Kritik intro for policy debate

1. Kritik Intro

2. What we mean by a Kritik?

-Kritiks indirectly challenge the other side's
arguments by attacking their assumptions

-Problem solving theory: takes the world as it is,
aims to promote efficiency/smooth functioning

-Critical theory: stands apart from the existing
world and asks "for whom?" and "for what
purpose?"

-Concepts/ideas are "contingent"

3. Part II: Vocabulary
• Capitalism
• Neoliberalism
• Modernism
• Postmodernism
• Structuralism
• Post-structuralism

4. Capitalism is…

Capitalism: An economic system characterized by

-ownership of private property

-a free market of exchange

-belief in rational actor model

5. Neoliberalism is…

What is Neoliberalism?

-attempts to explain currently existing capitalism
in this moment: capital mobility

-challenges assumptions behind capitalism as an
economic system

7. Postmodernism is…
 Postmodernism is a concept which
appears in a wide variety of
disciplines or areas of study
including art, music, film, literature,
architecture, and technology and
nowadays has burst into popular
usage as a term for everything
from rock music to the whole
cultural style and mood.

10. What does this have to do
with politics?

15. And this guys…
 Interest in semiotics
 Systems of signs = Difference,
not power
 Signifies vs object
 Minutia of human life,
hyperreality
 Globalization and symbolic
acts
 Simulation in a state of
simulacrum
 End of history – Fukuyama,
dustbin of society

16. And this one…
 Difference causes identity, instead of identity
causing different
 Transcendental imperialism – Experience
produces new ways of thinking, challenges status
quo knowledge
 Origami cosmos – where experience continually
changes or folds our understanding of being
 Society of control, instead of disciplinary society
 Arborescent versus rhizomatic thoughts

17. With the dissolution of art into a
commodity or rather with the social
reality commodified, what actually
happens is that reality becomes the
aesthetic. Now what does aesthetic
signify? Aesthetic signifies
texturedness, packaging,
fetishizing, libidinalizing, etc.
Terry Eagleton

19. 

21. Capitalism is Crisis Ridden
 Resource Depletion
 Externalized Costs
 Competition for scarce resources
 Lack of satisfaction with class
difference
 Democratic limits/failures
 Commodification of resistance