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case responses

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cyborgs bad

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1nc cyborgs bad frontline

Cyborgs imagery has been coopted by white posthumanism --- the aff forecloses the establishment and
spread of existing counter-narratives otherwise capable of transforming cultural mythos
Dinerstein 6 [Joel Dinerstein is an assistant professor of English at Tulane University, where he also teaches in
the American studies program, Technology and Its Discontents: On the Verge of the Posthuman, American
Quarterly 58.3 (2006) 569-595] //khirn
Judgment Day: The End of Progress
I will conclude with Sturken and Thomas's most important question of all: "How is it possible to think about technologies outside of these frameworks?" 59
Nearly a generation ago, Haraway recognized the need for a more "imaginative relation to technoscience that propound[ed]

human limits and dislocationsthe fact that we die, rather than Faustian . . . evasions." Yet as popular culture and well-funded GNR enthusiasts have more
influence than academic theorists, they have commandeered cyborg iconography ; the necessary corrective of conceding
the "human limits" of biological processes has yet to occur. Haraway has since called for new metaphorssuch as
trickster figures (e.g., Coyote)to "refigur[e] possible worlds" by thinking outside of techno-science; this hasn't happened even
within the humanities. Instead, we have seen the rise of the posthuman Adamic. 60 [End Page 589]
For Nye, the "technological creation story has long remained dominant" because questioning it required a reassessment of history, social justice, and ethicsas well as
the demystification (and demythification) of every keyword in the techno-cultural matrix. Here's Nye's assessment of why the nineteenth-century "second creation"
narrative remained dominant until the 1960s:
Rejecting the foundation story . . . meant recognizing historical injustices to the first inhabitants, accepting environmental limits, and acknowledging the ideological
nature of the free market. Rejecting the foundation story implied the loss of white entitlement to the continent. Discarding second-creation stories required
acknowledging cultural conflicts and listening to counter-narratives. 61

Such counternarratives of the frontier now exist: Nye points to ecofeminism and Native American accounts, the works of
wilderness advocates and borderlands scholars. Perhaps there is long-term potential for the trickle-down of such
counternarratives to transform the national mythos , but the techno-cultural matrix remains
strong.
To become conscious of the underlying mythology guiding their utopianism, GNR enthusiasts would need to acknowledge the cyborg's white
body, their ideal of white progress, and the historical conflation of technology and religion . Many scholars have traced the
social construction of the white body as the normative, ideal human body (e.g., Richard Dyer's White), but only recently have
nonwhites begun to answer back from an empowered cultural position. In White Theology: Outing Supremacy in Modernity (2004), religious
scholar James W. Perkinson claims that if Euro-Americans aspire to maturity, "the white body must be returned somehow to its history, [and]
white identity reincarnated in local community and global cosmology." To do so, Perkins claims, Euro-Americans must specifically leave
black bodies alone: "blackness can no longer be erected as a buffer against the demands of maturity, a screen against which to
play out fear and fantasy, despair and desire ." 62 An interesting claim, but such a separation is impossible due to hybridity at every level: cultural,
social, genetic, artistic, intellectual, philosophical.

Otherwise, that mythos of technological domination ensures the perpetuation Euro-American superiority
and whiteness
Dinerstein 6 [Joel Dinerstein is an assistant professor of English at Tulane University, where he also teaches in
the American studies program, Technology and Its Discontents: On the Verge of the Posthuman, American
Quarterly 58.3 (2006) 569-595] //khirn
Immediately after 9/11, a Middle East correspondent for The Nation summarized the coming war on terrorism as "[their] theology versus [our] technology, the suicide
bomber against the nuclear power." 1 His statement missed the point: technology is the American theology. For Americans, it is not the Christian God but technology
that structures the American sense of power and revenge, the nation's abstract sense of well-being, its arrogant sense of superiority, and its righteous justification for
global dominance. In the introduction to Technological Visions, Marita Sturken and Douglas Thomas declare that "in the popular imagination, technology

is often synonymous with the future," but it is more accurate to say that technology is synonymous with faith in the future
both in the future as a better world and as one in which the U nited S tates bestrides the globe as a colossus . 2
Technology has long been the unacknowledged source of European and Euro-American superiority
within modernity , and its underlying mythos always traffics in what James W. Carey once called "secular religiosity ." 3
Lewis Mumford called the American belief system "mechano-idolatry" as early as 1934; a few years later he deemed it our "mechano-centric religion." David F. Noble
calls this ideology "the religion of technology" in a work of the same name that traces its European roots to a doctrine that combines millenarianism, rationalism, and
Christian redemption in the writings of monks, explorers, inventors, and NASA scientists. If we take into account the functions of religion and not its rituals, it is not a
deity who insures the American future but new technologies: smart bombs in the Gulf War, Viagra and Prozac in the pharmacy, satellite TV at home. It is not social

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justice or equitable economic distribution that will reduce hunger, greed, and poverty, but fables of abundance and the rhetoric of technological utopianism. The United
States is in thrall to "techno-fundamentalism," in Siva Vaidhyanathan's apt phrase; to Thomas P. Hughes, "a god named technology has possessed Americans." Or, as
public policy scholar Edward Wenk Jr. sums it up, "we are . . . inclined to equate technology with civilization [itself]." 4 [End Page 569]
Technology as an abstract concept functions as a white mythology. Yet scholars of whiteness rarely engage technology as

a site of dominant white cultural practices (except in popular culture), and scholars of technology often sidestep the subtext
of whiteness within this mythos . The underlying ideology and cultural practices of technology were central to American studies scholarship in
its second and third generations, but the field has marginalized this critical framework; it is as if these works of (mostly) white men are now irrelevant to the field's
central concerns of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ethnic identity on the one hand, and power, empire, and nation on the other. In this essay I will integrate some
older works into the field's current concerns to situate the current posthuman discourse within an unmarked white tradition of technological utopianism that also
functions as a form of social evasion. By the conclusion, I hope to have shown that the posthuman is an escape from the panhuman .
This is an important moment to grapple with the relationship of technology and whiteness since many scientists, inventors, and cognitive philosophers currently hail the
arrival of the "posthuman." This emergent term represents the imminent transformation of the human body through GNR technologiesG for genetic engineering or
biotechnology, N for nanotechnology, and R for robotics. "The posthuman," as N. Katherine Hayles defined it in How We Became Posthuman (2000), "implies not only
a coupling with intelligent machines but a coupling so intense and multifaceted that it is no longer possible to distinguish meaningfully between the biological organism
and the informational circuits in which the organism is enmeshed." To be reductive, the posthuman envisions the near future as one in which humans are cyborgsin
which the human organism is, for all practical purposes, a networked being composed of multiple human-machine interfaces. Underlying cultural beliefs in
technological determinism matched with the inalienable right of consumer desire will soon produce what even cautious critics call "a social transformation" at the level
of the individual body, as consumers purchase genetic enhancements (to take one example). In other words, steroids, cloning, gene mapping, and surgical implants are
just the tip of an iceberg that, when it melts, will rebaptize human beings as cyborgs. 5
William J. Mitchell calls this new self-concept "Me++"a pun on the computer language C++and claims this future is already present. When Mitchell claims to
"routinely exist in the condition . . . [of] 'man-computer symbiosis,'" or that he "now interact[s] with sensate, intelligent, interconnected devices scattered throughout my
environment," who can argue with him? An eminent design theorist and urban planner at MIT, Mitchell breezily [End Page 570] describes a near future of "high-tech
'wearables'" with implanted computers (e.g., clothes, eyeglasses, shoes) that extend our sense of self over an increasingly permeable body surface. If each person is
"jacked in" to dozens of computers within a "few millimeters" of the human shell, will that transform human nature (as many GNR enthusiasts claim)? As Mitchell
declares, "increasingly I just don't think of this as computer interaction," but as something like an expansive self. "Me++" is a consumer gold rush: the evolution of the
fragile human body into a silicon-based cyborg with superhuman capacities. Here's a complementaryand unexceptionalclaim from Rodney A. Brooks, the chair of
the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT: "We are about to become our machines . . . [we] will morph into machines." Brooks admits this process may bring short-term
metaphysical confusion, but he assures readers in Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us that GNR technologies will bring long-term progress. 6
What do claims for "man-computer symbiosis" have to do with whiteness and religion? Brooks and Mitchell are technological determinists for whom the blithe
morphing of the human organism into cyborgs recapitulates the Western tendency to universalize its own perspective. Their works consider the coming of GNR
technologies as inevitable, progressive, and beneficial, and their rhetoric assumes universal, equitable distribution of such changes. Moreover, their disregard of social
realities perpetuates an unspoken racialized (white) narrative of exclusion that treats technology as an "autonomous" aspect of cultural production illuminating the road
to a utopian future that will not require social or political change.7

Technological progress has long structured Euro-American identity, and it functions as a prop for a muted form of social
Darwinismeither "might makes right," or "survival of the fittest." Here is the techno-cultural matrix: progress, religion, whiteness,
modernity, masculinity, the future. This matrix reproduces an assumed superiority over societies perceived as static,
primitive, passive, Communist, terrorist, or fundamentalist (depending on the era). The historian of technology Carroll Pursell points out that "the most
significant engine and marker" of modernity is "technology ([which is] almost always seen as masculine in our society)," and that only the West invokes modernity as
"a signal characteristic of its self-definition." 8 In Machines as the Measure of Man: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance, Michael Adas traced
the rhetoric of technology as it became the primary measure of intelligence, rationality, and the good society, supplanting Christianity for nineteenth-century colonial
powers. Weapons, mass production, and communication networks became the fetishes of colonial dominance and racial

superiority, which were [End Page 571] disseminated (for example) in numerous British best sellers through binary opposites of
dominance/passivity: "machine versus human or animal power; science versus superstition and myth; synthetic versus
organic; progressive versus stagnant." 9 Such oppositions still inform contemporary theories of Western superiority (e.g., "the
clash of civilizations," "the end of history"). Casting preindustrial (or premodern) peoples as risk-averse and enslaved to obsolescent
ideologiesthat is, as not progressingsentences them to second-class status with regard to the future.
Sturken and Thomas ask two crucial questions about the role of technology in the American cultural imagination: "Why are emergent and new technologies the screens
onto which our culture projects such a broad array of social concerns and desires?," and consequently, "Why is technology the object of such unrealistic expectations?" I
extrapolate the following two answers from the field's critical framework, by way of Leo Marx, Kasson, Nye, Carey, and Noble (among many others). New
technologies help maintain two crucial Euro-American myths: (1) the myth of progress and (2) the myth of white, Western superiority. 10
In a given society, a myth functions as "a play of past paradigm and future possibility," according to Laurence Coupe's study, an act of
"remembering and re-creating the sacred narratives of the past." Progress secularized the idea of Christian redemption by inventing (and instantiating) a near-sacred
temporal zonethe futureto contain its man-made utopian dreams. A myth cannot be declared in rational terms; it "resist[s] completion" in order to keep up its
"dialectic . . . of memory and desire, of ideology and utopia." For a myth to have cultural force, it must be unarticulated; it works as "a

disclosure rather than . . . a dogma," an opening into unspoken systems of belief . 11

Technological progress is the telos of American culture , the herald of the future, the mythic proof in the nation's self-righteous
pudding. "Nowhere . . . can we find a master narrative so deeply entrenched in popular imagination and popular language as
the mythic idea of progress," notes the historian of technology John Staudenmeier, "particularly technological progress." Yet at the intellectual level,
historians Carl Becker and J. B. Bury deconstructed the myth nearly a century ago. Becker even identified progress as a covalent religion at the 1935 Stanford lectures:
"the word Progress, like the Cross or the Crescent, is a symbol that stands for a social doctrine, a philosophy of human destiny." For both Bury and Becker, the myth of
social progress emerged from the Enlightenment idea of the perfectibility of man through the application of reason. That man-made future would be "a more just, more
peaceful, and less hierarchical republican society based on the consent of the governed." Instead, over two centuries, technology has piggybacked onto

social progress by creating the rush of change without social improvement . 12

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Cyborg imagery reinforces hegemonic depictions of masculinity

Walton 4 [Heather, The Gender of the Cyborg Theology Sexuality 2004 10: 33] //khirn
Cyborgs appear in many forms today. Their ubiquitous presence is felt whenever the boundaries that separate the human from the machine are breached
and the conventions of ontological hygiene (Graham 2002: 3335) are compromised. Many feminists would claim that these cyborgs are not only
present everywhere but active and working to sustain the representational practices through which gender is enduringly
inscribed within our culture. Anne Balsamo argues that cyborgs are in fact the postmodern icon, produced within a culture
which is saturated by a technological male imaginary and that the dominant representation of cyborgs reinserts us into the
dominant ideology by reaffirming bourgeois notions of human, machine and femininity (1999:154). There are many arguments that
can be made to support this argument. On the most basic level it is clear that our most mundane experiences of cyborg practice, when we reach
beyond our flesh through the computer keyboard, are gendered. Research indicates that boys enjoy losing themselves in
the world of virtual reality and see the machine as a quasi living entity with which they can form a passionate relation.
Girls are more likely to see their computers as tools aiding them in better interpersonal communication. Perhaps more worrying
than this differentiated experience is the fact that the virtual worlds to which our computers provide access have become yet other sites
of violence against women. In the ubiquitous availability of pornography on the internet the real time violation of girls and women is transformed into a
virtual commodity. This can be purchased, swapped or secretly traded in an unholy exploitation of an elision between human flesh and screen image. There is also
a growing awareness of the sexual harassment that is routinely experienced by women in online discussions, fantasy
games and via e-mail. The chatroom can be as much a male space as the boardroom and the dangers this presents to girls and women are becoming
increasingly apparent. If we begin to look beyond the interface with the computer and turn to popular cultural representations of the cyborg, we find that many of these
also extend into our imagined futures the dominant gendered forms of today. From the comic book to the screen mediums, we are all familiar

with representations of cyborgs that exaggerate and heighten, pleasurably and creatively or crudely and violently, the
representations of gender already in circulation. From Metropolis to James Bond, from Stepford Wives to The Terminator gender representation are
the means through which the significance of human identity in a technological future is experimented with, tested out and retransmitted. Male and female figures play
familiar roles in these productions. To be sure, as Jenny Wolmark has argued, feminist science fiction has created cyborg images that reorder boundaries and demolish
polarities (1999b: 237). And yes, as she has argued further, the strong women characters in some cyberpunk fictions and film owe much to these feminist interventions
(1999a: 142). We might even concede that male cyborgs through their hypermasculinity do queer themselves - or as Lois McNay would have it fetishised images of
masculinity bear within themselves traces of the feminised man transvestite and thus point towards their own constitutive instability and displacement (2000: 55). It is
nevertheless the case that gender stereotypes are more likely to be reaffirmed than challenged by the majority of cultural

depictions of the post/human. As Mary Doane writes: Although it is certainly true that in the case of some contemporary
science fiction writers - particularly feminist authors - technology makes possible a destabilisation of sexual identity as a
category, there has also been a curious but fairly insistent history of representations of technology which work to fortify
sometimes desperately conventional understandings of the feminine (in Balsamo 1999 : 148).

Turns case replacing human flesh with machines allows for the elimination of those who have not
assimilated enough
Dinello 5 [Dan, Technophobia! Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology
http://shockproductions.com/technophobia/technophobia.html] //khirn
Chapter Five: Rampaging Cyborgs extends the science fiction argument against techno-obsession to the bionic fusion of cybernetic device and biological organism
which may produce a new and improved cyborg body but may also produce a weapon. The

replacement of our flesh and blood with

mechanical augmentation subtly blurs the definition of what constitutes a human body and encourages a dream
of immortality. While technoscience projects a bionic vision of posthuman perfection, the cyborg was born as an astronaut and a weapon. The earliest
imagining of the cyborg, in the 1960s, involved a never-implemented military plan to surgically and
pharmaceutically modify the bodies of astronauts for space travel. At the same time, the military evolved the
cyborg in the development of man-machine interfaces, such as between pilot and jet, that structure modern weapon systems. This helped set
the stage for the cyborgs earliest fictional incarnation in the novel Cyborg (1972) by Martin Caidin - which centers on a crashed test pilot whose damaged body gets
machine replacement parts.
By the 1980s, the science fiction cyborg had become a ubiquitous icon of pop culture, reflecting its increasing importance. These machine people ranged from the
scarcely organic Terminator and the castrated, mostly mechanical Robocop to the tough virile Bionic Man and sexy gal pal Bionic Woman; from the
alien/human/machine cross-breed Ripley in Alien Resurrection to the human-hating Borg of Star Trek; and from the plugged-into-virtual reality savior of humanity in
The Matrix to the genetically enhanced Valids of Gattaca. The melding of the organic and the mechanical, the organic and the alien or the
engineering of a union between separate species, cyborgs also include American Iraq-War pilots integrated into a cybernetic weapon systems as well as suicidal

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merge with technology to transform themselves into human bombs.

Science fiction cyborg stories dramatize our fears as we become targets in the world of cyborg weapons, while
anticipating the demise of the flesh and blood body and the gradual extinction of humanity. "There is,
underlying these works, an uneasy but consistent sense of human obsolescence," writes Scott Bukatman in Terminal Identity
(1993), "and at stake is the very definition of the human."While the machinic replacement of lost body parts
enhances the lives of disabled people, the sheer number of monstrous cyborgs reflects a pervasive anxiety that
our technological lust will propagate grotesquely deformed, superhuman techno-creatures that will ultimately
extinguish us .
terrorists who

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2nc cyborgs bad race

Cyberfeminism is essentialist and fails to analyze the intersection of race and gender
Daniel 9 [Jessie, Writer on race, sexism Rethinking Cyberfeminism(s): Race, Gender, and Embodiment Women's Studies
Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 1/2, Technologies (spring - Summer, 2009),
http://www.jstor.org/stable/27655141 .LM]
Yet it is exceedingly rare within both cyberfeminist practices and critiques of them to see any reference to the intersection of gender and race (Fernandez, Wilding, and
Wright 2003, 21); instead both the practices and

the critiques suggest that "gender" is a unified category and, by

implication, that digital technologies mean the same thing to all women across differences of race, class,
sexuality. In her book Zeroes and Ones, Sadie Plant is exuberant about the potential of Internet technologies to transform the lives of women. Plant
conceptualizes cyberspace as a liberating place for women because, as she sees it, the inherently textual nature
of the Internet lends itself to "the female" (1997, 23). Her title refers to the binary code of zeroes and ones that
constitutes the basic programming language that computers use. Plant symbolically ren ders zeroes as "female"
and ones as phallic and "male," predicting that the digital future is feminine, distributed, nonlinear, a world in which "zeroes" are
displacing the phallic order of the "ones" (Gill 2005, 99). Plant is perhaps the leading figure in popularizing the ideas of cyberfeminism beyond the academy While
Plant has been justifiably criticized for reinscribing essen tialist notions of gender (Wilding 1998),Wajcman (2004) writes that Plant's optimism about the potential of
gender equality in cyberspace must be understood as a reaction against previous conceptualizations of technology as inherently masculine. In

addition to
essentializing gender, Plant's binary of "zeroes" and "ones" leaves no conceptual room for understanding
how gender intersects with " race ." In this way, Plant's writing is characteristic of the field, as there is relatively little discussion of
the intersections of gender with "race," except in cases where "race" is included in a long list of additional variables to be added on to
"gender." Thus, when cyberfeminists explicitly engage both gender and race it is both conspicuous and instructive. In their edited
volume, Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices, Fernandez, Wilding, and Wright highlight cyberfeminist practices
that eschew the exclusionary aspects of earlier forms of feminism , and they remind us "the lives of white
women and women of color are mutually reliant" (2003, 25). Yet, as Fernandez and Wilding point out, cyberfeminist writing often
assumes an "educated, white, upper-middle-class, English-speaking, culturally sophisti cated readership," which ironically ends up
replicating the "damaging uni versalism of'old-style feminism'" (Fernandez and Wilding 2003, 21). Given the "damaging
universalism" of some forms of cyberfeminism, what, then, do we make of claims for the subversive potential of the Internet?

The 1AC speaks in a positon of power and fails to recognize it- creates whiteness and silences women of
color
Schuller 9 [Malini Johar, PhD from Purdue University Analogy and (White) Feminist Theory: Thinking Race
and the Color of the Cyborg Body, University of Chicago Pres, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/431372
LM]
I have focused at length on the deployment of the category women of color because Haraways attempt to articulate an oppositional ontology and politically effective
strategy for feminism that includes women of color is to be lauded. Yet

if the practice entails a disregard for situatedness and

locatedness, it avails itself of the universalizing and unmarked privileges of whiteness discussed earlier. As Abby Wilkerson
suggestively points out, it might be worth asking whether many white feminists have enthusiastically taken up the cyborg
myth precisely because of what it does not say about race (1997, 170). Wilkerson argues that taking up the hybrid identity of the
cyborg might well be a way of not assuming responsibility for whiteness while appropriating the identity politics of women of color (1997, 17071). The same might be

the
relationship between the cyborg and women of color. At one level there is no relationship, only oneness. Since in the
said of similar universalizing gestures animating poststructuralist theorists use of the East, as I discuss above. We are now in a position to understand

informatics of domination we all cannot help being cyborgs, women of color are cyborgs. But the ultimate relationship is again analogical. Just as the cyborg is a fusion
of human and machine, a monstrous and illegitimate fusion, so, the argument goes, is the constituency of women of color, forged as it is without identity. Thus is it not
surprising that race sometimes figures in Haraways essay in a similar fashion as it does in Rubins: race, gender, and capital require a cyborg theory of wholes and
parts (Haraway 1991, 181); the causes of various womenheaded households are a function of race, class, or sexuality (167); and some of the rearrangements of
race, sex, and class rooted in hightechfacilitated social relations can make socialistfeminism more relevant to effective progressive politics (165). Cyborg

identities, mediated through the politics of women of color, help defuseor to use Wilkersons terminology,
deny the responsibility of working withwhiteness and white feminist social location. Haraways stated
reasons for turning to women of color make this clear. Haraway writes: For meand for many who share a similar historical location in
white, professional middleclass, female, radical, North American, midadult bodiesthe sources of a crisis in political identity are legion. The recent history for much
of the US left and US feminism has been a response to this kind of crisis by endless splitting and searches for a new essential unity. But there has also been a growing

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recognition of another response through coalitionaffinity, not identity (1991, 155). I argued earlier that analogy functions like a colonial fetish enabling the

white feminist theorist to displace racial difference onto a safer notion of similarity. We can now add the
following: racial analogy within (white) feminist theory helps whiteness retain its privilege by being
uninterrogated.

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2nc cyborgs bad gender

Cyberfeminism creates female subjectivity
Wildling 98 [Faith, the political condition of cyberfeminism Critical Art Ensemble. Art Journal57.2, 1998,
http://search.proquest.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/docview/223313079?pq-origsite=summon&accountid=14667
LM]
Cyberfeminism is currently at that unfortunate point where it has to decide who gets to be a separatist
cyberfeminist and who does not. The haunting question, "What is a woman?" once again returns. In theory, this
problem is graspable, but first, what is the problem? Looking back on any feminist movement, there have
always been tremendous problems among women's groups and organizations brought on by attempts to define
feminine subjectivity (and, thereby, "us" and "them"). In the second wave, the feminine was defined in a manner
that seemed largely to reflect the subjectivity of white, middle-class, straight women. The third wave had to
debate whether or not transvestites, transsexuals, and other "males" who claimed to be female-identified should
be accepted into activist organizations (and at the same time, women of color, working-class women, and
lesbians all still had grounds for complaints). In addition, it was never decided how to separate the feminine
from other primary social variables that construct a woman's identity. For example, part of the problem in many
feminist organizations, and in WAC in particular, was that the middle-class professional women had the greatest
economic and cultural resources. They therefore had greater opportunity for leadership and policy making. The
women outside this class felt that the professionals had unfair advantages and that their agenda was the primary
one, which in turn brought about a destructive form of separation.
Cyborgs are gendered and perpetuate gender stereotypes
Smith 9 [Nicole R, Wangechi Mutu: Feminist Collage and the Cyborg, Georgia State University, 12/1/2009
http://scholarworks.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1052&context=art_design_theses LM]
Though Haraways ironic political myth of the cyborg remains a powerful metaphor in feminist studies, critical assessments of it provide further suggestions on the
most productive ways to consider feminist cyborg figurations. In one of the better-known critical assessments of the cyborg, Anne Balsamo offers an ironic
ethnographic reading. Balsamo follows Haraways lead in reading the cyborg as a figure that can potentially disrupt concepts of the other in terms of human/machine
and natural/artificial binaries. However, Balsamo finds that the cyborg of popular culture does not completely follow through on this disruptive promise in terms of
gender binaries. She points out that popularized

versions of cyborgs in literature and film do not exist in a post-gendered or

utopian world but are instead highly gendered entities. On the one hand, female-gendered cyborgs, as fusions of
the female with machines and technology, challenge traditional gender assumptions due to the way femininity
has historically been associated with the emotional or sexual, as masculinity has with the rational, scientific, and
technological. Yet according to Balsamo, female cyborgs, while challenging the relationship between femaleness and technology, actually
perpetuate oppressive gender stereotypes. Balsamo singles out Rachel in Ridley Scotts Blade Runner and Helva in Anne McCaffreys sciencefiction novel The Ship that Sang as examples of how popular images of cyborgs reinforce the feminine as emotional, nurturing, or sexually objectified. Sara Cohen
Shabot adds William Gibsons cyfwwweberpunk novels and the films Robocop, The Terminator, and Total Recall as examples that further entrench normative views on
male and female gendered identities. Ultimately, both Balsamo and Shabot argue that the cyborg

of popular culture falls short of Haraways

vision of the cyborg as a figure capable of subverting patriarchal power structures and essentializing views on
gender. In similar fashion, Shabot also finds problematic the hyper-sexualized body found in popular versions of
female cyborgs. This body is configured as an ideal body type in its hyperreality.
Cyborg imagery reinforces hegemonic depictions of masculinity
Walton 4 [Heather, The Gender of the Cyborg Theology Sexuality 2004 10: 33]
Cyborgs appear in many forms today. Their ubiquitous presence is felt whenever the boundaries that separate the human from the machine are breached
and the conventions of ontological hygiene (Graham 2002: 3335) are compromised. Many feminists would claim that these cyborgs are not only
present everywhere but active and working to sustain the representational practices through which gender is enduringly
inscribed within our culture. Anne Balsamo argues that cyborgs are in fact the postmodern icon, produced within a culture

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which is saturated by a technological male imaginary and that the dominant representation of cyborgs reinserts us into the
dominant ideology by reaffirming bourgeois notions of human, machine and femininity (1999:154). There are many arguments that
can be made to support this argument. On the most basic level it is clear that our most mundane experiences of cyborg practice, when we reach
beyond our flesh through the computer keyboard, are gendered. Research indicates that boys enjoy losing themselves in
the world of virtual reality and see the machine as a quasi living entity with which they can form a passionate relation.
Girls are more likely to see their computers as tools aiding them in better interpersonal communication. Perhaps more worrying
than this differentiated experience is the fact that the virtual worlds to which our computers provide access have become yet other sites
of violence against women. In the ubiquitous availability of pornography on the internet the real time violation of girls and women is transformed into a
virtual commodity. This can be purchased, swapped or secretly traded in an unholy exploitation of an elision between human flesh and screen image. There is also
a growing awareness of the sexual harassment that is routinely experienced by women in online discussions, fantasy
games and via e-mail. The chatroom can be as much a male space as the boardroom and the dangers this presents to girls and women are becoming
increasingly apparent. If we begin to look beyond the interface with the computer and turn to popular cultural representations of the cyborg, we find that many of these
also extend into our imagined futures the dominant gendered forms of today. From the comic book to the screen mediums, we are all familiar

with representations of cyborgs that exaggerate and heighten, pleasurably and creatively or crudely and violently, the
representations of gender already in circulation. From Metropolis to James Bond, from Stepford Wives to The Terminator gender representation are
the means through which the significance of human identity in a technological future is experimented with, tested out and retransmitted. Male and female figures play
familiar roles in these productions. To be sure, as Jenny Wolmark has argued, feminist science fiction has created cyborg images that reorder boundaries and demolish
polarities (1999b: 237). And yes, as she has argued further, the strong women characters in some cyberpunk fictions and film owe much to these feminist interventions
(1999a: 142). We might even concede that male cyborgs through their hypermasculinity do queer themselves - or as Lois McNay would have it fetishised images of
masculinity bear within themselves traces of the feminised man transvestite and thus point towards their own constitutive instability and displacement (2000: 55). It is
nevertheless the case that gender stereotypes are more likely to be reaffirmed than challenged by the majority of cultural

depictions of the post/human. As Mary Doane writes: Although it is certainly true that in the case of some contemporary
science fiction writers - particularly feminist authors - technology makes possible a destabilisation of sexual identity as a
category, there has also been a curious but fairly insistent history of representations of technology which work to fortify
sometimes desperately conventional understandings of the feminine (in Balsamo 1999 : 148).

Cyborgs sustain and reify traditional gender categories

Walton 4 [Heather, The Gender of the Cyborg Theology Sexuality 2004 10: 33]
It is not remarkable that cyborg images have become part of the desperate work to sustain conventional gender categories .
Popular cultural icons are not only compelling because of their novelty but precisely because they return us via modern vehicles, to classic sites of cultural tension and
anxiety. This is made very clear in Grahams writing on monsters, the golem and the cultural prehistory of the cyborg. These sites of stress are where, what Julia
Kristeva (1982) has termed, the powers of horror and the mechanisms of female abjection are most clearly discerned and reproduced . This reminds us, contra

to much of the more optimistic literature on cyborgs, that the boundary territory or border where identity is contested is
not always a happy place of delightful confusion. It is also the site where stands a victimising machine at the cost of
which become the subject of the symbolic as well as the other of the abject (Kristeva 1982: 112). This victimizing mechanism
is the means through which social anxieties are resolved through the reproduction of subjectivities in conformity with a
phallogocentric symbolic order that cannot tolerate the disruptive indeterminacy of the feminine .1 Many of our most
enduring cultural anxieties are related to the need to achieve mastery over the threat to social order posed by the baleful forces of
the feminine sphere. These primal fears and the mechanisms for their overcoming are rehearsed again for us in cyborg dramas .
Many of these are concerned with the ambivalence of maternal power and the necessity to achieve discreet subjectivity through relinquishing the maternal connection.
Kristeva has a vivid metaphor for the abjection of the maternal by the subject who seeks individuation through repudiation of identity with the mother. She describes it
as vomiting milk (1982: 3-4). This is enacted in The Matrix where the one who is to come is detached from his cyborg continuity with the maternal nexus that feeds
him, nurtures him and incorporates his identity and vital force. He spews white fluid. Overlapping anxieties to those concerning maternal power

are articulated around issues concerning human reproduction. This is an area where many deep fears are situated
concerning personal origins individuation, continuity, familial and sexual authority, ethnicity, the dispersion of property
and the continuation of the species - to name but a few! The cyborg bears these concerns into the popular imagination for,
as Bladerunner famously illustrates, no cyborg has a mummy but they do possess the potential for endless replication. Once again the
threats cyborgs present to our discrete humanity (ontological hygiene) are frequently feminized. The cyborg temptress may seduce the real man or
the frail woman may be a less vigilant defender of ontological hygiene than her male partner. This is the case in Stephen Spielburgs
truly awful film, AI, in which the mother character is presented as a source of weakness that may lead to the adulteration of the species. She is more amenable to loving
the replicant, the mecha child, whereas the fathers concerns are for his own damaged but authentic, human son. It is not only in the popular representation of cyborg
characters that gender signifiers alert us to deep social unease. The cyborg sphere of existence, this real-becoming-virtual world, is also

commonly portrayed as a feminine space. It is imaged as a place of fascination, illusion, pleasure, loss of self. Here we

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lose our human freedom, and are confined in a docile servitude. Nicola Nixon, writing on cyber punk, speaks of a
feminized universe inhabited by ghosts (1999:199). In the film The Matrix this imagery is striking as human creatures are plugged into their nurturing but
destructive captivity. And in Kronenburgs Existenz we are captivated by Allegra, the dangerous queen of gaming and her organic, fleshly game pod (which Graham has
likened to breasts but which I see as placental) that leads us innocents into a place of foul flesh and abasement.

No link turn widespread opposition only a risk of the link

Walton 4 [Heather, The Gender of the Cyborg Theology Sexuality 2004 10: 33]
However, it

is also plain why this post/human figure is an anathema to other women activists. Feminist politics are marked
by what Curti has described as a nostalgic preoccupation with the abandonment of the real, particularly the political real
(1998: 1). The reality check of this nostalgic feminism is the figure of the flesh and blood woman in living relation with
others and suffering material oppression. It is against the representations of this figure (who is also a cultural fabulation) that all
feminist interventions are judged. What is to be feared is that her needs will be neglected by those who are supposed to be dedicated to her emancipation as
they are seduced by other, more trivial but superficially engaging, concerns. It is not going to be easy to persuade feminists (particularly religious
feminists and feminist theologians) to relinquish this icon and embrace silicon skin . And perhaps the nostalgia Curti
correctly identifies within contemporary feminism for the real struggles of real women should be viewed as a legitimate
defensive reaction to the illusion that transformed political futures are easily achieved through processes of cultural
change and resymbolization. Surely the mechanisms of power which have regulated sexual relations in the past so effectively are not so easily transformed?

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impact answers / cede the political

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1nc case frontline

They cede politics to the right and reinscribe gender roles
McCluskey 8 [Martha, Professor of Law and William J. Magavern Faculty Scholar @ SUNY Buffalo Law,
How Queer Theory Makes Neoliberalism Sexy, Buffalo Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2008-15]
Queer theory's anti-moralism works together with its anti-statism to advance not simply "politics," but a specific vision of good
"politics" seemingly defined in opposition to progressive law and morality. This anti-statist focus distinguishes queer theory from other
critical legal theories that bring questions of power to bear on moral ideals of justice. Kendall Thomas (2002), for example, articulates a critical political model that
sees justice as a problem of "power, antagonism, and interest," (p. 86) involving questions of how to constitute and support individuals as
citizens with interests and actions that count as alternative visions of the public. Thomas contrasts this political model of justice with a moral justice aimed at
discovering principles of fairness or institutional processes based in rational consensus and on personal feelings of respect and dignity. Rather than evaluating the moral
costs and benefits of a particular policy by analyzing its impact in terms of harm or pleasure, Thomas suggests that a political vision of justice would focus on analyzing
how policies produce and enhance the collective power of particular "publics" and "counterpublics" (pp. 915). From this political perspective of

justice, neoliberal economic ideology is distinctly moral, even though it appears to be anti-moralist and to reduce moral principles to competition
between self-interested power. Free-market economics rejects a political vision of justice , in this sense, in part because of its expressed
anti-statism: it turns contested normative questions of public power into objective rational calculations of private
individual sensibilities. Queer theory's similar tendency to romanticize power as the pursuit of
individualistic pleasure free from public control risks disengaging from and disdaining the
collective efforts to build and advance normative visions of the state that arguably define
effective politics. Brown and Halley (2002), for instance, cite the Montgomery bus boycott as a classic example of the left's
problematic march into legalistic and moralistic identity politics. In contrast, Thomas (2002) analyzes the Montgomery bus boycott as a positive
example of a political effort to constitute a black civic public, even though the boycott campaign relied on moral language to advance its cause, because it also
emphasized and challenged normative ideas of citizenship (p. 100, note 14). By glorifying rather than deconstructing the neoliberal dichotomy

between public and private, between individual interest and group identity, and between demands for power and demands
for protection, queer theory's anti-statism and anti-moralism plays into a right-wing double bind . In the current
conservative political context, the left appears weak both because its efforts to use state power get constructed as
excessively moralistic (the feminist thought police, or the naively paternalistic welfare state) and also because its efforts to resist state power get
constructed as excessively relativist (promoting elitism and materialism instead of family values and community wellbeing). The right, on the other hand, has it both ways, asserting its moralism as inherent private authority transcending human
subjectivity (as efficient market forces, the sacred family, or divine will) and defending its cultivation of self-interested
power as the ideally virtuous state and market (bringing freedom, democracy, equality to the world by exercising economic and
military authoritarianism). From Egalitarian Politics to Renewed Conservative Identity Queer theory's anti-statism and anti-moralism risks
not only reinforcing right-wing ideology, but also infusing that ideology with energy from renewed
identity politics . Susan Fraiman (2003) analyzes how queer theory (along with other prominent developments in left academics and culture) tends to
construct left resistance as a radical individualism modeled on the male "teen rebel , defined above all by his strenuous alienation from
the maternal" (p. xii). Fraiman observes that this left vision relies on "a posture of flamboyant unconventionality [that] coexists with
highly conventional views of gender [and] is , indeed, articulated through them " (p. xiii). Fraiman links
recent left contempt for feminism to a romantic vision of "coolness ... epitomized by the modem adolescent boy in his anxious, selfconscious and theatricalized will to separate from the mother" who is by definition uncoolcontrolling, moralistic,
sentimental and not sexy. (p. xii). Even though queer theory distinguishes itself from feminism by repudiating dualistic ideas
of gender, its anti-foundationalism covertly promotes an essentialist "binary that puts femininity,
reproduction, and normativity on the one hand, and masculinity, sexuality, and queer
resistance on the other" (p. 147). This binary permeates queer theory's condemnation of "governance feminism."
(Brown and Halley, 2002; Wiegman, 2004) a vague category mobilizing images of the frumpy, overbearing, unexciting, unfunny, and not-so-smart
"schoolmarm" (Halley, 2002) whose authority will naturally be undermined when real "men" appear on the scene. Suggesting the
importance of gender conventions to the term's power, similar phrases do not seem to have gained comparable academic currency as a way to deride the complex
regulatory impact of other specific uses of state authority -for instance postmodernists do not seem to widely denounce "governance anti-racism," "governance
socialism," "governance populism," "governance environmentalism" or "governance masculinism" (though Brown and Halley do criticize progressive law reform more
generally with the term "governance legalism" (p. 11)). Queer attraction to an adolescent masculinist idea of the "cool' dovetails smoothly

with the identity politics of the right. Right-wing politics and culture similarly condemn progressive and feminist policies

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with the term "nanny state" (McCluskey, 2000; 2005a). The "nanny state" epithet enlists femaleness or femininity as shorthand to make some
government authority feel bad to those comfortable with or excited by a masculinist moral order, it adds to this sentimental power by coding the maternal authority to be
resisted as a "nanny" (rather than simply a "mommy"), enlisting identities of class, ageand perhaps race and nationalityto enhance uncritical suspicions of disorder
and illegitimacy. The "nanny state" slur tells us that a rougher and tougher neoliberal state, market, and family will bring the

grown-up pleasures, freedom, and power that are the mark and privilege of ideal manhood . The "nanny state" is not an isolated
example of the use of gender identity to disparage progressive or even centrist policies that are not explicitly identified as
feminist or gender-related. For example, "girlie-man" gained currency in the 2004 presidential election to disparage opposition to George W. Bush's right-wing
economic and national security policies (Grossman and McClain, 2004), and and in 2008 critics of presidential candidate Barack Obama similarly linked him to
disparaging images of femininity (Campanile 2008; Faludi 2008). These terms open a window into the connections between economic

libertarianism and moral fundamentalism. Libertarianism's anti-statism and anti-moralism requires sharp distinctions between public and private,
morality and power, individual freedom and social coercion. The problem, if we assume these distinctions are not self-evident facts, is that libertarianism must refer
covertly to some external value system to draw its lines. Identity conventions have long helped to do this work , albeit in complex and sometimes
contradictory ways. Power appears weak, deceptive, illegitimate, manipulative, controlling, undisciplined, oppressive, exceptional, or naive if it is feminized; but
strong, self-satisfying, public-serving, protective, orderly, rational, and a normal exercise of individual freedom if it is masculinized. Conventional political

theory and culture identifies legitimate authority with an idea of a masculine power aimed at policing supposedly weaker or
subordinate others. A state that publicly depends on and promotes such power enhances rather than usurps private freedom and
security in citizenship, market, and family, according to the traditional theory of the patriarchal household as model for the
state (see Dubber, 2005). Queer theory updates this pre-modern political ideology into smart postmodernism and transgressive
politics by re-casting its idealized masculine power in the image of a youthful and sexy disdain for
feminized concerns about social, bodily, or material limits and support . In her challenge to this queer
romanticization of "coolness," Fraiman (2003) instead urges a feminism that will "question a masculinity overinvested in youth, fearful of the mutable flesh, and on the
run from intimacy ... [to] claim, in its place, the jouissance of a body that is aging, pulpy, no longer intact... a subject who is tender-hearted ... who is neither too hard
nor too fluid for attachment; who does the banal, scarcely narratable, but helpful things that moms' do" (p. 158). Feminist legal theory concerned with economic politics
adds to this alternative vision an ideal that advances and rewards the pleasure, power, and public value of the things done by some of those moms' nannies (McCluskey,
2005a)or by the many others engaged in the work (both paid and unpaid) that sustains and enhances others' pleasure and power in and out of the home (McCluskey,
2003a; Young, 2001). One means toward that end would be to make the domestic work (and its play and pleasure) conventionally treated as both banal or spiritual (see
Roberts, 1997b) deserving of a greater share of state and market material rewards and resources on a more egalitarian basis, as Fineman's (2004) vision would do.

That means the aff lapses into new-age individualistic therapy, in which suburban white kids get to
pretend theyre pirates, which demolishes collective political action
Myers 13 [Ella, Assistant Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies at the University of Utah, 2013,
Wordly Ethics: Democratic Politics and Care for the World, p. 44-45]
Unfortunately, Connolly is inconsistent in this regard, for he also positions Foucauldian self-

artistry as an essential preliminary to, and

even the necessary condition of, change at the macropolitical level .104 That is, although Connolly claims that micropolitics
and political movements work in tandem, each producing effects on the other,105 he sometimes privileges action by the self on itself
as a starting point and necessary prelude to macropolitical change. This approach not only avoids the
question of the genesis of such reflexive action and its possible harmful effects but also indicates that collective
efforts to alter social conditions actually await proper techniques of the self . For example, in a rich discussion of criminal
punishment in the United States, Connolly contends that today the micropolitics of desire in the domain of criminal violence has
become a condition for a macropolitics that reconfigures existing relations between class, race, crime and punishment .106
Here and elsewhere in Connollys writing the sequencing renders these activities primary and secondary rather than
mutually inspiring and reinforcing.107 It is a mistake to grant chronological primacy to ethical selfintervention , however. How, after all, is such intervention, credited with producing salient effects at the macropolitical
level, going to get off the ground , so to speak, or assuredly move in the direction of democratic engagement (rather
than withdrawal , for example) if it is not tethered, from the beginning, to public claims that direct
attention to a specific problem, defined as publicly significant and changeable ? How and why would an
individual take up reflexive work on the desire to punish if she were not already attuned , at least partially, to problems
afflicting current criminal punishment practices ? And that attunement is fostered, crucially, by the
macropolitical efforts of democratic actors who define a public matter of concern and elicit the attention of other citizens.108 For
reflexive self- care to be democratically significant, it must be inspired by and continually connected to
larger political mobilizations . Connolly sometimes acknowledges that the arts of the self he celebrates are not

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themselves the starting point of collaborative action but instead exist in a dynamic, reciprocal relation with
cooperative and antagonistic efforts to shape collective arrangements. Yet the selfs relation with itself is also
treated as a privileged site , the very source of democratic spirit and action. This tendency to prioritize the selfs
reflexive relationship over other modes of relation defines the therapeutic ethics that ultimately emerges out of Foucaults and, to a
lesser degree, Connollys work. This ethics not only elides differences between caring for oneself and caring for
conditions but also celebrates the former as primary or, as Foucault says, ontologically prior . An ethics
centered on the selfs engagement with itself may have value, but it is not an ethics fit for democracy .

Ascribing violence to metaphysical concepts like the liberal subject is essentialist and wrong---ontology
does not determine politics
Schwartz 8 [Joseph M., professor of political science at Temple, The Future of Democratic Equality, p 59-60,
google books]
To contend that only an anti-foundationalist, anti-realist epistemology can sustain democracy is to argue precisely for a
foundational metaphysical grounding for the democratic project. It is to contend that ones
epistemology determines ones politics . Hence, Brown and Butler both spoke at a spring 1998 academic conference at the University of
California at Santa Cruz where some attributed reactionary and left cultural conservatism to belief in reactionary foundationalist humanism42 Poststructuralism cannot escape its own essentialist conception of identity. For example, Butler contends in Feminist Contentions that democratic feminists must embrace
the post-structuralist non-definability of woman as best suited to open democratic constitution of what it is to be a woman.43 But this is itself a closed position
and runs counter to the practices of many democratic feminist activists who have tried to develop a pluralist, yet collective identity around the shared experiences of
being a woman in a patriarchal society (of course, realizing that working-class women and women of color experience patriarchy in some ways that are distinct from the
patriarchy experienced by middle-class white women). One query that post-structuralist theorists might ask themselves: has there ever existed a mass

social movement that defined its primary ethical values as being those of instability and flux ? Certainly many sexual
politics activists are cognizant of the fluid nature of sexuality and sexual and gender identity. But only a small (disproportionately university educated) segment
of the womens and gay and lesbian movement would subscribe to (or even be aware of) the core principles of post-structuralist
anti-essentialist epistemology. Nor would they be agnostic as to whether the state should protect
their rights to express their sexuality. Post-structuralist theorists cannot avoid justificatory arguments for why some identities should be
considered open and democratic and others exclusionary and anti-democratic. That is, how could post-structuralist political theorists argue that Nazi or Klan ethics
are antithetical to a democratic societyand that a democratic society can rightfully ban certain forms of agonal (e.g. harassing forms of behavior against minorities)

of radical democratic pluralism cannot be securely grounded by a

whole-hearted epistemological critique of enlightenment rationality. For implicit to any radical
democratic project is a belief in the equal moral worth of persons ; to embrace such a position renders one at least a
critical defender of enlightenment values of equality and justice , even if one rejects enlightenment metaphysics and believes that such values
are often embraced by non-Western cultures. Of course, democratic norms are developed by political practice and struggle rather
than by abstract philosophical argument . But this is a sociological and historical reality rather than a trumping philosophical proof.
Liberal democratic publics rarely ground their politics in coherent ontologies and epistemologies ; and even
among trained philosophers there is no necessary connection between ones metaphysics and ones politics .
There have, are, and will be Kantian conservatives (Nozick), liberals (Rawls), and radicals (Joshua Cohen; Sosuan Okin); teleologists, left,
center, and right (Michael Sandel, Alasdair McIntyre, or Leo Strauss); anti-universalist feminists (Judith Butler, Wendy Brown) and quasiuniversalist, Habermasian feminists (Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser). Post-structuralists try to read off from an epistemology or
ontology a politics; such attempts simply replace enlightenment meta-narratives with postmodern
(allegedly anti-) meta-narratives. Such efforts represent an idealist version of the materialist effortwhich post-structuralists explicitly condemnto
read social consciousness off the structural position of the agent. A democratic political theory must offer both a theory of social structure
struggle on the part of such anti-democratic groups. A politics

and of the social agents capable of building such a society. In exchanging the gods of Weber and Marx for Nietzsche and Heidegger (or their epigones Foucault and

theory has abandoned the institutional analysis of social theory for the idealism
of abstract philosophy .

Derrida), post-structuralist

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The aff fails---deriding all attempts at action as freezing becoming no way to deal with difficult political
choices---we also control terminal uniqueness because they cant convince others to abandon liberal
subjectivity
Schwartz 8 [Joseph, Professor of Political Science at Temple University, The Future of Democratic Equality,
56-61]
A politics

of radical democratic pluralism cannot be securely grounded by a whole-hearted epistemological critique of

enlightenment rationality. For implicit to any radical democratic project is a belief in the equal moral worth of persons;
to embrace such a position renders one at least a critical defender of enlightenment values of equality and justice, even
if one rejects enlightenment metaphysics and believes that such values are often embraced by non-Western cultures. Of course, democratic
norms are developed by political practice and 60 struggle rather than by abstract philosophical
argument . But this is a sociological and historical reality rather than a trumping philosophical proof. Liberal democratic publics rarely ground
their politics in coherent ontologies and epistemologies; and even among trained philosophers there is no necessary
connection between ones metaphysics and ones politics. There have, are, and will be Kantian conservatives (Nozick), liberals (Rawls), and
radicals (Joshua Cohen; Susan Okin); teleologists, left, center, and right (Michael Sandel, Alasdair McIntyre, or Leo Strauss); anti-universalist feminists (Judith Butler,
Wendy Brown) and quasi-universalist, Habermasian feminists (Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser). Post-structuralists try to read off from an epistemology or ontology a
politics; such attempts simply replace enlightenment meta-narratives with postmodern (allegedly anti) meta-narratives. Such efforts represent an idealist version of the
materialist effortwhich post-structuralists explicitly condemnto read social consciousness off of the structural position of the agent. A democratic

political theory must offer both a theory of social structure and of the social agents capable of building such a society. In
exchanging the gods of Weber and Marx for Nietzsche and Heidegger (or their epigones Foucault and Derrida), poststructuralist theory has abandoned
the institutional analysis of social theory for the idealism of abstract philosophy. Connolly, Brown, and Butler reject explicit moral deliberation
as a bad faith Nietzschean attempt at ressentiment. Instead, they celebrate the amoral, yet ethical strivings of a Machiavellian or Gramscian realist war of
position.44 Sheldon Wolin, however, has written convincingly of how Machiavelli can be read as an ethical realist, a theorist of moral utilitarianism.45 Even a
Machiavellian or Gramscian political realist must depend upon moral argument to justify the social utility of hard political choices. That is, if one reads both as
ethical utilitarians who believe that, at times, one must dirty ones hands in order to act ethically in politics, then they embrace a utilitarian, just war theory of
ethical choice. According to this consequentialist moral logic, bad means are only justifiable if they are the only, unavoidable way to achieve a greater ethical good
and if the use of such bad means are absolutely minimized. Such hard

political choices yield social policies and political

outcomes that fix identities as well as transform them . Not only in regard to epistemological questions has post-structuralist
theory created a new political metaphysics which misconstrues the nature of democratic political practice; the post-structuralist analysis of the death of
man and the death of the subject also radically preclude meaningful political agency . As with Michel Foucault, Butler
conceives of subjects as produced by powerknowledge discourses. In Butlers view, the modernist concept of an autonomous subject is a fictive construct; and

the very act of adhering to a belief in autonomous human choice is to engage in exclusion and differentiations, perhaps a
repression, that is subsequently concealed, covered over, by the effect of autonomy.46 That is, the power of discourse, of language and the unconscious, produces
subjects. If those subjects conceive of themselves as having the capacity for conscious choice, they are guilty of
repressing the manner in which their own subjectivity is itself produced by discursive 61 exclusion: if we agree that politics and
a power exist already at the level at which the subject and its agency are articulated and made possible, then agency can be presumed only at the cost of refusing to
inquire into its construction.47 Susan Bickford pithily summarizes the post-structuralist rejection of the modernist subject: power is not wielded by autonomous
subjects; rather through power, subjectivity is crafted.48 Bickford grants that post-structuralism provides some insight into how group and individual identity is
culturally constructed. But Bickford goes on to contend that after post-structuralism exposes the lie of the natural (that there are no

natural human identities), socially constructed modern individuals still wish to act in consort with others
and to use human communication to influence others: people generally understand
themselves as culturally constituted and capable of agency .49 For if there is no doer behind the deed, but
only performative acts that constitute the subject, how can the theorist (or activist) assign agency or moral responsibility to actors who are
constituted by discursive practices. (Discursive practices engaged in by whom, the observer may ask?) Butler insists that not only is the subject
socially constituted by power/knowledge discourses, but so too is the ontologically reflexive self of the enlightenment. Now if this claim is simply that all social
critics are socially-situated, then this view of agency is no more radical a claim than that made by Michael Walzer in his conception of the social critic (or agent).
Walzer argues that even the most radical dissident must rely upon the critical resources embedded within his own culture (often in the almost-hidden interstices of that
culture). Effective critical agency cannot depend on some abstract universal, external logic.50 Asserting that critical capacities are themselves

socially constructed provides the reader with no means by which to judge whether forms of resistance are democratic
and which are not. That is, no matter how hard one tries to substitute an aesthetic, ironic, amoral ethical sensibility for morality,
the social critic and political activist cannot escape engaging in moral argument and justification with fellow citizens. Butler
astutely notes that resistance often mirrors the very powerknowledge discourses it rejectsresisting hegemonic norms without offering alternative conceptions of a
common political life. But Butler seems to affirm the possibility (by whom?) of effective rejection of such norming by performative resignification. But the

resignification of performative discursive constructions provides no criteria by which to judge whether a given
resignification is emancipatory or repressive .51 And just who (if not a relatively coherent, choosing human subject) is performing the

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resignification. Furthermore, if

all forms of identity and social meaning are predicated upon exclusion, then the democratic
theorist needs to distinguish among those identities which exclude in a democratic way and those which exclude in an
anti-humanist, racist, and sexist manner. Some social identities are democratic and pluralist, such as those created by
voluntary affiliations. But other identities, such as structural, involuntary class differences and racial and sexual
hierarchies, must be transformed, even eliminated, if democracy is to be furthered . And how we behaveor performcan subvert (or
reinforce) such undemocratic social structures. But if these social structures are immutably inscribed by62 performative practices, then there can be no democratic
resistance. In her call for an ironic politics of performative resistance, Butler seems to imply that human beings have the capacity to choose which performative
practices to engage inand from which to abstain. If this is the case, then a modernist conception of agency and moral responsibility has covertly snuck its way back
into Butlers political strategy.52

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2nc cede the political

Queer rejection of the state absent a commitment to actual political change results in nothing
Kerl 10 [Eric, Contemporary anarchism, http://isreview.org/issue/72/contemporary-anarchism]
By the end of the decade, anarchism

had established itself as a provocative, radical opposition to the hegemony of pop culture and the
suburban conservatism of Reagan and Thatcher s worldview. At the same time, anarchist ideas were reduced to a tiny cultural milieu, stripped of virtually
all class politics. In this context, anarchism emphasized the politics of the personal; veganism, interpersonal relations, and lifestyle choices, rather than revolutionary

failure of anarchism to convincingly offer a coherent strategy for fighting

oppression meant that many turned to variants of identity politics. Rather than a unified movement, this resulted in an
increasingly disjointed residue of identity-based anarchisms; green anarchism, anarcha-feminism, anarchist people of
color, queer anarchism , etc. Just as the new global justice movement was chalking up some early victories, anarchist
organizations were disappearing. A new global strugglea new anarchism? In 1994, the Zapatista uprising marked the beginning of a worldwide fight
class politics. The

against the excesses of global capitalism. The growth of neoliberalism and global resistance had a profound effect on anarchism internationally. In the United States,
where the few workplace fightbacks were largely isolated and beaten, the 1999 Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization offered a militant, dynamic way of
fighting and immediately became a touchstone for a revived anarchist movement. In this new context, the central discussion within anarchism was no longer about the
nature of oppression. Instead, protest tactics became the immediate focushow to recreate the success of Seattle during other meetings of world capitalist elites. This
new emphasis on street tactics marked a significant turn from debates on the roots of oppression . In fact, much of the global

justice movement fostered an atmosphere hostile to political debate . Under the guise of building consensus, minority
perspectives were systematically buried. While much of the movement was preoccupied with a diversity of tactics, little
room was left to discuss the very real diversity of politics and ideas that existed in the movement. The new movement
did arrive, first in the pentecostal appearance of the Zapatistas in 1994, then in 1999 and after at Seattle, Quebec, Genoa, and Cancn, explains Staughton Lynd in
Wobblies and Zapatistas. Moreover, mirabile dictu, it arrived not exactly with a theory, but at least with a rhetoric: the vocabulary of anarchism. Far be it from me...to
tell these splendid and heroic young people that they need more and better theory. I will just say that I am worried that in the absence of theory, many of

those

who protest in the streets today may turn out to be sprinters rather than long-distance
runners .9I will just say that I am worried that in the absence of theory, many of those who protest in the streets today may
turn out to be sprinters rather than long-distance runners . This evolving emphasis on practice over
theoryand in some cases the elevation of tactics to the level of principle exposes two problems for contemporary
anarchism. First, the anarchist method was transformed into its raison dtre. The tactic itself became the goal.
Second, this represented a retreat from any goals-based, long-term strategy . As a result, anarchism was chiefly expressed in
the concept of prefigurative politics, where anarchisms method sought to prefigure an anarchist ideal of social relations. In this scenario, the classic anarchist
goal of destroying the state receded into the background. Instead, as Lynd describes the approach, the anarchist project should be to nurture a
horizontal network of self-governing institutions down below, to which whoever holds state power will learn they have to be obedient and accountable.10
Prefigurative politics, of course, have always been part of the anarchist creed. No revolution can ever succeed as a factor of liberation unless the means used to further
it be identical in spirit and tendency with the purposes to be achieved, wrote Emma Goldman.11 What is different about the new anarchism is that

it ignores rather than challenges state power ; instead of the means prefiguring the ends, the means have
become the ends .

The aff is anti-subversive and gets coopted

Halperin, 03 (David, PhD, W. H. Auden Distinguished University Professor of the History and Theory of Sexuality at the University of Michigan, where he is
also Professor of English, womens studies, comparative literature, and classical studies, The Normalization of Queer Theory,
https://www.academia.edu/4924445/The_Normalization_of_Queer_Theory, bgm)

But with the institutionalization of queer theory, and its acceptance by the academy (and by straight academics), have
come new problems and new challenges. There is something odd, suspiciously odd, about the rapidity with which queer
theorywhose claim to radical politics derived from its anti-assimilationist posture, from its shocking embrace of the
abnormal and the marginalhas been embraced by, canonized by, and absorbed into our (largely heterosexual) institutions
of knowledge, as lesbian and gay studies never were. Despite its implicit (and false) portrayal of lesbian and gay studies as liberal, assimilationist, and
accommodating of the status quo, queer theory has proven to be much more congenial to established institutions of the liberal
academy. The first step was for the theory in queer theory to prevail over the queer, for queer to become a harmless
qualifier of theory: if its theory, progressive academics seem to have reasoned, then its merely an extension of what
important people have already been doing all along. It can be folded back into the standard practice of literary and cultural studies, without impeding

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academic business as usual. The

next step was to despecify the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or transgressive content of
queerness, thereby abstracting queer and turning it into a generic badge of subversiveness , a more trendy
version of liberal: if its queer, its politically oppositional, so everyone who claims to be progressive has a vested
interest in owning a share of it. Finally, queer theory, being a theory instead of a discipline, posed no threat to the
monopoly of the established disciplines: on the contrary, queer theory could be incorporated into each of them, and it
could then be applied to topics in already established fields. Those working in English, history, classics, anthropology, sociology, or religion
would now have the option of using queer theory, as they had previously used Deconstruction, to advance the practice of
their disciplinesby queering them. The outcome of those three moves was to make queer theory a game the whole
family could play. This has resulted in a paradoxical situation: as queer theory becomes more widely diffused throughout
the disciplines, it becomes harder to figure out whats so very queer about it , while lesbian and gay studies, which by contrast would seem
to pertain only to lesbians and gay men, looks increasingly backward, identitarian, and outdated.

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2nc becoming/subjectivity fails

Openness to flux and constant becoming destroys the foundations for political institutions necessary to
sustain radical democratic life---some universal, fixed guarantees of equality are crucial to politics
Schwartz 8 [Joseph M., professor of political science at Temple, The Future of Democratic Equality, p 56-57,
google books]
Butler, Brown, and Connolly reject the essentialism of narrow identity politics as an inverted ressentiment of the Enlightenment desire for a universal, homogenized
identity. They judge identity politics to be a politics of wounding, resentment, and victimization that only can yield bad-faith moralization Wendy Brown takes to task
identity politics for essentializing conceptions of group identity. For example, she critiques the work of Catherine MacKinnon as epitomizing identity political
theory, accusing MacKinnon of denying women agency by depicting them purely as victims.38 Brown also remains wary of the patriarchal, conformist nature of
traditional left conceptions of solidarity and citizenship. Browns implicit concept of radical democratic citizenship rests upon the recognition that political identity is
continually in flux and is socially constituted through agonal political struggle. Brown celebrates an Arendtian conception of a polity in which both shared and
particular identities are continually open to reconstruction. In this left Nietzschean view of an everypersons will to power, there can be no cultural certainties or
political givens, as such givens would repress difference and fluidity.39 But, if the human condition is a world of permanent flux, then we must

postulate a human capability of living with constant insecurity, for in this world there can be no stable political institutions
or political identities.40 An ability to calculate the probabilities of political actions or public policies would disappear in
this world of infinite liminality. By assuming that the pre-eminent democratic value is that of leaving all issues as
permanently open to question, post-structuralist democratic theory eschews the theoretical and political
struggle over what established institutions and consensual values are needed to underpin a democratic
society . Post-structuralist analysis has contributed to a healthy suspicion of narrow and essentializing identity politics. But a self-identified feminist, AfricanAmerican, or lesbian activist is likely to value the shared historical narratives that partly constitute such group identities. Of course, if one is a democrat
and a pluralist, one would reject the oppressive homogenization and potentially authoritarian aspects of ethnic or racial chauvinism and of
essentializing types of identity politics. The democratic political home should be open, fluid, and self-reflective; but if
participation is to be open to all, then such a society also needs to reproduce a shared democratic culture and the institutional
guarantee of democratic rights. That is, contrary to post-structuralist analysis, not all issues can be open to agonal struggle in a democratic
society. The traditional radical democratic critique of democratic capitalism remains valid; the equal worth of the individual is devalued by
rampant social inequality within and between groups. Thus, a radical democrat, whether post-structuralist or not, must not
only be committed to institutional protections of political and civil rights, but also to social rights the equal access to the
basic goods of citizenship (education, health care , housing, child care). Of course, the precise nature and extent of these rights
will be politically contested and constructed. But a democratic society cannot leave as totally open the minimal
institutional basis of democracy a democratic society cannot be agnostic as to the value of freedom of speech, association, and universal suffrage. Social
movements fighting for an expansion of civil, political, and social rights, rarely, if ever, rest their arguments on appeals to epistemological truths whether
foundational or anti-foundational. To remain democratic, their policy goals cannot be so specific that they preclude political argument about both their worth and
how best to institutionalize them. If social movements in a 58 democratic society deemed that every policy defeat meant a betrayal of basic democratic principles, there
would be no give-and-take or winners and losers within democratic politics. But if a government were to abolish freedom of speech and competitive elections, or deny a
social group basic rights, it would be reasonable for an observer to judge that democratic principles had been violated. Democratic political movements and

to construct shared meanings about those political, civil, and social rights that should be guaranteed to all
citizensand they often work to expand the types of persons to be recognized as citizens (such as excluded immigrants). Such arguments are
inevitably grounded in normative arguments that go beyond merely asserting the import of
flux, difference, and anti-essentialism. The civil rights movement did not demand equal rights for all solely as an agonal assertion of the will of
coalitions struggle

the excluded; they desired to gain for persons of color an established set of civil and political rights that had been granted to some citizens and denied to others. The
movement correctly assumed that the exclusion of citizens from full political and civil rights violated the basic norms of a democratic society. Thus, postmodern

epistemological commitments to flux and openness cannot in-and-of-themselves sustain the fixed moral positions
needed to sustain a radical democracy. Post-structuralist theorists openly proclaim their hostility to all philosophical meta-narratives. They reject
comprehensive conceptions of how society operates and the type of society that would best instantiate human freedom. But post-structuralists go beyond
rejecting meta-narratives; they insist that only an anti-foundational epistemology can ground a politics of emancipation. For Butler, Brown, and Connolly, not only
do meta-discourses invariably fail in their efforts to ground moral positions in a theory of human nature or human reason. They also assert that an agonal politics of
democratic we formation can alone sustain democratic society. This agonal politics, they claim, can only be sustained by a recognition of the
inconstant signification of discourse and the ineluctable flux of personal and group identity.41 Rejecting the authoritarian, celebration of the ubermensch
by Nietzsche, they offer a post-Nietzschean, amoral conception of democracy as an open-ended project of defining a self and community that is constantly open to the

despite the
historical reality that social movements often contest dominant narratives in the name of a

desires of others. These theorists constantly reiterate the definitiveness (dare we say foundational truth) of this grounding of democracy,

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stable alternative narrative of a democratic and pluralist community. One might well contend that the poststructuralist political stance is guilty of a new meta-narrative of bad faith, that of anti-foundationalism. According to this
anti-foundational politics, a true democrat must reject any and all a priori truths allegedly grounded upon the nature of human reason or human nature. A committed
democrat may well be skeptical of such neo-Kantian or neo-Hegelian conceptions of freedom; but, many committed democrats justify their moral commitments using
these philosophical methods. A democrat might also reject (or accept) the arguments of a Jurgen Habermas or Hans Georg Gadamer that the structure of human
linguistic communication contains within it the potential for a society based on reasoned argument rather than manipulation and domination. But there are numerous
other philosophically pragmatic ways to justify democracy, even utilitarian ones. Political democrats may well disagree about the best philosophical defense of
democracy. But, invariably, practicing democrats will defend the belief (however philosophically proved or justified) that democratic regimes best fulfill the
moral commitment to the equal worth of persons and to the equal potential of human beings to freely develop and pursue their life plans. To contend that only an antifoundationalist, anti-realist epistemology can sustain democracy is to argue precisely for a foundational metaphysical grounding for the democratic project. It is to
contend that ones epistemology determines ones politics. Hence, Brown and Butler both spoke at a spring 1998 academic conference at the University of
California at Santa Cruz where some attributed reactionary and left cultural conservatism to belief in reactionary

foundationalist humanism.42
Post-structuralism cannot escape its own essentialist conception of identity. For example, Butler contends
in Feminist Contentions that democratic feminists must embrace the post-structuralist nondefinability of woman as best suited to open
democratic constitution of what it is to be a woman.43 But this is itself a closed position and runs counter to the practices of many
democratic feminist activists who have tried to develop a pluralist, yet collective identity around the shared experiences of
being a woman in a patriarchal society (of course, realizing that working-class women and women of color experience patriarchy in some ways that are
distinct from the patriarchy experienced by middle-class white women). One query that post-structuralist theorists might ask themselves: has
there ever existed a mass social movement that defined its primary ethical values as being
those of instability and flux? Certainly many sexual politics activists are cognizant of the fluid nature of sexuality and sexual and gender
identity. But only a small (disproportionately university educated) segment of the womens and gay and lesbian movement would subscribe to (or even be aware of) the
core principles of post-structuralist anti-essentialist epistemology. Nor would they be agnostic as to whether the state should protect their rights to express their
sexuality. Post-structuralist theorists cannot avoid justificatory arguments for why some identities should be considered open

and democratic and others exclusionary and anti-democratic . That is, how could post-structuralist political theorists argue that Nazi or Klan
ethics are antithetical to a democratic societyand that a democratic society can rightfully ban certain forms of agonal (e.g. harassing forms of behavior against
minorities) struggle on the part of such anti-democratic groups.

The affs focus on becoming forever suspends political engagement in favor of self-therapy accepting
some axioms of commonality are necessary to achieve emancipation
Ojeili 3 [Chamsy, Senior Lecturer School of Social and Cultural Studies, Victoria University of Wellington,
Post-modernism, the Return to Ethics, and the Crisis of Socialist Values,
www.democracynature.org/vol8/ojeili_ethics.htm#_edn9]
Notably, anarchists have often been charged with this failing by Marxian thinkers.[157] Anarchism does include those suspicious of the demands of association, those
who fear the tyranny of the majority and who emphasise instead the uniqueness and liberty of the individual. Here, the freedom of the creative individual, unhindered
by the limitations of sociality, is essential. This second strand shows clearly the influence of liberal ideas. It is also, in its bohemian and nihilistic incarnation, a child to
the malevolent trio of De Sade, Stirner, Nietzsche, that is, those who reject coercive community mores and who recoil from herdish, conformist pressures. The free
individual must create his or her own guiding set of values, exploring the hitherto untapped and perhaps darker aspects of him or herself through an art which chaffs
against the standards of beauty and taste of the ordinary mortal. Given that freedom cannot endure limitations and that all idols have been driven from the world and the
mind, for these revolutionaries, all is permitted.[158] This emphasis on individual sovereignty is clear in Godwin and Stirner,[159] but also in Goldmans suspicion of
collective life, in her elevation of the role of heroic individuals in history, and in the work of situationist Raoul Vaneigem.[160] This accent within non-orthodox
socialism has been much criticised. For instance, Murray Bookchin has contrasted social with lifestyle anarchism, rejecting the elevation the self-rule of the
individual in the latter to the highest goal of anarchist thinking.[161] One might consider, here, the consequences, in the case of Emma Goldman, of the

substitution of collective revolutionary change for boheme and for an intellectualist contempt for the masses. Goldman turned
more and more to purely self-expressive activity and increasingly appealed to intellectuals and middle class audiences, who felt amused and flattered by
her individualism and exotic iconoclasm.[162] This egoistic and personalistic turn ignores the essential social anarchist
aspiration to freedom, the commitment to an end to domination in society , the comprehension of the social premises of
the individualist urge itself, and the necessity of moving beyond a purely negative conception of liberty to a thicker, positive conception of freedom.[163] Perhaps, as

recent individualist and neo-situationist concern with subjectivity, expression, and desire is
all too much like middle class narcissism and the self-centred therapeutics of New Age culture .

Bookchin has rather trenchantly asserted, the

Perhaps also, as Barrot has said, the kind of revolutionary life advocated by Vaneigem cannot be lived.[164] Further, total freedom for any one individual necessarily
means diminished freedom for others. As La Banquise argue, Repression and sublimation prevent people from sliding into a refusal of otherness.[165] For socialists,
freedom must be an ineradicably social as well as an individual matter. The whole thrust of libertarian politics is towards a collective project

that reconstructs those freedom-limiting structures of economy, power, and ideology.[166] It seems unlikely that such ambitions could be
achieved by those motivated solely by a Sadean ambition to seek satisfaction of their own improperly understood desires. On this question, Castoriadis is again useful

accenting autonomy as a property of the collective and of each individual within society, and rejecting the opposition
between community and humanity, between the inner man [sic] and the public man [sic].[167] Castoriadis ridiculed abstract

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individualism: We are not individuals, freely floating above society and history, who are capable of deciding
sovereignly and in the absolute about what we shall do, about how we shall do it, and about the meaning our doing will have once it is done Above all, qua
individuals, we choose neither the questions to which we will have to respond nor the terms in which they will be posed, nor, especially, the ultimate meaning of our
response, once given.[168] Rejecting the contemporary tendency to posit others as limitations on our freedom, Castoriadis argued that

others were in fact premises of liberty, possibilities of action, and sources of facilitation.[169] Freedom is the most vital
object of politics, and this freedom always a process and never an achieved state is equated with the effective, humanly
feasible, lucid and reflective positing of the rules of individual and collective activity.[170] An autonomous society one without
alienation explicitly and democratically creates and recreates the institutions of its own world, formulating and reformulating its own rules, rather than simply
accepting them as given from above and outside. The resulting institutions, Castoriadis hoped, would facilitate high levels of responsibility and activity among all
people in respect of all questions about society.[171] Castoriadis notion of social transformation holds to the goals of integrated human communities, the unification of
peoples lives and culture, and the collective domination of people over their own lives.[172] He was also committed to the free deployment of the

persons creative forces. Just as Castoriadis enthused over the capacity of human collectivities for immense works of creativity and responsibility,[173] so he
insisted on the radical creativity of the individual and the importance of individual freedom. Congruent with the notion of social autonomy, Castoriadis posited the
autonomous individual as, most essentially, one who legislates for and thus regulates him or herself.[174] Turning to psychoanalysis, he designated this autonomy as the

these goals were not

guaranteed by anything outside of the collective activity of people towards such goals , and he
insisted that individual autonomy could only arise under heavily instituted conditions through the
instauration of a regime that is genuinely democratic .[175] Such an outcome could not be
solved in theory but only by a re-awakening of politics. Only in the clash of opinions dependent on a
restructured social formation not determined in advance by naturalistic or religious postulates, could a true ethics emerge.[176] This, I
emergence of a more balanced and productive relationship between the ego and the unconscious. For Castoriadis,

believe, is the highpoint of libertarian thinking about ethics and politics. Conclusion I have argued that socialist orthodoxy has been eclipsed as a programme for the
good life. On the one hand, it devolves into a project of pragmatic expediency bereft of a political and ethical dimension, where statist administration submerges both
individual freedom and democratic decision-making. On the other hand, as social democracy the orthodox tradition coalesces into a variety of more or less
straightforward liberalism. Liberalism tends to overstate the conception of humans as choosers, under-theorising and under-valuing the necessity of political community
and the social dimension of individuality and the necessity of a positive conception of freedom. The communitarian critique, however, too readily diminishes the
freedoms of the individual, subordinating people entirely to the horizons of community life and reducing politics to something like a general will. Possessed of both
liberal and communitarian features, post-modernism has been skeptical about the idea of a unitary human essence. It has jettisoned the notion of humans as
unencumbered choosers, and it has underscored the constructedness of all our values. In so doing, post-modernism signals a renewed interest in ethics, in
questions of responsibility, evaluation, and

difference, within contemporary social thinking. Post-modernism offers a valuable critique of the tendency of socialist

orthodoxy to bury the socialist insight as to the sociality and historicity of values. Nevertheless, advancing as it does on orthodox socialism, post-

modernisms radical constructivism and its horror at the disasters of confident and unreflective modernity can issue in an ironic hesitancy,
indicated in particular by an uncritical emphasis on pluralism and incommensurability that threatens to
forever suspend evaluation .[177] One signal of this is the cautious and depoliticised obsession with
Otherness and the subject as victim of the return to ethics.[178] Further, post-modernism all too often withdraws from
universals and emancipation towards particularist either individualist or community-based answers to questions of justice and
the content of the valuable life. In contrast, those seeking a radical, inclusive democracy must remain engaged
and universalist in orientation . A number of libertarians have not hesitated in committing themselves, most importantly, to the
emancipation of humanity without exception.[179] In fact, politics and ethics seem unthinkable without such
universalistic aspirations . Post-modernists themselves have often had to submit to this truth, smuggling into their
analyses universally-binding ethico-political principles and attempting to theorise the potential linkages between
progressive political struggles. However, such linkages do not amount to a coherent anti-systemic
movement that addresses the power of state and capital . In contrast, the universalist commitments of the ethics
of emancipation held to by many libertarians accents both freedom and equality , and the establishment of a true
political community , against the dominations and distortions of state and capital. Against the contemporary obsession
with ethics, which is so often sloganistic, depoliticised , defensive, privatised, and trivial, we should, with Castoriadis, accent
politics as primary and as the condition of proper ethical engagement. I have argued that, in line with Castoriadis strictures, such a political
community and the aspiration to truly ethical and political deliberation, can only be attained when socialists free themselves from belief in the possibility of extra social
guarantees other than the free play of passions and needs,[180] and from the expectation of an end to tensions and dilemmas around questions of social ordering. On
these terms, libertarian goals are not contra liberal strictures the negation of aspirations for freedom and democracy but are rather a collective pressing of these
aspirations to the very far limits of popular sovereignty. It is for this reason that the stubborn durability of these goals may, against all expectations, be an auspicious
sign for libertarian utopianism.

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at: global war impact

No war impact
Chandler 9 [David, Professor of International Relations at the Department of Politics and International
Relations, University of Westminster, War Without End(s): Grounding the Discourse of `Global War', Security
Dialogue 2009; 40; 243] //khirn
For many critical post-structuralist theorists, the

global war on terror reveals the essence of liberal modernity and fully reveals the
limits of its universalist ontology of peace and progress , where the reality of Kants perpetual peace is revealed to be perpetual war (Reid, 2006:
18). Perhaps the most radical abstract framing of global war is that of Giorgio Agamben. In his seminal work Homo Sacer, he reframed Foucaults
understanding of biopower in terms of the totalizing control over bare life, arguing that the exemplary places of modern biopolitics [were] the concentration camp and
the structure of the great totalitarian states of the twentieth century (Agamben, 1998: 4; see also Chandler, 2009a). Agambens view of liberal power is that of the
concentration camp writ globally, where we are all merely objects of power, we are all virtually homines sacri (Agamben, 1998: 115). In focusing on biopower as a
means of critiquing universalist policy discourses of global security, critical theorists of global war from diverse fields such as security

studies (Jabri, 2007), development (Duffield, 2007) or critical legal theory (Douzinas, 2007) are in danger of reducing their
critique of war to abstract statements instrumentalizing war as a technique of global power.
These are abstract critiques because the political stakes are never in question : instrumentality and the desire
for regulation and control are assumed from the outset. In effect, the critical aspect is merely in the reproduction of the framework of Foucault
that liberal discourses can be deconstructed as an exercise of regulatory power. Without deconstructing the dominant framings of global security threats, critical
theorists are in danger of reproducing Foucaults framework of biopower as an ahistorical abstraction. Foucault (2007: 1) himself stated that his analysis of biopower
was not in any way a general theory of what power is. It is not a part or even the start of such a theory, merely the study of the effects of liberal governance practices,
which posit as their goal the interests of society the population rather than government. In his recent attempt at a ground-clearing critique of Foucauldian
international relations theorizing, Jan Selby (2007) poses the question of the problem of the translation of Foucault from a domestic to an international context. He
argues that recasting the international sphere in terms of global liberal regimes of regulation is an accidental product of this move. This fails to appreciate the fact that
many critical theorists appear to be drawn to Foucault precisely because drawing on his work enables them to critique the international order in these terms. Ironically,
this Foucauldian critique of global wars has little to do with Foucaults understanding or concerns, which revolved around extending Marxs critique of the
freedoms of liberal modernity. In effect, the post-Foucauldians have a different goal: they desire to understand and to critique war and military intervention as a
product of the regulatory coercive nature of liberalism. This project owes much to the work of Agamben and his focus on the regulation of bare life, where the
concentration camp, the totalitarian state and (by extension) Guantnamo Bay are held to constitute a moral and political indictment of liberalism (Agamben, 1998: 4).

In these critical frameworks, global war is understood as the exercise of global aspirations for control, no longer mediated
by the interstate competition that was central to traditional realist framings of international relations. This less-mediated framework
understands the interests and instrumental techniques of power in global terms. As power becomes understood in
globalized terms, it becomes increasingly abstracted from any analysis of contemporary social
relations : viewed in terms of neoliberal governance, liberal power or biopolitical domination. In this context, global
war becomes little more than a metaphor for the operation of power. This war is a global one because, without
clearly demarcated political subjects, the unmediated operation of regulatory power is held to construct a world that becomes,
literally, one large concentration camp (Agamben, 1998: 171) where instrumental techniques of power can be exercised regardless of frameworks of
rights or international law (Agamben, 2005: 87). For Julian Reid (2006: 124), the global war on terror can be understood as an inevitable
response to any forms of life that exist outside and are therefore threatening to liberal modernity , revealing liberal
modernity itself to be ultimately a terrorising project arraigned against the vitality of life itself. For Jabri , and other
Foucauldian critics, the liberal peace can only mean unending war to pacify, discipline and reconstruct the liberal subject:

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at: puar impact

Homonationalism provides a simplistic account of relationship between tolerance and violence---specific
analysis of material structures and institutions is necessary to solve
Ritchie 14 [Jason, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Florida International University, Pinkwashing,
Homonationalism, and IsraelPalestine: The Conceits of Queer Theory and the Politics of the Ordinary,
Antipode, 3 Jun 2014] //khirn
My argument is not , of course, that racism does not exist in many contemporary contexts including IsraelPalestinenor I am
arguing that tolerance of homosexuals has not , in many of those contexts, been marshaled to provide cover for the
imposition of violence against racialized others (eg the Israeli occupation). My argument, instead , is that the popularity of the
concept of homonationalism owes much to its oversimplifications. Power, in this framework, is reducible to
racism, and racism is understood in a universalizing manner that allows the critic to avoid the messy work of
[locating] the meanings of race and racism within particular fields of discourse [and articulating their
meanings] to the social relations in concrete socio-historical contexts (Solomos and Back 1995:415). I have utilized the
metaphor of the checkpoint to demonstrate what I believe to be a more empirically convincing and politically
engaged account of the everyday violence queer Palestinians face. Focusing on the checkpoint requires one to locate the
racist violence of the Israeli state in a specific time and place, structured by identifiable social and political
processes and inhabited by actual human beings who embody multiple subject positions that differently inflect the ways in
which they encounter those processes and one another. Such a strategy will do little to challenge the monopolization of queer spaces in North American and European
cities by racist neocons like Michael Lucas, nor will it provide a convenient mechanism for radical activistsor theoretically sophisticated academicsto validate their
queer credentials. But if queers who live in other places have some value beyond serving as grist for North American and European queers to consolidate a properly

consider resisting the

impulse to homogenize this or that queer as the victim or the victor and work instead to develop a nuanced
framework for building coalitions to fight rather than platforms on which to fight aboutthe complex and
unpredictable ways space is organized, difference is enforced, and some bodies in some places are allowed to move more freely than others.
radical subjectivity and mitigate their privilege, homonationalism's activist criticsand its theoristsmight

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at: ressentiment impacts

Acting to change the world generates meaning their deterministic account of ressentiment leads to
social Darwinism that causes their impacts
Ure 12 [Michael, date inferred, political and social theory prof at Monash University, Resentment/Ressentiment,
http://www.academia.edu/2434176/Resentment_Ressentiment]
Nietzsche's slave revolt against the aristocratic order of rank larger/ fits the bill of socio-political resentment: it primarily derives from impotent distress about what its

Nietzsche
simply clouds the issue when he explains this socio-political resentment solely in terms of ressentiment
against life, which he conceives as a symptom of physiological degeneracy. If we follow Nietzsche we must agree in effect that
agents claim are global or systematic injustices directed at their social group, rather than individual distress over agent specific acts of malice.

slave protest against aristocratic privilege does not derive from socio-political resentment, but from ressentiment against the fundamental conditions of life, or what we

an aristocratic radical he assumes that a systematically uneven distribution of

power , goods and opportunities can be just as long as it reflects a natural hierarchy of excellence. He also
seems to assume that pagan antiquities' noble-slave divide properly reflected a natural order of rank between flourishing
(ascending) and degenerate (descending) types . He applauds the classical world's unequal distribution of power and goods
on the grounds that it facilitated the flourishing of the highest human types . Since Nietzsche claims the biologically impotent can never
might call ontological ressentiment. As

achieve personal excellence or cultural greatness he argues that their attempts to morally proscribe aggressive, combative drives and to equalize opportunities for all
only serve to eliminate the necessary conditions of existence for the highest human types. Nietzsche believes, then, that we should reverse the

slave revolt, not merely in order to a restore aristocratic privilege, but because to do so is to protect life itself from degeneration.
Nietzsche misconceives socio-political resentment of unjust aristocratic privilege with ressentiment or an attack on the
fundamental conditions of existence. Nietzsche wants to convince us that in attacking the aristocratic order of rank these 'slaves' are attacking 'life' or 'existence'.

Slaves are the enemies of 'life' , not aristocratic privilege. He transforms the political drama of class conflict and
resentment into an apocalyptic conflict between the forces of life affirmation and the forces of life-denial or
ressentiment. If we suspend Nietzsche's aristocratic prejudice, underpinned by the neo-Darwinian
spectre of biological degeneracy, we might argue instead that the unequal distribution of power, goods
and opportunities imposes rather than expresses an order of rank . If we grant this point, we can then conceive
'slave' revolt as legitimate socio-political resentment against political and material inequities, a protest that should aim to
establish conditions that enable the socially and political disadvantaged group the same opportunities to maximise their
capabilities. " What Nietzsche ignores " as Solomon explains "partly because of his own sense of biological
determinism ... is the legitimacy of the felt need to change the world . The sentiment of resentment
may often be a legitimate sense of oppression. It is not the voice of mediocrity or incompetence but
the passion for justice denied ".65 What then of Nietzsche's concept of ressentiment? If his account of the master-slave dynamic is better
understood primarily as a case of socio-political resentment, does the concept of ressentiment have any moral or political significance? Clearly in the modern
speculative philosophical tradition what I am calling ontological ressentiment has taken root as a meaningful concept. However, while we grant ressentiment

status as a peculiar, perhaps even uniquely modern psychological pathology, it remains an open question whether, as Nietzsche assumed, it can
help interpret or explain moral or political phenomena .66

No impact to ressentiment and we can use it productively

Dolgert 10 [Stefan, Prof @ Brock U, In Praise of Ressentiment: OR, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love
Glen Beck, APSA 2010 Annual Meeting Paper, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1642232]
Ressentiment is not jealous: It is not necessary to maintain consistency of political message across time and context.
Ressentiment can be cultivated via the assignment of blame to political enemies while simultaneous speaking of a politics of reconciliation, bipartisanship,
and aisle-crossing. Ronald Reagan coupled an insouciant optimism and personal charm with deft demonization of evil empires, welfare queens, and their fellow
travelers. Left politicians misunderstand the Rightist criticism of flip-flopping because they take the critic to literally mean

what he or she says. The Rightists do not mean this, and they know it. The flip-flopping of ones political allies is as meaningless as the flip- flopping of ones
foes is evidence of hypocrisy, weakness, indecisiveness, etc. Thus one sees plenty of politicians who play to opposite registers (resentment now,
reconciliation later) and who are not punished; the ones who are, like John Kerry, are punished not for 25 flip-flopping but for being
too dull-witted to understand the nature of the game they are playing. Ressentiment should be cultivated at the most general level

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possible, though without ruling out the use of specifics: Personalized narratives of woe are crucial to the refinement of ressentiment, but this should not be taken as
license to go specific at all costs. In particular, examples of particular people should be used carefully, as the most important element of the exemplar is that a general
audience be able to their own story mirrored in the spectacle of misery being displayed before them. While there are numerous possible foci for such a generalized
ressentiment, the corporation and the government agencies beholden to corporate capitalism still seems the most likely and

most fruitful targets of opportunity. It is crucial, however, to maintain the rhetoric of equality of opportunity and the defense of the small businessman
amidst the critique of the corporation. If this seems like an impossible feat, consider that it is no more inherently difficult than Reagans rhetorical evisceration of Big
Government while simultaneously creating the creating the largest American federal government in history. Of course there was a contradiction at the heart of his
program but does identifying this as a debating point have any real effect? Ressentiment is inevitable as long as consumer capitalism holds

sway, according to the theorists most prized by the Left, so we had better make our peace with her : This is not to reify ressentiment,
as I have stated before, but it is to say that the Left more so than the Right has reason to utilize ressentiment with a good conscience. It is
from the Left that 26 we hear the narrative of capitalism as a ressentiment-producing engine of amazing power (Connolly 1988;
Brown 1993), and unless capitalism is about to pass from the scene, which seems wishful thinking of the most extreme nature, the Left should be harnessing
the energy of this current rather than simply criticizing it. There are many filaments that comprise the fiber of the American Left, but whether
indebted to the theories of Marx, Nietzsche, or Rawls, most of these strands implicitly link their political programs to the ressentimentproducing apparatuses of contemporary society. Indeed, Wendy Brown implies that ressentiment is responsible for welfare-state liberalism as such
in the form of attenuations of the unmitigated license of the rich and powerful on behalf of the disadvantaged (Brown 1993, 400). Perhaps I am being unfair here to
Brown, but it sounds as if the welfare state is a rather tawdry achievement. While I have no interest in further propping up the status quo, it

seems worth noting that ressentiments acknowledged role in the creation of liberal democracy, here scoffed at by Brown,
is no small thing. Ressentiment is patient, but not infinitely so. If, as Melissa Lane observes in her study of Platos Statesman, a sense of timing is the sine qua
non of the political ruler (Lane 1998), then we must be sensitive to the kairos, the right moment for the deployment of a ressentiment-filled
rhetoric. It would be difficult to imagine a more opportune moment than the present recession for cultivating a sense of working-class
victimage, yet, oddly enough, it is the Right rather than the Left which has been carrying the banner of anti- finance capital. How is this possible? When one is the
party in power in the United States it is difficult to govern without the consent of the barons of Wall Street, and the 27 Democrats must be particularly solicitous of the
favor of the financial elites since a collapsing Dow Jones, ever skittish of statist Democratic interference, is prone to regard even the mildest brand of Democratic
populism as the equivalent of the October Revolution. Democratic elites have felt it necessary to go the extra mile around a horse as shy as this one, and coupled with
the particular friendships and connections between Obama and his economic advisors, who read like a whos who of Goldman Sachs alums, and it is easy to understand
why it is Glenn Beck rather than Barack Obama who has taken up the populist mantle. That said, opportunities like this do not come along often, and

pivotal electoral moments can reshape the political landscape for decades. The crucial question to ask is how the needs of
the resentful many can be squared with the need to placate corporate power (i.e. to prevent stock markets from crashing,
capital fleeing overseas, international economic sanctions , etc.). Populists from South America to Europe have found multiple answers to this
question, so the dilemma is not an insoluble one. But in order to address this tension the Left must first give up its utopian
hope that the Beloved Community is around the corner, and that all that is needed to get there is one final psychological
purge. The resentful are going to be here for a long time to come , as Brown and Connolly ably demonstrate, so Obama, Pelosi, Reid,
and their successors must begin to think more creatively about how to combine the politics of hope with the politics of
blame. After Ressentiment In closing I would suggest that my praise of ressentiment is also in line with the more deliberatively conceived multiculturalism of the Left
than is the current puritanical disdain. As Monique Deveaux argues, it is a failure of political imagination when we 28 fixate on liberal principles as preconditions to
multicultural dialogue, and in particular it is necessary to move toward a deeper level of intercultural respect rather than mere toleration (Deveaux 2000).10 But if it is
appropriate to go beyond simply tolerating non- liberal peoples abroad and in immigrant communities, if we must go beyond toleration to do justice to the rich tradition
of cultural pluralism, then perhaps we can also open our hearts and minds to the possibility that the ressentiment-suffused need to be heard out as well. Perhaps

rather than demonizing ressentiment as a toxin to politics, as the worst of the worst for subjects whom we purport to free,
we must accept that ressentiment is for many inseparable from their conception of their own freedom . Perhaps rather than
pitying these poor fools, in ways that we would never pity a plural wife in the global South, we should ponder whether
ressentiment as a precondition of subjectivity is as much a gift as a curse. And are we so sure, after all, we late Nietzscheans, that our
crusade against ressentiment is not itself suffused with ressentiment? Is not itself fully in the grips of it? How would we know if it were or werent? Perhaps we
are, in our own way, as spiteful, vain, petty, weak, subjected, enraged against the past, capitalized, consumerized, unfree,
as those we purport to want to free from the chains of slave morality. Perhaps it is ourselves that we need to give a break
to, that we need to get over, when we first look to purge the other of ressentiment. Perhaps we all swim in this current,
perhaps we are all Ressentiments children, and perhaps that is OK even to the extreme of the using ressentiment
unconsciously in the effort to rid the world of ressentiment . Though just in saying so I wouldnt expect that to do much to overturn Ressentiments
reign. No, she is far too puissant for that. But we do not need to rage against the weakness in others because we fear the dependence
and weakness in ourselves. As Vetlesen puts it, defending Amery: Against Nietzsche, who despised victims because he saw them as
weak, as losers in lifes struggles, Amery upholds the dignity of having been forced by circumstances beyond ones
control into that position, thus reminding Nietzsche that as humans we are essentially relational beings, dependent, not
self-sufficient. In hailing the strong and despising the weak, in denying that vulnerability is a basic ineluctably given
human condition, a condition from which not only the role of victim springs but that of the morally responsible agent too,
Nietzsche fails to be the provocateur he loves to believe he is: He sides with the complacent majority and so helps

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reinforce the existential and moral loneliness felt by Amery, the individual victim who speaks up precisely in that capacity (Vetlesen 2006, 43). Perhaps
we can begin to see how we have been using the weak, the viewers of Glenn Beck and others, as the targets for our need to find
blameworthy agents. And that too is fine. The trouble comes when we think weve gone beyond Ressentiment when in
fact were just listening to her whisperings without realizing it. We think that we can well and truly look down on the Rush Limbaughs, these
destroyers of civilization, because they are possessed by something that we are above. And far be it from me to suggest that we should not resent,
should not blame; I merely suggest we direct our blame toward more useful ends than where it is currently located.

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solvency

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1nc solvency
Debate cant solve --- voting for particular bodies reifies subjectivity
Jones 9 [Angela, Queer Heterotopias: Homonormativity and the Future of Queerness, interalia: a journal of
queer studies, 2009 4, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Farmingdale State College,
http://www.interalia.org.pl/en/artykuly/2009_4/13_queer_heterotopias_homonormativity_and_the_future_of_qu
eerness.htm] //khirn
These are spaces with no
ordered categories that qualify and rank bodies. This will require the radical transformation of bodies, subversive
performances, and transforming our minds, our souls, and our thoughts. It seems that queer theorists and queer utopian hopefuls have
pinned their hopes on subjectification. While, I too find the manipulation of the body through a "confused mimesis " (Scheie:
1994) alluring, ultimately, I must wonder if these performances only reify subjectification . The focal point of queer politics cannot
just be the body; queer bodies do not just look queer; these bodies behave queerly. While our bodies are sites of possibilities, we must be careful
about naming these performances and reifying the performances into identities. If all queer performances
Queer heterotopias are a radical post-human vision where nothing is fixed and there are no boundaries, and no hierarchies.

en masse despite their differences constitute queerness then no exclusion is possible.

The affs attempt to use subjectivity break free of binaries reinscribes the each metaphysical hierarchy
they criticize by valorizing the subject while precluding the possibility of seduction by the object --- vote
negative to revert the subject/object dialectic endorsed through the 1ac
Grace 8 [Baudrillards Illusions: The Seduction of Feminism, 2008, VICTORIA GRACE, University of
Canterbury, New Zealand, French Cultural Studies 19(3): 347361] //khirn
In feminist discourse, action and theorising since the mid-twentieth century, the woman who does not revolt, analyse or go
beyond, but who rather employs her position to entrap and seduce the world into her own domain of limitation, is a
particularly galling figure. She is the butt of the patriarchy as much as the scorn of feminism: she is the joke of the music hall, she is the demonic angel who
knows her place and uses it to diminish others in her own narcissistic grandstanding. By making herself prey, according to Beauvoir, she arouses and entraps men
through submissively making herself into a thing (Beauvoir, 1953 [1949]: 727). This passive position of entrapment invariably incites the declaration that woman
desires her position witness her delight, her cunning and her satisfaction. As I discuss below, the perception of such a desire can lead to her being a victim of sacrifice.
Although feminist theory has been transformed since Beauvoir and the second wave through a poststructuralist critique and its aftermath, even though

it is reasonable to
suggest that feminist theorising still wants to steer a course that is well clear of the figure of the feminine depicted above.
the object of feminist concern is now the phallo-centrism of the binary structure itself and not solely the position of women within it, I think
This archetypal feminine (of the fall) cannot be revisited in any incarnation.

This is where the ideas and provocations of Jean Baudrillard appear to contain their danger, their conservatism, indeed
their anti-feminism, and are therefore discouraging of feminist interest. The very word seduction (used frequently by Baudrillard, and the title of one
of his early books) acts as a formidable deterrent . I want to argue that consideration of what Baudrillard is doing with seduction and
similar concepts reveals why feminists should not reject them; my intention is to suggest they are not only useful but
central to a feminist critique. And simultaneously the argument must be made for where Baudrillards elaboration of these conceptual
foundations of his work needs to be critically reviewed for what is possibly its departure from its own terms.
Baudrillard for illusion
At the Baudrillard West of the Dateline conference in Auckland, New Zealand in 2001, Jean Baudrillard concluded his response to a question from Nicholas Zurbrugg
in a roundtable discussion with the statement that Look, I am not above reality, but I am not for hyperreality. I am for illusion (Baudrillard, 2003: 183). Baudrillard
is for illusion, seduction, reversion, singularity, challenge. He seeks

a world in which a radical otherness, an exquisite alterity, flourishes. This

vigorously critical ontology of absence and the nothing is pitted against the positivity of production, identity, power and
the universal a logic of positivity I argue elsewhere is that of phallo-centrism (Grace, 2000). A philosophy of the object as
illusion is one that refuses a valorising of identity and authority; it cannot abide a politics of yearning for the
position of subject in a subject/object dialectic (or in accordance with Beauvoir a world in which all humans are subjects ). To
produce, is to make visible ; to seduce is to remove from the visible order. To produce, within a code of language
and economic exchange is to make, or perform, reality as the thingness of things, to accumulate reality, to have more and more of
it. To seduce is the movement, or principle, that ensures that things circulate, and in their circulation they cancel each
other out. They do not remain, they do not accumulate, they circulate; they appear and disappear .

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This appearance and disappearance is sometimes referred to by Baudrillard as reversion the inevitable reversibility of the world. In the early years of his work,
Baudrillards unique and profoundly important theorisations circled around the fundamental problem of the social constitution of forms of generalised exchange . Any
form of generalised exchange attempts (it can never succeed) to obliterate the singular and incorporate it into a system whereby
a generalised standard of exchange becomes the benchmark against which value or identity is determined . As soon as the value
of an object is determined relative to another for the purpose of an economic exchange, it takes on its identity within that relation of value: one hen is equal in value to a
sack of manure.
How do we know this? By reference to a generalised scale of value that creates abstract quantities as units that can be added together . The meaning of words

in linguistic exchange can be ascertained through a system of signification that generalises a method to establish that a
word means this and not that. The systemisation of generalised exchange in the domains of value and meaning liberates all
exchange into the realm of the possible: only possible because the ontology of objects and language is locatable within
that broader system. It is here relative to there; it has this value relative to that; it means this relative to (not) that. Such an
order of economic and semiological exchange attempts to reduce the singularity of the illusion of things and beings into
the order of reality on a universal scale of difference and comparability . As soon as such a scale is
instituted, the binary constitution of the world is established, the universal is possible, singularity no longer features . Since
this early work Baudrillard has theorised a shift in the political economy of the sign and its parallel economic form, a shift from the universal to the global as the

There is frequent
confusion with Baudrillards reference to the significance of duality. With irreducible otherness, with the impossible exchange
351 of singularities, we confront the dual relation. As Baudrillard said at the roundtable discussion in 2001: Duality, duel, dopplegnger. All that is beyond
the individuality [sic], the other. Duality doesnt at all mean two, two things, two beings. There may be multiple ones but with
duality there is a sort of symbolic challenge, and for challenging you must be opposite, you must be antagonistic, you
must not be in a dialectical relation between subjects and objects, between individual and other, the social. That is our
system of values but we must break with it ... We must restore the secret of duality, of the dualistic, in the core of our
situation, of our actual system. (Baudrillard, 2003: 187) Following Nietzsche, this intervention of Baudrillards (only very briefly sketched here)
represents, I think, the most radical critique of the structure of identity/difference and its ontological commitments that we (in
our occidental philosophy) have. Its seduction not only reverses the universal and its truth, but also the investments in generalised
economic and semiological exchange on which this structure relies . Through this critique, identity/difference as a system of
equivalence/non-equivalence confronts the alterity of duality; its terms become that of the duel, a relation of the agon, and
they cannot be exchanged. This has to be consistent with a feminist project to transform specifically
the phallo-centric investments in this very structure of identity/difference.
hyperreal morphs into the integral reality of the virtual. Before explaining this in more detail, a word on Baudrillards notion of duality.

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at: mimesis
Their mimesis is mere repetition, in which they imagine some subversive remainder exudes from their
speeches this doesnt do anything but guarantee us a link, because that remainder does not exist after
getting swallowed whole by a very hungry phallagocentric economy
Grace 2k [Victoria, Canterbury sociology professor, Baudrillard's Challenge: A Feminist Reading, p. 53-4]
//khirn
Baudrillard is clear in his support for feminism when feminist critique and activism are aimed at the code, at the
fundamental problem of the dichotomous logic that creates the split of male/female and makes the female the unmarked
term (see MOP: 1345). In the opening to this chapter I indicated that Baudrillards objection to feminism stems from his
critique of a movement of those on the other side of the bar who articulate their desire to instantiate a subjectivity, a
positive identity. Such a desire fails to oppose the binary logic instituting an essentialist and phallocentric ontology. In
Irigarays work we have seen an ambiguity with respect to this desire, but certainly the desire is articulated: a desire for
womens subjecthood, and relatedly, a desire for the representation of womens desire. This is particularly evident in her
insistence to carve out a positive (+) space for women, for the feminine, in the face of Lacans assertion that woman does not exist and that
she, woman, cannot know or speak of her desire (see Irigaray 1977, trans. 1985: 86105). This seems to arouse a degree of ressentiment; a form
of indignation that compels opposition. However, to reiterate, the attempt to demand a subjecthood, to insist on a subjectivity as presence, fully
positivised without a concept of reversion, will only succeed in reasserting an essentialist premise, in semiologically reducing the symbolic, and Lacan would probably
still only see himself reflected back in the mirror.
The limitation of Irigarays engagement with the concept of reversion, or reversibility, is possibly evident in her discussion of
the work of Merleau-Ponty (1984, trans. 1993). Merleau-Pontys use of the concept of reversibility is developed differently from that of
Baudrillard, but aspects of Irigarays commentary reveal a predisposition to this concept. Her comment on Merleau-Pontys reversibility of the seer and the seen seems
to indicate a two-field vision on her part, with individuation into the logos of subjecthood on the one hand, and the death drive, or immersion in a non-differentiated
state, on the other. She writes: This reversibility of the world and the I (which Merleau-Ponty refuses to dissociate, to separate into two) suggests

some repetition of a prenatal sojourn where the universe and I form a closed economy, which is partly reversible (but only
in the opposite direction, if reversibility can have mean ing: the in utero providing it, the hypokeimenon, is more on the side of the maternalfeminine, the future subject or seer on the side of the world or of things ), or some anticipation of a heavenly sojourn, unless it is a love pact
between the world and things. [And later] I might say that Merleau-Pontys seer remains in an incestuous prenatal situation with the whole. (Irigaray 1984,
trans. 1993: 173) The point about reversibility in Baudrillards formulation is that both of these alternatives are inevitably
linked, and both result from a non-reversible, essentialist ontology. Reversibility of the seer and that which is seen cannot
be mapped on to a reversibility conceptualised in terms of the incest or death drive without missing the point.8 In conclusion to her
discussion, Irigaray states that it is impossible to have relations of reversibility without remainder (1984, trans. 1993: 184). Irigarays
concept of remainder refers to the symbolic excess that cannot be confined within the phallogocentric system of
representation; that which is unsayable in a logic of identity/difference. In Baudrillards terms, and at least to some extent in MerleauPontys, relations of reversibility are precisely those which symbolically exchange all terms so there is no remainder ;
in this sense, relations of reversibility are indeed possible, but certainly unthinkable from an essentialist frame .

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at: irony
Irony isnt key- ironically, it causes confusion and serves as a distraction from critical discussion
Paasonen 2011 (Susanna Paasonen, professor of media studies at the University of Turku, Revisiting Cyber
Feminism, Communications Volume: 36 Issue: 3 published 22 August 2011, page 344, Yung Jung)
the act of recognizing something as ironic, there is little guarantee that the
views of people producing and reading the texts necessarily meet. Literary scholar Linda Hutcheon
(1994, p. 14) notes that as a practice of saying one thing and meaning another, irony involves both
misunderstanding and messy meaning . Irony is a means of joining contradictory views, but it may well
function as a kind of boomerang if ironic distance is erased and things are read in a more
literal fashion . As its referent, point and location is left unclear, irony becomes a problematic or at least a heavily limited
strategy. In cyberfeminist texts, irony has been used to create distance towards both cyberculture and feminism in
ways that may obstruct, rather than facilitate, critical dialogue. Perhaps ironically, cyberfeminist articulations emphasizing
diversity and irony have not always been easy to combine with analyses of power and inequality (as they link to diversity and new
However, since irony involves interpretation,

media alike). Plants (1997) narrative of feminization, for example, connects Lady Lovelace, switchboard operators and South-East Asian women working in silicon
chip factories as female networkers and manufacturers of technology without paying attention to the in this case, rather glaring differences and inequalities between
the societies, professions and agencies. Similarly, while the 100 anti-theses of cyberfeminism highlight the differences among and

between women, and individual women are invited to outline their personal cyberfeminisms, these are not necessarily
followed by reflections on power, location and difference as they operate between individual cyberfeminists and within
cyberfeminist networks (see Fernandez, 2001, 2003; Fernandez and Wilding, 2003). We may all know that all women are different.
However, without analysis of how locations, positions and networks of privilege function in and through these differences
be this online or offline this amounts to little else than a truism ( also Paterson, 1992). A discourse on difference needs
to be self-reflexive so as not to produce a doubletalk in which diversity and multiplicity are
emphasized without questioning the normative position of white (perhaps middle-class, perhaps heterosexual)
Western women as the key agents of (cyber)feminism.

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offcase

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irigaray

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1nc irigaray
Embracing the cyborg detaches our analysis from the material reality of phallocentrism and ensures that
new cybernetic identities will just be assimilated into the larger structure of patriarchy
Cook 4 [Peta S., Centre for Social Change Research, Queensland University of Technology, The Modernistic
Posthuman Prophecy of Donna Haraway, paper presented to the Social Change in the 21st Century
Conference, 2004, http://eprints.qut.edu.au/646/1/cook_peta.pdf]
Similarly to Firestones utopian social vision of a techno-based post-gender reality that is free from biologically-based oppression (Braidotti, 2002; Firestone, 1970),
Haraway (1991) presents the cyborg as (another) liberating source to escape gender stereotypes (Dixon, 2003; Balsamo, 1988). In this way, desire for gender
reconstruction through dichotomist transgression is nothing more than a utopian dream, where the future reality will be more desirable than the present (Horner, 2001).
Hence, such cyborg concepts are an escapist futuristic solution from the dissatisfaction with the inadequacies and injustices

of [contemporary] human life (Springer, 1994: 163), which reconciles the self/other in a Lacanian Imaginary realm (Springer, 1994).
In this fashion, the blurring of reality/imagination (Haraway, 1991) is a repetition of old feminist stories that reduces the depths of
the: materiality of the concrete and embodied lived experience; structural embedded nature of gender; and the
rhizomatous role of technology, which is creating real oppression . Thus, as the body is our general medium for having a world (MerleauPonty 1962: 146), our real embodied experiences are cyborg facts, that should remain to be potently significant for cyborg anthropology. The powerful lived
experience of the body and its intentionality is seen in the phantom-limb syndrome, where the absent limb of an amputee
can be ambivalently (omni)present in a dual ontology of presence/absence (Merleau-Ponty 1962). Consequently, our understandings of
the body should not only be conceived as transcending the flesh, but also dependent on our familiar lived experiences of the body. In other words , the
embodiment of being-in-the-world is vital for the development and understanding of agency as experienced in reality.
As a result, the concrete (cyborg) body continues to be a site of oppression ; an interface a field of intersecting material and symbolic
forces; it is a surface were multiple codes are inscribed (Braidotti, 2002: 25). In this fashion, cyborgs are not simply the new ontology or new embodied flesh
envisioned by Haraway (in Kunzru 1997), as sexualised markings on the (cyborg) body (Foster 1996) increase, rather than decrease, the
gender divide. Furthermore, the immediate and everyday experience of the lived physical body (Leib) within a common
life-world (Lebenswelt) (Merleau-Ponty 1962), continues to reassert the need to be aware, and to respect, the present social
construction of human ontology as gendered3. In turn, the interrelation between materiality and discourse are important in the production of reality.
Therefore, while Haraway acknowledges the social influences on material-semiotic actors, she focuses on cyborg post-gender fiction at the expense of cyborggendered realities. Thus, it is important to consider what this reality actually means for the lived experiences of cyborg

bodies. An example of this real cyborg experience is the dominant transition of the androgynous human body to an
enhanced masculine male cyborg body. This reassertion of gender differences and dualisms occurs through the
technoscientific knowledges of military warfare, biomedicine (cyborg sex), and the popular icons of action figure toys and
science fiction stories (Gray, 2000). By repeating the fantasies of modernity, this means women have become (or are again) the
main losers (Braidotti, 1996) in a cyborgian hypermasculinity. In this vein, cyborg images reproduce limiting, not liberating, gender stereotypes (Balsamo,
1988: 341). As a result, the futuristic and untroubled embracement of cyborg technologies is a technologically-based idealistic and whimsical reconciliation of dualisms
(Horner, 2001), which does not erase sexual difference and otherness (Braidotti, 2002). Thus, gender dissolution requires more than acknowledging

and figuratively reconstructing dualistic social constructions through machines, as the question is not cyborg possibilities
in and of themselves, but how the cyborg has been constructed by patriarchal discourse (Rose in Dery, 1994: 217). These
understandings reveal that technoscience and the material-semiotic cyborg continue to: uphold modernisms patriarchal
stories and desires of domination, control, and progress; (re)create oppressive dualistic categories; and/or uphold the
precious sanctity of humanity and Christian Cartesian philosophy. This suggests that while it is permissible to dissolve some dualistic
assumptions (such as human/machine), other dichotomies are guarded ferociously and/or subtly (re)produced (such as man/woman). Therefore, while cyborgs can
create new possibilities, the structural inequalities and dualisms of patriarchy can also be intensified (Braidotti, 1996). Significantly, in her utopian post-gender cyborg
fantasy, Haraways cyborg connects to and intensifies the linear and paradisaical vision of modernism and Cartesianism. This can be explicitly demonstrated through the
connection of Haraways cyborg to the transhumanist and posthuman prophecies of the Extropians.

The narrative of the cyborg is a profoundly non gendered definition of identity --- that engenders a
technostrategic understanding of bodies as things one has, rather than things one performs
Paasonen 2 [Susanna Paasonen is Professor of Media Studies at University of Turku, Finland Thinking
Through the Cybernetic Body: Popular Cybernetics and Feminism
http://www.rhizomes.net/issue4/paasonen.html]
Although Ben-Tov's reading can be criticized for being too literal and not giving full credit to the

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ground for articulations of feminist subjectivity--it should be noted that the cyberdiscourse which Haraway employs in the manifesto has
force that feminist appropriation may not be able to subvert. Cyborg imageries figure embodiment in ways similar than Shulamith
Firestone, as a rationalized system that can be known, controlled and improved as to liberate people from biology. Once the
body becomes construed in such a mechanical vein, it is quite difficult to reverse this logic for outlining alternative forms
of human-machine connections. Such friction between cyberdiscourse and the project of "thinking through the body" has
become more explicit in the later appropriations of the cyborg figuration than it was in the speculative manifesto . [30] In
cyberfeminist texts of the 1990s, the appeal of cyberdiscourse, enthusiastic towards the possibilities of computer technology, often anti-political in its
articulations of cyberspace as alternative realm and tied into ideas of transcending the body (Adam 1997, 20-21) tended to
override feminist concerns for anti-Cartesian reasoning and body politics . As information networks became articulated as a cyberspace, a
parallel reality "on the other side of the screen" where old identifications and subjectivities were said to collapse (Plant 1995, 54; Plant 1997, 213), or as spaces of
transformation and identity factories (Stone 1996, 180-181)--only to quote some of the best known authors identified with cyberfeminism-- identity and

embodiment became conceptually separated, and, in many cases, the previous was simply left behind. [31] The figure of cyberspace
owes equally to popular cybernetics and the inter-connected fantasies of space, exploration , and freedom. As Constance Penley (1997,
22) points out, "'space' remains one of the major sites for utopian thinking " in the U.S., and "'going to space' is still one of the most
important ways we represent our relation to science, technology, and the future ." To paraphrase Penley (1997, 15-16), fictions such as
Cyborg and Bionic Woman represent a similar utopian stance towards the possibilities of technological progress. As texts of popular cybernetics,
they both humanize high technology and provide a vocabulary for discussing it . In bionic fictions, progress through technology
is tied with NASA in the shape of a male astronaut protagonist, yet in them, the act of "going into space" (technological
progress, humanized science, future of man) takes place on the surface of the earth, and the human body becomes the
space to explore and modify. Spaces of progress and adventure, then, open up on various level with references to
cybernetics: as the outer space of astronautics, the inner spaces of bodies and minds, and the terrain of cyberspace . [32]
Freedom from bodily constraints, various means of transcending material conditions, have been a recurrent theme in
cyberdiscourse since the 1950s: bodies have been subject to manipulation, their automatic functions have been simulated
with machines, bodies have been replicated and replaced by machine ones, and finally the body, as "meat," has been left behind
in cyberspace fantasies. Furthermore, while gender, along with other embodied differences and the materiality of bodies, tends to
disappear in abstracted cybernetic models, the varying representations of virtual embodiments in cyberspace tend to be
clearly gendered and heterosexualized (Springer 1996; Balsamo 1996; Braidotti 1996). There is something of an obsession towards embodiment in
cyberdiscourse--embodiment constantly becomes "an other" that needs to be controlled and objectified, rendered open to manipulation and altering. The tendency
to think of bodies as something that one has, rather than something one is and does, leaves unnoticed that bodies are not
capsules that "we" inhabit, but our very beings. Identity categories are inscribed in our bodies, read and performed: thus
bodies are "the transparent enabling power and 'zero-degree' of our agency" and yet opaque, "within our agency, yes, but
certainly in excess to our volition" (Sobchack 1999, 48).

The impact is the annihilation of sexual difference this social organization of masculine over feminine
justifies perpetual physical-psychological war
Irigaray 94 [Luce, Thinking the difference: for a peaceful revolution, p. 4-7, 1994]
What does it mean for our entire culture to be threatened with destruction ? There are, of course, declared stakes connected with threats of
war. According to the types of discourse whose economy is at issue here, such threats are the sole means of maintaining international equilibrium. I shall come back to
this point. Huge amounts of capital are allocated to the development of death machines in order to ensure peace , we are told.

This warlike method of organizing society is not self-evident. It has its origin in patriarchy. It has a sex. But the age of technology
has given weapons of war a power that exceeds the conflicts and risks taken among patriarchs. Women, children, all living things,
including elemental matter, are drawn into the maelstorm. And death and destruction cannot be associated solely with war. They are part
of the physical and mental aggression to which we are constantly subjected. What we need is an overall cultural
transformation, not just a decision about war per se. Patriarchal culture is based on sacrifice, crime and war. It is a culture that makes it men's duty or
right to fight in order to feed themselves, to inhabit a place, and to defend their property. From time to time, patriarchy must make decision concerning war, but that is
far from what is required to ensure a cultural transformation. Mankind [le peuple des hommes] wages war everywhere all the time with a perfectly

clear conscience. Mankind is traditionally carnivorous, sometimes cannibalistic. So men must kill to eat, must increase their domination of
nature in order to live or to survive, must seek on the most distant stars what no longer exists here , must defend by any means the small
patch of land they are exploiting here or over there. Men always go further, exploit further, seize more, without really knowing where they are going. Men seek what
they think they need without considering who they are and how their identity is defined by what they do. To overcome this ignorance, I think that mankind

needs those who are persons in their own right to help them understand themselves and find their limits. Only women can play this role. Women are not

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genuinely responsible subjects in the patriarchal community. That is why it may be possible for them to interpret this culture in which they
have less involvement and fewer interests than do men, and of which they are not themselves products to the point where they have been blinded by it. Given their
relative exclusive from society, women may, from their outside perspective, reflect back a more objective image of society than

can men. Moreover, in theory, women should not be in a hierarchical relationship to men. All other types of minorities potentially are. It is with a thoroughly
patriarchal condescension, either unconscious or cynical, that politicians and theoreticians take an interest in them, while exploiting them, with every possible risk of the
master-slave relationship being overturned. This dialectic or absence thereof is built into father-son relationships, and has been since the inception of patriarchy. It is
doomed to failure as a means of liberation and peace because it is based on (1) lines of descent insufficiently counterbalanced by a horizontal relationship between the
genders and (2) exclusively male lines of descent making any kind of dialectic between male and female ancestries and masculine and feminine genders impossible. The
possibility of sex-specific cultural and political ethics is our best chance today. The world's economic and religious equilibrium is precarious. Moreover, the

development of technology is subjecting our bodies to such trials that we are threatened with physical and mental
annihilation, that our living conditions leave us no time to rest or think, whatever real leisure time we may have, and that we are continually
overwhelmed, forgetful, distracted. Men's science is less concerned with prevention or the present than with curing. For objective reasons of accumulation
of property, for reasons of the subjective economy of the male subject, it allows disorder and pollution to grow, while funding various types of curative medicine. Men's
science helps destroy, then attempts to fix things up. But a body that has suffered is no longer the same. It bears the traces of physical

and moral trauma, despair, desire for revenge, recurrent inertia. The entire male economy demonstrates a forgetting of life,
a lack of recognition of debt to the mother, of maternal ancestry, of the women who do the work of producing and maintaining life. Tremendous
vital resources are wasted for the sake of money. But what good is money if it is not used for life? Despite policies that encourage the birth rate for
economic reasons, or sometimes for religious ones, destroying life seems to be as compulsory as giving life.

The alternative embraces the development of a female imaginary --- voting negative affirms the
potentiality of separate subjectivities beyond masculinity and its associated destructiveness --- that solves
the aff while maintaining the possibility of discourse outside the phallocentric order
Weedon 99 [Chris, Chair of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff University, Feminism, theory,
and the politics of difference, p. 90-93, 1999]
In the order of reason which has governed Western thought since the rise of Ancient Greek philosophy, feminine
otherness is denied and reconstituted as a male-defined otherness . This results in the denial of subjectivity to
potentially non-male-defined women. A maternal feminine subjectivity, were it to be realized, would enable women to
step outside of patriarchal definitions of the feminine and become subjects in their own right . Whereas the unconscious in Freud and
Lacan lays claim to fixed universal status, for Irigaray its actual form and content is a product of history. Thus , however patriarchal the symbolic order
may be in Lacan, it is open to change. The question is how this change might be brought about . For Irigaray, the key to change
is the development of a female imaginary . This can only be achieved under patriarchy in a fragmented way, as
what she terms the excess that is realized in margins of the dominant culture . The move towards a female imaginary would
also entail the transformation of the symbolic , since the relationship between the two is one of mutual shaping.
This would enable women to assume subjectivity in their own right. Although, for Irigaray, the imaginary and the symbolic are both historical
and changeable, this does not mean that, after thousands of years of repression and exclusion, change is easy. In a move not unlike that of
ecofeminists, Irigaray suggests that the symbolic order, men and masculinity are shaped by patriarchy in ways which are
immensely problematic not just for women but also for the future of the planet. The apparently objective, gender-neutral
discourses of science and philosophy the discourses of a male subject have led to the threat of global nuclear
destruction . In An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1993; original 1984), Irigaray suggests that the patriarchal male subject is himself shaped by
the loss of the maternal feminine which motivates a desire for mastery : Man's self-affect depends on the woman who has
given him being and birth, who has born/e him, enveloped him, warmed him, fed him. Love of self would seemingly take the form of a
long return to and through the other. A unique female other, who is forever lost and must be sought in many others, an infinite
number of others. The distance for this return can be conquered by the transcendence of God . The (female) other who is sought and
cherished may be assimilated to the unique god. The (female) other is mingled or confused with God or the gods. (Irigaray 1993: 60-1; original 1984)
Irigaray takes this theme further in Thinking the Difference: For a Peaceful Revolution (1994; original 1989) when she suggests that the desire for godlike
mastery and transcendence has dire consequences for the world: Huge amounts of capital are allocated to the development of
death machines in order to ensure peace, we are told. This warlike method of organising society is not self-evident. It has its m origin
in patriarchy. It has a sex. But the age of technology has given weapons of war a power that exceeds the conflicts and risks taken among patriarchs. Women,
children, all living things, including elemental matter, are drawn into the maelstrom. And death and destruction cannot be
associated solely with war. They are part of the physical and mental aggression to which we are constantly subjected . What
we need is an overall cultural transformation. Mankind [le peuple des homines] wages war everywhere all the time with a perfectly clear conscience.
Mankind is traditionally carnivorous, sometimes cannibalistic. So men must eat to kill, must increase their domination of nature in order to

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live or to survive,

must seek on the most distant stars what no longer exists here , must defend by any means the small patch of land they are
exploiting here or over there. Men always go further, exploit further, seize more, without really knowing where they are going . Men
seek what they think they need without considering who they are and how their identity is defined by what they do. To overcome this ignorance, I think that
mankind needs those who are persons in their own right to help them understand and find their limits. Only women can
play this role. Women are not genuinely responsible subjects in the patriarchal community. That is why it may be possible for them to interpret this culture in which
they have less involvement and fewer interests than do men, and of which they are not themselves products to the point where they have been blinded by it. Given their
relative exclusion from society, women may, from their outside perspective, reflect back a more objective image of society than can men. (Irigaray 1994: 45; original
1989) The destructive force of the patriarchal symbolic order makes all the more pressing Irigaray's project of creating a

female imaginary and symbolic, specific to women, which might in its turn transform the male-defined symbolic order in
the West, in which women figure only as lesser men . In this process, separatism becomes a strategy in the struggle for a
nonpatriarchal society in which sexual difference is both voiced and valued: Let women tacitly go on strike, avoid men long
enough to learn to defend their desire notably by their speech , let them discover the love of other women protected from
that imperious choice of men which puts them in a position of rival goods, let them forge a social status which demands
recognition, let them earn their living in order to leave behind their condition of prostitute these are certainly indispensable steps in their effort
to escape their proletarianization on the trade market . But if their goal is to reverse the existing order - even if that were possible history would simply repeat itself and return to phallocratism , where neither women's sex, their
imaginary , nor their language can exist . (1994: 106; original 1989).

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link cyborgs
Immortality link: the cyborg body is an attempt to escape imperfection they try to create the perfect
form of existence to reject organic bodies
Cohen-Shabot 6 [Sara, Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Haifa, Grotesque Bodies: A Response to
Disembodied Cyborgs, Journal of Gender Studies, Vol. 15, No. 3 November 2006, p. 223-235]
The abandonment of the altogether organic body, or the flesh and blood body, with all its imperfections, may be seen, again,
as a frequent characteristic of the popular imagery of the cyborg . It is true that a cyborg is not a machine, and that it cannot be
comprehended as a purely technological construction. The cyborg, different from the robot, is a mixture of the organic with the
technological. It represents the body that has lost its conventional limits and has intertwined with the technological. Nevertheless, the cyborg has lost
its organic features, and we should ask, then, why has it ? Why has the cyborg lost its meat, and why, rather than regretting this loss, does the
cyborg feel proud of it? In her article The pleasure of the interface, Claudia Springer (1999) refers precisely to this abandonment of the flesh when she explains how
the genre of the cyberpunk8 often presents the source of pleasure of its characters as arising from this disappearance of the meat. Losing the meat, the flesh

and blood body, provides happiness, pleasure and a sense of security. As an example of this, Springer brings the words of Topo, the
protagonist from the comic bookCyberpunk (Rockwell, 1989), when he mentally enters the Playing Field (a kind of cyberspace): it's the most beautiful thing in the
human universe he says, if I could leave my meat behind and just live here. If I could just be pure consciousness I could be happy (Rockwell, quoted in
Springer, 1999, p. 39, my emphasis).9 This abandonment of the flesh and blood body has been interpreted as a result of anxieties

regarding the vulnerability and the fragility of the carnal body and all that is related to it the maternal and the organic processes in
general, for instance (Doane, 1999; Springer, 1999; Sofia, 1999).10 The meaty body is indeed a perishing body, a body that can be
corrupted, that may get sick and which will ultimately die. The extreme vulnerability that bodies confront in this postnuclear era, an era which is plagued with threats of massive annihilation, by sicknesses or by environmental disasters, brings with itself the desire of remaking a self that is able to escape the body and with it, the threats to its destruction (Springer, 1999). Avoiding the maternal
means avoiding a self that is born out of an organic process and which for this reason, is absolutely weak and perishable.
The individual born out of the maternal is one that is completely dependent on a temporary structure, one that will
degenerate and die. This is why the cyborg has become a meat-hater, a technologicalorganic structure that relates with
fear and hatred to its organic core. In order to keep its promises of powerfulness and immortality, the cyborg must get rid
of its meat and of its maternal origin.11 In sum: the cyborg contains in itself the seeds of a liberating, disrupting figure. It is a figure that finds itself in the
middle ground between the technological and the human. Haraway (1985) tried to present it as a new way to dissolve the obsolete binary categories of Western thought
and as a promising figure to postmodern feminist postures, a figure by which it could be possible to overcome the rigid patriarchal structures of gender. Nevertheless, as
we have seen, the temptation to jump from a technologicalhuman body, to a body that is no more a meaty body, to a hyper-

sexualized body, an omnipotent body which does not have to confront any more the imperfections and limitations of the
organic body, is certainly a big temptation one which, in most cases, the fictional cyborg does not appear to be able to avoid.
This is the reason why I would like, next, to present the figure of the grotesque body as an alternative to the problematic figure of the cyborg.

This turns their ethics argumentthey make it impossible to exist in the world
Cohen-Shabot 6 [Sara, Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Haifa, Grotesque Bodies: A Response to
Disembodied Cyborgs, Journal of Gender Studies, Vol. 15, No. 3 November 2006, p. 223-235]
Before explaining why we may regard the grotesque body as an alternative to the figuration of the cyborg, I will briefly explain why it

is of great importance
to keep the meaty body in the postmodern discourse in general, and in the postmodern feminist discourse in particular.
Losing the flesh and blood body may mean a return to the Cartesian subject, a subject that can separate herself from her
mind, and, as a consequence, maybe throw her body away (and with it, throw her possibility of difference as well). To
think about ourselves as possible disembodied creatures, irremediably brings with itself a feeling of omnipotence that
makes us forget about the most meaningful experiences of human life, those that make us the historical, cultural and social
creatures with existential worries and questionings that we actually are. Such experiences are precisely the corporeal ones
the pleasant, such as the enjoyment of food, moving our bodies, sex or dancing; and also the painful, such as sickness,
aging, and, finally, dying. These are all the embodied experiences that constitute our phenomenological being-in-the-world.
Running away from the fleshy-body means leaving behind all the elements which conform to the embodied existence , that
is, the carnal experiences that I named and, as I sustained before, also the possibility of gendered existence. The hyper-sexualized cyborgs , as
I have shown, are mostly not real gendered subjects, but creatures that escape all the features of the embodied existence,
gender included, in order to become platonic ideals, transcendent beings. This act of transcendence maintains many of the

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power structures intact, and it also brings with itself the danger of giving legitimacy to undertake a struggle in order to
achieve perfect beings, a struggle that can be so easily associated with fascist or racist ideologies .12 Embodied existence,
then, is the one that describes our way of being in the world. We are situated in the world as embodied subjects and it is
through our bodies that we participate in the world of objects and of other subjects (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 142; De Beauvoir, 1948, pp.
1222). This is the reason why, if we want to propose a figuration that stands for our experience of being in the world, we must search for figurations that successfully
express our presence and our situation in this world as incarnated subjects. This means we must search for a figuration that describe subjectivity

as conformed by the elements which can be seen as essential to the embodied existence and its being in the world. Such an
embodied subjectivity should be described, for instance, as gendered, mutable, and perishable. Also, in order to avoid describing
this subjectivity by means of old and obsolete philosophical paradigms, which made of the subject an abstract concept,
alienated from his body and from the rest of the world (through the artificial, arbitrary binary divides mind/body and
subject/object), a new figuration should present such an incarnated being also as open to the world and , above all, as
provided with an ambiguous existence. We are in the world, our limits are blurred, our bodies are open, and that is the
reason why there is no true division between ourselves and the world. We are , then, ambiguous beings, hybrid creatures,
subjects and objects at the same time, inseparable from the different scenarios in which we act. We are also ambiguous
beings regarding ourways of existing: our gender, our looks and our thoughts, constitute an ever-changing flux that can
never be absolutely defined or contained by an abstract, purely conceptual, incorporeal subjectivity. This is the reason why
the figuration that will present such an ambiguous being, must try to avoid, above all, a return to forms of being that escape the body and
its imperfect features, especially when we know that such an escape may result even accidentally out of a good
intentioned attempt to create new, empowering descriptions of subjects (as in some cases of the cyborg).

Military link: cyborg are not a neutral identity --- the aff whitewashes the concept from its material
consequences --- it originated in NASAs militarist cyborg project to negate the body and replicate the
catholic division between soul and body --- means the aff is not a challenge to modernity
Cook 4 [Peta S., Centre for Social Change Research, Queensland University of Technology, The Modernistic
Posthuman Prophecy of Donna Haraway, paper presented to the Social Change in the 21st Century
Conference, 2004, http://eprints.qut.edu.au/646/1/cook_peta.pdf]
The word cyborg (cybernetic organism) was originally coined in 1960 by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline (1960). As engineers working for
the United States N.A.S.A. (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) program, Clynes and Klines (1960) cyborg vision is a human/machine hybrid that
modifies humans for space, rather than creating extraterrestrial human-friendly environments. Therefore, the cyborg is a
liberating mechanism from human environments via a self-regulating man-machine system (Clynes and Kline, 1960: 30).
Considered to be more flexible than human organisms alone, this hardware-based man-machine system is incorporated into a space suit that alters various bodily
functions (Tomas, 1995; Clynes and Kline, 1960). Clynes and Kline (1960) cyborg vision is therefore a superman dream of postbiological

evolution, which fuses space exploration with medicine, implants, and electronic modification to create human
dependence, rather than interdependence, on machines (Gray, 2002; Tomas, 1995). These scientific-militaristic origins of the
cyborg dreamed of a future where, similarly to the Christian soul, annoying restrictions of embodiment and bodily
constraint could be overcome via technologically influenced medical developments (Kunzru, 1997). As a creation of both science and
science fiction, these militaristic applications of the cyborg as overcoming the natural weaknesses of the body are distinctly Cartesian in viewing the body as a
manipulative and disposable mechanism of meat. Consequently, cyborg origins offer little to developing human ontology beyond

Western patriarchal and Cartesian-Christian conceptualisations of hierarchical duality .

Independently, embracing cyborg subjectivity within the framework of phallocentrism makes extinction
inevitable
Alaimo 94 [Stacy, Cyborg and Ecofeminist Interventions: Challenges for an Environmental Feminism,
Feminist Studies, Vol. 20, 1994]
More specifically, Haraway argues that the

cyborg, precisely by blurring human-machine boundaries, can discourage the worship of

technology and encourage a greater responsibility among humans for machines: "The machine is not an it to be animated, worshiped and
dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. We are
responsible for boundaries; we are they." 40 But thinking of machines as part of ourselves doesn't necessarily mean that the machines

won't be worshiped or feared. Caputi describes several amazing examples of "phallotechnology," confirming feminist suspicions that phallus worship
propels the technology of destruction. For example, an ad featuring a huge closeup of a fighter plane's "control stick" reads: Pilot and aircraft are one. He
thinks; the plane responds. . . . Systems and human engineering . . . have coupled the pilot with the world's most advanced avionics through an anatomically designed

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control stick. All vital controls are strategically positioned on the stick and throttle. . . . The competitive edge is his. Similarly, Caputi cites Ronald Reagan's scheme for
the Los Angeles Raiders: "If you would turn them over to us, we'd put them in silos and we wouldn't have to build the MX

missile." She comments: "Idealized virility is thus gleefully fused to weaponry and to an unprecedented and earth-destroying
lethality ."41 Carol Cohn analyzes a multitude of phallic, even orgasmic, images in the "technostrategic discourse" of
nuclear weapons.42 The super bowl-like television coverage of the 1991 war in the Persian Gulf enthusiastically diagrammed, pictured, and praised missiles and
other weapons. One episode showed a fighter pilot picking out a special missile, stroking it, and honoring it by signing it with a dedication to his wife. Thus, if
Haraway's argument for machine/body blurring is to make our machines less threatening, more controllable, less Other, a
phallocentric discourse has already accomplished these goals with a destructive twist . What these examples show is perhaps obvious. In
this culture the predominant ideology connected to the blurring of machines and humans is one of masculinist force and domination,
an erotics of power particularly terrifying in a nuclear age . This seems like an insurmountable difficulty for the
feminist cyborg. Feminism could benefit from an alliance with technology's cultural power, but could such a feminism be separated from phallotechnology in
order to open up the possibility of a feminist cyborg? Are the pleasures of boundary confusion appealing enough to disengage a technophilic ideology from a
phallocentric politics of domination, or does a feminist technophilic position merely bolster the dominant ideology of technoglorification that seems so strongly sutured
to phallic domination? In other words, how can one be a cyborg in a nuclear age? This question echoes Christina Crosby's more general concern: "I wonder how a
cyborg, which has multiple points of connection, knows how to say no. How can we determine the proper (although not natural, not necessary, not essential)

limits and boundaries of coalitions? . . . I want a politics of exclusion as well as inclusion ."43 I think it is important that feminists do
not simply demonize technology; on the other hand, within a culture that worships technological power , particularly in the form of
weapons, spends ghastly amounts of money fueling the military industrial complex (at the expense of women, who
constitute the majority of the poor adults in this country), and pollutes the environment in the process, it is crucial that
feminism maintain an oppositional voice against the military industrial complex.

The affirmative focuses their advocacy on what the subject is rather than who the subject is and who
comes after the subject. Their recourse to Haraways cyborg is the sort of fragmentation of the subject
that ignores the concrete universal of sexual difference
Perpich 2004 (Diane Subjectivity and Sexual Difference: New figures of the feminine in Irigaray and
Cavarero Continental Philosophy Review 36)
A similar aspiration animates the recent work of political philosopher Adriana Cavarero. Noting that in

Western history, every redefinition of politics

is a redefinition of the very notion of the subject, Cavarero argues for a shift away from approaches that emphasize the
what of subjectivity in favor of those that ask who the subject is.8 Cavarero belongs to an Italian tradition of sexual difference feminism
(penserio della differenza sessuale) significantly influenced by Irigarays thought, but she is increasingly impatient with debates about sexual difference
that either condemn it for its purported essentialism or save it from essentialism by aligning it with a post-modernism that
leaves the subject fragmented and on the cusp of political irrelevance. Irigarays thought is liable to be dismissed no matter which side of this
coin one considers since if shes not an essentialist (strategic or otherwise) who returns feminist thought to a long-discarded metaphysical conception of woman, then
shes a post-modernist in favor of multiple, fragmented, decentered subjectivities and runs up against the problem of how such subjects can also be agents in the sense
that feminist political action seems to require. As Cavarero humorously sketches the dilemma in relation to her own work: any Italian feminist espousing the theory of
sexual difference, when participating in a meeting with English-speaking feminists, knows that if she does not pronounce the magic word multiple subjectivity, she
will probably be attacked as an across-the-board antiquated, European, essentialist, metaphysical thinker. Additionally, she knows that she will cut the sad figure of
someone not prepared for the coming third millennium. She knows, even better, that she will be tagged for who, effectively, she is: someone to whom, guiltily, the fate
of postmodernist thought is not important. Just try it and see (WEP, p. 89). Essentialists and post-modernists alike , on Cavareros view, share a

commitment to asking what the subject is, and the differences between them come only from the fact that they give
opposing answers to the question. For example, even as postmodern political projects purport to leave behind the language
and the metaphysical commitments of Cartesianism, they continue to speak the language of the abstract what. Citing the
work of Butler and Haraway in this regard, Cavarero claims that though they center their political proposals on a strategic reblending of identities, rejecting the idea of a single or universal subject, they nonetheless continue to rely exclusively on
universal concepts, general categories and collective identities failing to consider that these intersect in a unique and
singular being who cannot be reduced to her group memberships or cultural inheritances (WEP, p. 98).9 Drawing inspiration from
Hannah Arendts notion of the political subject as a distinct, singular being amidst other equally distinct, singular beings, Cavarero gives precedence theoretically and
politically to the who of subjectivity rather than to its what. Who comes after the subject? The question is in fact crucial . Because, if it is true that
the subject is dead and we [women] are all truly happy about it! we

should not at all content ourselves with the fragments into which it
dissolved, and much less should we be happy to recycle its language of abstraction and its whatifying grammar in some
other way. Who comes after the subject? is then a crucial question in that it suggests that, after the subject, doesnt come
something else, something, a thing; instead someone comes . . . . In sum, who comes, then, is the embodied uniqueness of the

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existing being as he or she appears to the reciprocal sight of others (WEP, p. 99).

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impact extinction
Our ethics of sexual difference must come first--the Aff would bury women alive and cut them off from
their own becoming--the lack of our ethics in epistemology guarantees extinction
Whitford 91 [Margaret, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine, 1991, 149-150]
for Irigaray, epistemology without ethics is deadly
destructive to women, destructive to men, destructive to the earth. The danger of our times is that the subject as knower
has become split off from the embodied and social subject. It is essential to think through again the implications of the
fact that the Other is constitutive of subjectivity, whether the Other is the unconscious - that which the subject cannot master or control, or even know in
himself - or whether the Other is embodied in other people who likewise constitute that which is irreducible to the subject, or
whether the Other is the Lacanian Other, whose desire is located in the symbolic order. An ethics of sexual difference, that is, an ethics which
recognizes the subjectivity of each sex, would have to address the symbolic division which allocates the material,
corporeal, sensible, 'natural' to the feminine, and the spiritual, ideal, intelligible, transcendental to the masculine. A
sensible transcendental is the condition of an ethics of sexual difference, necessary if the fate of Antigone is not to go on
repeating itself (E: 106). If women are cut off from their own becoming, then they are 'buried alive' in our culture. Because of
the split, women, as the body, represent sexuality, which is then cut off from the ideal or spiritual, and becomes a 'lower'
function, that which is to be transcended in the pursuit of the good. To end the cultural schizophrenia (which does not seem too strong a term
in this context), and for women to be able to love themselves, and be for-themselves, women need to be able to move freely from
the most 'subterranean* and the most 'celestial', between the depths and the heights. Similarly, if men continue to allow
women to represent the carnal for them, they collude in keeping women in a kind of pseudo-childhood, which is both
'perverse' and 'animal' (QEL: 118), i.e. pro-ethical, unsymbolized, outside the sphere of the so-called 'higher' human activities.
So the issue of the body and of sexuality is central to ethics, not in the limited sense of a set of taboos and prohibitions,
but in the sense that the symbolic division of labour prevents women from becoming-for-themselves . However, it is not an issue that is easy
Irigaray wants to restore the link between epistemology and ethics. I don't think it would be putting it too strongly to say that,

to address without falling back into male parameters: 'Female sexuality has always been conceptualized on the basis of masculine parameters' (TS: 23; CS: 23). As Foucault has argued, though in quite different terms, the
discourse of sex is the locus of the (male) subject's subjection.1 So however we understand parter-femme, whatever it means for women to 'speak (of) their sex [parler leur sexcj' (PN: 272), it does not mean to begin simply
turning the tables, speaking of men as sex objects in a kind of imitation or revenge, or treating men as they might be for-worn en. Similarly it is not focused around the orgasm, which is a kind of technical criterion, a
quantitative measure of 'success', 2 more to do with the requirements of male sexuality than with a possible different sexuality. Nor is it organized around the scopophilic imagination, the pleasure of dominating with the look. It
is not even primarily a question of the 'truth' or unarguability of sexual pleasure, since for Irigaray sexuality is not a raw, primitive, and untouched territory which is somehow private, 'outside' conceptualization,

the links between sexuality, conceptualization, 'knowledge', and social

organization are intrinsic. Women are 'in exile*, or 'unhoused' in male sexuality, male discourse, and male society.
unconlaminated by patriarchy and unstructured by the paternal genealogy. On the contrary,

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impact genocide
Suppression of sexual difference guarantees extinction and genocide
Irigaray 91 [Luce, The Irigaray Reader, p.33]
Even a vaguely rigorous analysis of claims

to equality shows that they are justified at the level of a superficial critique of culture,
and Utopian as a means to women's liberation. The exploitation of women is based upon sexual difference, and can only
be resolved through sexual difference. Certain tendencies of the day, certain contemporary feminists, are noisily demanding the neutralization of
sex [sexe]. That neutralization, if it were possible, would correspond to the end of the human race. The human race is divided
into two genres which ensure its production and reproduction. Trying to suppress sexual differ ence is to invite a
genocide more radical than any destruction that has ever existed in History . What is important, on the other
hand, is defining the values of belonging to a sex-specific genre. What is indispensable is elaborating a culture of the sexual which does not yet exist, whilst respecting
both genres. Because of the historical time gaps between the gynocratic, matriarchal, patriarchal and phallocratic eras, we are in a sexual position which is bound up
with generation and not with genre as sex. This means that, within the family, women must be mothers and men must be fathers, but that we have no positive and ethical
values that allow two sexes of the same generation to form a creative, and not simply procreative, human couple. One of the major obstacles to the creation and
recognition of such values is the more or less covert hold patriarchal and phallocratic roles have had on the whole of our civilization for centuries. It is social justice,
pure and simple, to balance out the power of one sex over the other by giving, or restoring, cultural values to female sexuality. What is at stake is clearer today than it
was when The Second Sex was written.

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at: everyones a cyborg

The claim that everyone is always already a cyborg is a dangerous form of cultural essentialism that
universalizes the western subject and subverts any transformative potential of the 1ac.
Ben-Tov 1995 [Sharona, Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and English, Bowling Green State University,
The Artificial Paradise: Science Fiction and American Reality, pg. 144-145]
Moreover, we have to be careful about using the cyborg myth appropriately across cultures. Perhaps, Haraway suggests we can learn
from our fusions with animals and machines how not to be Man, the embodiment of Western logocs (MC 92). Do the women of Japan, Korea, Taiwan,
Hong Kong, Singapore, and other Asian states with high-tech industries, need to learn how not to be the embodiment of the
Western logos? The cyborg is a myth about identities and boundaries which might inform late-twentieth century political imaginations[Science fiction writers]
are our storytellers exploring what it means to be embodied in high-tech worlds (92). Whose late twentieth century are we talking about? Is embodiment in
high-tech worlds a universal experience? Science fictions tales of embodiment come from Western myths, express
Western experience, and paint Western fantasies. Other cultures interactions with high-tech machinery do not necessarily
guarantee their conversion to Western outlooks. Discussing a feminist approach to miniaturization technology, Haraway remarks that the nimble little
fingers of Oriental women, the old fascination of little Anglo-Saxon Victorian girls with doll houses, womens enforced attention to the small take on quite new
dimensions in this worldit might be the unnatural cyborg women making chips in Asia and spiral dancing in Santa Rita whose constructed unities will guide effective
oppositional strategies (71). I am concerned that the constructed unities here amount to imposing the cyborg myth on people who

might have oppositional strategies of their own, drawn from their own cultural resources . The dolls house and the cult of domesticity
remind us of a known Western cultural tradition, but nimble little fingers is mere rhetoricHaraway puts the orientalist clich in ironical quotes, yet what, after
her irony, is left of the Asian women and their cultural traditions? Nothing but Western words. Is it really fair to subsume
under the label of cyborg two different groups: women whose spiral dancing, although political, is also playful mythmaking and women working in
harsh conditions, whose myths we are not discussing here? Perhaps its worth recalling, with critical theorist Gayatri Spivak, that the
tendency to erase the cultural Other is not a general problem, but a European problem. The cyborg and other science fiction
mythologies may indeed be useful to cultural Others in the technological system, butspeaking to Westernersknowing ourselves, caution is indicated.

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at: link turns

No link turnsambiguity of cyborg identity glorifies the normative bodyno guaranteed dissolution of
binaries with cyborgs
Cook 4 [Peta S., Centre for Social Change Research, Queensland University of Technology, The Modernistic
Posthuman Prophecy of Donna Haraway, paper presented to the Social Change in the 21st Century
Conference, 2004, http://eprints.qut.edu.au/646/1/cook_peta.pdf]
The first issue that I want to address in order to explain how the cyborg may present a dangerous figure to postmodern-feminist thought is
the hyper-sexuality that the cyborg can be an expression of. By hyper-sexuality I mean a reinforcement and an exacerbation of the classic, binary divisions of sexual
bodies and identities. The hyper-sexualized cyborg, then, exaggerates stereotypical features of sexualized bodies, creating figures

that are easily and clearly identified with male or female entities, without leaving a place for any kind of ambiguity or
uncertainty regarding their respective sexuality. Thus, in spite of the important attempts of influential theorists such as Haraway to
present the cyborg as a possibility of liberating dissolution of classic categories , the fact is that science-fiction literature and
films, which function as the cyborg-terrain par excellence,3 present most of the time a cyborg that can be seen mainly as a recreation of
an exaggerated masculinity or femininity. Gibson's cyberpunk trilogy Neuromancer (Gibson, 1984), Count Zero (Gibson, 1986) and Mona Lisa
Overdrive (Gibson,1988) together with films such as The Terminator (1984), Robocop (1987), Total Recall (1990) and Blade Runner(1982)4 indeed show us the way
in which the cyborg instead of reverting the usual categories and the normative sexualities may be responsible of

completely the opposite outcome, namely, an exacerbation of normative sexual identities and sexed bodies . In other words, the
cyborg appears as a hyper-sexualized body, as if it was the glorification, the supreme expression of the normative body
and sexual identity.5 In a discussion about the hyper-sexuality that characterizes films such as those mentioned above, Mary Ann Doane (1999) analyses the way
in which a bridging of the classical human/technological divide does not bring, by itself, a bridging of other classical
categories such as the male/female one. Moreover, Doane argues that in fact, the dissolution of the binary human/technological
within the cyborg-literature is mostly the cause of serious anxieties around the loss of the maternal and around the
maternal body itself, which brings a perception of the dissolution of normative categories of sex and gender as a
threatening, frightful experience, that is to be negated and erased . The anxiety caused by the menace of this dissolution, then, is solved, in
psychoanalytical terms, by a radicalization of the classic, binary features of normative sexuality.6 The cyborg, then while being an important tool for bringing
together in an ambiguous figure the human and the technological often presents a total reluctance to create ambiguity concerning gender or
sexuality. As cyberspace and cyborg literature are still created and controlled mainly by men, they are still dominated by anxieties around threatened masculinity
(Fuchs, 1995; Hollinger, 1999; Wolmark, 1999a). The cyborg, then, is created as a hyper-masculine or hyper-feminine figure in order
to save us so it appears from the threat of ambiguous gender identities. It may even be argued that the ambiguity of the cyborg
regarding the human/technological divide is in a way responsible for the reluctance to create ambiguity in the gender and
sexual realm: the reinforcement of the normative gender and sexual structures is the only way from the point of view of the structures of power to avoid a
pervasive ambiguity that will turn everything into chaos and will strongly shake the foundations of domination. In other words: at times when ambiguity,
certain kinds of ambiguity (in this case, an ambiguity concerning the human/technology divide), is present, other binary structures (such as the
gender structure) are reinforced for fear oflosing everything as a consequence of a pervasive, chaotic and total blurriness .
Thus, it seems that the fear of losing the human body may be defeated, but not so the fear of the patriarchal order to lose masculinity as the center of power. This is in
fact what these hyper-sexualized figures of cyborgs show us: it is easier to give up the human body, to give up the body as flesh and
blood, than to abandon the idea of a masculine body as a basic fact and as the center of domination. Wolmark comments on this:
these cyberpunk texts draw back from the possibilities of the interface, in which both self and other could be redefined in non-essentialist terms. Not only are the
masculine identities of the console cowboys carefully preserved, even in the virtual realities of cyberspace, but because the artificial intelligences that inhabit the matrix
are also defined as masculine, the interface itself is made masculine. (Wolmark, 1999b, p. 233) By now, the danger that the hyper-sexualized cyborgs present to
postmodern-feminist conceptualizations of subjectivity (for instance, Braidotti, 1994; Butler, 1999; Grosz, 1996; Haraway, 1985; Kristeva, 1982; Stacey, 1997) might be
seen as obvious: reinforced stereotypes of masculinity and femininity leave the essentialist myths ofmanhood and womanhood untouched, and with them, they also
leave unquestioned the roles that men and women are due to play in society (mostly technological domination and military control versus reproduction, respectively).
Creating an ambiguity and uncertainty regarding the place of the human body in the postmodern world is clearly not enough: as long as the categories of sex and gender
will remain fixed (or, even worse, be radicalized), the status of the dominant and the dominated will not change, and women will still be confined to the same
conservative roles even within the most avant-garde science fiction literature and films.

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alternative female imaginary

The alternative solves the aff: toppling phallocentrism merely replicates the existing order --- but
disrupting the existing order through confronting the 1ac with its very lack and inadequacy creates the
gap through which alternative subjectivities and knowledges can emerge
Grosz 89 [Elizabeth, 1989, Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists, p. 228-229]
opening up philosophy to its own historicity, its contingencies, its historical and socio-cultural
positioning, is not unrelated to Foucault's analysis of the power and desire operative in knowledges (especially in 'The
Discourse on Language', in Foucault, 1972) , where Foucault asks not what discourses say but what they do, not as bodies
of t ruth but as institutionally produced and supervised practices. Like Derrida, L e Doeuff is also interested in
what texts say, and in particular how they articulate their positions. Yet unlike either Foucault or Derrida, she is
unwilling to emphasise either a text's interior (its discursive means) or its exterior (its place as a practice and a n
event) at the expense of the other. Like Irigaray, she is committed to revealing the elisions, repressions and disavowals
of femininity within philosophical and other discourses; and like Kristeva, she is concerned with the literary devices, sites of multiple meaning
Le Doeuff's project of

and ambiguity within texts; yet unlike either, her project is not limited to the discursive realm but is also directed to the relations between discourses and social
practices. Unlike Irigaray, she is not interested in constructing or speaking in a feminine voice ; nor, like Kristeva, does she advocate the
transgressive impetus of experimental and avant-garde forms of writing as part of a struggle for women's liberation. These French theorists may well mark out
the intel- lectual space within which Le Doeuff works, but they do not cover the same issues nor share similar methods or general goals. A more interrogative
project than Irigaray's or Kristeva's, Le Doeuff's aims a t a rigorous deconstruction of philosophy which may open it up to its own

lacks and inadequacies, not as a source of weakness but as a site for its growth and development. She confronts
philosophy with its own techniques of evasion and thus with its own concrete limits and spcificity. In doing so she
forces the discipline to accept its partial access to the real, the true and the good such tha t the discipline may be able
to accept from, and give more to, other disciplines, other knowledges, so that some sort of exchange relation becomes
possible. This is an eminently fem- inist gesture insofar as only such a notion of philosophy will enable it to accept whatever contributions feminism may
offer without pre-empting what either may find useful in the other. An open-ended philosophy heralds a future in which the contributions of men and women may
change the discipline, reorient its funda- mental questions, inflect its paths of historical development, changing the way tha t the discipline is practised as well
as the subjects who constitute the intellectual community producing and affected by philosophy.

Be skeptical of their offensethe masculine bias inherent to philosophy protects its own self-image and
remains blind to how philosophy is dependent on the suppression of difference
Jones 11 [Rachel, lecturer in philosophy at the University of Dundee, Irigaray: Towards a Sexuate Philosophy,
Key Contemporary Thinkers, Polity, 2011, p. 21-22]
In approaching Irigaray as a 'feminist philosopher', then, what matters is the transformative effect each of these terms has on the other, both the way Irigaray's feminist
project transforms philosophy, and the way her path through philosophy inflects her feminism. This inflection is not just a result of the conceptual resources that
Irigaray manages to steal away from western philosophers to aid her feminist project. It is also a result of the position she forges as a feminist who wants to keep doing
philosophy, despite its patriarchal or masculinist history. In fact, Irigaray's negotiation of a critical yet non-oppositional relation to philosophy is indicative of the kind of
feminism she espouses: one that seeks to make space for (sexual) difference without reinscribing a reductive logic of opposition and negation. Indeed, it is this logic
itself that is the problem insofar as it generates dichotomies that are governed by only one of their terms, and thus by what Irigaray calls a logic of the Same'.
Accordingly, it is this logic which defines woman in terms of her difference from a male subject, and hence positions her as the other of the Same.? As Irigaray
repeatedly insists, merely reversing the hierarchical opposition between the sexes - defining man in terms of his failure to be a woman, for example, or replacing
patriarchy with matriarchy - would not be a real solution, but merely a repetition of such oppositional structures of thought. Irigaray's position is doubly

risky: on the one hand, some feminists will be suspicious of the very act of engaging with the 'master discourse' of
philosophy in anything but a thoroughly critical way. From this perspective, Irigaray's desire to 'have a fling with the philosophers' looks
suspiciously like complicity with her oppressors (TS, 150). On the other hand, Irigaray's explicitly feminist orienta tion will tempt some
philosophers to claim that her own approach is 'biased' in ways that distort the philosophical texts with which she engages.
Irigaray thus runs the risk of being the doubly unduti-ful daughter: mistrusted by the philosophers, yet regarded with
suspicion by her feminist sisters because of her passion for philosophy .3 I do not wish to deny that Irigaray's position is
risky - but the stakes , as she would be the first to concede, are high : they concern nothing less than the question of being, and
thus, the nature of human being. The question, for Irigaray, is whether we think being in terms of any kind of oneness, unified essence or identity, or whether
we allow that being - and thus, human being - is two. Moreover, we should not presume we already know what this 'being-two' means , for as I
discuss in the Conclusion, Irigaray suggests that it resists normal systems of calculation by being irreduc ible to 'two times one'.
Instead, the 'being' of 'being-two' is found in-between . Rather than deny that Irigaray's thought is biased by her femi nism,

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we should look more closely at what is at stake in that so-called bias. Irigaray interrogates philosophy from a critical
feminist perspective because of a bias that she argues is already built in to the dominant forms philosophy has taken in the
western tradition since Plato; thus, her bias is corrective. Moreover, the pre-existing masculinist bias she identifies is
grounded on a series of blindspots and denials that protect philosophy's own self-image: thus it is hardly surprising that
some philosophers respond to Irigaray defensively. By accusing her of introducing a biased perspective, they can continue
to remain blind to the ways in which philosophy itself has been dependent on the denial of difference, and specifi cally, the
difference that woman embodies. However, there is another reason why Irigaray poses a genuinely disturbing challenge to
the philosophers. Her 'corrective' feminist perspective docs not aim to cancel out a historically contingent but 'improper'
masculinism in the name of establishing a 'proper' universal neutral, or objective mode of thought. Were this the case, her
position really would be re-absorbed by a model of philosophy that is the product and symptom of the very perspective
she critiques. Rather, her aim is to challenge a masculinism that masquer ades as universal, and an ideal of universality that
masks an inadequate articulation of the nature of (human) being . In response, Irigaray calls into question the very idea that a universal or
'neutral' way of thinking could properly do justice to human beings. Instead, what is required is 'an ontology founded on "being two"' (HEW, 101): an account of being
that takes sexual difference as primary in ways that allow us to acknowledge two different (sexuate) subjects. Thus her irreverent approach remains

properly 'improper': not only does she reveal philosophy's own pre-existing bias, but she denies that philosophy has the
resources to correct that bias, unless it is prepared to change its own nature and give up its commitment to an ideal
universalism.

Alt key to solve

Tyson 12 [Sarah, Reclamation from Absence? Luce Irigaray and Women in the History of Philosophy,
Hypatia, 2012]
rather than concede the
impossibility of reclamation, let's look more closely at the passage, for it seems to suggest a way forward. First, note that
Irigaray speaks of "woman," not "women." We misplace hope for the reclamation of women's writing if we put it on the
idea that woman reopens paths with the exploits of her hand. Rather, by using woman, Irigaray repeats a trope of dis course, one we can see in formulations like "The Woman Question," but she also speaks through it. Speaking through woman has the sense both of
speaking by way of woman and of woman being a concept through which Irigaray strains to be heard: the difference
between speaking through a receiver and speaking through a wall. Woman both sustains the possibility of speaking and
troubles it, which docs not yet easily lead to any sense in which individual women's work or writing might be reclaimed.
Irigaray signals with her use of "woman" that the unparalleled interrogation and revolution of a certain sense, which still constitutes the sense
of history also, will not be achieved by enfranchising certain voices into discourse. Woman does not speak. Woman is a
trope of discourse. Words, like woman, are powerless to translate all and will always be so, but we do not have to leave
uninterrogated the sense, which is the sense of history also, with which we engage discourse. Body thus appears in quotation marks in the above passage. When we write "body"
Such a description docs not sound promising for reclaiming women's writing; woman appears only as blanks and not as an articulator of philosophical discourse. But

we no more bring that which exceeds discourse into discourse than when we write "woman." Marking off "body" in quotation marks encourages an encounter with it as a concept that has a history in discourse of marking

Words, as Irigaray writes, are

powerless to translate all that pulses, clamors, and hangs hazily in the cryptic passages of hysterical suffering latency, but
that does not lead her to abandon discourse. Instead, she tells us to turn everything upside down, inside out, back to front.
She tells us to insist, insist on the blanks of discourse and not on the coherence they enable. This means the history of our
relationship to discourse can be changed. We can become readers who pay attention to the blanks of discourse, who read
with a sense of the history of discourse, who write with an ear for silences and the history upon which our meaning relies.
That does not mean we can master discourse. Rather, we can read with a sense that mastery is always what is at stake in
discourse. And mastery is what discourse cannot offer us. Exclusion has been both historical and structural. The structure
is changed by reading and writing differently, thereby giving us a new historical relation to discourse . As Elizabeth Weed writes:
some sort of limit, excess, or disturbance. Irigaray invites us to see every appeal to "body" as a citation with which we engage and through which we are constituted in discourse.

"Consciousness has a historyperhaps, Irigaray observes, the logic of consciousness and the logic of history 'add up to the same thing in the end, in a way'and that history can change and be changed" (Weed 1994, 101).

the logic of consciousness, can be changed. This is the point missed by reclamationists who dismiss Irigaray.
The power of discourse will always be its power to subordinateto fix everything along vertical and horizontal axes to
determine what is above and what is below. But must we remain powerless in the face of this power? Must we accept the
feminine as that which provides the place of this ordering ? In "The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine," Irigaray indicates a
different possibility. The power of discourse has been the subordination of the feminine, but we can read, write, and
rewrite differently. And in practicing discourse differ ently, we can create the possibility of reclaiming women's work
through our practice. We can make a history in which women's writing is part of history, not as the other to discourse and
Consciousnesses history,

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not as its alternative, but as part of a discourse we are powerful enough to read, write, and rewrite. In "Power of Discourse," after
describing philosophy's power to "reduce all others to the economy of the Same" Irigaray writes: Whence the necessity of
"reopening" the figures of philosophical discourse idea, substance, subject, transcendental subjectivity, absolute knowledgein order to pry out of them
what they have borrowed that is feminine, from the feminine, to make them "ren der up" and give back what they owe the
feminine. This may be done in various ways, along various "paths"; moreover, at minimum several of these must be pursued. (Irigaray 1985b, 74) Irigaray does not dictate what sort of
readers we must be; at minimum, we must pursue several paths. Irigaray's work records many different attempts at prying out of discourse
what it has borrowed and writing discourse differently. Here, I focus on the path of reclamation that she presents in "Sorcerer Love."

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at: permutation
The perm links --- reducing all perspectives to one neatly packaged advocacy is the foundation of sexual
indifference
Irigaray and Burke 80 [Luce and Carolyn, When Our Lips Speak Together, Signs, Vol. 6, No. 1, Women:
Sex and Sexuality, Part 2 (Autumn, 1980), p. 69-79]
If we continue to speak the same language to each other, we will re produce the same story. Begin the same stories all over
again. Don't you feel it? Listen: men and women around us all sound the same. Same arguments, same quarrels, same
scenes. Same attractions and separations. Same difficulties, the impossibility of reaching each other. Same . . . same. . . .
Always the same. If we continue to speak this sameness ,1 if we speak to each other as men have spoken for
centuries, as they taught us to speak, we will fail each other. Again. . . . Words will pass through our bodies, above our
heads, disappear, make us disappear. Far. Above. Absent from ourselves, we become machines that are spoken, machines
that speak. Clean skins2 envelop us, but they are not our own. We have fled into proper names, we have been
violated by them.3 Not yours, not mine. We don't have names. We change them as men exchange us, as they use us. It's
frivolous to be so changeable so long as we are a medium of exchange . How can I touch you if you're not there? Your

blood is translated into their senses.4 They can speak to each other and about us. But "us"? Get out of their
language. Go back through all the names they gave you. I'm waiting for you, I'm waiting for myself. Come
back. It's not so hard. Stay right here, and you won't be absorbed into the old scenarios , the redundant phrases,
the familiar gestures, bodies already encoded in a system. Try to be attentive to yourself. To me. Don't be distracted by
norms or habits.

Appropriation DA: the alt recognizies a place of enunciation for the feminine that cannot be reconciled
by the perm
Whitford 91 [Margaret, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine, 1991, p. 30]
In an article on women and/in philosophy called 'Ethics Revisited', Rosi Braidotti points out that (male)

philosophers trying to think the feminine,

and (female) feminists do not have the same place of enunciation (1986b: 60; see also Spivak 1983). Male philosophers situate
themselves within the tradition of philosophy as speaking subjects. They diagnose the crisis of philosophy, the decentring
of the subject, the problems of legitimation. Their interlocutor is the history of philosophy itself, and they attempt to deal
with the crisis, 'their' crisis, by a kind of feminization of philosophy, in which the text becomes the unconscious or the
feminine (often seen as synonymous). It is the male subject who is in crisis, Braidotti emphasizes, and he is dealing with it by turning
towards a hitherto neglected aspect of his self the previously repressed feminine - but not to women, although at the
same historical moment, women are making themselves heard with unprecedented forcefulness, demanding their right to
co-subjectivity. Women, on the other hand, have never had this relation to philosophy. In order to be the subject of
philosophy, women have had to alienate themselves, to take on a male part; the subject of philosophy is male. Since they
have never been by right the 'subjects' of philosophy, they are not, like male philosophers, trying to salvage a tradition, to
stay in the driving seat. Their position is much more contestatory. From a feminist point of view, what male philosophers are at present
engaged in can be seen as an attempt to continue by other means 'the age-long metaphorisation of women by the
masculine subject of enunciation' (Braidotti 1986b: 59). The philosophers do not call into question their 'hegemonic
model' (ibid.). In the feminization of philosophy, the feminine, as sign of unrepresentability, 'is not structurally different
from all the other signs to which the feminine was confined in the classical mode (the irrational, the emotional, etc.)' (ibid.). Suzanne
Moore, in a recent article, puts it even more strongly: such philosophers are the pimps of postmodernism . It's 'the new kind of
gender tourism, whereby male theorists are able to take package trips into the world of femininity' (Moore 1988: 167).

Reject the ideological bait-and-switch of the perm it is precisely the epistemic hijacking that makes it
impossible to create a space for the feminine in politics
Deutscher 2 [Penelope; A Politics of Impossible Difference: The Later Work of Luce Irigaray; p. 11-12]
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Are women's politics satisfactory when the language and ideals of traditionally male spheres are adopted? "When
[women's] movements aim simply for a change in the distribution of power, leaving intact the power structure itself, then
they are resubjecting themselves, deliberately or not, to a phallocratic order. This latter gesture must of course be denounced, and
with determination, since it may constitute a more subtly concealed exploitation of women" (Irigaray 1985c, 81). Irigaray concludes that
this "explains certain difficulties encountered by the liberation movements. If women allow themselves to be caught in the
trap of power, in the game of authority, if they allow themselves to be contaminated by the 'paranoid' operations of
masculine politics, they have nothing more to say or do as women" (166). Such passages are widely interpreted as indicating Irigaray's view
that games of power, authority, and rationality are inherently masculine and should be spurned by women. I do not consider this to be her position. It is uncontroversial
that power, authority, and rationality have historically been associated with masculinity. Eschewing a pursuit of anything that has historically been

associated with male authority would be untenable for women , and hardly a coherent political position. But it would also be naive to
think that women's exercising of varying degrees of power, authority, and rationality is immune from their historical
associations with masculinity. In this sense, women are taking up a position of symbolic "equivalence" to masculinity.

Footnoting DA
Witt 6 [Feminist Interpretations of the Philosophical Canon Author(s): Charlotte Witt Reviewed work(s):
Source: Signs, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Winter 2006), p. 537-552]
However, even

if we become convinced that women philosophers really were omitted just because they were women and that therefore their inclusion
as women is a necessary adjustment of the historical record, there still remains a question of how best to achieve this . How
can they be rewoven into the history of philosophy so that they are an integral part of that history? In a recent essay, Lisa Shapiro (2004), considering the case of women
philosophers in the early modern period, argues that it is not enough simply to add a woman philosopher or two to the reading list to

rectify womens past exclusion. Rather, according to Shapiro, we need to find a stronger thread that provides internal reasons
(rather than an external, feminist motivation on the part of the teacher or editor) for the inclusion of women. One way to do this is to show how
certain women philosophers made significant contributions to the work of male philosophers on central philosophical
issues. We could call this the Best Supporting Actress approach in that the central cast remains male and the
story line of philosophy is undisturbed. It is a good strategy for several reasons: it is relatively easy to accomplish, and it provides an internal anchor for
women philosophers. On the other hand, it reinforces the secondary status of women thinkers , and if this were the only way of integrating women
philosophers, that would be an unfortunate result. The wholly inadequate interpretation of Beauvoirs philosophical thought as a mere application of Jean-Paul Sartres
is a good example of the limitations of this strategy. Not only does it reinforce a secondary, handmaiden role for Beauvoir, but it also promotes a

distorted understanding and appreciation of her thought (Simons 1995).

Total rethinking key

Irigaray 93 [Luce, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, translated by Carolyn Burke and Gillian Gill, Cornell
University Press: Ithica, p. 6, 1996]
A revolution in thought and ethics is needed if the work of sexual difference is to take place. We need to reinterpret
everything concerning the relations between the subject and dis course, the subject and the world, the subject and the
cosmic, the microcosmic and the macrocosmic. Everything, beginning with the way in which the subject has always been
written in the masculine form, as man, even when it claimed to be universal or neutral . Despite the fact that manat least in French
rather than being neutral, is sexed.

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at: essentialism
1. Critiques of essentialism are misguidedher theory of nature is unteleologicalthat means her
critique reveals the way in which the feminine is because it has already been included: the 1NC does not
articulate the feminine, but postulates a relation to the intelligible that maintains sexual indifference
Grosz 89 [Elizabeth, 1989, Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists, p. 111-2]
Whether male or female, the

human body is thus already coded, placed in a social network, and given meaning in and by culture, the male being
are not the result of biology, but of the social and psychical
meaning of the body. It is for this reason that Irigaray carefully refers to the morphology and not to the anatomy of the
body: ;We must go back to the question not of the anatomy but of the morphology of the female sex' (1977:64). The lived body, the experience of
corporeality, is a social body: but it should not be reduced merely to a sociological phenomenon , the consequences of socialisation
constituted as virile or phallic, the female as passive and castrated. These

and learning. In a rather more complex fashion, systems of language and representation must be internalised, taken on as one's own, in order that speech and language
are possible, and that the subject's perceptions and experiences acquire meaning and thus value within its terms. The body is organised and structured as unified,
cohesive, controllable through psychical development and is specularisable or represent-able only through the acquisition of signification. There is, in short, a

parallelism, an isomorphism between patriarchal power relations, the structure of dominant or socially recognised
discourses, and the socially produced phallic male body. This isomorphism is not the result of male conspiracy.8 It is not based on men's
psychological need to dominate, nor is it an effect of a 'natural impulse (whether genetic, hormonal or physiological). Irigaray makes
no suggestion of a causal connection between men's bodies and dominant representations , although it is not uncommon to see
commentators assert that she directly links patriarchal domination to men's 'natures'.9 It is not the anatomy of the male body which seeks its own
image in dominant discourses. Rather, the pre-existence of patriarchal social relations relies on the production of a
specific form of male sexuality through inter-nalisation of images representations and signifying practices. In other words,
men do not form discourse in their own image(s); rather, phallocentric discourses form male sexuality in their image(s) .10 In
her understanding, languages and discourses do not reflect a pre-existing material reality; they function to actively constitute
the world and human experience as meaningful or representable 11, an effect of forces and relations of power. Each relies on
and implicates the other. Power and language function not simply through coercion or ideology, but also through the active construction of a meaningful
reality. Bestowing significance on things', constructing them as things, presenting them as natural, enticing and inciting are
among the more insidious effects of the cooperation of discursive and political structures . Bodies are not conceived by
Irigaray as biologically or anatomically given, inert, brute objects, fixed by nature once and for all. She sees them as the
bearers of meanings and social values, the products of social inscriptions, always inherently social . Speculum ... and This Sex ...
need to be read in the light of this mutually defining cluster of terms. Her emphasis on morphology in place of anatomy indicates that she has
stepped from the register of nature into that of social signification .

2. Sloppy translation
Irigaray, 1994. (Luce, Interview with Elizabeth Hirsh and Gary Olson, JeLuce Irigaray: A Meeting with
Luce Irigaray, Hypatia, May 1995, republished from Journal of Advanced Composition, 113-114)
Q. By way of conclusion, we have a tradition of posing the following question: Are

you aware of any misreadings or misunderstandings of your

work that you'd like to address here?

A. There are certainly errors of translation ; I've given you examples. There are errors of interpretation which are tied to something I've already indicated:
the principal points of error derive from not being sufficiently attentive to my philosophical training, and especially to my
relationship to ontology and to the negative. In the same vein, errors result from confusing a scientific with a philosophical
discipline, which aren't the same thing. Obviously, I represent a snare for the reader to the extent that I have various scientific trainings linguistic,
psychological, psychoanalytic, literary (my first studies were literary)and at the same time, a philosophical training. So I make use of scientific
techniques; sometimes I make an analysis of discourse using only scientific technique . Fundamentally, what 1 recur to the most in
interpretation is, I think finally, a certain philosophical level. So when I'm read simply as a psychoanalyst or as a linguist, there are some
levels of thought, intention, and interpretation in my work that are already lost.

3. Their authors misunderstand that the feminine describes subjectivity, not material bodies
van Leeuwen 10 [Anne, Sexuate difference, ontological difference: Between Irigaray and Heidegger, Cont
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Philos Rev (2010) 43:111126 DOI 10.1007/s11007-010-9136-7]

Given the salience of the notion of sexuate difference for Irigarays articulation of this phenomenological ontology, we must begin with an explication of this idea.
She invokes the neologism sexuate

difference in order reinterpret sexual difference as an irreducible dimension of human

identity. While sexual difference, in our ordinary understanding, is often treated as a biological or morphological category, sexuate
difference, while maintaining the carnal connotations of sexual difference, insinuates this incarnate difference within the
structure of subjectivity. As Irigaray tells us, sexuate difference means that man and woman do not belong to one and the same
subjectivity, that subjectivity itself is neither neutral nor universal .66 Through, the notion of sexuate difference, Irigaray wants us to see that
humanity, human subjectivity is not One but two.

Means there is no link

Bostic 2 [Heidi, Michigan Technological University, Reading and Rethinking the Subject in Luce Irigarays
Recent Work, Paragraph 25, November 2002]
Each gender has a specific relational identity, which is both natural and cultural . This difference results in part from womens and mens
experience with the mother as belonging either to the same or to the other gender, and is reflected in different ways of language use. Womens speech, for example,
tends to privilege the intersubjective relation. Affirming that men and women have different subjectivities does not mean that we

reduce them to a simple biological destiny. Rather, it entails a realization that men and women are culturally different
(Between East and West, 129).

4. Not offenseits inevitable without the alt

Frye 96 [The Necessity of Differences: Constructing a Positive Category of Women, Signs, Vol. 21, No. 4,
Feminist Theory and Practice (Summer, 1996), pp. 991-1010]
Schor believes that when Irigaray projects women as speaking a sexually marked language, she is "ultimately less concerned with theorizing feminine specificity than
with debunking the oppressive fiction of an universal subject" (1989,45). But Irigaray does go on and "theorize feminine specificity" to the

dismay of critics who have wanted "to sever her bril liant exposure of the specular logic of phallocentrism from her
theoriza-tion of a specifically feminine difference " (Schor 1989, 46). Schor quotes Toril Moi (1985, 139): "Having shown that so far femininity has
been produced exclusively in relation to the logic of the same, [Irigaray] falls for the temptation to produce her own positive theory of femininity. But, as we have
seen, to define 'woman' is necessarily to essentialize her" I disagree with Moi's statement at every step. First, I believe Irigaray had
no alternative but to go on to some positive construction. Until a positive category of women is historically constructed,
the man/woman distinction will be the A/not-A universal and exclusive dichotomy it has historically been in many of its
deployments; it cannot be dismantled or "deconstructed" by being folded in on itself (erase not-A). Second, I do not see that
the positive construction to which Irigaray is committed has to be understood as "defining 'woman .'"9 Third, even if it does, I do
not agree that defining "woman" necessarily commits one to any essentialism or to (what is to Moi and others the same thing) a
simple replication of A/not-A construction (with "us women" as A)as though the only possible logic of categories is this pseudodualistic monistic
logic. Moi is saying it is philosophically and politically wrong, incorrect, to construct a positive category of women. Others have suggested it is flat out (onto logically
impossible to do so. I think that they are wrong about this and that this mistake, by reiteration among prestigious academic feminist theorists across color and class
affiliations, has generated one of the rifts between feminist theory and feminist practice.

That means we outweighanti-essentialism is worse for women

Whitford 91 [Margaret, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine, 1991, p. 12-13]
Irigaray's work is of crucial importance, particularly if one regards the modernism/postmodernism debate as the principal intellectual debate of our time
(see some of the articles in Linda Nicholson (ed.) Feminism/Postmodernism (1990), and Susan Hekman's book Gender and Knowledge (1990), which puts forward this
argument from a feminist position). For this debate confronts feminists with a dilemma. On the one hand, they share with postmodernist

thought the radical critique of the modernist Enlightenment inheritance; on the other hand, the emancipatory thrust of
feminism is rooted in the Enlightenment. Feminist politics, up to now, appears to be grounded in a modernize category,
'woman', with essentialist implications, while the possibility of founding a political programme on a postmodernist base is ,
to say the least, still a matter for debate. Irigaray's contribution here is to point to the dangers for women of embracing
postmodernism too hastily or too uncritically. If, as she argues, all western theory - including the theories of postmodernism fails to recognize sexual difference, then we have to examine postmodernism for its sexual subtext. She warns against
displacing the male/female binary before the female side has acceded to identity and subjectivity. To omit the question of

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the woman-as-subject and her identity in thought and culture is to leave in place a tenacious and damaging imaginary
structure. 'Woman's time1, then, is not necessarily coincident with the chronology of the male subject.

5. The alt resolves this tensionmeans we have a unique link turn

Fuss 89 [Diana, "Essentially Speaking": Luce Irigaray's Language of Essence Hypatia, Vol. 3, No. 3, French
Feminist Philosophy (Winter, 1989), pp. 62-80]
Irigaray's reading of Aristotle's understanding of essence reminds me of Lacan's distinction between being and having the phallus: a woman does not possess the
phallus, she is the Phallus.16 Similarly, we can say that, in Aristotelian logic, a woman does not have an essence, she is Essence. Therefore

to
give "woman" an essence is to undo Western phallomorphism and to offer women entry into subjecthood . Moreover, because
in this Western ontology existence is predicated on essence , it has been possible for someone like Lacan to conclude, remaining fully within
traditional metaphysics, that without essence, "woman does not exist." Does this not cast a rather different light on Irigaray's
theorization of a woman's essence? A woman who lays claim to an essence of her own undoes the conventional binarisms
of essence/accident, form/matter, and actuality/potentiality. In this specific historical context, to essentialize "woman" can be a
politically strategic gesture of displacement .
To say that "woman" does not have an essence but is Essence, and at the same time to say that she has no access herself to
Essence as Form, seems blatantly contradictory. Moreover, has not Western philosophy always posited an essence for woman
an essence based on biology and, as everyone knows, defined by the properties of weakness, passivity, receptivity, and emotion, to name just a few? The
problem, I would argue, is not with Irigaray; it is precisely Irigaray's deployment of essentialism which clarifies for us the
contradiction at the heart of Aristotelian metaphysics . In his philosophy, we see that the figure of "woman" has become the site of this contradiction:
on the one hand, woman is asserted to have an essence which defines her as woman and yet, on the other hand, woman is relegated to the status of matter and can have
no access to essence (the most she can do is to facilitate man's actualizing of his inner potential). I would go so far as to say that the dominant line of

patriarchal thought since Aristotle is built on this central contradic tion: woman has an essence and it is matter; or, put slightly differently, it
is the essence of woman to have no essence. To the extent that Irigaray reopens the question of essence and woman's
access to it, essentialism represents not a trap she falls into but rather a key strategy she puts into play, not a dangerous
oversight but rather a lever of displacement .

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at: heterosexism
Its based on a misreadingand the alt solves
Schwab 7 [Gail, professor of French at Hofstra, Reading Irigaray (and Her Readers) in the Twenty-First
Century in Returning to Irigaray edited by Elaine P. Miller and Maria C. Cmitile, p. 33-35]
When assessing the relationship between the early and the late writings, even for those who are prepared to accept the idea of the underlying continuity of style and
intent of Irigaray's project, a problem remains. Certain readers, like Drucilla Cornell in the interview in diacritics, have read Irigaray's later work as

a
regression, an effort to reinscribe "conservatism on the deepest level of her understanding of sexual difference. "36 Cornell and
Judith Butler both pinpoint the Ethics as the moment when a blatant heterosexism comes in to vitiate Irigaray's project. Butler maintains that a certain
heterosexual notion of ethical exchange emerged in An Ethics of Sexual Difference . . . The intense overt heterosexuality of An Ethics of Sexual Difference and indeed
of the sexuate rights discourse, which is all about mom and motherhood and not at all about postfamily arrangements or alternative family arrangements, not only
brought to the fore a kind of presumptive heterosexuality, but actually made heterosexuality into the privileged locus of ethics, as if heterosexual relations, because they
putatively crossed this alterity, which is the alterity of sexual difference, were somehow more ethical, more other-directed, less narcissistic than anything else. It was, in
some sense, compelling men out of what she used to call their hom(m)osexualite into this encounter with alterity ... and what would emerge from that exchange would
be a certain kind of heterosexual love which would come to capture the domain of the ethical.37 Certain of these criticisms, the less important ones, are based

on misreadings or incomplete readings; sexuate rights, for example, are not really about "mom and motherhood," in the sense that Butler understands
them here. Irigaray does insist that mothers (those who have chosen maternity under the sexuate right to voluntary maternity that she demands) need special state
protection for their children. This, however, in no way reinstates the patriarchal family, and, in fact, can be read as requiring that
society recognize its responsibilities when it comes to nurturing and educating the next generation .38 Drucilla Cornell herself
points out the appropriateness of Irigaray's legal analyses to the French legal system, claiming that she has always "read her as programmatically serious about sexuate
rights, and seeing them as realizable. Such rights are certainly inconsistent with the way the law [read here 'the American legal system') operates now, but it is not
inconsistent with the concept of the French legal system."39 Nevertheless, the charge of heterosexism is a serious one, and it has at least occurred to many readers to
wonder at the new focus on the heterosexual couple that emerges at the time of the Ethics. I was not unaware of this new focus back in 1991 when I wrote "Irigarayan
Dialogism," but did not choose to deal with it at that time and focused on more formalistic issues instead. Others have found ways of reading Irigaray that do not limit
her thought to a monolithic presumptive heterosexuality. In the diacritics interview, Cheah and Grosz themselves offer subtler alternatives to this reading, many of
which had already been articulated by Grosz in "The Hetero and the Homo: The Sexual Ethics of Luce Irigaray," 40 an article published in Engaging with Irigaray.
Although it would be inappropriate to reproduce the whole of her argument here, it is useful to recall, with Grosz, that Irigaray was at one time seen to be the advocate
of a radical "presumptive" lesbianism. Grosz cautions readers against such presumptions, pointing out that Irigaray maintains a

critical distance from all existing types of sexual relations under patriarchy," and insisting that all current sexualities
hetero-, homo-, or lesbian--"represent the primacy of a sexuality conceived in phallic terms," but that "there still remains
the possibility of both heterosexual and homosexual relations based on an acceptance of women's pleasure."" In other
words, the future of all sexual relations beyond phallocentrism remains a completely open question. Far from being
presumed, heterosexuality as we currently conceive it might not even exist in a world where sexual difference had actually
emerged from the economy of the same. And this would, of course, also hold true for homosexualities as currently
conceived."

This misreading conflates ontic and ontological

Jones 11 [Emma, Speaking at The Limit, 2011, p. 30-31,
https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/11542/Jones_Emma_Reed_phd2011sp.pdf]
With regard to Irigarays explicitly formulated ethics of sexuate difference, however, some

commentators have worried that, in focusing on the

relation between sexuate subjects, Irigarays work is only applicable to intimate or sexual relations between men and
women. This is the substance of Judith Butlers critique of Irigaray, for instance, in the Diacritics interview, where she even quips that
Irigarays work should be filed under heterosexual studies. However , as I hope my discussion of ontology above has already shown,
when Irigaray speaks about the relation of sexuate subjects, she does not only mean a specific intimate relation between
men and women. Rather, the relation takes place at the ontological level, such that the event of being is already an event
of relation between-two, and the subject also comes to be re-defined as two: internally limited-by and perpetually
moved-toward the sexuate other. As Gail Schwab (2007) notes (and as I explain further in Chapter V), we can thus draw a distinction
between an empirical relation between the sexes and an ontological one . Schwab quotes Irigaray in To Be Two, who writes:
Certainly, I can decide to become woman while suspending my empirical relationship with the other gender [...] but [...]
to be woman necessarily involves [...] to be in relation with man, at least ontologically. (TBT: 34; Schwab, 32). Schwab interprets this
quote to say that [a]lthough generically, to be woman requires a relation to the other man , just as to be a man requires a relation to the other
woman, becoming a woman at the level of the individual is not dependent upon a heterosexual love choice (32). Thus, while

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the ethics of relationality proposed by Irigaray would certainly be applicable to empirical heterosexual love relations, it is
certainly not limited to this sphere, and instead concerns the relation between male and female genres (the French term translated
as genders) as a wholea relation that, in 31 turn, affects all of our empirical relations . Thus, as I will discuss in Chapter V, the ethical
practice of dialogue as the enactment of a relational limit is applicable to all human relationships. Nonetheless, for Irigaray, it is critical to transform the ontological
relation of sexuate difference (a transformation that, I argue, must be pursued through dialogues with all sexuate others) first and foremost if these relationships are to
thrive.

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heidegger

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1nc heidegger
Affirming the cyborg embraces a position of permanent wandering that forecloses the disclosure Being
and reifies technological thought --- voting aff merely results in iPhones and Google Glasses that grease
the wheels of capitalist exploitation
OHara 3 [Daniel T., Professor of English at Temple University, Neither Gods nor Monsters: An Untimely
Critique of the Post/Human Imagination, boundary 2 30:3, 2003] //khirn
An exemplary case in point, and a difficult case (for feminist political reasons), in fact, for her to take on, appears in Grahams extended analysis of Donna Haraways
work. Graham

discusses much of Haraways feminist cultural criticism, from her famous 1985 essay A Cyborg

Manifesto, to her 1997 book Modest-Witness@Second-Millennium.FemaleManMeets-OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. As Graham summarizes
Haraways general position (taken from her 1992 book Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science), simians, cyborgs and women all
occupy the boundaries of modernity, positioned there to show forth the scientific and cultural narratives that determine what will count as knowledge (203). One, of
course, can slide into the slot under the rubric of women ones own preferred monstrous minority, which is rather the point of both Haraways original position and
Grahams analytic use of it here. Haraway is a feminist cultural critic of scientific modernity and a scientist herself . She not only

argues her position announced above but attempts to perform it in her own writing , which she dubs
cyborg writing. Such writing would be, like poststructuralist criture, both subversively disruptive of the binary logics of
modernity in matters of race, class, gender, and now species, and celebratory of the hybridity and permeable boundaries of
cultural existence because of the ever greater possibilities for human (and beyond human) subjectivities it supposedly can now
foster. Cyborg writing is to conventional discourses what the cyborg is to the grand philosophical categories of modernity: humanity, nature, technology. That is, such
cyborg writing would make a vital mess of the rigid demarcations of class, race, gender, of life and death, of human and post/human, and so be able to promote the
liberations of new possibilities of existence on the planet. In characterizing Haraways position and writing in this way, however, Graham does not intend to reduce
them to the belated legacies of a romantic modernism intersecting with critical theorys desperate hunger for the next big thing in cultural critique. Haraways is no
simpleminded Rousseauistic vision for Graham. Instead, if there are any inheritances, they are Byronic in manner, as mediated by Shelleys Frankenstein. As Graham
remarks apropos Haraways figure of the cyborg and what it is intended to represent : Her cyborg has endured no fall from

primordial innocence, no Oedipal crisis, but also has no need , equally, therefore, of a narrative of restoration. Cyborgs [are without
families of any kind, and so] do not crave holism nor reunification with abandoned paradises nor maternal [or patriarchal] figures;
instead, like Haraways other favorites, the tricksters, cyborgs are restless nomads . . . so Haraways narrative of redemption is
[then] about transition and change without loss , permanent wandering and transmutation without
origins or ultimate destination (206). Whatever romantic analogues or paradigms for Haraway might be appropriate, Graham demonstrates
that for this feminist cultural critic of modernity, neither narratives of progress nor visions of apocalypse are require d. In fact, as Graham
details for most of an entire chapter, the ultimate expression of the modern Western binary logic Haraway wants to disarticulate and
surmount is precisely the religious logic that pits spiritual transcendence against material embodiment (21318), and, certainly, this
progressive critical position of Haraways is indebted, broadly speaking, to a recognizably post-Cartesian romantic social and cultural project that has revolutionary
dimensions. As Graham underscores, Haraway was raised a Roman Catholic, which touts officially an incarnational and sacramental religious vision. One can generally
find in her work that her opposition between human and divine, or (technolog-ized) earth and (immaterial) heaven itself rests upon unexamined [binary] constructions
of religion and transcendence that owe their origins to the Western Enlightenment (217) and also to what I take specifically to be its secularized Protestant and
politically revolutionary discourses. Consequently, Graham concludes that while Haraways cyborg writing demonstratively embraces

contingency and complicity [with irresolvable complexities], it can only do so in a mood predominantly suffused with irony, and
thus it can only adopt a postmodern veneer in its embrace of the hybridity and contingency of techno scientific culture
(218). In short, despite her most influential feminist cultural essay being entitled, after Foucault, Situated Knowledges (collected in Primate Visions), Haraway
apparently is not the real thingshes no Foucault (as Graham understands him), who did famously prophesize the so-called death of man. In Grahams view, that is,
Haraways cyborg writing permits the re-coalescence of the rigid binary structures of modern thinking that it would explode precisely because of its not fully examined
and critiqued post-Enlightenment religious underpinnings. In other words, Haraway is not enough of a social constructivist and new historicist critic but is more of a
powerfully diverting (albeit belatedly romantic) theoretical practitioner of modern irony. I have discussed Grahams representative critique of Haraway at some length
because it is so indicative of her avowedly Foucauldian critical framework and interpretive method, and because, from my admittedly untimely critical point of view,
Graham misses the most important matter, specifically with regard to Haraways would-be cyborg writing (whatever that really is supposed to be and do) and more

There is no post/humanyet ! What Haraway says about

the figure of the cyborg and the kind of writing she wants to write in its name is all imaginary, it has no material reality to
it yet and perhaps never will or can. Similarly, no monsters, mythic or otherwise, left us their ten thousand years of cultural history .
Nor, as far we know, have any godlike aliens dropped off their packets of instant worlds to mix up with a few of our spare tears. Nothing like that has
popped into existence . And nothing of the Internet and its virtual realities has subverted anything in the
real world of global capitalism; rather, all these developments have only enhanced the spread of capitalist power
into every nook and cranny of existence , proliferating and accelerating the alienated and
generally concerning all the talk of the post/human. What is that, you say?

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alienating work rhythms of our lives to such a pitch that there can apparently be no such thing as a vacation
anymore , no holidays in reality for us, no respite from an increasingly driven will-to-will ever new value(s).

The impact is the endless nihilism and repetition of the will to will --- within this paradigm no ethical
framing or value to life is possible --- the alternative is to do nothing --- this call to think and poetize is the
only transgression possible
OHara 3 [Daniel T., Professor of English at Temple University, Neither Gods nor Monsters: An Untimely
Critique of the Post/Human Imagination, boundary 2 30:3, 2003] //khirn
I have recalled this sci-fi world from the mists of my youth not for nostalgias sake but because in many ways Smiths world, chronicled in his published work between
1950 and his untimely death (at age fifty-three) in 1966, could virtually be the model of the world several recent books claim is emerging triumphantly or ominously (or
both) right now. The latest revolutions in biotechnology (largely associated in the popular mind with the Human Genome Project), in brain research and
psychopharmacology, and in digital technologies have given rise to a variety of subcultures. Each of these has its own worldview, and almost all of these
worldviews deploy in their discourses some form of the term post/human. The one meaning that the different uses of this term generally share is an opposition to
what is characterized as modernity. For modernity is portrayed in the discourses of these subcultures that are vying for hegemonic

status in the new age as the culture of already empowered white male subjects who are just up to no good : out to dominate
nature, marginalize further so-called minority groups (however defined), and assume godlike status at the expense of all these
monstrous others. That is, all these others have been constructed as monstrous in some fashion by being represented,
classified, subjected, supervised, and disciplined (by modern culture) solely in order to determine by contrast a purified (albeit fictionalized)
standard of (white male) normality. Although Grahams book contains a seventeen-page post/human bibliography in very tiny print, clearly the influence
of only a few theorists shines through her basically feminist critical formulation of modernity. Among the most prominent and formative of these
theorists for Grahams argument are Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway , and Bruno Latour. I intend to focus on Grahams representative use of Foucault
because he provides the announced critical framework and method. About Haraway more will follow from Graham herself. And about Latour? I hope to discuss his
work at length in a forthcoming essay. Broadly speaking, then, the discourses of the post/human (for Graham), as they accompany developments in contemporary
technoscience, are generally oppositional discourses critical of current conceptions and realities of Western culture in many, often potentially conflicting, perhaps
even self-contradictory, ways. This last is especially the case with technocratic futurists, who are critical of the status quo in contemporary society but in the name of
their own desired white male hegemony. However that may be, my primary concern is not with the internal logic (or illogic) of these discourses. Rather, my primary
concern with these discourses (about the sciences they invoke I will not comment on here) arises from two interrelated issues: the alleged affinity of their antihumanistic
polemics with poststructuralism in general and Foucault specifically, and the unrecognized nihilistic attitude they perpetuate. In a real sense, the centrality of Grahams
book in this context is a testament to the fact that it has done part of its job admirably well: it does indeed effectively survey and taxonomically place the discourses of
the post/human, and it does so better, more critically, than other recent texts. However, in its deployment of what Graham characterizes as a Foucauldian critical
framework (and the avowed method of critical genealogies) and in the incomplete analysis of its own invocations of a Heideggerian perspective on modernity and
technology, Representations of the Post/Human, already an excellent introduction to the topic, remains seemingly paralyzed on the threshold of the very comprehensive
critique it apparently aspires to mount. Before turning to the specifics of my critique of her representative work, however, I need first to give the reader at least some
sketch of Heideggers treatment of modernity and technology, since his vision of these phenomena helps to define my own critical framework and represents, I believe,
the fundamental step still not taken by Graham in her study. The essence of modern technology, in fact of modernity per se, is what Heidegger

calls in his various readings of Nietzsche, the will-to-will. 5 This will-to-will, the reader will recall, is the underlying form of
what Nietzsche could only see more metaphysically (in Heideggers readings) as a universal and transhistorical will-to-power.
All forms of beingatoms, ants, and anthropoidsdisplay, according to Nietzsche, a drive for ever more power. Whatever quantum of
power is observed and taken as a base state in relation to a configuration of other quanta of power, the entity under analysis will be seen as acting to secure an
increasingly larger quantum of power, initially at least despite the consequences for itself or other entities. Intelligence, in this context, is basically

an

administrative phenomenon for directing the will-to-power in ways that , while still maximizing power, can avoid or at least
postpone for as long as possible the worst consequences of its own fundamental drive. Why such postponement? In the case of living
organisms, so that reproduction may occur, and a potentially infinite future made possible for the entity in question. What Heidegger proposes in his
readings of Nietzsches will-topower is that modernitys form of this will is more precisely depicted as the will-to-will,
that is, as a will to itself in an infinite circuit of becoming through all the levels and modes of being, as that process of selfrevision is both captured in the staged spectacles of the modern wills self-images and housed in modernitys various
archives. In this severe light, the modern subject can be seen as nothing more than an endlessly self-revising and selfrecording dancer (or performance artist) with shocking masks, some drawn from the archives of the past, some from the
imagination, perhaps now, the post/human imagination, of the future . That these masks may be made of reanimated dead flesh, silicon chips,
and animal fur, or that they may penetrate the skin and serve as invasive prosthetic devices matters little, analytically speaking. Humanist, antihumanist,
or posthumanist, all modes of existence in modernity are manifestations of this nihilistic will-to-will . For
Heidegger, this modern condition is a historical epoch of potentially millennial expanse. But why is it nihilistic? After all, nihilism means that
existence is seen as valueless , and certainly the discourses of modernity and of the post/human are awash in a sea of values,
of value assertions, of value designations, of the conflict of values, and so on. For Heidegger, following Nietzsche, once it is shown that the highest values of the Judeo-

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Christian tradition have devalued themselves, then the production of new values is a project always strangling itself in its own crib, as it were. How can this be? The
highest value of the Judeo-Christian tradition is truth, according to Nietzsche and Heidegger. This traditions God is the true one, and this God demands truth from all
believers: truth in speaking to and loving others, and in praying and confessing to this God. For the better part of two thousand years, this tradition bred human subjects
to be seekers of the truth. With the emergence of modern science, the quintessential method for seeking truth, however, the Judeo-Christian tradition bred its own
executioner. Not only has modern science discovered the falsity at the basis of this tradition, but it has led to the prospect that there are only lies, only appearances, only
untruths. All truths, and so all true values, are necessary fabrications useful in the will-to-powers (or the will-to-wills) quest

ever to secure more power long enough to pass on such accumulated power to posterity. To what end? No end, only the
ever enhanced prospect of this endless process of self-revising will-to-will itself . (Heidegger stresses repeatedly that the value of
imaginary or real self-enhancement, at the expense of all else, is the nihilistic value par excellence.) It is in this nihilistic context that Heidegger
concludes that not only Nietzsches philosophy but any philosophy can at best now do nothing , for otherwise it will participate in
and help to perpetuate thereby such apparently endless nihilistic self-enhancement : Philosophy will be unable to effect
any immediate change in the current state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human reflection and
endeavor. Only a god can save us. The only possibility available to us is that by thinking and poetizing we prepare a
readiness for the appearance of a god . . . insofar as in view of the absent god we are in a state of decline (as cited in Graham,
224). It is interesting to note, I think, that the verb to enhance and its nominal variants appear in Grahams book too many times to count, virtually every couple of pages

a seemingly quietist response of Heideggers, only attempting to think and to poetize so as to prepare a
readiness for a gods appearance, does not appeal to the habitual activist impulses of the vast majority of
modern intellectuals. (On another occasion, I would argue in detail that this only thinking and poeticizing , whether in preparation for a
divine revelation or not, is perhaps the hardest thing one can attempt to do.) What does appeal nowadays , of course, is
representing ones critical efforts as being part of a large struggle against the powers that be , a struggle for
greater justice, that is, greater access to and distribution of the material and cultural resources of modernity, for all peoples
and now, in light of the post/human imagination, all possible beings. Each and every subject, in this best of all possible worlds that is
emerging, should form itself on the model of the nihilistic will-to-will according to the ultimate value of a potentially
infinite self-enhancement that can recognize no limits on the course of its sensational transgressions .
or so. Admittedly, such

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2nc link wall/ov

Haraways understanding of being as pure affirmation forecloses the contemplative rethinking required
to reveal the eclipse of Western metaphysics
Rae 14 [Gavin, American University at Cairo, The Philosophical Roots of Donna Haraways Cyborg Imagery:
Descartes and Heidegger Through Latour, Derrida, and Agamben, Human Studies, December 2014, Volume
37, Issue 4, pp 505-528] //khirn
Noting the three senses of metaphysics in Heidegger, I will suggest that Haraways thinking abandons the perceived ambiguity inherent to the question of being to
focus on thinking entities in a way that is not constrained by the logic of binary oppositions. In other words, it will be my suggestion that while Haraway is initially
implicitly influenced by Heideggers critique of anthropocentrism, she shares

Derridas and Latours rejection of Heideggers conclusion that

the overcoming of anthropocentrism can only occur through the re-raising of the question of the meaning of being to look at
the ways in which entities are, pace Descartes, ontologically entwined. Support for this understanding is found in Haraways work, where, in one of her few
explicit comments, placed in a marginal endnote to When Species Meet, on Heidegger, she claims that Heideggers notion of the open is
quite different from mine (2008: 367n.28), before going on to explain that her reading of Heidegger is based on Giorgio Agambens reading which
claims that (1) the notion of profound boredom is crucial to Heideggers understanding of the open, and (2) understanding the humans capacity for profound boredom
emanates from a comparison of the human to animal. From here, Haraway claims that her notion of the open is quite different, insofar as it

is not based on Heideggers negativity (human minus profound boredom leads to animal who cannot suffer boredom), but on pure
affirmation .
While Krzysztof Ziarek (2008: 189f., 196, 201) raises serious concerns over Agambens reading of Heidegger, claiming that Agamben forgets the role the question of
being plays in Heideggers analysis of the humananimal relation, Haraways support for Agambens reading reveals that she develops her thinking from (a reading of)
Heideggers. This appears to lend support to my claim that she is developing her thinking from a Heidegger-inspired heritage, a relationship that, if Heideggers notion
of trace is accurate, would ensure that a trace of Heideggers thinking finds expression in her thinking. Indeed, we see this further once we recognize that Haraway
develops her hybrid-ontology from Agambens suggestion that Heidegger develops his notions of profound boredom, the open, humans, and animals by comparing
humans to animals to reveal the abyss between them. Again, this reading of Heidegger has been criticised by, for example, Tracy Colony (2007: 7, 10) who argues that
Agambens and, by extension, Haraways reading of Heidegger on this point fails to recognize that Heidegger not only actually

aims to undermine the binary oppositions upon which modern metaphysics depends , but does so by
questioning and comparing the being of humans to the being of animals to show that profound boredom is a
possibility that emanates from human beings unique ek-static relationship to being, a relationship that the non-ek-sistence of animality cannot share.
In contrast, Haraway takes Agamben to be showing that Heidegger simply compares humans to animals to privilege the former over the latter. From here, she depends
on Latours privileging of empirical observation of entities over philosophical speculation into being, claims that to properly understand entities requires that we
examine the ontological entwinement of entities devoid of the ambiguity inherent to passing this re-thinking through a questioning of being, and, in so doing, calls into
question the radical division between human, animal, and machine through which Descartes (and, according to her reading, Heidegger) thinks and privileges human
being. To show this, I will now explore some aspects of Haraways thinking to draw out those currents that show her Cartesian and Heideggerian heritage. Again, there
is not sufficient space to engage with all aspects of her thinking and so the presentation will be rather brief and schematic, but it will be sufficient to show that
Haraways thinking emanates, but also departs, from Heideggers critique of the binary oppositions underpinning Descartes thinking on the humanmachine/animal
relationship.

Cyborgs cause extinction and destroy value to life

Dinello 2k5 (Dan, Technophobia! Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology
http://shockproductions.com/technophobia/technophobia.html)
Techno-Heaven awaits you.

You will be resurrected into posthuman immortality when you discard your body, digitize
your mind and download your identiy into the artificial brain of a computer. Cyber-existing in virtual reality, you will live forever in
a perfect simulation of divine bliss. This techno-heaven is envisioned by a cult of techno-priests scientists and their apostles - who profess a
religious faith that the god technology will eliminate the pain and suffering of humans by eliminating humans. These techno-utopians fervently
believe that technological progress will lead to perfection and immortality for the posthuman, cyborg
descendants of a flawed, inevitably extinct humanity . Is this a happy dream or a dismal nightmare? In contrast to
this bright vision of a pain-free, posthuman techno-heaven, science fiction frequently paints a dark picture of technology. From the destructive robot-witch of
Metropolis (1926) to the parasitic squid-machines of The Matrix Revolutions (2003), the technologized creatures of science fiction often seek to destroy or enslave
humanity. Science fiction shows the transformation into the posthuman as the horrific harbinger of the long twilight and decline of the human species.

In its

obsession with mad scientists, rampaging robots, killer clones, cut-throat cyborgs, human-hating androids, satanic
supercomputers, flesh-eating viruses and genetically mutated monsters, science fiction expresses a technophobic fear of losing our
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human identity, our freedom, our emotions, our values and our lives to machines. Like a virus, technology autonomously insinuates itself into human life and, to
insure its survival and dominance, malignantly manipulates the minds and behavior of humans. This book explains the dramatic conflict
between the techno-utopia promised by real world scientists and the techno-dystopia predicted by science
fiction. Such technophobic science fiction serves as a warning for the future, countering cyber-hype and reflecting the real world
of weaponized, religiously rationalized, and profit-fueled technology. The United States 2003 invasion of Iraq offers a suggestive
example of autonomous technology supported by religious, military and corporate interests. An expansion of
the American Techno-Empire, the invasions security rationales Iraqs nuclear threat, their huge stores of chemical and biological
weapons, and their ties to the September 11 terrorists all proved wrong. Falsehood was expressed as certainty by the Bush administration who fabricated,
exaggerated and distorted the pre-War intelligence to justify the war. With the bloody horror of its dead and wounded hidden, the
invasion appeared - in the American media as advertising hype for U.S. military power and technology. Human costs were
minimized. Battling a technologically-primitive enemy, the war was a techno-slaughter test of Americas latest bombs, guns, and planes. Even more insidiously, the
invasion can be seen as a war to seize control of the oil needed by the machines. In this sense ,

humans have been subsumed into weaponized

systems and themselves function as the slave-like tools of technology. Technological imperatives propel war
and the politics of domination. As American warfare has become more and more technologically driven, scientific, corporate and military interests have
become inseparable. Much of the research and development of 21st century posthuman technologies, such as artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and robotics, were
originated and funded by the American military often through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Created in 1958 to avert a weapons gap with
the Russians and inspired by their launching of Sputnik, DARPA which currently disburses nearly $2 billion annually to corporate, government and university
researchers remains Americas most powerful force driving technological change through weapons development. Aligned with weaponized technology, corporate
profit and religious propaganda, President George Bush an evangelical Methodist - pledged a crusade to rid the world of evil-doers, a phrase that sounds like a
call to battle against satanic forces; thankfully for the petroleum companies, Satan happens to reside on Iraqs rich oil reserves. The war, like the science fiction to be
discussed in this book, dramatizes a disturbing aspect of technology: it is energized by a deadly alliance of military, corporate, and religious interests. Promoting a

Transferring
human minds into death-free robots, according to artificial intelligence expert Raymond Kurzweil, will produce the next stage of
evolution - an immortal machine/man synthesis: Robosapiens. While this sounds like science fiction, Kurzweil - in his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual
religious vision of technology, the evangelists of techno-heaven promise the reward of everlasting life in exchange for subjugation to the machine.

Machines- expresses it as inevitable science fact. Calling this evolutionary transformation The Singularity, mathematician and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge

the result might be the physical extinction of the human race . Echoing Vinge and Kurzweil, robotics
pioneer Hans Moravec forecasts a utopian, robot-dominated, postbiological future in his book Robot: Mere Machine to
Transcendent Mind (1999). From a biotechnological angle, Gregory Stock in Metaman: The Merging of Humans and Machines into a Global
Superorganism (1993) predicts the genetic re-engineering of the species for posthuman perfection. Posthuman
evolution - the development of human/machine fusion - is clearly underway . Tiny cameras, serving
as artificial eyes, wired directly into the brain; mechanical hands and legs controlled by nerve impulses; computer networks populated by
disembodied minds all these blur the distinction between human and machine. The mapping of the human genome
bestows unprecedented, almost-divine power on biotechnologists who want to create superhumans by re-tooling
evolution and genetically reconstituting the species. While we wait for brain implants to make us smarter, nanotechnologists will engineer
believes that

intelligent molecular machines and inject them into our bodies to destroy diseases before they terminate us. Meanwhile, self-reproducing nanobots will revolutionize the
economy by providing an abundance of cheaply-made replacement organs, material goods and food. Taken collectively, 21st century technologies - Robotics, Artificial
Intelligence, Bionics, the Internet, Virtual Reality, Biotechnology and Nanotechnology - promise a new era in human progress, the Posthuman Age. While this book is
about science fiction, it includes a brief history and status report on these technologies as we explore imaginings of their future possibilities and the risks they entail .

The rapid development of posthuman technologies according to the requirements of war and profit - will have
profoundly disturbing, perhaps revolutionary effects on our world. If we are approaching a dangerous threshold
of posthuman evolution, or Singularity a twilight zone where . . . our old models must be discarded and a new
reality rules ,science fiction helps us envision that new reality. The best science fiction extrapolates from known technology and projects a vision of the
future against which we can evaluate present technology and its direction. The main premise of this book is that science fiction matters, that the
actual development of technology and our response (or lack of response) is influenced by popular culture. Drawing
a vision of the future from attitudes, moods and biases current among its artists and their audience, science fiction not only reflects popular assumptions and values, but
also gives us an appraisal of their success in practice. Alone, cultural imagery and themes do not motivate behavior. But recurring images and themes reveal behaviors
that are culturally valued while advocating a point of view for discussion. Science fiction serves as social criticism and popular philosophy. Often taking us a step
beyond escapist entertainment, science fiction imagines the problematic consequences brought about by these new technologies and the ethical, political and existential
questions they raise. As

emerging technologies shift the balance of power between human and machine, our concept of
humanity alters. Rapidly accelerating computer intelligence joins an escalating series of ego-smashing, scientific breakthroughs that diminish human selfimage. Copernicus pushed us from the center of the universe; Darwin linked us to apes, slugs and bacteria; Freud showed us
that we often do not control our own minds. Computers now threaten to surpass us in intelligence. Cyborgs are stronger
and more powerful . Clones portend an unlimited supply of duplicate selves. This reduces the value of our own minds, bodies, individuality and
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consciousness.

A kind of evolutionary panic ensues, giving rise to fears of being transformed or taken over by
machines . These fears are amplified by military and corporate funding of emerging technology, insuring life-

threatening and profit-making developments without regard to ethical or human consequences. As Langdon
Winner says in Autonomous Technology (1977), Technology is a source of domination that effectively rules
all forms of modern thought and activity . Whether by an inherent property or by an incidental set of
circumstances, technology looms as an oppressive force that poses a direct threat to human freedom .
Science fiction taps into these existential fears while reinforcing our concerns about the misanthropic humans
who serve as technologys collaborators in domination. In my analysis, Winners concept of autonomous technology - which develops
Jacques Elluls radical critique in The Technological Society (1964) - serves as a theoretical touchstone. Beyond this, I will show how science fiction anticipates and
reflects recent warnings about technomania. Bill Joy's widely read 2000 article in Wired "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" splashed cold water in the face of
technocrats with its incisive warning about the dangers that robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology pose to humanitys survival. Coming from Sun
Microsystems chief scientist, co-creator of the Unix operating system and developer of Java software, Joys stinging rebuke was all the more painful to technologists
who believed he shared their faith. He called attention to technologys unintended consequences while evaluating the techno-vision of everyone from the neo-Luddite
Unabomber to robotics posthumanist Hans Moravec, taking seriously the likelihood that machines will supplant humans as the dominant lifeform on the planet. He
singled out the most dangerous aspect of these technologies self-replication, an issue explored in the oldest science fiction novel, Mary Shelleys Frankenstein (1818),
and in contemporary ones, like Michael Crichtons 2003 best-seller Prey.

The aff forecloses being-in-the-world

Cook 4 [Peta S., Centre for Social Change Research, Queensland University of Technology, The Modernistic
Posthuman Prophecy of Donna Haraway, paper presented to the Social Change in the 21st Century
Conference, 2004, http://eprints.qut.edu.au/646/1/cook_peta.pdf] //khirn
Taking pleasure in these boundary transgressions of the cyborg, Haraway (1991: 150, emphasis added) blurs reality/fiction by asserting the cyborg is a creature in a
postgender world, while proposing we are cyborgs. In this fashion, Haraway (1991: 181) understands the importance of the cyborg as a

utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender, meaning the cyborg should be embraced in the promises of
monsters (Haraway, 1992b: 295). Nevertheless, despite Haraways (1991) acknowledgement of the utopian and dystopic past, present, and future potentials of
technoscience; bodies are maps of power and identity. Cyborgs are no exception (Haraway, 1991: 180); she focuses on a cyborg utopia2 as an
imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings (Haraway, 1991: 153). Similarly to Firestones utopian social vision of a technobased post-gender reality that is free from biologically-based oppression (Braidotti, 2002; Firestone, 1970), Haraway (1991) presents the cyborg as (another) liberating
source to escape gender stereotypes (Dixon, 2003; Balsamo, 1988). In this way, desire for gender reconstruction through dichotomist transgression is nothing more than
a utopian dream, where the future reality will be more desirable than the present (Horner, 2001). Hence, such cyborg concepts are an escapist futuristic

solution from the dissatisfaction with the inadequacies and injustices of [contemporary] human life (Springer, 1994: 163), which
reconciles the self/other in a Lacanian Imaginary realm (Springer, 1994). In this fashion, the blurring of reality/imagination (Haraway, 1991) is a repetition of old
feminist stories that reduces the depths of the: materiality of the concrete and embodied lived experience; structural embedded nature of gender; and the rhizomatous
role of technology, which is creating real oppression. Thus, as the body is our general medium for having a world (Merleau-Ponty 1962:

146), our real embodied experiences are cyborg facts, that should remain to be potently significant for cyborg
anthropology. The powerful lived experience of the body and its intentionality is seen in the phantom-limb
syndrome, where the absent limb of an amputee can be ambivalently (omni)present in a dual ontology of
presence/absence (Merleau-Ponty 1962). Consequently, our understandings of the body should not only be conceived as transcending the flesh, but also
dependent on our familiar lived experiences of the body. In other words , the embodiment of being-in-the-world is vital for the
development and understanding of agency as experienced in reality . As a result, the concrete (cyborg) body continues
to be a site of oppression; an interface a field of intersecting material and symbolic forces; it is a surface were multiple codes are inscribed (Braidotti,
2002: 25). In this fashion, cyborgs are not simply the new ontology or new embodied flesh envisioned by Haraway (in Kunzru 1997), as sexualised
markings on the (cyborg) body (Foster 1996) increase, rather than decrease, the gender divide. Furthermore, the immediate
and everyday experience of the lived physical body (Leib) within a common life-world (Lebenswelt) (Merleau-Ponty 1962), continues
to reassert the need to be aware, and to respect, the present social construction of human ontology as gendered3 . In turn, the
interrelation between materiality and discourse are important in the production of reality. Therefore, while Haraway acknowledges the social influences on materialsemiotic actors, she focuses on cyborg post-gender fiction at the expense of cyborg-gendered realities. Thus, it is important to consider what this

reality actually means for the lived experiences of cyborg bodies.

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That forecloses any metaphysical transformation

DeLuca 05 -- Environmental Humanities Research Professor @ University of Utah (Kevin , "Thinking with
Heidegger Rethinking Environmental Theory and Practice," Project Muse, p 67-87,
https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ethics_and_the_environment/v010/10.1deluca.html)
Citing the Cartesian ontology of the world as dominant, Heidegger in Being and Time works to "demonstrate explicitly not only
that Descartes' conception of the world is ontologically defective , but that his Interpretation and the foundations on which it is based have led
him to pass over both the phenomenon of the world and the Being of those entities within-the-world which are proximally ready-to-hand" (1962, 128). Briefly,
Heidegger critiques Descartes for positing a "bare subject without a world" (1962, 192) and for relying on mathematics, which produces the sort of Reality it can grasp,
thus "the kind of Being which belongs to sensuous perception is obliterated, and so is any possibility that the entities encountered in such perception should be grasped
in their Being" (1962, 130). Descartes' ontology presumes the dynamic of an isolated subject grasping mathematically world as object. Arguably, it is this perspective
that is at the root of the environmental crisis, for the world is reduced to an object laid out before me and I am reduced to a detached subject that has only a use-relation
to a dead world.
Heidegger disdains "the Cartesian approach of positing a subject one can come across in isolatio n" (1962, 248) and rejects the
"perennial philosophical

quest to prove that an 'external world' is present -at-hand" (1962, 250). Instead, Heidegger offers a different
foundational starting point: "The Interpretation of the world begins, in the first instance, with some entity within-the-world, so that the phenomenon
of the world in general no longer comes into view" (1962, 122). Humanity is never the isolated subject that surveys and grasps
the world-as-object displayed before it. Heidegger continues: "Our investigation takes its orientation from Being-in-the-World
that basic state of Dasein by which every mode of its being gets co-determined " (1962, 153). Heidegger concludes: "In clarifying
Being-in-the-world we have shown that a bare subject without a world never 'is' proximally, nor is it ever given "(1962, 152).
Heidegger explicitly clarifies this point in response to Descartes : "If the 'cogito sum' is to serve as the point of departure for
the existential analytic of Dasein, then it needs to be turned around, and furthermore its [End Page 73] content needs new
ontologico-phenomenal confirmation. The 'sum' is then asserted first, and indeed in the sense that "I am in a world." As such an entity, 'I am' in the
possibility of Being towards various ways of comporting myselfnamely, cogitationesas ways of Being alongside entities within the world" (1962, 254).
Heidegger, then, is suggesting a Copernican revolution with respect to humanity's relation to the world, for it is never

a
matter of "to" but "in." Humanity is never a subject over and against or above the world apart from the world ; rather, the
subject is always in the world, a part of the world, and , indeed, is constituted by relations in the world. Further, in an important point
that is not so clear in Being and Time but that becomes evident in later writings, "I am in the world" on earth, that Being-in-the-world is always
already Being-in-the-world on earth. Earth is "that on which and in which man bases his dwelling.... Upon the earth and in
it, historically man grounds his dwelling in the world.... The world grounds itself on the earth, and earth juts through
world" (1993, 169, 171, 172). In displacing the subject-object dichotomy that so circumscribes environmental theory and practice, Heidegger's thought
opens up a horizon of possibilities of other ways/beginnings/trajectories for environmentalism . What would it mean to approach all
environmental issues from a fundamental understanding of Being-in-the-world on earth?

Cyber feminism is engrained in technology ignores the dangers of technological development and
increases violence towards women
Suchman 6 [ Lucy, Professor of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Department of Sociology at
Lancaster University, Social Studies of Science, Wajcan Confronts Cyber Feminism Vol. 36, No. 2 (Apr.,
2006), pp. 321-327
April 2006, http://www.jstor.org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/stable/pdf/25474445.pdf?acceptTC=truem LM]
While Wajcman endorses the figure of the cyborg as developed by Haraway, she suggests that in the hands of
Haraway's followers the cyborg has been cut loose from its ironic, socialist feminist specificity, as '[t]he lived
technoscientific reality of cyborgs has taken second place to their treatment as fictional discourse' (p. 94). Wajcman's
primary difference with Haraway is over what she characterizes as the latter's excessive optimism with respect to the
emancipatory potential of new technologies; a position that Wajcman attributes to a privileging of the semiotic over the material. For
example, taking the mobile phone as a case in point, Wajcman emphasizes the labours hidden in its appearance as an object:
'For a young woman in the West, her silver cell phone is experienced as a liberating extension of her body. The social relations of
production that underpin its existence are invisible to her' (pp. 121). Those relations, she goes on to explain,
include the dependence of electronics manufacturing on the mineral Coltan, mined principally in Central Africa under semi-feudal
and colonial labour conditions. A rise in the price of Coltan in global markets exacerbates local armed conflicts, which
in turn have direct and violent consequences for women. It is conditions like these that Wajcman names the
'material realities' of technology production, and which she defines as a central object for technofeminism..
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2nc turns case

The will-to-wills infinite self-enhancement forecloses the questioning capable of disrupting global
capitalist and technical dominations
OHara 3 [Daniel T., Professor of English at Temple University, Neither Gods nor Monsters: An Untimely
Critique of the Post/Human Imagination, boundary 2 30:3, 2003] //khirn
What does it really matter in a truly impersonal way whether or not there is a designer baby, cyborg writing, or a spaced-out virtual reality freak who may or may not
have taken the required psychotropic medication today? What does it matter that the material and cultural resources of the emerging post/human imagination be more
(rather than less) equally distributed? And if each one of us (or our professional group) is able to play out, on a brief break from our alienated labor, the fantasy of Dr.
Frankenstein, so what? Once the last person or group on earth can become whatever she, he, or it wants to be, what then ? That

insatiable modern will-to-will indeed will, no must, not rest, cannot rest, because its only aim is an impossible infinite
self-enhancement . But what if the universe is as perfect as it can be already at every moment , and what if any
change, however tiny, however carefully done, means everything existing is abolished as it is, and so all begins to swing wildly out of
kilter, like those complex physical systems (such as our weather systems on the planet), wobbling ever more crazily toward an
absolute chaos that the madly beautiful figures of fractal geometry enshrine? What then? My point in raising such
questions as these is not to suggest that I or anyone knows their answers. Precisely the opposite is the case . No one can
ever know the answers about the whole , because no one , however enhanced by modern
technology, can ever know the whole (much less pretend to judge its value), and so no one can ever become that
post/human god that the administrative imaginary of global capitalism is busy producing simulacra of even in the harshest
discourses of its severest critics. (This dimension of critical imagination as an unintended repetition of the very thing it would overcome is the consequence
of existence in an epoch of nihilism.) All such developments compose the lesson of the unknowable (derived in part from critical
reflections on quantum physics and its theories) that few wish to recall now in this moment of global capitalisms apparent
ascendancy.11 It is just such recollection of the unknowable when projected into an imaginary cultural future that Smiths science fiction stories repeatedly perform
and so uncannily anticipate for us, I think, right now. Now is not the occasion for a full discussion of his work, some preliminary work toward which I have already
done elsewhere.12

The cyborg gets coopted---understanding their aff as inherently political maintains pre-determined
entities and reaffirms the binaries they try and eradicate
Rae 14 [Gavin, American University at Cairo, The Philosophical Roots of Donna Haraways Cyborg Imagery:
Descartes and Heidegger Through Latour, Derrida, and Agamben, Human Studies, December 2014, Volume
37, Issue 4, pp 505-528] //khirn
Two points stand out from the presentation of Haraways position so far: first, by identifying and criticising the underlying binary oppositions of Western thinking,
Haraway can be read as taking aim at Descartes and, in so doing, sharing a similarity with Heidegger who also criticises and aims to overcome the binary logic upon

Haraway links cyborg imagery to struggles for political emancipation .

Cyborg imagery is not to be glorified in-itself, but is meant to stimulate our thinking in ways that overcome the binary
oppositions upon which, she maintains, relations of domination are based (1991: 154). For this reason, cyborg imagery is
inherently political . However, while Haraways use of an ironic cyborg imagery to undermine the binary oppositions of Cartesian-inspired thinking was
which Descartes thinking operates. Second,

hugely influential, it quickly morphed into a serious post/trans-humanist thinking charting the ways human being and technology were influencing one another

purpose behind Haraways cyborg imagery was co-opted

away from its primary purpose of offering a critique of anthropocentric binary oppositions to a

(Bostrom 2005; Gray 2002; Clark 2003; Pepperell 2009). In other words, the

thinking that charted the various potential opportunities and consequences of human beings continuing cyborgisation. Of course, this re-thinking did continue to
challenge anthropocentric binary oppositions, but my suggestion is that this was no longer its primary purpose.
On the one hand, that subsequent post/trans-human thinking no longer addresses or justifies itself through this problematic but simply takes the critique of binary
oppositions as a given, shows how influential Haraways cyborg imagery was. On the other hand, however, and while there was the recognition that the human and
machine were changing, there was still a tendency to think the changing nature of both from the perspective of the human. In short, cyborgisation tended to

be
anthropomorphized with the result that anthropocentrism was re-admitted leading to the dominance of what has been
called humanist or anthropocentric approaches to posthumanism ( Wolfe 2010: 62). Furthermore, by downplaying cyborg imagerys challenging
of anthropocentrism, and focusing on the various ways the human and machine were melding together, post/trans-human theory often turned to science fiction to think
the cyborg with the consequence that the political intent behind Haraways use of cyborg imagery was downplayed. While recent posthuman theory has

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taken a noticeable political turn that returns to and emphasises the political strand in Haraways cyborg imagery (Campbell
2011; Cohen 2009; Eposito 2008; Fukuyama 2003; Gray 2002; Protevi 2009; Rose 2007; Thacker 2010), the initial downplaying of the political
implications of cyborg imagery contributed to an alteration in Haraways own thinking.
The Second Wave: Haraways Companion Species
While the serious, apolitical uses of cyborg imagery, failure to overcome anthropocentrism in all its guises, and personal interest in the question of animality all
contributed to a change in Haraways focus (1995: 514), there was something about cyborg imagery itself that Haraway felt was inadequate. First, focusing on the
humanmachine relationship downplays the other ways in which human being is entangled with the other. Second, and more fundamentally, by

unquestioningly taking over cyborg imagery to think how the male, female, human, and animal are being mechanised,
thinking failed to recognise that we need to take a more patient look at the troubled categories of woman and human
(2008: 17). Simply taking over these categories and showing how they are being cyborgised does not truly entail a radical thinking of
the fluid, embedded, and entangled nature of these categories, but risks simply maintaining pre-determined
entities that are complicated through their machinisation ; a thinking that tends to simply re-affirm
the binary oppositions of the anthropocentrism Haraway questions.

Cyborg accidents cause extinction

Somerville 10 [Margaret, Attempts to redesign our species or prolong life through avant garde science pose a
serious threat to humanity's survival. http://www.themarknews.com/articles/2849]
Being an incurable optimist,

I do not believe the human race will end, but, if it were to, I think it would most likely come about
through human intervention in human life with avant garde technoscience . Such interventions could either intentionally
wipe out the species, as in the case of the transhumanists, or unintentionally, as could happen with xenotransplantation. Transhumanism is a movement
supporting the belief that humans, and the human experience as we know and treasure it, should become obsolete. Transhumanists are working towards a
future in which humans are redesigned through technology, especially robotics and artificial intelligence, to become cyborgs
human machines. The physical, mental, emotional, and even moral capacities of cyborgs, transhumanists say, will far outstrip those of unmodified humans.. In this
techno-utopian vision one I, and others, see as dystopian of a post-human future, people like us unmodified humans are obsolete
models. In a nutshell, transhumanists describe a human, transhuman, post-human continuum. They believe that the technological
revolutions now underway in infotech, biotech, nanotech, robotics, and artificial intelligence will converge to alter the fundamental nature of being human, and with
that, our concepts of what it means to be human. We and all our most important values and beliefs will be transformed beyond recognition. Eventually, we

will reach the nirvana of a post-human future: we wont be human at all, transhumanists say. For them, human is not the end of evolution;
it is the beginning. Transhumanists want only to do good but this is dangerous. When we have an overwhelming desire to do good, it is much more difficult to see the
risks involved. In their own words, transhumanists seek to expand technological opportunities for humans to live longer and healthier lives and to enhance their
intellectual, physical, psychological, and emotional capacities. Taking them at face value, most of us would endorse those goals. But the ultimate goal of
transhumanism is that superior beings will be created by redesigning Homo sapiens with technoscience to become Techno sapiens.

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2nc alt
There is no escape to nihilism: the only response is to stop and think
OHara 3 [Daniel T., Professor of English at Temple University, Neither Gods nor Monsters: An Untimely
Critique of the Post/Human Imagination, boundary 2 30:3, 2003] //khirn
This is a
reading of Foucault that ignores or downplays the problematic of nihilism that Foucault inherits from Nietzsche and
Heidegger, despite his repeated invocations of this inheritance in his interviews and writings . This informed ignorance, as I like to
This is where a certain reading of Foucault comes into play in most of the varieties of contemporary oppositional discourse, post/human or otherwise.

think of it, derives from the utility of reading Foucault as making possible a positive conception of critical agency to effect substantial change. What, more specifically,
then, is this reading? It is a reading that presents Foucault as a social constructionist and new historicist critic of modernitys

institutions and discourses who is supportive of a liberal or socially democratic vision of all kinds of self-revising
subjectivities. 6 Well, you might say, isnt this Foucault? I do not think it is, and I have argued for a different, darker vision of Foucault, a
Foucault given to radical parodies of each and every one of the ever emerging discourses of modernity .7 My Foucault, as
it were, is a knowing instance of the Nietzschean will-topower or the Heideggerian will-to-will . Foucault, in this sense, is
preparing a readiness for thinking and poeticizing beyond modernity (or is it behind its back?) by playing out, via savage
ironies, all the discursive possibilities of modernity, even those still in the process of emerging even now, such as the post/human. Like Nietzsches
Socrates in The Twilight of the Idols, Foucault wills his own death as a figure or idol, so as to take as many of the discourses of
incipient nihilism with him as possible into the black hole of his radical parodies. Unfortunately, again like the dying Socrates,
Foucault has been taken with full seriousness, when he would have preferred to have inspired demonic laughter instead.
But isnt such laughter a testament to nihilism, too? Of course, for right now (however long that is), there simply is no escape from
nihilism . This does not mean that we should all fall on our swords. What it does mean , however, is that we should all
stop and try to think . Thinking in modernity is not an easy task to perform. As Paul A. Bov has demonstrated over the last decade
or so in his many essays on various aspects of Henry Adams and his work, thi nking is perhaps the most important thing we can
do, and the thing we are least prepared to do by modernity . In this respect, at least, I think Nietzsche, and Heidegger,
certainly would have concurred with Bovs Adams. 8 So, for purposes of argument, let us agree that attempting to think and to poeticize a readiness
for a form of being beyond an endlessly selfrevising and nihilistic modernity is an experiment that , whether itself nihilistic or not in
the final analysis, has not generally been tried in sustained ways by modern intellectuals , and especially not
by contemporary academic critics . Why not? I think it is because such attempts could possibly lead to where
Heideggers did, to a contemplation of what he calls, in the previously cited passage, the absent god, who is neither
quite the gone god nor quite a here one, either. Such an absent god is clearly a stand-in for the mode of
temporality we call the future , and it is in this mode of the future per se that this absent god paradoxically
embodies best, by its very formative absence, the nonhuman dimension of existence. I say nonhuman deliberately to
distinguish, terminologically at first, what I am indicating as being different from the human or the post/human or, for that
matter, the inhuman. 9

Alt solves the aff --- too hard to just transcend, gotta rethink --- solves their metaphysical violence
impacts better
Rae 14 [Gavin, American University at Cairo, The Philosophical Roots of Donna Haraways Cyborg Imagery:
Descartes and Heidegger Through Latour, Derrida, and Agamben, Human Studies, December 2014, Volume
37, Issue 4, pp 505-528] //khirn
Of course, Haraway would most probably argue that she is doing something else, but, as we saw with Latour, Heideggers rejoinder would be that any questioning of
empirical entities depends on, and so is always brought back to, a questioning of the essence or being of those entities. To focus on empirical observation alone is to
think from certain assumptions about the essence or being of the thing, such as the notion that entities are ontologically relational, that empirical observation discloses
what the being truly is, that a mediating aspect exists that allows entities to be simultaneously entwined and individuated, while also assuming certain understandings of
space and time that allow entities to become through one another. By showing that Haraways thinking assumes a certain ontological

understanding and is inspired by a long philosophical history which she overlooks to privilege the method(s) of empirical
social science, we not only show her intimate companionship to Heidegger, but also open a space to better explore how to

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become with her thinking. In particular, I want to conclude by suggesting that Haraways Heideggerian heritage leads to three lines of
future research: first, Haraways analysis brings us to question the nature of overcoming including whether we can, in fact,
overcome anthropocentrism and what this overcoming will look like given her recognition that to criticise
anthropocentrism is itself to perpetuate the mode of Western thinking underpinning anthropocentrism. Second, Haraways
thinking brings us to question the nature of identity and the role that relationships play in the formation of identity . While
the notion of relational identity is not new to the social sciences (think of Latours actor-network theory) or philosophy (think of Hegels masterslave dialectic),
Haraway pushes us to think identity and relationships non-anthropocentrically. One of the things her analyses shows, and on this

this is far harder than it initially appears . And third, to truly understand and justify her conclusions, the
ontological assumptions upon which her analysis is based need to be brought to the fore and questioned . This does not entail the
slavish replication of Heideggers thinking on being, but the recognition that the ontological question he brought to the fore continues to
offer possibilities that can deepen Haraways analyses .
Heidegger would agree, is that

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impacts tech thought bad

Technocratic approaches to technology jeopardizes the essence of human freedom: embracing the cyborg
simply makes us cogs in the collective machine this outweighs extinction
Rojcewicz 6 --- professor of philosophy at Point Park University (Richard, The Gods and Technology: A Reading of Heidegger,
SUNY, pg 140-142)
The danger Heidegger now launches an extended discussion of the danger inherent in modern technology. It needs to be
underlined that for Heidegger the threat is not simply to human existence. The prime danger is not that high-tech devices might get out of hand and wreck havoc on
their creators by way of a radioactive spill or an all-encompassing nuclear holocaust. The danger is not that by disposing of so many disposables we will defile the
planet and make it uninhabitable. For Heidegger the danger the prime danger does not lie in technological things but in the

essence of technology .

Technological things are indeed dangerous; the rampant exploitation of natural resources is deplorable; the contamination of the

itself , is not the

answer . Conservation alone is not radical enough . Conservation is aimed at things, technological things
and natural things , but it does not touch the outlook or basic attitude that is the essence of modern technology, and it is
there that the danger lies. It may well be that conservation will succeed and that technology will solve its own problems by
producing things that are safe and nonpolluting; nevertheless, the prime danger, which lies deeper down, will remain. For the
danger is not primarily to the existence of humans but to their essence : The threat to man does not come in the first instance from the
environment is tragic. We need to conserve and to keep high-tech things from disposing of us. Yes, for Heidegger, conservation,

potentially lethal effects of the machines and devices of technology. The genuine threat has already affected humans in their essence (FT, 29/28). In a sense, the
threat inherent in modern technology has already been made good. Though we have thus far averted a nuclear disaster, that does not mean

the genuine threat has been obviated. Humans still exist; they are not yet on the endangered species list. It would of course be tragic if humans
made that list. Yet, for Heidegger, there could be something more tragic, namely for humans to go on living but to lose their
human dignity , which stems from from their essence. Here lies the prime danger, the one posed not by technological things but by the disclosive looking that
constitutes the essence of modern technology. The prime danger is that humans could become (and in fact are already becoming)
enslaved to this way of disclosive looking. Thus what is primarily in danger is human freedom; if humans went on living
but allowed themselves to be turned into slaves that would be the genuine tragedy. The danger in modern technology is
that humans may fail to see themselves as free followers , fail to see the challenges directed at their freedom by the current guise of Being, and
fail to see the genuine possibilities open to them to work out their destiny. Then, not seeing their freedom, humans will
not protect it. They will let it slip away and will become mere followers, passively imposed on by modern technology, i.e., slaves to it,
mere cogs in the machine. For Heidegger, there is an essential connection between seeing and freedom. The way out of slavery begins
with seeing, insight. But it is the right thing that must be seen, namely, ones own condition . The danger is that humans
may perfect their powers of scientific seeing and yet be blind to that wherein their dignity and freedom lie, namely the
entire domain of disclosedness and their role in it. Humans would then pose as masters of the earth , and yet their selfblindness would make them slaves.
Endless management renders the world a standing reserve to be controlled only a new reflection of technological
thought can rethink our relationship to the earth - the impact is extinction and endless devaluing of life
McWhorter 92 assistant professor of philosophy at Northeast Missouri State University (Ladelle, Guilt As

Management Technology, Heidegger & The Earth: Essays in Environmental Philosophy)

Our ceaseless

interventions seem only to make things worse, to perpetuate a cycle of human activity followed by ecological
disaster followed by human intervention followed by a new disaster of another kind. In fact, it would appear that our
trying to do things, change things, fix things cannot be the solution, because it is part of the problem itself. But, if we cannot act
to solve our problems, what should we do? Heideggers work is a call to reflect, to think in some way other than calculatively,
technologically, pragmatically. Once we begin to move with and into Heideggers call and begin to see our trying to seize control and solve problems as
itself a problematic approach, if we still believe that thinkings only real purpose is to function as a prelude to action, we who attempt to think will twist within the
agonizing grip of paradox, feeling nothing but frustration, unable to conceive of ourselves as anything but paralyzed. However, as so many peoples before us have
known, paradox is not only a trap; it is also a scattering point and passageway. Paradox invites examination of its own constitution
(hence of the patterns of thinking within which it occurs) and thereby breaks a way of thinking open, revealing the configurations of power that propel it and hold it on
track. And thus it makes possible the dissipation of that power and the deflection of thinking into new paths and new possibilities. Heidegger frustrates us .

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time when the stakes are so very high and decisive action is so loudly and urgently called for,
Heidegger apparently calls us to do nothing. If we get beyond the revulsion and anger that such a call initially inspires and
actually examine the feasibility of response, we begin to undergo the frustration attendant upon paradox; how is it possible, we ask, to choose, to will, to do nothing?

The call itself places in question the bimodal logic of activity and passivity; it points up the paradoxical nature of our
passion for action, of our passion for maintaining control. The call itself suggests that our drive for acting decisively and forcefully is part of what
must be thought through, that the narrow option of will versus surrender is one of the power configurations of current thinking that must be allowed to dissipate. But of
course, those drives and those conceptual dichotomies are part of the very structure of our self-understanding both as

individuals and as a tradition and a civilization. Hence, Heideggers call is a threatening one, requiring great
courage , the courage to make the truth of our own presuppositions and the realm of our own goals into the things that most deserve to be called in question.
Heideggers work pushes thinking to think through the assumptions that underlie both our ecological vandalism and our
love of scientific solutions, assumptions that also ground the most basic patterns of our current ways of being human . What
is most illustrative is often also what is most common. Today, on all sides of ecological debate we hear, with greater and greater fuency, the word management. On the
one hand, business people want to manage natural resources so as to keep up profits. On the other hand, conservationists want to manage natural resources so that there
will be plenty of coal and oil and recreational facilities for future generations. These groups and factions within them debate vociferously over which management
policies are the best, that is, the most efficient and manageable. Radical environmentalists damn both groups and claim it is human population growth and rising
expectations that are in need of management. But wherever we look, wherever we listen, we see and hear the term management. We are living in a veritable age of
management. Before a middle class child graduates from high school she or he is already preliminarily trained in the arts of weight management, stress management,
and time management, to name just a few. As we approach middle age we continue to practice these essential arts, refining and adapting our regulatory regimes as the
pressures of life increase and the body begins to break down. We have become a society of managers - of our homes, careers, portfolios,

estates, even of our own bodies - so is it surprising that we set ourselves up as the managers of the earth itself? And yet, as
thoughtful earth-dwellers we must ask, what does this signify? In numerous essays - in particular the beautiful 1953 essay, "The Question Concerning Technology" Heidegger speaks of what he sees as the danger of dangers in this, our age. This danger is a kind of forgetfulness, a forgetfulness that

Heidegger thought could result not only in nuclear disaster or environmental catastrophe, but in the loss of what makes us
the kind of beings we are, beings who can think and who can stand in thoughtful relationship to things . This forgetfulness is not a
forgetting of facts and their relationships; it is a forgetfulness of something far more important and far more fundamental than that.
He called it forgetfulness of 'the mystery' . It would be easy to imagine that by the mystery Heidegger means some sort of entity, some thing,
temporarily hidden or permanently ineffable. But the mystery is not the name of some thing; it is the event of the occurring together of revealing and concealing.

Every academic discipline, whether it be biology or history, anthropology or mathematics, is interested in discovery, in the
relevation of new truths. Knowledge, at least as it is institutionalized in the modern world, is concerned, then, with what Heidegger
would call revealing, the bringing to light, or the coming to presence of things . However, in order for any of this revealing to occur,
Heidegger says, concealing must also occur. Revealing and concealing belong together. Now, what does this mean? We know that in order to pay attention to one thing,
we must stop paying close attention to something else. In order to read philosophy we must stop reading cereal boxes. In order to attend to the needs of students we
must sacrifice some of our research time. Allowing for one thing to reveal itself means allowing for the concealing of something else. All revealing comes at the price of
concomitant concealment. But this is more than just a kind of Kantian acknowledgment of human limitation. Heidegger is not simply dressing up the obvious, that is,
the fact that no individual can undergo two different experiences simultaneously. His is not a point about human subjectivity at all. Rather, it is a point about revealing
itself. When revealing reveals itself as temporally linear and causally ordered, for example, it cannot simultaneously reveal itself as ordered by song and unfolding in
dream. Furthermore, in revealing, revealing itself is concealed in order for what is revealed to come forth. Thus, when revealing occurs concealing occurs as well. The
two events are one and cannot be separated.4 Too often we forget. The radiance of revelation blinds us both to its own event and to the shadows that it casts, so that
revealing conceals itself and its self-concealing conceals itself, and we fall prey to that strange power of vision to consign to oblivion whatever cannot be seen. Even our
forgetting is forgotten, and all traces of absence absent themselves from our world. The noted physicist Stephen Hawking, in his popular book A Brief History of Time,
writes, The eventual goal of science is to provide a single theory that describes the whole universe. Such a theory, many people
would assert, would be a systematic arrangement of all knowledge both already acquired and theoretically possible. It would be a theory to end all theories, outside of
which no information, no revelation could, or would need to, occur. And the advent of such a theory would be as the shining of a light into every corner of being.
Nothing would remain concealed. This dream of Hawkings is a dream of power; in fact, it is a dream of absolute power, absolute

control. It is a dream of the ultimate managerial utopia. This, Heidegger would contend, is the dream of technological thought in
the modern age. We dream of knowing, grasping everything, for then we can control, then we can manage, everything . But
it is only a dream, itself predicated, ironically enough, upon concealment, the self-concealing of the mystery. We can never control the mystery, the belonging together
of revealing and concealing. In order to approach the world in a manner exclusively technological, calculative, mathematical, scientific, we must already have given up
(or lost, or been expelled by, or perhaps ways of being such as we are even impossible within) other approaches or modes of revealing that would unfold into
knowledges of other sorts. Those other approaches or paths of thinking must already have been obliterated; those other knowledges must already have concealed
themselves in order for technological or scientific revelation to occur. The danger of a managerial approach to the world lies not, then, in what it knows not in its
penetration into the secrets of galactic emergence or nuclear fission but in what it forgets, what it itself conceals. It forgets that any other truths are possible, and it

We can never have, or know,

it all; we can never manage everything . What is now especially dangerous about this sense of our own
managerial power, born of forgetfulness, is that it results in our viewing the world as mere resources to be stored or
consumed. Managerial or technological thinkers, Heidegger says, view the earth, the world, all things
as mere Bestand, standing-reserve . All is here simply for human use. No plant, no animal, no ecosystem has a
life of its own, has any significance, apart from human desire and need. Nothing, we say, other than human beings, has any
intrinsic value. All things are instruments for the working out of human will. Whether we believe that God gave Man dominion or simply that human might
forgets that the belonging together of revealing with concealing is forever beyond the power of human management.

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(sometimes called intelligence or rationality) in the face of ecological fragility makes us always right, we managerial, technological thinkers tend to believe that the

The forest is timber; the river, a power source.

Even people have become resources, human resources, personnel to be managed, or
populations to be controlled. This managerial, technological mode of revealing, Heidegger says, is embedded in and constitutive of Western

earth is only a stockpile or a set of commodities to be managed, bought, and sold.

culture and has been gathering strength for centuries. Now it is well on its way to extinguishing all other modes of revealing, all other ways of being human and being
earth. It will take tremendous effort to think through this danger, to think past it and beyond, tremendous courage and resolve to allow thought of the mystery to come
forth; thought of the inevitability, along with revealing, of concealment, of loss, of ignorance; thought of the occurring of things and their passage as events not
ultimately under human control. And of course even the call to allow this thinking couched as it so often must be in a grammatical imperative appealing
to an agent is

itself a paradox, the first that must be faced and allowed to speak to us and to shatter us as it scatters thinking
in new directions, directions of which we have not yet dreamed, directions of which we may never dream. And shattered we
may be, for our self-understanding is at stake; in fact, our very selves selves engineered by the technologies of power that shaped, that
are, modernity are at stake. Any thinking that threatens the notion of human being as modernity has posited it as
rationally self- interested individual, as self-possessed bearer of rights and obligations, as active mental and moral agent
is thinking that threatens our very being, the configurations of subjective existence in our age. Those configurations of forces
will resist this thinking. Their resistance will occur in many forms. However, one of the most common ways that modern calculative selfhood will attempt to reinstate
itself in the face of Heideggers paradoxical call to think the earth is by employing a strategy that has worked so well so many times before: it will feel guilty. Those of
us who are white know this strategy very well. Confronted with our racism, we respond not by working to dismantle the structures that perpetuate racism but rather by
feeling guilty. Our energy goes into self-rebuke, and the problems pointed out to us become so painful for us to contemplate that we keep our distance from them.
Through guilt we paralyze ourselves. Thus guilt is a marvelous strategy for maintaining the white racist self. Those of us who are women have sometimes watched this
strategy employed by the caring, liberal-minded men in our lives. When we have exposed sexism, pressed our criticisms and our claims, we have seen such men the
good men, by far the most responsive men deflate, apologize, and ask us to forgive. But seldom have we seen honest attempts at change. Instead we have seen guilt
deployed as a cry for mercy or pity on the status quo; and when pity is not forthcoming we have seen guilt turn to rage, and we have heard men ask, Why are you
punishing us? The primary issue then becomes the need to attend to the feelings of those criticized rather than to their oppressive institutions and behaviors. Guilt thus
protects the guilty. Guilt is a facet of power; it is not a reordering of power or a signal of oppressions end. Guilt is one of the modern managerial selfs maneuvers of
self-defense. Of course guilt does not feel that way. It feels like something unchosen, something we undergo. It feels much more like self-abuse than self-defense. But
we are shaped, informed, produced in our very selves by the same forces of history that have created calculative, technological revealing. Inevitably, whenever we are
confronted with the unacceptability of what is foundational for our lives, those foundations exert force to protect themselves. The exertion, which occurs as and in the
midst of very real pain, is not a conscious choice; but that does not lessen in fact it strengthens its power as a strategy of self-defense. Calculative, technological
thinking struggles to defend and maintain itself through us and as us. Some men feel guilty about sexism; many white people feel guilty about racism; most of us feel
guilty about all sorts of habits and idiosyncracies that we tell ourselves we firmly believe should be changed. For many of us guilt is a constant constraint upon our
lives, a seemingly permanent state. As a result, guilt is familiar, and, though somewhat uncomfortable at times, it comes to feel almost safe. It is no surprise, then, that
whenever caring people think hard about how to live with/in/on the earth, we find ourselves growing anxious and, usually, feeling guilty about the way we conduct
ourselves in relation to the natural world. Guilt is a standard defense against the call for change as it takes root within us. But, if we are to think with Heidegger, if we
are to heed his call to reflect, we must not respond to it simply by deploring our decadent life-styles and indulging ourselves in a fit of remorse. Heideggers call is not a
moral condemnation, nor is it a call to take up some politically correct position or some privileged ethical stance. When we respond to Heideggers call

as if it were a moral condemnation, we reinstate a discourse in which active agency and its projects and responsibilities
take precedence over any other way of being with the earth . In other words, we insist on remaining within the discourses, the power
configurations, of the modern managerial self. Guilt is a concept whose heritage and meaning occur within the ethical tradition of the Western world. But the history of
ethical theory in the West (and it could be argued that ethical theory only occurs in the West) is one with the history of technological thought. The revelation of things as
to-be-managed and the imperative to be in control work themselves out in the history of ethics just as surely as they work themselves out in the history of the natural
and human sciences. It is probably quite true that in many different cultures, times, and places human beings have asked the question: How shall I best live my life? But
in the West, and in relatively modern times, we have reformulated that question so as to ask: How shall I conduct myself? How shall I behave? How shall I manage my
actions, my relationships, my desires? And how shall I make sure my neighbors do the same? Alongside technologies of the earth have grown up technologies of the
soul, theories of human behavioral control of which current ethical theories are a significant subset. Ethics in the modern world at least very

frequently functions as just another field of scientific study yielding just another set of engineering goal s. Therefore, when we
react to problems like ecological crises by retreating into the familiar discomfort of our Western sense of guilt, we are not
placing ourselves in opposition to technological thinking and its ugly consequences . On the contrary, we are simply reasserting
our technological dream of perfect managerial control. How so? Our guilt professes our enduring faith in the managerial
dream by insisting that problems problems like oil spills, acid rain, groundwater pollution, the extinction of whales, the
destruction of the ozone, the rain forests, the wetlands lie simply in mismanagement or in a failure to manage (to
manage ourselves in this case) and by reaffirming to ourselves that if we had used our power to manage our behavior
better in the first place we could have avoided this mess . In other words, when we respond to Heideggers call by indulging in feelings of guilt
about how we have been treating the object earth, we are really just telling ourselves how truly powerful we, as agents, are. We are telling ourselves that we really could
have done differently; we had the power to make things work, if only we had stuck closer to the principles of good management. And in so saying we are in yet a new
and more stubborn way refusing to hear the real message, the message that human beings are not, never have been, and never can be in complete control, that the dream
of that sort of managerial omnipotence is itself the very danger of which Heidegger warns. Thus guilt as affirmation of human agential power over against passive
matter is just another way of covering over the mystery. Thus guilt is just another way of refusing to face the fact that we human beings are finite and that we must
begin to live with the earth instead of trying to maintain total control. Guilt is part and parcel of a managerial approach to the world. Thinking along

Heideggers paths means resisting the power of guilt, resisting the desire to close ourselves off from the possibility of
being with our own finitude. It means finding the courage to make the truth of our own presuppositions and the realm of
our own goals into the things that most deserve to be called in question. It means holding ourselves resolutely open for

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the shattering power of the event of thinking, even if what is shattered eventually is ourselves.

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at: alt destroys all tech

The alternative ethically interrogates everyday assumptions this is crucial to avoid total enframement
and eternal human enslavement, but it doesnt preclude technology which means the alt can solve the aff
Morris, 2013 - Visiting Faculty Member in Philosophy at Bennington College (Theresa, Hans Jonass Ethic of
Responsibility: From Ontology to Ecology, Project Muse)
Technology itself is not a danger ; it is the way in which we act in response to the scientific way of revealing the
world. Thus for Heidegger, as for Jonas and Arendt, the greatest danger we face arises from the lack of thought,

reflection, and deliberation about technology and the effect our practices have, as a result of this
thoughtlessness, on humans and nature. Yet neither is technology neutral because the rule of enframing threatens man
with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience a more
primal truth (ibid., 333). In other words, the way nature reveals itself to us through physics directs us to certain
attitudes toward it. When science reveals nature as enframed as resources for our use, as calculable and instrumental,
then we are destined to interact with it as something to be shaped by technology, and this slanting of our intentional
horizon toward utility is not a neutral property of technology.19
Another danger Heidegger sees is in the effect of this thinking on human beings , and this is something Jonas shares
with him as well. With modern technology nature is revealed as standing reserve ready-to-hand for our use, but so is the
human being. Humans become resources as human beings are caught up in the industry of
extraction and produc- tion (Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 323). Jonas observes,
[M]an is involved in all the other objects of technology, as these singly and jointly remake the worldly frame of his life,
in both the narrower and wider of its sense: that of the artificial frame of civilization in which social man leads his life
proximately, and that of the natural terrestrial environment in which this artifact is embedded and on which it ultimately
depends (Toward a Philosophy of Technology, 41). For Jonas, the worry is that human freedom is endangered as
technologies that can engineer and enhance human beings develop and creep into accepted use .20 Predetermined
human beings , learning of their engineered origin, will regard themselves as not free . For Heidegger, the
danger is also a threat to human freedom, but freedom here is the freedom to perceive what is true through an openness to
what is revealed to human questioning and thinking (Heidegger, ibid., 330). With enframing there is a narrowing of
what is revealed, and so long as we represent technol- ogy as an instrument, we remain transfixed in the will to master
it, a mastery that is an illusion (ibid., 336). Thus, enframing that comes with scientific thought and its
technologies lures us into a closed understand- ing and fosters illusion. As well, it threatens the highest dignity of
the essence of the human being. Heidegger says,

This dignity lies in keeping watch over the unconcealment and with it, from the first, the concealmentof all
essential unfolding on this earth. It is precisely in enframing, which threatens to sweep man away into ordering as the
ostensibly sole way of revealing, and so thrusts man into the danger of the surrender of his free essenceit is precisely in
this extreme danger that the innermost indestructible belonging- ness of man within granting may come to light, provided
that we, for our part, begin to pay heed to the essence of technology. (Ibid., 337)
How are we to approach these dangers? According to Heidegger, we must turn to poiesis to foster the growth of the
saving power and awaken and renew our vision of, and trust in, that which grants (ibid., 340). For Jonas, however, a

turn to poetic vision is not sufficient as a way to address the dangers we face with the advance of modern
technologies.
What is needed is a deeply ethical questioning and challenging of the drive toward seeing and using nature as a
resource for the increase of human power and the satisfaction of human will. Thus, while Heidegger opens the

question of technology and its dangers, it remains for his stu- dent Jonas to develop an ethical argument for a
thoughtful relation to technology in practical and political action. Perhaps neither poetry nor gods can save us,
but we may be able to awaken to the responsibility we have for the Earth, and we may become inspired to care
enough to take that responsibility. Through questioning the unthought underlying assumptions pervading our everyday
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relation to technology; the myths of progress, efficiency, and innovation as goods in themselves, Jonas opens the way
toward the thinking that is needed if we are to accept responsibil- ity for the effects of our technological actions on the
Earth and its beings.

The alternative does not preclude technological developmentwe must reorient ourselves against the
way we view nature as something to be exploited and our perception that technology is the solution to all
problems caused by technologyonly then will we be able to solve for the affirmatives environmental
impacts
Sabatino 7 was a professor at Daeman College, Amherst, PhD in Religious Studies from the University of
Chicago (Charles J., Trivium Publications, Amherst, NY, Daeman College, 2007, A Heideggerian Reection on

the Prospects of Technology, p 72-74, http://www.janushead.org/10-1/sabatino.pdf)//

Heidegger says there is hope for the world if and as the danger is perceived precisely as the danger . Somehow, the all-

encompassing man- ner in which everything is now open and accessible, that there may be no limits to what we
can do, and that all lies vulnerable might suddenly act as a lightning strike to shake us out of the slumbers of the
everyday business. It might dawn on us that everything, including world itself is at risk; and thus we ourselves are at
risk. Then we might understand that we ourselves are the danger . 9 The point of seeing the danger is not that
we then retreat from the enterprise of technology . Quite to the contrary, the danger haunting the
technological era is that there is no retreat. However, it is precisely this realization that can turn our heads around and
bring us to go forward in a manner Heidegger refers to as releasement. Releasement represents a form of letting go, but
not in the sense of surrendering to the inevitable, or dismantling it ; or merely leaving things alone.10 Releasement is
similar to the Buddhist notion of detachment. To detach (de-tache: unstake, let loose from being tied down) is to set
something free. Detachment does not leave things alone, for so long as we dwell within the world and its network of
relatedness, there is nothing alone. However, it represents a way of relating and thus a way of handling things that no
longer clings, possesses, holds on, and claims as ones own. To detach and release represents a reversal that learns to
let things be what they are. It does so by handling what is in a way that respects that though everything is available and
accessible, though it is all laid forth before us, nevertheless, it is not ours to possess and do with as we will simply
because we can. Things are what they are and not simply what we demand them to be. This is no
small matter in a world where everything has become a resource to fuel the machinery that produces what we want,
where nothing is respected except for what it can be taken up and used for, where there is little meaning or value to
anything except as material, energy, even information that can be mobilized and put to work to suit our purposes. Even
people, in so many instances, are caught up and swept up into the routines of usefulness, only to be marginalized with
no place to belong when no longer useful. Heidegger did not spell out with any clarity the specic kinds of
technology an attitude of releasement would have us develop or how we would use it dierently. Nevertheless,
it would have to be consistent with our belonging within the world; and so we could speculate that we would proceed in a
way that works with, not against nature, works with and not against one another, works with and not against the
interdependencies that nd us all connected and thus vulnerable within a shared world. Releasement need not abandon
what is possible with the genome, the stem cell; but it would have us approach such areas of research with a hand that
remains open: not in the manner of taking, but as receiving and thus grateful before all that is granted and all that becomes
possible. It would proceed as the steadied and care-ful hands of the micro-biologist who is astounded, thus

humbled, by the world that opens before him [or her]. It would proceed, seeking to bring hope where there is
suering and pain, yet thankful for the miracle of those healing energies of life itself that make it all possible. It
would proceed with the diligence and care of the parent, proud yet humbled, frightened yet ready to care. The
dierence would play a basic role not only in the kinds of technol- ogy we develop, but also in the purposes to which we
put that technology. Do we see ourselves at the center of a world that is increasingly at our disposal, in which nothing
else matters but what we will to do, becoming ever more powerful and able to extend what we can control, what we
can produce and consume without limits, as though entitled to do so? Do we continue to develop and use technology to
enhance the advantage of some regardless of the expense to others? Do we proceed with technology blindly believing that
every problem can be xed with technology itself? Or, do we see ourselves as uniquely destined to a level of

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responsibility and care toward one another and the earth that is frightening precisely in the power that has been given over
to us? And therefore, do we see ourselves as needing to consider how what we do with technology impacts one another
as well as the earth that births and sustains us as all belonging together within the shared gift of world ? It is not easy to

imagine what could be dierent should we heed such reections. Everything seems so locked into the world as
it is. And yet, perhaps Heidegger is correct when he says that precisely there, where such dangers lurk, hope can arise . It
would be not just overly simplistic, but also mistaken, simply to identify this hope with nostalgia for some
former or pristine manner of living closer to nature. Such is not likely to be; and likely never was what nostalgia
imagines, at least for most upon the earth. Instead, the possibilities for hope must arise precisely from within the
technological society, even as it becomes global in scope, from those willing to question what is becoming of
our world and what is becoming of ourselves. There is evidence of such questioning. For example, even as our
medical technologies become increasingingly capable of controling life and death processes, we hear questions
raised concerning the kind of care that is generally available, or perhaps not available, especially in the end
stages of life where we apparently view death mostly as failure and defeat. Learning to accept the livingdying
process as an essential aspect of our lives is certainly humbling; but it o ers a good example of acknowledging limits to
how much we can control and manuplate, how much we can use technology to distance ourselves from who we are as
human (humus: of the earth, thus mortal). Along the same lines, with regard to energy policies and uses,
we can nd hope from those who note the destructive nature of our lifestyles ; those who recognize
the impact of global warming, depleted resources, waste, etc; those who warn us of the unsustainability of it all. Even as

the problems brought with technology are becoming global in nature, we are being asked more than ever to
attend to what we are doing to the environment, and therefore to one another. We hear calls for greater reli- ance on
renewable resources that nd us accepting the natural limits within which we live rather than become dependent on other
technologies such as nuclear, that demand control for thousands of years, increasing risk factors at many levels. Further,

with respect to genomic and stem cell research, there is the dierentiation being made between techniques that
are therapeutic, and thus consistent with the healing energies that sustain life versus those that are strictly
reproductive and serve mostly what we see as a right and prerogative to do what we will.

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at: new tech good/different

Not redeemable
Hamilton, 2013 - Professor of Public Ethics at CAPPE and holds the Vice-Chancellor's Chair at Charles Sturt
University (Clive, What Would Heidegger Say About Geoengineering? 9/11/2013,
http://clivehamilton.com/what-would-heidegger-say-about-geoengineering/ )
IV. Models and systems thinking Some

authors have attempted to update Heideggers analysis by arguing that technology has
changed in some fundamental way since his death in the 1970s.38 The results have been unconvincing because they slip back
into thinking about technology as an instrument for affecting human welfare. They forget Heideggers injunction: All that is merely
technical never arrives at the essence of technology.39 Yet if information technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology and
so on do not represent anything fundamental, more recent developments in the conception of the world-as-picture do call
for further thinking about the evolution of Enframing. Today we would call Heideggers fixed ground plan a model. All models, which may take a
form more or less mathematical, simplify reality, with the simplification justified by the usefulness of the model. But what is overlooked is the way in which reality
is pictured before it is modeled. Selection of those aspects of reality to be captured in a model presupposes a type of world that can be so captured. While scientists
make judgments about which models are more or less useful (for understanding reality) they cannot stand outside the mode of representation. A model is a picture, a
mental image of 15 an otherwise impenetrable complexity that comes into clearer view as a set of well- defined relationships. This is not the world as it is but a
representation formed by humans. It defines what is, not in the sense that it emphasises some relations and ignores others, but in the act of representing in picture-model
form. From that point on, any anomaly is understood as a failure in the picture itself and not in the failure of picturing. This applies with equal force to models of the
Earths climate and the Earth-as-system thinking that grounds geoengineering. The Earth itself is first represented as a system of physical components, at the broadest
level comprising the atmosphere, the biosphere, the hydrosphere, the cryosphere (the frozen parts of the Earth), and the lithosphere (the Earths crust). These
components are linked and set in motion by various processes, such as the water cycle that takes moisture from oceans to the atmosphere to land and back again, and the
carbon cycle that describes the circulation of carbon through the various components of the system. Before the model can be constructed the Earth must first be
conceived as a system, after which anomalies can be made to conform to the system being modeled.40 This systematization must itself presuppose that what is
available for study consists of objects governed in their relation to other objects in ways definable by mathematical rules. This does not mean that climate models are
wrong; on the contrary, they are all-too- revealing. But if one can step outside of technological understanding, they reveal more than the

functioning of the technological world they set out to study; they reveal the limits to that understanding, and the partiality
of picture-thinking, which is to say, technological thinking. 16 So model-thinking systematizes nature, and the system defines the legitimate object
of study. The systems boundaries can be expanded, and the elements within elaborated, but in doing so every event is made subject to the process of model-

building. The essence of a system is representation, definability and calculability, and these features impose constraints on
being itself. Heidegger referred to this totalising process, an encompassing quantitativeness, as the gigantic, and it is the
quality of the gigantic that gives the modern epoch its greatness, 41 although the incalculable remains an invisible shadow cast around all
things.42 Through the picture character of the world whatever is comes to a stand as object and in that way alone receives the seal of Being.43 All of this flows out of
Descartes original positing of the modern subject; man as subject becomes the relational center of that which is as such.44 Climate models are developed

out of the emerging discipline of Earth system science, which draws together various fields of scientific study within a conception of the Earth as a
total system (comprised of the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the lithosphere and the biosphere). Earth system science, runs a typical definition, embraces chemistry,
physics, biology, mathematics and applied sciences in transcending disciplinary boundaries to treat the Earth as an integrated system .45

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at: nihilism
The affirmative embraces nihilism by forgetting beingthe alternative is the only way to overcome this
Beistegui, 98 Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick (Miguel de Beistegui, 1998, London and
New York, Heidegger and the Political (Dystopias), pg 66)
*This evidence has been gender modified
In a way, as far as the question of nihilism goes, Heidegger will not say anything more that what is expressed in this passage from Introduction to Metaphysics. Yet it
will take him some twenty years to unpack and fully thematize his brief opening statements. From the start, "nihilism" appears as a notion with multiple

entries and almost contradictory meanings, which Heidegger will nonetheless try to hold together. Three such meanings are here emphasized. First, in
the mouth of those who are absorbed in the thickness of beings to the point of philosophical blindness (and, no doubt, this blindness includes most of what is presented
as "philosophy"), "nihilism" serves to designate that which impedes their gesticulating busyness and upsets the secured world

of their values, that which, in other words, leads "nowhere" (that is, leads to no secured ground or absolute certainties).
From the perspective of such men, the question concerning being is the empty, pointless and nihilistic problem par excellence. The word "nihilism" is here worth a
condemnation, and presupposes values on the basis of which something can be dismissed as nihilistic. Yet true nihilism consists precisely in acting

and thinking in the way of such men humans, that is, as if being were nothing - or rather, since being is indeed no-thing (no particular being), to act as
if it is not (as if it did not rule or unfold),4 and thus as if its questioning made no difference (when difference as such always dwells within its reign). In that respect,

true nihilism is nothing but the forgetfulness of being. Third, there is also of course Nietzsche's concept of nihilism, which
Heidegger only alludes to here, insisting that it can only be understood on the basis of the truer sense of nihilism. In addition to all three senses sketched out in this
passage, Heidegger raises the difficult question concerning the overcoming of nihilism by suggesting that a "first and fruitful
step" toward such overcoming lies precisely in thinking being with the nothing. This concern regarding the possibility of
an overcoming of nihilism will remain at the very heart of Heidegger's thought well into the 1950s, without ever reaching the point of an
unequivocal opinion.

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at: permutation
The permutation cant solve --- questioning must come prior to engagement with technology and occur
for its own sake, not to justify a technocratic plan --- ensures an endless spiral of technological control
which devastates the alternative
Pistone 10 --- Faculty, Writing Program, Rutgers University (Renee, A Critical Examination of Heideggers Thoughts: Technology Places
Humanity in Shackles Hindering Our Natural Thinking Process and Our Connection to Being, http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/cis/article/view/5182/4782)
3.2 World: How We Experience Technology Heidegger does provide an explanation for what he means by world (Feenberg, 2005). Basically, world

is not meant
to denote every living thing, seen and unseen, as most people tend to think of it. Heidegger discusses the concept of world in
terms of a meaningful structure of experience and this experience leads to a platform whereby Being can be known
(Fennberg, 2005). Hence, when we question things, seeking truth and knowledge for its own sake , we move closer to
Being. We move closer to the point whereby Being reveals itself to us. This is an important point for Heidegger who is chiefly concerned with thoughtful questions
and not just simple questions in order to find an answer. For this reason, Heidegger teaches us how to think and to properly study a given
topic. Heidegger describes Being as something beyond the most trivial descriptions, in so far as Being constitutes what is asked about, and Being means the Being of
entities, then entities themselves turn out to be what is interrogated (Heidegger, 1962). We begin to understand that these entities exist and have some special relation to
Being. For Heidegger, Being can take the form of a series of questions, as we ascertain the meaning of Being . Technology relates

to Being in that it reveals facts about our modern technological age. We can determine the meaning of entities, especially
technological entities, by questioning which entities are useful to us. 3.3 Implications for the Atomic Age In Discourse on
Thinking: The Memorial Address featured in Part I describes some of the implications for the Atomic Age (Heidegger, 1966). Consider the answers that he gives
regarding how this technology came about. This is due to a revolution in leading concepts which has been going on for the past several centuries, and by which man is
placed in a different world. This radical revolution in outlook has come about in modern philosophy. From this arises a

completely new relation of man to the world and his place in it. The world now appears as an object open to the attacks of calculative thought,
attacks that nothing is believed able any longer to resist. Nature becomes a gigantic gasoline station, an energy source for modern technology and industry. This relation
of man to the world as such, in principle a technical one, developed in the seventeenth century first and only in Europe...the power concealed in modern technology
determines the relation of man to that which exists. It rules the whole earth (Heidegger, 1966). 4. Formulating a Theoretical Model for the Intersection between
World and Technology Here, we see another example of the philosophers view, as there

seems to be a circumvention of humanitys chance to

understand Being in the world. Technology is a mixed blessing, since we need it to fuel our lifestyle, but it often places an intolerable burden on Nature.
Moreover, technology may lead us, not to ask the right questions, and to rush into conclusions, valuing the conclusions reached above
the questions posed. This is a weakness, in any methodology, whether it be a scientific or a philosophical study. It is a form of
technological thinking which has limited consequences and Heidegger calls this Enframing which leads to erosion of resources and the elaborate compilation of things
imaginable in our consciousness (Heidegger, 1977). We have to continue to keep questioning and investigating because, as humans, we are Dasein, the actual
facilitators for the self-revelation of Being in our world (Rojcewicz, 2006). For Heidegger, the essence of technology can distort truth and lessen our freedom to live as
Dasein, as noted in the following: the question concerning the essence of freedom is the fundamental problem of philosophy, even if the leading question thereof
consists of Being (Heidegger, 2002). We properly function as Dasein, when as we are seeking the revelation of Being. When we act as Dasein, we recognize and we
seek the revelation of Being, in accordance with the perceptions from our body. Our body and senses, more specifically, allow for us to gain knowledge, and to
understand what these perceptions mean. This is a rather complicated process as we take these actions in order to seek out the revelation of Being. 5. Implications
Interestingly, the idea that Nature, a precious thing, becomes a gas station is surely relevant today, due to our quest for greater consumption of energy. In fact, the
possibility certainly does exist that the future consists of Nature versus technology. This notion or theory does not seem to be supported by Heideggers ideas. We do
know that the natural world suffers and our relationship to Nature is corrupt and exploitative. There used to be little to no reflection, at all, about what humans were
doing to these natural environments and more importantly, how this strains our dignity to be Dasein. Hence, our natural thinking processes are eroding and our natural
world is also degrading. This occurs largely, in part, because technology tends to facilitate technological thinking (that seeks to advance technology-artificial processes).
It seems that the primary purpose of the advancement of technology is not to protect the environment. Also, pursuing an advancement in technology

may not really lead to the revelation of Being since it helps machines gain greater control . We decide that we need
more technology and more inventions (that do complicated thinking, such as mathematical computations for us). Therefore, technology breeds more
technology and our thirst for different varieties, in order to make our lives more convenient leads us to think less, about our lives in relation to Being. Heidegger
articulates the following: Only to the extent that man for his part is already Challenged to exploit the energies of nature can this revealing that orders happenyet,
precisely because man is challenged more originally than are the energies of nature, i.e., into the process of ordering, he never is transformed into mere standingreserve. Since man drives technology forward, he takes part in ordering as a way of revealing (Heidegger, 1977). Here, he explains to
the readers about what drives humanity, as we attempt to order our world. He is not saying that we are in complete control over our world.

It is not entirely clear

whether or not technology gives us more or less control over this ordering process.

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other k links

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link anthro
The cyborg image is anthropocentric the way it is framed always brings the HUMAN in relation to
technology and transcendence, the metaphor is incapable of overcoming or interrogating a relation to
nature and the non-human
Lulka 2k9 (David The residual humanism of hybridity: retaining a sense of the earth Trans Inst Br Geogr NS
34 378393)
To begin this analysis, I assert, given current parlance, what appears to be a contradiction: that hybridity, as it is known and practised in the geographic discipline, is
humanist at its core. This seems counterintuitive for the notion of hybridity is predicated upon the mixing, exchange or inherent inseparability of different domains. Yet,
far from thinking that the concept has been fully dissected and adequately explained, I contend the concept is in further need of dissection and redistribution. This is
admittedly an odd statement to dissect (the ultimate act of separation) for the goal of expanding the scope of hybridity. Nonetheless, this conclusion can be drawn by
teasing out the origins of the hybrid approach within social scientific writings. Alternately, this finding can be based upon the distinct use of hybridity in the social
sciences as compared with the biological sciences. Indeed, I suggest that hybridity in the social sciences has stopped short, failing to fully account for the agencies that

Hybridity, as it is propounded, is a zone of licentiousness,

but it has not been taken far enough. It should not be characterised as a zone or liminal region of interaction between
humans and nonhumans, even one that is wave-like in formation, but rather as a spatially pervasive phenomenon. As
such, I want to reformulate hybridity in order to adequately acknowledge the wide scope of agency on earth. For those of
us who study nonhuman animals, the current register proves hardly satisfactory. The origins of a hybrid approach precede
the widespread use of the term in the social sciences . Like most good ideas, the notion emerged before it was fully
codified in thought. For explanatory reasons, I will begin by considering Haraways (1985) cyborg, though it was
exist in the world, the agencies, ironically, that such research attempts to explicate.

by no means the original explication of material cognitive heterogeneity. Indeed, Franklin (2006) sees the
embryonic presence of the cyborg in one of Haraways earlier texts written in the mid-1970s. Despite its
fantastic character, Haraways cyborg was unmistakably human. This is not to say that the cyborg looked human, for the
details of its articulation were left unspecified, left appropriately to the imagination of the reader and the unpredictable
trajectory of future developments. The cyborg is fundamentally impure, comprised of assorted bits of uncommon ancestry.
The cyborg is permeated by prostheses that will look inhuman to any contemporary eye. To the degree that the cyborg is
perceived as a form of empowerment, technics and normative ethics are linked together in a functional manner that
enables capabilities. Yet to say that these attributes and capacities are fully incorporated into the body psyche of the
cyborg seems incorrect, for the cyborg appears alien (probably even unto itself). It is clumsy, at least in its

conformation, having emanated from different affordances. Be this as it may, these incongruities (which may be
of benefit to the cyborg that possesses them) are not the problem here. Rather, the greater difficulty, one which I
believe is ultimately debilitating for its ability to contend with environmental issues, is that the cyborg could not be

For such reasons, I believe, Halliwell and Mousley (2003) have classified
Haraways work as technological humanism. It is human, all too human. Thus, Kull states, somewhat paradoxically,
that Haraway is looking for a figure of humanity outside the narratives of humanism (2002, 285). This in part relates to
mistaken for any other animal.

the feminist agenda behind the cyborg, which cannot be understood properly without reference to human historical
developments. The non-essential character of the cyborg was partly in response to the oppressions and inequalities
emerging from historical categorical formations. From these inessential properties, several issues emerge. A language
of monsters has developed that speaks of these impurities, although often with a more negative connotation (Davies 2003;
Graham 2004). Haraway is generally more positive in this regard, and while she is aware of the potential pitfalls, it is far from clear as to whether such mindfulness is
perpetuated in subsequent theorising. As Field notes: I agree with Haraway that we cannot simply ignore the extent to which our embodiment is technologised in
modern Western societies. However, I remain sceptical about the consequences of formulating this into a new cyborg feminism. I suspect that in the current climate of
technological fervour it may be just a little too easy to drop the self-reflexivity that Haraway intends to accompany such a formulation. (2000, 46) In this regard,
liberating impurities may simply be channelled into pre-existing hierarchies. I am driven to note here that hybrid shares the same

etymological root with hubris (Shipley 1984, 423), both terms suggesting a certain profligacy that intimates
excessiveness, transgression and impropriety. What is critical to the present discussion, however, is that humanity,
whatever that may be, is ever-present in the midst of these developments. Can it be that rather than diluting the
prominence of humanity through the articulation of impurities, the cyborg simply distributes humanity further abroad
much like technology (and the societies that possess it) has had a penchant to do? In this sense, a cyborgian
philosophy is humanist, albeit bastardised in a sense.

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Putting cyborgs in relation to the nonhuman is better

Lulka 2k9 (David The residual humanism of hybridity: retaining a sense of the earth Trans Inst Br Geogr NS
34 378393)
I do not want to delve into technophobia here, however, as this has been done and it does not strike at the heart of the present argument. More relevantly, though, this
argumentation about cyborgs can be oriented in another direction, regressively, one might say, toward the technology of the past. Inglis and Bone have reasonably
questioned when the cyborg might have emerged, stating that: Moreover, we might ask: where do we define the historical and epistemological points where more banal
forms of human tool-use and environmental manipulation turn into the status of the fully fledged cyborg is it with the weapon-wielding early human, the medieval
scribe, the modern typist or the contemporary computer geek? In the same vein, but this time in terms of descriptions of genetically-modified animals such as
Haraways (1997) favoured figure of the geneticallymodified OncoMouse which she understands as a particular sort of cyborg figure the sceptic might plausibly ask
as to the extent to which these represent fundamental departures from traditional practices to do with the selective breeding of livestock. (2006, 2789) I, too,

would like to take the cyborg backward, but not towards humanity, but to the banal and traditional practices of
nonhumans. This glance is not intended to regain nature per se . Rather, I want to ask in what sense, in their relations with
other objects, other bodies, are nonhumans cyborgian (and thus hybrid) in their own right? I will return to this critical question later in the paper,
but for now it is sufficient to note that the indefinite origin of the cyborg leaves this matter seriously in question. To be fair, though Haraway has studied relations
between humans and other animals (1989 1997 2003 2008), the image of the cyborg was not developed for such purposes. It developed more concisely out of a feminist
agenda, one that had serious concerns of its own to address (see Ganes (2006) interview with Haraway). Nonetheless, this state of affairs cannot be used

as an excuse either, for its limitations are significant even if it has been dragged into a whole host of other affairs against
its will. Geographers are not obligated to uphold its integrity when it has been thrown into spaces where it does not
belong. The cyborg, for all of its hybridity, cannot address the issue of nature in the more pervasive manifestations of
that word that intimate other species and other inorganics. It does not speak of natures other than the inessential nature of
the human and its prostheses. Nonetheless, despite these limits, the underlying philosophy of the cyborg has been incorporated into discussions of nature and
animal others, if not directly, then indirectly, by those who have been partially inspired by Haraways writing of this creature.

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link capitalism/neolib
Cyberfeminism coincides with the capitalist regime to commodify and fetishize gender
Reyes 2014 (Raniel S.M. Reyes, Department of Philosophy U of Santo Tomas, Cybersex, Bodies, and,
Domination: An imminent critique of Cyber-Technology and the Possibility of Emancipation, Filocracia
Volume: 1 Issue: 2, August 2014 pages 34-35, Yung Jung)
The cyber transcendence and
gratification concocted in the web are not blameless in inducing detrimental issues akin to persons body-self and gender
relations, as well as, inter-personal communication. In a virtual encounter, the mere focus is on the erotic-genital attribute of the persona
fragmented way of dealing with human sexuality. Users transactions are premised not on the holistic dialogue with the individual, but
on a specific object in mindthe breast, penis, or vagina of the partner. It is analogous to casual relations mediated by
technology. A serious ethical concern should not be overlooked here. The fragmentation engendered by the cybersex encounter devalues
the person, since his/her sexuality is solely reduced to utter eroticism. Integrative values constituting the whole individual, such as his
genealogy and feelings, are neglected, thereby, conditioning personhood debasement. By reducing the individual to mere symbolic eroticism,
he/she is degraded and objectified into a profitable item of commodity. From perceiving existence as a totality, cybersex
averts our attention to merely perceive reproductive organs as a narcissistic sexual apparatus. The persons sexuality is
commodified and is manipulated by the capitalist industry for the purpose of production, fetishization and domination. 14
The extensively vile sexual preoccupations in the cyberspace really demean the unified reality of the individual as constitutive and basis of higher values.15 It
perniciously violates the material integrity of the human body and critically assails the philosophical anthropology
conception that the person is an embodied subjectivity. In the advanced capitalist society, modifications in consumption
and production have commodified the old social patterns of human interaction into a thing-like relation . Upon the advent of
Contemporary man should not be oblivious on the confounding irregularities revolving around cybersex phenomenon.

cyber-technology and capitalisms parasitic infiltration into its fluid corpus, modes of conformity and dominion fortify and the individual becomes increasingly
assimilated within the rationally-administered system. Advanced capitalism has successfully commodified cultural values in a

systemically subtle way. This is made possible by the collaboration of capitalism, mass media and technology. According to
the critical theorist Theodor Adorno, the culture industry generates a world of false specificity in which the advertised uniqueness of the individual productthe
distinctive individual voice of a new poet, the inimitable style of a star conductor, of the sheer personality of a chat-show hostneeds to be foregrounded by the
relentless sameness of a whole range of the products other qualities, from diction to typeface.16

The aff props up a cybereconomy that creates narratives of treating each other as commodity
Reyes 2014 (Raniel S.M. Reyes, Department of Philosophy U of Santo Tomas, Cybersex, Bodies, and,

Domination: An imminent critique of Cyber-Technology and the Possibility of Emancipation, Filocracia

Volume: 1 Issue: 2, August 2014 pages 34-35, Yung Jung)
is viewed as a kind of ideological false consciousness that conceals capitalist domination .
Fetishism of commodities hence replaces the false conception of this economy as a relation between things by its true
definition as a system of social relations.17 In this context, fetishism for the genital organ of your partner translates into fetishism for commodities. In
the macro-level, this forms part of the larger structural scheme of the whole capitalist system that concomitantly serves as its
blood-line. The real object of consumption in the age of advanced capitalist society for Adorno18 is the labor or products
exchange-value, and not its use-value. Cybersexual satisfaction is gauged against cost and that homo sexualis has become
homo consumeris.19 The new cyber-economy creates a narrative composing of actors treating each other as commodity and as
objects of desire. In this manner, the commodification of sexuality discards its value in the persons totality. The aptitude of
In the Marxist tradition, fetishization

innumerable pleasures without immeasurably thinking of the risks and responsibility involved engenders the moral economys demise on one hand, and the
strengthening of techno-capitalism, on the other. Culture Industry, advanced capitalisms contemporary face, is the term used by Adorno to refer to the wreckage of
high culture to shallow spectacle and consumerism, as well as the corresponding manipulation of consumer preferences by advertising or the market economy
expectations. In his words: The culture industry intentionally integrates its consumers from above. To the detriment of both, it forces together the spheres of high and
low art, separated for thousands of years. The seriousness of high art is destroyed in speculation about its efficacy; the seriousness of the lower perishes with the
civilizational constraints imposed on the rebellious resistance inherent within it as long as social control was not yet total. Thus, although the culture industry
undeniably speculates on the conscious and unconscious state of the millions towards which it is directed, the masses are not primary, but secondary, they are an object
of calculation; an appendage of the machinery. The customer is not king, as the culture industry would have us believe, not its subject but its object.20 This novel
machinery addles down its products and the possibility of a meaningful response from its consumer-victims. Undeniably, its only aim is to foster a titillating fetishized
end in the consumers part, rather than to convey meaning. Its disseminated products promote passivity and regression embedded in pre-fabricated responses. The

reified delight propounded by the industry is seriously aberrant for instigating subtle yet brazen exploitation to the
individual, especially akin to his/her critical consciousness. For David Ingram, the culture industry is the site whereby the individual is invited to
experience, however, vicariously, the excitement, adventure, and glamour desired in everyday life.21 Nevertheless, engaging into cybersex or going to the movie house,
only let us realize what we do not have. To compound the pain further, the merchandise comes with a price that must be paid via longer hours of labor.22

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Cyberfeminism reinforces the capitalist system and furthers oppression of women of color in the work
force
Daniel 9 [Jessie, Writer on race, sexism Rethinking Cyberfeminism(s): Race, Gender, and Embodiment Women's Studies
Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 1/2, Technologies (spring - Summer, 2009),
http://www.jstor.org/stable/27655141 .LM]

A central debate within cyberfeminism has to do with the tension between the political economy required to
mass produce the infrastructure of the Internet and its reliance on the exploited labor, on the one hand, and, on
the other, claims for the subversive potential of those same technologies. Easily the most influential figure in
cyberfeminism is Donna Haraway. Her conceptualization of the cyborg, part human and part machine (1985),
and the subversive potential of a cyborg future, are of particular interest to a number of scholars who come to
gender and technology through poststruc turalism and cyberpunk fiction (Balsamo 1996; Flanagan and Booth
2002; DeVoss 2000; Flanagan 2002; Sunden 2001;Wolmark 1999). In contrast to this promised future, critics
have pointed to the problematic construction of women of color working in technology manufacturing as
quintessential cyborgs (Flanagan and Booth 2002; 12).The low-skilled work in microchip production and global
call centers has not eased "the oppression of Third World women, . . . [it] has merely perpetuated their
oppression in a new workplace" (Flanagan and Booth 2002,13; see also Eisenstein 1998). Ra dhika Gajjala
raises the central question about the possibility of "subaltern cyberfeminism from below," given this economic
context: "If cyberspace is produced at the expense of millions of men and women all over the world who are not
even able to enjoy its conveniences, how can we make claims that [these technologies] are changing the world
for the better?" (2003, 49). This juxtaposition of subversive Internet technologies, on the one hand, and global
economic inequality, on the other, is one that few scholars writ ing about cyberculture acknowledge. Yet, in
rethinking cyberfeminism, it is crucial to examine both. In the following section, I take up the empirical
evidence about political economy, gender, and race.
Cyber-feminism reinforces capitalism
Suchman 6 [ Lucy, Professor of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Department of Sociology at
Lancaster University, Social Studies of Science, Wajcan Confronts Cyber Feminism Vol. 36, No. 2 (Apr.,
2006), pp. 321-327
April 2006, http://www.jstor.org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/stable/pdf/25474445.pdf?acceptTC=truem LM]
Wajcman names 'technofeminism' refers to efforts on the part of feminist scholars of science and technology to retool STS so as to bring issues absent from mainstream accounts of

feminist scholarship, which has aimed at

restoring women's presence to technology histories. This includes accounts of the processes by which, in the late 19th century, technology
came to be equated with engineering, and engineering with (new forms) of masculinity. In this process,
Wajcman reminds us, the term 'technology' acquired its modern meaning, shifting from a broad and
heterogeneous range of 'useful arts' to the more narrowly gendered frame of'applied science'. Here Wajcman also
describes what she characterizes as an 'early second-wave' feminist empha sis on technology as neutral, the
defining issue being women's access to and inclusion in its production and use. Set against this liberal stance throughout the late 1960s
and early 1970s was the radical science movement's Marxist-inspired analysis of the class character of science and
its links to capitalist modes of production. This analysis in turn informed the 1970s 'science is social relations' stance of the women's health movement, along with
socialist and eco-feminist debates over the role of technologies - particularly reproductive technologies, and the impending automation of domestic
and service work in women's liberation or oppression. The writings of Oldenziel (1999), Cockburn (1983) and Schwartz Cowan (1983) figure centrally
technoscientific practice into focus. Chapter 1, 'Male Designs on Technology', reviews the past 20 years of

here; for example, Cockburn's analyses of the relations between labour process struggles and gendered anxieties, specifi cally about the 'feminization' of traditionally masculine-encoded trade
skills, and Schwartz Cowan's analysis of the failures of 'labor-saving devices' in the home, which she traced less to the devices than to the configuration of the private, nuclear family and its
associated social relations and cultural imaginaries. Perhaps most significantly for the developments that Wajcman names here technofeminism, the 1980s saw a shift from preoccupations with
the question of women in science to what Sandra Harding called 'the science question in feminism', and a more radical and thoroughgoing analysis of the gendering of technology (Harding,
1986).1 Against the background of this history, Wajcman introduces the central project of the book: to develop understandings that advance theorizing and action in relation to technology, and
to do so in ways informed by, rather than simply positioned as superseding, previous feminist analyses . Her

aim is to retain the critical concerns of earlier debates,

while looking for new spaces of action and possibility; 'to offer a way between Utopian optimism and pessimistic fatalism for
technofeminism, and between cultural con tingency and social determinism in social theory' . While Wajcman ends her review with what,
on my reading, is a somewhat reductionist charge that Haraway 'veers between an over-deter mined view of patriarchal capitalist
reproduction and a fantasist vanguard ism based on a fixation with cutting-edge technology' (

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The 1AC ignores the power relations caused by neoliberalism its the root cause of the dichotomy
Eisenstein 98 - Professor of Politics at Ithaca College in New York and focuses on the rise of neoliberalism
(Zillah R., 1998, Global Obscenities: Patriarchy, Capitalism, and the Lure of Cyberfantasy, pg. 93-95, Google
Books) /AMarb
Power relations structure the real/virtual divide . Freedom comes out of the wire of a modem,'3 and
this freedom is not equally distributed. Yet, digital technology has the potential to undermine existing relations of pow er.
The flow of information cannot be contained. The internet creates new lines of com- munication and challenges
older constructions of private/pub- lic dialogue. This remains of great concern to governments across the globe.
Pakistan and iran limit net availability; china rejects ab- solute freedom of information; many middle east
nations con- trol political and religious discussion; vietnam and saudi arabia control internet service through a
single government-c0n- trolled gateway; exorbitant rates are charged for net use in india; and the Clinton
administration supported the Commu- nications Decency Act. In an information society the tension between
equality and freedom can be seen with new clarity. The info society and its cybertech promise of freedom
embrace an individualism premised on privatization and consumerism. In contrast, equalityin terms of
economic class, sexual orientation, and gender and/or racial fairnesschallenges hierarchical rela- tions based
on these schemata. Equality remains potentially subversive as a really democratic discourse demanding access to
labor, information, and technology . Equality discourse chal- lenges the media/corporate control of
cybertechnology. Cyberdiscourse applauds the neoliberal commitment to freedom: of the market,
of the superhighway, of information routes themselves . But individual freedom must reckon with the
structured limitations of actualizing freedom. As I have said before, one may have the freedom to receive electronic
informa- tion, but one must have equality to do so: a computer, the soft- ware, the training, and a telephone line .

One may have the freedom to electronically communicate with anyone across the globe, but one must rst
secure an e-mail address. The more public funds are cutfor schools, libraries, and the computers for them
the less access exists for those with- out individual equipment. Spending on local libraries fell to about $100
million in 1996, compared to several billion dollars for prison construction.'5 The problem is one of public access
for individuals without private means. There is a harmful cycle already in place. The less access, the less equality.
The less the equality, the less access. This is why public access to informa- tion and the skills needed for
finding, understanding, and using it is so critical.'6 Freedom, however, remains a proposi- tion of selfsufficiency. Global telecommunications networks are not the originators of the tension between individual freedom and
access within the social/political/economic structure. But new layers of tech- nological elitism have been created, along
with new forms of obfuscation to justify the inequality.

Capitalism creates a racialized patriarchy turns the aff

Eisenstein 98 - Professor of Politics at Ithaca College in New York and focuses on the rise of neoliberalism
(Zillah R., 1998, Global Obscenities: Patriarchy, Capitalism, and the Lure of Cyberfantasy, pg. 103, Google
Books) /AMarb
While high-tech goes global, economic class divisions- often expressed racially and sexuallyare reconstituted across
and in geographical nations. Women and girls of color be- come/remain the poorest of the poor across the globe. This
racialized patriarchy is as universal as capitalism itself . Universal does not mean homogeneous or singular. Capital
denes itself in plural forms through the racial and gender structuring of different cultures. Families and nations are renegotiated in the process: capitalism, nationalism, and racialized patriarchy displace and replace each other as public
and pri- vate terrains are exploited by consumer capitalism. Transnational corporations restructure nation-states; the
traditional patriarchal nuclear family, no matter how un-real, remains a constant imaginary; a few women enter

management and government office, to little avail; and racialized patriarchy is reconstituted along with the
nation-state for global capital. I will explore these processes in order to reveal the power nexus of the global
information age. ssures and rumblings from these sites just might instigate a challenge to the dominance of
global capital and its cyber-media complex.
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topicality/framework

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2nc topical version

T version of aff: Supreme Court strike down bulk metadata collection on grounds that would overturn
third-party doctrine
Wittes and Chong 14 [Benjamin, senior fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution, cofounded and is the editor-in-chief of the Lawfare blog, and Jane, 2014 graduate of Yale Law School, where she
was an editor of the Yale Law Journal, Our Cyborg Future: Law and Policy Implications, September 2014,
Brookings Institution, http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports2/2014/09/cyborg-future-law-policyimplications] //khirn
Thus the

most immediate impact of cyborgization on the law of surveillance will likely be to put additional pressure on the sodoctrine, which underlies a great deal of government collection of transactional data and business records.
Under the third-party doctrine, an individual does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy with respect to information
he voluntarily discloses to a third party, like a bank or a telecommunications carrier, and the Fourth Amendment therefore does not regulate the
called third-party

acquisition of such transactional data from those third parties by government investigators. The Supreme Court declined to extend constitutional protections to bank
records in United States v. Miller78 based on the theory that the Fourth Amendment does not prohibit the obtaining of information revealed to a third party and
conveyed by [the third party] to Government authorities, even if the information is revealed on the assumption that it will be used only for a limited purpose and the
confidence placed in the third party will not be betrayed.79 The third-party doctrine underlies a huge array of collection, everything from

the basic building blocks of routine criminal investigations to the NSAs bulk telephony metadata program . The
third-party doctrine has long been controversial, even among humans . It has attracted particular criticism as backward in an era in which thirdparty service providers hold increasing amounts of what was previously considered personal information. Commentators have urged everything from overruling the

doctrine seems particularly illsuited to cyborgs . A world of humans can, after all, indulge the fiction that we each have a meaningful choice about
whether to engage the modern banking system or the telephone infrastructure. It can adopt the position however unrealistic in
practicethat we have the option of not using telephones if we prefer not to give our metadata to telephone companies , and
doctrine entirely80 to adapting the doctrine to extend constitutional protections to Internet searches.81 But the

that we can pay cash for everything if we do not like the idea of the FBI getting our credit card records without a warrant. But the cyborg does not meaningfully have

machines produce data as an inherent feature of their existence. The more we come to see the
machine as an extension of the person first by the pervasiveness of its use, then by its physical integration with its user, and ultimately
through cybernetic integration with the userthe less plausible will seem the notion that these are simply tools which we choose to
use and whose data we thus voluntarily turn over to service providers . The more like cyborgs we become, the more that
data will seem like the inevitable byproduct of our lives, and thus entitled to heightened legal protection.
choice. Digital

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2nc policy good

State engagement key to solve the aff
Wilding 98 (Faith, 1998, n.paradoxa, vol. 2, Where is Feminism in Cyberfeminism?,
http://www.obn.org/reading_room/writings/html/where.html) /AMarb
If cyberfeminists have the desire to research, theorize, work practically, and make visible how women (and others)
worldwide are affected by new communications technologies, technoscience, and the capitalist dominations of the
global communications networks, they must begin by clearly formulating cyberfeminisms political goals and positions.
Cyberfeminists have the chance to create new formulations of feminist theory and practice that address the complex new
social, cultural, and economic conditions created by global technologies. Strategic and politically savvy uses of these
technologies can facilitate the work of a transnational movement that aims to infiltrate and assault the networks of power
and communication through activist-feminist projects of solidarity, education, freedom, vision, and resistance. To be

effective in creating a politicized feminist environment on the Net that challenges its present gender, race, age,
and class structures, cyberfeminists need to draw on the researches and strategies of avant garde feminist history
and its critique of institutionalized patriarchy. While affirming new possibilities for women in cyberspace,
cyberfeminists must critique utopic and mythic constructions of the Net, and strive to work with other resistant
netgroups in activist coalitions. Cyberfeminists need to declare solidarity with transnational feminist and
postcolonial initiatives, and work to use their access to communications technologies and electronic networks to
support such initiatives.

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virus pic

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1nc virus word pic

The alternative is to embrace the virus the cyborg metaphor is ultimately constrained and limited by its
own presupositions however the language of the virus can break the boundary between self and other in
a more effective way
Thomas 2 [Anne-Marie, IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE: THE VIRUS, CULTURAL ANXIETY, AND
SPECULATIVE FICTION Disertation from the English department @ LSU] //khirn
As in non-fiction, traditional binaries tend to stay in place in most fictional representations of the virus, except perhaps in the case of speculative fiction, in which the
virus takes on characteristics not (yet) possible according to the convention of realism that naturalistic fictions employs. Speculative fiction also tends to engage more
directly with the complexity of the virus itself, elevating it to the status of a character instead of employing it as a mere plot device. Indeed, the very nature of the
virus is itself speculative, so it is particularly susceptible to theorization, as I have illustrated. And as Heather Schell observes, Virologists not only support the creation
of epidemic science fiction, they also indulge in it themselves as a brainstorming tool (100). What some science fiction writers speculate about the virus is the
possibility that infection can enliven the subject rather than debilitate it. Transformation of the human subject through viral infection in these

texts often leads not to death or debilitation, but to a different kind of humanity, which we might call, for lack of a better
term, posthumanity.15 This may represent not only an answer to the very real and debilitating phenomenon of a disease
like AIDS, but it could also represent an offshoot of the scientific viewpointwhich, compared to virus-as-malevolentforce, gets very little pressthat viruses may in some way be beneficial to the body . I refer here not to gene therapy,
which utilizes genetically engineered viruses in order to deliver much-needed genes, but rather to the notion that the viruss natural cutting and pasting of genes may in
fact be beneficial to the body and may even stimulate evolution. Certainly the representation of viruses that I examine in a number of the

speculative fiction texts suggest that the new posthuman is an evolutionary improvement upon homo sapiens . I focus on this
exchange between science and popular culture, both of which suggest a more utopian vision of the virus than the killer virus
narratives would seem to indicate. My plan is not to rescue the virus entirely from its bad press, but simply to emphasize
that as a theoretical category, the virus can in fact help us to negotiate the problematic multiplicities of postmodern
selves, as it is itself invested with multiplicity and inscribed with competing discourses. The virus, then, is a mirror of
our own postmodern moment. Both as a metaphor and as a liminal agent, it can lead us to deconstruct the central binary of
self and other in ways that other speculative postmodern metaphors, such as Haraways
cyborg, cannot . And that is primarily due, I would argue, to its ubiquitousness. The cyborg is indeed perhaps the most
significant construct, or ironic political myth, of the late twentieth century, serving as a key to navigate the
contradictions between self and other. But the cyborg imagery that Haraway calls for has not yet delivered us from our maze of
dualisms. Offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, the cyborg is a hybrid of machine and organism that a
number of critics have embraced as a figure that promises utopian possibilities, in part because of its ability to pick up the
tools that have marked it as Other and mark the world in its turn. The cyborg is also capable of erasing disparities between gender, or even regendering, as it has no essential origins. Haraways myth is a celebration of contradictions; she warns against the totalizing resolution of contradiction and notes that
the partial and the monstrous are both necessary to the new identities which are to be found in (for the most part) late twentieth century writing. The cyborg is

a being that is structured around contradictions, and those contradictions allow for transgressed boundaries, potent
fusions, and dangerous possibilities. And yet apart from professional academics in the field of cultural studies, the cyborg has yet to catch on as a
powerful metaphor for our times. The virus, on the other hand, as both a material object and a construction, is already more widely
recognizable as a locus for a dizzying array of metaphorical attachments and connotations. The virus is also, in our
contemporary moment, a uniquely postmodern agent, one that embodies contradictions of self and other within its own
structure, and one which inhabits a liminality that enables us, like Haraways cyborg, to imagine potent fusions and
dangerous possibilities. The task at hand, however, is to seize these possibilities; aside from a few representations, which I will examine in this study, the virus
has not been appropriated in ways that allow for the traditional collapse of binaries. It is still far more likely for the virus to be cast as the typical other. We should
recognize, too, that our othering is a projection of what is dangerous and unpleasant about ourselves. Our depiction of the virus as foreign is a typical strategy in order
to deal with our deeply entrenched fears of the other, which, despite the shrinking of the global stage, remain very much in evidence. We might take a cue from Julia
Kristeva, who writes in Strangers to Ourselves that it is necessary to acknowledge that we are all in some sense foreigners: The foreigner is within us. And when we
flee from or struggle against the foreigner, we are fighting our unconscious . . . . To discover our disturbing otherness, for that indeed is what bursts in to confront that
demon, that threat, that apprehension generated by the projective apparition of the other at the heart of what we persist in maintaining as a proper, solid us . By

recognizing our uncanny strangeness we shall neither suffer from it nor enjoy it from the outside. The foreigner is within
me, hence we are all foreigners. If I am a foreigner, there are no foreigners . (290).

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2nc virus word pic

Virus metaphor breaks down boundaries in a comparatively better way than the cyborg
Thomas 2 [Anne-Marie, IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE: THE VIRUS, CULTURAL ANXIETY, AND
SPECULATIVE FICTION Disertation from the English department @ LSU] //khirn
It is the viruss permeability as a signifier that makes it an ideal candidate for a whole host of metaphorical attachments ,
but it is that same permeability and mutability that allows for extreme possibilities . In Synners and Snow Crash, for example, the
virus not only to erases the very distinction between the computational and biological virus , but it also blurs all boundaries
between the organic and the artificial; these texts effect a naturalization of computer viruses and render humans and their
viruses as artificial. The virus serve as a locus by which the novels interrogate and compromise the binary of self and nonself, which in these texts is not only described in terms of human and virus, but also human and machine. It is, as I have
argued, a uniquely postmodern agent/construct, one that embodies contradictions of self and other within its own
structure, and one which inhabits a liminality that enables us , like Haraways cyborg, to imagine potent fusions and
dangerous possibilities. We see some of these possibilities represented in many of the fictional texts I have examined in this study, some of which, like The XFiles, attempt a collapse of the central binary of self and other, but which at the same time cast the virus in the role of the typical other. It will take time to discard the
old image of the body at war, with armies defending against (foreign) marauding invaders. Even more current images of the body and immune system response employ,
as I illustrated in Chapter One, a variety of war metaphors. The body is no longer simply a fortress; it is instead conceived as a strategic

system, highly militarized in key arenas of imagery and practice in which disease may be seen as a subspecies of
information malfunction or communications pathology . . . a process of misrecognition or transgression of the boundaries
of a strategic assemblage called self (Haraway 211-213). Here the distinction of self and non-self remains the same, even as the imagery evolves. For
potent fusions, we might do well to turn to Bears Darwins Radio, who describes an integration between human and virus that is beneficialand which is not a science

the day of viewing the

virus as a positive force and transformative agent may be at hand, a notion that science fiction
has anticipated. If such a day arrives, the very tenor of viral discourse (and viral metaphors)
will change . It will also, by necessity, be the day that the traditional self/non-self model of immunology finally
collapses , allowing us to transcend depictions of the immune system that employ metaphors of
war . At long last, we may find ourselves in line with the theories of immunologist Ludwig Fleck, who wrote the following in 1935: An organism can no
longer be construed as a self-contained, independent unit with fixed boundaries . . . . In the light of this concept [the
harmonious life unit], man appears as a complex to whose harmonious well-being many bacteria, for instance, are
absolutely essential . . . . It is very doubtful whether an invasion in the old sense is possible, involving as it does an
interference by completely foreign organisms in natural conditions. (Martin 109). In this view, the virusgendered,
historicized, and nationalized in texts ranging from popular fiction to science writingsis inseparable from who we are as
human beings. It is us. And knowing this, we may use it to negotiate the problematic multiplicities of postmodern
selves, as it is itself invested with multiplicity and inscribed with competing discourses. It is a touchstone, a mirror of our
postmodern moment, and just as our postmodern moment continually shifts and reforms, revealing itself as a construct, so
does our mirror. If the virus changes, it is only because we ourselves have consented to changeit is
up to us to seize its utopian potential .
fictional device. His delineation of phage therapy, which serves as our introduction to viruses in the novel, suggests that

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