Cites

__**1AC**__ Nonproductive expenditure has all but disappeared in modern life—humanity exists now in an ever-increasing state of self-objectification that is part and parcel with the history of the West’s colonial mission to eradicate mystery and unproductive consumption. The prohibition of wasteful expenditure mirrors the topic’s imperative to render all engagement with China useful. The will to productivity is a disciplinary apparatus that dictates what is useful debate activity, but also what is a useful way to exist in the world. Featherstone 10. [Mark, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Keele University, “Death-Drive America: On Scott Wilson’s Vision of the Cultural Politics of American Nihilism in the Age of Supercapitalism,” Fast Capitalism 7.1, 2010] Despite the dire warnings of the prophets of technological dystopia …on contemporary American supercapitalism, Great Satan’s Rage.

The systematic suppression of cultures of excessive generosity and ritual destruction of wealth, such as the Wenzhou in China, is justified based on productive rationality and the desire to promote modern utilitarian mechanisms of productivity and disciplinary power. Despite their poverty, the CCP violently attempting to end Wenzhou “superstitions,” and bend the people to savings accounts and other productive expansion, the Wenzhou people still make more sacrificial offerings than before. They are an example of a profound holdout against the oceanic tide of the productive side of economic engagement. Yang 13. (Mayfair, Professor of Religious Studies and East Asian Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, “Two Logics of the Gift and Banquet: A Genealogy of China and the Northwest Coast,” Taipei: National Chengchi University, Institute of Foreign Languages, Translation Center, 2013. However, Bataille’s work takes the Nietzschean spirit…they never stop trying to make more offerings than the others.

Instead the 1ac sacrifices productivity, the rituals in Wenzhou represent an impossible luxury which is unthinkable in profane life. This presents an opportunity for a sovereign moment of life beyond utility, in which individuals can experience the incalculable value. Yang 13. (Mayfair, Professor of Religious Studies and East Asian Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, “Two Logics of the Gift and Banquet: A Genealogy of China and the Northwest Coast,” Taipei: National Chengchi University, Institute of Foreign Languages, Translation Center, 2013. At the beginning of the 21 st century,…must be r e- cuperated and grasped for modernity.

We affirm the topic as a luxurious economic engagement with China, an absurd model of active and affective transgression of the very limits of utility. All meaning descends into madness wherein we are able to escape the bounds of time and space Featherstone 16. (Mark Featherstone, professor of sociology at Keele University, “Luxus: A thanatology of luxury from Nero to Bataille,” Cultural Politics Vol 12 Issue 1 pp. 67-71) In this article, I propose to develop an aneconomic theory of…the death drive that heads over to the other side of material things.

The 1AC is an assault on signification, a search for the excess within production which undoes calculation and brings down the world Brent Hayes Edwards, Professor of comparative literature, focuses on African diasporic and Francophone literature, 1998, “Review: The Ethnics of Surrealism” Transition, No. 78. pp. 84-104. The "Critical Dictionary" was a series of "entries"…instead of conjuring a resolution.

The aff is the production of knowledge to realize the impossibility of knowledge the ballot symbolizes a squandering of knowledge that you have gained, knowing things about the world is what normative education in this activity wants but within this normative education we realize the futility of this normative education The biggest threat to the global order lies within. In the transcapitalist era, any oppositional revolution against the system that acts through means of semiotic abstraction risks being complicit in the evils it tries to critique. Deterrence leads to war, not peace. Terror leads to true insurrection against the system. Pawlett 14 (William Pawlett, a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of Woverhampton, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Baudrillard and War, “Society at War With Itself,” Volume 11, Number 2, May 2014, [], LD) I It all depends on the ground…it is at war with itself.

I enter into peace as I enter into a dark unknown. I fall in this dark unknown. I myself become this dark unknown. I AM joy before death. Joy before death carries me. Joy before death hurls me down. Joy before death annihilates me.

The Being of beings is becoming. The only permanence in the world is ephemerality, the form of the universe is formlessness. Confused? Good. Bataille 1985. Georges. "The labyrinth." trans. Allan Stoekl, Visions of Excess, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985) 5 (1985). The Labyrinth (1930) Negativity, in other words, the integrity of determination -…if this nothingness had not totally opened beneath its feet.Georges Bataille

blindfold my eyes I love the night my heart is black

push me into the night all is false I suffer

the world smells like death birds fly blindly you are as dark as a night sky