Kenneth Burke has written that every re-flection of reality is also a se-lection of reality, and thus necessarily a de-flection of reality. Burke points to the problem inherent in representation. Every time that we attempt to represent, or “speak for,” another, we are caught up in a game of power and privilege.
According to Linda Alcoff, a professor of philosophy who has described her lifeworld as being invisible to the world of public discourse, the entitlement to speak is not natural. It is the product of certain “rituals of speaking” present in a given situation. The positionality of the speaker and nature of the discursive context predetermine the truth-value of what’s said.
Alcoff 92 [Linda, Prof of Philosophy, “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” Cultural Critique 20, p.12-3]
A plethora of sources… …eyes of the same milieu.
Teams like Louisville, Cal State Fullerton and Towson have long been telling us that systems of privilege infect the ways we make arguments in debate. Economic, racial, sexual, and other forms of cultural privilege help to produce subterranean biases in debate practice. Even the very metaphor of “speaking” is itself a privileged notion, assuming certain norms of communication and action which marginalize the claims made by those without access to “speech.” We would reject this metaphor out of hand if it weren’t for the fact that doing so would only further mask the privilege that does come from our ability to speak. At its most basic, traditional debate presupposes the right to make claims on behalf of the federal government without ever asking why we get to do that.
Many teams read evidence from John Rawls to justify their policy simulations. Rawls argues that “citizens are to think of themselves as if they were legislators and ask themselves what statutes … they would think most reasonable to enact.” Always glossed over when debaters read this evidence is the subject of Rawls’s sentence: it is the citizen who acts as if; it is the citizen who thinks reasonably; it is citizens who “view themselves as ideal … legislators.” I get to speak because I am a citizen and my speech forms the “social basis of liberal democracy.” It is my nation that validates my speech. Not everybody possesses this privilege. Despite the global reach of American cultural and military power – and the fact that nation-state citizenship is no longer a monolithic entity in an era of globalization – the perspectives of many are excluded from the political community, unable to make calls on international actors.
Rituals of speaking are part of a genocidal geo-politics of knowledge production. Cultural and epistemic boundaries are used to disqualify non-European epistemologies and justify the eradication of difference.
Mignolo & Tlostanova 06 [Walter & Madina, Prof of Literature & Prof of the History of Culture, “Theorizing from the Borders,” European Journal of Social Theory, p.205-6, 208]
The modern foundation of knowledge... … the globalization of culture.
Specifically, the Arab revolts are an instance of the autonomous self-institution of societal structures. The spontaneity and explicit self-organization of Arab civil societies is a revolutionary re-imagination of status quo social institutions.
Challand 11 [Benoit, Assoc Prof of Politics at the New School & Research Fellow at the Graduate Institute for International Peace and Development Studies, “The Counter-Power of Civil Society and the Emergence of a New Political Imaginary in the Arab World,” Constellations 18.3, p. 275-7]
Earlier, I chose the phrase… … etymologically comes from spons, the source
Unfortunately, status quo democracy assistance programs undermine these revolts by imposing upon them from the outside and preventing local civil society organizations from defining their own priorities. This crushes the autonomous and participatory spirit of democratic society
Challand 08 [Benoit, Assoc Prof of Politics at the New School & Research Fellow at the Graduate Institute for International Peace and Development Studies, “The Evolution of Western Aid for Palestinian Civil Society: Bypassing Local Knowledge and Resources,” Middle Eastern Studies 44(3), p.397-8]
This article does not intend… … as distinct and non-porous spheres.
Additionally, democracy assistance has been aimed at the production of neo-liberal forms of subjectivity – methodological individualism is geared against the forms of collectivity that have been the lynchpin of the revolts.
Challand 11 [Benoit, Assoc Prof of Politics at the New School & Research Fellow at the Graduate Institute for International Peace and Development Studies, “The Counter-Power of Civil Society and the Emergence of a New Political Imaginary in the Arab World,” Constellations 18.3, p. 274-5]
Another way to convey the… … against the good governance agenda
Further, any definition of “democracy assistance” must first confront the need to define democracy itself. The status quo is a farce that props up a pseudo-democratic liberal oligarchy. The political project of autonomous democratic creativity has been replaced by the heteronomous hegemony of neoliberalism.
Rockhill 11 [Gabriel, Assistant Prof of Philosophy at Villanova, Directeur de Programme at the College International de Philosophie in Paris, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Cornelius Castoriadis’s Postscript on Insignificance, p.xv-xviii]
The West attests to a powerful… … because a “break” is always possible.
Organizations in Yemen have called on the international community to hold Saleh and the government responsible for abuses on protestors in Yemen
FIDH November 16, 2011 “Disregarding the warnings of the UN Security Council, Yemen continues its murderous repression” http://www.fidh.org/Disregarding-the-warnings-of-the,10946f
The International Federation for… … Yemeni army, and security forces.
But if we cannot claim to “know” the other through our acts of representation, then what are we supposed to do?
We’re in a double bind. On the one hand, status quo representations of the Arab revolts are caught up in systems of power and manipulation such that any attempt at representing them could possibly end up reproducing those oppressive practices. On the other hand, failure to heed their perspectives will guarantee the continuation of structures of oppression. There is no easy answer. Speaking for others and speaking about them are deeply intertwined. Gayatri Spivak suggests a strategy of “unlearning our privilege as loss.” We need to learn to occupy the subject position of the other, which can only be accomplished through a historical critique of our own positions as investigating persons.
Spivak 90 [Gayatri, Prof of English at Columbia, The Post-Colonial Critic, p.56, 62-3, 121-2]
When I criticized Foucault… … and fun for some people.
In an attempt to unlearn our privilege and learn to occupy the subject position of the other, we are resolved that the United States federal government should initiate an international and independent commission of inquiry to investigate abuses committed in Yemen and to hold those responsible accountable.
Destabilizing dominant ways of knowing requires heeding the perspectives of those who have been rendered abject.
Escobar 95 [Arturo, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Encountering Development, p.222-3]
By now it should be clear… …research is supposed to illuminate.
Standard practice would ask us to defend this “as if” it were implemented by that body in Washington DC. Debaters remove the content of what is said AWAY from the subject who speaks and the context it’s spoken in. This reestablishes the privilege of the speaking subject by rendering their positionality transparent and foreclosing an analysis of the speaking situation. They try to pretend that their arguments can be evaluated in some magical and pristine world free of their dirty little fingerprints.
It is not enough to evaluate the content of each team’s claims to decide whose arguments are better reasoned or researched. Nor can we decide based on whose idea would be best in some hypothetical world of fiat. Instead, the criteria for evaluation must be whether the effects of their speech help to reconfigure the rituals of speaking in debate in such a way as to ally it with resistance to oppression
Alcoff 92 [Linda, Prof of Philosophy, “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” Cultural Critique 20, p.14-5]
Let me return now to the… …assessing the politics of the situation.
Affirming alternative models of democratic culture is key to meaningful civic education and autonomous political agency
Giroux 01 [Henry, Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, named one of Routledge’s top 50 educational thinkers, “‘Something’s Missing’: Cultural Studies, Neoliberalism, and the Politics of Hope,” Strategies 14.2, p.240-2]
The concept of educated hope… … social justice, and the public good.
Our plan is a counter-hegemonic statement that challenges our own position of privilege as members of the political community of the US. IF debate remains wedded to the false idol of implementation, it will be allied with structures of oppression. To realign debate with possibilities for resistance means changing the meaning of affirmation.
To be clear: we are not claiming to “get rid of” privilege. That is not possible, especially since we are the ones who have chosen the very terms by which we have called our privilege into question. “Unlearning” is not the same thing as “eliminating.” Unlearning is a critical interrogation that enables us to work through our privilege and being to understand how to challenge it.
