple “schooling regimes” that make up the U.S. educational system. The U.S. prison, in other words, has become a model and prototype for power relations more generally, in which 1) institutional authority is intertwined with the policing and surveillance capacities (legitimated violence) of the state, 2) the broadly cultural and peculiarly juridical racial/gender criminalization of particular social subjects becomes a primary framework for organizing institutional access, and 3) the practice of systemic bodily immobilization (incarceration) permeates the normal routines of the “free world.” To trace the movements of the prison’s modeling of power relations to the site of the school is to understand that policing/surveillance, criminalization, and immobilization are as much schooling practices as they are imprisonment practices. The teacher is generally being asked to train the foot soldiers, middle managers, administrators, workers, intellectuals, and potential captives of the school/prison confluence, whether the classroom is populated by criminalized Black and Brown youth or white Ph.D. candidates. Two thoughts are worth considering: the teaching act is constituted by the technologies of the prison regime, and the school is inseparable from the prison industrial complex. The “prison industrial complex,” in contrast to the prison regime, names the emergence over the last three decades of multiple symbiotic institutional relationships that dynamically link private business (such as architectural firms, construction companies, and uniform manufacturers) and government/state apparatuses (including police, corrections, and elected officials) in projects of multiply-scaled human immobilization and imprisonment. The national abolitionist organization Critical Resistance elaborates that the prison industrial complex is a “system situated at the intersection of governmental and private interests that uses prisons as a solution to social, political, and economic problems.”14 In fact, as many abolitionist scholars have noted, the rise of the prison industrial complex is in part a direct outcome of the liberal-progressive “prison reform” successes of the 1970s. The political convergence between liberals, progressives, and “law and order” conservatives/reactionaries, located within the accelerating political and geographical displacements of globalization,15 generated a host of material transformations and institutional shifts that facilitated— in fact, necessitated—the large-scale reorganization of the prison into a host of new and/or qualitatively intensified structural relationships with numerous political and economic apparatuses, including public policy and legislative bodies, electoral and lobbying apparatuses, the medical and architectural/construction industries, and various other hegemonic institutional forms. Concretely, the reform of the prison required its own expansion and bureaucratic multiplication: for example, the reform of prison overcrowding came to involve an astronomical growth in new prison construction (rather than decarceration and release), the reformist outrage against preventable deaths and severe physiological suffering from (communicable, congenital, and mental) illnesses yielded the piecemeal incorporation of medical facilities and staff into prison protocols (as opposed to addressing the fact that massive incarceration inherently creates and circulates sickness), and reformist recognition of carceral state violence against emotionally disordered, mentally ill, and disabled captives led to the creation of new prisons and pharmaceutical regimens for the “criminally insane,” and so on. Following the historical trajectory of Angela Y. Davis’ concise and accurate assessment that “during the (American) revolutionary period, the penitentiary was generally viewed as a progressive reform, linked to the larger campaign for the rights of citizens,”16 it is crucial to recognize that the prison industrial complex is one of the most significant “reformist” achievements in U.S. history and is not simply the perverse social project of self-identified reactionaries and conservatives. Its roots and sustenance are fundamentally located in the American liberal-progressive impulse toward reforming institutionalized state violence rather than abolishing it. The absolute banality of the prison regime’s presence in the administrative protocols, curricula, and educational routines of the school is almost omnipresent: aside from the most obvious appearances of the racist policing state on campuses everywhere, it is generally the fundamental epistemological (hence pedagogical) assumption of the school that 1) social order (peace) requires a normalized, culturally legitimated proliferation of state violence (policing, juridical punishment, war); 2) the survival of civil society (schools, citizenship, and individual “freedom”) depends on the capacity of the state to isolate or extinguish the criminal/dangerous; and 3) the U.S. nationbuilding project is endemically decent or (at least) democratic in spirit, and its apparent corruptions, contradictions, and systemic brutalities (including and especially the racial, gender, and class-based violence of the prison industrial complex) are ultimately reformable, redeemable, or (if all else fails) forgivable. It is virtually indisputable—though always worth restating—that most pedagogical practices (including many “critical/radical” ones) invest in producing or edifying “free” and self-governing citizen/subjects. The assumptive framework of this pedagogical framework tends to conflate civil society with “freedom,” as if one’s physical presence in civil society is separable from the actual and imminent state violence of criminalization and policing. (Is a criminalized and policed person really “free”?). This pedagogical approach also leaves unasked the question of whether the central premise of the teaching practice itself—that a given pedagogy is actually capable of producing free citizen/subjects under such historical conditions—might implode if its conditions of possibility were adequately confronted. To clarify: as teachers, our generic pedagogical assumption is that we are either teaching to “free” studentcitizens who must be empowered and encouraged to live up to the responsibilities of their nominal freedom (a task that may be interpreted differently and contradictorily depending on the teacher), or that our pedagogy intends to participate in the creation of free student-citizens who are capable of being trained to participate robustly in civil society, outside and apart from the social dominance and institutional violence of the prison regime. In both instances, the underlying task of the teacher is to train the student to avert direct confrontation with the policing and imprisonment apparatus, and to remain un-incarcerated and relatively un-criminalized by the state. Whether or not the teacher can claim to succeed in this task, a basic historical truth is obscured and avoided: the structural symbiosis between the schooling and prison regimes has already rendered the prevailing cultural and institutional rubrics “freedom” an utter sham, no less than the Declaration of Independence was a pronouncement of displacement, liquidation, and enslavement for the majority of the continent’s inhabitants. Within the schooling regime/prison regime nexus, many are taught into freedom in order to administer, enforce, and passively reproduce the unfreedom of others, while some are trained into a tentative and alwaystemporary avoidance of unfreedom, meagerly rewarded with the accoutrements of civic inclusion (a job, a vote, a home address). Numerous others are trained to inhabit a space across or in between these fraudulent modalities of freedom. If the radical teacher’s primary challenge does not initially revolve around the creation of pedagogical strategies that can produce “free,” self-governing, critical student/ subjects, but instead centers on the structurally violent conditions of possibility for “pedagogy” itself, in what form can critical, radical, liberationist teaching actually occur? To revise a previous question: how might the conceptual premises and practical premises of classroom pedagogy be transformed, rethought, and strategically disrupted in order that an abolitionist reorientation of teaching becomes feasible and effective? The impact is a form of epistemic innocence that requires the cleansing of black contamination in the name of free learning Wang 12 (Jackie, a writer, poet, musician, and academic whose writing has been published by Lies Journal, Semiotext(e), HTML Giant, BOMBlog, along with numerous zines, such as those by the Moonroot collective, “Against Innocence: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Safety”) WHITE SPACE [C]rime porn often presents a view of prisons and urban ghettoes as “alternate universes” where the social order is drastically different, and the links between social structures and the production of these environments is conveniently ignored. In particular, although they are public institutions, prisons are removed from everyday US experience.12 The spatial politics of safety organizes the urban landscape. Bodies that arouse feelings of fear, disgust, rage, guilt, or even discomfort must be made disposable and targeted for removal in order to secure a sense of safety for whites. In other words, the space that white people occupy must be cleansed. The visibility of poor Black bodies (as well as certain non-Black POC, trans people, homeless people, differently-abled people, and so forth) induces anxiety, so these bodies must be contained, controlled, and removed. Prisons and urban ghettoes prevent Black and brown bodies from contaminating white space. Historically, appeals to the safety of women have sanctioned the expansion of the police and prison regimes while conjuring the racist image of the Black male rapist. With the rise of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s came an increase in public awareness about sexual violence. Self-defense manuals and classes, as well as Take Back the Night marches and rallies, rapidly spread across the country. The 1970s and 1980s saw a surge in public campaigns targeted at women in urban areas warning of the dangers of appearing in public spaces alone. The New York City rape squad declared that “[s]ingle women should avoid being alone in any part of the city, at any time.”13 In The Rational Woman’s Guide to Self-Defense (1975), women were told, “a little paranoia is really good for every woman.”14 At the same time that the State was asserting itself as the protector of (white) women, the US saw the massive expansion of prisons and the criminalization of Blackness. It could be argued that the State and the media opportunistically seized on the energy of the feminist movement and appropriated feminist rhetoric to establish the racialized Penal State while simultaneously controlling the movement of women (by promoting the idea that public space was inherently threatening to women). People of this perspective might hold that the media frenzy about the safety of women was a backlash to the gains made by the feminist movement that sought to discipline women and promote the idea that, as Georgina Hickey wrote, “individual women were ultimately responsible for what happened to them in public space.”15 However, in In an Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement Against Sexual Violence, Kristin Bumiller argues that the feminist movement was actually “a partner in the unforeseen growth of a criminalized society”: by insisting on “aggressive sex crime prosecution and activism,” feminists assisted in the creation of a tough-on-crime model of policing and punishment.16 Regardless of what perspective we agree with, the alignment of racialized incarceration and the proliferation of campaigns warning women about the dangers of the lurking rapist was not a coincidence. If the safety of women was a genuine concern, the campaigns would not have been focused on anonymous rapes in public spaces, since statistically it is more common for a woman to be raped by someone she knows. Instead, women’s safety provided a convenient pretext for the escalation of the Penal State, which was needed to regulate and dispose of certain surplus populations (mostly poor Blacks) before they became a threat to the US social order. For Wacquant, this new regime of racialized social control became necessary after the crisis of the urban ghetto (provoked by the massive loss of jobs and resources attending deindustrialization) and the looming threat of Black radical movements.17 The torrent of uprisings that took place in Black ghettoes between 1963-1968, particularly following the murder of Martin Luther King in 1968, were followed by a wave of prison upheavals (including Attica, Solidad, San Quentin, and facilities across Michigan, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Illinois, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania). Of course, these upheavals were easier to contain and shield from public view because they were cloaked and muffled by the walls of the penitentiary. The engineering and management of urban space also demarcates the limits of our political imagination by determining which narratives and experiences are even thinkable. The media construction of urban ghettoes and prisons as “alternate universes” marks them as zones of unintelligibility, faraway places that are removed from the everyday white experience. Native American reservations are another example of a “void” zone that white people can only access through the fantasy of media representations. What happens in these zones of abjection and vulnerability does not typically register in the white imaginary. In the instance that an “injustice” does register, it will have to be translated into more comprehensible terms. When I think of the public responses to Oscar Grant and Trayvon Martin, it seems significant that these murders took place in spaces that the white imaginary has access to, which allows white people to narrativize the incidents in terms that are familiar to them. Trayvon was gunned down while visiting family in a gated neighborhood; Oscar was murdered by a police officer in an Oakland commuter rail station. These spaces are not “alternate universes” or void-zones that lie outside white experience and comprehension. To what extent is the attention these cases have received attributable to the encroachment of violence on spaces that white people occupy? What about cases of racialized violence that occur outside white comfort zones? When describing the spatialization of settler colonies, Frantz Fanon writes about “a zone of non-being, an extraordinary sterile and arid region,” where “Black is not a man.”18 In the regions where Black is not man, there is no story to be told. Or rather, there are no subjects seen as worthy of having a story of their own. TRANSLATION When an instance of racist violence takes place on white turf, as in the cases of Trayvon Martin and Oscar Grant, there is still the problem of translation. I contend that the politics of innocence renders such violence comprehensible only if one is capable of seeing themselves in that position. This framework often requires that a white narrative (posed as the neutral, universal perspective) be grafted onto the incidents that conflict with this narrative. I was baffled when a call for a protest march for Trayvon Martin made on the Occupy Baltimore website said, “The case of Trayvon Martin – is symbolic of the war on youth in general and the devaluing of young people everywhere.” I doubt George Zimmerman was thinking, I gotta shoot that boy because he’s young! No mention of race or anti-Blackness could be found in the statement; race had been translated to youth, a condition that white people can imaginatively access. At the march, speakers declared that the case of “Trayvon Martin is not a race issue — it’s a 99% issue!” As Saidiya Hartman has asserted in a conversation with Frank Wilderson, “the other must be assimilated, meaning in this case, utterly displaced and effaced.”19 In late 2011, riots exploded across London and the UK after Mark Duggan, a Black man, was murdered by the police. Many leftist and liberals were unable to grapple with the unruly expression of rage among largely poor and unemployed people of color, and refused to support the passionate outburst they saw as disorderly and delinquent. Even leftists fell into the trap of framing the State and property owners (including small business owners) as victims while criticizing rioters for being politically incoherent and opportunistic. Slavoj Žižek, for instance, responded by dismissing the riots as a “meaningless outburst” in an article cynically titled “Shoplifters of the World Unite.” Well-meaning leftists who felt obligated to affirm the riots often did so by imposing a narrative of political consciousness and coherence onto the amorphous eruption, sometimes recasting the participants as “the proletariat” (an unemployed person is just a worker without a job, I was once told) or dissatisfied consumers whose acts of theft and looting shed light on capitalist ideology.20 These leftists were quick to purge and re-articulate the anti-social and delinquent elements of the riots rather than integrate them into their analysis, insisting on figuring the rioter-subject as “a sovereign deliberate consciousness,” to borrow a phrase from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.21 Following the 1992 LA riots,22 leftist commentators often opted to define the event as a rebellion rather than a riot as a way to highlight the political nature of people’s actions. This attempt to reframe the public discourse is borne of “good intentions” (the desire to combat the conservative media’s portrayal of the riots as “pure criminality”), but it also reflects the an impulse to contain, consolidate, appropriate, and accommodate events that do not fit political models grounded in white, Euro-American traditions. When the mainstream media portrays social disruptions as apolitical, criminal, and devoid of meaning, leftists often respond by describing them as politically reasoned. Here, the confluence of political and anti-social tendencies in a riot/rebellion are neither recognized nor embraced. Certainly some who participated in the London riots were armed with sharp analyses of structural violence and explicitly political messages — the rioters were obviously not politically or demographically homogenous. However, sympathetic radicals tend to privilege the voices of those who are educated and politically astute, rather than listening to those who know viscerally that they are fucked and act without first seeking moral approval. Some leftists and radicals were reluctant to affirm the purely disruptive perspectives, like those expressed by a woman from Hackney, London who said, “We’re not all gathering together for a cause, we’re running down Foot Locker.”23 Or the excitement of two girls stopped by the BBC while drinking looted wine. When asked what they were doing, they spoke of the giddy “madness” of it all, the “good fun” they were having, and said that they were showing the police and the rich that “we can do what we want.”24 Translating riots into morally palatable terms is another manifestation of the appeal to innocence — rioters, looters, criminals, thieves, and disruptors are not proper victims and hence, not legitimate political actors. Morally ennobled victimization has become the necessary precondition for determining which grievances we are willing to acknowledge and authorize. Dechooling fails—their claims have no empirical backing, are illogical, and totalize schools Ian Lister, 1974, Department of Education, University of York, England, Deschooling: A Reader, ed. Ian Lister, p. 11-12 28. The limitations of deschooling theory In spite of its profound insights deschooling theory has serious weaknesses. The most serious of these are that the arguments lack a firm basis of empirical evidence and practical alternatives; they evade central questions of political power; and they offer critiques, rather than operational strategies or programmes. Much of the evidence is circumstantial, or anecdotal: both Goodman and Holt tend to buttress their assertions with the statements of friends who agree with them. When 'hard' data - such as statistics of economic costs of education - are presented they have often been selected to support the thesis being argued. Too much of the deschooling argument at the moment is based on general theories, standing on other general theories - particularly general theories about institutions and professionals - that is, it is a framework of assertions. The dominant ideology of both Goodman and Reimer is that of the libertarian anarchist: this position, although reflecting from Kropotkin on some of the highest ideals and best visions of man, has yet to reconcile its central paradox - society without the state, and major, common human activities without institutions. Both seem to believe in the myths of the American history books - the self-reliant frontiersman often appears to be their model - and perhaps they, as much as the schoolman- believer Silberman, are products of the Great American Dream Machine. Are they trying to 􀄄alvage an American dream in which a Jeffersonian, independent yeomanry have mod. cons. at their disposal? If so, they should remember that Jefferson in office was different from Jefferson in opposition: few did more to enhance the power of the state. In 'advanced' countries our crisis is one of mass, urban education. We should remember Jefferson's attitude: 'The mobs of great cities add so much to pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body. ' Goodman uses language in his own way, and for his own ends - 'natural' and 'human' are good, 'unnatural' and 'inhuman' are bad. Goodman, Reimer, and Illich all use a reality principle in which the 'real' is not what is, but what ought to be. Their ultimate appeal is to 'real education', but what that might be is stated in extremely vague terms. In Reimer's boo k it is Paulo Freire who carries a heavy burden as a rare example of what deschooling might achieve in practice. In Goodman's works apprenticeships are offered as a better way of learning than school in spite of the fact that he recognises that at present they are exploitative. (Social historians, like Peter Laslett, 6 7 and West German radicals, confirm that they were and are a means of exploitation and cheap labour. Howard S. Becker suggests that they are a very inefficient form of learning. To adapt Goodman's argument about schools, I would suggest that they are often a way of keeping youth at least half off the labour market. ) The point raises the question of just how much the classic deschoolers contrast a reality (or a distorted reality) of schooling with an alternative, deschooling ideal We need also to ask how much the concept of school, on which much of Reimer's and lllich's arguments are based, is essentially true in practice, and how much of it is stereotype and caricature. What is certain is that all the deschooling theorists, in their arguments about 'natural' learning, overuse the model of learning the native language, and base on it sweeping assertions that it cannot support. It is Ivan Illich, the most important of the deschooling theorists, who embodies most of the ambivalences, paradoxes, and contradictions of deschooling theory. His fundamental attack on schools has two dimensions: from his functional analysis he claims that schools fail to carry out their functions efficiently; from his idealistic position he claims that schools fail to fulfil the ideal of true education. On one level this may seem a subtle, two-pronged argument, that will catch the school on one hook, if not on the other. But there is, in the two dimensions, a fundamental ambiguity that runs right through his whole analysis. It concerns the political economy cl education or, put more simply, the relationship of school to our present industrial society. If there are major elements about the organisation of work in that society which are alienating we should rejoice that aspects cl the school are dysfunctional, and that their job-slotting work is inefficient. There are times in history when liberal education is a threat to the established order. The idealistic premisses of the second position, which proceeds from a vision of man and not a need for manpower, are curious bedfellows for the crude, reductionist arguments stemming from the sociological school of structural functionalism. One wonders whether he employs the device mainly for polemical purposes, or whether Illich really believes that major human institutions can be simplistically reduced to their alleged functions. This is not to deny that institutions have functions, but it is to assert that that is only one level of their reality as perceived by people. A functional analysis of any institution can help us to imagine alternative ways of carrying out its activities, as functionally defined. (The family's 'functions' of economic support, feeding, sex, love, and child rearing might be paralleled in the commune. ) Illich naturally chooses 'better' alternatives; but worse alternatives can also be imagined: custodial care, social role selection, and indoctrination - three of Reimer's and lllich's main school 'functions' - could be carried out in a worse form in a society without schools. They might be d0ne by families (often more manipulative and restrictive than schools); by people giving jobs to their relatives (blood being thicker than water, and more influential than certificates) and to their friends (a continuation, and revival of 'the old pals act'); indoctrination would be done, as it is now, by the media, which mediate a pre-packaged reality more effectively than schools have ever done. If schools have taken the place of the church in being the major legitimating institution of our society we could surmise that the passing of schools would be marked by the rise of a new legitimating institution. Illich also uses language in his own way - the word 'schooling' itself is often an assertion masquerading as a descriptive statement. The word 'deschooling' itself, for which Illich has apologised, in its best moments is multi-dimensional, but at its worst moments leads to conceptual confusions. Illich uses associative arguments; he insinuates that because something follows something else, it has been caused by it (e.g. higher educational expenditure causes increased educational failure); and that because two things exist at the same time they are necessarily connected. The argument that schools 'school people' - a central feature of Illich's position - is based on a characteristic lack of empirical evidence. It seems to rest on the simplicities of early American political socialisation theory. Linkages between children's political learning and adult political behaviour werre then assumed: they still need to be demonstrated. 68 Adult political socialisation might be much more important 69 This suggests that we need to look at life-situations in the working world, the real life curriculum, rather than at schools. H schools have a derivative, rather than a primary function in society - that is, if the school is a dependent variable - a lot of Illich's argument falls or loses its force. Illich treats sthools as a metaphysical category in his analysis: but schools are not metaphysical, they exist in a social context. To claim that schools are bad by their very nature, that in their essence they are evil, is to make them part of a demonology, a mirror version of the commodity fetishism that he himself decries.

Deschooling fails, even Illich admits—the school will just be reproduced in other, more insidious forms if we don’t create deeper structural changes Bruno-Jofré & Zaldívar, 2012, ROSA BRUNO-JOFRÉ is Professor of Education at Queen's University, Duncan McArthur Hall, 511 Union St., Kingston, Ontario, Canada, K7M 5R7; e-mail <brunojor@queensu.ca>. Her primary areas of scholarship are the history of education, the history of religious congregations, educational theory, and intellectual theory. JON IGELMO ZALDÍVAR is Assistant Researcher at University of Deusto, 24 Avd. de las Universidades, Bilbao, Bizkaia, Spain CP4 8007; e-mail <jigelmoza@deusto.es>. His primary areas of scholarship are the deschooling theories of the 1960s and 1970s and the current tendencies of educational historiography. Ivan Illich's Late Critique of Deschooling Society: “I Was Largely Barking Up the Wrong Tree”, Educational Theory, Volume 62, Issue 5, October 2012, Pages 573–592 Illich: The Past, the Critique of Education as a Discourse, and Free Learning After a hiatus of many years, Illich went back to his early work on education. During this period of his intellectual life, education was one of the certainties that Illich critiqued as being the result of tools (institutions) shaping our view of reality. In 1986, he wrote, To make my plea for this novel research plausible, I will explain the steps which led me to my present position. This I will do by criticizing my own Deschooling Society for its naïve views. My travelogue begins sixteen years ago, at a point when that book was about to appear. During the nine months the manuscript was at the publishers, I grew more and more dissatisfied with its texts. This misapprenhension I owe to Cass Canfield, Harper's owner, who named my baby, and, in doing so, misrepresented my thoughts.… Since then my curiosity and reflections have focused on the historical circumstances under which the very idea of educational needs can arise. (RLL, 11). In the foreword he wrote in 1995 for Matt Hern's edited collection, Deschooling Our Lives, Illich pointed to three moments in his intellectual journey, starting with the publication of Deschooling Society. The first moment, having his understanding of education as the point of reference, includes the texts that would become Deschooling Society in 1971. In this book, written at the peak of the expansion of modern educational institutions, Illich articulated a radical critique of schools and the idea of progress. He made a plea for the urgent need to liberate education from the monopoly of schooling, but he also proposed avenues and actions to work toward a world without schools. Drawing on his understanding of the process of the historical institutionalization of the Catholic Church, he was able to demonstrate in his critique of schooling how many of its mythologized rituals had originated in a process of secularization. Toward the middle of the twentieth century, as the Church lost believers and the new faith in schooling became evident, the schools monopolized the possibilities of education in the same way that the Church had progressively come to dominate spiritual life in the Western world during the previous twenty centuries. His emphasis on this parallelism was such that he neglected the connections that schools and educational institutions have with their social, cultural, political, and economic contexts. About this first moment, Illich wrote, “I called for the disestablishment of schools for the sake of improving education and here, I noticed, made my mistake. Much more important than the disestablishment of schools, I began to see, was the reversal of those trends that make of education a pressing need rather than a gift of gratuitous leisure.”47 The second moment in Illich's intellectual journey occurred in the five years following the publication of Deschooling Society, when he realized that even liberating education from the state's monopoly would not be enough because the state and the modern industrial society had a variety of “educational” tools designed to put people's views in conformance with dominant ideology. The texts Illich wrote just after Deschooling Society was published were to an extent a response to the criticism of that book. In a paper he presented at the 1971 Christian Education World Assembly in Lima, Peru, entitled “La Desescolarización de la Iglesia” (Deschooling the Church), Illich stressed how the fundamental aspects of modern society have been inculcated through schooling (for example, by means of methods of instruction accumulating canned life) while also denouncing the pseudoreligious character of “education.”48 He prepared the terrain for understanding education as one of the certainties of modernity. In this sense, his critique in Deschooling Society would not mean much without differentiating education from learning — the latter being planned, measurable, and imposed on another person. About this second moment Illich pointed out, Largely through the help of my friend and colleague Wolfgang Sachs, I came to see that the educational function was already emigrating from the schools and that, increasingly, other forms of compulsory learning would be instituted in modern society. It would become compulsory not by law, but by other tricks such as making people to pay huge amounts of money in order to be taught how to have better sex, how to be more sensitive, how to know more about the vitamins they need, how to play games, and so on. This talk of “lifelong learning” and “learning needs” has thoroughly polluted society, and not just schools, with the stench on education.49 In the third moment of his intellectual journey, during the 1980s and 1990s, Illich questioned the discourse behind the notion of educational needs, learning needs, and preparation for life (that is, lifelong learning). This third moment, neglected by historians, is of interest here. In fact, Illich realized then that when he wrote Deschooling Society, the social effects rather than the historical substance of education were at the core of his interest. Illich reflected that, in the past, he had called into question schooling as a desirable means but not as a desirable end. As he wrote in 1995, “I still accepted that, fundamentally, educational needs of some kind were an historical given of human nature. I no longer accept this today.”50 In addition, during this third moment, Illich critiqued educational institutions without a particular aim beyond critique, providing no alternative and even rejecting the alternatives that he had proposed in Deschooling Society. It is a creative critique without an ulterior response and with an ahistorical touch, which makes his later readings difficult to analyze, particularly in relation to schooling. It is difficult to use Illich's critique as a transforming tool. Furthermore, his understanding should be read again in the context of his understanding of learning as a search for freedom in God and his reading of the parable of the Good Samaritan, which we will analyze later. As he shifted focus from schooling to education, from the process to its orientation, Illich reflected in the 1980s, “I came to understand education as ‘acquired knowledge’ under conditions that postulate scarcity of the means to acquire it” (RLL, 12). In fact, his understanding that humans naturally belonged to the species homo educandus weakened when he studied economic conceptions and, in particular, when he read Karl Polanyi. From this perspective, the need for education as planned learning, which Illich seemed to equate with instruction and transmission of knowledge, was the result of ideas and arrangements that make the means for insertion in the school web scarce. The “educational rituals” reinforced faith in the value of knowledge acquired under conditions of scarcity. Illich further questioned the construction of ideals that could be educational aims and the pursuit of the ideal of the educated person. The parable of the Good Samaritan is central to Illich's thinking. In the parable, Illich found an example to illustrate how human relations have changed since God's message was revealed. His central point is that while Jesus tried to respond to the question, “Who is my neighbor?” modern thought interpreted the parable as how one should behave toward one's neighbor (RNF, 50). We can transfer this to education in the sense that it implies a duty and breaks with God's message that gives us the freedom to choose the fellow humans with whom we wish to associate beyond artificial constraints, such as the creation of a particular community — in other words, my neighbor is who I choose, not who I must choose. In Illich's interpretation, there is no way of categorizing who my neighbor ought to be. He believed that such an interpretation is the opposite of what Jesus wanted to point out. He had not been asked how one should behave toward one's neighbor but rather, who is my neighbor? Perhaps the only way we could recapture it today could be to imagine the Samaritan as a Palestinian ministering to a wounded Jew. He is someone who not only goes outside his ethnic preference for taking care of his own kind but who commits a kind of treason by caring for his enemy. In so doing he exercises a freedom of choice whose radical novelty has often been overlooked. (RNF, 50–51). This story represents the possibility of breaking with the ethical boundaries and exercising freedom of choice, having God as referent. Within the context of the history of proportionality, the parable elevates this notion to a level that had not been perceived before. Illich said that “nothing can exist without being dysymmetrically proportional to something else and that this dysymmetric proportionality is the reason for the existence of both” (RNF, 197). He went on to say, “‘I’ precisely because of you, by allowing me to love you, give me the possibility to be co-relative to you, to be dysymmetrically proportionate to you. I see, therefore, in love, hope, and charity the crowning of the proportional nature of creation in the full, old sense of that term” (RNF, 197). This led to Illich's revised thinking about education, since freedom of choice became more and more institutionalized and reached its zenith with compulsory schooling — the obligation to be in touch with others instead of exercising free choice in the selection. As a result, Illich claimed that the schools would exemplify a perversion of the parable and its Christian message: In earlier talks I tried to make it plausible that the Christian message explosively expands the scope of love by inviting us to love whomever we choose. There is a new freedom involved, and a new confidence in one's freedom. I also tried to establish that this new freedom makes a new type of betrayal possible. The way I was led to frame this hypothesis was by observing the modern mania for education and then concluding that the only way it can be explained is as the fruit of a 2,000-year institutionalization of the catechetical, or instructional, function of the Christian community, which has led us to believe that only through explicit teaching and through rituals in which teaching has a major part can we become fit for the community in which we ought to live. (RNF, 145). Charles Taylor also refers to Illich's interpretation of the parable of the Good Samaritan to explain the “great dissembedding” that opened doors to another kind of solidarity beyond sacred social boundaries. Taylor acknowledges that it was, in a sense, a “corruption” of the Gospel as expounded by Illich, since we did not get “a network of agape but rather a disciplined society in which categorical relations have primacy, and therefore norms.”51 Illich's radical negation of any ideal led him to argue that only God can inspire human action and, further, that in a direct relationship with each human being, one can find God in the other. He critiqued education from an apophatic perspective; education as he understood it — as planned learning — is a barrier between the individual who wishes to learn and the other, having in mind that the other is God. Therefore, Illich explicitly distinguished the history of education from the history of homo educandus. The history of education, he argued, assumed that education is inherent to human existence, a historical given; he rejected this idea along with its concomitant understanding that in every human culture there is a stock of knowledge that has to be transmitted from generation to generation.52 On the other hand, the history of homo educandus studied the steps through which education as necessity (need) came into existence historically: “The history of homo educandus deals with the emergence of a social reality within which ‘education’ [planned learning] is perceived as a basic human need.”53 From this perspective, Illich wrote, the “need” for education appears as a result of societal beliefs and arrangements that make the means for so-called socialization scarce. He went on to say, I began to notice that educational rituals reflected, reinforced, and actually created belief in the value of learning pursued under conditions of scarcity. Such beliefs, arrangements, and rituals, I came to see, could easily survive and thrive under the rubrics of deschooling, free schooling, or homeschooling (which, for the most part, are limited to the commendable rejection of authoritarian methods).54 As institutions developed, administered, and categorized the encounter among fellow humans and the learning process, the sense of scarcity became dominant. These institutions would thus be a consequence of the process of corruption of the Gospel and of the notion of hospitality; they remove from the individual the Christian responsibility. As a result, Illich wrote the following about Deschooling Society in his late years: If people are seriously to think about deschooling their life, and not just escape from the corrosive effects of compulsory schooling, they could do no better than to develop the habit of setting a mental question mark beside all discourse on young people's “educational needs” or “learning needs,” or about their need for a “preparation for life.” I would like them to reflect on the historicity of these very ideas. Such reflection would take the new crop of deschoolers a step further from where the younger and somewhat naïve Ivan was situated, back when talk of “deschooling” was born.55