Framework PIC

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Century GeddesFramework PIC

Framework PIC

Text: We will defend all of the 1ac sans the framework.

In other words, we are PIC/king out of the over-limiting and myopic framework attached to the plan.

A) Its legitimate the aff deliberately made the strategic and free choice to attach their plan and

advantages to an exclusive framework, we should get to test whether the strategy is legitimate and best forthe policy. They already developed ___ minutes of framework offense in the 1ac, we get to test this move,

only the counterplan focuses the debate on framework inclusion

1.AFF CHOICE AND PREDICTABILITY- THE 1AC CHOSE TO MAKE A FRAMING ARGUMENT-

THEY SHOULD WIN OFFENSE TO JUSTIFY THESE ARGUMENTS. ANY ALTERNATIVE WOULD

JUSTIFY AFF CONDITIONALITY TO SEVER 1NC LINKS, MAKING DEBATE IMPOSSIBLE AND

CREATES AN OVERWHELMING AFF BIAS

2.CHECKS AFF BIAS- THEY HAVE THE FIRST AND LAST SPEECH. THEY CHOSE TO INITIATE

FRAMEWORK, WE SHOULD GET TO TEST IT HOWEVER WE CHOOSE.

3.NO GROUND LOSS- WE DONT SEVER PORTIONS OF THE 1AC FORCING THEM TO ARGUE

AGAINST THEMSELVES- GENERIC PICS BAD ARGUMENTS DONT APPLY. THEY HAVE TO

JUSTIFY FRAMEWORK BEFORE IT CAN HAVE NORMATIVE VALUE

B) Its competitive they cant just win their framework is a good one for interpreting the merits of the plan,

they have to win its the only good framework to evaluate the plan any other framework is bracketed off by

the 1ac move.

C) Its net-beneficial any critical justification for the plan (feminist, anti-racist, anti-statist, etc) are

bracketed out from the utilitarian consequences only move of the 1ac this move is not value neutral, but is

soaked in conservative ideology that only privileges those already on top of the established order. Only the

counterplan can solve, you ignore root causes for solely proximate causes to global disorder

Meszaros 89(Istvan, likes Marx not Adam Smith. The Power of Ideology, p 232-234)

Nowhere is the myth of ideological neutrality the self-proclaimed Wertfreiheitor value neutrality of so-called rigorous social science

stronger than in the field of methodology. Indeed, we are often presented with the claim that the adoption of the advocated

methodological framework would automatically exempt one from all controversy about values, since they are

adequate method itself, thereby saving one from unnecessary complications and securing the desired objectivity and

uncontestable outcome. Claims and procedures of this kind are, of course, extremely problematical. For they circularly assume

that their enthusiasm for the virtues of methodological neutrality is bound to yield value neutral solutions with

regard to highly contested issues, without first examining the all-important question as to the conditions ofpossibility or otherwise

of the postulated systematic neutrality at the plans of methodology itself. The unchallengeable validity of the recommendedprocedure is supposed to be self-evident on account of its purely methodological character. In reality, of course, this

approach to methodology is heavily loaded with a conservative ideological substance. Since, however, the plane of

methodology (and meta-theory) is said to be in principle separated from that of the substantive issues, the

methodological circle can be conveniently closed. Whereupon the mere insistence on the purely methodological character of thecriteria laid down is supposed to establish the claim according to which the approach in question is neutral because everybody can adopt it as

the common frame of reference of rational discourse. Yet, curiously enough, the proposed methodological tenets are so defined that vast areas

of vital social concern are a priori excluded from their rational discourse metaphysical, ideological, etc. The effect of circumscribing

in this way the scope of the one and only admissible approach is that it automatically disqualifies in the name of

methodology itself, all those who do not fit into the stipulated framework of discourse . As a result, the propounders of theright method are spared the difficulties that go with acknowledging the real divisions and incompatibilities as they necessarily arise from the

contending social interests at the roots of alternative approaches and the rival sets of values associated with them. This is where we can see

more clearly the social orientation implicit in the whole procedure. For far from offering an adequate scope for critical enquiry

the advocated general adoption of the allegedly neutral methodological framework is equivalent, in fact, to

consenting not even to raise the issues that really matter. Instead, the stipulated common methodological procedure succeeds in

You sir and/or maam are a fucking fascist! :)


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transforming the enterprise of rational discourse into the dubious practice of producing methodology for the sake of methodology: a tendency

more pronounced in the twentieth century than ever before. This practice consists in sharpening the recommended methodological knife until

nothing but the bare handle is left, at which point the new knife is adopted for the same purpose. For the ideal methodological knife is not meantfor cutting, only for sharpening, thereby interposing itself between the critical intent and the real objects of criticism which it can obliterate for

as long as the pseudo-critical activity of knife-sharpening for tits own sake continues to be pursued. And that happens to be precisely its

inherent ideological purpose. Naturally, to speak of a common methodological framework in which one can resolve the problems of a society

torn by irreconcilable social interests and pursuing antagonistic confrontations is delusory, at best, notwithstanding all talk about

ideal communication communities. But to define the methodological tenets of all rational discourse by way of transubstantiating into

ideal types (orby putting into methodological brackets) the discussion of contending social values reveals the

ideological colour as well as the extreme fallaciousness of the claimed rationality. Forsuch treatment ofthe majorareas of conflict, under a great variety of forms from the Viennese version of logical positivism to Wittgensteins famous ladder that must be

thrown away at the point of confronting the question of values, and from the advocacy of the Popperian principle of little by little in theemotivist theory of value inevitably always favours the established order. And it does so by declaring the fundamental

structural parameters of the given society of of bounds to the potential contestants , in the authority of the ideally

common methodology. However, even on a cursory inspection of the issues at stake it out to be fairly obvious that to consent not to

question the fundamental structural framework of the established order is radically different according to

whether one does so as the beneficiary of the order or from the standpoint of those who find themselves at the

receiving end, exploited and oppressed by the overall determinations (and not just by some limited and more or less easily

corrigible detail) of that order. Consequently, to establish the common identity of the two, opposed sides of a structurally safeguardedhierarchical order by means of the reduction of the people belong to the contending social forces into fictitious rational interlocutors,

extracted from their divided real world and transplanted into a beneficially shared universe of ideal discourse would be nothing sort of

methodological miracle. Contrary to the wishful thinking hypostatized as a timeless and socially unspecified rational community, the

elementary condition of a truly rational discourse would be to acknowledge the legitimacy of contesting the given

order of society in substantive terms. This would imply the articulation of the relevant problems not on the plane of self-

referential articulation of the relevant problems not on the plane of self-referential theory and methodology, but as inherently practical

issues whose conditions of solution point towards the necessity of radical structural changes . In other words, it wouldrequire the explicit rejection of all fiction of methodological and meta-theoretical neutrality. But, of course, this would

be far too much to expect precisely because the society in which we live is a deeply divided society. This is why through the dichotomies of

fact and value, theory and practice, formal and substantive rationality, etc. The conflict-transcending methodological miracle is constantly

stipulated as the necessary regulative framework of the ruling ideology. What makes this approach particularly difficult to challenge is that itsvalue-commitments are mediatedby methodological precepts to such a degree that it is virtually impossible to bring them into the focus of

discussion without openly contesting the framework as a whole. For the conservative sets of values at the roots of such orientation remain

several steps removed from the ostensible subject of dispute as defined in logico/methodological, formal/structural, and semantic/analytical

terms. And who would suspect of ideological bias the impeccable methodologically sanctioned credentials of

procedural rules, models and paradigms? Once, though, such rules and paradigms are adopted as the common

frame of reference of what may or may not be allowed to considered the legitimate subject of debate, everything

that enters into the accepted parameters is necessarily constrained not only by the scope of the overall framework,

but simultaneously also by the inexplicit ideological assumptions upon the basis of which the methodological

principles themselves were in the first place constitution. This why the allegedly non-ideological ideologies which

so successfully conceal and exercise their apologetic function in the guise of neutral methodology are doubly mystifying.

Twentieth-century currents of thought are dominated by approaches that lend to articulate the social interests and values of the ruling orderthrough complicated at times completely bewildering mediations, on the methodological plane. Thus, more than ever before, the task of

ideological demystification is inseparable from the investigation of the complex dialectical relationship between methods and values which no

social theory or philosophy can escape.

D) We solve best the affs attempt at a community that is monolithic and represents a singular voice, a

singular style, a singular framework collapses on itself and does violence to the sub-altern

Secomb 00 (Linnell, a lecturer in Gender Studies at the University of Sydney Fractured

Community Hypatia Volume 15 Number 2 Spring 2000 pg. 138-139 RC)

This reformulated universalist model of community would be founded on "a moral conversation in which the

capacity to reverse perspectives, that is, the willingness to reason from the others' point of view, and the sensitivity

to hear their voice is paramount" (1992, 8). Benhabib argues that this model does not assume that consensus can be reached but that a"reasonable agreement" can be achieved. This formulation of community on the basis of a conversation in which perspectives can be reversed,also implies a new understanding of identity and alterity. Instead of the generalized other, Benhabib argues that ethics, politics, and community

must engage with the concrete or particular other. A theory that only engages with the generalized other sees the other as a replica of the self. Inorder to overcome this reductive assimilation of alterity, Benhabib formulates a universalist community which recognizes the concrete other and

which allows us to view others as unique individuals (1992, 10). Benhabib's critique of universalist liberal theory and her formulation of an

alternative conversational model of community are useful and illuminating. However, I suggest that her vision still assumes the

desirability ofcommonality and agreement, which, I argue,ultimately destroy difference. Her vision of a community

of conversing alterities assumes sufficient similarity between alterities [End Page 138] so that each can adopt the

point of view of the other and, through this means, reach a "reasonable agreement." She assumes the necessity of a common

goal for the community that would be the outcome of the "reasonable agreement." Benhabib's community , then,

while attempting to enable difference and diversity, continues to assume a commonality of purpose within

community and implies a subjectivity that would ultimately collapse back into sameness . Moreover, Benhabib's

formulation of community, while rejecting the fantasy of consensus, nevertheless privileges communication,

conversation, and agreement. This privileging of communication assumes that all can participate in the rational



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conversation irrespective of difference. Yet this assumes rational interlocutors, and rationality has tended, both in

theory and practice, to exclude many groups and individuals , including: women, who are deemed emotional and

corporeal rather than rational ; non-liberal cultures and individuals who are seen as intolerant and irrational; and

minoritarian groups who do not adopt the authoritative discourses necessary for rational exchanges . In addition, this

ideal of communication fails to acknowledge the indeterminacy and multiplicity of meaning in all speech and

writing. It assumes a singular, coherent, and transparent content. Yet, as Gayatri Spivak writes: "the verbal text is constitutedby concealment as much as revelation. . . . [T]he concealment is itself a revelation and visa versa" (Spivak 1976, xlvi). For Spivak, Jacques

Derrida, and other deconstructionists, all communication involves contradiction, inconsistency, and heterogeneity. Derrida'sconcept ofdiffrance indicates the inevitable deferral and displacement of any final coherent meaning. The apparently rigorous and irreducible

oppositions that structure language, Derrida contends, are a fiction. These mutually exclusive dichotomies turn out to be interrelated and

interdependent: their meanings and associations, multiple and ambiguous (Derrida 1973, 1976). While Benhabib's objective is clearly to allowall groups within a community to participate in this rational conversation, her formulation fails to recognize either that language is as much

structured by miscommunication as by communication, or that many groups are silenced or speak in different discourses that are unintelligible

to the majority. Minority groups and discourses are frequently ignored or excluded from political discussion and

decision-making because they do not adopt the dominant modes of authoritative and rational conversation that

assume homogeneity and transparency.



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2NC/1NR Overview

We solve 100% of the AFF. We do their plan which means that if we win any risk that they create bad forms

of community is probably a reason why we win this debate. This also means any of their arguments about

why policy making is good etc are irrelivent because the counterplan engaging in the same type of policymaking their AFF does however they should be responsible for their framing of the debate community. They

have to win that their framework is the only good framework for debate which is probably just not true. We

have two net benefits to the counterplan that dissprove this.

The first is the conservatism DA (Mazeros evi)

a. The neutral community that they propose gets filled in by conservative ideology because it becomes a

guise for privlaged communication which brackets out other relivent discussions.

b. This makes things like oppression, racism, patriarchy, and all the isms inevidable when the

disucssuions are controled by elites that are the root of these problems.

c. This is also a reason why there are other frameworks for discussion especially in context to policy

making which is a reason you should reject their monoliphic view of the debate community.

The second is the community DA (Secomb evi)

a. Their framework arguments attemp to find a community founded upon sameness which destorys

difference and fracture which are nessciary for the development of community. Sameness assumes all

can participate in political discussions rationally which has emperically been used to deny minority

groups to participate in policy making

b. This is probably especially true in context to the debate community that is made up of a large ammount

of unique individuals. Their interperation assures that only the most privalged of these views are seen

as rational.



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***EXTENSIONS***



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MUST READ 1AC FRAMEWORK

INTERPRETATION: THE AFF MUST ESTABLISH AN EXPLICIT FRAMEWORK FOR EVALUATING

THE ROUND IN THE 1AC.

1. GROUND- THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL BASIS FOR THE 1AC PRESCRIPTIONS AND NORMATIVE

CLAIMS ARE KEY TO STABLE LINK GROUND BECAUSE OTHERWISE WE DONT KNOW

WHAT PLAN MEANS OR HOW THEIR SPEECHES WILL RELATE TO IT.

2. EDUCATION- EVERY CLAIM HAS AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL BASIS WHICH MUST BE

DEFENDED FOR THOSE CLAIMS TO BE COGENT. THE KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION OF THE1AC IS KEY FOR EDUCATIVE CLARITY AND PRECISION ABOUT HOW THE AFF WILL BE

DEFENDED. THIS IS KEY TO STRATEGIC AND CRITICAL THINKING.

3. FAIRNESS- THE AFF GETS TO CHOOSE THEIR 1AC AND ALL FACETS. ALLOWING THE

ADDITIONAL ADVANTAGE OF SHIFTING EVALUATION CRITERIA UNTIL AFTER THE 1AC

PRECLUDES STRATEGIC NEGATIVES AND MAKES IT IMPOSSIBLE TO ESTABLISH A

COMPETITIVE EPISTEMOLOGICAL BASIS, MAKING THE AFF FUNCTIONALLYCONDITIONAL.

4. UNDERSTANDING THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL BASIS OF FACTUAL CLAIMS IS ESSENTIAL FORPROBLEM SOLVING AND POLITICAL PLANNING

Grdenfors 88(Peter, Department of Philosophy at Lund University in Sweden. Revisions of Knowledge Systems Using Epistemic Entrenchment. Google.)

In Section 3 we adopt a more constructive approach. It will be assumed that apart from the logical relations, a knowledge set has some additional

structure which makes it possible to determine the epistemic entrenchment of the facts in the system . The epistemic

entrenchment of a fact represents how important it is for problem solving or planning on the basis of theknowledge system and in this way determines the database priority of the fact. We introduce a set of logical constraints for an ordering ofepistemic entrenchment.

The key result of the paper is a representation theorem which says, roughly, that a revision method for a knowledge set satisfies the set ofrationality postulates presented in Section 2, if and only if, there exists an ordering of epistemic entrenchment satisfyingthe logical constraints such that this ordering determines the retraction priority of the facts . We also prove that, due to thelogical constraints on the ordering of epistemic entrenchment, the amount of information needed to uniquely determine the required ordering (and thereby also to determine

the revision method) is linear in the number of atomic facts of the knowledge set. We conclude by some comments implementations of revision (and contraction) methods



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MUST READ 1AC FRAMEWORK XTN- EPISTEMOLOGY KEY

EPISTEMIC CLARITY AND KNOWLEDGE IS ESSENTIAL TO DECISION-MAKING AND POLICY

EDUCATION.

Colebatch 06 (H.K., Professor, Department of Public Policy and Administration at University of Brunei Darussalam. The Work of Policy: An InternationalSurvey. P. 206)

On the basis of Flyvbjergs Aristotelian schema we can identify particularaffinities between types of policy actors and types ofknowledge. For instances, we can suggest that policy analysts within government agencies will be mostly comfortable with

epistemic knowledge. Practitioners and professionals, provider interest groups and those primarily involved in policy implementation and service provision aremost likely to be producers of practical-technical knowledge. 20. The groups and organization most likely to prefer phronetic knowledge are citizen and community

advocacy groups, and the promotional interest groups such as environmental organization or groups that define themselves primarily in terms of a particular value stance

Given the natural proclivities outlined above, one way to deal with integrating different types of knowledge is to assign clean

boundries between the production of different types of knowledge. These distinct inputs to the policy processcould then be synthesized and integrated at a higher level. This would be broadly consistent with allowing different types of

policy actors to focus their energies on the type of knowledge that fulfills a particular function in the policy

process. This is a common idea in the policy studies literature. In the classic stagist approach to policy processes, phronetic knowledge is important for the problem

definition and agenda-setting, epistemic knowledge is regarded as the cornerstone of the formulation of alternates anddecision-making, and practical-technical knowledge becomes relevant at the stage of implementation.



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MUST READ 1AC FRAMEWORK- POWER DISAD 1/2

EPISTEMOLOGICAL QUESTIONS COME BEFORE ANY QUESTIONS ONLY WAY TO COUNTER

ELITE POWER

Zimmerman 94 (Professor of Philosophy at Tulane University. Contesting Earths Future. P. 96-7)

Critique of representational epistemology: Truth does not consist of propositions that correctly "mirror" or "represent" anindependent, preexisting reality. Instead, what passes for "objective" truth is a construction generated by power-

interested elites. Although emphasizing that marginal social groups are oppressed by virtue of these supposedly universal and objective truths,postmodern

theorists influenced by Nietzsche {such as Foucault) insist that no one is in nocent; everyone (including the deep ecologist) is concerned withdefining truth as a way of acquiring and retaining power. To counter the power elite's hegemonic grip on truth,

postmodern theorists maintain that "truth" should result from negotiations in which as many voices as possible are

heard



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MUST READ 1AC FRAMEWORK- POWER DISAD 2/2

THE FAILURE TO DEAL WITH THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND ONTOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS OF

THE BIOPOLITICAL ORDER ENSURE PERPETUAL POLICY FAILURES AND AN INABILITY TO FORM

AN ADEQUATE POLITICS

Dillon and Reid 00 (Michael and Julian. Global Governance, Liberal Peace, and Complex Emergency. Alternatives: Social Transformation and Humangovernancei. Jan-Mar 25:1)

As a precursor to global governance, governmentality, according to Foucault's initial account, poses the question of ordernot in terms of the originof the law and the location of sovereignty, as do traditional accounts of power, but in terms instead of the management of population. Themanagement of population is further refined in terms of specific problematics to which population management

may be reduced. These typically include but are not necessarily exhausted by the following topoi of governmental power: economy, health, welfare, poverty,security, sexuality, demographics, resources, skills, culture, and so on. Now, where there is an operation of power there is knowledge, and where there is knowledge there

is an operation of power. Here discursive formations emerge and, as Foucault noted,

In every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed by a certain number of procedures whose role is to ward off itspowers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade its ponderous, formidable materiality.[34]

More specifically, where there is a policy problematic there is expertise, and where there is expertise there , too, a policy

problematic will emerge. Such problematics are detailed and elaborated in terms ofdiscrete forms of knowledge as well as

interlocking policy domains. Policy domains reify the problematization of life in certain ways by turning these

epistemically and politically contestable orderings of life into "problems" that require the continuous attention ofpolicy science and the continuous resolutions of policymakers. Policy "actors" develop and compete on the basis

of the expertise that grows up around such problems or clusters of problems and their client populations. Here, too, wemay also discover what might be called "epistemic entrepreneurs." Albeit the market for discourse is prescribed and policed in ways that Foucault indicated, bidding to

formulate novel problematizations they seek to "sell" these, or otherwise have them officially adopted. In principle, there is no limit to the ways in which the management

of population may be problematized. All aspects of human conduct, any encounter with life, is problematizable. Any problematization is capable of becoming a policy

problem. Governmentality thereby creates a market for policy, for science and for policy science, in whichproblematizations go looking for policy sponsors while policy sponsors fiercely compete on behalf of their

favored problematizations. Reproblematization of problems is constrained by the institutional and ideological investments surrounding accepted "problems,"and by the sheer difficulty of challenging the inescapable ontological and epistemological assumptions that go into their very formation. There is nothing so fiercely

contested as an epistemological or ontological assumption. And there is nothing so fiercely ridiculed as the suggestion that the real problem with problematizations exists

precisely at the level of such assumptions. Such "paralysis of analysis" is precisely what policymakers seek to avoid since they are compelled constantly to respond to

circumstances over which they ordinarily have in fact both more and less control than they proclaim. What they do not have is precisely the control that they want. Yet

serial policy failure--the fate and the fuel of all policy--compels them into a continuous search for the newanalysis that will extract them from the aporias in which they constantly find themselves enmeshed.[35] Serialpolicy failure is no simple shortcoming that science and policy--and policy science--will ultimately overcome.

Serial policy failure is rooted in the ontological and epistemological assumptions that fashion the ways in which

global governance encounters and problematizes life as a process of emergence through fitness landscapes thatconstantly adaptive and changing ensembles have continuously to negotiate . As a particular kind of intervention into life, globalgovernance promotes the very changes and unintended outcomes that it then serially reproblematizes in terms of policy failure. Thus, global liberal governance is not a

linear problem-solving process committed to the resolution of objective policy problems simply by bringing better information and knowledge to bear upon them. A

nonlinear economy of power/knowledge, it deliberately installs socially specific and radically inequitable distributions of wealth, opportunity, and mortal danger both

locally and globally through the very detailed ways in which life is variously (policy) problematized by it. In consequence, thinking and acting politically

is displaced by the institutional and epistemic rivalries that infuse its power/ knowledge networks, and by the local

conditions of application that govern the introduction of their policies. These now threaten to exhaust what

"politics," locally as well as globally,

is about.[36] It is here that the "emergence" characteristic of governance begins to make its appearance. For it is increasingly

recognized that there are no definitive policy solutions to objective, neat, discrete policy problems. The "subjects" of policy increasingly also

become a matter of definition as well, since the concept population does not have a stable referent either and has

itself also evolved in biophilosophical and biomolecular as well as Foucauldian "biopower" ways.



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MUST READ 1AC FRAMEWORK- A/T IMPLICIT EPISTEMIC BASIS

THEY CONFLATE THE EPISTEMIC VALUES THAT INFORM POLICY WITH THE PRESCRIPTIVE

POLITICAL/FACTUAL CLAIMS OF THE 1AC. THIS IS NOT USEFUL FOR EDUCATION ABOUT

POLICY-MAKING BECAUSE THE VALUES AND EPISTEMIC CLAIMS THAT INFORM THE POLITICSOF THE 1AC ARE FORMED BY A DISTINCT PROCESS. ONLY OUR INTERP SOLVES.

Colebatch 06 (H.K., Professor, Department of Public Policy and Administration at University of Brunei Darussalam. The Work of Policy: An InternationalSurvey. P. 206)

Arguments for separating the realms of policy analysis and values have, of course, been a staple element of the rationalist policy analysis tradition. While many policy

rationalists clearly recognize the importance of phronetic, value-based input into policy, they also typically argue that epistemic and phronetic knowledge (facts and values)

be strictly quarantined from each other. While values are an important input to the policy process, they must be decided prior to

policy analysis and this must happen through quite distinct processes such as elections. A related principle for the institutional design ofthe public sector is the functional separation between policy-making and operations, a separation that splits the epistemic fromthe practical-technical within the public sector.22. The rationale for functional separation can be found in new institutional economics and public

choice frameworks. Both emphasize the risk of provider capture (the risk that policy and organization power would be

captured by implementers) and the importance of sticking to core business, whether this be the provision of

policy advice or the provision of services to the public.

FRAMEWORK SHELL 1/8

THEIR FRAMEWORK ARGUMENTS BROACH A DISCUSSION OF THE COMMUNITY. THEIRRHETORIC OF PRESERVATION THROUGH STANDARDS AND EXCLUSION NECESSITATES THE

SUICIDE OF THE COMMUNITY. COMMUNITY IS NOT A PRODUCIBLE OBJECT (BY THE BALLOT OR

THEIR INTERPRETATION) BUT IS IMPOSSIBLE, ALLOWING US TO SHARE THIS EXPERIENCE OFIMPOSSIBILITY. THEIR UNWILLINGNESS TO ENGAGE THIS PERSPECTIVE PROVES THE

PERTINANCE OF OUR ARGUMENT.

Noys 00 (Benjamin. Georges Bataille. P. 53-56)

He does not offer us a distanced safe Nietzsche, but offers us a community with Nietzsche which places us in the greatest danger. Batailles generosity is to make

Nietzsche a gift to us outside of the appropriations that marked, and still mark, our understanding of Nietzsche. After Bataille Nietzsches Grand politics are no longer aNazi or fascist politics but instead new chances for political thought. Batailles luck is to have found some of his best readers after his death, readers who can open some of

these chances for a thought of Grand politics. He still catches readers today in sweet, shared slime as he failed to catch them during his lifetime. Jean-Luc Nancy isone of these readers, and he has brought out the depth of Batailles thought of community and the way that his thought responds to theexigency of community. In The Inoperative Community (La communaut dsceuvre),24 Nancy has proposed community as a demand that demands to be thought through

Bataille. Nancy has also elicited a response from Batailles old friend, Maurice Blanchot, and the exchange between them helps to raise the question of community in its

most demanding form. Community is not treated by them only asa matter of intellectual debate but asa practical question, a

question of how we live and how we die. Bataille is an essential figure in the thinking of community, which is

never restricted to a theory opposed to praxis, because as Nancy remarks , No doubt Bataille has gone furthest into thecrucial experience of the modem destiny of community. Community has been regularly invoked in contemporary

politics, and a rhetoric of community has developed: of the decline of community, of the need to renew community, of

community standards, and of the rights of communities for self-expression. This rhetoric of community has given

rise to strategies for revitalising communitiesand to the political theory of communitarianism.26

The tendency in this politics ofcommunity is to suppose that we already know what community is and that all that needs to be applied are certain

measures to save or restore it. Batailles thought of community is a practical interrogation of what is at stake in

community, a rethinking of community itself. Therefore, it isperhaps not surprising that neither his work nor that ofNancy is referenced by these contemporary debates, because they would call into question any politics of

community which supposes a knowledge of community. It also suggests that the war and the subsequent Cold War did not settle the politicaldebates initiated during the 1930s. Rather than the war violently resolving the political debates between proponents of fascism, democracy and communism, it violently pu

an end to those debates. The 1930s are not in fact over, in the sense that what was at stake, not least in relation to the question of community, is still to be thought. Thecontinuing turning towards political thinkers of the 1930s, or thinkers who called the political into question, like Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger and Georges Bataille, are

all indications that we are still living in the long 1930s. Nancy reopens these debates, where community is both a signifier and practice that was powerfully contested, by

refusing to read Bataille as something belonging to the past.

Instead Nancy finds in Bataille an opening of the thought of community. Not only is it the opening of community but it is also a thinking of community as open, in contrast

to contemporary readings of community as relatively closed and static forms. In this way Nancy is maintaining Batailles resistance to the



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unitary conception of community which underpins fascism and, disturbingly enough, which continues to dominatethe thought of community (even in some of the most democratic or progressive thinking of community).

Nancy uses Bataille against models of community for which community is closed, where community is thought of

as fusion or communion. This is what he calls a immanentism because it thinks of community as immanent, present to itself, and so as closed to the outside.27

To think community as immanent has two effects: firstly, it blocks a thinking of the opening that makes communities possible; andsecondly, it tries to bring about a purely immanent community and this is an impossibility which leads to the

destruction of community: Immanence, communal fusion, contains no other logic than that of the suicide of the

community that is governed by it.28 The Nazi community lived out this logic in the suicide of the Fhrer and thedestruction of Germany, but it is implicit in any immanent model of community. In Bataille can be found a

thought of community as open:Bataille is without doubt the one who experienced first, or most acutely, the modern experience of community as neither a

work to be produced, nor a lost communion, but rather as space itself, and the spacing of the experience of the outside, of the outside-of-self. 2 Bataille does notreduce community to a work to be produced, and he resisted the idea of the labour of the negative which is at work in

Hegel, Marx and Kojve. Community is not reduced either to a nostalgia for communion, although we have seen how that desire persists inBataille. In some sense the impossibility of communion animates Batailles critical thinking of community, while still remaining in it as a dream. Batailles resistance to

communion is not only a resistance against fascism but also against contemporary revivals of community, because these revivals suppose that community can be produced

rather than being an impossible possibility of an undefined throng of possible existences

[CONTINUED]



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FRAMEWORK SHELL 2/8

[NOYS 00 CONTINUED]

(IE, 61). The lack of a thought of community as open is evident in how these revivals of community are all too

often accompanied by a resistance to immigrants which, it is claimed, would destroy or contaminatecommunity. Bataille absolutely resists this thought through his rethinking of community . But he also too faces difficulty inconceiving of an open community, and Nancy is a careful enough reader to note the problems of some of Batailles formulations of community as communication.

Although communication is an act of opening, Batailles description of a place of communication, of fusion of the subject and the object (lb. 9) can reduce the

communication of community. As Nancy notes, The place of communication can in the last analysis still be determined as presence-to-self: for example, as the

presence-to-self of communication itself, something that would find an echo in certain ideologies of communication. 30 Bataille is in danger of taking communication as amoment of fusion where community is produced as present, whereas his own reading of communication is of communication as the interruption and opening of

community. This is the impossibility of community as what makes community possible and as that which makes it

impossible to achieve communion.

THE AFFIRMATIVES QUEST FOR COMMUNITY IGNORES THAT A COMMUNITY OF CONTINUAL

SACRIFICE FOR ABSTRATION PUSHES ITSELF TOWARDS SUICIDE. ONLY A RADICALCOMMUNITY OF BEING-WITH IS POSSIBLE.

Isseks 03 (Fred, doctorate student in philosophy. Media Courage: Impossible Pedagogy in an Artifical Community. A dissertation submitted to the division ofmedia and communications. June 2003)

Wernick traces Batailles history through the Surrealists and his quest for an experience of community, one which he realized was

impossible. However, he believed that it was possible to simulate the experience of community through the frenzy thatwould accompany the sacrifice of one of its members. What he and the members of the Acephale society imagined was a link to the notion of

sacrifice that Bataille later developed in his theory of a general economy in The Accursed Share. Sacrifice removes the victim from the real order

of things, and bestows upon him an intimacy and anguish, as he is about to lose his thing-ness, and beconsumed profitlessly. It is the sacrifice that removes him - if only for an evening as the feast before the ritual sacrifice takes place from

the degraded world of positivist, utilitarian relationships, and enters him into an exalted state. It is always the purpose of sacrifice to givedestruction its due, to save the rest from a mortal danger of contagion. All those who have to do with sacrifice are in danger, but its limited ritual form regularly has the

effect of protecting those who offer it. The point of sacrifice was to remove something from the chain of thing-ness andprofitability, and to share in a communal bond. Sacrifice is heat, in which the intimacy of those who make up the

system of common works is rediscovered. Violence is its principle, but the works limit it in time and space; it is

subordinated to the concern for uniting and preserving the commonality. The individuals break loose, but abreaking-loose that melts them and blends them indiscriminately with their fellow beings helps to connect them

together in the operations of secular time (Bataille 59) In this way, sacrifice serves the effect of bringing the sacrificers

together in a spirit of commonality, or community, in that it reveals to them their intimate connections with each

other.Bataille and the Acephale group plotted such a sacrifice never realized as an example of this quest for community, or at least the experience of such a community. In

its ecstatic signs and forms, and above all by living in the imminence of a voluntary human sacrifice, the group would try to realize in itself 140 - non-fusionally, and non-

hierarchically - a fully headless, i.e. Acephalic, condition (Wernick). It was in this way that Bataille hoped to bridge that impossible gap between the lone individual on

the one hand, and any sense of community with primal bonds of association, on the other. Bataille, along with Nancy and others, realized communitysimpossibility. Batailles contribution to this understanding was to seek the community without a head . As Nancy pointedout, there is no community of essence, for such an essence would imply a sacrifice of something. Concrete

singularity is usually sacrificed in the name of an abstraction that supposedly pulls community together; or the

Other is sacrificed in the name of the One, excluded because it does not fit in. In the case of the Acephalesacrifice, the head is offered up, so that headless, the group is unified without a principle, without a logos, or the

imposition of any abstraction or essence on their primal sense of community . In this way, the individual partakes in community,without having his or her freedom negated.



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FRAMEWORK SHELL 3/8

THE LOGIC OF THIS COMMUNITY IS ONE MAKES OR DOES WORK. THE AFFIRMATIVES

UNDERSTANDING OF COMMUNITY PUTS DEATH TO WORK, IN THE NAME OF AN IMMANENT, OR

SELF-EVIDENT COMMUNITY. THIS PUTTING DEATH TO TASK FORECLOSES ANY SPACE FORETHICS AND PUTS THE COMMUNITY TO SUICIDE.

Luszczynska 05 (Ana. The Opposite of the Concentration Camp: Nancys Vision of Community. CR: The New Centennial Review. P. 167-205.)

For Nancy, the logic of a will to immanence is the logic of imbuing death with meaning or making a work out of it. In

contrast, for the finite or mortal being (the being that is not an individual), death is that from which meaningcannot be derived. If immanence is the goal, then death functions as a work by moving being closer to an

achievement of purity, unity, and ultimately immanence. In contrast, Nancy often stresses that true community is that

which cannot make sense of death, as death is irrecoverable and unsublateable. But it certainly bears mentioning that Nancy alsoindicates that what is at stake here is death losing the senseless meaning that it ought to have and obstinately does have (Nancy 1991, 14). Thus a senseless meaning is

formulated as proper for death whereas a meaning with the goal of immanence is not.Nancy uses the example of Nazism to illustrate an empiricalsituation in which being is conceived from the point of departure of the individual and immanence is the ultimate goal. In this context of a will to immanence, death is

instituted as a work; community herein is only slight and inaccessible (Nancy 1991, 35). In contrast, for the finite or mortal being, there

is the unworkability of death and community. For the former, death has lost its senseless meaning, and for the latter, death is senselessly meaningful. If

we do not think the question of community (which is the question of the being for whom death is irrecoverable or senselessly meaningful), deathloses the senseless meaning that it ought to have (14). In other words, if we fail to think of death as that of which we canmake no sense, we will lose our death, that death which is most properly our own or the death that Nancy calls the singular

death. Thus it is evident that although Nancy repeatedly indicates deaths irrecoverable and unsublateable character he does not say

that it is meaningless; in fact he asserts that it has senseless meaning which is a meaning beyond meaning (1991, 14). Thissenseless meaning is crucial as it is that around which community emerges or upon which it is dependent. In other words, the senseless meaning of death has meaning

insofar as it is an understanding of its own senselessness, its irrecoverability and resistance to institution that form the backdrop for the existence of being and community.

Being and community occur simultaneously, as there is no mediation between the two ; thus, being is community. Being isoutside of being or being cannot recuperate, sublate, or make sense of its own possibility, that is, its singular death. Nancy first indicates the real ramifications of these

issues in this context of a will to immanence and its relation to death. While in other essays he will cite other examples, the primary example used in this essay is that of

Nazi Germany.5 Any political, economic, or social program that assumes as its goal the will to a community of essence

or immanence has as its work the work of death. Thus in Nazi Germany the desire for a pure Aryan being was

nothing other than a desire for death. What this meant for the victims or those who were deemed neither Aryannor pure is obvious.However, Nancy points out that the work of death extended to the victimizer, those for whom the community was to be

achieved as this immanence. That is why political or collective enterprises dominated by a will to absolute

immanence have as their truth the truth of death. Immanence, communal fusion, contains no other logic than thatof the suicide of the community that is governed by it (Nancy 1991, 12). Thus, we find that it was not only the other

who was exterminated but additionally those within the Aryan community who were not deemed sufficiently pureFurthermore, Nancy asserts that on a certain metaphorical level, Germany as a whole was self-exterminated. Interestingly, he maintains that it would bereasonable to make such an assessment given certain aspects of the spiritual reality of this nation (12). Herein we find the death of both victim and the community thatintends or wills immanence.Any institution or regime, like Nazism, governed by a desire to achieve purity and banish the impure other is

working according to a desire for immanence that is primarily ruled by a logic of death . In the end, despite the fact that death

must be conceived in both literal and metaphorical terms, this empirical example powerfully demonstrates that a work towardimmanence is the same as a work of death.6



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FRAMEWORK SHELL 4/8

THE CRITICISM PRECEDES THE CONCERN WITH EMPIRICAL POLITICS, BUT IT DOES NOT

FORECLOSE THE POSSIBILITY OF POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT. AUTO-CRITIQUE WITHIN POLITICS

FAILS.

James 06 (Ian, The Fragmentary Demand, p. 158-9)

The published Opening Address to the Center, delivered jointly by Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, is laced with qualifications and precisions as to the task or mode ofquestioning which they propose. For instance they make it clear that they have no pretension to political theory: that is to say, to anything that could evoke a political

science or a politology (RJ, RT, io8). They have no specialist knowledge or training in this area and claim no authority to make pronouncements within the discursive

parameters such disciplines set themselves. They also underline the fact that they are working very specifically as philosophers engaged in a properly philosophical

questioning which would have a properly philosophical value (RJ, RT, io8). As philosophers, then, neither Nancy nor Lacoue-Labarthe believe thattheir thinking of the political can occur as a direct empirical approach; nordo they believe that it is any longer

possible for philosophy to directly approach the political in an empirical way. This is not in the least to say that

something like a political science, theory, or politology that is empirically grounded is dismissed, ruled out, or held to beimpossible. On the contrary, the claim Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe [appears] to be making (and this is a claim that many of their

commentators seem to have ignored), is that any project ofa theory or science ofthe political can only operate on the basis of

fundamental concepts or forms of pre-understanding, and that these are properly philosophical in nature and needto be addressed as such, prior to their manifestation in the empirical field . 16 It is not enough,they claim, for political

science to be vigilant and ever more critical about some of its founding assumptions, nor to assume that it can perform anauto-critique from within the parameters of its own discourse, and through such critique transcend some of the

limitations or prejudices that it may have come to recognize in itself. This, indeed, would be all too hasty and, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe

contend, ineffectual, given the grip exerted over the human sciences by a certain kind ofanthropologism which is fundamentallyincapable of calling into question its prior understanding of the human and of human subjectivity (i.e., precisely that which in this context needs to be placed in question).

The demand, here, is fora retrieval of a philosophical questioning of the political, which will not be too hastilysubsumed into or engaged with the empirical field, since if a new concept of the political or something which one

could present as such could become clear, then any such concept would, in our opinion, necessarily derive from the

philosophical field (RJ, 109; RT, 109). Once again the key issue in all this is the question of how something new can emerge with within forms of human

understanding, a something new which would necessarily, but in no way directly, have an impact upon future possibilities of humanproduction.



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FRAMEWORK SHELL 5/8

THEIR RHETORICAL PRAGMATIC QUESTIONS ARE NOT ARGUMENTS AGAINST OUR CONCEPT OF

COMMUNITY BUT TESTAMENT TO THEIR HEIRARCHICAL UNDERSTANDING OF THE GRAMMAR

OF THE COMMUNITY. WE NEED NOT ADDRESS SUCH CONCERNS PRESCRIBING A NEWMETAPHYSICS, POLITICS, OR SET OF STANDARDS; OUR FLEAR FROM THEIR WILL TO ORDER IS

PROFICIENT

Strysick 97 (Michael, The End of Community and the Politic of Grammar, Cultural Critique, p. 195-215)

Community gains nothing from attempting to build and rebuild immanent, avowable empires. Violence is at theroot of the immanent mentality; its manifest destiny razes what it will, creating endless trails of tears. Incredulity

confronts the immanent with itself, mirroring it in order to undo power, not usurp it. But this entails a change in

foundation, in what Nietzsche refers to as grammar. Unless foundations change, what arises from them will notchange demonstrably. Rather, we must engage a task to expose totalizing gestures within community . This is the

approach that community's altered politics (la politique), by virtue of a new orientation of the political (le politique), must engage. Andthis approach marks not

merely incredulity to metanarratives, but more importantly, incredulity toward the lingering shadow of the

grammar of metanarratives. How will this grammar be broken?The importance of undoing this mentality arises not out of anysearch for truth, any metaphysical quest, or any religious pilgrimage; rather, it arises from the need for justice as manifest equality. Unavowability itselfdefines a horizontal community. In the process, difference-on which avowability and inequality has for so long been based-is not erased but rather becomes the greatest

challenge. Thus,it requires a radical shift, an overturning of a prevailing mentality that prefers the one to the many, oreven the many as mediated through the one . The challenge is to work to understand the many in terms of the many, mediated only by itself. But

how could such radical changes take place? Who would take charge of this? Again, even asking the question in

this manner belies the point to which empire is embedded in our very thinking , specifically if we seek to answer it through the

concept of leaders and followers. Community need not shrink the world to a handful but enlarge it to the many.Rather than scheming about andtheorizing on how to achieve such a horizontal structure, it is best to simply undo those vertical elements when

they appear. Rather than describing an end point to be reached, with a specific program to that end, we can

describe a point from which we wish to flee. Community has endured codes, laws, and plans promising paradise,redemption, and salvation; now, we must conceive of practical ways to move further away from self-created states

of emergency. Such a notion of community will not be achieved by some revisionist undoing of past documents

but by a real undoing of past practices- incredulityin its strongest form. After all, we cannot change the past, but we need not be anchored in itsmistakes nor chained to its insensitivities. We need go no further in thinking about undoing the grammar of community than Lyotard's first word in defining

postmodernism: incredulity.

Lyotard's term describes not merely a lack of belief, but even more, a lack of faith: an inability to invest trust in those past creeds and faiths that have preferred the

homogeneous and total at the expense of difference and our shared elective affinities. Now, we must be motivated to create new myths in order to reinvest the notion of

credibility. The relationship to the past is characterized purely by the necessity of rethinking and restating what has been said. But the post, while commenting on the past

by naming a "post-also relates to the future, saying not only that we have lost faith in the past but also its modus operandi. At once, all three tenses are brought into play:at present, in large part because of the past, we do not know what to do in the future, into which we are forever propelled. Of course, progress is called into question in the

process-Walter Benjamin states this so eloquently in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History." Despite the passage of time we are no better equipped to avoid the so-

called state of emergency in which we persist nor to repair it nor to quell the storm blowing us further away from paradise. The continued proliferation of voices and

visions in society, and concomitant ways of hearing and seeing those imaginings, have engaged the slow death of community by challenging its grammar. New ends-

stressing the plural over and against the singular, the total-are emerging, though perhaps very slowly. The degree to which they succeed will depend on the ability to undo

totality and its grammar such that our differences alone are held in common, affinities are as important as facts, and our discourse marks this alterity. An altered

grammar, thus,directs itself toward nothing less than an expression of the inability to speak for all, an

acknowledgment of the unspeakable manner in which we have tried to form and enforce such totalizing narratives,

and an awareness of the ultimate demand that we speak and think otherwise. Change can occur but only to thedegree that community begins to mark its end as not simply recognizing and allowing "other" voices to speak, and

at the point when the grammar of the same and the bias of homogeneity is broken. This will only occur at themoment when we begin to realize that all are "other" and none are the same.



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FRAMEWORK SHELL 6/8

OUR INTERPRETATION OF FRAMEWORK IS BASED ON THE IDEA OF BECOMING COMMUNITY.

THIS IS NOT A PROJECT ONCE AND DONE BUT A PROCESS OF RESISTANCE TO THOSE ELEMENTS

THAT WOULD DEFINE EXISTENCE, MAKE US SLAVE TO ORDER, AND ULTIMATELY HAVE USDESIRE OUR OWN SUFFERING. WE REJECT THIS KIND OF THINKING AND CHOOSE TO ENDORSE

AN IMPOSSIBLE CONCEPT OF COMMUNITY TO COME. WE UNDERSTAND THIS IMPOSSIBILITY

BY READING BATAILLES SACRED CONSPIRACYWHERE HE IMAGINES A BEING WITHOUT AHEAD. DEBATE MUST COME TO TERMS WITH ITS OWN HEADLESSNESS BEFORE ANY CONCEPT

OF COMMUNITY CAN REVEAL ITSELF. WE SHOULD NOT BEGIN BY UNDERSTANDING OUR

COMMUNITY AS A CALL TO SAMENESS, BUT RATHER AS A PETITION FOR THE RADICALDIFFERENCE OUR ALTERNATIVE STYLE OF DEBATE CAN OFFER. JUST SO WERE CLEAR, THESE

HERE ARE FIGHTIN WORDS!

Bataille in 1936 (Georges, The Sacred Conspiracy)

What we are undertaking is a war.

It is time to abandon the world of the civilized and its light. It is to late to want to be reasonable and learned,which has led to a life without attractions. Secretly or not, it is necessary to become other, or else cease to be.

The world to which we have belonged proposes nothing to love outside of each individual insufficiency: its

existence is limited to its convenience. A world that cant be loved to death in the same way a man loves a woman representsnothing but personal interest and the obligation to work. If it is compared with worlds that have disappeared it is

hideous and seems the most failed of all of them.

In those disappeared worlds it was possible to lose oneself in ecstasy, which is impossible in the world ofeducated vulgarity. Civilizations advantages are compensated for by the way men profit by it: men of today profit

by it to become the most degraded of all beings who have ever existed.

Life always occurs in a tumult with no apparent cohesion, but it only finds its grandeur and reality in ecstasy and ecstatic love.He who

wants to ignore or neglect ecstasy is a being whose thought has been reduced to analysis. Existence is not only anagitated void: it is a dance that forces us to dance fanatically. The idea that doesnt have as object a dead fragment

exists internally in the same way as does a flame.

One must become firm and unshakeable enough that the existence of the world of civilization finally appearsuncertain. It is useless to respond to those who are able to believe in this world and find their authorization in it. If

they speak it is possible to look at them without hearing them, and even if we look at them, to only see that

which exists far behind them. We must refuse boredom and live only on that which fascinates.On this road it would be vain to move about and to seek to attract those who have vague impulses, like those of passing the time, laughing, or becoming individually

bizarre. One must advance without looking back and without taking into account those who dont have the strength

to forget immediate reality. Human life is defeated because it serves as the head and reason of the universe.

Insofar as it becomes that head and reason it accepts slavery. If it isnt free, existence becomes empty or neuter,and if it is free, it is a game. The earth, as long as it only engendered cataclysms, trees, and birds was a free

universe; the fascination with liberty became dulled when the earth produced a being who demanded

Necessity as a law over the universe. Man nevertheless remained free to no longer respond to any necessity. He

Is free to resemble all that is not he in the universe. He can cast aside the idea that it is he or God who preventseverything else from being absurd. Man escaped from his head like the condemned man from his prison. He

found beyond him not God, who is the prohibition of crime, but a being who doesnt know prohibition. Beyondwhat I am, I meet a being who makes me laugh because he is headless, who fills me with anguish because he is

made of innocence and crime. He holds a weapon of steel in his left hand, flames like a sacred heart in his right

hand. He unites in one eruption birth and death. He is not a man. But he isnt a god, either. He is not I, but he is

more I than I: his belly is the labyrinth in which he himself goes astray, led me astray, and in which I find myselfbeing he, that is, a monster.



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FRAMEWORK SHELL 7/8

THE BUILDING OF COMMUNITY CANNOT COME FROM SINGULARITY OR FROM BEING IN-

COMMON. ANY ATTEMPT AT PLACING RULES AS THE GROUNDWORK FOR COMMUNITY

COMMITS US AND OUR COMMUNITY TO THE TOMB. WE SHOULD INSTEAD BE INVESTED IN THEPROCESS OF OPENING COMMUNITY TO OUR OWN FRAGMENTATION AND FIND OUR BEING IN-

COMMON ON THAT FLUID GROUND.

Nancy in 1986 (Jean-Luc, The Inoperable Community. Pg. Xxxviii-xli)

Finitude, or the infinite lack of infinite identity, if we can risk such a forumulation, is what makes community. That is,community is made or is formed by theretreat or by the subtraction of something: this something, which would be the fulfilled infinite identity of

community, is what I call its work. All our political programs imply this work: either as the product of the

working community, or else the community itself as work. But in fact it is the work that the community does notdo and that it is not that forms community. In the work, the properly common character of community disappears, giving way to a unicity and a substantiality.

(The work itself, in fact, should not be understood primarily as the exteriority of a product, but as the interiority of the subjects operation.)The community that becomes a

single thing (body, mind, fatherland, Leader) necessarily loses the in of being-in-common. Or, it loses the with

or the together that defines it. It yields its being-together to a being of togetherness. The truth of community, onthe contrary, resides in the retreat of such a being. Community is made of what retreats from it: the hypostasis of

the common, and its work. The retreat opens, and continues to keep open, this strange being-the-one-with-the-

other to which we are exposed. (Nothing indicates more clearly what the logic of this being of togetherness can imply than the role of Gemeinschaft, of community, in Naziideology.)

If I had to attempt to state the principle guiding the analyses in these texts, I might do so by saying this: community does not consist in the transcendence (nor in the transcendental) of a being

supposedly immanent to community. It consists on the contrary in the immanence of a transcendence- that of finite existence as such, which is to say, of it s exposition. Exposition,

precisely, is not a being that one can sup-pose (like a sub-stance) to be in community.Community is presuppositionless: this is why it is hauntedby such ambiguous ideas as foundation and sovereignty, which are at once ideas of what would be completely

suppositionless and ideas of what would always be presupposed. But community cannot be presupposed. It is only

exposed. This is undoubtedly not easy to think. But such thinking, which is perhaps inaccessible (inaccessible without the

being-in-common of thinking, without the sharing of reading, without the politics within which all writing and reading are inscribed), forms a point of convergence and

solidarity among the studies here dedicated to community properly speaking, to myth, to love, and to the retreat of

the divine. By inverting the principle stated a moment ago, we get totalitarianism. By ignoring it, we condemn

the political to management and to power(and to the management of power, and to the power of management). By taking it as a rule ofanalysis and thought, we raise the question: how can the community without essence (the community that is neither people nornation, neither destiny nor generic humanity, etc.) Be presented as such? That is, what might a politics be that does not stem

from the will to realize an essence? I shall not venture into the possible forms of such a politics, of this politicsthat one might call the politics of the political , if the political can be taken as the moment, the point, or the event of being-in-common. This would be

beyond my competence.But I do enter into the bond(not only the social bond, as one says today, all too readily, but the properly political bond) that

binds the political, or in which the political is bound up.When I speak, in the studies that follow, of literature, of a voice of interruption, of shattered love, of

coming, of joy, and finally of places of dislocation, it is always of the same bond that I shall be speaking:

of a bond that forms ties without attachment, or even less fusion, of a bond that unbinds by binding, that reunites

through the infinite exposition of an irreducible finitude. How can we be receptive to the meaning of our multiple,

dispersed, mortally fragmented existences, which nonetheless only makes sense by existing in common?In other words, perhaps: how do we communicate? But this question can be asked seriously only if we dismiss all

theories of communication, which begin by positing the necessity or the desire for a consensus, a continuity anda transfer of messages. It is not a question of establishing rules for communication, it is a question of

understanding before all else that in communication what takes place is an exposition: finite existence exposed

to finite existence, co-appearing before it and with it.To think this point, or rather this limit that exposition is,is necessarily to think the point or the limit at which the moment of

revolution presents itself. The idea of revolution has perhaps still not been understood, inasmuch as it is the

[CONTINUED]



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FRAMEWORK SHELL 8/8

[NANCY 86 CONTINUED]

Idea of a new foundation or that of a reversal of sovereignty. Of course, we need gestures of foundation and

reversal. But their reason lies elsewhere: it is in the incessantly present moment at which existence-in-commonresists every transcendence that tries to absorb it, be it in an All or in and Individual (in a Subject in general). This moment canno

be founded, and no foundation, therefore, can be reversed in it.This moment- when the in of the in-common erupts, resists, and

disrupts the relations of need and force- annuls collective and communal hypostases; this violent and troublingmoment resists murderous violence and the turmoil of fascination and identification: the intensity of the word

revolution names it well, a word that, undoubtedly, has been bequeathed or delegated to us by an ambiguous

history, but whose meaning has perhaps still to be revolutionized.One thing at least is clear: if we do not face up to such questions, the political will soon desert us completely, if it

has not already done so. It will abandon us to political and technological economies, if it has not already done so.

And this will be the end of our communities, if this has not yet come about. Being-in-common will nonethelessnever cease to resist, but its resistance will belong decidedly to another world entirely. Our world, as far as politics

is concerned, will be a desert, and we will wither away without a tomb- which is to say, without community,

deprived of our finite existence.

THE PROCESS OF THE PRODUCTION OF POSITIVITY WITH THE END OF REMOVING ALL

NEGATIVE ELEMENTS LEADS TO CANCER AND CERTIFIES ITS OWN DEATH.

Baudrillard 1993 (Jean, The Transparency of Evil; Essays on Extreme Phenomena. Translated by James Benedict. Verso London New York. Page 106)

The uninterrupted production of positivity has a terrifying consequence. Whereas negativity engenders crisis and

critique, hyperbolic positivity for its part engenders catastrophe, for it is incapable of distilling crisis and criticismin homeopathic doses. Any structure that hunts down, expels or exorcizes its negative elements risks a

catastrophe caused by a thoroughgoing backlash, just as any organism that hunts down and eliminates its germs,

bacteria, parasites or other biological antagonists risks metastasis and cancer in other words, it is threatened by avoracious positivity of its own cells, or, in the viral context, by the prospect of being devoured by its own now

unemployed antibodies. Anything that purges the accursed share in itself signs its own death warrant. This is

the theorem of the accursed share.

IMPACT- INFINITE ACTS OF VIOLENCE

THE TOP DOWN NOTION OF COMMUNITY PRODUCES INFINITE ACTS OF VIOLENCE. RATHER

THAN ATTEMPTING TO OVERTURN THIS SYSTEM WITH ANOTHER VERTICAL STRUCTURE, WE

SHOULD SIMPLY DESCRIBE POINTS OF FLIGHT BY RESISTING EVERY INSTANCE OF VERTICALORGANIZATION

Strysick 97 (Michael, The End of Community and the Politic of Grammar, Cultural Critique, p. 195-215)

Community, with the sense of the common seemingly implicit,has been thought for so long from a vertical standpoint , that is, top down.Perhaps the oldest term used to describe this verticalizing of community is "empire," what I believe Nancy means when he uses the term "immanentism." Anemperor ruled from the pinnacle of the community, and the rest of the world was compartmentalized beneath him.

Imperial grammar manifested itself so thoroughly, resulting in the creation of many empires, each smaller (but no less powerful) in nature and size. Community

gains nothing from attempting to build and rebuild immanent, avowable empires. Violence is at the root of the

immanent mentality; its manifest destiny razes what it will, creating endless trails of tears.Incredulity confronts the immanent

with itself, mirroring it in order to undo power, not usurp it. But this entails a change in foundation, in what Nietzsche refers to as grammar.Unless

foundations change, what arises from them will not change demonstrably. Rather,we must engage a task to expose

totalizing gestures within community.This is the approach that community's altered politics (la politique), by virtue of a new orientation of thepolitical (le politique), must engage. And this approach marks not merely incredulity to metanarratives, but more importantly, incredulity toward the lingering shadow of



19/33


the grammar of metanarratives.How will this grammar be broken?The importance of undoing this mentality arises not outof any search for truth, any metaphysical quest, or any religious pilgrimage; rather, it arises from the need for

justice as manifest equality. Unavowability itself defines a horizontal community. In the process, difference-on which

avowability and inequality has for so long been based-is not erased but rather becomes the greatest challenge.

Thus, it requires a radical shift, an overturning of a prevailing mentality that prefers the one to the many, or eventhe many as mediated through the one. The challenge is to work to understand the many in terms of the many, mediated only by itself.But how

could such radical changes take place? Who would take charge of this? Again, even asking the question in this

manner belies the point to which empire is embedded in our very thinking, specifically if we seek to answer itthrough the concept of leaders and followers. Community need not shrink the world to a handful but enlarge it to

the many. Rather than scheming about and theorizing on how to achieve such a horizontal structure, it is best to

simply undo those vertical elements when they appear. Rather than de-scribing an end point to be reached, with aspecific program to that end, we can describe a point from which we wish to flee.Com- munity has endured

codes, laws, and plans promising paradise, redemption, and salvation; now, we must conceive of practical ways to

move further away from self-created states of emergency. Such a notion of community will not be achieved bysome revisionist undoing of past documents but by a real undoing of past practices-incredulity in its strongest

form. After all, we cannot change the past, but we need not be anchored in its mistakes nor chained to its

insensitivities.



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IMPACT- NAZISM

A COMMUNITY OF BEING-WITH RESISTS THE LOGIC OF IMMANENCE THAT GIVES RISE TO

NAZISM

Strysick 97 (Michael, The End of Community and the Politic of Grammar. Cultural Critique. P. 195-215. The New Centennial Review. Volume 5, Number 3,Winter 2005)

In "Of Being-in-common" in Community at Loose Ends, Nancy addresses the politics of community by distinguishing between types of communal orientation. For him,community should be thought outside the bias of homogeneity and be based on what he calls"being-in-common," whichforms the basis of a question. "We are in common, with one another," Nancy writes, but "[w]hat does this 'in' and this 'with' mean? (Or, to put it another way, what does

'we' mean, what is the meaning of this pronoun which, in one way or another, must be inscribed in any discourse?)" (6). In other words, he continues, " Being, orexistence, is what we share. . . . But being is not a thing we could possess in common . . . . We shall say then thatbeing is

not common in the sense of a common property, but that it is in common. Being is in common" (1).Commonality, inother words,should not be understood here as singularity but instead as radical plurality. If singular, the tendency istoward totality and universality-what he calls immanentism. Nancymakes this clear in his preface to The Inoperative Community where

heprovides apoignantexample of how this in and with should not be conceived: "The community that becomes a

single thing (body, mind, fatherland, Leader. . . .) Necessarily loses the in of the being-in-common. Or, it loses the

with or the together that defines it. It yields its being-together to a being of togetherness. The truths ofcommunity, on the contrary,reside in the retreat of such a being." Nancy then gives an example of an in which is lost by saying, "Nothing

indicates more clearly what the logic of this being of togetherness can imply than the role of Gemeinschaft,of

community, in Nazi ideology" (Inoperative xxxix). This is the logic of totality that Levinas fears is bred by homogeneity and that Agamben warns results

from prescribed formulations. Even more, this prescribed totality is the grammar that Nietzsche diagnoses as imprisoning us.



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IMPACT- WITCH HUNTS 1/2

THEIR ATTEMPTS AT EXCLUSION REPLICATE SOME OF THE WORST FORMS OF VIOLENT

EXCLUSION IN HUMAN HISTORY INCLUDING THAT OF WITCHES IN PLACES LIKE SALEM AND

HERETICS DURING THE SPANISH INQUISITION. IT IS NOT THE PRESENCE OF DIFFERENT THATPRODUCES VIOLENCE, BUT RATHER THE TOTALIZING DISCOURSES THAT ALWAYS SEE

DIFFERENCE AS EVIL AND THUS DESERVING OF EXPULSION

Marx-Wolf 06 (Heidi, University of California Santa Barbara,Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2006.12.36. David Frankfurter,Evil Incarnate: Rumors of DemonicConspiracy and Ritual Abuse in History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pp. 312; 10 halftones. ISBN 0-691-11350-5.)

In his Introduction and second chapter, Frankfurter presents one of his most compelling ideas, namely that myths of evil conspiracy emerge in

contexts where local religious worlds encounter larger universal systems that produce totalizing discourses about

evil. Within these local religious worlds, misfortune and danger are accounted for in terms of malicious or capricious spirits or

specific marginal individuals on the fringe of communities. But with the introduction of a totalizing discourse,often by self-proclaimed experts who come into the local context from outside, these spirits are fitted into a universal structure

that lends them an added significance and makes them dangerous in an ultimate sense. This totalizing discourse

takes the form of a demonology, a discourse about the entire range of potentially malign spirits. In some sense then, demonology is "thecollection, classification and integration of demons out of their immediate social context, as a function of religious

centralization" (15). One example Frankfurter uses to demonstrate this encounter is the way Zoroastrianism recast older local spiritswithin a more universal framework and gave them a moral valence. These ancient spirits were no longer merelyad hoc, hostile or ambiguous beings. They became evil . The production of demonologies is usually done by self-defined experts acting underthe auspices of centralizing institutions. In Chapter Three, Frankfurter discusses the range of these experts who claim to have the ability to reveal the global system behind

inchoate misfortune. These includeprophets, missionaries, inquisitors, witch-finders, social workers, police, psychologists

and even the possessed or formerly possessed themselves. Frankfurter claims that these experts do not merely explain theexperience of everyday misfortune, they fundamentally change it. Furthermore, through their activities of

representing and projecting the conspiracy onto the local for others, experts gain charisma for themselves . ChaptersFour and Five explicate the common features of the stories that these experts convey to their audiences, the actual content of many of these myths of evil conspiracy.

Frankfurter's argument is that the commonality of many of these features is neither accidental nor the reflection of some essential or universal psychological trait of human

nature. Rather, their consistency derives from reflection about inversions of "prevailing notions of proper liturgy,

sacrifice, sacrament, or ceremonial behavior" as well as a "deeper element of speculation about humanness and

savagery, about local maleficence and a greater evil, and about ritual itself as an ambivalent aspect of society andtradition" (75). In other words, inversion is the mode through which human beings think about the Other in their midst.

This is why child sacrifice, cannibalism and the use of impure substances figure so universally in many of these

constructions. Frankfurter's treatment of early modern fantasies of the witches' Sabbat ritual reveals the way these

fantasies brought together various notions of danger and may have even drawn on Protestant suspicion of ritual ingeneral. Chapter Five takes this argument about inversion and otherness one step further. Here Frankfurter draws on psychoanalytic insights to account for the contentof the "tableaus of perversion" produced in the course of the construction of myths of Satanic conspiracy. His argument is that these tableaus are not merely

the result of groups attempting to clarify differences between themselves and the Other in their midst throughmodes of inversion. Rather, they are as much the outcome of voyeuristic participation. In other words, their

construction allows for the imaginative participation in perversions and atrocities, a transgressive enjoyment.

Frankfurter points to what he calls the "sheer pornographic inventiveness" of many of these tableaus, the graphic details of

which cause many to ask: "who could think up such bizarre and horrifying things -- they must be true." On thispoint, he invokes Georges Bataille, the quintessential philosopher on transgression. Frankfurter writes, "imaginative

inversion offers the experience of transgression from the vantage point of taboo, the projection of desires within aframework of censure" (154). One extreme example of this projection that the book explores is that of inquisitors in

early modern witch trials. These clerics were able to observe, probe and subject naked female bodies to torture in

the course of their investigations. These actions required a proximity and intimacy with women that would never

be allowed these men in their usual roles, but were permitted in the context of censure during the witch trial. Thequestion

[CONTINUED]



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IMPACT- WITCH HUNTS 2/2

[MARX-WOLF 06 CONTINUED]

Remains, however, of why large groups of people come to believe in these tableaus and myths if they are only

Imaginative constructions, and particularly perverse ones at that? According to Frankfurter, it is because thesemyths are performed. In other words, they gain reality through social acts and social experience. Chapter Six classifies various kinds of mimetic performancesand their performers. Some of these performers act directly, others indirectly, some performances are coerced, others voluntary. In the case of the SRA myth, performers

include "survivors", television show hosts, their audiences, therapists, exorcists, and so forth. Furthermore, those who parody the myth in their roles as self-identifying

Satanists, as a form of social deviance, also make a contribution to the performance by confirming stereotypical behaviors and appearances. In his final chapter,

Frankfurter returns to one of his most salient and, in this reviewer's opinion, most timely points, namely that the true evil that arises from myths of

demonic conspiracy is that which is wrought when groups seek to purge supposed participants and culprits from

their midst, be they Christians in the late Roman world, Jews or witches in any number of time periods. He saveshis most dramatic demonstration of this point for the final paragraph of the book in which he documents recent

cases of actual ritual abuse. A chilling footnote records at least nine cases, all children, who were either abused or killed in

the course of mainstream Christian exorcisms over the past ten years.



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***BLOCKS***



24/33


A/T ELITISM

1. THEYRE MISSING A CRITICAL INTERNAL LINK- THERES NO CONNECTION BETWEEN DEBATE

AND THE REAL WORLD. THERES NO WAY THAT EVEN IF WE DID PRECLUDE POLICY

EDUCATION IN DEBATE THAT WE WOULD HAVE ANY EFFECT ON THE REST OF THE WORLD.

2. THERE NO LINK- WE DONT PRECLUDE POLICY EDUCATION, WE RATHER ALLOW FOR ALL

FORMS OF EDUCATION AND ACKNOWLEDGE THE EQUAL IMPORTANCE OF POLICY ANDKRITIKAL EDUCATION.

3. TURN- WITHOUT EDUCATION ON ONTOLOGY, MORALITY, AND ETHICS, THERE WOULD BE NOBASIS FOR THE POLITICAL SPHERE. IF THESE CRITICAL FACETS OF DEBATE ARE EXPUNGED,

THERE WILL BE NO UNDERSTANDING OF THE JUSTIFICATION UNDERLYING THOSE DECISIONS.

IF THEIR FRAMEWORK TRAINS US TO BE POLICYMAKERS THAT DONT REFLECT CRITICALLY,THAT MEANS WE BECOME BAD POLICYMAKERS. LITERALLY EVERY IMPACT WE READ FLOWS

AGAINST THIS FORM OF TRAINING AND EDUCATION

4. TURN- THERE IS A NEVERENDING LIST OF FORUMS FOR POLITICAL EDUCATION, BUT ANINCREASINGLY MINISCULE LIST OF PHILOSOPHICAL HAVENS. DEBATE IS ONE OF THE LAST

VENUES FOR PHILOSOPHICAL EDUCATION AND WE MUST RECOGNIZE THAT AND EMBRACE IT



25/33


A/T JUSTIFY CHEATING (RULES V. NORMS)

1. THERES A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN RULES AND NORMS. RULES ARE THINGS THAT WE AGREE

UPON SO THAT WE CAN COME AND COMPETE AGAINST EACH OTHER, LIKE SPEECH TIMES.

NORMS ARE RESTRICTIONS THAT ARE CREATED IN THE OPEN SPACE OF DEBATE. IT IS NORMSTHAT ATTEMPT TO PLACE A HEAD ON DEBATE. THERE IS NO RULE ANYWHERE THAT SAYS

YOU HAVE TO HAVE A POLICY OPTION IN DEBATE. THERES NO RULEBOOK.

2. WHEN WE MAKE THE ARGUMENT THAT DEBATE SHOULD BE HEADLESS, IT IS NOT OUR

SUBJECTIVE INTENTION TO STAND UP HERE AND GIVE 20 MINUTE SPEECHES AND STUFF LIKE

THAT. WE DONT ENDORSE THINGS LIKE THAT BUT THAT DOESNT MEAN THAT WE ENFORCEOUR DECISION NOT TO DO SO UPON THE DEBATE. HOWEVER, IF THE AFFIRMATIVE IS

SUGGESTING THAT THEY ARE ABOUT TO STAND UP AND CHEAT AS AN ANSWER TO OUR

ARGUMENT, THEYD BETTER BE PREPARED FOR RECIPROCITY. NEMSISPLOTSCH ALAFRANKAON THE WAY.



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A/T NOT GOING FOR IT / NO OFFENSE

1. THEY CHOSE TO READ A FRAMEWORK IN THE 1AC INSTEAD OF WAITING TO DEPLOY IT

AS AN ANSWER IN THE 2AC. THIS IS DISTINCT FROM OTHER ARGUMENTS BECAUSE IT

DEFINES THE LENS THROUGH WHICH THE REMAINDER OF THE 1AC IS EVALUATED ANDDETERMINES 1NC STRATEGY. THIS SHIFT MAKES DEBATE LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE.

ANYTIME WE TRY TO GARNER OFFENSE THEYLL JUST SPIKE OUT OF IT. WE WONT CALL

FOR THEIR REJECTION, BUT CONSIDER OUR OFFENSE CONCEDED.

2. ITS IRRELEVANT IF THEY GO FOR FRAMEWORK OR NOT. IF THEY KICK AN

ADVANTAGE BUT CONCEED OFFENSE, THE NEG STILL GETS ACCESS TO THEUNANSWERED OFFENSE AS A REASON TO REJECT THE PLAN. OUR ARGUMENT IS THAT

THEIR CONCEPTUALIZATION OF DEBATE MAKES IT IMPOSSIBLE TO EVER EXTRACT

POLITICAL OPPORTUNITIES FROM A STRUCTURE OF VIOLENCE COMMITTED IN THENAME OF COMMUNITY. THEY MUST DEFEND THE 1AC IN LIGHT OF THE 1NC CRITICISM.

3. FRAMEWORK IS A SPEECH ACT. THEY WOULDNT BE ABLE TO SEVER IF THEY SAID THE

N WORD AND WE READ OFFENSE ON IT. HOLD THEM TO THE SAME STANDARD FORFRAMEWORK. IF YOU DONT BUY THAT, ITS AT LEAST TRUE THAT FRAMEWORK

FUNCTIONS ON A DIFFERENT LEVEL THAN ADVANTAGES. ITS A STATEMENT OF THEIR

ASUMPTIONS OF WHAT DEBATE SHOULD BE, MUCH LIKE VARIOUS ONTOLOGICALASSUMPTIONS LIKE USING NATURE IS OKAY. IF WE READ HEIDEGGER THEY WOULDNT

SEVER ALL OF THEIR ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT NATURE. THAT DESTROYS OUR STRATEGY

AND IS IRRESPONSIBLE AND WEAK.

4. THEIR ATTEMPT AT SEVERANCE IS A NEGATION. MUCH LIKE IF WE HAD PICD OUT OF

ANY OTHER PART OF PLAN, THE PERM THAT SEVERS IS ONLY AN ARGUMENT THAT THE

CP IS A GOOD IDEA AND THE 1AC IS INSUFFICIENT AND A BAD IDEA. VOTE NEG.

5. CROSS-APPLY THE #1 FROM THE COUNTERPLAN FLOW. THEY SAY AFF CHOICE MEANING

THAT THEYVE MADE A DECISION ABOUT WHAT THE ROUND SHOULD LOOK LIKE ANDWE SHOULD BE ABLE TO TURN IT.



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A/T SHIVEL

Framework PIC

Documents

Transcript of Framework PIC