1AC – Revenge of the Mirror People

Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially reduce

Direct Commercial Sales and/or Foreign Military Sales of arms from the United
States.

Here begins the great revenge of otherness, of all the forms which, subtly or
violently deprived of their singularity, henceforth pose an insoluble problem for
the social order.1

Arms debates valorize a disciplinary curriculum of paradigm compatibility that

insists on research that engages around the vocabulary and comfort of defense
experts – this warps the antagonizing questions of methodological nationalism
and colonialism posed by indigenous outsiders, who are conceived as an
insoluble problem.
Newell and Stavrianakis 17 (Peter, Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex; Anna, Senior
Lecturer in International Relations and Director of Teaching and Learning in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex.
“Beyond the “Ivory Tower”? IR in the world,” What’s the Point of International Relations?, Chapter 16, pg 209-214 //shree)

Fifth, the
nature and degree of access and the scope for influence is also a product of the nature of the
issue area that IR academics work in. It is clearly harder to shape ministries and parts of the state dealing with
“high” politics of core state strategy around security and economy where secrecy and confidentiality are at
a premium. This poses a key challenge for the discipline of IR given the weight afforded to those areas of study in the discipline and
somewhat easier for other issue areas such as health, environment, and development where weak bureaucracies sometimes seek
allies among academia and NGOs to reinforce their position in internal battles over resources, power, and influence. The same is to
some extent true of corporations where those parts of the company most open to engagement are often the least powerful
internally. It also needs to be recognized that any
attempt by IR researchers to generate change or impact
through their work has different starting points for entering the conversation, not only in terms
of individuals’ access and networks, but also in terms of how much meaningful scope there is to
shift the terms of debate. Often in practice this means engaging on others’ terms in order to be
heard. Examples might include those we illustrate later around the arms trade and the lack of space to
seriously debate the merits of the UK’s Trident nuclear program given the open hostility and mockery by military leaders
of the UK Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s position that he would not be willing to use nuclear weapons. In relation to
environmental issues the relevant parallel might be the difficulty of questioning the use and effectiveness of payments for
ecosystem services in the face of such widespread policy support for market mechanisms. Certain
framings are
seemingly non-negotiable for researchers and activists. Sixth, there is the question of the positionality of academics when it comes
to the types of engagement academics are willing and able to contemplate. There are issues of seniority and age, security of contract, and gender. In terms of stage of career,
how much safety academics have in their job to speak out and potentially antagonize employers and funders has a key bearing on who is able to speak out on what issues. At
our own university controversies over the offering of an associate position to a NATO official, around the privatization of some university services (the 235 campaign), or around
fossil fuel divestment (“fossilfree Sussex”) have involved many IR academics in ways which have led to difficult negotiations about when to speak out and to whom and in what
capacity. In the more conservative context of the US system, in terms of both the tenure system and the political culture which inhibits junior scholars from stepping out of line
or upsetting managers who have the power to withhold tenured employment from them, research aimed at policy elites and incremental change appears to be a far safer bet. In
the UK, the Research Excellence Framework, which places increasing emphasis on demonstrating nonacademic impact culture, has similar effects by rewarding more senior
figures with ample access to policy elites to generate impact. Engaging on climate change and the arms trade How do these factors that constrain, enable, and shape the role of
IR scholarship play out in practice? In what follows, we offer two sets of brief personal reflections on engaged scholarship around climate change (Newell) and the arms trade
(Stavrianakis). Newell has engaged with these dilemmas and pressures through working closely with a range of campaigning organizations from the earliest days of his research
career. During his PhD he worked at Friends of the Earth UK and Climate Network Europe in Brussels. More recently he has been working with Carbon Market Watch, based in
Brussels, on exposing flaws in global carbon market mechanisms and their impact on more marginalized groups in particular. Central among these has been the Clean

1
Adapted from Jean Baudrillard, Perfect Crime, p 148
Development Mechanism (CDM), a UN market-based offset mechanism created under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that allows richer countries, with legal obligations to reduce their
greenhouse gas emissions, to pay poorer ones for projects that reduce these emissions more cheaply. In return, developing countries are meant to receive local sustainable
development benefits, such as jobs, technology, and improved health and environmental outcomes. His research highlighted a number of key governance deficits in relation to
participation, accountability, coordination, and capacity, which are inhibiting the ability of governments to realize sustainable developmental benefits from CDM projects. It
examined these governance issues at a range of levels, from the UN’s CDM Executive Board, to national governments that have responsibility for approving and screening
projects, down to local bodies that oversee consultations and participation with local communities about the risks and benefits of projects they are asked to host.
Controversially, it found widespread evidence of collusion, corruption, and exclusion in decision-making and project approval processes. It found that decision-making tends to
revolve around tightly knit networks of project developers, financiers, regulators, and auditors, while many key stakeholders are not adequately consulted. The research also
found many examples of a “revolving door” between national officials, project developers, and verification agencies, often even occupying more than one role at the same time.
The research highlighted the need for redress mechanisms and efforts to monitor and evaluate whether or not sustainable development benefits are being delivered by projects,
as well as to ensure that adequate opportunities are provided for participation in and consultation over the projects. The findings were supportive, therefore, of a wave of NGO
concern about the effectiveness and beneficiaries of carbon markets. Timing – doing research that was useful and relevant to the debate at an opportune moment – was crucial
to the relationships Newell was able to form. A sense of a legitimacy crisis among key UN bodies and corporate carbon traders seeking to defend themselves from criticism
increased governments’ and NGO actors’ receptivity to what he was saying in seeking to reform carbon markets in the case of the UK government, for example, and to reduce
their use in the case of several NGOs (Newell 2014). Such was the sensitivity of the issue in late 2011 amid growing scandals around the social and human rights impacts of CDM
projects and questions around gaming and fraud in the buying and selling of permits, that the head of the UN’s CDM Executive Board attended Newell’s final project workshop
to debate the issues. Recognition of expertise was another key factor. An Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC – one of the main academic funding bodies in the UK)
“leadership fellowship” generated resources to facilitate the research having an impact on policy and helped Newell to secure access to key players through meetings hosted by
the ESRC with government officials and others. A self-reinforcing circle was generated between research and recognition whereby opportunities for “invited engagement”
increased. For example, the UN CDM Executive Board – the highest governmental decision-making body on carbon markets – held a closed retreat in September 2011 to discuss
challenges facing the CDM in the wake of the crises engulfing global carbon markets noted earlier. Newell was included among the “well-known leaders and thinkers in this
area” and produced a briefing note for the participants based on his research. This episode also points to the uneven openness and receptivity of different parts of the state to
research critical of international governance actors. His research was used by the UK government’s Department for International Development (DfID) in its submission to the UN
regarding the reform of carbon markets. This department has a somewhat more skeptical position toward the role of carbon markets in combatting climate change than other
parts of the UK government, and hence was more disposed to draw on research that was critical of the way carbon markets function. This is a good example of how actors can
use research and the support of expert networks to bolster their positions in policy battles with more powerful actors. Finally, Newell’s experience illustrates the challenges and
dilemmas of proximity to activists. His relationship with Carbon Market Watch has helped to promote his research among activists, and it has also provided an important vehicle
for getting access to key UN bodies. Yet proximity to activists has also brought challenges and dilemmas. Being considered too close to a group like Carbon Market Watch has led
to criticism from government and carbon traders, who claim the closeness discredits the neutrality of the findings of his work: a convenient way of delegitimizing research that
questions policy orthodoxies. Criticism also comes from more radical movements with whom leading scholars are aligned, who view any such engagement as misplaced and
lending legitimacy to a problematic solution to climate change (Lohman 2012). On other occasions, however, he has played precisely on the fiction of scholarly objectivity and
neutrality accorded to academic research when presenting findings to UK parliamentary select committees and parliamentary groups. Arguments are heard differently
depending on who is making them, and academics can often say things that their more politically situated allies cannot. Overall, his experience has been that the boundaries
between research, activism, and policy are blurred and problematic given the frequent interchange between different roles and the fact that academics occupy many of these
roles simultaneously. Several of the same themes emerge in Stavrianakis’ work on arms transfer control. She, too, has worked with NGOs and campaign organizations and faced

some of the same dilemmas and tensions. In her case, it was the
process of doing PhD research on NGO strategies in
relation to the arms trade that pushed her politically more toward the critical, “outsider” end of
the activist spectrum. The more she learnt about the arms trade, the more oriented toward
activism she became. Yet her experience has been that academia provides the freedom and autonomous
space to say things that cannot be said in an NGO or campaigner capacity. In this sense, her research is
not directly for NGOs or campaigners. During interview work for her research, for example, she was repeatedly struck by
not only the variety of opinions among NGO staffers, but how radical and critical the views often were of those
who worked within “insider” organizations. Yet those “personal” views could not be translated
into their organizations’ policy and strategy. This led her to think increasingly about the structural disciplining of NGOs and
about the ways that academic and NGO/campaign research can be made to complement each other. Over the past decade or so, she
has moved between oppositional activism and questioning the binary between theory and activism. She has experienced this as a
recursive move in and out of engagement and in and out of theory, in which activism and scholarship inform each other, but remain
distinct as social activities. This highlights the importance of translation (Stavrianakis 2006) but also is suggestive of how varied the
political space is. Some
arguments can be heard politically and are thus ripe for direct policy activism,
whereas others are beyond the pale. For example, a term’s sabbatical spent in Saferworld’s China team led directly to
policy-relevant briefing papers – welcomed, in part, because of the way the UK government’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office has
effectively outsourced its research capacity to insider NGOs, given funding cuts and changes to the character of the civil service.
Meanwhile, academic articles that explore the ramifications of the Arms Trade Treaty for liberal states’ arms transfer practice (e.g.,
Stavrianakis 2016) grew out of, and also shaped, engagement with practitioners (diplomats, NGO staffers, experts) through
participant observation at NGO and diplomatic meetings. This sort of work has policy ramifications, but does not readily lead to
policy-relevant recommendations. This is in contrast to her research on the imperial relations of racialized gun control
and the problem of methodological nationalism. This sort of research is too far removed from where the
policy debate is to have any practical application: the battle is so politicized that there is very little space for
engagement that broadens the boundaries. Hence, it is harder to trace the impact of the latter
on policy (whether of the state, corporations, or NGOs): it is not obvious who the target audience is or what immediate change
might be possible. There are several key practice-based issues that Stavrianakis has found repeated over the years. These include
the importance of paradigm
compatibility, or speaking the same language as those with whom
scholars are engaging. Given her research trajectory and political orientation, this has been easier with NGOs than with
government departments, and within government, easier with elements of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and DfID
than the Ministry of Defence (MoD) or Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS). Relatedly, she has been faced with the
question of whether she is engaging with practitioners (whether NGO or government) to influence them, to share knowledge with
them, or to conduct research on them. With some NGOs it has ended up being the former two elements; with the MoD it has ended
up being the latter. Even with NGOs and campaign groups there are lines of argument beyond the political pale or strategically
beyond the bounds of what can usefully be said. NGOs are often seen as the “good guys” against governments, but their positions
are also circumscribed by politics. This puts academics in a difficult position when they are seen to criticize
or not be on board with more progressive actors. This often results in an “ivory tower” criticism,
but to return to the model of scholarship as practice outlined earlier, there remains a value in academics’
autonomous positioning to articulate uncomfortable positions based on their research. On the
other hand, it is important to reflect on the ways academics are disciplined in a variety of ways. For
Stavrianakis, her experience has been one of wanting to be seen as reliable, respectable, or reasonable: not
only to get access to the MoD, FCO, and other “hard” elements of the state, but also to be able to
talk to them, for us to hear each other. Yet any listening or hearing is always on their terms.
Here the fiction of objectivity is useful but troublesome and limited – it is shot through with
power relations. Attempting to use her position as an academic by acting as an expert witness in an Information Tribunal case
brought by an anti–arms trade activist, she was repeatedly accused by government barristers of being a mouthpiece for Campaign
Against Arms Trade – an anti-arms group with whom she has developed a relationship over the years. Her expert knowledge has
been generated in part through involvement with activists; but when she used that knowledge as an ostensibly
disinterested expert (the precondition for being called as an expert), there was an attempt to discredit her by more
powerful actors. This illustrates the challenges of engagement: as academics we are autonomous but not disconnected and
have to negotiate the political terrain at each turn. Conclusion Reflecting on similarities and differences across these two
case studies and how they relate to the three types of interaction outlined, it is evident that there are practical issues
that resonate with the policy engagement model. Timing, windows of opportunity, serendipity,
speaking in the same terms as interlocutors, and so on are all significant practical challenges.
There are also larger political issues at stake that speak to the second and third models of activism and
scholarship as practice. These include the useful but troublesome fiction of disinterested scholarly
neutrality, the role of research in generating a sense of crisis, the potential to bolster the
position of weaker actors that require support, and the difficulties of creating openings for
articulating different views in policy debate. These challenges give a different slant to the way
we evaluate the impact of research beyond the university. Rather than valorizing research that
is useful to state policy or enhances competitiveness (the explicit aim of the ESRC, for example), the key criterion
could be whether research holds power (be it states or capital or civil society) to account. As UK citizens and
UK-based academics, the key question is how to hold state power in the core of the international system to
account. In both cases, that state power is allied to the power of capital – and at times to the power of NGOs. For example, in
the case of the arms trade, while the MoD and BIS operate in tandem with military capital, DfID and parts of the FCO have
(weaker) alliances with NGOs, so NGOs are integrated into the operation of state power (Stavrianakis 2010). So the question of
whom to hold to account, and for what, is more complicated than we might initially think. These issues mean we require a more
nuanced view of where and how impact happens and with or to whom, taking into account all of the contingencies earlier about
available spaces, risks involved, and the nature of the issue. Understanding the nature of the relationship between academia and the
world beyond the university is inherently political. Failure to address the politics of engagement means we run the risk of powerful
academics having powerful voices with powerful people, creating a self-reproducing dynamic and diminishing the prospects of
progressive change. Thinking about where power is located and how it operates requires us to go beyond homogenizing accounts of
key actors (be they states, corporations, international organizations, or NGOs) without being naive about the scope for autonomy
and the willingness of powerful actors to engage with researchers and act on their findings.
One night the mirror people attacked. Their power as great, but at the end of
bloody warfare the magic arts of the White Emperor prevailed. He repulsed the
invaders, imprisoned them in their mirrors, and forced on them the task of
repeating, as though in a kind of dream, all the actions of men. He stripped
them of their power and their forms, and reduced them to mere slavish
reflections.2

The imperial protocols of disciplinary academia weren’t born in an ahistorical

vacuum, but are the products of a murderous simulation that replaced the lived
reality of the colonized with caricatures of a New World re-imagined by
imperial vocabularies – submission to semiotic control inaugurates existential
absurdity for the colonized
Ganser 16 — Prof of English at U of Vienna (Alexandra, "Gerald Vizenor: Transnational Trickster of Theory," Native American
Survivance, Memory, and Futurity: The Gerald Vizenor Continuum, Ed. Birgit Dawes and Alexandra Hauke, London: Routledge, 2016,
20-24 //RRAO)

One of the many European theorists Vizenor calls upon is French Semiotician Jean Baudrillard (1927-2007), whose diagnosis of postmodernity as an age of simulation and
simulacra (of semiotic phenomena lacking any real reference that have come to dominate contemporary regimes of perception) has widely influenced postmodern theory
building. When Simulacra and Simulation appeared in France in 1981, it marked Baudrillard’s turn to theoretization of postmodernity, moving away from his earlier Marxist
model of economic determinism in cultural production without discarding Marxist notions (such as commodification) altogether. The simulacraum, as Baudrillard defines it, is a
copy without an original, and simulation “is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a

Simulation refers to “the question of substituting the signs of the real for the real” and
hyperreal” (1).

is a matter of “imperialism” as “present-day simulators attempt to make the real, all of the real,
coincide with their models of simulation” (2). It has nothing to do with mere pretense, which is a surface
phenomenon of imitation of a preceding reality that is not eradicated by the act of pretending; instead, simulation “threatens the difference

between the ‘true’ and the ‘false,’ the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’ (3) by engendering, preceding, and
intercepting reality. Vizenor often quotes Baudrillard’s example of a simulated illness that produces symptoms and thus cannot be reduced to a mere
pretending, which leaves the reality principles intact and only masks the difference (eg, Manners 13). It is no coincidence that already in the first chapter of the Simulacra and
Simulation, “the Precession of Simulacra,” Baudrillard undermines his basic concept of simulated hyperreality by invoking the field of ethnology as a practice of substituting the

for ethnology to live, its object must die,” he argues, as “science live[s] on this paradoxical slope to which it
real with the simulation: “In order

is doomed by the evanescence of its object” (7). The “Indian” in fact becomes Baudrillard’s “model of simulation”: The Indian thus returns to the ghetto, in

the glass coffin of the virgin forest, again becomes the model of simulation of all the possible Indians from

before ethnology. This model thus grants itself the luxury to incarnate itself beyond itself in the
“brute” reality of these Indians it has entirely reinvented—Savages who are indebted to
ethnology for still being Savages […]. If course, these savages are posthumous: frozen, cryogenized,
sterilized, protected to death, they have become referential simulacra, and science itself has become pure
simulation. In the following, Baudrillard extends his diagnosis to “all”: “We are all […] Indian who have again become what they were—simulacral Indians who at last proclaim

We have all become living specimens in the spectral light of ethnology” (8).
the universal truth of ethnology.

The subject of postmodernity exists under the violation of the traditional contract of
representation in the West, i.e., the assumption that there is a reality both beyond representation and foundational to it. In the postmodern reversal that
has done away with the transcendental signifier (“God” or other “grands recits” in Lyotard’s terminology), representation is foundational for (hyper-reality) (cf. Baudrillard 5).

Vizenor’s take on Baudrillard’s theory of simulation can be read as a first instance of de-
Here

centering the Western contract of representation and its development into postmodernity, for
the indian has never existed as real, long before postmodernity, in the Western logocentric and
visual system of representation. Ever since the arrival of Columbus in the “New World,” the

2
Adapted from Jean Baudrillard, Perfect Crime, p 148
indian has existed only under the murderous regime of simulation—let us just think of Columbus’
first letter from the “New World” and its tales of noble and ignoble savagery, guided by the
letter’s intention to secure further financing from the Spanish crown. It is with this letter that
ethnography, the “colonial invention of the indian” (Vizenor and Lee, Conversations 84) in America, truly starts. As
Vizenor states: The indian is the invention, and indian cultures are simulations, that is the ethnographic

construction of a model that replaces the real in most academic references. Natives are the real,
the ironies of the real, and an unnameable sense of presence, but simulations are the absence,
and so the indian is an absence, not a presence. You see, Indians are simulations of the
discoverable other […]. That is to say, the simulations of the other have no real origin, no original reference, and there is no real place on this continent that
bears the meaning of that name. (Conversations 85) In other words, “[t]he Indian was an occidental invention that become a

bankable simulation; the word has no reference in tribal languages or cultures” (Manners 11).
Colonization and discovery are defined implicitly here as symbolic possession, as the power to
simulate an Other and thus to attempt total semiotic control by the colonizer over the
colonized (cf. also Madsen, Vizenor 30).

Such is the allegory of otherness vanquished and condemned to the servile fate
of resemblance. Our image in the mirror is not innocent, then. Behind every
reflection, every representation, a defeated enemy lies concealed. The Other
vanquished, and condemned merely to be the Same. This casts a singular light
on the problem of representation and of all those mirrors which reflect us
“spontaneously” with and objective indulgence. None of that is true, and every
representation is a servile image, the ghost of a once sovereign being whose
singularity has been obliterated.3

The mirror people were not simply eliminated, but were imprisoned in their
mirrors and were coerced to compulsively repeat their servile fate of
resemblance. The discursive formation sutured to arms sales reduction
substitutes the radical agenda of the wretched of the earth with the
civilizational mantra of human security – specific initiatives of technology denial
don’t displace sovereignty but normalize the West’s monopoly on violence
Cooper 18 (Neil, Professor of International Relations and Security Studies and Head of Peace Studies & International
Development at University of Bradford. “Race, Sovereignty, and Free Trade: Arms Trade Regulation and Humanitarian Arms Control
in the Age of Empire. Journal of Global Security Studies, doi:10.1093/jogss/ogy013 //shree)

The proliferation of post-Cold War initiatives to regulate the arms trade has prompted a discussion about the relationship between norms, HAC, and arms trade regulation. In
this section, I identify different schools of thinking that have emerged in the literature—the norm optimists who are positive about the impact of HAC and the skeptics who are
more dubious. The latter can be further subdivided into those who suggest humanitarian arms trade norms are trumped by material interest and those who, alternatively, see
“good” norms balanced by “bad” norms. In addition, some skeptics have emphasized the need to locate both good and bad arms trade norms within the broader practices,
logics, and power relations expressed in what has been labeled arms control as governmentality (Krause2011). I conclude this section by delineating the elements of arms
control as governmentality relevant to this paper. Norms are commonly understood as “collective expectations for the proper behavior of actors with a given identity”

Norms can be promoted using a variety of means and by a variety of actors, but adoption of a new norm can
(Katzenstein 1996, 5;Finnemore and Sikkink 1998, 89).

be facilitated when it is nested within (Bower 2015) or grafted onto existing norms either through “manipulative persuasion” or “ the contingency of

3
Jean Baudrillard. The Perfect Crime. p 149
genealogical heritage” (Price 1998, 617). Indeed, the presence of mutually reinforcing and consistent norms works to strengthen each set of norms
(Finnemore 1996, 161). Norms can be prohibitive (constraining behavior), permissive (allowing behavior), or prescriptive (requiring behavior) (Glanville 2006, 155). Norms can
also be subdivided into regulative and constitutive norms; the former establish standards for the proper enactment of an already defined identity (Bj˝orkdahl 2002, 20). For
rationalists in particular, norms operate at this shallow level, creating consequentialist logics in which actors essentially adhere to norms for instrumental reasons (Farrell 2005,
8–9). For constructivists, norms can also be constitutive in the sense that they create new identities and interests for actors whilst also being shaped by preexisting identities and
interests. Norms, ideas, and interests thus interact recursively, leading some to argue that the attempt to separate norms from interests is “fundamentally flawed” (Bj˝orkdahl
2002, 20). As will be indicated below, this suggests that those skeptics who focus on the way declaratory arms trade norms appear to be trumped by the material interests of

critical international relations

states might simply be ignoring alternative sets of norms and ideas shaping particular conceptions of interest. In addition,

scholars such as MacKenzie and Sessay (2012) have criticized liberal constructivists for assuming norms such as those on
transitional justice emerge from equal exchanges and relationships rather than reflecting profound economic and political

inequalities. Indeed, they suggest the emphasis on norms as signals of appropriateness “should be viewed as
practical sirens warning of imperialism”(ibid., 147). The arms trade norms debate is characterized by
a division between optimists and pessimists. Interestingly, optimists include those who claim the mantle of constructivism (Wizotski

2009; Garcia 2015) or critical international relations/security studies (Borrie 2014) just as much as the pessimists do. The

optimistic school argues the post-Cold War era has witnessed the novel introduction of inherently benevolent humanitarian or human security norms into
the regulation of the arms trade (Axworthy 2001, 20, 23; Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue 2003; Borrie 2006; Kyt˝omäki 2015, 2, 4). This, it is argued, has resulted in the

norms that imply either a more restrictive approach to arms exports or, at the very least, a more restrictive
creation of new prohibitory arms trade

approach to “irresponsible” arms exports. For example, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has noted of the UN ATT that
“states have never before signed an international treaty that aimed to regulate the arms trade, with the express purpose of reducing human suffering”(ICRC 2013, emphasis
added). As will be demonstrated below, such claims are just historically wrong. Although far more sophisticated in her analyses, Garcia (2015,7) has not only argued initiatives on
small arms can be understood as part of a series of “novel” humanitarian security regimes but also that these are different from traditional arms control instruments that “took

these new humanitarian security regimes have established new international norms
a purely regulatory approach.” In contrast,

driven by altruistic imperatives, are “about everyone’s security,” and have “restructured” conceptions of national interest (ibid., 61). In
this view, post-Cold War “norm-mongers” have not just circumscribed the “warmongers” but have established new constitutive norms with far-reaching effects on international

humanitarian campaigns extract specific initiatives

actors’ understanding of their identities and interests. Others acknowledge that

on individual weapons from the broader complex of war and militarism but suggest this is a strategic campaigning
device that can hide more radical agendas (Bolton and Minor 2016). In this variant of optimism, action on small
arms can be understood as part of an incrementalist, “one technology at a time” route to
disarmament and antimilitarism (Stavrianakis 2016, 844). The reconstruction of identities and interests is, therefore,
just around the corner. Such optimistic assessments have led to a small but burgeoning literature on the phenomenon of post-Cold War HAC or
“humanitarian disarmament.” This label not only covers action on small arms but also initiatives on landmines,

cluster munitions, and even recent humanitarian initiatives to ban nuclear weapons (Thakur and Maley 1999; Borrie and Randin 2006;
Wizotski 2009, 2013, 3;Borrie 2014, 626; Ritchie 2014; Bolton and Minor 2016; Minor 2015). Historicizing the drivers and outcomes of early examples of HAC, therefore, has
implications for our understanding of the transformative potential inherent in present-day HAC/humanitarian disarmament initiatives. The pessimistic school encompasses a
number of different positions. First, some suggest that arms trade policy may be characterized as a form of organized hypocrisy under which declaratory commitments to
prohibitory norms and/or the socially constructed reputational concerns of states are frequently trumped by material interests (Perkins and Neumayer 2010; Efrat 2012, 289–91;
Erickson 2013, 2015; Hansen and Marsh 2015; Hansen 2016). In this perspective, state policy reflects the outcomes of clashes between relatively weak regulative arms trade

norms are not just regulative but

norms and material interests. An alternative pessimistic approach takes more seriously the constructivist claim that

can also be constitutive of identity and interests. It therefore shares some similarity with optimists such as Garcia but reaches different conclusions.
In particular, this set of scholars suggests that what may look like a clash between humanitarian principle and base self-interest actually reflects the influence of competing
foundational and constitutive norms such as sovereignty, self-defense, and free trade (Legro 1997,33; Capie 2008; Grilot 2011, 540; Avant 2013, 741). This has resonance with a
broader literature discussing the tensions between market liberal norms and cosmopolitan liberal norms (Orbie and Khorana 2015). Regulation, therefore, reflects the outcome
of clashes (or indeed overlaps)between so-called “good” (e.g., humanitarian) norms and “bad” (e.g., free trade, sovereignty, military necessity) norms, or, more precisely,
emerges as the outcome of particular norm hierarchies or systems of norms (Wunderlich2013, 23). I will argue that an analysis of policy in the late nineteenth century not only
provides support for this perspective but also illustrates the historically contingent nature of permissive and proscriptive arms trade norms—in this case, norms grafted onto

pessimistic literature
foundational constitutive norms of anti-slavery, free trade, sovereignty, colonialism, and the standard of civilization. The third strand of

has drawn on thicker understandings of critical or postcolonial theory to critique contemporary practices of arms
control. Where the optimists focus on and celebrate the success of discrete campaigning initiatives—the
first Matryoshka doll of arms trade governance—critical pessimists also aim to contextualize such initiatives within the broader fields and logics associated with the inter-related

action on landmines or cluster munitions has been depicted as part of a

governance of arms, security, economy, and people. In this context,

“devil’s bargain” (Krause2011, 23) in which the protection of some people from some weapons is
achieved at the expense of legitimizing other arms, forms of violence, and ways of war—in particular, liberal
militarism (Stavrianakis 2016).Even more fundamentally, some critical pessimists, drawing on Foucault (2003, 2007), have argued that initiatives on
landmines or small arms can only be properly understood as part of what has been labeled as “arms control as

governmentality”(Krause 2011; also see Mutimer 2011). It is not my intention here to provide a full exploration of the concept of governmentality or its
application to colonialism (on the latter see Scott 1995; Larner and Walters 2002) but rather to use it to highlight particular themes relevant both to the study of arms trade
regulation in the late nineteenth century and current debates about norms, HAC, and arms trade regulation. The first theme is reflected in the Sending and Neuman (2006; also
see Neuman and Sending 2007) who emphasize a reading of governmentality as concerned with the changing practices and rationality (or mentality) of governing and how these

adding in a governmentality perspective to the examination of

reflect and produce particular relations of power. For them,

both “good” and “bad” norms provides for a more complete analysis by situating them in the broader relations of power, rationalities,

and practices that produce certain forms of behavior as appropriate and certain actors and identities

as superior (Neuman and Sending 2007). For example, rather than viewing the landmines campaign as illustrative of a civil society realm empowered at the expense of
recalcitrant states, they suggest it is better understood as indicative of a governmental rationality in which political power operates through NGOs and one in which they are not
so much opponents of power as agents or even products of power (Sending and Neumann 2006; also see Lipschutz 2005, 247). A second theme concerns the way in which
governmentality is understood when applied to the field of international relations. In some perspectives, governmentality requires a concern with elaborating the techniques
aimed at regulating the behavior of states and governments, particularly in a context of unequal power relations between North and South (Joseph 2009). For example, Mathur

“colonialist governmentality” of arms control, evident in the practices of

(2016) has critiqued the

technology denial, forcible disarmament, and counter-proliferation employed by the West and laundered through a
new standard of civilization mantra. Alternatively, Krause has placed more emphasis on Foucault’s distinction between sovereign and
governmental power. The former is concerned with securing a given territory through the exercise of direct power, whilst the latter is exercised through the wide-ranging

does not
regulation of economy and society and particularly associated with liberal techniques of government (Krause 2011, 21). Here, the distinction between the two

imply a rejection or displacement of sovereignty (Joseph 2009, 415) but its recasting within the concern
for population (Sending and Neumann 2006,657). Equally, there always remains the possibility that governmental power can give way to the exercise of more direct
forms of sovereign and disciplinary power (Joseph 2009, 426). Thirdly, when applied to the field of arms control, this implies a distinction between a sovereign conception of
arms control and arms control as governmentality. The former is focused not only on securing the states’ monopoly of force but also on reducing the risk of war between states,

represents a
and its practices are shaped by formal adherence to notions of sovereign equality (Krause 2011). The latter is focused on managing populations,

technology of social control, and is concerned with “who could legitimately use what kinds of
violence against which people or groups ... under what circumstances”(ibid.,31). Both types of arms control can be identified in
the practices of earlier eras, but sovereign approaches to arms control were more characteristic of the Cold War era. In the post-Cold War era, arms control as governmentality
is characterized by initiatives such as the ban on landmines and postconflict disarmament demobilization programs (ibid.). At one level, therefore, this paper functions as a work
of history that aims to delineate the norms, logics, and practices that constituted a particular period of the operation of arms control as governmentality. As already discussed,

the analysis of the governmentality of arms trade regulation in the late nineteenth century also provides a
however,

basis for critiquing the ahistorical and uncritical assumptions of the norm optimist literature on arms
trade regulation.

The colonized were compared against the mirror to gauge if they were
sufficiently in line with the protocols of persuading the mainstream, and
excluded if they weren’t – evaluating “empirical” consequences papers over
cultural genocide and devaluation.
Inayatullah and Blaney 17 (Naeem, Professor - Department of Politics @ Ithaca College; David, G. Theodore Mitau
Professor of Political Science @ Macalester College. “Constructivism and the Normative Dangerous Liaisons?” Against International
Norms. Editor - Charlotte Epstein, Taylor Francis //shree)

Price wants to establish ethics as central to empirical inquiry. To do so, he turns to Mervyn Frost’s
exploration of the constitutive role of moral ideas in the international system. This move is important for it
seems to distance Price from the need to invoke a transcendental moral system that he could then bring to bear on the international
system. Instead, following Frost, he finds ethical materials already present. This move aligns with contemporary

constructivist thinking on ethics, like Onuf’s account of international social life as ‘a world of
everyday ethics’ in which people live according to and with the ‘standards that make their
worlds inescapably their own’ ( Onuf 1998 , 669–70) or Walker’s notion ( 1993 , 50–51) that international relations
theory and practice is ‘already constituted through accounts of ethical possibility’. The point is potentially
powerful: to give an account of the international system is to map its existing ethical contours. Price appears to begin humbly, recognizing that an emphasis on ethics as
description or as integral to explanation requires that we get the ethical descriptions or explanations right. For example, he acknowledges that we cannot simply presume a
unified international ethical community, as Frost seems to do (197). Despite this apparent doubt, Price’s engagement with Frost quickly raises the stakes, implying that
constructivist empirical inquiry can adjudicate between various accounts of ethical possibilities within a universalizing modern history. Following Hegel, Frost (1996 , Chapter 5 )
suggests that the modern era, with its distinctive recognition of individual freedom and rights connected to citizenship, arrives along with the modern state in Europe, which is
gradually spread across the globe. A communitarian global ethics thus turns on the recognition of sovereignty and the states system as the institutional underpinnings for the
norms of the international system. However, Price argues that other accounts of the institutional underpinnings of modern ethical life are possible (198), though his account
narrows our ethical vision. He points to cosmopolitan thought to suggest that a different set of institutional conditions (international interdependence; global governance,
 Price inadvertently (and rightly in our view) exposes the
universal human rights) may be necessary to achieve the ethical fruits of modernity.

communitarian-cosmopolitan debate as between competing claims about the institutional underpinnings of a

modern vision of the world, not a wider exploration of ethical possibilities, such as those
suggested by postcolonial scholars in IR, an issue to which we will return below. It is the more limited set of ethical
alternatives – between modernist communitarian and cosmopolitan ethics – that Price aims to adjudicate as empirical
questions. For example, we are asked to weigh the relative consequences of decisions to intervene or not for
humanitarian purposes (199–200), but the standards for that weighing are presumed as part of the given

backdrop of modernity . Norms constructivism works its empirical magic only against a broad historical story of (Western) international society, deciding
whether and in what mixture cosmopolitan or communitarian institutional underpinnings best realize what is already given in the universal history of modernity’s advance.

What Price delivers, then, is an empirical science that explores and makes possible the progressive
unfolding of modern consciousness and ethics. What Price’s constructivism does not or cannot tell us is
equally important. He gives no account of the ascendancy of modern norms, nor does he
investigate the possibility of alternative ethical visions. Here we have the central ‘empirical’
exclusion of Price’s account: gone is the colonial imposition of modern institutional forms;
erased is the violence, the blood, the resistance, the destroyed ways of life. 4 The answer might
be that this is all in the past; now we can move forward with an empirical agenda of
‘progressive ethical advance’. But we can move forward readily only if the violence was
complete, if the defeat of any alternative vision was so absolute that there really is no live
alternative vision of international ethical life. If so, the claimed capacity to ‘unpack the dichotomy between relativism and universal
objectivism’ (199) turns on the prior and complete destruction of alternatives. The ethical heroism of norms constructivism has

cultural genocide as precondition. Acknowledging this seems too painful. Much constructivist work trades in
images of ‘persuasion’ and ‘consent’, excluding or denying the power involved. For Finnemore and Sikkink (1998 , 895), norms have a
‘life cycle’ – a process of expansion and growth – involving norm acceptance, norm cascades, and peaceful and voluntary internalization. There is no hint of

coercion in this language – no epistemic, structural, or physical violence. But norm

entrepreneurs do seem to need the ‘leverage’ that comes with control of information, symbols,
accountability processes, and practices of shaming ( Finnemore and Sikkink 2001 , 401). Yet, the reference to ‘leverage’ hints at the
ambiguities in the idea of ‘internalization’ or ‘socialization’ documented by Epstein in Chapter 5, where the existing identity and values of the ‘socializee’ is ignored so that the

norms emerge via a power-laden process that

process of internalization appears without loss or resistance, 5 or where

distinguishes normal identities and practices from de-valued others (see Epstein 2014 ). (27-8)

This quotidian violence is an intrinsic harm

Morrison 93 (Toni, The Nobel Prize in Literature 1993 Lecture, Toni Morrison is an American novelist, essayist, editor, teacher, and professor
emeritus at Princeton University. Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award in 1988 for Beloved.
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1993/morrison-lecture.html)

Speculation on what other than its own frail body that bird-in-the-hand might signify has
( ) always

been attractive I choose to read the bird as language

to me, but especially so now thinking, as I have been, about the work I do that has brought me to this company. So

and the woman as a practiced writer She is worried about how the language she dreams in, .

given to her at birth, is handled, put into service, even withheld from her for certain nefarious
purposes So the question the children
. Being a writer she thinks of language partly as a system, partly as a living thing over which one has control, but mostly as agency - as an act with consequences.

put to her: "Is it living or dead?" is not unreal because she thinks of language as susceptible to
death, erasure; certainly imperiled and salvageable only by an effort of the will. She believes that if the bird in the hands of her

a dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is

visitors is dead the custodians are responsible for the corpse. For her

unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language Ruthless , censored and censoring.

in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own
narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However moribund, it is not without
effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential . Unreceptive to

it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling
interrogation,

silences Official language smitheryed to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege is a suit of
.

armor polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight departed long ago. Yet there it
is: predatory, sentimental. Exciting reverence in schoolchildren, providing shelter for despots
dumb, ,

harmony among the public. She is convinced that when language dies, out of
summoning false memories of stability,

carelessness or killed by fiat users are accountable for its demise

, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, , not only she herself, but all and makers . In
her country children have bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead to iterate the voice of speechlessness, of disabled and disabling language, of language adults have abandoned altogether as a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance, or

tongue-suicide
expressing love. But she knows is common among the infantile heads of state and
is not only the choice of children. It

power merchants whose evacuated language leaves them with no access to what is left of their
human instincts for they speak only to those who obey , or in order to force obedience. The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its

Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is

users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation.

violence Whether it is obscuring state language or

; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the

calcified language of the academy

proud but or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities,

it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood,
hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek -

laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability as it moves and patriotism

relentlessly toward the bottom line the policing languages of and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of

mastery cannot permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas
, and , do not . The old woman is

keenly aware that no intellectual mercenary, nor insatiable dictator, no paid-for politician or demagogue; no counterfeit journalist would be persuaded by her thoughts. There is and will be rousing language to keep citizens armed and arming; slaughtered and
slaughtering in the malls, courthouses, post offices, playgrounds, bedrooms and boulevards; stirring, memorializing language to mask the pity a nd waste of needless death. There will be more diplomatic language to countenance rape, torture, assassination. There is

there will be
and will be more seductive, mutant language designed to throttle women, to pack their throats like paté-producing geese with their own unsayable, transgressive words; more of the language of surveillance disguised as research;

arrogant pseudo-empirical language

of politics and history calculated to render the suffering of millions mute; language glamorized to thrill the dissatisfied and bereft into assaulting their neighbors;

crafted to lock creative people into cages of inferiority and hopelessness Underneath the . eloquence, the

scholarly associations, however

glamor, the seductive, the heart of such language is languishing stirring or , or perhaps

if the bird is already dead.

not beating at all -

Nonetheless, a day will come when the magic spell will be shaken off… shapes
will begin to stir. Little by little they will differ from us; little by little they will
not imitate us. They will break through the barriers of glass or metal and this
time will not be defeated.4

Jach’a marka jisk’a qanqa di istadus unidus.

The 1AC embodies a trickster hermeneutics that uses debate as a game to inject
native countersimulations in response to simulations of the absent colonized in
arms reduction affirmatives – this throws the paradigm of “New World” IR into
crisis
Ganser 16 — Professor of Philological and Cultural Studies at University of Vienna (Alexandra, "Gerald Vizenor: Transnational
Trickster of Theory," Native North American Survivance and Memory: The Vizenor Continuum, Ed. Birgit Daewes and Alexandra
Hauke, London: Routledge, 2016, 16-33, Errors due to OCR, RRao //akash)

Although Baudrillard also frequently invokes the geno- cidal beginnings of colonization in America in both symbolic and physical respects, this
invocation has more to do with the French semiotician’s excep- tionalist view of the US. as both the world’s most hyperreal society and “the only
remaining primitive society” (America 7) than with a questioning of a linear, hegemonic Western history of epistemology that would have to be

4
Jean Baudrillard. The Perfect Crime. P 149
fundamentally rewritten through the lens of (post)colonialism. Vizenor is thus less concerned with a faithful rendering
of Baudrillard’s argumentation but instead produces a cultural translation of his insights meaningful for
the Native American context. This process becomes even more fruitful when Vizenor locates pockets of
resistance in Baudrillard’s theory and invests them with trickster energies. In this context, Vizenor harks back
to another theoretical point Baudril- lard makes in his conception of simulation. Baudrillard mentions “the ven- geance of the

dead” (9) as the force that will always disrupt controlling simulations with traces of the (symbolically or materially)
dead: “science can’t help but die contaminated by the death of this object that is its inverse mirror. It

is science that masters the objects, but it is the objects that invest it with depth” (9). This idea is shared by
Vizenor’s faith in postindian simula- tions. The postindian, like Baudrillard’s “dead,” uses a subjectivity that signi- fies no

reality but is a mere simulacrum, playing with dominant simulations and “manifest manners” ascribed to the
indian by the Western regime of representation. S/he represents“ “resistance and survival, native survivance
beyond tragedy, victimry, and the simulations of the ‘indian.’ The postindian at once exposes the lack of substance that is
constitutive of the stereotype (like Baudrillard’s postmodern copy without an original) but at the same time suggests something of what it is that is
missing” (Madsen, Vizenor 35). By disturbing the “hyperrealities of neo-colonial consumerism” (Vizenor,
“Introduction” 3) that have prepared indian simulations for ready consump- tion by the West—Wild-West shows, Edward Curtis’s photography,
western movies—the postindian continues a long tradition of semiotic intervention by Native Americans: Natives have resisted empires, negotiated
treaties, and, as diplomatic strategies, embraced the simulations of absence to secure the chance of a decisive presence in national literature, history,
and canonry. Native resistance to dominance is an undeniable trace of presence, but even these memories of survivance in a constitutional democracy
The spirit of the trickster is evoked here, securing a
are cast as narratives of absence and victimry. (Vizenor, Fugitive 23)

resistant, “decisive presence” to counter “simulations of absence” such as the indian.5 Vizenor calls his

project one dedicated to ironic simulations and countersimulations (cf. Vizenor and Lee, Conversations 83), as there is
no contending with the simulation but on the level of simulation itself: [M]ost natives are wiser to the
simulations. The point is that we are long past the colonial invention of the indian. We come after the

invention, and we are the postindians. [. . .] Natives, of course, use simulations too, but for reasons of
liberation rather than dominance [. . .]. The postin- dian stands for an active, ironic resistance to
dominance, and the good energy of native survivance. (Conversations 84—85) Contradicting the simulations of Natives is the
simulation by Natives, Vizenor seems to imply here. For him, then, as Amy Elias points out, what Natives have always done and must do is perform a
“reverse striptease” (88) in which the (post)colonial subject sheds the costume and garb of imperial indian simulation. In other words, the

postindian signifies the return of the repressed, the return of the vanishing Indian as an uncanny specter
of empire, or, in the Derridean terms Vizenor also invokes time and again, as a trace of suppressed cultural difference.‘
The central Derridean concept for Vizenor’s adaptation of Baudrillard’s simulation theory is that of the simultaneity of absence and

presence in the sign, which, generated in a system of linguistic differences, has to suppress its Others in order to
achieve identity but also bears traces of the Others because they fulfill a constitutive function for
the sign’s identity. The colonial Other has traditionally filled a similar absence in Western discourses
and is repressed in the construction, for example, of national or imperial identity. But the Other, like the other sign, continues to

haunt the West because the boundaries between self and other, identity and alterity, are arbitrary,
con- structed, and contested. Vizenor sees simulation Indians as the sign for an absence of the
colonial Other, the Native American, who nevertheless is a continuing presence in the Americas—hence his turn to
countersimulations, which pay attention to presence as integral for survivance. His postindian warriors are
“warriors of simulation” (not against simulation): “The postin- dian warriors and the missionaries of manifest manners are both

responsible for simulations. [. . .] The warriors of simulation are entitled to tease the absence of remembrance in the

ruins of representation [. . .]” (Manners 13). The goal is thus not to achieve any full or authentic Native presence,

which, as Derrida has taught us, is impossible, but to delve into the “ruins of representation” that
Baudrillard diagnoses in his work and to creatively, critically intervene in the constructions on the site: “The
postindian is the absence of the invention, and the end of representation in literature; the clo- sure of
that evasive melancholy of dominance [in the simulation of manifest manners]. [. . .] The counteractions of postindian warriors are the simulations of
survivance” (Manners 11-12).7 The most important aesthetic strategy of the postindian warriors of simulation is
probably their tricksters, which also leads Vizenor to an appropriation and re-evaluation of trickster theory as it is grounded in ethnology,
anthropology, and folklore studies. Trickster Hermeneutics8 In his theoretical narratives, Vizenor has developed the concept of

trickster hermeneutics as a disturbance of traditional intellectual and scholarly discourses through the
energies set free by cultural difference and moments of transdifference.9 He has drawn on the trickster as an
agency—not always in the figural form, but also as a certain form of energy or spirit produced by a distinct aesthetic or
social practice—that transcends and potentially connects cultures, a liminal, transgressive figure of the
thresholds between various worlds, as well as a mythical embodiment of cultural, ontological,

gendered, and other ambiguities, of doublings and exchange, of formal flu- idity and the paradoxical.
Trickster hermeneutics emphasize the openness of the hermeneutic circle and the polysemic nature of the sign,
sublimated yet never fully vanquished in a structured system of linguistic difference. In an interview with Dallas
Miller, Gerald Vizenor comments on his Wittgenstein- ian and Derridean understanding of language: Language certainly is a game.

It’s more than that, of course. It’s less than that too. But it is a game, a form of play. It’s serious. What’s so delightful about

language is that you don’t have to make it mean what it means. How boring if it only means
what it means. (91) Thus Vizenor’s trickster hermeneutics refuses logocentrism and the focus on
rationality and closure that has been at the center of Western (and hence colonial) thought, and it views the
playful re-negotiation of tradition and the intended use of contradiction as tools for overcoming
what he calls “victimry”: the prison-house of simulation-indians as the dominant cultural script through which the first settlers

of America are still perceived in the U.S. and beyond,10 and with which they have always had to come to terms in order to create “survivance,”

Vizenor’s term for a cultural presence that exceeds mere survival and endurance.“ For Vizenor, the
trickster is a figura- tion of self-empowerment of marginalized cultures that questions dominant
discourses (in anthropology, philosophy, literature, politics and the law, the arts, and popular culture) and draws our attention to
the absences and gaps in the dominant systems of representation and knowledge. In Vizenor’s fic- tional
work this process is present both on the level of character (e.g., via plural hybrid identities, as in the novel Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles) and on
The trickster, a mythical
the level of narrative (e.g. the ironic re-valuation and appropriation of colonial grands récits in The Heirs of Columbus).

element in non-written narratives of various cul- tures (cf. Otto and Ballinger), is a figure that transgresses
the borders between
identity and alterity, the sacred and the profane, the linguistic-aesthetic, and the social-political. As a mythical
embodiment of ambiguity, ambivalence, and of all that which is not finally explicable and understandable, the
trick- ster, always changing identity and form (s/he has no ontological gender, for instance; cf.
Rosier-Smith 5 and 21—22) is potentially both reproductive and productive, both generative and

destructive, both stabilizing and destabi- lizing. In all its cultural forms, the trickster has a
fundamental function in a cultural system: that of border negotiations (cf. Spinks, “Trickster” 3). “Trickster
disrupts. This disruption is normal. It is part of what we know is there. Making trouble—messing up the order—is part of the order,” Elizabeth Ammons
introduces a collection of essays, recurring on earlier arguments by Paula Gunn Allen or Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (vii).12 However, Ammons continues,
tricksterism is in any case a “positive way of negotiating mul- tiple cultural systems” (xi) in that tricksterstrategies and narratives bring
together conflicting world views and value systems and thereby create new forms of identity that
are “turbulent, shape-changing, contradictory, ‘bad,’ culturally central, liminal, powerful, power-interrogating” (xi)—
located in a border space of continuing re-invention of the self, and by extension of territory, of
cultural identity, of the nation. The ambiguity of trickster-figures such as Hermes, Coyote, Br’er Rabbit, the Chinese Monkey King, or the

German Till Eulenspiegel is at the center of interest for many scholars. Franchot Ballinger has detected in the classical structuralist texts on

the trickster by Paul Radin and Claude Levi-Strauss a stark dualism that locates the figure of the trickster always

between two poles and explains its ambiguity by arguing that the elements of both poles (such as good/evil) are united in it, brought into
friction and re-balanced (cf. Ballinger 30—31). Ballinger, like Vizenor, counters these structuralist, logo- centric models

in the attempt to conceptualize the trickster as polyvalent: If Trickster seems to mediate between two poles only, if he seems

a bun- dle of dualities, these appearances may be a consequence of our own misfiring perceptions. [. . .] [I]t might be best to forget
our customary use of ambiguity as something with two or more meanings which [. . .] must be resolved
or ‘mediated’ somehow. For Trickster there can never be resolution [. . .1. Like a subatomic particle, Trickster never allows final

definition of time, place and character. He never settles or shapes himself so as to allow closure, either fictional or moral. (31) With Ballinger, the

trickster appears not as a mediator of bipolarity, but as a figuration that reflects back onto society the inherent
polyvalency of real- ity, especially in cultural texts (which Ballinger limits to written literature); ambigere, from the Latin “to wander
around, meander,” already points to the figuration’s mobile quality (cf. Ballinger 32). If we bring Ballinger’s arguments to the issue of the trickster as an
(inter-)cultural mediator, what becomes clear is that the
trickster plays less the role of a mediator between
cultural difference than that of the hermeneutic agent who is always already inter- and intra-
culturally active, mirroring to each cultural system its insta- bility and infiniteness. Only after this trickster-generated
insight, we could spin the thought further, can there be a chance of cultural communication and openness vis-é-vis
the Other—which is hence no longer radically dif- ferent, as it is always already part of the self. Thus the
trickster functions as a skeptic of cultural categorization per se and demonstrates the artificial,
arbitrary categoriality that cultural systems and social orders are based on (cf. Campbell Reesman xvii). In
its function, the trickster figure may well be a universal cultural archetype—a presumption made in the psychological studies of C. G. Jung and
ethnographic folklore studies that have dominated the focus of trickster studies for a long time. Critics today agree for the most part that the study of
tricksters cannot dispense with their culturally specific contexts (cf. Ammons xii, Campbell Reesman xii). In general, the analysis of trickster figures in
the humanities has shifted from ethnology and anthropology toward semiotics and cultural theory—discourses that question the positivistic
assumptions of earlier studies also for reasons of an epistemological critique of science. Defi- nitions like the one to be found in Funk (9' Wagnalls
Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend of 1950, stating that trickster stories were told “chiefly for amusement” or that the trickster
figure can only be found in “primitive” (1124) societies, as Jung also asserted (206-07), sound highly naive and simplistic and are no longer accepted by
cultural critics and theorists, also for lack of a sensibility for cultural difference and specificity. In addition, trickster
theory has turned
from the figural dimension toward the epistemological. The critical questioning of the epistemological basis of dominant

traditions of Western thought and writing is also at the center of Vizenor’s works, texts that produce an
“alterNative” version of academic and fictional writing by implicitly and explicitly critiquing rationalism and by a
persiflage of elitist language. Simultaneously, they acknowledge theoret- ical insights from fields like philosophy, psychology, literary studies, history,
linguistics, cultural studies, anthropology, and ethnology. For Vizenor, trickster hermeneutics combine traditional cultural
studies issues such as representation, stereotyping and exoticism, self and Other, and identity
and alterity with Indigenous strategies of understanding the world, including the playful, shifty,
even treacherous aspects of trickster discourse. Vizenor’s use of the trickster motif is aimed at
finding a way out of binary and hierarchical constructions of meaning and discursive order; Vizenor re-
interprets poststructuralist, postmodern, and postcolonial elements (relat- ing to hybridization, pastiche, simulation, and ambiguity) and thus

produces an open, often partially unstructured, fluid stream of theory-narrative, as is evident, for instance, in his
essay “Trickster Discourse.”
Positing debate as a sterile laboratory for predictable argument refinement
reinforces the murderous simulation of colonial modernity
Schnurer 4. Maxwell, Ph.D., Pittsburgh, Assistant Professor at Marist College, Spring 2004 “GAMING AS CONTROL: WILL TO
POWER, THE PRISON OF DEBATE AND GAME CALLED POTLATCH,” CONTEMPORARY ARGUMENTATION AND DEBATE.”

What kind of academic activity encourages students to fantasize about making change without
considering for the slightest bit how to bring that change about? Douglas positions this impulse
alongside the Sisyphean burden of trying to make the world into a structured, controlled, sterile
environment. Sisyphus and the reset button on a videogame console share a common ancestor
with the debate model that has thirty debate teams advocating different policies in separate
rooms at exactly the same time. All of these examples showcase humans desperately attempting
to construct meaning out of a confusing world, where the human will to power forces the world to fit a
structure. Douglas reminds us that games help to structure an oft-confusing world, imbuing the person imagining with god-like
powers (McGuire, 1980; Nietzsche 1966): Games therefore do not threaten film’s status so much as they threaten religion, because they perform the same existentially
soothing task as religion. They proffer a world of meaning, in which we not only have a task to perform, but a world that is made with us in mind. And indeed, the game world is

Gaming draws forth a natural impulse of humans – to make

made with us, or at least our avatar in mind. (Douglas, 2002, p. 9).

the world in our image. But debate and videogames contain the same fantastic lure that
encourages people to pore their energies into debate. Fiat and utopian flights of fancy are both
seductions of our will to power, encouraging us to commit to becoming better debaters. This process of
self-important distraction has its model in the theories of the hyper-real posited by Jean
Baudrillard. He argues that modern economies are geared to sell humans mass produced
products, but whose advertising attempts to convince people that they have an authentic
experience with the product. Economic structures make products that are more-than real –
hyperreal in order to sell their products. The hyperreal creates games and fantasylands that are
far richer and pleasurable than real life. One example of the hyperreal is Epcott center at Disneyland, which reduces
foreign cultures to their most base natures – ensuring that everything is uniform, bland, and
suitably “ethnic.” While one never need worry about eating food that is “too strange” in the Epcott lands, other negatives emerge in the world of the hyperreal.
Humans who desire order and structure to our worlds often come to prefer the hyperreal to
the real. The hyperreal has a world with all of the attractions of our own, but with none of the
depressing realities of our own world. The hyperreal doesn’t have credit card bills or racism. The
hyperreal is filled with beautiful people (who all want to have sex with you). The hyperreal is a
hot seduction pulling our vision and hearing away form our own lives. Describing Snider’s gaming as a dangerous
distraction that pulls us away from our communities and our lives is a bit simplistic. Rather, gaming greases the wheels for powers of

control to remain in control. Douglas articulates some of the specific ways games solidify structures of power. In board games or
computer games, however, players actually do start out in relative equality (although there are some chance elements as well, depending on the game), whereas in real life, so

are already determined before birth, including social and economic standing, political freedom,
many characteristics of one’s life

skin color, gender, etc. What games accomplish is the instilling of the ideology of equality, which
postulates that we are born equal and that differences emerge later on; the primary different to
be explained away in this way is that of economic disparity, and games help explain that
difference as the result of, in America, hard work and effort vs. laziness. Thus gaming helps
inculcate the ideology that covers over the fact that, with the exception of the information
technology bubble, most of those who are wealthy in the United States were born that way.
Beyond this narrow ideological function, the game helps create subjects that accept the
inevitability of rules as things that are given and must be “played” within—or else there is no
game. This process is not total or ever complete, as the current gaming discourse complaining
about the rules shows; here, player critique a games rules in view of a conventionalized notion of how “reality” works, or, less often, how a game’s playability
is compromised by rules that are too “realistic (Douglas, 2002, p. 24). Viewing debate as a game may have the opposite effect that Snider desires. Gaming teaches participants to
play by the rules and even when challenging the game, to do that within the games structures. Debaters who are moved by poetry are encouraged to bring that poetry back to
the debate realm – not to become poets. There are certainly debate-activists who bring their debate skills to bear on the political community. These debaters seamlessly slide
between academic hyperbole in the First Affirmative Constructive and talking to homeless folks at a Food Not Bombs meal. But these folks are few and far between. Most who
hear the call to conscience turn their backs on the call and justify their (in)actions by valorizing debate. Let me be clear that the desire of individuals to make the world is not the
enemy. It is a positive drive that encourages debaters to fiat worlds into existence or hypothesizes that the world would be good if George Bush were before the International
Criminal Court on charges of crimes against humanity. This drive to create a better world is the will to power. The big question is, what we do with that will to power?
Recognizing that there are many complex problems in the world that require smart articulate people to solve them, we can appreciate the potential value of will to power
(McGuire). In the debate context, will to power becomes reified in a hyper-real role-playing exercise. Debate can be an amazing experience where students learn about complex
ideas and then take those ideas into their own lives and communities. Debate can be a method for learning that people have their own voices in a world drowning with

mediated/televised slime-balls. Debate can encourage intellectual growth and cause epiphanies. Debate
encourages solidarity and teaches people to struggle together. Debate is primed to be a blast
furnace for the will to power and take it to the furthest level of revolutionary potential. The
only limitation is our own. If we frame debate to limit the revolutionary potential of the
participants, then we do a disservice not only to our students, but also to the world.
Nietzschean will to power is a drive for self-overcoming, transforming fuel for personal and
collective change. Will to power exists in all of us as a lunging to escape our current world and
create another beyond the moral structure and hierarchy of this world. This desire to create a
better world is admirable and is at the root of social change. My criticism of gaming is that this energy is
sublimated into a fantasy world rather than being brought to the larger world. But perhaps there is a kind of game that might elicit something of
what I desire . . . from within debate. The Real Game: Potlatch As pointed out in the last section, the stakes for the game of debate are high. The method of

debate contains the possibility for revolutionary insight and revolutionary praxis. The question is
how to understand an activity without systematizing and controlling the potential of debate.
What we really must do is let free the will to power within debaters. In this sense, we can use gaming
as the topoi to launch our conversation to a debate game that might encourage revolution. But what
does will to power look like? How do we encourage it? Lets get a feeling from George Bataille, who orients the Nietzschean impulse of will to power alongside a quote from
Nietzsche himself: Through the shutters into my window comes an infinite wind, carrying with it unleashed struggles, raging disasters of the ages. And don’t I too carry within me
a blood rage, a blindness satisfied by the hunger to mete out blows? How I would enjoy being a pure snarl of hatred, demanding death: the upshot being no prettier than two
dogs going at it tooth and nail! Though I am tired and feverish . . . “Now the air all around is alive with the heat, earth breathing a fiery breath. Now everyone walks naked, the

Will to power can be the outgrowth

good and bad, side by side. And for those in love with knowledge, it’s a celebration.” (The Will to Power) (4).

of debate that challenges existing structures. Bataille and Nietzsche desire a wild emancipation
from traditional structures, far beyond conventional morality. Coupling Nietzsche’s theorizing
with the practice of debate something new can emerge, but only if we free ourselves from the
shackles of conventional debate, including gaming. How to break these chains? How do we get beyond that which has brought us so
far? To help, I want to turn to Guy Debord and the Situationists. Guy Debord was a French revolutionary whose political
theorizing and activism culminated in the creation first of the Letterist International and later in the establishment of the Situationist International. The

Letterists/Situationists were revolutionary philosophers who believed that the situations of the modern world were increasingly controlled by mediated/corporate
experience. They viewed traditional politics in all of its reformist formats as a waste of time. Through a variety

of situations (manipulated by the situationists) it was possible to create revolutionary meaning. They used a variety of tactics in order to

elicit revolutionary change. Some of their methods, like detournement, have become common post-modern critical theory concepts. I focus our attention
on the Situationists because they succeeded in creating a revolution. Situationist propaganda and theorizing were at the heart of

the Parisian rebellion of May of 1968. This was the most powerful expression of malaise against
the increasingly wealthy industrial western world. The riots in Paris, which upended cars and collectives emerged in
downtown, became a model for revolutions in the industrialized north. Debord was seen as an

intellectual architect of the uprising of students and workers. Situationists/Letterists were increasingly capable of articulate
criticisms of the nature of the spectacle. These were often told through journals, graffiti, and
posters (Dark Star Collective, 2001; Debord, 1995; Jappe, 1992; Hussey, 2001). One of the most important Situationist tactics was articulated in the potlatch. The potlatch
was a practice modeled on American indigenous communities of increasingly committed giving. In the potlatch, indigenous would give everything they had to each other, ever
increasing the stakes of the gifts until the gifts were so outlandish the offers exposed the foolish nature of ownership. Potlatch became so important to these revolutionaries
that they named their first journal potlatch because the writings held within the journal would hopefully be given on and on in an ever increasing spiral. Potlatch became an

extended metaphor for the Situationists/Letterists, indicating all the possible spaces where revolution could emerge without capitalist economies. Every non-
capitalist moment eked out of the day was articulated as a potlatch. Every relationship that
emerged along side revolutionary dialogue became a potlatch. In a recent biography of Debord and the situationists, the
author Hussey describes the Potlatch. Potlatch . . . is the highest form of game. It is also the living moment of poetry,

a moment which breaks down or reverses conventional chronological patterns. Most significantly, the
object or gift which the Letterist International gave functioned symbolically between the giver, the International Letterists, and the receiver. The relationship between the two

constitutes a third term – the gift is also a catalyst of the future in the form of a crystallization of desire. ‘Don’t
collect Potlatch!’ ran a line at the end of the journals second year. “Time is working against you!” (Hussey, 2001, p. 89) For the Situationists, the potlatch was the ultimate
resistance to traditional economies. Originally a concept theorized by George Battaille, the potlatch was seen as a method to criticize the acquisition/showcase methods of

modern capitalist economies. Because the potlatch could never be returned, it highlighted the foolishness of the modern economy and state. Through sacrifice
and destruction, the act of giving overwhelms the possible response. Eventually, the social requirements of the
potlatch necessitate that every society member give away everything they could ever have. Yet we should not move too far from the fundamental truth of the potlatch: it

is in fact a game. Indigenous nations would choose to exchange gifts in the potlatch as a form of entertainment. But let us not understate the importance of
games. This game was made illegal because it was so dangerous to colonial economies . The Potlatch

was recognized as threatening the burgeoning trading economy that was central to westward expansion. The
potlatch was the most dangerous idea that indigenous nations could forward against the
white/capitalist drive. The act of giving too much was the threat. This move disturbed the intense drive for
acquisition. Why fight to trade beaver pelt, when at the next potlatch your neighbor might give you all her possessions? Potlatch was
threatening because it made competition meaningless. Non-competitive social structure was only one threat from the Potlatch.
Situationist biographer Jappe discovers an obscure quotation by Debord on the Potlatch (Debord himself was remarkably close-
lipped about the meaning of Potlatch): “Debord refers explicitly to the Indian custom of Potlatch and announces that ‘the non-
saleable goods that a free bulletin such as this is able to distribute are novel desires and problems; and only the further elaboration
of these by others can constitute the corresponding return gift’” (148). What was exchanged in Debord’s vision was not necessarily
goods but rather ideas. Debate is the ultimate potlatch, demanding that we offer up something inside of ourselves without asking
for something in return. Debate provides a few minutes carved out of lives that are otherwise consumed by pop-up ads, or email.
When I think about the moments that I treasure in my life, few of them are moments of consumption. I don’t remember when I
bought my television, but I remember with painful longing the last bicycle ride I took with friends. Alongside the memories of
moments with friends and in nature, I treasure a collection of moments in debate. Moments when I first learned about ideas, late
nights in the squad room, the friendships that emerged, and watching my debaters grow and develop. The parts of the
potlatch where humans draw out moments of freedom with each other are increasingly the
only thing that keeps me interested in debate. Debord and the Situationists wanted people to
take their initial offerings of the Potlatch and move them along into their own lives. We can
do the same thing with debate. Almost all of us have debate memories that are deeply infused with the Potlatch-ethic. All it takes is for
us to seek out and celebrate those moments, and our community will change. But these moments of time have
to be grappled away from the industrial-capitalist state with great gusto. We must be brave to crack open debate. In our own lives, we should strive

to bring about the kinds of realizations that elicit revolutionary transformation. Snider’s gaming does not bring
us forward in direct revolutionary thinking. Rather, it encourages revolutionary thought and then focuses its power into the system of debate. The solution for

Snider is not to continue looking for a way to explain and systematize debate but, rather, to
embrace the confluence of potential meaning in debate and lunge forward. Debate should be
about taking risks and creating new meaning out of our desires. We should never sublimate
our feral interests and instead should seek the highest level of meaning. Let us push gaming
further. Let us find games that fulfill our revolutionary potential, take whatever moments we can
for ourselves and try to push for as much change as we possibly can. In this case, perhaps it is not the game, but the
players who have not yet made their move.
We dreamed of passing through the looking-glass, but it is the mirror people
themselves who will burst in upon our world. And ‘this time will not be
defeated.’5
Belcourt 17 (Billy-Ray Belcourt is from Driftpile Cree First Nation. He is a PhD student in the Department of English and Film
Studies at the University of Alberta. “The Optics of the Language: How Joi T. Arcand Looks with Words.” 8-29-17.
https://canadianart.ca/features/optics-language-joi-t-arcand-looks-words/ //shree)

What did Bushby see? In his formulation, “one” brings into focus a sinister optic, where “optic” is the lens or filter by which one
looks and from this looking ropes what is seen into an encounter humming with all sorts of potential. Bushby’s is an optic that
mediates the interpellative call “one” seeks to enact—it is a part of the grammar of settler horror. “One” is
thus a modality by which we, the ante-Canada, those of us who bear that which is prior to and beneath Canada, are racialized and
roped into a representational field where all things, like trailer hitches, can be put to violent use. We cannot survive in the visual
register of “one.” Words are worldly; not just in the sense that they proliferate and float up into the sky and become cloud-
like. Words world too. Words like “one” incubate death-worlds (see Achille Mbembe’s 2003 essay
“Necropolitics”) inside which those of us who look like Kentner are made to inhabit modes of
enfleshment that fix the stares of the grim reapers of the present. On the other hand, some of us recruit
words in the name of something like freedom. We might call this duality the double-bind of enunciation. How do we refuse a
savage call to being with a more spacious one? Joi T. Arcand is a photo-based artist and industrial sculptor from
Muskeg Lake Cree Nation, and she knows that words, that letter forms, shapes and glyphs,
“change the visual landscape,” that they are how we go about practicing new ways of looking.
Words are emotional architectures, and Arcand calls hers “Future Earth.” In her 2015 book The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson tends to a
debate about whether words do or do not potentiate. She takes up a claim of a partner’s that words do nothing but nominalize, and
what is left unnamed is subject to a host of horrors. Nelson, however, holds out more hope for words; she contends that they are
“good enough,” that how one speaks makes all of the difference and that words can, following Deleuze, incite “the outline of a
becoming.” Bushby’s angered vocalization of a genre of non-being—where “one” is the refusal
of a name and the humanity
that comes with it—is evidence of the terrible mechanics of language. But, it is in opposition to this
linguistic state of killability, this metaphysics and rhetoric of coloniality, that Arcand articulates a
grammar of subjectivity vis-à-vis the time and space of a native future. Here on Future Earth is a series of
photographs that Arcand produced in 2010. In a phone interview, Arcand explained to me that this is where her photo-based
practice and her interest in textuality synched. Arcand wants us to think about these photographs as documents of “an alternative
present,” of a future that is within arm’s reach. For this series, Arcand
manipulated signs and replaced their
slogans and names with Cree syllabics. By doing this, Arcand images something of a present
beside itself and therefore loops us into a new mode of perception, one that enables us to
attune to the rogue possibilities bubbling up in the thick ordinariness of everyday life. Arcand
wanted to see things “where they weren’t.” Hers is not a utopian elsewhere we need to map out via an ethos of
discovery. Rather, Arcand straddles the threshold of radical hope. She asks us to orient ourselves to the world as if
we were out to document or to think back on a future past. That is, Arcand rendered these photographs with a pink hue and a thick,
round border, tapping into what she calls “the signifiers of nostalgia.” Importantly, these signifiers are inextricably bound to the
charisma of words, to the emotional life of the syllabics. The syllabics are what enunciate; they potentiate a performance of
world-making that does not belong to the mise-en-scene of settlement. It is this mise-en-scene of
settlement that Arcand conjures to then obliterate, which is to say that her photographs evince a prairie world that is crowded with
meaning, meaning that belongs differently to the logic of terra nullius (that a place exists without history or politics prior to
European settlement) and to myths of Indian savagery and degeneracy. It
is against this system of signs that Arcand
opens the prairies up to radical resignification. It is where we build a future atop the decayed remains of
coloniality. Perhaps Here on Future Earth visually captures the tempos of “Indian time,” which is always a scene of
errant temporality. Indian time is less about the absence of rhythm and more about an inability to fix
or to analytically hold up the rhythmic as a mode of feral movement itself. Words like “one” are

5
Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, p 149
spun such that they stomp us into the rut of social death. But: Indian time evinces an otherwise
kinetics. In Here on Future Earth, this kinetics is energized by the textual, by the stories that they tell, and their visual
culture. The modified signs exploit our ability to look; that we see them and conceptualize them
as out of place or untimely is how we transport ourselves to a different time, to a place
governed by Indian time. The syllabics themselves map a visual field. This is what Arcand calls
“the optics of the language.” It is around these words that sociality orbits. This thematic persists in
Arcand’s latest project, a set of large neon signs that light up Cree words like keyam. For Arcand, all of her engagements with the
Cree language are partly elegiac. She is mourning language loss, but puts this negative affect to rebellious use to signify a world-to-
come. Like the syllabics in Here on Future Earth, the bright signs prop up affective structures for a time and place where our
relations to Cree are not always-already bound up in performances of grief. In one sign, Arcand translates the English phrase “I don’t
have the words” into Cree. “I don’t have the words” is a paradoxical speech act; it uses words to announce their absence. These
signs are installed in gallery spaces where Arcand’s work is commissioned; one was recently installed at the second gesture of the
Wood Land School at the SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art in Montreal, another outside the Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff. These
signs interrupt the visual terrain of the gallery, as if welcoming onlookers to a new world, to a new geographic
form. The signs something like kinship around a common wordlessness in the service of a new
world-making praxis. These photographs and signs, then, are all relics of a future past. They emerge from something of an
anthropological interest in a future-in-the-present, in the affects of Indian time. Arcand thus writes the world wrong so that she can
write it anew.
Don’t underestimate the colonial nature of procedural form bracketing out
“unenlightened” content
Samson 7 (Colin, professor of sociology and director of the BA Liberal Arts program at the University of Essex, “The
dispossession of the Innu and the colonial magic of Canadian Liberalism,” 11/16/07, Citizenship Studies, 3:1, pp. 5-25 //akash)
*Published on akash’s bday\

Liberalism, as an established and official channel for contemporary intellectual discussions of the broader dilemmas raised in this
article, proclaims a proud lineage in European Enlightenment thought, the most recent port of call before it being the Utilitarianism
of nineteenth-century Britain, especially the figure of John Stuart Mill. In its current manifestations, and here I include
communitarianism, also, as a reformist tendency, liberalism grapples with both long-standing philosophical issues such as
the problem of social order and contemporary debates such as those posed by 'multiculturalism'. It aspires to
identify laws, procedures and processes for 'fairness', 'citizenship', and 'justice' within contemporary societies.
Liberalism, like other Western philosophies, is predicated upon an unquestioned assumption that the
cosmologies and ways of life of Europeans, although containing flaws, are somehow, a priori. That is, at a more applied
level, instruments such as the codified law which defines and identifies rights and obligations,
have some primordial quality that functions as a trump card over all other, non-European,
practices. Within the law, the sovereignty of the invented nation state, as asserted by the state and recognised by other states, is
accepted as a given. Liberal concepts of fairness and justice are conceived, as Parekh (1994, p. 11) has pointed out,
in the context of the assertion of universalised values, such as individualism, and in distinction to the
supposedly unenlightened societies thrown into relief by colonialism . The liberalism of Mill, according to
Parekh, had its origins in the English colonial images of the backwardness of those to whom it
made subject. Currently, writers such as Sandel, Walzer and Kymlicka and many others are formulating discourses not in
imperial centres, but in colonial settler states. Their definitions of rights and citizenship emerge from a socio-political context in
which other nation states have already accepted the states in which they are located as fait accompli. As Tully (1995, p. 53)
perceptively remarks of these theorists' writing, 'it skips over the first step in questioning the sovereignty of the authoritative
traditions and institutions they serve to legitimate'. Thus, when these liberals consider the problems posed by
multiculturalism, such as the rights of aboriginal peoples, their remedies are enclosed within inherited
European assumptions about order, the rule of law, conquest and the nature of the native Other. As such,
they confine themselves to agonising over levels of political representation, access to the vote
and 'fair hearings' (Kymlicka, 1995, p. 131). Instead of considering how incorporation of aboriginal
people has been and continues to be achieved through various contrivances identified in this article, they
concentrate only on how such incorporation can be achieved with least inconvenience to the
social order of the settler state. For them, it is enriching for 'First Nations' to 'participate' in institutions
created by Canada and it is to be encouraged that native people proudly display their 'culture' and 'identity' as
'First Nations'. But these narrow expressions of the world of aboriginal peoples are largely those which
can be accommodated by the state. Liberals would be appalled at virtually any expression of Innu
difference that threatened the hegemony of the Canadian state and the 'democracy' upon which
this is allegedly based. The notion of the Innu asserting their sovereignty over Canada in Nitassinan and actively asserting their
collective right to protect and enjoy their way of life by practicing hunting in the region of the Voisey's Bay mine, hypothetically by
forcibly removing industrial apparatus from the area would be alien to liberals. Conversely, because under the recent Delgamuukw
decision, natives can only exercise 'traditional' rights under 'aboriginal title', the Innu could not, if they so chose, own and control
mining activities without abandoning their aboriginal title. Likewise, treating the process of land claims negotiations as the 'Canada
claim', rather than the Innu claim, as Innu leaders often joke, would be ruled out by liberals. Because liberals and their colleagues,
communitarians, are very concerned with order and with diverse social groups getting along together, they tend
to commend
only those forms of cultural expression which do not threaten the dominant, Euro-American, social
order. They believe that the settler state has created, to use Beiner's (1995, pp. 6,8) language, a 'common culture'. Liberal
multi-culturalism in Canada is really a form of Euro-Canadian hegemony that permits certain innocuous
displays of difference in order to show itself as diverse and tolerant. Thus, prominent commentators such as
Kymlicka are threatened by what they regard as 'groupism' (see Beiner, 1995, p. 6)—the increasing assertion of autonomous ways of
life by numerous groups. Like the communitarian writers of the United States, they see fragmentation and ethnic particularism
everywhere. Communitarians complain about the loss of 'community', republican virtues and
shared values in liberal democratic society. In their denunciations of the particularistic struggles of various groups,
the colonial and violent basis upon which such a democratic 'common culture' has asserted
itself becomes not so much obscured—it is often freely conceded—but underestimated. The virtues of the
European Enlightenment and the democracy that it allegedly spawned are held up as ideals which have
been violated in North American history and have yet to be fully realised. These assumptions are rarely questioned. Looked at from a
different angle, democracy is little more than the rule of the majority, no matter how that 21 Downloaded by [University of
Nebraska, Lincoln] at 11:42 31 May 2016 Colin Samson majority was established. It is only through making light of the continuing
cultural relevance of colonisation, conquest, and racism within such 'democracies' that a sociologist like Gitlin (1995, p. 32) can
muse, '[w]hy are so many people attached to their marginality and why is so much of their intellectual labor spent developing
theories to justify it? Why insist on difference with such rigidity, rancor, and blindness to the exclusion of the possibility of common
knowledge and common dreams?' While
liberals are rarely so tetchy and even applaud cultural difference, they
invariably set limits on the assertion of difference in the name of 'liberal justice'. Thus, Kymlicka (1995, p. 153),
defends 'the right of national minorities to maintain themselves as culturally distinct societies', and then adds the qualification which
exposes the colonial underpinnings of liberalism, 'but only if, and in so far as, they are themselves governed by liberal principles'
(emphasis added).

So, everywhere, objects, children, the dead, images, women, everything which
serves to provide a passive reflection in a world based on identity, is ready to
go on the counter-offensive. Already they resemble us less and less…
I’ll not be your mirror!6

6
Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime. P149.