1NC

The 1ACs identity politics only ensures that marginalized

populations become defined by their exclusion from the
political community, re-entrenching the sovereignty
Armstrong 8 [Armstrong, A. (2008, November 5). Beyond Resistance: A response to ieks critique of
Foucaults subject of freedom.] Hebron ADN
Reflection on the theme of practices of freedom in Foucaults late work on ethics suggests a further sense in which political

strategies of resistance might be both problematic and insufficient. Insofar as a politics of resistance, like the
project of liberation, inevitably emerges in reaction to the injuries or constraints

imposed by the system against which it struggles, it is likely to

give rise to an attachment to the identity formed through the
social injury suffered and, thus, to reinforce rather than question
the terms of domination that generated it. For example, the contemporary
trend to seek legal redress for injuries related to social
subordination marked by race or sex tends, as Wendy Brown has noted, to fix the
identities of the injured and the injuring as social positions and to cast
the law and the state as protectors against injury and , thus, the injured
as in continuing need of such protection.14 One of the risks contained in this
demand for protection is that it may serve[s] to reinforce an economy
premised on the distinction between victims and perpetrators by
encouraging a politics of blame directed not at empowering the
injured or vulnerable, but at punishing the perpetrators. There are, thus, two related
dangers to which politics-as-resistance is susceptible. The first derives from the manner in which those who are

oppressed by power come to be invested in that oppression in so far

as their self identity becomes bound up with the terms through which they are marginalized, excluded and
politicized identity becomes attached to its
discriminated against. In other words,

exclusion because its existence is premised on this exclusion. The

danger, then, is that in reacting to domination through the defensive assertion of a subordinated or marginalized identity, a politics
of resistance may fail to address the way in which oppressive structures are reproduced at the level of attachments
to forms of identity which presuppose and support those structures. It is, perhaps, in recognition of this danger that Foucault
worries especially about that mode of modern power which categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches
him to his identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to recognize in him.15 The other
danger is that resistance to oppression may tend, by virtue of the suffering that undergirds it, to be transformed into a politics of
resentment which reinforces social powerlessness by making that powerlessness the basis for political recognition and legal redress.
The 1ACs instance of legal reform fails and legitimizes a
permanent state of emergency. This has three implications:
1. No Solvency: The sovereign will always be able to justify
extralegal surveillance in the name of necessity within the
state of exception the 1AC is a useless attempt to
manipulate the law in a place where it has been deactivated
2. Biopolitics: The state of exception guarantees the inevitable
production of bare life
3. Turns Case: The premise of restraining the state masks
disciplinary domination while allowing the sovereign to
suspend the law to institute more insidious forms of
surveillance at will
Frost 10 [Tom, Professor of Legal Theory at the University of Sussex and PhD from the University of
Southampton, Agambens Sovereign Legalization of Foucault, Oxford Legal Studies, Volume 30, Issue 3, pp. 545-
577] Hebron ADN
B. Agamben, Law and Bare Life Agamben builds upon this zo/bios opposition at the start of Homo Sacer to
develop his formulations of how law and biopower interact. Whilst Foucault joined together both disciplinary power
and biopower at the micro and macro levels, respectively, with disciplinary power affecting the individual and
biopower operating at the level of populations,53 Agamben replaces this distinction, with biopower being tied
directly to the individual. Power acts in both creating and maintaining bios, political life, by directly acting upon zo
and granting natural life the political rights that transform it into bios.54 Agambenian biopower therefore subsumes
disciplinary power. Unlike Foucault, who saw both forms of power as attempting to cover all of life, Agambens
biopower can be described as totalizing in its operation. This biopolitics, far from complimenting the disciplines,
or existing in a tensional relation with normative operations of power, is today causing disciplinary

institutions to retreat in their influence over life.55 Yet at the same time
this biopower is aligned with and acts through the law. Agambenian biopower aims to transform all zo into bios,
attempting to regulate, order and increase powers hold over every human action. Life is aligned with and lived through the law. Political life, bios, becomes a legal subject, as the juridical order constructs legal subjects that can be
acted upon by power. There are no longer separate spheres of power, only a juridical biopower. Thus Agamben argues that biopower aims to dominate every aspect of being a human; there can be no human actions that are outside
of biopolitical regulation and control. In this manner biopower and the biopolitical juridical order maintain the fiction of immanentism.56 Sergei Prozorov describes immanentism as having the aim to recast the social order as a
closed universal self-propelling system without an outside. Immanentism denies that there can be any human action outside of the order, as it denies that such an outside exists. It is a fiction because such a view pre-supposes an
all-encompassing social order that is always already encapsulating acts that have not yet happenedthe order is given omnipotent and omniscient powers as it is able to subsume any act within itself. The analogy needs to be
modified slightly here as Agamben deals primarily with a juridical order, rather than a social order. The distinction made between legality and illegality may not necessarily correlate with Foucauldian concepts of normality and
abnormality developed in Discipline and Punish. Agamben sees human actions as constrained not by denotations of normality, but by denoting them as legal or otherwise. Nevertheless, Prozorovs conception of immanentism is
helpful here in analogizing the structure of Agambenian biopower. Agambens totalizing biopower ties in directly to his notion of bare life, the necessary yet contradictory element of his formulation of biopower, by focusing upon, and
modifying, Carl Schmitts concept of the sovereign decision.57 For Schmitt, sovereignty was not identifiable through statutes, ordinances or constitutions, but instead rested on one concrete political fact, namely which individual or
body could declare a state of exception and thus suspend the existing legal order. It was therefore the decision, rather than any pre-ordained power, that decided who was sovereign. Adopting and modifying Schmitts definition of
sovereignty, Agamben contends that the sovereign and sovereign power can be identified through the creation of bare life; the individual or body that creates bare life will be by definition imbibed with sovereign power. This
sovereign decision is tied directly to the operation of law. In State of Exception Agamben posits bare life not only being created through a sovereign decision, but also through the operation of the law, and specifically through the
state of exception, which exists as a zone of indistinction between law and anomie, laws beyond.58 C. The State of Exception The state of exception is not a true exception as understood by the theorists of emergency powers, as
Agamben denies that the exception can be temporally or spatially separated from the norm. Instead the exception is a zone of indistinction where law and fact completely coincide. In his work on the exception Agamben
distinguishes between the juridical order (il diritto) and the law (la legge). The juridical order maintains the fiction of immanentism; the abstract notion of law pre-supposes that it applies to all of reality, to all of life itself. Whilst the
law (la legge) of a State may be unprincipled and contain lacunae in certain areas,59 the juridical order maintains that there are no lacunae, in the sense that the juridical order covers all lacunae and all situations that arise. The
fiction of immanentism is maintained even when the law seems conflict and contradict itself internally. Agambens exception then does not exist as separate from or as dichotomous to the law. Although Agamben appropriates
Schmitts notion of the sovereign decision, he argues that attempts to relate the exception into the juridical order result in paradoxes and aporias that cannot be explained. If the exception is contained within the juridical order as
part of positive law, such as the process of derogation, then the paradoxical situation arises where the exception that suspends the juridical order is contained within the very objectthe juridical orderthat it is suspending.60
Likewise, if the exception is, like Schmitt maintains, a purely political, de facto, extra-juridical situation, then the juridical order must contain a lacuna precisely where the decisive situation concerning its existence in the face of
grave threats exists. To conclude this is to support a fiction that the juridical order does not legislate for exceptions, which is patently not the case.61 Agamben has argued that in the 20th century, with increasing recourse to
emergency governance in Western democracies, the exception can no longer be distinguished from the norm, and today we live in a permanent state of exception. This is quite a curious claim, taking into account his works on the
primacy of the figure of bare life and his emphasis upon the paradigmatic method. It appears, at least on the face of things that Agamben embarks upon a genealogical diversion explaining how the exception developed throughout
the 20th century. With his statement in Homo Sacer that the exception is the originary form of the law,62 it may be questionable to state that the exception has become the norm only during the 20th century. Despite this point,
Agambens development of the concept of the exception deserves further attention. The exception is neither inherent to law, nor other to law; the problem of defining the exception cannot be resolved through a simple opposition of
inside/outside. Rather, the exception should be understood as a zone of indistinction where inside and outside blur with one another. Agamben explains the importance of the exception for the law through the analogy of language
and linguistics. Agamben argues that the law and language are interconnected; the aporias to be found in language are equally to be found in law. Thus linguistic elements exist in langue, in language, without any real meaning.
These linguistic elements only gain meaning through their use in actual speech, parole. Equally, speech, concrete linguistic activity, only gains meaning if a language is pre-supposed.63 The relationship between speech and
language is not based upon any logical operation; the only way in which a generic proposition endowed with a merely virtual reference (e.g. a tree) passes to a concrete reference that corresponds to a segment of reality is through
a practical activity (pre-supposing what is meant when the linguistic element tree is used). As it is for language, so it is for law. The application of a norm is in no way contained within the norm and cannot be derived from the
norm. There is no internal logical nexus that allows the norm to be derived from its application.64 The nexus that holds the norm in relation to its application is found in the exception, which exists as a zone of indistinction where
the norm and application reveal their separation. In other words, in the exception the norm is applied even though its application has been suspended. In order to apply a norm, it is ultimately necessary to produce an exception, to
suspend its application. This can be seen most clearly in the case of necessity, which shows the being-in-force of the law even though it is suspended. In a case of necessity, legal norms still remain in force, yet the norm is not

the law is suspended but still remains in force.65

applied to a concrete factual situation. In effect,

Equally, factual situations that are justified through necessity can gain

legal status, in that they do not constitute transgressions of the law. In this way, an act that
contradicts legal norms can gain legal force. However the decisive act to which
necessity applies elides all definition, in that it is neither fact nor law. If the act is considered legal and not factual, then why, asks
Agamben, does that act need to be approved ex post facto by a judicial or legislative decision? 66 Yet if the decisive act is
considered as factual rather than legal, then another problem arises, namely that the legal effects of the action begin not from the
moment that it is converted from law to fact at the moment of decision after the event, but from the very moment of its taking
place. The laws retroactive ratification of such necessary acts, delimiting them as lawful, can be seen as a fiction, concealing the
very status of the act of necessity. Far from being a matter of law or a matter of fact, the act of necessity is a zone of indistinction
that is subsumed into the law and considered legal in character, despite the fact that the actual necessary act defies all logical

Every interpretative act thus becomes an instance of

subsumption into either fact or law.

the exception, trying to contain within the law that act which is
neither law nor fact, and in doing so legitimizing the act of bare power that has occurred in
the necessary act. The law therefore becomes completely indistinct and is exercised solely through a concrete praxis in the exception, a zone of indistinction. Agamben concludes that the exception is the opening of a fictitious
lacuna in the juridical order. It is fictitious as the lacuna is not real and there is no gap in the law that the judge has to fill. Instead the lacuna is fictitious as it suspends the order that is in force, safeguarding the existence of the
norm and its applicability to the normal situation.67 Through suspending the norm the exception guarantees the norms pre-eminence for future cases; only by demarcating when the norm does not apply can it be possible to
constitute and give the norm its content. This leads to the exception having some curious characteristics. First, in the zone of indistinction all legal determinations are deactivated, 68 but this does not mean that there is no law in
the exception. The exception is full of legality, and, perhaps even more curiously, this means that potentially any action taken in the exception can gain legal force.69 Yet the exception is not part of the law, or the juridical order. To
pre-suppose this would be to reduce the exception to a function of law, and misses the key point about the actions that occur in the state of exception, namely their radical dis-location to the juridical order and the potential for any
act to gain legal status. The legal norm is suspended but still in force, but in thus suspending the norm the norms force-of-law is also separated from its application. By force-of-law Agamben refers to the constitutive essence of
the law, the element that literally gives laws, decrees and other measures their force.70 With the norm remaining in force but not being applied, acts that do not have the value of law can acquire the force-of-law that is separated
from the norms application. Such acts are characterized by Agamben as having the force-of-law (without law), the norm still being in force but not being applied. The force-of-law (without law) can be claimed by both the State and
non-State groups not just to justify their actions, but to give them the force-of-law, to make their actions legal.71 The exception is tied by Agamben directly to both the operation of the sovereign decision to create bare life and the
exercise of law. Drawing upon his analysis of the relationship of the norm to its application, Agamben argues that it is through the exception that the bare life that the political order requires to operate is created. Because bare life is

the creation
created through the exception, it is created through a zone of indistinction that is neither fact nor law. In this way, drawing upon Agambens analysis, it is possible to conclude that

of bare life in the exception can gain the force-of-law (without law). This
allows an action that may contradict legal norms to suspend
those norms and at the same time be declared as legal. In this way the law can remain in
force yet not be applied to bare life. Such an analysis calls into question the efficacy of all legal rights in protecting the individual
against the power controlled by the State. D. Agamben, Benjamin and the Exception To help support these arguments Agamben
draws upon the work of Walter Benjamin, and specifically his Critique of Violence, Zur Kritik der Gewalt in the original German.72
Gewalt signifies legitimized force or judicial power and also carries the meanings of authority, dominion, might and control.73 In
this text, Benjamin made explicit the connection between law and violence (Gewalt). For Benjamin, law and violence are intertwined
and cannot be separated. Violence is the foundation of law, although today the law seems not to recognize its violent past.
Benjamin argued that modern law has developed out of the violent revolutions and wars of the past and it preserves itself through
violence by stopping challenges to the law and legitimizing its own actions. Benjamin posited two forms of violence to illustrate the
connection the violence has to law: law-making violence, violence used against the existing laws and conditions with the effect of
constituting new laws, and law-preserving violence, which maintains the authority and laws of the current system. Despite the
differences between the two types of violence, Saul Newman argues that they both lead to a perpetuation of the law and power as
neither type of violence affects the laws position; law-making and law-preserving violence are used everyday by the law in order to
perpetuate itself.74 In other words, every legal act can be classified as using law-making violence or law-preserving violence.

the exception extends the legal violence Benjamin explored beyond its
Agamben argues that

own boundaries by making it possible for extra-legal actions to acquire

legal status, to gain force-of-law.75 The exception as a zone of indistinction

deactivates the law that is contained within it. In doing so it produces a
violence that has shed every relation to law,76 making it appropriable by anyone, potentially allowing any
action to acquire legal force through this legal violence that has shed its relation to law: It is as if the
suspension of law freed a force that both the ruling power and its adversaries, the constituted power as well as the constituent
power, seek to appropriate.77 The paradox Agamben identifies is that suspending law only increases its violent activity; the
exception produces law-making violence through the laws suspension. Building upon this paradox, which Agamben states is
representative of the force-of-law (without law), Agamben argues that the biopolitical law is caught within a dialectic akin to

Any legal attempt to subsume or contain the

Benjamins dialectic of violence.

exception within the law does not work because the exception
by its very definition is a zone of indistinction where legal
terms are deactivated, thus escaping the very law that sought to
contain it. Therefore the sovereign decision creating bare life will
always already be legal, allowing Agamben to predict that: The normative aspect of law can be obliterated and
contradicted with impunity by a governmental violence that whilst ignoring international law externally and producing a state of
exception internally nevertheless claims to be applying the law.78 E. Foucault, Post-Structuralism and Law In Foucaults Law, Ben
Golder and Peter Fitzpatrick reinterpret Foucaults writings on law and develop a Foucauldian approach to law that is markedly
similar to Agambens own direction. Their approach does not have the theoretical drawback of existing within a violent dialectic
where power subsumes political resistance within itself. This post-structuralist account of law does not get subsumed by relations of
power, although it is susceptible to domination by power.79 It is Golder and Fitzpatricks argument that Foucault did not do away
with either sovereignty or law in modernity but on the contrary, the two persisted in an integral relation.80 In fact, it is disciplinary

It is
power that is dependent upon the law, a law which acts as a constituent power in relation to the disciplines.81

through the law acting as a restraint to disciplinary power that the law
actually constitutes disciplinary power, rather than being subsumed under disciplinary
power as the expulsion thesis argues. By acting in a supervisory jurisdiction over the
abuses and excesses of the disciplines, law implicitly confirms the claim at the heart
of disciplinary power to adjudicate on questions of normality and
social cohesion.82 By the law confining its jurisdiction to the periphery of the disciplines the core of disciplinary
power is left reinforced, whilst at the same time the disciplines remain constituently reliant upon law to curb their abuses.83 In this

the law masks the disciplinary domination through offering

way,

the veil of legality; law and the disciplines exist within a relation where they are dependent on one another .

The alternative is to embrace whatever-being to create the

coming community a refusal to recognize categorical
identities in order to to reject the ability of the sovereign to
isolate bare life. Only the dissolution of identity politics can
solve for the 1AC and the state of exception.
Robinson 11 [Andrew, is a political theorist and activist at Ceasefire, Ceasefire, In Theory Giorgio
Agamben: destroying sovereignty, 1/21/11, https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-giorgio-agamben-
destroying-sovereignty/] Hebron ADN
Agamben proposes whatever-singularity as an alternative basis for political action, which escapes the logic of sovereignty. Taken
from Deleuze and Guattaris thought, a singularity is something which is unique and which cant be reduced to a measurement or
representation. Agamben likes it because it avoids his having to choose between universality and particularity.

Whatever in English has unfortunate overtones of indifference (whatever, talk to the hand) which is not at all what
Agamben means. Rather, he is referring to something mattering whatever it is, always

mattering regardless of what it is as opposed to the

sovereign decision to divide life into things which matter and
things which dont. A whatever-singularity is neither reducible to its attributes nor
expressible as an abstract generality such as universal humanity; rather, it is something which has general value as it is, with all of

does not depend on any standard of

its attributes (and especially, as potentiality or possibility). It

conformity or subjectification or normality, or on belonging to the people or masses.

It also denies that there is any particular essence which makes
people human instead, being human is a scattering of singularities. Whatever-singularity is also a kind of being
which people are assumed to already have, which for instance motivates resistance to being normalised. In a sense, this is a
radicalised version of human rights discourse, since anyone, whatever they are and whatever they do, is recognised as having a
kind of autonomous ethical value. This is fundamentally an ethics of letting be (with overtones of being who you are). It entails
doing away with normativity as usually defined, with standards of good and evil which declare certain people to be valueless
because of some particularly heinous deviant act theyve committed (in contrast to the more common approach of either
contracting normativity to cover a smaller range of acts, or altering it to focus on oppressive abuses). For instance, Agamben

argues that ideas such as guilt and responsibility are derived from legal thought and hence from sovereignty. The ethical
challenge Agamben poses is to still view every person and, in line with the discussion in
The Open, every animal as fundamentally valuable in their own life , as having forms
of life and particularity worthy of respect and autonomous existence, regardless of how bad they are or what crimes they commit.

Agamben aims to take away, through choices in terms of language, ethics and philosophy,
In effect,

the threat posed by others ethical judgements in constituting a person

or being as vulnerable . This does not remove human vulnerability per se, but does remove the particular risk
of being made into homo sacer. It does, however, leave a particular ethical problem: are agents of sovereignty also to be treated as
whatever-singularities, or as the negation of all such singularities? The coming community corresponds on a collective level to
whatever-singularity. It is related to the people to come, a concept Deleuze and Guattari borrow from Bergson, and to messianic
ideas of a coming liberation. Agamben refers to the coming community as a form of social togetherness which is also a non-state

The coming community is defined in Agamben as a kind

and is counterposed to the logic of sovereignty.

of post-consumerist condition, emerging from a passage through current forms of

life, such as the indifference of mass media images and of commodities through

which one can reshape ones identity. It passes through and beyond such forms of life by
 challenge[s]
radicalising their tonormativity and sovereignty . It is not a hybrid space
hybridity is already actualised in homo sacer and the sovereign but rather, a negation, the un-man. It is based on whatever-
singularities in their antagonism with the state and sovereignty (hence it cannot seek to seize state power). Agamben believes that
whatever-singularities can form communities without affirming representable conditions of belonging (such as laws, norms, etc).

It also does not rest on categories of identity (even the identity of

excluded or marginalised groups), which for Agamben, remain trapped

within old forms of politics which reproduce sovereignty (mainly

because the recognition of an identity is necessarily separate from the processes of life which constitute it). In conditions of

life has to separate itself from the orders of subjects and

sovereignty,

objects, to free itself from biopower and from hierarchical relations with
living things, to become whatever-singularity and to attain radical immanence. In Potentialities, Agamben argues for
an almost Buddhist stance of contemplative separation which preserves instead of deciding. Agambens stance also has a
revolutionary aspect. Rather than starting from identity, Agambens ethical theory starts from the standpoint of bare life. In
Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben argues that the ethical standpoint from which one should start is provided by the experience of
concentration camp inmates. More precisely, it should start from the standpoint of the most abject sub-group of inmates, the so-
called Musselmanner who were near death and had lost the will to live, who hence embodied directly the idea of bare life. This is
because of a particular moment of inversion. The moment of catastrophe is taken also to contain the moment where salvation
becomes possible, with passage through the low point of the current expansion of sovereignty acting as a transition to liberation.
This is a rather strange argument, but based on a viable observation: that only when the logic of sovereignty is fully unfolded (only
when we are faced with a giant tree instead of a sapling) does the nature of the problem or the nature of what needs to be got rid
of become clear. This also means that, in Agambens view, liberation is ambiguously tied to sovereignty, as its negation. In a
sense, therefore, Agamben remains within a Marxist model of historical becoming. Richard Day has expanded Agambens argument,
claiming that social networks of marginalised groups are already coming communities, and also that the term should always be
kept plural. He views the Marxist element in Agambens thought as unhelpful, arguing that post-consumers are not the most likely
source of the coming communities. Another aspect of the coming community is that, on one level, it is a very small shift. Inspired
by Jewish theology and authors such as Walter Benjamin, Agamben draws on messianic ideas of a total transformation of the
existing world into a different world through a small gesture, the addition of an aura, or a new way of seeing. In a sense, everything
stays as it is, and yet is rendered different by the removal of the transcendent moment of sovereignty.
 T

A. Interpretation: Substantial indicates that the aff has to

reduce surveillance by at least 13%.

Substantial Curtailment is at LEAST 13 percent

Utter 77 (Utter http://courts.mrsc.org/mc/courts/zsupreme/088wn2d/088wn2d0909.htm, This is from a
formal court decision between Shell Oil and the appellant Norward Brooks, Decisions were made by Wright, C.J.,
and Rosellini, Hamilton, Stafford, Brachtenbach, Horowitz, Dolliver, and Hicks, JJ.)
The act specifies the particular circumstances in which one who leaves employment due to a labor dispute may qualify for
compensation, despite the voluntary character of such a termination. "An individual shall be disqualified for benefits for any week
with respect to which the commissioner finds that his unemployment is due to a stoppage of work which exists because of a labor
dispute at the factory, establishment, or other premises at which he is or was last employed . . ." RCW 50.20.090. The parties
concede each claimant was unemployed because of the labor dispute. The next issue presented then is whether there was a
"stoppage of work" which raises the ancillary issues of how that term is to be defined and whether the record supports the findings
of the commissioner. The term "stoppage of work" refers to the operation of the employer's plant or business rather than the
activity of individual employees. LAWRENCE BAKING CO. v. UNEMPLOYMENT COMPENSATION COMM'N, 308 Mich. 198, 13 N.W.2d
260, 154 A.L.R. 660 (1944), CERT. DENIED, 323 U.S. 738, 89 L. Ed. 591, 65 S. Ct. 43 (1944). SEE CONSTRUCTION OF PHRASE
"STOPPAGE OF WORK" IN STATUTORY PROVISION DENYING UNEMPLOYMENT COMPENSATION BENEFITS DURING STOPPAGE
RESULTING FROM LABOR DISPUTE, Annot., 61 A.L.R.3d 693 (1975); Shadur, UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS AND THE "LABOR
DISPUTE" DISQUALIFICATION, 17 U. Chi. L. Rev. 294 (1950). Cases from other jurisdictions interpreting statutes similar to RCW

a substantial
50.20.090 are in general agreement that the term "stoppage of work" is most often defined in terms of

curtailment of the employer's overall operations at the

particular situs in question. MOUNTAIN STATES TEL. & TEL. CO. v. SAKRISON, 71 Ariz. 219, 225 P.2d
707 (1950); INTER-ISLAND RESORTS, LTD. v. AKAHANE, 46 Hawaii 140, 377 P.2d 715 (1962); GENERAL ELEC. CO. v. DIRECTOR
OF EMPLOYMENT SECURITY, 349 Mass. 358, 208 N.E.2d 234 (1965); TRAVIS v. GRABIEC, 52 Ill. 2d 175, 287 N.E.2d 468 (1972).

Whether there is a substantial

SEE Annot., SUPRA, 61 A.L.R.3d 693, 5, at 705.

curtailment is resolved by application of a number of

established criteria to the facts of the particular case. There are
a few fixed boundaries for the meaning of the term
"substantial" in this context. The attempts by other courts to
devise a formula based upon a percentage of reduction in
normal production or operations by which a line delineating
substantial from nonsubstantial could be established have
varied from 50 percent of normal production in early decisions
to as low as a 20 percent decline in business activity in
subsequent decisions. More recently, the difficulty of applying a fixed percentage concept to define
"substantial" has resulted in courts assessing a number of factors. The specific criteria accented by the commissioner in this case
were whether there was a diminution in production and whether there was a substantial curtailment of other normal nonproduction
"operations." The parties concede and the court found there was no curtailment of production. The parties then focused on whether
there was a substantial curtailment of other, nonproduction related, operations. Appellant placed its primary emphasis upon
disruptions resulting from the necessity to reassign nonproduction personnel. Of the nonproduction staff, a total of 64 employees
out of the total employment complement of 381 employees, were reassigned. Because these individuals were not replaced, there

Appellant argues
was at least a 16 percent reduction in the overall personnel within the employer's operations.

a 16 percent reduction in overall personnel constitutes a

substantial curtailment of normal employer operations.
Jurisdictions outside the state of Washington considering the
same question have varied in their conclusions, ranging from a
low of perhaps 13 percent to a high of over 50 percent in
personnel reduction as being indicative of "substantial
curtailment" of employer operations. COMPARE MOUNTAIN STATES TEL. & TEL. CO. v.
SAKRISON, SUPRA, AND GENERAL ELEC. CO. v. DIRECTOR OF EMPLOYMENT SECURITY, SUPRA. Appellant asserts first the
commissioner's decision was fundamentally wrong as a matter of law in that he failed to consider the nature of the work that was
not being performed in relation to the total operation of the refinery, and that he should have considered factors other than simply
the reduction in overall personnel. We do not read the record as limiting the commissioner's determination solely to that factor. In
this context, in his decision the commissioner discussed at length another case involving a strike at a refinery which is in many
respects factually similar to this situation. TRAVIS v. GRABIEC, SUPRA. He emphasized the strike in TRAVIS had caused a severe
curtailment in overall operations, including the destroying of work in the treatment and research department and the suspension of
construction and maintenance work, as well as truck and barge transportation. He recognized that these factors had led the court in
that case to find significant evidence of a stoppage of work despite the fact that for a period of time full production of barrels of oil
per day was carried on by a skeleton force working abnormal hours and performing abnormal functions. Later in his opinion the
commissioner made it clear that he believed the impact on normal operations caused by the reduction in personnel was not as
severe as that in the TRAVIS case.

B. Violation: The aff has not substantially curtailed domestic

surveillance

C. Reasons to prefer

1. Limits- The topic is already massive and has a huge aff side
bias. A strict definition of substantial is key to creating debates
with clash and negative ground.
2. Topic Research and education- they shift the focus of the
topic from discussions about large forms of surveillance to
finding the smallest aff.

Competing interpretations, reasonability makes judge

intervention inevitable.
 Case
Their analysis of exclusion fails to take into account
unobserved disabilities, possessed by multiple people in the
debate space
Zelinger 7/15 (Julie Zeilinger: a freelance author from the Barnard College class of 2015. Mic.com: 6
Things You Must Know About The Disabilities We Can't See published July 15 th, 2015. Accessed July 24th, 2015.
http://mic.com/articles/122187/5-things-you-must-know-about-the-disabilities-we-can-t-see)TheFedora
Some disabilities aren't exactly visible. They don't require a wheelchair, a hearing
aid or any other piece of equipment that helps us know to give up our seats on the subway or not shake our heads
when we see a seemingly able-bodied person park their car in a handicap parking spot. In fact, about 20% of
millions of those individuals
people in the U.S. live with a disability, according to the 2010 U.S. census, but
live with what's commonly referred to as "invisible" or "non-
appearing" disabilities like depression, epilepsy, chronic pain
disorder or learning disabilities. These disabilities may vary in
terms of severity or symptoms, but the people who live with
them have one thing in common: They often encounter others
who don't know these disabilities exist at all, and even more
resistance to understand what it's like to live with these issues.

Studies of ableism rely on ableist assumptions

Imrie 96 (Rob Imrie has experience as a professor of Geography at Kings College and at London: Royal
Holloway University of London. The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers): Ableist
geographies, disablist spaces: towards a reconstruction of Golledge's 'Geography and the disabled' article revised
in February 1995. Accessed July 25th, 2015. http://www.jstor.org/stable/622489?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents)
TheFedora
Geographers have only recently started to research and write about the experiences of people with disabilities, yet
there is some evidence that they are replicating some of the more problematical aspects of what we might term an
'ableist sociology'. Its main features are the utilization of conceptions of disability which are reducible to the
functionalimitations of people with disabilities, the assertion of the normality (and naturalness) of able-bodiedness,
the notion that disability is abnormal, even a product of deviant behaviour, and the assumption that the goal of
Any notion of
society is to return disabled people back to a normal state (whatever that is).
celebrating, even recognizing, the vitality of difference seems
beyond the emergent ableist geographies. This paper provides
a critique of such geographies by considering the shortcomings of one of the more recent
contributions in the genre, that by Golledge (1993). Introduction In recent times,
geographers have made significant contributions to our
understanding of both race and gender in the social
construction of environments, yet have had little to say about
the geography of people with disabilities (Laws 1994; McDowell 1992). While
this reflects, in part, the relative absence of people with
disabilities in academia, it also relates to their relative
powerlessness in society more generally and to wider social
discourses, and practices, which tend to portray disabled
people as inferior, dependent and, by implication, of little or no
value. Such conceptions are, as Oliver (1990) notes, still dominant and the term 'disablism' has been coined to
describe socio-political processes which marginalize and oppress disabled people (Imrie and Wells 1993; Oliver
1990). As Oliver (1990) has commented, people with disabilities are people too,
yet sociological theory, from where the dominant theorizations of disability stem, is, as Abberley
(1987) notes, theoretically backward and a hindrance rather than a help. The dominant strands of
theory individualize the nature and experiences of disability ,
suggesting that it is akin to a medical condition that requires treatment and/or a cure. In this way, any
negative experiences which disabled people encounter in, for
instance, moving around their environments or failing to obtain
employment, is conceptualized as linked to individual
impairment rather than resulting from forms of social and
political discrimination While such conceptions are subject to a
growing critique, particularly by people with disabilities
themselves, geographers have only started to research and write about the
experiences of disabled people, yet there is evidence that they too are
replicating some of the more problematical aspects of what we
might term an 'ableist' sociology (see Andrews 1983; Golledge 1991, 1993). Its main
features are the utilization of conceptions of disability which
are reducible to the functional limitations of people with
disabilities, the assertion of the normality (and naturalness) of able-
bodiedness, the notion that disability is abnormal , even a product of
deviant behaviour, and the assumption that the goal of society is to
return disabled people back to a normal state (whatever that is). Any
sense of celebrating, even recognizing, the vitality of difference
seems beyond the emergent ableist geography. In turn, the
methodological individualism, underpinning ableist conceptions
of geography and the disabled, is generating studies devoid of
structural socio-political content or of little understanding of
how societal values, attitudes and structures may be
conditioning the experiences of people with disabilities
Ableism critique bad for a laundry list of reasons
Cogburn 14 (Jon Cogburn: Professor in the Philosophy department at Louisiana State University, Baton
Rouge, LA. Jon Cogburns Blog: What I should have said about anti-anti-ableism published September 7 th 2014.
Accessed July 27th, 2015. http://drjon.typepad.com/jon_cogburns_blog/2014/09/what-i-should-have-said.html)
TheFedora
many charges of ableism in the blogosphere to be problematic for a
I find
variety of reasons: The way that the problem of ableism is
focused on in blogospheric exchanges often undermines the suffering and
heroic struggles of many disabled people. Much of the struggle
is against reality itself, not the social configuration theroff . It may
very well be bad to call an idea "insane," but to reduce the badness of doing so to the wrongness of negative
perceptions of insanity strikes me as cruel to the insane.* It's a real drag to be mentally ill. I don't find
the focus on anti-ableism to be psychologically healthy with
respect to dealing with my own limited disabilities.With many of them
there's just no possible world where the world could
accomodate me. I have to accommodate myself to the world. Consider dementia, a disability perhaps
most of us will face at some point. Yes we desperately need social institutions that lighten misery of the demented,
but it will still suck to be demented and to have demented family members no matter what anyone does. In
such cases wisdom lies in accommodating yourself to the
world, not bemoaning the way society doesn't accomodate you.
This is a really difficult struggle, but it's reality. We don't need the
protection of Shelley Tremaine (God bless her for all of the important work that she does) when she berates people
the self-congratulatory nature
for ableist speech. I find this protection infantilizing. I find
of liberal speech policing to be off putting. With the important exceptions of the
R word campaign and various anti-bullying efforts relating to GLBT issues, I don't think that
censorious academic bloggers make very much of a real
political difference. The pretense that we do probably prevents
many of us from putting in the real work to make a difference.
While political correctness is an important and necessary solution to
the kind of bullying shown in the first two seasons of Mad Men, I agree with Freddie DeBoer that policing
of speech in social media has been really destructive. When we take
such delight in denouncing people who we don't agree with in
terms of moral censure, we end up just preaching to the
converted. I have tried to indicate that I realize there are moral dangers attendant to each point. Most
importantly every human life has immeasurable value and I don't
mean to imply anything otherwise when I mention that reality
presents problems for most disabled people in ways that go
above and beyond our contemporary organization of society . I
also realize that for most adult disabled people, it becomes a part of
your identity and if things are going well something that you
would not cast away, for that would be casting yourself away.

Ableist language inevitable

Kesler 11 (Jennifer Kesler is a freelance online writer and proclaimed feminist blogger. She is the creative
lead at Lojo Group, a branding, marketing and advertising agency based in Sacramento, California. What Privilege:
Replacing crazy for ableism and preciseness of language. Published February 10 th, 2011. Accessed July 25th,
2015. http://whatprivilege.com/replacing-crazy-for-ableism-and-preciseness-of-language/) TheFedora
There are some other words which may or may not be ableist, depending who you talk
to. Perhaps this is the right time to say that I have had depression and anxiety issues since childhood and
personally dont find crazy ableist except when its being used to describe a person whos not conforming to your
expectations. Different people have different sensitivities. To be safe, dumping
all of the following words from your publication vocabulary would be wise. But they are not
indisputably ableist there is debate. Lunatic/lunacy. Refers to
the belief that the moon could make people deranged, which
we now know is just silly. But its still a mental health label,
and calling someone a lunatic is a little like calling one of those armchair
diagnoses we discussed above. I think lunacy, however, is acceptable, as in This law the politician has
proposed is sheer lunacy. That suggests a very real phenomenon, in which humans get swept up in a mob mentality and develop
horrifically bad judgment. But thats the only context I use it in. [See comments for arguments that lunacy is ableist.] Nuts.

Purely a euphemism for crazy, so most people who find crazy

ableist will also object to it. But, again with the varying sensitivities.