More Poop File

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Is this really a file about poop?

The poop affirmative is a playful yet serious attempt to engage with
the distinction between humans and waste. The term poop, jokes
about it and the like are initial moves to engage with the excluded
substance of human life. The moves made by this file are tentative,
this is not meant to be an argument that one could deploy all year
without modification, and in its current form it would be difficult to
utilize as a new surprise affirmative.
There is a kernel of a policy affirmative in this file, the evidence for

sewage biomass energy is out there, just not really in here. What you
will find in here is a 1AC, evidence defending the normative dimension
of sewage biomass energy, a developed critique advantage predicated
on abjection, and a host of other work intended for critical 2AC’s on
this affirmative, and for other critical affirmative 2AC’s. This file should
provide a critical or performance team a solid core from which they
can begin their approach to the topic.
If you intend to use this as your primary affirmative case, you should
find the performative moments of the 1AC and replace them with your
own story/rap/jokes about abjection. You should retune the affirmative
performance to fit with your personality, although the current version
of the affirmative attempts to stay on the lighter side, there are surely
approaches to this case that are not jovial. Remake the affirmative,
make it your own, and be fierce.
To answer the initial question, this file is about poop and those who
produce it. This file was a lot of fun to produce and hopefully should be
very fun to debate.
Good Crapping,
The Poop Group
Patrick, Sydnie, Taylor and Lillian
(feat. Dan Faltesek)
Abjection 1AC
Raw sewage mixed with flood waters permeates the air,
landfills lord over mountains, the shit is separated from the
good clean body, the city distinct from the suburban home, at
least there is order, we stink of exhaust and 2000 flushes-
what a relief!
In the status quo, shit is rejected as negative because it is
viewed as a threat to identity, system, and order.
Marisol F. Cortez is a Ph. D candidate at UC Davis. B.A. English, Women's Studies
Minor, Southwest Texas State University, San Marcos, TX. "Brown Meets Green: The
Political Fecology of Poop Report.Com". Reconstruction 5, no. 2 (Spring 2005).
Available at http://www.reconstruction.ws/05 2/cortez.shtml
Sue Vice (1997) has pointed out that if Bakhtin tries to recuperate the positive
element in those bodily phenomena we now consider negative, Julia Kristeva's
concept of abjection attempts to explains why we might view these phenomena as
negative in the first place. 16 In Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection (1982),
Kristeva marries Lacanian psychoanalysis to the structural anthropology of Mary
Douglas, whose famous argument that dirt is "matter out of place" first pointed out
the stabilizing role that exclusion plays in the establishment of social order. 17
Likewise, Kristeva argues that shit is negative because it represents par excellence
what the individual must reject in order to delimit the bounds of his or her
subectivity. The excremental, as Kristeva tells us, is what the "I" is not; "dung
signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me
to be". 18 When present within the symbolic realm of "language, law, and gender
difference", shit thus reminds the subject of "a boundary its existence is premised
upon forgetting", a boundary beyond which lies the realm of prohibition and
"unmeaning". 19 It is this idea which leads to Kristeva's infamous pronouncement
regardng the symbolic power of shit, invoked by many a subsequent reader of the
scatological: "[i]t is ... not a lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but
what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions,
rules". 20 When it appears in literary texts, then, shit functions as ambivalent because
it symbolizes the return of the very thing that the symbolic must exclude in the
process of self-definition. Kristeva's understanding of the ambivalence of shit thus
tends to emphasize the negative, threatening aspect of its double character -- just as
Bakhtin presents a similarly lopsided (if inverted) ambivalence, in which the upward
movement of degradation takes precedence over the downward.
We are running out of valueless space to dispel our waste. The

question is not if we encounter the excremental, but how we
deal with it.
Jody Baker, Modeling Industrial Thresholds, Cultronix 1, Fall 1994,

http://eserver.org/cultronix/baker
With modernity and industrialization, the meaning of waste has moved across the
production process to its other end: the waste product. The idea of waste and the
valuelessness, the otherness (as in wilderness) and the danger which it signifies has
shifted from those things that exist in the realm of pre-production to those which are
post-production. Thus, we find ourselves faced with a double bind: as the value of
pre-production wastelands rises so too does the demand for their protection from the
dangers of industrial intrusion. At the same time, as the danger and threat of post-
production waste also rises, so does the demand that it be gotten rid of, either by
containment or disposal. The imperialist nature of industrial capitalism, coupled with
its particular capacity for expansion and growth, has succeeded in colonizing the
entire globe. There are virtually no places left which have not been incorporated into
its production process. There is no wilderness left (what is called wilderness today if it
is not stripped of its of material resources has become incorporated as spectacle; e.g.
Yellowstone National Park.) At the other end this expansion of the production process
has come to produce more and more commodities which are consumed faster and
faster. This, of course, entails the production of more and more by-products which
become increasing difficult to contain. The problem is compounded because if the
entire world becomes colonized then there is no outside, no geographical other, no
place left to put wastes. Waste is still a wilderness, an other, but it no longer lurks
just outside the edges of the social world. It now exists within capitalist society and
so must be managed from within rather than discarded and banished
Abjection 1AC
to the outside. This is becoming the meta-crisis of late modernity: there is no
valueless space of wilderness, no wastelands into which we can cast off industrial
waste and destroy its materiality and its danger through disposal, dissipation,
dispersion, disintegration, desubstantiation.
But when did people get so afraid of their own poop?
Dave Prager calls it out in 2007…
Many members of our society have interpreted the bathroom

infrastructure passed down to us from the Victorians as an
imperative of fecal denial-that poop should not be seen, heard,
smelled, or touched (or tasted, for that matter). Even among
the shameless shitters, have all five senses cut off from our
poop has engaged a sense of fecal invisibility. We’re ignorant
of the cultural forces that sculpt the common turd into an
object of almost occult dread, and ignorant of its economic
ramifications. We don’t know were it goes or what happens to
it, or appreciate how the answers to those mysteries affect us.
The overflow of waste that is produced by our fear of feces is dumped on the
disadvantaged communities- the short time frame solution while politically easy is
an utter failure.
Jody Baker, Modeling Industrial Thresholds, Cultronix 1, Fall 1994, http://eserver.org/cultronix/baker
In North America this double bind is perhaps most acutely felt at the municipal level. By the mid-1990s,
one half of the 6,500 municipal landfills in the United States are expected to reach capacity; 1,400 landfills
have closed since 1978 (Royte 55). Meanwhile, as the amount and danger of municipal, consumer wastes
continue to rise, so do the regulations and costs of constructing new sites. Large cities are faced with
mountains of trash and overflowing landfills; smaller municipalities are faced with the financial burdens of
constructing elaborate and costly landfills to meet EPA standards. The trend, according to Elizabeth Royte,
is the construction of huge landfill sites in poor isolated, communities who are desperate for income. Waste
management firms scour the countryside with lucrative deals to offer communities: "host fees," jobs,
scholarships and a cost-free solution to their own waste problems. Huge profits can be made by those who
participate in the $30 billion-a-year industry: in the construction of huge waste containers and the transport
of waste over long distances. But even in the poorest, most desperate communities, not-in-my-backyard
struggles continue to leave waste in highly contested political terrain. The profit-driven solutions to the
crisis of an ever-increasing waste stream provide only relatively short-term solutions that come only at
great social and environmental costs.
Abjection 1AC
The structural exclusion pervasive in global politics has
become a form of annihilation, a genocidal violence which
produces what are considered to be “garbage human beings,”
to be thrown away out of the global city.
Balibar, Professor of Philosophy, 2004

[Etienne, We, The People of Europe?, p.125-30]
In such conditions, we can incline toward divergent conclusions. Either we can think that the
multifaceted phenomenon of mass violence and extreme violence has generally replaced
politics, including internal and external relationships of forces among states, or we fully take
into account the fact that the fields of politics and violence—a violence that seems
to lack rational organization, not excepting self-destruction—are
no longer separated.
They have progressively permeated one another. It is precisely in such
conditions that something called “humanitarian action” or “intervention,” both “private” and
“public,” has become the necessary supplement of politics. I cannot discuss all the aspects of
this mutation, but I would like briefly to address three questions that seem to me to have an
importance for the concept of politics itself. Are We Facing an “Unprecedented” Spread of
Extreme Violence (or Violence of the Extremes)? I should like to be very careful on this point,
which raises a number of discussions ranging from the issue of “old and new wars” to the
highly sensitive moral questions of why and how to “compare genocides” in history. Perhaps
what is unprecedented is basically the new visibility of
extreme violence, particularly in the sense that modern techniques of media
coverage and broadcasting and the transformation of images—in the end,
as we could see for the first time on a grand scale during the Gulf War, of the production of
“virtual reality”—transform extreme violence into a show, and display this
show simultaneously before a world audience. We also know that the
effect of such techniques is, at the same time, to uncover some violent
processes, or scenes of horror (truly horrifying, such as hundreds of
mutilated children in Angola or Sierra Leone), and to cover up others
(equally horrifying, such as babies starving in Baghdad). We suspect
that powerful ideological biases are at work when the coverage of
extreme violence gives credit to such simplistic ideas as the political
transition from the “equilibrium of terror” during the Cold War to the
“competition among victims,” by way of the undifferentiated uses of
the legal and moral but hardly political notion of “crimes against
humanity.” In the end, we become aware of the fact that talking about
and showing the images of everyday horror produces, particularly in
the relatively wealthy and protected regions of humanity, a very
ambivalent effect: raising compassion but also disgust, reinforcing the
idea that humankind as such is really divided into qualitatively
different cultures or civilization, which, according to one political
scientist, could only produce a “clash” among them. I am aware of all
these difficulties, but I would maintain that a reality lies behind the
notion of something “unprecedented.” Perhaps it is simply the fact that
a number of heterogeneous methods or processes of extermination (by
which I mean eliminating masses of individuals inasmuch as they
belong to objective or subjective groups) have themselves become
“globalized,” that is, operate in a similar manner everywhere in the
world at the same time, and so progressively form a “chain,”
giving full reality to what E.P. Thompson anticipated twenty years ago
with the name “exterminism.” In this series of connected processes,
we must include, precisely because they are heterogeneous—they do
not have one and the same “cause,” but they produce cumulative
effects:
1. Wars (both “civil” and “foreign,” a distinction that is not easy to

draw in many cases, such as Yugoslavia or Chechnya).
2. Communal rioting, with ethnic and/or religious ideologies of

“cleansing.”
3. Famines and other kinds of “absolute” poverty produced by the ruin

of traditional or nontraditional economies.
Abjection 1AC
4. Seemingly “natural” catastrophes, which in fact are killing on a mass
scale because they are overdetermined by social, economic, and
political structures, such as pandemics (for example, the difference in
the distribution of AIDS and the possibilities of treatment between
Europe and North America on the one side, Africa and some parts of
Asia on the other), drought, floods, or earthquakes in the absence of
developed civil protection. In the end it would be my suggestion that
the “globalization” of various kinds of extreme violence has produced
a growing division of the “globalized world” into life zones and
death zones. Between these zones (which indeed are intricate and
frequently reproduced within the boundaries of a single country or city)
there exists a decisive and fragile superborder, which raises fears and
concerns about the unity and division of mankind—something like a
global and local “enmity line,” like the “amity line” that existed in the
beginning of the modern European seizure of the world. It is this
superborder, this enmity line, that becomes at the same time an object
of permanent show and a hot place for intervention but also for
nonintervention. We might discuss whether the most worrying aspect
of present international politics is “humanitarian intervention” or
“generalized nonintervention,” or one coming after the other.
Should We Consider Extreme Violence to be “Rational” or “Functional”

from the Point of View of Market Capitalism (the “Liberal Economy”)?
This is a very difficult question—in fact, I think it is the most difficult
question—but it cannot be avoided; hence it is also the most
intellectually challenging. Again, we should warn against the
paralogism that is only too obvious but nonetheless frequent: that of
mistaking consequences for goals or purposes. (But is it really possible
to discuss social systems in terms of purposes? On the other hand, can
we avoid reflecting on the immanent ends, or “logic,” or a structure
such as capitalism?) It seems to me, very schematically, that the
difficulty arises from the two opposite “global effects” that derive from
the emergence of a chain of mass violence—as compared, for
example, with what Marx called primitive accumulation when he
described the creation of the preconditions for capitalist accumulation
in terms of the violent suppression of the poor. One kind of effect is
simply to generalize material and moral insecurity for millions of
potential workers, that is, to induce a massive proletarianization or
reproletarianization (a new phase of proletarianization that crucially
involves a return of many to the proletarian condition from which they
had more or less escaped, given that insecurity is precisely the heart
of the “proletarian condition”). This process is contemporary with an
increased mobility of capital and also humans, and so it takes place
across borders. But, seen historically, it can also be distributed among
several political varieties:
1. In the “North,” it involves a partial or deep dismantling of the social

policies and the institutions of social citizenship created by the welfare
state, what I called the “national social citizenship,” and therefore also
a violent transition from welfare to workfare, from the social state to
the penal state (the United States showing the way in this respect, as
was convincingly argued in a recent essay by Loic Wacquant).
2. In the “South,” it involves destroying and inverting the

“developmental” programs and policies, which admittedly did not
suffice to produce the desired “takeoff” but indicated a way to resist
impoverishment.
3. In the “semiperiphery,” to borrow Immanuel Wallerstein’s category,

it was connected with the collapse of dictatorial structure called “real
existing socialism,” which was based on scarcity and corruption, but
again kept the polarization of riches and poverty within certain limits.
Abjection 1AC
Let me suggest that a common formal feature of all these processes
resulting in the reproletarianization of the labor force is the fact that
they suppress or minimize the forms and possibilities of representation
of the subaltern within the state apparatus itself, or, if you prefer, the
possibilities of more or less effective counterpower. With this remark I
want to emphasize the political aspect of processes that, in the first
instance, seem to be mainly “economic.” This political aspect, I think,
is even more decisive when we turn to the other scene, the other kind
of result produced by massive violence, although the mechanism here
is extremely mysterious. Mysterious but real, unquestionably. I am
thinking of a much more destructive tendency, destructive not of
welfare or traditional ways of life, but of the social bond itself and, in
the end, of “bare life.” Let us think of Michel Foucault, who used to
oppose two kinds of politics: “Let live” and “let die.” In the face of the
cumulative effects of different forms of extreme violence or cruelty
that are displayed in what I called the “death zones” of humanity, we
are led to admit that the current mode of production and reproduction
has become a mode of production for elimination, a
reproduction of populations that are not likely to be productively
used or exploited but are always already superfluous, and therefore
can be only eliminated either through “political” or “natural” means—
what Latin American sociologists provocatively call poblacion chatarra,
“garbage humans,” to be “thrown” way out of the global city. If
this is the case, the question arises once again: what is the rationality
of that? Or do we face an absolute triumph of irrationality. My
suggestion would be: it is economically irrational (because it amounts
to a limitation of the scale of accumulation), but it is politically rational
—or, better said, it can be interpreted in political terms. The fact is that
history does not move simply in a circle, the circular pattern of
successive phases of accumulation. Economic and political class
struggles have already taken place in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries with the result of limiting the possibilities of exploitation,
creating a balance of forces, and this event remains, so to speak, in
the “memory” of the system. The system (and probably also some of
its theoreticians and politicians) “knows” that there is no exploitation
without class struggles, no class struggles without organization and
representation of the exploited, no representation and organization
without a tendency toward political and social citizenship. This is
precisely what current capitalism cannot afford: there is no
possibility of a “global social state” corresponding to the “national
social states” in some parts of the world during the last century. I
mean, there is no political possibility. Therefore there is political
resistance, very violent indeed, to every move in that direction.
Technological revolutions provide a positive but insufficient condition
for the deproletarianization of the actual or potential labor force. This
time, direct political repression may also be insufficient.
Elimination or extermination has to take place, “passive” if possible,

“active” if necessary; mutual elimination is “best,” but it has to be
encouraged from outside. This is what allows me to suggest (and it
already takes me to my third question) that if the “economy of global
violence” is not functional (because its immanent goals are indeed
contradictory), it remains in a sense teleological: the same
populations are massively targeted (or the reverse: those
populations that are targeted become progressively assimilated, they
look “the same”). They are qualitatively “deterritorialized,” as Gilles
Deleuze would say, in an intensive rather than extensive sense: they
“live” on the edge of the city under the permanent threat of
elimination; but also, conversely, they live and are perceived as
“nomads,” even when they are fixed in their homelands, that is, their
mere existence, their quantity, their movements, their virtual claims
of rights and citizenship are perceived as a threat for
“civilization.”In the End, Does “Extreme Violence” Form a Global
System”? Violence can be highly “unpolitical”—this is what I wanted to
suggest—but still form a system or be considered “systematic” if
Abjection 1AC
its various forms reinforce each other, if they contribute to creating the
conditions for their succession and encroachment, if in the end they
build a chain of “human(itarian) catastrophies” where actions to
prevent the spread of cruelty and extermination, or simply limit their
effects, are systematically obstructed. This teleology without an end is
exactly what I suggested calling, in the most objective manner,
“preventative counterrevolution” or, better perhaps, “preventative
counterinsurrection.” It is only seemingly “Hobbesian,” since the
weapon used against a “war of all against all” is another kind of war
(Le Monde recently spoke about Colombia in terms of “a war against
society” waged by the state and the Mafiosi together). It is politics as
antipolitics, but it appears as a system because of the many
connections between the heterogeneous forms of violence (arms trade
indispensable to state budgets with corruption; corruption with
criminality; drugs, organ, and modern slave trade with dictatorships;
dictatorships with civil wars and terror); and perhaps also, last but not
least, because there is a politics of extreme violence that confuses all
the forms to erect the figure of “evil” (humanitarian intervention
sometimes participates in that) and because there is an economics of
extreme violence, which makes both coverage and intervention
sources of profitable business. I spoke of a division between zones of
life and zones of death, with a fragile line of demarcation. It was
tantamount to speaking of the “totalitarian” aspects of globalization.
But globalization is clearly not only that. At the moment at which
humankind becomes economically and, to some extent, culturally
“united,” it is violently divided “biopolitically.” A politics of civility
(or a politics of human rights) can be either the imaginary substitute of
the destroyed unity, or the set of initiatives that reintroduce
everywhere, and particularly on the borderlines themselves, the issue
of equality, the horizon of political action.
THUS- The United States Federal Government should provide

incentives sufficient to see to it that all or nearly all of the
United States electrical energy needs are met by fecal biomass
energy sources as soon as possible.
EVERY BODYPOOPS; is the name of a childrens’ book and an
unbearable truth.
By reconceptualizing how we view shit, we can reshape our material relationship

with the self, the body, others, and the environment
Marisol F. Cortez is a Ph. D candidate at UC Davis. "Brown Meets Green: The Political Fecology of Poop
Report.Com". Reconstruction 5, no. 2 (Spring 2005). Available at http://www.reconstruction.ws/05
2/cortez.shtml
However, I would contend that Barney's observations are as problematic as they are accurate, in no small
part due to his casual use of the term "abject" to head the entire list of texts he names -- "abject" referring
here to Kristeva's term for what we necessarily reject in the delimitation of self and society. 2 For the same
span of time that has witnessed the proliferation of filthy texts has also seen the emergence of a critical
space for rethinking the very categories of "filth" and "waste" upon which Barney's analysis hinges. This
development has taken place largely outside of literary criticism as narrowly conceived, arising instead at
the confluence of ecology, cultural studies, and Marxist political economy -- a synthesis that has yielded
the rise of such disciplinary hybrids as political ecology, green cultural studies, and ecocriticism. 3 Perhaps
best representative of this new filth-consciousness is a recent volume of essays entitled Culture and Waste
(2003), which examines the ethical implications of a category that has primarily been conceptualized in
structural terms, seen as the negative of both culture and value. In focusing not simply on the positive or
negative value of waste, but instead on the "complex role [waste plays] in formations of value", editors Gay
Hawkins and Stephen Muecke stress[es] "not our difference from waste and our mastery of it, but our
profound implications with it". This paves the way, they argue, for an "ethics of responsibility", an ethics
that, in being "open to the various responses and affects waste can initiate", recognizes its ability to "make
us think about what we are doing". 4
Abjection 1AC
So although the present cultural moment may indeed be one in which we are increasingly bombarded with
"filth", it is also one that has witnessed the ecological and cultural imperative to think differently about the
things whose displacement from consciousness shapes our material relationships to self, body, and others.
We cannot, then, as Barney does, so easily read the scatological content of recent texts within the
prevailing framework of brown criticism -- via a theory of abjection, as in Barney's case, but no more
satisfactorily by way of the Bakhtinian grotesque, which celebrates the positivity of shit without
confronting the structural or psychic mechanisms that occasion its prior negative status. As I will point out
in this essay, these oversights have resulted in a brown hermeneutics that assumes a radical separation of
shit and self -- and which consequently overlooks not only the material reasons for such a separation, but its
ecological consequences as well.
An alternate method for reading shit is therefore necessary, one that escapes the binary between a liberatory
grotesque and an apocalyptic abject, both of which ultimately depend upon impermeable bodily and social
boundaries against which shit is the disruptive outside, capable of signifying within texts only the
indeterminate, the excessive, and the unassimilable. As a way around (or through) this theoretical dualism,
I propose an ecocritical reading of the scatological, one that does not assume an antagonism between order
and ordure, and which hence sees shit as a familiar and knowable part of symbolic systems. In particular, I
want to draw upon Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder's bioregionalist understandings of place, subjectivity,
and narrative to argue for a political fecology5: a critical framework for reading shit that arises at the
meeting point of brown and green, and which derives its interpretive power from proximity to rather than
distance from shit.
(STOP and SLOW)
A little boy runs across this man who has a truck load of cow
manure and the boy asks him what he is going to do with all of
that cow poop.
The man tells the little boy, "I'm taking it home to put on my
strawberries."
The little boy looks up at the man and says, "I don't know
where you come from, but where I come from we put cream
and sugar on our strawberries."
Our affirmation of the resolution is an impossible demand that

takes place outside the possibilities of strategic conventional
politics, changing the very basis of what is considered politics.
Slavoj Zizek traveling professor, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle 2004

There are (also) political acts, for politics cannot be reduced to the
level of strategic pragmatic interventions. In a radical political act, the
opposition between 'crazy' destructive gesture and a strategic political
decision momentarily breakdown, which is why it is theoretically
and politically wrong to oppose strategic political acts, risky as they
may be to radical 'suicidal' gestures a la Antigone: gestures of pure
self-destructive ethical insistence with, apparently, no political goal.
The point is not simply that, once we are thoroughly engaged in a
political project, we are ready to put everything at stake for it,
including our lives, but more precisely, that only such an 'impossible'
gesture of pure expenditure can change the very coordinates of
what is strategically possible within a historical constellation.
This is the key point: an act is neither a strategic intervention in the
existing order, nor its 'crazy' destructive negation, an act is an
excessive trans-strategic intersection which refines the rules and
contours of the existing order.
Abjection 1AC
Third, Science is not neutral- the scientific narrative deployed by energy interests is
animated by an escatalogical fantasy and forecloses alternative imaginations and
capacities. The possibilities of imagination and possibility lie with the affirmative
approach alone.
Shiv Visvanathan is senior fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi. 2001 An
anthropologist and Human Rights researcher his work has explored the question of alternatives as a
dialogue between the West and India. http://www.ces.fe.uc.pt/emancipa/research/en/ft/sonhos.html
In 1983, C.V. Seshadri worked as a fellow at MIT under the auspices of the United Nations University.
During that period he wrote his monograph Development and Thermodynamics, a theoretical reflection of
the work at MCRC. For Seshadri the theology of limits that physics as thermodynamics provides is forceful
but not life-enhancing enough precisely because it is theological. Science is replete with Judeo-Christian
concepts and it is precisely as theology that entropy fails.
Let us reread the liturgy of the steam engine. If one reads the records of the steam engine, whether it is
Crosbie Smith on energy or Cardwell’s life of Joule, one realizes that there is something Christian about the
discourse. Push your mind a bit. One wished one had a Roland Barthes to help; Barthes with a touch of
Umberto Eco. The ritual of the engine constitutes the equivalent of the Christian mass. The boiler is the
vessel, the coal the literal equivalent of sacred bread. The nature of the act and its meaning constitutes one
of the great theological problems of western society. It raises questions about quality, of time, of
transubstantiation, of the liturgy of work, of the notion of death and apocalypse. One often hears the claim
that science owes more to the steam engine than the steam engine to science. One must elaborate on the
nature of the debt.
Firstly, and obviously, the steam engine did as much for the nature of work as the Christian monastery. The
economic notion of ‘work’ or ‘duty’ becomes central to this physical concept. Pierre Duhem’s complaint of
the factory mentality of 19th-century English physicists is well known. While fair to Britain, it is also
equally true for thermodynamics in general. It is this that led the American physicist Percy Bridgman to
complain that these laws "had an unblushing economic tinge." The preoccupation with energy, as Crosbie
Smith points out, replaces the concept of force with the concept of work. Work remained the central
measure of energy throughout this period under various names such as mechanical power (John Smeaton)
or simply ‘effect’ (James Watt) or ‘duty’. It was the basic measure of engine achievement and derived from
the practical work of early engineers who required a useful comparison of the relative performances of
water, wind, animal and steam power. The work of Joule, Carnot, Mayer, Thompson sought to provide a
measure of work and efficiency.
But what sort of work? The work that thermodynamics is talking about involves work done at high
temperature gradients. Consider the statement of the American Physical Society on energy quality. It states
that "from the perspective of the second law, organized coherent motion is most precious, very high and
very low temperature energy is next most precious and heat at a temperature near ambient (lukewarm cool)
is degraded energy." Apart from the mechanistic bias present, this holds (i) that the higher the temperature,
the lesser the entropy production, and the more useful the work produced; (ii) that ambient temperature
processes are degraded energy processes. Such descriptions, says Seshadri, are unfortunate.
Consider the following examples. The monsoon over Africa and Asia carries billions of tons of water
across continents performing countless gigawatts of work, but work as defined by physics makes this a
work of low quality as it is done across small gradients at ambient temperatures; and living creatures work
and live at ambient conditions but that energy is seen as degraded. The APS sets strange standards of
energy quality, strictly related to economics. Thermodynamics sensitizes one to the limits of natural
resources but not fully to the fact that nature works. Given its preoccupation with gradients it provides the
rationale for the factory and synthetic fertilizer processes rather than traditional farming. In terms of the
APS statement, composting is a low quality activity!
Thermodynamics is anthropomorphic but one often misses the fact that the anthropomorphism is of two
kinds. "One by virtue of being human and the other the virtue of being western. The poorer countries,
ignorant of the latter kind of
Abjection 1AC
anthropomorphism, apply it to end up with gross misapplication and enhancement of existing disparities."
Seshadri was the first to point out it was not just that Thermodynamics had an unblushing economic tinge.
Applied as a scale of value it increases disparities or warps priorities. Since energy is inseparable from use,
it becomes a criteria for prioritizing the use of resources. Consider for example a forest. A forest had a
multiplicity of uses. Forest wood, for instance, was used as fuel for smelting iron, boiling sugar and as
household fuel. Wood provides the fuel for cooking in many households in India today. Considerations of
energy indicate that the forest should be primarily used as a raw material for industry. Forests are marked
more and more for the paper and pulp industry. Forest people in fact are deprived of their traditional rights
to fuel, and the forest becomes the preserve for the paper pulp industry. So when we apply the modern
criteria of efficiency embodied in the Second Law, tribal people lose access to the forest which provides
food, fuel, fodder, medicine, the diversity of uses losing out to the paper industry which soon converts the
forest into a monocultural plantation of fast growing eucalyptuses. Seshadri shows that the logic of
Thermodynamics sets loose a chain that works against the tribals and peasants of the Third World. So
tribals and peasants of the Third World are confronted not just with Nation-States and the multinationals
but with the logic of modern science that works against them. Within this view, Chipko and the Anti-Dam
movement are complete only when the laws of energy are rewritten.
There is a final point. The notion of time, of heat death, of the apocalyptic ending of the world, all rhyme
with the Judeo-Christian ideas of eschatology. In fact whether it is thermodynamic laws or the modern
detective story, both are constructed out of the scaffolding of Christianity. Thermodynamics coincides with
the doomsday view of knowledge which has become such a powerful feature of modernity. It is such a
narrow scaffolding of religious belief that Seshadri objects to. He makes two separate points. Firstly that
the scientific method is not neutral. It is a part of the Judeo-Christian consciousness. It is based on cultural
roots that are not universal, and consequently "they become very difficult to stream into the consciousness
of a practising engineer who does not share the tradition. Dreaming and creativity require native
categories." Otherwise one loses one’s sources in the archetypal and the primordial. Secondly our
civilizational notions of time are different. "We should teach our people that our own lives and deaths are
not synonymous with the deluge, that they are a part of much larger enmeshed cycles, helices, spirals of
time which give the earth substance and civilization."
The Circle of Life, it consumes us all! Debate is a spaceship

that is also a submarine, I am a debater, who has an ass that is
a power plant.
Dave Praeger 2007

Besides technological advances, we will have to make psychological ones, learning to view poop not as
waste but as a resource. It will be socially acceptable for poop to fertilize our vegetables and power our
homes only when we realize to use it thus is to take our rightful place in the circle of life. The day that you
come to view your ass as a power plant will not herald and era defined by the stench of feces billowing out
of backyards and basements. Any use of poop as a resource will still accord with the fact that poop stinks
and no one wants to see it, smell it, or touch it we’ll view poop holistically, and use it fully, but we wont
live in the Stink Years. Without the environmental crises this holistic attitude toward poop will avert, the
future will be quite the opposite.
Energy policy consensus has been configured by the exclusion of abjection; the
inclusion of abject biomass is a hinge point for the transformation of the polity
It is around the idea of cycles that the discourse on waste, pollution and obsolescence is constructed.
Seshadri’s idea of shakthi was an attempt to develop quality markers for creating a grammar for this
discourse.
Seshadri, the early Seshadri, talked in aphorisms and epigrams. I remember him grinning and observing
"pollution is someone else’s profit" or that "one man’s waste is another man’s resource." But these were not
just pretty little
Abjection 1AC
proverbs. Consider the popular idea of recycling. He said, "You can’t recycle waste without violating the
second law of thermodynamics. The question of recycling has to be looked at in this perspective for all
waste is useful in some context." For Seshadri it was more fruitful to recycle ideas instead of things. He
provided the example of sheet metal stamping.
Circular blanks of metal are stamped out of metal sheets leaving behind perforated sheets which the
manufacturers characterize as waste. But one man’s waste is another man’s resource. The perforated sheets
are used by several poor people as fencing, structural elements in housing, tracks for paths, etc. What has
been recycled is neither material nor energy. Only the idea. A waste has been turned into a resource by
perceiving it differently. A low-value high-entropy perforated sheet becomes a high-value low-entropy
fence, tracks and such by recycling ideas. The process also adds value locally.
"The classic recycling option would be to melt down the perforated sheets and then re-roll them. The
material is recycled at tremendous cost. Idea recycling is far less energy intensive than material recycling."
Recycling ideas is the forte of the squatter and scavenger. The Indian slum becomes the great laboratory for
recycling ideas. "For the wasted people of our states, wastes and nature are the only resources left for them
to build on. Only these resources are available outside the commercial mainstream."
The idea of cycles substitutes and goes beyond the alchemical limits of the perpetual machine. In fact the
idea of cycles is disappearing in modern agriculture. As one Japanese scientist noted "modern agriculture
has replaced most of the cycles in nature by products of manufacturing, especially with chemical fertilizers
and petroleum products. These are not compatible with the cycles of nature."
Seshadri’s still incomplete idea of shakthi was developed as a quality marker to understand such processes.
V. Balaji observed that "it helped one redesign processes, identify the real wastes in the system like the
amount of pure water used in flush toilets in western countries, or the consumption of processed water in
chemical industrial processes. Viewed this way the efficiency of the thermal plants may be scaled down by
50%."
"The notion of shakthi is scale invariant. It can range from the depth of the ocean to the upper atmosphere.
It can look at the interaction of two microbes in a bio-gas digester." Balaji added that it is an engineer's
understanding of thermodynamics.
It is like a Thanedar’s understanding of thermodynamics rather than a commissioner’s. It sensitizes you to

the real costs of water and nutrients in, say, an agricultural process, as for instance the over-application of
water and fertilizers in hybrid seed technology. Shakthi would give you a knowledge-intensive rather than
an input-intensive approach to agriculture. You apply that many grams of fertilizer at that time on that
place. A vaidyar’s approach rather than that of agri-business.
But biomass is not merely a discourse on nature and the environment; it is a plea for a new pedagogy of
citizenship. Seshadri felt that the state was not going to wither away or that it was something easily
compostible. The more interesting challenge for lateral thinking in politics was to reinvent nature,
citizenship and civil society. In this context he and Joe Thomas would often talk of the Juliflora almost as a
fable. I remember one of the first times Joe and I were having tea outside the MCRC gate. Joe showed me a
beautiful garden fence, exquisitely green, trimmed and beautiful. "The prosopis Juliflora", he announced.
No compère could have been prouder and more delighted.
The Juliflora, a mesquite, provides 40% of Madras firewood. The irony is that it is not a creation of state
forest policy but an inadvertent introduction that grew in spite of the state. One felt that Seshadri wanted
the Julifloras of citizenship.
Once we accept Arthur Koestler’s statement that "the greatest superstition of our time is the belief in the
ethical neutrality of science," we have to relook at biomass economics. In a vernacular world technology is
not a solution, it is a means to an end. Love is a solution, and if technology is to be an act of love, like
cooking or prayer, we have to go
Abjection 1AC
beyond the political economy of biomass. This sees only poverty and hunger. We have to look beyond the
scientific epistemology of biomass which sees poverty as hunger, hunger as nutrition and nutrition as so
many kilo-calories. The moral economy of resistance and reciprocity worked out by James Scott needs an
epistemic sense that the knowledge system itself may create immiseration. The politics of knowledge must
combine all three: ethics, politics and science. This marriage of Gandhi and self-critical thermodynamics
can be illustrated through the calculus of sugar. It is a search for quality markers which can also alter the
level of debate. Otherwise you are caught in contradictions. It is no use criticizing the green revolution and
accepting a petroleum economy. For this you need a different notion of economics. One can examine the
need for a different, more holistic, quality marker beyond price through the problem of the sugar-food-
alcohol nexus.
Sewage Solvency
1. Municipal sewage can be converted into methane gas via anaerobic digestion
The Oregon Department of Energy. Page updated: August 01, 2007.
http://www.oregon.gov/ENERGY/RENEW/Biomass/biogas.shtml
Municipal sewage contains organic biomass solids, and many wastewater treatment plants use anaerobic
digestion to reduce the volume of these solids. Anaerobic digestion stabilizes sewage sludge and destroys
pathogens. Sludge digestion produces biogas containing 60-percent to 70-percent methane, with an energy
content of about 600 Btu per cubic foot.
Most wastewater treatment plants that use anaerobic digesters burn the gas for heat to maintain digester
temperatures and to heat building space. Unused gas is burned off as waste but could be used for fuel in an
engine-generator or fuel cell to produce electric power.
A fuel cell at the Columbia Boulevard Wastewater Treatment Plant in Portland, Oregon, converts digester
gas into electricity. The fuel cell began producing power in July 1999. The Columbia Boulevard fuel cell
will produce an estimated 1,500,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity each year
2. Bio technology is there-Rwanda prison proves.

Cyrus Faviar staff writer for Wired “Feces power Rawandan Prison” 2005
http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/news/2005/07/68127
Imagine eating food that was cooked using natural gas generated from your own human waste. Thousands of prisoners
in Rwanda don't have to imagine it -- they live it. Prisoners' feces is converted into combustible "biogas," or methane
gas that can be used for cooking. It has reduced by 60 percent the annual wood-fuel costs which would otherwise reach
near $1 million, according to Silas Lwakabamba, rector of the Kigali Institute of Science, Technology and
Management, where the technology was developed.
3. Empirical Solvency from King County Washington. You lose.
Dave Praeger 2007 POOP CULTURE How America Is Shaped By Its Grossest National
Product
But in between the collection of poop and recycling of it as compost, it

may have another value: as a source of power. The secondary
treatment stage at sewage plants introduces bacteria to digest the
poop that produce byproducts including methane. Most treatment
plants just burn the methane off, but a few are starting to collect this
“biogas” to turn turbines that generate electricity. The King Country
Wastewater Treatment plant in Seattle has pioneered an innovation in
exploitation methane by sending it into a fuel cell system. Their system
breaks down methane into hydrogen and Carbon Dioxide; the carbon
dioxide is then transformed into carbonate, which is recombined with
the hydrogen to produce electricity. Not only are fuel cells more
efficient at generating electricity than turbines, but their byproducts-
water, carbon dioxide, and heat-are relatively innocuous. Burning
methane doesn’t produce much pollution, but the King Country system
produces none.
AT: Not Enough Poop

1. There will be enough poop-
Dave Prager Poop Culture 2007

The King County experiment isn’t yet cost-effective, but the technology is in its infancy. This is a good
step toward maximizing the value of poop as a resource. Even better, a group of researchers at Penn State
University are working on their own fuel cell system to generate electricity from poop at the house hold
level. This experimental system involves dropping poop into a container of bacteria. A microbial fuel cell
captures electrons that bacteria release as they digest and converts them into electrical current. Poop goes
in, electricity and sludge come out- the electricity to power the homes of the people who pooped, and the
sludge ready from composing. Household plumbing that generates electricity and fertilizer: it’s like a
utopian vision of the future. Instead of wasting our poop, we could be using it to power our homes and
fertilize our crops.
2. Human shit is not the only option.

Green Topics 2007
http://greentopics.blogspot.com/2007/02/biomass-plants-find-power-in-poop.html
Animal waste. Anaerobic digesters are oxygen-deprived tanks that break down cow manure into methane
that's sent to power plants or pumped through natural-gas pipelines. Environmental Power (EP) operates
digesters at three dairies in Wisconsin and plans four more in Texas and six in California. PG&E is set to
buy enough gas from EP to power 50,000 homes.
"It really reduces the odor (and methane emissions) of the manure and … it's another income stream," says
Lee Jensen, an Elk Mound, Wis., dairy farmer. He and his partners own a digester that generates about
$360,000 a year in gas sales to a small utility.
3. Biomass energy plants can incorporate multiple types of

waste, solving multiple scenarios for environmental damage.
Lisa Stiffler staff writer “Ranchers turning cow manure into kilowatt hours” 2007
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/327785_waste16.html
While the effort serves lofty goals to slow global warming, Reiner's motivation is simpler.
That includes biomass energy that's created when organic material rots or is burned to make electricity. It's
typically fueled by waste products: sewage and cow manure, logging trims and agricultural leftovers such
as grape skins from winemaking. It also stops the methane created by decaying waste from escaping to the
atmosphere and warming the planet; it captures the gas and burns it. Biomass plants already are fired up
around the state.
If you took all of the barnyard manure, fibrous ends of asparagus, restaurant grease, chicken feathers and
logging debris -- all of the state's organic waste -- and turned it into energy, you could heat and light half
the state's homes. Reiner's project, Qualco Energy, is a non-profit partnership with the Sno/Sky
Agricultural Alliance, the Tulalip Tribes and Northwest Chinook Recovery, who like its benefits for
salmon. Dairy farmers traditionally use the manure that fills up their feedlots to fertilize fields, but
sometimes too much is applied, polluting streams. The power project could prevent that.
Dairies have been losing money for a decade. More than 40 percent of Washington's dairies have shut
down. Selling manure could keep a farmer on the financial edge afloat.
"The only way to save farmland is to make it so valuable that farmers don't want to sell it," said Reiner,
whose great-grandfather homesteaded the area in 1873.
Does not interact with the case advantage. The question

isn’t the amount of feces, but the political will to utilize
this energy source, advantage solvency comes from the
confrontation with the fecal, not the actual use of the
poop. Although, the poop should surely be in the biomass
loop.
AT: Not Enough Energy from the Poop

Plenty of energy
Dave Praeger 2007 POOP CULTURE How America Is Shaped By Its

Grossest National Product
And while it seems farfetched that poop could be so rich an energy source, doesn’t it seem equally
improbable that a 200-pound body can be powered for fourteen hours a day on a bowl of Corn Flakes, a
tuna sandwich, and a sensible dinner? Our most advanced technology is still decades, if not centuries, away
from generating the kind of power from organic matter that our bodies do every day. Perhaps poop has just
as much potential as food. Perhaps poop is the next great energy frontier waiting to be tapped, a renewable
resource that grows ever more abundant as our population does.
Incentives Solvency
Incentives needed for biomass usage
Oregon State University. Oregon Biofuels and Biomass – Potential Project Survey including Regulatory
Barriers. OSU Chemical Engineering Department. OSU Institute for Natural Resources. Environmental
Strategies, LLC. Northwest Environmental Business Council. 5/1/07
http://oregonbest.org/files/BioenergySurveyReport_May07.pdf
The Bioenergy Projects Survey identified 75 projects and potential projects that
intend to
produce either biofuel or electricity from biomass or biogas: 10 ethanol plants, 21
biodiesel, 5 cellulosic ethanol, 17 biomass, and 22 biogas projects. If all these projects
were to be built, Oregon bioenergy projects could produce 400 million gallons per year
(MGY) ethanol, 315 MGY biodiesel, cellulosic ethanol from three pilots and two or three
20 MGY plants, and also 150 megawatts (MW) of power from biomass and 30 MW from
biogas projects.
Not including plants currently in operation, the following capacity is in construction or
expansion: 153 MGY ethanol, 7 MGY biodiesel, 15 MW biomass power, 2.25 MW
biogas power from dairy manure and 3.5 MW biogas from wastewater treatment
facilities.
In addition, projects due to start construction in 2007, according to the developers, would
produce: 80 MGY ethanol, 225 MGY biodiesel, and 29 MW biomass power. However,
it is by no means certain that all these plants will be built.
Many challenges impede completion of bioenergy projects, most notably competition
for
feedstocks and low projected returns. Key findings include:
• Oregon’s business energy tax credit, pro-active development by the Oregon
Department of Energy, and passionate advocacy by non-profits and private
business have been very successful in stimulating project development in Oregon.
• All bioenergy sectors need incentives and market creation efforts to grow.
• Biofuel projects face tough competition for feedstock, and face the
risk of
maneuvers by oil companies to prevent loss of market share.
AT: Warming
The case would lead to a great deal of biomas conversion
which uptakes C02.
Dave Reay updated/accessed 2008 PhD for the response of Southern Ocean algae
and bacteria to temperature change. http://www.ghgonline.org/methanebioburn.htm
Biomass burning, largely resulting from the activities of man, accounts

for between 20 and 40 million tonnes of methane emissions each year.
Methane emissions arising from biomass burning are a result of
incomplete combustion and huge amounts can be produced during
large scale burning of woodlands, savanna and agricultural waste. In
savanna regions of the world, burning is often carried out every few
years to promote regeneration of the vegetation. The importance of
methane emission from biomass burning can be overshadowed by the
large amounts of carbon dioxide which are also produced, but in many
cases the subsequent regrowth, and carbon dioxide uptake, of
previously burned woodland and savanna areas means that the net
emission of carbon dioxide is much reduced.
Disadvantages Non-Unique
Incentives have always been there-now is the time to use them.
Harvest Clean Energy 2005
http://www.harvestcleanenergy.org/enews/enews_0305/enews_0305_State_Biomass_Incentives.htm
Generating electricity from renewable fuels such as wind, solar power, and biomass conveys many benefits
that are widely recognized, including reduced emissions, fuel diversity, and protection against energy price
fluctuations. The federal government provides incentives for renewable energy development, including
investment and production tax credits and accelerated depreciation. More significantly, over the past
decade, many states have adopted measures to promote use of renewable electricity, and these policies have
become significant drivers for the development of new renewable generating capacity.
Incentives Now
APS Incentives for Biomass and Biogas Energy 08’
http://www.aps.com/main/green/choice/choice_25.html
Biomass and biogas are not new to the U.S. In fact, they make up some of the most utilized renewable
resources. Each year 60 million tons of biomass material is used to produce approximately 37 billion kWh
of electricity in an environmentally friendly way. It is also one of our most readily available renewable
resources in Arizona.
THE QUESTION as will all topical options is not IF incentives

exist, but the extent to which they are deployed. Don’t punish
us for a poorly worded resolution. Do punish the negative for
being afraid of poop.
AT: SO2 Screw

Integrating Biomass stabilizes other forms of emissions
Saqib Mukhtar and Sergio Capareda at Texas A&M Extension Services Manure to Energy 2006
http://tammi.tamu.edu/ManurtoEnrgyE428.pdf
Because of the variability of animal manure, it is often
desirable to mix it with other less variable fuels for

combustion. One means of doing this is co-firing,
which refers to mixing biomass and fossil fuels in
conventional power plants. Significant reductions
in emissions from sulfur dioxide (SO2) — an air
pollutant released when coal is burned) — are
achieved with co-firing systems in power plants that
use a small amount of coal as input fuel.
Small-scale studies at Texas A&M University show
that co-firing of manure with coal may also reduce
emissions from coal of nitrogen oxide (NOx), which
contributes to air pollution. This depends whether
the manure is injected at the proper location, such as
the secondary combustion chamber. There it serves as
supplemental or reburn fuel and an organic source of urea and ammonia (NH3).
Upon co-firing manure and
coal, NH3 is released from manure and combines with
NOx to produce harmless N and water.
AT: Not Enough Power

Gasification is used on farms to process manure into usable energy the capacity to give off enough
energy to power four city blocks.
Gasification is the process by which carbonaceous
fuel (any fossil or biomass fuel consisting of /or
containing carbon) is converted to a useable gaseous
product without complete combustion of the fuel.
The process occurs in an oxygen deficient (partial
oxidation) environment at high temperatures (Figure
2). The resulting fuel is a producer gas (a synthesis gas
or syngas) that consists primarily of varying ratios of
hydrogen and carbon monoxide (CO).

Animal facility operators could build these
systems to process and convert part of their waste
streams and to produce auxiliary energy and power,
including bio-fuel for farm use. As the operators learn
to work these systems, they could add more units and
increase the amount of waste stream to process. This
would provide them a totally closed-loop system for
waste handling.
Methane is now produced and cleaned to generate power while avoiding the global warming
advantages.
An example would be a modular anaerobic digestion
system. It directs part of the manure stream to a
covered lagoon, which acts as an anaerobic digester.
Methane that is produced could be cleaned and used
to power a small engine-generator set-up to generate
electricity. This will satisfy a portion of their power
requirement.
Several modules of digester-gasifier combination may
be installed, depending on the needs and capability
of the facility. As the research community establishes
newer technologies for highly advanced systems for
liquid fuel production, operators and managers of
these combined systems would already have some
experience in operating them for on-farm heat and
power generation. Simultaneously, they would be
reducing potential for animal waste pollution.
AT: Any Silly Climate Argument

The Western and scientific drive to expand is rooted in a form of immanence that
centers on money. Scientific attempts to model and manage the environment further
domination.
Claude Karnoouh Currently Senior Fellow C.N.R.S-Paris, “On the Geneaology of Globalization” Telos
2002 http://journal.telospress.com/cgi/reprint/2002/124/183
Finally, the genesis of this eidos of the Western experimentum — introduced

by Bacon, Galileo, and its metaphysician, Descartes, which became the eidos
of ingenium (engineering) — has to be traced back to the birth of historicity.
In order to do so, it is necessary to focus on the role of Christianity. By gradually
imposing the teleology of Judgment Day, Christianity was already prefiguring
the sense of history — a history which, once secularized, received a
meaning from Western man’s experimentum and ingenium, from his efficiency,
his becoming aware of the fact that acting on the world with calculable
rationality is all it took to obtain immediate results. This implies
deploying mathematical abstractions to build physical, chemical, and later
biological objects, in order for this ingenuity to allow man to dominate nature
and to transform himself. In short, modernity created a really new, unified
world. Arendt defined it as the shifting of the Archimedian point by the
anthropogenesis of the philosophy of the subject, and by generalizing objectifications
according to Galilean theory and Cartesian metaphysics:14 Heidegger
envisioned it as Gestell (inspection, or recasting everything that exists in
view of a generalized and unified production), as the ultimate accomplishment
of the metaphysics that constitutes the essence of technology. There are
numerous examples: from electricity, which substitutes daylight in the darkness
of night, to the atom, which can vitrify the planet or provide it with an
almost inexhaustible form of energy, to the creation of new living beings
through genetic engineering. When all is said and done, there is no choice
other than to accept the fact that the only real world is the one generated by
technological science and the capital that supports its continuous spreading.
This is the triumph of immanence, because its values no longer originate from
any world-organizing metaphysics, but are immediately confirmed by real
life. Thus, religion became a private matter, just like property and matters of
the heart, whereas revolution ended up in the museum of historical “pathologies”
(sic!). So values become exhausted and obsolete (the media denounces
them as “archaic”). To the extent that the experimental affectation unfolds,
they are constantly replaced. But the reserves have become exhausted. So
people believe only in the truth of immanence — in the universal value which
has become the substitute for everything: money.
Abject is a threat to centered self

In the status quo, shit is rejected as negative because it is viewed as a threat to
identity, system, and order.
2/cortez.shtml
Sue Vice (1997) has pointed out that if Bakhtin tries to recuperate the positive element in those bodily
phenomena we now consider negative, Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection attempts to explains why we
might view these phenomena as negative in the first place. 16 In Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection
(1982), Kristeva marries Lacanian psychoanalysis to the structural anthropology of Mary Douglas, whose
famous argument that dirt is "matter out of place" first pointed out the stabilizing role that exclusion plays
in the establishment of social order. 17 Likewise, Kristeva argues that shit is negative because it represents
par excellence what the individual must reject in order to delimit the bounds of his or her subectivity. The
excremental, as Kristeva tells us, is what the "I" is not; "dung signifies the other side of the border, the
place where I am not and which permits me to be". 18 When present within the symbolic realm of
"language, law, and gender difference", shit thus reminds the subject of "a boundary its existence is
premised upon forgetting", a boundary beyond which lies the realm of prohibition and "unmeaning". 19 It is
this idea which leads to Kristeva's infamous pronouncement regardng the symbolic power of shit, invoked
by many a subsequent reader of the scatological: "[i]t is ... not a lack of cleanliness or health that causes
abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules". 20
When it appears in literary texts, then, shit functions as ambivalent because it symbolizes the return of the
very thing that the symbolic must exclude in the process of self-definition. Kristeva's understanding of the
ambivalence of shit thus tends to emphasize the negative, threatening aspect of its double character -- just
as Bakhtin presents a similarly lopsided (if inverted) ambivalence, in which the upward movement of
degradation takes precedence over the downward.
Exclusion of Abject is Racist/Classist

Overflowing waste gets pushed off on poor communities
causing serious repercussions
Baker, Modeling Industrial Thresholds, Cultronix 1, Fall 1994,
In North America this double bind is perhaps most acutely felt at the municipal level.
By the mid-1990s, one half of the 6,500 municipal landfills in the United
States are expected to reach capacity; 1,400 landfills have closed since
1978 (Royte 55). Meanwhile, as the amount and danger of municipal,
consumer wastes continue to rise, so do the regulations and costs of
constructing new sites. Large cities are faced with mountains of trash and
overflowing landfills; smaller municipalities are faced with the financial
burdens of constructing elaborate and costly landfills to meet EPA
standards. The trend, according to Elizabeth Royte, is the construction of huge
landfill sites in poor isolated, communities who are desperate for income.
Waste management firms scour the countryside with lucrative deals to
offer communities: "host fees," jobs, scholarships and a cost-free solution
to their own waste problems. Huge profits can be made by those who
participate in the $30 billion-a-year industry: in the construction of huge
waste containers and the transport of waste over long distances. But even
in the poorest, most desperate communities, not-in-my-backyard struggles
continue to leave waste in highly contested political terrain. The profit-
driven solutions to the crisis of an ever-increasing waste stream provide
only relatively short-term solutions that come only at great social and
environmental costs.
The production of waste is the production of boundaries

To return to the polysemy of waste: if it comes from an industrial process it is referred to as

industrial waste, or more specifically: chemical waste or nuclear waste, these also go by the
term hazardous waste. When these get out of control we introduce systems of waste
management. Thus, the production of waste is not only an industrial process but a
discursive one. The production of waste is in essence a production of boundaries,
the foundations of which are formed on that meta-dichotomy of inside/outside.
Waste is precisely that which poses a threat to the social body and must be placed
outside it. But as the social body expands, the membranes between it and the
outside are constantly ruptured, as when suburban development encroaches upon waste
disposal sites. If, then, waste cannot be gotten rid of altogether, it must be contained. Lewis
Mumford begins his book Technics and Human Development with an attempt to shift the
defining characteristics of human development away from tool making--'man the tool-maker'--
toward the development of container technologies: fire pits, baskets, canals, prisons, cities.
Here is a useful starting point for understanding waste. The "management" of waste (in a
discursive and material sense) involves either one of two things: containment or
disposal. These are the two modes by which disengagement from the social body is
achieved: separation by a membrane of concrete or steel (chemical ponds or
barrels) or by disposal in a space outside the social where it dissipates (into the
dump on the edge of town or into the sea).
Abjection Produces Sacrifice Zones

It is not that states of equilibrium and far-from-equilibrium are incommensurable. Indeed, life
itself is only possible in those latitudes where order and chaos can coexist: life is not found in
the chaotic disintegration of the sun, nor is found upon the frozen stability of the moon. But a
rational universe of socially constructed order cannot tolerate states of
uncontrolled, unchanneled and ever-increasing disorder. This is why a rational
society so often sets itself against uncontrolled living matter as expressed most
succinctly in the practice of sterilization: of body surfaces, of homes and lawns, the
soil, monoculture crops, rainforests, even some cities. Waste disposal is an attempt
to harness nonequilibrium either in a highly controlled system (anaerobic, in-vessel
composting or incineration) or in a relatively uncontrolled system (dumping onto the
ground or into the sea) that is outside the social. "Sacrifice zones," as an example of
the latter practice, are an attempt to make an outside wilderness area from within
the social body--they are akin prisons or to First Nation reserves 1 in North America or
the South African townships--the other/outside area is surrounded by and contained within the
social space. These zones are indeed wilderness areas--perhaps the only wilderness areas left
in America. The Jefferson Proving Grounds of Madison Indiana, a 100 square mile sacrifice
zone, is littered with millions of unexploded bombs, mines and artillery shells, some buried
thirty feet or more under the ground. The clean-up costs are estimated at 31 billion it is likely
that "the vast instillation may well be the first to be fenced off in perpetuity, permanently
isolated from human contact, like a quarantined victim with a contagious and terminal
disease" ( Shulman 4) The area has already become a nature preserve of sorts which
supports an abundance wildlife--with some endangered species of reptiles--which
find a save refuge from human contact--aside from the occasional casualty (Shulman
4-9). In these zones the meaning of the word waste comes full circle, and again
signifies an unproductive, wild and dangerous territory.
Various Environmental Imapcts

The walled city symbolizes, repairing the dynamic informational flow that links "eater and eaten"
and in the process cultivating a sense of agency and "responsibility.
Marisol F. Cortez is a Ph. D candidate at UC Davis. B.A. English, Women's Studies Minor, Southwest
Texas State University, San Marcos, TX. "Brown Meets Green: The Political Fecology of Poop
2/cortez.shtml
He inverts the accustomed relationship between known and unknown,

order and ordure: instead of a cognitive system constituted through
the elimination of what can't be known -- and which results in a
polarized conceptualization of shit as either positive or negative --
Berry describes a system defined by its failure to excrete. Moreover, he
describes this system in terms of its failure to excrete consciousness.
In this way, he implicitly identifies shit with the knowledge of place we
lose when we are geographically and culturally distant from
agricultural cycles. But if knowing the story of our food can restore us
to a knowledge of our participation in the cycling of matter and energy,
and to the adverse ecological consequences that can result when we
are distant from these processes, it follows that knowing the story of
our shit might accomplish complementary results. The destruction of
soil health through the use of petroleum-based fertilizers; the
eutrophication of rivers and lakes; the reliance on a costly and
expensive system for the separation of "one part excreta" from "one
hundred parts clean water"; and -- as concerns us here -- an attendant
philosophy that views shit as radically separate from self and society,
something to be mastered and eliminated through increasingly
advanced systems of dumping shit into drinking water.
Terminal Impact- Extinction

The world is heading into an inevitable downward spiral to
destruction if the ideology of the status quo is maintained.
Patrick Reinsborough 03’

[An activist]http://www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/1/de_colonizing/index.html
Our planet is heading into an unprecedented global crisis. The blatancy

of the corporate power grab and the accelerating ecological meltdown
is evidence that we do not live in an era where we can afford the
luxury of fighting the symptoms. As is often noted, crisis provides both
danger and opportunity. The extent that these two opposing qualities
define our era will be largely based on the appeal and breadth of the
social movements which arise to address the crisis.
We live in a dangerous time, an urgent time, a time of profound crisis.

Ecologically speaking it is an apocalyptic time defined by the sixth
mass extinction 2, the destruction of the planet’s last wilderness areas
and the forced assimilation of the planet’s few remaining earth
centered cultures. Every ecosystem, every traditional culture and
every subsistence economy is on the chopping block as the global
corporatizers force their consumer monoculture "development" model
upon the entire world. Corporate capitalism’s inherent drive towards
global domination has literally pushed the life support systems of the
planet to the point of collapse.
Pure rationalism causes extinction
Murray Bookchin green activist “What is social ecology” Comunalism 2003

http://www.communalism.org/Archive/4/wise.html
The failure of a rational, socially committed ecology movement would yield a mechanized, aesthetically
arid, and administered society, composed of vacuous egos at best and totalitarian automata at worst. Before
the planet was rendered physically uninhabitable, there would be few humans who would be able to inhabit
it.
Alternatively, a truly ecological society would open the vista of a "free nature" with a sophisticated eco-
technology based on solar, wind, and water; carefully treated fossil fuels would be sited to produce power
to meet rationally conceived needs. Production would occur entirely for use, not for profit, and the
distribution of goods would occur entirely to meet human needs based on norms established by citizens'
assemblies and confederations of assemblies. Decisions by the community would be made according to
direct, face-to-face procedures with all the coordinative judgments mandated delegates. These judgments,
in turn, would be referred back for discussion, approval, modification, or rejection by the assembly of
assemblies (or Commune of communes) as a whole, reflecting the wishes of the fully assembled majority.
We cannot tell how much technology will be expanded a few decades from now, let alone a few
generations. Its growth and the prospects it is likely to open over the course of this century alone are too
dazzling even for the most imaginative utopian to envision. If nothing else, we have been swept into a
permanent technological and communications revolution whose culmination it is impossible to foresee.
This amassing of power and knowledge opens two radically opposing prospects: either humanity will truly
destroy itself and its habitat, or it will create a garden, a fruitful and benign world that not even the most
fanciful utopian, Charles Fourier, could have imagined.
It is fitting that such dire alternatives should appear now and in such extreme forms. Unless social ecology
– with its naturalistic outlook, its developmental interpretations of natural and social phenomena, its
emphasis on discipline with freedom and responsibility with imagination – can be brought to the service of
such historic ends, humanity may well prove to be incapable of changing the world. We cannot defer the
need to deal with these prospects indefinitely: either a movement will arise that will bestir humanity into
action, or the last great chance in history for the complete emancipation of humanity will perish in
unrestrained self-destruction.
Terminal Impact- Root Cause of All Conflict

The distinction between the privileged self and unworthy other substance is at the
heart of colonialism, violence and war.
Claude Karnoouh Currently Senior Fellow C.N.R.S-Paris, “On the Geneaology of Globalization” Telos
2002 http://journal.telospress.com/cgi/reprint/2002/124/183
That is a summary of several aspects of this arche (and its effects), which unfolded its full meaning during
the conquest of America. This arche implemented the eidos of externalization and experience, which had
already generated a representation of the world as a unified sphere — the globe — the new world stage that
Western man had created. What is the meaning of the current frenzy for conferences, debates, university
courses, research, books, etc. devoted to “globalization” and its unavoidable corollary, identity; or, more
precisely, of the cultural identity crisis (the “everything is possible” in contemporary art) and the political
identity crisis (the state-nation crisis)? Hegel wrote that, as Athena’s owl, philosophy flies off at dusk. This
is true for all interpretations of human actions, which are formulated when most of an era has already
passed or is about to undo itself.15 So globalization seems to be in the process of being fully realized, even
if so-called indomitable pockets of archaism remain here and there. They will soon be integrated into the
general Western world by the market, the economy, technological constraints and, last but not least, bombs.
Where can one find radical otherness in the future — the only one which, thanks to its irreducible
identity,16 used to defy the Western World, always certain of the universality of its values? Where can one
find these people,17 within their own culture, their representations and their rites, impossible to understand
by locking them up in the little drawers of positive knowledge, in social and cultural anthropology, in the
history of religions, civilizations, etc.? Where can one find alternative identities to what the Western World
has to offer as so many products on supermarket shelves? Is not yoga practiced as if it were bodybuilding,
and transcendental meditation as if it were jogging or rollerblading? This is an updated version of what
Nietzsche, prophesying a late modernity, announced, i.e., that modern man — the last man — chooses his
identities and his roles as an actor chooses his masks. Who can deny that today everyone is “on stage” —
the same stage — and that the roles are only complementary and of one and the same play? So, the more
the conferences on identity, the more, in everyday life, irreconcilable differences fade into obscene
pretenses of the banalities of a folklorism which, ethnologized, is now marketed to tourists convinced they
are enjoying real “knowledge” at a good price (a short trip to China or Peru looks like a good deal,
compared to a life devoted to the study of Chinese or Incan civilization in the original language).18 The
standardization of identities reappears ever more forcefully in “multiculturalism,” which has become the
correct version of contemporary social control, guaranteed by the political and economic authorities of the
most advanced capitalism.19 The same is true for what Western pre-modern and modern traditions defined
as “Nature,” the savage world — another otherness understood as the sum of communities representing
different civilizations. Just watch television, especially the Discovery Channel, National Geographic, and
Animal Planet: wild nature has become nothing but a media production, and wild animals which still
survive in reservations (like the Indians in North America) owe it to purely philanthropic rescue operations.
It is nothing but the negation of the “natural” selection typical of wilderness! What is obvious is that
globalization and the end of difference was announced the day Christopher Columbus, a merchant from
Genoa well versed in the problems and techniques of oceanic navigation, landed on the shores of a small
Caribbean island for the glory of God, the Prince and, above all, a frantic search for gold.20 What he did
not see (and could not see) was that the concept of the globe presupposed by that step allowed Western men
to create a constantly expanding new world. A few centuries later, at the end of a world war and a massacre
marking the start of late modernity, when a lot of people began to doubt the relation of technological
progress and happiness, the truth of that old fact became clear, most of all to some poets. The achievement
of globalization suggests that it had been coming about for a long time — long before the first trans-
Atlantic expeditions, and before the people involved were aware of the consequences of their actions. Yet,
they must have had a vague premonition as soon as their image of the earth could be represented as a globe.
This form suggests that an overseas trip necessarily implies a return. That is why they thought it could be
possible. But they were not sure. Having circumnavigated the real globe, all that was left for Western man
was to make it comply with this eidos of the conquest of the old worlds (archaic Europe cultures) in order
to produce a new world. This was accomplished by eliminating all differences except one, the one
corresponding to the essence of that eidos of the beyond oneself for the production — a difference which
requires constant growth and a better separation between those who rule and those who are ruled, between
wealth and poverty.
AT: Order Good

Order is disorder
But as many green scholars and activists have pointed out, the particular conception
of order that underlies a view of shit as materially separate from life is, in
ecosystemic terms, a profoundly disordered one. As stated nicely by a webpage on
permaculture, an "ecological design science",
Order is found in things working beneficially together. The fact that neatness, tidiness, and straightness
require extensive investments of energy ... yet produce little yield, tells us that these illusory forms of order
are, in fact, nature in wild disarray. True order often lies in apparent confusion, like a meadow, with its
hundreds of hidden synergies. 35
Impossible Demands Good

We should make renewable energy demands against capital, even if not realistic.
The cooptation of our demands can be used to build more support for fundamental
transformations
Brian Yanity “Socialism and the Energy Question” Upsidedown World 2004
http://www.upsidedownworld.org/energyquestionthree.htm
It is the material world that determines what is possible for human beings. A completely environmentally-
sustainable world economy is not possible under capitalism, but this does not mean important struggles for
environmental protection (which renewable energy is a part of) are unimportant. On the contrary, struggles
attacking capitalism’s destruction of the environment are yet another strategic blow against the global
system of exploitation. Socialists should actively engage in environmental struggles and foster more
discussion within the environmental movement about the exploitative nature of the capitalist system and
the mass movement needed to replace it with a fair and truly sustainable system of production. A
politicized environmental movement, with a firm grasp of political economy and the role of working people
in it, could very well prove to be a crucial blow to the world capitalist system. Renewable energy is an
immediate gain for the environment and for workers.
The means of producing energy are vital tools of production. Capitalism may create these invaluable new
technologies, but this does not mean that these technologies’ full potential will be realized under capitalism.
The technologies and production processes that are implemented under capitalism are the ones which
benefit the capitalist class the most.
While only socialist revolution can completely dismantle such economic structures as Exxon-Mobil or
Chevron-Texaco, small scale renewable energy projects do provide immediate material and environmental
gains. In the short to medium term, renewable energy projects (though still representing a small percentage
of overall energy production), demonstrate in a very real sense that alternatives to established modes of
production and both possible and desirable. As Chris Harman writes in How Marxism Works:
For example under the Roman Empire there were many ideas about how to produce more crops from a
given amount of ground, but people didn’t put them into effect because they required more devotion to
work than you could get from slaves working under the fear of the whip. When the British ruled Ireland in
the 18th century they tried to stop the development of industry there because it clashed with the interests of
businessmen in London.
If someone produced a method of solving the food problem of India by slaughtering the sacred cows or
providing everyone in Britain with succulent steaks by processing rat meat, they would be ignored because
of established prejudices. Developments in production challenge old prejudices and old ways of organising
society, but they do not automatically overthrow those old prejudices and social forms. Many human beings
fight to prevent change –and those wanting to use new methods of production have to fight for change. If
those who oppose change win, then the new forms of production cannot come into operation and
production stagnates or even goes backwards.
In Marxist terminology: as the forces of production develop they clash with the pre-existing social relations
and ideas that grew up on the basis of old forces of production. Either people identified with the new forces
of production win this clash, or those identified with the old system do. In the one case, society moves
forward, in the other it remains stuck in a rut, or even goes backwards.
The effort to convert the world from fossil to renewable energy has already started as a series of reforms
under capitalism. Socialists should support renewable energy and other environmental causes in the same
manner as we support present-day struggles for union rights or racial and gender equality. Renewable
energy developments now will add to the experience and technical know-how among workers around the
world, laying the groundwork for a totally sustainable, democratically controlled, system of global
production. In same way that the steam engine helped lay the foundations of industrial capitalist society,
the wind turbine, solar cell, fuel cell, and biomass generator will help lay the groundwork for post-capitalist
society. But the steam engine, of course, is only part of the story in the way capitalism became the
dominant system. It is up to people to use their knowledge of harnessing energy in a responsible way. As
Daniel M. Berman and John T. O’Conner write in Who Owns the Sun?: “The real solutions to the energy
problem are more democracy, more efficiency, more use of renewable energy, and more local control. To
hold otherwise is to help rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.”
Conclusion
When decisions about energy production and consumption are decided democratically by the majority of
people, renewable energy will naturally become the main energy source. When such decisions are by a few
looking out only for their own profits, even if the vast majority of people do support clean sources of
energy, renewables will not become implemented in a democratic manner. As socialists, we know that we
should not be shy about making public demands which capital says is unrealistic. These will only
strengthen are argument that the system as a whole is not reformable. As Paul McGarr said in a 2000
International Socialism Journal article:
The same picture emerges from other collapsed civilisations, where there is little evidence of the ruling
class being willing to carry through the fundamental changes needed to avoid disaster. This is what Marx
and Engels meant when they talked of crisis having two possible resolutions, either 'a revolutionary
reconstitution of society at large or in the common ruin of the contending classes'.
Marx pointed to the way this process of crisis could unfold in relation to the environment. He argued that
any society depends 'on the climate, the physical properties of the soil, the physically conditioned mode of
its utilisation' and how if that society 'is to continue in the old way, the reproduction of its members under
the objective conditions already assumed as given is necessary'. But such reproduction of society in its
existing form, with its existing class relations and way of organising production, has the seeds of disaster
built into it: 'Production itself in time necessarily eliminates these conditions, destroying instead of
reproducing them, etc, and as this occurs the community decays and dies, together with the property
relations on which it was based'.
The grip of the old ruling class leads to an increasing inability to sustain the needs of society on the basis of
the old way of organising production. Persistence in a particular way of organising society and the
production it is based on produces social crisis and environmental crisis, the two go hand in hand.
Renewable energy should not be called “alternative” energy, though that is true in the present energy
situation. If human civilization is to survive, there is ultimately no alternative to renewable energy.

Their so-called neutral images of insecurity created by our
demand are really a means of ideologically blackmailing us to
accept the structural exclusions and violence in the system –
voting aff in the face of these claims is critical to exploding the
system.
Anustup Basu, University of Pittsburgh English Cultural Studies

Fellow, Jan 12 2004 http://www.why-war.com/news/2004/01/12/bombsand.html
A new form of political thinking has to begin by taking into account vast amounts of
energies in the world that are antagonistic to capital. This has to be done in terms
other than those pertaining to the figure of the human citizen and his charter of
rights. It is part of the transcendental stupidity of the cult of information to impart
such energies with a catalogue of profiles: the criminal, the delinquent, the madman,
the negro, the woman, the child, the African AIDS victim, the poor, the unemployed,
the illegal immigrant, or the terrorist. Informatics is about the reporting of the
state’s pharmacopic action on these bodies, as objects of charity, aid, medication,
schooling, or military action. This is why the unspeakable antagonism of living labour
in the world is never ‘visible’ on CNN, Fox or any other corporate geo-televisual
schema of metropolitan representation. The latter can discern only the ontology of
money and its coalitionary interests –- that which perpetually makes screen time
money time. Humans, who are merely refugees great and small, can only climb into
one or many of the designated profiles of massification. The centralising,
perspectivist drive of CNN as commentary of the world, as a repetitive human
psychodrama of development (birth pangs of modernity in the frontier, subjugated
and freed consumer desires) -– overlooks the energy from the margins of the frame
in trying to fit entire crowds into the telegenic face. This is why populations can be
categorically divided into simple binaries like ‘with us’ or ‘against us’. Labour and its
multiple wills to antagonism (of which various narratives of resistance are only partial
but undeniably important molar expressions) are thus un-representable precisely
because they lack a ‘human’ face, or rather the face of the future American
consumer. Global antagonisms to capital are at once utopic (as in ‘non-place’ since
the logic of globalisation cannot posit an ‘outside’) and pantopic; they are, in multiple
forms, and in different degrees of sublimation, nowhere and everywhere. It is a
complex, political understanding of such matters -– like linking insurrectionary
violence in different corners of the world to unfair and imbalanced trade practices
like agricultural subsidiaries, dumping, and tariff walls by first world countries –- that
spectacular informatisation removes or minimises from the public sphere. Politics
therefore is replaced by symbiotic exchanges between peace and terror, and fear
and security; communication likewise, is overwritten by a great monologue of global
managerial-elite interests, in which power speaks to itself.
A judgement of the panorama of expressions of this global antagonistic will on the

lines of good and bad can take place only as an afterthought; political thinking in our
occasion can begin only with the acknowledgement of these energies as eventful,
and not subject to essential categories of a state language that has become
global. In other words, thinking has to proceed acutely, from an awareness of that
very point of danger, where the state fails to ‘translate’ such affective hostilities into
repetitive instances of its own already explained story. It must be remembered that
informatics, as a form of social production of consent, is able to attain a normative
power precisely because it is accompanied by an epistemic presumption of the end
of the historical process altogether.[3]
Stories therefore cannot be seen to be teaching us anything new in terms of

constitutive politics because in the new world order of a globally rampant
neoliberalism, there can be nothing new to narrate at all, in terms of alternative
destinies and potentials of the world. They can only be local instances of crisis and
management, in a grand chronicle of financialisation of the globe that is already
foretold. It is this dire poverty of political language that the neo-liberal state tries to
cover up with violence dictated in a situation of ‘emergency’ that is legitimised by an
emotionalist, folksy rhetoric of ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Here I must strongly clarify that
I am not registering support for either the undeniably tyrannical Saddam Hussein, or
a statist ideology of violence like that of Al Qaida. These two totalitarian entities, like
some of their western counterparts, merely capture and mobilise some of these
antagonistic energies. As far as the latter is concerned, it is not difficult to see how
informatics peddles the worst cliches of neo-liberalism in trying to enframe
antagonism through a host of good and evil profile doublets according to which a
population is invented and managed, or policed and fed -– the model minority contra
the inner city delinquent, the healthy contra the mad, the peaceful Arab contra the
Islamic bigot. In terms of spectacle and violence, it thus falls perfectly within the logic
of war/information to have the yellow cluster bomb be interspersed with the yellow
food packet during the recent war in Afghanistan. The global state of surveillance and
security today violently tries to foreclose the political by informatising complex
insurrectionary potentialities in terms of a simplistic, self-evident, and bipolar logic of
peace and terror. The latter thus becomes a generic term to reductively describe a
multiplicity of forces -– from Latin American guerilla movements, to African tribal
formations, to Islamic militancy in the Middle-East to Maoist rebellion in Nepal. The
freedom of choice offered by the globally rampant North Atlantic machine of war and
informatics is no longer between dwelling as a poet or as an assassin, but between
a statistic or a terrorist

It is necessary to crystallize the demand in a concrete political
prescription. It is only with prescriptive mobilization combative
to particular neoliberal policies that one can gain a foothold in
the political situation. Abstract rejections of capitalism or the
nation-state are doomed to failure.
Hallward, Professor of Modern European Philosophy, 2005
[Peter, “The Politics of Prescription,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 104(4), p.782-4]
A consequential prescription requires an effective foothold in the situation it transforms. Guided by its
hunch or anticipation, prescriptive subjectivation is also dependent on the crystallization of historical
conditions of pertinence. The axiom of territorial integrity is not pertinent in every political situation; it
would be fatal, on the other hand, to assume that a supposedly global condition of postnational mobility has
rendered it impertinent. As Edward Said knew all too well, to take only the most obvious example, it is no
accident that the armored bulldozer remains the chief weapon of the Israeli occupation.
A prescription concerning immigration cannot proceed, today, on the basis of a utopian rejection of
international borders (although it can and must concern the “reception” of immigrants here and now: the
quasi-criminalization of refuges, the exploitation of immigrant workers in the domestic economy, the
segregation of their communities, etc.). Prescriptions about working conditions will advance less in the
abstract terms of a campaign against “capitalism” or “globalization” than through combative opposition to
particular neoliberal policies or the elimination of precise forms of corporate power—for instance, through
direct measures like those advanced by Via Compesina or Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement in their
campaigns for food sovereignty, fair trade, and land redistribution. Again, the key to the decisive campaign
against slavery, according to the most detailed study of the “Haitian revolution from below,” lay less in
resolute leadership at the top than in the “self-sustained activities of the masses,” activities that proved
powerful enough to transcend the various regional, occupational, and cultural tensions working against
their long-term cooperation. These activities were themselves conditioned by structural changes to the
plantation economy during its last decades of rapid commercial expansion, and these changes, together
with the conjunctural impact of the revolution in France and new divisions within the slave-owning sector,
lent the 1791 mobilization against slavery a strategic pertinence that Francois Mackandal’s rebellion, for
instance, had lacked back in 1757.
Upheld as a strategic imperative, a prescription says shall rather than ought. Prescription is not a matter of
abstract moral reflection, of aspecific obligation, of “objective” rights and wrongs: it is a matter, under the
constraints of a given situation, of practical consequence and material intervention, of relational struggle, of
mobilization and countermobilization.
He Continues…
Prescription can proceed only in the imperative of a “logical revolt.” In its indifference to community,
compromise, or consensus, every prescriptive practice has an authoritarian or intransigent aspect. To avoid
or dilute the moment of a “dictator of the prescription” is to evade the prescription itself. By definition, a
prescriptive mobilization binds its adherents in a common dedication: a dedication that exceeds its deferral
to authorized representatives, that is irreducible to the exercise of merely individual choice or to the
reproduction of sociocultural norms.
In today’s circumstances, a “democratic politics” designates first and foremost a contradiction in terms.
Democracy defines a particular administrative or procedural regime, not the dimension of politics itself.
The imperial advocates of “political democracy” have themselves always recognized the true meaning of
this phrase whenever it applies to situations polarized by significant conflict or resistance—from
Guatemala (1954) and Vietnam (1956) to Haiti and Iraq (2004). An election is a routine organized for the
stable validation of an evolving status quo; an election that threatens to do otherwise is cancelled or
postponed, pending the extermination of insurgents. The Algerian sequence that began with the annulment
of an unacceptable vote in 1992 and ended with the electoral “stability” of April 2004—a sequence marked
by some 100,000 deaths—will no doubt remain a model for the imminent democratization of the Middle
East.
Transcend into Shamelssness

When we engage in the subject of shit, we are able to transcend into a state of
Shamelessness.
PoopReport explore[s], even meditate[s] upon the human condition from the vantage point of pooping
and poop. ... [Thus] [o]ur emotional tone is one of curiosity and mutual respect. This frees us up to
venture into one of the culture's shame-indoctrination zones -- poop[.] ... We are not into thrill
seeking or disgust for its own sake. We don't just talk about poop and pooping, we reflect on it. We
engage the subject, own it and our participation in it. 8
The creation of a 26-year-old writer and programmer from Brooklyn, PoopReport began in late 2000 as a
forum for the posting of humorous poop stories; since then it has swelled to over 700 pages of stories,
articles, discussion threads, and forums, in which hundreds of site contributors ceaselessly ruminate on
every conceivable aspect of human excretory experience. These features of PR, which together make up its
"(relatively) intellectual appreciation of poop humor", would alone be grist for the mill of any cultural critic
interested in tracing shifting representations of the scatological across time, geography, and media. What is
of concern to the present essay, however, is the thread of nascent political self-consciousness that ties
together these features and all of their voluminous content into a philosophical whole: the concept of
Shamelessness, embodiment of which can be found in a document called the "Shameless Shitting
Manifesto". Click on the link from the homepage to the Manifesto -- an image of an upraised, anger-red fist
with plunger in hand -- and the visitor encounters demands for a "fecal utopia" in which all people "have
the right to enter a bathroom, drop a deuce, and leave -- without anyone caring, and without caring if
anyone cares". 9 Carnivalesque though this may sound, I nonetheless want to make the argument that the
notion of Shamelessness, particularly when made concrete and textual in the form of poop stories,
can be better read within the bioregionalist framework mentioned above, in which shit neither
constitutes nor transgresses the delimitations of systems but instead is essential to their self-regulatory
functioning.
Challenges the parameters/Great Evidence

Biomass is the discourse of the defeated, maintaining individuality by resisting
totalizing state power
For Seshadri the idea of a biomass society was not anchored on a second-rate science for a second-rate
society. He evaded many of the political traps associated with the intermediate technology movement. He
repeatedly emphasized that the idea of biomass demanded a new epistemology and a reinvention of
citizenship. He also added that the concern with biomass societies is not only a third world discourse but
that it emerged at two levels. There was first the northern discourse that began with the oil crisis and the
discussion of the Limits to Growth model and also the discussion of the need for soft energy paths in a
nuclear world. There was a radicalism to the discourse, a critique of industrialism where, to paraphrase
Patrick Geddes, "the economics of the leaf and the economics of metals were in opposition." But sadly the
radical edge of such a discourse became co-opted into the technocratic ecocratic discourse called
sustainability.
In the third world biomass as a discourse arose mainly as a challenge to the surreal science of elites who
worshipped electricity. It was a crisis of wood and cooking. But the biomass discourse began as a radical
critique of industrialism at two levels. A theory of limits became a praxis of creative possibilities. We
realize today that oil, the green revolution and’ modern medicine cannot deliver. Given this, the local, the
traditional, the futuristic—all become sites of innovation.
The radical possibilities of a biomass as an epistemology can be easily suppressed. For example, in
anthologies of energy, biomass is categorized as a way of life, of societies outside the pale of industrialism.
It is usually chapter 10 or 12 of a textbook on energy, a sidebet following the preoccupations with nuclear,
oil, hydel or even wind energy. It is seen as residual.
There is simultaneously a split in the construction of the globalization regime. Oil and nuclear are for the
industrial what biomass is for the societies of Africa and Asia that might be triaged out of history. Biomass
then becomes the discourse of the defeated, the third world and the third rate. Consider how the regime of
biomass appears in the spy thrillers that Seshadri was so fond of. Into the happy life of western
industrialism appear the oil sheikhs, the OPEC cartels and the urban guerrilla. Constructed simultaneously
with the oil crisis is the wood crisis. The pictures of the woman carrying wood, the guerrilla in the forest
and the oil sheikh become the three archetypal figures of the crisis. Yet we should not succumb to such a
reading because it not only predetermines narratives but also creates pre-emptive futures. We have to
remember that the Vietnam War represents the victory and resistance of a biomass society over an
industrial high-calorie regime. Seshadri repeatedly emphasized that biomass is the conversation of the leaf
talking to its ancient friends coal and oil, establishing similarities and differences in their common
genealogy to the sun.
One must emphasize some dangers here. The first is the sheer economism of discourse and the danger of
conventional economic categories and thought. The sun is not a conventional factory. It is not too keen to
subject itself to man-made time and organization. Secondly, biomass should not be reduced to the
language of scarcity and crisis. There are shortages, there is poverty, but biomass need
not be reduced to a discourse on scarcity. Nicholas Xenos’s comments are apt in this
context. In his Scarcity and Modernity (1989), Xenos observes that the European 18th
century saw the invention of both the steam engine and of scarcity. Scarcity, as
anthropologists have pointed out, is seen as episodic in most societies. It signified a
period of insufficiency or dearth. This remained the principal usage until the late
nineteenth century, when neoclassical economics made the scarcity postulate its
foundation. The notion of scarcity also opens up a Pandora’s box of technological fixes,
where problems of biomass need biotechnology and then the entire spectrum of
biotechnology gets reduced to genetic engineering. Seshadri explained that Biomass is a
word for people. It smacks "of the ordinary and the non-mechanical. Compare the tree to
a factory, or a cow to a reactor. Like the people it is not amenable to efficiency and
control in a factory sense. You can’t boss over the science of photosynthesis."
The state thus has problems with biomass in the way it does not have with electricity.
Electricity is a disciplinary grid but biomass offers little ground for collectivization to
"turn the stinking pastry of the ordinary people into a tasty pie by trainers, educators, the
masters." You can’t say Soviets+Electrification = Communism in a Biomass society.
Unless, you are a Pol Pot.
It is around biomass that the resistance to the state can come into being. Biomass reopens
the debate in a tremendous way. Firstly, energy forms like oil; nuclear or large dams are
state-oriented while biomass speaks the language of civil society. Secondly, by linking
life and death in the idea of the cycle, it brackets the idea of obsolescence, preventing it
from being read as a universalizing process.
Responsibility
To restore this place-consciousness, he claims, we must
restore the sense that eating is agricultural, "reclaiming
responsibility for [our] own part in the food economy".
The Pleasures of Eating", farmer, writer, and scholar Wendell Berry

begins with a proposition: "eating", he writes, "is an agricultural act".
By this he means that eating occurs as one node along an entire
cyclical process that moves from "soil to seed to flower to fruit to food
to offal to decay, and around again"; in eating, we subjectively locate
ourselves within this larger sequence of events. But Berry points out
that within societies in which industrialized food production
predominates, we lose a sense of participation in these cycles; instead
we identify primarily as consumers, for whom the freedom from
cumbersome seasonal and geographical limits equates to convenience
and better living.
Ecological economist Thomas Princen refers to this phenomenon as "distancing", in
which "the separation of production and consumption decisions" within a rapidly
expanding global market "impede[s] ecological and social feedback". Distancing
breaks down the flow of information that would otherwise attune the user of a
resource to the signals that indicate the availability and wellbeing of that resource,
so that agents along the chain from extraction to final purchase must make
production and consumption decisions in isolation from both the land and one
another. As this isolation increases and feedback decreases, it becomes increasingly
difficult to assess the impact of single decision-points along the chain, ultimately
leading, in Princen's words, to "uncounted costs and unaccountable actors". "a walled
city surrounded by valves that let merchandise in but no consciousness out".
Metaphor takes on particular significance, for it seems descriptive not only of
industrialized food production systems but of the conceptions of order and self that
inform the dominant readings of shit. For the industrialized self, we might say, shit is
epistemologically distanced as the unassimilable element of text and order; it serves
as "limit-category" that marks the boundary between known and unknowable, but
which itself is always indeterminate.
AT: Waste Doesn’t Mean That

The meaning of the word waste has changed from its original meaning to come to mean unwanted
byproduct
Jody Baker, Phd comm. Studies at Pitt appears to teach at Carnegie Mellon, “Modeling Industrial
Thresholds,” Cultronix 1, Fall 1994, http://eserver.org/cultronix/baker
The word waste has come to signify a lot of things. As a verb, one can
waste one's time, money and energy if one does not heed the old
adage: "waste not want not." Not enough nutrients and you waste
away; too much drugs or alcohol and you become wasted.
According to the OED, as a noun the earliest meaning of waste
was land that was uninhabited or uncultivated: a wilderness.
Waste was that which existed prior to the process of
production; waste was that which had yet to be incorporated
into the production process and into the realm of value. One
would be inclined to call an unproductive place a wasteland or to
comment that a once productive place had been laid waste by an
enemy. Today this use of the word is rarely heard and the situation is
quite different; one would not dream of calling a wilderness area a
waste, as was done in the 13th century. In their rarity, those areas
constructed as outside and beyond the social have increased in value
so that the valuelessness of the term waste is no longer appropriate.
These days the only wastelands are those like Love Canal or the area
around Chernobyl, places too polluted for habitation. And these places
are becoming more dangerous and more numerous.
With modernity and industrialization, the meaning of waste
has moved across the production process to its other end: the
waste product. The idea of waste and the valuelessness, the
otherness (as in wilderness) and the danger which it signifies
has shifted from those things that exist in the realm of pre-
production to those which are post-production. Thus, we find
ourselves faced with a double bind: as the value of pre-production
wastelands rises so too does the demand for their protection from the
dangers of industrial intrusion. At the same time, as the danger and
threat of post-production waste also rises, so does the demand that it
be gotten rid of, either by containment or disposal. The imperialist
nature of industrial capitalism, coupled with its particular capacity for
expansion and growth, has succeeded in colonizing the entire globe.
There are virtually no places left which have not been incorporated
into its production process. There is no wilderness left (what is called
wilderness today if it is not stripped of its of material resources has
become incorporated as spectacle; e.g. Yellowstone National Park.) At
the other end this expansion of the production process has come to
produce more and more commodities which are consumed faster and
faster. This, of course, entails the production of more and more by-
products which become increasing difficult to contain. The problem is
compounded because if the entire world becomes colonized then there
is no outside, no geographical other, no place left to put wastes. Waste
is still a wilderness, an other, but it no longer lurks just outside the
edges of the social world. It now exists within capitalist society and so
must be managed from within rather than discarded and banished to
the outside. This is becoming the meta-crisis of late modernity: there is
no valueless space of wilderness, no wastelands into which we can cast
off industrial waste and destroy its materiality and its danger through
disposal, dissipation, dispersion, disintegration, desubstantiation.
AT: Poop Art is Bad Art
Using scatology in art is good- it allows for shit to be expanded
across all aspects of life.
Gabriel P. Weisberg Art Journal, Vol. 52, No. 3, Scatological Art (Autumn, 1993),
pp. 18-19 Published by: College Art Association
Thus, From the beginning, scatology had not only a negative but also a positive connotation-a
fact that is of considerable importance to those currently studying this tendency or actively
using scatology in their art. Ubi roi, taken as a touchstone in the discussion of scatological
discourse, was important for, first, making a subject that one had been a private now public,
and second for its demonstration of the fact that scatological allusions broke barriers between
different classes of society by focusing on a subject common to all: the physical need to relieve
oneself.
AT: Poop Isn’t a Text

Shit itself is a sign stream to read
Waste containment is not simply the containment of its materiality; the

management of waste is above all a social production, waste management is at the
same time social management. Hence, containment systems fall under Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari's category of machinic assemblage, which Manuel De Landa, refers to as an
"overall set of self-organizing processes" (6), a phylum which can include chemical, political,
organic, historical, linguistic/semiotic, and so on. But what is important is not so much the
specific content or even the specific forms of organizational structure, rather it is the shifting
relations, the movement and energy flows between and through them, the ways singular
organized elements coalesce to produce larger, abstract machines. Out of these relations there
can emerge spontaneous self-organization, order out of chaos in the form of chemical clocks,
cities, insect colonies, social institutions. As an assemblage, waste containment needs to
be considered as a rhizomatic collection of multiplicities in motion: "An assemblage,
in its multiplicity, necessarily act on semiotic flows, material flows, and social flows
simultaneously" (22). It is not surprising, then, that the containment of waste may
also entail the containment of information. For example, information about the release of
radioactive waste into the environment around the Hanford nuclear complex in the state of
Washington in the 1940s and 50s was not released until 1986, and then only after the
Department of Energy which is responsible for the plant was forced through the Freedom of
Information Act. (Epperson 89) It seems that social engineering machines for discursive
containment intermesh with matter containment machines. The discursive universe
is as unstable as that of matter and so meaning must be contained by
representation machines that are constructed and maintained by a variety of social
institutions. The production of conditions of stability and equilibrium for waste
involves chemical, engineering, environmental, economic, political and semiotic
integrants. The waste-stream is also a sign-stream. To contain waste is to
simultaneously contain its significance, its semiotic power.
AT: Counter Plans

Performance of the 1AC is critical to access the advantage- non-performance is a
devastating solvency deficit
Marisol F. Cortez is a Ph. D candidate at UC Davis. "Brown Meets Green: The Political
Fecology of Poop Report.Com". Reconstruction 5, no. 2 (Spring 2005). Available at
http://www.reconstruction.ws/05 2/cortez.shtml
For the stories that narrate the body's intensities, "shamelessness" is not necessarily what
the PoopReporter experiences at the time of the recounted events. As the postscript to
"Curry, Cricket, and Cramps" suggests, shamelessness is a function of the narrative act
itself; it is the willingness to speak about what is "not publicly-aired enough". By
vocalizing both public humiliation and private discomfort as humorous items of interest
to others, PoopReporters interrogate the social dicta that relegate subjective experience of
intestinal functioning to the realm of the private and "under-explored". Defending the
rights of people to bear witness to their bowels, one PoopReporter sums up the essence of
this exploratory shamelessness in a comment to a critic of the site, stating that "[t]his
[website] is where the proud stand up and report their poop.
We seem to forget the most part of our day to day lives is
pooping, and being ashamed of taking a shit at public places
doesn’t make you any less but more of a person.
2/cortez.shtml
While the "courtesy flush" references a pre-wipe flush enacted to reduce the unseemly impact of either
noise or smell during a public poop. In both of these examples, a playful neologistic impulse codifies
events and subjective registers that -- due to the habits engendered by technologies of shame and privacy --
would escape not simply vocalization but cognition itself: the awareness of particular relations to self,
body, and others as distinct events to be thought and spoken. A kind of literary prankishness infuses
otherwise unmentionable -- because unexceptional -- events and objects, such that a sphincter becomes a
"straining balloon knot" or a "brown eye"; a turd is a "muddy rooster tail" or a "Captain Darksnake"; and an
impending fart is recast as a "broccoli and tuna steam sauna beckoning at the backdoor". This playful
process of naming and renaming reaches a peak of near-frenzy in the site's propensity for scatological
punning.
Related in theme to tales of excretory near- and total misses, and just as frequently-submitted, are stories
that narrate experiences whose intensity derives from physical or psychological distress rather than from
the risk of public humiliation. "Constipation", for instance, details the bowel movements of a pooper whose
chronic lack of intestinal motility produces "turds as hard as depleted uranium and with the diameter of a
4yr old child's arm". 48Similarly, "Shell Hell" describes the sphincter-shredding aftereffects of ingesting
three bags of sunflower seeds with shells intact: "this was much more painful than normal shit," the narrator
notes. "It was cutting and slicing my asshole like a butcher infatuated with meat".49 As we can see from just
a few examples, the agonies and ecstasies of bowel activity are a major impetus for the reporting of one's
poop. "a subject which is perhaps under-explored and certainly not publicly-aired enough".
AT: States Counter Plan

Decenralization in the form of the states counter plan reinforces racism and classism; the affirmative
is a pre-requisite for positive decentralization. The counter plan always must come after the plan to
even be in the debate.
Jerry Frug prof of law at Harvard Decentering Decentralization, Spring 1993, 60 U. Chi. L Rev. 253 Lexis
In this Article I reject this traditional understanding of decentralized power in America. The traditional
account attributes to localities the power of self-assertion associated in our liberal culture with an
autonomous individual. It presents localities as being able to do whatever they want: they can act in their
own self-interest, cooperate with others on their own terms, and cause harm to those who disagree with
them. The political term for this form of autonomy is "sovereignty." n2 Indeed, these days the same term is
often used to describe the extent to which individuals, as well as nations, can define and implement their
own self-interest ("consumer sovereignty"). The traditional version of decentralization envisions cities as
sovereign in this sense: they are entitled to be selfish, like consumers, on a collective rather than an
individual basis. n3
The problem with the traditional account of decentralization lies in this understanding of local power. By
modeling cities on the autonomous individual and the nation-state, the traditional account ascribes to all
three entities the same kind of subjectivity. All three, in the words of postmodern theory, have a centered
sense of self. All three define themselves as radically separate from others, all three discover their desires
by looking within themselves, [*255] and all three have a core of self-interest with which they can be in
touch. n4 The traditional account thus seeks to decenter power without questioning -- without decentering --
the kind of subject that exercises that power. The subjectivity associated with the nation-state is simply
recentered, moved from the national government to the localities.
Not surprisingly, the possibility of decentralizing power becomes severely limited when it is based on a
sovereign subjectivity that is transplanted but not transformed. No one could trust such an entity to exercise
unsupervised power. It presents too much danger to outsiders and to its own members. Indeed, as Foucault
suggests, fear of sovereign power is so common that it is routinely converted into a subjected sovereignty, a
sovereignty limited by some other sovereignty.
Humanism [has] invented a whole series of subjected sovereignties: the soul (ruling the body, but subjected
to God), consciousness (sovereign in a context of judgment, but subjected to the necessities of truth), the
individual (a titular control of personal rights subjected to the laws of nature and society), basic freedom
(sovereignty within, but accepting the demands of an outside world and "aligned with destiny"). n5
[*256] Decentralized localities have a similarly subjected sovereignty: they can exercise power, but they
are simultaneously subject to the power of the state.
Of course, the notion of subjected sovereignty has always allowed some degree of decentralized power.
Indeed, although suburbs, like cities, are subject to state control, many suburbs have profited greatly from
the positive associations with the notion of sovereignty. They have separated themselves from the city and
promoted their own self-interest regardless of the impact on city residents. n6 As a result, millions of people
have escaped city problems by crossing the boundary between city and suburb. Major American cities, on
the other hand, have largely suffered from the negative associations with the notion of sovereignty. Local
government law has denied cities the power to confront their problems in their own way. City policies
dealing with the exodus of local businesses and unemployment, for example, have been treated as
undermining the national economy; city policies on crime, homelessness, and racism have been treated as
threatening the rights of citizens. n7 This combination of suburban power and city powerlessness has had
disastrous consequences for American life. It has segregated many of America's metropolitan areas into
"two nations": rich and poor, white and black, expanding and contracting. n8 By dividing prosperous
suburbs from decaying inner cities, it has denied the poor access to jobs and increased interracial
inequality. n9 And, in the process, it has destroyed millions of acres of natural beauty and fostered a "cliche
conformity as far as the eye can see." n10 Yet [*257] decentralizing genuine power to both cities and suburbs
seems inconceivable -- and undesirable -- as long as decentralization is understood in the traditional way.
Proponents of decentralization, however, need not attribute to cities the subjectivity of the centered self. In
my view, the values of decentralization -- the freedom gained from the ability to participate in the basic
societal decisions that affect one's life, the creativity generated by the capacity to experiment in solving
public problems and to tailor possible solutions to local needs, and the energy derived from democratic
forms of organization n11 -- are better defended by basing decentralization on alternative theories of the
subject. In this Article, I redefine decentralization of power by building on the vast literature of critique of
the centered subject, n12 [*258] a literature that has focused primarily on the individual rather than on
collective entities such as cities. n13 I offer below a brief introduction to this critique; this introduction is
designed to serve as a contrasting background to the ensuing account of the decisive role that the notion of
the centered subject now plays in the structure of local government law. Then, in Parts II and III, I analyze
two alternative versions of local government law, both organized in terms of a decentered subject. In these
sections, I address not only how the definition of city power would change under a revised local
government law, but also the ways in which a legal doctrine based on the concept of a decentered self
would transform the institutional structure of decentralized power in America.

The way that the counter plan is written overcodes the position of the subject. 50 state fiat is the
perfect example for our argument because of its emphasis on mimicking the affirmative.
This Article has advanced a third reading of the relationship among the three subjectivities: it has presented
the situated subject and the postmodern subject as alternatives to the notion of the centered subject. Both
reject the centered subject's focus on boundary lines, an emphasis that so far has dominated thinking about
local government law. Both refuse to treat cities as if they are individual units that have a relationship only
with the state; both seek instead to build a form of metropolitan life in which people across the region learn
to recognize, and make policy on the basis of, their interactions with each other. At the same time, both are
post-integration visions of America. Of course, integration remains possible, but it is no longer a master
goal. Either version of [*337] regional negotiations allows people to form their own communities (defined
by notions of race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, gender, or whatever); it's just that they cannot do so
without confronting people in other communities -- as well as dissidents in their own communities -- whose
lives they affect. Above all, both alternatives reject the current social policy of current local government
law and the form of consciousness that it fosters, one that has fragmented our metropolitan areas into areas
of privilege and want, us vs. them. The kind of metropolitan life that either version would foster no doubt
differs. But in both cases decentralization means the ability to participate actively in the basic societal
decisions that affect one's life, n348 not the ability to mimic state or national power on the local level.

The centered subject in terms of government allows for violent and racist group
identification
One way to understand the critique of the centered subject is to recognize that describing one's own sense of self --
describing oneself, even to oneself -- is a creative process. Identifying the self requires the invention of a narrative: the
selection, editing, and unifying of countless aspects of memory and desire. It requires the transformation of the
multiplicity of one's life into a single account -- more accurately, into a series of accounts, since the attempt to establish
one's identity has elements of both the synchronic (identity at any particular moment) and the diachronic (continuity
over time). n14 As Nietzsche says in The Will to Power, "the 'subject' is only a fiction." n15 It "is not something given, it
is [*259] something added and invented and projected behind what there is." n16
A considerable controversy now exists in the literature over this addition, invention, and projection of a "self." Some
find its source in culture, n17 others in political power, n18 still others in language. n19 Whichever explanation is adopted,
however, all those who describe the decentered self see it as contestable, amenable to the multiple interpretations.
Although identity is usually defined in terms of sameness, it is constructed out of a series of differences: the difference
between the aspects of life that one attributes to the self and the aspects that one associates with the actions of others;
[*260] the difference between the self as described in the present and as seen in the past; the difference between the
parts of oneself accepted into the narrative and those rejected; the difference between the describing self and the self
being described. The creation of these differences cannot produce a centered subject because neither the interpreter nor
the materials being interpreted has a fixed meaning. This is not just a problem of articulation. Determining how to
express oneself and not just the demands of the culture, defining a sphere in which personal behavior is not subservient
to political power, deciding how to give meaning to one's life -- these are questions about how to become a person, how
to form one's character. But the "self" who must answer these questions is being challenged by them: the consciousness
of the answerer is what is being questioned. Trying to live in a way that is different from, rather than controlled by,
cultural or political commands -- like trying to give meaning to a self read as a "text" -- thus demands more than just
continuous effort. It requires endless interpretation, and it is never possible to know for sure what to interpret or who is
doing the interpreting. The Arabian poet, Sama Ma'ari, has described a version of this sense of self by saying:
"Identities are highly complex, tension filled, contradictory, and inconsistent entities. Only the one who
claims to have a simple, definite, and clear-cut identity has an identity problem." n20
This brief account of the critique of the centered subject does not begin to capture the complexities of the
topic, but it might nevertheless be adequate to introduce the related problem of group identity. The critique
of the centered subject is more familiar when it is applied to groups rather than the self. Treating
individuals as a group plainly requires selecting, editing, and unifying disparate elements -- the creation of
a sameness out of a multitude of differences. Consider any group to which you belong. It does not matter
whether the group is defined in terms of geography, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, politics, or
some other criteria. Defining what the group has in common and what distinguishes it from outsiders is
always a contestable matter of interpretation. To say that one "is" an Asian American or a transvestite or a
Democrat or a man or a Texan never means that one's self-image can be captured by any of these labels. It
is common to feel both inside and outside these group identifications simultaneously. In part this is because
each of these labels has meanings imposed by outsiders that a self-identified [*261] group member might
reject: being called a queer from someone in a passing car does not have the same meaning as the feeling of
identification with Queer Nation. n21
But there is no single group identity from an insider perspective either. Since everyone is a member of
many groups, any particular group label falsifies to the extent it suggests a sameness within the group. A
group identity has to be forged out of differences that divide the group; it never simply exists. Every group
member recognizes the problem of uniting all Asian Americans or transvestites or Democrats or men or
Texans behind any single cause. But the multiplicity of group identifications also allows some group
members to dispute the legitimacy of others' claim to membership: to some Asian Americans, an American
from Sri Lanka is not a "real" Asian American; to some Texans, an Asian American is not a "real" Texan;
to some men, a transvestite is not a "real" man; to some Democrats, Paul Tsongas is not a "real" Democrat.
As Barbara Johnson observes, "difference disliked is identity affirmed." n22
This critique of the coherence of collective identity, often called "anti-essentialism," has been elaborated
extensively in literature denying that there is a core identity to being black n23 or being [*262] a woman n24
or being gay. n25 The argument applies equally to groups such as cities. Territorial boundaries circumscribe
a very diverse group of people. For major American cities, this is obvious enough: race, ethnicity, class,
politics, gender, sexual preference, and neighborhood, among other sources of identity, fracture the city in a
multitude of ways.
AT: Contain Waste CP

Containment fails because interaction can’t be eliminated
The production of a rational social and material world is essentially the production of states of equilibrium
out of the chaos of 'nature' and social life. But, whether material or discursive, strategies of containment
continually fail; they fail because they depend on simplistic, mechanistic understandings of the world. As
Prigogine and Stengers point out, "simple, integrable systems can indeed be reduced into noninteracting
units, but in general, interactions cannot be eliminated" (73). The ongoing failure of these strategies points
us to another conception of the world, that of an evolving, interactive multiplicities that cannot be reduced
to timeless universals (73)--dynamic systems of thermodynamics, for instance. The crisis of waste is, at its
most essential, a crisis of system, or more specifically: rational systemicity. Crisis seeps out of the stainless
steel canister of rationality.
AT: Alternative Disposal CP

Doesn’t solve case- our advantage stem is the identification with shit, not
developing new ways to contain it.
Perm- do the plan and the counter plan.
Permutation not abusive- plan does not specify how the energy is derived from
the poop, only that it is.
Not mutually exclusive- we wouldn’t use all the poop. Perm solves counter plan
advantages from other uses.
We are running out of valueless space to dispel our waste to, we must manage it
from within society
Jody Baker, Phd comm. Studies at Pitt appears to teach at Carnegie Mellon, “Modeling Industrial
Thresholds,” Cultronix 1, Fall 1994, http://eserver.org/cultronix/baker
With modernity and industrialization, the meaning of waste has moved across the production process to its
other end: the waste product. The idea of waste and the valuelessness, the otherness (as in wilderness) and
the danger which it signifies has shifted from those things that exist in the realm of pre-production to those
which are post-production. Thus, we find ourselves faced with a double bind: as the value of pre-
production wastelands rises so too does the demand for their protection from the dangers of industrial
intrusion. At the same time, as the danger and threat of post-production waste also rises, so does the
demand that it be gotten rid of, either by containment or disposal. The imperialist nature of
industrial capitalism, coupled with its particular capacity for expansion and growth, has succeeded in
colonizing the entire globe. There are virtually no places left which have not been incorporated into
its production process. There is no wilderness left (what is called wilderness today if it is not stripped of
its of material resources has become incorporated as spectacle; e.g. Yellowstone National Park.) At the
other end this expansion of the production process has come to produce more and more commodities
which are consumed faster and faster. This, of course, entails the production of more and more by-
products which become increasing difficult to contain. The problem is compounded because if the
entire world becomes colonized then there is no outside, no geographical other, no place left to put
wastes. Waste is still a wilderness, an other, but it no longer lurks just outside the edges of the social
world. It now exists within capitalist society and so must be managed from within rather than
discarded and banished to the outside. This is becoming the meta-crisis of late modernity: there is no
valueless space of wilderness, no wastelands into which we can cast off industrial waste and destroy
its materiality and its danger through disposal, dissipation, dispersion, disintegration,
desubstantiation.
Topicality: Alternative Energy
1. We meet- write as needed
2. Counter Interpretation- Alternative Energy is not derived

from fossil fuels, typically from renewable sources.
US Department of the Interior in ‘08

Last Updated: 06/24/2008, http://www.mms.gov/offshore/AlternativeEnergy/Definitions.htm
Alternative energy: Fuel sources that are other than those derived from fossil fuels. Typically used
interchangeably for renewable energy. Examples include: wind, solar, biomass, wave and tidal energy.
3. Prefer the counter interpretation
A. Intent to define- this is from the US department of the

interior definitions section.
B. Definition explicitly includes our case in a list of topical

areas.
C. No mutually exclusive definitions. There is not a definition

that explicitly excludes biomass, meaning that our definition,
which both sets parameters for what alternative energy is and
provides a list is the best for the topic.
D. Clear Limit- alternative energy means not fossil fuels. Which

is a simple test, that can be sorted out.
Negative interpretation over limits- excluding biomass cases

causes all renewable resource cases to be off the table;
means the topic would be sats and nuclear only, which is
would be a terrible topic as the entire corpus of
alternative energy sources that are really relevant in the
discussion would be excluded.
Alternative energy only limits red herrings- this is a noun in

the resolution not the very substantial limiter that a verb
would be. The cases that would be excluded here are on
face not topical.
Only vote on abuse. There is an unlimited reserve of

potential abuse. Worst case scenario- Jurisdiction means
Pass-it-on.
Topicality: Incentives
We Meet- what ever definition of incentives you have we can
be it.
Counter Interpretation- Incentives are inducements toward

a particular action with new benefits that the actor did
not previously have. Restrictions and threats are not
incentives.
Journal of Chemical Health and Safety “Perverse and Unintended” 13:4 2006
I’ve said it before. There are three ways to change the behavior of others – we can
appeal to instinct for self-preservation by threatening people, coercing them to do
our bidding. We can appeal to instinct for self-interest by offering incentives, luring
them to do our bidding. We can appeal to their instinct for self-actualization by
engaging their intellect and having them decide that our way is better. In all three of
these cases, our way had darn well better be better, or we do the others a severe
disservice. Simply applying coercion is a disservice. But so are bad incentive
programs.
Incentives work on a quid pro quo basis – this for that. If you change your behavior,
I’ll give you a reward. One could say that coercion is an incentive program – do as I
say and I’ll let you live. However, I define an incentive as getting something you
didn’t have before in exchange for new behavior, so that pretty much puts coercion
in its own box, one separate from incentives. But fundamental problems plague the
incentive approach. Like coercion, incentives are poor motivators in the long run, for
at least two reasons – unintended consequences and perverse incentives.
3. We meet the counter interpretation- the plan provides benefits from the
government that had not been previously available.
4. Prefer the counter interpretation-
Clear Distinction- to be topical an affirmative would

need to provide a new reward that has not been
previously offered.
Avoids Mixing Burdens- interpretations of incentive as

something that motivates action depend on the
solvency of the action to be topical. Solvency
derived incentives unlimits the resolution and
defeats any meaningful check the expansion of
solvency derived topicality defenses.
Bi-Directionality- the negative interpretation protects

link ground; if incentives can mean carrots and
sticks, as opposed to just carrots as in our
interpretation the negative needs to cut a
fundamentally different set of generic arguments.
Any ground lost is bad ground anyway- we will win that

uniqueness based disadvantages are bad because they
encourage non-intrinsic positions that divert attention
from the learning about topic education, which is
impacted by our Balibar evidence.
No unique abuse- the link ground they lose is wildly generic

and non-intrinsic to boot.
More Topicality Evidence

Biomass is an alternative energy.
1. DOE U.S. Department of Energy: Energy efficiency and

Renewable Energy 5/13/2008
http://www1.eere.energy.gov/biomass/biomass_basics_faqs.html
Biomass is any organic material made from plants or animals. Domestic biomass resources include agricultural and
forestry residues, municipal solid wastes, industrial wastes, and terrestrial and aquatic crops grown solely for energy
purposes.
Biomass can be converted to other usable forms of energy and is an attractive petroleum alternative for a number of
reasons. First, it is a renewable resource that is more evenly distributed over the Earth's surface than are finite energy
sources, and may be exploited using more environmentally friendly technologies. Agriculture and forestry residues, and
in particular residues from paper mills, are the most common biomass resources used for generating electricity and
power, including industrial process heat and steam, as well as for a variety of biobased products. Use of liquid
transportation fuels such as ethanol and biodiesel, however, currently derived primarily from agricultural crops, is
increasing dramatically.
2.
EcoGeneration Solutions “Manure to Methane” accessed in 2008

http://www.cogeneration.net/Manure_To_Energy.htm
Biomass is a renewable energy resource which includes a wide variety if organic

resources. A few of these include wood, agricultural residue/waste, and animal
manure.
3.
biomass. (n.d.). WordNet® 3.0. June 27, 2008, from Dictionary.com website:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/biomass
Energy. organic matter, esp. plant matter, that can be converted to fuel and is therefore regarded as a potential
energy source.
Framework 2AC
Our interpretation is that we must AFFIRM the TOPIC. This question
should rightfully be broken into two distinct and meaningful
elements, the term AFFIRM and the term TOPIC. We will defend
the topic, we are clearly topical, we are incentives for biomass
energy. The question that we should answer is if we AFFIRM.
To Affirm we site the Oxford English Dictionary: To make a

statement and stand to it; to maintain or assert strongly, to
declare or state positively. We will stand to our reading of the
topic, we will say it loud and proud. If the affirmative precludes
us from maintaining it, we lose.
The Pedagogical Question of Framework is Prior to the Theoretical

predilections of the policy framework. The work product of
debate is corporeal, it is the shit we become, not the worlds we
imagine. What we take from the debate is the ability to think in
new and unique ways- not the ballot per se. Three Impacts:
Uniqueness is on our side- the benefits of our approach to the

topic are unique- policy education happens all the time.
Interventions into the relationship between the self and
shit are not common. You will get your politics disad
debate in another place, unless we really get through to
you, in which case, we probably won.
We don’t dignify cheap shots- individual theory arguments

about the game implications of policy debate good are
impossible to meaningfully answer, and are not responsive
to our approach. It is entirely possible that we will drop a
short highly technical argument that defends the internal
logic of policy debate, these do not address the central
pedagogical question about the currliculum of the activity
and exclusion there to.
Defense- they need to win a specific link to how our

conception of affirming the resolution without fiat is
educationally bankrupt. Without a SPECIFIC INTRINSIC
disadvantage to our approach to affirmation, you vote
affirmative.
Our affirmative approach is a critique of the Framework argument:

Style and Form- the distinction between self and shit is
mirrored in the distinction between good and bad debate.
Our Viswanthan and Cortez evidence argues that these
distinctions are counter productive and enact violent
separations.
Content- the 1AC impacts the distinction between shit and the
self as rendering some humans as garbage to be disposed
of. Our Balibar evidence impacts this, as this conception of
politics in the human city is Genocidal.
Affirmative Education is amazing- our solvency evidence argues

that our impossible demand for human biomass energy is central
to a pedagogy that reinvents citizenship and transforms the self
to shit relationship that is implicated in racism, classism, sexism
and genocidal violence. This education can not be accomplished
in a traditional policy framework because the policy framework is
structured by the exclusion of abjection and the fetishization of
cleanliness. Basically, traditional policy debate is anal retentive
to a dangerous degree.
Uniqueness based disadvantages bad- there is no reasonable

defense of consultation counter plans and political
disadvantages. These positions are the bane of topic specific
education, predictability, evidence quality standards, speaking
skills, new research development and participation- this is
OFFENSE against these positions. These positions did NOT
APPEAR until the 90’s in anything like their current form, and
there is surely a connection between the development of these
positions and the decline in participation in debate that the 90’s
witnessed. TO boil this down; the ground the negative loses has
not been historically needed to insure fair debate, much less to
prevent flight from the activity, which is DEFENSE.
READ Additional Evidence As Needed…
Framework: Role Play Bad

Role Playing only forces us to participate in the herd-like ego, breeding
ressentiment. This ressentiment results in nihilism and self-laceration.
Robert J. Antonio Source “Nietzsche's Antisociology: Subjectified Culture and the End
of History” The American Journal of Sociology 1995
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2782505
One should inaugurate culture in the right place—not in the “soul” ... [but in] the body, demeanor, diet,
physiology: the rest follows. . . Christianity, which despised the body, has up to now been mankind’s
greatest misfortune. (Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols)
Nietzsche rejected the enduring Western conception of the “rational subject,” which portrays reason or
mind as a “higher” faculty governing the body. He was especially critical of the new version of the subject
or the social self, emergent during his own day. Holding that “every association” makes strong
individuals “shudder slightly” and that “all contact . . . ‘in society’—involves inevitable uncleanliness,”
Nietzsche identified individuality with bodily “intelligence” and “multiplicity.” Consequently, he
viewed the genuine “self” to be a nonsocial, irreducible, individual particularity and contradictory to the
“herd”-like “ego” (i.e., the social self). Nietzsche believed culture to originate from and to regulate the
body. Superior cultures nurture particularity by providing resources to express bodily drives in a
“spiritualized” way that favors pleasure and “ascending life.” Although these cultures provide healthy
individuals resources to express themselves vitally and creatively, they also exert “domestication” that
constrains the destructive inclinations of the “weak.” Some cultures, however, domesticate so
thoroughly and repress bodily drives so severely that the “herd instinct of obedience” and
consequent guilt, illness, and “nihilism” prevail (Nietzsche [1882] 1974, p. 342; [1883—85] 1969c, pp.
61—66, 86, 118, 120; [1883—88] 1968b, pp. 203—4, 347—49, 363; [1886] 1966, pp. 26, 110—11, 226;
[1888] 1968a, pp. 29—44).
The overarching “moral” regulation of inferior cultures is animated by ressentiment (i.e., the
inclination of the weak to make their suffering meaningful by blaming others and taking “imaginary
revenge”). According to Nietzsche, “ascetic priests” attain cultural leadership by manipulating this
sentiment, creating normative systems or “slave moralities” that promise salvation for the obedient and
punishment for the dissolute. By intensifying and redirecting ressentiment inward against the blameworthy
body and outward against collective enemies, morality forges powerlessness into mass discipline and the
weak into a society (Nietzsche [1887] 1969b, pp. 36—37, 116—18, 125—27; 1968b, p. 156). Moreover,
healthy, uninhibited individuals are made prime targets of ressentiment and coercion. Bound by slave
morality, the herd collects and defeats the “strong.” Thus, Nietzsche reverses Spencerian “survival of the
fittest” because in his view social “selection” favors the weak (Nietzsche 1968b, pp. 55, 75, 343, 361—65,
479; 1968a, pp. 75—76).
According to Nietzsche, Western culture breeds especially powerful, unhealthy ressentiment. He

argued that Socrates, an ingenious ascetic priest, initiated the “modern” or “Socratic” culture
complex, giving “reason” absolute dominion over the body and, thereby, taming the explosion of impulses
and desires unleashed by the collapse of Greek antiquity. Socrates’ equation of truth and virtue with
disembodied reason gave rise to the West’s characteristic splits between mind and body, subject and object,
and theory and practice. Socratic culture’s brutal domestication turns drives “backward” against the
body, creating crippling “inwardness” and “self-laceration” (Nietzsche [18721 1967; 1968b, pp. 156,
202—3, 328, 1969b, pp. 84—85; 1968a, pp. 29—34)
Framework: Role Play Bad

Role playing is simply an extension of the slave morality that leaves society
vulnerable to a new type of tyrant—the role player.
Robert J. Antonio Source “Nietzsche's Antisociology: Subjectified Culture and the End of History” The
American Journal of Sociology 1995 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2782505
The phenomenon of modern man has become wholly appearance; he is not visible in what he
represents but rather concealed by it. (Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations) “ He advocated writing in a
style that proves “one believes in an idea; not only thinks it but also feels it” (personal communication to
Lou Andreas-Salome, quoted in [1894] 1988, pp. 77—78). According to Nietzsche, the “subject” is
Socratic culture’s most central, durable foundation. This prototypic expression of ressentiment, master
reification, and ultimate justification for slave morality and mass discipline “separates strength from
expressions of strength, as if there were a neutral substratum . . free to express strength or not to do so. But
there is no such substratum; there is no ‘being’ behind the doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely
a fiction added to the deed” ‘(Nietzsche 1969b, pp. 45—46). Leveling of Socratic culture’s “objective”
foundations makes its “subjective” features all the more important. For example, the subject is a central
focus of the new human sciences, appearing prominently in its emphases on neutral standpoints, motives as
causes, and selves as entities, objects of inquiry, problems, and targets of care (Nietzsche 1966, pp. 19—21;
1968a, pp. 47—54). Arguing that subjectified culture weakens the personality, Nietzsche spoke of a
“remarkable antithesis between an interior which fails to correspond to any exterior and an exterior which
fails to correspond to any interior” (Nietzsche 1983, pp. 78—79, 83).
The “problem of the actor,” Nietzsche said, “troubled me for the longest time.”2 He considered “roles” as
“external,” “surface,” or “foreground” phenomena and viewed close personal identification with them
as symptomatic of estrangement. While modern theorists saw differentiated roles and professions as a
matrix of autonomy and reflexivity, Nietzsche held that persons (especially male professionals) in
specialized occupations overidentify with their positions and engage in gross fabrications to obtain
advancement. They look hesitantly to the opinion of others, asking themselves, “How ought I feel
about this?” They are so thoroughly absorbed in simulating effective role players that they have
trouble being anything but actors—”The role has actually become the character.” This highly
subjectified social self or simulator suffers devastating inauthenticity. The powerful authority given
the social greatly amplifies Socratic culture’s already self-indulgent “inwardness.” Integrity,
decisiveness, spontaneity, and pleasure are undone by paralyzing overconcern about possible causes,
meanings, and consequences of acts and unending internal dialogue about what others might think,
expect, say, or do (Nietzsche 1983, pp. 83—86; 1986, pp. 39—40; 1974, pp. 302—4, 3 16—17).
Nervous rotation of socially appropriate “masks” reduces persons to hypostatized “shadows,”

“abstracts,” or simulacra. One adopts “many roles,” playing them “badly and superficially” in the
fashion of a stiff “puppet play.” Nietzsche asked, “Are you genuine? Or only an actor? 12 The important
passages on actor and role in The Gay Science were added to the second edition in 1887 and, thus, reflect
Nietzsche’s mature thought. A representative or that which is represented? . . . [Or] no more than an
imitation of an actor?” Simulation is so pervasive that it is hard to tell the copy from the genuine
article; social selves “prefer the copies to the originals” (Nietzsche 1983, pp. 84—86; 1986, P. 136;
1974, pp. 232— 33, 259; 1969b, pp. 268, 300, 302; 1968a, pp. 26—27). Their inwardness and aleatory
scripts foreclose genuine attachment to others. This type of actor cannot plan for the long term or
participate in enduring networks of interdependence; such a person is neither willing nor able to be a
“stone” in the societal “edifice” (Nietzsche 1974, pp. 302—4; 1986a, pp. 93—94).
Superficiality rules in the arid subjectivized landscape. Neitzsche (1974, p. 259) stated, “One thinks
with a watch in one’s hand, even as one eats one’s midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock
market; one lives as if one always ‘might miss out on something.’ ‘Rather do anything than nothing’: this
principle, too, is merely a string to throttle all culture. . . . Living in a constant chase after gain compels
people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretense and overreaching and
anticipating others.”
Pervasive leveling, improvising, and faking foster an inflated sense of ability and an oblivious
attitude about the fortuitous circumstances that contribute to role attainment (e.g., class or ethnicity).
The most mediocre people believe they can fill any position, even cultural leadership. Nietzsche respected
the self-mastery of genuine ascetic priests, like Socrates, and praised their ability to redirect ressentiment
creatively and to render the “sick” harmless. But he deeply feared the new simulated versions. Lacking
the “born physician’s” capacities, these impostors amplify the worst inclinations of the herd; they are
“violent, envious, exploitative, scheming, fawning, cringing, arrogant, all according to
circumstances.” Social selves are fodder for the “great man of the masses.” Nietzsche held that “the
less one knows how to command, the more urgently one covets someone who commands, who commands
severely— a god, prince, class, physician, father confessor, dogma, or party conscience.” The deadly
combination of desperate conforming and overreaching and untrammeled ressentiment paves the
way for a new type of tyrant (Nietzsche 1986, pp. 137, 168; 1974, pp. 117—18, 213, 288—89, 303—4).
Framework: Imagination
The way we view shit is in a negative way which is bad- it
allows for people to think they can colonize everything.

[An
activist]http://www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/1/de_colonizing/index.html
Pathological values have shaped not only the global system but also our ability to imagine true
change. The system we are fighting is not merely structural it’s also inside us, through the
internalization of oppressive cultural norms which define our worldview. Our minds have been
colonized to normalize deeply pathological assumptions. Thus often times our own sense of
self-defeatism becomes complicit with the anesthetic qualities of a cynical mass media to
make fundamental social change unimaginable.
As a consequence activists frequently ghettoize themselves by self-identifying through protest

and failing to conceive of themselves as building movements that can actually change power
relations. All too often we project our own sense of powerlessness by mistaking militancy for
radicalism and mobilization for movement building. It seems highly unlikely to me that
capitalism will be smashed one widow at a time. Likewise getting tens of thousands of people
to take joint action is not an end in itself, rather only the first step in catalyzing deeper shifts in
Western culture. Our revolution(s) will really start rolling when the logic of our actions and the
appeal of our disobedience is so clear that it can easily replicate and spread far beyond the
limiting definition of “protester” or “activist”.
Framework: Imagination
To be able to view shit as more than “shit” we must De-
Colonize the revolutionary imagination that we have about it.
[An activist]http://www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/1/de_colonizing/index.html
In part it was inspired by a profound strategy insight I received while

watching a circling bird of prey. The raptor seemed to spend hours
calmly drifting on the breezes, waiting and watching, then suddenly
made a lightning quick dive to seize its prey. Had I only witnessed the
raptor’s final plunge, I might not have realizing that it took hours of
patient surveillance for the raptor to be in the right place to make a
seemingly effortless kill. I was struck by what a clear metaphor the
raptor’s circling time is for what our movements need to do in order to
be successful. Social change is not just the bird of prey’s sudden
plunge—the flurry of direct confrontation - but rather the whole
process of circling, watching, and preparing.
Framework: Individual Action Good
Individual scholarship, representations and politics is crucial –
their framework forecloses other avenues of change through
emphasis United States Federal Government action. This
denies our individual responsibility for violence and makes all
impacts inevitable
Kappeler 1995 (Susanne, Associate Professor @ the School of

Humanities and Social Sciences Al-Akhawayn University, The Will to
Violence: The Politics of Personal Behavior, p 10-11)
‗We are the war‘ does not mean that the responsibility for a war is shared collectively
and diffusely by an entire society—which would be equivalent to exonerating
warlords and politicians and profiteers or, as Ulrich Beck says, upholding the notion of
collective irresponsibility1, where people are no longer held responsible for their
actions, and where the conception of universal responsibility becomes the equivalent
of a universal acquittal. 6 On the contrary, the object is precisely to analyze the
specific and differential responsibilities of everyone in their diverse situations.
Decisions to unleash a war are indeed taken at particular levels of power by those in
a position to make them to command such collective action. We need to hold them
clearly responsible for their decisions and actions without lessening theirs by any
collective ‗assumption‘ of responsibility. Yet our habit of focusing on the stage where
the major dramas of power take place tends to obscure our sight in relation to our
own sphere of competence, our own power and our own responsibility—leading to the
–well-known illusion of our apparent ‗powerlessness‘ and its accompanying
phenomenon, our so-called political disillusionment. Single citizens- even more so
those of other nations – have come to feel secure in their obvious non-responsibility
for such large-scale political events as, say, the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-
Hercegovina or Somalia – since the decisions for such events are always made
elsewhere. Yet our insight that indeed we are not responsible for the decisions of a
Serbian general or a Croatian president tends to mislead us into thinking that
therefore we have no responsibility at all, not even for forming our own judgment,
and thus into underrating the responsibility we do have within our own sphere of
action. In particular, it seems to absolve us from having to try to see any relation
between our own actions and those events, or to recognize the connections between
those political decisions and our own personal decisions. It not only shows that we
participate in what Beck calls ‗organized irresponsibility‘, upholding the apparent
lack of connection between bureaucratically, institutionally, nationally and also
individually organized separate competences. It also proves the phenomenal and
unquestioned alliance of our personal thinking with the thinking of the major
powermongers. For we tend to think that we cannot ‗do‘ anything, say, about a war,
because we deem ourselves to be in the wrong situation; because we are not where
the major decisions are made.
Which is why many of those not yet entirely disillusioned with politics tend to engage
in a form of mental deputy politics, in the style of ‗What would I do if I were the
general, the prime minister, the president, the foreign minister or the minister of
defence?‘ Since we seem to regard their mega spheres of action as the only
worthwhile and truly effective ones, and since our political analyses tend to dwell
there first of all, any question of what I would do if I were indeed myself tends to
peter out in the comparative insignificance of having what is perceived as ‗virtually
no possibilities‘: what I could do seems petty and futile. For my own action I obviously
desire the range of action of a general, a prime minister, or a General Secretary of
the UN — finding expression in ever more prevalent formulations like ‗I want to stop
this war‘, ‗I want military intervention‘, ‗I want to stop this backlash‘, or ‗I want a
moral revolution.‘7 ‗We are this war‘, however, even if we do not command the
troops or participate in so—called peace talks, namely as Drakuli~ says, in our non-
comprehension‘: our willed refusal to feel responsible for our own thinking and for
working out our own understanding, preferring innocently to drift along the
ideological current of prefabricated arguments or less than innocently taking
advantage of the advantages these offer. And we ‗are‘ the war in our ‗unconscious
cruelty towards you‘, our tolerance of the ‗fact that you have a yellow form for
refugees and I don‘t‘ — our readiness, in other words, to build identities, one for
ourselves and one for refugees, one of our own and one for the ‗others‘. We share in
the responsibility for this war and its violence in the way we let them grow inside us,
that is, in the way we shape ‗our feelings, our relationships, our values‘ according to
the structures and the values of war and violence.
Framework: AT: Do aff in policy world
Framework: Western Thought Bad Impact

Dominant western thought is ethnocidal – ―an other thinking‖ seeks to
check dominant western thought
Mignolo 2000 (Walter, A companion to postcolonial studies, ed.

Schwarz and ray, p. 68-71)
AT: Heidegger/State Bad

Alternatives that focus on individual ontology preclude a feeling of responsibility
and connection to the social; furthering the domination incumbent in the separation
between the human and the world.
Indeed, to separate ecological problems from social problems – or even to play down or give only token
recognition to their crucial relationship – would be to grossly misconstrue the sources of the growing
environmental crisis. In effect, the way human beings deal with each other as social beings is crucial to
addressing the ecological crisis. Unless we clearly recognize this, we will fail to see that the hierarchical
mentality and class relationships that so thoroughly permeate society are what has given rise to the very
idea of dominating the natural world.
Unless we realize that the present market society, structured around the brutally competitive imperative of
"grow or die," is a thoroughly impersonal, self-operating mechanism, we will falsely tend to blame other
phenomena – such as technology or population growth – for growing environmental dislocations. We will
ignore their root causes, such as trade for profit, industrial expansion for its own sake, and the identification
of progress with corporate self-interest. In short, we will tend to focus on the symptoms of a grim social
pathology rather than on the pathology itself, and our efforts will be directed toward limited goals whose
attainment is more cosmetic than curative.
Some critics have recently questioned whether social ecology has treated the issue of spirituality in
ecological politics adequately. In fact, social ecology was among the earliest of contemporary ecologies to
call for a sweeping change in existing spiritual values. Indeed, such a change would involve a far-reaching
transformation of our prevailing mentality of domination into one of complementarity, one that sees our
role in the natural world as creative, supportive, and deeply appreciative of the well-being of nonhuman
life. In social ecology a truly natural spirituality, free of mystical regressions, would center on the ability of
an emancipated humanity to function as ethical agents for diminishing needless suffering, engaging in
ecological restoration, and fostering an aesthetic appreciation of natural evolution in all its fecundity and
diversity.
Thus, in its call for a collective effort to change society, social ecology has never eschewed the need for a
radically new spirituality or mentality. As early as 1965, the first public statement to advance the ideas of
social ecology concluded with the injunction: "The cast of mind that today organizes differences among
human and other life-forms along hierarchical lines of 'supremacy or 'inferiority' will give way to an
outlook that deals with diversity in an ecological manner – that is, according to an ethics of
complementarity." (1) In such an ethics, human beings would complement nonhuman beings with their
own capacities to produce a richer, creative, and developmental whole – not as a "dominant" species but as
supportive one. Although this ethics, expressed at times as an appeal for the "respiritization of the natural
world," recurs throughout the literature of social ecology, it should not be mistaken for a theology that
raises a deity above the natural world or even that seeks to discover one within it. The spirituality advanced
by social ecology is definitively naturalist (as one would expect, given its relation to ecology itself, which
stems from the biological sciences) rather than supernaturalistic or pantheistic areas of speculation.
The effort in some quarters of the ecology movement to prioritize the need to develop a pantheistic "eco-
spirituality" over the need to address social factors raises serious questions about their ability to comes to
grips with reality. At a time when a blind social mechanism – the market – is turning soil into sand,
covering fertile land with concrete, poisoning air and water, and producing sweeping climatic and
atmospheric changes, we cannot ignore the impact that an aggressive hierarchical and exploitative class
society has on the natural world. We must face the fact that economic growth, gender oppressions, and
ethnic domination – not to speak of corporate, state, and bureaucratic incursions on human well-being – are
much more capable of shaping the future of the natural world than are privatistic forms of spiritual self-
redemption. These forms of domination must be confronted by collective action and by major social
movements that challenge the social sources of the ecological crisis, not simply by personalistic forms of
consumption and investment that often go under the oxymoronic rubric of "green capitalism." The present
highly cooptative society is only too eager to find new means of commercial aggrandizement and to add
ecological verbiage to its advertising and customer relations efforts.
AT: Heidegger/State Bad

Your alt obscures the need for concerted social action, deflecting attention from a
broader and systemic focus
Indeed, to the extent that environmental movements and ideologies merely moralize
about the wickedness of our anti-ecological society and call for changes in personal
lifestyles and attitudes, they obscure the need for concerted social action and tend to
deflect the struggle for far-reaching social change. Meanwhile, corporations are skillfully
manipulating this popular desire for personal ecologically sound practices by cultivating
ecological mirages. Mercedes-Benz, for example, declaims in a two-page magazine
advertisement, decorated with a bison painting from a Paleolithic cave wall, that "we
must work to make progress more environmentally sustainable by including
environmental themes in the planning of new products." (7) Such messages are
commonplace in Germany, one of western Europe's worst polluters. Such advertising is
equally manipulative in the United States, where leading polluters piously declare that for
them, "every day is Earth Day."
AT: Heidegger/Revolution- Latour Evidence

Heidegger is wrong about the relationship between people and objects. The critical
linkage is at the point where we relate to and use objects, not to the objects
themselves. Heidegger’s approach entails a surrender to social forces that meddle
with technology and science for pernicious ends.
Bruno Latour prof at Paris Institute of Political Studies “Can We get our materialism back, please? Isis
2007
In other words, whereas res extensa is a way to draw technical parts side by side, those
parts themselves do not assemble or gather or survive as if they were “in” res extensa or
“made of” matter. Or, rather, we are now faced with two different definitions of “matter”:
one (the idealist one) in which the reproduction of the parts through geometry is confused
with the reproduction of the parts themselves, and another in which those two pathways
are clearly distinct. The first gives way to objects, the description of which is always thin;
the second gives way to things, which are the topics, as Ken Alder says in his introduction,
of thick description. Thin objects, on one hand, with an ideal definition of matter; thick
things, on the other, with a material definition of matter: this seems to me the choice
offered to the reader of the pieces in this Focus section.
This does not mean that reproduction through geometry is “abstract,” “cold,” and “dead”
while reproduction through steel, brass, or wood is “concrete,” “warm,” and “alive,” but
simply that geometry is what allows engineers to draw and know the parts, while the parts
themselves go their own ways and follow, so to speak, their own directions. . . . If Ortega
had really wanted to provide a view of the VW Beetle that would do justice to his title—
Cosmic Thing—he would have to redo his installation entirely and do for the Beetle what
Gabrielle Hecht and Wiebe Bijker and Ken Alder have done here for “their” uranium
rocks, dams, and lie detectors: that is, first prodigiously extend the number of parts necessary
for the gathering of the Beetle and then multiply the number of assembling principles
that gather them together in a functioning whole. The suspension of the parts side by side
with nylon thread is a nice way of reminding us of the gathering aspect of every technical
“whole,” but it is much too restricted a census of which parts are necessary and of the
process through which they might coalesce together. To the assemblage of parts, Ortega
should have added an assembly of entities that would have made his installation really
worthy of the name Cosmic Thing.
This is why I always find it baffling that people would take Heidegger’s “philosophy of
technology” seriously. Not only would Heidegger see no difference whatsoever between
an atomic bomb, a dam, a lie detector, and a staple—all being mere examples of the same
“enframing”—but when he finally gives some respect to a shoe or a hammer it is only to
see it as the assembly of four elements—his “fourfold.” To be sure, such tools may be
beautifully made, and it is much better to call on the gods and the mortals, heaven and
earth, to account for their emergence than to dismiss them as the thinnest of “mere” objects.
But look again at the VW Beetle: just four elements, really? That’s a very small list indeed.
. . . According to Hecht, there are many more than four existing deities, or dimensions, or
factors, brought simultaneously into play in order to define what it is for “uranium” to be
“nuclear.” Any technical imbroglio forces us to count way beyond four. But it is true—
and here Heidegger sends the inquiry in the right direction—that any artifact is a form of
assembling, of gathering, of “thinging” entities together and that it is absurd to forget the
mortals and the gods when describing a piece of hardware, even the most hypermodern
ones. But I am sure that Heidegger would refuse to comment on Ortega’s exploded view.
And Ortega himself, by offering, as I have just said, such a limited number of parts and
types of assembling, betrays the title he gave to his piece—or else he is enjoying himself
with a very modernist irony that follows the same pattern as Heidegger’s spite for modernity.
What is so promising about extricating material materialism from its idealist counterpart—
of which the concept of “enframing” is a typical example—is that it accounts for
the surprise and opacity that are so typical of techniques-as-things and that techniques-asobjects,
drawn in the res extensa mode, completely hide. The exploded-view principle of
description makes it possible to overcome one of the main aspects of bringing an artifact
into existence: opacity. In other words, it draws the object as if it were open to inspection
and mastery while it hides the elementary mode of existence of technical artifacts—to
take up Gilbert Simondon’s title.2 Parts hide one another; and when the artifact is completed
the activity that fit them together disappears entirely. Mastery, prediction, clarity, and
functionality are very local and tentative achievements that are not themselves obtained
inside the idealized digital or paper world of res extensa—even though it would be impossible
to carry them forward without working upon and with technical drawings and
models. But, again, it is not the same thing to work upon a model—mathematical, analogical,
digital—as it is for a technical assemblage to be a model. As every engineer knows,
scaling up (or scaling down, in the case of miniaturization and industrialization) is a tough,
surprising adventure filled with twists and detours. As soon as one assimilates mechanisms
to the res extensa mode, one is no longer prepared to encounter any of the tricky, clever
innovations that go with every technical gathering. Nor is there any room left for a Daedalus
or a Viktor Frankenstein, though aspects of these mythological figures abound in the
tales recounted in these essays: the demiurgic ambitions of Brazilian positivists; the monstrous
and protean power of “nuclearity”; the rivalries, twists, and disappointments involved
in powering and watering the Indian subcontinent; the labyrinths of bluff and double
bluff that come to define both lie detection and the arms race.
Finally, what one is no longer prepared to encounter either are the various meddlers,
known in an earlier period of our disciplines as the “social context” that surrounded artifacts
that were otherwise essentially imperturbable. After having remained for so long
rather politely at a safe distance around the techniques, now meddlers of all sorts—not
only engineers, of course, but also “members of the public,” those who suffer various
“unwanted consequences” of technology, militants, dreamers, activists, lawyers—are
part and parcel of the gathering of techniques. Each of the essays in this Focus section
shows this major shift in our understanding of technological things; it was also strikingly
revealed in 2003 when, after the explosion of the shuttle Columbia, hundreds of hithertounknown
actors had to be drawn into the discussion—a legal dispute, a “thing” in the
etymological sense.3 Suddenly, everyone discovered that the shuttle was actually encased
in an organization, NASA, and that many “parts” of Columbia could not be seen in an
Ortega-style exploded view of the shuttle. And yet those parts were indeed elements of
the process of assembly necessary for the final assemblage of parts to function safely. But
no more than the stakeholders in so many of the projects reviewed by Bijker did they have
any way to be literally “drawn together” within the conventions of technical representation
now entrenched into CAD digital files.
AT: Revolution/Heidegger
Escape, rejection and change are mirages- we have never
escaped.
Bruno Latour prof at Paris Institute of Political Studies “A Plea for Earthly Sciences” Keynote address at
the British Sociological Association annual meeting in London 2007
“What has this to do”, you could object, “with the topic of the social sciences? No matter how you define
what humans do, sociologists can still study their shifting ‘identities’, their moving ‘technologies’, their
newly formed ‘relationships’. ‘Social connections’ will always be ‘social connections’.” Not necessarily,
and this is where I want to enter more deeply —and may be too polemically— into the topic: the whole
idea of “social connections” was linked to a moment in history, that of modernization and of emancipation.
What happens if we have shifted to another period, one of explicitation and of attachments? Since “we
have never been modern”, we have always been living through a completely different history than the one
we kept telling ourselves about: until the ecological crisis began to strike hard and tough, we could go on as
though “we” humans were living through one modernization after another, jumping from one emancipation
to the next. After all, the future was one of greater and greater detachment from all sorts of contingencies
and cumbersome ties. Free at last! What happens to our identities, if it finally dawns on us that that very
same history always had another meaning: the slow explicitation of all of the attachments necessary for the
sustenance of our fragile spheres of existence? What happens if the very definition of the future has
changed? If we now move from the taken into account of a few beings, to the weaving of careful
attachments with an ever greater and greater list of explicitated beings? Attached at last! Dependent!
Responsible! Is it at all imaginable that the “social sciences” could have the same agenda, the same
methods, the same calling, in both cases? If modernization was for humans, explicitation is for… for
whom? what would be a good name? “Post-human” will not do, but why not using that word that science-
fiction writers have used all along, yes that of Earthlings? After all, if Lovelock is even one bit right, it’s
fitting to call those who have waged wars on Gaia, Earthlings. What I am saying, to put it too bluntly, is
that while we might have had social sciences for modernizing and emancipating humans, we have not the
faintest idea of what sort of social science is needed for Earthlings buried in the task of explicitating their
newly discovered attachments. If modernization has been a parenthesis, for what happens next we are sent
back to the design table. I surmise that’s why we have been assembled here today.
The negative does not get links to the case- talking about materiality through a
governmental technique does not entail the vissicitudes of material relationships and
instrumental rationality. On your best day your links foreclose art, science, religion
and politics.
Back to Tarde, or rather to ANT: take for instance the law (Tarde by the way was been a
judge most of his career). Forget about explaining the solidity of legal ties by appealing to some
extraneous force, for instance society itself. Follow in details, for instance in a court of law, as I
have done with the French Conseil d’Etat, or as Mike Lynch has done with DNA fingerprinting,
the sort of objectivity it provides between scattered elements: common sense reasoning, results
from instruments, precedents, legal documents, signatures, etc. If you do this, you might end up
focusing on a type of connector that is not social (social n°1) to be sure, but that does connect in a
thoroughly original way. Whenever we sign our name at the bottom of a document, we link
words and deeds through a type of attachment that is typical of legal connection. Whenever a
lawyer tries out possible gaps in the “chain of custody” that guarantees, through many layers of
paper works, that a DNA sample pertains indeed to this or that suspect, we witness a sort of
objectivity that deserves to be treated with extreme care, and not explained (that is, explained
away) by saying that, if its strong and durable, it means that social forces have taken over. No,
it’s just the opposite: a large part of what we mean by being “socially durable” is to be tied by
that sort of fragile and yet wholly original legal ties: I am responsible for what I have done,
precedents carry some weight, the law binds. It does not bind socially, it binds legally.
The same is true, as is well known now through the efforts of the STS community, if, instead
of to law, we were paying attention to techniques. Techniques don’t form a cold domain of
material relations wholly divorced from the rest of the collective. It does not form an
infrastructure under our feet nor is it a mere background for the exercise of our freedom. If you
take the example of the container so beautifully studied by Marc Levinson, it becomes very
quickly clear that a large part of what we mean by “global” depends on the invention of that
box. To use the title of this book, the container is “the box that made the world smaller and the
world economy bigger”. But nowhere in the book do you have a technique on the one hand,
and a society on the other. And for one good reason: the container is entirely a logistical
invention with a very few “harder” parts —like the cranes or the holding gears. The spread of
the container depends just as much on legal litigation, accounting procedures, ship design, labor
relations among dock workers unions, harbor redevelopment, and so on. In other words,
whenever a technology is considered, it becomes an assemblage of complex heterogeneous

threads. And yet, there is a type of connection that can truly be called technical: that is when
non-humans are brought in, aligned and black-boxed in such a way that they provide some sort
of durable objectivity. This is why it’s so moot to try to provide a social explanation (still social
n°1) of the spread of a technique, since a large part of what is meant by being durably associated
is made, in the first place, by the weaving of those very technical ties.
And I could have multiplied the examples, by taking, for instance, science or religion, or art,
or politics. Each of those words designate specific modes of connection that cannot be explained
by the other. If you had the patience to listen to the last two cases, law and technique, you will
have noticed that I ended up each case with the same lesson: the durability of the associations is
due to the ways laws and techniques connect. It’s not because they are social that they last, but
because the collective relies in part on the legal and technical ways to form a durable sphere. In
a way, this is not surprising since (at least according to ANT) society, or rather the collective, is
the consequence of all the different types of association —and not its cause.
Revolution, Heidegger and most other critiques that rely on some kind of concrete
political formation.
I will close this lecture with a strange paradox: never was the need for radical social sciences
more pressing than it is today, and yet this is just the time when the lines of columnists in the
Western world, especially in France, are complaining about the abandonment of “utopian
ideals”, the demise of “revolutionary impulses”, the fall back into complacency, the final victory
of neo-liberalism; this is just the time when the task that lies ahead is not only “revolutionary”
but of truly “earth-shaking proportion” —and remember, all of those expressions are now literal
not metaphorical. We have managed to shake the Earth out of balance for good!
Think of it: what was the storming of the Winter Palace, compared to the total
transformation of our landscape, cities, factories, transportation system for which we will have to
gird ourselves after the Oil Peak? How ridiculously timid does Karl Marx’s preoccupation with
the mere “appropriation of means of production” seem, when compared against the total
metamorphosis of all of the very means of production necessary to adjust 9 Billion people on a
livable planet Earth? Every product, every biological species, every packaging, every consumer
in excruciating detail is concerned in this, together with every river, every glaciers, and every
bug —even the earthworms have to be brought in according to a recent article in the New
Scientist! We knew about Darwin’s work on earthworms, but where could you find, before today,
a Marxist view of earthworms? I know Marx’s salutation: “Well done, old mole”, yes, but, as far
as I know, he never said “Be careful with earthworms!”.
It’s now painfully clear that communism was never more than capitalism’s abundance
pushed to the power. How unimaginative was such an idea, compared to the modification of all
the sinews and corridors of what abundance and wealth should be, from now on! Which
communist could think that the day would come when they would have to devise a politics for
the Gulf Stream? The Gulf Stream, for Goodness sake! And yet it might fail you (and then this
place will be under water and probably frozen too!). Yet this is just the time when activists and
politicians, pundits and intellectuals, complain about the “ends of utopias” and the
disappearance of “les maîtres penseurs”…
No wonder, the travails of explicitation have nothing in common with the naïve dreams of
emancipation. But they are radical nonetheless, they are our future nonetheless. Don’t fool
yourselves: explicitation is a much tougher task than the “business as usual” of the modernizing
revolutionaries. There are more Third Ways than even New Labor and Tony Giddens could
ever envisage…
Who are you really, Earthlings, to believe that you are the ones adding relations by the sheer
symbolic order of your mind, by the projective power of your brain, by the sheer intensity of
your social schemes, to a world entirely devoid of meaning, of relations, of connections?! Where
have you lived until now? Oh I know, you have lived into this strange modernist utterly archaic
globe; and suddenly [under crisis] you realize that all along you have been inhabiting the Earth.
It’s as if you had changed space and time, past, present and future. Can we reequip our
window of opportunity, less than forty three years to go… So now let’s get on with the social, I
mean the earthly sciences.
AT: Rejection Alternatives

We must reconfigure waste within the dialectic
As a discursive construct, as a concrete entity, as a political, economic and health
issue, waste is overdetermined. And in the grand scheme of things, the dumping problems
of a small-town or even big-city mayor pale in comparison to those of the Department of
Energy with thousands of tons of high-level radioactive waste on its hands. And the future
political struggles to which interstate waste disposal portend will be small next to those now
emerging from numerous communities of "downwinders" who suffer the devastating health
effects of chemical and nuclear pollution. The moral, economic and political panics that
circle the landfills, chemical and nuclear dumps (like so many seagulls) are by no
means unwarranted. The mountains of trash outside every city and town begin to
signify the historical limits of industrialization. Waste appears as the historical
horizon of late, consumer capitalism, it is a central component of an ecological
threshold that implies, perhaps even demands, socio-historical transition. To begin
to model this threshold and locate its singular crises, we need to fully engage that
which is repressed, set aside and disposed of--and yet at the same time imposes
itself on the social body, leaks back and will not go away. In his concise interpretation
of Benjamin's contribution to dialectics, Theodor Adorno offers theoretical justification for such
a project:
knowledge ... should also address itself to those things which were not embraced by
this dynamic, which fell by the wayside--what might be called the waste products
and blind spots that have escaped the dialectic... What transcends the ruling society is
not only the potentiality it develops but also all that which did not fit properly into the laws of
historical movement. Theory must needs deal with cross-grained, opaque, unassimilated
material, which as such admittedly has from the start an anachronistic quality, but is not
wholly obsolete since it has outwitted the historical dynamic. (151)
So the point is to bring waste, along with its containment and disposal, back into
the dialectic: to posit waste as a theoretical/philosophical category through which
to (re)define the process of capitalist, industrial production. Waste is that which is
severed from the social body--but it can be folded it back into discursive and
material economies to displace and mobilize their terms of demarcation, offering a
re-vision of their limits and crises. This has been the strategic contribution of green
politics in which I locate this work: to figure waste into the rational economy, to count
the costs of disposal in the economy of industrial production, to posit waste within
the overdetermined, master or meta-crisis of late modernity.
AT: Disadvantages
This prioritization of survival makes possible a foreign policy of human rights that
is ultimately authoritatian by focusing on the right to life. This prioritization of the
right to life within rights makes biopolitics look apolitical by making survival THE
central task of policymaking
Ulrike Kistner, Department of Comparative Literature, University of the Witwatersrand 5/11/04
(http://wiserweb.wits.ac.za/PDF%20Files/biopolitics%20-%20kirstner.PDF)
p. 3-5
While acknowledging a multiplicity of actors and forms of power, I would like to point to a new role of the
State in the arena of health and medicine that simultaneously recurs on the oldest documented notions of
sovereignty. These entail the power over life and death, and the assertion of human rights in their originary
sense: the right to and protection of life and security of the person. Both the principle of sovereignty and
the originary conception of rights will have to be unearthed from layers of modernisation, secularisation
and interiorisation which have obscured their constitutive role in relation to society.5
Bio-power and bio-politics
The locus classicus for a historical analysis of power in matters of bio-politics is to be found in the writings
of Michel Foucault on clinical medicine, sexuality, war, race and class. I would like to revisit some of their
main points in order to show their possibilities and limitations for the analysis of power in these domains.
Their limitations are productive in showing up some of the specificities of modi operandi of bio-politics
and racism in colonial and post-colonial contexts. Their internal limitations, I would want to argue, arise to
some extent from abandoning the sphere of the political, if not committing politicide altogether, by
dismissing the principle of sovereignty and its important role within an analysis of power. The disavowal of
sovereignty, I think, is what produces incomprehension at the South African government’s stance on
HIV/AIDS. Put the other way round: re-instituting the principle of sovereignty within an analysis of power,
and of bio-politics in particular, would allow us to understand this policy not simply as a matter of state
oppression and presidential lunacy, but as definitive of a new way of exercising political power in matters
of life and death – a type of power that we can ill afford to ignore in our contestations. To provide an
argument for the continued validity of the principle of sovereignty as a criterion in the analysis of power, I
would have to embark on a genealogical/historical excursion, and explore the external and internal limits of
the domain of power as described by Michel Foucault. Of particular interest will be the place of racially
defined antagonism, of racial categorisations and racism. In exploring the internal limits of Foucault’s
analysis of power, I will point to different lineages of racism, and to paradoxes of colonial power that are
anathema to the account of modern power and the method of analysing it, as proposed by Foucault. In
exploring the external limits of Foucault’s analysis of power, I will look at the disavowal of the principle of
sovereignty, and the theoretical and political possibilities afforded by its re-inscription. In one of the main
lines of his genealogy, Foucault outlines different modes power at the level of the body, which can broadly
be summarised as follows:
-Bio-power, defined as discipline extended across the individual body
- Regularisation, normalisation, stretching from the individual body to the population
- Bio-politics defined as regulatory controls over the life of the species, or over particular
collectivities.
In a revolutionised regime of power in the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century, Foucault
claims, power was brought to bear on the individual body by means of disciplining. In medicine, this
corresponded to the predominance of the anatomo-politics of the human body. Health interventions were
made at the level of the body, and of the conduct of everyday life. Thus, medicine assumed a normative
posture in defining standards for physical and moral life-conduct of the individual in relation to society.
With this shift, the task of doctors became socially defined. Disciplinary measures were taken to control
and channel the functions of the body socially and politically - initially in the delimited domains of schools,
hospitals, military barracks and artisans’ workshops (1999: 288, 290, 289, 75; see also 1976: 34).
At the end of the eighteenth century, Foucault shows, a new form of bio-power emerged: that of
regularisation and normalisation. Its field of application was no longer the individual body, but that of the
life of the species. The norm was made to circulate between discipline and regulation, pertaining to both
individual body and population. Intersecting and operating in tandem with discipline, regulation according
to norms managed to take charge of individual and collective life; “it was able to cover the entire surface
that stretched from the organic to the biological, from the body to the population, by a double play of
technologies of discipline on the one hand, of technologies of regulation on the other” (1991: 51).6
At the intersection between bio-power (disciplining of the individual body) and bio- politics (regularisation
and regulation extending from the body to the population), “sex became a crucial target of a power
organized around the management of life rather than the menace of death”. “Sex was a means of access
both to the life of the body and the life of the species. It was employed as a standard for the disciplines and
as a basis of regulation.” (1985: 146) Since the nineteenth century, sexuality became the object of both
individual and public health, insofar as it signifies the juncture between individual pathology and pathology
of the species, the juncture between the individual body and the population, between disciplinary regimes
made to pertain to the individual body, and the biological regulation of the collective ([1976] 1992: 31).
Correspondingly, women’s bodies were medicalised, on account of their capacity to bear children, and “in
the name of the responsibility they owed to the health of their children, the solidity of the family institution
and the safeguarding of society” (1985: 147). Regulatory controls were extended over the life of the
species. From the end of the eighteenth century, Foucault demonstrates, “[medicine] takes its place in that
borderline, but for modern man paramount, area where a certain organic, unruffled, sensory happiness
communicates by right with the order of a nation, the rigour of its armies, the fertility of its people, and the
patient advance of its labours” (1976: 34-35). Bio-politics is a kind of bio- power that seizes hold of
collectivities, constituting them as ‘the people’, ‘the nation’, ‘the race’, ‘the species’ ([1976] 1992: 30).
Regulatory mechanisms, such as health interventions, were placed under the auspices of the state, and
directed at the population as a whole: housing policy, systems of health insurance, pensions, rules of public
hygiene, measures to ensure longevity and optimal health, child care, and compulsory schooling (1999:
289-290). In the process, medicine attained a strong link to public hygiene. As health care delivery is co-
ordinated and centralised, society is medicalised (1992: 31) and medicine is socialised.
AT: Disadvantages
The apocalyptic mindset pervades the debate activity. Securitization parallels the narrative pleasure
we get from reading impacts from nuclear war to the aliens. This process turns the subject, whether
it be debaters or the American population, into apocalyptic bodies whose lives have meaning only
insofar as they achieve ultimate health.
Elana Gomel, Head of English Dept @ Tel Aviv University, Winter 2000
Twentieth Century Literature Vol 46

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0403/is_4_46/ai_75141042)
In the secular apocalyptic visions that have proliferated wildly in the last 200 years, the world has been
destroyed by nuclear wars, alien invasions, climatic changes, social upheavals, meteor strikes, and
technological shutdowns.
These baroque scenarios are shaped by the eroticism of disaster. The apocalyptic desire that finds
satisfaction in elaborating fictions of the End is double-edged. On the one hand, its ultimate object is some
version of the crystalline New Jerusalem, an image of purity so absolute that it denies the organic
messiness of life. [1] On the other hand, apocalyptic fictions typically linger on pain and suffering. The end
result of apocalyptic purification often seems of less importance than the narrative pleasure derived from
the bizarre and opulent tribulations of the bodies being burnt by fire and brimstone, tormented by scorpion
stings, trodden like grapes in the winepress.
In this interplay between the incorporeal purity of the ends and the violent corporeality of the means the
apocalyptic body is born. It is a body whose mortal sickness is a precondition of ultimate health, whose
grotesque and excessive sexuality issues in angelic sexlessness, and whose torture underpins a painless--
and lifeless--millennium.
The apocalyptic body is perverse, points out Tina Pippin, unstable and mutating from maleness to
femaleness and back again, purified by the sadomasochistic "bloodletting on the cross," trembling in abject
terror while awaiting an unearthly consummation (122). But most of all it is a suffering body, a text written
in the script of stigmata, scars, wounds, and sores. Any apocalypse strikes the body politic like a disease,
progressing from the first symptoms of a large-scale disaster through the crisis of the tribulation to the
recovery of the millennium. But of all the Four Horsemen, the one whose ride begins most intimately, in
the private travails of individual flesh, and ends in the devastation of the entire community, is the last one,
Pestilence. The contagious body is the most characteristic modality of apocalyptic corporeality. At the
same time, I will argue, it contains a counterapocalyptic potential, resisting the dangerous lure of Endism,
the ideologically potent combination of "apocalyptic terror", a nd "millennial perfection" (Quinby 2).
This essay, a brief sketch of the poetics and politics of the contagious body, does not attempt a
comprehensive overview of the historical development of the trope of pestilence. Nor does it limit itself to
a particular disease, along the lines of Susan Sontag's classic delineation of the poetics of TB and many
subsequent attempts to develop a poetics of AIDS. Rather, my focus is on the general narrativity of
contagion and on the way the plague-stricken body is manipulated within the overall plot of apocalyptic
millennialism, which is a powerful ideological current in twentieth-century political history, embracing
such diverse manifestations as religious fundamentalism, Nazism, and other forms of "radical desperation"
(Quinby 4--5). Thus, I consider both real and imaginary diseases, focusing on the narrative construction of
the contagious body rather than on the precise epidemiology of the contagion.
All apocalyptic and millenarian ideologies ultimately converge on the utopian transformation of the body
(and the body politic) through suffering. But pestilence offers a uniquely ambivalent modality of corporeal
apocalypse. On the one hand, it may be appropriated to the standard plot of apocalyptic purification as a
singularly atrocious technique of separating the damned from the saved. Thus, the plague becomes a
metaphor for genocide, functioning as such both in Mein Kampf and in Gamus's The Plague.[2] On the
other hand, the experience of a pandemic undermines the giddy hopefulness of Endism. Since everybody is
a potential victim, the line between the pure and the impure can never be drawn with any precision. Instead
of delivering the climactic moment of the Last Judgment, pestilence lingers on, generating a limbo of
common suffering in which a tenuous and moribund but all-embracing body politic springs into being. The
end is indefinitely postponed and the disease becomes a metaphor for the process of livi ng. The finality of
mortality clashes with the duration of morbidity.
AT: Disadvantages
With the advent of technological inventions that have cost more lives than any war,
we must question whether the end of technology is total comfort or total danger
Ernst Junger German writer and literary critic. New German Critique, Spring/Summer 1993 Issue 59, p27,
6p; http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdf?vid=6&hid=22&sid=7e46d1a0-0c15-4390-8022-fcf8de8c131b
%40SRCSM2
Precisely for this reason, however, the tasks that order must accomplish have become
much more comprehensive than before; these tasks have to be performed where danger is
not the exception, but is constantly present. As an example of this the police force might
be mentioned. It has transformed itself from a group of civil servants into a formation that
already greatly resembles a military unit. Likewise the various large parties acknowledge
the need to adopt means of power that express the fact that the battle of opinions will not
be decided solely through votes and programs but also by the stalwarts committed to
march in support of those programs. Such facts are in no way to be isolated and regarded
as a temporary or transient change in the political landscape. Nor can the inclination to
danger be overlooked in intellectual endeavors, and it is unmistakable that new forms of
the volcanic spirit are at work. Phenomena like modern atomic theory, glacial
cosmogony, the introduction of the concept of mutation into zoology all point clearly,
completely apart from their truth content, to how strongly the spirit is beginning to
partake of explosive events. The history of inventions also raises ever more clearly the
question of whether a space of absolute comfort or a space of absolute danger is the final
aim concealed in technology. Completely apart from the circumstance that scarcely a
machine, scarcely a science has ever existed which did not fulfill, directly or indirectly,
dangerous functions in the war, inventions like the automobile engine have already
resulted in greater losses than any war, be it ever so bloody.
AT: Disadvantages
Put away your tired disadvantages- the refinement of the absolute distinction
between danger and salvation allows a technological threat to roam freely across the
earth. The catastrophe produced by the epistemology of the status quo is far more of
a threat than your disad.
Ernst Junger German writer and literary critic. New German Critique, Spring/Summer 1993 Issue 59, p27,
6p; http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdf?vid=6&hid=22&sid=7e46d1a0-0c15-4390-8022-fcf8de8c131b
%40SRCSM2
What especially characterizes the era in which we find ourselves, into which we enter more deeply with
every passing day, is the close relationship that exists between danger and order. It may be expressed in this
way: danger appears merely as the other side of our order. The whole is more or less equivalent to our
image of the atom, which is utterly mobile and utterly constant. The secret concealed within is a new and
different return to nature; it is the fact that we are simultaneously civilized and barbaric, that we have
approached the elemental without having sacrificed the acuity of our consciousness. Thus does the path
through which danger has penetrated our life present itself as twofold. It has intruded upon us first of all out
or an arena in which nature is still more vital. Things, "the likes of which were only possible in South
America," are now familiar to us. The distinction is that danger, from a romantic dimension, has in this way
become real. Secondly, however, we are sending danger back out over the globe in a new form.
This new form of danger appears in the closest connection having been made between elemental events and
consciousness. The elemental is eternal: as people have always found themselves in passionate struggle
with things, animals, or other people, as is the case today. The particular characteristic of our era, however,
is precisely that all this transpires in the presence of the most acute consciousness. This finds expression
above all in the circumstance that in all of these conflicts the most powerful servant of consciousness, the
machine, is always present. Thus does humanity's eternal struggle with the elemental nature of the sea
present itself in the temporal form of a supremely complicated mechanical contrivance. Thus does the
battle appear as a process during which the armored engine moves fighting men through the sea, over land,
or into the air. Thus does the daily accident itself, with which our newspapers are tilled, appear nearly
exclusively as a catastrophe of a technological type.
Beyond all this the wonder of our world, at once sober and dangerous,
is the registration of the moment in which the danger transpires -- a
registration that is moreover accomplished whenever it does not
capture human consciousness immediately, by means of machines.
One needs no prophetic talent to predict that soon any given event will
be there to see or to hear in any given place. Already today there is
hardly an event of human significance toward which the artificial eye
of civilization, the photographic lens, is not directed. The result is often
pictures of demoniacal precision through which humanity's new relation
to danger becomes visible in an exceptional fashion. One has to
recognize that it is a question here much less of the peculiarity of new
tools than of a new style that makes use of technological tools. The
change becomes illuminating in the investigation of the change in tools
that have long been at our disposal, such as language. Although our
time produces little in the way of literature in the old sense, much of
significance is accomplished through objective reports of experience.
Our time is prompted by human need -- which explains, among other
things, the success of war literature. We already possess a new style of
language, one which gradually becomes visible from underneath the
language of the bourgeois epoch. The same, however, is true of our
style altogether; it is reminiscent of the tact that the automobile was
for a long time constructed in the form of a horse-drawn coach, or that
a wholly different society has already long since established itself
beneath the surface of bourgeois society. As during the inflation, we
continue for a time to spend the usual coins, without sensing that the
rate of exchange is no longer the same.
In this sense, it may be said that we have already plunged deeply into
new, more dangerous realms, without our being conscious of them.
AT: Speaking For Others

We can rally around discussions of wounded and afflicted people to transform
power relations.
Peter Covillo professor at Boudin “Agonizing Affection” Early American literature 2002
Is it possible anymore to imagine the shape and substance of American nationality, and of the bonds that
comprise it, in the absence of visions of trauma, woundedness, suffering, and bereavement? Does the ideal
of national cohesion have any more prominent form of expression in America than the language of affect,
of impassioned feeling, proper to scenes of tragic severance and loss? We do not, of course, come by these
matters as innocently as once we might have. But even before the events of 11 September 2001 gave these
once-academic questions such horrific resonance, a number of critics had observed the strangely insistent
correlation, in the American context, of national belonging and something like devastation. Writing in
1988, for instance, Mark Seltzer described the contemporary American scene as a “wound culture.” “The
contemporary public sphere,” he writes, “represents itself to itself, from the art and culture scenes to tabloid
and talk TV, as a culture of suffering, states of injury, and wounded attachments” (254). He goes on to
describe the peculiar “sociality of the wound,” arguing that in wound culture, “one discovers the sociality
that gathers, and the public that meets, in the spectacle of the untoward accident: the pathological public
sphere” (278). Similarly, Lauren Berlant has argued that in a much broader swath of American liberal
democracy, ranging across centuries, subjects have been bound to the nation “through a universalist
rhetoric not of citizenship per se but of the capacity for suffering and trauma at the citizen's core” (“Poor
Eliza” 636). The sense of belonging that results, Berlant suggests, “involves a fantasy scene of national
feeling”: “In this imaginary world,” she writes, “the sentimental subject is connected to others who share
the same feeling” (“Poor Eliza” 646). Woundedness, suffering, trauma: the modern citizens these critics
evoke are less “subjects of violence” than of feeling: convulsed and, in turn, galvanized in a sense of
collectivity by their shared emotional responses to the suffering before them.[ 1]
From one angle, everything about these dynamics seems relentlessly modern, as contemporary as the new
millennial rhetoric of war, or the still-otherwordly moving images of airplanes diving into skyscrapers. But
we deceive ourselves if we imagine our present fascination with the nation's affective states to be some
strictly latter-day declension—a fall from a more vigorously conceived ideal of national citizenship into an
often mawkish or opportunist sentiment. As it happens, the question of affect, impassioned feeling, and
American nationality has a startlingly long history, one that stretches back as far as the Puritans, and
animates with particular vibrancy the era of the nation's founding, when the matter of affect and its place in
civic life became the source of a remarkable degree of contention and volatility. That era, and the volatility
that courses through its political and literary accounts of affect, will be my primary object of study in this
essay. But in a curious and sometimes unsettling way, my own sense of its defining dynamics has been
ghosted throughout by questions and concerns that, in our present moment, seem anything but antiquated.
We may now find ourselves speaking with new urgency about war and bereavement, collective affect and
the fate of the nation; but it is a conversation that, as I hope to show, precedes us by centuries.
AT: Speaking For Others
We digest your Rorty arguments in ways you cannot yet understand- a national
identity predicated on affective solidarity achieves our country
Peter Covillo professor at Boudin “Agonizing Affection” Early American literature 2002
Such speculation, whatever its plausibility, does not finally make Jefferson's dismissal of Wheatley any less
ungenerous, unfair, or unbecomingly prejudiced. Wheatley was not the countess of Huntingdon after all,
and it would be capriciously unjust to hang upon her invocation of “feeling hearts” all the burdens and
consequences, civic as well as theological, of a sentimental practice which both pre-dates her and comes to
flourish well after her untimely death in 1784. Still, the patterns of affinity and disavowal that crisscross the
works of Jefferson and Wheatley show us in some detail the ramifying complexities of the question of
affect and its place in the civic life of early America. More particularly, they show us some of the
difficulties and perplexities involved in the endeavor to imagine for the new nation a kind of coherence,
and for its citizens a kind of mutuality, that might prove sustaining. For affect, as I have tried to show, takes
its place in early America at the center of what was, crucially, a dream of fellowship, of some manner of
bond that would make kin of strangers, and in so doing distinguish the American collectivity—as well as
the whole of the American project, with its proliferating utopias and endless betrayals—from anything else
in the world. It is a model of national belonging by no means peculiar to Jefferson, but one he found
particularly useful when drawing up the document that would advertise, before the world, the American
claim to coherence, autonomy, and distinction. That document, with its measured intermixing of languages
both mechanistically rationalist and demonstrably affective, reminds us still again that the early American
republic was not, even for the Enlightenment thinkers whose creation it was, a realm from which
impassioned feeling was meant to be expelled. Like many other myths of our founding, this one seems
impelled by a too-credulous reading of Federalist reaction.[ 17] But the voices of Phillis Wheatley and
Thomas Jefferson (to name only two) tell a different story of early American civic life. In their story a
particular intensity of feeling—an intensity of bereavement—translates into a peculiar kind of mutuality, an
attachment to distant others. And it is this far-flung affective mutuality which, for them as for many others
to follow, is the stuff and substance of American nationality.
AT: State Bad Critiques

Foucault and Agamben critiques deployed in debate bring the
sovereign in the back door and are depoliticizing.
Ulrike Kistner, Department of Comparative Literature, University of the Witwatersrand 5/11/04
(http://wiserweb.wits.ac.za/PDF%20Files/biopolitics%20-%20kirstner.PDF)
p. 10-13
However, this is not simply a matter of a limited domain of application of Foucault’s notion of power. The
internal limitation is framed by an external one, which is shared by his postcolonial adepts. What
conditions the internal limitation, I would want to argue, is a theoretical disavowal. This becomes evident
in his frequent denunciation of historiographies and explanations focussing on the pole of sovereign power,
jurisdiction, law and the state: “In order to conduct a concrete analysis of the relations of power, we must
abandon the juridical model of sovereignty.” (Foucault 1982: 15). Instead, he postulates an immanent
description within an approach “which is more empirical, more directly related to our present situation, and
which implies more relations between theory and practice” (15). It is worth examining what happens in the
process of this methodological move. The principle of sovereignty, the generating principle of society, and
the source of the law are discursive limits insofar as they refer to the transcendental locus of power which,
in modern democracies, cannot be usurped by anyone, but which has to remain empty of concrete
manifestations. As such, it performs an epistemological and a political role. It allows for a transcendental
analysis of power that does not become complicit with the description of particular ruses of power. In
postulating an immanent description of the circulation of power, Foucault relinquishes this critical
possibility, and concretises the necessarily empty locus of power, to detrimental theoretical-political effect.
He erases the political ontology of the social.10 And in reducing the political to the ways of its functioning
within society, he Bio-Politics in South Africa 13 rids his account of power of its status as genealogy. For if
power becomes immanent to the state, its discourses and institutions extending state power into the arena of
the social where it becomes unrecognisable as such, there cannot be any knowledge production
independently of it, and the ground for any critique is lost (see Tobias 1998: 227). However, “to negate the
political does not make it disappear, it only leads to bewilderment in the face of its manifestations and to
impotence in dealing with them” (Mouffe 1993: 149). Modern democracies marked by disembodied power
have difficulties in confronting sovereign power, while at the same time, they cannot think politics free
from it, and from the form of the state (see Agamben 1998: 109). In concretising the transcendental locus
of power, Foucault is depriving his analysis of any way of accounting for instances of sovereign power
where they occur in modernity. It is thus not co-incidental that the acolytes of Foucault’s writings on power
have remained largely blind to the strange twists by which he has to concede a continued role for sovereign
power after having concretised it and thereby declared it out of existence (or rather, out of
philosophical/theoretical purchase). Having capitulated to the concrete, there are strange leftovers in
Foucault’s descriptions of state power and racism that remain the oretically orphaned. Nowhere is this more
apparent than in his statements on fascist racism and on the holocaust – i.e. in relation to those events
which cannot be accounted for by the immanent description of normalising bio-power-cum-bio-politics,
where there is clearly an intrusion of sovereign power into the biological domains of modern power: 11
“The Nazi state has brought a notion of life, which it made its task to improve, protect, to guarantee, and to
biologically cultivate, to coincide in every respect with the right of sovereignty – the unreserved right to
kill, not only the others, but even its own” (1992: 147; see also 1999: 301). Despite the fact that Foucault
attempts to subordinate sovereign power to bio-politics (pointing to the fact that in biologised racism, the
other is being killed in the name of strengthening, purifying, and promoting the health and well-being of the
species -life defined as worthy of preserving and promoting), it rears its head (literally) again and again.
Biologised state racism, for Foucault, introduces “… a fundamental division between those who must live
and those who must die” (1991: 53). More explicitly bringing in the principle of sovereignty through the
back door, he elaborates on the notion of state racism in a contradictory statement: The specificity of
modern racism … is not tied to mentalities, ideologies, to the deceits of power. It is linked to the
technology of power … to that which places us far from the war of races and this intelligibility of history:
to a mechanism that permits biopower to exercise itself. Racism is tied to the functioning of a State that is
compelled to use race, the elimination of races and the purification of the race to exercise it sovereign
power. (1991: 56-57)
10 This move has been definitive for Foucault’s ‘politicide’, which, it has been argued, has rendered him a
naturalist (Rudi Visker). He misses the point of symbolisation – the civil imaginary – as that which
accompanies the disincorporation of the body of the king in democracy. The empty place of power is being
continuously ritualised through the continued symbolic efficacy of the memory of the principle of
sovereignty.
11 This is how Foucault contrastively defines sovereign power and modern power in matters of the body
and of life: The power of sovereignty before the nineteenth century held the right to violence, the right of
death and the power over life, and the power to make die and let live (1992: 28). Modern power, in
contrast,
is put at the service of life – to make live and let die; to ensure, maintain, or develop the life of the social
body (1985: 136); to “intervene in the making of life, in the manner of living, in ‘how’ to live” (1991: 46);
to
allow for the entry of life into history. Modern power is situated and exercised at the level of life: the
species,
the race, the population. Correspondingly, the role of medical interventions is to ensure, sustain, and
multiply
life (1992: 30).
Negative Framework Censors Poop Discussion
____ Poop censorship pervades the public sphere

Persels and Ganim, Associate Professor of French at the University of South Carolina
and sociate Professor of French and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages at the
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, in 2004
Jeff and Russell,
http://www.poopreport.com/Academic/Content/Fecalmatters/fecalmatters.html, October
5
The 'civilizing process' here becomes synonymous with the rigorous public and
private effort to distance oneself from one's own excrement, the sight and smell of
which grow proportionally offensive. That offense transfers easily to those words
and images that represent that sight and smell, resulting in as much discomfort with
scatology as with the excretory experience itself. Rabelais's 'bathroom humor' becomes
the cause of an embarrassed snicker, the object of academic dismissal, the reason we read
him in private but gloss over the 'dirty bits' in public. All the more so as he, like many of
his contemporaries treated in this anthology, has the vexing habit of mixing an altior
sensus with the quest for a perfect asswipe. Much Early Modern vernacular art and
literature is disorderly, is unclean, is thus 'dangerous,' subversive, and is in need of the
neo-Classical bath it will receive in subsequent centuries.
_____ Impact: They render life valueless. Poop is the most important site for
meaning and truth.
Persels and Ganim, Associate Professor of French at the University of South Carolina
and sociate Professor of French and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages at the
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, in 2004
Jeff and Russell,
http://www.poopreport.com/Academic/Content/Fecalmatters/fecalmatters.html, October
5
Worthy children of a Classical, Romantic and, most tellingly, bourgeois aesthetic, we can
hardly be blamed for several centuries of discomfort, in both our teaching and our
writing, when faced with works that deal with that last taboo, what Victor Hugo
evocatively called the 'last veil' clouding our vision of the truth. Sexuality in all its
myriad forms has long been the darling of academic readers, a once marginalized,
now legitimate field of critical investigation, commentary and theory building.
Scatology, however, arguably an even more universal function than sexuality, still
retains the power to make us blush, to provoke shame and embarrassment.
Discussion of excrement is generally relegated to one of two extremes: the objective,
clinical discourse of medical and social sciences (e.g., gastroenterology, psychology,
anthropology) or the subjective, gross indecency of infantile insult or juvenile jest (e.g.,
South Park).

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Patrick, Sydnie, Taylor and Lillian

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Balibar, Professor of Philosophy, 2004

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2. In the “South,” it involves destroying and inverting the

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Slavoj Zizek traveling professor, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle 2004

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Dave Praeger 2007

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3. Empirical Solvency from King County Washington. You lose.

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AT: Not Enough Poop

Dave Prager Poop Culture 2007

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3. Biomass energy plants can incorporate multiple types of

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AT: Not Enough Energy from the Poop

Dave Praeger 2007 POOP CULTURE How America Is Shaped By Its

maneuvers by oil companies to prevent loss of market share.

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AT: SO2 Screw

Because of the variability of animal manure, it is often

desirable to mix it with other less variable fuels for

which refers to mixing biomass and fossil fuels in

conventional power plants. Significant reductions

in emissions from sulfur dioxide (SO2) — an air

pollutant released when coal is burned) — are

achieved with co-firing systems in power plants that

use a small amount of coal as input fuel.

Small-scale studies at Texas A&M University show

that co-firing of manure with coal may also reduce

emissions from coal of nitrogen oxide (NOx), which

contributes to air pollution. This depends whether

the manure is injected at the proper location, such as

the secondary combustion chamber. There it serves as

Upon co-firing manure and

coal, NH3 is released from manure and combines with

NOx to produce harmless N and water.

AT: Not Enough Power

Gasification is the process by which carbonaceous

fuel (any fossil or biomass fuel consisting of /or

containing carbon) is converted to a useable gaseous