Psycho K Surveillance1NC1NC ShellThe affs piecemeal curtailment induces a palliative enjoyment which sustains the state legal reform cant change the underlying structure of enjoyment so we should instead engage in overconformity to reveal the obscene underside of the surveillance fantasyKrips 10 (Henry, Professor of Cultural Studies and Andrew W. Mellon all Claremont Chair of Humanities at Claremont Graduate University; The Politics of the Gaze: Foucault, Lacan and iek, Culture Unbound, Volume 2, 2010)It is clear that the film theoretic account of Foucault that Copjec uses, misrepresents Foucaults concept of the panoptic gaze, and that this misrepresentation, in turn, is responsible for her insistence upon a gap between the Foucauldian and Lacanian concepts of the gaze. By correctly representing Foucault, I have closed this gap. A fortiori I have changed the exclusively conservative political valence that, in virtue of its function as a disciplinary tool that supports the status quo, has come to be associated with the panopticon. In particular, I allow that, like the Lacanian gaze, and depending on context, the Foucauldian gaze may have either disruptive, Dionysian effects or conservative, Apollonian effects.5 Foucaults practices of freedom are one way of thinking the possibility of disruptive effects. Rather than pursuing this line of thought at an abstract level, however, I turn finally to Slavoj ieks work, in particular his concept of overconformity, in order to show that, by reconceiving the panoptic gaze along the lines that I have suggested, new political possibilities arise for opposing modern regimes of surveillance. Central to ieks account of the modern state is the concept of an obscene underside of the law , namely widespread practices petty tax evasion, speeding, walking on the grass, etc which, although strictly speaking illicit, are unofficially tolerated. This network of practices is sustained thanks to what iek calls an ideological phantasy that keeps them an open secret everyone knows about and participates in them in private, but no one mentions them, let alone publicly flaunts participating in them. Such practices constitute points of failure of the law in so far as they fall in an indeterminate zone in relation to legal categories: on the one hand, in so far as they are tolerated they are not straightforwardly illegal, but, on the other hand, neither are they legal; and as such, constitute a fundamental illegality at the heart of the legal system. ieks point is that, rather than undermining the law, the obscene underside of the law sustains it the law is tol-erated because of the little secret pleasures that people derive from its obscene underside. In Lacanian terms, we may say that the obscene underside of the law is the set of necessary but repressed points of failure of the legal system in short, it is the symptom of the legal system. In particular, in the context of a legal state apparatus that is held in place by a panoptic system of surveillance, the obscene underside of the law is a liminal zone of high anxiety that, like the Emperors body under his new clothes, is obscenely visible to each of his subjects in the privacy of their own visual field, yet must be shrouded in a cloak of invisibility in the public realm. This is the site of the gaze. How are we to oppose such a system, which seemingly coexists with, indeed depends upon its own systematic transgression? According to iek, not by acts of resistance, since the system is readily able to accommodate, indeed depends upon such acts.6 Instead, iek suggests opposition through acts of overconformity, which, rather than protesting let alone breaking the law, insist upon it to the letter, even when ideological common sense suggests otherwise. In particular, this means a refusal to turn a blind eye from manifestations of laws obscene underside. As iek puts it: Sometimes, at least the truly subversive thing is not to disregard the explicit letter of Law on behalf of the underlying fantasies, but to stick to this letter against the fantasy which sustains it.Is not an exemplary case of such subversion-through-identification provided by Jaroslav Hseks The Good Soldier Schweik, the novel whose hero wreaks total havoc by simply executing the orders of his superiors in an overzealous and all-too-literal way (iek 1997: 30, 22, 31). What constitutes such strategies of overconformity in the context of a modern panoptic regime of surveillance? Answer: openly/publicly sticking to the letter of the law by refusing the cloak of invisibility that shrouds the laws points of failure; in other words, by refusing to indulge what iek calls the ideological fantasy , orchestrating a direct encounter with the objet a qua gaze. To put it in ieks terms, it is a matter of actively endorsing the passive confrontation with the objet a, bypassing the intermediate role of the screen of fantasy (iek 1997: 31). To be specific, it is matter of not merely saying but also acting out publicly what everyone knows in private but dares not say: not merely announcing in public that the Emperor is naked, but arresting him for indecent exposure. By Lacanianizing Foucault, as I have done here, we are able to understand the logic behind such heterodox strategies for opposing modern regimes of surveillance.The affs political project is impossiblethe plan stands in for a future world without surveillance, but there is always some obstacle to our political visions which will met with violence and ultimately risks extinctionexamining the structure of desire and enjoyment rather than projecting better political worlds is the only means of channeling the death drive away from catastropheMcGowan 2013 --- Associate Professor at the University of Vermont (Todd, Enjoying What We Dont Have, Project Muse)//trepkaThere is no path leading from the death drive to utopia. The death drive undermines every attempt to construct a utopia; it is the enemy of the good society. It is thus not surprising that political thought from Plato onward has largely ignored this psychic force of repetition and negation. But this does not mean that psychoanalytic thought concerning the death drive has only a negative value for political theorizing. It is possible to conceive of a positive politics of the death drive. The previous chapters have attempted to lay out the political implications of the death drive, and, on this basis, we can sketch what a society founded on a recognition of the death drive might look like. Such a recognition would not involve a radical transformation of society: in one sense, it would leave everything as it is. In contemporary social arrangements, the death drive subverts progress with repetition and leads to the widespread sacrifice of self-interest for the enjoyment of the sacrifice itself. This structure is impervious to change and to all attempts at amelioration. But in another sense, the recognition of the death drive would change everything. Recognizing the centrality of the death drive would not eliminate the proclivity to sacrifice for the sake of enjoyment, but it would change our relationship to this sacrifice. Rather than being done for the sake of an ultimate enjoyment to be achieved in the future, it would be done for its own sake. The fundamental problem with the effort to escape the death drive and pursue the good is that it leaves us unable to locate where our enjoyment lies. By positing a future where we will attain the ultimate enjoyment (either through the purchase of the perfect commodity or through a transcendent romantic union or through the attainment of some heavenly paradise), we replace the partial enjoyment of the death drive with the image of a complete enjoyment to come. There is no question of fully enjoying our submission to the death drive. We will always remain alienated from our mode of enjoying. As Adrian Johnston rightly points out, Transgressively overcoming the impediments of the drives doesnt enable one to simply enjoy enjoyment.1 But we can transform our relationship to the impediments that block the full realization of our drive. We can see the impediments as the internal product of the death drive rather than as an external limit. The enjoyment that the death drive provides, in contrast to the form of enjoyment proffered by capitalism, religion, and utopian politics, is at once infinite and limited. This oxymoronic form of enjoyment operates in the way that the concept does in Hegels Logic. The concept attains its infinitude not through endless progress toward a point that always remains beyond and out of reach but through including the beyond as a beyond within itself. As Hegel puts it, The universality of the concept is the achieved beyond, whereas that bad infinity remains afflicted with a beyond which is unattainable but remains a mere progression to infinity.2 That is to say, the concept transforms an external limit into an internal one and thereby becomes both infinite and limited. The infinitude of the concept is nothing but the concepts own self-limitation. The enjoyment that the death drive produces also achieves its infinitude through self-limitation. It revolves around a lost object that exists only insofar as it is lost, and it relates to this object as the vehicle for the infinite unfurling of its movement. The lost object operates as the self-limitation of the death drive through which the drive produces an infinite enjoyment. Rather than acting as a mark of the drives finitude, the limitation that the lost object introduces provides access to infinity. A society founded on a recognition of the death drive would be one that viewed its limitations as the source of its infinite enjoyment rather than an obstacle to that enjoyment. To take the clearest and most traumatic example in recent history, the recognition of the death drive in 1930s Germany would have conceived the figure of the Jew not as the barrier to the ultimate enjoyment that must therefore be eliminated but as the internal limit through which German society attained its enjoyment. As numerous theorists have said, the appeal of Nazism lay in its ability to mobilize the enjoyment of the average German through pointing out a threat to that enjoyment. The average German under Nazism could enjoy the figure of the Jew as it appeared in the form of an obstacle, but it is possible to recognize the obstacle not as an external limit but as an internal one. In this way, the figure of the Jew would become merely a figure for the average German rather than a position embodied by actual Jews. Closer to home, one would recognize the terrorist as a figure representing the internal limit of global capitalist society. Far from serving as an obstacle to the ultimate enjoyment in that society, the terrorist provides a barrier where none otherwise exists and thereby serves as the vehicle through which capitalist society attains its enjoyment. The absence of explicit limitations within contemporary global capitalism necessitates such a figure: if terrorists did not exist, global capitalist society would have to invent them. But recognizing the terrorist as the internal limit of global capitalist society would mean the end of terrorism. This recognition would transform the global landscape and deprive would-be terrorists of the libidinal space within which to act. Though some people may continue to blow up buildings, they would cease to be terrorists in the way that we now understand the term. A self-limiting society would still have real batt les to fight. There would remain a need for this society to defend itself against external threats and against the cruelty of the natural universe. Perhaps it would require nuclear weapons in space to defend against comets or meteors that would threaten to wipe out human life on the planet. But it would cease positing the ultimate enjoyment in vanquishing an external threat or surpassing a natural limit. The external limit would no longer stand in for a repressed internal one. Such a society would instead enjoy its own internal limitations and merely address external limits as they came up. Psychoanalytic theory never preaches, and it cannot help us to construct a better society. But it can help us to subtract the illusion of the good from our own society. By depriving us of this illusion, it has the ability to transform our thinking about politics. With the assistance of psychoanalytic thought, we might reconceive politics in a direction completely opposed to that articulated by Aristotle, to whichZizalluded in the introduction. In the Politics, Aristotle asserts: Every state is a community of some kind, and every community is established with a view to some good; for everyone always acts in order to obtain that which they think good. But, if all communities aim at some good, the state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good.3 Though later political thinkers have obviously departed from Aristotle concerning the question of the content of the good society, few have thought of politics in terms opposed to the good. This is what psychoanalytic thought introduces. If we act on the basis of enjoyment rather than the good, this does not mean that we can simply construct a society that privileges enjoyment in an overt way. An open society with no restrictions on sexual activity, drug use, food consumption, or play in general would not be a more enjoyable one than our own. That is the sure path to impoverishing our ability to enjoy, as the aftermath of the 1960s has made painfully clear. One must arrive at enjoyment indirectly. A society centered around the death drive would not be a better society, nor would it entail less suffering. Rather than continually sacrificing for the sake of the good, we would sacrifice the good for the sake of enjoyment. A society centered around the death drive would allow us to recognize that we enjoy the lost object only insofar as it remains lost.The act of demanding government change is doomed to failure because situating our demands with the state creates an addiction to refusal that maintains the worst elements of our political structuretheir framework arguments are only coherent within this perverse commitment to the status quo, and all of the purported benefits to their model of debate require the intervention of our alternative firstLundberg 12 --- Professor and Communication Strategies Consultant (Christian, Lacan in Public, Published by The University of Alabama Press, Project Muse)//trepkaOn Resistance: The Dangers of Enjoying Ones Demands The demands of student revolutionaries and antiglobalization protestors provide a set of opportunities for interrogating hysteria as a political practice. For the antiglobalization protestors cited earlier, demands to be added to a list of dangerous globophobes uncannily condense a dynamic inherent to all demands for recognition. But the demands of the Mexico Solidarity Network and the Seattle Independent Media project demand more than recognition: they also demand danger as a specific mode of representation. Danger functions as a sign of something more than inclusion, a way of reaffirming the protestors imaginary agency over processes of globalization. If danger represents an assertion of agency, and the assertion of agency is proportional to the deferral of desire to the master upon whom the demand is placed, then demands to be recognized as dangerous are doubly hysterical. Such demands are also demands for a certain kind of love, namely, the state might extend its love by recognizing the dangerousness of the one who makes the demand. At the level the demands rhetorical function, dangerousness is metonymically connected with the idea that average citizens can effect change in the prevailing order, or that they might be recognized as agents who, in the instance of the list of globalophobic leaders, can command the Mexican state to reaffirm their agency by recognizing their dangerousness. The rhetorical structure of danger implies the continuing existence of the state or governing apparatuss interests, and these interests become a nodal point at which the hysterical demand is discharged. This structure generates enjoyment of the existence of oppressive state policies as a point for the articulation of identity. The addiction to the state and the demands for the states love is also bound up with a fundamental dependency on the oppression of the state: otherwise the identity would collapse. Such demands constitute a reaffirmation of a hysterical subject position: they reaffirm not only the subjects marginality in the global system but the danger that protestors present to the global system. There are three practical implications for this formation. First, for the hysteric the simple discharge of the demand is both the beginning and satisfaction of the political project. Although there is always a nascent political potential in performance, in this case the performance of demand comes to fully eclipse the desires that animate content of the demand. Second, demand allows institutions that stand in for the global order to dictate the direction of politics. This is not to say that engaging such institutions is a bad thing; rather, it is to say that when antagonistic engagement with certain institutions is read as the end point of politics, the field of political options is relatively constrained. Demands to be recognized as dangerous by the Mexican government or as a powerful antiglobalization force by the WTO often function at the cost of addressing how practices of globalization are reaffirmed at the level of consumption, of identity, and so on or in thinking through alternative political strategies for engaging globalization that do not hinge on the state and the states actions. Paradoxically, the third danger is that an addiction to the refusal of demands creates a paralyzing disposition toward institutional politics. Grossberg has identified a tendency in left politics to retreat from the politics of policy and public debate.45 Although Grossberg identifies the problem as a specific coordination of theory and its relation to left politics, perhaps a hysterical commitment to marginality informs the impulse in some sectors to eschew engagements with institutions and institutional debate. An addiction to the states refusal often makes the perfect the enemy of the good, implying a stifling commitment to political purity as a pretext for sustaining a structure of enjoyment dependent on refusal, dependent on a kind of paternal no. Instead of seeing institutions and policy making as one part of the political field that might be pressured for contingent or relative goods, a hysterical politics is in the incredibly difficult position of taking an addressee (such as the state) that it assumes represents the totality of the political field; simultaneously it understands its addressee as constitutively and necessarily only a locus of prohibition. These paradoxes become nearly insufferable when one makes an analytical cut between the content of a demand and its rhetorical functionality. At the level of the content of the demand, the state or institutions that represent globalization are figured as illegitimate, as morally and politically compromised because of their misdeeds. Here there is an assertion of agency, but because the assertion of agency is simultaneously a deferral of desire, the identity produced in the hysterical demand is not only intimately tied to but is ultimately dependent on the continuing existence of the state, hegemonic order, or institution. At the level of affective investment, the state or institution is automatically figured as the legitimate authority over its domain. As Lacan puts it: demand in itself . . . is demand of a presence or of an absence . . . pregnant with that Other to be situated within the needs that it can satisfy. Demand constitutes the Other as already possessing the privilege of satisfying needs, that it is to say, the power of depriving them of that alone by which they are satisfied.46 One outcome of framing demand as an affective and symbolic process tied to a set of determinate rhetorical functions enjoins against the simple celebration of demands as either exclusively liberatory, as unproblematic modes of resistance, as exhausting the political, or as nodes for the production of political identity along the lines of equivalence. Alternatively, a politics of desire requires that the place of the demand in a political toolbox ought to be relativized: demands are useful as a precursor to articulating desire; they are important when moored to a broader political strategy; but they are dangerous if seen as the summum bonum of political life. A politics of desire thus functions simply as a negative constraint on the efficacy of a politics of demand, and as a practice a politics of desire asks that political subjects constantly test their demands against the measure of desire or against an explicitly owned set of political investments that envision an alternative world. It is the presence of this alternative, explicitly owned as a desired end state of the political, that might become the prerequisite for desire-based solidarities instead of demand-driven affinities, and as such, a politics of desire recognizes the inevitability and productivity of frustrated demand as part and parcel of antagonistic democratic struggle.

StavrakakisThe futility of their utopian fantasy devolves into violent lashoutStavrakakis 2 --- Professor of Political Discourse Analysis (Yannis, Lacan and the Political, https://books.google.com/books?id=_jjJAwAAQBAJ&dq=stavrakakis+lacan+and+the+political+scapegoat&source=gbs_navlinks_s)//trepkaWhatZizwill try to do in this chapter is, first of all, to demonstrate the deeply problematic nature of utopian politics. Simply put, my argument will be that every utopian fantasy construction needs a scapegoat in order to constitute itself the Nazi utopian fantasy and the production of the Jew is a good example, especially as pointed out in Zizeks analysis. Every utopian fantasy produces its reverse and calls for its elimination. Put another way, the beatific side of fantasy is coupled in utopian constructions with a horrific side, a paranoid need for a stigmatized scapegoat. The naivetyand also the dangerof utopian structures is revealed when the realization of this fantasy is attempted. It is then that we are brought close to the frightening kernel of the real: stigmatization is followed by extermination. This is not an accident. It is inscribed in the structure of utopian constructions; it seems to be the way all fantasy constructions work. If in almost all utopian visions, violence and antagonism are eliminated, if utopia is based on the expulsion and repression of violence (this is its beatific side) this is only because it owes its own creation to violence; it is sustained and fed by violence (this is its horrific side). This represed moment of violence resurfaces, as Marin points out, in the difference inscribed in the name utopia itself (Marin, 1984:110). What we shall argue is that it also resurfaces in the production of the figure of an enemy. To use a phrase enunciated by the utopianist Fourier, what is driven out through the door comes back through the window (is not this a precursor of Lacans dictum that what is foreclosed in the symbolic reappears in the real?VII:131). The work of Norman Cohn and other historians permits the articulation of a genealogy of this Manichean, equivalential way of understanding the world, from the great witch-hunt up to modern anti-Semitism, and Lacanian theory can provide valuable insights into any attempt to understand the logic behind this utopian operationhere the approach to fantasy developed in Chapter 2 will further demonstrate its potential in analyzing our political experience. In fact, from the time of his unpublished seminar on The Formations of the Unconscious, Lacan identified the utopian dream of a perfectly functioning society as a highly problematic area (seminar of 18 June 1958).

***Links*** American Cred/LegitimacyThe assumption that foreign decisions are made in reaction to American leadership is the height of narcissism this delusion creates policy failure and turns the caseWEINER 2013 (Greg, teaches political science at Assumption College, Narcissistic Polity Disorder: Its Diagnosis and Treatment, Library of Law and Liberty, July 9, http://www.libertylawsite.org/2013/07/09/narcissistic-polity-disorder-its-diagnosis-and-treatment/)The recently published fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Associations Diagnostic and Statistical Manual contains no diagnosis for Narcissistic Polity Disorderthe books scope being confined to the personality disorder of a similar namebut should the editors ever wish to expand into political science, they will find an excellent case study in the interview Senator John McCain gave on CBS Face the Nation last Sunday. It turns out the Egyptian coup, which gave all signs of being a conflict among Egyptians about Egypt, was in fact aboutwell, us. Its a strong indicator, McCain said, of the lack of American leadership and influence since we urged the military not to do that, McCain explained. The attentive reader will recognize failure of American leadership as an emission from the F6 button of McCains keyboard, which he hits anytime an adverse event occurs anywhere in the world. But it turns out Egypt is not the only country into whose water the Senator gazes and sees Americas reflection. He continued: [T]he place is descending into chaos but so is the entire Middle East because of the total vacuum and lack of American leadership whether it be the massacres in SyriaLebanon isis beset by sectarian violence, Jordan is about to collapse under the weight of refugees, Iraq is unraveling, Afghanistan, were having grave problems organizing a follow on force in Afghanistan. America has not led and America is not leading and when America doesnt lead bad things happen and other people do lead and Egypt is just one segment of a failure of American leadership over the last five years and we need to start being leaders rather thanthanthan bystanders. Sectarian violence in the Middle East, an ancient and evidently incurable phenomenon, an American failure? Thats one powerful reflection staring back from the water. It is also a powerful fantasy, with roots in the same placeand the metaphor is separated from reality by only the narrowest of marginsas narcissistic personality disorder, one of whose hallmarks is the proclivity to interpret foreign events in terms of oneself. Any event, anywhere, anytime becomes a test of American leadership: He who does what America wished he had not done had no autonomous motives; he meant to stick a thumb in the American eye. Thus McCains understanding of leadership and its breathtaking condescensionin, ironically, the name of the neoconservative project of spreading freedom. Note that within that modelsomeone is going to lead and it is therefore best for it to be a, make that the, righteous nationlittle room is left for the very thing McCain claims he wants to promote: nations actually making choices about their own futures from within. In the present case, Egyptians are fighting about Egypt; the real issue, according to McCain, must be what the United States had to say, or failed to say, about it. The generals could not possibly have been motivated by (a) different aspirations for Egypt, (b) venality, (c) power or (d) some combination of the above: We must understand their motives for the coup in terms of whether they complied with our request that they not do that. To be sure, north of $1.5 billion in foreign aid ought to buy some influence with Egypts governors, although primarily what it buys is assurance of Egyptian compliance with the countrys peace with Israelwhich the generals may be likelier to keep than the Muslim Brotherhood. If what it was supposed to buy was democracy as an American gift to the Egyptian people, we ought not to be surprised if Egyptians turn around and resent the arrogance of our beneficenceand hold us accountable for its failures too. McCains interpretation of the turmoil in the Middle Eastnote, incidentally, the utter lack of self-awareness as to Iraqs descent into chaosis powerful evidence of the extent to which American exceptionalism, poorly understood, can slouch into narcissism. So widespread is the phenomenon that all politicians, even those accused of harboring heretical thoughts about exceptionalism, must make obeisance to it. (President Obama: [T]here is no substitute for American leadership.) It did not start this way. John Winthrops City on a Hill address was not a boast. It was a warning. The fact that Heaven had special plans for America meant not that America had special privileges but rather that Americans, should they fail, faced special punishments: For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. That was 1630; this is 2013. No one seriously believes the United States can retreat from the world. Superpower status brings obligations of leadership. But leadership can be exercised with arrogance or humility and in a spirit of adventure or restraint. Conservatism used to prize the latter qualities. They would also be effective therapy for the ailment disordering the nations thinking about its responsibilitiesand capacitiesoverseas. Free Trade / EconomyFree trade and a free market economy dont exist pursuit of them, even with government oversight, only sustains a neoliberal fantasy that ensures economic inequality and violenceDean, 8 Professor, Political Theory, Hobart and William Smith Colleges (Jodi, Enjoying Neoliberalism, Vol. 4, No. 1, 54-57, http://culturalpolitics.dukejournals.org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/content/4/1/47.full.pdf+html)//SYNeoliberal ideology relies on the fantasy of free trade. Everyone, ultimately, benefits in an unfettered market because markets are the most effi cient ways of ensuring that everyone does that for which they are best suited and gets what they want. Michael Lebowitz describes this faith: The unfettered market, we are told, insures that everyone benefits from a free exchange (or it would not occur) and that those trades chosen by rational individuals (from all pos sible exchanges) will produce the best possible outcomes. Accordingly, it follows that interference with the perfect market system by the state must produce disaster a negative-sum result in which the losses exceed the gains. So, the answer for all right-thinking people must be, remove those interferences. (2004: 1516) The fantasy of the free market promises that everyone will win. To ensure that all will win, the market has to be liberated, freed from constraints, unleashed to realize its and our full potential (cf. Shaik 2005). As free rational agents armed with full information, people will make the right choices but, again, only so long as nothing biases or constrains these choices. ieks account of the phantasmatic background of ideology brings to the fore the analytic benefi ts in considering neoliberalism in terms of the fantasy of free trade. I consider here four elements of his discussion. First, iek argues that the external ideological ritual is the true locus of the fantasy which sustains an ideological edifice (1997: 6). Considering a discourse or formation as an ideology, then, does not involve some kind of search for truth hidden under the distorted beliefs of misguided masses. Rather it involves looking at actual practices; these practices, what people actually do, are the location of ideological beliefs. Neoliberal ideology focuses on practices of exchange. The ordinary exchanges of everyday people cleaned up and understood as rational decisions made under ideal conditions are trade. Part of the fantastic appeal of neoliberalism comes from the way individual exchanges stand in for global fl ows (upward) of capital. Second, iek holds that fantasy answers the question, What am I to the Other? (1997: 8). The typical answer in the United States is free. To the Other, I am the one, we are the ones, who are free. After September 11, 2001, because we are free answered the question Why do they hate us? Moreover, from the US perspective, the Cold War was fought between freedom and total itarian ism. Neoliberalisms emphasis on free trade answers the question of who we, as Americans, are, and, increasingly, who we are in a global sense: the global we is the we connected through markets, the we of what I describe elsewhere as communicative capitalism (Dean 2002, 2005). Third, iek explains that fantasy occludes an original deadlock (1997: 10). The fantasy of free trade covers over persistent market failure, structural inequalities, the violence of privatization, and the redistribution of wealth to the have mores. Free trade sustains at the level of fantasy what it seeks to avoid at the level of reality namely actually free trade among equal players, that is equal participants with equal opportunities to establish the rules of the game, access information, distribution, and fi nancial networks, etc. Paradoxically, free trade is invoked as a mantra in order to foreclose possibilities for the actualization of free trade and equality. This foreclosure appears in the slippage between ideas of competition and winning. On the one hand neoliberal thought emphasizes the necessity of competition. As Susan George points out, competition was Margaret Thatchers central value, and faith in competition was the governing precept of her destruction of the British public sector. George quotes Thatcher, It is our job to glory in inequality and see that talents and abilities are given vent and expression for the benefit of us all (1999: 4). On the other hand even as neoliberalism emphasizes competition, it holds onto the notion that everyone is a winner, a notion clearly at odds with competition because in competition there are winners and losers. Thus Third World countries are not told, sorry, losers, thats the breaks in a global economy. Rather, they are promised that everyone will win (cf. Derber 2002: 378). The Global Report on Human Settlements notes: Conventional trade theories see increased trade and a liberalized trade regime as purely beneficial; but, as in all chance, there are, in fact, winners and losers. Those participating in the active, growing areas of the world economy or receiving (unreliable) trickle-down effects benefit. Those who do not participate at best receive no benefits, but, in fact, are usually losers, since capital tends to take flight from their countries or their industries to move to more productive zones, reducing work opportunities and business returns as currencies and wages fall or jobs disappear. (2003: 40) Similarly, in the United States, workers are advised not to worry about the decline in manufacturing and rise of outsourcing. New jobs will be created. With education, they can be retrained. Again, the neoliberal fantasy promises that no one will lose. Finally, at the level of the local school, kids today are taught that everyone wins. Everyone gets some kind of prize or ribbon just for showing up. In some US districts, schools no longer post grades or rankings out of fear of hurting the self-esteem of those students near the bottom. Thus the emphasis on testing part of George W. Bushs education policy, No Child Left Behind, is not accompanied by a corresponding ranking of students; instead, schools and teachers are ranked and assessed not the students, because everyone is a winner. Fourth, iek writes that fantasy constructs a scene in which the jouissance we are deprived of is concentrated in the other who stole it from us (1997: 32). Free trade stages this scene as a deferred promise of fulfilment. When we meet in the market, our needs and desires will be met. This is the very definition of a perfect market it will meet everyones needs and desires. In a crude sense, financial, stock, bond, and commodities markets are bets on this future, investments in the promised fulfilment. We could also include here mortgages, loans, credit cards, that is all sorts of different financial instruments that rely on a presumption of future satisfaction. Of course market exchanges do not actually provide jouissance. Moreover when the market serves as a vehicle for jouissance, it is mesmerizing, repulsive, excessive. I can explain this point more clearly by distinguishing between free trades staging of the lack of enjoyment as a loss or theft and its figuring of the corresponding excess of jouissance. According to the fantasy of free trade, everybody wins. If someone loses, this simply indicates that trade was not free. Someone cheated; he didnt play by the rules. She had secret information, the benefits of insider knowledge or the advantages of an unfair monopoly. Within the terms of the fantasy, the solution to this problem is oversight, preferably by those familiar with the industry or practice in question. The government can make sure that others are not out there stealing our enjoyment, the fruits of our labor, through their dishonest and unfair dealings. There are risks, however. The government might get overinvolved. It might overstep its boundaries and impede free trade. Differently put, the notion of oversight continues to sustain enjoyment as stolen as it shifts the location of thievery from the insider or cheat to the government itself it might tax me too much; it might pay for the medical expenses of all sorts of illegal immigrants while I could lose my health insurance at any point; it might use my tax dollars to support tenured radicals (who look down their lazy, secular noses at me and my hardworking, God-fearing way of life) while I cant even afford my kids tuition . . . The fantasy of free trade thus plays host to series of tensions and anxieties associated with our failure to enjoy.7 Monopoly on EnjoymentThey imagine the Other has a monopoly on enjoyment --- reducing surveillance is an empty act of rebellion to steal some of that enjoyment while maintaining the locus of enjoyment in the OtherMcGowan 2013 --- Associate Professor at the University of Vermont (Todd, Enjoying What We Dont Have, Project Muse)//trepkaAs Slavoj iek points out in Tarrying with the Negative, We always impute to the other an excessive enjoyment: he [the other] wants to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our way of life) and/or he has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment. In short, what really bothers us about the other is the peculiar way he organizes his enjoyment, precisely the surplus, the excess that pertains to this way: the smell of their food, their noisy songs and dances, their strange manners, their att itude toward work.32 This belief this paranoia about the others secret enjoyment derives from the signifiers inability to manifest its transparency. In one sense, the signifier is transparent: the very possibility of psychoanalysis depends on the fact that subjects speak their unconscious desire even (or especially) when they try hardest to hide it. The signifiers that subjects choose reveal the truth of their unconscious desires. And yet, at the same time, the signifier does not avow its own transparency; every signifier appears to be hiding something, a secret meaning, a private intention, to which only the subject itself has access. Ludwig Wittgenstein spent the better part of his philosophical career attempting to disabuse fellow philosophers of the idea that the signifier could hide anything. When we believe that signifiers hide a private meaning, we fall victim to the deception of language as such. Hearing what someone says allows us to grasp all that there is to grasp. As Wittgenstein puts it, To say He alone can know what he intends is nonsense.33 In fact, he goes so far as to claim that the subject can know the others intention even better than its own. He notes, I can know what someone else is thinking, not whatZizam thinking.34 By recognizing the transparency of the signifier, we might fight against the paranoia that seems to accompany subjectivity itself, and all of Wittgensteins thought participates in this combat. Even though Wittgensteins argument has undoubtedly found adherents among many philosophers and laypersons, paranoia about the others hidden enjoyment has not disappeared in the years since this argument first appeared. One could even safely say that paranoia has grown more rampant. Is this simply the result of a failure to disseminate Wittgensteins thought widely enough or of popular resistance to it? Or is it that paranoia is written into the structure of the signifier itself? The hidden meaning that the subject perceives beneath the signifier is the result of the signifiers apparent opaqueness, and no amount of inveighing against hidden meaning will stop subjects from believing in it. The belief that the other holds a secret enjoyment that the subject has sacrificed renders the smooth functioning of collective life impossible. The force that allows human beings to come together to form a society in common language is at once the force that prevents any society from working out. The structure of the signifier itself militates against utopia. It produces societies replete with subjects paranoid about, and full of envy for, the enjoying other. Though one might imagine a society in which subjects enjoyed without bothering themselves about the others enjoyment, such a vision fails to comprehend the nature of our enjoyment. We find our enjoyment through that of the other rather than intrinsically within ourselves. Our envy of the others enjoyment persists because this is the mode through which we ourselves enjoy. It is thus far easier to give up the idea of ones own private enjoyment for the sake of the social order than it is to give up the idea of the enjoying other. PRISM/NSA ProgramsPost-plan, surveillance like PRISM will continue unabated because of the narcissistic desire for the gaze of and recognition by the otherKriss 13 (Sam, University of Sussex, MA Critical Theory, Prism: the psychopathology of internet surveillance, https://samkriss.wordpress.com/2013/06/10/prism-the-psychopathology-of-internet-surveillance/)//trepkaNeurosis. Top-secret documents released recently by the Guardian and the Washington Post reveal the existence of a far-reaching surveillance programme operated by the National Security Agency (a part of the US military), codenamed PRISM. Under the programme, personal communications from nine Internet services including Facebook, Skype, and Google, but with the notable exception of Twitter can be accessed at any time by government security agents. Not just public postings but also private emails and video calls; in a separate scandal it was revealed that the NSA has been collecting the phone records of US citizens. Whats more shocking is that these companies voluntarily signed up to the programme; they abused the trust of their users in handing over private data to government spies. What were seeing is the development of a surveillance society far more insidious than any historical totalitarian regime. You can still think and say whatever you want, but youre always being watched; your right to privacy has disappeared without you even noticing it. In some sinister concrete server complex theres a digital file on you, containing everything youve said and done. Government agencies listen in on your telephone calls, software built in to your iPhone records your exact location, web cookies track your browsing habits. This is what radical openness means; its a laceration. The government-corporation complex is with you at every moment, and should it decide that it doesnt like what youre thinking and saying, it has the power to murder you on a whim. Psychosis. Theres something grimly humorous about the whole situation. One of the nine services that forms part of the Prism system is YouTube; the unbidden image arises of a young, driven NSA staffer going in to work his tie fastidiously knotted, his shoes gleaming like an oil slick to watch hundreds of videos of cats falling over in the defence of American security interests. With every new maladroit kitten the aquiline focus of his eyes sharpens; the furrows on his forehead grow glacial in their cragginess. Ashleys going for cocktails with the girls, Matts watching the football, Tariqs eaten too much Ardennes pt, and the government has to take note of it all in a desperate and doomed attempt to regulate our world. Except what if thats the entire point? The programme isnt political, its sexual. Its not surveillance, its scopophilia. You think the NSA is trudging through millions of hours of Skype conversations just so they can catch out a couple of would-be terrorists? What do those initials really stand for, anyway? Nudes Seekin Agency? Nasty Sex Appraisers? Our agent isnt watching out for coded communications, hes got something entirely different in mind. A couple are talking into their webcams. Shes gone off to university, he stayed at home; theyre still together but in her absence hes been feeling kinda down. He wants to touch her, he wants to hold her, he wants to feel flesh against flesh, but he cant. As he talks a smile slithers across her face. Oh, dont, she says. Not now. Come on, he says. Please. Im going crazy out here. They think theyre alone. OK, she says. She takes off her shirt. As her tits flop out our agent bellows in exultation. There are hundreds of workstations in the big tile-carpeted room in Fort Meade, Maryland, and they all spout arcing parabolas of cum Schizophrenia. Internet surveillance is different from ordinary surveillance. The NSA isnt putting bugs in your home or following you down the street; youre giving them everything they want. Youre putting all this information out there of your own free will, and you can stop any time you want. We all know that everything we post online is monitored, that every like on Facebook is worth 114 to advertisers and retailers, that Google knows far more about our shameful desires than our sexual partners or our psychotherapists, that intelligence agencies routinely prowl through our communications. And yet we still do it. Some people cant eat their lunch without slapping an Instagram filter on it, others feel the need to tweet the precise consistency of their morning shit. Planet Earth produces 25 petabytes of data every day, a quantity of information several orders of magnitude larger than that contained in every book ever published and most of it is banality or gibberish. A web developer named Mike DiGiovanni commented of Google Glass: Ive taken more pictures today thanZizhave the past 5 days thanks to this. Sure, they are mostly silly, but my timeline has now truly become a timeline of where Ive been. As if this perverse behaviour is somehow to be encouraged. Why do we do this? Why can we no longer handle unmediated reality? Why does it always have to be accompanied by a digital representation? The fear of death must play into it. We mustnt lose a moment to the decay of time, it has to be electronically immortalised. But surely that cant be all. Perhaps this is precisely what we were designed to do. Its engineered into the fabric of our being, its what were for. Our world is a distraction, its light entertainment. The NSA existed long before our society. It existed before the first human being gazed at the stars and rearranged them into shapes it could comprehend, it existed before the first gasping half-fish hauled itself out of the slime to feel the sun on its back. The NSA is our demiurge, and we are its creatures. And as for what its agents look like when they take their masks off, perhaps its better for us to never know. Melancholia. Theres something odd about all these interpretations: theyre grotesque, but at the same time they tickle our narcissism a narcissism which is, after all, founded on the gaze. In a strange way its nice to think that youre being watched, its nice to think that whatever drivel you produce somehow merits the attention of big important government agencies. Its far more horrifying to think that nobody is watching you, because nobody cares. The problem is that thats the truth that, as Lacan insisted, the Big Other doesnt exist. Youre being watched, but only by machines. Your data is thoroughly chewed up in the inhuman mandibles of some great complex algorithm, and by the time its regurgitated for advertisers or spies youre pretty much unrecognisable. Youre not a person, youre input and output; a blip with a few pathetic delusions of sentience. And the narcissism of the surveilled is the most telling of those delusions. This is the complaint of the privacy campaigners: the flying robots of death were bad, but this is really the last straw. As if someone snooping on your emails was the worst thing that could ever happen to anyone. We dont live in a society of surveillance; thats ultimately ephemeral. Programs like PRISM are manifestations of Americans fantasies about being watched peoples willful participation in surveillance means that legal reforms wont deal with its problems

Smecker, 13 BA, Philosophy and Psychology, University of Vermont and Writer, Peace and Justice Center (Frank, 1984.0: The Rise of the big Other as Big Brother, Truthout, 6/20, http://www.truth-out.org/speakout/item/17111-19840-the-rise-of-the-big-other-as-big-brother)//SY

In the old days, before the advent of post-Grecian democracy, when civil society was presided over by a monarch, the monarch was, as director of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture at SUNY Buffalo, Joan Copjec, puts it: someone everyone - or everyone who counted - was encouraged to 'emulate,' [the king was] merely the retroactive effect of the general will-of-the-people. The place of this leader [was] thus a point of convergence, a point where the full sense of this unified will [was] located. [1] Obviously, these days there is no king. But as French philosopher Claude Lefort explained, the locus of power that was once embodied by a legitimate pretender - the monarch - has, upon the advent of modern democracy, become an empty place... Now that the "throne is empty," so to speak, and modern democracy (an "indetermination that was born from the loss of the substance of the body politic"[2]) has usurped its place, modern power, to paraphrase Foucault, is wielded by no one in particular, though we are all subject to it. In order to grasp what I'm getting at here, it's important to familiarize oneself for the time being with two theoretical terms: the "big Other" and "gaze." The latter often lends itself to a multitude of theoretical interpretations, each one replete with its own definition and conceptualization of functioning. To preempt against too much confusion, however, we'll focus on the gaze as discussed hereunder. To start, the twentieth century psychoanalyst Badass, Jacques Lacan, gave an account of the gaze with the following story he borrowed from Sartre: The gaze that I encounter [...] is not a seen gaze [not a set of eyes that I see looking at me] but a gaze imagined by me in the field of the Other [...] the sound of rustling leaves heard while out hunting [...] a footstep heard in a corridor [The gaze exists] not at the level of [a particular] other whose gaze surprises the subject looking through the keyhole. It is that the other surprises him, the subject, as an entirely hidden gaze. [3] And then there is what Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic, Slavoj iek, calls the "impossible gaze": that uncanny perspective by means of which we are already present at the scene of our own absence. What this means is that, any good ol' fantasy functions properly only by "removing" ourselves from the fantasy we are having. Take as an example Disney's Wall-E, the story of a convivial little robot that looks like an anthropomorphized Mars rover, that "falls in love" with Eva, a robot that basically looks like an egg. Essentially, this is a fantasy of a post-human earth - though of course dreamed up by someone (human) and, definitely watched by a whole bunch of (human) people. Hence the perspective in which "I am present at the very scene of my own absence" - the human viewer reduced to the "impossible" gaze - as if I'm not a part of the very "reality" I'm observing. This is, in a nutshell, the definition of gaze. The big Other, on the other hand, is a bit more involved. Its definition is inherently nuanced. To start off, what we'll call the Symbolic big Other is something that is shared by everyone. It is none other than that which embodies the very ideological essence of the socio-symbolic order of our lives; rules and etiquette - especially juridical Law itself - customs and beliefs, everything you should or should not do, what you aspire toward, and who or what you aspire to be, all of this and more, individually or in combination, constitutes the Symbolic big Other. The subject's big Other (hereafter, the Imaginary big Other), however, is a sort of private investment in the Symbolic big Other, a personal allegiance to the ruling ideology which sustains the narratives, beliefs, and lived fantasies of the very culture in which the subject is immersed. Each Imaginary big Other is distinct in its own unique way: my Imaginary big Other may be, say, a patriotic bricolage (not really, but you get the point) - a composite of things like, e.g., Uncle Sam, the American soldier trope, "God" and Tim Tebow. And your Imaginary big Other may embody, say, just Emily Post, or maybe some vague ideological package of some other normative principles. In any case, the Imaginary big Other, the subject's big Other as such, designates a private virtualization of the socio-symbolic field in which he or she is inscribed. Whether it exists in one's private notion of God, or one's notion of government, or family, or "what's cool," or a combination of these things or whatever, the Imaginary big Other refers directly to that distinctly personalized social standard by which each of us respectively measures ourselves - 24/7/365 (yes, the big Other can make itself known even in our dreams). Virtually everybody shares in the Symbolic big Other, for it's that very point from which the general "will-of-the-people" is reflected back to the people, so that we can see ourselves as we appear in this reflection - as a consistent social "whole." In other words, the big Other is that which gives substance to the body politic. We are its subjects. And despite not really existing - that, at the imaginative level of the individual, it's really none other than one's own internalization of society's dos-and-don'ts - the big Other is nonetheless experienced as a sort of independent phantasm which situates itself smack dab in the middle of any social interaction like some kind of incorporeal incarnation of a necessary third-wheel that both instructs and scrutinizes our every thought, utterance, and move. As such, the big Other ensures that the rules of society are being followed, that we are conducting ourselves properly in society. Without the big Other the social fabric begins to fray, presenting the veritable threat of losing the constitutive substance of society itself, its governing laws, and its subjects. I suppose I should've been a little clearer earlier on: when we combine the Symbolic big Other and gaze, the result is the Imaginary big Other, the subject's big Other - that remote sense of being watched and evaluated by something that's not really there. It's sort of like a cross between a Jiminy Cricket figure of conscience and an iconic role-model of sorts, who, as such, seems to loom over your shoulder, telling you what and what not to do simply by "looking" at you, normatively shaping and informing your every thought and behavior. We all have a big Other. It is, to repeat an emphasis from earlier, that standard by which we measure ourselves: our own private piece of the larger, public social space we inhabit. To paraphrase iek, the gaze of the Symbolic big Other is my own view of myself, which I see through eyes that are not authentically my own. Here, one should not fail to notice the Symbolic big Other's striking resemblance to Bentham's "Panopticon," that omnipresent, omniscient "God's-eye-view" intended to watch over us wherever we go. The likeness is unmistakable, simply because Bentham's little wet dream embodies the big Other as such. The essential point to take away from this is that one's sense of (political) "self" is inevitably bound up with the localization of the panoptic gaze - that centralized point of omnipresent, omniscient surveillance. Wherever we go, our image of self, as seen by the gaze of the big Other, always functions for another. And further, in these times, do we not receive constant arousal, enjoyment, from the act of watching our own image of self, controlling our own image of self, tracking our own image of self? Though it's not: as if we were the Panopticon itself, but rather: because we are the Panopticon itself. We bring the Panopticon, the gaze of the Symbolic big Other as such, with us wherever we go. Social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., instantiate this. But what, precisely, does this even mean? Well, this is where things get both revelatory and a bit complicated. The trouble with all this is that, to return to Copjec's analysis, the Symbolic big Other is "a point of convergence of the general will-of-the-people." What this means - and bear with me here, because this may turn confusing - is that the Symbolic big Other, as such, signifies the very mode of appearance in which we appear to ourselves, for ourselves, as we desire to appear as such. So it would follow that, if we appear to ourselves, for ourselves, as images to be controlled, manipulated, tracked, watched, and so on, as we certainly do in today's digital medium of social networking - which, by the way, we collectively, willfully and, pleasurably participate in - then this zeitgeist of the modern majority will inevitably converge at a centralized point: which is to say, the big Other, both its Symbolic and Imaginary incarnations, will appear in the guise of "Big Brother." At the individual level, each of us embodies "Big Brother": we are intrigued with the act of watching, tracking, manipulating, images of ourselves. At the Symbolic level, the truth of this enjoyment expresses itself today in all of its unsettling perversity: PRISM.Their predictable calls to reform PRISM ignore the human relations that create the desire to be surveilled --- locks in totalitarianismONeill 14 --- focuses on Critical Theory Studies, Faculty Member of the Film and Digital Media Department @ University of Wales Trinity Saint David (Timi, Michel Foucault and the NSA Panopticon, https://www.academia.edu/9290473/Michel_Foucault_predicts_the_NSAs_cyber_Panopticon)//trepkaThe NSA controversy The Prism program allows the NSA, the world's largest surveillance organisation, to obtain targeted communications without having to request them from the service providers and without having to obtain individual court orders. 2 On the morning of 5th of June 2013, the world woke up to the news that the US Federal Government had been collecting metadata from Verizon customers as part of their on-going war against...someone and everyone. The resulting outcry sent the by now predictive shockwaves around the world. How could the government of a democracy championing, freedom obsessed nation do such a wicked thing? Within days, the name of the deep throat was released and from that moment Edward Snowden became a poster child of government interference in our everyday lives. Obamas response was to point to the needs of America to protect its national security interests and in so doing conjure up the ghost of 9/11. This specter has haunted the American political landscape with such force that it has perhaps changed the American mindset for generations to come an almost forced jump in evolutionary terms. The problem in this case, is that the ghost of 9/11 appears to be more akin to the ambivalent vision of Hamlets father ; Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned,/Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell, 3Zizsuggest this in the sense that the original event has now become split in perceptions and of the subsequent events since 9/11 led to The Patriot Act and this is turn has perhaps inevitably led to the NSAs actions; Perhaps the most interesting remarks about the NSA controversy thus far came from Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, one of the original authors of the USA PATRIOT [...] Sensenbrenner stated that particular provision of the Act requires government lawyers to prove to the FISC that a request for specific business records is linked to an authorized investigation and further stated that targeting US citizens is prohibited as part of the request. Sensenbrenner argued that the NSA telephone metadata collection is a bridge too far and falls well outside the original intended scope of the Act: [t]he administration claims authority to sift through details of our private lives because the Patriot Act says that it can.Zizdisagree.Zizauthored the Patriot Act, and this [NSA surveillance] is an abuse of that law. 4 If the author has control over the intention of his work then by his words US government agencies were acting outside the scope of the law. Being so, what are we to make of this? Are we seeing a new approach to governance or in effect business as normal, but with a new strategy adapted to meet new demands? Worryingly so, if we remind ourselves of the words of Michel Foucault; Then it gets really scary. Foucault describes the observation of our private lives, as aided by new technology. Felluga notes the French philosophers emphasis on surveillance within an emerging information society and a developing bureaucracy that turns individuals into statistics and paperwork,... Lest we forget Michel Foucault (1926 1984) In seeing Foucault, alongside his compatriots of Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida as one of the pioneers of post structuralism, it helps the reader to locate Foucaultian ideas firmly and squarely at the heartbeat of this contemporary world we share. Although at times his work on madness and punishment could be said to be more historical than political in nature, thatZizfeel would be to misread both his methodological approach and closely philosophical conclusions that emanate from his work. His work on surveillance and power (highly influenced by both Nietzsches genealogical approach and Bastilles ideas on otherness) help us to see tried and tested mechanisms of power at play. His work on power and its analysis on political regimes can be said to have an even greater relevancy today than in the years he was alive. In todays age we seem at times to be stumbling toward a dystopian reality; A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude 6.

Lenny Brahins HighlightingThe affs piecemeal criticism of surveillance is a kind of enjoyment, precisely what maintains the larger structure of state controlrepealing surveillance laws cant change the underlying structure of enjoyment so we should instead overconform to reveal the obscene underside of the surveillance fantasyKRIPS 2010 (Henry, Professor of Cultural Studies and Andrew W. Mellon all Claremont Chair of Humanities at Claremont Graduate University; The Politics of the Gaze: Foucault, Lacan and iek, Culture Unbound, Volume 2, 2010) It is clear that the film theoretic account of Foucault that Copjec uses, misrepresents Foucaults concept of the panoptic gaze, and that this misrepresentation, in turn, is responsible for her insistence upon a gap between the Foucauldian and Lacanian concepts of the gaze. By correctly representing Foucault, I have closed this gap. A fortiori I have changed the exclusively conservative political valence that, in virtue of its function as a disciplinary tool that supports the status quo, has come to be associated with the panopticon. In particular, I allow that, like the Lacanian gaze, and depending on context, the Foucauldian gaze may have either disruptive, Dionysian effects or conservative, Apollonian effects.5 Foucaults practices of freedom are one way of thinking the possibility of disruptive effects. Rather than pursuing this line of thought at an abstract level, however, I turn finally to Slavoj ieks work, in particular his concept of overconformity, in order to show that, by reconceiving the panoptic gaze along the lines that I have suggested, new political possibilities arise for opposing modern regimes of surveillance. Central to ieks account of the modern state is the concept of an obscene underside of the law , namely widespread practices petty tax evasion, speeding, walking on the grass, etc which, although strictly speaking illicit, are unofficially tolerated. This network of practices is sustained thanks to what iek calls an ideological phantasy that keeps them an open secret everyone knows about and participates in them in private, but no one mentions them, let alone publicly flaunts participating in them. Such practices constitute points of failure of the law in so far as they fall in an indeterminate zone in relation to legal categories: on the one hand, in so far as they are tolerated they are not straightforwardly illegal, but, on the other hand, neither are they legal; and as such, constitute a fundamental illegality at the heart of the legal system. ieks point is that, rather than undermining the law, the obscene underside of the law sustains it the law is tol-erated because of the little secret pleasures that people derive from its obscene underside. In Lacanian terms, we may say that the obscene underside of the law is the set of necessary but repressed points of failure of the legal system in short, it is the symptom of the legal system. In particular, in the context of a legal state apparatus that is held in place by a panoptic system of surveillance, the obscene underside of the law is a liminal zone of high anxiety that, like the Emperors body under his new clothes, is obscenely visible to each of his subjects in the privacy of their own visual field, yet must be shrouded in a cloak of invisibility in the public realm. This is the site of the gaze. How are we to oppose such a system, which seemingly coexists with, indeed depends upon its own systematic transgression? According to iek, not by acts of resistance, since the system is readily able to accommodate, indeed depends upon such acts.6 Instead, iek suggests opposition through acts of overconformity, which, rather than protesting let alone breaking the law, insist upon it to the letter, even when ideological common sense suggests otherwise. In particular, this means a refusal to turn a blind eye from manifestations of laws obscene underside. As iek puts it: Sometimes, at least the truly subversive thing is not to disregard the explicit letter of Law on behalf of the underlying fantasies, but to stick to this letter against the fantasy which sustains it.Is not an exemplary case of such subversion-through-identification provided by Jaroslav Hseks The Good Soldier Schweik, the novel whose hero wreaks total havoc by simply executing the orders of his superiors in an overzealous and all-too-literal way (iek 1997: 30, 22, 31). What constitutes such strategies of overconformity in the context of a modern panoptic regime of surveillance? Answer: openly/publicly sticking to the letter of the law by refusing the cloak of invisibility that shrouds the laws points of failure; in other words, by refusing to indulge what iek calls the ideological fantasy , orchestrating a direct encounter with the objet a qua gaze. To put it in ieks terms, it is a matter of actively endorsing the passive confrontation with the objet a, bypassing the intermediate role of the screen of fantasy (iek 1997: 31). To be specific, it is matter of not merely saying but also acting out publicly what everyone knows in private but dares not say: not merely announcing in public that the Emperor is naked, but arresting him for indecent exposure. By Lacanianizing Foucault, as I have done here, we are able to understand the logic behind such heterodox strategies for opposing modern regimes of surveillance.The affs political project is impossiblethe plan stands in for a future world without surveillance, but there is always some obstacle to our political visions which will met with violence and ultimately risks extinctionexamining the structure of desire and enjoyment rather than projecting better political worlds is the only means of channeling the death drive away from catastropheMcGowan 2013 --- Associate Professor at the University of Vermont (Todd, Enjoying What We Dont Have, Project Muse)//trepkaThere is no path leading from the death drive to utopia. The death drive undermines every attempt to construct a utopia; it is the enemy of the good society. It is thus not surprising that political thought from Plato onward has largely ignored this psychic force of repetition and negation. But this does not mean that psychoanalytic thought concerning the death drive has only a negative value for political theorizing. It is possible to conceive of a positive politics of the death drive. The previous chapters have attempted to lay out the political implications of the death drive, and, on this basis, we can sketch what a society founded on a recognition of the death drive might look like. Such a recognition would not involve a radical transformation of society: in one sense, it would leave everything as it is. In contemporary social arrangements, the death drive subverts progress with repetition and leads to the widespread sacrifice of self-interest for the enjoyment of the sacrifice itself. This structure is impervious to change and to all attempts at amelioration. But in another sense, the recognition of the death drive would change everything. Recognizing the centrality of the death drive would not eliminate the proclivity to sacrifice for the sake of enjoyment, but it would change our relationship to this sacrifice. Rather than being done for the sake of an ultimate enjoyment to be achieved in the future, it would be done for its own sake. The fundamental problem with the effort to escape the death drive and pursue the good is that it leaves us unable to locate where our enjoyment lies. By positing a future where we will attain the ultimate enjoyment (either through the purchase of the perfect commodity or through a transcendent romantic union or through the attainment of some heavenly paradise), we replace the partial enjoyment of the death drive with the image of a complete enjoyment to come. There is no question of fully enjoying our submission to the death drive. We will always remain alienated from our mode of enjoying. As Adrian Johnston rightly points out, Transgressively overcoming the impediments of the drives doesnt enable one to simply enjoy enjoyment.1 But we can transform our relationship to the impediments that block the full realization of our drive. We can see the impediments as the internal product of the death drive rather than as an external limit. The enjoyment that the death drive provides, in contrast to the form of enjoyment proffered by capitalism, religion, and utopian politics, is at once infinite and limited. This oxymoronic form of enjoyment operates in the way that the concept does in Hegels Logic. The concept attains its infinitude not through endless progress toward a point that always remains beyond and out of reach but through including the beyond as a beyond within itself. As Hegel puts it, The universality of the concept is the achieved beyond, whereas that bad infinity remains afflicted with a beyond which is unattainable but remains a mere progression to infinity.2 That is to say, the concept transforms an external limit into an internal one and thereby becomes both infinite and limited. The infinitude of the concept is nothing but the concepts own self-limitation. The enjoyment that the death drive produces also achieves its infinitude through self-limitation. It revolves around a lost object that exists only insofar as it is lost, and it relates to this object as the vehicle for the infinite unfurling of its movement. The lost object operates as the self-limitation of the death drive through which the drive produces an infinite enjoyment. Rather than acting as a mark of the drives finitude, the limitation that the lost object introduces provides access to infinity. A society founded on a recognition of the death drive would be one that viewed its limitations as the source of its infinite enjoyment rather than an obstacle to that enjoyment. To take the clearest and most traumatic example in recent history, the recognition of the death drive in 1930s Germany would have conceived the figure of the Jew not as the barrier to the ultimate enjoyment that must therefore be eliminated but as the internal limit through which German society attained its enjoyment. As numerous theorists have said, the appeal of Nazism lay in its ability to mobilize the enjoyment of the average German through pointing out a threat to that enjoyment. The average German under Nazism could enjoy the figure of the Jew as it appeared in the form of an obstacle, but it is possible to recognize the obstacle not as an external limit but as an internal one. In this way, the figure of the Jew would become merely a figure for the average German rather than a position embodied by actual Jews. Closer to home, one would recognize the terrorist as a figure representing the internal limit of global capitalist society. Far from serving as an obstacle to the ultimate enjoyment in that society, the terrorist provides a barrier where none otherwise exists and thereby serves as the vehicle through which capitalist society attains its enjoyment. The absence of explicit limitations within contemporary global capitalism necessitates such a figure: if terrorists did not exist, global capitalist society would have to invent them. But recognizing the terrorist as the internal limit of global capitalist society would mean the end of terrorism. This recognition would transform the global landscape and deprive would-be terrorists of the libidinal space within which to act. Though some people may continue to blow up buildings, they would cease to be terrorists in the way that we now understand the term. A self-limiting society would still have real batt les to fight. There would remain a need for this society to defend itself against external threats and against the cruelty of the natural universe. Perhaps it would require nuclear weapons in space to defend against comets or meteors that would threaten to wipe out human life on the planet. But it would cease positing the ultimate enjoyment in vanquishing an external threat or surpassing a natural limit. The external limit would no longer stand in for a repressed internal one. Such a society would instead enjoy its own internal limitations and merely address external limits as they came up. Psychoanalytic theory never preaches, and it cannot help us to construct a better society. But it can help us to subtract the illusion of the good from our own society. By depriving us of this illusion, it has the ability to transform our thinking about politics. With the assistance of psychoanalytic thought, we might reconceive politics in a direction completely opposed to that articulated by Aristotle, to whichZizalluded in the introduction. In the Politics, Aristotle asserts: Every state is a community of some kind, and every community is established with a view to some good; for everyone always acts in order to obtain that which they think good. But, if all communities aim at some good, the state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good.3 Though later political thinkers have obviously departed from Aristotle concerning the question of the content of the good society, few have thought of politics in terms opposed to the good. This is what psychoanalytic thought introduces. If we act on the basis of enjoyment rather than the good, this does not mean that we can simply construct a society that privileges enjoyment in an overt way. An open society with no restrictions on sexual activity, drug use, food consumption, or play in general would not be a more enjoyable one than our own. That is the sure path to impoverishing our ability to enjoy, as the aftermath of the 1960s has made painfully clear. One must arrive at enjoyment indirectly. A society centered around the death drive would not be a better society, nor would it entail less suffering. Rather than continually sacrificing for the sake of the good, we would sacrifice the good for the sake of enjoyment. A society centered around the death drive would allow us to recognize that we enjoy the lost object only insofar as it remains lost.

The act of demanding government change is doomed to failure because situating our demands with the state creates an addiction to refusal that maintains the worst elements of our political structuretheir framework arguments are only coherent within this perverse commitment to the status quo, and all of the purported benefits to their model of debate require the intervention of our alternative firstLundberg 12 --- Professor and Communication Strategies Consultant (Christian, Lacan in Public, Published by The University of Alabama Press, Project Muse)//trepkaOn Resistance: The Dangers of Enjoying Ones Demands The demands of student revolutionaries and antiglobalization protestors provide a set of opportunities for interrogating hysteria as a political practice. For the antiglobalization protestors cited earlier, demands to be added to a list of dangerous globophobes uncannily condense a dynamic inherent to all demands for recognition. But the demands of the Mexico Solidarity Network and the Seattle Independent Media project demand more than recognition: they also demand danger as a specific mode of representation. Danger functions as a sign of something more than inclusion, a way of reaffirming the protestors imaginary agency over processes of globalization. If danger represents an assertion of agency, and the assertion of agency is proportional to the deferral of desire to the master upon whom the demand is placed, then demands to be recognized as dangerous are doubly hysterical. Such demands are also demands for a certain kind of love, namely, the state might extend its love by recognizing the dangerousness of the one who makes the demand. At the level the demands rhetorical function, dangerousness is metonymically connected with the idea that average citizens can effect change in the prevailing order, or that they might be recognized as agents who, in the instance of the list of globalophobic leaders, can command the Mexican state to reaffirm their agency by recognizing their dangerousness. The rhetorical structure of danger implies the continuing existence of the state or governing apparatuss interests, and these interests become a nodal point at which the hysterical demand is discharged. This structure generates enjoyment of the existence of oppressive state policies as a point for the articulation of identity. The addiction to the state and the demands for the states love is also bound up with a fundamental dependency on the oppression of the state: otherwise the identity would collapse. Such demands constitute a reaffirmation of a hysterical subject position: they reaffirm not only the subjects marginality in the global system but the danger that protestors present to the global system. There are three practical implications for this formation. First, for the hysteric the simple discharge of the demand is both the beginning and satisfaction of the political project. Although there is always a nascent political potential in performance, in this case the performance of demand comes to fully eclipse the desires that animate content of the demand. Second, demand allows institutions that stand in for the global order to dictate the direction of politics. This is not to say that engaging such institutions is a bad thing; rather, it is to say that when antagonistic engagement with certain institutions is read as the end point of politics, the field of political options is relatively constrained. Demands to be recognized as dangerous by the Mexican government or as a powerful antiglobalization force by the WTO often function at the cost of addressing how practices of globalization are reaffirmed at the level of consumption, of identity, and so on or in thinking through alternative political strategies for engaging globalization that do not hinge on the state and the states actions. Paradoxically, the third danger is that an addiction to the refusal of demands creates a paralyzing disposition toward institutional politics. Grossberg has identified a tendency in left politics to retreat from the politics of policy and public debate.45 Although Grossberg identifies the problem as a specific coordination of theory and its relation to left politics, perhaps a hysterical commitment to marginality informs the impulse in some sectors to eschew engagements with institutions and institutional debate. An addiction to the states refusal often makes the perfect the enemy of the good, implying a stifling commitment to political purity as a pretext for sustaining a structure of enjoyment dependent on refusal, dependent on a kind of paternal no. Instead of seeing institutions and policy making as one part of the political field that might be pressured for contingent or relative goods, a hysterical politics is in the incredibly difficult position of taking an addressee (such as the state) that it assumes represents the totality of the political field; simultaneously it understands its addressee as constitutively and necessarily only a locus of prohibition. These paradoxes become nearly insufferable when one makes an analytical cut between the content of a demand and its rhetorical functionality. At the level of the content of the demand, the state or institutions that represent globalization are figured as illegitimate, as morally and politically compromised because of their misdeeds. Here there is an assertion of agency, but because the assertion of agency is simultaneously a deferral of desire, the identity produced in the hysterical demand is not only intimately tied to but is ultimately dependent on the continuing existence of the state, hegemonic order, or institution. At the level of affective investment, the state or institution is automatically figured as the legitimate authority over its domain. As Lacan puts it: demand in itself . . . is demand of a presence or of an absence . . . pregnant with that Other to be situated within the needs that it can satisfy. Demand constitutes the Other as already possessing the privilege of satisfying needs, that it is to say, the power of depriving them of that alone by which they are satisfied.46 One outcome of framing demand as an affective and symbolic process tied to a set of determinate rhetorical functions enjoins against the simple celebration of demands as either exclusively liberatory, as unproblematic modes of resistance, as exhausting the political, or as nodes for the production of political identity along the lines of equivalence. Alternatively, a politics of desire requires that the place of the demand in a political toolbox ought to be relativized: demands are useful as a precursor to articulating desire; they are important when moored to a broader political strategy; but they are dangerous if seen as the summum bonum of political life. A politics of desire thus functions simply as a negative constraint on the efficacy of a politics of demand, and as a practice a politics of desire asks that political subjects constantly test their demands against the measure of desire or against an explicitly owned set of political investments that envision an alternative world. It is the presence of this alternative, explicitly owned as a desired end state of the political, that might become the prerequisite for desire-based solidarities instead of demand-driven affinities, and as such, a politics of desire recognizes the inevitability and productivity of frustrated demand as part and parcel of antagonistic democratic struggle.2NCOVHuman behavior follows known scripts of desire and enjoyment, we have isolated two reasons why these tendencies preclude Affirmative solvency:A. Permissible transgression the surveillance state is structurally designed to include reforms like the affirmative in the same way that the police selectively persecute the worst traffic violations while permitting many minor infractions this contingency in legal enforcement means that the Affirmative is only furthering the system, producing a palliative enjoyment amongst reformers who perceive their progress as thrilling, without instituting any tangible policy change thats our Krips card.B. The death drive

The inevitable failure to achieve their utopian vision of [a perfectly credible surveillance state that solves all economic problems domestically and all data localization globally] is the link to our impact when desires are frustrated this produces scapegoating of marginalized populations i.e. the US would blame policy failure on the Chinese because it fits the narrative that our credibility was always already being undercut by devious commies conspiring against us with other nations as part of a broader scheme to defame America. Exacerbated racism, escalation of conflicts and repression of dissent all result from their utopian politics.FW

Alt OV

AT: Not Applicable to PolicyLacans theories are applicable to policyGunder 6Michael Gunder is an Associate Professor in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of Auckland, and is a past president of the New Zealand Planning Institute. (Lacan, Planning and Urban Policy Formation, August 22nd 2006, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/0811114042000335287, HSA)This article has illustrated that Lacans theoretical conceptualisation of human identity and desire can provide insight into urban policy formulation and implementation. Planning and its associated urban policy disciplines not only supply scientific knowledge and analysis, but also inform the publics views by providing, and even imposing, ideal master signifiers and supporting narratives that emotively, as well as rationally, frame and define what constitutes our major urban policy issues and their scope for viable reasoned resolution (Gunder, 2003b). These signifiers shape and contain the urban policy debate. They identify what is lacking, or missing, from the contemporary ideal of the good city and then supply the solution to fill this lack. Desire is a central component within this process. Urban policy master signifiers first provide points of anchor from which to construct and constrain the ego-ideal of the fledgling planner who then deploys these master signifiers as their planning policy ideals. These professional master signifiers, and the value and knowledge arrays that underwrite them, construct our strategic urban visioning narratives, plans and solutions. They shape issues as deficiencies, or as a lack, detracting from a whole, complete, good city and then provide the content of our urban policies to fill these identified deficient voids. These prescriptions, in turn, set the limits of our social realities and desires of what ought to be, at least for the production of the spaces constituting our built environments. Policy planning is not just delivering facts from the expert to the public. The initial evolution and subsequent imposition of urban policy gives rise to alienation and transmission of knowledge, resulting in group formation around shared signifiers, i.e. a doxa (Verhaeghe, 2001, p. 47). This is a common set of identity shaping beliefs that initially forms the professional identifications of planners and these beliefs are then induced onto the public as the only rational urban policy narratives for producing viable answers and city forming policy behaviours. Urban policy formulation involves the partial shaping of the publics identity as urban residents and actors through shaping their adoption of narratives and master signifiers that produce specific modes of urban behavioursi.e. urban practices and submission to regulatory compliance (Gunder, 2003b); and, as this article suggests, the resultant production and loss of pleasurejouissancethat this incurs. Yet planning and urban policy formulation should not be dismissed because they are comprised of ideological ideas that are imposed on the public. Rather their ideological nature is a consequence of policy planning b