Negative 1nc

Liberalism

2ac – liberalism impact defense

Liberal universalism doesn’t explain global violence - their impact is ahistorical

Teschke, 11 - Department of International Relations, School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK (Benno, “Fatal attraction: a critique of Carl Schmitt’s international political and legal theory” International Theory (2011), 3:2, 179–227, doi:10.1017/S175297191100011X
For at the centre of the heterodox – partly post-structuralist, partly realist – neo-Schmittian analysis stands the conclusion of The Nomos: the thesis of a structural and continuous relation between liberalism and violence (Mouffe 2005, 2007; Odysseos 2007). It suggests that, in sharp contrast to the liberal-cosmopolitan programme of ‘perpetual peace’, the geographical expansion of liberal modernity was accompanied by the intensification and de-formalization of war in the international construction of liberal constitutional states of law and the production of liberal subjectivities as rights-bearing individuals. Liberal world-ordering proceeds via the conduit of wars for humanity, leading to Schmitt’s ‘spaceless universalism’. In this perspective, a straight line is drawn from WWI to the War on Terror to verify Schmitt’s long-term prognostic of the 20th century as the age of ‘neutralizations and de-politicizations’ (Schmitt 1993).

But this attempt to read the history of 20th century international relations in terms of a succession of confrontations between the carriernations of liberal modernity and the criminalized foes at its outer margins seems unable to comprehend the complexities and specificities of ‘liberal’ world-ordering, then and now. For in the cases of Wilhelmine, Weimar and fascist Germany, the assumption that their conflicts with the Anglo- American liberal-capitalist heartland were grounded in an antagonism between liberal modernity and a recalcitrant Germany outside its geographical and conceptual lines runs counter to the historical evidence. For this reading presupposes that late-Wilhelmine Germany was not already substantially penetrated by capitalism and fully incorporated into the capitalist world economy, posing the question of whether the causes of WWI lay in the capitalist dynamics of inter-imperial rivalry (Blackbourn and Eley 1984), or in processes of belated and incomplete liberal capitalist development, due to the survival of ‘re-feudalized’ elites in the German state classes and the marriage between ‘rye and iron’ (Wehler 1997). It also assumes that the late-Weimar and early Nazi turn towards the construction of an autarchic German regionalism – Mitteleuropa or Großraum – was not deeply influenced by the international ramifications of the 1929 Great Depression, but premised on a purely political– existentialist assertion of German national identity. Against a reading of the early 20th century conflicts between ‘the liberal West’ and Germany as ‘wars for humanity’ between an expanding liberal modernity and its political exterior, there is more evidence to suggest that these confrontations were interstate conflicts within the crisis-ridden and nationally uneven capitalist project of modernity.

Similar objections and caveats to the binary opposition between the Western discourse of liberal humanity against non-liberal foes apply to the more recent period. For how can this optic explain that the ‘liberal West’ coexisted (and keeps coexisting) with a large number of pliant authoritarian client-regimes (Mubarak’s Egypt, Suharto’s Indonesia, Pahlavi’s Iran, Fahd’s Saudi-Arabia, even Gaddafi’s pre-intervention Libya, to name but a few), which were and are actively managed and supported by the West as antiliberal Schmittian states of emergency, with concerns for liberal subjectivities and Human Rights secondary to the strategic interests of political and geopolitical stability and economic access? Even in the more obvious cases of Afghanistan, Iraq, and, now, Libya, the idea that Western intervention has to be conceived as an encounter between the liberal project and a series of foes outside its sphere seems to rely on a denial of their antecedent histories as geopolitically and socially contested state-building projects in pro-Western fashion, deeply co-determined by long histories of Western anti-liberal colonial and post-colonial legacies. If these states (or social forces within them) turn against their imperial masters, the conventional policy expression is ‘blowback’. And as the Schmittian analytical vocabulary does not include a conception of human agency and social forces – only friend/ enemy groupings and collective political entities governed by executive decision – it also lacks the categories of analysis to comprehend the social dynamics that drive the struggles around sovereign power and the eventual overcoming, for example, of Tunisian and Egyptian states of emergency without US-led wars for humanity. Similarly, it seems unlikely that the generic idea of liberal world-ordering and the production of liberal subjectivities can actually explain why Western intervention seems improbable in some cases (e.g. Bahrain, Qatar, Yemen or Syria) and more likely in others (e.g. Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya).

Liberal world-ordering consists of differential strategies of building, coordinating, and drawing liberal and anti-liberal states into the Western orbit, and overtly or covertly intervening and refashioning them once they step out of line. These are conflicts within a world, which seem to push the term liberalism beyond its original meaning. The generic Schmittian idea of a liberal ‘spaceless universalism’ sits uncomfortably with the realities of maintaining an America-supervised ‘informal empire’, which has to manage a persisting interstate system in diverse and case-specific ways. But it is this persistence of a worldwide system of states, which encase national particularities, which renders challenges to American supremacy possible in the first place.

1ar – liberalism impact defense

Liberalism is the best overall political system and constrains fundamentalist violence – their totalizing critique ignores the possibility of reform within liberalism.

Bowie and Simon, 8 - *professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota. Until his retirement in 2009 he was Elmer L Andersen Chair of Corporate Responsibility and served in the departments of strategic management and of philosophy AND ** (Norman and Robert, The Individual and the Political Order: An Introduction to Social and Political Philosophy, p. 199-202)
Implicit in much of the work of Young is a concern that Native Americans, African Americans, and women have been marginalized in modern liberal democratic societies and that impartiality is in some way the cause of the marginalization. Even if the marginalization claim is partially true, we doubt that the liberal emphasis on impartiality leads to viewing all problems from one perspective, that of the dominant. Impartiality properly applied requires each of us to consider the viewpoint of others and to give no special weight to our own. Moreover, impartiality need not lead to simplistic and highly abstract rules. Liberal impartiality, as Brian Barry has argued, is a second-order notion requiring that the major rules governing the political order be reasonable for all to accept, but it does not require that the rules themselves be simple or few in number.24 On our view, especially complex political issues sometimes may need to be resolved by suitably constrained democratic procedures that allow for the play of a variety of perspectives in mutual dialogue.

So where does that leave us? We think that the feminists are right to point out the failures of liberal theory in the real world. Despite the claims of impartiality, great injustice still exists in the world, and it is statistically correct to say that injustice falls disproportionately on certain groups. However, liberals need not be convinced that this failure results from any errors of logic in the rights-based theory of the democratic state. Where violations of human rights or justice occur, liberals should remain committed to corrective action. Feminist theories have sensitized much of our society to potential blind spots, but they have not shown that rights-based theories of the democratic state are fundamentally flawed. Indeed, if Benhabib is right, and we think she is, feminism itself needs a rights-based ethical theory.25

Many "postliberal" thinkers tend to condemn or reject liberal attempts to ground political argument on impartial, neutral, or relatively objective grounds because they believe that such notions presuppose a "god's-eye view" or a neutral perspective of impartiality and objectivity that humans cannot attain. Of course, we agree that the language of neutrality, impartiality, and objectivity can be misused as a cover for self-seeking, especially (but not only) by those in power. And of course we realize that political claims regarding the attributes of the just state arc- not scientific claims.

However, there is widespread agreement that the function of the state is to preserve order, limit conflict, and assist its citizens as they seek fulfillment in their lives and that the state should do so justly. We believe that the liberal democratic state is best able to achieve those goals.

In the absence of a liberal state, here is what worries us. Unless there are acceptable points of view from which reason can proceed, impartial ground rules acceptable to all parties, it is hard to see how people on any side of a dispute can persuade those who disagree with them. What worries liberals is that if there are no preconditions on discussion and no human rights that are specifiable in advance, then there is the danger that individuals will be unjustly treated. The rights theorist believes that some things should be off the table, such as racism, if justice is to prevail. And a democracy should be constrained by rights. Otherwise a religious fundamentalist majority could elect to become a theocracy that would run roughshod over individual rights. The early twenty-first century provides vivid pictures of what happens in a fundamentalist theocracy, like that of the Taliban.

Accordingly, although liberal theory is far from perfect, and forceful objections have been brought against many of its key assumptions, such objections, we have argued, are far from decisive. The liberal democratic state, we have argued, provides protections for the individual that can be abandoned only at our great peril.

2ac – law good

Legal change is a struggle, not an end-point – and risks of cooption, rollback and masking exist only because progressive social movements turned away from state-based legal strategies. The neg has a goal – not a strategy – and consigning that goal to the level of the performative or imaginary breeds self-mystification and passivity when society ceases to change

Lobel, 7 - Assistant Professor of Law, University of San Diego (Orly, “THE PARADOX OF EXTRALEGAL ACTIVISM: CRITICAL LEGAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND TRANSFORMATIVE POLITICS“ HARVARD LAW REVIEW [Vol. 120:937, http://www.harvardlawreview.org/media/pdf/lobel.pdf)
Once again, this conclusion reveals flaws parallel to the original disenchantment with legal reform. Although the new extralegal frames present themselves as apt alternatives to legal reform models and as capable of producing significant changes to the social map, in practice they generate very limited improvement in existing social arrangements. Most strikingly, the cooptation effect here can be explained in terms of the most profound risk of the typology — that of legitimation. The common pattern of extralegal scholarship is to describe an inherent instability in dominant structures by pointing, for example, to grassroots strategies,223 and then to assume that specific instances of counterhegemonic activities translate into a more complete transformation. This celebration of multiple micro-resistances seems to rely on an aggregate approach — an idea that the multiplication of practices will evolve into something substantial. In fact, the myth of engagement obscures the actual lack of change being produced, while the broader pattern of equating extralegal activism with social reform produces a false belief in the potential of change. There are few instances of meaningful reordering of social and economic arrangements and macro-redistribution. Scholars write about decoding what is really happening, as though the scholarly narrative has the power to unpack more than the actual conventional experience will admit.224 Unrelated efforts become related and part of a whole through mere reframing. At the same time, the elephant in the room — the rising level of economic inequality — is left unaddressed and comes to be understood as natural and inevitable.225 This is precisely the problematic process that critical theorists decry as losers’ self-mystification, through which marginalized groups come to see systemic losses as the product of their own actions and thereby begin to focus on minor achievements as representing the boundaries of their willed reality.

The explorations of micro-instances of activism are often fundamentally performative, obscuring the distance between the descriptive and the prescriptive. The manifestations of extralegal activism — the law and organizing model; the proliferation of informal, soft norms and norm-generating actors; and the celebrated, separate nongovernmental sphere of action — all produce a fantasy that change can be brought about through small-scale, decentralized transformation. The emphasis is local, but the locality is described as a microcosm of the whole and the audience is national and global. In the context of the humanities, Professor Carol Greenhouse poses a comparable challenge to ethnographic studies from the 1990s, which utilized the genres of narrative and community studies, the latter including works on American cities and neighborhoods in trouble.226 The aspiration of these genres was that each individual story could translate into a “time of the nation” body of knowledge and motivation.227 In contemporary legal thought, a corresponding gap opens between the local scale and the larger, translocal one. In reality, although there has been a recent proliferation of associations and grassroots groups, few new local-statenational federations have emerged in the United States since the 1960s and 1970s, and many of the existing voluntary federations that flourished in the mid-twentieth century are in decline.228 There is, therefore, an absence of links between the local and the national, an absent intermediate public sphere, which has been termed “the missing middle” by Professor Theda Skocpol.229 New social movements have for the most part failed in sustaining coalitions or producing significant institutional change through grassroots activism. Professor Handler concludes that this failure is due in part to the ideas of contingency, pluralism, and localism that are so embedded in current activism.230 Is the focus on small-scale dynamics simply an evasion of the need to engage in broader substantive debate?

It is important for next-generation progressive legal scholars, while maintaining a critical legal consciousness, to recognize that not all extralegal associational life is transformative. We must differentiate, for example, between inward-looking groups, which tend to be self- regarding and depoliticized, and social movements that participate in political activities, engage the public debate, and aim to challenge and reform existing realities.231 We must differentiate between professional associations and more inclusive forms of institutions that act as trustees for larger segments of the community.232 As described above, extralegal activism tends to operate on a more divided and hence a smaller scale than earlier social movements, which had national reform agendas. Consequently, within critical discourse there is a need to recognize the limited capacity of small-scale action. We should question the narrative that imagines consciousness-raising as directly translating into action and action as directly translating into change. Certainly not every cultural description is political. Indeed, it is questionable whether forms of activism that are opposed to programmatic reconstruction of a social agenda should even be understood as social movements. In fact, when groups are situated in opposition to any form of institutionalized power, they may be simply mirroring what they are fighting against and merely producing moot activism that settles for what seems possible within the narrow space that is left in a rising convergence of ideologies. The original vision is consequently coopted, and contemporary discontent is legitimated through a process of self-mystification.

V. RESTORING CRITICAL OPTIMISM IN THE LEGAL FIELD

“La critique est aisée; l’art difficile.”

A critique of cooptation often takes an uneasy path. Critique has always been and remains not simply an intellectual exercise but a political and moral act. The question we must constantly pose is how critical accounts of social reform models contribute to our ability to produce scholarship and action that will be constructive. To critique the ability of law to produce social change is inevitably to raise the question of alternatives. In and of itself, the exploration of the limits of law and the search for new possibilities is an insightful field of inquiry. However, the contemporary message that emerges from critical legal consciousness analysis has often resulted in the distortion of the critical arguments themselves. This distortion denies the potential of legal change in order to illuminate what has yet to be achieved or even imagined. Most importantly, cooptation analysis is not unique to legal reform but can be extended to any process of social action and engagement. When claims of legal cooptation are compared to possible alternative forms of activism, the false necessity embedded in the contemporary story emerges — a story that privileges informal extralegal forms as transformative while assuming that a conservative tilt exists in formal legal paths.

In the triangular conundrum of “law and social change,” law is regularly the first to be questioned, deconstructed, and then critically dismissed. The other two components of the equation — social and change — are often presumed to be immutable and unambiguous. Understanding the limits of legal change reveals the dangers of absolute reliance on one system and the need, in any effort for social reform, to contextualize the discourse, to avoid evasive, open-ended slogans, and to develop greater sensitivity to indirect effects and multiple courses of action. Despite its weaknesses, however, law is an optimistic discipline. It operates both in the present and in the future. Order without law is often the privilege of the strong. Marginalized groups have used legal reform precisely because they lacked power. Despite limitations, these groups have often successfully secured their interests through legislative and judicial victories. Rather than experiencing a disabling disenchantment with the legal system, we can learn from both the successes and failures of past models, with the aim of constantly redefining the boundaries of legal reform and making visible law’s broad reach.

1ar – law good

Legal reform can force compliance without producing new states of emergency – debates over the law are key

Sanders 8 - Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science, University of Toronto (Rebecca, “Norms of Exception? Intelligence Agencies, Human Rights, and the Rule of Law”, 6/6/08, http://www.cpsa-acsp.ca/papers-2008/Sanders.pdf)//DBI
There is no doubt that law is part of and shaped by power. But there is a reason the Bush administration is disdainful of law. There is a potential for an anti-imperialist egalitarianism within international law that should be pursued, not rejected. Law can be a weapon of the weak (Bartholomew, 2006, p. 178). While recognizing the unilateral violence of “empire’s law” that is “derivative of its own will as the global sovereign” (p. 162) we should also remain committed to Dworkin’s “law’s empire”, where human rights and international law regimes forge a democratic cosmopolitan order (p. 164). The aspirational view of law, devoted to a substantive rule of law as opposed to lawless legal black holes and procedural positivistic legality or rule by law, suggests there are “moral resources” in the law available to deal with crises without producing exceptions (Dyzenhaus, 2007). Finally, it should be noted that unlike domestic law, the absence of a unified international sovereign negates the possibility of pure sovereign suspension. Breaches of international law are just that - they break rather than remake the law.

This is not to say the law alone provides some sort of antidote to the abuses of the powerful. In this sense international human rights campaigners would do well to examine the debates over the role of law in achieving minority rights in the domestic context. For instance Stuart Scheingold (2004) has argued that the “myth of rights” should be supplanted with a “politics of rights” in which “rights are treated as contingent resources which impact on public policy indirectly-in the measure, that is, that they can aid the altering balance of the political forces” (p. 148). In this view, law is a resource in a larger political struggle that takes place not only in the courts, but through various channels of social action. In acknowledging the role of power relations in shaping law, the excluded should not be obliged to renounce the possibility of rights. Instead, oppressed people can contribute to the generation of new norms that reflect their experience. As Matsuda (1987) asks “How could anyone believe both of the following statements? (1) I have a right to participate equally in society with any other person. (2) Rights are whatever people in power say they are...the experience of the bottom is that one can believe in both of those statements simultaneously, and that it may well be necessary to do so” (p. 138). Rather than painting a black and white portrait, the ambiguities and contingencies inherent in the relationship between law and power demand examination and engagement in their historically specific configurations.

We must do everything we can to combat the surveillance state – including collective movement and pragmatic reform – weak law is better than none at all and lays the foundation for improvement.

Lyon 94 – Director of Surveillance Studies Centre and Professor of Sociology at Queen’s University (David, “the electronic eye : the rise of surveillance society”, p. 223-224)//RZ

To eschew fatalism or paranoia is one thing. To face the future with realism and hope is another. I have tried to sketch a vision that catches some elements of hope, and to couple that to the realism of sociological analysis. But even this is of little use without the identification of some agency or agencies, capable of transforming present situations into something different and desirable. Surveillance, as explored in this book, is neither overwhelmingly negative in its effects nor incorrigibly evil in its character. But it is undergoing certain rapid changes at present, so that it is hard to get a handle on what exactly is happening. The first agency then, would actually be responsible social analysis. In understanding better the meaning of electronic languages and of the relation between consumption, social order, and surveillance, common obstacles to appropriate political action would be removed. The more this could be considered within the educative processes of contemporary society, the better. Our worst fears of surveillance will be realized much more easily in contexts where such complacent assumptions reign as that computerized efficiency equals progress or that privacy laws protect citizens. Thus educative initiatives should be welcomed. In the USA, for instance, university and college computer science accreditation requires the inclusion of 'social and ethical implications of computing'. 9 In Britain, the Open University's 'Introduction to Information Technology' includes similar questions. Such public awareness of surveillance issues could further be raised through professional groups and organizations, especially those directly concerned with computing, information management, and so on. Recall the importance of 'mobilization' responses mentioned in Chapter Eight, and the dramatic results of the computer networking of the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility group in blocking development of the Lotus Household Marketplace software in 1991. Their attempts to argue for limits to consumer surveillance expansion fits in exactly with my criteria of participation, personhood and purposes. Resisting the growth of electronic surveillance per se would be a futile gesture. Attempting to channel it in ethically and politically appropriate directions is sociologically much more a propos. More broadly, other kinds of movements may also contribute to the containment of surveillance. If we are right to think of 'surveillance as a site of struggle in its own right', 10 then there is every reason to expect various kinds of groups and movements to contest this territory, no doubt in the name of privacy. Consumer groups and organizations represent one important sector which, as we have seen, has already flexed its muscles. In Britain banking practices and consumer blacklisting have come in for criticism, and in the USA more ad hoc groups have mobilized to resist unwanted direct marketing. Of course, creating policies and laws equal to the realities of today's surveillance society is another task for which agencies exist. Without relaxing my indictment of privacy laws for being cynical, sieve-like and subject-unfriendly, it may still be said that such laws are a necessary minimum. Weak law is better than none at all. Precedents for some protection are set that way, and the foundation for improvements laid. In a situation where surveillance becomes increasingly global, it is interesting that legal limits similarly start to have international implications. The European Convention on Data Protection, for instance, may well have beneficial effects on citizens well beyond Europe, as well as within it. As Europe requires trading partners to comply with the convention, the USA and Canada may well be obliged to extend legislation to the currently untouched field of consumer surveillance. Needless to say, the political problem involves not only identifying agencies that might spur transformative activity, but also searching for appropriate ways of doing so. It is clear, for instance, that some kinds of regulation of surveillance practices could wind up with as much invasive bureaucratic machinery as the practices they intend to reduce. It is equally clear that if surveillance is not to be viewed in a paranoid fashion, then space must be made not only for viewing it as a 'necessary evil' but as a 'greater good'. The case of caller ID telephone services is a case in point. Technical means are available for maintaining such services for women or minority groups in danger while denying them to direct marketers. The question of which purposes would be served is critical here.

2ac – permutation

Surveillance restrictions generate new modes of political engagement that limit further state power

Marquez 12 - Victoria University of Wellington, School of History, Philosophy, Political Science & International Relations, Lecturer in Political Theory (Xavier, “Spaces of Appearance and Spaces of Surveillance”, Polity, January 2012, http://www.palgrave-journals.com/polity/journal/v44/n1/full/pol201120a.html)//DBI
A solution to these problems would at least involve the expansion of spaces of appearance (even if they can never be untainted by surveillance) and the reduction of the reach of spaces of surveillance, and in particular of those disciplinary spaces that reduce the “disclosiveness” of human action and make it the slave of production processes. Arendt’s apparently “utopian” proposal for a council system in lieu of representative democracy can be understood as an attempt to describe the way a society would look if its spaces of appearance were greatly expanded, even though she never fully or properly articulated the connection between these potential new spaces of appearance with the myriad other spaces that would still remain in society.77 Yet it is important to stress again that the point is not that spaces of surveillance could or should be eliminated wholesale; any moderately complex society, and indeed any society that aspires to a certain level of material security, will certainly contain a very large number of spaces of surveillance.78 But the number of activities that take place in spaces of surveillance can be decreased while increasing the number of activities that take place in spaces of appearance (however imperfect), and groups excluded from public spaces can be brought into such spaces. Moreover, spaces of appearance can be generated within spaces that remain shot through with surveillance; witness, for example, the ways in which “social media” technologies enabled many activists in the Middle East both to enter the public space (and mobilize collective action through their stories of resistance to oppression) while at the same time enabling governments to monitor their activities: as in Eastern Europe in the 1980s, the activist’s courage to appear tended to subvert or undermine the apparatus of surveillance without completely rendering it ineffective.79

Indeed, spaces of appearance have repeatedly emerged within disciplinary organizations as a result of what Foucault calls resistance. As Arendt notes, during the twentieth century, labor movements time and again attempted to create spaces of appearance and to engage in political action where, in our terms, only spaces of surveillance had existed. According to Arendt, such political action by the working class eventually provided workers with an unprecedented amount of economic security and political power (now under threat in various ways, to be sure). But the significance of the working-class action lay not in its economic success (which, arguably, simply integrated the working class into the apparatuses of the state, with all its spaces of surveillance), but in its ability to force open the public realm to “a whole new segment of the population” that “appeared in public” for the first time.80 These movements of resistance to disciplinary power (both in labor movements and more recently in Egypt and Syria) illustrate the Arendtian notion of action. Human beings generate counter- power by means of their joint action, disrupt the instrumentalization imposed on them by disciplinary organization, and create, at least momentarily, spaces of appearance where people’s individual stories can be articulated.

Perhaps Foucault’s notion of resistance could be enriched through the Arendtian notion of a space of appearance. Foucault values the rejection of imposed identities, but when discussing the possibility of such rejection, he seems to consider only the evasion of visibility. He does not consider the establishment of new spaces of appearance where the disclosure of individual identity and the generation of power go hand in hand. Arendt, in contrast, proposes changing the way in which visibility operates. Her goal is to make visibility function less as a lever of control and more as an opportunity to express individuality, less as an experience that separates people and more as one that enables collective action, less as a weapon with which to impose norms and more as a springboard from which to launch new experiments in collective self-regulation—“new modes and orders,” in the Machiavellian phrase that Arendt was fond of quoting.81 The creation of spaces of appearances may well involve providing opportunities for individuals to escape visibility, but it is not reducible to such an escape.

Late in life, Foucault also came to the conclusion that we need to expand the spaces where self-creation is possible.82 He tended to understand these spaces as places where one can “make” the self as one might make a thing. Although his “aesthetic of existence” is not devoid of a collective dimension,83 it misses Arendt’s important points about how the human condition of plurality prevents us from “making” ourselves as we make other things. At best, we can disclose ourselves as individuals (in spaces of appearance) or as types or roles (in spaces of surveillance), or as a mixture of both (in most spaces).

Finally, it may be possible to harness the power of surveillance to control those “commanding heights” of public space in modern democracies. As Green has argued, because the structural features of modern states have restricted access to enduring and significant public spaces to a small elite, the actors in these spaces should be prevented as far as possible from fully controlling the conditions of their visibility. One might, for example, increase the number of opportunities where relatively spontaneous and sometimes hostile challenges of the visible leader can occur—perhaps through the use of press conferences and parliamentary “question time.”84 When political leaders cannot control the conditions of their visibility, they are both more subject to the surveillance of the public (which compensates, to some extent, for its normal lack of power), and more likely to engage in genuine action, which is unpredictable and incalculable and capable of generating new modes and orders. A space of surveillance can thus work in tandem with the maintenance of a genuine space of appearance.

1ar – pragmatism

Vote for the permutation - evaluate the round through a lens of pragmatism, which is self-correcting. Their critique is totalizing and meaningless absent contextualization to the specific scenario of the 1AC.

Hickman 7 – Professor of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University Carbondale (Larry A., Pragmatism as Post-Postmodernism: Lessons from John Dewey, p.34-37)//RZ

One of the striking things about James's proposal is that it did not anticipate or privilege any special result. It was offered as a method only—a ticket to ride to wherever the method went. Once the Pragmatic method was applied, James thought, it was sure to undercut some of the old philosophical antagonisms. In language that went even beyond the call of Jonathan Edwards for a return to "naked ideas" unencumbered by the dead weight of parasitic abstractions, James demanded that every word pay its own way—that it earn its living within the stream of experience. And he insisted that every theory be regarded as an instrument, as a tool for the remodeling of experience. In other words, the Pragmatic method would be flexible enough to allow for a wide range of viewpoints and activities, de-pending on individual temperament and context. But it would not accept just any applicant. Though they might live for a time on credit, ideas submitted to this test would eventually have to either pay their own bills or declare bankruptcy. It is worth noting at this point that there is a significant difference between James's proposal for a working method that privileges no particular result, and the proposal issued by Lyotard and other post-modernists that no particular narrative or standpoint can or should be privileged. James's proposal possesses the virtues of what has been termed "the scientific method"' of inquiry (on which it is based): when it is properly applied, it does present a privileged method with respect to knowledge-getting, since it is experimental and therefore produces practical effects that are objective. It is self-correcting. Lyotard's postmodernist proposal, on the other hand, appears to be self-defeating: it must privilege its own announced narrative, namely, that no narrative is privileged. It is also important to keep in mind that Lyotard's book does in fact appear to privilege the domain of knowledge-getting. Its subtitle is "A Report on Knowledge." Underscoring his claim that the Pragmatic method privileges no special result, James borrowed a metaphor from the Italian Pragmatist Giovanni Papini. The Pragmatic method would be like a corridor in a hotel, he said. Many rooms would open onto it, and inside those rooms there would be a wide variety of activities. Religionists as well as atheists would be found there and scientists as well as philosophers. Despite their differences, the occupants of the rooms would have one important thing in common: they would have to pass through the corridor—they would have to employ the Pragmatic method—to get in or out of their respective rooms." What James was suggesting, therefore, was that cultural, intellectual, and political differences, can in many cases be negotiated under the umbrella of the Pragmatic method. If his view is correct, we would therefore expect to find in it a tool for fostering global citizenship and its corollary, the formation of global publics. But what, more specifically, is the Pragmatic method? Given that it privileges no particular result, what is it about that corridor that allows religionists and atheists to pass, as well as scientists and philosophers, but (presumably) not democrats and dictators, secularists and theocrats, and humanists and fundamentalists? This is a question that Pragmatism must answer if it is to pay its own way as a set of tools for fostering global citizenship. The question is complicated by the fact that now, almost one hundred years after James's Lowell Lectures, and after a period during which it had precious few friends, Pragmatism appears to have be-come quite fashionable. Despite its current popularity (or perhaps because of it), however, the central tenets of Pragmatism have not yet been appropriated in some of the most important arenas of human life. Stripped to its most muscular form, Pragmatism is a precise theory of meaning, truth, and inquiry, or perhaps better put, it is a closely related family of precise theories of meaning, truth, and inquiry. Here is Peirce in 1878: "Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object."9 Here is James, twenty years later, in 1898: "The effective meaning of any philosophic proposition can always be brought down to some particular consequence, in our future practical experience, whether active or passive; the point lying rather in the fact that the experience must be particular, than in the fact that it must be active."i° And here is Dewey in 1938, sixty years after Peirce's statement: "The proper interpretation of 'pragmatic,' [involves] namely the function of consequences as necessary tests of the validity of propositions, provided these consequences are operationally instituted and are such as to resolve the specific problem evoking the operations" (LW 12.4). Put succinctly, the Pragmatic theory of meaning insists that we treat the whole meaning of a concept not just in terms of its use in a language game, as Wittgenstein urged us to do, but in terms that are overtly experimental and behavioral and in ways that transcend particular language games: the meaning of a concept is the difference it will make within and for our future experience. Another way of putting this is that the Pragmatic method is experimental at its core. Here is Peirce in 1906. "All Pragmatists will further agree that their method of ascertaining the meanings of words and concepts is no other than that experimental method by which all the successful sciences . . . have reached the degrees of certainty that are severally proper to them today." Applying Peirce's Pragmatic maxim, it seemed to James natural enough to conclude that since the word "truth" is not otiose, then it, too, must have a meaning.12 Absorbing the best elements of both correspondence and coherence theories of truth (as well as rejecting their less defensible elements) and then adding a temporal dimension, James claimed that "true ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot."" Some who have read this remark have concluded that James equated truth with personal satisfaction, but Dewey understood the matter differently. James's real doctrine, he wrote, was, "A belief is true when it satisfies both personal needs and the requirements of objective things" (MW 4.112.). In his most precise statement of the matter, Dewey defined truth as warranted assertibility." In a word, the Pragmatic theory of truth involves a robust form of experimentalism: it requires that we regard our ideas as true when they have both an objective basis (i.e., their warrant can be demonstrated before a candid world) and the capacity to resolve some type of objective difficulty (i.e., they are assertible under relevant conditions). Pragmatism treats inquiry as a natural activity, that is, as intimately related to organic nature as the beating of a heart and the perches and flight of a bird. At the conscious level, inquiry takes its start in situations that are doubtful, from which it seeks to shape well defined problems. It then uses tools of all sorts, abstract as well as concrete, to form hypotheses which it tests in the very existential arena from which the motivating difficulty arose. In sum, the Pragmatic account of inquiry is invariably situated with respect to specific circumstances. It arises from felt needs, employs both abstract and concrete tools, tests proposals in the laboratory of experience, and terminates in the resolution of the difficulties which occasion that particular sequence of inquiry. In Dewey’s book, logic is the theory of inquiry.

AT: Surveillance state inevitable

The critique is overly pessimistic – that discourages the imagination of effective solutions.

Lyon 94 – Director of Surveillance Studies Centre and Professor of Sociology at Queen’s University (David, “the electronic eye : the rise of surveillance society”, p. 223-224)//RZ

The dystopic paradigms deriving from Orwell and Bentham are indeed illuminating. They serve the purposes of alerting us to significant social trends or tendencies in the present that have already been discussed imaginatively in the past. They assist our identification of undesirable trends. Although the more dramatic 'thought control' is what we often associate with Orwell, in many ways his vision was far more mundane, and alarmingly contemporary. As Stanley Cohen observes, the control of proles, the mass of the population, depended on nothing more sophisticated than classification, segregation and behaviour modification. 17 Crime control in the later twentieth century, with all the humane talk of decarceration, seems to have some surprising affinities with Orwell; surveillance, anticipation, prevention are its watchwords. One might add that consumer surveillance operates by a smiliar logic as well, though seduction and channelling of choices might here be better terms than 'prevention'. 18 This kind of exposition ties Orwell even more closely to Bentham, for whom the instrumental channelling of behaviour was paramount. A technique was sought in the Panopticon that would ensure the automatic functioning of the system, so that organizational certainty could be obtained at the price of uncertainty in the people it contained. Though Bentham conceived of his 'moral architecture' as a place for the 'fabrication of virtue', in fact the Panopticon served to redefined virtue itself. This production of virtue is essentially cynical - Bentham unwittingly used 'fabrication' in an ambiguous way. Psychological conditioning of the most deplorable kind here supplants genuine responsibility. 19 There are some differences between Orwell's vision and that of Foucault's Bentham, however. Whereas Orwell's could be viewed as a 'possible but preventable' future, as it is in, say, Rule's hands, Foucault's Panopticon often appears as imminent and inevitable. Whereas the contemporary interpreters of Orwell's dystopia may under certain circumstances galvanize action and resistance - 'Big Brother is watching you' must be the best known anti-surveillance slogan - Foucault's dystopia seems rather to instil paranoia and paralysis. Whereas Nineteen EightyFour still clings to some shadowy hopes of democracy and decency, Discipline and Punish dissolves them in discourses of ubiquitous power. The differences should not however be exaggerated. Even Orwell's dystopia finally leaves us with almost unrelieved pessimism. True, conflict, struggle, and resistance are present, but in the end only at an elite level. The proles - 85% of the population - are a pretty docile, determinable and one-dimensional lot. Does not even Orwell underestimate their knowledgeability, their capacity for making a difference? As Raymond Willams notes, 'by viewing the struggle as one between only a few people over the heads of an apathetic mass, Orwell created the conditions for defeat and despair'. 20 But even if Orwell had a more positive message, the problem is that after Foucault it is hard to go back to Orwell. For Foucault has shown how the 'autonomous individuals' or Orwell's elite are indeed the product of post-Enlightenment Western thought. The quest for 'privacy' bound up with that approach is thus equally suspect as a means of countersurveillance. Even if we grant that Orwell's desire for dignity and decency barked up the right tree, it is not clear how they would be preserved. Foucault's approach, for all its luminary quality, also seems unsatisfactory, because it is unclear exactly what is wrong with the Panopticon or what strategy might be appropriate to question or resist it. Herein lies the challenge for surveillance theory. I propose that such theory often depends for its criterion of judgement, its normative basis, upon dystopian visions. These have the virtue of directing our attention to the negative, constraining, and unjust aspects of surveillance, and of helping us to identify which kinds of trends are especially dangerous from this point of view. But their disadvantage is that they may thus exaggerate the negative by seeing only one side of surveillance, promote pessimism about whether such negative traits can be countered, and fail to offer any indication as to what the content of an alternative might be.

The critique is unreflective and overly fatalistic – contemporary surveillance’s potential for harm is distinct from its realization –multiple factors check.

Marx 3 – Professor Emeritus of Sociology M.I.T. (Gary, “A Tack in the Shoe: Neutralizing and Resisting the New Surveillance”, Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 59, No. 2, 2003, pp. 369—390)

The identification of factors encouraging the spread of surveillance and the ready availability of newsworthy horror stories of privacy invasions such as the selling of information from AIDS tests or cameras hidden in dressing rooms (e.g., Smith, 1990) too often lead to an unreflective “the sky is falling” view of contemporary surveillance, whether explicit or implicit. The potential of a technology for harm needs to be kept distinct from its realization. Just because something negative could happen, does not mean that it must happen. In short, little consideration is given to how the dystopia will actually be produced or to factors working against it, such as practicality, cost, laws and fears of lawsuits, organizational policies, morality, doubts about effectiveness or the ability to control the technology, and concern with public opinion. Control systems are not usually as effective and efficient as their advocates claim and they often have a variety of unintended consequences (Marx, 1995; Sieber, 1981; Tenner, 1996). There is frequently a gap between visible conforming behavior and less visible attitudes, emotions, and fantasies. Moreover, new technologies rarely enter passive environments of total inequality. Instead, they become enmeshed in complex, pre-existing systems. They are as likely to be altered as to alter. Professional associations, oversight organizations, and political and social movements are also factors.

Technological innovation in surveillance will never result in a totalitarianism state – they ignore the potential of human ingenuity for resistance.

Marx 3 – Professor Emeritus of Sociology M.I.T. (Gary, “A Tack in the Shoe: Neutralizing and Resisting the New Surveillance”, Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 59, No. 2, 2003, pp. 369—390)

As the examples of neutralization suggest, the human spirit valiantly expresses itself in the face of the machine. It frequently proves richer than the possibilities anticipated and built into the latter. However, victory may be short lived. While the present analysis is static, in reality the processes are fluid and dynamic. That is, just as new means of information collection can lead to innovations in resistance, those in the surveillance business respond to neutralization efforts with their own innovations that are then responded to in a reoccurring pattern. This is not to deny the greater power of employers, manufacturers, merchants, landlords, professionals, parents, and state agents, such as welfare workers, teachers, police, and prison guards, over those subordinate to them. Issues of power and control are central to the kinds of surveillance that become social issues. Yet power is rarely a zero-sum game. Beyond varying degrees of normative constraint on power holders, power is not unlimited because it is often rooted in interdependency and occurs on a broad and decentralized scale. In informational-conflict 388 Marx settings in democratic societies, the advantage of technological and other strategic surveillance advances are often short-lived and contain ironic vulnerabilities. Neutralization is a dynamic adversarial social dance involving strategic moves and counter-moves. It has the quality of an endless chess game. This emergent phenomenon is well worth studying as a conflict interaction process. Note the escalation and “the see-saw principle” of military technology in which new developments are balanced by counter-developments. Consider for example the appearance of the “unshredder,” a computerized document reconstruction process that appeared in response to the initial strip-cut type of shredder. This cat-and-mouse reciprocity raises questions such as: How are neutralization and counter-neutralization techniques discovered, chosen, combined, and diffused? Useful in studying this would be the “how to do it” literature made possible by a free market and free press (with an enormous boost from the Internet) and communications of the surveillance industry. What are the major “career paths” and “life cycles” of techniques of surveillance and neutralization? Does the lag time vary by the properties of the technique and characteristics of the players, by resource and skill factors, or by the perceived importance of success and cost of failure? Final Comments In summary, I have noted factors encouraging compliance with and subverting the vast expansion in the collection of personal information. I have identified 11 behavioral techniques of neutralization intended to subvert the collection of personal information and some issues for research. In spite of doomsday scenarios about the death of privacy, in societies with liberal democratic economic and political systems, the initial advantages offered by technological developments may be weakened by their own ironic vulnerabilities and, in Poe’s (1843/1967, p. 153) term, “human ingenuity.” This is certainly not to argue for complacency because power imbalances (both legitimate and illegitimate) are central to a majority of surveillance situations. It is, however, to ask that our vigilance be informed by careful empirical research and analysis.