Tournament: Weber State | Round: 2 | Opponent: Weber state | Judge:
Framework
This is a challenge to the current violent use of structural abstractions of life by an engagement in aesthetic manipulation of the very same images on another plane to unite life and art as one thing.
“¶ T. A. Z.¶ ¶ The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism¶ ¶ By Hakim Bey 1991¶ ¶ THE TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONE” http://hermetic.com/bey/taz3.html
COMMUNIQUE #6¶ I. Salon Apocalypse: "Secret Theater"¶ AS LONG AS NO Stalin breathes down our necks, why not make some art in the service of...an insurrection?¶ Never mind if it's "impossible." What else can we hope to attain but the "impossible"? Should we wait for someone else to reveal our true desires?¶ If art has died, or the audience has withered away, then we find ourselves free of two dead weights. Potentially, everyone is now some kind of artist--and potentially every audience has regained its innocence, its ability to become the art that it experiences.¶ Provided we can escape from the museums we carry around inside us, provided we can stop selling ourselves tickets to the galleries in our own skulls, we can begin to contemplate an art which re-creates the goal of the sorcerer: changing the structure of reality by the manipulation of living symbols (in this case, the images we've been "given" by the organizers of this salon--murder, war, famine, and greed).¶ We might now contemplate aesthetic actions which possess some of the resonance of terrorism (or "cruelty," as Artaud put it) aimed at the destruction of abstractions rather than people, at liberation rather than power, pleasure rather than profit, joy rather than fear. "Poetic Terrorism." Our chosen images have the potency of darkness--but all images are masks, and behind these masks lie energies we can turn toward light and pleasure.¶ For example, the man who invented aikido was a samurai who became a pacifist and refused to fight for Japanese imperialism. He became a hermit, lived on a mountain sitting under a tree..¶ One day a former fellow-officer came to visit him and accused him of betrayal, cowardice, etc. The hermit said nothing, but kept on sitting--and the officer fell into a rage, drew his sword, and struck. Spontaneously the unarmed master disarmed the officer and returned his sword. Again and again the officer tried to kill, using every subtle kata in his repertoire--but out of his empty mind the hermit each time invented a new way to disarm him.¶ The officer of course became his first disciple. Later, they learned how to dodge bullets. We might contemplate some form of metadrama meant to capture a taste of this performance, which gave rise to a wholly new art, a totally non-violent way of fighting--war without murder, "the sword of life" rather than death.¶ A conspiracy of artists, anonymous as any mad bombers, but aimed toward an act of gratuitous generosity rather than violence--at the millennium rather than the apocalypse--or rather, aimed at a present moment of aesthetic shock in the service of realization and liberation.¶ Art tells gorgeous lies that come true.¶ Is it possible to create a SECRET THEATER in which both artist and audience have completely disappeared--only to re-appear on another plane, where life and art have become the same thing, the pure giving of gifts?¶ (Note: The "Salon Apocalypse" was organized by Sharon Gannon in July, 1986.)
Movement is not required, nor inherent of the nomadic thought rather in the administrative images of terror, while true terror lies in our ability to distance ourselves physically and mentally from this mutilation of others.
“Creating Lines of Flight and Activating Resistance: Deleuze and Guattari’s War Machine”¶ Dr Robert Deuchars No-Date Political Science and International Relations Programme¶ Victoria University of Wellington http://www.philosophyandculture.org/books/2010/humanbeings07.pdf¶
The nomad thought of Nietzsche the warrior supplants the sedentary nature of codification and recodification of the three elements of philosophical discourse Deleuze identifies as being central to philosophy; ‘law, institutions and contracts’. On the contrary Nietzsche’s discourse is according to Deleuze: ¶ ‘…above all nomadic; its statements can be conceived as the products of a mobile war machine and not the utterances of a rational, administrative machinery, whose philosophers would be bureaucrats of pure reason. It is perhaps in this sense that Nietzsche announces the advent of a new politics that begins with him (which Klossowski calls a plot against his own class)’. This new politics is one of movement versus the sedentary and it is Nietzsche that inaugurates it. In contemporary society we now see this interplay between the nomadic and the sedentary in all aspects of existence, from disembodied social networking to the global ‘war on terror’. It is not simply a refusal to be identified; rather it is intrinsically implicated in the instability of identities, whether that takes on an aesthetic value viewed in positive terms or even in the most venal acts by state terrorists and retail terrorists alike. The suicide bomber is celebrated by many and cannot be said to be a ‘worse’ person than the controller of a drone aeroplane who sits with his playstation in an aircraft hanger in Nevada, wreaks a horrible violence, mutilates others ‘from a distance’, and then goes home, pats the dog and plays with his kids. Which one of these two can be considered a warrior? The one who seeks death or the one who fights and kills without being exposed to danger? Perhaps it is both, each with a radically different and changing subjectivity. It is as, Deleuze correctly highlights in Nietzsche, a refusal to be fixed or to be pinned down, to be always moving even if one doesn’t go anywhere, for example the soldier-warrior who sits, rather than marching. Deleuze says as follows: ‘Even historically, nomads are not necessarily those who move about like migrants. On the contrary they do not move; nomads, they nevertheless stay in the same place and continually evade the codes of settled people’. In short it is war: a war of becoming over being, of the sedentary over the nomadic. Becoming different, to think and act differently. This form of ambiguity of the decentred self, continuously shifting defines both the warrior who ‘wars’ without war and the warrior who ‘wars’ without the chance of ‘winning’. They both denote a shift in the calculus of modern war.¶ Deleuze asserts that it is with Nietzsche that creative force can be utilized for revolutionary ends but avoiding the repetition of the state-form that revolutionary struggle fights against. There is no point he argues to overthrow the state-form merely to re-create it. Rather he points to the originality of Nietzsche who ‘made thought into a machine of war—a battering ram—into a nomadic force’. Nomad thought, then represents a fundamental shift in the thinking of the left as it breaks completely with the idea of the mass party being the motor of resistance to modernist capitalism. Deleuze sees through the emptiness and ultimately the futility of such movements and posits a radical re-thinking of thought; a type of thought that is intrinsically ‘related to the outside that will not revive an internal despotic unity’.
Fracture and difference are essential characteristics of community. Communities found upon sameness exclude minority groups who seem less important.
Secomb 00 (Linnell, a lecturer in Gender Studies at the University of Sydney “Fractured Community” Hypatia – Volume 15 Number 2 Spring 2000 pg. 138-139 RC)
This reformulated universalist model of community would be founded on "a moral conversation in which the capacity to reverse perspectives, that is, the willingness to reason from the others' point of view, and the sensitivity to hear their voice is paramount" (1992, 8). Benhabib argues that this model does not assume that consensus can be reached but that a "reasonable agreement" can be achieved. This formulation of community on the basis of a conversation in which perspectives can be reversed, also implies a new understanding of identity and alterity. Instead of the generalized other, Benhabib argues that ethics, politics, and community must engage with the concrete or particular other. A theory that only engages with the generalized other sees the other as a replica of the self. In order to overcome this reductive assimilation of alterity, Benhabib formulates a universalist community which recognizes the concrete other and which allows us to view others as unique individuals (1992, 10). Benhabib's critique of universalist liberal theory and her formulation of an alternative conversational model of community are useful and illuminating. However, I suggest that her vision still assumes the desirability of commonality and agreement, which, I argue, ultimately destroy difference. Her vision of a community of conversing alterities assumes sufficient similarity between alterities End Page 138 so that each can adopt the point of view of the other and, through this means, reach a "reasonable agreement." She assumes the necessity of a common goal for the community that would be the outcome of the "reasonable agreement." Benhabib's community, then, while attempting to enable difference and diversity, continues to assume a commonality of purpose within community and implies a subjectivity that would ultimately collapse back into sameness. Moreover, Benhabib's formulation of community, while rejecting the fantasy of consensus, nevertheless privileges communication, conversation, and agreement. This privileging of communication assumes that all can participate in the rational conversation irrespective of difference. Yet this assumes rational interlocutors, and rationality has tended, both in theory and practice, to exclude many groups and individuals, including: women, who are deemed emotional and corporeal rather than rational; non-liberal cultures and individuals who are seen as intolerant and irrational; and minoritarian groups who do not adopt the authoritative discourses necessary for rational exchanges. In addition, this ideal of communication fails to acknowledge the indeterminacy and multiplicity of meaning in all speech and writing. It assumes a singular, coherent, and transparent content. Yet, as Gayatri Spivak writes: "the verbal text is constituted by concealment as much as revelation. . . . The concealment is itself a revelation and visa versa" (Spivak 1976, xlvi). For Spivak, Jacques Derrida, and other deconstructionists, all communication involves contradiction, inconsistency, and heterogeneity. Derrida's concept of différance indicates the inevitable deferral and displacement of any final coherent meaning. The apparently rigorous and irreducible oppositions that structure language, Derrida contends, are a fiction. These mutually exclusive dichotomies turn out to be interrelated and interdependent: their meanings and associations, multiple and ambiguous (Derrida 1973, 1976). While Benhabib's objective is clearly to allow all groups within a community to participate in this rational conversation, her formulation fails to recognize either that language is as much structured by miscommunication as by communication, or that many groups are silenced or speak in different discourses that are unintelligible to the majority. Minority groups and discourses are frequently ignored or excluded from political discussion and decision-making because they do not adopt the dominant modes of authoritative and rational conversation that assume homogeneity and transparency.
Links:
Use the state
Impacts:
Violence against trans* folk comes from the police and other institutional power structures.
A REPORT FROM THE
NATIONAL COALITION OF ANTI-VIOLENCE PROGRAMS (NCAVP)
LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL, TRANSGENDER,
QUEER AND HIV-AFFECTED
HATE VIOLENCE IN 2012
2013 RELEASE EDITION
http://avp.org/storage/documents/ncavp_2012_hvreport_final.pdf
Transgender people were:
• 3.32 times as likely to experience police violence as compared to cisgender survivors and victims.
• 2.46 times as likely to experience physical violence by the police compared to cisgender survivors and victims.
Transgender people of color were:
• 2.59 times as likely to experience police violence compared to white cisgender survivors and victims.
• 2.37 times as likely to experience discrimination compared to white cisgender survivors and victims.
Transgender women were:
• 2.90 times as likely to experience police violence as compared to survivors and victims who were not transgender women.
• 2.71 times as likely to experience physical violence by the police as compared to survivors and victims who were not transgender women.
• 2.14 times as likely to experience discrimination as compared to survivors and victims who were not transgender women.
Grant, Jaime M., Lisa A. Mottet, Justin Tanis, Jack Harrison, Jody L. Herman,
and Mara Keisling. Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender
Discrimination Survey. Washington: National Center for Transgender Equality
and National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, 2011.
• Respondents experienced widespread abuse in the public sector, and were often abused at the hands
of “helping” professionals and government officials. One fifth (22) were denied equal treatment by a government agency or official; 29 reported police harassment or disrespect; and 12 had been denied equal treatment or harassed by judges or court officials.
“Why we should support CeCe McDonald” Jessica Annabelle (2012)
http://www.racialicious.com/2012/01/27/why-we-should-support-cece-mcdonald/
CeCe McDonald, a black trans woman, has been facing 2nd degree murder charges since being attacked last summer by a group of white adults.
CeCe and several friends, all black, were walking to the grocery store on June 5th, 2011 when white adults standing in the patio area of a South Minneapolis bar started screaming racist and transphobic slurs at the youth. CeCe, who is only 23 years old, approached the group and replied that she and her friends would not tolerate hate speech. In response, one of the white women said “I’ll take you bitches on” and smashed her glass into CeCe’s face. The broken glass sliced all the way through CeCe’s cheek. A fight ensued between the adults and the young people after this initial attack and one of the attackers, Dean Schmitz, was fatally stabbed. As if it were not sufficiently tragic that a group of young people were subjected to such severe violence and that Dean Schmitz lost his life, police arriving at the scene arrested CeCe, denied her adequate medical treatment, interrogated her for hours, and placed her in solitary confinement. In the aftermath of being attacked, she was not treated with care, but launched into another nightmare. The only person arrested that night, she has since been charged with two counts of 2nd degree murder. Hennepin County Attorney Michael Freeman has the power to drop these charges, a choice he made in multiple other clear instances of self-defense this year, but he has not yet done so.
CeCe’s story is a portrait of the United States Criminal Justice System. Her story is what is meant when we are told that transgender people, especially transgender women of color, experience disproportionate rates of police harassment, profiling, and abuse. She is living one of the stories rolled into statistics like: trans people are ten to fifteen times more likely to be incarcerated than cisgender (not transgender) people, or nearly half of African American transgender people have spent time in jail or prison.
CeCe was ultimately sentenced to two years in prison for defending herself.
Alt:
Smash the state!
Alt solvency:
The state exists to uphold the interests of the capitalists.
Is the State a Tool of Capitalists?
Jane Thornton No Date
Marx asserts in the Communist Manifesto: "The executive of the modern state is nothing more than a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie." His theory of the state maintains that the state arises when there exist in society irreconcilable class antagonisms. The proletarian and capitalist classes are necessarily and inevitably in conflict over their different interests, and the state arises in capitalist societies from this antagonism. The state does not and cannot reconcile the two classes. It functions as the organ of class rule, moderating, legalizing and maintaining the oppression of the proletariat by the capitalist class. The state functions in this way because it is part of the 'superstructure' of society, a reflection of the economic base.
The interventions by the state thus reflect the needs of capital.
The interests of the capitalists are inherently queer and trans* phobic.
2NC
The obsessive replication of death is to us an inappropriate estimation for the potential of existence –Death can only kill us once but until then we are free to express a free life of art on which to impose our imagination and will to create the most beautiful act we can conceive and to apply it as the value of our existence
“¶ T. A. Z.¶ The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism¶ By Hakim Bey 1991¶ THE TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONE” http://hermetic.com/bey/taz3.html
AGAINST THE REPRODUCTION OF DEATH¶ ONE OF THE SIGNS of that End Time so many seem to anticipate would consist of a fascination with all the most negative and hateful detritus of that Time, a fascination felt by the very class of thinkers who consider themselves most perspicacious about the so-called apocalypse they warn us to beware. I'm speaking of people I know very well--those of the "spiritual right" (such as the neo-Guenonians with their obsession for signs of decadence)--and those of the post- philosophical left, the detached essayists of death, connoisseurs of the arts of mutilation.¶ For both these sets, all possible action in the world is smeared out onto one level plain--all become equally meaningless. For the Traditionalist, nothing matters but to prepare the soul for death (not only its own but the whole world's as well). For the "cultural critic" nothing matters but the game of identifying yet one more reason for despair, analyzing it, adding it to the catalogue.¶ Now the End of the World is an abstraction because it has never happened. It has no existence in the real world. It will cease to be an abstraction only when it happens--if it happens. (I do not claim to know "God's mind" on the subject- -nor to possess any scientific knowledge about a still non- existent future). I see only a mental image and its emotional ramifications; as such I identify it as a kind of ghostly virus, a spook-sickness in myself which ought to be expunged rather than hypochondriacally coddled and indulged. I have come to despise the "End of the World" as an ideological icon held over my head by religion, state, and cultural milieu alike, as a reason for doing nothing.¶ I understand why the religious and political "powers" would want to keep me quaking in my shoes. Since only they offer even a chance of evading ragnarok (thru prayer, thru democracy, thru communism, etc.), I will sheepishly follow their dictates and dare nothing on my own. The case of the enlightened intellectuals, however, seems more puzzling at first. What power do they derive from this telling-the- beads of fear and gloom, sadism and hatred?¶ Essentially they gain smartness. Any attack on them must appear stupid, since they alone are clear-eyed enough to recognize the truth, they alone daring enough to show it forth in defiance of rude shit-kicking censors and liberal wimps. If I attack them as part of the very problem they claim to be discussing objectively, I will be seen as a bumpkin, a prude, a pollyanna. If I admit my hatred for the artifacts of their perception (books, artworks, performances) then I may be dismissed as merely squeamish (and so of course psychologically repressed), or else at the very least lacking in seriousness.¶ Many people assume that because I sometimes express myself as an anarchist boy-lover, I must also be "interested" in other ultra-postmodern ideas like serial child-murder, fascist ideology, or the photographs of Joel P. Witkin. They assume only two sides to any issue--the hip side and the unhip side. A marxist who objected to all this death-cultishness as anti-progressive would be thought as foolish as a Xtian fundamentalist who believed it immoral.¶ I maintain that (as usual) many sides exist to this issue rather than only two. Two-sided issues (creationism vs darwinism, "choice" vs "pro-life," etc.) are all without exception delusions, spectacular lies.¶ My position is this: I am all too well aware of the "intelligence" which prevents action. I myself possess it in abundance. Every once in a while however I have managed to behave as if I were stupid enough to try to change my life. Sometimes I've used dangerous stupifiants like religion, marijuana, chaos, the love of boys. On a few occasions I have attained some degree of success--and I say this not to boast but rather to bear witness. By overthrowing the inner icons of the End of the World and the Futility of all mundane endeavor, I have (rarely) broken through into a state which (by comparison with all I'd known) appeared to be one of health. The images of death and mutilation which fascinate our artists and intellectuals appear to me--in the remembered light of these experiences--tragically inappropriate to the real potential of existence and of discourse about existence.¶ Existence itself may be considered an abyss possessed of no meaning. I do not read this as a pessimistic statement. If it be true, then I can see in it nothing else but a declaration of autonomy for my imagination and will--and for the most beautiful act they can conceive with which to bestow meaning upon existence.¶ Why should I emblemize this freedom with an act such as murder (as did the existentialists) or with any of the ghoulish tastes of the eighties? Death can only kill me once- -till then I am free to express and experience (as much as I can) a life and an art of life based on self-valuating "peak experiences," as well as "conviviality" (which also possesses its own reward).¶ The obsessive replication of Death-imagery (and its reproduction or even commodification) gets in the way of this project just as obstructively as censorship or media- brainwashing. It sets up negative feedback loops--it is bad juju. It helps no one conquer fear of death, but merely inculcates a morbid fear in place of the healthy fear all sentient creatures feel at the smell of their own mortality.¶ This is not to absolve the world of its ugliness, or to deny that truly fearful things exist in it. But some of these things can be overcome--on the condition that we build an aesthetic on the overcoming rather than the fear.¶ I recently attended a gay dance/poetry performance of uncompromising hipness: the one black dancer in the troupe had to pretend to fuck a dead sheep.¶ Part of my self-induced stupidity, I confess, is to believe (and even feel) that art can change me, and change others. That's why I write pornography and propaganda--to cause change. Art can never mean as much as a love affair, perhaps, or an insurrection. But...to a certain extent...it works.¶ Even if I'd given up all hope in art, however, all expectation of exaltation, I would still refuse to put up with art that merely exacerbates my misery, or indulges in schadenfreude, "delight in the misery of others." I turn away from certain art as a dog would turn away howling from the corpse of its companion. I'd like to renounce the sophistication which would permit me to sniff it with detached curiosity as yet another example of post-industrial decomposition.¶ Only the dead are truly smart, truly cool. Nothing touches them. While I live, however, I side with bumbling suffering crooked life, with anger rather than boredom, with sweet lust, hunger and carelessness...against the icy avant-guard and its fashionable premonitions of the sepulcher.¶
Our current conception of politics is rooted in desire control and morbid systems of exploitation that absurdly expect solutions to come in the form of legislation or other ready-made solutions. We don’t need a plan or set destination just need to know of a place where such expression is already possible.
“Creating Lines of Flight and Activating Resistance: Deleuze and Guattari’s War Machine”¶ Dr Robert Deuchars No-Date Political Science and International Relations Programme¶ Victoria University of Wellington http://www.philosophyandculture.org/books/2010/humanbeings07.pdf¶
It seems fair to state that we are living in what Antonio Gramsci called an interregnum, in, which ‘a great variety morbid symptoms appear’. Gramsci was writing specifically about historical fascism in the Italian setting, but his comments seem to resonate as powerfully today. In Gramsci I see affinities with the works of Foucault and of Deleuze and Guattari. Gramsci was all too well aware of the realities of the State and its apparatus of capture in both senses of the word. Literally incarcerated by Mussolini and also cognisant of the way in the way in which the State-capital nexus needs to control the desires of humans in order to make them ‘fit’ the logic and imperatives of capital. Gramsci recognised early on in Fordist production the need or desire for a new type of worker that would comply with mass industrialisation being introduced early in the twentieth century. In his discussion on the reconfiguration of labour and society following the methods of Taylorism and Fordism, Gramsci points out practices that render the worker that can meet the requirements of the producer, such as being diligent, consistent, calculable and (reasonably) sober; having a stable domestic existence. In other words Gramsci recognised the need for workers to be trained to conform to certain patterns of behaviour, regularities based on the control of time, movement and sexuality. The common theme that runs through these practices is delayed gratification i.e. waiting to be paid, waiting to be gratified at home, the delay of desire, all of which is subject to the regime of calculability. ¶ Returning to Deleuze and Guattari they argue using different language, a different time-frame but in similar vein that people are organized on a large-scale according to the underlying logic of capital and the accumulation of surplus value. As they say:¶ ‘a State apparatus is erected upon the primitive agricultural communities, which already have lineal-territorial codes; but it overcodes them, submitting them to the power of a despotic emperor, the sole and transcendent public-property owner, the master of the surplus or the stock, the organizer of large-scale works (surplus labor), the source of public functions and bureaucracy. This is the paradigm of the bond, the knot. Such is the regime of signs of the State: overcoding, or the Signifier. It is a system of machinic enslavement: the first “megamachine” in the strict sense, to use Mumford’s term’. ¶ What Deleuze and Guattari suggest is that it is indeed the State (or ordering practices) that renders human beings calculable. It is the State that takes hunter-gatherer societies and introduces agriculture, metallurgy and lastly public works, not the other way around. As such the State is an alien formation in relation to societies; societies who may indeed have maintained quite complex networks of exchange for example, but which nonetheless, had no desire to be captured by an exterior force; an alien force not really required but imposed. Why? The logic is reasonably straightforward and can be expressed by the desire to capture the energy of bodies and put them to use for extraction of that energy. The human body is simply energy-matter and the apparatus of capture needs to extract as much of this energy for itself; the creation of surplus value. In line with Foucault’s reasoning the population is an undifferentiated mass that requires, naming, classifying, encoding and ordering largely through the tripartite system of power he outlines in Discipline and Punish. Manuel DeLanda, again using different language but expressing the same sentiment argues that society and the population that inhabits it, ¶ ‘…appears as just another ensemble of fluxes, with reservoirs of potentials of different kinds (water, energy, population, wealth etc.) driving those fluxes. From the point of view of the machinic phylum, we are simply a very complex dynamical system. And like any other physical ensemble of fluxes, we can reach critical points (singularities, bifurcations) where new forms of order may spontaneously emerge’. ¶And it is this potential that the apparatus of capture embodied in the State formation seeks. And it is at this point that we must take one variant of the war machine and ask: what does it have to offer in terms of resistance to capture? Deleuze and Guattari seem to argue near the end of Plateau 13 that it is perhaps to be found in the minoritarian politics of ‘The ‘revolutionary movement (the connection of flows, the composition of nondeumerable aggregates, the becoming-minoritarian of everybody/everything)’ . This variant of the war machine is the one that we are most interested at this juncture. What does it offer?¶ Those seeking a plan, an alternative a manifesto should be disappointed, or confused by the antagonism between the line and the point. The point of the line is, as I have been arguing is to follow the line; not to have a point; that’s the point of not having a point. Consider escape along lines of flight as journeys; journeys’ where one does not know the destination but where ‘other world’s are (already) possible’. There is an emancipatory aspect to this line of thinking that is despised by some of those on the Left, who would prefer to stay pure and clean. What the above suggests is the enormous contribution Deleuze and Guattari’s excursus on the sedentary and the nomadic can add to the analytical armour towards an understanding the modern subject, both in the sense of individual identity, subjectivities and forms of various political communities. What they highlight are the absurdities of those seeking ready-made solutions. On the contrary Deleuze and Guattari emphasize the experimental, the ambiguous, the misleading and the aleatory nature of becoming and of life itself. In turn this opens up theoretical space for others beyond social theory to re-conceptualize the concrete assembling and dissembling of many entities without recourse to mainstream IR neo-realism or to more recent challenges from constructivism. And in the spirit of sampling, splicing, re-mixing found in musical creation this logic is perfectly applicable to intellectual creations too, such as this essay or a book. Viewing this essay as an emergent assemblage as opposed to some(thing) that has to be listened to or read as being on the register of intellectual authority has merit and shares similarities with the Deleuzean attentiveness to the emergent possibilities of the ‘social’, as well as the ‘ambiguous, complex and contested flows that International Relations focus on stable, unitary actors and identities can at times obscure’. ¶
