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ACT I: The Securitization of the ‘Status Quo’
The performance of the 1AC is an act of externalization of identity to a
foreign ‘other’. This is predicated on the states use of marginality as a
mechanism for discursively constructing difference. Identity is an
aesthetic act of interpretation, only though the stylized repetitive
affirmations of state discourse do these paradigms of interpretation
become legitimate. The state framework of interpret identity are
necessary based on a sexism, racism, and classism directed at a static
point.
CAMPBELL, 1998. (David Campbell, 1998). Professor of International Politics at Univ. Of Newcastly. Writing Security. Revised Edition, 1998. P.
73-74
The performative constitution of identity; that has been the fundamental theme in this
argument. Whether at the level of the body, the individual, the state or some other
articulation, this theme has focused attention on the boundary-producing practices that
instantiate the identity in whose name they operate. Sometimes these practices will affirm
more than they will abjure, at other times they will contain rather than constitute. Foreign
policy, being those practices of differentiation implicated in all confrontations between a self
and other, embraces both positive and negative valences. In contrast, Foreign Policy,
understood as one of the practices that contingently constructs through stylized and
regulated performances the identity of the state in whose name it operates is obviously more
dependent on discourses of fear and danger. The concern of this chapter is how difference
is figured and danger is represented through foreign policy/Foreign Policy.
Danger constitutes more than the boundary that demarcates a space; to have a threat
requires enforcing a closure on the community that is threatened. A notion of what “we” are
is intrinsic to an understanding of what “we” fear. What this highlights is that there is an
axiological level that proffers a range of moral valuations that are implicit in any
spatialization. The construction of social space that emerges from practices associated with
the paradigm of sovereignty thus exceeds a simple geographical partitioning: it results in a
conception of divergent moral spaces. In other words, the social space of inside/outside is
both made possible by and helps constitute a moral space of superior/inferior, which can be
animated in terms of any number of figurations of higher/lower. For example, in delineating
the domain of the rational, ordered polity from the dangerous, anarchic world in which it was
situated, Hobbes did more than draw a boundary; he enumerated the character of each
realm by arguing that the former was the resident of good, sane, sober, modest, and
civilized people, while the latter was populated by evil, mad, drunk, arrogant and savage
characters.
Identity is therefore more than something that derives its meaning solely from being
positioned. In contradistinction to difference, indentity is a condition that has depth, is
multilayered, possesses texture and comprises many dimensions. As such, identity is a
condition for which there can be cataloged no single point of origin or myth of genesis; the
manifold, diverse, and eclectic ingredients that comprise a settled identity cannot be reduced
to any single spatial or temporal source. None of this diminished the role of difference in the
logic of identity. But it does suggest that we might consider all the characteristics, traits or
distinctions that are understood as difference to be unequal in their identity-effects.
Moreover, this might also suggest that some of the dispositions we combine under the
category of “difference” - especially insofar as that term is often used to refer to entries in a
register of marginality, such as race, class, gender and ethnicity – are basic to the
construction of the discursive field on which the dichotomy of identity/difference is itself
erected.
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This totalization of identity comes with it the need to ‘discipline’ other
methods of interpretation. The Affirmative is characteristic of a
disciplinary act where the state inscribes the identity of ‘Us’ and the
‘Other’ via a paradigm of legitimate sovereignty in which the ‘Us’ impose
sovereignty over the ‘Other’ by regarding it as the source of danger.
This legitimate sovereignty seeks to order discourse into dichotomies
where anything considered ‘inferior’ or ‘opposed’ to the sovereign
identity is eliminated. This obfuscates the true chaotic nature of
identity crushing difference.
CAMPBELL 1998 (David Campbell, Univ. of Newcastly Professor of International Politics, Writing Security, Revised Edition, p. 64-5)
The need to discipline and contain the ambiguity and contingency of the “domestic” realm is
a vital source of externalization and totalization to threats to that realm through discoursed of
danger. But the achievements of foreign policy for the state are not due to any inherent
characteristics of the state existing in an endangered world. The effectiveness of foreign
policy as one political practice among many that swerves to discipline ambiguity and
construct identity is made possible because it is one instance of a series of cultural practices
central to modernity operating within its own specific domain. This can be understood by
reference to Ashley’s discussion of the “paradigm of sovereignty.”
The paradigm of sovereignty is not sa paradigm in the kuhnian sense of a conceptual
resource that man applies to make sense of the world: it is a problematization in the
foucauldian sense that swerves to discipline the ambiguity and cindingency of history by
differentiating, hierarchizing, and normalizing the site in which it operates. But it is also more
than that. Ambiguity is not disciplined by reference to a pregiven foundation. That
“foundation” is constituted through the same process in which its name is invoked to
discipline ambiguity.
The paradigm of sovereignty operates on the basis of a simple dichotomy: sovereignty
versus anarchy. Although these terms have special significance within the discourse of
international relations - a significance that depends on their effectiveness elsewheresovereignty and anarchy are erplicable concepts that are pivotal for the construction of
various mutually reinforcing dichotomies, such as subject/object, inside/outside, and so on.
In each instance the former is the higher, regulative ideal to which the latter is derivative and
inferiour, and a source of danger to the former’s existence.In each instance, “sovereignty”
(or its equilavent) signifies a center of decision presiding over a self that is to be valued and
demarcated from an external domain that cannot or will not be assimilated to the identity of
the sovereign domain.
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ACT II: The Securitization of the Self
This discursive act of securitization against a foreign other comes at
the cost of essentializing ones own ontology via hegemonic narratives
about rhetoric. The discursive binary of superior/inferior becomes
translated into wins and losses. In which the debaters relationship to
the other is based on a politic to security, a debater’s very ontology
becomes contingent upon the flattery of the judge. Speech has no value
outside of its ability to persuade. In this moment of powerlessness the
subject sovereignty deceptions about truth become constituted in the
subject locking us into mental games of ego stoking.
Foucault, Michel (Author) 1988
We see here then in what respect and how studious otium can play the role of delimiting the
function he performs. As an art of oneself, which has the aim of ensuring that the individual
establish an appropriate and sufficient relationship to himself, studious olium ensures that
the individual does not invest his own self, his own subjectivity, in the presumptuous delirium
of a power that exceeds its real functions. He puts all the sovereignty he exercises in
himself, within himself, or, more precisely, in a relationship of himself to himself. And on that
basis, on the basis of this lucid and total sovereignty that he exercises over himself, he will
be able to define and delimit the performance of his office to only those functions it has been
assigned. This, then, is the good Roman functionary. I think we can use this term. He can
exercise his power as a good functionary precisely on the basis of this relationship of self to
self that he obtains through the culture that is his own. So, he says, this is what you do,
Lucilius. However, there are, of course, very few men who can do this. Most of the others,
he says, are tormented by either self-love or disgust with themselves. And this disgust with
oneself, or this excessive love of oneself, leads, in the former case, to being concerned
about things that are really not worth caring about; they are tormented, he says, by
sollicitudo, by concern, by caring about things external to the self; and, in the latter case,
through self-love, it leads to being attracted by sensual pleasures, by all the pleasures
through which one tries to please oneself. In both cases, whether disgust with oneself, and
as a result constant concern about events that may occur, or self-love, and as a result
attachment to sensual pleasure, he says, these people are anyway never alone with
themselves." They are never alone with themselves in the sense that they never have that
full, adequate, and sufficient relationship to themselves that ensures that we do not feel
dependent on anything, neither on the misfortunes that threaten nor on the pleasures we
may encounter or obtain from around us. The figure of the flatterer and the dangers of
flattery rush in here, in this insufficiency that ensures that we are never alone with ourselves,
in this inability to be alone, when we are either disgusted with or too attached to ourselves.
In this non-solitude, in this inability to establish that full, adequate, and sufficient relationship
to ourselves, the Other intervenes who, as it were, meets the lack and substitutes or rather
makes up for this inadequacy through a discourse, and precisely through a discourse that is
not the discourse of truth through which we can establish, fasten, and close up on itself the
sovereignty we exercise over ourselves. The flatterer will introduce a foreign discourse, one
that precisely depends on the other, on him, the flatterer. And this discourse will be a lying
discourse. Thus, through the insufficiency of his relationship to himself, the flattered person
finds himself dependent on the flatterer, on someone who is an other and who may therefore
disappear or transform his flattery into wickedness, into a trap, etcetera. He is therefore
dependent on this other, and what's more he is dependent on the duplicity of the flatterer's
discourse. The subjectivity, as we would say, the typical relationship of self to self of the
flattered person, is therefore a relationship of insufficiency mediated by the other, and a
relationship of duplicity mediated by the other's lying. From this it is easy to draw a
conclusion, and maybe make some remarks.
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The Affirmative can not be an instance of parrhesian liberation due to
appeal to secure concepts of sovereignty and political orientation
which make the harms of case predictable and static in relation to the
status quo. looking to security in the face of truth crushes our ability
to define our own ontology and forces sovereign binaries of us vs. them
to exists between ‘Us’ and ‘The Other’.
Foucault, 2001 [Michel, Author, Fearless Speech pg. 15-17]
Someone is said to use parrhesia and marits consideration as a parrhesiastes only if there is
a risk or danger for him in telling the truth. For instance, from the ancient Greek perspective,
a grammar teacher may tell the truth to the children that he teaches, and indeed may have
no doubt that what he teaches is true. But in spite of this coincidence between belief and
truth, he is not aparrhesiastes. However, when a philosopher addresses himself to a
sovereign, to a tyrant, and tells him that his tyranny is disturbing and unpleasant because
tyranny is incompatible with justice, then the philosopher speaks the truth, believes he is
speaking the truth, and, more than that, also takes a risk (since the tyrant may become
angry, may punish him, may exile him, may kill him). And that was exactly Plato's situation
with Dionysius in Syracuse-concerning which there are very interesting references in Plato's
Seventh Letter, and also in The Life of Dion by Plutarch. I hope we shall study these texts
later. So you see, the parrhesiastes is someone who takes a risk. Of course, this risk is not
always a risk of life. When, for example, you see a friend doing something wrong and you
risk incurring his anger by telling him he is wrong, you are acting as a parrhesiastes. In such
a case, you do not risk your life, but you may hurt him by your remarks, and your friendship
may consequently suffer for it. If, in a political debate, an orator risks losing his popularity
because his opinions are contrary to the majority's opinion, or his opinions may usher in a
political scandal, he uses parrhesia. Parrhesia, then, is linked to courage in the face of
danger: it demands the courage to speak the truth in spite of some danger. And in its
extreme form, telling the truth takes place in the "game" of life or death. It is because the
parrhesiartes must take a risk in speaking the truth that the king or tyrant generally cannot
use parrhesia; for he risks nothing. When you accept the parrhesiastic game in which your
own life is exposed, you are taking up a specific relationship to yourself: you risk death to tell
the truth instead of reposing in the security of a life where the truth goes unspoken. Of
course, the threat of death comes from the Other, and thereby requires a relationship to the
Other. But the parrhesiastes primarily chooses a specific relationship to himself: he prefers
himself as a truth-teller rather than as a living being who is false to himself.
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ACT III: A paradigm of Sovergnity and its ‘benefits’
The end point of this paradigm of sovereign discourse is a biopolitical
deduction used by the sovereign is to impose a meaning on what ‘life’
means which allows the sovereign to deny this right to the ‘Other’
leading to wars of ontology where the state has the power to expose
entire populations to death in order to guarantee its existence. This is
predicated on the fact that a state must necessarily continue to negate
the other as a means of affirmation. This process is reparative and
replicated in debate though the negation of others and an affirmation
of the self via status quo paradigms of discourse relating to wins and
losses. This justifies genocide, mass killings, biological and nuclear
war
Foucault, 1978 (Michel Foucault, 1978). Philosopher/historian, Former Director at the Francais Institute at Hamberg, The History of
Sexuality, Nov. 1978, Volume 1, pp. 136-137,
Since the classical age the west has undergone a very profound transformation of these
mechanisms of power. “Deduction” has tended to be no longer the major form of power but
merely one element among others, working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize
and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and
ordering them, rather then one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, destroying
them. There has been a parallel shift in the right of death, or at least a tendency to align
itself with the exigencies of a life-administering power to define itself accordingly. This death
that was based on the right of the sovereign is now manifested as simply the reversal of the
right to the social body to ensure, maintain, or develop its life. Yet wars were never as
bloody as they have been since the nineteenth century, and all things being equal, never
before did regimes visit such holocausts on their own populations. But this formidable power
of death-and this is perhaps what accounts for part of its force and the cynicism which it has
so greatly expanded its limits—now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts
positive influences on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize and multiply it, subjecting it
to precise controls and comprehensive regulations. Wars are no longer waged in the name
of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of
everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the
name of life necessity; massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life and survival,
of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars,
causing so many men to be killed. And though a turn that closes the circle, as the
technology of wars has caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out destruction, the
decision that initiated them and the one that terminates them are in fact increasingly
informed by the naked question of survival. The atomic situation is now at the end point of
this process: the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power
to guarantee an individuals continued existence. The principle underlying the tactics of battle
– the one that has to be capable of killing in order to go on living – has become the principle
that defines the strategy of states. But the existence in question is no longer the judicial
existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a population. If genocide is
indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient
right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the
race, and the large scale phenomena of population.
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ACT: IV A little Game of Parrhesia
The alternative is a reconceptualization of our own ontology though
performative speeches of parrhisea. This way of situating speech as
being exposed to risk will be used to question ‘the unchallenged,
unconsidered, modes of thought that the affirmative deploys in its
affirmation of the sovereign. This frees us from state identity formation
and gives others a space where individuals in their everyday lives can
question and critique there relation to the state which deconstructs
the sovereign biopolitical control though paradigm shifts in how
discourse is oriented towards the other.
KULYNYCH 1997. (Jessica Kulynych, Winthrop University, 1997). Polity, V, XXX, N. 2, Winter, p 317-318
This notion of performativity, applied to Foucault's notion of resistance, better explains the
character of such resistance. McCarthy's critique assumes that if Foucault is correct about
disciplinary power, that it is capillary, reaching into the innermost corners of our lives and
combining to form complexes of subjection that are invasive, productive, and impervious to
citizen influence, then there are no "acting" citizens available to resist, only "cultural dopes."
However, if we understand resistance per formatively, then we see the acting citizen as
brought into being by her resistance. As Butler argues in Bodies that Matter, there need not
exist a core identity from which action or resistance emanates in order for it to be real
resistance.(57) McCarthy's question reveals how fundamentally indebted to the modern
Cartesian version of agency our understanding of political action is. Although disciplinary
regimes do render many of our normative distinctions meaningless, dissolving firm
boundaries between socialization and domination, they do not necessarily signify a
wholesale dissolution of agency. What has been destroyed is any understanding of agency
that sees action as grounded in its representation of some essential and universal core of
humanness.(58) As Butler explains, we can still act, but our actions are based only on a
contingent identity that is simultaneously created by that very action. That resistance stems
from an agent that is an "effect of power" guarantees its political efficacy. Agency is not
proof of the existence of an identity, but is instead the creation of an identity through a
referential repetition, that "provisionally institutes an identity and at the same time [opens]
the category as a site of permanent political contest."(59) The subject created by resistance
in its name is simultaneously what is being resisted. According to Butler, "that the category
can never be descriptive is the very condition of its political efficacy .... The claim to have
achieved . . . an impartial concept of description shores itself up by foreclosing the very
political field that it claims to have exhausted."(60) McCarthy is right that it is hard to identify
"just what it is that resists,"(61) but that that identification is contingent and provisional in no
way forecloses the possibility of agency. Performative resistance brings into being the citizen
it purports to represent. The thoroughly privatized, client-citizen is re-created as a public
actor in the moment of resistance. Foucault himself seemed to be leaning toward this sort of
notion of performative action in his focus on care for the self and on an aesthetic of "selfcreation." In these later thoughts, Foucault seems clearly to be searching for a way to
understand innovative and experimental subjectivities that are not a return to the idea of a
liberated human essence. His focus on the active constitution of the self is additional
evidence of a move toward a more performative notion of resistance. As he stated in a 1984
interview, I would say that if now I am interested, in fact, in the way the subject constitutes
himself in an active fashion, by the practices of the self, these practices are nevertheless not
something that the individual invents by himself. They are patterns that he finds in his culture
and which are proposed, suggested and imposed on him by his culture, his society, and his
social group.(62) As long as we look at this type of resistance as expressive of the subject,
then McCarthy is right: the intent of the subject's actions are proposed, suggested, and
imposed, and hardly what we would label autonomous. But, once we think of the activity of
self-creation performatively, then the possibility of a resistant citizen emerges. It is indeed
incongruous to ask what it is that resists, since the citizen as participant, the resistant citizen,
is created by the act of resistance. The above notion of performativity as "world creating," or
identity-creating is crucial given the subjectifying nature of modern power that McCarthy so
clearly recognizes. However, the world-creating facet of performativity is not adequate for
answering Fraser's normative query. Fraser's concerns reflect a real normative confusion in
Foucault. He interrogates the development of disciplinary power at the same time he denies
that there is a foundation for his own normativity.(63) He utilizes liberal ideals, such as
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personal liberty, to expose the malevolence of enlightenment liberation, but combines them
with a critique that eschews normative grounding. Again, an understanding of resistance as
performative helps explain this apparent contradiction. William Chaloupka provides a second
understanding of performativity that helps explain Foucault's "cryptonormativism."
Chaloupka plays upon the dual meaning of demonstration to highlight the performative
aspects of protest. In the typical usage, to demonstrate means "to point out, to make known,
to describe and explain."(64) In this sense, protesters utilize their actions as a vehicle for
their interests. They make their point, which already exists, through the use of the
demonstration as tactic. But demonstration has also an alternative meaning, a meaning
derived from the French demontrer (to demonstrate), and montrer (to show).(65) Thus, as
Chaloupka sees it, a demonstration is also "a show." The demonstration in this sense is not
an explanation but an exposure, a defiance embodied in action that flies in the face of
acceptability. Accordingly, the protestor's usage moves toward the contingent realm of
strategies and emotions. Here demonstration does not establish objectivity and logic, so
much as it shows up the objective order, assertively getting in the way.(66) Thus the
performative aspect of demonstration cannot be adequately captured with the lens of truth
and justice. The protestor is not trying to make a point, to prove that the system is unjust.
Rather, the protestor exposes the contingency of justice itself. Foucault comes close to
saying what Chaloupka argues here when he states, a critique is not a matter of saying that
things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions,
what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices we
accept rest .... Criticism is a matter of flushing out that thought and trying to change it: to
show that things are not as self-evident as one believes, to see that what is accepted as
self-evident will no longer be accepted as such. (67) If we interpret the "to show" here not as
pointing out what is wrong with disciplinary society (which would leave Foucault subject to
Fraser's normative criticism), but rather as "showing," or "showing up," then we no longer
need the introduction of normative notions, we are merely doing disciplinary society one
better. Making a point is a function of discourse, the ability to align and arrange arguments
that support a position. Yet, the performative protestor does not argue against the state, he
mocks it. The protestor works at the margins of discourse, utilizing puns and jokes and
caricature to "expose" the limits of what is being said. Thus, performative resistance, when
considered as critique, does not need to tell us what is wrong, rather it reveals the existence
of subjection where we had not previously seen it. I am not suggesting that we can get a
normative anchor out of the notion of performativity. To the contrary, I am suggesting
performative resistance makes no such normative distinctions, or rather, that performativity
is not about normative distinctions. We bring normativity to our performances as ethical
principles that are themselves subject to resistance. By unearthing the contingency of the
"self-evident," performative resistance enables politics. Thus, the question is not should we
resist (since resistance is always, already present), but rather what and how we should
resist. ….. This notion of performativity is also important for understanding the possibilities
for innovation in Habermasian deliberative participation. Just as a protestor exposes the
contingency of concepts like justice, a dialogue exposes the limits and contingency of
rational argumentation. Once we are sensitive to the performative nature of speech,
language and discourse, then we can see that deliberative politics cannot be confined to the
rational statement of validity claims. Deliberation must be theatrical: it is in the performance
of deliberation that that which cannot be argued for finds expression. Indeed it is precisely
the non-rational aspects of deliberation that carry the potential for innovation. In his
description of the poignant reminders of demonstration Chaloupka recognizes that it is at the
margins that the actual force of the demonstration resides, no matter what happens at the
microphone. The oral histories of demonstrations (the next day over coffee) linger over the
jokes and funny signs and slogans, the outrages and improprieties, more than the speeches
and carefully coherent position papers.(68) Any convincing account of the politics of
deliberation must take account of the creative potential that resides in the performance of
debate. The identity-creating facet of performativity is also intimately connected to the
possibilities for innovative communication and deliberation. While Fraser has also suggested
a combination of Habermasian and Foucauldian perspectives, she is less optimistic about
the intersection of these perspectives. Fraser argues that while the performative approach of
theorists like Butler is a good resource for thinking about how constructed subjects can still
be agents capable of innovation, such an approach is entirely "intra-subjective" and
incapable of helping us to theorize the "inter-subjective' relationships between thoroughly
constructed subjects.(69) I am suggesting, to the contrary, that a performative
reconceptualization of political action is relevant not only for resisting the way we are
constructed as subjects but also for opening up new possibilities for inter-subjective
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communication. To the extent that the possibilities for communication and understanding (for
convincing others of the validity of your claims) are limited by the imaginable universe of
possible subjectivities, then the ability to communicate with "different" subjects depends on
the disruption of that universe and the performative creation of new, previously unimaginable
subjects. In other words, as in the Sears case, in an authentically gendered universe subject
positions and possible arguments about those positions are structured by a gendered
dichotomy. To the extent that performative action on an intrasubjective level helps to break
down that dichotomy, it opens the door for alternative arguments. Per formative resistance is
thus important not only for understanding the potential for innovation in the micro-politics of
identity, but also for understanding the potential for innovation in an inter-subjective politics
of deliberation. VI. Participation as Performative Resistance The notion of performativity as
both identity- or world-creating and as demonstration, is crucial for understanding
contemporary political action…… Performative resistance does not eliminate power and it is
not effected in the name of some subjugated agency, but rather its purpose is disruption and
re-creation. It is a reoccurring disruption that ensures an endless reconstitution of power.
Disciplinary technologies effect the internalization of norms--a removal from view of the
mechanisms that create us as subjects, making our identities self-evident. Resistance brings
those norms back into an arena of contestation. By its very existence resistance ensures
resistibility, which is the very thing internalized norms are designed to suppress. In other
words, resistance is not undertaken as a protest against the subjugation of a reified ideal
subject, but rather resistance, as the action of thoroughly constructed subjects, reveals the
contingency of both subjectivity and subjection. While Chaloupka suggests that the role of
the protestor is "tellingly different" from that of the citizen, I disagree. Often only the act of
resistance provides any meaningful sense of "citizenship" in this privatized contemporary
world. As Dana Villa points out, resistance "can be seen as a successor concept to Arendt's
notion of political action: where the space for action is usurped, where action in the strict
sense is no longer possible, resistance becomes the primary vehicle of spontaneity and
agonistic subjectivity."(70) Performative resistance recognizes disciplinary power, enables
action in the face of that power, enables innovation in deliberation, and thus allows us to see
the world of political action differently. Consequently, it is possible, and more meaningful, to
conceptualize contemporary participation as a performative rather than a representative
action. The failure to reconceptualize political participation as resistance furthers an illusion
of democratic control that obscures the techniques of disciplinary power and their role in
global strategies of domination, fundamentally missing the real, although much more humble
opportunities for citizens to "take part" in their own "governance." Accepting the idea of
participation as resistance has two broad implications that fundamentally transform the
participation debate. First, it widens the parameters of participation to include a host of new
actors, activities, and locations for political action. A performative concept redirects our
attention away from the normal apparatus of government and economy, and therefore allows
us to see a much broader range of political actions. Second, it requires that we look anew at
traditional participatory activities and evaluate their performative potential. …Broadening the
Political Horizon Participation as resistance compels us to expand the category of political
participation. Whereas traditional studies of participation delimit political participation from
other "social" activities, once participation is defined as resistance this distinction is no
longer tenable. Bonnie Honig suggests that performative action is an event, an agonistic
disruption of the ordinary sequence of things, a site of resistance of the irresistible, a
challenge to the normalizing rules that seek to constitute, govern, and control various
behaviors. And, [thus,] we might be in a position to identify sites of political action in a much
broader array of constations, ranging from the self-evident truths of God, nature, technology
and capital to those of identity, of gender, race and ethnicity. We might then be in a position
to act--in the private realm.(71)… A performative concept of participation as resistance
explodes the distinction between public and private, between the political and the apolitical.
As Foucault explains, what was formerly considered apolitical, or social rather than political,
is revealed as the foundation of technologies of state control. Contests over identity and
everyday social life are not merely additions to the realm of the political, but actually create
the very character of those things traditionally considered political. The state itself is
"superstructural in relation to a whole series of power networks that invest the body,
sexuality, the family, kinship, knowledge, technology and so forth."(72) Thus it is
contestations at the micro-level, over the intricacies of everyday life, that provide the raw
material for global domination, and the key to disrupting global strategies of domination.
Therefore, the location of political participation extends way beyond the formal apparatus of
government, or the formal organization of the workplace, to the intimacy of daily actions and
iterations.
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Debate may be a game but it should not be a game of wins and losses it
should be a game of parrhesia which though developing contextual and
free connections with the other we can embrace a more ethical and
productive approach to criticism. The judge can still make a decision in
the debate round. Its just how debaters situate themselves within the
ballot that the critique finds problematic. These questions are key to
uncovering and destabilizing sovereign control of our ontology
Foucault, 2001 [Michel, Author, Fearless Speech pg. 105-107]
The last time we met we analyzed some texts from Plato's Laches where we saw the
emergence, with Socrates, of a new "philosophical" parrhesia very different from the
previous forms we examined.'j8 In the Laches we had a game with five main players. Two of
them, Lysimachus and Melesius, were well-born Athenian citizens from noble houses who
were unable to assume a parrhesiastic role-for they did not know how to educate their own
children. So they turned to a general and a political statesman, Laches and Nicias, who were
also unable to play the role of parrhesiastes. Laches and Nicias, in turn, were obliged to
appeal for help to Socrates, who appears as the real parrhesiastic figure. We see in these
transitional moves a successive displacement of the parrhesiastic role from the well-born
Athenian and the political leader-who formerly possessed the role-to the philosopher,
Socrates. Taking the Laches as our point of departure, we can now observe in GrecoRoman culture the rise and development of this new kind of parrhesia wich, I think can be
chartizied as followed. First, this parrhesia is philosophical, and has been put into pratice for
centuries by the philosophers. Indeed, a large part of the philosophical activity that
transpired in Greco-Roman culture required playing certain parrhesiasitc games. Very
schematically, I think that this philosophical role involved three types of parrhesiastic activity,
all of them related to one another. (1) Insofar as the philosopher had to discover and to
teach certain truths about the world, nature, etc., he assumed an epistemic role. (2) Taking a
stand towards the city, the laws, political institutions, and so on, required, in addition, a
political role. (3) And parrhesiastic activity also endeavored to elaborate the nature of the
relationships between truth and one's style of life, or truth and an ethics and aesthetics of the
self. Parrhesia as it appears in the field of philosophical activity in Greco-Roman culture is
not primarily a concept or theme, but apractice which tries to shape the specific relations
individuals have to themselves. And I think that our own moral subjectivity is rooted, at least
in part, in these practices. More precisely, I think that the decisive criterion which identifies
The parrhesiastes is not to be found in his birth, nor in his citizenship, nor in his intellectual
competence, but in the harmony which exists between his logos and his bios. Secondly, the
target of this new parrhesia is not to persuade the Assembly, but to convince someone that
he must take care of himself and of others; and this means that he must change his life. This
theme of changing one's life, of conversion, becomes very important from the Fourth
Century B.C. to the beginnings of Christianity. It is essential to philosophical parrhesiastic
practices. Of course conversion is not completely different from the change of mind that an
orator, using hisparrhesia, wished to bring about when he asked his fellow citizens to wake
up, to refuse what they previously accepted, or to accept what they previously refused. But
in philosophical practice the notion of changing one's mind takes on a more general and
expanded meaning since it is no longer just a matter of altering one's belief or opinion, but of
changing one's style of life, one's relation to others, and one's relation to oneself. Thirdly,
these new parrhesiastic practices imply a complex set of connections between the self and
truth. For not only are these practices supposed to endow the individual with self-knowledge,
this self-knowledge in turn is supposed to grant access to truth and further knowledge. The
circle implied in knowing the truth about oneself in order to know the truth is characteristic of
parrhesiastic practice since the Fourth Century, and has been one of the problematic
enigmas of Western Thought--e.g., as in Descartes or Kant. And a final point I would like to
underscore about this philosophical parrhesia is that it has recourse to numerous techniques
quite different from the techniques of persuasive discourse previously utilized; and it is no
longer specifically linked to the agora, or the king’s court, but can now be utilized in
numerous diverse place.
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