Texas-San Antonio » UTSA nerison-stroud Aff

UTSA nerison-stroud Aff

Last modified by Administrator on 2012/10/17 18:59

UTD AFF

IMPORTANT NOTE: This aff is a constant work in progress, but if you read everything below you should have a pretty good idea of how it works. There are residues (ghosts if you will) in the text.

[you can ctl+f your a2 crazy UTSA biz now]

this will be important in cx, i promise;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP4NMoJcFd4

Of course there are many risks when one attempts to remain open, to remain receptive to – in full response with – otherness. As Jacques Derrida points out, if we are attempting to remain faithful to a democracy that is to come, then we can no longer be prescriptive about what democracy is. Hence, democracy becomes not an over-arching Idea, not even a teleological goal, but a process, a becoming; something that can only be known as it is being known. And this incurs a large risk, as one can then no longer exclude anything a priori: thus when Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Party came to power via democratic elections, one can not then claim that this is not part of democracy. The only thing that one can draw from this is that democracy allows for elements that are not democratic – that even go against democracy itself – to come to power through its process. Once we attempt to exclude all so called non-democratic elements from the process of democracy, then we are back to an exclusionary politics; a terroristic politics. This is of course the irony of the United State of America’s position on democracy: by enforcing their brand of democracy, the US is now no different from any other terroristic power; all they are doing is effacing one method of governance with their own. The only time that one can judge whether a system is democratic or not is after they come into power: of course in this light, the Nazi party is as un-democratic as they come. However in order to be faithful to the possibility of a democracy that is to come, that perhaps may come, one cannot exclude the possibility of fascism a priori.41 -- Fernando 2010 (Jeremy, suicide bomber and her gift of death, EGS PHD)

We have all spent hours of time imagining the perfect debate round; the round to end all rounds, maybe its doubles in dallas.

[everyone should be having fun right about now.]

The same way US policy makers have spent even longer imagining the perfect democratic movement in the world; the movement that not only ends in modern US-capitalist-liberal democracy, and all its confounding glory, but one that will also never take place, precisely because of our intent to realize it in the world.

The fundamental premise of the world is not that it is given to us with a set purpose, or endpoint, but rather, that we are given a world that is unintelligible and enigmatic, one where reversion and duel is constantly in play between opposing forces; as soon as there is a movement in one direction, there is an equal and opposite reaction in the other direction, two sides of the same coin, good and evil, order and chaos, democracy and fascism.

But at the same time, this means our world cannot be reducible to a meaning, or a telos, there is no a priori truths about the world that we can hold as universal valuations, the way things always ought to be, that are revealed to us up front;

The capitalists always become the anti-capitalists

The oppressed become the new oppressors

Democracy becomes a state of endless war

[if you’re not having fun, im super sorry, we are, we promise]

I have begun this essay with this grotesque picture from the recent past for three primary reasons. The first one should be fairly evident - that American mainstream media responses (which I will largely focus on) to events like the Arab Spring are guided by a curious mixture of an almost onto-theological commitment to abstract, totemic ideals like ‘freedom' and ‘democracy' and a Realpolitik one to American strategic, monetarist, and security interests in the Middle-East. In the overall flow of informatised commonsense, the two lines of reckoning are rendered inseparable. Democratic structures of representation anywhere in the world cannot be disruptive in relation to networks of governance and financialisation stipulated by the Washington Consensus. Democracy must yield ‘liberalism' in its neo-incarnation; it cannot give us Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood instead. My second reason is that the ‘Arab Spring' is still unfolding in front of us with a long rumble. It is always difficult and dangerous to ‘read' the present, for any understanding of it is already belated. The present has to be grasped in a manner that is open to the many imaginative and political possibilities - of self-making, sovereignty, or antagonism - that it brings. My invocation of the Israeli-Palestinian situation has been intended to illustrate a habit of neoliberal statist thinking that, in the name of security, stability and combatting terror, threatens to kill us anyway. It is this murderous habit of thinking that imperils, more than anything else, the exhilarating possibilities of the Arab Spring.

But there are some events that escape this trend, that escape the whole realm of value, and meaning, as the counter-weight to our current project of cryogenizing the whole globe in our insatiable quest for knowledge; this is the singularity.

Bartleby’s “I’d prefer not to”, natural catastrophe, 9/11, Bouizizi’s self immolation; the singularity is that which confounds our ability to make a valuation of it, it is the grey area that turns our whole system of black and white on its head.

It is also manifest in the way we debate;

Irreducible to its components, and without having the same meaning as a whole as it does by itself, this debate round is also singularity, an event that cannot be reproduced, predicted, or, despite best efforts, produced towards a definitive endpoint

But we already have the answers, everything else is a matter of tweaking

Abstracted from the events on the ground, we make policy prescriptions the same way we calculate drone attacks in Yemen from a military base in Nevada or Virginia.

Crystallizing to a point where all that matters, and all that always already matters, is how we respond to he topical heil, the injunction of the text of the resolution to be read by us, the judge, and the negative team;

The author is dead, we can never know what he or she might truly mean

[“The beauty of writing lies—perhaps writing only lies—in the always unwritten, the un-writeable; the always imagined, yet outside the realm of the imaginable. This is both the strength of writing and forever its weakness—trying to capture but always failing in representation. The scribbles on a page, the blobs of ink that appear, speak—the phantom of the voice seems to constantly resurrect—of something; an event, an occurrence. But the event it speaks of is always already dead; the word speaks not of it, but of a transubstantiated event, the ghost of the event—there is necromancy at play.

Not that it matters. For the risen event, perhaps akin to a phoenix—a regeneration, a re-incarnation—then takes flight. And develops a life of its own; it is now its own pure image: without reflexivity, without referent, sans papiers. And ultimately sans meaning; for meaning requires an external correspondence. A simulated event is purely internal—it refers to nothing but itself, it speaks of nothing but itself. In this sense, every sign is a meaningless gesture: the ‘meaning’ that is derived is precisely because it is imbued with meaning by its receiver; impregnated by its emptiness. The sign is a vacuum; that is by its very existence, full. Orphaned at the moment of its birth, it is then embodied by the receiver and already re-born complete with plastic surgery. And it is precisely this sign—which has nothing to do with the event—that draws us into action, an almost arbitrary action: in fact, whenever we act, we are acting on absolutely nothing.

In other words, we are always already acting as if we can. The problem is of course when we forget this ‘as if’, and act as though we know what we are doing, as though our actions are based on knowledge, as though everything is clear to us.

For, there are consequences to this simulated clarity. In The Transparency of Evil (1999) we are continually warned of the dangers of an absolute transparency, where all things “lose their specificity and partake of a process of confusion and contagion—a viral loss of determinacy …” (7) In this way, “every individual category is subject to contamination, substitution is possible between any sphere and any other: there is a total confusion of types.” (8)

Each category is generalized to the greatest possible extent, so that it eventually loses all specificity and is reabsorbed by all the other categories. When everything is political, nothing is political any more, the world itself is meaningless. When everything is sexual, nothing is sexual any more, and sex loses its determinants. When everything is aesthetic, nothing is beautiful or ugly anymore, and art itself disappears. This paradoxical state of affairs, which is simultaneously the complete actualization of an idea, the perfect realization of the whole tendency of modernity, and the negation of that idea and that tendency, their annihilation by virtue of their very success … (9-10)

And not only is meaninglessness the problem. By extension, everything can be flattened, and hence, everything becomes calculable, and is no longer singular; there is no longer an irreducible difference in humans, in us: we are all completely and utterly exchangeable.

…

Just like death—for one can only utter death metaphorically, naming something that one cannot have a prior experience of; without any possibility of a referent. In other words, death is a catachrestic metaphor; a pure name. And death is precisely what haunts each name, each act of naming.

Each naming is always already a naming in anticipation of the possibility of death. Perhaps this is why I am refusing to mention his name even as I am speaking about him. But is it possible to mourn, to say adieu without a name: can we ever mourn anything but the passing of a name? For, it is the paradoxical nature of names—singular and referring to no one but one; and referring to everyone but that one at the same time—that allows us to, at least momentarily, approach death. It is only in the foregrounding of the singular-plurality of the name that we escape the banality of clarity, of transparency, of the claim to knowing the person that we are mourning. And which allows us to mourn the passing that was always already in the name, whilst maintaining the absolute alterity of the person; her/ his absolute singularity.

And even as we are attempting to bear witness—for what else are we doing by attempting to speak of something we cannot know about, attempting to speak the impossible—to this passing, we are faced with the problem of either letting him speak for himself, or attempting to speak for him.

If we are content to speak for him, we risk effacing him, speaking over him, as if he never spoke; silencing him.

If we only allow him to speak for himself, citing him, quoting him, placing those vampire marks around his words (even in full fidelity to him), we are still enacting a violence onto him—after all, every citation is always already out of context, a borrowing of the voice of the other. This might even be a worse violence to his voice: appropriating it as if it was his words, whilst divorcing ourselves from the responsibility that I am the one that is giving voice to his already silent voice.

Perhaps when faced with this Beckettian paradox where I must speak yet I cannot speak, I have no choice but to speak as if I can; I have no choice but to allow him to speak as if he can—I have to vampirize him, and let him speak through me, as if that is even legitimate to begin with. And take full responsibility that it is I who is calling forth this voice; as if in a séance, where I am the shaman. Or a telephone.

Here, we must not forget the promise that Alexander Graham Bell and his brother Melville made to each other whilst working on an early prototype of the telephone: whoever died first was to try and make contact with the other.

What the other had to do was to listen for the call of the other. And pick up the phone.

For this moment though, even as I answer the call, and take full responsibility for answering this particular call over all other calls—just as important, just as relevant—taking into account the fact that this call might never have even be meant for me, I shall let the call speak through me, and at most, lend my voice to the call. But doing so whilst always keeping in mind the static that is in all calls, the silent voices, the ghosts, spectres, hauntings, interjections, interventions; and allowing all the different registers to speak, remaining open to the possibilities, and forgettings, and memories of the to come, the yet to come, the always already come. Keeping in mind that all response is elliptical; that when we attempt to respond, we do not hear, but in fact cease hearing, puncture knowing—that all we can do is attend to the possibility of attending;

By listening …

The absolute rule, that of symbolic exchange, is to return what you received. Never less, but always more. The absolute rule of thought is to return the world as we received it: unintelligible.

And if it is possible, to return it a little bit more unintelligible. A little bit more enigmatic. –Adiou Professor ~jean baudrillard --Jeremy Fernando – Adiou jeremyfernando.com]

Because we are born into language it is inescapable, it mediates everything we do. This debate round is no different, but the way we attend to that is the fundamental quest(ion).

Information is the new system of technology, seeking to dictate, understand, and name the revolutions in the revolution, to bury its radical energy underneath the dead weight of meaning.

News coverage is coupled with the illusion of present time, of presence – this is the media illusion of the world “live” and, at the same time, the horizon of disappearance of the real event. Hence the dilemma posed by all the images we receive: uncertainty regarding the truth of the event as soon as the news media are involved. As soon as they are both involved in and involved by the course of phenomena, it is the news media that are the event. It is the event of news coverage that substitutes itself for coverage of the event. The historic time of the event, the psychological time of affects, the subjective time of judgment and will, the objective time of reality – these are all simultaneously thrown into question by real time. If there were a subject of history, a subject of knowledge, a subject of power, these have all disappeared in the obliteration by real time of distance, of the pathos of distance, in the integral realization of the world by information. Before the event it is too early for the possible. After the event it is too late for the possible. It is too late also for representation, and nothing will really be able to account for it. September 11th, for example, is there first – only then do its possibility and its causes catch up with it, through all the discourses that will attempt to explain it. But it is as impossible to represent that event as it was to forecast it before it occurred. The CIA's experts had at their disposal all the information on the possibility of an attack, but they simply didn't believe in it. It was beyond imagining. Such an event always is. It is beyond all possible causes (and perhaps even, as Italo Svevo suggests, causes are merely a misunderstanding that prevents the world from being what it is). We have, then, to pass through the non-event of news coverage (information) to detect what resists that coverage. To find, as it were, the “living coin” of the event. To make a literal analysis of it, against all the machinery of commentary and stage-management that merely neutralizes it. Only events set free from news and information (and us with them) create a fantastic longing. These alone are “real”, since there is nothing to explain them and the imagination welcomes them with open arms. There is in us an immense desire for events. And an immense disappointment, as all the contents of the information media are desperately inferior to the power of the broadcasting machinery. This disproportionality creates a demand that is ready to swoop on any incident, to crystallize on any catastrophe. And the pathetic contagion that sweeps through crowds on some particular occasion (the death of Diana, the World Cup) has no other cause. It isn't a question of voyeurism or letting off steam. It's a spontaneous reaction to an immoral situation: the excess of information creates an immoral situation, in that it has no equivalent in the real event. Automatically, one wants a maximal event, a “fateful” event – which repairs this immense banalization of life by the information machine. We dream of senseless events that will free us from this tyranny of meaning and the constraint of causes. We live in terror both of the excess of meaning and of total meaninglessness. And in the banal context of social and political life these excessive events are the equivalent of the excess of signifier in language for Lévi-Strauss: namely, that which founds it as symbolic function. Desire for events, desire for non-events – the two drives are simultaneous and, doubtless, each as powerful as the other. Hence this mix of jubilation and terror, of secret elation and remorse. Elation linked not so much to death as to the unpredictable, to which we are so partial. All the justifications merely mask precisely this obscure desire for events, for overthrowing the order of things, whatever it may be. A perfectly sacrilegious desire for the irruption of evil, for the restitution of a secret rule, which, in the form of a totally unjustified event (natural catastrophes are similarly unjustified), reestablishes something like a balance between the forces of good and evil. Our moral protestations are directly proportionate to the immoral fascination that the automatic reversibility of evil exerts on us.

Kitsch condensation of complex concepts filtered down to digital ink for exportation and assimilation…

“curtailing the historical horizons of possibility by drumming transcendent abstractions like ‘security,' ‘order' and ‘stability'

[This Sunday evening at 10pm, I'll be sitting at the counter of Waffle House on Tunnel Road. I'll be wearing clothing but underneath I'll be naked. You'll know it's me because I'll be eating Bert's BEST bowl of Chili. Please note that Bert's BEST is a large bowl of chili, smothered, covered, chunked and peppered. This clarification is important, just in case there is someone else at the counter eating a bowl of Bert's Chili, which is just chili and not as good as Bert's BEST. After you identify me by my chili and also perhaps by my concealed nakedness, you'll take the stool beside me. At first I won't be sure it's you and the anticipation will be a real thrill for me. When the waitress greets you... I'm not sexist it's just statisticaly probable that your server will be a female because male Waffle House servers are very rare. Anyway, when your waitress greets you, you won't need to review a menu because I'm about to tell you what to order and you'll have it memorized. It may be a good idea to write this down on a small piece of paper and memorize while you're driving to the Tunnel Road Waffle House. Ready? Good. You'll tell the waitress you'll have Hashbrowns, covered, diced, peppered and topped. Curiously enough, topped means topped with Burt's Chili. The other code words stand for melted cheese, grilled tomatoes, and spicy jalapeno peppers, respectively. I mention this because often times people don't care for spicy foods, in which case you can substitute capped for peppered. Capped is the code word for grilled button mushrooms. Either way, I'll still know it's you. Yet just to be sure, in addition to the Hashbrowns, order a city ham biscuit from the DOLLAR$ MENU. Of course it's possible that you may not like City Ham. The name itself can conjur unpleasant connotations if you think too long about it. This isn't important though because you don't have to eat it. It's just something off the DOLLAR$ MENU that you'll order it so I can be sure you're you and not just someone else that happens to be ordering Hashbrowns, covered, diced, peppered and topped. After you order and only after the waitress has walked away, I'll ask you if you'd like a spoonful of my Bert's BEST Bowl of Chili. Don't respond verbally, just looked me in the eyes, squint slightly in a seductive manner and then open your mouth, stick out your tongue and get ready for a spoonful of Bert's BEST. Taste the chili, the sautéed onions, melted cheese, grilled hickory smoked ham and spicy jalepeno peppers. It doesn't matter if you like the spicy peppers or not. You're going to eat them and they're going to be HOT! So hot your salivation may carry a little piece of grilled hickory smoked ham from the corner of your mouth down the precipice of your chin. Don't wipe it off, let it drip. When my body stops covulsing and my emotions return from sheer ecstacy, I'll put a $20 bill on the counter. Then I'll get up slowly and walk out the door. Never to see you again. If this sounds like the kind of thing you're looking for, email me to set up a time to meet. I know I said I'd be there tonight at 10 pm but if more then one woman showed up it would cause confusion. Also I'd like to make sure you're not a weirdo before we meet.]

Information is a way of understanding the world as a generalized exchange, one where each piece of information is rendered with a set use-value and is completely exchangeable with every other tidbit of knowledge

[Hibbitts 1994 (Bernard J., Assoc. Prof of Law @ Pitt, “Making Sense of Metaphors: Visuality, Aurality, and the Reconfiguration of American Legal Discourse” Cardozo Law Review, 229, http://faculty.law.pitt.edu/hibbitts/meta_int.htm)

[2.5] Less obviously, but more fundamentally, our visuality shapes our sense of social identity and difference. We tend to group one another more on the basis of similar visual appearance than on, say, similar accent.53 This is most obvious when we categorize individuals according to the color of their skin: in our visualist culture, most Americans are "white" or "black." Visual identity has indeed become so important to us that we not only differentiate, but actually discriminate against one another on a visual basis. Having skin of a certain color may in practice entitle us to, or alternatively, it may disqualify us from educational opportunity, economic wealth, and political power.

In light of our cultural preoccupation with the visual, it is not at all surprising that we are far more concerned with personal deficiencies in our sense of sight than with deficiencies in our other sensory departments. We insist on wearing glasses or contact lenses to correct minor flaws in our vision while we would not think of, say, wearing a hearing aid to correct similar minor defects in our hearing. We fear losing our sight more than we fear losing any of our other faculties. We harbor great pity for the blind, while deaf persons often arouse our irritation and impatience.

Visuality penetrates our very language. We routinely rely on visual metaphors to communicate understanding and knowing, or phenomena understood and known. When we comprehend something, we say "I see." Someone who does not understand "can't see" what we mean; he or she may even be "blind" to the obvious. We describe good leaders in metaphorical terms that suggest that they see far or well: they are "visionary"; they have "insight" or "foresight"; they have "perspective" or a "world view." We also associate knowledge and understanding with light, the physical presence of which is necessary for seeing. If I want someone to explain a topic, I might ask them to "illuminate" it or "shed light" on it. In the same vein, smart people are "bright." Darkness, on the other hand, inhibits seeing and therefore denotes ignorance. If I don't know what's going on, I'm "in the dark." As a general matter, not-so-smart people are "dimwits."

[2.8] American law has both reflected and actively contributed to our overall cultural visuality. Even in American trial courts which have resounded with the voices of lawyers, litigants, judges, and jurors, seeing has traditionally been given priority over the other senses.58 Great effort has gone into making testimony and arguments visible in writing. Eyewitnesses testifying to what they have seen have been preferred over "earwitnesses" testifying to what they have heard.59 Frequently, earwitnesses have been barred as bearers of inadmissible hearsay.60 Our judges and juries have generally given greater weight to visual evidence (in the form of both writings and exhibits) than to oral evidence.61 The existence of some visible written instrument has traditionally precluded oral testimony as to that instrument's meaning (the parol evidence rule). On appeal, disputed cases have come before appellate judges who have been expressly tasked with resolving them in writing. The appellate process still requires these judges to read visible briefs, precedents, and statutes rather than listen to live witnesses or (given severe time limits on oral argument) even attorneys.62

nonverbal diagrams and graphs into their works.73

[2.14] The intimate connection between writing and visuality has been indirectly and directly demonstrated at numerous junctures in Western cultural and legal history. Members of societies having little or no experience with writing have tended to value a variety of senses.79 They may not have held all in equal esteem, but relative to contemporary America, their members have generally placed less emphasis on sight and more emphasis on sound.80 On the other hand, members of societies having more experience with writing have given increased weight to visuality and visual experience.81

meaning "to recite" or "to read aloud."92 In this context, it should not be surprising that Greek law was long understood as having intimate ties to oral poetry,93 and, via an alternative rendering of nomos as "tune," even music.94 At one point in The Republic, Plato metaphorically described the just man as one who "must have put all three parts [of his soul] in tune with him, highest and lowest and middle, exactly like the three chief notes of a scale."95

In 1096, Bishop Ivo of Chartes actually entitled the prologue to his collection of canons De consonantia canonum, "Of the Consonance [literally, a "sounding-together"] of the Canons."105 Circa 1140, the monk Gratian evoked the Latin term chorda or "string" (of, e.g., a lyre) when he gave his Decretum the long-form title of Concordia discordantium canonum, or "The Concordance [or "Harmonizing"] of Discordant Canons."106

in courtrooms decorated with allegorical paintings.127 Rules, procedures, and precedents were increasingly set down in treatises, customals, and codes, the finer copies of which were illuminated with detailed pictures of legal situations128 and allegorical tables of legal relations.129 Heraldry's popularity suggested the term "by color of office" (later extended to "color of law" and "color of title") as a metaphor for the appearance, if not the fact, of legal right and power.130 In response to another aspect of contemporary visuality, several late medieval legal texts, and even several famous late medieval lawyers, were metaphorically described as "mirrors" that reflected what was good or right for the community.131

was expressed as "hearing." called law a "golden metewand."162 Late in the seventeenth century, the German legal philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz elaborated the ancient Aristotelian notion of law as geometry.163

[2.23] In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, writing and visuality matured together. European and American literacy rates reached unprecedented levels.164 Philosophers actually proclaimed the 1700s the "Age of Enlightenment." In the 1800s, paeans to sight became commonplace.165 John Ruskin wrote that "[t]he greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something. . . . To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion, all in one."166 Ralph Waldo Emerson declared that at the moment of epiphany, "I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all."167 In a variety of contexts, vision became a sensory cipher for the exercise of power. Styles of landscape gardening that provided the upper-class householder with a pleasing view of his estate gave him power over nature. Designs for asylums and prisons (such as Jeremy Bentham's "Panopticon") that enabled authorities to continually survey their inmates gave the sane power over the insane, and the law-abiding power over the criminal. Vision even became an instrument of imperialism, as didactic and theatric exhibitions at home of exotic colonial lifestyles abroad gave Europeans psychological power over their overseas possessions.170

[2.24] In English law, William Blackstone set his Commentaries in a metaphoric language that was strikingly visualist, especially considering that his work was born as a series of lectures wherein aural metaphors would have been tolerated and even naturally expected. Blackstone repeatedly made "observations,"171 analyzed legal powers from various "views" or "points of view,"172 and reported that truths "appear."173 He notably regarded himself as offering the prospective law student "a general map" of the law,174 which he later described in visual terms as a magnificent, if somewhat antiquated, "Gothic castle."175 In American law, visuality similarly manifested itself in the form, and even arguably in some of the features, of the written Constitution approved at Philadelphia.176 Thomas Jefferson proclaimed that the Constitution was "a good canvas, on which some strokes only want retouching";177 he called the principles protected in the Bill of Rights a "bright constellation" which had guided the republic through the course of revolution and reformation.178 Early in the nineteenth century, Chief Justice John Marshall's constitutional jurisprudence was fraught with visual metaphors, some of which were inspired by the very visibility of the document he was construing.179 Later in the nineteenth century, such English and American legal educators as A1bert Venn Dicey, Frederick Pollock, and Christopher Columbus Langdell employed the radically disembodied visual metaphor of law as geometry 180 to reconceive freedom "as a set of barriers against coercive intrusion into zones of autonomous conduct."181 English legal historian Frederic Maitland pioneered the similarly abstract characterization of law as a visible "seamless web."182 It was nonetheless another jurist, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who best reflected the sensory bias of the age. Holmes repeatedly approached law, not to mention life and language,183 as a matter of looking. It was he who first described law as a "magic mirror";184 it was he who first advanced the notion that law could be found in a "penumbra."185 Such metaphoric language gave law, not to mention his own words, extraordinary power and presence in an unprecedentedly visualist culture.

[2.25] The added boost that print provided to the social and intellectual status of vision gradually undermined the position still occupied by the other forms of sensory experience in the Western tradition. In societies no longer so unfamiliar or uncomfortable with the visible word that they needed sound, touch, or savor to ensure their own survival, those senses could be abandoned as primary carriers of information; in some instances they could even be condemned. Aurality suffered especially. From the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries (with perhaps a brief interruption during the consciously nostalgic days of Romanticism),186 speech was radically severed from writing and reading; the latter became almost universally understood as silent practices having a distinct and superior syntactic style.187 Rhetoric was transformed into the more visual study of composition and belles-lettres.188 At least among the "reading" middle and upper classes, silence became a powerful norm of social etiquette and order.189 Aural concepts such as the "music of the spheres" were driven from the realm of Newtonian science.190 Written literature cast off most of the aural forms it had previously assumed. The dialogue first became strangely "monologic,"191 and then was virtually abandoned as a leading literary device.192 Poetry, to the extent it was not supplanted by less aurally appealing prose,193 was increasingly written not for the ear, but for the eye.194 Once again, the form as a whole was analogized to painting-ut pictura poesis.195

[2.26] Law was inevitably caught up in the new antipathy to sound. Between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, many traditional legal ceremonies in which aural declarations had reinforced visual or tactile gestures were either abandoned or reduced to the status of archaisms. In England, law showed noticeably less respect for customary property "rights" based only on oral tradition.196 Judges increasingly refused to admit hearsay evidence.197 In a society where the spoken word had lost a critical measure of its traditional power, slander (which had been taken very seriously right through the Middle Ages)198 was increasingly marginalized as a legitimate cause of action.199 Dialogues all but disappeared from legal literature.200 Law finally dissolved its ancient relationship with poetry: Blackstone's The Lawyer's Farewell to his Muse,201 a verse of dubious quality written in the early 1740s on the occasion of the future commentator's abandonment of poetry for law, is a rough but convenient marker of a broader historical transition.202 The ancient and ailing system of aural lectures and exercises at the Inns of Court in London finally collapsed, leaving law students to learn most of their law from printed texts.203

[2.27] In America, oral tradition had a significant impact on law and legal composition through the end of the eighteenth century;204 when Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776, his draft contained marks indicating breaths and pauses appropriate to an oral reading of the document.205 In the nineteenth century, however, oral practices and procedures fell out of legal favor. An early judicial indulgence of "unwritten" sources of constitutional authority based on broad contextual understandings of the Framers' intent soon gave way to a more strictly visual "textualism."206 At mid-century, the United States Supreme Court began to limit time for oral argument, preferring to place more weight on written briefs.207 Legal apprenticeship, which had traditionally been premised on the multisensory virtues of listening, observation, and discussion, was first transformed into an opportunity to read the master's books,208 and then was largely abandoned in favor of a form of classroom instruction that revolved around the reading of appellate decisions and the writing of examinations.209 Legal language reflected material change: by the end of the 1800s, the figurative references to "harmony" and "voice" that had once been scattered through the pages of the Federalist Papers210 and the works of legal luminary Joseph Story211 were largely gone. Metaphorically, at least, American law fell all but silent.

[2.28] Contemporary America is heir to both the technology and the sensory bias of the recent past. Despite numerous signs that both our facility and our comfort with writing are declining,212 the United States is still one of the most print-saturated and print-oriented nations on earth. Our continued cultural dependence on the written word undergirds our own visuality as I have described it-a visuality that today is supported (even if, in the process, it is being transformed) by such new "visual" technologies as motion pictures, television, and computers. In this context, the visualist legal language that our culture has spawned and still sustains may ultimately be regarded as one of the most powerful, if also one of the least recognized, legacies of writing.

B. Visuality and Power

The traditional visuality of American legal metaphor has, however, been more than just a function of general cultural circumstance. It has also been the product of power: the power of American men over women, the power of American whites over blacks, the power of American "Anglos" over Hispanics, and the power of American Protestants over Catholics and Jews. By making special use of the written word to secure or extend their cultural authority, members of the former groups have gained a special respect

exploring how greater exposure to, dependence on, and even literal faith in writing have traditionally encouraged some American groups to embrace visuality more enthusiastically than have others. I will then examine how the members of these former groups have imposed their visuality on American legal culture and, in that course, on American legal language.

in a visualist society238- the visuality of American women's culture has nonetheless been qualified. The failure of the available male-dominated visual media to adequately address women's concerns or women's reality has only ensured that unmediated looking has not been as important or meaningful to American women as a group, as it has been to American men as a group.239

experiments in "dialogic" or "collective" writing,249 and in the pointedly personal, consciously conversational style of much feminist scholarship.250

[2.36] Most important for present purposes, however, the relative aurality of American women's culture is reflected in the aural metaphors American women often choose to define themselves, their condition, and their world. Psychologist Mary Field Belenky and her colleagues recently noted that

[i]n describing their lives [to us], women commonly talked about voice and silence: "speaking up," "speaking out," "being silenced," "not being heard," "really listening," "really talking," "words as weapons," "feeling deaf and dumb," "having no words," "saying what you mean," "listening to be heard," and so on in an endless variety of connotations . . . . We found that women repeatedly used the metaphor of voice to depict their intellectual and ethical development . . . .251 actors who appeared before them.267 In the schoolroom where white American teachers had once taught their students to read by recitation, the most important meta-lesson became, as it today remains, how to sit, write, and read in contented quiet.268

visual arts, contemporary African American cultural critic Michele Wallace actually claims that there exists a "visual void in black discourse"272 attributable to "intra-racial pain and outside intervention."273 Exclusively visual expression and experience-including reading and writing-have even been denigrated by some members of the African American community as being either secondary repositories of the African American heritage274 or, more provocatively, undesirable marks of racial assimilation and oppression.275 I write for the Black voice and any ear which can hear it. As a composer writes for musical instruments and a choreographer creates for the body, I search for sound, tempos, and rhythms to ride through the vocal cord over the tongue, and out of the lips of Black people. . . . I accept the glory of stridencies and purrings, trumpetings and somber sonorities.293

Music and oral storytelling have additionally provided the narrative frameworks or have been particularly prominent themes in the writings of a variety of African American novelists.294 of reality is found in communicative speech. The outer aspect of things is unimportant. Neither Scripture nor the rabbis gave visual descriptions of things or people."325

contemporary Judaism would be complete without mention of Yiddish, the usually spoken but (at least until recently) rarely written folk language that has long served as "the vehicle of . . . social and political cohesion" in the Jewish community.332 on American law faculties was similarly restricted well into this century. Hispanic Americans, the overwhelming majority of whom are Catholic, are only just beginning to break into mainstream legal practice342 and still have only a toehold in the professoriate.343 In this context, relatively few American lawyers or law professors have come from backgrounds that might have inclined them to push American legal metaphors in a nonvisualist sensory direction.

tasks while rendering aural traditions and talents irrelevant, can only have distanced successful female, African American, Hispanic, and even some Catholic and Jewish lawyers from their relatively more aural roots and any inclination they might have had to evoke those roots in aural legal metaphors.

African American, Hispanic, Catholic, and Jewish lawyers - despite their undoubted success in achieving greater social justice for members of their own and other "out groups" - have until recently been disinclined to challenge the fundamental visuality of American law and legal metaphor.

[2.53] In addition to being both a consequence of culture and a product of power, the historical popularity of visual metaphors in American legal discourse has been a function of the considerable overlap between the traditional American understanding of law and the predominant American understanding of vision. In this society, law and vision have been deemed to share certain characteristics and to favor similar values. American lawyers and legal scholars casting about for accessible, "sensible" ways in which to describe or explain difficult or theoretical legal concepts have therefore been particularly drawn to visual figures of speech.

[2.54] Since at least the mid-nineteenth century, most American lawyers and jurists, if not all American law professors,350 have understood law as being ideally abstract, disengaging, objective, determinate, timeless, systematic, and differentiatory.351 Law has been regarded as abstract to the extent that its rules, principles, and such legal constructs as "the reasonable man" are generalizations independent of particular concrete circumstances.352 Law has been understood as disengaging to the extent that it allows and even encourages parties to pursue their own autonomous self-interests free from the involvement or interference of others-hence, the concept of "rights."353 It has been considered objective in that it exists apart from, and is supposedly applied regardless of, the feelings or whims of individual judges or lawyers or their personal attitudes towards the disputing parties.354 It has been held to be determinate insofar as it has been assumed that proper legal analysis leads to "one right answer."355 Traditional American jurisprudence has conceived of law as timeless insofar as its core principles-if not always its specific rules-remain constant.356 Law has been viewed as systematic in that its rules and principles are presumed to be related to each other in a coherent deductive pattern.357 Finally, traditional lawyers and legal scholars have thought of law as differentiatory in that they have attributed much of its success to depend on its ability to make and maintain sharp distinctions between various situations, categories, and rules.358 [2.55] Each of these qualities of law has been closely matched by a characteristic of vision, at least as American and other Western philosophers have encouraged us to understand visual "phenomenology." To begin, we have traditionally considered vision to be the ultimate abstract sense. Sight depends not on contact or proximity with concrete reality, but rather on withdrawal: "The best view is by no means the closest view; to get the proper view we take the proper distance, which may vary for different objects and different purposes, but which is always realized as a positive and not a defective feature in the phenomenal presence of the object." To this extent, sight literally abstracts one from the world-certainly not completely, but more than the other senses.360 Perhaps this is why "it is easier to be a visual spiritualist than a tactile one."361 Regarded in a positive sense, visually induced abstraction facilitates generalization; indeed, our word for the ultimate generalization, a "theory," is derived from the Greek theoria, meaning "a seeing." In a negative sense, however, visual abstraction inhibits the appreciation of lifelike particularity.362 After World War II, deafened veterans reported that their loss of hearing at first made the noisy world a peaceful place. In time, as they were forced to mediate more and more of their experience through vision, they found it to be lifeless and unreal.363 Their original abstraction had become outright alienation.

]

“An analogy of this would be one of furniture in the modern context: each piece of furniture no longer has a meaning in itself (the last of this is perhaps "Dad's chair," which only he can sit in), except for the fact that it is part of the overall design of that particular room. In this manner, each piece is perfectly substitutable with any other piece; take any chair out and replace it with another chair-as long as it fits in with the overall design, it will work: functionality is the key here… In a concept of communication in which there is a direct exchange of information, each word functions like a piece of furniture: nothing has meaning in itself, and there is no singularity; individual words have meaning only as part of a network of other words”

This is a generalized exchange; each piece of information is god insofar as it is useful, each use is the same, thus, the actual information is completely exchangeable with every other other,

Think about how many different args theyre about to read; really, it doesn’t matter which ones you read,

It’s the saaaaaame shit

This imposition of an overarching end-goal of interpretation, information is exactly the problem; all of these facts and theories lose their place in the contingent, in order to become universalisms that must enact the same violence on the people that it theorizes about;

Protesters in the revolution are only important in that they are protesting for democracy

Which is only important as an internal link to extinction

Which is only important for a debate ballot

None of the protesters actually matter as a singularity, everything is reducible to a base-calculation to win the round

There is no doubt that there is an exchange that takes place in communication--otherwise, one will emerge from any process of communication completely unchanged (which is not true). But the exchange that takes place is not one of a direct information exchange; this would be the realm of a general exchange, an exchange of one unit of information for another. This is communication conceived as an economic exchange, where all differences have to be flattened (or abstracted from a use-value to an exchange-value), and perhaps the sense of meaning that is derived from the act is, then, its surplus value. This fits in perfectly with the logic of capital: communication as a process that is calculable, predictable, and which produces surplus value that guarantees its continual cycle. An analogy of this would be one of furniture in the modern context: each piece of furniture no longer has a meaning in itself(the last of this is perhaps "Dad's chair," which only he can sit in), except for the fact that it is part of the overall design of that particular room. In this manner, each piece is perfectly substitutable with any other piece; take any chair out and replace it with another chair-as long as it fits in with the overall design, it will work: functionality is the key here. The "ambience" of the room is the concept that determines the individual pieces of furniture, which only have meaning insofar as being part of the network that is the room itself: each piece is individual, but not singular.34 In a concept of communication in which there is a direct exchange of information, each word functions like a piece of furniture: nothing has meaning in itself, and there is no singularity; individual words have meaning only as part of a network of other words, constructions, sentences, other sentences, and so on. Communication itself would be subsumed under functionality (that is, the purpose of communication would be predetermined-exchange a particular piece of information). This is the only way in which one can deem that miscommunication took place: only with an aim that is set can any failure be determined and calculated. With such a concept of communication, the importance of each person is determined by her position in the network, and, by extension, each person is completely and utterly replaceable, exchangeable.

This is our informational loop caught up with itself in our fascination with complete transparency and exchangeability, we have short-circuited any value or singularity left in the world; every sphere of value loses meaning.

Why does it matter if we all die when we have all been rendered as useful as chairs in a living room, anyways?

While we continue climbing stair machines to heaven, still searching for that clarity, that metaphysical comfort of knowing, being at the center of the text, it is only the radical potential of the text -- we must approach it differently – that keeps debate alive.

When things reach that apogee where they clarify and resolve themselves, they then with equal suddenness become unintelligible and ungraspable.

There is no finer parallel universe than that of the detail or the fragment.

Freed from the whole and its transcendent ventriloquism, the detail inevitably becomes mysterious.

Every particle wrested from the natural world is in itself an immediate subversion of the real and its wholeness.

Like the fragment, it only has to be elliptical.

It only has to be an exception.

Every singular image can be reckoned exceptional.

And it puts an end to all the others.

There is an alternative, which avoids this generalized exchange for impossible exchange with the world;

Impossible exchange is not an exchange with the other that involves a transfer of information, or meaing

Impossible exchange postulates that, when faced with the demand of the other, we will inevitably respond incorrectly, and that there are infinite others, with infinite demands upon us, that we can never fully respond to

“I just want to hug every cat..but…I….cant”

Instead of letting ourselves become paralyzed with this knowledge, we have to make a choice to respond to the other, but also mediate this choice with a respect for alterity, the demands the other exerts upon us can never be known entirely, just as the absolute clarity of the text can never be known to the reader, just the author.

We keep the demands that require a response unknown to us, responding to these others in the revolution with itself - like leftover ghosts in the text.

This probably proves our argument in a context of the self and its ability to textually extend over the globe – we offer a recent example:

This need to know one’s own self is the very same reason why there was an outpouring of rage at the People’s Republic of China over the recent melamine-tainted milk scandal. For the anger was surely not directed at the fact that there were foreign agents in the food: that has happened so many times in the past that one almost expects it. Nor could the outrage be due to the fact that the authorities had known about the potential poisonous agent a few months before the scandal broke but covered it up to protect their image ahead of the Olympics: such cover-ups are so commonplace that an open admission before a major event would have been an even bigger shock to us. This world-wide anger over the milk scandal was due to two things. Firstly, China’s central role in the world can no longer be denied: a local event in China ends up poisoning people from around the world – the People’s Republic of China has announced that their arrival on the world stage can no longer be ignored. Secondly, and more importantly, no one can unplug themselves from this connection: whether we like it or not, most of our products go through China in own way or another: any localized problem is not only just a global problem in a conceptual sense, it is now effectively also our problem. This means that not only are we unable to cut ourselves from our link with China, but by extension, if we are no longer able to delineate ourselves from them, our definition of our selves is no longer as fixed, as determined. Hence, regardless of our nationalities, we are in effect part-Chinese. In some sense the direct translation of China as the “middle kingdom” which suggests that China is the ‘centre of the world’ is coming true – and this fact which is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore is making us uncomfortable. We see this anxiety over our own selves play out in daily acts of discrimination at foreign workers which range from accusing them of ‘taking our jobs’ to ‘not assimilating to our culture’ and ‘bringing their dirty habits from their homeland to our shores’, all of which are manifestations of attempts to differentiate them from us. For only if this other is clearly determined can our selves be secure again. In the case of the milk scandal, an outpouring of scorn serves to delineate the People’s Republic of China as the enemy: by accusing them of negligence, and even of being ‘murderous capitalists who would poison milk just to gain a quick buck’, we then – by oppositional logic – get to cast ourselves as people with a conscience, and more importantly as people that wouldn’t have done the same thing, and therefore as people who are different from them. Since just about every product seems to pass through China at some point, there is an added element of fear that anything that contains milk is now potentially poisoned. Hence not only is there anger against China, it is reinforced by a climate of fear, of collective paranoia: after all, as Hitler and Goebbels have taught us, there is nothing that motivates an angry mob more than fear of the enemy. In this way, fear serves a dual function: it both creates a mob, and mobilizes that very same mob against the enemy. This is the world attempting to make its futile final stance against the People’s Republic of China: this is all of us desperately claiming, ‘we are not you’ … -- Fernando 2008 (Jeremy, egs phd, melamine or the might of the dragon, http://goo.gl/o9McS \\stroud)

[I revealed to the group about how I had just participated in my first threesome: with two hot latina women…. Plus this guy named Dave Rothchild… Later I found out it was a foursome, see, I had always thought a threesome was two people plus yourself. At first it was just me and the two hot latina women getting at it, and I mean getting at it! There was muff flying everywhere! I was knee deep in muff! I had to get my muff waders on. You know what I mean? No, this guy does not know what I mean. Well, needless to say there was a high volume of muff. Is there anyone confused now as to how much muff there was, because I have a few more examples. You know the Great Wall of China? Imagine that was made entirely of muff. You know those water cannons that riot police use to hose down crowds? Imagine all that’s coming out is liquid muff. 3000 P.S.I. of pure muff. Is that enough? Muff Said.]

We will think democracy , everything it has been, has yet to come, will never be, and already is. We think the resolution is a singularity, something that can never be responded to as a sound-bite, as it is irreducible to its component countries or their respective issues, but instead as a global event that escapes our total understanding, that we will not try and map over with our own meaning and endpoint. Fernando explains,

Each person is individual, but not singular. A process of communication in which there is no a priori aim (and, by extension, no result) rests on an impossible exchange: an exchange that occurs in spite of the fact that there is no flattening of differences.35 An impossible exchange is one that realizes that there can be no exchange because all logical systems rest on an exclusion, one that realizes that there is no logical system that can sustain itself within itself; without the possibility of a totalizing logical system, there can never be a natural equivalence. Therefore, there can never be any direct exchange except if the exchange is simulated. This brings us back to Lucretius' conception of communication: the exchange takes place in the simulacra, an exchange that is impossible but which happens nonetheless. This exchange, in the form of the act of communication, is precisely the emergent property of the process of communication: communication occurs for the sake of communication and not for some teleological goal. There is no overall "design" or "ambience" to govern the process of communication; an emergent property, by strict definition, is unknowable a priori. Hence, each act of communication is unique. Since there is no overall structure under which the act of communication is subsumed, there is a potential for a unique and new response in each act of communication.36 It is this incalculability that resides in every pure decision, where there is, as Jacques Derrida posits, "the sacrifice of economy, that without which there is no free responsibility or decision." It is this incalculability that saves a decision from being a mere prelude to an act. The moment of decision is one in which there is the potential for responding to the other, where the other remains unknowable (if not totally, at least partially), and in which one responds with a degree of blindness. The blindness occurs in two realms: one with regards to the other which the self is responding to (in the sense of not subsuming the other under the self); the second to the act that is to be done in response to the other (in the sense of not knowing a priori what is to be done). It is this double blindness that allows the self to respond, in the fullest sense, to the other: not only does "every other (one) [remain] every (bit) other"38 in the acknowledgement that every decision privileges one over all the remaining others, toward whom we always remain accountable, but also the other that is privileged does not become merely an extension of the self. This is why Kierkegaard proclaims, "The instant of decision is madness":39 one chooses in spite of the fact that there is no rational decision to choose one course over the other(s). If one were to rely solely on logic or rationality, there would always be an aporetic situation, but one has to choose in spite of this. Otherwise, there is a situation of inaction (which is a decision in itself): this would be the decision of nonresponsibility, the refusal to respond to the other and all the other others. This is the problem with Zizek's position: by refusing to choose, he ultimately chooses a position that responds to none, that abandons all the others. However, if one chooses to respond, then one must respond whilst being blind (to all other possibilities). It is this double blindness that allows for the potentiality of a response that is an absolute responsibility [that] could not be derived from a concept of responsibility and therefore, in order for it to be what it must be it must remain inconceivable, indeed unthinkable: it must therefore be irresponsible in order to be absolutely responsible.40 This is why Zizek claims that the authentic moment, the real moment of decision, has to be one which is "harshness ... sustained by love,"41 which in his conception is a moment of justice that is guided by love, a blindness in fidelity to the other. This is akin to Derrida's claim that true responsibility is one that doesn't keep account or give an account, neither to man, to humans, to society, to one's fellows, or to one's own. Such a responsibility keeps its secret, it cannot and need not present itself...It refuses to present itself before the violence that consists of asking for accounts and justifications ... 42 This is a responsibility that is blind in and to itself, in fidelity to responding to the needs of the other. Whilst responding to the needs of the other, the self and the other remain absolute singularities-this is why there is no economy of exchange that takes place. The exchange is an impossible exchange: it is an aeconomical exchange that takes place. This is secret of the exchange: there is nothing in the exchange except for the exchange itself. This is the secret of the gift: there is nothing in the giving but the giving itself. In a blind responsibility, one is responsible to no one except to the ability to respond; this is the paradoxical condition of every decision: it cannot be deduced from a form of knowledge of which it would simply be the effect, conclusion or explication. It structurally breaches knowledge and is thus destined to nonmanifestation; a decision is, in the end, always secret.43 But in spite of this destiny, in order to respond to the other, one must respond-this is precisely where the element of blindness lies. To fully respond to the needs of the other, one must be blind to everything else, including the other: it is this that allows the other to remain fully other whilst one responds to her or him. There is no object to responsibility.

Not resolved in meaning, but in returning the world as we found it, perhaps more enigmatic, more unintelligible.

[I will now answer your facile cross-examination questions]

Anustup Basu <basu1 AT illinois.edu> is Associate Professor of English, Criticism and Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Bollywood in the Age of New Media: The Geotelevisual Aesthetic (Edinburgh University Press, 2010) and co-editor of Figurations in Indian Film (forthcoming from Palgrave-Macmillan in 2012) and InterMedia in South Asia: The Fourth ScreenHerbert (2005), which won the Indian National Award for Best Bengali Feature Film in 2005-06. (forthcoming from Routledge, 2012). He is also the executive producer of Herbert (2005), which won the Indian National Award for Best Bengali Feature Film in 2005-06, “Reflections on the Arab Spring”, 22, September, 2011, http://www.metamute.org/en/articles/reflections_on_the_arab_spring

Fernando ’09 [Jeremy, super nice, Jean Baudrillard Fellow at the European Graduate School and Fellow of Tembusu College at The National University of Singapore. He received his MA in Media Philosophy from the European Graduate School (2006) and an MA in English Literature from Nanyang Technological University (2008). “Reading blindly: Literature, Otherness, and the Possibility of an Ethical Reading”.]

Baudrillard, the intelligence of evil, or the lucidity pact

UNT RD 4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDBvtOzJsb8

I'm not your babe.
I'm not your babe, Fernando.

UTD RD 1

We begin with a story of two attas’….

Mohammad Atta received a Western education and assimilated the ideas and technologies of modernity and globalization into the 9/11 plan. Baudrillard, himself points out that the suicide attackers were unique in that they used the banality of American life as camouflage (Ibid.:19). Consider this in the context of his point that the 9/11 attacks represent “triumphant globalization battling against itself” (Ibid.:11). Also, consider it against a number of strange details concerning Atta’s personality, notably claims that there were two different Attas: a hardliner fundamentalist and a flexible Westerner. What makes Atta so remarkable is that he lived in America for quite a long time and blended in strikingly well. One could even go so far as to argue that Atta was a Westerner. He had his idiosyncrasies, but was not a religious ‘robot’ at the command of al-Qaida control. Atta led the attack on the World Trade Center and died by piloting American Airlines flight 11 into the North Tower. He was born at Kafr-el-Sheikh in the Nile Delta and was brought up in the suburbs outside Cairo. He was not raised in poverty. His father was a lawyer and his family lived in a relatively middle class neighbourhood. Atta studied architecture and city planning at the University of Cairo between 1985 and 1990. For many years he lived in Hamburg, Germany and attended the Technical University of Hamburg under the name Muhammad el-Amir. He was said to be a shy, considerate man and was close to Western acquaintances. His friends do remember him as introverted and very reserved. Employees at the planning consultancy firm where he worked in 1992 recall him as “flexible and conscientious”. While they do recall him as mildly critical of capitalistic Western development schemes, notably big hotels and offices, no one was at any time alarmed by his views. In 1994 however, he took a week-long trip to Cairo and returned with a beard, trimmed in the manner of a North African fundamentalist. Shortly after this trip to Cairo he was laid off from work. He sent his last paycheque back to his employers because he received too much money, explaining that he had not earned the excess and refused to accept it. As time went on Atta began dressing in traditional baggy pants and flowing kaftans. He continued, however, to excel at his studies in Hamburg, and despite slipping a page from the Qur’an into his thesis, received the highest possible mark the school could award him. It seems there were two different Attas: a shy tolerant university student in Hamburg and a terror cell ringleader in Egypt and the United States (Hooper, 2001). What can we say about this schizophrenic identity? At times Atta was indifferent to murder although at other times he cared very much about others, and not just Muslims (Ibid.) For instance, just two days before the hijacking of American Airlines flight 11, he rented a car in Pompano Beach, Florida. He called the owner of the car rental to inform him that the car’s oil light had turned on. Upon returning the car he told the owner once again. When asked about the incident, the owner spoke of Atta in the same manner that that those who had known him in Hamburg had: “…the only thing out of the ordinary was that he was nice enough to let me know that the car needed an oil change” (Ibid.) Despite being strictly religious, in the weeks and months leading up to the 9/11 attacks, Atta and some of the other attackers enjoyed the occasional drink, danced, and even flirted with women. While they covered up swimsuit model posters on motel room walls, they ordered and watched a pornographic pay-per-view movie on one of the nights leading up to 9/11 (Reuter, 2004:8). As we scrutinize Atta’s biography we see less of a stereotypical CNN inspired Islamic “Other”, and more of a man familiar to us. “Hence”, according to Baudrillard, “the logic – however shocking – behind the fact that the terrorists lived banal American lives for years, boarded typical American airliners in typical American cities, before rounding on the nerve centre of the body politic itself from the inside” (Kearney, 2002:126). In Atta we find a man both outside and inside the system, a man who covers up swimsuit photos and at the same time orders pay-per-view pornography; a man who studies Western architectural engineering and planning and then creates a blueprint for the destruction of one of the West’s architectural marvels; a man contemplating mass murder and simultaneously concerned about the future well being of a rental car. We find an irreducible singularity emerge out from a system of generalized exchange, the exacerbation of an uncertain culture of virtuality carried out by a man who was produced and influenced by that very culture. In light of Baudrillard’s argument, we might consider Atta as a singularity that emerges from within the system, whose death initiates the suiciding of the system by its inability to adequately reciprocate. The system recognizes it cannot respond to the excess of such a singularity and falls back on Manichean dualisms in order to return the gift of ‘shock and awe’ in a ‘War (without-end) on Terror’.

Information is the new system of technology, seeking to dictate, understand, and name the revolutions in the arab spring, to bury its radical energy underneath the dead weight of meaning

curtailing the historical horizons of possibility by drumming transcendent abstractions like ‘security,' ‘order' and ‘stability'[1]

Starting from the understanding of democratic deliberation, the architectural substructure is the very thing that prevents any sort of moving forward

Abstracted from the events on the ground, we make policy prescriptions the same way we calculate drone attacks in Yemen from a military base in Nevada or Virginia.

…politics and technology can… no longer be separated in a time when the latter forms the very framework within which the former takes place, to such an extent in fact, that deliberation is often subsumed by technique altogether; … "technology encompasses not just nuclear power stations and computers. It extends, for example, to hedgerows, trees and walls. The row of trees outside the American Embassy in London was not planted out of commitment to natural beauty, but to break up student demonstrations, just as the Paris streets were designed to frustrate revolutionary mobs".1•‹ In … what are generally thought of as liberal 'democracies'… almost all of the most important decisions in regard to overall design are made not by the people directly affected by them, much less by their elected representatives in government, but rather by technicians who not only exclude the public from the decision of whether or not a particular form of technology should be introduced, but even design them from the start so as to preclude the very possibility from ever occurring at all." 'Of course there is still an ostensible simulacrum of 'democracy' in which people continue to 'vote' and to express their will in the 'public forum', … but by and large democracy has been subsumed by the predominance of predetermined procedure and technique, …if the streets and hedgerows are designed to prevent public input into decision-making, then clearly there is a double-exclusion taking place.

There is no intelligence to be found here – “Johnny 5 is alive”, Zarathustra’s ape evolving into the hyper-active man, for the sake of change and clarity.

The proof is in the filmstrip.

Kitsch condensation of complex concepts filtered down to digital ink for exportation and assimilation…

“the revolution is live television, live television is the revolution” – And today, when the form truly is the content, all differenced is effaced,

“If that's the case, better to feel ourselves dying, even in the convulsions of terrorism, than to disappear like ectoplasms which no one, even desensitized, will want to conjure up later to give themselves a fright.”[2]

All phantoms eradicated, absolute certainty, a textual conundrum, erupting with meaning from every orifice - Gay Girl in Damascus say it ain’t so…

But we already have the answers, everything else is a matter of tweaking

Theories of deliberative democracy…… such authority has already collapsed.[3]

Lost in M.C. Escher’s house of stairs haunted by whores with an affliction unknown, plagued by phantoms hiding in-between each well. Scratching, crawling, drawing, nearer… - kneeling at the alter of a banality unknown forever to be discovered, I make my journey through the maze to arrive once again where I already remain…

Our informational loop caught up with itself in our fascination with complete transparency and exchangeability, we have short circuited any value or singularity left in the world; when the message of the text becomes absolutely clear, they become completely interchangble, and every sphere of value loses meaning.

Its not that we cant ever know anything about the world, but this is exactly the problem; we know things, and then we learn more things, and then the things we know become challenged, and we re-learn them with a slightly different nuance, and continue to learn, to educate ourselves, and to one day know everything that there is to know about the world.

Isn’t the endpoint of education in debate, anyways?

But this endpoint sets a trajectory, an unchangeable collision course, in which thought becomes vestigial, completely useless.

When everything is known about the text, there’s no need for thought.

everything can be flattened, and hence, everything becomes calculable, and is no longer singular; there is no longer an irreducible difference in humans, in us: we are all completely and utterly exchangeable.[4]

Undone by realization of a perfect system.

How do we know it wasn’t all a dream?

Not just phantoms of text, but phantoms of our own thought realized, when we try to read with a misplaced sense of certainty.

Forgetting the idea is unattainable, the slippages in language to perilous, the spectres haunting all the while, you never know what it is that seduces you. What you are sure of is that this was meant for you.

the text whispers the words of the perfect seductress: "I can be whatever you want me to be."[5]

Seduced by our own logic thrown back at us, the conclusions we have come to about the arab spring are just our own image projected onto the world.

Only a starting from an understanding that the reader will never be able to fully understand the text that allows us an escape

There is no finer parallel universe than that of the detail or the fragment.

Freed from the whole and its transcendent ventriloquism, the detail inevitably becomes mysterious.

Every particle wrested from the natural world is in itself an immediate subversion of the real and its wholeness.

Like the fragment, it only has to be elliptical.

It only has to be an exception.

Every singular image can be reckoned exceptional.

And it puts an end to all the others.[6]

In debate, we’re given the so called 'Arab Spring', an object of study, to be understood, mapped out, and to have its afflictions treated. we amputate, cutting off limbs and entire movements to create proper limits, ensure ground, produce education, the perfect resolution. But the imperfections remain, specters of the Arab Spring that refuse to go away.

Its not that events the events didn’t happen, its just that some were less newsworthy

But if an absent limb can affect one, can it really be all that absent?

Some amputees often report feeling sensation in limbs that are no longer physically present to their body, phantom limbs, that the brain still perceives as present, but inactive. Constantly there, the only known way to treat these phantoms is to trick the brain into perceiving the amputated limb as present, and functional, as if it were never missing to begin with. It's not just a memory from the past, it is training the brain to image the absent, yet ever-present part of their body.

“the phantom limb 'is not a recollection, it is a quasi-present and the patient feels it now ... with no hint of it belonging to the past.' Every time there is a sensation in the phantom limb, it is an event, unknowable until the moment in which it is felt; it is both pre-objective and pre-subjective, preceding both the cognitive subject and also the very object of cognition itself. So, even as the phantom-limb pain is treatable in the realm of the imagination, this is a treatment of its symptoms; the cause, and the very status of the sensation itself, remains unknown and ultimately unknowable.”[7]

Whenever we see “Aff” on a schematic, we feel a tickle in our phantom limbs, remnants of the resolution, which have been cut off by the topic, by framework, by the enframing of the revolutions by news, and information soundbites. They have been excised, yet whenever we turn on the news we are haunted by them, in images of Gaddafi overthrown, of female protesters raped, of Iran's nuclear ambitions. All these lie at the heart of the resolution, yet we can only deal with them superficially, or as passing steps in a heg/nuclear war scenario.

“Just because something is not written on a page does not mean that it is not there. Perhaps in order to read properly, one must always respond to both what is and what is not--or at least seems not to be-there. Perhaps, then, reading is the effect – the sensation – that lies beyond both the reader and the text; it is something that can only be experienced in its singular situation and known, at best, only retrospectively. Or, more radically still, one must always treat the absent as a (potential) present; it is, after all, the ghosts-the phantoms that haunt the text-that maintain the unknowability of the text, that keep it from becoming a book.”[8]

Indeterminacy at its finest, this phantom keeps returning, recurring, and it is only this constant haunting which makes debate possible.

When things reach that apogee where they clarify and resolve themselves, they then with equal suddenness become unintelligible and ungraspable.

In a concept of communication in ….individual, but not singular.[9]

These imperfection, phantoms of the resolution, are the necessary spectres that disrupt our fascination with the truth, perfect representations or prefigured schemas; they allow for the uncertainty about the topic that is necessary for the debate to begin from.

It is just as probable that I have also written the one - or two - best books I shall ever write. They are done with. That is how things go. And it is most unlikely that a second burst of inspiration will alter this irreversible fact. This is where the rest of life begins. But the rest is what is given to you as something extra, and there is a charm and a particular freedom about letting just anything come along, with the grace or ennui - of a later destiny.”[10]

Such numerous particularities, or potential readings, of the resolution disrupts the evolution of debate towards perfect communication, with one aff and neg argument, and the same round over and over, ad nauseum.

Perhaps in this light, or darkness, there must be an attention to, a reading of, the small, the unnoticed, the little, and a blindness to a large, the whole. In this way, there is a potential for the mysterious and the wonderful to appear, and perhaps we can catch a glimpse of the phantoms that haunt the text. After all, one can only see ghosts with the third eye.

These phantoms are the unanticipated reading that we may inexplicably stumble upon, as if an act of fate. Not something we can conjure at will, or blueprint.

What kind of thing is the ghost or the spectre but that which confounds the question of what and where it is?[11]

The phantoms of this text, of the debate round, will affect any way we chose to read and interpret the resolution, even if they have been severed off from the topic proper, or despite remaining unseen, not readily available to us for comprehension.

Ironically serving to disrupt our attempt to write the world, to exert our thought upon it, thought, like destiny, appears to us when we least expect it. Imagining things not readily known to us, but also not absent, like a phantom limb, is the very act of thinking, of poetic resolution, of the world.

Not resolved in meaning, but in returning the world as we found it, perhaps more enigmatic, more unintelligible

[1] Anustup Basu <basu1 AT illinois.edu> is Associate Professor of English, Criticism and Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Bollywood in the Age of New Media: The Geotelevisual Aesthetic (Edinburgh University Press, 2010) and co-editor of Figurations in Indian Film (forthcoming from Palgrave-Macmillan in 2012) and InterMedia in South Asia: The Fourth ScreenHerbert (2005), which won the Indian National Award for Best Bengali Feature Film in 2005-06. (forthcoming from Routledge, 2012). He is also the executive producer of Herbert (2005), which won the Indian National Award for Best Bengali Feature Film in 2005-06, “Reflections on the Arab Spring”, 22, September, 2011, http://www.metamute.org/en/articles/reflections_on_the_arab_spring

[2] Baudrillard, cool memories

[3] Dean 2009 (JODI DEAN, Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and Erasmus Professor of the Humanities in the Faculty of Philosophy at Erasmus University. DEMOCRACY AND OTHER NEOLIBERAL FANTASIES: Communicative Capitalism & Left Politics. DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS : DURHAM & LONDON, 2009. Pages p 78-80)

[4] Fernando, Jeremy, Jean Baudrillard Fellow at the European Graduate School and Fellow of Tembusu College at The National University of Singapore. He received his MA in Media Philosophy from the European Graduate School (2006) and an MA in English Literature from Nanyang Technological University (2008). “Writing Death”, 2011

[5] Fernando, Jeremy, Jean Baudrillard Fellow at the European Graduate School and Fellow of Tembusu College at The National University of Singapore. He received his MA in Media Philosophy from the European Graduate School (2006) and an MA in English Literature from Nanyang Technological University (2008). “Writing Death”, 2011

[6] Baudrillard, the intelligence of evil, or the lucidity pact

[7] Fernando ’09 [Jeremy, super nice, Jean Baudrillard Fellow at the European Graduate School and Fellow of Tembusu College at The National University of Singapore. He received his MA in Media Philosophy from the European Graduate School (2006) and an MA in English Literature from Nanyang Technological University (2008). “Reading blindly: Literature, Otherness, and the Possibility of an Ethical Reading”.]

[8] Fernando ’09 [Jeremy, super nice, Jean Baudrillard Fellow at the European Graduate School and Fellow of Tembusu College at The National University of Singapore. He received his MA in Media Philosophy from the European Graduate School (2006) and an MA in English Literature from Nanyang Technological University (2008). “Reading blindly: Literature, Otherness, and the Possibility of an Ethical Reading”.]

[9] ibid

[10] Baudrillard, cool memories

[11] Lucy, co-director of the Centre for Culture & Technology. He is a former Head of the School of Arts at Murdoch University, where he taught for many years in the Literature, Philosophy and Communication Studies programs. “A Derrida dictionary”, 2004

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