AT: Baudrillard

1) Alt bites itself: They say that there is no meaning and that you should affirm the
aff as a joyous gesture. They’re going to say that oversaturating the rez with
meaning via an aff ballot is desirable. That’s nonsense – the very act of giving
you something to vote for by appealing to a desirable outcome means that
there is some sort of stable meaning for you to pull the trigger on.
2) Merely affirming the aff as a joyous gesture and endorsing the aff is cynical,
nihilistic, and dooms society to having no future.
Rojek 93 (Chris, Deputy Director, Theory, Culture & Society Centre , Professor of Sociology and Culture
at Nottingham Trent University, Forget Baudrillard? Edited by Chris Rojek, pgs 109)

His lacerating nihilism, his readiness to prick any cause, his devotion to experience for experience s sake,
are all recurring tropes of at least one type of modernism. To be sure, modernism is a multi-faceted
concept. Rather than speak of the project of modernism it is perhaps more accurate to speak o projects
of modernism. These projects work around a central dichotomy: reflecting the order of things and
exposing the fundamental disorder of things. In the political realm the keynote projects designed to
reflect the order of things have been (a) providing a theory of liberal democracy which legitimates the
operation of the market; (b) the socialist critiques of capitalism and the plan for the reconstruction of
society; and (c) the feminist transformation of the male order of things. These are all constructive
projects. They either aim to give shape to people's lives or they seek to replace the easing set of politico-
economic conditions with a state of affairs that is judged to be superior on rational or moral grounds.
Baudrillard it might be said, traces the dispersal of these projects He relishes being the imp of the
perverse, the ruthless exponent of the disorder of things His work exposes the posturing and
circularities of constructive arguments. But in doing this Baudrillard is not acting as the harbinger of a
new postmodern state of affairs. Rather he is treading the well worn paths of one type of modernist
skepticism and excess – a path which has no other destiny than repletion. His message of ‘no future’
does not transcend the political dilemma of modernism, it exemplifies it.
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3) Baudrillard’s postmodern theory forecloses the chance of real political change

in the name of self-serving academic theorizing. This means that they willfully
ignore real world impacts and leave us unaccountable for the lives of others.
Their insistence that the will to create change is bad is the type of false ivory
tower theorizing that aims only to protect the self.
Catharine A. Mackinnon, Visiting Professor of Law @ U of Chicago, 2000 (“Points Against
Postmodernism” – Chicago-Kent Law Review, Vol. 75:687)

This analysis in turn raises a question feminism has not had to answer before, as critically as we do now,
because we never had a theory class before: what is the place of the academy in the movement?
Postmodernism, empty as much of it is, is taking up a lot of feminist theoretical energy in this one world
that we all go to sleep in and wake up in. Postmodernism is an academic theory, originating in academia
with an academic elite, not in the world of women and men, where feminist theory is rooted. In the
early 1970s, I (for one) had imagined that feminists doing theory would retheorize life in the concrete
rather than spend the next three decades on metatheory, talking about theory, rehashing over and over
in this disconnected way how theory should be done, leaving women’s lives twisting in the wind. Too,
theorizing about little except other theories of theories provides little experience on how to do it.
My feeling is, if the postmodernists took responsibility for changing even one real thing, they would
learn more about theory than everything they have written to date put together. Instead, as practiced
by postmodernists, the job of theory, as the blood sport of the academic cutting edge, is to observe and
pass on and play with these big questions, out of touch with and unaccountable to the lives of the
unequal. Their critically-minded students are taught that nothing is real, that disengagement is smart
(not to mention careerpromoting), that politics is pantomime and ventriloquism, that reality is a text
(reading is safer than acting any day), that creative misreading is resistance (you feel so radical and
comfortably marginal), that nothing can be changed (you can only amuse yourself). With power left
standing, the feminism of this theory cannot be proven by any living woman. It is time to ask these
people: what are you doing?
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4) They are situated in a privileged subject position where they can claim that
reality doesn’t exist and impacts don’t matter. This is an abuse of power
dynamics that relegates the powerless to both non-participation in their plan
and death. Their denial of social reality makes them complicit with mass
genocide and the worst atrocities in human history.

MacKinnon 2000 (Catharine, Symposium On Unfinished Feminist Business: Points Against

Postmodernism, Chicago-Kent Law Review, Prof of Law at Univ of Mich and Prof of Law at Univ of
Chicago)

It is the denial of their social reality that is complicated and raises difficult philosophical questions.
Understand that the denial of the reality of such events has been a philosophical position about reality
itself. Unless and until effectively challenged, only what power wants to see as real is granted reality
status. Reality is a social status. Power's reality does not have to establish itself as real in order to exist,
because it has the status as real that power gives it; only the reality of the powerless has to establish
itself as real. Power can also establish unreality--like the harmlessness of pornography or smoking--as
reality. That doesn't make it harmless. But until power is effectively challenged on these lies, and they
are lies, only those harmed (and those harming them, who have every incentive to conceal) have access
to knowing that that is what they are. So it has taken us all this time, and a movement that has
challenged male power, to figure out that women's reality is also a philosophical position: that women's
reality exists, including women's denied violation, therefore social reality exists separate from its
constitution by male power or its validation by male knowledge. This analysis raises some questions
about postmodernism that are not simply a report on my current mental state. They are: Can
postmodernism stop the rape of children when everyone has their story, and everyone is presumably
exercising sexual agency all the time? Can postmodernism identify fascism if power only exists in
microcenters and never in systematic, fixed, and determinate hierarchical arrangements? How can you
oppose something that is always only in play? How do you organize against something that isn't even
really there except when you are thinking about it? Can postmodernism hold the perpetrators of
genocide accountable? If the subject is dead, and we are dealing with deeds without doers, how do we
hold perpetrators accountable for what they perpetrate? Can the Serbian cultural defense for the
extermination of Croats, Bosnian Muslims, and Kosovar Albanians be far behind? If we can have a
multicultural defense for the current genocide, because that's how the Serbs see it, why not a German
cultural defense for the earlier one? Anti-Semitism was part of German culture. Finally, for another old
question, if you only exist in opposition, if you are only full in opposition to the modern, it has
determined you. Don't you need an account of how you are not merely reiterating your determinations?
From postmodernists, one is not yet forthcoming. The postmodernist reality corrosion, thus, not only
makes it incoherent and useless--the pragmatists' valid criticism --but also regressive, disempowering,
and collaborationist.
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5) Baudrillard’s plan abdicates social responsibility and leaves the masses to
collapse.
Best and Kellner 02 (Steven, Doug, Postmodern Politics and the Battle for the Future
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/Illumina%20Folder/kell28.htm)

A postmodern politics begins to take shape during the 1960s, when numerous new political groups and
struggles emerged. The development of a new postmodern politics is strongly informed by the
vicissitudes of social movements in France, the United States, and elsewhere, as well as by emerging
postmodern theories. The utopian visions of modern politics proved, in this context, difficult to sustain
and were either rejected in favor of cynicism, nihilism, and, in some cases, a turn to the right, or were
dramatically recast and scaled down to more "modest" proportions. The modern emphasis on collective
struggle, solidarity, and alliance politics gave way to extreme fragmentation, as the "movement" of the
1960s splintered into various competing struggles for rights and liberties. The previous emphasis on
transforming the public sphere and institutions of domination gave way to new emphases on culture,
personal identity, and everyday life, as macropolitics were replaced by the micropolitics of local
transformation and subjectivity. In the aftermath of the 1960s, novel and conflicting conceptions of
postmodern politics emerged. Postmodern politics thus take a variety of forms and would include the
anti-politics of Baudrillard and his followers, who exhibit a cynical, despairing rejection of the belief in
emancipatory social transformation, as well as a variety of efforts to create a new or reconstructed
politics. On the extreme and apolitical position of a Baudrillard, we are stranded at the end of history,
paralyzed and frozen, as the masses collapse into inertia and indifference, and simulacra and technology
triumph over agency. Thus, from Baudrillard's perspective, all we can do is "accommodate ourselves to
the time left to us."
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6) Voting aff locks you into a cycle of never-ending criticism of which there is no
escape. Also, Baudrillard’s postmodern theories link back into their own logic
regarding the absence or presence of meaning. This means that there’s no
compelling reason to vote aff since the impacts will happen anyway.

Jarvis, 2000 (Darryl, Studies in International Relations, “International Relations and the Challenge of
Postmodernism”, pg. 57)

One of the central theoretical matrices of the postmodernist project, then, is a repudiation of organonist
thought systems: an attempt to deconstruct inscribed means of reasoning and logic indicative of
Western philosophy. This, undoubtedly, is what makes postmodernists so conspicuous and their project
both tenacious and tenuous. For while postmodernists are patendy antimodernist, their very rationality
and purpose is prescribed by the logic of modernity, whether as an alternative to it or a reaction against
it. Thus, the antilogic on which postmodern theory is founded can itself be seen as the binary opposite
logic of modernity, entrapping postmodernists within modernist logic if only because of their own
antilogo-centrism. This makes postmodern theory vulnerable not only to criticism that it is unable to
escape the very logic it chastises, but also because those criticisms it levels against modernist discourse
invariably repudiate postmodern theory too. As Kate Manzo observes, "Even the most radically critical
discourse easily slips into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to
contest, for it can never step completely outside of a heritage from which it must borrow its tools—its
history, its language—in an attempt to destroy that heritage itself."
 AT: Baudrillard

The aff’s failure to engage the political process turns us all into spectators who are
powerless to produce real change.

Rorty 98 – professor emeritus of comparative literature and philosophy, by courtesy, at Stanford

University (Richard, “ACHIEVING OUR COUNTRY: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America”, 1998,
Pg. 7-9)

Such people find pride in American citizenship impossible, and vigorous participation in electoral politics
pointless. They associate American patriotism with an endorsement of atrocities: the importation of
African slaves, the slaughter of Native Americans, the rape of ancient forests, and the Vietnam War.
Many of them think of national pride as appropriate only for chauvinists: for the sort of American who
rejoices that America can still orchestrate something like the Gulf War, can still bring deadly force to
bear whenever and wherever it chooses. When young intellectuals watch John Wayne war movies after
reading Heidegger, Foucault, Stephenson, or Silko, they often become convinced that they live in a
violent, inhuman, corrupt country. They begin to think of themselves as a saving remnant-as the happy
few who have the insight to see through nationalist rhetoric to the ghastly reality of contemporary
America. But this insight does not move them to formulate a legislative program, to join a political
movement, or to share in a national hope. The contrast between national hope and national self¬-
mockery and self-disgust becomes vivid when one compares novels like Snow Crash and Almanac of the
Dead with socialist novels of the first half of the century-books like The Jungle, An American Tragedy,
and The Grapes of Wrath. The latter were written in the belief that the tone of the Gettysburg Address
was absolutely right, but that our country would have to transform itself in order to fulfill Lincoln's
hopes. Transformation would be needed because the rise of industrial capitalism had made the
individualist rhetoric of America's first century obsolete. The authors of these novels thought that this
rhetoric should be replaced by one in which America is destined to become the first cooperative
commonwealth, the first classless society. This America would be one in which income and wealth are
equitably distributed, and in which the government ensures equality of opportunity as well as individual
liberty. This new, quasi-communitarian rhetoric was at the heart of the Progressive Movement and the
New Deal. It set the tone for the American Left during the first six decades of the twentieth century.
Walt Whitman and John Dewey, as we shall see, did a great deal to shape this rhetoric. The difference
between early twentieth-century leftist intellectuals and the majority of their contemporary
counterparts is the difference between agents and spectators. In the early decades of this century, when
an intellectual stepped back from his or her country's history and looked at it through skeptical eyes, the
chances were that he or she was about to propose a new political initiative. Henry Adams was, of
course, the great exception-the great abstainer from •politics. But William James thought that Adams'
diagnosis of the First Gilded Age as a symptom of irreversible moral and political decline was merely
perverse. James's pragmatist theory of truth was in part a reaction against the sort of detached
spectators hip which Adams affected. For James, disgust with American hypocrisy and self-deception
was pointless unless accompanied by an effort to give America reason to be proud of itself in the future.
The kind of proto- Heideggerian cultural pessimism which Adams cultivated seemed, to James, decadent
and cowardly. "Democracy," James wrote, "is a kind of religion, and we are bound not to admit its
failure. Faiths and utopias are the no¬blest exercise of human reason, and no one with a spark of reason
in him will sit down fatalistically before the croaker's picture. "