1NC vs Xu

1NC - OFF
Removing military presence increases virtualized militarism. This hand-sanitizer war
escapes public scrutiny but necessitates violent liquidation for political gain. In fact,
commanders would rather fight without troops on the ground, because they do more
and lose less.
Waldman 17 (Thomas Waldman, Senior Lecturer in International Security Studies at the Department
of Security Studies and Criminology, Macquarie University, 12-5-2017, accessed on 2-18-2021, Taylor &
Francis, "Vicarious warfare: The counterproductive consequences of modern American military
practice", https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13523260.2017.1393201?
journalCode=fcsp20)

Even if the rhetoric of “progress” and “victory” must still be produced for public consumption, Smith’s
observation that armed forces are increasingly expected to establish “conditions” was indicative of emerging thinking.
Policy-makers, at least in the current context, increasingly approach the instrumentality of warfare less in
terms of securing decisive victories through the defeat of enemies in battle, and more as a tool to
selectively manage a disparate range of dangers, threats, and risks (Rasmussen, 2006). These trends are apparent in
the profusion of decision methodologies adopted by governments, such as risk analysis and scenario planning,
and the language employed in official policy papers. Further, the growing juridification of war has made the use of force
subject to various rules and restrictions, closely policed by monitoring organizations, which potentially
limits freedom of action and raises the prospect of prosecution—yet more problems requiring vicarious
mitigation. Porter (2015) has convincingly demonstrated the illusory quality of the many ominous risks that “globalists”
claim threaten Western societies. Byman and McCants (2017) similarly argue that, contrary to appearances, 6 contemporary
terrorist threat is significantly exaggerated. Yet, whether or not global modernity has actually given rise to a proliferation of strategic dangers is
not the focus of this paper. The important point is that it is the
perception among politicians that they are assailed both
internally and externally by all manner of inescapable risks (such as electoral defeat due to casualty aversion or attacks by
messianic terrorists armed with Weapons of Mass Destruction), however apocryphal or overblown, which has crucially
served to shape war-making behaviors and decision-making patterns. These political imperatives are
exacerbated in a security landscape characterized principally by limited wars of choice, or as Dandeker (2010)
puts it “contested choice” (p. 29). The uncertain nature of both threats and objectives in divisive small wars
compounds the difficulty of justifying to skeptical, “post-heroic” populations the sacrifices required (H.
Smith, 2005). Securing the legitimacy necessary to persist in lengthy military commitments is thus deeply
problematic. The obscurity of interests at stake, combined with instant media reaction, has the effect of
disproportionately magnifying even marginal setbacks that might in other contexts be judged acceptable. With
accountability and political competition as major determinants of behavior, politicians in advanced
democracies are notably sensitive to the political implications of war (Allen, 2007, p. 117; Morgan & Campbell, 1991,
p. 187). Beholden to electoral timetables, facing demands for the immediate satisfaction of citizens’ expectations, and operating “under
the arc-light scrutiny of the international media” (Kilcullen, 2009, p. 4), decision-makers tend to act based on
calculations of immediate utility and the minimization of political costs at the expense of long-term
consequence. Meanwhile, the exorbitant cost and huge scale of public resources that need to be diverted for large-scale
missions have become politically intolerable in an era of economic austerity (Bunker, 2013/2014, pp. 57–58; Malkesian &
Weston, 2012, p. 111). Soldiers represent millions of dollars of investment and high-tech weapons systems are at once incredibly lethal but also
fragile and vulnerable to low-cost offsetting tactics. In short, valuable
personnel and equipment must be preserved,
protected, and employed selectively. In coping with these contemporary dilemmas, politicians inevitably look for ways
to prevent serious security incidents which might jeopardize their hold on power while keeping the necessary measures
economically affordable, socially acceptable, legally permissible, and politically viable. According to this view, there is a
balance to be struck between doing too much or too little—one extreme is deemed too costly, leading to the proliferation
of countless unintended consequences; the other is seen as politically risky, tantamount to taking one’s hands off the wheel as the nation drives
toward the cliff edge. In this light, emerging technologies, covert instruments, and opportunities afforded by the
expanding market in private military services, all appear to provide ready-made means for handling a
range of risks and threats. Responsibility is increasingly delegated to those explicitly designed to take
considerable risks (special forces), those regarding whom the public is relatively ambivalent about sending
into harm’s way (private contractors), or those who seemingly have the capacity to sweep risk under the
carpet (intelligence agencies). So, the prospect of obtaining security on the cheap, or even transcending risk, becomes
the modern philosopher’s stone—a quest sustained by a messianic faith in the opportunities provided by
new technologies, reinforced by the flattering lessons of recent military operations that appear to fit the
vicarious mold, and exacerbated by old-fashioned hubris, wishful thinking, and overconfidence. These all
lead decision-makers to believe that force can be applied economically, at arm’s length, and in
discrete, limited, and controllable ways, evading various risks and restraints. Through the core mechanisms of
delegation, danger-proofing, and darkness, vicarious warfare can be understood as the tactical
manifestation of seeking to fight war without the people, without political or legal consequence, and on an
indefinite basis. As the following section demonstrates, it is also a dangerous illusion. “3D defense”: vicarious warfare in practice
The preceding section considered some of the prominent explanations for the emergence and persistence of vicarious warfare. Building on this
foundation, this section will expose its manifestations in practice to further scrutiny, with the aim of uncovering its central dynamics and the
manner in which selfharming consequences are repeatedly generated. The three “Ds” outlined below represent short-hand
means for conceiving of a range of disparate practices, organized into workable categories for the purpose of analytical clarity. They should not
be understood as entirely comprehensive. They represent only the most prominent and consequential elements of a mode of warfare that in
reality encompasses a range of specific practices, operational measures, and technologies. It is also important to note that there exists a
significant overlap between the categories. In operational terms, there are strong connections and dependencies between the three areas. So,
core special forces missions include working with surrogate forces and designating targets for long-
range missile attack; a significant portion of lethal drone strikes have been conducted as covert “targeted killing” operations
directed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In this respect, the human or institutional agents of delegation, danger-
proofing, and darkness may be one and the same. Despite such blurred boundaries and mutual dependencies, the focus
here is on their unique attributes as distinct modes of behavior, and important consequences can be traced back to the unique features of the
individual areas. Their collective harmful impact in terms of efforts to promote American security will be considered in the conclusion.
Delegation A central element of vicarious warfare involves shifting the burden of risk and responsibility onto others—as
such, delegation refers to the contemporary pattern of increasingly externalizing the burden of war (Krieg, 2016) and contracting out security
tasks to an assortment of proxy actors beyond the regular armed forces (Bruneau, 2013, pp. 638–665; Mumford, 2013, p. 45). The
“risks of
ground combat, on the Western/US side, are transferred to local allies,” such as private military and
security companies, local security forces, or irregular militias (Shaw, 2002, p. 349). This allows the true costs of war
to be partially hidden. Porch (2014) suggests the use of proxies can “lower the political and financial costs of
intervention by desensitizing home populations to the human overheads of foreign adventures” (p. 700).
Enthusiastic commentators and, not least, official doctrinal publications promote the utility of irregular forces (Cassidy, 2006, pp. 47–62; U.S.
Army and Marine Corps, 2006, pp. 122, 153, 193). Operationally, militias can provide the local knowledge, indigenous legitimacy, and force
density required to pacify peripheral areas of a country—understood as essential in counterinsurgency—especially where foreign presence is
believed to drive resistance (Byman, 2006, 87– 88). Others propose leveraging contingents of advisers to build up foreign security forces
(Malkesian & Weston, 2012, pp. 111–121). Private contractors, it is claimed, act as valuable “force multipliers.” These rationales all appear
superficially persuasive. However, the
empirical record, especially when considered over the long term, presents a less
positive picture. The most detached scholarship is profoundly skeptical. Tellingly, although military contractors and
Western-aligned surrogate forces are increasingly familiar on the contemporary battlefield , often such
outsourcing has been employed as a form of “expedient cooptation” (Vlahos, 2007, p. 7) to rescue faltering missions as public support declines:
ready-made instruments for salvaging sunk costs or forestalling imminent mission collapse (Hughes, 2016, p. 198; Krieg, 2016, p. 102; Sedra,
2006, pp. 94–95). The exponential rise of the private security industry, to the extent that in some contexts contractors have
outnumbered American servicemen by three to one, is well documented (Avant, 2005; Zenko, 2015). This development has various
drivers—a major one being the strong demand among policy-makers for functions enabling them to fight war vicariously. The key issue here is
that, while they appear to allow Western elites to buy political capital in exchange for huge financial outlays, the return on their investment is
questionable at best. It is true that contractor casualties often escape public attention, thus shielding policy-makers
from unwelcome press (Avant & Sigelman, 2010, pp. 243–249; Schooner, 2008, pp. 78–91). Nevertheless, incidents involving
contractors still generate harmful consequences—consider, for instance, the U.S. reaction to the Blackwater contractor killings in
CONTEMPORARY SECURITY POLICY 9 Downloaded by [University of Florida] at 04:38 05 December 2017 March 2004, which led to the ill-fated
first battle of Fallujah (Ricks, 2006, p. 332). Similarly, contractor abuses levy a “heavy soft-power cost” and undermine efforts to secure popular
support in theatre. Reliance on private firms draws qualified personnel away from local security forces, frustrates efforts to forge a legitimate
state monopoly of violence, and, absent publicly provided security, citizens are increasingly compelled to rely on sectarian militias and
protection rackets (Friedrichs & Friesendorf, 2009, pp. 43–46). Experts also express concern regarding the increased outsourcing of what were
traditionally strictly in-house functions, such as intelligence collection and interrogation, which limits the transparency necessary for
democratic debate on strategy or the oversight required to restrain executive adventurism (Avant &
Sigelman, 2010; Perry, 2012, pp. 41–55). Friedrichs and Friesendorf (2009) conclude that the benefits of outsourcing “are
either specious or fleeting, and its costs are massive and manifest” (p. 48).

Withdrawal perfects the transition to socially distanced war, because it assumes a

territorial basis for violence that no longer exists. Crises has become diffused as a
discontinuous global non-event, but mapping affective energies towards specific
flashpoints ensures that extinction is inevitable.
Merrin 20 (William Merrin – Associate Professor in Media Studies at Swansea University.
“Anthropocenic war: coronavirus and total demobilization” Digi War. 2020 Jun 5 : 1–14
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7273126/, DOA: 3/11/21, ebb)

The hyperconnected world of global travel and contact will take a long time to recover and as with
domestic life, much that can be transferred online will be. International conflict will not end but one
possibility is nations will be more inward looking and less interested in others. On 12 May, it was revealed, for example,
that the UK’s National Security Council had not met since January, with the government focused on covid-

19 (Sabbagh 2020). Military action may be more difficult with the expected slashing of military budgets and a
possible mindset that might resent spending on international action or aid when the domestic economy
remains to be fixed (Warrell 2020). The emphasis may shift, therefore, to strengthening the national and civilian infrastructure in anticipation of future
human, or human-created threats. Military action is also physically difficult right now, with the need for social distancing impacting on

military bases, ships and submarines, on training and exercises, and parades and future operations.

But that
is why we can expect an acceleration of one particular trend in warfare. Since the 1991 Gulf
War, with the allied air supremacy that allowed them to bomb with utter impunity, through the zero-casualty
aerial 1999 NATO Kosovo War, to the development of drones, the USA has led the way in socially-distanced
warfare. We can expect to see the post-covid-19 explosion, therefore, of drones, surrogate robotics
and autonomous systems, all controlled from remote shipping containers or box-room
bunkers. This will be a new phase of clean war, defined now not by the absence of civilian casualties
but by the hand sanitizer available for the next shift of pilots and the plastic screen between them and
the camera and weapons operators. Here, the act of washing one’s hands before taking over the controls will take on a macabre moral
dimension.

There are other reasons why conflict may have an expanded future. In a world where international powers are more reluctant to intervene, regional powers will
have far more leeway to pursue their aims. China’s ongoing actions in the South China Sea (Nicol 2020) and imposition of new security laws in Hong Kong (Kuo and
Davidson 2020) are one example of this, but others have seen the opportunity. Data analytics company Babel Street recorded an apparent increase in military
activity in May by Iran. Despite being badly hit by covid-19, Iran’s support for offensive cyber-operations and for proxy forces in Yemen and Iraq rose in the previous
2 weeks (Tucker 2020a).

International conflict has continued online during the pandemic. Already poor US–Chinese relations have worsened, as
Trump tries to direct domestic anger towards China and as China tries to divert international attention from the virus’s origins and their poor handling of medical

reports.This has all the making of a new, viral, respiratory cold war . As the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security
Agency noted, ‘China and other authoritarian governments have promoted false claims about the origins of the virus in an attempt to shift blame overseas and
divide free societies against themselves’, using tactics such as ‘censoring news, injecting false narratives onto social media platforms and promoting slick
government-produced videos’ (Baksh 2020). On 29 April, for example, China’s state-run news agency Xinhua posted an animated video titled ‘Once Upon a Virus’,
showing Lego-like figures representing China and the US trading barbs at each other, with the US Statue of Liberty getting progressively sicker whilst claiming ‘The
virus is not dangerous. But millions of Chinese are dead. Even though the virus is not dangerous. We are correct. Even though we contradict ourselves’
(Timsit 2020). This was not traditional state propaganda. Designed as viral, sharable social media content, this was troll-warfare. Instead of a hot war, China had
launched a burn war against the USA. It did not matter that its own claims were false, here you win with the lulz.

Beyond China, Russia and Iran were also using the opportunity to extend their online disinformation campaigns against the west (Beaumont et al. 2020;
Tucker 2020b). Even cyberwar was changing, with espionage now targeting not military, political or economic secrets, but research into the coronavirus and
vaccines, as reports emerged of China, Russia and Iran hacking western laboratories (Cole 2020a, b; Davidson 2020). Overall, we can expect computer network
exploitation (CNE), disinformation, propaganda and trolling to continue with, perhaps, greater impact.

The post-covid-19 era has the potential for considerable national economic, political and social instability, including backlashes against governments and their
responses, the scapegoating of particular groups, unrest at the economic impact so soon after the 2008 crash and its enforced ‘austerity’, and a more nationalist,
isolationist, anti-globalitarian mood. The UK lockdown, for example, prompted a surge in hate crimes against Asian communities (Grierson 2020), and continuing
anger, hostility and fear seem likely to be one inheritance of this crisis. The entire post-covid-19 world will be more unpredictable and more volatile. The virus did

not affect each nation the same, and within each country, the responses of governments and populations will be different. Globally, an already
fragile world order—still recovering from the 2008 crash, suffering the after-effects of the ‘War on
Terror’, facing the reassertion of Russian power and the rise of China and India, hit by the retreat of
liberal democracy, the success of populist strongmen leaders and ethno-nationalist movements, and
struggling with long-term civil wars, refugees and immigration flows, climate change and a US
president pursuing an unpredictable, random and often-dangerous foreign policy—will only
become more unstable. If the seismic political shift of the fall of Communism in 1991 led many to speculate about a possible ‘New World
Order’, the seismic political shift of covid-19 brings the possibility of an epoch-defining New World Disorder.

H. G. Wells’ 1897 novel The War of the Worlds told the story of the Martian invasion of earth and the alien’s eventual defeat, not by human hands, but ‘by the
putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared’ (Wells 2019). The book was an attack on hubris, using ‘invasion literature’ to
question both evolutionary theory and imperialism and the idea that humanity in general, and Victorian, colonial Britain in particular, were superior to all others: for
how superior were we if we had to be saved by ‘the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth’? Actually, bacteria were not the smallest
things—it would take years before the much smaller viruses were discovered—but Wells was correct about our hubris. Although in his ‘scientific romance’ these
bacteria were our ‘microscopic allies’, we failed, in the subsequent years, to take seriously the threat of these microbial forces. Covid-19 was a reminder of the
power of the world and our place within it. With this anthropogenic pandemic, The War of the Worlds gave way to its inevitable sequel: the War of the World.

Why the battle against covid-19 and the concept of Anthropocenic War are important is because they help us recognize that, from now on, human conflict
will be increasingly accompanied by, exacerbated or even sparked by anthropogenic environmental
factors. Environmental change or phenomena will increasingly impact upon human societies, destabilizing
them, creating poverty and increasing political violence and competition. Hence, the Anthropocene has
definitively announced itself as the final global superpower, replacing the limited realms of human state power
with its own, singular, environmental force. The aftershocks of covid-19 will be serious, as it spreads through the global south, as it
pits nations into competition, as it introduces new pressures into areas already riven by natural disasters, civil war, or

political extremism, as it impacts domestically on each nation’s economy, politics and world view and as it destabilizes the international order.
Given the likelihood of more pandemics to come and the growing impact of anthropogenic environmental problems, the first Anthropocenic war will not be the last.
The war of the world will continue.
Anti-war stances have fallen for the communicative trap of affirming war’s reality.
Rivera 20 (Alex Rivera, Western Kentucky University. “Baudrillard and the Viral Violence of Cyber
Security” https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1851&context=stu_hon_theses,
DOA: 3/7/21, ebb)

It is important to question what the end point of this supposed war is supposed to be. What seems to separate
war from a slaughter or extermination is the struggle of somewhat evenly matched adversaries to contest control over territory or some
material thing. If
fighting for victory on the ground was the defining feature of many of the early wars of the
20th century, is it even possible to define the present global violence as war? This is not to insinuate a
mere semantic distinction between the flexibility of executive waged conflict versus congressionally declared war, but something else entirely.
Twentyfirst century warfare has been marked by the defeat of the more traditional notion of war-as-
fighting, ushering in the triumphant rise of non-war. Extreme instability and the propensity for a conflict
to expand past the scope of anything demarcated in advance has vanished. There is a complete loss of event;
Baudrillard argues that “anything that can occur must be predicted in advance, exterminated in advance” (qtd. in Bishop, 2009). War, which
is executed as an omnipotent model, like discussed above, is a virtual affair that deters anything real from taking place. It can
essentially be described as a “[…] deterrence of the real by the virtual” (Baudrillard, 1997). All that is left is a convincing screenplay
of conflict that goes through the motions, desperate to convince the population of its own reality. “Film becomes war,” argues
Baudrillard “the two united by their shared overflowing of technology” (qtd. in Shapiro, 2014). In an entirely enclosed set, soldiers drop a few
bombs for the cameras, fire shots for the reporters, and hack some infrastructure for news websites. The extravagant set pieces show an
eagerness to demonstrate the clear victory of one side but are eerily desperate to prove that there is indeed a war taking place. It
is not an
evenly matched duel with some amount of luck or spontaneous strategic thinking to determine the
victor, but an entirely asymmetric affair; the more unequal, the more useful the film. Defeat of the model is never actually at
stake; that would imply a lapse in control and the potentiality for an event to occur. Screenwriters for the global media apparatus nevertheless
tease out the dramatic implications of military defeat, keeping the domestic population’s eyes glued to the storyline on the screen. For
Baudrillard, this disappearance is not just of the physical referent, but also marks the symbolic disappearance of the body, leaving a void of
subjectivity and social relations in the processing of war (Nordin & Öberg, 2014). There is a famous example he uses throughout his works from
the novel The Supermale by Alfred Jarry to describe the vanishing limits between technological structuring and human beings. It depicts a
10,000- mile bicycle race between a five-man bicycle and a train. Together, the cyclist’s function as a single machine to race the train, but in
doing so lose their humanity along the way. One of the cyclists literally dies of exhaustion, yet his corpse keeps on riding to perform the task,
which illustrates the bodies disappearing into the process itself (Nordin & Öberg, 2014). In Jarry’s novel, the individual human, their particular
characteristics, and their relation to anything except the repetitive completion of the process become irrelevant as they achieve machine-like
synchronization. Cyber war interconnects with a plethora of military strategies to form a unified model
capable of being consistently executed across all domains of combat without failure. Importantly, this
achieves complete asymmetry over the adversary, like a game tutorial that lays out a linear progression of moves for the
player to achieve victory. The “[…] seamless economy of violence”, Baudrillard argues, is “[…] a systemic violence which stems from the
way in which war is operationalised" (Nordin & Öberg, 2014). Our focus on particular battles perhaps
masks the more destructive nature of perfecting an obscenely specific model . In recent years the
United States national security establishment has mapped and labeled the critical infrastructures of society – assets of the utmost importance
that could potentially be threatened by a cyberattack (Smith, 2013). The role of military planners is then to repeatedly apply postures like
‘defend forward’ or the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) framework to each sector. This is likened to an instruction
manual for winning the cyber war, complete with an evolving checklist of actions that must be taken to defeat cyberterrorism in every area
before it ever takes place. New symbols and steps to the model are consistently added, piling onto its excess of meaning and information,
making the war more unreal. To
be real there would have to be a potential for something new to happen,
something that is not predicted, anticipated, and simulated from the outset by the model. Yet, as it is
constantly shown on military newsletters, offensive and defensive postures around these checklists have become the principal mission of both
the Cybercommand and Department of Homeland Security, who strive to perfect war by crossing off each step to completion. There is
nothing spontaneous or reactive about the execution of this strategy, which would imply a lapse in the model’s
calculated control. This is where one can begin to see the horrendous violence of these omnipotent models. When there is no luck or
desperation to speak of in war, it is akin to playing cards with a person who gets to know every move
and card before it is played. Despite military language of preemption creating global peace,
abolishing mysteriousness does not end the violence of war, it allows one side to discover
variance from the model and violently respond in anticipation of some terroristic act taking
place (Bishop, 2009: 62). It seems the justification for all modern conflicts tend to follow this formula:
create a blueprint (or simulation) of reality that ascribes global peace, amass intelligence (or
information) to make that model become reality, and preemptively shutdown any event that may
confound such a reality. This is precisely the pretense for the Iraq War “[…] whose aim was nominally the
prevention in advance of Saddam’s use of weapons of mass destruction” (Bishop, 2009: 62). The chance for
the model of global non-proliferation to be violated became the justification for United States force, but
even an invasion like this lacks any reality because it is also contained in the model. The complex diagrams of Afghanistan stability which went
viral in 2010 absurdly listed every process necessary to win the war in immense detail (Nordin & Öberg, 2014). From the perspective, it is easy
to see why a cyber
war will never take place. Any supposed war will reiterate what has already been
simulated or, with cyberweapons being increasingly categorized as weapons of mass destruction, be a
banal rehash of a scripted preemptive war. With the dominant execution of the virtual model leaving a
ghost of what war used to be, it is no longer clear what is being fought over. In the new era of conflict,
the real power does not lie within the strategic geopolitics of controlling territory. It is not the
occupation of land or cities that is being threatened but, in a sense, occupation of the hearts and minds
of billions across the globe. The new game of deterrence posits “[…] all of us as information hostages on the world media stage”, and
our fervent belief is the action which is threatened (Baudrillard, 1997). Models and simulations are destructive insofar as our dedication and
belief in them drives their violent imposition onto reality. This is a marked shift from the old deterrence regime, which was reliant on the virtual
excess of destructive capabilities (Baudrillard, 1997). Instead, the exchange value is now the hostage, whose commitment to networking and
consuming information must be won through media bombardment. It is not as if some god-like figure has structured the entire system of
symbolic exchange, but rather it is a shared consequence “[…] to a will to information, to a will to meaning […]” (Artrip & Debrix, 2014). Our
desire to know everything about the war, to render every event meaningful, and to endlessly
speculate over it manifests in mass global violence . In a sense, we are all simultaneously hostages to the global
media apparatus while also being integral supporters of the violence it enacts. The implications of what this means for the individual who
consumes media to formulate a criticism of military action is perhaps where Baudrillard faces the staunchest academic opposition. It seems
difficult to stand against military imperialism without being well informed about current events. Thus, it is frustrating to many academics who
understand his critique to be “[…] passive indifference […]” which would result in “[…] epistemic closure […]” (Lovink, 2013). It is easy to see
how nihilism or complete callousness to global violence could be interpreted from his texts. However, there is a high degree of nuance to
Baudrillard’s argument that makes it quite defensible. First, dissent is always accommodated in symbolic exchange because consuming
the media’s information, even when using it to criticize the war, is caught in the trap of affirming the
war’s reality. In fact, the public is exposed to this ineffective informative binary quite consistently; FOX News versus CNN, and Breitbart
versus NBC demonstrate a few polarizing examples. For Baudrillard, there would be no radical potential in affirming

CNN’s oppositional stance toward the conflict. To be for or against particular

wars merely
completes the great tautology, presupposing its own existence in the debate. This
is sort of likened to the argumentative logical fallacy begging the question, which assumes the conclusion in its premises. When
Baudrillard writes just prior to the invasion of Iraq, “[…] this war is a nonevent, and it is absurd to come
to a conclusion about a nonevent”, he is criticizing that type of self-positing certitude which refuses to
question the reality of the event (Baudrillard, 2003). Second, such an oppositional stance is often just as
complicit in global violence, like the aforementioned example in his essay War Porn. Viewing and publicly criticizing the images from
the Abu Ghraib prison merely completed its violence because their potential to symbolically exterminate the prisoners were reliant on being
facts and information about the war, even when they are
globally viewed. Third, in less grotesque cases, amassing
critical, simply contribute to the scope of military models. To expand these media representations of war, rendering
what is unknown meaningful and visible, is to be complicit in the precoding of war . Asymmetric
combat emerges from models with excessive information; producing new knowledge about the
potential ramifications of the war would simply be integrated into the model, where a counterstrategy
can be written in before the event takes place. As Baudrillard describes it, “we are not, however, in danger of
lacking meaning; […] we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us ” (qted. in Artrip & Debrix, 2014). Who better to
absolve the informative lapses in the model than the harshest critics of a conflict? Fourth, another
perspective or piece of
information about the war does not end the global violence, it amasses the oversaturated
pile of information that is indifferently exchanged on a global level . These images and representations of
war are information, and information does not necessarily result in truth or certainty; it actually makes the event far less certain. For example,
when CNN submits a claim about cyber war, it begets a counterclaim or response from FOX News and
thousands of other media outlets. The
result is not a clear and singular narrative, but an explosion of
discourse that makes us less certain about any truth or validity and cyclically drives us to
acquire even more information. Our end goal becomes entirely self-defeating because “information devours
its own content”, it is dissuasive instead of persuasive to the population (Baudrillard,
1981). It is not that knowing more about cyber war gets us any closer to penetrating the truth of the event, but instead locks us into the process

Any contemporary mechanism of

of information searching, which is only a function of immersion in the virtual.

criticizing cyber war fails to plot a way out of its extensive violence.
The alternative is to affirm war as stasis.
Von Boemcken 16 (Marc von Boemcken – Senior Researcher at Bonn international Centre for
Conversion. “Unknowing the unknowable. From ‘critical war studies’ to a critique of war” Critical
Military Studies, 2:3, 226-241 (2016)
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/23337486.2016.1178493?
casa_token=cDQCbvC4q_EAAAAA:jGdl3YcBtaBhNyX94_pZB4HEXSfSC0_jL5poJLw22gr_hfeY2OKY2S9sQ2
PKZBv7tsDEqDueYb02gw, DOA: 1/30/21) liz

‘War is impossible, and yet it takes place. But the fact that it takes places in no way detracts from its
impossibility’. This acute statement by Jean Baudrillard conveys an important insight: War defies rational comprehension;
nevertheless, it becomes rationalized. Or, as Baudrillard went on: ‘The system is absurd and yet it functions. But the fact that it
functions in no way detracts from its absurdity’ (2006, 25). If we accept the premise of war as a fundamentally ‘absurd’
undertaking, we need to acknowledge a deep-seated paradox: Although wars are widely condemned and outlawed,
they continue unabated, fought as fiercely and cruel as ever. Why? Given the nearly universal
consensus on the undesirability of war, should it not be the easiest thing in the world to confine this
absurdity, once and for all, to the ash heap of history, to turn swords into ploughshares? Critical
engagements, concerned with ostensible ‘root causes’, economics, power, biology, human psychology,
and so forth, can fill entire libraries. Why have they had so little impact? Are they barking up the wrong tree? Or,
rather: Are they possibly missing a far more fundamental issue at stake here – that is, the ‘impossibility’
and ‘absurdity’ of war itself? Modern rejections of war are by and large indebted to Enlightenment
thought. In his ‘Encyclopedia’, Denis Diderot recognized in war the ‘fruit of man’s depravity’, a ‘convulsive and violent sickness of the body
politic’ (2012, 76). The task is thus to find a cure to the disease: to impose order onto chaos, to civilize, to pacify. However, and to further
complicate matters, recent critical interventions have severely questioned the ethical foundation of this perspective. Drawing on thinkers as
diverse as Michel Foucault, Karl Marx, or Baruch Spinoza, they argue that those very efforts to eliminate war go a long way in actually
generating it in the first place: the ‘liberal way of war’ (Dillon and Reid 2009), war as ‘pacification’ (Neocleous 2014), ‘peace as war’ (Polat
2010). War is a rational practice of violent social ordering, purifying, homogenizing – of universally enforcing a certain imagination of ‘peace’
and ‘security’. A second camp of academics follows Carl von Clausewitz and locates the ‘ontology’ of war in ‘fighting’. Calling for a ‘critical war
studies’, Tarak Barkawi and Shane Brighton emphasize its constitutive ‘excess’. ‘War’, we are told, ‘is a generative force like no other’ (2011,
126). More than mere pacification and the enforcement of order, it is a ‘destroyer and maker of truths’ (127), which has the ‘capacity to rework
the reality of social and political existence’ (136). Both interventions challenge the Enlightenment view of war as the radical antithesis of an
ordered social life or ‘peace’. The first suggests a trajectory from order to violence, the second from violence to order. If they are combined
with each other, a fairly pessimistic picture begins to take shape: War makes and remakes order, and yet, any such order continues to wage
war. To be sure, the argument here does not refute the validity of any of these important critical contributions. They actually correspond, it will
be suggested, to the cycle of ‘mythical’ violence that Walter Benjamin outlines in his famous essay ‘Critique of violence’ (1986). Following
Benjamin, this article does, however, question whether such ‘mythical’ accounts alone suffice for formulating a ‘critique’ of war proper. The
first part considers the ‘peace as war’ or ‘police war’ argument. It agrees that
a perspective of war as some kind of
barbarism is dangerous to the extent that it tends to excite pacifying ‘wars against war’. Yet what follows from
this insight? Do we need a different understanding of war? For many critics this question is not of primary importance, since they are less
concerned with ‘war’ as such than with a critique of the order in the name of which wars are waged, be it bio-politics or capitalism.
Nevertheless, the logical counter-perspective is all too obvious: Instead of being condemned as the epitome of unreason, war ought to be
rationalized as the reciprocal encounter between opposing forces. Is this what ‘critical war studies’ does? Astrid Nordin and Dan Öberg have

the
criticized Barkawi and Brighton on precisely these grounds. With reference to Baudrillard, they claim that such a viewpoint contributes to

imagination of war as a comprehensible and thus ‘real’ object of knowledge – a

reasonable choice, a possible course of action, a social reality (2015). The critical study of war
runs into the danger of becoming complicit with the construction of war itself. The
second part of the argument shares this concern with proposing something like a rational ontology of war and conflict, especially if it is also
presented as a ‘generative’ force. Its intellectual centre of gravity is not so much encountered in ‘critical war studies’, however, as in Nazi
Germany. It runs through a line of thought that can be traced from Carl Schmitt over Martin Heidegger to Erich Ludendorff. As will be argued,
the attempt to ‘tame’ war in this manner might actually result in a delirious call for ‘total war’. Is there a way of avoiding such dangerous
pitfalls? The proposal of Chantal Mouffe (2005) and others to solve this problem by shifting from ‘antagonistic’ to ‘agonistic’ encounters is not
fully satisfying, since it continues to rely on some measure of disciplinary and violent policing (see Shinko 2008). Hence, the following question
emerges: Can the critique of ‘police war’ be reconciled with a critique of the ontology of war more generally? Although building on the thoughts
of Nordin and Öberg, the third part suggests that we do not necessarily need Baudrillard to answer this question. Indeed, Barkawi’s and
Brighton’s careful reading of von Clausewitz already goes some way in this direction: War is never fully rational, never a mere instrument in the
service of independent political aims; beset by the forces of radical contingency and chance, it destroys orders as much as it creates them anew.
To set this position clearly apart from the vindicators of war in Nazi Germany, it is helpful to consider Benjamin’s notion of ‘divine’ violence,
which he places in opposition to the ‘mythical’ rationalization of war. Reading Benjamin, the
article concludes that a critique of
war ought to return to the Enlightenment premise of war as unknowable chaos and disorder. The
problem is not the imagination of war that this perspective evokes, for it effectively guards us against a
line of reasoning that culminates in ‘total war’. The problem, rather, is with the conclusion drawn from
this. War, that is, should not be negated and fought in ‘police wars’; instead, we should affirm war in its
unintelligibility, its impossibility.

[van Boemcken continues]

A critique of war needs to be premised on the unconditional affirmation of stasis . Against those futile
attempts to ‘tame’, rationalize, and instrumentalize war, transform it from stasis into polemos, Enlightenment thinkers
rightly stressed the endurance of unreason in any human war. Only, to the extent that they perceived ‘unreason’ as something ‘bad’, as
something to be opposed, violently suppressed, and ultimately eliminated, they actually did little more than help to conceive and legitimize a
particular kind of polemos themselves: a limitless ‘war against war’ or ‘law-preserving’ police war that seeks to enforce and expand a
proclaimed imagination of universal order or ‘reason’ against uncivilized savages. The same problem applies to those recent calls for a
supposedly non-violent politics of ‘agonistic’ encounter. The critical counterperspective of polemos as a constitutive or ‘law-making’ violent
conflict between ‘real’ political enemies is not much better, however. There is no guarantee that the will to survival and self-assertion in a
hostile and deeply antagonistic world results in the kind of bounded or ‘tamed’ war envisioned by Schmitt. Indeed, and more than any other

constructs and invents the notion of ‘war’ in the first place:

perspective, this position explicitly

war-making and the preparation for war as a reasonable, even necessary, thing
to do. ‘Tamed war’ may quickly become ‘total war’. Organized violence remains deeply implicated in every single
‘mythical’ epistemology of war as polemos. What, then, comes of it if we decide to affirm war as stasis,
as belonging to the sphere of what Benjamin called the ‘divine’? Such a perspective would negate any effort to render war
polemos; it fully recognizes that war cannot be ‘tamed’ in a reasonable manner, that it cannot be
employed as an instrument, that it cannot be known, that it lacks a secure ontological foundation in
the political whereupon the decision to ‘go to war’ could be consistently justified or even imagined. At
the very same time, it consciously embraces stasis – uncertainty, contingency, unintelligibility, chaos, a
reversal of values, even; it condemns any effort to police life. The political, political life, and being
itself become conceived as celebrated sites of irreducible difference and self-destruction. This is still far
from a concrete political vision, to be sure. Moreover, and unless we side with Rousseau, the affirmation of stasis does not
necessarily entail an end to all violence. It does, however, foreclose the organization of violence for
rationally construed ends. If stasis was ‘absolute war’ for von Clausewitz, it was nevertheless not real, a mere abstraction. The
‘reality’ of war only emerges once it becomes ‘tamed’ as polemos. The critical intervention consists in denying the possibility of containing war
in this manner, in claiming that war, although it exists, is stasis nevertheless: that it is at the same time real and impossible.
The move from ‘critical war studies’ to a critique of war emphasizes precisely this paradox. When Nordin and Öberg (2015) take issue with the
way in which Barkawi and Brighton (2011) locate the ‘ontology of war’ in ‘fighting’, they are certainly correct in warning against any move that
purports to speak a single ‘truth’ of war. A growing body of literature demonstrates that war – as a corporeal, human experience – has multiple
‘truths’ attached to it, and the experience of ‘fighting’ might just be one amongst many others (Sylvester 2012; Parashar 2013). War has no
intrinsic ontology independent from the ways in which various war-stories are mediated and processed, in turn continually reproducing (or
simulating) the idea of war as something that ‘really’ exists, as something that can be known and
applied. This, however, is nothing but the ‘myth’ of polemos, and we might be well advised to follow Benjamin and insist on the ‘divine’ force
of stasis that is the only ‘true’ sovereign of war. Doing so entails an acceptance of the impossibility of ‘knowing’ war, of naming and verifying a
single ‘truth’ of war. Or, to put it another way: We
need to realize that war is truth, a non-truth, a truth-machine,
incessantly undoing and reprocessing truth and thereby drawing immediate attention to the
hopelessness of conceiving and articulating any forever stable and absolute ontology. Barkawi and Brighton
emphasize ‘fighting’, because they want to draw attention to precisely this sense of unpredictable un/making. Yet they concede themselves
that ‘knowledge about war is never fully exterior to an order war itself creates’ (2011, 135, my emphasis). Even
the statement that ‘war is fighting’ may well be eventually undone by war. In a very fundamental manner, war escapes human intelligibility. A
critique of war acknowledges just that: it affirms war in its impossibility – and a global society granting
full impact to this insight would necessarily be a society that does not know war.

Interpretation: The AFF must defend its communicative model prior to weighing case.
1. Prior question – knowledge models are the basis of the war, and the
weapon itself.
Chow, 6 (Rey Chow, Ph.D., Stanford, Dukeupress, "Duke University Press - The Age of the World
Target", https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1198xbg [Accessed 12-9-23])
In the decades since 1945, whether in dealing with the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, North Korea, Vietnam, and countries in
Central America, or during the Gulf Wars, the
United States has been conducting war on the basis of a certain kind of
knowledge production, and producing knowledge on the basis of war. War and knowledge enable and
foster each other primarily through the collective fantasizing of some foreign or alien body that poses danger
to the "self" and the "eye" that is the nation. Once the monstrosity of this foreign body is firmly
established in the national consciousness, the decision makers of the U.S. government often talk and
behave as though they had no choice but war. War, then, is acted out as a moral obligation to expel an
imagined dangerous alienness from the United States' self-concept as the global custodian of freedom
and democracy. Put in a different way, the "moral element," insofar as it produces knowledge about the "self"
and "other"—and hence the "eye" and its "target"—as such, justifies war by its very dichotomizing logic.
Conversely, the violence of war, once begun, fixes the other in its attributed monstrosity and affirms the
idealized image of the self. In this regard, the pernicious stereotyping of the Japanese during the Second World
War—not only by U.S. military personnel but also by social and behavioral scientists—was simply a flagrant example of an
ongoing ideological mechanism that had accompanied Western treatments of non-Western "others" for
centuries. In the hands of academics such as Geoffrey Gorer, writes Dower, the notion that was collectively and "objectively"
formed about the Japanese was that they were "a clinically compulsive and probably collectively
neurotic people, whose lives were governed by ritual and 'situational ethics,' wracked with insecurity,
and swollen with deep, dark currents of repressed resentment and aggression."39 As Dower points out, such
stereotyping was by no means accidental or unprecedented: The Japanese, so "unique" in the rhetoric of World War
Two, were actually saddled with racial stereotypes that Europeans and Americans had applied to nonwhites
for centuries: during the conquest of the New World, the slave trade, the Indian wars in the United States,
the agitation against Chinese immigrants in America, the colonization of Asia and Africa, the U.S.
conquest of the Philippines at the turn of the century. These were stereotypes, moreover, which had been strongly
reinforced by nineteenth-century Western science. In the final analysis, in fact, these favored idioms denoting superiority and
inferiority transcended race and represented formulaic expressions of Self and Other in general."' The
moralistic divide between "self" and "other" constitutes the production of knowledge during the U.S.
Occupation of Japan after the Second World War as well. As Monica Braw writes, in the years immediately after
1945, the risk that the United States would be regarded as barbaric and inhumane was carefully
monitored, in the main by cutting off Japan from the rest of the world through the ban on travel, control of
private mail, and censorship of research, mass media information, and other kinds of communication. The
entire Occupation policy was permeated by the view that "the United States was not to be accused; guilt was only for
Japan":41 As the Occupation of Japan started, the atmosphere was military. Japan was a defeated enemy
that must be subdued. The Japanese should be taught their place in the world: as a defeated nation, Japan had no
status and was entitled to no respect. People should be made to realize that any catastrophe that had
befallen them was of their own making. Until they had repented, they were suspect. If they wanted to release information
about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it could only be for the wrong reasons, such as accusing the
United States of inhumanity. Thus this information was suppressed.42 As in the scenario of aerial bombing, the
elitist and aggressive panoramic "vision" in which the other is beheld means that the sufferings of the
other matter much less than the transcendent aspirations of the self. And, despite being the products of a
particular culture's technological fanaticism, such transcendent aspirations are typically expressed in the
form of selfless universalisms. As Sherry puts it, "The reality of Hiroshima and Nagasaki seemed less
important than the bomb's effect on 'mankind's destiny,' on 'humanity's choice,' on 'what is happening
to men's minds,' and on hopes (now often extravagantly revived) to achieve world government."'" On Ja-
pan's side, as Yoneyama writes, such a "global narrative of the universal history of humanity" has helped sustain "a national
victimology and phantasm of innocence throughout most of the postwar years." Going one step further, she remarks: "The idea that
Hiroshima's disaster ought to be remembered from the transcendent and anonymous position of
humanity .. . .might best be described as 'nuclear universalism.' "44 Once the relations among war,
racism, and knowledge production are underlined in these terms, it is no longer possible to assume, as
some still do, that the recognizable features of modern war—its impersonality, coerciveness, and
deliberate cruelty—are "divergences" from the "antipathy" to violence and to conflict that characterize
the modern world.45 Instead, it would be incumbent on us to realize that the pursuit of war— with its use of violence—and the
pursuit of peace—with its cultivation of knowledge—are the obverse and reverse of the same coin, the
coin that I have been calling "the age of the world target." Rather than being irreconcilable opposites, war and
peace are coexisting, collaborative functions in the continuum of a virtualized world . More crucially still,
only the privileged nations of the world can afford to wage war and preach peace at one and the same
time. As Sherry writes, "The United States had different resources with which to be fanatical: resources
allowing it to take the lives of others more than its own, ones whose accompanying rhetoric of
technique disguised the will to destroy."45 From this it follows that, if indeed political and military acts of cruelty are not unique
to the United States—a point which is easy enough to substantiate—what is nonetheless remarkable is the manner in
which such acts are, in the United States, usually cloaked in the form of enlightenment and altruism, in
the form of an aspiration simultaneously toward technological perfection and the pursuit of peace. In a
country in which political leaders are held accountable for their decisions by an electorate, violence simply cannot—as it can in totalitarian
countries—exist in the raw. Even the most violent acts must be adorned with a benign, rational story. It is in the light of such interlocking
relations among war, racism, and knowledge production that I would make the following comments about area studies, the academic
establishment that crystallizes the connection between the epistemic targeting of the world and the
"humane" practices of peacetime learning. From Atomic Bombs to Area Studies As its name suggests, area studies as a mode
of knowledge production is, strictly speaking, military in its origins. Even though the study of the history, languages, and literatures of, for
instance, "Far Eastern" cultures existed well before the Second World War (in what Edward W. Said would term the old Orientalist
tradition predicated on philology), the systematization of such study under the rubric of special geopolitical areas
was largely a postwar and U.S. phenomenon. In H. D. Harootunian's words, "The systematic formation of area
studies, principally in major universities, was .. . a massive attempt to relocate the enemy in the new
configuration of the Cold War."47 As Bruce Cumings puts it: "It is now fair to say, based on the declassified
evidence, that the American state and especially the intelligence elements in it shaped the entire field of
postwar area studies, with the clearest and most direct impact on those regions of the world where
communism was strongest: Russia, Central and Eastern Europe, and East Asia."48 In the decades after 1945, when
the United States competed with the Soviet Union for the power to rule and/or destroy the world, these regions were the ones that required
continued, specialized super-vision; tothis list we may also add Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle
East. As areas to be studied, these regions took on the significance of target fields—fields of information
retrieval and dissemination that were necessary for the perpetuation of the United States' political
and ideological hegemony. In the final part of his classic Orientalism, Said describes area studies as a continuation of the old
European Orientalism with a different pedagogical emphasis: No longer does an Orientalist try first to master the esoteric
languages of the Orient; he begins instead as a trained social scientist and "applies" his science to the
Orient, or anywhere else. This is the specifically American contribution to the history of Orientalism, and it can be dated roughly from
the period immediately following World War II, when the United States found itself in the position recently vacated by Britain and France."
Whereas Said draws his examples mainly from Islamic and Middle Eastern area studies, Cumings provides this portrait of the Fast Asian target
field: The Association for Asian Studies (AAS) was the first "area" organization in the U.S., founded in 1943 as the Far Eastern
Association and reorganized as the AAS in 1956. Before 1945 there had been little attention to and not much funding for such
things; but now the idea was to bring contemporary social science theory to bear on the non-Western
world, rather than continue to pursue the classic themes of Oriental studies, often examined through philology. . In return for their
sufferance, the Orientalists would get vastly enhanced academic resources (positions, libraries, language studies)—
and soon, a certain degree of separation which came from the social scientists inhabiting institutes of
East Asian studies, whereas the Orientalists occupied departments of East Asian languages and cultures.
This implicit Faustian bargain sealed the postwar academic deal.50 A largely administrative enterprise, closely tied to policy, the new American
Orientalism took over from the old Orientalism attitudes of cultural hostility, among which is, as Said writes, the dogma that "the Orient is at
bottom something either to be feared (the Yellow Peril, the Mongol hordes, the brown dominions) or
to be controlled (by
pacification, research and development, outright occupation whenever possible)."" Often under the
modest apparently innocuous agendas of fact gathering and documentation, the “scientific” and
“objective” production of knowledge during peacetime about the various special “areas” became the
institutional practice that substantiated and elaborated the militaristic conception of the world as
target. In other words, despite the claims about the apolitical and disinterested nature of the pursuit of
higher learning, activities undertaken under the rubric of area studies, such as language training.
Historiography, anthropology, economics, political science, and so forth, are fully inscribed in the
politics and ideology of war. To that extent, the disciplining, research, and development of so-called
academic information are part and parcel of a strategic logic. And yet, if the production of knowledge (with
its vocabulary of aims and goals, research, data analysis, experimentation, and verification) in fact
shares the same scientific and military premises as war —if, for instance, the ability to translate a difficult language can be
regarded as equivalent to the ability to break military codes—is it a surprise that it is doomed to fail in its avowed
attempts to “know” the other cultures? Can “knowledge” that is derived from the same kinds of bases as
war put an end to the violence of warfare, or is such knowledge not simply warfare’s accomplice, destined to destroy rather than preserve the
forms of lives at which it aims to focus? As long as knowledge is produced in this self-referential manner, as a
circuit of targeting or getting the other that ultimately consolidates the omnipotence and
omnipresence of the sovereign “self”/“eye”—the “I”—that is the United States, the other will have no
choice but remain just that—a target whose existence justifies only one thing, its destruction by the
bomber. As long as the focus of our study of Asia remains by the United States, and as long as this focus is not
accompanied by knowledge of what is happening elsewhere at other times as well as the present, such study will ultimately
confirm once again the self-referential function of virtual worlding that was unleashed by the
dropping of the atomic bombs, with the United States always occupying the position of the bomber, and other cultures always
viewed as the military and information target fields. In this manner, events whose historicity does not fall into the
epistemically closed orbit of the atomic bomber—such as the Chinese reactions to the war from a
primarily anti-Japanese point of view that I alluded to at the beginning of this chapter—will never
receive the attention that is due to them. “Knowledge,” however conscientiously gathered and however large in volume, will
lead only to further silence and to the silencing of diverse experiences. This is one reason why, as Harootunian remark, area studies has been,
since its inception, “haunted by the absence of a definable subject” – and by the “problem of the vanishing
object”

2. Predictability – debate is a research game, not premised on policy

making. You should “grade” the AC based on it’s rhetorical commitments
not it’s implications because that’s all your ballot has proximity to.
No 1AR interps – it’s predictable and fair for the AC to set the grounds for weighing
impacts, latebreaking debates favor the AFF.
3. Stance taking – the “for or against the war” game is recursive and
cannibalistic. No risk of offense if we take out their communicative
model.
Artrip and Debrix, 14 (Ryan E. Artrip and Francois Debrix, Doctoral student Virginia Poletechnic,
Professor of Political Science Virginia Poytechnic, May 2014, " The Digital Fog of War: Baudrillard and the
Violence of Representation," https://baudrillardstudies.ubishops.ca/the-digital-fog-of-war-baudrillard-
and-the-violence-of-representation/ [Accessed 12-9-23])

To wish to communicate some truth about war, to seek to represent it, to insist on explaining it or even
justifying it (or one’s opposition to it) may be an ethical gesture. But to communicate, to seek and give meaning, or
indeed to want to represent war (even by way of the immediacy or “real-time” effect of digitalized media) is still about
thickening its fog. The representation of war, whatever form it takes, will never be much more than
endless information/ prognostication, all the more so since war will never take place (since it will always
already have taken place). Thus, seeking to make sense of war through/ as representation will always be a
matter of describing a pathology without disease. Only proliferated symptoms will be made visible and
granted significance in the flow of information and the desperate quest for meaning. Symptoms of a
proliferated war without a core, a meaning, a purpose, or a subject are everywhere around us. They make
up our mediatized universe of war and/ as terror. They are both the substance and appearance relayed by
digital technologies and media on behalf of a demos that itself has become the medium, a network that
processes and distributes images and events. As Baudrillard writes, “Every event today is virtually inconsequential, open
to all possible interpretations, none of which could determine its meaning: the equiprobability of all causes and
of all consequences” (Baudrillard, 2008: 36). It is indeed in this manner that war gains its momentum and virulence.
Not to recognize this representational virulence, and further to demand that war reveal an origin, a cause, a responsibility, or
indeed a subject or object that could grant it meaning is to reproduce its fog and, possibly, to acquiesce to its
violence. After all, there is no such thing as a benign representation or appearance (of war, or anything else, for
that matter).

The various attempts at representing, explaining, justifying, or making sense of war and its violence, often in
traditional referential geopolitical terms, are involved in an infinite splitting of what war must be or mean as
much as they are concerned with a deepening and widening of the violence/ virulence of its (global)
representation. In its dissolution/ dissemination through political analysis, war reveals its violent representational forms.
On the one hand, analytically dissolved and disseminated, war becomes unlocalizable, thus, in a way
impossible to contain. It can no longer “take place.” On the other hand, although it can no longer be waged in
one place, it still must proliferate its effects virally and virulently. Representationally unhinged from any
object (and reifying no particular subject or, rather, all sorts of subjects at once), war can no longer be geopolitically
maintained, cultivated, and made use of by way of any of the (modern) categories that once sought to give
it gravity: geography, ideology, morality, sovereignty, domination, or history. Thus, war becomes strategically
useless even if, tactically, it betrays the violence or virulence of representation everywhere it is found. Just like in the image of terror/terrorism,
all we witness, then, is panic. Panic war is a “floating reality… where we live on the edge of ecstasy and dread”
(Kroker, Kroker, and Cook, 1989: 14).

Ungrounded, strategically indifferent, and yet representationally effective and virulent, panic war no longer stands
in as the “substantial event” of time/ history, as the referential hinge that allows passage from one
human epoch to the next. Today, Janus, the God of passages, transitions, and attributions of meaning in time,
may still be worried about war. But Janus must now fixate his gaze in all directions (thankfully, today’s Janus is likely to have access
to YouTube…). The once mythologized and later romanticized uniqueness of Janus’ bioptic talents has been
transmuted into an impossible requirement of omniscience, omnivoyance, and omnipresence. The temple of Janus,
which was once a symbolic spatial conduit for the inertia of time, has collapsed under the weight of an indifferent, perhaps more catastrophic,
inertia: the inertia not of war’s violence (counter-actable through peace), but rather of the violence of
war’s representation (that knows no bounds and no antagonisms). War no longer takes place in order to
mediate time or to usher in a strategic (political) change through conflict. Perhaps it never really did. Rather, as
representation, war tactically preserves and perpetuates violent conflicts and a propensity for doing away
with things (starting with meaning) through a kind of digital/informational immanence (today’s preferred version of
representation or mediation).

Toward what ends/ futures does this war and its representation reproduce themselves virally and
virulently? Or, better yet, what compels us, if anything at all, to reproduce this war and its violence through our fascination with real-time
digital technologies? Is it perhaps that the ideal of world peace still seduce us and that we must continue to
represent war so that, if nothing else, we can always be there to try to antagonize it? Or is it perhaps
instead that we harbor a secret wish of global/ total annihilation, some will to terror hidden just beneath
cognition, perhaps to unsettle regimes of representation, meaning, and truth once and for all? Are we and our digitized
technologies of immediation advancing boldly in the face of war and war’s representation in the hope
that our will to total visibility/ informationality can function as the accursed share of the system? Is it such a
principle (today’s secret death wish, perhaps), or is it another principle, more conventional but just as sinister perhaps, the will to communicate
in the open that can explain that our opinions,
theories, explanations, blogs, tweets, statuses, SMS’s, emails, video recordings,
and photographs of war/ terror/ agony have to surface in pixels and circulate by way of viral imaging? Could it
be that war is merely an excrescence, “[a]n indefinite extension: metastasis” (Baudrillard, 2008: 52)? Read
this way, whether it has a
logic, whether it can be explained, whether it can even be put into language or in representation, war
would be like some sort of cancerous growth, exceeding temporal/ transitional configurations. “In a
system where things are increasingly governed by chance,” Baudrillard writes, “finality turns into delirium, and
elements develop that know only too well how to exceed their end—until they wind up invading the whole system” (Baudrillard, 2008: 30).
Without a locatable or intelligible object/ subject, but equipped
with the representational virulence of the digital, war
becomes an in(de)terminable principle of decomposition and decay.
1NC – ON