Verbatim Mac

AT: Totality Bad

Totality good—pragmatism misrecognizes labor and capital. Totality doesn’t glaze over difference or unique experience, but rather it recognizes oppression as a concrete and identifiable structure

Ebert 5 (Teresa, Professor of Humanities at the College of Arts and Sciences at the University at Albany who specializes in Critical and Cultural Theory, Feminist Critique, Marxist Theory and Globalization Theory, “Rematerializing Feminism” http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/40404228.pdf)//meb

Pragmatism, Totalization, Totality The question of totality, today, is either rejected in the name of pragmatism or turned into a notion of totalization. For many, total- ization is not the issue - it is seen as an unavoidable aspect of theory. What matters are the purposes totalization is made to serve. But if we have to evaluate totalization purely in terms of its consequences ("the purposes it is made to serve"), we repeat pragmatism and its various narratives that truth is what works. If we accept such an operational definition of truth then it will become even more difficult to argue for a post-capitalist society that would be inclusive in its economic access and its political and cultural freedoms. In other words, a prag- matist approach to truth - which I see as basically behind the propo- sition that totalization should be judged by its consequences - will return us back to what I described in my discussion of ideology as a misrecognition of the relation of labor and capital. A pragmatist approach would have to say that such a relation is acceptable and truthful because, on the practical level, it works. It seems to me that any theorization of totalization has to be very critique-al of such prag- matism and its various versions in postmodern theory. The version of pragmatism that I just paraphrased is one developed most notably by Richard Rorty. But in his Just Gaming and the Différend, Lyotard also puts forth a version of pragmatist social theory. Lyotard's social theory takes as its point of departure his closing statement in The Postmodern Condition: "Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable" (1984, 82). The Lyotardian anti-totality social theory eventually leads to a notion of indeterminate judgement, that is to say, a judgement that is not based on any foundation of truth. This Lyotardian theory becomes the paradigm of postmodern juris- prudence in which justice is separated from truth because truth is by definition a totalization and justice has to attend to the "différend" - the "unpresentable" and the untranslatable. In contrast to a Rortyian anti-totality pragmatism and the Lyotard- ian "différend" (judgement without truth), I think a more produc- tive way to deal with totality is to go back to Lukács - a Lukács whose Hegelian idealism one should be very careful about. Lukács argues, in History and Class Consciousness, that bourgeois thought is by its very constitution detotalized and detotalizing: it is a fragmentary mode of knowing. This fragmentary consciousness he calls, in a rather ide- alist way, "false consciousness." However, my point here is not to cri- tique the way Lukács theorizes false consciousness, but rather to focus on what he proposes as the other of bourgeois thought: "concrete analysis," which means "the relation to society as a whole" (1983, 51). Totality is far from being an abstraction that forgets about specific differences (which is after all the charge postmodernism levels at totality) - it is a concrete recognition of the diverse relations that produce the social. However, as Lukács insists and, of course, as Marx himself indicated in his "Introduction" to the Grundrisse, the concrete of the totality is not identical with the empirical and the individual; this is the concrete which, "is a concentration of many determina- tions, hence a unity of the diverse" (1993, 101). For Lukács it is only by arriving at knowledge of society as a whole that it "becomes pos- sible to infer the thoughts and feelings which men would have in a particular situation if they were able to assess both it and the inter- ests arising from it in their impact on immediate action and on the whole structure of society" (1983, 51). If the purpose of cultural theory is to come to terms with not only the structures of cultural relations but also the "thoughts and feel- ings," it needs to overcome its postmodern reluctance and rigorously theorize the totality which in fact encompasses and informs particu- larity. Far from being the master-monster that it is made to be in contemporary theory, totalizing is a historical grasping of the con- crete in its diverging and divergent relations: it is a dialectical réin- scription of the abstract and the concrete, the local and the global, the particular and the general. It is this historical grasping of the concrete of labor that grounds Red Feminism.

Framework

Our interpretation is the aff must justify their representations before they get to weigh their arguments—all of our link arguments are disads to their framework.

We need to question the assumptions and representations behind the affirmative—it’s key to solving capitalism and attacking widespread problematic notions

Shantz 13 (Jeff, activist and sociologist teaching critical criminology at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, “Editorial: In Defense of Radicalism” Radical Criminology, http://journal.radicalcriminology.org/index.php/rc/article/view/34/44)//meb

In the present period few terms or ideas have been as slandered, distorted, diminished, or degraded as radical or radicalism. This is perhaps not too surprising given that this is a period of expanding struggles against state and capital, oppression and exploitation, in numerous global contexts. In such contexts, the issue of radicalism, of effective means to overcome power (or stifle resistance) become pressing. The stakes are high, possibilities for real alternatives being posed and opposed. In such contexts activists and academics must not only adequately understand radicalism, but defend (and advance) radical approaches to social change and social justice. The first known use of the term radical is in the 14th century, 1350–1400; Middle English coming from Late Latin rādīcālis, having roots. It is also defined as being very different from the usual or traditional. The term radical simply means of or going to the roots or origin. Thoroughgoing. Straightforwardly, it means getting to the root of a problem. Radicalism is a perspective, an orientation in the world. It is not, as is often mistakenly claimed, a strategy. To be radical is to dig beneath the surface of taken for granted assumptions, too easy explanations, unsatisfactory answers, and panaceas that pose as solutions to problems. Radicalism challenges and opposes status quo definitions—it refuses the selfserving justifications offered up by authority and power. Rather than a set of ideas or action,s this is a crucial approach to life. As the existential Marxist analyst Erich Fromm has suggested in an earlier context of struggle: To begin with this approach can be characterized by the motto: de omnibus dubitandum; everything must be doubted, particularly the ideological concepts which are virtually shared by everybody and have consequently assumed the role of indubitable common­sensical axioms…Radical doubt is a process; a process of liberation from idolatrous thinking; a widening of awareness, of imaginative, creative vision of our possibilities and options. The radical approach does not occur in a vacuum. It does not start from nothing, but it starts from the roots. (1971, vii) As is true for much of views and practices in class divided capitalist society, there are two distinct perspectives on radicalism, two meanings of radicalism. From the first perspective of radicalism as a getting to the roots—going to the source of problems —the nature of capital must be understood, addressed, confronted—overcome. Ending capital’s violence can only be achieved by ending the processes essential to its existence: exploitation, expropriation, dispossession, profit, extraction, possession of the commons, of nature. And how can this be accomplished? Capital and states know—they understand. Thus, the identification of those acts outlined above—identified, precisely, as radical.