T - Framework - Michigan 7 2023 CFLMP

Framework Core—CFMLP
Notes
The 1NC is modular; you can pick and choose which (if any) cards you want to read. Along those lines, if you would prefer different 1NC interpretations, by all means switch them out! I would recommend reading interpretations which say that the resolutional wording implies action by the federal government, but any interpretation that the aff in question doesn’t meet works—this is a topicality argument at its core.
1NC Modules
1NC Core
The text of the resolution calls for debate on hypothetical government action.
Ericson 3 (Jon M., Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts – California Polytechnic U., et al., The Debater’s Guide, Third Edition, p. 4)
The Proposition of Policy: Urging Future Action In policy propositions, each topic contains certain key elements, although they have slightly different functions from comparable elements of value-oriented propositions. 1. An agent doing the acting ---“The United States” in “The United States should adopt a policy of free trade.” Like the object of evaluation in a proposition of value, the agent is the subject of the sentence. 2. The verb should—the first part of a verb phrase that urges action. 3. An action verb to follow should in the should-verb combination. For example, should adopt here means to put a program or policy into action though governmental means. 4. A specification of directions or a limitation of the action desired. The phrase free trade, for example, gives direction and limits to the topic, which would, for example, eliminate consideration of increasing tariffs, discussing diplomatic recognition, or discussing interstate commerce. Propositions of policy deal with future action. Nothing has yet occurred. The entire debate is about whether something ought to occur. What you agree to do, then, when you accept the affirmative side in such a debate is to offer sufficient and compelling reasons for an audience to perform the future action that you propose.
“Fiscal” redistribution is done by the government.
Hicks 86, Researcher, Northwestern University (Alexander Hicks, 1986, “CLASS INFLUENCE ON REDISTRIBUTIVE POLICY: THE CASE OF U.S. STATE GOVERNMENTS, 1951-1961,” Journal of Political and Military Sociology, Vol. 14)//BB
The present redistributive policy focus is on a particular type of government redistribution that may be called direct fiscal redistribution to the poor (hereafter DFRP). Fiscal redistribution refers here to redistribution of money and in-kind income among strata of households by means of both government spending and taxing (i.e., fiscal) activities. For example, increased generosity in public assistance payment levels and reliance upon progressive income as opposed to regressive sales taxes can provide positive fiscal redistribution. Direct fiscal redistribution refers to that part of such redistribution that can be accounted for in terms of government's relatively direct and immediate give-and-take of expenditures and taxes to and from income strata of households. Current evidence suggests that such redistribution is considerable in advanced capitalist political democracies, especially vis-à-vis the poor (e.g., Reynolds and Smolensky, 1977; Hicks and Swank, 1984b). During the 1970s DFRP apparently augmented the "pre-fisc" income share of poor households in the U.S. by over 100 percent (see Reynolds and Smolensky, 1977: 74 on the U.S.; and Hicks and Swank, 1984b on advanced capitalism).
Our impact is competitive clash—there are two internal links:
Limits. A bounded topic serves as a predictable stasis point for debate that guarantees thematic coherence. Absent defined limits, debate’s competitive incentives create a race to the margins which distorts topic research.
Ground. A pre-defined controversy ensures a vibrant lit base and in-depth clash, but it’s unreasonable to prepare for alternative frameworks with the ground allocated to us by the parameters of the resolution. All 2AC defense to this claim will rely on concessionary ground, which isn’t a stable basis for a year of debate.
Anderson—T Isn’t Violent
Analogies between limits and violent exclusion are faulty—argumentative exclusion is inevitable, but topicality ensures it occurs around reciprocal lines.
Anderson, 6—Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English at Brown University (Amanda, “Reply to My Critic(s),” Criticism, Vol. 48, No. 2, 281-290, dml)
My recent book, The Way We Argue Now, has in a sense two theses. In the first place, the book makes the case for the importance of debate and argument to any vital democratic or pluralistic intellectual culture. This is in many ways an unexceptional position, but the premise of the book is that the claims of reasoned argument are often trumped, within the current intellectual terrain, by appeals to cultural identity and what I gather more broadly under the rubric of ethos, which includes cultural identity but also forms of ethical piety and charismatic authority. In promoting argument as a universal practice keyed to a human capacity for communicative reason, my book is a critique of relativism and identity politics, or the notion that forms of cultural authenticity or group identity have a certain unquestioned legitimacy, one that cannot or should not be subjected to the challenges of reason or principle, precisely because reason and what is often called "false universalism" are, according to this pattern of thinking, always involved in forms of exclusion, power, or domination. My book insists, by contrast, that argument is a form of respect, that the ideals of democracy, whether conceived from a nationalist or an internationalist perspective, rely fundamentally upon procedures of argumentation and debate in order to legitimate themselves and to keep their central institutions vital. And the idea that one should be protected from debate, that argument is somehow injurious to persons if it does not honor their desire to have their basic beliefs and claims and solidarities accepted without challenge, is strenuously opposed. As is the notion that any attempt to ask people to agree upon processes of reason-giving argument is somehow necessarily to impose a coercive norm, one that will disable the free expression and performance of identities, feelings, or solidarities. Disagreement is, by the terms of my book, a form of respect, not a form of disrespect. And by disagreement, I don't mean simply to say that we should expect disagreement rather than agreement, which is a frequently voiced—if misconceived—criticism of Habermas. Of course we should expect disagreement. My point is that we should focus on the moment of dissatisfaction in the face of disagreement—the internal dynamic in argument that imagines argument might be the beginning of [End Page 281] a process of persuasion and exchange that could end in agreement (or partial agreement). For those who advocate reconciling ourselves to disagreements rather than arguing them out, by contrast, there is a complacent—and in some versions, even celebratory—attitude toward fixed disagreement. Refusing these options, I make the case for dissatisfied disagreement in the final chapter of the book and argue that people should be willing to justify their positions in dialogue with one another, especially if they hope to live together in a post-traditional pluralist society.
One example of the trumping of argument by ethos is the form that was taken by the late stage of the Foucault/Habermas debate, where an appeal to ethos—specifically, an appeal to Foucault's style of ironic or negative critique, often seen as most in evidence in the interviews, where he would playfully refuse labels or evade direct answers—was used to exemplify an alternative to the forms of argument employed by Habermas and like-minded critics. (I should pause to say that I provide this example, and the framing summary of the book that surrounds it, not to take up airtime through expansive self-reference, but because neither of my respondents provided any contextualizing summary of the book's central arguments, though one certainly gets an incremental sense of the book's claims from Bruce Robbins. Because I don't assume that readers of this forum have necessarily read the book, and because I believe that it is the obligation of forum participants to provide sufficient context for their remarks, I will perform this task as economically as I can, with the recognition that it might have carried more weight if provided by a respondent rather than the author.)
The Foucauldian counter-critique importantly emphasizes a relation between style and position, but it obscures (1) the importance or value of the Habermasian critique and (2) the possibility that the other side of the debate might have its own ethos to advocate, one that has precisely to do with an ethos of argument, an ideal of reciprocal debate that involves taking distance on one's pre-given forms of identity or the norms of one's community, both so as to talk across differences and to articulate one's claims in relation to shared and even universal ideals. And this leads to the second thesis of the book, the insistence that an emphasis on ethos and character is interestingly present if not widely recognized in contemporary theory, and one of the ways its vitality and existential pertinence makes itself felt (even despite the occurrence of the kinds of unfair trumping moves I have mentioned). We often fail to notice this, because identity has so uniformly come to mean sociological, ascribed, or group identity—race, gender, class, nationality, ethnicity, sexuality, and so forth. Instances of the move toward character and ethos include the later Foucault (for whom ethos is a central concept), cosmopolitanism (whose aspiration it is to turn universalism into an ethos), and, more controversially, proceduralist ethics and politics (with its emphasis on sincerity and civility). Another version of this attentiveness to ethos and character appears in contemporary pragmatism, with its insistence on casualness of attitude, or insouciance in the face of [End Page 282] contingency—recommendations that get elevated into full-fledged exemplary personae in Richard Rorty's notion of the "ironist" or Barbara Herrnstein Smith's portrait of the "postmodern skeptic." These examples—and the larger claim they support—are meant to defend theory as still living, despite the many reports of its demise, and in fact still interestingly and incessantly re-elaborating its relation to practice. This second aspect of the project is at once descriptive, motivated by the notion that characterology within theory is intrinsically interesting, and critical, in its attempt to identify how characterology can itself be used to cover or evade the claims of rational argument, as in appeals to charismatic authority or in what I identify as narrow personifications of theory (pragmatism, in its insistence on insouciance in the face of contingency, is a prime example of this second form). And as a complement to the critical agenda, there is a reconstructive agenda as well, an attempt to recuperate liberalism and proceduralism, in part by advocating the possibility, as I have suggested, of an ethos of argument.
Robbins, in his extraordinarily rich and challenging response, zeroes in immediately on a crucial issue: who is to say exactly when argument is occurring or not, and what do we do when there is disagreement over the fundamentals (the primary one being over what counts as proper reasoning)? Interestingly, Robbins approaches this issue after first observing a certain tension in the book: on the one hand, The Way We Argue Now calls for dialogue, debate, argument; on the other, its project is "potentially something a bit stricter, or pushier: getting us all to agree on what should and should not count as true argument." What this point of entry into the larger issue reveals is a kind of blur that the book, I am now aware, invites. On the one hand, the book anatomizes academic debates, and in doing so is quite "debaterly." This can give the impression that what I mean by argument is a very specific form unique to disciplinary methodologies in higher education. But the book is not generally advocating a narrow practice of formal and philosophical argumentation in the culture at large, however much its author may relish adherence to the principle of non-contradiction in scholarly argument. I take pains to elaborate an ethos of argument that is linked to democratic debate and the forms of dissent that constitutional patriotism allows and even promotes. In this sense, while argument here is necessarily contextualized sociohistorically, the concept is not merely academic. It is a practice seen as integral to specific political forms and institutions in modern democracies, and to the more general activity of critique within modern societies—to the tradition of the public sphere, to speak in broad terms. Additionally, insofar as argument impels one to take distance on embedded customs, norms, and senses of given identity, it is a practice that at once acknowledges identity, the need to understand the perspectives of others, and the shared commitment to commonality and generality, to finding a way to live together under conditions of difference.
More than this: the book also discusses at great length and from several different angles the issue that Robbins inexplicably claims I entirely ignore: the [End Page 283] question of disagreement about what counts as argument. In the opening essay, "Debatable Performances," I fault the proponents of communicative ethics for not having a broader understanding of public expression, one that would include the disruptions of spectacle and performance. I return to and underscore this point in my final chapter, where I espouse a democratic politics that can embrace and accommodate a wide variety of expressions and modes. This is certainly a discussion of what counts as dialogue and hence argument in the broad sense in which I mean it, and in fact I fully acknowledge that taking distance from cultural norms and given identities can be advanced not only through critical reflection, but through ironic critique and defamiliarizing performance as well. But I do insist—and this is where I take a position on the fundamental disagreements that have arisen with respect to communicative ethics—that when they have an effect, these other dimensions of experience do not remain unreflective, and insofar as they do become reflective, they are contributing to the very form of reasoned analysis that their champions sometimes imagine they must refuse in order to liberate other modes of being (the affective, the narrative, the performative, the nonrational). If a narrative of human rights violation is persuasive in court, or in the broader cultural public sphere, it is because it draws attention to a violation of humanity that is condemned on principle; if a performance jolts people out of their normative understandings of sexuality and gender, it prompts forms of understanding that can be affirmed and communicated and also can be used to justify political positions and legislative agendas.
Robbins claims that I violate my own ideal of dialogue by failing to engage those who, according to him, are "[my] most significant antagonists": Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Rancière. But it is simply not true that I fail to address the fundamental concerns that neither of these thinkers owns in any absolute sense. I might have addressed their work particularly (there are significant differences between them), and I think the example of Rancière is a particularly fruitful one, especially given his own critique of sociological reductionism (and identity politics), and his universalism, which shares affinities with the forms of poststructuralist universalism (notably, Etienne Balibar's) that I address in the third chapter of my book. But the relevant issues of incommensurability of language games or cultural perspectives, and the question of intractable or "hardwired" exclusion, are adduced and repeatedly critiqued throughout the book, across a range of disciplines. The debate between the accommodationist position of Thomas McCarthy and the universalist position of Habermas addresses these issues straight on, and the discussion of Habermas clearly maps out the two main alternatives to his position as (1) incommensurable perspectives and (2) overlapping consensus. The analysis of Satya Mohanty and Martha Nussbaum is also directly relevant: Mohanty situates his project with respect to a well-known and parallel debate in anthropology represented by the opposed positions of Ernest Gellner and Talal Asad. My emphasis on the newer discussions of accommodation, [End Page 284] rather than the incommensurability theorists (e.g., Lyotard), is meant to argue for the Habermasian position against its newer and more interesting challengers, and I also wanted the book to move beyond the parochial reference points of literary and cultural studies to engage relevant work in political theory and political philosophy. And of course I do discuss the work of many influential theorists and literary critics who oppose the approach I take in the book generally. But I'm not going to reproduce my complete range of references: readers are free to decide for themselves how comprehensive and various the theoretical landscape is in my book. But I will say in response to Robbins that my "primary antagonist" considered as a position rather than a set of proper names is consistently present in the book, and taken on in a number of different ways.
There is a deeper issue at play in Robbins's invocation of Lyotard and Rancière, especially given where his discussion of what he calls my "argumentative normativity" ends up. On the one hand, Robbins wants to say that the argument I am taking up is no longer relevant, that "thankfully" literary critics have moved past the critique of Enlightenment. On this account I am sadly unaware that my earlier books have actually had some influence, and seem to be stuck in an agonistic position that has no traction, and that at this point constitutes a regression toward a naively pro-Enlightenment position that is likely to invite—and that at some level deserves to invite—a strong reiteration of the critique of Enlightenment. The moves need to be replayed in slow motion here to discover exactly what is going on, since the argument is quite kinetic, and involves a dubious framing of my own project. It is certainly the case that in diagnosing the state of academic argument in the humanities today, I invoke, as one of the contributing factors, the excesses involved in the critique of Enlightenment. It is not the only factor I invoke, but it is certainly adduced as a major contributing factor to the denigration of reason, critical distance, and formal argument. I do agree with Robbins that there are many critics challenging the critique of Enlightenment. There are also, as it happens, many critics who have walked away from the debate to do other things. But it remains the case, as Robbins's own response makes clear, that the stronger version of the critique has a kind of staying power, particularly as a way of asserting political pedigree in the last instance. Indeed, Robbins must insist that I resurrect a version of the very form of Enlightenment that was once the whipping boy of poststructuralism, in order to himself reintroduce a high-stakes political allegory that will imagine cultural criticism to be an immediate actor in the current international political landscape.
Let's first examine the claim that my book is "unwittingly" inviting a resurrection of the "Enlightenment-equals-totalitarianism position." How, one wonders, could a book promoting argument and debate, and promoting reason-giving practices as a kind of common ground that should prevail over assertions of cultural auth

Preview shortened. Download the file for the full document.