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Social Death K
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( ) The logic of social death replicates the violence of the middle
passage rejection is necessary to honor the dead
Brown 2009 professor of history and of African and African American Studies specializing in Atlantic Slavery
(Vincent, Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,
http://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/documents/brown-socialdeath.pdf)
But this was not the emphasis of Pattersons argument. As a result, those he has inspired have often conflated his
Seen as a
state of being, the concept of social death is ultimately out of place
in the political history of slavery. If studies of slavery would account for
the outlooks and maneuvers of the enslaved as an important part of
that history, scholars would do better to keep in view the struggle
against alienation rather than alienation itself. To see social death as a productive
exposition of slaveholding ideology with a description of the actual condition of the enslaved.
peril entails a subtle but significant shift in perspective, from seeing slavery as a condition to viewing enslavement
seek to explainblack pathology or black politics, resistance or attempts to remake social life? For too long,
debates about whether there were black families took precedence over discussions of how such families were
formed; disputes about whether African culture had survived in the Americas overwhelmed discussions of how
particular practices mediated slaves attempts to survive; and scholars felt compelled to prioritize the
documentation of resistance over the examination of political strife in its myriad forms. But of course, because
slaves social and political life grew directly out of the violence and dislocation of Atlantic slavery, these are false
choices. And we may not even have to choose between tragic and romantic modes of storytelling, for history tinged
with romance may offer the truest acknowledgment of the tragedy confronted by the enslaved: it took heroic effort
for them to make social lives. There is romance, too, in the tragic fact that although scholars may never be able to
If scholars
were to emphasize the efforts of the enslaved more than the
condition of slavery, we might at least tell richer stories about how
the endeavors of the weakest and most abject have at times
reshaped the world. The history of their social and political lives lies
between resistance and oblivion, not in the nature of their condition
but in their continuous struggles to remake it. Those struggles are
slaverys bequest to us.
give a satisfactory account of the human experience in slavery, they nevertheless continue to try.
As the historian
Walter Johnson has argued, studies of slavery conducted within the
terms of social history have often taken agency, or the self-willed
activity of choice-making subjects, to be their starting point.43 Perhaps it
the allegation may seem unfair. Nevertheless, some of the criticisms are helpful.
was inevitable, then, that many historians would find themselves charged with depicting slave communities and
cultures that were so resistant and so vibrant that the social relations of slavery must not have done much damage
the
agency of the weak and the power of the strong have too often been
viewed as simple opposites. The anthropologist David Scott is probably correct to suggest that
at all. Even if this particular accusation is a form of caricature, it contains an important insight, that
for most scholars, the power of slaveholders and the damage wrought by slavery have been pictured principally as
a negative or limiting force that restricted, blocked, paralyzed, or deformed the transformative agency of the
slave.44 In this sense, scholars who have emphasized slaverys corrosive power and those who stress resistance
2NC Overview
Wildersons view of social death dismisses transformative politics
a. By focusing on the horror of slavery, rather than the progressive
politics which emerged from it, Wilderson dismisses all forms of
African American innovation and resistance
b. Regaining agency by rejecting this deterministic approach is a
prerequisite- thats Brown
approach has been subjected to critical scrutiny in a number of disciplines.45 While culture may still refer to what
William Sewell, Jr. has called the particular shapes and consistencies of worlds of meaning in different places and
times that somehow fit together despite tension and conflict, the fluidity of this definition would suggest that
practices of meaning are better seen as tools to be used than as possessions to be lost.46 And though culture is still
sometimes portrayed as a holistic set of worldviews or attitudes commensurate with circumscribed populations,
2)
3)
It applies a snapshot picture of antebellum slavery to justify its
assertion
Brown 2009 professor of history and of African and African American Studies specializing in Atlantic
Slavery (Vincent, Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,
http://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/documents/brown-socialdeath.pdf)
Chicago professor Robert Park, the grand-pe`re of the social pathologists, set the terms in 1919: the Negro, when
he landed in the United States, left behind almost everything but his dark complexion and his tropical
making the synchronic study of social phenomena more tempting than more descriptive studies of historical
transformation. Slavery and Social
Turn Agency
( ) Social death is a reductionist concept that does little to actually
explain the slave experience this pessimistic view erases notions of
agency of the oppressed people.
Brown 09 [Vincent; AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 2009
http://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/documents/brown-socialdeath.pdf //liam]
Slavery and Social Death was widely reviewed and lavishly praised for its erudition and conceptual rigor. As a result
of its success, social death has become a handy general definition of slavery, for many historians and non-
the wake of Slavery and Social Death, Pattersons abstract distillates have been used to explain the existential
condition of the enslaved. Having emerged from the discipline of sociology, s ocial
death fit
comfortably within a scholarly tradition that had generally been
more alert to deviations in patterns of black life from prevailing
social norms than to the worldviews, strategies, and social tactics of
people in black communities. Together with Pattersons work on the distortions wrought by slavery
on black families, social death reflected sociologys abiding concern with social pathology; the pathological
condition of twentieth-century black life could be seen as an outcome of the damage that black people had
suffered during slavery. University of Chicago professor Robert Park, the grand-pe`re of the social pathologists, set
the terms in 1919: the Negro, when he landed in the United States, left behind almost everything but his dark
synchronic studies of antebellum slavery in the United States dominated the scholarship on human bondage, and
Pattersons expansive view was meant to situate U.S. slavery in a broad context rather than to discuss changes as
WIDELY ACKNOWLEDGED AS AMONG the most onerous of social institutions, slavery has much to tell us about the
if the invocation of
Pattersons social death is any indication, the pendulum seems to
have swung decidedly toward despair.
versus anatomies of doomthat compete for ascendance. In recent years,
Afro Pessimism K
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We criticize the absoluteness of the ontological critique of the
Human, the modern, and the Slave. Their absolute ontological
division between Master and slave or human and slave does
violence to slaves and dooms our political strategy to one of
unsuccessful revolutionary violence.
A) Modernity and civil society
Our historical reading of the relationship between slavery and civil
society and humanity honors the legacy of slave revolution. The
Haitian revolution contained and expanded ideas trafficked in civil
society of universal humanity
DASH 10 [J. Michael Africana Studies French, Social and Cultural Analysis @ NYU 10 Book Review: Universal
Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and The Radical Enlightenment Slavery & Abolition 31 (1) p. 142-143 //liam ]
Universal Emancipation argues against the French appropriation of universalism as the exclusive product of the
revolution of 1789. From the broad focus of Nesbitts narrative, the age of revolution becomes a truly global
phenomenon and furthermore, the Haitian revolution surpassed that of the metropole in realising the goal of
universal freedom. This is not a new story. Michel Rolph Trouillot, for instance, argued in 1995 The
Haitian
revolution was the ultimate test to the universalist pretensions of
both the French and the American revolutions.1 Later, for another major scholar
Laurent Dubois, the Haitian Revolution represented the pinnacle of Enlightenment universalism.2 Furthermore,
C.L.R. James in the Black Jacobins reminded us that the revolutionary events in Frances colony would take the
French Revolution further than was ever intended. The slaves of St Domingue were left out of the universalist claims
that there is nothing surprising about the fact that the slaves caught the spirit of the thing since they needed no
interpreter but the fact that they were on the so-called periphery of the modern world-system in 1791 meant that
centres and peripheries and challenges the silencing of the Haitian Revolution by asserting that it succeeded in
displacing the center of modernity . . . not only for a small peripheral island but for the entire world system (131).
depends on no new research into the circumstances of the Haitian revolution, Nesbitt depends heavily on the work
of Carolyn Fick and the late Gerard Barthelemy to make his case for the importance popular insurgency inthe
citing social strategies, such as the refusal of technological innovation, the subdivision of property from generation
to generation, and active caco resistance to the outside world that supported bossale egalitarianism. Haitian
peasant society is presented as a maroon enclave beyond the reach of the liberal individualism and boundless
consumerism of the West. This seems a puzzling departure from both Eugene Genovese and Michel-Rolph Trouillot
the great
achievement of the Haitian revolution was the attempt to create a
modern black state and not continue the restorationist practices of
marronage.4 Similarly, Trouillot has argued that those who insist on the isolation of
the moun andeyo or the dualist sociologists have missed the depth of
penetration of urban civil society by the peasantry.5 In both
instances, Haitian peasants are seen to be part of a global process
and not the worlds indigestible other. The modern heroes of Nesbitts spirited narrative
who are cited at other times with approval. Genovese argued in From Rebellion to Revolution that
of mass-based revolution are the agronomist turned broadcaster Jean Dominique and the priest turned politician
Jean Bertrand Aristide. In both instances, heroic popular resistance masks the much more complex reality of the
spread of modern technology, of cassettes and transistor radios in rural Haiti, and the doctrine of liberation
theology spread by the grassroots church or ti legliz. The idealising of strategic marronnage and stateless
egalitarianism in Haiti is aimed ultimately at all who believe that the coming shift from unlimited consumerism to
an ethics of global responsibility will require fundamental changes to the sociopolitical system that has brought us
to the brink of disaster (171). It might have been more useful to think of the New World context and not the new
World order. Oddly enough there is no reference, except for a fleeting allusion to Brazilian music at the end, to other
instances of the radicalisation of the idea of the rights of man in the hemisphere. What of Guadeloupe, for instance,
which had a parallel history at the turn of the century? Do other peasant societies in the Caribbean share Haitis
bossale culture? Trouillot claims to have learned more about the Haitian peasantry after fifteen months doing
fieldwork on the peasantry of Dominica than he did during eighteen years in Port-au-Prince. 6 What Nick Nesbitt
does very persuasively is present the Haitian revolution as the most radical revolution of its time. He is less
convincing in enlisting the Haitian moun andeyo in his campaign against global capitalism.
B) Humanity
We should not abandon the category of universal humanity. Antislavery abolition and its intersections with critiques of gendered
citizenship drew on universal humanity as a source of solidarity.
GILROY 9 [Paul, Anthony Giddens Prf. of Social Theory @ London School of Economics 9 Race and the Right to
be Human p. 6-11 //liam]
That alternative provides my point of departure this evening. It was articulated in distinctive accents which were
neither bourgeois nor liberal2. It requires us to follow a detour through colonial history which has come under
That dubious
development has made it imperative to place the wests avowal of
modern, liberal, humanistic and humanitarian ideas in the context
of the formative encounter with native peoples whose moral
personality and humanity had long been placed in doubt . The
approach I favour requires seeing not just how all-conquering liberal
revisionist pressure as a result of recent attempts to revive imperial relations.
not amenable to colour-coded hierarchy and, in complicating approaches to human sameness, they refused the full,
obvious force of natural differences even when they were articulated together with sex and gender.
These
practiced a chiliastic Christianity that built upon St. Paul with incendiary consequences which could not be limited
by the heading of anti-slavery. Consider the way in which Angelina Grimk had articulated the concept of human
rights in her 1836 Appeal To The Christian Women of The South: . . . man is never vested with . . . dominion over
his fellow man; he was never told that any of the human species were put under his feet; it was only all things, and
man, who was created in the image of his Maker, never can properly be termed a thing, though the laws of Slave
States do call him a chattel personal; Man then, I assert never was put under the feet of man, by that first charter
of human rights which was given by God, to the Fathers of the Antediluvian and Postdiluvian worlds, therefore this
doctrine of equality is based on the Bible10. Grimk elaborated upon this inspired refusal of the reduction of people
to things in a memorable (1838) letter to her friend Catherine Beecher (the older sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe).
There, she connected the notion of divinely instituted human rights to a growing sense of what it would mean for
women to acquire political rights. Her insight was framed by a deep engagement with the problem of a gendered
alienation from the humanity of species being: The investigation of the rights of the slave has led me to better
understanding of our own. I have found the Anti-slavery cause to be the high school of morals in our landthe
school in which human rights are more fully investigated and better understood and taught, than in any other. Here
a great fundamental principle is uplifted and illuminated, and from this central light rays innumerable stream all
around.
Human beings have rights, because they are moral beings: the
rights of all men grown out of their moral nature, they have
essentially the same rights. 11 It is not easy to assimilate this variety of critical reflection to the
political traditions inherited by modern liberalism from revolutionary France. The foregrounding of race is, for
example, a fundamental and distinguishing feature as is the suggestion that reflecting upon the thwarted rights of
slaves promotes a richer understanding of the rightslessness known by women. Here, slavery was not only a
language and political morality of human rights re-worked the assumptions which had led to articulating the
unthinkable prospects of black citizenship and black humanity in the form of the ancient rhetorical questions
The
liberatory recognition solicited by those inquiries was pitched
against the corrosive power of racial categories and mediated by
the cosmopolitan power of human shame. It asked that the social
divisions signified by phenotypical difference be set aside in favour
of a more substantive human commonality. It promised an
alternative conception of kinship that could deliver a world purged
of injustice in general and racial hierarchy in particular.
immortalized in Wedgewoods porcelain: Am I not a Man and a brother? Am I not a Woman and a sister?.
the non-European world, or implicitly, by indicating a rank ordering of superior and inferior peoples, which could
then be used to justify a more indirect, quasi-imperial civilizing process? The aforementioned commitments
are
universalism and, as we have seen, they are sometimes considered to constitute the core of the
Enlightenment project. I have suggested already that such assertions mask and distort a
complex reality. In this case, they obscure the multiplicity of
universalisms across eighteenth-century European political thought,
each with distinct foundational claims, varying relationships to conceptualizations of human diversity and to
humanity (which themselves differ from thinker to thinker, and even from text to text), and different political
orientations toward the nature and limits of state power in theory and in practice. These philosophical sensibilities
and approaches can yield remarkably dif ferent political arguments toward foreign peoples, international justice,
and imperialism. Thus, rather than ask whether the Enlightenment project and Enlightenment universalism are
it is
more constructive to pose more precise and historically accurate
versions of such questions with regard to particular texts and
thinkers. In this book, I have studied a distinctive variant of Enlightenment writings against empire, one which
compatible with an appreciation of cultural pluralism or whether they are at bottom imperializing ideologies,
includes the philosophical and political arguments of Diderot, Kant, and Herder. While there is no such thing as
Enlightenment universalism as such, let alone a larger Enlightenment project, there is nonetheless an identifiable
set of philosophical and political arguments, assumptions, and tendencies about the relationship between universal
and pluralistic concepts that animates the strand of Enlightenment political thought under study here. With this in
mind, one can more meaningfully ask what the relationship is between universalism, pluralism, and
incommensurability in such political philosophies, and how precisely they yield anti-imperialist political
commitments. Answers to these more circumscribed questions can be given by better understanding the core
elements of Diderots, Kants, and Herders political philosophies, and how they differ from earlier (and, indeed,
from many later) understandings and judgements of empire. Immanuel Kant remarks pointedly in Toward Perpetual
Peace that the Europeans who landed and eventually settled in the New World often denied indigenous peoples any
moral status. When America, the Negro countries, the Spice Islands, the Cape, and so forth were discovered, they
were, to them [to Europeans], countries belonging to no one [die keinem angehorten], since they counted the
taken in this book to be the philosophically most robust strand of Enlightenment anti-imperialist political thought.17
Despite the many differences in the ethnographic sources that Diderot, Kant, and Herder consulted, the
philosophical languages that these thinkers employed, and the particular concepts they drew upon to attack
European empires, their anti-imperialist arguments intriguingly overlap in important respects. Thus, in this section, I
identify and elucidate the family resemblances that exist among their philosophical arguments and rhetorical
strategies, and discuss the underlying assumptions, ideas, and intellec tual dispositions that make their version of
anti-imperialist political thinking conceptually possible. In contrast to what is effectively the premiss of the kinds of
familiar questions asked at the opening of this section, the commitments of Diderot, Kant, and Herder to moral
universalism, cultural diversity, partial incommensurability, and the delegitimization of empire are not
imperialist politics. The whole modern tradition of natural right and social contract theory held this view in some
form. Moreover, Amerindians in particular were explicitly described by such thinkers as the pure, natural humans of
the state of nature. Yet much of this tradition of modern political thought, from Grotius onward, was either agnostic
about imperialism or lent philosophical support to European empires. Not every understanding of what it means
fundamentally to be a human fosters the philosophical materials necessary to build a more inclusive and pluralistic
political theory that could serve as the basis of anti-imperialist arguments. Indeed, as I will argue, some
understandings of humanity that are manifestly egalitarian can nevertheless impede such a development.
imperialist political theory, my focus in this section (as it has been generally in this book) is on Europeans political
attitudes toward non-Europeans. Many thinkers in non-European societies clearly operated with similarly selfcentred conceptions, but my emphasis throughout is on Europeans intellectual responses to the fact of cultural
difference and imperial politics, not with non-European peoples understandings of each other or of their accounts
of European peoples. Nor do I examine here the variety of intra-European distinctions between allegedly superior
and inferior groups, those, for instance, involving linguistic, geographical, class, religious, and gender differences,
which of course historically also legitimated differential treatment within European societies. Thus, I do not intend to
argue that Enlightenment anti-imperialist political philosophies are inclusive as such, for their underlying principles
do not necessarily (and, in the eighteenth century, they manifestly did not) support egalitarian arguments against
every form of exclusion. As I have noted, the first idea that enables Enlightenment anti-imperialism first both
historically and analyticallyis that foreigners are human beings and, consequently, that they deserve moral
of respect and reciprocity had been limited almost always to (some) members of ones own tribe, polis, nation,
religion, or civilization. Accordingly, the distinction between ones own society, however defined, and the barbaroi
(others, foreigners), whether justified outright or tacitly assumed, influenced not only the anthropological
conceptions of, and popular understandings about, foreign peoples, but also legitimated the often brutally
differential treatment of various groups. It is along these lines that Kant expresses dismay, in a lecture on moral
philosophy, at what he calls the error that the [ancient] Greeks displayed, in that they evinced no goodwill towards
extranei [outsiders, or foreigners], but included them all, rather, sub voce hostes _ barbari [under the name of
enemies, or barbarians]. (27:674) In the long history of imperial exploits, actions that in at least some contexts
might have provoked outrage in ones own land not only gained legitimacy on foreign soil but were deemed
praiseworthy, noble, and even morally obligatory abroad. While European imperialists in the New World, writes
Diderot, faithfully observe their own laws, they will violate the rights of other nations in order to increase their
power. That is what the Romans did.18 Enlightenment anti-imperialists recognized that such Janus-faced practices
constituted the very core of imperial activity from the empires of the ancient world to the imperial conquests and
commercial voyages of their day. The fact of difference itself lay at the heart of such inconsistent behaviour from
Europeans initial encounters with Amerindians onward, as Diderot notes: [t]he Spaniard, the first to be thrown up
by the waves onto the shores of the New World, thought he had no duty to people who did not share his colour,
customs, or religion. 19 Not wanting to single out the Spanish, Diderot suggests further that the Portuguese,
Dutch, English, French, and Danes all followed in precisely the same spirit of exclusion and injustice. From an
anthropological viewpoint, such discoveries of non-European peoples no doubt played a role in Europeans changing
conceptions of humanity. From Herodotus onward, of course, travel narratives played a central role in contemplating
what it might mean to be, in some fundamental sense, a human being. Given that theorizations of human nature
relate, in complicated ways, to changing understandings of the range and characteristics of human societies,
institutions, and practices, the European discovery of new lands and peoples accordingly generated further, and at
times more complex, theorizations of humanity.20 Moreover, from the sixteenth century onward, thinkers were
particularly keen to consult and appropriate the latest ethnographic reports. In part, the heightened interest no
doubt complemented, and may in part have resulted from, what is often described as the intellectual revolution in
natural philosophy and the resulting emphasis on experimentation, empirical study, and inductive reasoning in
fields such as astronomy, but also (especially from the mid-seventeenth century onward) in the study of human
anatomy, physiology, and psychology. Although many of Humes contemporaries did not share his hope of
introducing the experimental method to moral philosophy, there was nonetheless a widespread presumption that
an understanding of the human condition needed to take account, in some manner, of the growing anthropological
literature that detailed the vast range of human experiences, customs, and practices throughout the globe.21 This
turn toward what Georges Gusdorf has called human science, however, requires a stable referent for what counts
as human while also upsetting the stability of the term by focusing attention increasingly on human difference.22
In this sense, the attempt at identifying the most salient features of humanity was often an erratic and inherently
conflicted task, as John Locke argued it would have to be, given the very nature of our self-knowledge.
GILROY 9 [Paul, Anthony Giddens Prf. of Social Theory @ London School of Economics 9 Race and the Right to
be Human p. 13-15 //liam ]
The structure of sentimental feeling articulated by Harriet Beecher Stowe was instrumental in the formation of a
trans-national moral collectivity and in winning recognition of the suffering humanity of the slave whom it was no
longer possible to dismiss as a brute. Through her voice and chosen genre, distinctive patterns of heteropathic
problems posed by the case of Uncle Toms Cabin can only be glimpsed here. George Bullen, keeper of books at the
British Museum compiled a bibliographic note included in the repackaged 1879 edition. He revealed that almost
three decades after publication, Stowes novel had been translated into numerous languages including Dutch,
Bengali, Farsi, Japanese, Magyar and Mandarin. Fourteen editions had been sold in the German language during the
first year of publication and a year later, seventeen editions in French and a further six in Portuguese had also
appeared. In Russia, the book had been recommended as a primer in the struggle against serfdom and was duly
banned. The first book to sell more than a million copies in the US, the publication of Stowes novel was a world
version of human rights that racial hierarchy could not qualify or interrupt. The example of Stowe draws attention to
issues which would reappear through the nineteenth century as part of struggles to defend indigenous peoples, to
improve the moral and juridical standards of colonial government and to reform the immorality and brutality of
Europes imperial order. This activity was not always altruistically motivated. How those themes developed in the
period after slavery is evident from the para-academic work of campaigners like Harriet Colenso, Ida B. Wells, Roger
nonetheless be seen to comprise a tradition of reflection on and opposition to racial hierarchy that, even now, has
the power, not only to disturb and amend the official genealogy provided for Human Rights but also to re-work it
and Morel were alive to what we now call a deconstructive approach. They identified problems with rights-talk and
saw the way that racial difference mediated the relationship of that lofty rhetoric to brutal reality. They grasped the
limits of rights-oriented institutional life empirically and saw how rights-claims entered into the battle to extend
citizenship. But, their vivid sense of the power of racism meant that the luxury of any casual anti-humanism could
commentaries might even represent the quickening of the new humanism of which Frantz Fanon would speak years
Arendt and Agamben are linked by their apparent distaste for analyzing racism and by their complex and critical
relations to the idea of the human. This combination of positions can facilitate hostility to the project of human
rights which is then dismissed for its inability to face the political and strategic processes from which all rights
derive and a related refusal to address the analytical shortcomings that arise from the dependence of human rights
on an expansion of the rule of lawwhich can incidentally be shown to be fully compatible with colonial crimes23.
blocks, profligacy, stupidity, malignance and laziness in the inmates barracks. Our gaze onto the SS-city was one of
envy and lust as well. As with the colonized Fanon, each of us fantasized at least once a day of taking the place
of the oppressor. In the concentration camp too, just as in the native city, envy ahistorically transformed itself into
aggression against fellow inmates with whom fought over a bowl of soup while the whip of the oppressor lashed at
experiences at the hands of the Gestapo, he insisted that torture was the essence25 of the Third Reich and in
making that case, shows how these issues should become important again in comprehending and criticising the
brutal, permissive conduct of the war on terror.
2NC O/V
The affirmatives afro-pessimism undermines humanitys
universalism and prevents the possibility of change
A modern approach to racism requires a rejection of social
isolationism
This mandates an approach which acknowledges intersectionality
and universalism- thats Gilroy and Dash
Their critique of whiteness undermines the role that anti-imperialist
movements, feminism in the Civil War have had in combating
racism- thats Muthu
Unproductive skepticism has to be replaced with a cosmopolitanism
history- this is not nave, but accepts that even flawed systems can
be net forces for good- thats Gilroy
Ahistorical
( ) They assume that anti-black animus arises from nothingness but
its caught up in a broader web of historical power relationships like
Islamophobia and nativism
Charoenying 8 [Timothy, citing Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Prof of Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley,
Islamophobia
& Anti-Blackness: A Genealogical Approach, http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/islamophobia-anti-blacknessgenealogical-approach //liam]
expulsion of the Moors from continental Europe marked a transition from an age of imperial relations between
Christian and Muslim empires, to an age of European colonial expansion throughout the known world .
The
discovery of godless natives in the Americas would also inspire
the great debates between Las Casas and Seplveda in 1550 on the nature of the
human soul. Such a geopolitical and philosophical shift, Maldonado-Torres
argues, would lead to a Eurocentric, re-categorization of humanity based upon
religousand ultimately racialdifferences. Maldonado-Torres has proposed that
anti-black racism is not simply an extension of some historical bias
against blacks, but rather, is an amalgam of old-world Islamophobia
linked to the history of the Iberian peninsula, and to the notion of
souless beings embodied in popular conceptions about the
indigenous natives of the Americas. These beliefs would contribute
to an ideological basis for, and justification of, colonial conquests in
the name of cultural and religious conversion, as well as pave the
way for the enslavement and human trafficking of sub-Saharan
Africans.
( ) Their nihilism turns the case greatest comparative threat
Miah quoting West in 94 [Malik Miah, Cornel West's Race Matters, May-June, http://www.solidarityus.org/node/3079 //liam]
the
most basic issue now facing Black America: the nihilistic threat to
its very existence. This threat is not simply a matter of relative economic deprivation and political
powerlessness -- though economic well-being and political clout are requisites for meaningful Black progress. It is
primarily a question of speaking to the profound sense of
psychological depression, personal worthlessness, and social
despair so widespread in Black America. (12-13) Nihilism, he continues, is
to be understood here not as a philosophic doctrine ... it is, far
more, the lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying
In the chapter, Nihilism in Black America, West observes The liberal/conservative discussion conceals
and yet in much of the scholarship that followed in the wake of Slavery and Social Death, Pattersons abstract
distillates have been used to explain the existential condition of the enslaved. Having emerged from the discipline
of sociology,
the grand-pe`re of the social pathologists, set the terms in 1919: the Negro, when he landed in the United States,
left behind almost everything but his dark complexion and his tropical temperament. 8 Pattersons distillation also
conformed to the nomothetic imperative of social science, which has traditionally aimed to discover universal laws
of operation that would be true regardless of time and place, making the synchronic study of social phenomena
more tempting than more descriptive studies of historical transformation. Slavery and Social Death took shape
during a period when largely synchronic studies of antebellum slavery in the United States dominated the
scholarship on human bondage, and Pattersons expansive view was meant to situate U.S. slavery in a broad
context rather than to discuss changes as the institution developed through time. Thus one might see social
death as an obsolete product of its time and tradition, an academic artifact with limited purchase for contemporary
scholarship, were it not for the concepts reemergence in some important new studies of slavery. 9 WIDELY
ACKNOWLEDGED AS AMONG themost onerous of social institutions, slavery has much to tell us about the way
[Eric Brandom Brown v Agamben V. Brown, 'Social Death and Political Life in the Study of
Slavery', The American Historical Review, 114, (2009), pp 1231-1249.
http://ebrandom.blogspot.com/2009/12/brown-v-agamben.html //liam]
This essay is most straightforwardly a corrective to what Brown sees as the misuse (overuse) of Orlando Pattersons
categorical definition of slavery as social death. According to Brown ,
slavery, to the movement of the Haitian Revolution, and thus to modernity. One effect of Browns argument, or
rather one consequence of the argument that he wants to make, is a firm and empirically-oriented rejection of
Giorgio Agamben. Brown deals with this in a few paragraphs explaining the limits of an Agambenian perspective
definition of culture, commenting, practices of meaning are better seen as tools to be used than as possessions to
be lost. There are several somewhat separable issues here. First, there is the methodological question of how one
should think about culture and agency. In this, I simply agree with Brown. I prefer to treat culture (or, qua
intellectual historian, unit ideas) as a bundle of tools to be manipulatedtools that empower, but also limit,
channel, and react upon, those that wield them. Then there is the more empirical question of the admissibility and
utility of the notion of social death in the study of slave systems, say specifically in the Caribbean. Not having read
all the relevant texts, I defer with enthusiasm to Brown. What I have read leads me to believe that he is entirely
correct.
contemporary dispensation. While their absolutisation of mass neurosis, closure and entrapment might be said to
such
images of social sickness, paralysis and mass neurosis can be
manipulated by Africas anthropological detractors in their justification of a static
be a reflection of the state of the nation in the post independence period, it is also estimable that
and back pedalling African race, particularly along the evolutionary spectrum, which is presented as a universal
doomed. Such a definition which trivialises the African existential trajectory pays homage to the subversive labels
that Europe has generously donated to Africa. Such labels include Third World; Underdeveloped; Dark Continent;
Poor majority, cultural other and many more. These are designations that bespeak helplessness and mass neurosis.
http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Postmodern_Blackness_18270.html //liam]
that are threatening to and potentially disruptive of that critical practice which would support radical liberation struggle. The postmodern critique of "identity," though relevant for
renewed black liberation struggle, is often posed in ways that are problematic. Given a pervasive politic of white supremacy which seeks to prevent the formation of radical black
subjectivity, we cannot cavalierly dismiss a concern with identity politics. Any critic exploring the radical potential of postmodernism as it relates to racial difference and racial
We must
engage decolonization as a critical practice if we are to have
meaningful chances of survival even as we must simultaneously
cope with the loss of political grounding which made radical
activism more possible. I am thinking here about the postmodernist critique of essentialism as it pertains to the construction of "identity" as one
domination would need to consider the implications of a critique of identity for oppressed groups. Many of us are struggling to find new strategies of resistance.
example. Postmodern theory that is not seeking to simply appropriate the experience of "otherness" in order to enhance its discourse or to be radically chic should not separate the
"politics of difference" from the politics of racism. To take racism seriously one must consider the plight of underclass people of color, a vast majority of whom are black. For AfricanAmericans our collective condition prior to the advent of postmodernism and perhaps more tragically expressed under current postmodern conditions has been and is characterized by
There is
increasing class division and differentiation, creating on the one
hand a significant black middle-class, highly anxiety- ridden, insecure, willing to be
co-opted and incorporated into the powers that be, concerned with racism to the degree that it poses constraints on upward social mobility ; and, on the
other, a vast and growing black underclass, an underclass that
embodies a kind of walking nihilism of pervasive drug addiction, pervasive alcoholism, pervasive homicide, and an
exponential rise in suicide. Now because of the deindustrialization, we also have a devastated black industrial working class. We are talking here
about tremendous hopelessness. This hopelessness creates longing
for insight and strategies for change that can renew spirits and
reconstruct grounds for collective black liberation struggle. The overall impact of the
postmodern condition is that many other groups now share with black folks a sense of
continued displacement, profound alienation and despair. Writing about blacks and postmodernism, Cornel West describes our collective plight:
open up our understanding of African-American experience. The critique of essentialism encouraged by postmodernist thought is useful for African-Americans concerned with
. Many of us are as reluctant to face this task as many non-black postmodern thinkers who focus theoretically on the issue of "difference" are to confront
Supremacy K
1NC
( ) Voting aff destroys creativity it merely replaces white
supremacy. Their ideal form of debate is the same kind of stagnant,
rotting, unreflexive image of thought they criticize.
Jeanes 5 (Emma L. Jeanes, Lecturer, University of Exeter and Christian De Cock, Professor of Management,
Swansea University, MAKING THE FAMILIAR STRANGE: A DELEUZIAN PERSPECTIVE ON CREATIVITY,
http://www.iacat.com/revista/recrearte/recrearte03/Familiar_Strange.pdf, 2005, p. 4-8)
This process of becoming, the creation of what is not yet, is achieved through extending the virtual; thinking in new, perhaps previously unimagined, modes of
world is limited in its future possibilities by what is already given. The actual world, therefore, evolves through the unfolding of given possibilities towards a given
end. In the virtual world, however, there is the power to become in unforeseen ways, unlimited by the actual world. The virtual is real, though not actual, but
virtualities may become actualised in the present. Deleuze advocated actualization over realization. The process of realization is guided by resemblance and
limitation. The real is thought to be in the image of the possible it realizes; the possible simply has reality added to it, but there is no difference. Furthermore since not
all possibilities can be realised, there is also a process of limitation. However for the virtual to become actual it must create its own terms of actualisation; with no
preformed order
What would be necessary for the creative organization of the actual would be
an enlarging, inclusive movement oriented toward the future capable of producing a new unity In these terms, the organization of the actual would have to be a
movement from perception to a new recollection that would be a future memory (a sort of futur antrieur or future perfect in the grammatical sense) as a common
immanence: plateaus from which further thinking occurs; the assumptions and distinctions from which we think which constitutes the outside of thought and which
creates the exterior the world we know which in turn creates planes of transcendence.
is a form of transcendence. We have created an image of thought (Deleuze, 1994:131) which is accepted as common sense, the taken-forgranted and the foundation for opinion. For Deleuze transcendence is ultimately an illusion: it is a
creation of the planes of immanence.
transcendent image is merely an invention. Paradoxically, this also exhibits the power of the inventive process that thinking can be so powerful as to enslave itself to
images of a transcendent outside (Colebrook, 2002:71). Like Foucault (1972), Deleuze (with Guattari) explores historically situated illusions of transcendence
most notably in the context of the history of philosophy where planes of transcendence have created grounds for thinking (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994). Philosophy,
for Deleuze, gives consistency to chaos, and allows us to think the immanent difference that produces transcendence (Colebrook, 2002). But it is never a full return
to the first level of absolute deterritorialization, before transcendence. By deterritorialization Deleuze refers to the freeing of a possibility from its origins, its original
territory. In contrast, territorialization refers to the manner by which we organise (particularly language) such that it remains constrained by this territory. Remaining
territorialized naturally limits future possibilities to what is already given, to the constraints of the ordering of language: In Deleuzes view, language is charged with
power relations. The object of language is not communication, but the inculcation of mots dordre-slogans, watchwords, but also literally words of order, the
dominant, orthodox ways of classifying, organizing, and explaining the world. Far from being a mere collection of ideological signifiers, language is a mode of action,
the various mots dordre of a culture being enforced through regular patterns of practice, collective assemblages of enunciation, or regimes of signs (Bogue, 2004:
So philosophers have to create, and recreate concepts that give consistency to this chaos but in doing so they have to constantly
reopen their thinking to the outside without allowing the plane of immanence (the assumptions,
distinctions, images) to act as a foundation, to territorialize. Philosophy, therefore, is practical: Thinkings never just a theoretical
71).
matter. It has to do with vital problems. To do with life itself. (Deleuze, 1995: 105). And the notion of immanence is key to Deleuzes philosophy; it is the essence of
Thinking experience as an open and immanent whole acknowledges that each new event of
experience will transform what experience is, thereby precluding in principle any final or closed
ground for experience. Immanence is, then, for Deleuze the only true philosophy. If we allow thought to
accept some transcendent foundation such as reason, God, truth or human nature then we have stopped
philosophy.
thinking. And if immanence is philosophy for Deleuze it is also an ethics: not allowing experience to be enslaved by any single image that would elevate itself
above others. (Smith, 2003: 79; see also Nietzsche, 1976: 451). The question, therefore, is how to avoid this grounding of our thinking that would otherwise prevent
us from thinking creatively.
( ) This both turns and solves the case better because good and bad
are not binary. They wrongly think its a zero-sum power struggle
between white and blacks, a fight between two sides the police
and the policed. The struggle of 21st century politics is not a
struggle oriented around race; rather, it is the very concept of race
which has come to inhibit and constrain radical politics. The
affirmatives deployment of the concept of race as the
organizational focus of political struggle is a smokescreen which
obscures the dynamics of oppression the very deployment of race
as a concept itself is the lynchpin of racialized oppression.
Darder and Torress 4 (Antonia Darder, Prof of education policy studies at U of Illinois, and Rodolfo Torress, Associate prof of latino studies at UC
Irvine, After Race: Racism after multiculturalism, p. 1-2)
Over a century ago, W E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk proclaimed one of his most cited dictums: The problem of the 20th Century is the problem of the
the problem of
racean ideology that has served well to successfully obscure and disguise class interests behind the
smokescreen of multiculturalism, diversity, difference, and more recently, whiteness. Whether the terms of analysis are race, racial
color line (1989, 10). In this book we echo his sentiment, but with a radical twist. The problem of the twenty-first century is
identity, race consciousness, or political race, the category of race and its many derivatives function as the lynchpin of racism, which forbids its objects to be
other than members of a race (Fields 2001, 49). As Barbara Fields has noted with respect to African Americans, Afro-Americans themselves have fought successively
peoplebut most importantly on the lives of those who have been enslaved, colonized, or marked for genocide in the course of world history.
( ) However, the problem isnt that the police are winning this fight
the problem is that we conceive of debate as a fight at all. The
reason we can even have a concept of supremacy in the first place
is because debate at all accepts the ability to be governed by a
single image of thought.
MacDonald 9 (Michael MacDonald, Postdoctoral Fellow @ the University of Alberta, Deleuze and the
Wild, http://halfsharpmusic.wordpress.com/2009/11/30/deleuze-and-the-wild/)
this reaction is the creation of difference, or hierachy, and of the subject itself, We do not feel,
experience or know any becoming but becoming-reactive {Deleuze, 1962/1983 #20} 64. But becoming reactive is not the
negation of creativity. Creativity is expressed in the negotiation unleashed by becoming-reactive. The act of becoming therefore is always in
And
relation to something else. Since the community and the environment are all outside of the subject, and since the subject is defined by their reaction to what is outside,
then it is unnecessary and even misleading to suggest that there is a special set of negotiations between people and objects. Everything is an object to the mind and the
minds negotiations and creative reactions with all of these objects affect the individual. Therefore the natural world, people, art, ideas are all particles that are
synthesized in the establishment of the subject and subjects are synthesized into community.
thought
to
reaction there is, what Nietzsche called a will to power being expressed. The will is not Hobbes General Will. It is not a transcendental expression of community or
humanity that motivates and activates the community through the individual. The will, according to Deleuze, is not merely the desire for power or the need for self
aggrandizement. The will is not something so simple and selfish. The will to power is the, genetic element of force 53. And the force is a response in reaction.
Reaction therefore is more than simple response. Reaction has two possibilities. Reaction, which defines the subject, defines the subjects relationships as well. The
will to power, says Nietszche is not without morality. But it is not the morality of the Church or the State. Nietzsche claims that he has invented a new conception of
the will. A will that does not finds its essence outside of itself but in the relationship between self and the world. The relationship may take two forms. It must either be
Nietzsche taught that god is dead. But it is not the death of something concrete. Not even of something divine. But it is the death of exteriority. Replaced by an
french deconstruction in the Spinoza-Nitzscheian critical heritage. Deleuze claims that Nietzsches genealogy is a critical but ultimately creative discourse. Morality
Creativity is
expressed by everyone. But everyone does not express creativity equally or, to use moral terminology, in an
equally upstanding way. The good is the creative and the joyful and the bad is the creative that is bounded and
is dependent, not upon socially constituted rules and norms but in the evaluation of creativity. The will to power is expressed.
without freedom. Creativity that is reactive-active or reactive-reactive. A reactive-active creativity occurs in critique, Critique is destruction as joy, the aggression of
the creator. A creator of values cannot be distinguished from a destroyer, from a criminal or from a critic: a critic of established values, reactive values and baseness
(87). But Deleuze opens himself to criticism here. He claimed to avoid the role of judge. But through Nietzsche he established a criterion to judge value. But to do so
he tore down class, community, tradition, and even revolution and replaced it all with a morality of creativity. Ranciere suggested that this philosophy runs into a dead
end. Zizek is troubled because Deleuze attempts to always dissolve the contradiction to never allow the ultimate moment of pure negativity. But Deleuze does this to
inventions and inventions are creations. Deleuze used Nietzsche to dissolve the subject:object binary, to establish a creative deconstruction called genealogy, and to
deny the binary creating dialectic.
Nietzsches good genealogy has a lot in common with composting. The breaking down of items to create from their debris a fertile ground from which new life can
spring. Composting is life affirming and destructive. Intellectual composting, the act of destroying to affirm life, is a more active genealogy. Deleuze would prefer
composting. It is a creative, life affirming act that demonstrates immanence. If Deleuze had been born in America instead of France his orientation may have been
different. If genealogy is translated through deconstruction to composting then Deleuze may have more of a connection with contemporary ecology than one may
think. Free creativity is the wild.
theorists so often say, whiteness is a norm. But the assertion by itself, no matter how
Placing race and of course whiteness in the context of the
development of biopower gives a much clearer picture of what it means to say whiteness is
a norm and indicates some important directions for further study. Once that context is supplied, the work of historians like Allen, Roediger, and Saxton can help
explain why it is whiteness (rather than Saxonness, for example) that functions as the racial norm in the USA. Like Whiteness Studies theorists, Foucault
meant for his work to have political effects, to disrupt power formations and make new configurations possible. Looking back on
It is true then that, as the Whiteness Studies
the publication of Discipline and Punish, he had this to say to an interviewer: When the book came out, different readers in particular, correctional officers, social
they still believe that racism originates in subjectivity, not in structures or institutions or practices. This belief is implicit in their search for a psychological account of
The account offered in virtually every Whiteness Studies theorists work can be
summed up in two words: white privilege. The story goes that white people exercise power
not so much by exercising their capacity to harm non-white people but by exercising the
privileges that hundreds of years of racism have put in place for them. They are in fact deploying racist power, but they do not see
racisms persistence.
it as such because to them it seems that they are simply claiming for themselves the goods to which they are entitled, and they have a deep investment in being able to
Across the very different social analyses that Whiteness Studies theorists put
forth and across their very pronounced disagreements over political strategy, this concept
of white privilege stretches; it, like the claim that whiteness functions as a norm, unites theorists who
continue to do so.
otherwise have very little in common. My contention is that wherever we see the concept of white privilege operating, we can be sure the conception of power that is
also operating is the traditional juridical conception that construes power as the possession of a preexistent subject. No thorough overview of Whiteness Studies ever
omits reference to Peggy McIntoshs article White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack (1989). Although McIntoshs article is tentative and limited to
description at a very basic, individualistic level, it popularized the notion that white people possess (like tools in a knapsack) something called white privilege.11
McIntosh lists 46 of these unearned assets (McIntosh, 1988: 1), including such disparate tools as: (3) If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or
purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live; (5) I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not
be followed or harassed; (21) I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group; (22) I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons
of color who constitute the worlds majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion; (33) I am not made acutely aware that my shape, bearing, or
body odor will be taken as a reflection on my race; and (41) I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me (McIntosh, 1988: 5
9). One could spend a lot of time critiquing this list and pointing out various problems with it, but what is important here is the focus on privilege itself.
McIntosh claims that racism persists because white people use tools that non-white people
have not been given. If we want to eliminate racist exercises of power, white people have to
divest themselves of those tools. Clearly this sort of analysis can never lead to an account of the production and maintenance of white
subjectivities within racist regimes of power unless all we mean by white subjectivity is a generic subject plus
a knapsack full of white privileges, a knapsack that the generic subject can jettison without seriously altering its own composition. But that
is surely not what the thesis of the social construction of white identity amounts to. So why do Whiteness theorists hang onto this terminology? Why does the concept
of white privilege appear in virtually every Whiteness Studies book and article? Lisa Heldke and Peg OConnor are among the few writers who expend any effort at
all trying to justify their use of the concept of white privilege. According to them, the analytic value of the term privilege lies in its ability to play the opposite role to
oppression. Everyone generally agrees that there is such a thing as racial oppression and that the members of some races are oppressed, but what of the races that are
not oppressed? Heldke and OConnor write: Some will argue that domination is the companion concept of oppression; they assert that if you are not a member of a
particular oppressed group, then you are automatically a dominator (Heldke and OConnor, 2004: 299). They dislike the term domination, however, because it
presupposes that a group or an individual exercises power over another group in very obvious and overt ways (ibid.); in other words, it runs counter to the apparent
fact that, as analyses like Omi and Winants make clear, racism does not operate in obvious and overt ways (at least not by the lights of most white people) and many
white people are not aware of its functioning at all. Heldke and OConnors analysis continues: . . . oppression has many different faces; it is created in all kinds of
social practices, structures, and institutions. In many instances of oppression, we may not be able to point to any person or group of persons who are actively engaged
in dominating the oppressed group . . . We need a companion concept that has as many different faces as does oppression. The concept of privilege will fill the bill; its
multiple aspects allow us to describe and understand the roles that different unoppressed groups play in the maintenance of oppressive systems. (Heldke and
within racist societies there are three kinds of people; there are oppressed
people (those without much power), dominators (those with power who intend to oppress others), and people who exercise
privilege (those with power who do not intend to oppress others but do so anyway). If we hang onto a conception of power
that makes it the property of a pre-constituted subjectivity and do not posit that third
group, we cannot explain how racism can continue to exist if most people are not avowed racists. We will need a
psychological theory to explain the persistence of racism. In other words, if we hang onto a traditional juridical conception
of power, we will remain stuck where race theorists were stuck 30 years ago. I contend that the
OConnor, 2004: 299) In sum,
pervasiveness of the term white privilege is testament to how deeply and profoundly stuck race theorists typically still are.
one whose essence is exteriority : une pensee du dehors. The classical image of thought, as it is pre- sented in the history of
philosophy, is that of conceptual systems whose relationship with the outside is always mediated by some form of interiority, whether this be the soul, consciousness,
These are centered and hierarchical systems, and precisely the primary
characteristic of arborescent thought is its organization around a principle of unity or
interiority: this forms the underlying structure or axis in terms of which the object in question (language, the unconscious, society) and its relation to other
things must be understood. Against this image, Deleuze defends a form of thought defined by its essential exteriority, its
potential for multiple and polyvalent relations with an outside. This is one of the most
important characteristics of rhizomes: rhizomes are a certain kind of assemblage or
multiplicity and, as such, are defined by their outside, "by the abstract line, line of flight or
of deterritorialization along which they are transformed by being connected to other
multiplicities" (15-16). More- over, rhizomatic thought implies a style of writing which displays immediate connections with the outside: "It seems to us
that writing will never be carried out enough in the name of an outside. The outside has no image , no meaning, no subjectivity.
or concepts themselves.
The book, assemblage with the outside, against the book-image of the world. A book-rhizome" (34). Examples of such writing include texts by Kleist, Kafka, Artaud,
and Nietzsche. Elsewhere Deleuze cites the passage from The Genealogy of Morals dealing with the founders of the State, those "terrible artists with the look of
bronze": "One does not reckon with such natures; they come like fate, without reason, consideration or pretext; they appear as lighten- ing, too terrible, too sudden, too
convincing, too 'different' even to be hated. .. ." Such texts, he suggests, are animated by a movement which comes from without, an external force or intensity such
that "something jumps from the book, entering into contact with a pure outside."3 This Deleuzian alternative is not simply a matter of another image of thought, an
alternative model for the elaboration of concepts. For that would imply a constant form which could then be reproduced in different domains, whereas exteriorizing
not the repetition of some Other Form of conceptual assemblage, but a process: the operation of putting thought into an immediate
relation with outside forces, "in short, of making thought a war-machine" (467). Thought as a war-machine means a nomadic thought, since it
was the nomads who invented war-machines and deployed them against the apparatuses of the State. This opposition between the State and nomads allows the
difference between these two modes of thought to be expressed in terms of the kind of mental space occupied or described by concepts. The classical image, or Stateform of thought, involves a striated mental space which is traditionally delimited by a dual pretention to universality: "In effect, it operates with two 'universals,' the
Totality as the ultimate foundation of being or the enfolding horizon, and the Subject as the principle which converts being into being-for- us" (469). In these terms,
the alternative is therefore a thought which refuses any universal subject, attributing itself
instead to a particular multiplicity, race, or tribe and, which does not locate itself within some englobing totality but 62 Conceptual
Politics is rather deployed in a milieu without horizon, occupying a smooth space in the manner in which
nomads occupy a steppe. A number of conclusions may be drawn from this regarding Mille Plateaux itself. First, while it may, at a certain level of
generality, be "philosophy in the traditional sense," the kinds of concepts invented and their rhizomatic assemblage result in a far from traditional book. These are
untimely concepts, calculated to produce critical effects on the established forms of understanding: "The philosopher creates concepts that are neither eternal nor
historical but untimely, not of the present."4 Second, an understanding of the nature of a book-rhizome clearly has implications for how we should read it. It cannot be
times deploying the same concepts, although not in the same manner, but they remain self-sufficient trajectories. Despite the undoubted presence of a metaphysical
tendency, a system- building impulse evident in the very proliferation of concepts and distinctions, it would be futile to try to reconstitute a system from Mille
Plateaux. Such an architectonic analysis would suppose the existence of a stable conceptual interiority which by right the book does not have. The question remains,
how- ever, How do they function, these plateaux? How do they work, both as conceptual thought providing effects of intelligibility, however local or provisional, and
as connections with an outside? An appropriate way to proceed might be to choose a particular conceptual line and track it: exegesis should follow a path rather than
reproduce a system. Like the primitive metallurgist, whose importance derives from the fact that he is the ultimate source of arms for nomads and the State alike, we
should identify a conceptual lode and follow it, extracting whatever gems we may discover in the process. For the remainder of this essay, we shall be guided by the
political seam through Mille Plateaux. As well as being a prodigious enterprise of conceptual innovation, this is a thoroughly political text. At one point, the authors
install the political as their ultimate metaphysical category: "Before being there is politics" (249). At the level of political theory, their work, like that of Foucault and
others in post-1968 France, needs to be read in the context of an attempt to redefine what constitutes "revolutionary" politics and to rethink the terms in which we
evaluate social movements. From the section in plateau 13 where they discuss the current situation and from remarks throughout the book, it is apparent that their
political sympathies lie with those "marginal" movements which have been the principal force of European leftism since the early 70s. These include not only the
movements of women, prisoners, migrant workers, and others, but also struggles around ecology, autonomy, and the networks 63 of alternative institutions. In view of
these explicit concerns, we may ask how the several plateaux serve in relation to political evaluation and action: does Mille Plateaux propose a politics, and, if so,
what is it? We shall address this question primarily via the use by Deleuze and Guattari of the concepts of war-machine and nomadism. These are elaborated in detail
in plateau 12, the Treatise on Nomadology, but they are also frequently invoked in contexts where it is a question of the active forces recognized by rhizomatic
analysis. They are recurrent figures of the political morality found in Mille Plateaux. Our objective is not to recapture all that is relevant to political evaluation: much
of the analysis of capitalism as an axiom system will be passed over. Rather, the aim is to use the discourse on nomadism and the war-machine to illustrate the manner
in which philosophical and political concerns are articulated in the text. There are in the course of Mille Plateaux a number of discursive platforms in whose terms
individual and social processes may be analyzed: rhizomatics, schizo-analysis, pragmatics, cartography, and nomadology are the names of just a few of these distinct
but overlapping frames of reference. Before taking up directly the concepts of war-machine and nomadism, it may be helpful briefly to survey at least one of these, in
order to indicate the general terms of Deleuzian analysis and to locate the concept of war-machine by reference to another platform. The political perspective for
which Deleuze and Guattari are best known is probably that of "micro-politics." This is not a perspective which limits itself to the local or personal phenomena of
desire, but one which explicitly takes these into account as a constitutive and sometimes leading element in social processes. The point is not to perpetuate distinctions
of scale or divisions between the private and public spheres, but to obviate all of these, replacing them by a differentiation between the kinds of segment or lines of
which we are composed. In Mille Plateaux, the earlier schizo-analytic analysis in terms of types of desiring process is largely superseded by a cartographic analysis of
the lines of power and desire which characterize individuals or groups: on the one hand, a molar line of rigid segmentarity which implies the presence of something
like a State apparatus; on the other, a molecular line of supple segmentarity along which occur affective attachments and all kinds of "becomings" -becoming-woman,
becoming-animal, becoming-imperceptible. Processes of desire tend to operate along the molecular line, whereas the official organization of institutions and of lives
tends to effect the molar line. However, these two distinctions do not exactly coincide, and in reality the two kinds of line are closely intertwined: Every society, but
also every individual, is therefore composed of both segmentarities at once: the one molar, the other molecular. These are distinguished by the fact that they don't have
the same terms, the same relations, the same nature or the same type of multiplicity. They are inseparable by virtue of the fact that they coexist, the one leading into
the other . .. always in presupposition to one another. (260) 64 Conceptual Politics The difference between these two lines is not an axiological one, but an effective
difference, important for the understanding of social phenomena: which processes correspond to what line in a given situation. Thus, the authors show how the
specificity of fascism as a form of totalitarian regime appears once it is understood how it organizes libidinal attractions at the molecular level. Fascism, they suggest,
is inseparable from a proliferation of micro-fascisms in the school, family, office, or other local centers, all in constant interaction with each other before they resonate
together in the national-socialist State (261-262). There is a third type of line, however, which is the most important of all a line no less real, but more abstract than
This is the line of flight, a line without segments which is more like the collapse of
all segmentarity. It is the line along which structures constituted in terms of the preceding lines break down or become transformed into something else.
It is the line of absolute deterritorialization. In any assemblage, the lines of flight are primary in both an ontological as well as an
ethico-political sense. An assemblage is governed or defined by its abstract line: assemblages do not have a causal
infrastructure or sub-structure, but they do have "an abstract line of specific, creative causality, a line
of flight or deterritorialization, which can only be effective in relation to other, general causalities, but
which cannot be explained by these" (347). In ethico-political terms, the line of flight is privileged because "it is always on a line of
the other two.
flight that one creates."5 Throughout Mille Plateaux, preference is accorded to those processes or modes of existence which exhibit the greatest possible degree of
creativity or life: absolute deterritorialization, continuous variation, becoming-minor are some of these processes; rhizome, body without organs, plane of consistence,
and nomadism are some of the modes of exist- ence exhibiting these creative processes. If there is a certain vitalism implicit in the book, it is one with no necessary
relation to the organic. What is valued is a "non-organic life" which may be found in art, a film, or a piece of music. Indeed, the fundamentally affirmative character of
the Deleuzian metaphysic is expressed in the coincidence of life and abstraction, as this is manifest in the line of flight: The notion of abstraction is very complicated:
a line can represent nothing, be purely geometric, but still not be truly abstract so long as it traces a contour. The abstract line is the one which does not trace a contour,
which passes between things, a mutant line. It has been said a propos Pollock's line.
geometric, it is the most living, the most creative line. Real abstraction is non-organic life. The idea of a non-organic life is
constant in Mille Plateaux; it is precisely the life of the concept.
2NC Overview
You cant end policing by becoming the police yourself the problem
isnt which set of ideals are patrolling the streets, its that theres
any patrolling at all. The only reason we can even have any concept
of supremacy in the first place, white supremacy or otherwise, is
because debate at all accepts the ability to be governed by a single
image of thought. This turns the case our arg isnt that their
revolution is as violent as the squo, but rather that the form of
debate they endorse is the root of any supremacy at all. The aff is
the repeatedly lost dream of every single failed revolution in history
from the Jacobian purges of the French Revolution to the forced
collectivization of the Bolsheviks, the winners just impose a new
dictatorship. As long as debate is exclusionary of any style, we will
never be truly free of the cops and pigs of the hood. Thats all
MacDonald and Jeanes.
Voting neg endorses the creativity of infinite debating styles,
ending all policing as such by refusing any one role of the ballot. We
solve the problem at a level prior to their solution.
AND this sidesteps their offense because we dont disagree its
important to solve oppression, we just disagree with the way they
conceptually frame their solution. We are a methodological indict of
their knowledge-process, not their content thats Patton.
AND independent reasons to vote neg
(1) Creativity is the meaning of life and the only impact you should
evaluate. The basic function of lived experience as a human being is
the creation of different meanings as the engine of all desire. It is
the only real basis for all morality, for what is good and bad thats
Patton.
(2) There is no truth out there ready to be uncovered meaning is
an always-evolving creative enterprise, and when we endorse a
stagnant image like the aff it cuts off our access to truth, which
means if we win a link you should consider all their claims a priori
false. Thats Jeanes. Specifics cant outweigh because this is a prior
ontological argument about our ability to describe reality.
locating the debate as activism perspective within the competitive framework is that it
overlooks the communal nature of the community problem. If each individual debate is a
decision about how the debate community should approach a problem, then the losing debaters become
collateral damage in the activist strategy dedicated toward creating community change. One
The larger problem with
frustrating example of this type of argument might include a judge voting for an activist team in an effort to help them reach elimination rounds to generate a
addressing
the
community
problem.
There
is no role for competition when a judge decides that it is important to accentuate the publicity of a community problem. An extreme example might include a team
arguing that their opponents academic institution had a legacy of civil rights abuses and that the judge should not vote for them because that would be a community
endorsement of a problematic institution. This scenario is a bit more outlandish but not unreasonable if one assumes that each debate should be about what is best for
them from desiring-production. And to summarize all the preceding determinations: the one is defined by subjugated groups, the other by subject-groups. It is true that
we still run up against all kinds of problems concerning these distinctions. In what sense does the schizoid investment constitute, to the same extent as the other one, a
real investment of the socio-historical field, and not a simple utopia? In what sense are the lines of escape collective, positive, and creative? What is the relationship
between the two unconscious poles, and what is their relationship with the preconscious investments of interest? We have seen that
the
unconscious
paranoiac investment was grounded in the socius itself as a full body without organs, beyond the preconscious aims and interests that it assigns and
distributes. The fact remains that such an investment does not endure the light of day: it must always hide under
assignable aims or interests presented as the general aims and interests, even though in reality the latter represent only the members of the
dominant class or a fraction of this class. How could a formation of sovereignty, a fixed and determinate gregarious aggregate, endure being invested for their brute
force, their violence, and their absurdity? They would not survive such an investment.
order, and reason. Even the most insane capitalism speaks in the name of economic rationality. And this is necessarily the case, since it is
the
bringing to light of the unconscious reactionary investment as if devoid of an aim ,
would be enough to transform it completely, to make it pass to the other pole of the libido, i.e., to the
schizorevolutionary pole, since this action could not be accomplished without overthrowing power,
without reversing subordination, without returning production itself to desire: for it is only
desire that lives from having no aim. Molecular desiring-production would regain its liberty to master in its turn the molar aggregate
goals, of law,
in the irrationality of the full body that the order of reasons is inextricably fixed, under a code, under an axiomatic that determines it. What is more,
under an overturned form of power or sovereignty. That is why Klossowski, who has taken the theory of the two poles of investment the furthest, but still within the
category of an active utopia, is able to write: "Every sovereign formation would thus have to foresee the destined moment of its disintegration.... No formation of
sovereignty, in order to crystalize, will ever endure this prise de conscience: for as soon as this formation becomes conscious of its immanent disintegration in the
individuals who compose it, these same individuals decompose it. ... By way of the circuitous route of science and art, human beings have many times revolted against
method that the means that it constantly elaborates do no more than reproduce, on the outside, an interplay of forces by themselves without aim or end whose
combinations obtain such and such a result. ... However, no science can develop outside a constituted social grouping. In order to prevent science from calling social
groups back in question, these groups take science back in hand ... [integrate it] into the diverse industrial schemes; its autonomy appears strictly inconceivable. A
conspiracy joining together art and science presupposes a rupture of all our institutions and a total upheaval of the means of production.... If some conspiracy,
according to Nietzsche's wish, were to use science and art in a plot whose ends were no less suspect, industrial society would seem to foil this conspiracy in advance
Not
only is the nuclear family as social institution the basis for Oedipalized subjects and Oedipal
representations of desire (including psychoanalysis) alike, historically speaking it is only the latest in a long line of
social institutions responsible for the construction of fixed subjectivities, and it is in some ways the weakest
and the most abstract. Fixed subjects of all kinds arise from an illegitimate use of the conjunctive
synthesis that segregates one set of subjectivities from all the others and demands that an
otherwise nomadic subjectivity (resulting from legitimate conjunctive syntheses) identify only with members of
that restricted set: whites rather than blacks; men rather than women; Christians rather
than Jews, and so forth. Instead of the I am everyone and anyone of the nomadic subject,
the segregated subject believes that he/she belongs to a superior race (103105), identifies himself/herself
Deleuze and Guattari take this argument yet one step further, for schizoanalysis is not just a materialist semiotics: it is an historical-materialist semiotics.
as essentially different from and better than all the others from which he/she is segregated. Historically, the content or rationale for such segregation has varied
1NC
Ahhh.
2NC
We offer our scream as the only thing we can do in the face of a
mutilated world as well as a world only seen as mutilated. Our
visceral rejection of the world-as-is is the starting point for
resistance from our own souls not from passive ivory towers.
Change only comes from radical refusal and negativity, not rational
discourse. This is our scream of rage, of anger, of opposition to the
horrors of our world!
Holloway '02 [John, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today, London,
Pluto Press]
In the beginning is the scream. We scream. When we write or when we read, it is easy to forget that the
beginning is not the word, but the scream. Faced with the mutilation of human lives by capitalism, a
scream of sadness, a scream of horror, a scream of anger, a scream of refusal: NO . The starting point of
theoretical reflection is opposition, negativity, struggle. It is from rage that thought is born, not from
the pose of reason, not from the reasoned-sitting-back-and-reflecting-on-the-mysteries-of-existence
that is the conventional image of the thinker. We start from negation, from dissonance . The dissonance
can take many shapes. An inarticulate mumble of discontent, tears of frustration, a scream of rage, a confident
roar. An unease, a confusion, a longing, a critical vibration. Our dissonance comes from our experience, but
that experience varies. Sometimes it is the direct experience of exploitation in the factory, or of
oppression in the home, of stress in the office, of hunger and poverty, or of state violence or
discrimination. Sometimes it is the less direct experience through television, newspapers or books that
moves us to rage. Millions of children live on the streets of the world. In some cities, street children are
systematically murdered as the only way of enforcing respect for private property. In 1998 the assets
of the 358 richest people were worth more than the total annual income of 45 per cent of the worlds
people (over 2.5 billion). The gap between rich and poor is growing, not just between countries but within
countries. The stock market rises every time there is an increase in unemployment. Students are
imprisoned for struggling for free education while those who are actively responsible for the misery of
millions are heaped with honours and given titles of distinction: General, Secretary of Defence,
President. The list goes on and on. It is impossible to read a newspaper without feeling rage, without feeling pain.
You can think of your own examples. Our anger changes with each day, as outrage piles upon outrage.1 Dimly
perhaps, we feel that these things that anger us are not isolated phenomena, that there is a connection
between them, that they are all part of a world that is flawed, a world that is wrong in some
fundamental way. We see more and more people begging on the street while the stock markets break new
records and company directors salaries rise to ever dizzier heights, and we feel that the wrongs of the world
are not chance injustices but part of a system that is profoundly wrong . Even Hollywood films (surprisingly,
perhaps) almost always start from the portrayal of a fundamentally unjust worldbefore going on to reassure us
(less surprisingly) that justice for the individual can be won through individual effort. Our anger is directed not
just against particular happenings but against a more general wrongness, a feeling that the world is
askew, that the world is in some way untrue. When we experience something particularly horrific, we hold up
our hands in horror and say that cannot be! it cannot be true! We know that it is true, but feel that it is the truth
of an untrue world.2 What would a true world look like? We may have a vague idea: it would be a world of justice, a
world in which people could relate to each other as people and not as things, a world in which people would shape
their own lives. But we do not need to have a picture of what a true world would be like in order
radically wrong with the world that exists. Feeling that the world is
wrong does not necessarily mean that we have a picture of a utopia to put its place. Nor does it
necessarily mean a romantic, some-day-my-prince-will-come idea that, although things are wrong
now, one day we shall come to a true world, a promised land, a happy ending. We need no promise of a
happy ending to justify our rejection of a world we feel to be wrong. That is our starting point:
rejection of a world that we feel to be wrong, negation of a world we feel to be negative. This is what
we must cling to.
And our scream isnt part of any bigger picture, rather it is just our
affirmation of rejection. Social analysis and critical theory only serve
to exclude or dilute or rage into mediated discourse. This guts
solvency and turns case because our screams begin to be
comsumed into the system we fight to oppose. Before all else we
have to reserve our ability to rage and scream in the midst of
academia. Instead of opting for studying on the oppression of
others we should focus on our own massive frustration with the
system.
Holloway '02 [John, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today, London,
Pluto Press]
Cling to, indeed, for there is so much to stifle our negativity, to smother our scream. Our anger is constantly fired
by experience, but any attempt to express that anger is met by a wall of absorbent cotton wool. We are met with
so many arguments that seem quite reasonable. There are so many ways of bouncing our scream back
against us, of looking at us and asking why we scream. It is because of our age, our social background,
or just some psychological maladjustment that we are so negative? Are we hungry, did we sleep badly
or is it just pre-menstrual tension? Do we not understand the complexity of the world, the practical
difficulties of implementing radical change? Do we not know that it is unscientific to scream? And so
they urge us (and we feel the need) to study society, and to study social and political theory. And a
strange thing happens. The more we study society, the more our negativity is dissipated or sidelined as
being irrelevant. There is no room for the scream in academic discourse. More than that: academic
study provides us with a language and a way of thinking that makes it very difficult for us to express
our scream. The scream, if it appears at all, appears as something to be explained, not as something to
be articulated. The scream, from being the subject of our questions about society, becomes the object
of analysis. Why is it that we scream? Or rather, since we are now social scientists, why is it that they
scream? How do we explain social revolt, social discontent? The scream is systematically disqualified
by dissolving it into its context. It is because of infantile experiences that they scream, because of their
modernist conception of the subject, because of their unhealthy diet, because of the weakening of family
structures: all of these explanations are backed up by statistically supported research. The scream is not
entirely denied, but it is robbed of all validity . By being torn from us and projected on to a they, the scream
is excluded from the scientific method. When we become social scientists, we learn that the way to understand is
to pursue objectivity, to put our own feelings on one side. It is not so much what we learn as how we learn that
seems to smother our scream. It is a whole structure of thought that disarms us. And yet none of the
things which made us so angry to start off with have disappeared. We have learnt, perhaps, how they
fit together as parts of a system of social domination, but somehow our negativity has been erased
from the picture. The horrors of the world continue . That is why it is necessary to do what is
considered scientifically taboo: to scream like a child, to lift the scream from all its structural
explanations, to say We dont care what the psychiatrist says, we dont care if our subjectivity is a
social construct: this is our scream, this is our pain, these are our tears. We will not let our rage be
diluted into reality: it is reality rather that must yield to our scream. Call us childish or adolescent if
you like, but this is our starting point: we scream. 3
Framework
1NC
Contention ____: Our Framework
The affirmative should win a topical plan is better than the status
quo or competitive policy option
The resolution indicates affs should advocate topical government
change
Ericson 3 (Jon M., Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts California Polytechnic U., et al., The Debaters
Guide, Third Edition, p. 4)
The Proposition of Policy: Urging Future Action In policy propositions, each topic contains certain key elements , although
they have slightly different functions from comparable elements of value-oriented propositions. 1. An agent doing the acting
---The United States in The United States shouldadopt a policy of free trade. Like the object of evaluation in a
proposition of value, the agent is the subject of the sentence. 2. The verb shouldthe first part of a verb phrase
that urges action. 3. An action verb to follow should in the should-verb combination. For example, shouldadopt here
means to put a program or policy into action though governmental means. 4. A specification of directions or a
limitation of the action desired. The phrase free trade, for example, gives direction and limits to the topic, which would, for example,
eliminate consideration of increasing tariffs, discussing diplomatic recognition, or discussing interstate commerce. Propositions of
policy deal with future action. Nothing has yet occurred. The entire debate is about whether something ought to
occur. What you agree to do, then, when you accept the affirmative side in such a debate is to offer sufficient and compelling
reasons for an audience to perform the future action that you propose.
yet I realize how much all this can remain precarious, how easily it can all lapse back into somnolence. But you
are right, one has to be more suspicious. Perhaps what ( have written has had an anaesthetic effect. But one still
needs to distinguish on whom. To judge by what the psychiatric authorities have had to say, the cohorts on the
right who charge me with being against any form of power, rhose on the left who call me the 'last bulwark of the
bourgeoisie' (this isn't a 'Kanapa phrase'; on the contrary), the worthy psychoanalyst who likened me to the Hitler
of Mei. Kampf, the numbe r of times I've been 'autopsied' and 'buried' during the past fifreen years - well, I have
the impression of having had an irritant rather than anaesthetic effect on a good many people. The epidermi bristle
with a constancy I find encouraging. A journal recently warned its readers in deliciously Petainist style against
accepting as a credo what I had had to s~i about sexuality ('the importance of the subject', 'the personaliry of the
author' rendered my enterprise 'dangerous'). No risk of anaesthesis in that direction. But I agree with you, these
between ana esthesis and paralysis. Let's talk about paralysis first. Who has been paralyzed? Do you think what I
wrote on the history of psychiatry paralyzed those people who had already been concerned for some time about
what was happening in psychiatric institutions? And , seeing what has been happening in and around rhe prisons, I
don't think the effect of paralysis is very evident there either. As far.s the people in prison are concerned, things
effect is intentional. And then I have some newS for you: for me the problem of the
prisons isn't one for the 'social workers' but one for the prisoners .
And on that side, I'm not so sure what's been said over .the last fifteen years has been quite so - how shall I put
it? - demobilizing. But
Critique
doesn't have to be the premise of a deduction which concludes : this
then is what needs to be done. It should be an instrument for those who fight,
those who resist and refuse what is. Its use should be in processes
of conflict and confrontation, essays in refusal. It doesn't have to
lay down the law for the law. It isn't a stage in a programming . It is
'Don't criticize, since you're not capable of carrying ,out a reform.' That's ministerial cabinet talk.
a challenge directed to what is. The problem, you see, is one for the subject who acts - the
subject of action through which the real is transformed. If prisons and punitive
mechanisms are transformed, it won't be because a plan of reform
has found its way into the heads of the social workers; it will be
when those who have to do with that penal reality, all those people,
have come into collision with each other and with themselves, run
into dead-ends, problems and impossibilities, been through
conflicts and confrontations; when critique has been played out in
the real, not when reformers have realized their ideas.
And this interpretation of framework is best for debate:
First is Competitive Equity.
Plan focus prevents the negative from advocating vague and
unpredictable alternatives. Competitive equity should be evaluated
first because it shapes the way we engage their arguments.
A)
Strategy Skew lack of plan focus allows the negative to spend the entire 1NC criticizing one concept
without engaging the 1AC arguments. We can't leverage our 1AC as offense against the vague and
unpredictable alternatives their interpretation allows.
B)
Timeframe immediacy is crucial because established timeframes are necessary for our uniqueness
arguments and impact turns against their positions. If they can shift when or if the alternative is
successful, we can't argue against the desirability of it being endorsed or outweigh it with the arguments
presented in the 1AC.
C)
Context the indefinite passage of the alternative allows them to argue that their alternative changes the
world so dramatically that the arguments and assumptions of our 1AC no longer apply. No evidence
contextualizes our Affirmative within this world, creating an impossible burden for us to generate specific
offense from the 1AC against their vague and shifting 1NC.
Second is Fairness.
Plan focus is necessary to provide the affirmative with fair and
predictable ground. This is the critical internal link to education
because an unfair playing field discourages research and
participation.
A)
Choice we are bound by the resolution to defend the plan. The least the negative can do is answer the
question that we are forced to answer.
B)
Stability lack of clarity allows them to shift exactly what they have to defend as the debate continues,
rendering our 2AC arguments irrelevant and causing the debate to degrade into attempts to catch up to
nebulous alternatives.
C)
Counter-Topicality just as the affirmative is confined within the limits of the resolution so too should the
negative be confined to only those arguments which are competitive with the resolution. This is a
reciprocal burden that ensures predictable ground for both sides and distills the debate to a single yes/no
question.
Third is Education.
Plan focus is the best format for achieving educational benefits
through participation in debate.
Citizenship plan focus is key to effective citizenship switching
sides develops openness to other perspectives; it models the
experience of political candidates and activist voters; weighing
competing claims teaches responsible decision-making; and it
develops the skills needed to engage in effective exchanges of
ideas.
Dr. David GLASS, Director of Debate at Edgemont High School and President of the NDCA, 2005
[Necessary Conditions for Policy Debate, Rostrum, Volume 79, Number 8, April, Available Online at
http://www.nflonline.org/Rostrum/ Coach0405Glass, Accessed 08-30-2005 // BATMAN]
By imbuing students with the tools to meet the fourth condition of a Democracy - the
ability to compare competing policies - scholastic debate provides a critical mechanism to
train students to be effective citizens, and activists in the political process. First, scholastic
policy debate offers students a resolution of advocacy, and asks them to both defend and
oppose a resolution which mandates governmental action. The very duality of
responsibility (to both defend and to oppose the resolution, in different debate rounds)
forces the future democrat to learn that there are multiple sides to a question, and that an
effective defense of one position requires a thorough understanding of the opposition.
Second, policy debate forces students to actively participate in a framework established by
the Resolution, and in so doing they model the experience of the candidate - who must
argue for voter support - and of the activist voter, who tries to sway others to her or his
point of view. Third, policy debate teaches the student to appraise competing values; often
a policy may have both benefits and disadvantages, and it is only the experienced debater
who can accept a nuanced position, and show why a particular issue may be preferable
even when one recognizes its down-side. Fourth, policy debate teaches the student to
participate in an organized proceeding of advocacy; this is often the students first
experience in such a proceeding, and thus - almost through osmosis - the student soaks up
the critical components of an effective forum for the exchange of ideas: they learn process,
they learn fairness, they learn what it is like to be judged by individuals with different
preconceptions - and thus they learn how important it is to have mechanisms which allow
them a hearing which will be steeped with the feel of justice, despite the preconceptions
which an individual judge may bring to the debate.
knowledge in policy.
processes really evolve. This demands precise knowledgeofpolicy. There is an obvious link between the two:
the
politics.Peter Weingart (this issue) claims that the development of the science-policy nexus can be analyzed as a
dialectical process of the scientization of politics/policy and thepoliticization of science. Science Technology and
Society (STS) studies can claim particular credit for showing the latter tendency (Cozzens & Woodhouse, 1995:551).
Applying critical sociology, symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology to the innermost workings of the
laboratories, STS-scholars have shown that the idealist image of science as producer of privileged, authoritative
knowledge claims, supported by an ascetic practice of Mertonian norms for proper scientific conduct (commonality
or communism, universalism, disinterestedness, organized skepticism - CUDOs) is just the outside, legitimizing
veneer of scientific practices and successes. Using interpretive frames from Marxist science studies, conflict theory,
interest theory, and social constructivism, a much more realistic perspective on science has been developed.
Instead of Mertonian CUDO-norms, contemporary scientistsde factobehave as if science were proprietary, local,
authoritarian, commissioned, and expert (Ziman, 1990 - PLACE). From Olympian heights of abstraction, curiositydriven speculation, innovative but stringent experiments, and Humboldtian institutional autonomy, small-s
Turns Case
( ) Productive agonism requires limits to measure the performance
of contestants---simply throwing out the topic destroys the agonism
and the productive gains
Christa Davis Acampora 2, Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College of the City University of New York, Fall
2002, Of Dangerous Games and Dastardly Deeds, International Studies in Philosophy, Vol. 34, No. 3
The agonistic game is organized around the test of a specific quality the persons involved possess. When two
runners compete, the quality tested is typically speed or endurance; when artists compete, it is creativity;
craftsmen test their skills, etc..The contest has a specific set of rules and criteria for determining (i.e.,
measuring) which person has excelled above the others in the relevant way. What is tested is a quality the
individual competitors themselves possess; and external assistance is not permitted. (This is not to say that
agonistic games occur only between individuals and that there can be no cooperative aspects of agonistic
engagement. Clearly individuals can assert themselves and strive against other individuals within the context of a
team competition, but groups can also work collectively to engage other groups agonistically. In those cases what is
tested is the collective might, creativity, endurance, or organizational ability of the participating groups.) Ideally,
agonistic endeavors draw out of the competitors the best performance of which they are capable. Although
agonistic competition is sometimes viewed as a "zero-sum game," in which the winner takes all, in the cases that
Nietzsche highlights as particularly productive agonistic institutions, all who participate are enhanced by their
competition. Winning must be a significant goal of participation in agonistic contests, but it would seem
that winning might be only one, and not necessarily the most important one, among many reasons to participate in
such a competition. In his later writings, Nietzsche appears to be interested in thinking about how the structures of
contests or struggles can facilitate different possibilities for competing well within them. In other words, he
questions whether the structure of the game might limit the way in which one might be able to compete. His study
of slavish morality illuminates well that concern. II. Dastardly Deeds The so-called "Good Eris," described in
"Homer's Contest," supposedly allowed the unavoidable urge to strive for preeminence to find expression in
perpetual competition in ancient Greek culture. In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche seeks to critique
Christianity for advocating a kind of altruism, or selflessness, that is essentially self-destructive, and for perverting
the urge to struggle by transforming it into a desire for annihilation. Read in light of "Homer's Contest," Nietzsche's
Genealogy enables us to better grasp his conception of the value of contest as a possible arena for the revaluation
of values, and it advances an understanding of the distinctions Nietzsche draws between creative and
destructive forms of contest and modes of competing within them. Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals, a
Streitschrifta polemic, a writing that aims to provoke a certain kind of fightingportrays a battle between "the
two opposing values 'good and bad,' 'good and evil'." Nietzsche depicts slavish morality as that which
condemns as evil what perpetuates the agonnamely, self-interest, jealousy, and the desire to legislate
values but rather than killing off the desire to struggle, slavish morality manipulates and redirects it. Prevention
of struggle is considered by Nietzsche to be hostile to life: an "order thought of as sovereign and universal, not
as a means in the struggle between power-complexes but as a means of preventing all struggle in general...
would be a principle hostile to life, an agent of the dissolution and destruction of man, an attempt to assassinate
the future of man, a sign of weariness, a secret path to nothingness" (GM II:11). "The 'evolution' of a thing, a
custom, an organ is [...] a succession of [...] more or less mutually independent processes of subduing, plus the
resistances they encounter, the attempts at transformation for the purpose of defense and reaction, and the results
of successful counteractions"(GM II:12). For Nietzsche, human beings, like nations, acquire their identityin their
histories of struggles, accomplishments, and moments of resistance. The complete cessation of strife, for
Nietzsche, robs a being of its activity, of its life. In the second essay of the Genealogy, Nietzsche identifies the
notion of conscience, which demands a kind of self-mortification, as an example of the kind of contest slavish
morality seeks: "Hostility, cruelty, joy in persecuting, in attacking, in change, in destructionall this turned against
the possessors of such instinct: that is the origin of the 'bad conscience'" (GM II:16). Denied all enemies and
resistances, finding nothing and no one with whom to struggle except himself, the man of bad conscience:
impatiently lacerated, persecuted, gnawed at, assaulted, and maltreated himself; this animal that rubbed itself raw
against the bars of its cage as one tried to 'tame' it; this deprived creature... had to turn himself into an adventure,
a torture chamber, an uncertain and dangerous wilderness this fool, this yearning and desperate prisoner
became the inventor of the 'bad conscience.' But thus began the gravest and uncanniest illness... a declaration of
war against the old instincts upon which his strength, joy, and terribleness had reached hitherto (GM II:16). Bad
conscience functions in slavish morality as a means of self-flagellation, as a way to vent the desire to hurt others
once external expressions of opposition are inhibited and forbidden. "Guilt before God: this thought becomes an
instrument of torture to him" (GM II:22). In that case, self-worth depends upon the ability to injure and harm oneself,
to apply the payment of selfmaltreatment to one's irreconcilable account with God. It is the effort expended in one's
attempt to make the impossible repayment that determines one's worth. xi The genuine struggle, that which truly
determines value for the ascetic ideal is one in which one destructively opposes oneselfone's value increases as
one succeeds in annihilating oneself. Slavish morality is still driven by contest, but the mode of this contest is
destructive. It mistakes self-inflicted suffering as a sign of strength. The ascetic ideal celebrates cruelty and torture
it revels in and sanctifies its own pain. It is a discord that wants to be discordant, that enjoys itself in this suffering
and even grows more self-confident and triumphant the more its own presupposition, its physiological capacity for
life decreases. 'Triumph in the ultimate agony': the ascetic ideal has always fought under this hyperbolic sign; in
this enigma of seduction, in this image of torment and delight, it recognized its brightest light, its salvation, its
ultimate victory (GM III:28). Slavish morality, particularly in the form of Pauline Christianity, redirects the
competitive drive
abandoning, as Nietzsche portrays it, both the structure of the contests he admired in "Homer's Contest" and the
productive ways of competing within them. It does not merely redirect the goal of the contest (e.g., struggling for
the glory of Christ rather than competing for the glory of Athens), rather how one competes well is also transformed
(e.g., the "good fight" is conceived as tapping divine power to destroy worldly strongholds xiii rather than excelling
them). In other words, the ethos of contest, the ethos of the agonis transformed in slavish morality. xiv III.
Dangerous Games Moralities effect contests in two ways: 1) they articulate a structure through which the meaning
of human being (e.g., excellence, goodness, etc.) can be created and meted out, and 2) they simultaneously
cultivate a commitment to a certain way of competing within those structures. By cultivating not only a desire
to win but a desire to compete well (which includes respect for one's competitor and the institutions that sets
forth the terms of the engagement), xv we can establish a culture capable of deriving our standards of
excellence internally and of renewing and revaluing those standards according to changes in needs and
interests of our communities. This is the legacy that Nietzsche strives to articulate in his "Homer's Contest," one
that he intends his so-called "new nobility" to claim. If the life of slavish morality is characterized by actions of
annihilation and cruelty, Nietzsche's alternative form of valuation is marked by its activity of surmounting what
opposes, of overcoming opposition by rising above (erheben) what resists, of striving continually to rise above
the form of life it has lived. As a form of spiritualized striving, self-overcoming, must, like Christian agony, be self
directed; its aim is primarily resistance to and within oneself, but the agonythat is, the structure of that kind of
painful strugglediffers both in how it orients its opposition and in how it pursues its goals . Self-overcoming does
not aim at self-destruction but rather at self exhaustion and self-surpassing. It strives not for annihilation but for
transformation, and the method of doing so is the one most productive in the external contests of the ancient
Greeks: the act of rising above. Self-overcoming asks us to seek hostility and enmity as effective means
for summoning our powers of development. Others who pose as resistances, who challenge and test our
strength, are to be earnestly sought and revered. That kind of reverence, Nietzsche claims, is what makes possible
genuine relationships that enhance our lives. Such admiration and cultivation of opposition serve as "a bridge to
love" (GM I:10) because they present a person with the opportunity to actively distinguish himself, to experience
the joy and satisfaction that comes with what Nietzsche describes as "becoming what one is." xvi This, Nietzsche
suggests, is what makes life worth livingit is what permits us to realize a certain human freedom to be active
participants in shaping our own lives. xvii Agonists, in the sense that Nietzsche has in mind, do not strive to win at
all costs. Were that their chief or even highly prominent goal we would expect to see even the best contestants
hiding from their serious challengers to their superiority or much more frequently resorting to cheating in
order to win. Rather, agonists strive to claim maximal meaning for their actions. (That's the good of winning.)
They want to perform in a superior manner, one that they certainly hope will excel that of their opponent. In other
words, the best contestants have a foremost commitment to excellence, a disposition that includes being mindful of
the structure through which their action might have any meaning at allthe rules of the contest or game. xviii
What makes this contest dangerous?xix To be engaged in the process of overcoming, as Nietzsche describes it, is
to be willing to risk oneself, to be willing to risk what one has been the meaning of what one isin the process of
creating and realizing a possible future. The outcome is not guaranteed, that a satisfactory or "better" set of
meanings and values will result is not certain. And when the contest is one in which rights to authority are in play,
even the Nietzschean contest always runs the risk of supporting tyrannyof supplying the means by which the
tyrannical takes its hold. Nietzsche is, of course, mindful of this danger, which is why in his account of the Greek
agon he finds it important to discuss the alleged origin of ostracism as the mechanism for preserving the openness
of contest. xx Nietzsche claims agonistic institutions contribute to the health of individuals and the culture in which
these institutions are organized because agon provides the means for attaining personal distinction and for creating
shared goals and interests. Pursuit of this activity, Nietzsche claims, is meaningful freedom. Late in his career,
Nietzsche writes, "How is freedom measured in individuals and peoples? According to the resistance which must be
overcome, according to the exertion required, to remain to top. The highest type of free men should be sought
where the highest resistance is constantly overcome: five steps from tyranny, close to the threshold of the danger
of servitude" (TI, "Skirmishes," 38). Nietzsche believes that it is only when our strength is tested that it will develop.
Later in the passage just cited, Nietzsche continues, "Danger alone acquaints us with our own resources, our
virtues, our armor and weapons, our spirit, and forces us to be strong. First principle: one must need to strong
otherwise one will never become strong" (TI, "Skirmishes," 38). Nietzsche takes upon himself, in his own writing, the
task of 11 making these kinds of challenges for his readers. Nietzsche's critiques of liberal institutions, democracy,
feminism, and socialism should be read in the context of his conception of human freedom and the goal he takes for
himself as a kind of liberator. Read thus, we could very well come to see the relevance of agonistic engagement
as a means of pursuing a kind of democracy viewed not as a static preservation of some artificial and stultifying
sense of equality, but as a process of pursuing meaningfulliberty, mutual striving together in pursuit of freedom
conceived not as freedom from the claims of each other but as the freedom of engagement in the process of
creating ourselves. xxi IV. A Nietzschean ethos of agonism In a recent essay, Dana R. Villa examines the general
thrust of arguments of those advocating agonistic politics. These "contemporary agonists," xxii he claims, largely
look to Nietzsche and Foucault (cast as Nietzsche's heir, at least with regard to his conception of power and contest)
for inspiration as they make their "battle cry of 'incessant contestation'," which is supposed to create the space a
radical democratic politics. These theorists, remind us that the public sphere is as much a stage for conflict and
expression as it is a set of procedures or institutions designed to preserve peace, promote fairness, or achieve
consensus. They also (contra Rawls) insist that politics and culture form a continuum, where ultimate values are
always already in play; where the content of basic rights and the purposes of political association are not the
objects of a frictionless 'overlapping consensus' but are contested every day in a dizzying array of venues. xxiii
Villa would commend them for this reminder, but he claims that "recent formulations of an agonistic politics []
have tended to celebrate conflict, and individual and group expression, a bit too unselectively". xxiv He argues that
"Nietzsche-inspired" agonists would do better to look to Arendt's conception of the agon and its place in political life
for pursuing democratic aims, because she stipulates "that action and contestation must be informed by both
judgment and a sense of the public if they are to be praiseworthy. The mere expression of energy in the form of 12
political commitment fails to impress her." "'Incessant contestation,' like Foucauldian 'resistance,' is essentially
reactive." What such apolitics boils down to is "merely fighting"; so conceived, "politics is simply conflict".
xxv Placing the expression of energies of the individual, multiplicities of selves, or groups at the center of an
agonistic politics that lacks some aim beyond just fighting does not advance the aims of democracy. Without
specifying an agonistic ethos that crafts a sense of "care for the worlda care for the public realm," politics as the
socalled "contemporary agonists" conceive it cannot be liberatory. Arendt, Villa argues, supplies such an ethos in a
way that Nietzsche does not. My goal here has been to argue that Nietzsche does supply us with an agonistic ethos,
that despite the fact that the advocates of "incessant contestation" might fail to distinguish agonistic conflict from
"mere fighting" or "simply conflict" Nietzsche does. My aim is more than mere point-scoring. I am not interested in
supporting a case that Nietzsche's views are better than Arendt's. I do think Nietzsche's work offers conceptual
resources useful for amplifying and clarifying agonistic theories that are pervasive in numerous fields, including
political science, moral psychology, and literary criticism. If we are attentive to how Nietzsche distinguishes
different kinds of contests and ways of striving within them we can construct an ethos of agonism that is potentially
valuable not only for the cultivation of a few great men but which also contributes to the development of a vibrant
culture. By way of concluding, I shall draw on the distinctions developed in Nietzsche's conception of agon and
sketch the outlines of a productive ethos of agonism. Some competitions bring with them entitlements and rewards
that are reserved for the sole winner. Nearly all of these can be described as zero-sum games: in order for someone
to win, others must lose. Further, if I choose to help you to prepare your dossier for your promotion application for
the only available post, I risk reducing my own chances for success. Let's call these kinds of competitions
antagonistic ones, in which the competitors are pitted against each other in an environment hostile to cooperation.
We can also imagine competitions that are not zero-sum games, in which there is not a limited number of
resources. Such contests would allow us to enact some of the original meanings at the root of our words for
competition and struggle. The Latin root of compete means "to meet," "to be fitting," and "to strive together
toward." The Greek word for struggle, which also applied to games and competitions, is agon, which in its original
use meant "gathering together." xxvi Practicing an agonistic model of competition could provide results of shared
satisfaction and might enable us to transformcompetitions for fame and status that inform so much of our lives into
competitions for meeting cooperatively and provisionally defined standards of aesthetic and intellectual excellence.
xxvii If we can revive the sense of agon as a gathering together that vivifies the sense of competition that initiates
a striving together toward, we can better appreciate the unique relational possibilities of competition. Recalling the
definitions of agon and competition provided above, from which I tried to indicate a sense of competition that could
facilitate a process of gathering to strive together toward, consider another example. When two runners compete in
order to bring out the best performances in each, their own performances become inextricably linked. When I run
with you, I push you to pull me, I leap ahead and call you to join me. When you run faster, I respond to your
advance not by wishing you would run slower or that you might fall so that I could surge ahead. I do not view your
success as a personal affront, rather I respond to it as a call to join you in the pursuit. When in the course of running
with me, you draw from me the best of which I am capable, our performances serve as the measure of the strength
in both of us. Neither achievement finds its meaning outside of the context in which we created it. When two (or
more) compete in order to inspire each other, to strive together toward, the gathering they create, their agon,
creates a space in which the meaning of their achievements are gathered. When your excellent performance
draws mine out of me, together we potentially unlock the possibilities in each. For this we can certainly
be deeply indebted to each other. At the same time, we come to understand and appreciate ourselves and our own
possibilities in a new way. Furthermore, this way of coming to understand and appreciate our difference(s), and 14
of recognizing perhaps their interdependence, might be preferable, to other ways in which differences might be
determined. Although surely not appropriate in all circumstances, agonistic endeavors can provide an arena for
devising a more flexible and creative way of measuring excellence than by comparison with some rigid and
externally-imposed rule. xxviii Agonism is not the only productive way of relating to each other, and we
can certainly play in ways that are not agonistic, but I do think such an ethos of agonism is compatible with
recognition of both the vulnerability of the other and one's dependence upon others for one's own identity. It
incorporates aggression, instructive resistance, as well as cooperation, and it is compatible with the practice of
generosity. It cultivates senses of yearning and desire that do not necessarily have destructive ends. It requires us
to conceive of liberation as something more than freedom from the constraints of others and the community, but as
a kind of freedom buttressed with active supportto be a participant in the definition and perpetual recreation of
the values, beliefs, and practices of the communities of which one is a part. That participation might entail
provisional restraints, limitations, and norms that mark out the arenas in which such recreations occur. At his best, I
think Nietzsche envisions a similar form for the agonistic life. Competitive "striving together toward" can be a
difficult condition to create and a fragile one to maintain. It requires the creation of a common ground from which
participants can interact. It needs a clearly defined goal that is appropriately demanding of those who participate. It
requires that the goal and the acceptable means of achieving it are cooperatively defined and clearly articulated,
and yet it must allow for creativity within those rules. It demands systematic support to cultivate future
participants. And it must have some kind of mechanism for keeping the competition open so that future play can be
anticipated. When any one of the required elements is disrupted, the competition can deteriorate into
alternative and non-productive modes of competition and destructive forms of striving. But when
agonistic contest is realized, it creates enormous opportunities for creative self-expression, for the formation of
individual and communal identity, for acquiring self-esteem and mutual admiration, and for achieving individual as
well as 15 corporate goals. It is one of the possibilities that lie not only beyond good and evil but also beyond the
cowardly and barbarous.
character of existing sites of deliberation, citing the prevalence of structural inequality and power (108). Second, he
criticizes recent measures aimed at inclusion for falling far short of providing opportunities for real voice for those
less privileged in the social structures (112).
reconfigure their discursive authority, and to orchestrate the multiple voices of a dialogical game space in relation
to particular goals. These Bakhtinian perspectives provide a valuable analytical framework for describing the
discursive interplay between different practices and knowledge aspects when enacting (debate) game scenarios. In
addition to this, Bakhtinsdialogical
really see one's own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real
exterior can be seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space, and
Case
1NC
The core of Wildersons argument is based in
a. Antonio Negris marxism
b. psychoanalysis in film study
c. sextons concept of the libidinal economy based on unconscious
drives
Wilderson 10 (Frank, Assoc prof of African American Studies Cal-Irvine, Red, White, & Black, pp 7-8
ajones)
variously across scales and is as "objective" as political economy. It is linked not only to forms of attraction,
Sexton
emphasizes that it is "the whole structure of psychic and emotional
life," something more than, but inclusive of or traversed by, what
Antonio Gramsci and other Marxists call a "structure of feeling"; it is "a
affection, and alliance, but also to aggression, destruction, and the violence of lethal consumption.
dispensation of energies, concerns, points of attention, anxieties, pleasures, appetites, revulsions, and phobias
theorize: the Black, a subject who is always already positioned as Slave. The implications of my interrogation reach
far beyond film studies, for these metacommentaries not only have the status of paradigmatic analyses, but their
reasoning and assumptions permeate the private and quotidian of political common sense and buttress organizing
and activism on the left.
a. the totalizing materialism of scholars like Negri is self contradictory and messianistic
Quinby 04 (Lee, Chair Distinguished Teaching in Humanities Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Empires New
Clothes, p. 233 ajones)
Hardts
and Negris tendency to say one thing and yet do another. For example,
even though they explicitly claim a nonprophetic stance by stating that they can see
only shadows of the figures that will animate our future (205), much of what actually
animates the book is its prophetic vision of the nature and role of the militant, the poor,
the nomad, the new barbarian, and the multitude. In place of specific and concrete
Demonstrating Empires millennial drift is a complicated undertaking, in no small part because of
Our attention turns from the woman's gaze to the woman's voice in
Kaja Silverman's "Disembodying the Female Voice." Her formal analysis of the
sound/ image relation in terms of gender concentrates on the conspicuous absence of a female voice-over in
classical cinema. This absence symptomizes the exclusion of the female subject from the production of discourse.
Silverman's essay has implications for the practice of feminist filmmaking, and it invites the re-analysis of
Hollywood films with attention to the construction of the soundtrack and to the way the films obsessively refer the
female voice to the female body. Silverman discusses the use of the "disembodied" female voice-over in a number
of films directed by women, finding Yvonne Rainer's JOURNEYS FROM BERLIN (1971) a powerful example of this
formal strategy. The final essay in the volume, Teresa de Lauretis' "Now and Nowhere: Roeg's BAD TIMING" is the
most indebted to discourse theory. In its choice of topic, it seems the most puzzling essay to find in a book on
feminist film criticism. Nicholas Roeg's film BAD TIMING concerns the police investigation of a psychoanalyst who is
suspected of attempting to murder and then raping his lover. De Lauretis' choice of this particular film seems to be
a kind of worst-case exercise in proving Foucault's assertion that "the points of resistance are present everywhere in
the power network." She also admires the director as auteur a great deal. I cannot summarize Dc Lauretis' complex
argument here, but I would suggest her analysis is seriously limited by concentrating on a film such as BAD TIMING,
which does not offer most women what it has offered de Lauretis. These four essays contribute many original and
by the dearth of references to feminist theorists working outside of film or semiotics, and will be alienated by the
frequency with which the names of the fathers appear here. Only Linda Williams' piece has the kind of skepticism
about psychoanalysis that most feminists demand. When Mary Ann Doane cites Freud's case study on masochism,
social implications, such as Michelle Citron. De Lauretis chooses a film that is literally about a
psychoanalyst. Altogether they emphasize English-language and avant-garde cinema to the exclusion of other kinds
Tolerance to Erotic Liberation: MAEDCHEN IN UNIFORM (reprinted from JUMP CUT, No. 24-25. March, 1981).
Johnston and Laura Mulvey. This essay offers both a lucid explication of the theories involved and a careful analysis
We will need to listen to women of color, lesbians and working class women. And as teachers and critics we must
keep in mind Adrienne Rich's words: "Our struggles can have meaning and our privileges however precarious
under patriarchy can be justified only if they can help to change the lives of women whose gifts and whose
very being continue to be thwarted and silenced."[1]
With Amalgamation
Schemes, Jared Sexton is trying to stir up some controversy. He
presents a facile, sophisticated, and theoretically informed intelligence, and he picks
a fight from the start. His title suggests that the study of multiraciality is some kind of plot, or at the very least
an illegitimate enterprise. His tone is angry and accusatory on every page. It is
difficult to get to the grounds of his argument, because the cloud of
invective is so thick, and because his writing is abstract, referential,
and at key points vague. For Sexton (as for the Spencers and Gordon) race is
about Blackness, in the United States and around the world. That is silly, for there are
other racialized relationships. In the U.S., native peoples were
racialized by European intruders in all the ways that Africans were,
and more: they were nearly extinguished. To take just one example
from many around the world, Han Chinese have racialized Tibetans historically in
all the ways (including slavery) that Whites have racialized Blacks and
Indians in the United States. So there is a problem with Sexton's concept of race as Blackness . There is
also a problem with his insistence on monoraciality. For Sexton and the
others, one cannot be mixed or multiple; one must choose ever and
only to be Black. I don't have a problem with that as a political choice, but to insist that it is
the only possibility flies in the face of a great deal of human
experience, and it ignores the history of how modern racial ideas
emerged. Sexton does point out, as do many writers, the flawed tendencies in multiracial advocacy
monoracially-defined movement for Black community empowerment.
mentioned in the second paragraph above. But he imputes them to the whole movement and to the subject of
makes some pretty outrageous claims. He takes the fact that people who study multiracial identities are often
studying aspects of family life (such as the shaping of a child's identity), and twists that to charge them with
homophobia and nuclear family-ism. That is simply not accurate for any of the main writers in the field. The same is
true for his argument by innuendo that scholars of multiraciality somehow advocate mail-order bride services. And
unfortunate, because Sexton appears bright and might have written a much better book detailing his hesitations
about some tendencies in the multiracial movement. He might even have opened up a new direction for productive
study of racial commitment amid complexity. Sexton does make several observations that are worth thinking about,
[End Page 126] and surely this intellectual movement, like any other, needs to think critically about itself. Sadly, this
is not that book.
example, Crews 1996). In the face of these difficulties, a number of proponents of psychoanalysis have turned to
contemporary cognitive science for assistance (see, for example, Epstein 1994; Erdelyi 1985; Shevrin 1992; and
Westen 1998). Their aim has been to show that psychoanalytic conjectures about the dynamic unconscious receive
a great deal of support from the empirical evidence in favor of the cognitive unconscious. By variously integrating
the dynamic unconscious with the cognitive unconscious (Epstein 1994) or extending the cognitive unconscious to
cover psychical entities and processes traditionally associated with the dynamic [End Page 141] unconscious
(Westen 1998), the hope is that the struggling psychoanalytic concept will be buttressed by its healthier
for our subsequent discussion, we will offer a very brief recapitulation of the dynamic unconscious, especially as it
was originally conceived by Sigmund Freud.
Agency Disad
a. Wildersons social death argument is too sweeping, denies Black
agency, and cannot translate to politics
B 11 (Dr. Sar Maty, Professor of Film University of Portsmouth and Co-Editor The Encyclopedia of Global
Human Migration, The US Decentred: From Black Social Death to Cultural Transformation, Cultural Studies Review,
17(2), September, p. 385-387 ajones)
WILDERSONS WHITE WATCH SEES RED ON BLACK: SOME WEAKNESSES A few pages into Red, White and Black, I
Wildersons blackassocialdeath
idea and multiple attacks on issues and scholars he disagrees with
run (him) into (theoretical) trouble. This happens in chapter two, The Narcissistic Slave,
feared that it would just be a matter of time before
where he critiques black film theorists and books. For example, Wilderson declares that Gladstone Yearwoods Black
Film as Signifying Practice (2000) betrays a kind of conceptual anxiety with respect to the historical object of study
... it clings, anxiously, to the filmastextaslegitimateobject of Black cinema. (62) He then quotes from
Yearwoods book to highlight just how vague the aesthetic foundation of Yearwoods attempt to construct a canon
Wilderson does not link Tommy Lotts mobilisation of Third Cinema for black film theory to Yearwoods idea of
African Diaspora. (64) Additionally, of course, Wilderson seems unaware that Third Cinema itself has been
fundamentally questioned since Lotts 1990s theory of black film was formulated. Yet another consequence of
filmography, (95) I am talking about Wildersons choice of films. For example, Antwone Fisher (dir. Denzel
Washington, 2002) is attacked unfairly for failing to acknowledge a grid of captivity across spatial dimensions of
the Black body, the Black home, and the Black community (111) while films like Alan and Albert Hughess
Menace II Society (1993), overlooked, do acknowledge the same grid and, additionally, problematise Street
Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention Act (STEP) policing. The above examples expose the fact of Wildersons
too aware that through the Middle Passage, African culture became Black style ... Blackness can be placed and
displaced with limitless frequency and across untold territories, by whoever so chooses. Most important, there is
nothing real Black people can do to either check or direct this process ... Anyone can say nigger because anyone
can be a nigger. (235)7 Similarly, in chapter ten, A Crisis in the Commons, Wilderson addresses the issue of
Black time. Black is irredeemable, he argues, because, at no time in history had it been deemed, or deemed
through the right historical moment and place. In other words, the black moment and place are not right because
they are the ship hold of the Middle Passage: the most coherent temporality ever deemed as Black time but also
the moment of no time at all on the map of no place at all. (279) Not only does Pinhos more mature analysis
expose this point as preposterous (see below), I also wonder what Wilderson makes of the countless historians and
sociologists works on slave ships, shipboard insurrections and/during the Middle Passage,8 or of groundbreaking
Nowhere has
another side, but once Wilderson theorises blacks as socially and
ontologically dead while dismissing jazz as belonging nowhere and
to no one, simply there for the taking, (225) there seems to be no way
back. It is therefore hardly surprising that Wilderson ducks the need to provide a
solution or alternative to both his sustained bashing of blacks and
anti Blackness.9 Last but not least, Red, White and Black ends like a badly
jazzstudies books on crosscultural dialogue like The Other Side of Nowhere (2004).
(Sar Maty, The US Decentred, Cultural Studies Review, volume 17 number 2 September 2011 ajones)
In chapter nine, Savage Negrophobia, he writes: The philosophical anxiety of Skins is all too aware that through
be a nigger. (235)7 Similarly, in chapter ten, A Crisis in the Commons, Wilderson addresses the issue of Black
time. Black is irredeemable, he argues, because, at no time in history had it been deemed, or
deemed through the right historical moment and place. In other words, the black moment and place are not
right because they are the ship hold of the Middle Passage: the most coherent temporality ever deemed as Black
time but also the moment of no time at all on the map of no place at all. (279 )
liberal/conservative
discussion conceals the most basic issue now facing Black America:
the nihilistic threat to its very existence. This threat is not simply a
matter of relative economic deprivation and political powerlessness
-- though economic well-being and political clout are requisites for
meaningful Black progress. It is primarily a question of speaking to the profound sense of
psychological depression, personal worthlessness, and social despair so widespread in Black America. (12-13)
Nihilism, he continues, is to be understood here not as a philosophic doctrine ... it is, far more, the lived
experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaningless, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness. (14)
Nihilism is not new in Black America. . . . In fact, West explains, the
even recounts a speech he attended in 1994 by the newly elected state president, in which he stood up and grilled
Mandela about plans for the Reconstruction and Development Program. This all culminated in 1995 with a phone
call from a Mail & Guardian reporter who asked for a comment because Nelson Mandela thinks youre a threat to
national security (470). The book jacket declares that Wilderson is one of only two Americans ever to be a member
of the African National Congress (ANC). An African American, he first visited South Africa in 1989 on a brief research
expedition, during which he met the Tswana woman he would later marry. He settled more permanently in
Johannesburg in 1991, where he was soon elected to the executive council of the local and sub-regional branches of
the ANC. But even as he was holding aboveground positions in the newly unbanned liberation party, he was also
working with an underground cell loyal to Chris Hani and Winnie Mandela, in defiance of Nelson Mandela's decision
to disband Umkhonto we Sizwe and cease all covert operations. In this capacity, Wilderson gathered information
on [visiting] Americans and worked on psychological warfare, propaganda, disinformation, and general political
analysis (276). From his position as lecturer, first at Wits University and later at the Soweto campus of Vista
University, he was charged with capturing as much territory (real and imagined) of the university-industrial
complex before the ANC came to power as possible (143). Wilderson's perspective on the events of 19891996 is
unique: he sees the seminal moments of South Africa's transition both as an insider (as an elected official in the
ANC) and as an outsider who never fully gains the trust of the party's power structure. And whereas even a couple
of years ago his condemnations of the New South Africa and its economic policies might have struck many
middle-class South African readers as strident and delusional, the predictions he recalls making now seem
undeniably prescient in light of the recent power shift within the ANC. After all, one wonders whether Jacob Zuma's
demagoguery would have ever found political traction had Thabo Mbeki's wing of the party not succeeded in
United States, Incognegro offers a few engaging stories: he visited Fred Hampton's house in Chicago at age
thirteen, soon after Hampton had been shot dead by police; and he took part in battles with the police and national
AND Reject Wildersons call for absolutism no movement is antiestablishment enough for him
Graham 9 Dr. Shane Graham Associate Professor of English at Utah State University. Review of Frank B.
Wilderson III, Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid, Cambridge, MA, South End Press, 2008, 501 pp. (pbk)
978-0-8960-8783-5 Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, Vol. 10, No. 4, October 2009, 479
494 via Taylor & Francis Online Database ajones)
The difficulty of reviewing a book such as this is that the author would no doubt respond
to any criticism (of the book's tone, for instance, or of its clumsy, self-consciously postmodern structure,
which jumps randomly between time frames) by attacking the reviewer as a deluded
quisling of the global capitalist establishment and blah, blah, blah (to quote
Wilderson's own paraphrase of Mandela's response to his aforementioned question). In my pre-emptive selfdefence, I can only emphasize again that it is this memoir's narcissism and self-indulgent tone that made it an
2NC Overview
Multiple Das to Wildersons method
Three reasons his arguments are grounded in poor theory
1- His reliance on Negris Marxism is riddled with contradictions and
relies on an unfeasible, messianic rescue from materialism- falls
prey to totalizing methodology- thats Quinby
2- Use of psychoanalytic film leads to further exclusionmarginalizes women, entrenches patriarchy, which destroys any
hope for intersectional collaboration against oppression- thats
OBrien
3- Adopts Sextons adversarial, Black-only ideology- deliberately
ignores mixed causes of identity by relying on a sole race focus
This cherry picks historical examples of oppression and destroys
any opportunities at building coalitions- turns case- thats Spickard
Independently, Wildersons arguments destroy agency and lead to
fatalism
They portray oppression as inevitable and deny the agency of
transformative black movements
This leads to a loss of hope which is the single most effective way to
undermine transformative struggles- thats Ba and Micah
And finally the participation DAWilderson is radical by the most liberal of standards
Rails against Mandela, labels prominent leaders as sellouts
This alienates almost every active movement- none are pure enough
to meet Wildersons ideology
Creates impossible standards which abandon pragmatic reform
chair, the room of the psychoanalytic encounter. As Jonathan Lee reminds us, at stake in Lacan's account of the
psychoanalytic encounter is the realization of subjectivity itself, "the very being of the subject. "31 I argue that
"Savage' Human, and Slave should be theorized in the way we theorize worker and capitalist as positions first and
as identities second, or as we theorize capitalism as a paradigm rather than as an experience-that is, before they
take on national origin or gendered specfficity Throughout the course of this book I argue that "Savage' Human, and
Slave are more essential to our understanding of the truth of institutionality than the positions from political or
libidinal economy. For in this trio we find the key to our world's creation as well as to its undoing. This argument, as
it relates to political economy, continues in chapter i, "The Ruse of Analogy:' In chapter 2, "The Narcissistic Slave," I
shift focus from political economy to libidinal economy before undertaking more concrete analyses of films in parts
2, 3, and 4. No one makes films and declares their own films "Human" while simultaneously asserting that other
films (Red and Black) are not Human cinema. Civil society represents itself to itself as being infinitely inclusive, and
its technologies of hegemony (including cinema) are mobilized to manufacture this assertion, not to dissent from it.
In my quest to interrogate the bad faith of the civic "invitation;' I have chosen White cinema as the sine qua non of
Human cinema. Films can be thought of as one of an ensemble of discursive practices mobilized by civil society to
"invite:' or interpellate, Blacks to the same variety of social identities that other races are able to embody without
contradiction, identities such as worker, soldier, immigrant, brother, sister, father, mother, and citizen. The bad
faith of this invitation, this faux interpeLlation, can be discerned by deconstructing the way cinema's narrative
strategies displace our consideration and understanding of the ontological status of Blacks (social death) onto a
series of fanciful stories that are organized around conflicts which are the purview only of those who are not natally
alienated, generally dishonored, or open to gratuitous violence, in other words, people who are White or colored but
who are not Black. (I leave aside, for the moment, the liminality of the Native American position-oscillating as it
does between the living and the dead.) Immigrant cinema of those who are not White would have sufficed as well;
but, due to its exceptional capacity to escape racial markers, Whiteness is the most impeccable embodiment of
what it means to be Human. As Richard Dyer writes, "Having no content, we [White people] can't see that we have
anything that accounts for our position of privilege and power . . . . The equation of being white with being human
secures a position of power:' He goes on to explain how "the privilege of being white... is not to be subjected to
stereotyping in relation to one's whiteness. 'White people are stereotyped in terms of gender, nation, class,
sexuality, ability and so on, but the overt point of such typification is gender, nation, etc. Whiteness generally
colonises the stereotypical definition of all social categories other than those of race.' Unlike Dyer, I do not meditate
on the representational power of Whiteness, "that it be made strange:' divested of its imperial capacity, and thus
make way for representational practices in cinema and beyond that serve as aesthetic accompaniments for a more
egalitarian civil society in which Whites and non-Whites could live in harmony. Laudable as that dream is, I do not
share Dyer's assumption that we are all Human. Some of us are only part Human ("Savage") and some of us are
Black (Slave). I find his argument that Whiteness possesses the easiest claim to Humanness to be productive. But
whereas Dyer offers this argument as a lament for a social ill that needs to be corrected, I borrow it merely for its
explanatory power-as a way into a paradigmatic analysis that clarifies structural relations of global antagonisms
and not as a step toward healing the wounds of social relations in civil society. Hence this book's interchangeable
argue that the antagonism between Black and Human supercedes the "antagonism" between worker and capitalist
in political economy, as well as the gendered "antagonism" in libidinal economy. To this end, this book takes stock of
how socially engaged popular cinema participates in the systemic violence that constructs America as a "settler
society" (Churchill) and "slave estate" (Spilers). Rather than privilege a politics of culture(s)-that is, rather than
examine and accept the cultural gestures and declarations which the three groups under examination make about
themselves-1 privilege a culture of politics: in other words, what I am concerned with is how White film, Black film,
and Red film articulate and disavow the matrix of violence which constructs the three essential positions which in
turn structure US. antagonisms.
expulsion of the Moors from continental Europe marked a transition from an age of imperial relations between
Christian and Muslim empires, to an age of European colonial expansion throughout the known world. The
discovery of godless natives in the Americas would also inspire the great debates between Las Casas and
symptom to another with no end in sight and no way to break into or out of the chain of signifiers in the name of a
The real world is transformed into a poetic world, that is, into
a world without beginning in which one thinks without knowing
what one thinks (35). Put less poetically, Levinass worry is that psychoanalysis furnishes us with no
signified.
fixed point or firm footing from which to launch a critique and to break with social and historical determinations of
the psyche in order to judge society and history and to call both to account. Indeed, his uncharacteristic allusion to
clear and distinct ideas betrays his intention: to seek, against both religious and psychoanalytic participations, for
a relationship in which the ego is an absolute, irreducible singularity, within a totality but still separate from it,
that is, still capable of a relation with exteriority. To seek such a relation is, Levinas says, to ask whether a living
man [sic] does not have the power to judge the history in which he is engaged, that is, whether the thinker as an
ego, over and beyond all that he does with what he possesses, creates and leaves, does not have the substance of
a cynic (35). The naked being who confronts me with his or her alterity, the naked being that I am myself and
whose being counts as such is now naked not with an erotic nudity but with the nudity of a cynic who has thrown
off the cloak of culture in order to present him- or herself directly and in person through this chaste bit of skin
with brow, nose, eyes, and mouth (41). Levinas picks up the thread of this worry about psychoanalysis in Ethics
and Discourse, the main section of The Ego and the Totality. To affirm humankind as a power to judge history, he
claims, is to affirm rationalism and to reject the merely poetic thought which thinks without knowing what it things,
or thinks as one dreams (40). The impetus for psychoanalysis is philosophical, Levinas admits; that is, it shares
initially in this affirmation of rationalism insofar as it affirms the need for reflection and for going underneath or
and historical ethos and mythos in a way that seems to Levinas to permit no end to interpretation and thus no
power to judge. He imagines psychoanalysis as a swirling phantasmagoria in which language is all dissimulation
and deception. One can find ones bearings in all this phantasmagoria, one can inaugurate the work of criticism
(Christopher, The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the Revolutionary Project,
http://mikeely.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/historical_failure_of_aanarchism_chris_day_kasama.pdf ajones)
anticipate that the future will bring upsurges in popular opposition to the existing system. Without being any
more specific about where those upsurges might occur it seems clear that it is from the ranks of such upsurges
that the numbers of the revolutionary movement will be increased, eventually leading to a revolutionary situation
(which is distinguished from the normal crises of the current order only by the existence of a revolutionary
movement ready to push things further). People who are fed up with the existing system and who are willing to
If
we dont have a plausible plan for making revolution we can be sure
that there will be somebody else there who will. There is no guarantee that
revolutionary-minded people will be spontaneously drawn to anti-authoritarian politics. The plan
doesnt have to be an exact blueprint. It shouldnt be treated as something sacred. It
should be subject to constant revision in light of experience and debate. But at the very least it
needs to be able to answer questions that have been posed
concretely in the past. We know that we will never confront the exact same circumstances as
commit themselves to its overthrow will look around for likeminded people who have an idea of what to do.
previous revolutions. But we should also know that certain problems are persistent ones and that if we cant say
what we would have done in the past we should not expect people to think much of our ability to face the future.
carried by the tide of history instead of attempting to steer our own course. And by allowing this to happen again it
will be we who have really betrayed the revolution. The net result of the refusal to deal with what it will actually
take to make a revolution is that anarchism has become a sort of directionless but militant reformism. We are
either building various counter-institutions that resemble nothing so much as grungier versions of the social
AT// Antiblackness
( ) anti-blackness vs whiteness studies is a distinction without
a difference. The effects and political mechanisms are
indistinguishable
Sullivan 1 - Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at Penn State at University Park (Shannon
Living Across & Through Skins : Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism & Feminism06/2001 p161-162 ajones)
who made no incriminating confession, a black defendant who did make such a confession was treated fairly by the
egalitarian white participants. Compared to a white defendant who made such a confession, the black defendant
who confessed was not treated fairly by the white egalitarians. The white defendant received benecial treatment
that the black defendant did not, disadvantaging the black defendant in a signicant way solely because of the
racial identity. According to Nelson Maldonado-Torres, of the University of California, Berkeley, the
expulsion of the Moors from continental Europe marked a transition from an age of imperial relations between
Christian and Muslim empires, to an age of European colonial expansion throughout the known world. The
discovery of godless natives in the Americas would also inspire the great debates between Las Casas and
Baucoms deep insights into the structural features of Atlantic slave trading and its afterlife come with a cost.