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cyborgs aff
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1ac
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1ac cyborgs
The revolution will not be tweeted
(but if it is, please use this hashtag)
If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear
(except drones)
Encryption works
(except when it doesn't, in which case you're fucked)
Everyone has the right to freedom of speech
(except terrorists, and we'll decide who's a terrorist
<em>thank you very much</em>
and well, frankly, anyone whose politics we don't like)
Harassment will not be tolerated
(unless it comes from us)
Lean in!
(so they can see your cleavage better)
Check this box if you agree with the terms and conditions
(which we know you didn't read)
We will not share any of your personal information
(well, you know, except with the NSA and GCHQ and maybe the Mossad)
Rest assured, your data is safe with us. 1
Rosi Braidotti elucidates our position with an ode to the past, when 1ac’s began with inherency
and debaters (or at least judges) had some semblance of an idea what was going on:
Braidotti 96 [Rosi, Philosopher and Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University as well as
director of the Centre for the Humanities in Utrecht, “Cyberfeminism with a difference,” 1996,
http://www.let.uu.nl/womens_studies/rosi/cyberfem.htm] //khirn
No spectacular fin-de-siecle for us contemporary statistical units. No
theatrical come back in broad daylight. We are the antiLazarus generation of the post-Christian era. No cry of alarm, no tears. The age of tragic aesthetic arrest has
been replaced by the principles of the photocopy - the eternal absent-minded reproduction of the Sarne. Walter Benjamin
and Nietzsche with I.B.M. and Rank-Xerox .
Sitting in the post-Becket gloom I lost the last fragment of wholeness. I had the impulse to wait, wait for the
accelerated particles to come . Nothing very tragic, just the steel-cold blue light of reason reducing us to insignificance. Life a mere
re aching-out for non-being, a living ab-negation. Love is dead in metropolis . My voice is dry and fading already. My skin
getting cracked and rougher at each clicklng of the digital mastermind. The Kafkaesque plot is working its way through my genetic apparatus.
I'll soon be a gigantic insect and I shall die after my next attempt at copulation .
This is the way the world will end, my post-mortem lover, not with a bang but with the whimpering buzzing
sound of insects crawling upon a wall. The long-legged spiders of my discontent, my heart a cockroach's delight.
S(t)imulating, dissimulation. They failed to keep the margin of negotiation open, stayed right on target till they pushed
us over the edge, drawing the penphery to the centre and we were blasted off-balance. Aphasic. So beautiful, ever
so beautiful it made me long for the ninteenth century, before god died. It must have been nice to say:
"God, it is true!" and not feel the probabilities pulling us apart .
Not that I mind the loss of the classical narrative. Lyotard tells all about modernity and the crisis of legitimation. I don't mind not having
a single shred of discursive coherence to rest upon . Conceptually, it is quite a stimulating
position, rich with epistemological potential , and yet I know: I have already paid for this. Deep in the
heart of the gaping hole of my heart I mourn the loss of metaphysical grandeur, I mourn the death of love
divine. I miss the sublime, as we plunge headlong into the ridiculous.
1
Jillian C. York “Subtext”, Deep Lab page 96 published December 2014. //Yung Jung
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Plunging headlong into the ridiculous, we come to the topic of the resolution, which asks us to
draw clear lines between government surveillance and non-government surveillance, watcher
and watched --- those pitiful attempts to demarcate person from machine represents the law’s
utter failure to recognize that we are already becoming cyborgs
Wittes and Chong 14 [Benjamin, senior fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution, cofounded and is the editor-in-chief of the Lawfare blog, and Jane, 2014 graduate of Yale Law School, where she
was an editor of the Yale Law Journal, “Our Cyborg Future: Law and Policy Implications,” September 2014,
Brookings Institution, http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports2/2014/09/cyborg-future-law-policyimplications] //khirn
There is, however, another way to think about all of this: what
if we were to understand technology itself as increasingly part of
our very being?
Indeed, do we care so much about whether and how the government accesses our data perhaps because the line
between ourselves and the machines that generate the data is getting fuzzier ? Perhaps the NSA
disclosures have struck such a chord with so many people because on a visceral level we know what our law
has not yet begun to recognize: that we are already juvenile cyborgs , and fast becoming
adolescent cyborgs; we fear that as adult cyborgs, we will get from the state nothing more than the
rights of the machine with respect to those areas of our lives that are bound up with the capabilities of the
machine.
In this paper, we try to take Wu’s challenge seriously and think about how the law will respond as the divide between human and machine becomes evermore unstable. We survey a variety of areas in which the law will have to respond as we become more cyborg-like. In particular, we consider how the law
of surveillance will shift as we develop from humans who use machines into humans who partially are machines or, at least, who depend on machines
pervasively for our most human-like activities.
We proceed in a number of steps. First, we try to usefully define cyborgs and examine the question of to what extent modern humans represent an early
phase of cyborg development. Next we turn to a number of controversies—some of them social, some of them legal—that have arisen as the process of
cyborgization has gotten under way. Lastly, we take an initial stab at identifying key facets of life among cyborgs, looking in particular at the surveillance
context and the stress that cyborgization is likely to put on modern Fourth Amendment law’s so-called third-party doctrine—the idea that transactional
data voluntarily given to third parties is not protected by the guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure.
What Is a Cyborg and Are We Already Cyborgs?
Human fascination with man-machine hybrids spans centuries and civilizations.12 From this rich history we extract two lineages of modern thought to
help elucidate the theoretical underpinnings of the cyborg.
In 1960, Manfred Clynes coined the term “cyborg”13 for a paper he coauthored with Nathan Kline for a NASA conference on space exploration.14 As
conceived by Clynes and Kline, the cyborg—a portmanteau of “cybernetics” and “organism”15—was not merely an amalgam of synthetic and organic
parts. It represented, rather, a particular approach to the technical challenges of space travel—physically adapting man to survive a hostile environment,
rather than modifying the environment alone.16
The proposal would prove influential. Soon after the publication of Clynes and Kline’s paper, NASA commissioned “The Cyborg Study.” Released in 1963,
the study was designed to assess “the theoretical possibility of incorporating artificial organs, drugs, and/or hypothermia as integral parts of the life
support systems in space craft design of the future, and of reducing metabolic demands and the attendant life support requirements.”17 This sort of
cyborg can be understood as a commitment to a larger project. As a “self-regulating man-machine,” the cyborg was designed “to provide an organization
system in which . . . robot-like problems are taken care of automatically and unconsciously, leaving man free to explore, to create, to think, and to feel.”18
Distinguishing man’s “robot-like” functions from the higher-order processes that rendered him uniquely human, Clynes and Kline presented the cyborg
as the realization of a concrete transhumanist goal: man liberated from the strictly mechanical (“robot-like”) limitations of his organism and the
conditions of his environment by means of mechanization.
Outside the realm of space exploration, use of the term “cyborg” has evolved to encompass an expansive mesh of the mythological, metaphorical and
technical.19 According to Chris Hables Gray, who has written extensively on cyborgs and the politics of cyborgization, “cyborg” has become “as specific,
as general, as powerful, and as useless a term as tool or machine.”20 Perhaps because of its plasticity, the term has become more popular among sciencefiction writers and political theorists than among scientists, who prefer more exacting vocabularies—using terms like biotelemetry, teleoperators, bionics
and the like.21
The idea that we are already cyborgs—indeed, that we have always been cyborgs—has been out there for some time. For example, in her seminal
1991 feminist manifesto, Donna
Haraway deployed the term for purposes of building an “ironic political myth, ” one that
rejected the bright-line identity markers purporting to separate human from animal, animal from machine. She
famously declared, “[W]e are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we
are cyborgs.”22
Periodically repackaged as a radical idea, the claim has not remained confined to the figurative or sociopolitical realms. Technologists, too, have
proposed that humans have already made the transition to cyborgs. In 1998, Andy Clark and David Chalmers proposed that where “the human organism
is linked with an external entity in a two-way interaction” the result is “a coupled system that can be seen as a cognitive system in its own right.”23 Clark
expanded on these ideas in his 2003 book Natural-Born Cyborgs:
My body is an electronic virgin. I incorporate no silicon chips, no retinal or cochlear implants, no pacemaker. I
don’t even wear glasses (though I do wear clothes), but I am slowly becoming more and more a cyborg. So are you. Pretty soon, and
still without the need for wires, surgery, or bodily alterations, we shall all be kin to the Terminator, to Eve 8, to Cable . . . just fill in your favorite fictional
cyborg. Perhaps we already are. For we shall be cyborgs not in the merely superficial sense of combining flesh and
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wires but in the more profound sense of being human-technology symbionts: thinking and reasoning systems
whose minds and selves are spread across biological brain and nonbiological circuitry.24 We are—if not yet
Terminators—at least a little more integrated with our machines .
Instead, we refuse to take sides in the border war between organism and machine, and instead
affirm the pleasure one finds in the confusion of boundaries in an effort to contribute to
utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, genesis, or end. Say it with me: we are
cyborgs!
Haraway 85 (Diana Haraway, Ph.D. in Biology Researches gender and primatology. A Cyborg Manifesto:
Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, orig. published 1985, Socialist
Review republished 2000. Pages 291-293, Yung Jung)
A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature
of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing
fiction. The international women's movements have constructed 'women's experience', as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial
collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the
construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The
cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late
twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality
is an optical illusion. Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs — creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds
ambiguously natural and crafted. Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices,
in an intimacy and with a power that was not generated in the history of sexuality. Cyborg 'sex' restores some of the lovely replicative baroque of ferns
and invertebrates (such nice organic prophylactics against heterosexism). Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction. Modern
production seems like a dream of cyborg colonization work, a dream that makes the nightmare of Taylorism seem idyllic. And modern war is a cyborg
orgy, coded by C3I, command-control-communication-intelligence, an $84 billion item in 1984's US defence budget. I am making an argument for the
cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings. Michael Foucault's
biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics, a very open field. By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras,
theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our
ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and
material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation. In the
traditions of 'Western' science and politics — the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of
progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of
reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other — the relation between organism and machine has
been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production,
reproduction, and imagination. This chapter is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of
boundaries and for responsibility in their construction. It is also an effort to contribute to socialistfeminist culture and theory in a postmodernist, non-naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of
imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a
world without end . The cyborg incarnation is outside salvation history. Nor does it mark time on an oedipal calendar, attempting to heal the
terrible cleavages of gender in an oral symbiotic utopia or post-oedipal apocalypse. As Zoe Sofoulis argues in her unpublished manuscript on Jacques
Lacan, Melanie Klein, and nuclear culture, Lacklein, the most terrible and perhaps the most promising monsters in cyborg worlds are embodied in nonoedipal narratives with a different logic of repression, which we need to understand for our survival. The cyborg is a creature in a post-
gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions
to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. In a sense,
the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense — a 'final' irony since the cyborg is also the awful
apocalyptic telos of the 'West's' escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last
from all dependency, a man in space. An origin story in the 'Western', humanist sense depends on the myth of original unity, fullness, bliss
and terror, represented by the phallic mother from whom all humans must separate, the task of individual development and of history, the twin potent
myths inscribed most powerfully for us in psychoanalysis and Marxism. Hilary Klein has argued that both Marxism and psychoanalysis, in their concepts
of labour and of individuation and gender formation, depend on the plot of original unity out of which difference must be produced and enlisted in a
drama of escalating domination of woman/nature. The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in
the Western sense. This is its illegitimate promise that might lead to subversion of its teleology as star wars. The cyborg is resolutely
committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without
innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological polls based partly on a revolution of social
relations in the oikos, the household. Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the
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other. The relationships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg world. Unlike
the hopes of Frankenstein's monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden;
that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and
cosmos. The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not
recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. Perhaps that is why I want to see if cyborgs can subvert the
apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name the Enemy. Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-
member the cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection- they seem to have a natural feel for
united front politics, but without the vanguard party. The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate
offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their
origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.
This affirmation of our cyborg nature reflects the societal shift from panoptic regimes of
surveillance toward more complex apparatuses of control. The 1ac’s perversely fruitful alliance
between technology, philosophy, and art seeks to strip away nostalgia for a time before cyborgs,
or a time before K affs, in favor of an ethics of ludic self-awareness that embraces the
ontological insecurity inherent in confronting the future
Braidotti 96 [Rosi, Philosopher and Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University as well as
director of the Centre for the Humanities in Utrecht, “Cyberfeminism with a difference,” 1996,
http://www.let.uu.nl/womens_studies/rosi/cyberfem.htm] //khirn
Last, but not least, postmodernity
is about a new and perversely fruitful alliance between technology and culture.
Technology has evolved from the Panoptical device that Foucault analyzed in terms of surveillance and control,
to a far more complex apparatus, which Haraway describes in terms of "the informatics of domination." Approaching the
issue of technology in post-modernity consequently requires a shift of perspective. Far from appearing antithetical to the human
organism and set of values, the technological factor must be seen as co-extensive with and inter-mingled with the
human. This mutual imbrication makes it necessary to speak of technology as a material and symbolic
apparatus, i.e. a semiotic and social agent among others.
This shift of perspective, which I have analyzed elsewhere3 as a move away from technophobia, towards a more
technophilic approach, also redefines the terms of the relationships between technology and art. If in a
conventional humanistic framework the two may appear as opposites, in postmodernity, they are much more inter-connected.
In all fields, but especially in information technology, the strict separation between the technical and the creative has in fact been made redundant by
digital images and the skills required by computer-aided design. The new alliance between the previously segregated domains of
the technical and the artistic marks a contemporary version of the post-humanistic reconstruction of a technoculture whose aesthetics is equal to its technological sophistication.
All this to say that I wish to take my distance equally from, on the one hand the euphoria of mainstream postmodernists who
seize advanced technology and especially cyber-space as the possibility for multiple and polymorphous
reembodiments; and on the other hand, from the many prophets of doom who mourn the decline of classical
humanism. I see postmodernity instead as the threshold of new and important re-locations for cultural practice. One of the most significant preconditions for these re-locations is relinquishing both the phantasy of multiple re-embodiments and the fatal attraction of nostalgia.4 The nostalgic
longing for an allegedly better past is a hasty and unintelligent response to the challenges of our age. It is not only culturally ineffective - in
so far as it relates to-the conditions of its own historicity by negating them; it
is also a short-cut through their complexity. I find that
there is something deeply a-moral and quite desperate in the way in which post-industrial societies rush
headlong towards a hasty solution to their contradictions. This flight into nostalgia has the immediate effect of
neglecting by sheer denial the transition from a humanistic to a posthuman world . That this basic selfdeception be compensated by a wave of longing for saviours of all brands and formats is not surprising.
In this generalized climate of denial and neglect of the terminal crisis of classical humanism, I would like to suggest that we need to turn to
'minor' literary genres, such as science-fiction and more specifically cyber-punk, in order to find non-nostalgic
solutions to the contradictions of our times.
Whereas mainstream culture refuses to mourn the loss of humanistic certaintles, "minor" cultural productions foreground the crisis
and highlight the potential it offers for creative solutions. As opposed to the a-morality of denial, "minor" cultural genres
cultivate an ethics of lucid self-awareness. Some of the most moral beings left in Western postmodernity are the sciencefiction writers who take the time to linger on the death of the humanist ideal of "Man”, thus inscribing this loss - and the
ontological insecurity it entails - at the (dead) heart of contemporary cultural concerns. By taking the time to
symbolize the crisis of humanism, these creative spirits , following Nietzsche, push the crisis to its
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innermost resolution . In so doing, they not only inscribe death at the top of the postmodern cultural agenda, but
they also strip the veneer of nostalgia that covers up the inadequacies of the present cultural (dis)order.
In the rest of this paper, I would like to suggest that first and foremost among these iconoclastic readers of the
contemporary crisis are feminist cultural and media activists such as the riot girls and other 'cyber feminists'
who are devoted to the politics of parody or parodic repetition. Some of these creative minds are prone to theory, others - feminist
science fiction writers and other 'fabulators'5 like Angela Carter - choose the fictional mode. While irony remains a major stylistic device, of great
significance are also contemporary multi-media electronic artists of the non-nostalgic kind like Jenny Holzer, Laurie Anderson and Cindy Sherman. They
are the ideal travel companions in postmodernity.
“My partner and I wrote this 1ac together. Since each of us were several, there was already
quite a crowd.” Our ontogentic understanding of becoming-cyborg theorizes ourselves as
multiple sets of embodied positions – that paradox enables the contestation of metaphysical
binaries that produce and maintain hegemonic masculinity, compulsory heterosexuality, and
the melancholy cynicism of ressentiment that stifles contemporary political possibilities.
Moreover, the joyful resistance of the 1ac opens up possibilities for challenging both the gaze of
surveillance and the immiseration and commodification of billions around the globe.
Braidotti 96 [Rosi, Philosopher and Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University as well as
director of the Centre for the Humanities in Utrecht, “Cyberfeminism with a difference,” 1996,
http://www.let.uu.nl/womens_studies/rosi/cyberfem.htm] //khirn
I would like to suggest as a consequence that
it is more adequate to speak of our body in terms of embodiment, that is to
say of multiple bodies or sets of embodied positions. Embodiment means that we are situated subjects, capable
of performing sets of (inter)actions which are--discontinuous in space and time. Embodied subjectivity is thus
a paradox that rests simultaneously on the historical decline of mind/body distinctions and the proliferation of
discourses about the body. Foucault reformulates this in terms of the paradox of simultaneous disappearance and over-exposure of the body.
Though technology makes the paradox manifest and in some ways exemplifies it perfectly, it cannot be argued that it is responsible for such a shift in
paradigm.
In spite of the dangers of nostalgia, mentioned above, there is still hope: we can still hang on to Nietzsche's crazed insight that God
is finally dead and the stench of his rotting corpse is filling the cosmos. The death of God has been long ln coming and it
has joined a domino-effect, which has brought down a number of familiar notions. The security about the categorical
distinction between mind and body; the safe belief in the role and function of the nation state; the family;
masculine authority; the eternal feminine and compulsory heterosexuality. These metaphysically founded
certainties have floundered and made room for something more complex, more playful and infinitely
more disturbing.
Speaking as a woman, that is to say a subject emerging from a history of oppression and exclusion, I would say that this crisis of conventional
values is rather a positive thing. The metaphysical condition in fact had entailed an institutionalised vision of
femininity which has burdened my gender for centuries. The crisis of modernity is, for feminists, not a
melancholy plunge into loss and decline, but rather the joyful opening up of new possibilities.
Thus, the hyper-reality of the posthuman predicament so sublimely represented by Parton, Taylor and Fonda, does not wipe out politics or the need for
political resistance:
it just makes it more necessary than ever to work towards a radical redefinition of political
action . Nothing could be further from a postmodern ethics than Dostoyevsky's over-quoted and profoundly mistaken statement that, if God is dead,
challenge here is rather how to combine the recognition of postmodern embodiment with
resistance to relativism and a free fall into cynicism .
anything goes. The
Secondly, the three cyborg goddesses mentioned above are immensely rich because they are media stars. Capital in these postindustrial times is an
immaterial flow of cash that travels as pure data in cyber-space till it lands in (some of) our bank accounts. Moreover, capital harps on and
trades in body fluids: the cheap sweat and blood of the disposable workforce throughout the third
world; but also, the wetness of desire of first world consumers as they commodify their existence into
over-saturated stupor. Hyper-reality does not wipe out class relations: it just intensifies them .9
Postmodernity rests on the paradox of simultaneous commodification and conformism of cultures, while
intensifying disparities among them, as well as structural inequalities.
An important aspect of this situation is the omnipotence of the visual media. Our era has turned
visualization into the ultimate form of control; in the hands of the clarity fetishists who have turned CNN
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into a verb: "I've been CNN-ed today, haven't you?n. This marks not only the final stage in the commodification of the scopic, but also
the triumph of vision over all the other senses.10
This is of special concern from a feminist perspective, because it tends to reinstate a hierarchy of bodily perception which over-privileges vision over
other senses, especially touch and sound. The primacy of vision has been challenged by feminist theories. In the light of the feminist work proposed by
Luce Irigaray and Kaja Silverman, the idea has emerged to explore the potentiality of hearing and audio material as a
way out of the tyranny of the gaze. Donna Haraway has inspiring things to say about the logocentric hold of
disembodied vision, which is best exemplified by the satellite/eye in the sky. She opposes to it an embodied
and therefore accountable redefinition of the act of seeing as a form of connection to the object of vision, which
she defines in terms of 'passionate detachment'. If you look across the board of contemporary electronic art, especially in the field of
virtual reality, you will find many wo men artists, like Catherine Richards and Nell Tenhaaf, who apply the technology to challenge the in-built
assumption of visual superiority which it carries.
The 1ac’s joyful theorization can fabulate the dynamic flux of nomadic politics into political
empowerment. Blurring the distinction between philosophy, politics, art, and fiction within the
spaces we find ourselves enables a life-affirming subversion of oppressive structures and the
possibility of becoming-otherwise
Braidotti 96 [Rosi, Philosopher and Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University as well as
director of the Centre for the Humanities in Utrecht, “Cyberfeminism with a difference,” 1996,
http://www.let.uu.nl/womens_studies/rosi/cyberfem.htm] //khirn
The first thing a feminist critic can do is to acknowledge the aporias and the aphasias of theoretical frameworks
and look with hope in the direction of (women) artists. There is no question that the creative spirits have a head start
over the masters of meta discourse, even and especially of deconstructive meta discourse. This is a very sobering prospect: after
years of post-structuralist theoretical arrogance, philosophy lags behind art and fiction in the difficult struggle to keep
up with today's world. Maybe the time has come for us to moderate the theoretical voice within us and to attempt
to deal with our historical situation differently.
Feminist have been prompt in picking up the challenge of finding political and intellectual answers to
this theoretical crisis . It has largely taken the form of a 'linguistic turn', i.e.: a shift towards more imaginative styles. Evidence of this is the
emphasis feminist theory is placing on the need for new 'figurations' , as Donna Haraway puts it, or 'fabulations' , to
quote Marleen Barr, to express the alternative forms of female subjectivity developed within feminism ,
as well as the on-going struggle with language to produce affirmative representations of women.
But nowhere is the feminist challenge more evident than in the field of artistic practice . For instance, the
ironical force, the hardly suppressed violence and the vitriolic wit of feminist groups like the Guerrilla or the
Riot Girls are an important aspect of the contemporary relocation of culture, and the struggle over
representation. I would define their position in terms of the politics of the parody. The riot girls want to argue
that there is a war going on and women are not pacifists, we are the guerilla girls, the riot girls, the bad girls. We want to put
up some active resistance, but we also want to have fun and we want to do it our way. The ever increasing number of
women writing their own science fiction, cyberpunk, film scripts, 'zines', rap and rock music and the likes testifies to this new mode.
There is definitely a touch of violence in the mode exposed by the riot and guerilla girls: a sort of raw directness that clashes with the syncopated tones of
standard art criticism. This forceful style is a response to hostile environmental and social forces. It also expresses a reliance on collective
bonding through rituals and ritualized actions, which far from dissolving the individual into the group, simply accentuate her
unrepentant singularity. I find a powerful evocation of this singular yet collectively shared position in the raucous,
demonic beat of Kathy Acker's In Memoriam to Identity 11, in her flair for multiple becomings , her joy in the
reversibility of situations and people - her border-line capacity to impersonate, mimic and cut
across an infinity of 'others '.
As many feminist theorists have pointed out, the practice of parody , which I also call 'the philosophy as if' , with its
ritualized repetitions , needs to be grounded in order to be politically effective . Postmodern feminist
knowledge claims are grounded in life-experiences and consequently mark radical forms of re-embodiment. But they also need to be
dynamic - or nomadic - and allow for shifts of location and multiplicity.
The practice of 'as if' can also degenerate into the mode of fetishistic representation. This consists in simultaneously
recognising and denying certain attributes or experiences. In male-stream postmodern thought12, fetishistic disavowal seems to mark most discussions
I see feminist theory as a corrective to this trend. The feminist 'philosophy of as
if' is not a form of disavowal, but rather the affirmation of a subject that is both nonessentialized,
of sexual difference13.
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that is to say no longer grounded in the idea of human or feminine 'nature', but she is nonetheless capable of
ethic and moral agency. As Judith Butler lucidly warns us, the force of the parodic mode consists precisely in turning
the practice of repetitions into a politically empowering position.
What I find empowering in the theoretical and political practice of 'as if' is its potential for opening up , through
successive repetitions and mimetic strategies, spaces where forms of feminist agency can be
engendered . In other words, parody can be politically empowering on the condition of being
sustained by a critical consciousness that aims at the subversion of dominant codes. Thus, I have
argued14 that Irigaray's strategy of 'mimesis' is politically empowering because it addresses
simultaneously issues of identity, identifications and political subjectivity. The ironical mode is an orchestrated
form of provocation and, as such, it marks a sort of symbolic violence and the riot girls are unsurpassed masters
of it.
I am sick and tired of Virtual Reality technology and cyber space being toys for the bovs. I am
mildly amused and tolerably bored with the sight of recycled aging hippies who, having failed to shake off their narcotic
habits from the 60's, simply resolved to transpose them to 'video or computer drugs' . This is only a displacement of the pursuit of
one solipsistic pleasure onto another. I, as one of the riot girls, of the bad girls, want my own imaginary, my own projected self; I want to design
the world in my own glorious image. It is time for the unholy marriage of Nietzsche's Ariadne with
Dionysian forces; it's time for the female death-wish to express itself by setting up workable
networks of translation for female desire into socially negotiable forms of behaviour. It is time for
history and the unconscious to strike a new deal.
The figure of the cyborg can energize the destabilizing, creative processes of becomingimperceptible, the point at which micropolitical intensitites can send a tremor through a party
line. Refuse to play the rules of the game, or at least break the rules before you play it.
Flieger 2k [Jerry Aline, professor at Rutgers University, “Becoming-Woman: Deleuze, Schreber and
Molecular Identification,” chapter 2, Deleuze and Feminism, ed. Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook,
Edinburgh University Press, 2000, p. 60-62] //khirn
I shall close by suggesting one other mapping of Deleuze with feminist theory which might allow us to think of
Deleuze as a ‘millennial’ thinker. For high-tech ‘millennial’ feminism – in the work of thinkers like Donna Haraway, Roseanne
Stone, or Avital Ronell – seems to be in a kind of disjunctive synchrony with Deleuzean becoming (Haraway 1991; Stone 1995;
Ronell 1989, 1994). Haraway’s cyborg, for instance, is itself a disjunctive synthesis of sorts, a monstrous Frankensteinian
coupling which commingles and inter-wires human and machine, human and animal. In her later work, dealing with ‘engineered’ species of mice
with human genes, the distinction between ‘phyla’ is further blurred (Haraway 1996). Of course Haraway is only one of
many important thinkers talking about cybernetics, but what is so striking about Haraway’s formulation is that it lacks the
dystopian tenor of other millennial commentaries: she welcomes this permeability of animal-machinehuman, as an
opportunity for feminism , or for living beyond the boundaries imposed by a too-strictly constructed and
observed gender, claiming that cyborg society is a ‘post-gender world’. While at the moment, I think there is nothing like this ‘postgender’ society anywhere in sight, Haraway’s notion of a hybrid, post-gender world is not inconsistent with
Deleuze’s trajectory of implicated serial becoming: woman-child-animal. And Freud could join the club: like Haraway’s humanmachine, Freud’s paraphrenic man-woman belies a single identity: in his becoming, man-woman is no longer a binary opposition but a binary
apposition, whereby majoritarian man is de-positioned. In other words, Haraway’s permeable boundaries promote contamination
in the sense of pollination, and cross-connecting, culminating in hybrid organisms that change our view of
evolution itself. For thinkers like Haraway and Deleuze, the masculinist agon of evolution no longer
suffices to explain being, since it describes a hierarchy culminating in ‘Man’, the hero of the narrative of the
survival of the fittest. ‘Millennial’ thinkers like Deleuze and Haraway promote instead a cross-gendered game of
lure and alliance, where the surviving of the fittest becomes the conniving of the wittiest – as when the orchid ‘dresses’
to fool the wasp. In this molecular play of intensities, the orchid is a transvestite, luring the wasp with a material wit. But the joke is on no one,
for in becoming-other, every ‘one’ loses face and identity, and finds creative solutions, ways to
gain pleasure. Paradoxically, one finds ‘survival’ at the expense of ‘identity’, by becoming-other . Yet there is
nothing tame about Deleuze’s universe, however ludic and sympathetic: its intensity comes from passion. After
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all, for Deleuze, ‘ Paradox
is the passion of philosophy’, its self-sacrifice, its becoming-intense, its selfirony . In Deleuze’s work, philosophy is wittily transvesting itself so that its subject becomes its object (‘man’) and in
so doing loses a centred identity . For the ultimate modern philosophical paradox is that modern ‘man’ loses
‘manhood’, his majoritarian identity, by becoming-intense, but this loss is enabling, and energising . The Deleuzean
transformation – becoming less (perceptible) by becoming-other – is becoming to him, like Schreber’s
flamboyant finery. I will close with Deleuze’s reference to Viriginia Woolf, who says that it is necessary to ‘saturate every atom’ in order to be ‘present at
the dawn of the world’: To reduce oneself to an abstract line, a trait . . . and in this way enter the haecceity and impersonality of the creator. One is then
like grass: one has made the world, everyday/everything, into a becoming, because one has made a necessarily communicating world, because one has
suppressed in oneself everything that prevents us from slipping between things and growing in the midst of things . . . Saturate, eliminate, put everything
in. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 280) This passage highlights a productive irony: here Deleuze cites a feminist icon, the very emblem of
‘identity’ for woman, the original tenant of a ‘room of one’s own’, claiming to put down roots, a ‘plot’ or place from which to
speak. But Woolf is also Deleuze’s chosen poet of deterritorialisation, of itinerant moves, of becomingimperceptible , 61 the ‘point’ which destabilises and sends a tremor through any party ‘line’ . We are
reminded that Deleuze’s non-linear politics is ‘the opposite of macropopolitics , and even of History’ because all
history is majoritarian (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 292). Deleuze seems to be saying that activism must be at the level of
intensities, always far from equilibrium, shaking things up : ‘A punctual system is most interesting
when there is a musician, painter, writer or philosopher to oppose it, who even fabricates it in order to oppose
it, like a springboard to jump from. History is made only by those who oppose history (not by those who insert
themselves into it, or even reshape it)’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 295). Deleuze’s ‘fabrication’ would seem to exclude any effort to solve the problems of
history by intervention, revolution, or persuasion. We thus seem to be left with a quietism as problematic as the formulations on becoming-woman with
which we began. But at another level – at the level of disjunction, saturation with matter, location in ‘real bodies’, and the valorisation and mobilisation
of difference as a force that ‘does what it can do’ – Deleuze may speak to the strongest impulses of feminists who seek to
deterritorialise rather than codify, who seek to change the very rules and terms of being oneself – to being
beside oneself, passionately and radically – struggling with the paradox of becoming equal while insisting on
being different. Perhaps some feminists have always understood that history is made only by those who oppose history :
those not in line but out of line , who refuse to play the game , or who play the game wittily in order to
alter its rules . Deleuze and feminism may seem to be at odds, from the perspective of the concerns of real women. But like
the orchid and the wasp, the relation of Deleuzean thought and feminist thought may be ‘mapped’ or
interwoven in a kind of productive disjunction. It is perhaps neither a matter of windowdressing, masquerade and cosmetic
solutions, nor of conflict and irreconcilable differences, but a matter of paradox.
Refuse the demand to abstract this debate elsewhere in favor of the 1ac’s radical politics of
subversion --- forefront the creation of a queer heterotopia in this room
Jones 9 [Angela, “Queer Heterotopias: Homonormativity and the Future of Queerness,” interalia: a journal of
queer studies, 2009 – 4, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Farmingdale State College,
http://www.interalia.org.pl/en/artykuly/2009_4/13_queer_heterotopias_homonormativity_and_the_future
_of_queerness.htm] //khirn
Utopias are abstract portraits of ideal or perfect societies that do not exist. Therefore, queer utopias are not possible. However, we
are witnessing
the birth of what I call queer heterotopias, which are spaces for the "other" to be transgressive, and which are
located in real spaces . Drawing from the work of Michel Foucault, I argue that queer heterotopias are places where
individuals can challenge the heteronormative regime and are "free" to perform their gender and sexuality
without fear of being qualified, marginalized, or punished.[1] Queer heterotopias are material spaces
where radical practices go unregulated . Unlike his previous work on power, in "Of Other Spaces," Foucault (1986) noted
that in everyday life escaping repression requires the creation of heterotopic spaces, where individuals can
celebrate their difference. Unlike utopias, heterotopic spaces can be created in reality .
Queer heterotopias are sites of empowerment. They always exist in relation to heteronormative spaces and are
shaped by them. Queer heterotopias exist in opposition to heteronormative spaces and are spaces where
individuals seek to disrupt heterosexist discourses . They are sites where actors, whether academics or activists,
engage in what we might call a radical politics of subversion , where individuals attempt to dislocate the
normative configurations of sex, gender, and sexuality through daily exploration and experimentation with crafting a queer
identity. Queer relates to unspecified social practices that challenge the hegemonic discourses on sex, gender,
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sexuality. To perform queer through everyday practice means to constantly behave in ways, whether through
sexual practice or aesthetically transforming one's body, that defy the conventional sex/gender system. Various rituals, from sex acts, to getting dressed
in the morning, to body modifications are ways individuals shape their queerness and in turn create queer heterotopias. The ways in which queerness
develops in everyday life must be seen less as a clearly-defined political program and more as a spiritual
journey individuals embark on. Their everyday battles shape queer subjectivity and have political
consequences. This article explores the development of queer heterotopias, and the problematic way in which
queerness is being made, re-made, and fixed by academics and well-meaning activists who would like to
appropriate, qualify, and fix queer subjectivity in order to advance a rights-based political program.
We conclude with a requiem for the future:
Braidotti 96 [Rosi, Philosopher and Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University as well as
director of the Centre for the Humanities in Utrecht, “Cyberfeminism with a difference,” 1996,
http://www.let.uu.nl/womens_studies/rosi/cyberfem.htm] //khirn
Yes, the world will end, my post-Zarathustra friend. It will go out like a brief candle. Dying is an art
and one must have a flair for it . And you do it exceptionally well, you do it so it feels like hell, you do it so
it feels real. We're only killing time. I hope you make your killing in time.
Unconditional surrender, o Hiroshima mon amour , my own private Enola Gay. What immortal eye
drew your breath-taking dissymetry? What injection of post-heideggerian angst, what fatal nuclear leak
traumatized you into such a state of emotional incompetence? When did you turn into such an autistic machine, a collection of
non-integrated circuits? Where did your death-wish go right, my posthuman travel companion ?
You are a wire electrifying, when bared. Hardly a self, an entity, an individual in any old humanistic sense of
the term. Heraclitus revisited with Deleuze, you embody the decapitated modern subject. You declared yourself
pure becoming, but you were actually a mere reflector, a moving synthetic image - one-dimensional and yet
multi-functional.
Is this how one should read Deleuze's machines dÈsirantes? Is this what Lyotard is getting at? And Baudrillard
with his hyper-reel and the simulacrum? Are all these just elaborate metaphors for the metabolic bankruptcy
we are going through? Of course all this necrophilic discourse makes me nervous and if you had my brains you'd
be nervous, too. I am a human, sexed, mortal being of the female kind, endowed with language. Just call me woman.
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case extensions
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2ac role of the ballot
The role of the ballot is to create queer heterotopias, spaces away from regulation or
marginalization in which subjects can become unfixed and malleable
Jones 9 [Angela, “Queer Heterotopias: Homonormativity and the Future of Queerness,” interalia: a journal of
queer studies, 2009 – 4, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Farmingdale State College,
http://www.interalia.org.pl/en/artykuly/2009_4/13_queer_heterotopias_homonormativity_and_the_future
_of_queerness.htm] //khirn
Gilles Deleuze and Queer Heterotopias
The future of queer theory, queer politics, and queer
heterotopias relies on nomadology, or Gilles Deleuze's notion that we are
Deleuze's concept of assemblages
helps us think critically about utilizing technology to shape queer practices and subjectivities . "A human body is an
not fixed beings. Deleuze wanted to release Western thought from the chokehold of essentialism. Gilles
assemblage of genetic material, ideas, powers of acting and a relation to other bodies" (Colebrook: 2002). Life is a series of connections; there is no
beginning or end that we can somehow uncover through research. Also drawing from Michael Warner (1993) we can only imagine the emergence of
queer heterotopias; we cannot configure an exact program or prescription for the future of queerness. While throughout this article I interrogate existing
strategies for creating queer heterotopic spaces and present illustrations of possibilities, none of this is meant to prescribe an exact vision of queerness;
this article just utilizes a Deleuzian framework to explore its possibilities.
Mimesis, whether through drag or trans identities, is a promising but limited strategy for creating queer heterotopias. It
cannot be the only strategy we use to disrupt essentialist discourses and universalizing subjectivities. This queer identity
may limit the ability for subjects to become unfixed, unstable, and malleable, which is the ultimate goal. From
Deleuze we draw the question: in what ways can we deterritorialize the body in an effort to break down the subject (Grosz: 1999, Gatens & Lloyd: 1999)?
The emergence of assemblages may enable the dismantling what Gilles Delueze called molar categories, or what many call
binaries. Can there be bodies without organs, or technologically-constructed bodies within complex systems of desire and power relations that
continually produce so much difference that the subject might disappear? Queer heterotopias require a post-human vision that not
only seeks to disrupt binaries like, man/woman, male/female, hetero/homo, but also human/non-human
(Haraway: 1991). Can there be no stable identity? In order for queer heterotopias to flourish, there must be a move away
from stable identities, not towards them, as we are currently witnessing. In Judith Butler's most recent work she says, "it seems
crucial to realize that a livable life does require various degrees of stability" (2004: 8). The idea that having a fixed or stable identity
is a human need is socially constructed. Our compulsory need to have fixed identities was created by a
need for rigid social order. While having fixed subjectivities is a social need, there is no reason to believe that
having a stable identity is a human need. To my mind, to flourish, the human condition needs transformation .
A transgendered person, a body modifier, etc., do not necessarily desire to be something else; it is the process of transformation
that feeds the human soul .
Rethinking the idea of queer heterotopias requires that theories of difference, particularly sexual difference,
abandon all fascination with metaphysics (Colebrook: 2000, Braidotti: 2005), give up the notion that political
action requires fixed identities . The demise of the compulsory need to order and create any fixed identity/subject/body is the key to
developing queer heterotopias further. However, creating queer heterotopias , or spaces where the infinite
performances of queerness can exist and flourish free from regulation and marginalization , free
from violence, and free to exist and be recognized, cannot be accomplished if we have a fixed notion of what
queer bodies look like or how a queer body behaves.
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2ac irony/parody good
The 1ac’s ironic blending of coherent evidence with self-aware parody, the transgression of
some debate norms juxtaposed with the adherence to others, is integral to subverting the
binary logic underpinning a Western metaphysics
Rae 14 [Gavin, American University at Cairo, “The Philosophical Roots of Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Imagery:
Descartes and Heidegger Through Latour, Derrida, and Agamben,” Human Studies, December 2014, Volume
37, Issue 4, pp 505-528] //khirn
The First Wave: Haraway’s Cyborg Imagery
In her much discussed ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs,’ Haraway, without ever explicitly mentioning either figure, returns to Descartes’ questioning of the
human–machine relationship and follows Heidegger’s claim that “the new fundamental science [is] cybernetics” (1977b: 434), to explain that, such is the
dominance of technology, informational flows, and cybernetic systems in contemporary society, that the human being is no longer merely organic, but is
also part machine (1991: 57). The conclusion reached is that “by the late twentieth-century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and
fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs” (1991: 150). Michelle Bastion (2006: 1030) points out that there are two aspects to
this claim: a serious aspect that aims to break down binary oppositions between human and machine and a playful side that uses metaphor and cyborg
figuration to describe this overcoming. Haraway’s point is not to glorify cyborgs, but entails an ironic thinking that plays with long dominant boundaries.
This is important because Haraway is sufficiently reflexive to recognize that critique is itself intimately bound up with the logos of Western philosophical
thinking. In other words, critique is itself a part of the logic to be overcome meaning that to engage in critique is to perpetuate the logic to be overcome.
While Heidegger is also aware of this and suggests that its resolution requires a prior historical analysis that destructs the history of metaphysical
thinking to subsequently make the leap beyond metaphysical thinking, Haraway disagrees on the need for this prior historical
engagement and instead turns to irony as a means of disrupting long established oppositions . The
reasoning behind this is never made explicit, but runs something like this: if criticising the logic of Western thinking itself
perpetuates this logic then the only way ‘out’ of this logic is to subvert it from ‘within’ by playing with its
categories, focusing on double meanings, and so on. The use of irony in Haraway’s critique not only
distinguishes her thinking from Heidegger’s, but is also an integral part of the critique she aims at the
binary logic underpinning Western thinking . In particular, she notes that “certain dualisms have been
persistent in Western thinking [and have] been systematic to the logics and practices of domination of women,
people of color, nature, workers, animals—in short, domination of all constituted as others, whose tasks is to mirror the
self” (1991: 177). Haraway mentions that the cyborg challenges the human–machine dichotomy , a challenging best
summarized by her comment that “late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind
and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines” (1991: 152). As a
consequence, Haraway
argues that the anthropocentric opposition pitting a human subject against a
machinised object is redundant as “our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly
inert” (1991: 152).
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2ac cyborgs good
Voting aff embraces a social imaginary capable of shattering essentialist attachments to
identity in favor of creative transvaluation
Braidotti 2k [Rosi, Philosopher and Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University as well as
director of the Centre for the Humanities in Utrecht, Chapter 8, “Teratologies”, Deleuze and Feminism, ed. Ian
Buchanan and Claire Colebrook, Edinburgh University Press, 2000, p. 168-9] //khirn
Technological culture expresses a colder and more depersonalised kind of sensibility. In order to illustrate the
paradox of the biotechnological era, also known as the era of the information technologies, let us consider the
World Wide Web: a huge and practically uncontrollable social space which confronts us with a paradox: on the
one hand a cheerful cacophony of clashing bits and bytes of the most diverse information and , on the other hand,
with the threat of monoculture and the largest concentration of military-industrial monopolies in the world. I
could not think of a better image for the paradox of globalisation and concentration, uniformity and fragmentation which characterises the transnational
economy. The theoretical appraisal of this specific historical moment is very varied, ranging from the euphoric promises of the electronic democracy
(Kroker and Kroher 1987) to prophecies of doom (Unibomber). Only a few sober scholars like Castells (1996) and Haraway (1991) can
actually articulate a theoretical framework that is up to the challenges of our day . For such scholars, the
crisis of representation, values and agency that is engendered by the new world disorder is not necessarily a negative mark of decline, but it rather opens
up new perspectives for critical thought. The
arena where this discussion is being deployed is the social imaginary ,
which is a highly contested social space where the technoteratological imaginary, supported and
promoted by post-industrial societies, is rampant . Whether we like it or not, and most of us do not, we are made to desire
the interface human/machine. I want to argue consequently that, given the importance of both the social imaginary and
the role of technology in coding it, we need to develop both forms of representation and of resistance that
are adequate. Adequate representations are the heart of the matter. As I have often argued, Deleuze shares with a
great deal of feminists the need for a renewal of our imaginary repertoires . Conceptual
creativity is called for , new figurations are needed to help us to think through the maze of techno-teratological culture. Let me
clarify one important point here. I have been referring to the ‘imaginary’ as a set of socially mediated practices which function as the anchoring point –
albeit unstable and contingent – for identifications and therefore for identity formation. These practices act like interactive structures where desire as a
subjective yearning and agency in a broader socio-political sense are mutually shaped by one another. Neither ‘pure’ imagination – locked in its classical
opposition to reason – nor fantasy in the Freudian sense, the imaginary for me marks a space of transitions and transactions. Nomadic, in a
Deleuzean sense, it flows
like symbolic glue between the social and the self, the outside – ‘constitutive outside’, as Stuart Hall
would say, quoting Derrida – and the subject: the material and the ethereal. It flows, but it is sticky : it catches on as it
goes. It possesses fluidity, but it distinctly lacks transparency, let alone purity. I have used the term ‘desire’ – in
keeping with my poststructuralist training – to connote the subject’s own investment, or enmeshment, in this sticky
network of inter-related social and discursive effects. This network constitutes the social field as a
libidinal – or affective – landscape , as well as a normative – or disciplinary – framework. possesses any unitary or generalised meaning,
nor can any philosopher easily promise an immediate Nietzschean transmutation of values . It is rather the case that
the task of decoding and accounting for the imaginary has been a critical concern for social and cultural critics
since the 1960s. It has provided the arena in which different and often conflicting critiques of representation have
clashed, fuelling the discourse of the crisis of representation. I think this crisis needs to be read in the context of the decline of
Europe as a world power (West 1994). It is also intrinsic to the post-nuclear predicament of an advanced world whose
social realities become virtual – or dematerialised – because they are changing at such a fast rate under the pressure
and the acceleration of a digitally-clad economy.
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2ac cyborgs  queer heterotopia
The emergence of the cyborg breaks down traditional categories undergirding subjectivity and
catalyze the creation of a queer heterotopia
Jones 9 [Angela, “Queer Heterotopias: Homonormativity and the Future of Queerness,” interalia: a journal of
queer studies, 2009 – 4, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Farmingdale State College,
http://www.interalia.org.pl/en/artykuly/2009_4/13_queer_heterotopias_homonormativity_and_the_future
_of_queerness.htm] //khirn
We can begin to imagine the possibilities for new subjectivities to exist by examining the hybridization of
human, animal, and technology. Donna Haraway has opened up possibilities for thinking about subverting
binaries and the way traditional binaries are already being broken down.
A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a
creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. The international
women's movements have constructed 'women's experience', as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction
and fact of the most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so
of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's
experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science
fiction and social reality is an optical illusion (Haraway: 1991:149).
We are already becoming cyborgs . Science fiction and modernity have collided. The emergence of the cyborg body is
breaking down traditional binary constructions like male/female. Even further, it breaks down important binaries like
human/non-human. The cyborg or techno-body opens up the possibilities for asking new questions about
subjectivity and destroys essential categories of organization. Perhaps Renee Richard's presence on the tennis court and Oscar
Pistorious'[3] sprinting signal the coming of queer heterotopias. They both certainly force a new dialogue within society about the usefulness of
traditional binaries. Moreover, as these others emerge and multiply, they force discourse to expand to meet their needs. For example, recently the
International Olympic Committee allowed transsexuals to compete in the Olympics. On a micro-level individuals can force society to slowly change
merely by behaving "queerly." The hybridization of bodies and technologies forces people to rethink how they understand and perceive human life.
Hybridization produces the multiplication and amplification of difference and identities. The increase in hybridization is linked with the rise of global
capitalism and advanced technology (Braidotti: 2002, 2006). The possibilities of the techno-body are tempting. However, it could all too readily become
yet another grand narrative where technology will be the weapon of revolution. Moreover, the romanticism of the techno-body is only helping to create
yet another fixed identity (to be exploited and marginalized). However, new
technologies are a strategy for creating queer
heterotopias because new technologies can assist individuals to further develop their own queerness .
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2ac surveillance impact
The control society culminates in superpanoptic control, in which subjects internalize the gaze
of surveillance and behavior of a docile body --- that fosters prehensive understandings of risk
management that cause global biopolitical control and colonial intervention
Puar 14 [Jasbir, Associate Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers University, Ph.D. in Ethnic
Studies from the University of California at Berkeley in 1999, M.A. from the University of York, England, in
Women’s Studies in 1993, “Jasbir Puar: Regimes of Surveillance,” Cosmologics, December 4, 2014,
http://cosmologicsmagazine.com/jasbir-puar-regimes-of-surveillance] //khirn
Jasbir Puar: Much of my
work on surveillance has focused on technologies of surveillance as not only responsive and thus
and thus productive. And many of these forms of surveillance appear in neo-liberal
models of security, model-minority racialization, proper modes of masculine and feminine gender
conformity, educational mandates, and patriotic citizenship. This interest follows from Michel Foucault’s
basic insight regarding “regimes of security” and how they operate in control societies through an anticipatory
temporality: in other words, controlling so that one does not have to repress . Regimes of security also entail
corralling greater numbers of populations into a collective project of surveillance .
repressive, but also as pre-emptive
We have seen, and continue to see, many examples of this post September 11th. The If You See Something, Say Something campaign on NYC public
transit interpellates the general public into service of the “greater good”; the NSEERS list impelled pre-emptive repatriation (and sometimes migration to
a country of origin that one had never been to) to South Asia and the Middle East; the Turban Is Not a Hat campaign sought to educate Americans about
the differences between Muslims and Sikhs by regulating the distinctions between headwear, turbans, headscarves. Surveillance is not just
about who the state is watching, but about multiple circuits of collective surveillance : it’s not just about
the act of seeing or noticing or screening (bodies/identities), but also about acts of collecting, curating, and tabulating data and
affect. Surveillance doesn’t just modulate between inner/outer or public/private, but rather upholds the fantasy that these discrete
realms exist, while working quite insidiously through networks of gaze, data, and more. Even with forms of direct
policing such as Stop and Frisk, the temporality of surveilling is not just reactive, but also preemptive and increasingly,
predictive.
In surveillance studies, the notion of the “superpanoptic” supplements the panoptic. The latter is a system through which the
subject internalizes the gaze of surveillance and the behavior of a docile body; the Superpanopticon, however,
supplements and sometimes precedes the Panopticon. It is a system through which data forms and announces the body, producing a data
body that may well show up before an actual body. After 9/11, the meme “Flying While Brown” emerged in response to
airport policies regarding Arab or Muslim-looking passengers and as a correlate to “Driving While Black.” Flyers in U.S. with great
compliance started throwing out their expensive toiletries and, since the “shoe bomber” incident, taking off their shoes without reflection, a comment on
the smooth inhabitation of new surveillance tactics.
This kind of connective analysis links various kinds of figures that emerge as targets of explicit surveillance to the
on-going systems of surveillance that bubble underneath.
More recently, Global Entry, TSA Pre√, and other pay-as-you-go securitization programs allow you to pay for your status as a non-security risk or
terrorist threat. I’m very interested in these forms of pay-as-you-go surveillance systems that neutralize you as a security risk. I think they allow for new
fissures in the informational superpanoptic to develop, as people like myself, who have traveled, for example, to Pakistan, Lebanon, and Palestine, have
nonetheless paid to be certified as non-risky travelers. The data body, composed of information, of qualitative and quantitative metrics, supersedes the
physical body. The data body does not replace the physical body, but cuts in front of it, thus allowing a scrambling of class, race, and nation in particular.
Cosmologics: Writers have noted a shift in American surveillance after September 11th which in part refocused police efforts on religious minorities.
Could you speak a little more to this shift, and perhaps place it within a wider trajectory of surveillance in America?
Jasbir Puar: Much of the work in Terrorist Assemblages mapped out the dissolution of public/private divides that have
in the past animated feminist scholarship regarding the state and state intrusion into the “private.” This
private, as women of color and transnational feminists have pointed out, has never quite existed given the level
of state bureaucratic and administrative presence in the households of immigrants and people of color . One
interest of mine is connecting the securitization upsurge that occurred after 9/11 with the formation of Homeland Security to both earlier and more
recent discourses of security that revolve around the “home,” and in particular the home as something private, national, and safe. So before the War
on Terror we had the War on Drugs: this rationalized policing in the name of safe homes, in Black communities
in particular. The War on Drugs no doubt provided a domestic blueprint for the foreign deployment enacted
after September 11th. This is one connective point to 9/11.
Another connective tissue to 9/11 is the financial crisis of 2008, which was not a break from the securitization of the home and homeland, but a
manifestation of one of its tactical failures, that of securing the home economically. I think 2008 marks the end of the “post 9/11″ moment and recomplicates the “Muslim terrorist” as the predominate target of surveillance technologies and discourses. Surveillance happens—obliquely, but it
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happens—through the instrument of the sub-prime mortgage, whereby once again the security and safety of the
home is determined through the surveillance of those subjects deemed financially suspect. In this case, predominantly
Black and Latino populations were subject to foreclosures. Surveillance and securitization economies work through a
sort of monetization of ontology—certain bodies are intrinsically risky investments via a circular logic of precarity
whereby these bodies are set up as unable to take on risk in the very system that produces them as risky.
This kind of connective analysis links various kinds of figures that emerge as targets of explicit surveillance —in the
case of 9/11, a religious figure, the fundamentalist terrorist—to the on-going systems of surveillance that bubble underneath. One analysis that I offer in
Terrorist Assemblages is the irony of the decriminalization of sodomy in the Lawrence decision of 2004 , a ruling that
pivoted around the privatization of anal (and thus homosexual) sex within the sanctity of the privately-owned home.
This was at a time when Homeland Security was requiring registration of men from Muslim countries,
infiltrating mosques, enacting home deportations—just generally disrupting and halting the construction of any
kind of private home. One interpretation, then, of who exactly the Lawrence decision protects is: not so much the lesbian or gay or
homosexual or queer subject, but rather one whose private home has no reason to be suspected and is not suspicious.
The construction of “intimacy,” as it is anchored in the private, becomes instrumentalized within the calculus of
biopolitics, a measure of one’s worth to the state .
The “democratization” of surveillance through networks of control demands we pay even greater attention to the uneven distribution of disciplining,
punishment, and pleasure.
Cosmologics: What frameworks have you found the most compelling for understanding the experience of surveillance in ways more sensitive to lived
reality, especially given the many ways we ourselves participate in surveillance?
Jasbir Puar: I have always been bemused about the debates regarding social media and privacy. Outrage over the intrusion of privacy
practices on Facebook and Twitter erupt with regularity. But rather than merely expressing discomfort and nostalgia about a longgone protected realm of the private, these debates also obfuscate an uncomfortable truth : that Facebook taps into our
inner-stalker , taps into the pleasures we revel in by surveilling others and by living out our own
“privates” in public. There is a kind of affective, technonationalist embrace of surveillance .
So I think there is a conversation yet to be had about pleasure and surveillance in relation to governmentality, policing, and biopolitics. This pleasure is
both afforded and sublimated in the directive to surveil on behalf of patriotism, the War on Terror, and “America .”
Given the ubiquity of
surveillance in our everyday lives—we think nothing of pulling out cell phones to capture on video any number of events that may
unexpectedly unfold in front of us, from car accidents to incidents of police brutality to weather phenomena to gang rapes—it then is hardly a
stretch for a university administration (in this case, Rutgers University) to present the possibility of installing cameras
in classrooms as a protective measure and as the natural course of the normalization of surveillance.
Of course, the inhabitation of such pleasures is uneven and linked to the differential effects of surveillance upon
different bodies and communities. So the questions in front of us toggle between “who is being surveilled, and
based on the assumption of what political/dissident/deviant qualities?” to “is everyone being surveilled, and if
so, what is done with the surveillance? How are the lines drawn between pleasure and punishment?” The “democratization” of surveillance
through networks of control demands we pay even greater attention to the uneven distribution of disciplining, punishment, and pleasure.
Gaza will be purportedly be uninhabitable by year 2020—according to whose metric, and by which predictive, prehensive algorithms?
Cosmologics: How do you understand surveillance as having changed recently, and what do you see as the challenges it will pose in the future?
Jasbir Puar: One tendency I have also been tracking is the move from responsive to pre-emptive to “prehensive”
securitization. The prehensive is a way of thinking about calculations of risk and the functioning of surveillance
that considers more than how surveillance potentially pre-empts unwanted outcomes through the disciplining
of some as a warning to all , and through the recruitment of the general populace in the task of watching.
Rather the prehensive is about making the present look exactly the way it needs to in order to guarantee a
very specific and singular outcome in the future.
I am most interested in how this works in Gaza—how mathematical algorithms are deployed to fix calorie intake, water supplies, and electric
currents, among other infrastructural elements—to create an asphixatory regime of control, in which the Palestinians can
breathe and not breathe according to the desires of the Occupier/Israel. This to me seems to be yet another manifestation of
surveillance which is indebted to Foucault’s regimes of security, but which also mutates it. It is not just an attempt to eliminate
unwanted entities through a paternalistic discourse of protectionism, but an actual predictive economy that is much more
deliberate in its targeting. Gaza will be purportedly be uninhabitable by year 2020 —according to whose metric,
and by which predictive, prehensive algorithms? How is this inevitability procured? The prehensive is about putting
into place a set of predictive facts-on-the-ground, in the terms of the language of risk, which extends itself to a
projected “apocalypse.” This set of constructed “facts” then lends itself easily to the representation of Gaza as
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a “natural” disaster likely to happen. This kind of surveillance, in the name not only of securitization but also of
controlling the future , is one, I believe, with which we will increasingly have to grapple .
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at: cede the political
Restricting goals to the legal domain forecloses the creation of queer heterotopias and
reinforces the status quo --- we have the potential to create new spaces in the here and now
Jones 9 [Angela, “Queer Heterotopias: Homonormativity and the Future of Queerness,” interalia: a journal of
queer studies, 2009 – 4, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Farmingdale State College,
http://www.interalia.org.pl/en/artykuly/2009_4/13_queer_heterotopias_homonormativity_and_the_future
_of_queerness.htm] //khirn
While crafting queer heterotopias will allow for human growth and human satisfaction, it may thwart the political project of many queer activists. If
queer is not a fixed identity, it makes collective action harder to organize. Perhaps we must rethink our goals. Is queerness just a political
strategy to claim legal recognition? This cannot be the only goal of the queer project . Queer politics
cannot just be reduced to the struggle for marriage equality, equal protection laws, the right to legally change
your sex, and/or the legal struggle to end the coercive surgeries of intersexed bodies (just to name a few). This liberalist approach to queer
politics is limited. Individuals need social rights as well. The right to exist, to be seen, to be heard, to be accepted as
a "viable body," and the right explore our desires, free from fear reprisal is a social right.
By creating queer heterotopias individuals are creating spaces where they force the larger
heteronormative society to recognize queer bodies as viable on their own terms .
Recently, Judith Butler astutely noted that what many individuals seem to desire is simply to be a "livable
body." She writes:
The task of all these movements seems to me to be about distinguishing among the norms and conventions that permit people to breathe, to desire, to
love, and to live, and those norms and conventions that restrict or eviscerate the conditions of life itself...what is most important is to cease legislating for
all lives what is livable only for some, and similarly, to refrain from proscribing for all lives what is unlivable for some (2004:8).
The current queer political project asks for acceptance from the overarching political structure. Queer heterotopias
they ask
only to be recognized as viable bodies. At this point, having spaces where bodies are free to live , literally
breathe and walk down the street free from regulation and marginalization is a success. Queer heterotopias are these spaces .
Legal sanction or legitimacy is not the only strategy for liberation. For now, if individuals can merely live outside of the binary
constructions of sex, gender, and sexuality, they are liberated. Queer heterotopias are spaces where individuals, of infinite genders,
sexualities, and radically transformed bodies can, by living, interacting and creating their own spaces, take power
and be empowered . They do not need to ask for it .
are spaces created by queer individuals that demand recognition. In recognition, I mean that individuals do not ask for legal sanction;
Their overdetermination of what activism and engagement looks like is precisely the point—the
1nc is merely a violent smokescreen for the violence of the conformity machine
Svirsky 10. Marcelo Svirsky, professor of critical and cultural theory at Cardiff University (UK),
“Introduction: Beyond the Royal Science of Politics,” Deleuze Studies Vol 4: 2010, pg. 3
Rather than problematising the political, this royal understanding of activism uses its ‘metric power’ to
axiomatise politics, while simultaneously repressing activist experiences that refuse simply to align
with ‘the given’ of formal politics. An example of this can be seen in the hostility of western states
towards organisations such as ‘Wikileaks’ or the ‘Animal rights movement’, each of which are immersed in
creative acts of citizenship that actualise ruptures. Such new scenes and acts are constantly at risk
of being appropriated by this royal science of politics, which imposes upon them a model that
channels civic participation according to established rules and concepts. Activisms that seek only to
guarantee the workings of representative democracy are essentially slave activisms; they dwell in safety
and their impact and potential is expected to be absorbed without drawing the system into new
structures of resonance.
The assumption that ‘mass participation is the lifeblood of representative democracy’ not only imposes a
particular model of the political, it also reinforces a pejorative way to conceive activism. By positing
representative democracy (or any other regime) as the reified model of political process, theory necessarily
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idealises certain forms of involvement over others. For example, classical participatory theory is often
blind to [unable to comprehend] the creative significance of the activist energies being unfolded in such
events as critical teaching in schools, revolutionary philosophical writing, the deconstructive
effect of a critical assemblage that confronts patriarchal power, or of civic homosexuality which
disrupts heterosexism. In fact, the assumptions underlying ‘representative’ participation are troublesome for at
least two reasons. Firstly, participation in the formal political process of ‘representative democracy’ does not
in itself necessarily implicate a critical attitude or action, seeking a less repressive and more creative life.
To evidence this, it is enough to keep in mind some fearful recent examples of mass political support for
‘representative’ state violence, as occurred last May when thousands of Israelis marched in Tel Aviv and the
streets of Jerusalem to back the killing by the Israeli Defence Forces of nine activists from the Turkish
Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief, as they boarded the Mavi Marmara
ship sailing to Gaza as part of a humanitarian flotilla. Similarly, we might remain mindful of other, no less
electrifying, cases of popular support for wars and genocides in South America, Asia, Eastern Europe and
Africa, or of events such as the Holocaust. In these instances, mass participation more accurately falls
within the Reichian analysis of a popular ‘desire for fascism’–which lies worlds away from a
participatory liberalism that idealises the commitment of the public to activist citizenship (see Isin 2009)
and to the tolerant ‘good life’ that western democracy claims to represent. Secondly, passivity is not
necessarily a sign of political anaemia, but may be a cultural expression that requires local
explanation. Here, research at times confuses the visible with the political: absence of visible mass
participation might be a sign of unconscious and pre-conscious compliance with ongoing forms of oppression,
and can impact more energetically on the perpetuation of a regime than can tangible acts of the body – these
modes of active abandonment produce the reign of daily microfascisms.
After Deleuze and Guattari, political activism may be approached in a fundamentally different way: without
an image, without a form. As Deleuze and Guattari make clear, the interaction between royal and nomad
science produces a ‘constantly shifting borderline’, meaning that there is always some element that
escapes containment by the ‘iron collars’ of representation (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 367; see also
Deleuze 1994). This occurs when the plane of consistency is passionately thrown against the plane of
organisation, when a nomad element inserts itself in political struggles in which, for instance, the
boundaries of citizenship are challenged and reopened (as occurred in the struggle associated with the
sans-papiers movement, see Isin 2009), or barriers of ethnic segregation are challenged by new forms of
interculturalism (as occurs with bilingual forms of education). It is through these ‘smallest deviations’ that
smooth types of political activity dwell within the striated forms of state politics (Deleuze and Guattari
1987: 371). Deleuze’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophies have created some of the conceptual
tools which may be put to innovative use in activism that seeks to break with repressive traditions. Their alien
relation to the standards set by the royal science of politics (see Patton 2000) – an alienation laid out in the
philosophical resources they draw on, in the issues and concepts that characterise their work and, principally,
in the incessant movement of their thought – points towards a richer philosophical weaponry with which
to confront and possibly overcome political inhibitions, in both knowledge and practice.
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at: commodification
The constant process of experimentation fomented by the 1ac is capable of challenging
commodification
Jones 9 [Angela, “Queer Heterotopias: Homonormativity and the Future of Queerness,” interalia: a journal of
queer studies, 2009 – 4, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Farmingdale State College,
http://www.interalia.org.pl/en/artykuly/2009_4/13_queer_heterotopias_homonormativity_and_the_future
_of_queerness.htm] //khirn
As new queer subjectivities are crafted, it is likely that under capitalism they will be commodified and
exploited; becoming queer then demands constant experimentation, movement, and change.
Moving away from fixed identities will then also help thwart to problem of commodification and exploitation.
Desire must be freed from the confines of a heteronormative order. Becoming queer means we must see
ourselves as free-floating entities of desire. Most importantly, becoming queer entails a constant process of
spiritual experimentation . Individuals are increasingly looking for alternative roads to spirituality outside of organized religion . The
most interesting aspect of queerness is the internal liberation experienced in this process , not the
political emancipation that it seems many queer activists are concerned with. In my view, spirituality relates to introspection and becoming queer
provides a rewarding means by which to explore ones desires and their relationship with the external
world .
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at: cyborg racist/sexist
Not all fluidity is necessarily whiteness; fluid mobility is inevitable in some contexts for many
people, and it can be used to conceal whiteness or to weaponize privilege against it: context
determines what. In short, they need to win that other links outweigh the transformative
potential of our method for them to win that our 1ac is a fluid method that reinscribes
whiteness
Beasley 10 [Chris, “The Elephant in the Room: Heterosexuality in Critical Gender/Sexuality Studies,” NORA Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, Volume 18, Issue 3, 2010] //khirn
Rather than conceiving heterosexuality as simply to be conflated with the heteronormative, as a closed system, it is
useful to consider the Deleuzian account of “becoming”—the notion of an open-ended system (Deleuze & Guattari
1980/1987: 6–12; see also Chia 1996: 34–35). Such a conception does not necessarily ignore the constraining normalization
of heterosexuality in which corporeal identities and practices are situated as dualistic forms of inherent
immoveable “being”, but nevertheless refuses to accept that this is all there is. The anti-juridical thought with which
Deleuze is associated enables attention to the transgressive micro-political which arises out of a disavowal of set binary positions as the
only actuality. Instead such an approach proposes an incessant dynamic mobility which—though blocked and contained—
remains incompletely closed, unfinished and unpredictable (Deleuze & Parnet 1987: 133; Eveline 2005: 644). If heterosexual intercorporeality is understood in this Deleuzian sense of a terrain of “becoming”, rather than a matter of primordial “being”, it is also possible to claim for it
an expansive productivity that cannot be reduced to the heteronormative. It can be countenanced as capable of “deterritorialization”, of breaks and
spaces, as well as micro-practices which move away from set binary meanings/identities towards more dynamic, diffused, and heterogeneous
possibilities (Deleuze & Guattari 1972/2004). Deterritorialization does not inevitably equate to the dissolution of
hetero/homo and gender binaries (though this might indeed be a direction) and thus does not propose heterosexuality's productivity as a synonym for
erasure of its specificity. Rather such an approach enables heterosexuality to be reconceived as a field of potential
transgression. The intention of such a rethinking is bring to the fore a positive optimistic micro-politics and
destabilize socio-political determinism . Nevertheless, to my mind this is not sufficient to a consideration of transgression in
relation to the mainstream, to heterosexuality. Deleuze, along with Foucault and queer theorists like Bersani, turns our attention to a
positive fluidity, mobility, and multiplicity. However, this unremitting attention to a propulsive social creativity, to “flows of becoming
which have infinite possibilities” (Jenkins 2009: xi, emphasis added) may involve a privileged disembodiment side-stepping
racialized/ethnic/cultural location in bodily and geographic terms (Beasley 2005: 168–174). The Deleuzian emphasis on the open-ended quality
of sociality, on “becoming” rather than “being”, offers a significant step forward for analyses of heterosexuality and heterosex, in so far as they have
become encased in negative characterization as exemplary normalization. Nevertheless, such an open-ended emphasis can amount to a strategy not
simply of de-essentializing but of dematerialization, which places in the shadows asymmetric constraints in existing social relations but also the
constraints of visceral physicality and embodied interconnection. Sexuality and heterosex demand an account of pleasure and transgression which
tenaciously holds on to the sensuous fleshliness of sociality, to both the creativity and the limits of “social flesh” (Beasley & Bacchi
2007). Secondly, fluidity/multiplicity in sexual practices is
not necessarily transgressive. Endless fluidity/multiplicity perhaps
in the sphere of the heterosexual mainstream such
productivity might after all largely maintain and extend the hegemony of the heteronormative . For heterosexual
transgression to have any substantive meaning at all, an advocacy of fluidity must be moderated by a stance
which challenges the heteronormative (Beasley forthcoming). However, despite some caveats, what is useful about the work
of writers like Deleuze is that heterosexuality can no longer be cast in such approaches as an immoveable elephant
from which nothing pleasurable or positive can be gained and which is therefore best ignored by critical commentators. The refusal to inculcate
socio-political determinism enables a rejection of simplistic accounts of sexual modes, a rejection of notions
that queer/minority sexualities are somehow politically pure and synonymous with transgression or that
heterosexuality is unremittingly oppressive and transgressive heterosexuality an oxymoron. In destabilizing reductive
assumptions about the political possibilities of sexualities we can then consider the potential myriad of fissures in the
socially normative and hence develop evidence to question both its seeming strangle-hold and naturalized status. All the same there
can be deemed transgressive in relation to minority sexualities, but
remain significant uncertainties about what counts as transgressive and socially subversive, and what counts when heterosexuality is the site. What is the
difference between the merely unusual and the transgressive in this instance? This is a problem for discussions about social life and about sexualities per
se but is particularly an issue when analysing heterosexuality. I would assert that transgression cannot be understood as only
available at the social margins. Instead, transgression may be seen as intrinsic within dominant practices like
heterosexuality (rather than necessarily always external to them). But what then might transgression in the realm of the dominant look like
(Beasley 2011 forthcoming); how might a transgressive heterosexuality be conceptualized? It would seem that considering the question of a
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pleasurable transgressive heterosexuality, and what it might involve, complicates our understandings of self and social
change and thus opens up hopeful, if not infinite, possibilities.
The Cyborg breaks down racial, sexual, and gender binaries --- it’s capable of destructuring
identitarian dogma
Miyake 4 (Esperanza Miyake, PhD in Gender and Woman’s studies, My, is that Cyborg a little bit Queer?,
Journal of International Women's Studies Volume: 5 No. 2, published March 2004, pages 57-58, Yung Jung)
The human/animal boundary breakdown is a power(ful) strategy that the queer cyborg practices. The sexy,
alluring and enigmatic mermaid is an early form and a good example of the carnivalesque, queer,
animal/human cyborg. By subverting and emerging the animal with the human, the queer cyborg celebrates and relishes its
transgression and acknowledgement of its bestial origins. The animalistic and illegitimate queer cyborg sucks
the fruits of perversion and licks the juices of transgression upon its lips, glittery to the eye and wet with a purpose. Suleiman
rightly states that “perversion is one of the essential ways and means…to push forward the frontiers of what is
possible and to unsettle reality” (1990, 148). The queer cyborg, with a hand on its (in)organic crotch, ‘rejoices’ its perverse
status/strategy and confronts authority whilst challenging the Western quest for innocence and origin. The
breakdown of animal/machine boundary allows queer cyborgs to a ‘rejoice in the illegitimate fusion’ (Haraway
1985, p.176) of machine and body. Not only does this signify the symbolic fact that there is a growing awareness
amongst women to see their bodies as powerful machines, better than (hu)mans; but also, the body as the
battleground, tool and escape from the ‘masculinist orgy’. Wittig’s ‘war machine’ seems to also have a place within this hybrid. The
body becomes not just the writing, written and (re)written, it becomes the ‘war machine’ that “utilizes
strategies of parody and inversion for purposes of political analysis and protest” (Palmer 1993, p.99). On a physical level,
the body and the machine are literally becoming more and more integrated. Wilson observes that, “you could never be certain where the edges are.
Multiplicity is another way of not being sure where people’s edges are, where their identity begins and ends”
(Wilson 1995, p.243). Queer cyborgs would enjoy hearing that. The amalgamation of body and machine makes the queer cyborg
monstrous, strong, sexy and powerful. In Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep? the human characters in the novel carry ‘empathy boxes’
which are mechanic extensions of the body that enable the carrier to feel empathy. In addition, they carry ‘Penfield mood organs’ which allow them to
choose and set a mood they want to be in. Hawthorne expresses a concern over this matter, and wonders whether there will be a point where “we will no
longer listen to our bodies…perhaps we will no longer feel sympathy?” (Hawthorne 1999, p.233). Whilst this might be a cause for apprehension, concern,
and even fear, the ‘soullessness’ of a machine that Wilson describes, coupled with the bestiality of humans indeed, “evokes horror” (1995, p.246), the
perfect confrontational tool for the queer cyborg engaging in the politics of provocation. In addition, Wilson argues that machines are “composed out of
parts. They may be assembled and disassembled. They are open to modifications or ‘retoolings’” (1985, p.247). Does this not sound like the physical
realisation of what Haraway originally stated? A disassembled and reassembled, postmodern, collective and personal self
(1985, p.163). She is right: the
machine is us, our processes and an aspect of our embodiment (1985, p.180). The final
binary breakdown occurs between the physical/non-physical. Haraway claims that cyborgs are creatures that are “no
longer structured by the polarity of public and private” (1985, p.151). As I have mentioned before, the queer cyborg is an
entity that drifts in/out/on/off-line. As the screen which resides in the private home becomes a window to the
public network of power, the distinction between private/public become more and more blurred. Haraway expands
upon this point by mentioning the eradication of the ‘public’ and ‘private’ life through growing technology, such as video games (1985, p.168). Foster
makes an excellent point in saying that the “virtual reality computer interfaces or telepresence technologies both restage and disrupt the distinction
between inner and outer worlds” (2000, p.440). This means that we are in a position to embody the outside power, and also
empower the outside body. Queer cyborgs can thus detach their public persona with their physical body,
strengthening the argument that gender, and other categories are just a stage act, unlinked to the physical self.
The parade continues on/off-line, noisy and garrulous; Bateson argues that “there must be a systematic relation between the internal and the external--the engineer's term for nonsystematic elements in codification is ‘noise’”(1970, p.30). And this relation between the external and
internal occurs because there is no barrier, no solid boundary that separates the two. Let the music be heard,
loud and clear for there will be no inner closet with its door----queer cyborgs no longer need to come ‘out’ for
they are already there.
Establishing intersectional cyborg discourse is key to claim identity
Garoian and Gaudelius 2001 (Charles R. Garoian, Professor of Art Education School of Visual
Arts Penn State University and Yvonne M. Gaudelius, Associate Vice President and Senior
Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education; Cyborg Pedagogy: Performing Resistance In the
Digital Age, Studies in Art Education, Vol. 42 No. 4, pp. 333 published Summer 2001, Yung
Jung)
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In this article we
argue for the importance of situating information technology within a larger cultural context in
order to identify its social, political, and aesthetic impact on human identity. Just as identity is not created within a cultural
vacuum, neither is art or information technology. Wanting to challenge the idea that identity is merely inscribed by information technology, we must
create strategies of resistance that enable us to re-think the construction of identity and technology.
Understanding that we perform inscription just as we do resistance, a critical process such as this compels us to
re-form our epistemological understanding of art, technology, and the body. In doing so, this process represents a
practice of critical citizenship within a radical democratic society that is undergoing rapid transformations
through information technologies. We argue that the performance of the cyborg metaphor, as discussed by Donna Haraway, N. Katherine
Hayles, and other critical theorists, enables us to expose, examine, and critique the ways in which the body is implicated and bound up in our
understandings of art, technology, and identity. The performance of this metaphor within the context of art creates a
conceptual space within which we can imagine and perform an embodied pedagogy of resistance. Discussing the
cultural work of performance artists such as Stelarc, Eduardo Kac, Orlan, and Guillermo G6mez-Pefia and Roberto Sifuentes we examine the
pedagogical characteristics of their performances and the ways that they challenge the effects of information
technologies on their bodies and identities, a critique that we refer to as "cyborg pedagogy." A euphemism for
"cybernetic organism," Haraway (1991) defines the cyborg as "a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of
fiction" (p. 149). Thus, "cyborg pedagogy" serves as a complex metaphor that represents the body/technology hybrid
while it exposes the cyborg's dialectical pedagogy of inscription and resistance. As cyborg pedagogues, these artists perform
informational technologies to examine and critique their pedagogical machinations on the body.
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at: cyborg destroys body focus
The cyborg can think through the body, rather than away from it: this confronts the boundaries
and limits of abstract technological focus while providing a crucial analytic frame for the
postmodern era
Braidotti 2k [Rosi, Philosopher and Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University as well as
director of the Centre for the Humanities in Utrecht, Chapter 8, “Teratologies”, Deleuze and Feminism, ed. Ian
Buchanan and Claire Colebrook, Edinburgh University Press, 2000, p. 159-161] //khirn
Deleuze’s enfleshed, vitalistic but not essentialist vision of the subject is a self-sustainable one, which in some
ways owes a lot to the ecology of the self. The rhythm, speed and sequencing of the affects and the selection of the constitutive elements
are crucial to the whole process. It is the pattern of re-occurrence of these changes that marks the successive steps in the
process of becoming , thus allowing for the actualisation of a field of forces that is apt to frame and thus to express the singularity of the
subject. This is a way of containing the excessive edges of the postmodernist discourse about the body, notably
the denial of the materiality of the bodily self. Deleuze proposes instead a form of neo-materialism and a blend
of vitalism that is attuned to the technological era. Thinking through the body, and not in a flight away from it,
means confronting boundaries and limitations. These claims also constitute the basis of Deleuze’s critique of
Lacanian psychoanalysis. Special emphasis is placed on the criticism of the sacralisation of the
sexual self by Lacan as well as the teleological structure of identity formation in psychoanalytic theory, which
shows its Hegelian legacy. Not the least of this concerns the definition of desire as lack, to which Deleuze never ceases to oppose
the positivity of desire. More on this later. On an everyday sociological level, as Camilla Griggers (1997) points out, the body is striking
back , with a vengeance. An estimated two million American women have silicon breast implants most of which leak, bounce off during bumpy
airplane flights or cause undesirable side-effects. Millions of women throughout the advanced world are on Prozac or other
‘mood-enhancement’ drugs. The hidden epidemic of anorexia–bulimia continues to strike one third of the
younger women of the opulent world, as Princess Diana so clearly illustrated. Killer diseases today do not include only the
great exterminators, like cancer and AIDS, but also the return of traditional diseases which we thought we had conquered, like tuberculosis and malaria.
The human immunity system has adapted to the anti-bodies and we are vulnerable again. In such a historical,
bio-political and geo-political context, there is no question that what, even and especially in feminism, we go on calling, quite nostalgically, ‘our
bodies, ourselves’ are abstract technological constructs fully immersed in advanced
psychopharmacological industry, bio-science and the new media . This does not make them any less
embodied, or less ourselves, it just complicates considerably the task of representing to ourselves the
experience of inhabiting them. What is equally clear is that a culture that is in the grip of a techno-teratological imaginary is in need
of Deleuze’s philosophy. The techno-hype needs to be kept in check by a sustainable understanding of the self: we need to assess more lucidly the price
we are prepared to pay for our high technological environments. We got our prosthetic promises of perfectability, now we need to hand over our pound
of flesh. In this discussion that in some way juxtaposes the rhetoric of ‘the desire to be wired’ to a more radical
sense of materialism, there is no doubt that Deleuze’s philosophy lends precious help to those – including the
feminists of sexual difference – who remain ‘proud to be flesh!’
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at: debate fails
We solve their debate fails arguments --- forming the 1ac as a queer heterotopia entails
carefully anticipating reactions and negative responses while nonetheless legitimizing the
possibilities of queer becoming
Jones 9 [Angela, “Queer Heterotopias: Homonormativity and the Future of Queerness,” interalia: a journal of
queer studies, 2009 – 4, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Farmingdale State College,
http://www.interalia.org.pl/en/artykuly/2009_4/13_queer_heterotopias_homonormativity_and_the_future
_of_queerness.htm] //khirn
However, to my mind the
parody found in drag shows only minimally pushes discursive boundaries. Because drag
performers are fetishized by audiences and seen by eager kibitzers as a parody of a "true" identity, such performances lose their
subversive quality and their transformative possibilities. While the avid queer theorist recognizes the irony in this performance, the
onlooker generally will not read this performance as subversive. Drag is viewed as mere imitation by
heteronormative society and is generally perceived as a spectacle , a comedic performance consumed by
cultural tourists. Therefore, drag, a prime example of subversive mimesis is a limited strategy for sustaining queer
heterotopias.
Queer heterotopias were formed in opposition to heteronormative spaces we cannot dismiss how the behaviors
of queer individuals will be perceived by others in society. Understanding how queer performances will be seen
or received by the larger society is important. In order to thwart the negative responses and reactions, which are often violent, from
bigoted individuals, carefully anticipating these reactions are crucial . Moreover, the legitimization of queer
bodies, the right to exist, is not just a result of queer individuals' public performances. Managing the
negative responses from different sources within heteronormative spaces is an important part of
queer politics .
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at: essentialism
Cyberfeminist projection is fluid and rejects hegemonic subjectivity
Soper 8’ [Kate, Professor of Philosophy, The University of North London, “Of oncomice and femalemen:
Donna Haraway’s on cyborg ontology” Women: A Cultural Review, Pg 180, 6/19/2008 http://wwwtandfonline-com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/doi/pdf/10.1080/09574049908578386 LM]
The other part of her answer gestures to the Utopian potentials of cybernetics, although there is rather little here in the way of exemplification.
Haraway wants a 'cyberfeminism' rather than recourse to 'nature' because she thinks that a nature-invoking
politics is inevitably pulled into essentialist positions on female being, feminist projections of 'woman' as
innocent, maternal and victimized, and so on. Only by refusing to root a feminist politics in bodily integrity, she
argues, can one do justice to the 'partial, fluid, sometimes aspect of sex and sexual embodiment', and thereby
avoid the heterosexual and maternal 'norms';13 and it is in this spirit that she applauds the FemaleMen, cyborg monsters, mutants
and experiments in 'technological pollution' of the personal and political that 'people' cyberpunk writings and feminist science fiction.14 But this
seems based on a quite unjustified assumption that there is no alternative between a total (and often wholly
fantastic) flight from 'nature' and the acceptance of patriarchal constructions of the female body and sexuality.
In reality, is it only in the appeal to the bodily integrity, anguish and suffering of the oppressed subject that one can Downloaded by [] at 13:20 17 July
2015 OF ONCOMICE AND FEMALEMEN • 171 15 Jill Marsden, 'Virtual Sexes and Feminist Futures: The Philosophy of "Cyberfeminism"', Radical
Philosophy 78, July-August 1996, 8-9, 13. 16 Ibid., p. 14. ultimately ground the demand for release from distorting or confining identities, or call for
improved cultural understandings of what it is to be cast as subordinate.
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at: irony bad
Redefining cyber feminism through the positive use of irony allows the effective subversion of
surveillance culture
Paasonen 2011 (Susanna Paasonen, professor of media studies at the University of Turku,
Revisiting Cyber Feminism, Communications Volume: 36 Issue: 3 published 22 August 2011, pages. 349350, Yung Jung)
The cyberdiscourse of the 1990s sort was premised on disembodiment through technology: it mapped the internet as a disembodied cyberspace,
explored virtual reality applications and forms of serious play taking place in virtual communities (MUDs and MOOs in particular). In contrast,
contemporary online cultures are defined by the ubiquity of the web (that is hardly a virtual reality in the immersive sense envisioned two decades ago)
and social media. This environment is corporate to a large degree, the communications taking place within it are far from anonymous by default and its
uses of are seldom articulated through the tropes of disembodied travel and adventure. Due to developments in broadband, the web is also increasingly
visual and multimodal a medium. The abundance of images, videos and webcams countered online on a daily basis, again, works against the premise of
bodies and minds as being somehow separated in online communications this idea being crucial to cyberdiscourse (e. g. Benedikt, 1991; Barlow, 1996;
Brophy, 2010). According to this idea, users leave their bodies behind when entering virtual spaces and become free to
explore new forms of identity and textual interaction. While there is reason to doubt this ever having been the case (considering, for
example, the popularity of personal home pages, online diaries and photo albums in the 1990s), the separations of the two, like the separation of
the online from the offline, is increasingly artificial and hardly descriptive of the experiences of internet usage
characterised by ubiquitous access and multimodal representations of the self (through social networking sites, webcams,
gaming characters, etc). All this leads to the inevitable question of what cyberfeminism might look like in current web
environments: what shapes might it take and what kinds might the fruits of its labour be? There is certainly no short
age of possible objects for critical engagement and intervention. In fact, the issues seem merely to have grown ever more acute since the
mid- 1990s, be this biotech, genetics, data mining, surveillance, immaterial labour, online pornographies, the labour involved in the production
of hardware, digital divides, accessibility of information, gaming cultures or the commodification of bodies in digital
media only to list some possible topics, all of which cyberfeminists have addressed in the past. In this sense, “new” cyberfeminism might look a lot its
older forms, yet the work currently conducted on these topics is hardly ever identified as cyberfeminist. The discursive framework seems to have shifted.
Rephrasing the question, one might then ask if the strategies of cyber feminism should be readjusted in the current technological landscape. As a
strategy, cyberfeminist irony involves negativity and reactivity in the sense that irony is a response and reaction to
something that it tries to ridicule, derail, challenge or subvert. This reactivity can be an efficient strategy, yet it
comes with weaknesses. For as the “something” that is being reacted to shifts, moves or alters, irony loses much of its force and potentiality.
Since cyberfeminism has remained a slippery concept in relation to both “cyber” and “feminism”, positive
points of identification have been difficult enough to find. And since cyberdiscourse has undergone rather drastic
transformations parallel to those occurring in the technologies that it has aimed to describe (or even predict), ironical
commentaries of disembodiment or the dominance of male users are much less pertinent than they were some fifteen
years ago. In order to be both effective and affective, cyberfeminism would need to move beyond the negativity
and reactivity of irony, and shift towards more productive engagements with contemporary technocultures in
order to map out possible solutions for current social and economic inequalities that also take seriously the
attraction and appeal of these very systems. This, again, is not a question of utopianism as figurations of ideal
alternative societies, but one of strategies and tactics for living in the societies that we do. And if all this
necessitates a move beyond both utopianism and irony and experimentation with more positive and creative critical positions, it is fair to ask whether
this kind of cyberfeminism would any longer be recognized as such.
Virtual reality bad for gender
Braidotti 96 [Rosi, Philosopher and Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University as well as
director of the Centre for the Humanities in Utrecht, “Cyberfeminism with a difference,” 1996,
http://www.let.uu.nl/womens_studies/rosi/cyberfem.htm] //khirn
The cyber imaginary
While this kind of negotiation goes on, the gender gap in the use of computers, in women's access to computer
literacy, internet equipment and other expensive technological apparati, as well as women's participation in
programming and in designing the technology will continue to grow wider. Similarly, the gap between first and
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third worlds in the access to technology will also go on. It is always at times of great technological advance that
Western culture reiterates some of its most persistent habits, notably the tendency to creating differences and
organizing them hierarchically.
Thus, while the computer technology seems to promise a world beyond gender differences, the gender gap
grows wider. All the talk of a brand new telematic world masks the ever-increasing polarisation of resources
and means, in which women are the main losers. There is strong indication therefore, that the shifting of
conventional boundaries between the sexes and the proliferation of all kinds of differences through the new
technologies will not be nearly as liberating as the cyber-artists and internet addicts would want us to believe.
In analyzing the contemporary cyber-imagination, a special point needs to be made about the cultural
production surrounding virtual reality technology; this is an advan ced brand of computer designed reality,
useful in its medical or architectural applications, but very poor from the angle of the imagination, especially if
you look at it in terms of gender-roles. Computer-aided design and animation has the potential for great
creativity, not only in professional areas such as architecture and medicine, but also in mass entertainment,
especially video-games. It originates in technology to train air pilots to fly jet fighters. The gulf war was fought
by virtual reality machinery (it still resulted in the usual butchery); of late, the costs involved in producing
Virtual Reality equipment have simply decreased, so that people other than NASA are able to afford it.
Feminist researchers in this field have noted the paradoxes and the dangers of contemporary forms of
disembodiment, which accompany these new technologies. I am especially struck by the persistence of
pornographic, violent and humiliating images of women that are still circulating through these allegedly
'new'technological products. I worry about designing programmes that allow for 'virtual rape and virtual
murder'.
For example, The Lawn Mower Man is one of the commercially released films featuring 'virtual reality' images,
which are in fact only computer images. I find that it makes a very mediocre use of powerful images. The
subject of the film is a scientist who works for NASA and has devised very advanced mindmanipulating
technologies first using a chimpanzee as the object of a scientific experiment later to be replaced by a mentally
retarded man, whose brain gets 'expanded' through this new technology.
The images of penetration of the brain are crucial to the visual impact of this film: it is all about 'opening up' to
the influence of a higher power. You can compare this to Cronenberg's 'invaginated' male bodies, penetrated by
the cathode tube radiations of Videodrome and more recently to the brains implants in Johnny Memonic.
Thanks to this technology, the retarded man blossoms first into a normal boy, then grows into a superhuman
figure. The reconstruction of masculinity in this film shows an evolution from idiot/little
boy/adolescentlcowboy/ loses virginity/great lover/macho/ rapist/murderer/serial killer/psycho. The film
implicitly raises questions about the interaction of sexuality and technologies, and both of them as forms of
masturbatory and masculinist power.
At an intermediary stage of his development, he claims he can see God and he wants to share this experience
with his girlfriend, to give her the ultimate orgasm. What follows is a scene of psychic rape, when the woman is
literally blown apart and goes out of her mind. The woman will be insane from then on, as the boy progresses
to become a god-like figure, a serial killer, and finally a force of nature. Thus, where as the male mind gets first
to see and then to become god, the female one is just shown as cracking under the strain.
A feminist watching this cannot help being struck by the persistence of gender stereotypes and misogynist
streaks. The alleged triumph of high-technologies is not matched by a leap of the human imagination to create
new images and representati ons. Quite on the contrary, what I notice is the repetition of very old themes and
cliches, under the appearance of 'new' technological advances. It just goes to prove that it takes more than
machinery to really alter patterns of thought and mental habits. The fiction of science, which is the theme of
science-fiction films and literatu re, calls for more imagination and more gender equality in order to
approximate a 'new' representation of a post-modern humanity. Unless our culture can take up the challenge
and invent suitably new forms of expression, this technology is useless.
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One of the great contradictions of Virtual Reality images is that they titillate our imagination, promising the
marvels and wonders of a gender-free world while it simultaneously reproduces some of the most banal, flat
images of gender identity, but also class and race relations that you can think of. Virtual Reality images also
titillate our imagination, as is characteristic of the pornographic regime of representation. The imagination is a
very gendered space and the woman's imagination has always been represented as a troublesome and
dangerous quality as the feminist film theorist Doane put it.25
The imaginative poverty of virtual reality is all the more striking if you compare it to the creativity of some of
the women artists I mentioned earlier. By comparison, the banality, the sexism, the repetitive nature of
computer-designed videogames are quite appalling. As usual, at times of great changes and upheavals, the
potential for the new engenders great fear, anxiety and in some cases even nostalgia for the previous regime.
As if the imaginative misery were not enough, postmodernity is marked by a wides pread impact and a
qualitative shift of pornography in every sphere of cultural activity. Pornography is more and more about the
power relations and less and less about sex. In classical pornography sex was a vehicle by which to convey
power relations. Nowadays anything can become such a vehicle: the becoming-culture of pornography means
that any cultural activity or product can become a commodity and through that process express inequalities,
patterns of exclusion, fantasies of domination, desires for power and control.26
The central point remains: there is a credibility gap between the promises of Virtual Reality and cyberspace and
the quality of what it delivers. It consequently seems to me that, in the short range, this new technological
frontier will intensify the gender-gap and increase the polarisation between the sexes. We are back to the war
metaphor, but its location is the real world, not the hyperspace of abstract masculinity. And its protagonists are
no computer images, but the real social agents of postin dustrial urban landscapes.
The most effective strategy remains for women to use technology in order to disengage our collective
imagination from the phallus and its accessory values: money, exclusion and domination, nationalism, iconic
femininity and systematic violence.
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at: intersectionality good
The insistence on intersectional discourse has resulted in a reification of racism, producing an
“Other” that’s always a woman of color.
Puar 12 (Jasbir K. Puar, Jasbir K. Puar is Associate Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She received her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California at
Berkeley in 1999 and an M.A. from the University of York, England, in Women’s Studies in 1993. Her major awards include the 2013-14 Society for the Humanities Fellowship at Cornell University, the
Edward Said Chair of American Studies 2012-13 at the American University of Beirut, a Rockefeller Fellowship at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center (1999-2000) and a
Ford Foundation grant for archival and ethnographic documentation work (2002-2003). She received the 2013 Modern Languages Association Gay Lesbian/Queer Caucus Michael Lynch Award for her
years of scholar-activist work. In January 2013 she was honored with the Robert Sutherland Visitorship at Queens University, awarded to “a notable individual with expertise in race relations.” She has
also received two awards for her graduate teaching, in 2011 from the Graduate School of Rutgers University and in 2012 from the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools. “’I would rather be a cyborg
than a goddess’: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory”, philoSOPHIA, Volume 2, Issue 1, 2012, pages 49-66,
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/philosophia/v002/2.1.puar.html) ZB
Intersectionality and Its Discontents It has been more than twenty years since Kimberle Crenshaw wrote her
groundbreaking piece titled, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of
Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics” (1989), which, along with her 1991 piece
“Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” went on to
become seminal texts for the theorization of intersectionality. The twentieth anniversary was marked by a
number of special journal issues, edited books, and conferences commemorating Crenshaw’s contribution and
discussing the impact of intersectional feminist theorizing, perhaps generating a resurgence of interest in the
topic, as anniversaries are wont to do. As activist and theoretical discourse about “difference” developed over
several decades by black feminists in the United States such as Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Angela Davis, and The
Combahee River Collective, the term intersectionality was introduced by and became solidified as a feminist
heuristic through Crenshaw’s analysis of U.S. antidiscrimination legal doctrine. Crenshaw mapped out three
forms of intersectional analysis she deemed crucial: structural (addressing the intersection of racism and
patriarchy in relation to battering and rape of women); political (addressing the intersection of antiracist
organizing and feminist organizing); and representational (addressing the intersection of racial stereotypes and
gender stereotypes, particularly in the case of 2 Live Crew). Her intervention into mutually exclusive identity
paradigms is one of rethinking identity politics from within, in particular, from within systemic legal
exclusions. While Crenshaw specifically targeted the elisions of both critical race paradigms and gender
normative paradigms, intersectionality emerged from the struggles of second wave feminism as a crucial black
feminist intervention challenging the hegemonic rubrics of race, class, and gender within predominantly white
feminist frames. Pedagogically, since the emergence and consolidation of intersectionality from the 1980s on, it
has been deployed more forcefully as a feminist intervention to disrupt whiteness and less so as a critical race
intervention to disrupt masculinist frames. Thus, precisely in the act of performing this intervention, what is
also produced is an ironic reification of sexual difference as a/the foundational one that needs to be disrupted.
Sexual and gender difference is understood as the constant from which there are variants, just as women of
color are constructed in dominant feminist generational narratives as the newest arrivals among the subjects of
feminism. This pedagogical deployment has had the effect of re-securing the centrality of the subject
positioning of white women. How is this possible? The theory of intersectionality argues that all identities are
lived and experienced as intersectional—in such a way that identity categories themselves are cut through and
unstable—and that all subjects are intersectional whether or not they recognize themselves as such. In the
succinct words of Arun Saldahna, using Venn diagrams to illustrate his point, “The theory of intersectionality
holds that there is no actual body that is a member of only one set” (Saldanha 2010, 289). But what the method
of intersectionality is most predominantly used to qualify is the specific difference of “women of color,” a
category that has now become, I would argue, simultaneously emptied of specific meaning in its ubiquitous
application and yet overdetermined in its deployment. In this usage, intersectionality always produces an
Other, and that Other is always a Woman of Color (now on referred to as WOC, to underscore the
overdetermined emptiness of its gratuitousness), who must invariably be shown to be resistant, subversive, or
articulating a grievance.4 More pointedly, it is the difference of African American women that dominates this
genealogy of the term women of color. Indeed, Crenshaw is clear that she centralizes “black women’s
experience” and posits “black women as the starting point” of her analysis (Crenshaw 1991, 1243). Thus, the
insistent consolidation of intersectionality as a dominant heuristic may well be driven by anxieties about
maintaining the “integrity” of a discrete black feminist genealogy, one that might actually obfuscate how
intersectionality is thought of and functions differently in different strands of black feminist and women of
color feminist thought. For example, while Crenshaw’s work is about disrupting and reconciling what are
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perceived to be irreconcilable binary options of gender and race, Audre Lorde’s seminal piece “Age, Race, Class,
and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” from 1984 reads as a dynamic, affectively resonant postulation of
inchoate and sometimes contradictory intersectional subjectivities.4 This ironic othering of WOC through an
approach that meant to alleviate such othering is exacerbated by the fact that intersectionality has become
cathected to the field of women’s studies as the paradigmatic frame through which women’s lives are
understood and theorized, a problem reified by both WOC feminists and white feminists.'' McCall notes that
“feminists are perhaps alone in the academy in the extent to which they have embraced intersectionality as
itself a central category of analysis” (McCall 2005, 1771). This claim to intersectionality as the dominant
feminist method can be produced with such insistence that an interest in exploring other frames, for example
assemblage, is rendered problematic and even produces WOC feminists invested in multiple genealogies as
“race-traitors ”7 This accusation of course reinforces the implicit understanding that intersectionality is a tool
to diagnose specifically racial difference. Despite decades of feminist theorizing on the question of difference,
difference continues to be “difference from,” that is, the difference from “white woman.” Distinct from a frame
that privileges “difference within,” “difference from” produces difference as a contradiction rather than as a
recognizing it as a perpetual and continuous process of splitting. This is also then an ironic reification of racial
difference. Malini Johar Schueller, for example, argues that most scholarship on WOC is produced by WOC,
while many white feminists, although hailing intersectionality as a self-evident, primary methodological rubric,
continue to produce scholarship that presumes gender difference as foundational. Writes Schueller: “While
women of color theorize about a particular group of women, many white feminists continue to theorize about
gender/ sexuality/women in general.” And later: “Indeed, it has become almost a given that works in gender
and sexuality studies acknowledge multiple axes of oppression or invoke the mantra of race, class, gender and
sexuality” (Schueller 2005, 64).8 Much like the language of diversity, the language of intersectionality, its very
invocation, it seems, largely substitutes for intersectional analysis itself. What I have elsewhere called “diversity
management” can more rigorously be described as a “tendency to displace the concept of intersectionality from
any political practice and socio-economic context by translating it into a merely theoretical abstraction of
slipping signifiers of identity” (Erel et al. 2011, 66).
Intersectionality’s focus on “difference” recreates exclusionary politics in the name of
inclusion. Difference from a “norm” now defines identity.
Puar 12 (Jasbir K. Puar, Jasbir K. Puar is Associate Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She received her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California at
Berkeley in 1999 and an M.A. from the University of York, England, in Women’s Studies in 1993. Her major awards include the 2013-14 Society for the Humanities Fellowship at Cornell University, the
Edward Said Chair of American Studies 2012-13 at the American University of Beirut, a Rockefeller Fellowship at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center (1999-2000) and a
Ford Foundation grant for archival and ethnographic documentation work (2002-2003). She received the 2013 Modern Languages Association Gay Lesbian/Queer Caucus Michael Lynch Award for her
years of scholar-activist work. In January 2013 she was honored with the Robert Sutherland Visitorship at Queens University, awarded to “a notable individual with expertise in race relations.” She has
also received two awards for her graduate teaching, in 2011 from the Graduate School of Rutgers University and in 2012 from the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools. “’I would rather be a cyborg
than a goddess’: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory”, philoSOPHIA, Volume 2, Issue 1, 2012, pages 49-66,
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/philosophia/v002/2.1.puar.html) ZB
The issues I have sketched out reflect issues about knowledge production and suggest that intersectionality is a
viable corrective to epistemological violence, should these limitations regarding subject positioning be
addressed. But a different critique suggests that intersectionality functions as a problematic reinvestment in
the humanist subject, in particular, the “subject X.” Rey Chow has produced the most damning critique of what
she calls “poststructuralist significatory incarceration,” seriously questioning whether the marginalized subject
is still a viable site from which to produce politics, much less whether the subject is a necessary precursor for
politics (Chow 2006, 53). “Difference” produces new subjects of inquiry that then infinitely multiply exclusion
in order to promote inclusion. Difference now precedes and defines identity. Part of Chow’s concern is that
poststructuralist efforts to attend to the specificity of Others has become a universalizing project that is always
beholden to the self-referentiality of the “center,” ironically given that intersectionality functions as a call for
and a form of antiessentialism (Brail and Davis 2004, 76). The poststructuralist fatigue Chow describes is
contingent on the following temporal sequencing: Subject X may be different in content, but shows up, time
and again, as the same in form. (Examples might be found in the relatively recent entrance of both “trans”
identity and “disability” into the intersectional fray.)
Intersectionality has become a tool for white liberal feminists to control the movement, and
many categories used are products of epistemic violence.
Puar 12 (Jasbir K. Puar, Jasbir K. Puar is Associate Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She received her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California at
Berkeley in 1999 and an M.A. from the University of York, England, in Women’s Studies in 1993. Her major awards include the 2013-14 Society for the Humanities Fellowship at Cornell University, the
Edward Said Chair of American Studies 2012-13 at the American University of Beirut, a Rockefeller Fellowship at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center (1999-2000) and a
Ford Foundation grant for archival and ethnographic documentation work (2002-2003). She received the 2013 Modern Languages Association Gay Lesbian/Queer Caucus Michael Lynch Award for her
years of scholar-activist work. In January 2013 she was honored with the Robert Sutherland Visitorship at Queens University, awarded to “a notable individual with expertise in race relations.” She has
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also received two awards for her graduate teaching, in 2011 from the Graduate School of Rutgers University and in 2012 from the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools. “’I would rather be a cyborg
than a goddess’: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory”, philoSOPHIA, Volume 2, Issue 1, 2012, pages 49-66,
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/philosophia/v002/2.1.puar.html) ZB
Political practice and socioeconomic context are shifting metrics that require a historicization of the “event” of
intersectionality, its emergence, and the thought that it moved and generated. Further questions about practice
and context arise when intersectionality is situated within the changing historical and economic landscape of
neoliberal capitalism and identity. What does an intersectional critique look like—or more to the point, what
does it do—in an age of neoliberal pluralism, absorption, and accommodation of all kinds of differences? If it is
the case that intersectionality has been “mainstreamed” in the last two decades—a way to manage difference
that colludes with dominant forms of liberal multiculturalism—is the qualitative force of the interpellation of
“difference itself” altered or uncertain? Should intersectionality have to account for anything beyond the
context of the legal doctrine from which it was developed? Let me qualify that my concern is not about the
formative, generative, and necessary intervention of Crenshaw’s work, but about both the changed geopolitics
of reception (one that purports to include rather than exclude difference) as well as a tendency toward
reification in the deployment of intersectional method. Has intersectionality become, as Schueller implies,
an alibi for the re-centering of white liberal feminists? What is a poststructuralist theory of
intersectionality that might address liberal multicultural and “postracial” discourses of inclusion that
destabilize the WOC as a mere enabling prosthetic to white feminists? Such questions about time, history, and
the shifts from exclusion to inclusion also bring to the fore the dynamics of the spatialization of intersectional
analyses. If, as Avtar Brah and Ann Pheonix have argued, “old debates about the category woman have
assumed new critical urgency” (Brah and Pheonix 2004, 76) in the context of recent historical events, such as
September 11th and the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, transnational and postcolonial scholars point out
that the categories privileged by intersectional analysis do not necessarily traverse national and regional
boundaries nor genealogical exigencies, presuming and producing static epistemological renderings of
categories themselves across historical and geopolitical locations. Indeed, many of the cherished categories of
the intersectional mantra—originally starting with race, class, gender, now including sexuality, nation, religion,
age, and disability—are the products of modernist colonial agendas and regimes of epistemic violence,
operative through a Western/Euro-American epistemological formation through which the notion of discrete
identity has emerged. Joseph Massad quite astutely points out, in his refinement of Foucauldian framings of
sexuality, that the colonial project deployed “sexuality” as a concept that was largely internalized within
intellectual and juridical realms but was not distilled as a widespread hegemonic project. While one might
worry, then, about the development and adaptation of the terms gay or lesbian or the globalization of the term
queer, Massad highlights the graver problem of the generalization and assumed transparency of the term
sexuality itself—a taken for granted category of the modernist imperial project, not only an imposed
epistemological frame, but also ontologically presumptuous—or in fact, an epistemological capture of an
ontologically irreducible becoming (Massad 2009).
Intersectionality reproduces the bias to focus women’s studies on Europe and America, skirting
transnational and postcolonial efforts.
Puar 12 (Jasbir K. Puar, Jasbir K. Puar is Associate Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She received her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California at
Berkeley in 1999 and an M.A. from the University of York, England, in Women’s Studies in 1993. Her major awards include the 2013-14 Society for the Humanities Fellowship at Cornell University, the
Edward Said Chair of American Studies 2012-13 at the American University of Beirut, a Rockefeller Fellowship at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center (1999-2000) and a
Ford Foundation grant for archival and ethnographic documentation work (2002-2003). She received the 2013 Modern Languages Association Gay Lesbian/Queer Caucus Michael Lynch Award for her
years of scholar-activist work. In January 2013 she was honored with the Robert Sutherland Visitorship at Queens University, awarded to “a notable individual with expertise in race relations.” She has
also received two awards for her graduate teaching, in 2011 from the Graduate School of Rutgers University and in 2012 from the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools. “’I would rather be a cyborg
than a goddess’: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory”, philoSOPHIA, Volume 2, Issue 1, 2012, pages 49-66,
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/philosophia/v002/2.1.puar.html) ZB
These problems of epistemic violence are reproduced in feminist and gay and lesbian human rights discourses,
as intersectionality is now widely understood as a policy-friendly paradigm. In her piece detailing the
incorporation of the language and the conceptual frame of intersectionality into UN and NGO forums, Nira
Yuval-Davis points out: “The analysis and methodology of intersectionality, especially in UN-related bodies is
just emerging and often suffers from analytic confusions that have already been tackled by feminist scholars
who have been working on these issues for longer” (Yuval-Davis 2006, 206). Yuval-Davis also notes that the
relatively recent spread of intersectionality in Europe has largely been attributed to its amenability to police
discussions, an attribution she argues elides the work on migrant feminisms in Europe and particularly the
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scholarly interventions of black British feminists in the 1970s. To further complicate the travels of
intersectional theorizing, in the United States intersectionality came from a very specific set of social
movements, whereas in Europe, where the term is currently being widely taken up, the interest in
intersectionality does not emerge from social movements (and in fact, as Yuval-Davis points out, with the
exception perhaps of Britain, the efforts of migrant women to challenge dominant feminist frames went largely
ignored). Rather, this newfound interest in intersectionality signals a belated recognition of the need to
theorize racial difference; it also functions as a method for European women’s studies to “catch up
institutionally” with U.S. women’s studies. The category “nation” therefore appears to be the least theorized
and acknowledged of intersectional categories, transmitted through a form of globalizing transparency. The
United States is reproduced as the dominant site of feminist inquiry through the use of intersectionality as a
heuristic to teach difference. Thus, the Euro-American bias of women’s studies and history of feminism is
ironically reiterated via intersectionality, eliding the main intervention of transnational and postcolonial
feminist scholars since the 1990s, which has been, in part, about destabilizing the nation-centered production
of the category WOC (Kaplan and Grewal 1994).
Intersectionality is based on decentering feminism, thereby shifting the burden onto women of
color and away from white women.
Puar 12 (Jasbir K. Puar, Jasbir K. Puar is Associate Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She received her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California at
Berkeley in 1999 and an M.A. from the University of York, England, in Women’s Studies in 1993. Her major awards include the 2013-14 Society for the Humanities Fellowship at Cornell University, the
Edward Said Chair of American Studies 2012-13 at the American University of Beirut, a Rockefeller Fellowship at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center (1999-2000) and a
Ford Foundation grant for archival and ethnographic documentation work (2002-2003). She received the 2013 Modern Languages Association Gay Lesbian/Queer Caucus Michael Lynch Award for her
years of scholar-activist work. In January 2013 she was honored with the Robert Sutherland Visitorship at Queens University, awarded to “a notable individual with expertise in race relations.” She has
also received two awards for her graduate teaching, in 2011 from the Graduate School of Rutgers University and in 2012 from the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools. “’I would rather be a cyborg
than a goddess’: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory”, philoSOPHIA, Volume 2, Issue 1, 2012, pages 49-66,
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/philosophia/v002/2.1.puar.html) ZB
It seems to me, and I pose these as speculative points that I continue to think through, that intersectional
critique has both intervened in the legal and capitalist structures that demand the fixity of the rights-bearing
subject and has also simultaneously reproduced the disciplinary demands of that subject formation. As Norma
Alarcon presciently asked, in 1984, in her response to the publication of This Bridge Called My Back, are we
going to make a subject of the whole world? (Alarcon 1990, 361). If, as Brail and Phoenix argue, “a key feature
of feminist analysis of intersectionality is . . . decentering . . . the normative subject of feminism” (Brail and
Phoenix 2004, 78), then how do feminist thinkers address the problem that the construct of the subject is itself
already normative? At this productive impasse, then, is this conundrum: the heuristic of intersectionality has
produced a tremendous amount of work on WOC while concomitantly excusing white feminists from this work,
re-centering gender and sexual difference as foundational and primary—indeed, this amplification of
knowledge has in some senses been at the cost of WOC. Yet “we” (this “we” always under duress and
contestation) might be reaching a poststructuralist fatigue around the notion of the subject itself. The limits of
the epistemological corrective are encountered.
In place of intersectionality, we advocate for assemblages like the cyborg, which inhabit the
intersection between body and technology.
Puar 12 (Jasbir K. Puar, Jasbir K. Puar is Associate Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She received her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California at
Berkeley in 1999 and an M.A. from the University of York, England, in Women’s Studies in 1993. Her major awards include the 2013-14 Society for the Humanities Fellowship at Cornell University, the
Edward Said Chair of American Studies 2012-13 at the American University of Beirut, a Rockefeller Fellowship at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center (1999-2000) and a
Ford Foundation grant for archival and ethnographic documentation wok (2002-2003). She received the 2013 Modern Languages Association Gay Lesbian/Queer Caucus Michael Lynch Award for her
years of scholar-activist work. In January 2013 she was honored with the Robert Sutherland Visitorship at Queens University, awarded to “a notable individual with expertise in race relations.” She has
also received two awards for her graduate teaching, in 2011 from the Graduate School of Rutgers University and in 2012 from the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools. “’I would rather be a cyborg
than a goddess’: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory”, philoSOPHIA, Volume 2, Issue 1, 2012, pages 49-66,
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/philosophia/v002/2.1.puar.html) ZB
Haraway has arguably been the most influential of this group. In a leading text from this literature she famously stated, as the very last line in
her groundbreaking 1985 essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” that she would rather be a cyborg than a goddess, favoring the
postmodern technologized figure of techno-human over the reclamation of a racialized, matriarchal past, thus
implicitly invoking this binary between intersectionality and assemblage (Haraway 1985). Several theorists have
critiqued Haraway’s use of the trope of “woman of color” to denote a cyborg par excellence, including Chela
Sandoval and Schueller (who has argued that women of color function as a prosthetic to the cyborg myth, which, as I point out earlier, is not
unlike how WOC function in relation to intersectionality) (Sandoval 2000; Schueller 2005). Even though Haraway’s cyborgs are meant
to undermine binaries—of humans and animals, of humans and machines, and of the organic and inorganic—a cyborg actually inhabits
the intersection of body and technology. Dianne Currier writes: “In the construction of a cyborg, technologies are
added to impact upon, and at some point intersect with a discrete, lion-technological ‘body.’ . . . Thus, insofar
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as the hybrid cyborg is forged in the intermeshing of technology with a body, in a process of addition, it leaves
largely intact those two categories—(human) body and technology—that preceded the conjunction.” Currier
argues that despite intending otherwise, the theorization of cyborgs winds up unwittingly “reinscribing the
cyborg into the binary logic of identity which Haraway hopes to circumvent” (Currier 2003, 323). Haraway does not
actually approach a human/animal/machine nexus, though more recent theorizations of the nature/ culture
divide, by Luciana Parisi for example, demarcate the biophysical, the biocultural, and the biodigital (Parisi 2004, 12). Still, the
question of how the body is materialized, rather than what the body signifies, is the dominant one in this
literature. “Assemblage” is actually an awkward translation of the French term agencement. The original term
in Deleuze and Guattari’s work is not the French word assemblage, but agencement, a term that means design,
layout, organization, arrangement, and relations—the focus being not on content but on relations, relations of
patterns (Phillips 2006, 108). In agencement, as John Phillips explains, specific connections with other concepts is precisely
what gives them their meaning. Concepts do not prescribe relations, nor do they exist prior to them; rather,
relations of force, connection, resonance, and patterning give rise to concepts. As Phillips writes, the priority is
neither to “the state of affairs [what one might call essence] nor the statement [enunciation or expression of
that essence] but rather of their connection, which implies the production of a sense that exceeds them and of
which, transformed, they now form parts” (ibid., 108). The French and English definitions of assemblage, however,
both refer to a collection of things, a combination of items and the fact of assembling. The problematic that
haunts this traversal from French theoretical production to U.S. academic usage is about the generative effects
of this “mistranslation.” Phillips argues that the enunciation of agencement as assemblage might be “justified as a
further event of agencement (assemblage) were it not for the tendency of discourses of knowledge to operate as
statements about states of affairs” (ibid., 109).
Intersectionality doesn’t account for the infinitely regressive spaces between categories.
Arrangements solve the notion that social entities are binary, they allow for interactive
crossings of identity deeper than a series of oppositions.
Puar 12 (Jasbir K. Puar, Jasbir K. Puar is Associate Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She received her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California at
Berkeley in 1999 and an M.A. from the University of York, England, in Women’s Studies in 1993. Her major awards include the 2013-14 Society for the Humanities Fellowship at Cornell University, the
Edward Said Chair of American Studies 2012-13 at the American University of Beirut, a Rockefeller Fellowship at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center (1999-2000) and a
Ford Foundation grant for archival and ethnographic documentation work (2002-2003). She received the 2013 Modern Languages Association Gay Lesbian/Queer Caucus Michael Lynch Award for her
years of scholar-activist work. In January 2013 she was honored with the Robert Sutherland Visitorship at Queens University, awarded to “a notable individual with expertise in race relations.” She has
also received two awards for her graduate teaching, in 2011 from the Graduate School of Rutgers University and in 2012 from the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools. “’I would rather be a cyborg
than a goddess’: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory”, philoSOPHIA, Volume 2, Issue 1, 2012, pages 49-66,
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/philosophia/v002/2.1.puar.html) ZB
One productive way of approaching this continental impasse would be to ask not necessarily what assemblages
are, but rather, what assemblages do. What does assemblage as a conceptual frame do, and what does their
theoretical deployment as such do? What is a practice of agencement? For current purposes, assemblages are
interesting because they de-privilege the human body as a discrete organic thing. As Haraway notes, the body
does not end at the skin. We leave traces of our DNA everywhere we go, we live with other bodies within us,
microbes and bacteria, we are enmeshed in forces, affects, energies, we are composites of information.
Assemblages do not privilege bodies as human, nor as residing within a human animal/nonhuman animal
binary. Along with a de-exceptionalizing of human bodies, multiple forms of matter can be bodies—bodies of
water, cities, institutions, and so on. Matter is an actor. Following Karen Barad on her theory of performative
metaphysics, matter is not a “thing” but a doing. In particular, Barad challenges dominant notions of
performativity that operate through an implicit distinction between signification and that which is signified,
stating that matter does not materialize through signification alone. Writes Barad: A performative
understanding of discursive practices challenges the representationalist belief in the power of words to
represent preexisting things. Performativity, properly construed, is not an invitation to turn everything
(including material bodies) into words; on the contrary, performativity is precisely a contestation of the
excessive power granted to language to determine what is real. Hence, in ironic contrast to the monism that
takes language to be the stuff of reality, performativity is actually a contestation of the unexamined habits of
mind that grant language and other forms of representation more power in determining our ontologies than
they deserve (Barad 2003, 802).IO Barad’s is a posthumanist framing that questions the boundaries between
human and nonhuman, matter and discourse, and interrogates the practices through which these boundaries
are constituted, stabilized, and destabilized. Signification is only one element of many that give a substance
both meaning and capacity. In his book A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social
Complexity, Manuel DeLanda undertakes the radical move to “make language last” (DeLanda 2006, 16). In this
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post-poststructuralist framing, essentialism, which is usually posited as the opposite of social constructionism,
is now placed squarely within the realms of signification and language, what DeLanda and others have called
“linguistic essentialism.” Karen Barad writes: “Language has been granted too much power. The linguistic turn,
the semiotic turn, the interpretative turn, the cultural turn; it seems that at every turn lately every ‘thing’ is
turned into language or some other form of cultural representation. . . . There is an important sense in which
the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter” (Barad 2003, 801). Categories—race, gender,
sexuality—are considered events, actions, and encounters between bodies, rather than simply entities and
attributes of subjects. Situated along a “vertical and horizontal axis,” assemblages come into existence within
processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari
problematize a model that produces a constant in order to establish its variations. Instead, they argue,
assemblages foreground no constants but rather “variation to variation” and hence the event-ness of identity
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987). DeLanda thus argues that race and gender are situated as attributes only within a
study of “the pattern of recurring links, as well as the properties of those links” (DeLanda 2006, 56). Using the
notion of assemblage (note the translation of agencement as “arrangement” here), Guattari elaborates the
limits of “molar” categories such as class: Take the notion of class, or the class struggle. It implies that there
are perfectly delimited sociological objects: bourgeoisie, proletariat, aristocracy. . . . But these entities become
hazy in the many interzones, the intersections of the petite bourgeoisie, the aristocratic bourgeoisie, the
aristocracy of the proletariat, the lumpenproletariat, the nonguaranteed elite. . . . The result: an indeterminacy
that prevents the social field from being mapped out in a clear and distinct way, and which undermines
militant practice. Now the notion of arrangement can be useful here, because it shows that social entities are
not made up of bipolar oppositions. Complex arrangements place parameters like race, sex, age, nationality,
etc., into relief. Interactive crossings imply other kinds of logic than that of two-by-two class oppositions.
Importing this notion of arrangement to the social field isn’t just a gratuitous theoretical subtlety. But it might
help to configure the situation, to come up with cartographies capable of identifying and eluding certain
simplistic conceptions concerning class struggle. (Guattari 2009, 26)
Intersectionality requires thinking of identity as an analysis of a traffic accident, leaving
questions unanswered. Assemblages, however, place far more emphasis on questioning the
conditions creating the accident.
Puar 12 (Jasbir K. Puar, Jasbir K. Puar is Associate Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She received her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California at
Berkeley in 1999 and an M.A. from the University of York, England, in Women’s Studies in 1993. Her major awards include the 2013-14 Society for the Humanities Fellowship at Cornell University, the
Edward Said Chair of American Studies 2012-13 at the American University of Beirut, a Rockefeller Fellowship at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center (1999-2000) and a
Ford Foundation grant for archival and ethnographic documentation work (2002-2003). She received the 2013 Modern Languages Association Gay Lesbian/Queer Caucus Michael Lynch Award for her
years of scholar-activist work. In January 2013 she was honored with the Robert Sutherland Visitorship at Queens University, awarded to “a notable individual with expertise in race relations.” She has
also received two awards for her graduate teaching, in 2011 from the Graduate School of Rutgers University and in 2012 from the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools. “’I would rather be a cyborg
than a goddess’: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory”, philoSOPHIA, Volume 2, Issue 1, 2012, pages 49-66,
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/philosophia/v002/2.1.puar.html) ZB
Re-reading Intersectionality as Assemblage One of Crenshaw’s foundational examples—that of the traffic
intersection— does indeed describe intersectionality as an event. Crenshaw writes, “Consider an analogy to
traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic through an
intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it
can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them.” And later:
“But it is not always easy to reconstruct an accident: Sometimes the skid marks and the injuries simply indicate
that they occurred simultaneously, frustrating efforts to determine which driver caused the harm. In these
cases the tendency seems to be that no driver is held responsible, no treatment is administered, and the
involved parties simply get back in their cars and zoom away” (Crenshaw 1989, 149). As Crenshaw indicates in
this description, identification is a process; identity is an encounter, an event, an accident, in fact. Identities are
multicausal, multidirectional, liminal; traces aren’t always self-evident. The problem of how the two preexisting
roads come into being notwithstanding, there is emphasis on motion rather than gridlock, on how the halting
of motion produces the demand to locate. The accident itself indicates the entry of the standardizing needs of
the juridical; is there a crime taking place? How does one determine who is at fault? As a metaphor, then,
intersectionality is a more porous paradigm than the standardization of method inherent to a discipline has
allowed it to be; the institutionalization of women’s studies in the United States has led to demands for a
subject/s (subject X, in fact) and a method. However animated the scene of the accident at the traffic
intersection might read, it still remains, I would argue, primarily trapped within the logic of identity. I want to
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turn now to a moment in Brian Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual where he reads an incident of domestic
violence through what he calls the “home event-space” (Massumi 2002, 81). For him, the event is not defined
as a discrete act or series of actions or activities, but rather the “folding of dimensions of time into each other”
(ibid., 15). This folding of dimensions of time is a result of the “conversion of surface distance into intensity
[which] is also the conversion of the materiality of the body into an event” (ibid., 14). Interested in the claim
regarding a purported increase in domestic violence during Super Bowl Sunday, Massumi writes: The home
entry of the game, at its crest of intensity, upsets the fragile equilibrium of the household. The patterns of
relations between househeld bodies is reproblematized. The game event momentarily interrupts the pattern of
extrinsic relations generally obtaining between domestic types, as typed by gender. A struggle ensues: a gender
struggle over clashing codes of sociality, rights to access to portions of the home and its contents, and rituals of
servitude. The sociohistorical home place converts into an event space. The television suddenly stands out from
the background of the furnishings, imposing itself as a catalytic part-subject, arraying domestic bodies around
itself according to the differential potentials generally attaching to their gender type. For a moment, everything
is up in the air—and around the TV set, and between the living room and the kitchen. In proximity to the TV,
words and gestures take on unaccustomed intensity. Anything could happen. The male body, sensing the
potential, transduces the heterogeneity of the elements of the situation into a reflex readiness to violence. The
“game” is rigged by the male’s already-constituted propensity to strike. The typical pattern of relations is reimposed in the unity of movement of hand against face. The strike expresses the empirical reality of situation:
recontainment by the male-dominated power formation of the domestic. The event short- circuits. The event is
recapture. The home event-space is back to the place it was: a container of asymmetric relations between terms
already constituted according to gender. Folding back onto domestication. Coded belonging, no becoming,
(ibid., 80-81) So what transpires in this assemblage of the event-space? There is an intensification of the body’s
relation to itself (one definition of affect), produced not only by the significance of the game, Super Bowl
Sunday, but by the bodily force and energy given over to this significance. The difference between signification
and significance (sense, value, force) is accentuated. There is a focus on the patterns of relations—not the
entities themselves, but the patterns within which they are arranged with each other. The placements within
the space itself have not necessarily altered, but the intensified relations have given new capacities to the
entities (“The television suddenly stands out”). Not Assemblage, but Agencement. “Househeld” bodies are not
organic bodies alone: the television is an actor, a matter with force, conveying (not deterministically, but
suggestively) who moves where and how and when. The television is an affective conductor: “In proximity to
the TV, words and gestures take on an unaccustomed intensity.” There is a sense of potentiality, a becoming.
“Anything could happen.” It is a moment of deterritorialization, a line of flight, something not available for
immediate capture—“everything is up in the air,” and quite literally, the air is charged with possibility.
Intersectional identity comes into play, as the (white) male is always already ideologically coded as more prone
to violence. Finally, the strike happens: the hand against face. The line of flight is reterritorialized, forward into
the social script, a closing off of one becoming, routed into another assemblage. Massumi writes: “The point of
bringing up this issue is not to enter the debate on whether there is an empirically provable causal link between
professional sports and violence against women. The outpouring of verbal aggression provoked by the mere
suggestion that there was a link is enough to establish the theoretical point in question here: that what the
mass media transmit is not fundamentally image-content but event-potential” (Massumi 2002, 269115). Thus,
this reading of Massumi’s is not a textual analysis of the possibility that watching violent television produces
violence, or violent subjects. It is not a theory of spectatorship identification, but of affective intensification: the
meeting of technology (good old television, no need to always privilege the Internet), bodies, matter, molecular
movements, and energetic transfers. Massumi has been criticized for aestheticizing violence, but I would argue
that what he conveys so well is the interplay between signification and significance, movement and capture,
matter and meaning, affect and identity. Unlike Crenshaw’s accident at the traffic intersection, the focus here is
not on whether there is a crime taking place, nor determining who is at fault, but rather asking, what are the
affective conditions necessary for the event-space to unfold? In the most basic of feminist terms, we can read
Massumi’s interest in unraveling the script as offering a different way of thinking about the questions, what
causes domestic violence and how can we prevent it?
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at: mimesis/irony bad
Queer heterotopia’s move beyond mere mimetic strategy to create and perform new
subjectivities
Jones 9 [Angela, “Queer Heterotopias: Homonormativity and the Future of Queerness,” interalia: a journal of
queer studies, 2009 – 4, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Farmingdale State College,
http://www.interalia.org.pl/en/artykuly/2009_4/13_queer_heterotopias_homonormativity_and_the_future
_of_queerness.htm] //khirn
Beyond Mimesis
Mimesis refers to imitation or representation of an already existing form. In the work of Walter Benjamin and Theodor
Adorno the mimetic capacity of the individual is a strategy for adaptation. Mimesis is then a means by which an actor can blur
the binary-subject/object. Difference is created in the process by which individuals imitate something already in existence. Where Adorno draws
primarily from a biological model, Michael Taussig applies the mimetic capacity to the social realm. For these authors, mimesis is not just imitation; it
always reproduces an other. He defines the "mimetic faculty [as] the nature that culture uses to create second nature, the faculty to copy, imitate, make
models, explore difference, yield into, and become Other" (Taussig: 1993: xiii). Mimesis is a means by which to experience alterity. A copy can never
reproduce the original and can never fully capture the essence or aura (Benjamin: 1969) of the original. Therefore, mimesis always produces an other. If
we drew from these authors we could conclude that the development of queer heterotopias depends on the process of othering and the creation of
material spaces that celebrate difference. For them, mimesis might be a means by which to achieve this plurality of identities.
Post-structuralist theorists discussed the possibilities of producing ruptures within discourses through the emergence of difference and the
multiplication of the "other." For instance, post-structural feminists like Luce Iriggary and Judith Butler both draw on a Lacanian
framework that sees the subject as mediated by a linguistic symbolic order, which is conditioned by the
compulsory ordering of the body vis-a-vis binary constructions. Butler pays acute attention to the social context which shapes the
language, and hence the performance, of gender. In Butler's earlier work, Gender Trouble, (as opposed to her revised ideas in Undoing Gender), the
mimetic capacity of the actor can produce subversive performances of gender that push the boundaries of the discourse from within. This mimetic
capacity is conditioned by heterosexist discourses, and these performances are not conscious or willful. Butler warns:
To claim that that the subject is itself produced in and as a gendered matrix of relations is not to do away with the subject, but only to ask after the
conditions of its emergence and operation. The 'activity' of this gendering cannot, strictly speaking, be a human act or expression, a willful appropriation,
and it is certainly not a question of taking on a mask; it is the matrix through which all willing first becomes possible, its enabling cultural condition.
(Butler: 1993:7)
The strategies we develop to bring about queer heterotopias are not as simple as taking a dress on and off. We must work within the discourses at our
disposal; there is no getting outside the matrix of power.
In order to push discourse we will need to move beyond Butler's focus on gender performativity and the discursive
realm and place more emphasis on actual bodies (Grosz: 1994). In my view, mimesis, or the replication of already existing gendered
subjectivities is a limited strategy for the deconstruction of binaries and creating ruptures in discourse.
Individuals can and do create new subjectivities . The more individuals create spaces where they can
freely explore and experiment with subjectivity and their bodies, the more we will see queer heterotopias
appear.
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at: ressentiment defense
Ressentiment is the primary cause of war and violence
Blin 1 [9/11/01, Arnaud Blin Coordinateur Forum for a new World Governance a political scientist specializing
in the study of conflict tin the particular terrorism. He has studied political science at the University of
Georgetown; International law and political philosophy at the Fletecher School of Law and Diplomacy; the
history of religions and ethics at the Harvard University "WORLD GOVERNANCE OF RESSENTIMENT"]
History offers us an infinite array of examples of major and minor conflicts born of ressentiment. Revolutions,
the key periods marking a break from the past and generating major cycles of history, are often the result of a sudden explosion of old
ressentiments. Following the great revolutions of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries and the eruption of major ideologies and
virulent nationalist movements which have all, in some way, instrumentalized legitimate ressentiments, the 21st
century offers us the spectacle of a worldwide political map consumed by every sort of ressentiment . To
paraphrase René Descartes, we could almost say that ressentiment is the most widely shared thing in the world. It is
indeed difficult to observe current affairs without perceiving the ressentiments that are the causes or consequences of the major events that make up our
daily lives. Let us take a recent example. What can we make of the current financial crisis? That it will create a mountain of
ressentiments, notably in Southern hemisphere countries which could be freed from poverty with just a fraction of the hundreds of
billions of euros and dollars released with disconcerting speed by rich countries to save their banks. The events of 11 September 2001 provide another
example. The causes behind it? For many observers, Islamic terrorism springs from the ressentiment felt by the Muslim
world towards the West. The war in Iraq? How many long-standing ressentiments has it created or exacerbated in
the Middle East? There is an endless supply of examples. Most current conflicts are primarily fed by
ressentiment , such as the conflict in the Middle East, tensions between India and Pakistan, and inter-ethnic conflicts in
Africa. The genocide in Rwanda and Burundi, the bloodiest conflict of the last fifty years, was essentially a war of
ressentiment, as were the wars in the former Yugoslavia. And aside from these examples of open conflicts, how many countries and
peoples are influenced by enduring animosity dating from the past, recent or distant, which the collective memory keeps alive just below the surface,
ready to explode? China, for instance, has yet to forgive Japan the acts of violence it committed in the 1930s. Neither
have the Armenians forgiven the Turks for the genocide of 1915, their bitterness only exacerbated by the Turks’
refusal to recognise the event. The Spanish continue to nurture bitter memories of Napoleon and, increasingly now
that Civil War mass graves are being opened, Franco, as well as of the Muslim colonisation, despite several centuries having passed
since it took place. The Greeks continue to hold a strong grudge against the Turks for the centuries of subjugation they inflicted
upon them. The Africans and Indians have ambivalent relationships with their former colonial nations , France, England,
Portugal and the Netherlands. Since the days of Monroe and, especially, Theodore Roosevelt, the US has given its southern neighbours
plenty of grounds for ressentment, and still today does nothing to overturn the feelings of animosity. Peru and Bolivia have not
yet forgiven the Chileans for having sequestered a vast territory and, for the Bolivians, access to the sea. Throughout the Americas, from Chile to
Argentina and the great Canadian north, Amerindian peoples feel the consequences of European colonization in their daily lives, just like the Aborigines
and Maoris, amongst others, in the Pacific region.
Ressentiment gnaws at people’s minds and hearts and shuts the
door on forgiveness .
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at: subjectivity answers
The ontological drive to become structures the subject – radical experimentation within
affective networks of relations undermines the liberal drive to purify the self or wallow in
anxiety in favor of a joyous process of becoming
Braidotti 6 [Rosi, Philosopher and Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University as well as
director of the Centre for the Humanities in Utrecht, “The Ethics of Becoming Imperceptible,” Deleuze and
Philosophy, ed. Constantin Boundas, Edinburgh University, Press: Edinburgh, 2006, p. 133-159] //khirn
how does one know if one has reached the threshold of sustainability ? This sort of intensive
mapping requires experimentation . This is where the non-individualistic vision of the subject as embodied
and hence affective, socially embedded and interrelational is of major consequence. Your body will
thus tell you if and when you have reached a threshold or a limit. The warning can take the form of opposing
resistance, falling ill, feeling nauseous or it can take other somatic manifestations, like fear, anxiety or a sense
of insecurity . Whereas the semiotic-linguistic frame of psychoanalysis reduces these to symptoms awaiting interpretation, I see them as corporeal
So
warning-signals or boundary-markers that express a clear message: " too much!". I think that one of the reasons why Deleuze and Guattari are so
interested in studying self-destructive or pathological modes of behavious, such as schizophrenia, masochism, anorexia, various forms of addiction and
the black hole of murderous violence, is precisely in order to explore their function as markers of thresholds. This assumes a qualitative distinction
between on the one hand the desire that propels the subject's expression of his/her conatus - which in a neo-Spinozist perspective is implicitly positive
and on the other hand the constraints imposed by society. The specific, contextually-determined conditions are the forms in which the desire is 6
To find out about thresholds, you must experiment , which means always,
necessarily, relationally or in encounters with others . We need new cognitive and sensorial mappings of
the thresholds of sustainability for bodies-inprocesses-of-transformation. This is supported by Deleuze’s reading of
Spinoza. Another word for Spinoza’s conatus is self-preservation, not in the liberal individualistic sense of the term, but rather as the
actualisation of one’s essence , that is to say of one’s ontological drive to become . This is not an automatic, nor an
intrinsically harmonius process, in so far as it involves inter-connection with other forces and consequently also conflicts and clashes. Violence, pain
and a touch of cruelty are part of this process. Negotiations have to occur as stepping stones to sustainable flows of becoming. The
actualized or actually expressed.
bodily self’s interaction with his/her environment can either increase or descrease that body’s conatus or potentia. The mind as a sensor that prompts
understanding can assist by helping to discern and choose those forces that increase its power of acting and its activity in both physical and mental
terms. A higher form of self-knowledge by understanding the nature of one’s affectivity is the key to a Spinozist
ethics of empowerment. It includes a more adequate understanding of the inter-connections between the self
and a multitude of other forces, and it thus undermines the liberal individual understanding of the
subject . It also implies, however, the body’a ability to comprehend and to physically sustain a greater number of
complex inter-connections, and to deal with complexity witjout being over-burdened. Thus, only an appreciation of increasing
degrees of complexity can guarantee the freedom of the mind in the awareness of its true, affective and
dynamic nature. Sustainability thus defined is also about de-centering anthropocentrism in the new, complex
compound that is nomadic subjectivity. The notion of sustainability brings together ethical, epistemological and political concerns under
the cover of a nonunitary vision of the subject. ‘Life’ privileges assemblages of a heterogeneous kind: animals, insects,
machines are as many fields of forces or territories of becoming. The life in me is not only, not even, human.
That nomadic potential can increases one’s powers to act by requiring awareness of one’s
condition of interaction with others: ethically empowering modes of being create joyous
passions capable of negotiating interpersonal relations
Braidotti 6 [Rosi, Philosopher and Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University as well as
director of the Centre for the Humanities in Utrecht, “The Ethics of Becoming Imperceptible,” Deleuze and
Philosophy, ed. Constantin Boundas, Edinburgh University, Press: Edinburgh, 2006, p. 133-159] //khirn
What is, then, this
sustainable subject? It is a slice of living, sensible matter: a self-sustaining system activated by a
fundamental drive to life. It expresses potentia (rather than potestas), neither by the will of God, nor the secret encryption of the
genetic code. This subject is physiologically embedded in the corporeal materiality of the self, but the enfleshed
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intensive or nomadic subject is an in-between: a folding-in of external influences and a simultaneous
unfolding-outwards of affects . A mobile entity, in space and time, and also an enfleshed kind of memory, this subject is in-process but
is also capable of 4 lasting through sets of discontinuous variations, while remaining extra-ordinarily faithful to itself. This ‘faithfulness to
oneself’ is not to be understood in the mode of the psychological or sentimental attachment to a personal
‘identity’ that often is little more than a social security number and a set of family photo albums.
Nor is it the mark of authenticity of a self ("me, myself and I") that is a clearing house for narcissism
and paranoia - the great pillars on which Western identity predicates itself. It is rather a faithfulness that is predicated upon
mutual sets of inter-dependence and inter-connections, that is to say sets of relations and encounters. These
compose a web of multiple relationships that encompass all levels of one's multi-layered subjectivity, binding
the cognitive to the emotional, the intellectual to the affective and connecting them all to socially embedded
forms of stratification. Thus, the faithfulness that is at stake in nomadic ethics coincides with the awareness of
one's condition of interaction with others, that is to say one's capacity to affect and to be affected .
Translated into a temporal scale, this is the faithfulness of duration, the expression of one’s continuing attachment to
certain dynamic spatio-temporal co-ordinates and to endure. In a philosophy of temporally-inscribed radical immanence, subjects
differ. But they differ along materially embedded co-ordinates: they come in different mileage, temperatures and beats. One can and does change gears
and moves across these coordinates, but cannot claim all of them, all of the time. The latitudinal and longitudinal forces which structure the subject have
limits which I express in terms of thresholds of sustainability. By latitudinal forces Deleuze means the affects a subject is capable of, following the
degrees of intensity or potency: how intensely they run. By longitude is meant the span of extension: how far they can go. Sustainability is about
how much of it a subject can take and ethics is accordingly redefined as the geometry of how much bodies are
capable of. What is this threshold, then, and how does it get fixed? A radically immanent intensive body is an assemblage of
forces, or flows, intensities and passions that solidify - in space - and consolidate - in time - within the singular
configuration commonly known as an ‘individual’( or rather: di-vidual) self. This 5 intensive and dynamic entity does not coincide
with the enumeration of inner rationalist laws, nor is it merely the unfolding of genetic data and information encrypted in the material structure of the
embodied self. It is rather a portion of forces that is stable enough - spatio-temporally speaking - to sustain and to
undergo constant fluxes of transformation. On all three scores, it is the body’s degrees and levels of affectivity that determine
the modes of differentiation. Joyful or positive passions and the transcendence of reactive affects are the
desirable mode , as I argued earlier. Positivity is in-built into this programme through the idea of thresholds of
sustainability. Thus, an ethically empowering option increases one’s potentia and creates joyful energy
in the process. The conditions which can encourage such a quest are not only historical, but also relational: they have to do with
cultivating and facilitating productive encounters, which sustain processes of self-transformation or selffashioning in the direction of affirming positivity . Because all subjects share in this common nature,
there is a common ground on which to negotiate these encounters and also their eventual conflicts .
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at: subjectivity bad for ptx
Subjectivity focus good for micro-politics --- joyous becoming outweighs any of their DA’s
Braidotti 6 [Rosi, Philosopher and Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University as well as
director of the Centre for the Humanities in Utrecht, “The Ethics of Becoming Imperceptible,” Deleuze and
Philosophy, ed. Constantin Boundas, Edinburgh University, Press: Edinburgh, 2006, p. 133-159] //khirn
We lost so many of its specimen to dead-end experimentations of the existential, political, sexual, narcotic, or technological kind. Although it is true that
we lost as many if not more of our members to the stultifying inertia of the status quo - a sort of generalized ‘Stepford wives’ syndrome - it is nonetheless
the case that I have developed an acute awareness of how difficult changes are. Which is not meant as a deterrent against them, on the contrary: I think
that the current political climate has placed undue emphasis on the risks involved in pursuing social changes, playing ad nauseam the refrain about the
death of ideologies. Such a conservative reaction aims at disciplining the citizens and reducing their desire for the
‘new’ to docile and compulsive forms of consumerism. Nothing could be further removed from my
project than this approach . I simply want to issue a cautionary note: processes of change and transformation are
so important and ever so vital and necessary, that they have to be handled with care . The concept of ethical
sustainability addresses these complex issues. We have to take pain into account as a major incentive for and not only an obstacle to, an ethics of changes
and transformations. We need also to rethink the knowing subject in terms of affectivity , inter-relationality ,
territories, ecophilosophical resources, locations and forces. In so doing, we shall take our final leave from the spatio-temporal continuum of classical
humanism, though not necessarily from its ideals. The nomadic ethico-political project focuses on becomings as a pragmatic
philosophy that stresses the need to act , to experiment with different modes of constituting
subjectivity and different ways of inhabiting our corporeality . Accordingly, nomadic ethics is not about a
master theory, but rather about multiple micro-political modes of daily activism . As we shall see, it is
essential to put the ‘active’ back into activism .1 The starting point for my project is the concept of a sustainable self that aims
at endurance. Endurance has a temporal dimension: it has to do with lasting in tim e - hence duration and
self-perpetuation (traces of Bergson). But it also has a spatial side to do with the space of the body as an enfleshed field of actualization of
passions or forces (traces of Spinoza). It evolves affectivity and joy , as in the capacity for being affected to the point of
pain or extreme pleasure - which comes to the same. It means putting up with, tolerating hardship and
physical pain . Apart from providing the key to an aetiology of forces (Gatens and Lloyd, 1999) endurance is also an ethical
principle of affirmation of the positivity of the intensive subject - its joyful affirmation as potentia . The
subject is a spatio-temporal compound which frames the boundaries of processes of becoming. This process works by transforming
negative into positive passions through the power of the understanding that is no longer indexed upon a
phallogocentric set of standards, based on Law and Lack, but is rather unhinged and therefore affective . The
task of turning the tide of negativity is an ethical transformative process. It aims at achieving the freedom
of understanding, through the awareness of our limits, of our bondage. This results in the freedom to affirm
one’s essence as joy, through encounters and minglings with other bodies, entities, beings and forces.
Ethics means faithfulness to this potentia , or the desire to become. Affectivity is intrinsically understood
as positive : it is the force that aims at fulfilling the subject’s capacity for inter-action and freedom. It is Spinoza’s
conatus, or the notion of potentia as the affirmative aspect of power. It is joyful and pleasure-prone and it is
immanent in that it coincides with the terms and modes of its expression. This means concretely that
ethical behaviour confirms, facilitates and enhances the subject’s potentia, as the capacity to express his/her freedom. The
positivity of this desire to express one's innermost and constitutive freedom (conatus, potentia or becoming) is
conducive to ethical behaviour , however, only if the subject is capable of making it last and endure, thus
allowing it to sustain its own impetus. Unethical behaviour achieves the opposite: it denies, hinders and diminishes that impetus and hence
makes the subject unable to sustain it. The temporal dimension of this process lays the very conditions of possibility of the
future and hence of futurity as such. The production and expression of positive affects is what makes the subject last or endure: it is like a
source of long-term energy at the affective core of subjectivity. I want to argue that Deleuze’s (1972, 1980) ‘ nomadology’ is a philosophy of
immanence that rests on the idea of sustainability as a principle of framing, synchronizing and tuning a subject’s intensive resources, understood
environmentally, affectively and cognitively. A subject thus constituted inhabits a time that is the active tense of continuous
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‘becoming’. Deleuze defines the latter with reference to Bergson’s concept of ‘duration’, thus proposing the
notion of the subject as an entity that lasts, that is to say that endures sustainable changes and transformation and
enacts them around him/herself in a community or collectivity. Deleuze however disengages the notion of
‘endurance’ from the metaphysical tradition that associates it to the idea of intuition, essence, i.e. of permanence.
Deleuze shoots ‘endurance’ through with spatio-temporal forces and with mobility. It is a form of transcendental
empiricism or of anti-essentialist vitalism. In this perspective, even the Earth/Gaia is posited as a partner in a community which it still to come, to be
constructed by subjects who will interact with the Earth differently.
Our social imaginative transforms conceptual creativity in a process that undoes the power
relations undergirding the very structure of one’s subject position
Braidotti 2k [Rosi, Philosopher and Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University as well as
director of the Centre for the Humanities in Utrecht, Chapter 8, “Teratologies”, Deleuze and Feminism, ed. Ian
Buchanan and Claire Colebrook, Edinburgh University Press, 2000, p. 169-171] //khirn
This state of crisis had engendered a positive and highly stimulating response in the conceptual teratology proposed by Deleuze. Deleuze innovates on
the notion of the ‘cartographic diagramme’ proposed by Foucault in his attempt to provide a materially-based practice of representation of the fastshifting social landscape of post-industrial societies. The ‘diagramme’ is a cartographic device that enables the tracking of an intersecting network of
power-effects that simultaneously enable and constrain the subjects. It also functions as a point of support for the task of redesigning a framework for
subjectivity. The imagination plays a major role in this process of conceptual creativity. For Deleuze – following Bergson and
Nietzsche – the
imagination is a transformative force that propels multiple, heterogeneous ‘ becomings’ , or repositioning
of the subject. The process of becoming is collectively driven, that is to say relational and external; it is also
framed by affectivity or desire , and is thus excentric to rational control. The notion of ‘figurations’ – in contrast
to the representational function of ‘metaphors’ – emerges as crucial to Deleuze’s notion of a conceptually charged use of the
imagination. Deleuze, not unlike Haraway or, for that matter, the performance artist Laurie Anderson, thinks by inventing
unconventional and even disturbing conceptual personae. These mark different steps in the process of
‘becoming-minoritarian’, that is of undoing power relations in the very structures of one’s subject position.
Figurations of these multiple becomings are: the rhizome, the nomad, the bodies-without-organs, the cyborg, the onco-mouse and acoustic masks of all
electronic kinds. Terms like ‘figuration’ or ‘fabulation’ are often used to describe this politically charged practice of alternative representation (Barr
1993). It is a way of bringing into representation the unthinkable, insofar as it requires awareness of the limitations as well as the specificity of one’s
locations. Figurations thus act as the spotlight that illuminates aspects of one’s practice which were blind spots before. A conceptual persona is no
metaphor, but a materially embodied stage of metamorphosis of a dominant subject towards all that the phallogocentric system does not want it to
become. Massumi (1992) refers to this process as the actualisation of monstrosity. The process of conceptual creativity in Deleuze and
the transformative repossession of knowledge in feminism amount to a common quest for alternative
figurations of subjects-in-becoming. Feminist theories of ‘politics of location’ (Rich 1987) or ‘situated knowledges’ (Haraway 1991)
also stress the material basis of alternative forms of representation, as well as their transgressive and
transformative potential. In feminism, these ideas are coupled with that of epistemological and political accountability (Harding 1991), that is,
the practice that consists in unveiling the power locations which one inevitably inhabits as the site of one’s identity. The practice of accountability (for
memory
and narratives . They activate the process of putting into words, that is to say bringing into symbolic
representation, that which by definition escapes consciousness, insofar as it is relational – that is interactive and
retrospective, that is memory-driven and invested by a yearning or desire for change, and that is outsideoriented . Feminists knew this well before Deleuze theorised it in his rhizomatic philosophy, that there is a hiatus between the new subject-positions
one’s embodied and embedded locations) as a relational, collective activity of undoing power differentials is linked to two crucial notions:
women have begun to develop and the forms of representation of their subjectivity which their culture makes available to them. In the post-nuclear
context of the second millennium a feminist quest for a new imaginary representation has exploded. Myths,
metaphors, or alternative figurations have merged feminist theory with fictions. It is precisely this mixture
of the techno-scientific with the fictional or fantastic that also triggers the contemporary fascination with the
monstrous, both among feminists and in mainstream culture. The monstrous refers to the potentially explosive social
subjects for whom contemporary cultural and social theory has no adequate schemes of representation. It
expresses a positive potential of the ‘crisis’ of the humanist subject, which is the leitmotif of modernity .
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offcase
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framework
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2ac framework/topicality
1. We shouldn’t debate the resolution if it naturalizes the metaphysical and ontological
certainties that Braidotti describes as undergirding modern oppression. She says that their
framework is the resentful appeal to statecraft that characterizes modern patriarchy and
shapes structures of domination: we have internalized our own powerlessness, which makes us
impose and police useless rules upon others, an impulse produced and maintained by societies
of control. That prevents the joyful relationship to the world that makes life valuable and
actualizes political possibilities.
2. The resolution is an apparatus of surveillance: their framework upholds the fantasy of a neat
division of ground and the idea that debate exists to build productive neoliberal skills helpful
on the job market. That means the 1ac’s rejection of the topic is itself a curtailment of United
States surveillance
Puar 14 [Jasbir, Associate Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers University, Ph.D. in Ethnic
Studies from the University of California at Berkeley in 1999, M.A. from the University of York, England, in
Women’s Studies in 1993, “Jasbir Puar: Regimes of Surveillance,” Cosmologics, December 4, 2014,
http://cosmologicsmagazine.com/jasbir-puar-regimes-of-surveillance] //khirn
Jasbir Puar: Much of my
work on surveillance has focused on technologies of surveillance as not only responsive and thus
repressive, but also as pre-emptive and thus productive. And many of these forms of surveillance appear in neo-liberal
models of security, model-minority racialization, proper modes of masculine and feminine gender
conformity, educational mandates, and patriotic citizenship. This interest follows from Michel Foucault’s
basic insight regarding “regimes of security” and how they operate in control societies through an anticipatory
temporality: in other words, controlling so that one does not have to repress . Regimes of security also entail
corralling greater numbers of populations into a collective project of surveillance .
We have seen, and continue to see, many examples of this post September 11th. The If You See Something, Say Something campaign on NYC public
transit interpellates the general public into service of the “greater good”; the NSEERS list impelled pre-emptive repatriation (and sometimes migration to
a country of origin that one had never been to) to South Asia and the Middle East; the Turban Is Not a Hat campaign sought to educate Americans about
the differences between Muslims and Sikhs by regulating the distinctions between headwear, turbans, headscarves. Surveillance is not just
about who the state is watching, but about multiple circuits of collective surveillance : it’s not just about
the act of seeing or noticing or screening (bodies/identities), but also about acts of collecting, curating, and tabulating
data and affect. Surveillance doesn’t just modulate between inner/outer or public/private, but rather upholds
the fantasy that these discrete realms exist, while working quite insidiously through networks of gaze,
data, and more . Even with forms of direct policing such as Stop and Frisk, the temporality of surveilling is not just
reactive, but also preemptive and increasingly, predictive .
3. Becoming-cyborg enables us to surveil the state from below --- curtailing surveillance
requires far more than laws, but changing societal notions of what privacy entails
Wittes and Chong 14 [Benjamin, senior fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution, cofounded and is the editor-in-chief of the Lawfare blog, and Jane, 2014 graduate of Yale Law School, where she
was an editor of the Yale Law Journal, “Our Cyborg Future: Law and Policy Implications,” September 2014,
Brookings Institution, http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports2/2014/09/cyborg-future-law-policyimplications] //khirn
2. Data Collection While cyborgs generate the kind of comprehensive data that subjects them to surveillance, cyborgs
also collect data,
making them a powerful instrument of surveillance . Cyborg data collection can be benign; much of it consists
these days of people posting a lot of selfies and pictures of their kids on Facebook, for example, or people recording their own experiences. But the result
is also a world in which one has to interact with others on the assumption that they are, or that they may be, recording aspects of the engagement. This is
what animates those—like the people who run the Stop the Cyborgs website—who fear the ubiquitous presence of small, low-visibility surveillance
devices. Cyborgization innately transforms people into agents capable of collection and retention and processing of
large volumes of information. The cyborg is, indeed, an instrument of highly distributed surveillance. Mann’s wearable
computer is an outgrowth of a political stance: he has long advocated using technology to “invert the panopticon” and turn the tables on surveillance
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authorities. A play on the term “surveillance,” which translates from the French as watching from above, “sousveillance”
reflects the idea of
a populace watching the state from below .86 And wearable technologies with recording functions
could indeed secure individuals in a number of ways, notably by deterring and documenting crime.
Sousveillance may secure the cyborg but it also imposes costs on cyborgs and noncyborgs alike. “Google Glass is possibly the most significant
technological threat to ‘privacy in public’ I've seen,” Woodrow Hartzog, an affiliate scholar at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School,
“In order to protect our privacy, we will need more than just effective laws
and countermeasures . We will need to change our societal notions of what ‘privacy’ is .”87 But efforts to
told Ars Technica last year.
combat the perceived privacy threat posed by certain technologies raise their own set of ethical and legal issues. For instance, technologies have been
developed to detect and blind cameras, as well as neutralize vision aids and other assistive technologies.88 The cyborg thus raises the problem of how
society—and its law—will respond to large numbers of people recording their routine interactions with others. In short, the further down the
cyborg spectrum we go, the more we are both agents of and subject to surveillance.
4. Fashioning surveillance policy for cyborgs is impossible --- but embracing our positionality
as becoming-cyborg is crucial to inform policy later
Wittes and Chong 14 [Benjamin, senior fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution, cofounded and is the editor-in-chief of the Lawfare blog, and Jane, 2014 graduate of Yale Law School, where she
was an editor of the Yale Law Journal, “Our Cyborg Future: Law and Policy Implications,” September 2014,
Brookings Institution, http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports2/2014/09/cyborg-future-law-policyimplications] //khirn
Principles for Juvenile Cyborgs: Surveillance and Beyond We
can expect our increasing cyborgization to have the most
significant immediate effects on the law in the surveillance arena. And here cyborgism is a two-edged sword. For the cyborg
both enables surveillance and is unusually subject to it . We are, at this stage, at most juvenile
cyborgs —more likely still infant cyborgs. We do not yet have a detailed sense of the scope, speed, or depth of our
ongoing integration with machines. Will it remain, as it mostly is now, a sort of consumer dependence on objects and devices that make
themselves useful, and eventually essential? Or will it evolve into something deeper—a physically more intimate connection
between human and machine, and a dependence among more people for functions that we regard, or come to
regard, as core human activity? The cliché goes that an order-of-magnitude quantitative change is a qualitative change. Put differently, it is
not merely that technology gets faster or more sophisticated; when the original speed or complication is raised to the power of ten, the change is one in
kind, rather than simply in degree. Today we may be baby cyborgs, our reliance on certain technologies increasing quantifiably, but at some point we will
be looking at a qualitative change—a point at which we are truly no longer using those technologies but have sufficiently fused with them so as to reduce
the government’s claims of tracking “them” and not “us” to an untenable legal fiction. Contrary to the layman’s assumption, that need not be the point at
which we surgically implant chips into our wrists or introduce nanobots into our bloodstreams; it could be a simple question of the extent of our reliance
or frequency and pervasiveness of our use. Until we know how far down the cyborg spectrum how many of us are going to
travel, it is folly to imagine that we can fashion definitive policy for surveillance —or anything else— in a
world of cyborgs . It is more plausible, however, to imagine that we might discern certain principles and
considerations that should inform policy as we mature into adolescent cyborgs and ultimately into adult cyborgs.
Indeed, such an examination is vital if we are to make deliberate choices about whether and to what extent
the protections and liberties we enjoy as humans are properly afforded to —or forfeited by—cyborgs. The cyborg both
enables surveillance and is unusually subject to it.
5. Decision-making is inevitable – Will and I have a combined 15 years of past debate
experience, classes outside of debate, etc – there’s maybe no unique educational impact to any
interpretation, but that just means our DAs to their their imposition outweighs
6. Our pedagogical model of authentic learning requires chaotic unpredictability – makes us
smarter, more ethical, and better at doing the things they want to do
Waghid 14 [Pedagogy Out of Bounds: Untamed Variations of a Democratic Future, Yusef Waghid,
Stellenbosch University, Matieland, South Africa, 2014, ebook, EDUCATIONAL FUTURES, RETHINKING
THEORY AND PRACTICE, Volume 63, p. 59-63] //khirn
For Greene, authentic
learning has the task of arousing students’ imagination, which ‘allows us to break with the
taken for granted, to set aside familiar distinctions and definitions’ (1995, p. 3). When students are provoked to
use their imagination they are ‘stirred to reach out on their own initiatives’ (Greene, 1995, p. 5). The point about
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authentic learning is that it is considered as releasing the imagination of students with the intention to cultivate ‘a community
always in the making – the community that may someday be called a democracy’ (Greene, 1995, p. 6). In other
words, the emphasis Greene places on positive freedom as a condition for authentic learning is quite obvious in the sense that students are
encouraged to break the chain of causes and effects , of probabilities in which they usually find themselves
entangled, and to come to be themselves. In other words, authentic learning involves students taking initiative and
looking at things as if they could be otherwise, as has been mentioned previously in this book (Greene, 1995, p. 16). So,
tapping into imagination as a way of enacting their positive freedom, students ‘become able to break with what is supposedly fixed and finished,
objectively and independently real. It is to see beyond ... and to carve out new orders in experience ... to glimpse what might be, to form notions of what
should be and what is not yet (Greene, 1995, p. 19). Consequently,
authentic learning always reaches beyond itself towards a
completeness that can never be attained. As aptly stated by Greene (1995, p. 28), releasing students’ imagination ‘is not to resolve, not to
point the way, not to improve. It is to awaken, to disclose the ordinarily unseen, unheard, and unexpected’. This
makes authentic learning a perpetual ‘narrative in the making’ (Greene, 1995, p. 5) – a democratically educative
experience ‘that is always in the making’ (Greene, 1995, p. 39). It is for the latter reason that authentic (positive) learning is concomitantly
linked to a democratic education in becoming, where ‘[n]o one can predict precisely the common world of possibility we will grow to [co]inhabit, nor can
we absolutely justify one kind of community over another’ (Greene, 1995, p. 167) – that is, pedagogical encounters remain out of bounds. A
democratic community of possibility in which individuals co-exist, says Greene, is one that embraces pluralism and does
‘not fly apart in violence and disorder’ (1995, p. 167). Such a community of possibility engages individuals to ‘speak
with others as eloquently and passionately as ... [they] can about justice and caring and love and trust’
(Greene, 1995, p. 167). In a way, Greene’s call for a democratic community of possibility – a democratic community in becoming –
intimates that teachers and students become more responsive to societal injustices , such as people being
subjected to insecurity as a result of crime and violence; those suffering under corrupt governments and dictatorships; and
others stunned by lives in refugee camps. Therefore, teachers ‘need to be attentive and vigilant if ... [they] are to open texts and spaces, [and] if ...
[they] are to provoke the young [students] to be free’ (Greene, 1995, p. 121). Greene places vigilance at the centre of the concept of authentic learning and
suggests some interesting distinctions that further expand the concept. Authentic learning therefore gains a new meaning that perhaps is beyond current
to be vigilant is ‘to awaken’ in students an
awareness of the ‘ordinarily unseen, unheard, and unexpected’ (Greene, 1995, p. 28). To be vigilant is to be cautious and
human understandings if thought of in relation to vigilance. In the first instance,
suspicious, yet attentive and open to something different and new. This view of vigilance is corroborated by Applebaum (2013, p. 19), who states that
vigilance ‘involves listening not simply to confirm what is already known but listening to hear something new ...’. More importantly, vigilance
implies being able to listen to the voices of the marginalised when they suffer injustices – that is, vigilance insists that
teachers and students show their ‘outrage at injustices’ (Greene, 1995, p. 42). In this way, vigilance does not only involve listening to
what is beyond recognition, but also that teachers and students remain in discomfort about the injustices and
‘identify moments where the new can emerge ’ (Applebaum, 2013, p. 34) – that is, where new authentic learning can occur.
Such a notion of vigilance intimates the possibility that students take an ethical and political stand. And when students act ethically and politically they
listen with an openness so that there is always more to learn – they are stirred ‘to wide-awakeness, to imaginative action, and to renewed consciousness
of possibility’ (Greene, 1995, p. 43). When vigilance interrupts the minds of students they become ‘conscious’ – that is, pursue a kind of
thinking that always involves a risk, a venture into the unknown, and thus become open to new ways of
looking at things , what Greene refers to as ‘ the making of a democratic community’ (Greene, 1998, p. 126). A potent
example of authentic learning in which vigilance is at play, and of the notion of a democratic community in becoming, is poignantly illustrated in the film
In the land of blood and honey , directed by Angelina Jolie in 2011. Against the backdrop of the Bosnian war in the 1990s, when Serbs committed
atrocious genocidal acts against Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims and Croats), Danijel, a soldier fighting for the Serbs, falls in love with Ajla, a Muslim. The
romantic relationship soon garnered the dissatisfaction of Danijel’s ruthless father – a Yugoslav People’s Army general, and Danijel and Ajla were
confronted with the unfamiliar, the unexplored, and the unexpected. Ajla, once used as a human shield by Serbs against resistant fighters, also witnessed
the genocidal killings and sniper assassinations, and the torturous rapes of women (including herself) in prison camps. Danijel, although in many ways
sympathetic towards Bosniak killings as a consequence of his love for a Muslim, could not look beyond his parochialism towards pluralism and accept
that every person had a legitimate right to life, irrespective of one’s hatred for them. Only when he himself eventually killed Ajla did he realise the
senselessness of the Bosnian war and surrender to the United Nations forces as a criminal of war. Now for Danijel to have acted vigilantly and with the
human freedom to enact justice towards those whom he disliked would have harnessed his learning in an authentic way. It is not that he did not learn
from his dogmatic blindness and prejudice towards unjust Serbian atrocities. Of course he did, otherwise he would not have acted unjustly. However,
such learning is frivolous or useless, as he acted freely under coercion from his father’s external influence and the suspicion he harboured towards the
Bosniaks, who made an attempt on his life by bombing a church that he attended. What Danijel failed to do, unlike Ajla, was to have ventured into the
unfamiliar, the improbable, where there always was the possibility to think differently about his situation. Ajla knew that her love affair with Danijel
upset the Bosniaks, yet she did not let the hatred of the Bosniaks blind her to recognise even her torturers’ (Serbs) right to existence. Unlike Danijel, Ajla
was prepared to embark on a new beginning (with Danijel), in which they could have opened themselves up to the possibility of human co-existence by
writing the texts of their democratic community in becoming. If a democratic community in becoming provides the space in which human action is
disclosed in potentially unexpected and unpredictable ways, it makes sense to bring into the discussion Danjel’s predicament after he killed Ajla. If
Danijel wanted to reverse his act of having killed Ajla – the one he loved – he would have had to consider two things: to seek the forgiveness of Ajla’s
community, and to promise not to repeat his acts of violence towards other Bosniaks. Therefore he gave himself up as a war criminal. In other words,
forgiving and promising are never enacted in solitude or isolation, but rather, as stated by Hannah Arendt (1998, p. 237), in the ‘public realm through the
presence of others ... for no one can forgive himself and no one can feel bound by a promise made only to himself ...’. By implication, for human
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freedom to ensure rebeginnings it has to embark on action informed by forgiveness and making promises.
Forgiveness implies the unexpected public acknowledgement of one’s act of evil (even if possible, just retribution might
ensue), considering that one would be unable to undo the past, whereas promising implies committing oneself in the presence of others to put an end to
something, such as heinous crimes that would go on endlessly if there were no interference. In the words of Arendt, ‘only through this constant mutual
release [of forgiving and promising] from what they do can [wo]men remain free agents, only by constant willingness to change their minds and start
again can they be trusted with so great a power as that, to begin something new’ (Arendt, 1998, p. 240). The issue of forgiveness and making
promises not to repeat unjust and undesirable human action has implications for authentic learning. Firstly,
teachers and students always act in community. They are dependent on one another ‘without intimacy and without closeness’
in that they treat one another with respect, irrespective of the distance that the space of the world puts between them (Arendt, 1998, p. 243). If students
were to be guilty of committing an unexpected and undesirable act – such as bullying another student, abusing drugs, or threatening a teacher – there is
always the possibility that their transgressions will be subjected to the correctives of forgiveness and making promises. Condemnation and
exclusion perhaps would not be possible, as forgiveness and making promises will engender possibilities to
begin anew. A common example in South African schools is the rising incidence of pregnancies in teenage girls. The girls, upon informing the school
of their pregnancy, often find themselves in a situation where their continuing attendance of school becomes extremely problematised by unsupportive
school structures, perhaps even judgemental teachers, and they would encounter great difficulty in re-accessing the school after they have given birth. In
many respects, their appeals for compassion and forgiveness either to their schools or their respective communities are met by exclusion, rather than
forgiveness and acceptance. Secondly, making and keeping promises has the potential to undermine the spurious
condition of sovereignty (Arendt, 1998, p. 245). In fact, making promises in the presence of others binds a person in a non-sovereign way to
others and, for once, teachers’ views might not be considered as the sovereign and predicable calculations in pedagogical encounters. Making promises
has some connection with the inability of individuals just to rely on themselves ‘as isolated islands of certainty’ (Arendt, 1998, p. 244). Rather, by making
and keeping promises, teachers and students are connected in a non-sovereign way, so that the mastery and predictability of human action becomes selfdefeating. There will always be more to learn and it would be impossible for teachers and students to remain ‘unique [sovereign] masters of what they do’
(Arendt, 1998, p. 244). Thirdly, human action that takes the risk to forgive and be forgiven should make any pedagogical encounter concerned with the
possibility ‘to start anew ... in an ever-recurring cycle of becoming’ (Arendt, 1998, p. 246). This means that an authentic pedagogical
encounter is always an interruption and a beginning of something new, especially in the light of human
unpredictability and unreliability in a world marred by conflict, transgressions and suffering. The point about
authentic learning in a positively free manner , unconstrained by the sovereignty of the other, is the fact that
learning has no end and that what is to be learned will always be strange to the one who learns otherwise,
learning will have reached its becoming. Authentic learning in becoming is always open to the new, the unexpected,
the strange – a matter of retaining the un-bounded and strangeness of both teaching and learning. Authentic learning, therefore,
includes being confronted with incidents of bullying, discrimination, teenage pregnancies, teenage suicide and
homophobia – since these are all constitutive of our societal condition and cannot be wished away. Authentic learning requires of
teachers to be willing to deal with the aforementioned in an open and unbiased fashion so that what emerges are forms of
engagement that move towards recognition of otherness and PEDAGOGY AND DIALECTIC OF FREEDOM 63 forgiveness of transgressions. It is to a
discussion of teaching as strangeness that I now turn. TEACHING AND STRANGENESS Authentic learning, as has been argued for thus far, has
the best chance of being realised if teachers in pedagogical encounters are attentive and vigilant, provoking students
to ethically and politically open up the texts of their lived experiences. Such pedagogical encounters would invariably remain open
to the unfamiliar, the unpredictable, the unexpected – that is, the possibility of rebeginnings would be enhanced through such democratic spaces
in which nothing remains certain and where there always is the possibility to begin anew. In this way, learning would be authentic and
informed by positive human freedom. Such an account of authentic learning invariably depends on a particular
way of teaching, which Greene suggests should be associated with strangeness (1995, p. 92). The teacher as stranger enacts her
rupture as a way of finding herself in relation to others (her students) as she cultivates a pedagogical encounter. A teacher does
not arrogate students, but comes to experience students through the eyes of a stranger in order ‘to see’ the
unfamiliar, the unheard of (Greene, 1995, p. 92). In a way, teachers as strangers suspend both what they desire to see and try to control
students’ desire. As aptly stated by Jo Anne Pagano (1998, p. 260): Most students come to the texts we teach as strangers. Greene teaches us that we
must also come to those same texts as strangers, even though the syllabus is ours and filled with our questions, loaded with our desires. To teach our
students to read so as to teach [positive] freedom and to choose freedom of humane action, we need to open landscapes to admit their questions, to
change the landscape by honoring the identities they bring to the series of indentifications they will make.
7. No internal link to any fairness impact – we disclosed the aff well over a day in advance,
constructing it solely from camp cards – alt cause anyways, we’re way better than you – if you
don’t have generics prepared you should probably change how you prep in order to enhance
your ability to engage with substance
8. Debate doesn’t give you any meaningful skills
Hester, 2013. This is a note posted to the CEDA Forums. The note is from Mike Hester, an extremely
successful and influential policy debate coach at University of West Georgia. I have had a lot of respect for him
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through the years. -Alfred Snider, editor November 22, 2013, 01:27:03 AM.
http://www.cedadebate.org/forum/index.php/topic,5407.msg11974.html#msg11974
To whom it may concern,
CEDA-NDT Debate is a hot mess right now. There are so many things wrong, it can sometimes seem like they're all related.
Maybe they are (reference Homer Simpson's "one big ball of lies" explanation to Marge), but a delineation may still provide some guidance as to
what we can change, what we may have to accept, and where (if anywhere) we may go from here...
the foundation
We no longer have one, and haven't for more than two decades. Fewer and fewer debate coaches are
communication scholars, which is fine because Communication Departments don't consider us anything more than
the bastard cousins who show up at the family reunion piss-drunk and demanding more potato salad. Our
activity long ago (40 years?) lost any resemblance to a public speaking event attracting outside audiences. The problem is
we vacated that academic space without being able to find a home anywhere else. Despite the pious assumptions of some with "policy" in
mind, we are not a legitimate "research" community of scholars. The "portable skills" we currently
engrain in our students via practice are: all sources are equivalent, no need for qualifications; "quoting" a
source simply means underlining ANY words found ANYWHERE in the document, context and intent are
irrelevant; and we are the only group outside of Faux News that believes one's argument is improved by taking
every point of logic to its most absurd extreme. Simply put, 99.9% of the speech docs produced in debates would
receive no better than a C (more likely F) in any upper division undergraduate research-based class. Comically, we are the public
speaking research activity that is atrocious at oral persuasion and woefully in violation of any standard research
practices. But this letter is not intended to bury Debate, even though it's hard to praise it in its current state. Before any peace treaty ending the
Paradigm Wars can be signed and ratified, an honest appraisal of where Debate fits in the Academy is necessary.
9. Now, to preserve some degree of debateability, we use the surveillance topic as a jumping off
point for research about radical controversies that provide far more pressing debates. You
have lots of ground: literally any K of Deleuze from a race, gender, queerness, capitalism,
psychoanalytic, or Heideggerian perspective is responsive, which is why the negative file exists.
Our offense:
10. Their framing of skills as something to constantly improve is the corporate logic of the
control society – the impact is the global immiseration of the dispossessed described in our
Braidotti evidence
Thompson and Cook 14 [“The Eternal Return of Teaching in the Time of the Corporation,” Greg Thompson
and Ian Cook, Murdoch University, Edinburgh, Deleuze Studies 8.2 (2014): 280–298] //khirn
The school, like all disciplinary institutions and, indeed, society itself, is being overtaken by what Deleuze refers to as the corporation, but
what we refer to as corporate logics , or the logic of the corporation (in order to emphasise the noology in play). While Deleuze accepted
Foucault’s account of the organisation of disciplinary societies as a series of sites of enclosure through which individuals pass, he was convinced
that ‘we were leaving them [enclosed spaces of disciplinary society] behind’ (Deleuze 1995b: 178). For Deleuze, the central
expression in societies of control is the corporation: The family, the school, the army, the factory are no longer the distinct
analogical spaces that converge towards an owner-state or private power – but coded figures – deformable and
transformable – of a single corporation that now has only stockholders. (Deleuze 1995b: 181) The corporation’s axioms overlay (or
are superimposed on) the disciplinary traditions of the liberal democratic institution (Savat 2009). Continuousness is one example.
Disciplinary societies had termination points for each of their spaces (from family to school to factory – perhaps via barracks, prison or hospital – each of
which finishes with its subjects at some point). In a disciplinary society ‘one was always starting again’, whereas in control
societies ‘one is never finished with anything – the corporation, the educational system, the armed
services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation’ (Deleuze
1995b: 179). The rise and ubiquity of the corporation, understood as a noology or way of thinking, means that all other ‘institutions’
gradually adopt corporate logics. For, ‘just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to
replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination, [which is] . . . the surest way of delivering the school
over to the corporation’ (Deleuze 1995b: 179). When it came to the school system, Deleuze noted the emergence of ‘continuous forms
of control, and the effect on the school of perpetual training, the corresponding abandonment of all
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university research, the introduction of the “corporation” at all levels of schooling’ (182). Schools do not disappear but are
reorganised or retooled and teaching is reconfigured within modulatory policy machines (Thompson and Cook 2014a),
digital surveillance technologies (Bogard 1996) and the increasingly performative cultures operating at all
levels of education (Ball 2003). Certain desires are encouraged; the desire for patterns that represent better
numbers as evidence of the quality, and therefore linearity and recordability, of events overlays the care for individuals. In
a control society ‘Individuals have become “dividuals,” and masses, samples, data, markets, or “banks” ’ (Deleuze 1995b: 180). Whereas in disciplinary
societies enclosures served to mould individuals according to specific requirements, ‘controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will
continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point’ (179). The computer as
database constantly evaluates the dividual’s new position like ‘floating rates of exchange, modulated according to a rate
established by a set of standard currencies’ (180). The continuous collection of data on teaching, such as through high-stakes testing , valueadded measures and continual re-accreditation, exemplify this dividuation. Teachers must understand and practise teaching in the context of
auditable outputs assembled anonymously and at a distance from the classroom. Care for students’ knowledge (curriculum) as some concern
for bodies close by, is represented, at best, through commodified measures or becomes meaningless and counterproductive (such as when schools focus attention only on the performance of those students who may improve test scores). It is not that teachers
have stopped caring for their students; it is that this does not register in databases measuring ‘quality’. Mercieca argues that these corporate
ethics of standardisation and performativity infusing schools ‘give the teacher “permission” to not get involved
in the lives of students’ (Mercieca 2012: 44). The challenge is to understand teaching in terms of forces, flows and the
ways teachers connect to children, despite the policy environment which aims to remove or distance them. In
other words, we need new theoretical weapons that enable the ‘teacher and students to “surpass” the
idea of themselves and the kind of life they live’ (44).
11. Policing DA: The 1AC marked the territory of this debate round as a queer heterotopiarefusing this possibility by repositioning and fixing our former identities of aff and neg is a
form of rhetorical violence that excludes queerness and maintain networks of oppression
Jones 9 [Angela, “Queer Heterotopias: Homonormativity and the Future of Queerness,” interalia: a journal of
queer studies, 2009 – 4, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Farmingdale State College,
http://www.interalia.org.pl/en/artykuly/2009_4/13_queer_heterotopias_homonormativity_and_the_future
_of_queerness.htm] //khirn
Becoming Queer
How does an individual become queer? Becoming
queer is not about crafting a fixed identity or culture. It is about playing
with your individual desires and engaging in an ongoing spiritual process of experimentation with those
desires. Queer theorists cannot afford to minimize this point . Becoming queer and the queer heterotopia cannot be
envisioned as a collective project with programmed visions of how we need to perform queer. While performances of drag may be an experiment in
becoming queer for some, and masochism the way for others, every individual will achieve queerness vis-a-vis their own process of becoming. Again, this
article does not aim to define queerness on its own terms. The illustrations provided here were meant to just serve as possibilities; the possibilities for
we are perpetually becoming
queer, constantly changing, and constantly experimenting with desire logically means that we
cannot have fixed identities. By retaining fixed identities, we shut ourselves off from the constant
experimentation that is required for becoming queer, or a body without organs. Moreover, having fixed identities as the
basis for the creation of queer heterotopias will lead to exclusion. We continually witness this
problem in praxis; gay men have been kicked out of lesbian turf; trans individuals have been excluded from gay politics. The policing of
queerness leads to exclusion .
creating queer bodies are infinite and a personal everyday adventure. Finally, in recognizing that
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1ar - aff pedagogy o/w
The aff turns framework – our performance accesses a unique pedagogical experience that
allows for dialogue and democratic ideals that solves for oppression and surveillance by the
state
Garoian and Gaudelius 1 (Charles R. and Yvonne M, Summer 2001, Cyborg Pedagogy: Performing
Resistance in the Digital Age, Studies in Art Education
Vol. 42, No. 4, pp. 333-347, 10.2307/1321078, http://www.jstor.org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/stable/1321078,
JSTOR) /AMarb
As cyborg pedagogy, this reflexive interplay between the actual and the virtual commences as the body
abandons awareness of its corporeal reality by being aesthetically absorbed in cyberspace . As information foregrounds
materiality, the body's identity is predicated on the contingent circumstances of virtuality, its patterning and
randomness. "Located within the dialectic of pattern/randomness and grounded in embodied actuality rather than disembodied information, the
posthuman offers resources for rethinking the articulation of humans and intelligent machines" (Hayles, 1999, p. 287).
Thus, the completion of a posthuman performance of subjectivity requires aesthetic absorption to complete. To do so,
awareness must once again take a reflexive turn back to the body where its flickering signifier becomes an embodied experience. To
neglect this return to the body would be to deny the impact of information technology on the body's
identity and to limit the oppositional dialectic of the cyborg to pure information thus
preventing the existence of any discourse within body. Artist/writer Nell Tenhaaf (1996) argues that this reflexive
turn is a "way to self-knowledge, the body read back to itself through its bioapparatus loop. But this cannot come
about without an integration of representation and signifying systems with the enhanced perceptual and information field of
cybertechnologies" (p. 65). As cyborg pedagogy, Tenhaaf's bioapparatus loop, enables a critical dialogue to occur
between the narratives of the body and those of cyberculture . To substantiate cyborg narratives as critical
pedagogy, we can look to Pinar and Grumet's (1976) concept of a "poor curriculum," DeCerteau's (1984) "tactics of everyday life,"
and Ross's (1991) metaphor of the "hacker." A poor curriculum, according to Pinar and Grumet, represents a critical grassroots approach to education whereby students' performances of autobiographical content
disrupt the so called "rich" metanarratives of schooling. The authors refer to the performance of autobiography
as currere, a process whereby "curriculum development and innovation do not require a revamping and
reorganization of the schools, of instructional methodologies, or of the academic disciplines, but a transfer of our attention
from these forms themselves to the ways in which a student uses them and moves through them" (1976, p. 68).
When students identify their own ways of performing what they have learned in school, they transform the curriculum
from a reified construct to one that is dynamic, fluid, and diverse in its interpretations. What currere offers cyborg
pedagogy is the possibility to expose, examine, and critique the oppressive conditions of digital media, its ability
to reproduce identity, and to eradicate the body's cultural and historical differences. This transformation of
everyday life, according to Michel De Certeau, is predicated upon the use of "tactics," individual performances that
subvert the inertia of cultural metanarratives. Within the context of currere, tactics represent the particular ways in which the metanarratives
are ruptured and critiqued. " A tactic is an art of the weak," it serves to overcome oppression (1984, p. 37). De
Certeau argues that we use tactics to personalize cultural work, to make it our own, to overcome its domination of
our lives. Critical theorist Deborah J. Haynes (1997) refers to artists who work in this mode as, "pragmatic radical technologists
[who use] technology, 'before it is used on you,' as the cyberpunk dictum puts it . Often marked by attitudes of resistance,
radical technologists might combine acts of sabotage in the workplace with establishing alternative media institutions
that work for democratic ideals " (p. 78). Within cyberspace such tactics correspond with "hacking," a subversive metaphor that Andrew
Ross (1991) uses to suggest countercultural performance in the digital realm. Ross identifies five ways in which the tactic of hacking functions as a
defense against prevailing myths about cyberculture: "* Hacking performs a benign industrial service of uncovering security deficiencies and design
flaws. "* Hacking, as an experimental, free-form research activity, has been responsible for many of the most progressive developments in software
development. * Hacking, when not purely recreational, is an elite educational practice that reflects the ways in which the
development of high technology has outpaced orthodox forms of institutional education. "* Hacking is an
important form of watchdog counterresponse to the use of surveillance technology and data
gathering by the state, and to the increasingly monolithic communications power of giant corporations. "* Hacking, as guerrilla know-how,
is essential to the task of maintaining fronts of cultural resistance and stocks of oppositional knowledge as a
hedge against a technofascist future. (1991, pp. 113-114) Ross's tactics of hacking can be interpreted as five attributes of
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cyborg pedagogy. His first tactic deconstructs the cyborg myth in order to "uncover" its limiting pedagogical
assumptions. Improvisation, a "freeform" play between the actual and virtual body and the creation of its identity/s,
represents Ross's second tactic. His third suggests the ways in which information technologies demonstrate an
irreverance toward the traditional and historical assumptions of "institutional education." Ross's fourth tactic suggests
remaining vigilant and "counterresponding" to institutionalized and corporate assumptions of education. Finally,
his fifth tactic "maintains fronts of cultural resistance" as it applies to future possibility of educational oppression.
Each of these tactics corresponds with the radical practices of posthuman performance artists who struggle to attain
political and creative agency in the digital age. The performance of a personal narrative based on the cyborg
metaphor is a tactic that functions in a similar fashion to Ross's five attributes of hacking. As a political act of
resistance, G6mez-Pefia and Sifuentes uncover a
nd challenge the oppressive cultural stereotypes of digital culture. For example, their work questions
notions of the "primitive" as a
social and historical technology that serves to exclude the personal narratives of those who exist outside of
digital technology. Furthermore, their work forces us to acknowledge all constructions of identity as predicated. Eduardo
Kac's conflation of personal memory with digital memory provides a space within which to improvise and construct
hybrid identities that are outside the metanarratives presented through traditional systems of
technology. The irreverence presented toward the "sanctity of the body" by Orlan constitutes a form of political and cultural
resistance as she renders the insignificance of our institutional understandings of the body through her surgical
procedures. Stelarc's insertion of technology on and in his body represents a counterresponse to the ways in which
the body is conceived and inscribed by technological culture. For example, by establishing himself as a node on the Internet,
Stelarc uses his body to disrupt institutionalized sources of information whose exclusionary pedagogies are otherwise hidden. Finally, all of these artists
perform what Ross refers to as "guerrilla know-how" through the oppositional discourse and practice of performance art. Moreover, the critical
pragmatism which they perform through their cultural work serves as cyborg pedagogy to expose, examine,
and critique the informatics of posthuman culture, a practice of critical citizenship that is essential to attaining
cultural democracy in the digital age.
Discussions in small groups about feminism is key to spillover – empirics
Freedman 9 (Estelle B. June 2009, Feminist Pedagogy: Looking Back to Move Forward, Chapter 7: Small
Group Pedagogy: Consciousness-Raising in Conservative Times, pg. 124-125, Johns Hopkins University Press;
1 edition, Robbin D. Crabtree (Editor), David Alan Sapp (Editor), Adela C. Licona (Editor) ) /AMarb
Anger was a primary reaction to the readings but one that evoked deep conflict, especially for women. At the
beginning of the course, many students stereotyped feminists as "angry" and feared being so-labelled. The
small groups functioned to legitimize anger and make it less overwhelming. "Our first group meeting can be
summed up in one word: ANGER," a student recalled. "Unfortunately," she continued: most of us felt defensive
when speaking about feminism, as if we needed to prove something to men, but could not channel the anger
into well articulated arguments.... We hoped that this class and our upcoming small group meetings would help
articulate our thoughts, explain why we were angry, and how we could feel "offensive" by presenting a clear
definition of feminism and its goals. Even a student who was more reluctant to identify as a feminist shared
similar feelings: "Being able to air my feelings and hear the impressions of the other women in the group
helped me to resolve some of the anger that I formed while reading the materials on violence against women."
Another student recalled thinking that "At last, here were some people who I could talk to about those things
that make me angry that no one seems to understand. I felt somewhat empowered." Speaking about the
experiences of the past week "was good for me," a minority woman wrote, because "I found that I had a lot of
unvented anger that I could let loose at these meetings." One group applied the reading of Virginia Woolf's
Three Guineas to the problem of anger. Because Woolf "encouraged people to understand the background
people are coming from," a student wrote, she talked of her father's traditional upbringing. "The group
discussion," she concluded, "helped bring out that I should be angry at the socialization structure that my
father grew up in, not merely at my father himself."" Finding the support for taking the course and for
processing both the knowledge of sexism and the anger it evoked made meetings valuable and a source of
growth. As one student explained, "As a result of the support I received during the meetings, I quickly began to
look forward to them. If I were religious I might say that the meetings were a bit like going to church, in that I
felt stronger, more self-loving, and more confident after leaving." The sole man in another group wrote that he
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had "the courage to persevere in my studies because I had a support group. I had the drive to share so that I
could see reflections of myself in others, even if the reflections had the faces of a different gender." Drawing on
Bernice Johnson Reagon's ideas in "Coalition Politics," one student described the small groups as "the 'room'
that we all went back to in order to discuss strategies on how to change the world."14 The ability to feel safe,
relaxed, and candid, was due "no doubt," one student suggested, "to the absence of a TA or other authority
figure." For some students, feeling empowered to speak, learning to.listen, and growing more confident were
not ends in themselves. Members of several groups reported a new comfort with carrying their feminism
outside of the classroom. All of the students in one group discovered that they had become known as the "dorm
feminist" in their residences. One woman "decided to confront some people on my floor who were constantly
making sexist remarks . . . and I probably would never have done it had we not had the discussion in our small
group." Three members of smother group decided to take a women's self-defense course together. A resident
assistant distributed questionnaires from the women's center to t he frosh in her dorm and asked her group for
affirmation that she was helping the cause. At least one woman planned to be "challenging my parents on a lot
of things I never thought about before." In contrast, one student felt relieved simply to meet: "I used to wonder
why I was not planning or participating in demonstrations, but have realized that I am comfortable listening to
other people and sharing with other people on a personal level. Both aspects are necessary and I don't believe
one to be more valuable than another."
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1ar - prereq to politics
Aff is a prereq to engaging in politics
Wilding 98 (Faith, 1998, n.paradoxa, vol. 2, Where is Feminism in Cyberfeminism?,
http://www.obn.org/reading_room/writings/html/where.html) /AMarb
While cyberfeminists want to avoid the damaging mistakes of exclusion, lesbophobia, political correctness, and
racism, which sometimes were part of past feminist thinking, the knowledge, experience, and feminist analysis
and strategies accumulated thus far are crucial for carrying their work forward now. If the goal is to create a
feminist politics on the Net and to empower women, then cyberfeminists must reinterpret and transpose
feminist analysis, critique, strategies, and experience to encounter and contest new conditions, new
technologies, and new formations. (Self)definition can be an emergent property that arises out of practice and
changes with the movements of desire and action. Definition can be fluid and affirmative--a declaration of
strategies, actions, and goals. It can create crucial solidarity in the house of difference--solidarity,
rather than unity or consensus--solidarity that is a basis for effective political action.
Cyberfeminists have too much at stake to be frightened away from tough political strategizing and action by the
fear of squabbles, ideologizing, and political differences. If I d rather be a cyberfeminist than a goddess, I d
damned well better know why, and be willing to say so.
A feminist pedagogy is a perquisite to concrete solutions
Mayberry and Rees 9 (Maralee and Margaret N, June 2009, Feminist Pedagogy: Looking Back to Move
Forward, Chapter 6: Feminist Pedagogy, Interdisciplinary Praxis, and Science Education, pg. 106-107, Johns
Hopkins University Press; 1 edition, Robbin D. Crabtree (Editor), David Alan Sapp (Editor), Adela C. Licona
(Editor) ) /AMarb
At its core, feminist pedagogy is a commitment not only to interdisciplinary knowledge and process learning
but also to the development of a critical consciousness empowered to apply knowledge to social action and
social transformation. Nancy Schniedewind suggests that a fundamental component of feminist pedagogy is
"learning a process for applying theory to practice, attempting to change a concrete situation based on that
learning, and recreating theory based on that activity" (1993, 25). Without this component, commonly known
as praxis, feminist pedagogy merely becomes, in the words of Jane Kenway and Helen Modra, "wishful
thinking" (1992, 156). Five months after the course had ended, we wanted to better understand the impact
Earth Systems: A Feminist Approach had had on the students', and our own, social and political awareness.
Had the class affected day-to-day understandings of either the earth or society? Did the class have an impact on
a student's intellectual and personal life? Had the content and pedagogy of the class inspired new attitudes
about environmental and social change? Kristin Kampschroeder, a sociology graduate student working as a research assistant in the Department of Geoscience, interviewed six students from our class, asking them to
discuss these questions. When students discussed their understanding of the interrelatedness of earth systems
and social systems, some expressed concern over the role natural resources play in the development of foreign
policy: Anytime I hear about national policy or military policy (like in Rwanda), I am. always wondering what is
it that our country wants to export from the other country. What do they have that we want? I'm not as naive. I
think the most important thing that I gained was a new insight into how geology and sociology are interrelated
and how social policies don't naturally evolve from things that we are taught to think of as beyond human
control, such as mineral deposits. A number of students also expressed a new awareness of the social context
within which scientific "knowledge" is produced: I have a greater interest in the structure of scientific
knowledge and how it has shaped our culture and political policies. Most important to me was the idea that
science is not objective. That was a new concept for me at the time. The course greatly changed my perception
of society. I was always earth centered and it certainly helped me refine my feelings of frustration with
environmental issues; particularly in regard to how capitalism and science shape our environmental policy. For
other students the course reinforced previously held beliefs and, for some, helped them better articulate their
environmental and social attitudes: Because I have a major that is interdisciplinary, women's studies, before
the class I was always looking for things that were interrelated. The class was solid proof that everything is
interrelated, even geology and sociology. Since being a women's studies major, I have become more active in
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my community. The Earth Systems class is definitely a part of my continued involvement, since it was a class in
my major field. I had a lot of knowledge about the earth and U.S. society before taking this class. What the class
did was to clarify what I knew and also to give me the facts and figures to back up my general knowledge and
intuition. Everything in your life, any bit of learning has some effect. The course reinforced my feminist feelings
and gave me more confidence in them. I now have fewer doubts about what I want to do, where I want to go,
and what I want to accomplish. For many students the awareness of earth processes and social systems had an
impact on their daily activities. By engaging in individual activism, most students felt they could be effective
agents of social change in everyday life:
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1ar - definitions
Resolved means to personally think about things
AHD 2k6. American Heritage Dictionary
resolved v. To cause (a person) to reach a decision.
We represent the USFG in the resolution
Raney 10 [Gary Raney – Ada County Sherriff, “ Ada County Sheriff Gary Raney Response to Inquiry regarding
Oathkeepers”, October 25th, 2010, http://wearechangeidaho.org/CategoryArticles.php?id=1]
First premise: “They”
– the federal government – are not a distant body beyond our control. We are a republic and we
are the federal government by the power of our vote. It is disingenuous for people to talk about the government
as something foreign, like an enemy. In my opinion, it is our general apathy as voters that, by an omission of a vote.
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1ar - aff key to surveillance debates
Social perceptions of surveillance shape collective responses to government policy --- the aff is
crucial to effective engagement with surveillance
Wittes and Chong 14 [Benjamin, senior fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution, cofounded and is the editor-in-chief of the Lawfare blog, and Jane, 2014 graduate of Yale Law School, where she
was an editor of the Yale Law Journal, “Our Cyborg Future: Law and Policy Implications,” September 2014,
Brookings Institution, http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports2/2014/09/cyborg-future-law-policyimplications] //khirn
In other words, the
more essential the role our machines play in our lives, the more integral the data they produce
are to our human existences, and the more inextricably intertwined the devices become with us—socially, physically,
and biologically—the less plausible will seem the notion that the data they produce is material we voluntarily turn
over to a third party like some file cabinet we give to a friend. A society of cyborgs—or a society that understands itself as on the
cyborg spectrum—will have a whole different cultural engagement with the idea of electronic surveillance than will a society that understands itself as
composed of humans using tools. This shift may explain, at a subconscious level anyway, some of the fury over the past year about the NSA disclosures.
People around the world infuriated by what they have learned about American intelligence collection practices
are certainly not consciously thinking of themselves as cyborgs. But the point is that we no longer experience
surveillance of the phone networks simply as surveillance of machines either. There was a time, not that long ago,
when NSA coverage of large volumes of overseas calls—including those with one end in the U.S.—did not bother people all
that much. It was no secret that NSA captured a huge amount of such material and that it incidentally captured
U.S. person communications along the way, weeding out these communications using minimization
procedures. But we did not make that many international calls and we did not Skype with people overseas very often. We did not send emails all over
the world many times a day. We were not constantly engaging the network as though it were part of ourselves. Today, as juvenile cyborgs, we
experience surveillance of that architecture very directly as surveillance of us. We can no longer
disassociate ourselves from those machines . Our engagement with them is pervasive enough that systematic
collection of data from those networks—even if accompanied by appropriate procedures and limiting rules—inevitably appears as
collection on our innermost thoughts and private lives, closer and more oppressive than it did when the
network and we were further apart. As cyborgization progresses, we will therefore be faced with constant choices about whether to invest
the machines with which we are integrating with some measure of the rights of humans or whether to divest humans of some rights they expected before
they developed machine parts. The construction we have traditionally given this problem, that of the rights of human in
the use of machines, will break down as the line between human activity and machine activity continues to
blur. The person who carries a smartphone we might still construe as using a machine. And perhaps we might even think that of the person who wears
an electronic insulin pump. But an eyeborg or a pacemaker? When dealing with a world of cyborgs, to conduct surveillance against a machine is to
conduct surveillance against a person. After losing her left arm in a motorcycle accident, Claudia Mitchell became the first person to receive a bionic arm.
The device detects the movements of a chest muscle rewired to the stumps of nerve once connected to her former limb.89 Would we really say she is
using a machine? Or would we say she has machine parts? And if the latter, do we think about those machine parts as sharing in Mitchell’s rights as a
human or do we think about her rights as a human as limited by our surveillance capabilities with respect to those machine parts? The answers to these
questions will not always be the same. We will not feel the same way about the privacy of what you see with your bionic
eye—and your right not to incriminate yourself with the images it collects—as we will feel about your right to shield physiological data you collect on
yourself recreationally or to incentivize your own fitness. To the extent you opt to film everything you see with Google Glass, you may be out of luck.
Our choices will hinge on the depth of integration of human and technology, the function the technology is
playing in our lives and the seriousness we attach to that function, and probably the perceived but ineffable
inherency of that function to the irreducibly human.
Understanding the relationship between inequality and surveillance is key
Mason & Magnet 12’ [Corinne Lysandra Mason, Shoshana Magnet, University of Ottawa, “Surveillance
Studies and Violence against Women” Suvelliance and Society, Vol 10, No 2 (2012)
http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/vaw/PDF LM]
Surveillance practices and their relationship to inequality have a long history, from the surveillance of slaves
through a reliance on identity documents (Parenti 2003) to the scrutiny of those receiving certain forms of aid
from the state (Eubanks 2006; Monahan 2010).1 As contemporary scholarship within surveillance studies documents (Doyle et al. 2012; Lyon
2009; Lyon 2006; Andrejevic 2007; Kohler Hausmann 2007), the surveillance of consumers by companies and of citizens by the
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state intensified birth of a new range of surveillance technologies, from computer programs able to track the
exact number of minutes that an employee spends on the phone (Head 2003) to personal digital assistants (PDAs)
that transmit the user’s exact geographic location. Scholarship within surveillance studies notes the
relationship of surveillance to inequality, whether it is the scrutiny of immigrants and refugees (Zureik and Salter 2005) or the policing of
folks living in low-income neighbourhoods (Gates 2011). Less attention has been concentrated on intersectional feminist approaches to surveillance that
examine its relationship to racisms, sexisms, ableisms, and homo- and trans- phobias. That is, while inequalities have been paid serious attention in the
field, axioms of oppression are rarely analysed simultaneously. Moreover, surveillance practices are intimately connected to
stalking and have had tremendous consequences for violence against women, and yet the implications of the rise of
surveillance for VAW are less studied in the field of surveillance studies, with a few excellent exceptions (Eubanks 2006; Römkens 2006; Southworth et
al. 2005). An upcoming volume titled Feminist Surveillance Studies notes in its introduction that studies on the surveillance of women have a long
history, even if they are not explicitly named as such (Magnet and Dubrofsky, under contract). From Laura Mulvey’s article ‘Visual Practices and
Narrative Cinema’ (1975) on practices of looking at women in film to bell hooks’ foundational work on the power of the white supremacist gaze (1992),
violent ways of visually dismembering and reconstituting women’s bodies using new visualization technologies are not new. Nor is the institutional
scrutiny and regulation of women’s bodies a new phenomenon. Including the sterilization of women of colour and women with disabilities as part of neoeugenics programmes in the U.S., as well as the scrutiny of women receiving particular forms of aid from the state, women have long been policed by
state institutions (Smith 2007; Smith 2008; Eubanks 2006; Kohler-Hausmann 2007). Unsurprisingly, the state is not the only actor
capable of violently surveying women’s bodies and behaviours. Surveillance practices, in some cases ones that
were explicitly developed by the state such as welfare registries and emergency hotlines to report welfare or
immigration violations, are now being adopted by abusers in order to violently control the women in their lives .
In examining the connection of new surveillance technologies to violence against women, we ask the following questions: How does violence against
women inform the development of new technologies? And how do new technologies inform violence against women?
Dismissing the relationship between gender and surveillance is rooted in the male
normalization of surveillance practices
Ball et al., 9 (Kirstie Ball, Business School at Open University in Birmingham UK, Nicola Green,
Department of Sociology at University of Surrey in UK, Hillie Koskela, Department of Social Policy at
University of Helsinki in Finland, David Phillips, Faculty of Information at University of Toronto in Canada,
2009, “Surveillance Studies Needs Gender and Sexuality”)
One of the common concerns amongst the papers in this issue is that of subjectivity and the experience of surveillance. Hitherto, studies of the surveilled
subject have been limited to a very narrow range of areas, as Ball (2009) describes: To date, discussions of the surveillance
society have assumed a limited range of positions for the surveilled subject, reducing the experience of
surveillance to one of oppression, coercion, ambivalence or ignorance. Few studies have suggested to the contrary (Koskela 2004;
McGrath 2004). In some circumstances it is the case that the experience of surveillance features coercion (for example, in
the mandatory provision of DNA on arrest in the UK to feed the Police National Computer DNA database), oppression (for example, those whose international
mobilities are deemed ‘risky’) ambivalence or ignorance (for example, consumers who are unaware that their data doubles are structuring their access to
goods and services), but this is not the whole story. Indeed if the subject is perfectly docile and compliant, as Foucault predicted, then we have perfect
surveillance, which is rarely the case. The fact that individuals sometimes appear to do little to counter surveillance does not mean that surveillance means nothing to
them. Surveillance
may be tolerated or even sought after because the giving of data satisfies individual anxieties,
or may represent patriotic or participative values to the individual. It may also be the case that individuals are
ambivalent towards surveillance because there is sometimes no identifiable ‘watcher’ or perceivable ‘control’
being asserted, or because the pleasures of performative display override the scrutinies that come hand-inhand with self-revelation (Ball 2009: 640-641). Papers within this issue begin to augment the documentation of the experience of surveilled subjects.
In particular they challenge the normative statement of ‘nothing to hide: nothing to fear,’ a response which is often cited in ‘vox
pop’ media coverage of the surveillance society. They do so by problematising the association between that which is hidden with that which is shameful - an
the politics of what is hidden
and what is revealed are imbued with gendered and sexualised politics of heteronormativity
and shame, and of vulnerability and fear . In this volume, Toby Beauchamp and Kevin Walby, for example, highlight how
the equating of ‘what is hidden’ with ‘what is shameful’ is problematic for transgender and genderqueer
communities. Beauchamp’s article on transgendered people and border security explores contradictory revelation and
concealment practices across medical, political, and security discourses, and the almost insurmountable
difficulty of managing a usable gender identity at their intersection. In Walby’s paper ‘Are you looking for fags?’ we are reminded of
association which is implicit within the phrase ‘nothing to hide: nothing to fear’. In the Anglo-American north,
McGrath’s (2004) accounts of the Manhattan gay bar ‘Splash’, and of other sexual practices within queer subcultures that embrace exposure as both political tactic
and erotic thrill. Walby explores how that sort of publicness is necessarily marginalised and suppressed within institutional frameworks of “official” and normative
publicness, such as that maintained and policed by Canada’s ‘National Capital Commission.’
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Modern surveillance justifies the use of discrimination via social sorting
Ball et al., 9 (Kirstie Ball, Business School at Open University in Birmingham UK, Nicola Green,
Department of Sociology at University of Surrey in UK, Hillie Koskela, Department of Social Policy at
University of Helsinki in Finland, David Phillips, Faculty of Information at University of Toronto in Canada,
2009, “Surveillance Studies Needs Gender and Sexuality”)
To date, one of the themes within surveillance studies has been the discriminatory and exclusionary outcomes of
social sorting. Discussions of practices within inter alia consumer surveillance (Danna and Gandy 2002), the surveillance of mobile populations (Amoore and
DeGoede 2005) and surveillance within political processes (Sussman and Galicio 2004) highlight the difficulties with categorisation which arises as a result of social
sorting. Social
sorting has very real consequences for subjects. For example, errors occur when databases are
combined, inaccurate or unrepresentative data are used and missing data are ‘filled in’ (Danna and Gandy 2002), leading
to the observation that social sorting is nearly always ‘wrong’ at the level of the individual (Berry and Linoff 2000). Recent
evidence (Canhoto 2007; Beckett 2008) also suggests that the production of profiles is socially embedded and replicates the
prejudices of data mining experts. Potential is createdfor prejudices to be written into algorithms which identify
risk, entitlement and criminality. As a result data subjects may unwittingly suffer discrimination, or may be wrongly allocated to categories they do
not belong. Moreover inadequacies tend to be perpetuated because replacing legacy systems is both expensive and
complex (Head 2007). Social sorting is often based on geodemographic information, and ascribes value judgement
to different groups of people. For example, particular consumption preferences, whilst forming distinct groups, are mapped onto places when combined
with information such as a postcode. Lifestyles and places hence begin to merge (Burrows and Gane 2006) and neighbourhood
characteristics come to determine the products and services offered to individuals living there. Some of these
characteristics include discriminatory categories the likes of which would be illegal in other
settings . For example, in Cherry vs. Amoco Oil Co, a noteworthy legal case in the US, it was revealed that a white woman who lived in a predominantly black
neighbourhood was refused a credit card not because of her personal credit history, but because the postcode in which she lived was considered too risky in the
credit checking system. One
of the most important things to note about the categorisation practices usually discussed
in studies of surveillance is that categories are statistically generated. Central to the operation of a category is its norm, or average:
the ascription of any case – human or otherwise – to a category implies some kind of proximity to the norm expressed
by the category. Categories thus have a normalising tendency. And whilst the majority of the work on categorisation to date critiques at
the level of systems and practices, some of the papers within this issue address the implications of categorisation itself at the local level. Kathryn Conrad, in particular,
critiques the normalizing tendency of categories in terms of the pressure it places on queer subjects, while Anthony Corones and Susan Hardy, and Kevin Walby show
how essentialist discourses around gender and sexuality normalise diverse responses to surveillant processes.
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at: state reform solves gender violence
Legislation meant to protect women reinforces the structural violence perpetuated against
women
Connell 90 (R. Connell, Professor at Macquarie University in Australia, 1990, “The state, gender, and sexual
politics”)
The way the state embodies gender gives it cause and capacity to "do" gender. As the central institutionalization
of power the state has a considerable, though not unlimited, capacity to regulate gender relations in the society as a
whole. This issue has been the subject of more feminist and gay discussion about the state than any other, and the
contours are becoming familiar. Again we may trace this issue across the three substructures of labor, power, and
cathexis. In terms of the gendered organization of production and the gender division of labor, the liberal state was an "interventionist" state well
before the twentieth century. "Protective" legislation on women's work affected women's participation in wage labor
and attempted to impose a nuclear-family model on the nhaeteenth-century working class. State control of
women's wages through wage boards, arbitration, legislation, and decree is now a familiar theme in economic
history. The state's capacity to change its tack was shown in the shift of women into manufacturing during the world wars. A highly visible gender
politics of employment re-emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, revolving around "equal opportunity" principles and affirmative action programs. This has
carried over strongly into the international dimension of the state, with the ILO, OECD, and UN being forums where policy and progress around
women's employment are debated. At the same time there is a system of indirect control of the division of labor, as McIntosh has
argued, through
welfare provision, the education system, and other machinery. 42 The state similarly has a
capacity to regulate the power relations of gender in other institutions. The most-discussed case of this is
marital violence, where regulation involves a violation of the cultural boundary between the "public" and the
"private" spheres. Police reluctance to intervene in "domestic disputes" is familiar. In effect, feminist research indicates, the state's nonintervention has tacitly supported domestic violence - which mainly means husbands battering wives - up to the point where
a public-realm scandal is created and state legitimacy is at issue. At that point men as state agents will move to restrain men in
households: arrests may take place, legal proceedings begin, refuges are funded. The effect of this routine of management is to construct the issue as one
of a deviant minority of violent husbands, and to deflect criticism of marriage as an institution that generates violence. Radical feminists in the
1970s used this problem of legitimacy very effectively to get funding for the women's refuge movement, but as
Johnson observes of the Australian experience they found themselves trapped in this construction of the issue of violence. 43
Nevertheless, the fact that the state will restrain some manifestations of private-sphere patriarchy is significant. Donzelot, in a widely read book on the
"policing of families" in France, suggests that the growth of an apparatus of surveillance and regulation - in what Anglo-Saxon
writers call the welfare state - has generally undermined domestic patriarchy. The idea is shared by some of the American right, who
wish to roll back the state in order to restore women's dependence on men ("traditional family life"). This view is exaggerated, but it is nevertheless true
that the state has functioned as an alternative means of economic support for many women disadvantaged by a
patriarchal economy. "Welfare mothers" and age pensioners are not exactly a mass base for feminism; they are nevertheless not abjectly
dependent on particular men. Defending the level of income coming to women through the state has been a key issue
for feminism since the onset of the recession of the 1970S. 44 The state has a capacity to regulate sexuality and
has shown an active interest in doing so. There are legal definitions of forbidden heterosexual relationships, for instance, laws on age of
consent and on incest. Around the prohibition of incest a to-and-fro comparable to that on domestic violence occurs. As the 1987 furor about diagnoses
of incest at Cleveland in England shows, vigorous enforcement can create legitimacy problems at least as severe as non-
enforcement. Marital sexuality is regulated in the name of population policy. The state in early twentieth- century Australia banned the sale of
contraceptives and introduced "baby bonus" payments in order to increase the (white) population. The state in contemporary India and China is
vigorously trying to restrain population growth. During the nineteenth and early twentieth century state repression of men's homosexuality became
heavier. The process escalated through criminalization of all male homosexual behavior (for example, the Labouchbre Amendment in Britain in 1885) to
the rounding-up of gay men into concentration camps in Nazi Germany. 45 Much of this regulation can be read as an attempt to
promote a particular form of sexuality in the conjugal family against a whole series of tendencies in other
directions. This is not a simple matter of "social reproduction" Often, as population policies illustrate, the state is pursuing a re-structuring of the
family or of sexuality. And there is no doubt that these policies have met a great deal of resistance. The criminalization of male homosexuality failed to
stop male homosexual behavior, though it drove it underground for a couple of generations. The public banning of contraceptives failed to stop the early
twentieth-century decline in family size, as women found other means of regulating births. Nor are third-world governments wonderfully successful in
restraining population growth at present, while children remain an important asset in peasant society and are valued in urban culture.
These programs perpetuate structural violence against women – the government is built to
serve the patriarchy
Connell 90 (R. Connell, Professor at Macquarie University in Australia, 1990, “The state, gender, and sexual
politics”)
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Where liberal feminism sees itself as challenging prejudice, radical feminisms see themselves as contending with a social system. The name "patriarchy"
is much debated; it has been criticized in particular for a false universality, attributing modern western patterns of men's domination over women to the
rest of the world and the rest of history. If this implication is dropped, "patriarchy" is a serviceable term for historically produced
situations in gender relations where men's domination is institutionalized. That is to say, men's overall social
supremacy is embedded in face-to-face settings such as the family and the workplace, generated by the
functioning of the economy, reproduced over time by the normal operation of schools, media, and churches .
Prejudice is part of this institutionalization, but only a small part of the whole. TM An account of patriarchy as a social system was
initially modelled on socialist theories of class; feminist theorists such as Firestone adopted even the terminology, speaking of "sex class" alongside
"economic class." They did not at first adapt socialist theories of the state; but these existed and could be asked feminist questions. 15 In the first
translations of socialist ideas into sexual politics, the state was seen as being patriarchal in order to pursue the
class interests of the bourgeoisie. The ruling class through the state might seek social order by repressing
homosexuality, or bolster profit by maintaining a low wage structure for women, or solve employment crises by
shunting female labor between home and factory. Although some of these effects certainly occur, and are documented in research on
the welfare state, the theoretical premise is untenable. As Burstyn argues, we cannot continue to see class dynamics as the
ultimate cause of gender dynamics in the state . These social dynamics constantly interact, but one cannot be dissolved into
the other. As this point has been increasingly accepted, a more sophisticated analysis has developed that sees the state as
implicated in a class system and a system of patriarchy at the same time. Indeed, the state may be seen as the vital
bridge between these two systems, as in Ursel's historical analysis of the regulation of women's labor in Canada) 6 Socialist feminism
has generally seen the link between the family and the economy as the theoretical key to women's oppression . It
has therefore focussed on the way the state regulates or restructures this link. In the most sophisticated statement of this view, Mclntosh sees the state
intervening both in the family, and in the capitalist workplace and labor market, not to pursue immediate class interests so much as to pursue the longterm goal of securing the social conditions that allow capitalist production to continue. The moves made by the state depend on a balancing of needs and
demands that may be in conflict with each other, and that certainly change historically. Thus Mclntosh introduces the very important issue of the
strategic complexity of state action in gender politics. State agencies act under contradictory pressures, which often result in ambivalent policies.
Mcintosh emphasizes that the state's role in the oppression of women is usually indirect. It plays a part in
establishing or regulating "systems" (the family, wage labor) in which women are oppressed. But the state can appear in itself to
be gender-neutral; and this is a vital aid to legitimacy) 7 To some extent this approach overcomes the tendency of socialist theory to prioritize class over
patriarchy. But the emphasis is still on the reproduction of capitalist relations of production; gender relations are still conceptually derivative. The
problem is only fully overcome when the analysis is generalized to the reproduction of social structure in
general. Burton has proposed an "extended theory of social reproduction," which treats the state as central. She points to the importance of state
action in spheres that Marxist-feminist analysis tended to bypass, notably biological reproduction and mass education. While sociological analysis of the
state, whether feminist or not, has generally seen the state as influenced by a pre-given social structure, Burton forcibly draws attention to the role of the
state in constituting the categories of social structure. In particular she emphasizes the ways in which masculinity and femininity, and the relation
between them, are produced as effects of state policies and state structures. The interplay between schools and families, for instance, is fertile ground in
the making of gender. 18 Although this line of thought connects with the most sophisticated levels of social theory, the
main line of feminist thinking has taken another path. Its point of departure is a criticism of liberal feminism
for not realizing the depth at which the state is connected with men's interests. As Scutt puts it, reflecting on the defeat of
feminist proposals in a process of rape law reform in Australia, "governments and laws are established for the benefit of men,
and against women." In such a view the state is a direct expression of men's interests, it is socially masculine.
The idea of the "male state" spread in feminist writing of the later 1970s. Daly's widely read Gyn/Ecology spoke of the "sado-state," assimilating the state
to the destructive aspect of male sexuality. Very similar ideas became important in the feminist anti-war movement in the 1980s, which has often treated
the state's military apparatus - especially nuclear weapons - as an expression of male aggression and destructiveness.~9 These conceptions are close to a
view of the state widespread in the early gay liberation movement, which likewise broke with a liberal politics of law reform in favor of mass mobilization
and confrontation. Gay men in particular faced the state as direct oppressor, because their own sexuality was criminalized. Police homophobia has been
an important issue; it is significant that the gay liberation movement was triggered by a confrontation between gay men and police in New York, the socalled "Stonewall riot" of 1969. Lesbians have experienced the state as oppressor in the courts (for example, in custody battles), in the exclusion of
lesbian experience from education, and through experiences shared with heterosexual women. Gay and lesbian writers have not, however, produced
much formal theorization of the state. What there is, notably the work of Fernbach, emphasizes the historical embedding of violent
masculinity in the state with the creation of armies and empires. 2~ On any reading, the idea of the "male state"
commits feminism against the state. It has been, however, nuanced in two ways that imply rather different politics. The first treats the state
as the hireling or messengerboy of patriarchy, as an agent for a social interest - that of men - that is constituted outside it. Scutt's comment that
governments are "established for the benefit of men" illustrates this position. This is closer to liberal feminism, as it suggests at least a logical possibility
of turning the state around. The second conception (perhaps deriving from anarchist views of the state as well as the new feminist focus on
sexual violence) sees
the state itself as oppressor; the state is the patriarchal power structure. Mies's comment on the state as
"the general patriarch," quoted earlier, illustrates this idea. Here there is no political ambiguity: the state as such has got to go,
in the interests of women. 2~ It is the second variant that has led to the most interesting developments, which give more bite to the conception
of the state as patriarch. An influential paper by MacKinnon explores how the U.S. legal system operates in relation to rape. Historically, rape has
been constructed as a crime from the point of view of men. The legal system translates this interested point of
view into impersonal procedural norms, defining (for instance) what must be proven and what is acceptable or
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convincing evidence. The courts are not patriarchal because they are improperly biased against women; rather
they are patriarchal through the way the whole structure of rape law operates. The more objective they are in procedure the
more effectively patriarchal they are. The norm of "legal objectivity" thus becomes an institutionalization of men's interestsY A very similar point is made
by Burton about job evaluations in Australia. "Equal opportunity" or "pay equity" programs often call for an objective assessment of jobs to overcome
traditional gender inequalities. But the appearance of technical neutrality is contradicted as the underlying rationale of evaluation schemes embeds
patriarchal points of view, for instance in the weighting given to different aspects of a job. On a broader canvas, Grant and Tancred-Sheriff in Canada
point to the arrangement of administrative units within bureaucracies as a practice embodying gender interests. Departments where women's
interests are represented tend to be peripheral. Thus women's advisory units have slight organizational power
compared with, say, economic policymaking units dominated by men. 23 What these arguments have in common is the
perception that patriarchy is embedded in procedure, in the state's way of functioning . This perception is extremely
important. It allows us to acknowledge the patriarchal character of the state without falling into a conspiracy theory or making futile searches for
Patriarch Headquarters. It locates sexual politics in the realm of social action, where it belongs, avoiding the speculative reductionism that would explain
state action as an emanation of the inner nature of males. Finally it opens up the question of the state apparatus, overlooked by liberal feminism and
earlier radical feminism alike. The character and dynamics of the state apparatus, the actual machinery of government, are a major theme in nonfeminist state theory, and urgently need analysis in terms of gender. 24
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top-level kritik answers
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2ac critique bad/at: joy bad
Joy is good – their critique stifles the possibilities of overcoming repetitive negativity –
embrace affirmation
Grosz 7 [“Feminism, Art, Deleuze, and Darwin: An Interview with Elizabeth Grosz,” NORA - Nordic Journal
of Feminist and Gender Research, Volume 15, Issue 4, 2007, Katve‐Kaisa Kontturi,* & Milla Tiainen, pages
246-256] //khirn
Kontturi & Tiainen: Our last question relates to the broader concerns engaging feminist scholarship. Unlike many feminist thinkers, your
attitude
towards the writings of Deleuze, Spinoza, and Darwin, for instance, can be described as genuinely affirmative rather than
critical. Could you elaborate on this? Why is it important to be affirmative? What can this approach give to
feminism and especially to the future of feminism? Grosz: I've made it a policy for quite a while to avoid critique. Critique always affirms
the primacy of what is being critiqued, ironically producing exactly the thing it wants to problematize . But
more than that, critique is a negative exercise. It is an attempt to remove obstacles to one's position. It is really
difficult to continue to work only on material that you don't like, or that's problematic or oppressive. And this is the
future facing feminists forever if feminist theories are only a critique of patriarchal discourse . Such a
critique was necessary in the first place to leave open the option of something like feminist thought. But once feminist thought has
erupted, it is important that it not be defensive, that it not be attracted to its lowest enemy rather than aspiring to something higher.
We need to find out more than what is wrong with the position: we need to understand primarily what is
right with the position. There is no text that is so dangerous to feminist thought that we shouldn't read it. I don't
think that we are in danger of being contaminated by patriarchal thought, since we are already contaminated by patriarchy. The real question is how
can we exceed patriarchy , how can we put more into patriarchal texts than there is there so they become
transformed in the process. Now one could easily read Deleuze, Spinoza, or Darwin negatively, especially if one is a feminist;
none of them have anything particularly positive to say about women. At best, they are indifferent about the question of women, but nonetheless we
have to ask, even if they don't say something positive about women, what tools do they give as such that we might be able to
say something positive about women. And it seems to me that they do give us a number of tools that maybe they
haven't understood how well they can be used themselves … Deleuze allows us to say things that we couldn't say
without Deleuze. The same goes with Spinoza, or Darwin. We need to be more joyous in the work that we do. Life
is hard enough with the crippling limitations placed on women, minorities, queers, and so on. We need something
primarily affirmative, and theory is one of the few places where we can affirm. Theory is not necessary for the conducting of
everyday life. Theory is a joyous luxury. We need to affirm all those activities that give us joy. We need to
affirm those activities—thinking gives us joy, perceiving gives us joy. Feminism has been too much about what has been
done to us that is wrong. We need to affirm the joyousness of the kind of life that we are looking for. The
joyousness of art, the pleasure of thought, feminism needs to return to something that makes it feel happier as well as productive. Joy, affirmation,
pleasure, these are not obstacles to our self‐understanding, they are forms of self‐understanding. And if life is more and more
oppressive, then in a way it is only these small pockets of knowledge production, art production that provide a
counter to the weight and emptiness of everyday life. So we need to affirm, we need a place where we can
simply affirm. The rest of the world is bleak enough. I mean the point is the way in which the new
world is produced is precisely through revelling in the affirmation of the strengths that art gives us . The only way we
can make a new world is by having a new horizon. And this is something that art can give us: a new world, a new body, a
people to come.
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2ac perm: conviviality
We offer this debate as a convivial gather, a becoming with, imagining an unpredictable
becoming with rather than an overdetermined effacement of alterity, its inability to move or
escape, which characterizes the status quo. This flight from the norm reveals the invented and
constructed nature of everything: the permutation is radical technique of self-fashioning and
we are “no longer anything, only a pretext.”2
Puar 10. Jasbir Puar, professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University, Women & Performance:
a journal of feminist theory, Vol. 19, No. 2, July 2009, pg. 168
Out of the numerous possibilities that ‘‘assemblage theory’’ offers, much of it has already begun to transform
queer theory, from Elizabeth Grosz’s crucial re-reading of the relations between bodies and prosthetics (which
complicates not only the contours of bodies in relation to forms of bodily discharge, but also complicates the
relationships to objects, such as cell phones, cars, wheelchairs, and the distinctions between them as capacityenabling devices) (1994), to Donna Haraway’s cyborgs (1991), to Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘‘BwO’’ (Bodies without
Organs – organs, loosely defined, rearranged against the presumed natural ordering of bodily capacity) (1987).
I want to close by foregrounding the analytic power of conviviality that may further complicate how
subjects are positioned, underscoring instead more fluid relations between capacity and debility.
Conviviality, unlike notions of resistance, oppositionality, subversion or transgression (facets of
queer exceptionalism that unwittingly dovetail with modern narratives of progress in modernity),
foregrounds categories such as race, gender, and sexuality as events – as encounters – rather than
as entities or attributes of the subject. Surrendering certain notions of revolution, identity
politics, and social change – the ‘‘big utopian picture’’ that Massumi complicates in the opening
epigraph of this essay – conviviality instead always entails an ‘‘experimental step.’’ Why the
destabilization of the subject of identity and a turn to affect matters is because affect – as a bodily
matter – makes identity politics both possible and yet impossible. In its conventional usage, conviviality
means relating to, occupied with, or fond of feasting, drinking, and good company – to be merry,
festive, together at a table, with companions and guests, and hence, to live with. As an attribute and
function of assembling, however, conviviality does not lead to a politics of the universal or inclusive
common, nor an ethics of individuatedness, rather the futurity enabled through the open
materiality of bodies as a Place to Meet. We could usefully invoke Donna Haraway’s notion of ‘‘encounter
value’’ here, a ‘‘becoming with’’ companionate (and I would also add, incompanionate) species, whereby
actors are the products of relating, not pre-formed before the encounter (2008, 16). Conviviality is an ethical
orientation that rewrites a Levinasian taking up of the ontology of the Other by arguing that there is no
absolute self or other,15 rather bodies that come together and dissipate through intensifications
and vulnerabilities, insistently rendering bare the instability of the divisions between capacityendowed and debility-laden bodies. These encounters are rarely comfortable mergers but rather
entail forms of eventness that could potentially unravel oneself but just as quickly be recuperated
through a restabilized self, so that the political transformation is invited, as Arun Saldhana writes,
through ‘‘letting yourself be destabilized by the radical alterity of the other, in [perceiving] his or
her difference not as a threat but as a resource to question your own position in the world’’
(2007, 118). Conviviality is thus open to its own dissolution and self-annihilation and less interested in
a mandate to reproduce its terms of creation or sustenance, recognizing that political critique must be open to
the possibility that it might disrupt and alter the conditions of its own emergence such that it is no
longer needed – an openness to something other than what we might have hoped for. This is my
alternative approach to Lee Edelman’s No Future, then, one that is not driven by rejecting the figure of the
2
Genet, 119
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child as the overdetermined outcome of ‘‘reproductive futurism’’ (2004),16 but rather complicates the very
terms of the regeneration of queer critique itself. Thus the challenge before us is how to craft
convivial political praxis that does not demand a continual reinvestment in its form and content,
its genesis or its outcome, the literalism of its object nor the direction of its drive.
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2ac perm: alliances
Perm do both – alliances are key for revolution
Precaido 13 [Interview between Ricky Tucker and Beatriz Preciado, professor of Political History of the Body,
Gender Theory, and History of Performance at Paris VIII, “Pharmacopornography: An Interview with Beatriz
Preciado,” December 4, 2013, The Paris Review] //khirn
We don’t have to be afraid of questioning democracy, but I’m also very interested in disability, nonfunctional
bodies, other forms of functionality and cognitive experiences. Democracy and the model of democracy is still
too much about able bodies , masculine able bodies that have control over the body and the individual’s
choices, and have dialogues and communications in a type of parliament. We have to imagine politics that
go beyond the parliament, otherwise how are we going to imagine politics with nonhumans, or the planet?
I am interested in the model of the body as subjectivity that is working within democracy, and then goes
beyond that. Also, the global situation that we are in requires a revolution. There is no other option . We
must manage to actually create some political alliance of minority bodies, to create a revolution
together. Otherwise these necropolitical techniques will take the planet over . In this sense, I have a
very utopian way of thinking, of rethinking new technologies of government and the body, creating new
regimes of knowledge. The domain of politics has to be taken over by artists. Politics and philosophy
both are our domains. The problem is that they have been expropriated and taken by other entities for the
production of capital or just for the sake of power itself. That’s the definition of revolution, when the
political domain becomes art. We desperately need it .
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at: counter-performance
Giving primacy to one form of subversive performance over another fixes identity and
precludes transcendence
Jones 9 [Angela, “Queer Heterotopias: Homonormativity and the Future of Queerness,” interalia: a journal of
queer studies, 2009 – 4, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Farmingdale State College,
http://www.interalia.org.pl/en/artykuly/2009_4/13_queer_heterotopias_homonormativity_and_the_future
_of_queerness.htm] //khirn
Queer heterotopias are spaces characterized by infinite sets of social practices . "The BwO is what remains
when you take everything away. What you take away is precisely the phantasy, and significances and subjectifications as a whole" (Deleuze & Guattari:
1987). Then queer heterotopias will exist when we take everything away- all order, all fixed categories. It is thus
order that structures the body and hence it is this order that must cease. There are practices of desire that
disrupt this order.
The masochist uses suffering as a way of constituting a body without organs and bringing forth a plane of consistency of desire. That there are other
ways, other procedures than masochism, and certainly better ones, is beside the point; it is enough that some find this procedure suitable for them
(Deleuze & Guattari: 1987: 155-7).
We cannot give primacy to one form of subversive performance of desire over another . The masochist has
the potential of becoming a body without organs. Crucially, the creation of multiple bodies without organs could cause queer heterotopias to flourish.
This line of thinking allows us to think in terms of immanence rather than transcendence. Queer heterotopias
will require the end of fixed organisms and the free flow of desire. Like the masochist, we can become vessels of freeflowing desire. However, we cannot become fettered to a desire; no individual has one desire. Our desires are
multiple ; we are polymorphously perverse entities.[4] In addition, desire cannot be seen as only relating to sexuality. Desire is
fluid and can relate to a wide range of practices that seek to satisfy immediate wants of the mind and body. However, if an individual allows one
desire to consume their time and thoughts, and uses that desire to adopt an identity, they are dangerously
fixing their own subjectivity. Instead, if individuals recognize their multiple desires and utilize everyday to
explore a new one, they are becoming queer . Becoming queer is not a political process; it is a
spiritual journey .
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specific blocks
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2ac academia/university k
The role of the ballot is to create queer heterotopias, spaces away from regulation or
marginalization in which subjects can become unfixed and malleable
Jones 9 [Angela, “Queer Heterotopias: Homonormativity and the Future of Queerness,” interalia: a journal of
queer studies, 2009 – 4, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Farmingdale State College,
http://www.interalia.org.pl/en/artykuly/2009_4/13_queer_heterotopias_homonormativity_and_the_future
_of_queerness.htm] //khirn
Gilles Deleuze and Queer Heterotopias
The future of queer theory, queer politics, and queer
heterotopias relies on nomadology, or Gilles Deleuze's notion that we are
Deleuze's concept of assemblages
helps us think critically about utilizing technology to shape queer practices and subjectivities. "A human body is an
not fixed beings. Deleuze wanted to release Western thought from the chokehold of essentialism. Gilles
assemblage of genetic material, ideas, powers of acting and a relation to other bodies" (Colebrook: 2002). Life is a series of connections; there is no
beginning or end that we can somehow uncover through research. Also drawing from Michael Warner (1993) we can only imagine the emergence of
queer heterotopias; we cannot configure an exact program or prescription for the future of queerness. While throughout this article I interrogate existing
strategies for creating queer heterotopic spaces and present illustrations of possibilities, none of this is meant to prescribe an exact vision of queerness;
this article just utilizes a Deleuzian framework to explore its possibilities.
Mimesis, whether through drag or trans identities, is a promising but limited strategy for creating queer heterotopias. It
cannot be the only strategy we use to disrupt essentialist discourses and universalizing subjectivities. This queer identity
may limit the ability for subjects to become unfixed, unstable, and malleable, which is the ultimate goal. From
Deleuze we draw the question: in what ways can we deterritorialize the body in an effort to break down the subject (Grosz: 1999, Gatens & Lloyd: 1999)?
The emergence of assemblages may enable the dismantling what Gilles Delueze called molar categories, or what many call
binaries. Can there be bodies without organs, or technologically-constructed bodies within complex systems of desire and power relations that
continually produce so much difference that the subject might disappear? Queer heterotopias require a post-human vision that not
only seeks to disrupt binaries like, man/woman, male/female, hetero/homo, but also human/non-human
(Haraway: 1991). Can there be no stable identity? In order for queer heterotopias to flourish, there must be a move away
from stable identities, not towards them, as we are currently witnessing. In Judith Butler's most recent work she says, "it seems
crucial to realize that a livable life does require various degrees of stability" (2004: 8). The idea that having a fixed or stable identity
is a human need is socially constructed. Our compulsory need to have fixed identities was created by a
need for rigid social order. While having fixed subjectivities is a social need, there is no reason to believe that
having a stable identity is a human need. To my mind, to flourish, the human condition needs transformation .
A transgendered person, a body modifier, etc., do not necessarily desire to be something else; it is the process of transformation
that feeds the human soul .
Rethinking the idea of queer heterotopias requires that theories of difference, particularly sexual difference,
abandon all fascination with metaphysics (Colebrook: 2000, Braidotti: 2005), give up the notion that political
action requires fixed identities . The demise of the compulsory need to order and create any fixed identity/subject/body is the key to
developing queer heterotopias further. However, creating queer heterotopias , or spaces where the infinite
performances of queerness can exist and flourish free from regulation and marginalization , free
from violence, and free to exist and be recognized, cannot be accomplished if we have a fixed notion of what
queer bodies look like or how a queer body behaves.
Language is action – their attempt to strictly demarcate speaking from violence is shallow
oversimplified nonsense
Chen 12. Mel Y. Chen, professor of linguistics and women’s studies at UC Berkeley, Animacies: Biopolitics,
Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, Duke U Press, pg. 53
Language is as much alive as it is dead, and it is certainly material. For humans and others, spoken
and signed speech can involve the tongue, vocal tract, breath, lips, hands, eyes, and shoulders. It
is a corporeal, sensual, embodied act. It is, by definition, animated. But in spite of, or because of, the socalled linguistic turn (which occurred outside of the social-science discipline of linguistics, largely in the
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humanities) and the influence of poststructuralist thought, language in theory has in many ways steadily
become bleached of its quality to be anything but referential, or structural, or performative. Some attempts at
theorizing language have been labeled shallow “linguisticisms” that fail to recognize, or include,
the vast materialities that set up the conditions under which language might even begin to be
spoken. As Judith Butler has stated, “the point has never been that everything is discursively constructed’;
that point, when and where it is made, belongs to a kind of discursive monism or linguisticism that refuses the
constitutive force of exclusion, erasure, violent fore¬closure, abjection, and its disruptive return within the very
terms of discursive legitimacy.”74
Words more than signify; they affect and effect. Whether read or heard, they complexly pulse
through bodies (live or dead), rendering their effects in feeling and active response. They are a first level of
animation, one in which we deeply linguistic creatures attached to our own language are caught, but not the
last. Indeed, language is but one discourse among many in a cacophony of anti-, re-, and miscoordinations
between objects, things, and beings. It sometimes only sees itself; if it sees outside of itself, it sometimes
responds only with itself; and it sometimes must be left altogether, perishing in the nonlanguage the moment
demands. If we think only about insult and effect, injury and response, then language, for all its special
investments, cannot suffice as the final agent or medium by which any of these is actuated.
Ultimately, we don’t know what this debate will do or won’t do --- to presume we know that this
is meaningful or utterly meaningless is to assume a knowledge of the future we lack --- in fact,
fantasies of the future structure our political lives --- reject their disavowal of materiality
Shanks 15 [“Affect, Critique, and the Social Contract,” Torrey Shanks, Assistant Professor of Political Science
at the University at Albany, State University of New York, Theory & Event, Volume 18, Issue 1, 2015] //khirn
Cruel optimism highlights the workings of affect beyond familiar oppositions in the tradition of political theory, in which it is
assimilated to rational social interests and the individual’s private preferences or seen as detrimental to political and social order. In
contrast, cruel optimism enables us to consider how fantasies – say, fantasies of freedom as choice and unencumbered individualism
– structure and animate our collective political as well as personal lives, even as they disappoint and
discourage. Cruel optimism is particularly rich for the way that it recalls us to the importance of affect mediated by
shared fantasies within historical, social and political conditions. For Berlant, it is not fantasy that marks the failure of the
otherwise rational subject, but fantasy as a condition of political subjectivity that is important. This subjectivity
is not forged prior to or outside of social life, but instead its intersubjectivity is situated culturally, historically, and
politically.20 Reading political affect with Berlant cautions us against two depoliticizing tendencies : first, disavowing
the affective attachments of our social and political condition in favor of a notion of reason and/or interests
untouched by, or prior to, affect ; and second, disavowing the intersubjective and specifically social, cultural and political conditions
of affect in favor of affect as an unmediated experience. Berlant’s work in Cruel Optimism is primarily directed at seeking out the
psychic, affective and material sources of a recurring sense of political failure. The project is not only diagnostic, however. Cruel
optimism as a critical lens gestures forward, optimistically (which is not necessarily to say happily), that is, toward a future
that might be otherwise . The possibility of other futures begins in imagining “a potentialized present,” in
what is both an undoing and a remaking of worlds that “requires fantasy to motor programs of action, to distort the
present on behalf of what the present can become.”21 The closing call of Cruel Optimism is “to reinvent , from the scene of survival, new
idioms of the political, and of belonging itself, which requires debating what the baselines of survival
should be in the near future, which is, now, the future we are making.”22 Cruel optimism invites us to engage and work
inventively from within affective attachments and fantastic scenes for transformative effects. That does not entail a flight
from the “affectsphere,” but rather requires an affective reorientation in which relations and conditions (political, social,
and historical) come to be seen in new ways. Such a project is imaginative, aesthetic, and passionate. Because it requires the capacity to
communicate such imaginations and desires, it is necessarily rhetorical . More precisely, rhetoric as an imaginative
language includes the power to persuade as well as to move the passions, but its more capacious meaning includes the
ingenious placing of things into new relation and drawing new images into view. In this way, rhetoric not only strikes affectively ,
but its effects may also reorient our attention and our encounters with the world and with others. The essential work
of analogy and metaphor in transferring or borrowing meanings for new contexts and new uses, on this account, is far more powerful and integral for
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critique than persuasion alone.23 Contract
theory, capacious construed to include classical and contemporary modes and importantly critical
contract theory, gives us a robust tradition in which to consider how political idioms can be ingeniously reinvented
for critique that engages the affects.
Their alt does nothing but cede academia to the status quo --- debate doesn’t die when you vote
for the alt --- the question becomes, do we accept the control society’s domination or vote aff in
a recognition of the ongoing acts of resistance made thinkable by our initial affirmation
Thompson and Cook 14 [“The Eternal Return of Teaching in the Time of the Corporation,” Greg Thompson
and Ian Cook, Murdoch University, Edinburgh, Deleuze Studies 8.2 (2014): 280–298] //khirn
The school, like all disciplinary institutions and, indeed, society itself, is being overtaken by what Deleuze refers to as the corporation, but
what we refer to as corporate logics , or the logic of the corporation (in order to emphasise the noology in play). While Deleuze accepted
Foucault’s account of the organisation of disciplinary societies as a series of sites of enclosure through which individuals pass, he was convinced
that ‘we were leaving them [enclosed spaces of disciplinary society] behind’ (Deleuze 1995b: 178). For Deleuze, the central
expression in societies of control is the corporation: The family, the school, the army, the factory are no longer the distinct
analogical spaces that converge towards an owner-state or private power – but coded figures – deformable and
transformable – of a single corporation that now has only stockholders. (Deleuze 1995b: 181) The corporation’s axioms overlay (or
are superimposed on) the disciplinary traditions of the liberal democratic institution (Savat 2009). Continuousness is one example.
Disciplinary societies had termination points for each of their spaces (from family to school to factory – perhaps via barracks, prison or hospital – each of
which finishes with its subjects at some point). In a disciplinary society ‘one was always starting again’, whereas in control
societies ‘one is never finished with anything – the corporation, the educational system, the armed
services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation’ (Deleuze
1995b: 179). The rise and ubiquity of the corporation, understood as a noology or way of thinking, means that all other ‘institutions’
gradually adopt corporate logics. For, ‘just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to
replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination, [which is] . . . the surest way of delivering the school
over to the corporation’ (Deleuze 1995b: 179). When it came to the school system, Deleuze noted the emergence of ‘continuous forms
of control, and the effect on the school of perpetual training, the corresponding abandonment of all
university research, the introduction of the “corporation” at all levels of schooling’ (182). Schools do not disappear but are
reorganised or retooled and teaching is reconfigured within modulatory policy machines (Thompson and Cook 2014a),
digital surveillance technologies (Bogard 1996) and the increasingly performative cultures operating at all
levels of education (Ball 2003). Certain desires are encouraged; the desire for patterns that represent better
numbers as evidence of the quality, and therefore linearity and recordability, of events overlays the care for individuals. In
a control society ‘Individuals have become “dividuals,” and masses, samples, data, markets, or “banks” ’ (Deleuze 1995b: 180). Whereas in disciplinary
societies enclosures served to mould individuals according to specific requirements, ‘controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will
continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point’ (179). The computer as
database constantly evaluates the dividual’s new position like ‘floating rates of exchange, modulated according to a rate
established by a set of standard currencies’ (180). The continuous collection of data on teaching, such as through high-stakes testing , valueadded measures and continual re-accreditation, exemplify this dividuation. Teachers must understand and practise teaching in the context of
auditable outputs assembled anonymously and at a distance from the classroom. Care for students’ knowledge (curriculum) as some concern
for bodies close by, is represented, at best, through commodified measures or becomes meaningless and counterproductive (such as when schools focus attention only on the performance of those students who may improve test scores). It is not that teachers
have stopped caring for their students; it is that this does not register in databases measuring ‘quality’. Mercieca argues that these corporate
ethics of standardisation and performativity infusing schools ‘give the teacher “permission” to not get involved
in the lives of students’ (Mercieca 2012: 44). The challenge is to understand teaching in terms of forces, flows and the
ways teachers connect to children, despite the policy environment which aims to remove or distance them. In
other words, we need new theoretical weapons that enable the ‘teacher and students to “surpass” the
idea of themselves and the kind of life they live’ (44).
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Public spaces key – interventions like the 1ac release intense bursts of joyful creativity
Braidotti 96 [Rosi, Philosopher and Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University as well as
director of the Centre for the Humanities in Utrecht, “Cyberfeminism with a difference,” 1996,
http://www.let.uu.nl/womens_studies/rosi/cyberfem.htm] //khirn
Creative writing in the fictional mode is another important example of the politics of parody. Writing in
postmodernity is not only a process of constant translation, but also of successive adaptations to different
cultural realities. This point is raised strongly by the Vietnamese Californian writer and film-maker Trinh Minh Ha who, following
Deleuze's rereading of nietzschean dionysian forces, speaks of: 'writing in intensity'. This indicates that writing
marks an intransitive sort of becoming , i.e.: the kind of becoming that intensifies one's level of joyful
creativity and pleasure.
Laurie Anderson's performance-art is an interesting example of intransitive becoming through an effective parodic
style. Unsurpassed master in the 'as-if' mode of creative expression17, Laurie Anderson proposes a conceptual universe where situations and people are
always reversible. This allows Anderson to depict a high-tech kind of continuum between different levels of experience. In turn this makes for her
extraordinary talent to evoke complexity in a minimalist mode.
Interventions in public spaces form also an important element of this kind of artistic sensibility. For instance,
Barbara Krueger's large billboards are strategically set up in huge intersections at the centre of the metropolises of the Western world. They
announce 'We don't need another hero' with breath-taking force18. In these days of post-industrial decay of the urban space, artists like
Krueger manage to return to the artwork the monumental value that used to be its prerogative in the past, while also preserving its politically committed
nature. Similarly, Jenny Holzer's electronic panels flash right across the advertisement-infested skyline of our cities and relay very politicized and
consciousness-raising messages: 'Money creates taste', 'Proper ty created crime', 'Torture is barbaric', etc. etc.19 Holzer also uses the airport spaces,
especially the information panels of luggage carrousels, to transmit her staggering messages, such as: 'Lack of charisma can be fatal' and ironical ones,
such as; 'If you had behaved nicely, the communists wouldn't exist' or: 'What country should you adopt if you hate poor people?' .
Krueger and Holzer are perfect examples of postmodern, insightful and nonnostalgic appropriations of urban, public
spaces for creative and political purposes. In their hands, the city as an area of transit and passage becomes a text, a signifying space,
heavily marked by signs and boards indicating a multitude of possible directions, to which the artist adds her own, unexpected and disruptive one. The
guerilla girls have been doing this with supreme talent for years.
The public spaces as sites of creativity therefore highlight a paradox: they are both loaded with
signification and profoundly anonymous; they are spaces of de tached transition, but also venues of
inspiration, of visionary insight, of great release of creativity . Brian Eno's musical experiment with 'Music for airports'
makes the same point very strongly: it is a creative appropriation of the dead heart of the slightly hallucinating zones that are the public places.
Engaging in academia is key – we must come to our own understanding of these policing
policies
Goldstein 04 (Rebecca Goldstein, professor at Montclair State University, 2004, “Who Needs the
Government to Police Us When We Can Do It Ourselves? The New Panopticon in Teaching”)
The way I see it, we, as teachers, have a moral obligation to engage students in a discussion about these issues and
what they mean in relation to education, community, and social justice (Kincheloe & Steinberg, 1996). I believe education
is a process in which teachers engage students in critical reflection about concepts such as democracy and
justice to gain a deeper understanding that the things that we struggle over in the classroom did not evolve in a
vacuum. An educated person must be aware that such concepts are rooted in history, economics, sociocultural reality, and
identity. They are part of everyday life. It is in the spirit of equity and social justice that we engage in such a
conversation, because we refuse to concede the ideal. Likewise, Dewey (1916/1997) talked extensively about the need to educate
students so that they can actively engage in civic responsibilities on a very reflective level. However, he cautioned that teachers must not force their
political views on students. This is crucial to the issue at hand. In our quest to engage students in critical thought about diversity
and social justice as it relates to democracy and education, we must remember that we cannot simply replace
liberal or conservative rhetoric with a transformative one. That would merely inscribe a new hegemonic discourse onto our
classroom relationships. However, my dilemma arises when I think about the dangers of engaging in a practice that might imply that mere “tolerance” is
okay, or that any and all opinions are valid and true. I
have to find a balance and create a classroom in which students can
explore for themselves the policing aspects of this particular historical moment while making it clear
what is at stake should we fail to change things. How do we uncover how we police ourselves and heal ourselves so that we speak freely?
I hope that by reflecting on how we police ourselves we can reex- amine the indoctrination that silences us. In doing so, I hope that we think about the
fact that simply replacing the discourses of the new panopticon with other discourses without critical reflection is no better than what we are attempting
to challenge. Still, we must develop the strength to effect change and challenge NCLB in spite of the new panopticon.
We cannot police this crisis until we stop policing ourselves. It is also important that we do not blame ourselves. We need to be
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more informed about the small points of NCLB and use that knowledge to our advantage. As for me? I must not be afraid to present the data to my
students, engage them in critical reflection, and ask them, “Is this the educational future you want for our children?”
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2ac capitalism
The negative’s nostalgia for an anti-capitalism before identity politics and post structuralism is
left melancholy -- causes comparatively more political inaction
Deana 14 [Contemporary Political Theory, 4 November 2014, “Radicalism restored? Communism and the
end of left melancholia,” Jonathan, School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds] //khirn
The use of melancholia as an analytical category has its roots in Freudian psychoanalysis, and is to be distinguished from the related concept of
mourning. For Freud, the latter refers to the (non-pathological) process of working through an acknowledged ‘loss of a loved person, or of some
abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on’ (Freud, 2001, p. 243). Crucially, after a period of
mourning is completed ‘the ego becomes free and uninhibited again’ (2001, p. 243) but melancholia, by contrast, is ‘related to an object loss that is
withdrawn from consciousness’ (2001, p. 245), and as such it remains unacknowledged, enduring and intransigent. A number of authors have argued
that Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia can help capture something specific about the affects and dispositions of the academic left.
Wendy Brown’s 1999 essay ‘Resisting Left Melancholy’ remains the standard-bearer. Drawing on Freud, Walter Benjamin and Stuart Hall, Brown argues
that the left-wing melancholic is ‘attached more to a particular political analysis or ideal – even to the failure of that ideal – than to seizing possibilities
for radical change in the present’ (Brown, 1999, p. 20). Left-wing melancholy, says Brown, ‘signifies a certain narcissism with
regard to one’s past political attachments and identity that exceeds any contemporary investment in political
mobilization, alliance or transformation’ (1999, p. 20). But what precisely is it that has brought about this pervasive
left-wing melancholy? Brown’s answer is twofold. First, she argues that the discourse of the left-wing melancholic frequently
cites the turn to so-called ‘cultural politics’ or ‘identity politics’ – in which struggles around gender, race and sexuality are seen to
have displaced the traditional focus on class – as having caused a crisis and loss of focus (1999, p. 23). The second alleged
culprit – in the eyes of the left-wing melancholic – is the turn to ‘poststructuralism, discourse analysis, postmodernism,
trendy literary theory got up as political analysis’ (1999, p. 23). Brown argues that this pervasive structure of leftwing melancholy, despite being based on an ostensible commitment to radical transformation, in fact
engenders a conservative refusal to engage critically and constructively with the world. Instead, the left-wing
melancholic takes refuge in his or her attachments to a lost ideal of traditional left theory and politics .
The crucial point for Brown is that the problems affecting the academic left do not – as the left-wing melancholic would have it
– arise from the left’s abandonment of its radical principles. Rather, this melancholia arises from many leftists’
continued (often unacknowledged) attachments to a historically specific model of anti-capitalist revolutionary social
change, whose privileged status is now called into question. Left-wing melancholia, for Brown, is therefore bound
up with a generalised refusal or inability to respond to the challenges engendered by the changing nature
of capitalism , and the emergence of various forms of radical politics – feminism, queer politics, anti-racism and so on –
irreducible to historical materialist models of political transformation.3 Brown’s text is notable for its lack of proper names,
and as such melancholia is implicitly understood to refer to a collective, widely shared set of investments and
orientations. This aspect of left melancholia is tackled in some detail in J.K. Gibson-Graham’s (2006) analysis of the affects and emotions of the
academic left. One of Gibson-Graham’s central aims is to contest an entrenched mindset in which ‘the accepted or correct ‘political’ stance is one in
which the emotional and affective dispositions of paranoia, melancholia, and moralism intermingle and self-reinforce’ (2006, p. 4). Crucially, these
negative affects are not located in particular individuals, but are a ‘structure of feeling’ (2006, p. 1) ‘widely present
if not fully manifest in any person or pronouncement’ (2006, p. 6). Gibson-Graham suggests that these structures of feeling
reduce the academic left to political [stagnation], and also curtail our analytical capacities: left melancholia,
they argue, reflects and reinforces rather crude, totalising renditions of capitalism as a pervasive and largely
uncontestable socio-economic formation. Consequently, complexities within capitalism, and socio-economic practices that diverge from – or
indeed actively resist – capitalism, are downplayed, overlooked and cast to the margins, precluding the production of
more nuanced framings of contemporary economic practices and social formations. The thrust of Brown and GibsonGraham’s critical analyses of various aspects of left melancholia is not to suggest that those on the academic left should simply cheer up, or foster more
positive affective orientations for the sake of it. Rather, their point is that melancholia – conceived as a specific kind of psychic formation different
hampers the academic left’s ability to intervene politically, or to engage in
fruitful socio-political analysis. Consequently, Gibson-Graham and others make a persuasive argument that an urgent task for the
left is to explore how we might weaken the hold of melancholia.
to, say, disappointment or sadness –
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Assemblage theory allows us to deal with the profound materiality of our bodies: our traces of
DNA, the living bacteria in our bowels – refusing to privilege the frame of human embodiment
makes possible the politicization of matter, which is more important than their embodiment
arguments
Puar 12. Jasbir Puar, Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers University, “I Would Rather Be a
Cyborg than a Goddess”: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory, philoSOPHIA, 2012, available on
www.jasbirpuar.com, pg. 57
A performative understanding of discursive practices challenges the representationalist belief in
the power of words to represent preexisting things. Performativity, properly construed, is not an
invitation to turn everything (including material bodies) into words; on the contrary, performativity is precisely
a contestation of the excessive power granted to language to determine what is real. Hence, in
ironic contrast to the monism that takes language to be the stuff of reality, performativity is actually a
contestation of the unexamined habits of mind that grant language and other forms of representation more
power in determining our ontologies than they deserve (Barad 2003, 802).10
Barad’s is a posthumanist framing that questions the boundaries between human and nonhuman,
matter and discourse, and interrogates the practices through which these boundaries are constituted,
stabilized, and destabilized. Signification is only one element of many that give a substance both meaning
and capacity. In his book A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity, Manuel
DeLanda undertakes the radical move to “make language last” (DeLanda 2006, 16). In this postpoststructuralist framing, essentialism, which is usually posited as the opposite of social constructionism, is
now placed squarely within the realms of signification and language, what DeLanda and others have called
“linguistic essentialism.” Karen Barad writes: “Language has been granted too much power. The linguistic
turn, the semiotic turn, the interpretative turn, the cultural turn; it seems that at every turn lately every ‘thing’
is turned into language or some other form of cultural representation. . . . There is an important sense in which
the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter” (Barad 2003, 801). Categories—race,
gender, sexuality—are considered events, actions, and encounters between bodies, rather than simply
entities and attributes of subjects. Situated along a “vertical and horizontal axis,” assemblages come into
existence within processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. In A Thousand Plateaus,
Deleuze and Guattari problematize a model that produces a constant in order to establish its variations.
Instead, they argue, assemblages foreground no constants but rather “variation to variation” and
hence the event-ness of identity (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). DeLanda thus argues that race and
gender are situated as attributes only within a study of “the pattern of recurring links, as well as
the properties of those links” (DeLanda 2006, 56). Using the notion of assemblage (note the translation of
agencement as “arrangement” here), Guattari elaborates the limits of “molar” categories such as class:
Take the notion of class, or the class struggle. It implies that there are perfectly delimited sociological
objects: bourgeoisie, proletariat, aristocracy. . . . But these entities become hazy in the many
interzones, the intersections of the petite bourgeoisie, the aristocratic bourgeoisie, the aristocracy of the
proletariat, the lumpenproletariat, the nonguaranteed elite. . . . The result: an indeterminacy that
prevents the social field from being mapped out in a clear and distinct way, and which undermines
militant practice. Now the notion of arrangement can be useful here, because it shows that social entities
are not made up of bipolar oppositions. Complex arrangements place parameters like race, sex,
age, nationality, etc., into relief. Interactive crossings imply other kinds of logic than that of two-bytwo class oppositions. Importing this notion of arrangement to the social field isn’t just a gratuitous theoretical
subtlety. But it might help to configure the situation, to come up with cartographies capable of
identifying and eluding certain simplistic conceptions concerning class struggle. (Guattari 2009, 26)
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Permutation – Their criticism’s class focus trades off with more inclusive analysis of
oppression which is key to effective anti-capitalist resistance—their attempt to marginalize the
incrementalism of the permutation proves that they can never solve the multivalent nature of
structuralized violence constellated in overlapping systems of domination
Biewener 99 [Carole, Professor and Director of Gender/Cultural Studies at Simmons College, 1999, “A
Postmodern Encounter: Poststructuralist Feminism and the Decentering of Marxism,” Socialist Review,
Volume 27, Issue 1/2, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via ProQuest]
By developing such an overdeterminist class knowledge, "reformist" class struggles may then be recognized as
having transformative consequences in a gendered, racial, or other- than-class sense and "traditional" class
politics may be understood as also gendered and racialized politics. For instance, women's participation in capitalist waged
labor has, under some circumstances, enabled them to escape or challenge patriarchal familial relations, contributing to new notions of what it means to
be a "woman." Struggles over parental leave, the social provision of child care, and universal health insurance may enable divisions of labor that do not
constitute or reinforce patriarchal gender relations to the same extent. Extension of parental leave or family benefits to gay and lesbian couples may
reform our sexual and gendered identities in potentially new emancipatory ways. Campaigns for "comparable worth" have aimed to revision the
valuation of female-identified skills and occupations relative to male-identified ones, thereby destabilizing and subverting gendered notions of "worth"
and "value" in transformative ways. Struggles over deindustrialization in urban areas may serve to revitalize communities of color in ways that challenge
racist stereotypes. In all of these instances, what might be considered as reformist from a traditional Marxian class
standpoint may be understood as transformative and radical from a decentered class perspective that does not
privilege class exploitation nor subordinate relations of domination, oppression, and power that are constituted
by other-than-class aspects of social life. Thus, rather than eviscerating the potentialities of left political
activity, the decentering of class enables a multiplication and surplus of potentially transformative
left political practices. For, not only are we able to recognize the radical character of transforming other-thanclass aspects of social life, we are also able to theorize the class dimensions of struggles over these ostensibly
other-than-class issues. Marxists are thus able to highlight the class aspect of social life in new and compelling
ways. For instance, Marxists may contribute to struggles over reproductive rights by showing the links between feminist concerns about gender
subordination and the rights of women and Marxists' concerns with who does the work of childcare and under what conditions, or with who has access to
reproductive technology and medical services and for what reasons. Or, in organizing to stop the spread of HIV, Marxists may highlight the class aspects
of this crisis, emphasizing the links between joblessness and drug use or between the lack of economic development and prostitution, while also
recognizing how the racialized, gendered, and sexualized aspects of the spread of HIV reinforce and help (re)produce these class aspects. "The
challenge for Marxists, then, is to develop the ways in which the loss of class as a universal or hegemonic
project provides new areas of strength and vitality within Marxism, and opens new horizons for progressive
political action."37 In general, by making "class" in any Marxian sense visible, a project is constructed whose
political intentionality is, in part, to "reveal" and problematize exploitative class relations. This is a subversive
aspect of most Marxian traditions and this subversive aspect may be established in many different ways: via
projects that pose class in hegemonic and universalizing terms, but also via projects that understand class in a
local and contextual sense.38 Usually a particular ethical dimension is associated with this project whereby a Marxian class analysis is aimed at
creating an understanding in which one of the "rules" of the discourse is that class exploitation is "bad." Thus, in addition to theorizing or "revealing" the
character of class relations, there is also often the more-or-less explicit project of eradicating class exploitation and of instituting communal forms of
producing, appropriating, and distributing surplus labor. Yet, here we must confront a second major challenge presented by poststructuralist feminism,
that of the construction of agency and subjectivity. For, in
recognizing the contextuality and openness of subjectivity,
along with the partiality and discursive character of knowledge, we face the challenge of emptying "class" of
any a priori normative status in order to reconstruct a contextual postmodern class politics and/or ethics that
does not have recourse to an extradiscursive "standard" by which to justify its political intentionalities,
strategies, and projects.39 In and of itself we cannot, therefore, conclude that class exploitation is "bad." Rather, from a postmodern
materialist perspective, political, social, and ethical intentionalities and projects depend upon the particular
context within which we are situated. Therefore, we must consider and theorize the constituent aspects of class
processes in order to ground a class politics. This perspective, therefore, does not mean that it is impossible to
embrace a politics committed to furthering nonexploitative class processes or relations, but that such a politics
must be continually constructed and enabled, rather than presumed, imposed, or universalized.
The reduction of the antiglobalist movement to purely anti-capitalist ignores the significant
connections to feminism and contributions of women.
Eschle 5 (Catherine Eschle, BSc, MSc, DPhil British political scientist, feminist and academic Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government, University of Strathclyde Education: BSc,
University of Bristol; MSc, University of London; DPhil, University of Sussex Career: Catherine Eschle is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government at the University of Strathclyde and Director of
Undergraduate Studies: First Year. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersections of feminist theory, international relations theory, globalization, theories of social movements and social
change. She is currently working on an ESRC funded research project with Bice Maiguashca of the University of Exeter entitled ‘Making Feminist Sense of “the Anti-Globalisation Movement”’ and teaching
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classes in international relations and feminism. She is co-editor of International Feminist Journal of Politics. Publications include: Global Democracy, Social Movements and Feminism 2001, Critical
Theories, International Relations and ‘the Anti-Globalisation Movement’ (co-editor) 2005; several book chapters, book reviews and articles in professional journals. “’Skeleton Women’: Feminism and the
Antiglobalization Movement”, Signs, Vol. 30, No. 3, Spring 2005, p. 1741-1769. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/426793.) ZB
Productive discourses: (Anti)globalization, social struggle, and feminism Following Milliken’s second strategy
for discourse analysis, I now expand my focus to broad narratives of meaning that are generated through
practices and institutions, that naturalize certain ways of life and courses of action, and that feed off and into
“common sense” (Milliken 1999, 236). I begin by examining the following: general narratives of globalization
as driven by economic forces, discourses of social struggle in terms of violent confrontation with the state, and
representations of feminism as centering on identity and as universalizing and imperialist. The combined effect
of these discourses is to produce a “common sense” view, reflected in the texts above, of feminism and the
antiglobalization movement as separate, even incompatible, entities. Blurring Milliken’s neat tripartite
categorization, I immediately move to challenge such discourses by pointing to alternatives. This
“juxtapositional method” aims “not to establish the ‘right story’ but to render ambiguous predominant
interpretations . . . and to demonstrate the[ir] inherently political nature” (Milliken 1999, 243). Specifically, I
draw attention to discourses of globalization as having multiple dimensions, of social struggle as nonviolent,
and of feminism as focusing on intersecting inequalities and struggling for democracy and diversity in
movement organizing. Taken together, these discourses point to ways in which feminism and the
antiglobalization movement can be perceived as interconnected. The commonsense understanding of
globalization clearly places economic processes center stage. In particular, most analyses focus on the role of
corporations and international financial institutions such as the WTO, which push for a neoliberal agenda of
“free” trade, the reduction of state barriers to and intervention in trade processes, and the continuing
integration of domestic markets. Further, it can be argued that this understanding of globalization is, in many
instances, economistic, assuming a priori that economic processes are causal, even determining, of other social,
cultural, and political phenomena (Robertson and Khondker 1998; Eschle 2004a, 104-9). Indeed, an emphasis
on the determining impact of the global economy has become so widespread that it now dominates approaches
to globalization in academia, activist circles, and the media and is characteristic of both neoliberal advocacy of
globalization and critical opposition. In a highly significant move, many critics redefine globalization as the
latest stage of capitalism. According to Klein, “The critique of ‘capitalism’ just saw a comeback of Santana-like
proportions” (2002, 12). I would add that Marxist critiques of capitalism in particular are making a comeback.
While Gramscian modifications of Marxism dominate in the discipline of international relations (Rupert 2000;
Gill 2003), activist texts tend rather toward an ad hoc, strategic appropriation of elements of Marxism (Starr
2000) or a reductive, even structurally determinist version that depicts globalization as driven by changes in
the mode of production. This usually brings with it an attempt to reframe “antiglobalization” activism as
“anticapitalist,” that is, as a struggle against more fundamental economic structures (e.g., Callinicos 2003),
which functions to root the movement in class identity and interests. Some effort may be made to conceptualize
class-based resistance in an inclusive manner (Barker 2001, 332). However, alliances with groups that cannot
be defined primarily in terms of class location, or that are suspected of reformist accommodation with
capitalism, are likely to be hierarchical—if such groups are granted a role at all. Certainly, it becomes difficult to
imagine that gender might lie at the root of globalizing dynamics and that feminist mobilization is therefore
integral to reshaping them. Thus it is no accident that Sam Ashman’s account of resistances in India touches on
the Narmada dam protest without mentioning either that many of its leaders are women or that there is an
extensive tradition of women’s ecological and antistate activism in India, concluding instead by emphasizing
recent strikes that have “tied together opposition to neo-liberalism” (2001, 240M1; cf. Raj- gopal 2002). Or
that Mike Gonzales’s (2001) description of resistances in Latin America does not incorporate the extensive
mobilization of women’s groups in opposition to structural adjustment and militarized rule.
The two prevailing notions that feminism is a new movement, concerned with only identity, and
as a universalizing ideology, position it as surpassed by antiglobalization and a justification for
neoliberalism.
Eschle 5 (Catherine Eschle, BSc, MSc, DPhil British political scientist, feminist and academic Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government, University of Strathclyde Education: BSc,
University of Bristol; MSc, University of London; DPhil, University of Sussex Career: Catherine Eschle is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government at the University of Strathclyde and Director of
Undergraduate Studies: First Year. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersections of feminist theory, international relations theory, globalization, theories of social movements and social
change. She is currently working on an ESRC funded research project with Bice Maiguashca of the University of Exeter entitled ‘Making Feminist Sense of “the Anti-Globalisation Movement”’ and teaching
classes in international relations and feminism. She is co-editor of International Feminist Journal of Politics. Publications include: Global Democracy, Social Movements and Feminism 2001, Critical
Theories, International Relations and ‘the Anti-Globalisation Movement’ (co-editor) 2005; several book chapters, book reviews and articles in professional journals. “’Skeleton Women’: Feminism and the
Antiglobalization Movement”, Signs, Vol. 30, No. 3, Spring 2005, p. 1741-1769. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/426793.) ZB
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However, I now want to turn to discourses of feminism that represent it as unconcerned with, or complicit in,
globalized processes. At least two such discourses are relevant here. First, as evident in Klein’s No Logo (2001),
feminism can be represented as operating on the terrain of identity and culture. Klein focuses on feminist
campaigns for fairer representation of women in the media and academic curriculum, but feminist debates on
identity are more complex than that, including extensive struggles over the content of the category “women”
and its relation to feminist politics (e.g., Riley 1988; Parmar 1989). The notion that such debates are what
feminism is most centrally about has been given force by external commentary in academia. Notably, “new
social movement” theory tends to classify feminism with other “new” movements concerned with culture and
identity, in contrast to “older” movements concerned with material redistribution and access to state power
(e.g., Melucci 1989; cf. Habermas 1981). When combined with economistic discourses of (anti)globalization,
this positions feminism as unconcerned with, and surpassed by, the return to materialist movement politics
exemplified by the antiglobalization movement. A second relevant discourse presents feminism as a
universalizing ideology and movement. Feminists are characterized as making claims about women’s identity
and oppression that they allegedly believe are universally valid and as responding by promoting a global
movement of women, one that transcends national boundaries. This understanding of the feminist project was
widespread in liberal and radical feminism in the 1970s and 1980s, and the debates about identity described
above emerged partly in response to its limitations. It has been thoroughly critiqued within feminism,
particularly with regard to the notion that feminism thus constituted is somehow transcendental, “already
oppositional or outside global processes” (Basu et al. 2001a, 944). Feminist critics reveal this discourse to be an
imperial Western construct, exported throughout the world on the back of iniquitous colonial and globalization
processes and serving to mask geopolitical, economic, and racial hierarchies among women (Mohanty 1998). A
universalizing/imperial discourse of feminism still circulates today, as evident in its mobilization by British and
U.S. elites in the context of the war against Afghanistan (Brah 2002, 38M-1) and the tendency of hostile
nationalist and fundamentalist elites to conflate universalizing/ imperial feminism with feminism as a whole.
The effect is to position feminism as integral to globalization—as part of the problem rather than part of the
solution.
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2ac edelman/queer negativity
Edelman’s theory of reproductive futurism falls prey to a homonationalist understanding of
citizenship
Smith 10. Andrea Smith, feminist and American Indian activist, professor of media and cultural studies at the
University of California, Riverside, “Queer Studies and Native Studies,” GLQ 16:1, pg. 49, muse
As Jasbir Puar notes, this articulation of queerness as “freedom from norms” actually relies on a
genocidal logic of biopower that separates those who should live from those who must die.33 That is, for
the queer subject to live under Edelman’s analysis, it must be freed from genealogical, primitivist subjects who
are hopelessly tied to reproductive futures. This impulse is similar to Warner’s juxtaposition of a transgressive
queer subject with the racialized subject trapped within identity and ethnic organization. Puar terms this
tendency a “sexual exceptionalism” that mirrors U.S. exceptionalism, in which a white queer subject reinscribes
a U.S. homonormativity by positioning himself/herself in an imperialist relationship to those ethnic subjects
deemed unable to transgress. “Queerness has its own exceptionalist desires: exceptionalism is a founding
impulse. . . . ‘Freedom from norms’ resonates with liberal humanism’s authorization of the fully self- possessed
speaking subject, untethered by hegemony or false consciousness, enabled by the life/stylization offerings of
capitalism, rationally choosing modern individualism over the ensnaring bonds of family.”34 If we build on
Silva’s previously described analysis, we can see that the Native queer or the queer of color then becomes
situated at the “horizon of death” within a “no futures” queer theory: such individuals must free themselves
from their Native identity and com- munity to become fully self-determined subjects. They must forgo national
self- determination for individual self-determination; they cannot have both. Racialized subjects trapped
within primitive and pathological communities must give way to modern queer subjects. Puar’s analysis of
biopower suggests that modern white queer subjects can live only if racialized subjects trapped in primitive and
unenlightened cultures pass away. For instance, some LGBT organizations (as well as feminist organizations)
supported the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan because the bombing would supposedly free queer people from the
Taliban. Apparently, throw- ing bombs on people frees them. But of course, it was not actually queer people in
Afghanistan who were the real subject of liberation—rather, modern queer subjects in the United States could
live only if a sexually savage Afghanistan were eliminated. To quote Puar: “Queerness as automatically and
inherently transgressive enacts specific forms of disciplining and control, erecting celebratory queer liberal
subjects folded into life (queerness as subject) against the sexually patho- logical and defiant populations
targeted for death (queerness as population).”35 Meanwhile, as Puar, Silva, and Povinelli imply, the white
queer subject, despite its disavowals, is firmly rooted in a past, present, and future structured by the logics of
white supremacy — it is as much complicit in, as it is transgressive of, the status quo. Rather than disavow
traditions and futures, it may be more politically effica- cious to engage them critically.
The blanket assertion that the future is kid’s stuff assumes a conception of queerness that is
exclusively white and middle-class – it ignores that the future is not at the fingertips of queers
of colour or others excluded from politics. Only embracing the future can create a world where
these people can be included.
Muñoz prof/chair of performance studies @ NYU 2k9 (José Esteban, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer
Futurity)
The Hegelian narrative is enriched when we insert Frantz Fanon’s contribution to the very central philosophical thematic of self/other and the drama of
recognition. If we consider the vicissitudes of the fact of blackness, the radical contingency that is epidermalization, the narrative fills out further and the
tale of vulnerability is fleshed out. Recognition, across antagonisms within the social such as sex, race, and still other modalities of difference, is often
more than simply a tacit admission of vulnerability. Indeed, it is often a moment of being wounded.25 In this sense I offer The Toilet as a tale
of wounded recognition. It marks and narrativizes the frenzy of violence that characterizes our crossidentificatory recognition. The Toilet teaches us that the practice of recognition is a brutal choreography,
scored to the discordant sounds of desire and hate. With that stated, its semidisowned ending speaks to the sticky interface between
the interracial and the queer. The interracial and the queer coanimate each other, and that coanimation, which is not
only about homosexuality but about blackness and how the two touch across space and time, takes the form of
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not only the amalgamation of movements that rate a seizure but also the fragmented gesture that signals an
endurance/support, queerness’s being in, toward, and for futurity. Utopian hermeneutics like those invoked in
the project of queer futurity consider the forward-dawning significance of
the gesture. Thus, the play’s dramatic conclusion is not an end but, more nearly, an
+ Agambenian means without an end. Recognition of this order challenges theories of antirelationality that dominate
queer criticism, such as Edelman’s and the Leo Bersani of “Is the Rectum a Grave?” and, to a lesser degree, Homos.26 The act of
accepting no future is dependent on renouncing politics and various principles of hope that are, by
their very nature, relational. By finishing on a note not of reconciliation but of the refusal of total repudiation—
a gestural enduring/supporting—The Toilet shows us that relationality is not pretty, but the option of simply
opting out of it, or describing it as something that has never been available to us, is imaginable only if one can
frame queerness as a singular abstraction that can be subtracted and isolated from a larger social matrix.
In No Future Edelman takes on Cornel West’s referencing of futurity in an op-ed for the Boston Globe that he wrote with Sylvia
Ann Hewitt titled “A Parent’s Bill of Rights.”27 The title is disturbingly smug (as if biological parents of the middle class did not already have uncontested
rights to their children!), and the editorial is a neoliberal screed on behalf of the culture of the child. But Edelman’s critique never considers the topic of
race that is central to the actual editorial. West’s pro-children agenda aligns with his other concerns about the crises of African American youth.
Edelman’s critique of the editorial, with which for the most part I am deeply sympathetic, is flawed insofar as it decontextualizes West’s work from the
topic that has been so central to his critical interventions: blackness. In the same way all queers are not the stealth-universal-
white-gay- man invoked in queer antirelational formulations , all children are not the privileged white
babies to whom contemporary society caters. Again, there is for me a lot to like in this critique of
antireproductive futurism, but in Edelman’s theory it is enacted by the active disavowal of a crisis in
afrofuturism.28 Theories of queer temporality that fail to factor in the relational relevance of race or class
merely reproduce a crypto-universal white gay subject that is weirdly atemporal—which is to say a subject
whose time is a restricted and restricting hollowed-out present free of the need for the challenge of imagining a
futurity that exists beyond the self or the here and now.
The question of children hangs heavily when one considers Baraka’s present. On August 12, 2003, one of his daughters, Shani Baraka, and her female
lover, Rayshon Holmes, were killed by the estranged husband of Wanda Pasha, who is also one of Baraka’s daughters. The thirty-one- and thirty-year-old
women’s murders were preceded a few months earlier by another hate crime in Newark, the killing of fifteen-year-old Sakia Gunn. Gunn was a black
transgendered youth who traveled from Hoboken to
Greenwich Village and the Christopher Street piers to hang out with other young queers of color. Baraka and his wife, Amina, have in part dealt with the
tragic loss of their daughter by turning to activism. The violent fate of their child has alerted them to the systemic violence that faces queer people (and
especially young people) of color. The Barakas have both become ardent antiviolence activists speaking out directly on LGBT issues. Real violence has
ironically brought Baraka back to a queer world that he had renounced so many years ago. Through his tremendous loss he has decided to further
diversify his consistent commitment to activism and social justice to include what can only be understood as queer politics. In the world of The
Toilet there are no hate crimes, no lexicon that identifies homophobia per se, but there is the fact of an
aggression constantly on the verge of brutal actualization. The mimetic violence resonates across time and to
the scene of the loss that the author will endure decades later. This story from real life is not meant to serve as
the proof for my argument. Indeed, the play’s highly homoerotic violence is in crucial ways nothing like the
misogynist violence against women that befell the dramatist’s family or the transgenderphobic violence that
ended Gunn’s young life. I mention these tragedies because it makes one simple point. The future is only the stuff of some
kids . Racialized kids, queer kids, are not the sovereign princes of futurity. Although Edelman
does indicate that the future of the child as futurity is different from the future of actual
children, his framing nonetheless accepts and reproduces this monolithic figure of the child
that is indeed always already white. He all but ignores the point that other modes of particularity within
the social are constitutive of subjecthood beyond the kind of jouissance that refuses both narratological
meaning and what he understands as the fantasy of futurity. He anticipates and bristles against his future critics with a
precognitive paranoia in footnote 19 of his first chapter. He rightly predicts that some identitarian critics (I suppose that would be me in this instance,
despite my ambivalent relation to the concept of identity) would dismiss his polemic by saying it is determined by his middle-class white gay male
positionality. This attempt to inoculate himself from those who engage his polemic does not do the job. In the final analysis, white gay male cryptoidentity politics (the restaging of whiteness as universal norm via the imaginary negation of all other identities that position themselves as not white) is
beside the point. The deeper point is indeed “political,” as, but certainly not more, political than
Edelman’s argument. It is important not to hand over futurity to normative white reproductive
futurity. That dominant mode of futurity is indeed “winning;’ but that is all the more reason to
call on a utopian political imagination that will enable us to glimpse another time and place:
a “not-yet” where queer youths of color actually get to grow up. Utopian and willfully idealistic practices of
thought are in order if we are to resist the perils of heteronormative pragmatism and Anglo-normative
pessimism. Imagining a queer subject who is abstracted from the sensuous intersectionalities that mark our
experience is an ineffectual way out. Such an escape via singularity is a ticket whose price most cannot afford.
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The way to deal with the asymmetries and violent frenzies that mark the present is not to forget the future. The
here and now is simply not enough. Queerness should and could be about a desire for another way of being in
both the world and time, a desire that resists mandates to accept that which is not enough.
Through performances like the 1ac we can create futures within the present
Muñoz prof/chair of performance studies @ NYU 2k9 (José Esteban, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer
Futurity)
F UT U RI T Y CAN B E a problem. Heterosexual culture depends on a notion of the future: as the song goes,
“the children are our future:’ But that is not the case for different cultures of sexual dissidence. Rather than invest in a deferred future, the
queer citizen-subject labors to live in a present that is calibrated, through the protocols of state power, to sacrifice our liveness for what Lauren Berlant
has called the “dead citizenship” of heterosexuality.’ This dead citizenship is formatted, in part, through the sacrifice of the present for a fantasmatic
future. On oil dance floors, sites of public sex, various theatrical stages, music festivals, and arenas both
subterranean and aboveground, queers live, labor, and enact queer worlds in the present. But must the
future and the present exist in this rigid binary? Can the future stop being a fantasy of heterosexual
reproduction? In this chapter I argue for the disruption of this binarized logic and the enactment of what I call, following
C. L. R. James, a future in the present .2 To call for this notion of the future in the present is to summon a
refunctioned notion of utopia in the service of subaltern politics. Certain performances of queer citizenship
contain what I call an anticipatory illumination of a queer world, a sign of an actually existing queer reality, a
kernel of political possibility within a stultifying heterosexual present. I gesture to sites of embodied and
performed queer politics and describe them as outposts of actually existing queer worlds. The sites I consider
are sites of mass gatherings, performances that can be understood as defiantly public and glimpses into an
ensemble of social actors performing a queer world.
The real question is not whether negativity is good or bad – it’s what negativity is used for – the
neg just accepts negativity as the essential queer condition – the aff and perm reserve the
strategic use of negativity to cruise ahead to a queer future
Muñoz prof/chair of performance studies @ NYU 2k9 (José Esteban, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer
Futurity)
Failure and hopelessness seem strange topics for a book about utopia and hope. Yet I want to see the failure
and bad sentiments in Dynasty Handbag’s work as active political refusal. To make this point I turn to particular moment in philosopher
Paolo Virno’s A Grammar of the Multitudes, which speaks of the emotional situation of the post-Fordist moment as characterized by a certain mode of
ambivalence. This ambivalence leads to “bad sentiments:’ As Virno puts it, the emotional situation of the multitude today is that of these bad sentiments,
which include “opportunism, cynicism, social integration, inexhaustible recanting, cheerful resignation’8 Virno imagines the ways in which
the laborer may call on restructured opportunism and cynicism as a sort of escape or exit from late capitalism’s
mandate to work and be productive. Negative sentiments such as cynicism, opportunism, depression, and
bitchiness are often seen as solipsistic, individualistic, and anticommunal affective stances associated with an
emotional tonality of hopelessness. Yet these bad sentiments can signal the capacity to transcend
hopelessness. These sentiments associated with despondence contain the potentiality for new modes of
collectivity, belonging in difference and dissent. The worker can potentially redirect cynicism, which
may lead to a criticality that does collapse into a postFordist standard mode of alienation.
Virno, like other writers associated with the Italian proponents of Operaismo (workerism) and the Autonomia movement, makes an argument against
work itself. Operaistas understand that capitalism is a problem not simply because workers are exploited but also
because work has become the dominating condition of human life.9 Operaistas do not want to take over the
means of production; instead they plan on reducing it. What would it mean, on an emotional level, to make work not the defining
feature of our lives? How could such a procedure be carried out?
The strategy at the center of Operaismo is described as exodus—a strategy of refusal or defection. ‘This mode of
resistance as refusal or escape resonates with many patterns of minoritarian resistance to structures of social
command. Examples could include the trope of escapology that Daphne Brooks has recently described in her
book Bodies in Dissent’° or various acts of illegal border crossing. Real or symbolic “escapes” from chattel
slavery and xenophobic immigration laws are examples of a certain mode of exodus, which is political action
that does not automatically vector into a fixed counterdiscourse of resistance.
Cynicism, opportunism, and other bad sentiments can be responses to the current emotional situation, which
many of us interested in the project of radical politics understand as hopelessness. Virno’s reimagining of bad sentiments
helps us understand them as something the worker can use to escape. “Bad sentiments” can be critically redeployed and
function as refusals of social control mandates that become transformative behaviors.
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Dynasty Handbag’s queer failure is not an aesthetic failure but, instead, a political refusal. It is a going off
script, and the script in this instance is the mandate that makes queer and other minoritarian cultural
performers work not for themselves but for distorted cultural hierarchy.
Queerness may be a negation of status quo norms – however it can also be used to create new
norms outside of the present
Hammill assoc prof English @ SUNY buffalo 2k8 (Graham, “Stupid Pleasures” Volume 19, Number 1,
September 2008, Muse)
One of Snediker's most salient points (a point that deserves more attention than he gives it) is that queer isn't
best understood as deviation from social norms but rather as a kind of singularity t hat emerges within the Winnicottian
space of object relations. In this account, queer is no longer opposed to norms but becomes a moment of optimistic
affirmation through which new sets of norms can be created. Snediker develops his claims for singularity through chapters
on Crane and Dickinson. Chapter One of Queer Optimism focuses on the network of smiles in Crane's poetry, reading the figure of the smile not as a sign
of ironic suffering but as a singular affirmation of joy produced through its repetition. Snediker develops this thesis against the backdrop of Bersani's
writings on self-shattering, showing how the smile survives as a poetic artifact that endures beyond Crane's suicide. Like the object in object relations
that survives beyond the subject's attempt to destroy it, Crane's smiles are involved in a poetics that sustains "relationality" beyond all forms of antirelational thinking (77). Chapter Two reads the figure of the smile in Dickinson in order to show how her repeated emphasis on pain highlights the
surprising singularity of joy-surprising for Dickinson and, perhaps, for her readers as well. Instead of reading Dickinson's emphasis on pain as a queer
performance of masochism, Snediker reads the repetition of pain as Dickinson's attempt to isolate and understand the feeling of joy as a positive affect
that is, for Dickinson herself, only minimally understandable.
The other salient point that Snediker insists on is that this understanding of queer is best thought through a
poetic-and not a theatrical-notion of the person. In some ways, this is Queer Optimism's most powerful insight, one
that should stand as a serious challenge to queer studies. While a theatrical notion of the person has allowed
critics to show the constructedness and naturalization of norms, it also tends to assume a vision of politics and
culture that is fundamentally anti-aesthetic. The revelation that norms are artificial is revelatory only to the
extent that one assumes a worldview in which art and nature are firmly separated. But, as Snediker argues, a poetic
notion of the person assumes that the person is first and foremost a literary artifact (a point that could be significantly
elaborated through a reading of Barbara Johnson's account in Persons and Things of personification in lyric and law). In Chapters Three and Four,
Snediker focuses on Jack Spicer and Elizabeth Bishop, respectively. Especially for modern poets working against T.S. Eliot's poetics of impersonality, the
literary nature of the person becomes the basis for exploring the persistent singularity at the heart of the person through the serial nature of lyric poetry.
Although Spicer explicitly espouses Eliot's poetics of impersonality, Snediker shows that his serial poem Billy the Kid attaches singularity and repetition
to the problem of the poetic person. For Bishop, this repetition is related to love. Snediker reads submerged reference to Crane in her poetry as an
attempt to develop a logic of love based on "a particular form of incomplete or imperfect repetition" (191). In a sense, both Spicer and Bishop explore the
inner workings of the Winnicottian space of object relations and its implications for queer identity and love through a Deleuzian sense of repetition and
seriality.
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2ac irigaray
The 1ac’s imperceptible feminism calls the very forms which the feminine is overcoded to take
into question: recognition based politics always feed the hand of the systems of domination
which establish femininity—only we have a way out of binaristic understandings that violently
write identity onto bodies, coloring them as feminine
Žukauskaitė 13. Audronė Žukauskaitė, professor of philosophy at the Lithuanian Cultural Research Institute,
Politics of Imperceptibility: Philosophy, Post-Feminism and New Media Arts, Baltic Screen Media Review
(Baltic Screen Media Review), issue: 1 / 2013, pg. 67
The history of feminism has been very closely related to the history of philosophy: the politics of emancipation
strives to construct a universal subject that makes women equal to men; when this goal is achieved, it is
replaced by a need to conceptualize specific gender differences and to argue for a politics of gender identity.
However, when a certain identity is defined and recognized, it should be replaced by other forms which are
not foreseen or known at the present moment. In other words, once the politics of gender difference or identity
had been formulated and conceptualized, it became clear that it was the reverse of the phallocentric
ontology: masculine discourse was replaced by écriture féminine, the phallic One was replaced by “sex
which is not one” (in Luce Irigaray’s words), but the dualistic patterns of thinking behind this opposition
remained intact. The second wave feminism elevated the subjected part of the opposition into a dominant
position but failed to dismantle the power structure organizing this opposi- tion. Moreover, this structure of
power and domination created the eternal cause for feminist struggles and the plea for emancipation. As
Jami Weinstein argues, “most advocates of sexual difference as a fundamental ontology would theorize
sexual difference into perpetuity and thus establish a basis upon which feminism would always
exist” (Weinstein 2008: 25). Following this logic of gender identity or difference, our desire is caught up in
a resentment, a reactive and unrealizable thinking.
This is why such theorists as Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz argue for undoing gender identity and
striving to becoming-imperceptible. Once a feminine identity is conceptualized, it should be replaced
by another goal: as Grosz points out, “the future feminine must render itself obsolete or the object of
profound and even inhuman (or imperceptible) becomings rather than itself rest on the forms of
femininity as they have been represented and idealized in sexual indifference, or within patriarchy as it has
existed up to now” (Grosz 2005: 177). So instead of arguing for a politics of recognition and visibility, which is
the agenda of identity feminism, Grosz argues for the politics of imperceptibility: “Instead of a politics of
recognition, in which subjected groups and minorities strive for a validated and affirmed place in public
life, feminist politics should, I believe, now consider the affirmation of a politics of imperceptibility,
leaving its traces and effects everywhere but never being able to be identified with a person, a group, or
organization. It is not a politics of visibility, of recognition and of self-validation, but a process of selfmarking that constitutes oneself in the very model of that which oppresses and opposes the subject. The
imperceptible is that which the inhuman musters” (ibid.). Similarly Weinstein, interpreting Grosz, argues that
“the ultimate goal of human becoming is becoming imperceptible”, though being conscious that “feminists
would also be hesitant about, if not com- pletely antagonistic to, the idea that a fully successful feminist
strategy is to aim for its own eradication” (Weinstein 2008: 25).
This is not a decentering of the feminine; rather, becoming-woman is a necessary step towards
becoming-imperceptible and we’ll take the position that it always must be the very first step
Žukauskaitė 13. Audronė Žukauskaitė, professor of philosophy at the Lithuanian Cultural Research Institute,
Politics of Imperceptibility: Philosophy, Post-Feminism and New Media Arts, Baltic Screen Media Review
(Baltic Screen Media Review), issue: 1 / 2013, pg. 69
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Although Deleuze and Guattari
argue for different types of becoming, any becoming begins with and passes
through becoming-woman: “It is the key to all the other becomings” (Deleuze, Guattari 2004b: 306). This
means not imitating a woman
or becoming like a woman but “emitting particles that enter the
relation of movement and rest, or the zone of proximity, of
a microfemininity, in other words, that
produce in us a molecular woman” (Deleuze, Guattari 2004b: 304). In this sense Deleuze and Guattari
see a feminine identity, or what they call “a molar woman”, as an obstacle
to their project of
becoming. They point out that it is “indispensable for women to conduct a molar politics, with a view to
winning back their own organism, their own history, their own subjectivity... But it’s dangerous to confine
oneself to such a subject, which does not function without drying
up a spring or stopping a flow”
(Deleuze, Guattari 2004b: 304). That means that the process of becoming-woman should not imitate a
molar woman but has to create what Deleuze and Guattari call a “politics
of molecular woman”. Such a
politics withdraws from a specific feminine subjectivity and merges this subjectivity into impersonal, multiple,
molecular flow. By contrast, the attempt to recreate feminine identity would mean the return to the binary
molar forms and rigid segmentarity.
Only the becoming-imperceptible, becoming-molecular of feminity strategy can avoid
spectatorship and the reification of fixed gendered boundaries—obviously we are not saying
stop talking we are putting forth another way to RELATE to the ballot that does not constitute
itself on visual or narrative markers of molar identity and use the ballot to validate the selfevident truth of such abstractions
Žukauskaitė 13. Audronė Žukauskaitė, professor of philosophy at the Lithuanian Cultural Research Institute,
Politics of Imperceptibility: Philosophy, Post-Feminism and New Media Arts, Baltic Screen Media Review
(Baltic Screen Media Review), issue: 1 / 2013, pg. 75
This act of becoming-imperceptible establishes a new kind of visual regime based not on “organic” or “natural”
perception but on philosophical recollection and reflection. Deleuze makes several points in defining the
contrast between the organic and the crystalline regimes. The first point relates to description: the organic
regime describes the object as if it exists independently of the camera, whereas the crys- talline description
“stands for its object, replaces it, both creates and erases it (...) and constantly gives way to other descriptions
which contradict, displace, or modify the preceding ones. It is now the description itself which constitutes the
sole decom- posed and multiplied object” (Deleuze 2008: 122). The second point concerns the rela- tion
between the real and the imaginary: in the organic regime the real and the imagi- nary are recognizable and
distinguishable, whereas in the crystalline regime the two modes of existence form a circuit, “where the real
and the imaginary, the actual and the virtual, chase after each other, exchange their roles and become
indiscernible” (Deleuze 2008: 123). The third point con- cerns the narration and its relation to truth: the
organic regime creates a narration following a sensory-motor schemata. In this sense it is always a
truthful narration, even if it relates to fiction. By contrast, the crystalline description rejects the sensorymotor schemata and gives way to pure optical and sound situations (Deleuze 2008: 124). The narration
ceases to be truthful and becomes falsifying, in other words, it opens the “powers of the false”.
The “powers of the false” do not
mean pure appearance or even a lie here; the “powers of the false”
open the way to becoming, “which constitutes series or degrees, which crosses limits, carries out
metamorphoses, and develops along its whole path an act of legend, of story-telling. Beyond the true or the
false, becoming as power of the false” (Deleuze 2008: 264).
In this sense, we can see a close affinity between
the Deleuzian notion of becoming- imperceptible and the notion of the crystal- line image which appears in
Deleuze’s film theory: both notions are based on dura- tion, temporality and qualitative change. The crystalline
image does not represent the world but recreates this world through multiple, changing and virtual images.
Such a visual strategy suspends the spectator
in a regime of uncertainty because every image
becomes what probability physics calls a “bifurcation point”, where it is impos- sible to predict in advance
which direction the change will take. Rodowick compares Deleuzian film theory with that of Ilya Prigogine’s
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ideas, asserting that the bifurca- tion point can define an equal chance in the evolution of physical systems:
“Either the system disintegrates into chaos, or it makes an unforeseen and unpredictable leap to
a new, more
complex, and different order” (Rodowick 1997: 16).
To summarize, becoming-imperceptible means not an escape from visibility
or a drive toward
annihilation but a new conceptual strategy for new media arts: becoming-imperceptible opens the
potential of the unforeseen and the unpredictable and in this sense creates the conditions for social and
political change. Of course, some feminist thinkers and artists might have reservations about this strategy,
saying that becoming-imperceptible leads to abandoning the feminist struggles for recognition and visibility.
But the crucial thing here is to detach oneself from the old logic of molar stratification and move
toward the flux of molecular becoming that can engender bodily modifications, political changes and
artistic innovations. Deleuze was very conscious about this when he pointed out that “female authors, female
directors,
do not owe their importance to a militant feminism. What is more important is the way
they have produced innovations in this cinema of bodies, as if women had to conquer the source of their own
attitudes and the temporality which corresponds to them as individual or common gest” (Deleuze 2008: 189).
In this sense, the becoming- imperceptible can be seen as a practice of experimentation working on
several levels: first, it is an attempt to abandon the anthropomorphic forms and defined gender
identities and replace them with molecular transformations; second, it is an attempt
to abandon the
old forms of representation and open the space for the crystalline regime of virtual images, creating
and recreating the world. Even if such a politics of becoming-imperceptible does not belong to a safety
zone and is not necessarily a successful visual strategy, it can equally disintegrate into chaos or it can
make an unforeseen and unpredictable leap to a new social and political order.
Their criticism’s reliance on Lacanian psychoanalysis freezes subjectivity and prevents any
political transformation
Braidotti 2k [Rosi, Philosopher and Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University as well as
director of the Centre for the Humanities in Utrecht, Chapter 8, “Teratologies”, Deleuze and Feminism, ed. Ian
Buchanan and Claire Colebrook, Edinburgh University Press, 2000, p. 161-2] //khirn
Like Irigaray, Deleuze
is in fact a philosopher of radical immanence who takes temporality seriously. Both argue that we
need to think the deep, dense materiality of bodies-in-time, so as to dis-engage them from the liberal bourgeois
definition of the self. As utterly singular but collectively constituted enfleshed complexity, or embodied genealogy, the Deleuzean subject is
sustainable: that is, limited, while having firmly departed from any reference to the ‘natural’ order. Significantly, both Irigaray and Deleuze are
post-Lacanians, though in dissymetrical ways. However critical Irigaray has been of Lacan’s psychic essentialism and of
his rejection of any possibility of transformation of the structures of the unconscious and the positioning of Woman in it, she
remains faithful to the conceptual structure of Lacan’s reading of the unconscious. For instance, the symbolic
system remains Irigaray’s point of reference, although in her reading it is more porous to the influence of
historical changes and thus more affected by the workings of the imaginary. Irigaray’s radical feminism rests precisely on the
investment on the power of the feminine to redefine the symbolic. Deleuze goes much further in rejecting the Lacanian
conceptual scheme of the unconscious altogether. Dismissing the metaphysics of the self, Deleuze redefines the
unconscious as a productive, forward-propelling force of flows or intensities . This rests to a large degree on
Deleuze’s philosophy of time: his Bergsonian reading of a continuous present can be opposed to the
tyranny of the past in the psychoanalytic reading of memory, repetition or the process of
repression and retrieval of the repressed material. Deleuze’s ‘minoritarian’ definition of memory as a
nomadic or deterritorialising force runs against the established definitions of memory as a
centralised data bank of frozen information. As a vector of deterritorialisation, memory for Deleuze destabilises identity by
stringing together virtual possibilities. Re-membering in this mode requires careful lay-outs of empowering conditions
which allow for the actualisation to take place. Like a choreography of flows or intensities that require adequate framing in order to
compose into a form, memories require empathy and cohesion between the constitutive elements . It is
like a constant reshuffling that yearns for the moment of sustainable balance or expression, before they
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dissolve again and move on. And on it goes, never equal to itself, but close enough not to lose sight of the
structure altogether. As I have argued elsewhere (Braidotti 1994b), in the short term Deleuze’s radical reconceptualisation
erodes the foundations of a specific feminist epistemology and of a theory of feminine subjectivity insofar as it
rejects the masculine/feminine dichotomy altogether. In the longer run, however, the radically projective concept of
the intensive Deleuzean subject opens the door to possible configurations of a variety of subject-positions that
are postmetaphysics of gender, or beyond sexual difference.
The 1nc’s monocausal explanation undercuts the any of the alternative’s explanatory power –
its deployment will become firmly ensuared within the matrix of sexuality’s epistemological
imperialism
Butler 99 [Judith, Gender Trouble, edition published 1999, Routledge: New York, NY, p. 18-19]
Beauvoir and Irigaray clearly differ over the fundamental structures by¶ which gender asymmetry is reproduced; Beauvoir turns to the failed¶ reciprocity
of an asymmetrical dialectic, while Irigaray suggests that¶ the dialectic itself is the monologic elaboration of a masculinist signifying¶ economy.
Although Irigaray clearly broadens the scope of feminist¶ critique by exposing the epistemological, ontological, and logical¶
structures of a masculinist signifying economy, the
power of her analysis¶ is undercut precisely by its globalizing
reach. Is it possible to identify¶ a monolithic as well as a monologic masculinist economy that¶ traverses the
array of cultural and historical contexts in which sexual¶ difference takes place? Is the failure to
acknowledge the specific cultural¶ operations of gender oppression itself a kind of epistemological¶
imperialism , one which is not ameliorated by the simple elaboration of¶ cultural differences as “examples” of
the selfsame phallogocentrism?¶ The effort to include “Other” cultures as variegated amplifications of a¶ global
phallogocentrism constitutes an appropriative act that risks a¶ repetition of the self-aggrandizing gesture of
phallogocentrism, colonizing¶ under the sign of the same those differences that might otherwise¶ call that
totalizing concept into question.23¶ Feminist critique ought to explore the totalizing claims of a masculinist¶
signifying economy, but also remain self-critical with respect to¶ the totalizing gestures of feminism. The effort
to identify the enemy as¶ singular in form is a reverse-discourse that uncritically mimics the¶ strategy of
the oppressor instead of offering a different set of terms.¶ That the tactic can operate in feminist and antifeminist contexts alike¶
suggests that the colonizing gesture is not primarily or irreducibly masculinist .¶ It can operate to effect
other relations of racial, class, and heterosexist¶ subordination, to name but a few. And clearly, listing the¶ varieties
of oppression, as I began to do, assumes their discrete, sequential¶ coexistence along a horizontal axis that does
not describe their convergences¶ within the social field. A vertical model is similarly¶ insufficient; oppressions
cannot be summarily ranked, causally related,¶ distributed among planes of “originality” and “derivativeness.”24
Indeed,¶ the field of power structured in part by the imperializing gesture of ¶ dialectical appropriation
exceeds and encompasses the axis of sexual¶ difference, offering a mapping of intersecting differentials which cannot¶
be summarily hierarchized either within the terms of phallogocentrism¶ or any other candidate for the position of “primary condition of oppression.”¶
Rather than an exclusive tactic of masculinist signifying economies,¶ dialectical appropriation and suppression of the Other is one¶
tactic among many, deployed centrally but not exclusively in the service¶ of expanding and rationalizing the
masculinist domain.
The phallocentric economy Irigaray critiques is less stable and unitary than they assume—the
structuralist underpinnings of the 1ac prevent any positive notion of becoming.
Butler 99 [Judith, Gender Trouble, edition published 1999, Routledge: New York, NY, p. 37-43]
The feminist appropriation of sexual difference, whether written in opposition to the phallogocentrism of Lacan
(Irigaray) or as a critical reelaboration of Lacan, attempts to theorize the feminine, not as an expression of the metaphysics of
substance, but as the unrepresentable absence effected by (masculine) denial that grounds the signifying economy through
exclusion.The feminine as the repudiated/excluded within that system constitutes the possibility of a critique and disruption of that hegemonic
conceptual scheme.The works of Jacqueline Rose49 and Jane Gallop50 underscore in different ways the constructed status of sexual
difference, the inherent instability of that construction, and the dual consequentiality of a prohibition that at once institutes a
sexual identity and provides for the exposure of that construction’s tenuous ground. Although Wittig and other
materialist feminists within the French context would argue that sexual difference is an unthinking replication of a reified set of sexed polarities, these
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criticisms neglect the critical dimension of the unconscious which, as a site of repressed sexuality, reemerges
within the discourse of the subject as the very impossibility of its coherence . As Rose points out very clearly, the
construction of a coherent sexual identity along the disjunctive axis of the feminine/masculine is bound to
fail;51 the disruptions of this coherence through the inadvertent reemergence of the repressed reveal not only that “identity” is constructed, but that the
prohibition that constructs identity is inefficacious (the paternal law ought to be understood not as a deterministic
divine will, but as a perpetual bumbler, preparing the ground for the insurrections against
him). The differences between the materialist and Lacanian (and post- Lacanian) positions emerge in a normative
quarrel over whether there is a retrievable sexuality either “before” or “outside” the law in the mode of the unconscious
or “after” the law as a postgenital sexuality. Paradoxically, the normative trope of polymorphous perversity is understood to characterize both views of
alternative sexuality. There is no agreement, however, on the manner of delimiting that “law” or set of “laws.” The
psychoanalytic critique succeeds in giving an account of the construction of “the subject”—and perhaps also the illusion of substance—within the matrix
of normative gender relations. In her existential-materialist mode,Wittig presumes the subject, the person, to have a presocial and pregendered integrity.
On the other hand, “the paternal Law” in Lacan, as well as the monologic mastery of phallogocentrism in Irigaray,
bear the mark of a monotheistic singularity that is perhaps less unitary and culturally universal than the
guiding structuralist assumptions of the account presume .52 But the quarrel seems also to turn on the articulation of a
temporal trope of a subversive sexuality that flourishes prior to the imposition of a law, after its overthrow, or during its reign as a constant challenge to
its authority. Here it seems wise to reinvoke Foucault who, in claiming that sexuality and power are coextensive,
implicitly refutes the postulation of a subversive or emancipatory sexuality which could be free of the law . We can
press the argument further by pointing out that “the before” of the law and “the after” are discursively and performatively instituted modes of
temporality that are invoked within the terms of a normative framework which asserts that subversion, destabilization, or displacement requires a
sexuality that somehow escapes the hegemonic prohibitions on sex. For Foucault, those prohibitions are invariably and inadvertently
productive in the sense that “the subject” who is supposed to be founded and produced in and through those
prohibitions does not have access to a sexuality that is in some sense “outside,” “before,” or “after” power itself.
Power, rather than the law, encompasses both the juridical (prohibitive and regulatory) and the productive (inadvertently
generative) functions of differential relations. Hence, the sexuality that emerges within the matrix of power
relations is not a simple replication or copy of the law itself, a uniform repetition of a masculinist economy of identity. The
productions swerve from their original purposes and inadvertently mobilize possibilities of “subjects” that do
not merely exceed the bounds of cultural intelligibility, but effectively expand the boundaries of what is, in fact,
culturally intelligible. The feminist norm of a postgenital sexuality became the object of significant criticism from feminist theorists of sexuality,
some of whom have sought a specifically feminist and/or lesbian appropriation of Foucault. This utopian notion of a sexuality freed
from heterosexual constructs, a sexuality beyond “sex ,” failed to acknowledge the ways in which power relations
continue to construct sexuality for women even within the terms of a “liberated” heterosexuality or
lesbianism.53 The same criticism is waged against the notion of a specifically feminine sexual
pleasure that is radically differentiated from phallic sexuality . Irigaray’s occasional efforts to derive a
specific feminine sexuality from a specific female anatomy have been the focus of anti-essentialist arguments for some
time.54 The return to biology as the ground of a specific feminine sexuality or meaning seems to defeat the feminist premise that
biology is not destiny. But whether feminine sexuality is articulated here through a discourse of biology for
purely strategic reasons,55 or whether it is, in fact, a feminist return to biological essentialism, the characterization of
female sexuality as radically distinct from a phallic organization of sexuality remains problematic . Women who
fail either to recognize that sexuality as their own or understand their sexuality as partially constructed within the terms of
the phallic economy are potentially written off within the terms of that theory as “male-identified” or
“unenlightened .” Indeed, it is often unclear within Irigaray’s text whether sexuality is culturally constructed, or
whether it is only culturally constructed within the terms of the phallus. In other words, is specifically feminine
pleasure “outside” of culture as its prehistory or as its utopian future? If so, of what use is such a notion for
negotiating the contemporary struggles of sexuality within the terms of its construction? The pro-sexuality movement
within feminist theory and practice has effectively argued that sexuality is always constructed within the terms of discourse and
power, where power is partially understood in terms of heterosexual and phallic cultural conventions.The emergence
of a sexuality constructed (not determined) in these terms within lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual contexts is, therefore, not a sign of a masculine
identification in some reductive sense. It is not the failed project of criticizing phallogocentrism or heterosexual hegemony, as if a political critique could
effectively undo the cultural construction of the feminist critic’s sexuality. If sexuality is culturally constructed within existing power
relations, then the postulation of a normative sexuality that is “before,” “outside,” or “beyond” power is a cultural
impossibility and a politically impracticable dream , one that postpones the concrete and contemporary task of rethinking
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subversive possibilities for sexuality and identity within the terms of power itself.
This critical task presumes, of course, that to operate
within the matrix of power is not the same as to replicate uncritically relations of domination. It offers the possibility
of a repetition of the law which is not its consolidation, but its displacement. In the place of a “male-identified” sexuality in which “male” serves as the
cause and irreducible meaning of that sexuality, we might develop a notion of sexuality constructed in terms of phallic
relations of power that replay and redistribute the possibilities of that phallicism precisely through the
subversive operation of “identifications” that are, within the power field of sexuality, inevitable. If “identifications,”
following Jacqueline Rose, can be exposed as phantasmatic, then it must be possible to enact an identification that displays its phantasmatic structure. If
there is no radical repudiation of a culturally constructed sexuality, what is left is the question of how to acknowledge and “do” the construction one is
invariably in.
Are there forms of repetition that do not constitute a simple imitation , reproduction, and, hence,
consolidation of the law (the anachronistic notion of “male identification” that ought to be discarded from a feminist vocabulary)? What
possibilities of gender configurations exist among the various emergent and occasionally convergent matrices of
cultural intelligibility that govern gendered life? Within the terms of feminist sexual theory, it is clear that the presence of power dynamics within
sexuality is in no sense the same as the simple consolidation or augmentation of a heterosexist or phallogocentric power regime. The “presence” of
so-called heterosexual conventions within homosexual contexts as well as the proliferation of specifically gay
discourses of sexual difference, as in the case of “butch” and “femme” as historical identities of sexual style, cannot be explained as
chimerical representations of originally heterosexual identities. And neither can they be understood as the pernicious insistence of heterosexist
constructs within gay sexuality and identity. The repetition of heterosexual constructs within sexual cultures both gay and
straight may well be the inevitable site of the denaturalization and mobilization of gender categories. The
replication of heterosexual constructs in non-heterosexual frames brings into relief the utterly constructed
status of the so-called heterosexual original.Thus, gay is to straight not as copy is to original, but, rather, as copy
is to copy . The parodic repetition of “the original,” discussed in the final sections of chapter 3 of this text, reveals the original to be nothing other
than a parody of the idea of the natural and the original.56 Even if heterosexist constructs circulate as the available sites of
power/discourse from which to do gender at all, the question remains: What possibilities of recirculation exist?
Which possibilities of doing gender repeat and displace through hyperbole, dissonance, internal confusion, and proliferation the
very constructs by which they are mobilized? Consider not only that the ambiguities and incoherences
within and among heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual practices are suppressed and redescribed within the reified framework of the
disjunctive and asymmetrical binary of masculine/feminine, but that these cultural configurations of gender confusion operate as sites for intervention,
exposure, and displacement of these reifications. In other words, the “unity” of gender is the effect of a regulatory practice
that seeks to render gender identity uniform through a compulsory heterosexuality. The force of this practice is, through
an exclusionary apparatus of production, to restrict the relative meanings of “heterosexuality,” “homosexuality,” and “bisexuality” as well as the
subversive sites of their convergence and resignification. That the power regimes of heterosexism and phallogocentrism seek
to
augment themselves through a constant repetition of their logic, their metaphysic, and their naturalized
ontologies does not imply that repetition itself ought to be stopped—as if it could be. If repetition is bound to persist as the
mechanism of the cultural reproduction of identities, then the crucial question emerges: What kind of
subversive repetition might call into question the regulatory practice of identity itself? If there is no recourse to a “person,” a
“sex,” or a “sexuality” that escapes the matrix of power and discursive relations that effectively produce and regulate the intelligibility of
those concepts for us, what constitutes the possibility of effective inversion, subversion, or displacement within the terms
of a constructed identity? What possibilities exist by virtue of the constructed character of sex and gender? Whereas Foucault is ambiguous about the
precise character of the “regulatory practices” that produce the category of sex, and Wittig appears to invest the full responsibility of the construction to
sexual reproduction and its instrument, compulsory heterosexuality, yet other discourses converge to produce this categorial
fiction for reasons not always clear or consistent with one another. The power relations that infuse the biological
sciences are not easily reduced , and the medicolegal alliance emerging in nineteenth-century Europe has spawned
categorial fictions that could not be anticipated in advance. The very complexity of the discursive map
that constructs gender appears to hold out the promise of an inadvertent and generative convergence of these
discursive and regulatory structures. If the regulatory fictions of sex and gender are themselves multiply contested
sites of meaning, then the very multiplicity of their construction holds out the possibility of a disruption of
their univocal posturing.
Compulsory heterosexuality materializes into massive violence
Gómez, Political theorist on Hate Crimes, 2005 (María Mercedes, On Prejudice, Violence, and Democracy, labuena-vida.info, ongoing project from 2005 until 2008, pp. 2-3)
Albert Memmi wrote that difference
is a value that we assign to real or imaginary characteristics in order to establish ¶
social hierarchies. Those who have the power to assign value commonly position themselves at the dominant
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end of¶ this hierarchy, using their power for “scaling bodies” 2 and in the process, establishing the relational
character of every¶ identity. Differences have been historically established in various ways: through the reification
of biological¶ characteristics as in the case of race and gender; the stigmatization of particular cultural practices and
expressions¶ such as in the case of religion, ethnicity, and sexuality; or through the development of economic
formations and class¶ differentiation. Biological, cultural and economic differences often overlap and reciprocally shape each other. One
of¶ the central challenges of contemporary democratic societies is how best to recognize and include such
differences¶ without reproducing hierarchies of inequality.¶ Dissenting Sexualities¶ Deconstruction and queer theories, as well as
research on sexual behavior, have shown that a binary categorization of¶ differences is inadequate and insufficient to
contain the fluidity of our desires and our identifications. It is not only that¶ for some people biological
sex, gender roles, sexual desire and practices do not correspond, but that they do not¶ coincide for anyone.
Our sexuality and our self is undetermined and contingent. But the perception of this generates¶ extreme
anxiety because it not only discloses the unsubstantiated condition of sexual binaries, but puts them at stake.¶ It
also puts at risk the privileges that derive from such binaries.¶ Many of us dwell in societies of “compulsory
heterosexuality ” 3 and act and live as if the binary construction of the world¶ were natural and universal instead of
contingent and socially constructed. Compulsory heterosexuality operates¶ through political, sexual, social and economic
practices that stigmatize and make targets of violence that which is¶ perceived as feminine and sexualities, which
do not conform to the heterosexual norm. Such a norm assumes male¶ and female bodies invested with masculine and feminine roles, desiring the
opposite sex and acting accordingly.¶ Despite the cultural and legal reforms that dissenting sexualities have achieved in the past decades --especially gay¶
men and lesbians and, in a lesser degree transgender people-- they are still submitted to second class citizenship and¶ to
extraordinary State and non-state violence in many societies.¶ People who embody difference are marked in two
ways. The first way is premised on the assumption that one cannot¶ become “the other” because the borders between the norm and
those outside the norm are rigid. Race and gender, for¶ instance, have been historically conceived, in social, cultural and
legal settings, as essential, visible, and largely¶ immutable physical attributes.4 In contrast, the second way seeks to exteriorize
difference when the “other” threatens to¶ become one of “us” or part of the norm. Prejudice against dissenting
sexualities is paradigmatic of border anxiety¶ because unlike other seemingly essential, visible and immutable
differences, sexual orientation has often been seen as¶ invisible and mutable. 5 In this case, the assumed
permeability of the borders of difference –between the norm and¶ deviance or dissent-- is related to violence in
a specific way.
Irigaray re-instates the belief that the other can be stably identified and known.
Winnubst 06. Shannon Winnubst, professor of Women’s and gender studies at Ohio State University,
Queering Freedom, pg. 104
Two fundamental and related moves haunt and limit Irigaray’s efforts to resist the marginalizing
erasure of the feminine and its subsequent ethics of mastery, control, and sameness. Both have been
diagnosed as emerging in Irigaray’s later texts: the increasing idealization of the heterosexual couple
and the increasing move toward idealization itself. The emergent heterosexism is most often dated from
the 1996 publication of I Love to You, where she locates the heterosexual couple as the fundamental unit of
sociality.44 As Deutscher develops with great subtlety, Irigaray falls short of her own textual aims and
strategies here, reassert[s]ing a kind of essentialism that reads the heterosocial/heterosexual as the
privileged site of (potential) difference and, oppositionally, the homosocial/homosexual as the
privileged site of selfsameness. Drawing on Derrida’s texts on friendship and narcissism, Deutscher
compellingly argues that Irigaray “reinstates the belief that the other can be stably identified and
known” (2002, 138), a belief that situates sexual difference as something that has already occurred, rather
than some- thing yet to be imagined and created. As Deutscher writes succinctly, “once she affirms sexual
difference as the privileged site of difference, . . . she returns to an identification of difference
that we might wish to see left more in suspense” (2002, 137).
Deutscher proceeds to suggest that perhaps we can “deemphasize the exaggeratedly heterosexual imagery in
Irigaray’s recent work” (2002, 139) if we read it as an intentional response to historical conditions, which do in
fact privilege heterosexuality as the social relation par excellence.46 But I argue that Irigaray’s increased
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heteronormativity is actually connected to her increased move away from historicized conditions
and toward transcendent idealized states—those states in which cultures of phallicized whiteness
thrive. And, more damningly, I also argue that we can see this movement already in her 1980 lecture, “Belief
Itself,” and its meditation on angels.
As indicated in my prior reading, the figures of angels in this text echo Aristotelian notions of place almost
perfectly: vessels that carry messages across vertical thresholds, particularly the threshold of thresholds
between God and man. Despite Irigaray’s pleas to the contrary, these figures read all too easily as always
already inscribed in predetermined, predictable tasks designated by the power of powers, God. They traverse
the fields of the eternal and the historical, the transcendent and the material; but they ultimately find their
meaning in the first elements of these pairs, the transcendent space of the heavenly messages they convey.
Irigaray ultimately places them in this transcendent space in her idealizing of them as a figure to
mime (not to mimic) in our attempts to imagine sexual difference. As Cynthia Willett writes, “She
presents her angels as though they were untouched by the struggles of the material world” (2001, 152).
These characteristics become clearer through the stark contrasts with the figures of self-touching, half-open
lips and mucus that clings to all surfaces from “This Sex Which Is Not One” and “When Our Lips Speak
Together.” As I developed above, these figures blur all boundaries, opening us toward possibilities of sociality
irreducible to delimited bodies and the ethics of mastery, control, and self-sameness that ensues. Aristotelian
notions of place, and the logic of the limit that they enact, have little purchase here. Written three years earlier
than the lecture on angels, these texts also notably flirt with homoeroticism.47 But in so doing, they
also flirt with a doubled essentialism: lesbianism as the ideal of egalitarian relations and its
precondition, women as inherently egalitarian. The homosocial/homosexual is the perfect site of
egalitarianism in these texts because it is already read as the site of sameness-dressed-as-equality.
The evidence of this is her conflation of women’s auto-eroticism and homosexuality: to love oneself
is already to love the same, and to love the same is the act of homosexuality. There is no queer
pleasure here, despite the tantalizing descriptions of the auto-eroticism of female morphologies. The move
toward angels and away from these half- open, self-touching wet lips is perhaps less radical than we might have
thought at first.
Cynthia Willett argues that Irigaray’s heterosexism comes explicitly at the expense of all other forms of
difference—racial, national, religious, and, of utmost concern to Willett’s project, class (2001, 150–51).
When Irigaray fixes on heterosexuality as the site of difference, she reinscribes sexual difference as the
only horizon of difference that matters. Amplifying that reading, I argue that Irigaray’s heteronormative
perspective enacts the oppositional logic that, despite all her aims and intentions, she cannot
escape. The move toward angels and away from half-open, self-touching, wet lips is not thereby accidental or
a radical break. And the increasingly explicit heterosexism of her recent work is just that—increasingly
explicit. It is not, however, a radical departure from her conception of difference—namely, as demarcated and
oppositional.
To say that the figure of angels enacts an Aristotelian sense of place in a way that the earlier figures of lips and
mucus disrupt it is to say that the figure of angels enacts the logic of the limit. These vessels-as-angels are
delimitable, albeit bizarrely so. One last index of this delimited state brings the question of Irigaray’s ‘place’
fully into view: the angels reside in an ahistorical place. Both ontologically and textually, these angels do not
exist in historical time for Irigaray: ontologically, we can only glimpse them and hear their message at “the
moment when they pass by” and “at the limits of known spatiality” (1993a, 42), a fleeting moment that escapes
our spatio-temporal existence; textually, they function in Irigaray’s lecture as an ideal to be sought but never
caught, existing in a space that transcends the text’s own abilities to articulate it. Irigaray only points toward
the kinds of effects the angels can have, should we learn to hear and see them. The angels never enter historical
time. And this seems to be why Irigaray finds them so powerful.48
So, what is the connection between her heteronormativity and this idealization of ahistorical beings?
I suggest that they function dialectically, mutually grounding one another: the heterosexual poses as
the ahistorical site of difference and the power of the transcendent ahistorical articulates itself in the ideal of
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heterosexuality. Each compounds the other to allow a subtle logic of the limit to reinstall itself in the very
spaces of Irigaray’s texts where she seems most ready to unhinge it: heterosexuality functions through the
careful, oppositional demarcation of difference; and one must delimit the ahistorical clearly from the historical
in order to idealize a transcendent, ahistorical state. The increasingly explicit heterosexism diagnosed in
Irigaray’s recent texts (post-1996) is thereby a perpetuation of this prior move toward figures that are
both more contained and less historicized. The vessels-as-angels reinstall the logic of containment, which in
turn grounds the logic of opposition that is at the heart of phallocentrism: bodies must be contained if they
are to be legible to an oppositional , dyadic logic. And the idealized, ahistorical ontology of these vesselsas-angels compounds the idealization of that oppositional logic. The apparently increased idealization of
heterosexuality in Irigaray’s texts is thereby only a further expression of a dynamic already at work in
her texts, the very dynamic that reinscribes the problems of the oppositional, dyadic, phallicized
logic of difference, particularly when idealized. Heterosexuality emerges not as something radically new in
Irigaray’s texts, but as the most forceful expression of the logic of difference as that which is delimited. And,
despite her idealization of angels as beings to mime, it seems her texts are finally historicized, placing her in
the very place that the logics of phallicized whiteness attempt to place all of us: the endless desire for
that idealized heterosexuality.
All of this results in an increasing cannibalism of differences, where differences (racial, class,
religious, national) must mirror the perfectly delimited opposition of heterosexuality. When Butler
warns that “every oppositional discourse will produce its outside” (1993, 52), we must read this
founding gesture toward ahistorical heterosexism in Irigaray’s text as it excludes historicized differences
that do not function according to the logic of delimitation. The radically limitless, as a performative force
that might invite an uncontained reimagining of spatiality and embodiment, does not surface in Irigaray’s
texts.
Or what Bataille might call “the formless.” And we might call “queer pleasures.”
Alt fails – asserting that there is any ontological primacy with regards to femininity reinforces
static understandings of subjectivity that lock in women as the others of men
Grace 2k [Victoria, Canterbury sociology professor, Baudrillard's Challenge: A Feminist Reading, p. 50-3]
//khirn
Another example of Irigaray taking a resolutely critical stance is a quotation frequently
cited by Grosz in her discussion of Irigaray’s work
issue is not one of elaborating a new theory of which women would be the subject or the
object, but of jamming the theoretical machinery itself, of suspending its pretension to the production of a truth and of a meaning
that are excessively univocal. (Irigaray 1977, trans. 1985: 78) When this critical observation is placed alongside another
statement by Grosz – that Irigaray’s aim (amongst others) is ‘the recategorisation of women and femininity so
that they are now capable of being autonomously defined according to women’s and not men’s interests’ (Grosz
1989: 105) – we have to question how the autonomous definition of women with their clearly defined interests is compatible
(1989): In other words, the
with a theory in which women would be neither the subject nor the object. Grosz cannot be criticised for misrepresenting and distorting Irigaray through
the use of her own terminology. Irigaray herself refers repeatedly to the need for women’s ‘autonomy’, in
contradistinction to valorising her (‘woman’) being ‘neither one nor two’, and ‘resisting adequate definition’ (1977,
trans. 1985: 26). In Speculum, the notion of ‘interests’ appears to underpin her critique: ‘We will continue to waver indecisively before this dilemma
unless we interpret the interest, and the interests, involved here. Who or what profits by the credits invested in the effectiveness of such a system of
metaphor . . . ?’ (1974, trans. 1985: 270). To assert the importance of the ontological specificity of ‘woman’, of ‘women’s
sexuality’, as Irigaray frequently does, must be to assume an essence. Concerns about essentialism in relation to
Irigaray’s work have typically focused on her morphological allusions; concerns about biological essentialism which have been
countered by the claim that she is utilising these allusions metaphorically and hence strategically, or that she is writing in accordance with a particular,
French form of rhetoric (Spivak 1989). More fundamentally, some critics have raised concerns about the inevitable essentialism implicit in the recourse
to ‘woman’ or the ‘feminine’ in Irigaray’s work (for example, Moi 1985). I want to raise a similar concern: to assert the ontological necessity
of a positive presence, albeit in the context of a critique of the ‘otherness of sameness’, albeit plural instead of singular,
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apparently changing instead of fixed, involves the assumption of an essence. An essentialist ontology posits a ‘core’ that persists,
where Being has a thingness quality to it, and has recourse to a unique origin, and a myth of its end. It prevails. ‘Woman’s sexuality’, ‘woman’s desire’, has a truth and an
origin: one would have to dig down very deep indeed to discover beneath the traces of this civilisation, of this history, the vestiges of a more archaic civilisation that might give
some clue to woman’s sexuality. That extremely ancient civilisation would undoubtedly have a different alphabet, a different language . . . Woman’s desire would not be
expected to speak the same language as man’s; woman’s desire has doubtless been submerged by the logic that has dominated the West since the time of the Greeks. (Irigaray
1977, trans. 1985: 25) It is buried, but its truth persists; an intact core that cannot be eradicated but can be overlaid, submerged. In This Sex Which is Not One, Irigaray
suggests, with ironic understatement, that Freud, in his descriptions of feminine sexuality, ‘overlook[s] the fact that the female sex might possibly have its own “specificity”’ (p.
69). The notion
of ‘specificity’ is used repeatedly in relation to female sex, women, the feminine, in Irigaray’s
work and conveys a sense of that which can be defined in its own right, on its own terms, without reference to anything
else; defined autonomously. Such specifically identifiable ‘things’ require an origin, which is consistent with Irigaray’s concern with the importance of the
maternal origin, and indeed the denial of the debt to the maternal origin. Irigaray is explicit in her wish: she ‘want[s] to secure a place for
the feminine within sexual difference’ (1977, trans. 1985: 159). A place. Her writing is replete with references to ‘woman’s desire’, ‘woman’s
path’, ‘woman’s pleasure’, ‘woman’s body’. Irigaray states that the feminine has never been defined except as the inverse of the masculine, and that it is
not a matter of woman ‘installing herself within this lack’ (p. 159) and certainly not of ‘reversing the economy of sameness by turning the feminine into
the standard for “sexual difference”’, but rather it is ‘a matter of trying to practice [sic] that difference’ (p. 159). The notion of ‘practice’ here gives a sense
of process, action, a plea for that which is conceptualised as gestural rather than ontologically installed within a binary logic. Within Irigaray’s discourse,
however, we repeatedly come back to the female ‘subject’ which, no matter how much she tries to distance this
new subject from the subject/ object, identity/ difference dichotomy, still rests on its essentialist premise with its
essentialist origin while it continues to be articulated as a non-reversible positivity. This recourse to the notion
of ‘identity’ becomes increasingly evident in her later writings. For example, in Sexes and Genealogies (1987, trans. 1993), Irigaray
has numerous references to women’s ‘sexual identity’. In ‘Body against body: in relation to the mother’ from that volume, statements like the following
appear: ‘hold on to our identity’ (p. 19); ‘to discover our identity’ (p. 19); ‘to do so is to sever women from the roots of their identity and their subjectivity’
(p. 20); ‘much more in harmony with what women are, with their sexual identity’ (p. 20); ‘and be hallowed in her identity as a woman’ (p. 21).7 Grosz’s
representation of Irigaray’s work certainly reflects this trend. According to Grosz (1989) Irigaray’s project is ‘both to undo the phallocentric constriction
of women as men’s others and to create a means by which women’s specificity may figure in discourse in autonomous terms’ (Grosz 1989: 109). Grosz
does not comment on what I am arguing is an implicit tension in the aims expressed here. Women are the others of men, at least in part,
because of the specificity and autonomy granted the signifier ‘man’; quite simply, if women have this too (which is
precisely what I want to go on to argue is happening in the contemporary hyperreal context), there is no ‘undoing’ of the phallocentric
construction. This tension remains unresolved and, as we have seen, is increasingly articulated in terms of the importance of women’s positivity. For
example, Grosz refers to Irigaray’s project of ‘reconceiving the female body as a positivity rather than a lack’ (Grosz 1989: 110). Braidotti (1991) firmly
embraces Irigaray’s work in such terms.
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2ac heidegger
Their criticism is totalizing and engenders sad affects incapable of breaching metaphysical
binaries --- the cyborg is inevitable, it’s just a question of who can best appropriate it and
influence political futures
Trantan 7 [Kieran, Senior Lecture in Law and Technology at Griffin University, “Sovereignty, Heidegger,
Haraway,” February 13, 2007, Law and Technological Theory, collaborative academic blog,
http://techtheory.blogspot.com/2007/02/sovereignty-heidegger-haraway.html]
Heidegger’s writings on technology should be considered from within his wider concerns with the
impoverishment of ontology, and the need for a revitalized ontology to structure critical questions about modern existence. For Heidegger the
Western metaphysical tradition forgot the question of Being. That is, the ontological task of thinking about being an entity disclosed to its own existence
had been passed over in favor of “pragmatic” abstractions. Technology is important to Heidegger, not because of its monstrous violence, but because in
its holding sway the forgetting of Being is absolute. Heidegger’s account of technology, or in his terms, the essence of technology is fourfold.
First, that technology is not machines, but a fundamental way of revealing the world as is. It reveals the world as standing reserved, as items stockpiles
ready-at-hand to be used. Second, to be human means to be “thrown” into the world and our fate is to come to a dwelling in this finite totality. Third, that
our “thrown-ness” means that Being is responsible to become aware of the world, to be open to its “truth.” Fourth, in saying that technology is a way of
revealing, technology becomes located deeply and fundamentally in what it means to be human and to engage in the world.
This gives an ontological frame to law as technology. The ascendance of technology in Being means that law itself is seen as an object, in standingreserved, ready to be deployed.
Heidegger’s account of technology is total and depressing . Technology is the mode of Being in the
modern West, and in that mode of Being all existence, including law and humans, are conceived as objects in
the stockpile to the exclusion of more “original,” “truthful” and authentic ways of Being-in the world. Heidegger
influence on technology studies can be seen in the metaphysical and existential orientation of many of the seminal writers. Indeed, Marcuse, Ellul and
more recently Borgmann and Fukuyama have grounded their critiques of technology on the basis that it is polluting the very being of humanity.
There is a tragic aura surrounding this tradition . The totality of technology means that it is difficult to
theorize strategies for overcoming. This can be seen in the juridical-political account of law as technology that revealed the need for some
external value to limit law. Yet acceptance of Heidegger’s thesis means that there is very little left in humanity
external to technology on which to ground non-technical values.
For Heidegger the “saving power” lay with technology’s ancient sibling, art. He thought that art remained authentically open to the world as is, not
imposing stockpiled order on it. His turning to art has not been without its critics. Benjamin saw that art was also about techniques and imposing order
on the world Benjamin can be seen as pointing towards an alternative direction from Heidegger and a metaphysical orientation. In technology studies
this post-Heideggerian strand can be identified in Donna Haraway.
Haraway rejects metaphysical approaches to thinking about technology . Her appropriation of
science fiction’s cyborg is without tragedy or romance. The cyborg is a materialist account of what it means to
be human at the particular moment when technology has undermined the past certainties of existence.
Haraway, notwithstanding these radical differences does basically articulate Heideggerian starting points ; that
humans are thrown into the world and must make sense of it and that for contemporary beings that making sense of
occurs where technology has imposed itself over the very way that the world is revealed. Haraway argues for an
approach to the study of technology that does not seek metaphysical totalities , and does not tries to save
humanity from technology. The cyborg image declares that such an enterprise, if not fundamentally flawed,
lacks meaning in the modern West . To live in the modern West means to be thoroughly technological and
the task should be to come to terms with the messy “informatics of domination.” It is this task , I will argue in my next
and final post, that should inform law and technology.
In summary, LTSS embodied law as technology. Legal theory shows that to hold law as technology is to see law tied to sovereignty, violence and death.
Heidegger shows that law as technology discloses the totality of technology for Western Being. This could
lead to depressing destinations ; however, I suggest that post-Heideggerian technology writers like Haraway offer
an alternative basis for the study of law and technology .
And, their alternative alone destroys value to life, alienates humans from nature, and forgets
Being
Latour 2 – Professor, Paris Institute of Political Studies (Bruno, Environmentalism, ed Direk, p 303)
Who has forgotten Being? No one, no one ever has, otherwise Nature would be truly available as a pure 'stock'.
Look around you: scientific objects are circulating simultaneously as subjects objects and discourse. Networks are full of Being. As for
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machines, they are laden with subjects and collectives. How
could a being lose its difference, its incompleteness, its mark, its trace of
Being? This is never in anyone's power; otherwise we should have to imagine that we have truly been
modern, we should be taken in by the upper half of the modern Constitution. Has someone, however, actually forgotten Being? Yes:
anyone who really thinks that Being has really been forgotten. As Levi-Strauss says, 'the barbarian is first and foremost the man
who believe in barbarism.' (Levi-Strauss, [1952] 1987. p. 12). Those who have failed to undertake empirical studies of sciences,
technologies, law, politics, economics, religion or fiction have lost the traces of Being that are distributed
everywhere among beings. If, scorning empiricism, you opt out of the exact sciences, then the human sciences, then traditional
philosophy, then the sciences of language, and you hunker down in your forest -- then you will indeed feel a tragic loss. But
what is missing is you yourself, not the world! Heidegger's epigones have converted that glaring weakness into a
strength. 'We don't know anything empirical, but that doesn't matter, since your world is empty of Being. We are keeping the little flame
of Being safe from everything, and you, who have all the rest, have nothing.' On the contrary: we have everything,
since we have Being, and beings, and we have never lost track of the difference between Being and beings. We are
carrying out the impossible project undertaken by Heidegger, who believed what the modern Constitution said about itself
without understanding that what is at issue there is only half of a larger mechanism which has never abandoned the old anthropological matrix. No
one can forget Being, since there has never been a modern world , or, by the same token, metaphysics. We
have always remained pre-Socratic, pre-Cartesian, pre-Kantian, pre-Nietzschean. No radical revolution can separate us
from these pasts, so there is no need for reactionary counter-revolutions to lead us back to what has
never been abandoned. Yes, Heraclitus is a surer guide than Heidegger: 'Einai gar kai entautha theous.'
The aff catalyzes the same poetic rethinking while avoiding Latour’s criticism of Heidegger’s
ontological difference
Rae 14 [Gavin, American University at Cairo, “The Philosophical Roots of Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Imagery:
Descartes and Heidegger Through Latour, Derrida, and Agamben,” Human Studies, December 2014, Volume
37, Issue 4, pp 505-528] //khirn
From this, we see that Haraway’s project aims to rethink what it is to be ‘human’ and ‘dog’ by thinking each through their entanglement. As Don
Handelman recognizes, Haraway undertakes “a meta-inquiry, asking about how to ask about the dogginess of dog, of dogs in their different breeds and
mixtures in relation to human beings” (2007: 256). Put differently, Haraway is attempting to identify the ‘essence’ or ‘dogginess’
of dogs (i.e., what makes a dog a dog and not, for example, a cat), by thinking this ‘essence’ through the dog–human relation.
If this is what Haraway is doing, and it seems a good way to think about it, then despite her Latourianinspired critique of Heidegger’s ontological difference, it shares a direct connection to Heidegger’s
thinking because, as we have seen, his thinking also aims to identify the being of entities, in this case, the being of dogs, which,
put more concretely, seeks to answer the question: what is it to say that something is a dog, which, in turn, depends on a prior question: what makes a
dog a dog or, put differently, what is the ‘dogginess’ (read being) of dog? In other words, if we accept Handelman’s description, we see that Haraway’s
attempt to understand the dogginess of dogs mirrors Heidegger’s privileging of being in that she asks about
what it is to be a dog and so echoes Heidegger in recognizing that to understand an entity (dog) requires an inquiry into
the being (dogginess) of that entity (dog). While Haraway’s Latourian connection means that she rejects the need to explicitly ask about the ‘dogginess,’
or being, of the dog to understand the dog, instead claiming that we simply have to examine the empirical relations inherent to an actual concrete dog to
understand it, by claiming that the dog is, in its essence, relational, Haraway is actually implicitly asking about the ‘dogginess’ of the dog, which brings
her thinking back to the question of the being of dog and from there to Heidegger’s thinking. Of course, Haraway would most probably argue that she is
doing something else, but, as we saw with Latour, Heidegger’s rejoinder would be that any questioning of empirical entities depends on, and so is always
brought back to, a questioning of the ‘essence’ or being of those entities. To focus on empirical observation alone is to think from certain assumptions
about the essence or being of the thing, such as the notion that entities are ontologically relational, that empirical observation discloses what the being
truly is, that a mediating aspect exists that allows entities to be simultaneously entwined and individuated, while also assuming certain understandings
of space and time that allow entities to become through one another. By showing that Haraway’s thinking assumes a certain
ontological understanding and is inspired by a long philosophical history which she overlooks to privilege the
method(s) of empirical social science, we not only show her intimate companionship to Heidegger, but also
open a space to better explore how to become with her thinking
The figure of the cyborg is key to political resistance --- their alt lapses into sadness and
inactivity
Stone 6 [Lynda, Professor of Philosophy of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
“From Technologization to Totalization in Education Research: US Graduate Training, Methodology, and
Critique,” Journal of Philosophy of Education Volume 40, Issue 4, pages 527–545, November 2006] //khirn
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From within a particular viewpoint of feminist techno-science studies, Haraway
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offers the trope of the ‘cyborg’, what amounts
through implicit critique to a new ‘unity’ . It is a non-unity-unity, the term borrowed from cybernetics researchers Manfred Clynes
and Nathan Kline, who in 1960 posited the need for an ‘enhanced man—a cyb(ernectic) org(anism)—who could survive in extraterrestial environments’
in space (Haraway, 2000b/2004d, p. 204). ‘[In
our] time, a mythic time’… Haraway explains, ‘ we are all chimeras , theorized
hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs’ (Haraway, 1991, p. 150). Taken principally from science fiction but
realized actually in such arenas as medicine and the military, cyborgs are ‘creatures’ who are both animal/man and machine living in worlds of
ambiguous social relations. For Haraway, ‘[the] cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality,
the two joined centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation’ (ibid.). They are both figurative
and literal, with ‘a physicality that is undeniable and deeply historically specific’ (Haraway, 2000a/2004c, p. 323). Central
to the concept of the cyborg is ‘blurring’; Haraway names three kinds of blurring: between animal and human, animalhuman and machine, and physical and non-physical, kinds that are already existing and not, visible and not. Pertinently, she asserts
that ‘late twentieth century machines … have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing
and externally designed …. [Continuing, ironically our] machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert’ (Haraway, 1991, p. 152).
Significantly, to pose the trope of the cyborg makes science itself political—not just something which may have
political impact. Haraway's cyborg signifies a new relationship between science and technology and persons . It
is emphatically not that man has conquered machines, or that machines have conquered him as in Huxley's vision, nor that humankind has formed a
The cyborg is ‘new’ science . Haraway explains, ‘ Science is practice and
culture …. There is no core, only layers …. Everything is supported, but there is no final foundation’ (Haraway, 2000b/2004d, p.
synthesis with nature as was Adams' desire.
201; see also Haraway, 1992/2004a). As practice, science is both materially ‘solid’ and discursively ‘liquid’, incorporating aspects of culture that are at
once historical, technical and political. For her science is about physicality with material effects; it is about culturally constructed
meaning; it is about a particular historical moment, specific technologies, and the doing of politics. What results
is scientific practice that is
always ambiguous and changing and ‘might be otherwise’ (Haraway, 2000a/2004c, p. 326), and, significantly, in a culture
that also might be different. Acknowledging the always-ambiguous ‘nature’ of science has two results. The first
is an altered form of its own operation. In this regard, Haraway has something additional to offer, in a revised
form of ‘objectivity’. In a paper from the late 1980s, she posits ‘situated knowledges’, in which ‘only partial perspective … [not a transcendent now
archaic unity] promises objective vision’ (Haraway, 1988/1999, p. 177). The joining together of many partial perspectives, in webs
of connections and shared conversations, produces a new form of scientific objectivity, one of practice not
abstract ideal. The second is an altered phenomenon that recognizes its own political character. The cyborg itself is ‘an act of
resistance’ (Haraway, 2000a/2004c, p. 321), a tool (a technology!) and a symbol that intervention is always
possible , but not, in today's complex world, something simple. CONCLUSION The thesis of this paper has been that US graduate study in
education research entails a standardized over-emphasis on methodology. Such way of training technologizes method as both scientific process and
specific techniques. The overall danger is that what results is a narrow view of research that limits possibilities for educational change and reform. The
chapter closes with a continued use of insights from the theorists from Part II. Heidegger, Ellul, Adams, Huxley and Haraway all recognize the potential
for totalization from science and technology, and their writings help dramatize and make vivid that potential, negatively and positively. They help us,
concerned both with education research training and beyond, to see what we may otherwise fail to notice. Taken chronologically across the 20th century,
their insights into the relationships between science, technology and persons are as follows. Adams hopes for a positive totalization, the unification of a
changing culture, and is nearly paralyzed in his historical ‘discovery’ that one is not possible. Huxley describes the ultimate negative totalization and
fictionally in humanistic terms ‘sees no way out’. Significantly, in his 1946 Forward he suggests another way of life for Savage. It is one in which ‘[science]
and technology would be used as though … they had been made for man’, not (at present and still more so in the Brave New World) as though man were
to be adapted and enslaved to them (Huxley, 1946, p. ix, parenthesis in original). The contributions of Heidegger and Ellul, both from the 1950s,
explore technology as a basic human and societal presence, a pervasive phenomenon that has advanced nearly to the point of totality. In
Ellul's closing comment on the future, he points to possible negative ‘solutions’ from within technology itself. Ironically, he suggests the possibility by the
year 2000 of ‘a golden age’ of control and standardization, that is ‘a future Huxley never dreamed of’ (Ellul, 1954/1964, p. 433), as if yet further totalizing
were possible. Heidegger's conclusion about the essence of technology contrasts with that of Ellul; his hope for
positive intervention in technological domination in some ways prefigures Haraway's positive politics . Both
require some concluding attention. First, the ‘enframing’ of technology that Heidegger writes of—the box that we find it hard to think
outside of, as we might put it in today's terms— does not wholly deprive us of the capacity for questioning . Through
questioning and ‘listening’ is revealed a ‘free space’ in which there is potential for danger and for a saving power. Danger comes in
misconstruing the unconcealed as essence, that is God, Nature or Man; this is another sign of the ordering of technology. A saving power
comes from understanding that ‘enframing’ is also potentially ‘the granting that lets man endure … [so] that he may be the one who … is used for the
safekeeping of the essence of truth’ (p. 338). For Heidegger this is done through ‘thinking’, reflection through art that points to ‘the bringing forth of the
Haraway's ‘freedom’
is a form of politics . She recognizes the potential power of language for positive change. Borrowing from the
Russian formalist of the early century, Mikhail Bakhtin, her own ‘technology’ is topos, a rhetorical site. She creates such a space with the
technological trope of the cyborg, pointing to a general ‘contingency, thickness, inequality,
incommensurability, and a dynamism of cultural systems of reference through which people enroll each other
true into the beautiful’ (p. 339). Here results the ‘free relationship’ to technology that this paper sketches as an ideal.
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in their realities’ (Haraway, 1997/2004b, p. 241). The cyborg's own blurred ‘identity’ undermines established
categories of 20th century meaning; it shifts the relationship of nature, science, technology, and persons. It speaks
to a cultural politics of intervention, of ‘altering’ a potential technological totalization.
Perm – do both – net benefits:
1) Heidegger and Deleuze’s understanding of becoming are mutually transformative – they
foreclose potential animacies
Bolman 13 [Brad, two-time should-be NDT finalist, “On Heidegger, Deleuze, and Becoming,” November 12,
2013, http://www.malapropped.com/leak/academia/on-heidegger-deleuze-and-becoming]
Here, then, we have started to establish the futurity of daily existence. In other words, that being is always becoming.
Thus, Heidegger writes, “Dasein is constantly ‘more’ than it factually is” because we are all more than the list of attributes
that describe us: that someone is a six-foot tall firefighter with brown hair who likes wearing Asics does not even begin to exhaust his being. And
yet “Dasein is never more than it factically is…. Yet as Being-possible, moreover, Dasein is never anything less,”[xii] which echoes, almost perfectly,
Deleuze’s suggestion that “there is no being beyond becoming.” Here we are returned to the difference between factuality and facticality: for something to
be factual is for it to be an ontic fact (height, weight, color, etc.); for it to be factical is for it to describe an ontological structure (being-possible,
thrownness, etc.). We are “existentially that which, in [our] potentiality-for-Being, [we are] not yet.”[xiii] So, yes, to describe the firefighter
with the former list of attributes is to reference him, and it might even be enough for his mother to realize you
are talking about him, but to know what it really means for this firefighter to be himself is to understand that
he is always his “not yet,” his possibility. Thus, Heidegger says, “Only because the Being of the “there” receives its Constitution through
understanding and through the character of understanding as projection, only because it is what it becomes… can it say to itself ‘Become what you are’,
and say this with understanding.”[xiv] Being = becoming: we are always thrown into becoming who we are.
Heidegger’s understanding of being relies on a notion of being that is inevitably both future-oriented and
constantly self-transforming . It is also not a change of the person that one could plan or legislate into
existence: you cannot truly force yourself to become who you are (and this is where the concept of authenticity emerges, but
which we do not have space to engage with in this paper). Heidegger’s being is a becoming , and in many ways it parallels the way that
Gilles Deleuze will much later deploy the concept of becoming to describe being. Thus, when Deleuze distinguishes between virtuality
and actuality, on one hand, and possibility and reality, on the other, and places “becoming” on the side of virtuality
(which at first sight seems different from Heidegger’s way of theorizing becoming which embraces the terminology of possibility), I think he is
actually very close to Heidegger’s formulation . For Deleuze, the possible is “that which does not exist
but might,” whereas the virtual is real “but has a wholely different character from that which we consciously
experience” (the actual).[xv] Yet this is precisely Heidegger’s articulation of the structuring role of projection in
understanding: if Being-possible defines Dasein, this does not imply that the various possibilities that Dasein
projects into exist on some transcendental level and then come into existence from some other “where”. Instead,
they are possibilities “in-the-world,” and those all pertain to the “full disclosedness of Being-in-the-world.”[xvi]
Thus, Heidegger says, when we “become (or alternatively, [do] not become)” something or other, this does not mean that
“the other [possibility] is… laid aside.”[xvii]Instead, “this diversion of the understanding,” precisely like
Deleuze’s becoming , “is an existential modification of projection as a whole.”[xviii] These shifts, these changes of
who we are, of what we become also become shifts in how we will become in the future.
This consideration of the centrality of becoming not only helps to unite two very important, but different, thinkers
across time – and an aspect of their similarity that I think has gone relatively ignored – but the theorization of being as becoming is crucial to any
project of understanding what it means to exist in such a way that being is given a real and “authentic” freedom. What both Deleuze and
Heidegger share is an insistence upon the ability of the subject to radically alter its current conditions
in ways that are radically unpredictable , radically transformative, but, importantly, always there .
2) Do both – we at once act actively and passively --- that opens a paradox that solves the
alternative
McWhorter, 92 – Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Northeast Missouri State University
(Ladelle, Heidegger and the Earth, ed. by Ladelle McWhorter)//JRC—no change
Heidegger's work is a call to reflect, to think in some way other than calculatively, technologically,
pragmatically. Once we begin to move with and into Heidegger's call and begin to see our trying to seize control
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and solve problems as itself a problematic approach, if we still believe that thinking's only real purpose is to
function as a prelude to action, we who attempt to think will twist within the agonizing grip of paradox, feeling
nothing but frustration, unable to conceive of ourselves as anything but paralyzed. However, as so many peoples before us have known, paradox IS
not only a trap; it is also a scattering point and passageway. Paradox invites examination of its own constitution
(hence of the patterns of thinking within which it occurs) and thereby breaks a way of thinking open, revealing the
configurations of power that propel it and hold it on track. And thus it makes possible the dissipation of that
power and the deflection of thinking into new paths and new possibilities.
3) Not mutually exclusive – meditative thinking is needed alongside calculative thought
Housman and Flynn 11 – (Benjamin H. and Thomas R., April 14, “Cooling Down Global Warming: Revisiting Sartre and Heidegger on this
Modern Day Challenge” The ‘Step Back’ as a ‘Step Towards’ Confronting Global) Jacome
Having said that, though, Heidegger never explicitly states how this mode of dwelling described as a releasement toward things will allow us to say both
yes and no to technology—how it will guide us towards finding the hidden meaning in technology. Furthermore, while the scientist, scholar, and teacher
come to identify that releasement lies beyond the distinction between activity and passivity, the challenge still persists in identifying what
such a non-willing would practically look like in society. Since we are neither passive nor active, does this mean
we are simply living aimlessly, without any purpose, solely in the moment but reflective nonetheless in that
moment, waiting for a “turning” of being to occur in society? Heidegger’s message does not to encourage us to
become dormant, lazy individuals who simply meditate upon everything in such a way that we lose any sense of action in our
own lives. Heidegger says calculative thinking is needed along with meditative thinking in its own right.
Practically, then, releasement signals a thoughtful way of living in the world that steps back from the ‘ontic’, everyday hustle-bustle and finds meaning in
what presences around us through careful consideration and a non-doing that lets being be.
And, the alt fails and relies on a false distinction – nature has been a resource far before the
rise of modern tech
Riis 11—Carlsberg Research Fellow and Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Science Studies at Roskilde
University, Ph.D. from Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg (Søren, 8 February 2011, “Towards the origin of
modern technology: reconfiguring Martin Heidegger’s thinking,” RBatra)
** Gestell (or sometimes Ge-stell) is a German word used by twentieth century German philosopher Martin
Heidegger to describe what lies behind or beneath modern technology.[1]
Moreover, Heidegger maintains: ‘‘Readiness-to-hand is the way in which entities as they are ‘in themselves’ are defined ontologico-categorially.’’47
According to Heidegger’s fundamental phenomenology, which he unfolds in detail in Being and Time and reaffirms a decisive part of in ‘‘The Question
Concerning Technology,’’ nature is ‘‘primally’’ revealed in its ‘‘usability’’ and ‘‘serviceability-for-;’’ that is to say, ‘‘nature’’ is a
resource long before the actual rise of modern and ancient technology, namely simultaneously with the
very origin of human beings. That something is primordially revealed in its ‘‘usability’’ and ‘‘serviceability-for-’’ does not imply that it is
actually used or serves accordingly, but that it is revealed as standing ready to be utilized in the corresponding context. As such, it is revealed as
‘‘standing-reserve.’’ This, for example, also corresponds to the empirical fact that prehistoric humans settled close to woods and rivers. In these
areas they always had stockpiles of timber, power for transportation, and easy access to drinking water. Based on ‘‘The Question
Concerning Technology’’ and completed through references to Being and Time, we now have an interpretation of the origin of the essence of modern
technology, which traces back the characteristic revealing of das Gestell to the beginning of humankind.48 This does not imply that prehistoric
technology is identical with contemporary technology; rather the third genealogy of the rule of das Gestell suggests that when ‘‘we still more
primally’’ try to consider the origin of the challenging revealing characterizing the rule of das Gestell, we in fact
rediscover that it is connected to being human. The rule of das Gestell has challenged humans as long as they
have existed. In this sense, humans first and foremost exist under the rule of das Gestell.49 This also
entails a revision and precision of Heidegger’s renowned formula characterizing the world-connectedness of
human existence: being-in-the-world. Based on the comparison of ‘‘The Question Concerning Technology’’ and Being and Time, human
existence is better described as being-under-the-spell-of-das-Gestell. Trying to understand the various more-or-less explicit
accounts of the origin of the rule of das Gestell in ‘‘The Question Concerning Technology’’ and the resulting ambiguity is not just an exercise, nor only a
way to criticize Heidegger. Rather, it is a way to better understand the nuances and layers in Heidegger’s thinking concerning technology and to warn
against a short-sighted ‘‘saving’’ from an alleged danger. If the challenging revealing of nature, which characterizes the rule of das Gestell is taken
seriously, then we cannot avoid it just by revolutionizing our technology, instead, we must revise our very human existence.
And, voting neg links to their argument – it’s an instance of calc thought
Buckley 89 (last referenced date) – McGill University (R. Phillip, “Rationality and Responsibility in Heidegger’s and Husserl’s View of
Technology,” http://ulla.mcgill.ca/arts150/arts150r3.htm) Jacome
At the root of Heidegger's understanding of technology is the fundamental distinction between "calculative" thought (rechnendes Denken)and
"contemplative" thought (besinnliches Denken).1 The word "calculative" is connected to a type of thinking which finds its
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powerful expression in modern science and which is motivated by measurement, by the search for results.
"Calculative" also connotes how this thinking aims to manipulate and control. Just as a "calculating person" is someone who seeks to gain advantage, so
too the thinking of science aims not just to observe a situation, but to make predictions, to plan for the future, to quantify in the sense of "taking stock"
and thereby to keep everything in order. This thinking betrays for Heidegger a fundamental need for certainty and security: it wants to know exactly
where "things"are and precisely what "they" might be doing.2 "Contemplative" thought, to the contrary, seeks neither to measure nor to
control things, but to uncover their meaning (Sinn), above all, to question the meaning of things. It is a thinking which is fundamental and it
is linked to Heidegger's vision of authentic philosophy. Though Heidegger is far from consistent with his terminology, contemplative thinking as
authentic philosophy is often just called "thought" in his later works, and the word "philosophy" itself is frequently reserved for the philosophical
tradition. Thus "thought" is at times severely contrasted with "philosophy" - that is, with the philosophy of the tradition. The link between the philosophy
of the tradition and the calculative thought of modern science is made through the introduction of yet another type of thinking: "representational
thinking" (vorstellendesDenken). This thinking takes the world as something that can be "placed before" (vor-gestellt) the subject, just as one places a
picture before oneself and hence representational thought treats the world or reality itself as if it were a picture (Bild). For Heidegger, the appearance of
the"subject" and the world becoming a "picture" are two "interwoven events" which mark the beginning of the modern age dominated by science, the age
of the "world-picture."3 The calculative thinking which characterizes modern science is itself only possible on the basis of having a subject that can
calculate and a "world" which is "placed before" it, a world that is easily manipulated, controlled and contained. For Heidegger, there would be no
science without philosophy and its representational thinking.4 What does this "opposition" between calculative and contemplative thinking amount to?
First, it is crucial to note that the thinking which Heidegger describes as taking place in science is not a "lesser" form that could be "upgraded" to a
contemplative form of thought. The calculative thought of science is constitutionally incapable of being contemplative thought, and hence Heidegger's
oft-quoted assentation that "science does not think."5 Certainly scientists can reflect on their own field, on its methods, procedures and so forth. But this
sort of self-interrogation aimed at improvement is part of calculative thinking in the first place. Calculative thought turned in on itself remains calculative
thought. This implies a "distance" between the calculative and contemplative forms of thought, or an unbridgeable "gap" (Kl~lft).6 The difference
between these two types of thinking is one of kind and not degree. This "gap" does not mean that calculative
thought is somehow "bad,"or that contemplative thinking is "better." To judge contemplative thought as
superior to calculative thought is to think calculatively, and hence cannot be the task of authentic philosophy. Neither is
Heidegger claiming that the nature of modern science as calculative is to be viewed as negative. It is the good "fortune" of science that it cannot "think" in
the contemplative, deliberative or recollective sense.7 The problem, it seems, occurs when calculative thought pushes aside other forms of thinking.
Heidegger wants to undermine the exclusivity of calculative thinking without denigrating it. He desires to open a space for other forms of thinking. A first
step away from the domination of calculative thinking consists in uncovering the presuppositions which underlie it, in seeing that calculation is not the
only possibility of human "thought." It may well be that the realm of contemplative thought can only be approached by means of this method which
ultimately might be characterized as avia negative. Nonetheless, the description of calculative thought and its representational character does tell us
something about the nature of contemplative thought. Contemplative thought is extremely difficult to attain because, by its very nature, it cannot be
"attained." To want to have a contemplative style of thought is to remain in the clutch of the basically possessive
calculative style of thinking.8 Contemplative thought is hence marked by a fundamental "passivity,"9 it consists of a
certain "letting-go" of all "attitudes," of any "picturing" of the world. Put in terms which are even more expressive of passivity, contemplative thought is a
"releasement" from the dominating style of calculative thought. Both "letting-go" and "releasement" are plausible translations of Heidegger's basic
characterization of contemplative thought as Gelassenheit.
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2ac object oriented ontology
Their rejection of correlationism is a form of objective essentialism that eradicates the
possibility of ecological change. This negation of subjectivity spirals into resentful and aesthetic
withdrawal
Aravamudan 13 [Srinivas Aravamudan teaches at Duke University, “The Catachronism of Climate Change,”
diacritics, Volume 41, Number 3, 2013]
Definitions: cathexis = the concentration of mental energy on one particular person, idea, or object (especially
to an unhealthy degree).
Meillassoux’s option—to theorize a speculative materialism that opens itself toward the possible that is also necessarily untotalizable—seems compatible
with a certain kind of deconstruction despite its reliance on Badiou-inspired Cantorian set theory. Graham Harman’s object-oriented
ontology (OOO) presents us, however, with a more dogmatic take on the subject-object dichotomy. Harman also has
a strong Anthropocene impetus away from the metaphysics of subjectivity even though it is something of a cheap shot: “while
human philosophers bludgeon each other over the very possibility of ‘access’ to the world, sharks bludgeon tuna fish and icebergs smash into
coastlines.”57 Harman’s essential insight, to which he returns obsessively, is that Heidegger’s distinction between Vorhandenes and Zuhandenes
(presence-at-hand or tool-like objectivity versus being ready-to-hand, or non-teleological being-in-the-world, human-like subjectivity) is fundamentally
flawed, as referential contexts determine instrumentalization, and all beings (from hammers to animals to humans) can be tools in some contexts, and
broken tools with ontological excess in other contexts. Bernard Stiegler had already developed a powerful oppositional reading of this
longstanding contradiction in Heidegger’s residual humanism that had hierarchically placed all objects below
the instrumental intentionalities of the human subject.58 Harman’s approach discovers Dasein in the hammer,
granting all objects in the world an inner totality. This “volcanic core” of all objects is invisible and in excess of every object’s participation in revealing
secondary qualities and related phenomena. We find Harman to be reimagining the object with all the qualities that, since Kant and Heidegger, were
invested in the human subject: freedom, agency, and prehension (a category taken from Whitehead that bypasses the anthropomorphism of
apprehension, intentionality, and consciousness). Subjective solipsism is replayed here as a kind of objective solipsism:
“objects never touch, since they recede into the monastic solitude of private vacuums.” 59 Freedom becomes an
ontological principle characteristic of all objects. While Meillassoux criticizes as fideism Levinas’s desire to evolve toward a wholly
other, Harman and others have rediscovered the metaphysical “allure” of objects as their new gods. Objects are liberated from the taint of
subjectivity and anthropotropic being-at-hand. While Harman claims that “the progress of technology is leading us toward a completely
de-fetishized world,” he lovingly endorses Alphonso Lingis’s claim that the de-fetishized original object becomes a “phantom
object devoid of any serviceability,” or an “orchid.”60 But isn’t the useless idea of the object as hothouse flower the
greatest fetish of unserviceable indulgence ? God is multiplied into the atoms . Harman’s
metaphysics is also an inadvertent reinscription of a Platonic aesthetics of mutual attraction. A world as “a
system of dueling, seducing, turbulent objects” is also a world of polymorphous perversity and infantile
cathexis , even though it is one that does not recognize itself as such. This is a world without subjects,
inhabited by a sorcerer’s apprentice, where magical properties exist in objects that are animated and appear to
have agency.61 Rejecting networks and all naïve relationality, OOO exists in a kind of frozen permanence,
before space and time. Instead, all objects—from the most simple and inanimate to the most complex and
imaginary—are granted a stolid (not just solid) interiority analogous to that of [End Page 19] subjectivity. The paradox of
Harman’s position is that while all relationality “objectifies” and reduces the objects put in relation, non-relationality
conversely “subjectifies” and enhances all objects into quasi-subjects. Finding these objects their place under
the sun also renders them fixed and unusable, enacting the proud purposelessness of “broken tools” in Heideggerian
language. A world where all objects and subjects are on strike (with aspirations of aristocratic leisure) is a world where
nothing much happens. Here begins Harman’s Ptolemaic counter-revolution (to adopt Meillassoux’s pejorative term about
Kantian subjectivism). To mitigate this deadly tranquility at the heart of OOO, Harman wheels in a theory of “vicarious causation” to account for
causality. (Harman rejects “occasional cause” for its theological overtones, but the substitution creates similar difficulties.) Reminiscent of Malebranche’s
metaphysical idealism, objects are irreducible substances or monads that can only interact as the result of a wholly alien tertiary principle.62 Real
objects exist alongside intentional objects (a Husserlian adaptation) and to some degree the wheel is being reinvented
or renamed, as intentional objects have a parallel “encrusted” existence based on real objects that are always “withdrawn” and
inaccessible. For Malebranche, the principle of the occasional cause of every event from the trivial to the catastrophic was God. Descartes needed
energetic vortices in ether. It is from a love of the transcendental that Harman can deem objects substantially primary and time and space secondary;
essence is reposited as primary and objective relationality emanates as multiple secondaries. Even though Harman professes a post-metaphysical version
of Dasein whose essence is in its existence, he inadvertently rigidifies object boundaries into eternal impermeability. The refusal
of relationality results in philosophical permafrost . Just as the methane that bubbles up from the Arctic
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tundra might alter climate change equations for the worse, OOO would need to come to terms with interactive
philosophy before it outmodes itself as a solipsistic form of thought. The very characterization of action as
resulting from “occasional cause” (or “vicarious causation”) demonstrates that events are secondary to this world of
immanent objects. Our expository detour into the new objective essentialism of Harman’s is nonetheless useful, as it indirectly
reveals the escapist philosophy of various dimensions of the hypothesis concerning the Anthropocene. Trying to free
themselves from the taint of subjectivism, correlationism, and human messiness in our involvement with the world, objectoriented ontologies parallel the Anthropocene by taking the position of Olympus (or Hades), giving its adherents a
ringside view of objects that collide and interact in parallel universes and alternative realities. Object
metaphysics refuses all access to essence even while an intransitive, static atomism of objects sans relations
occasionally reveals casual contexture and causal function. A somewhat masculinist, disorientated [End Page 20]
ressentiment seeps through at the edges, as OOO is a withdrawal from a world of the subjective fetish .63 The
OOO proclamation that “everything exists equally” shows that Harman and his colleagues wish to return to philosophy as a
“flat” ontological realism that promulgates a direct contemplation of reality; they see themselves as theorizing
the existence of subjectless objects rather than as mere human beings contemplating their navels. Levi
Bryant refuses what he terms the narcissism of subjectivist “Malkovichism” (drawn from Spike Jonze’s 1999 film Being John
Malkovich that invites spectators to spend time vicariously in John Malkovich’s brain) in favor of an ontological egalitarianism that
supposedly puts all objects on the same footing and treats them with equal dignity.64 But this is where the ringside
entertainment of a cosmological scopophilia is preferred to the Heideggerian category of boredom, induced by omphaloskepsis. Present at the other side
of Archimedes’s lever, OOO seems very compatible with Hollywood blockbusters featuring the end of the world,
investigating the sensuous insides of objects, while claiming to be tired with one more bout of endless auto-psychoanalysis. Nonetheless,
any focus on the anthropogenic nature of climate change has to contend, not just with OOO, but with the elementary logic of the subjectivist fetish that
inaugurates infantile subjectivity in Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “Fort-Da,” or “o-o-o-o.”65 The interactive world-making in the links
among the rings of small o’s in Freud’s grandson Ernst’s baby talk connects objects with subjects and textual understandings with embodied
performances. Yet the weaving process of relationality is anathema to the OOO crowd. While OOO is a fideism focused on the object, its skeptical
refusal to endorse the realist concept of the “world” as a totalization is a salutary dimension. However, object
entanglement (rather than object solipsism) is indeed what can allow for us to understand the challenge of climate
change. The sum of the OOO objection to worlding is as follows: can we really think of “the planet” or “the
universe” in meaningful ways and doesn’t such totalization always err? There is something methodologically
amiss in a dogmatic attachment to the impermeability of object boundaries even while there is an
ethical refusal to contemplate world-boundaries and overlapping pluralities. While “correlationist”
philosophies allow world and object boundaries to be done, undone, and redone, perhaps too easily, those redoings
are precisely the operations, not just of anthropocentric thought, but of objects in their multiple worlds.
Boundaries exist and are redrawn; if objects exist, worlds as their concentric temporary universes also exist. If
boundaries do not exist and a world is a fiction, objects too must be fungible. If meaning-making always
involves an embodied subjectivity, “to see a world in a grain of sand,” as William Blake poetically opined, a hermeneutic
manipulation of an object is akin to having a measuring instrument with which the operation of thought (whether human, animal, or cybernetic)
doesn’t just prehend but apprehends the world. The toy in Ernst’s hand drops in and out of his cot, substituting for his mother as a
relational object no doubt, but such an activity is material and yet transcendental, relational and also substantial. For Ernst, his mother is the genetic
universe he inhabits that he is trying to reduce into an object, yet through this yo-yo he constructs another universe involving his father as a missing
object, who “has gone to the fwont.”66 Through [End Page 21] Ernst’s evocative modeling operation we see the attempts of
internal objects (human, animal, vegetable, or mineral) that reconfigure their multiple temporary containers or universes,
through the consciousness of both present and absent objects that emerge and disappear out of temporality
and experiential collision. That reconfiguration can be crucial, from which we can infer climate change criticism at the end of a
very long stretch of Ernst’s yo-yo, looking behind battlefronts to frontal systems of weather and, ultimately, to climate. The battlefront that
Ernst imperfectly enunciated refers now to a different kind of war, not World War I but the yet-to-take-place World War III, no
longer nuclear Armageddon, but re-inflected as climate change catastrophe, the unnerving idea of the perpetual peace
that will be produced once there is a war that will end all wars. It will be an unthinkable but also an unavoidable
war, a political split and a philosophical dispute, a war of substance as well as a war of relation.
The 1ac’s ontological turn is an anti-political primitivism that sanitizes settler colonialism and
capitalism
Rosenberg 14 [Jordana, Associate Professor of English, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, “The
Molecularization of Sexuality: On Some Primitivisms of the Present,” Theory & Event, Volume 17, Issue 2,
2014]
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This essay is not the venue for an extended reading of this magisterial novel – nor, for that matter, of Spinozist materialism. But I open with Mama
Grace’s assertion because I see it as an intervention into current tendencies in thinking matter and materialism.4 These theories take a number of
names – Object-Oriented
Ontologies (OOO), new materialisms, vitalism – but they might be provisionally grouped
together under the heading of a general positioning: an ontological turn, and one that, as Mama Grace might suggest, takes exemplary form
in the molecular.5 Object-extraordinaire of a new-materialist microphysics of the subject, biocapitalist frameworks, and the
micrologizing drives of ontological orientations, the molecular names a theoretical conjuncture and conceptual abstraction
that calls out to be understood in historical context. What I am calling the molecularization of sexuality is my entry point into that
project. In what follows, I wish to focus attention on the molecular’s intersection with queerness, and ask a very simple question: what might
queer studies have to illuminate about the ontological turn? My approach to this symposium – and to the molecularization of
sexuality – is animated by what the theorist Joel Olson has called a “fanatical approach.” In his unfinished manuscript, American Zealot,
Olson poses fanaticism as a tradition of engaged radicalism that occupies a structural position “outside the
realm of respectable politics.”6 Fanaticism, that is, functions as that denigrated location that, as Alberto Toscano
has argued, is coded as an “excess of politics,” and thus external to the sphere conceived as legitimately political. I
want to suggest that current ontological thought has made its home in this interstice : the space between
what is considered properly political and that which is derided as fanatical. What do I mean by a “home in this interstice”?
The separation of radicalism from rationality – or the separation of a genuinely emancipatory fanaticism from realpolitik – took
place long ago, is constitutive of Enlightenment rationality and liberal governmentality, and is not in need of review here. The point, rather,
has to do with the ways in which the ontological turn borrows from a long tradition of radical bewilderment ,
but unlike the kinds of committed, engaged fervor traditionally linked to fanaticism, substitutes a kind of
sheer bewilderment that depoliticizes and obscures the fissure between fanaticism and what has
been authorized as recognizably political . The ontological turn, in other words, equips itself with the fanatical character of
radicalism, but only as a kind of technical sheen. What I am saying is that, central to ontological thought is a
flourishing of the limit to that thought, a limit that becomes internal to and constitutive of that thought . That
limit is politics . The molecular is exemplary of this limit, as particulate matter becomes a kind of sublime miniature and a point at which
ontological wonder blooms. Given that we have such rich histories of thinking secular and nonsecular forms of enthusiasm as a kind of political affect,
one has to wonder how and why the space of rapture has become separated from questions with which it was once so
cognate: commitment, collective struggle, utopias .7 In an effort to generate a productive encounter
between Olson’s unfinished work and these questions, I want to suggest that a fanatical approach to the molecularization of sexuality
would thus aim to elucidate the molecule as a suppressed or veiled engagement with an occluded historical situation. The fanatical approach, put simply,
seeks to discern what Spinoza described as the “absent cause”: history.8 An “absent cause” and a fanatical approach, in other
words, are linked at a praxical and fundamental level; for it
is only in understanding our conditions as historical that we can
commit ourselves to their transformation. 1. Onto-Primitivism Let me begin by briefly anticipating a key claim in deliberately polemical
terms: the ontological turn is a kind of theoretical primitivism that presents itself as a methodological avantgarde. What do I mean by this? Current continental philosophies have turned toward ever-smaller particulate matter
for a foothold into the question of Being. As some critics have pointed out, this litanizing of the object-world exhibits a
kind of lust or enthrallment with things that sits uncomfortably close to the commodity-logic of late
capitalism itself .9 I’m not so concerned, however, to approach this question as one of commodity cathexes. Indeed, if we share the materialist
conviction – with Alfred Sohn-Rethel10 – that the commodity-form comprises the secret structure of abstract thought, then such accusations are so
uncontroversial as to lose analytic force: all abstract thought is cast in the same dialectical fires borne (Träger) by the commodity. The ontological
turn, I want to offer, has less to do with the libidinal object-urges of the ontologists, and more to do with a species of temporalization.
Beyond the question of commodity-lust, I think we ought to be far more unnerved by the ways in which the ontological
turn focuses its attention toward what Quentin Meillassoux has admiringly termed the “ancestral realm” of the pre-conscious world, and of
object life .11 Surely, some of us have been wondering what the appeal of ancestralness might be for contemporary theorists, and why it has come
into relief at present. Here, then, is one polemical hypothesis: the urge towards objects comports itself in a very
particular fashion, one that will be familiar to scholars of colonialism and settler-colonialism, and that calls to mind any number of NewWorld-style fantasies about locations unmediated by social order. The ontological turn, that is to say, reshapes an old
paradigm, a primitivist fantasy that hinges on the violent erasure of the social : the conjuring of a realm – an
“ancestral realm” – that exists in the present, but in parallax to historical time. A terra nullius of the theoretical landscape. The burden of
this essay will be to show first that this ontological turn is primitivist; next how this ontological primitivism intersects
with work on sexuality; and finally, what might be specific about our current conjuncture that would activate
such primitivisms and give them contemporary form. To anticipate this final claim at the outset: I believe that the primitivist
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turn mediates a dual intensification specific to the present: that of neoliberal forms of settler colonialism
and financialized capital accumulation . I will expand on this claim in greater detail throughout.
OOO’s flattening of ontological difference violently severs socio-political economy from
ontology, masking virulent anti-blackness
Rosenberg 14 [Jordana, Associate Professor of English, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, “The
Molecularization of Sexuality: On Some Primitivisms of the Present,” Theory & Event, Volume 17, Issue 2,
2014]
The signature statement of molecular futurity might be Thacker’s insistence that we inhabit a “new era” of
capitalism, one marked by the “cut-and-paste body of recombinant DNA technologies.” Thacker’s “global genome” is now a keystone articulation of
what has appeared to some to be a mid-century shift; in some departure from industry-heavy modes of production, DNA technologies, according
to Thacker, mark the leading edge of capital accumulation: a “mode of flexible accumulation,” or “the transformation of certain
biomolecules into "wet" factories for the generation of a range of custom-tailored proteins.”46 To this “wet,” luminescent allure of the molecular, some
cautions have been issued from within queer studies and cognate fields. Dana Luciano, for example, offers a cautionary note regarding queer studies’
relations to these ever-multiplying objects – casting the theoretical desire for such objects into question as a potentially specious “enchantment of
collecting.” Puar has raised questions about the unreconstructed faith in the “truth” of matter, and Steven Shaviro has wondered if the ontological turn
functions as a rehashing of a Kantian sublime. Mel Chen, furthermore, has redirected Bennett’s vitalism away from “invest[ing]
certain materialities with life,” toward those “dead zones” – ordinarily overlooked or simply wished away in the dance of vitalism –
historically informed by “queer and raced formations.”47 Against such warnings however, we have seen that the
molecular can tend to function as a periodizing abstraction, by which I mean the molecular functions to suggest that the present is
marked off from the past by a “new” bodily politics. The kind of epochal time that appears under the sign of the molecular is reliant, more broadly, on the
proposition that objects are ontologically separate from the social field, and that this impassable separation between objects and the social order marks a
new historical period – or, as Alberto Toscano puts it, that “the link between life and value heralds a transformative historical tendency, if not an epochal
shift altogether.”48 Recent jubilant announcements regarding the division of the social from the object world are too many to cite. To take just one,
brief, example, I offer Morton’s “Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology” – an essay
that closes by lashing the significance of OOO to a constitutive failure to capture its objects in (human?) language: At
least OOO takes a shot at saying what objects are: they withdraw. This doesn’t mean that they don’t relate at all. It simply means
that how they appear has a shadowy, illusory, magical, ‘strangely strange’ quality.49 Morton’s simultaneous exasperation – “[a]t least
OOO takes a shot” – and what I can only describe as a vicious, amnesiac joy in the hallucination of a world
in which thinkers like Du Bois, Dussell, Fanon, and Marx had never contributed powerful, if not definitive,
demonstrations of the conditions of possibility for “strangeness” (alternately: estrangement) in the social mechanisms
of alienation, racialization, and the hierarchized division of labor, should suggest to us that OOO may reach the
limit of its thought in its commitment to the ontological significance of “strangeness” as a marker of some
purportedly unbridgeable and ahistorical parallax between subjects and objects. The sign of this limit, of course, is
evidenced in the attempt to overcome it. Perhaps we ought to consider the exalted litanizing and imagined
extinction of humanity/absorption into a catalogue of things in which we are but an insignificant entry, as just
such a desire. Along such lines, Elizabeth Grosz predicts: The human is but a momentary blip in a history and cosmology that remains
fundamentally indifferent to this temporary eruption. What kind of new understanding of the humanities would it take to adequately map this
decentering that places man back within the animal, within nature, and within a space and time that man does not regulate, understand, or control?50
Grosz’s future, of course, is not Morton’s. But what they share is a de-suturing of objects from the social world, an
unloosing of the socius from historical time and acceleration into sheer cataclysm . To this vision, we
is it easier to imagine the destruction of the
planet than an end to Capitalism?”51 Indeed, one worries that such “futural” imaginaries and apocalyptic
aphrodisiacs are fundamentally conditioned by the legacy of the Cold War excision of revolutionary thought from the
thinking of the horizon. Thus, rather than imagining a world in which the horrors of instrumental reason (with its attendant racist, eugenic, and
might counterpose Pedro Lasch/the And And And Collective, who put it very simply: “Why
exploitative logics) are directly confronted–and give way to a costewardship of/with the earth – the only possible outcome is extinction: of the species, of
cognition, of the problem of the socius tout court.52 Let me assert that the problems stemming from this increasingly widespread
tendency to regard objects as disembedded from the social world are not merely semantic, nor strictly internal
to academic debate. As Fred Moten and Stefano Harney have recently pointed out, the political character of our current moment
might be described as one in which “society” – that is to say, the commons, the undercommons, the collectivity – “is under
attack.”53 Is it possible that such an attack is mirrored in the exclusions that shape such OOO and new materialist
self-authorizations? For Moten, the remedy for such exclusions lies in an inextricably social conception of ontology, and one that is explicitly
counterhegemonic, rather than “withdrawn.” Might ontology, asks Moten, be resutured to the social world as the “imagination
of … escape as a kind of social gathering, as undercommon plainsong and dance”?54 Perhaps we would do well to
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revisit a more socially-oriented theory of ontology and resistance, one that makes clear that ontology is
never an unmediated field. If ontologies bear the traces of the forces that make up any specific
conjuncture, surely we know no better explication of this process than Fanon’s: that the “historico-racial
schema” prevents blackness from having any “ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man. ”55 So much
is lost in a theory of resistance that posits itself outside of the contradictions of the social field –
and one such loss is an understanding of the extent to which the ontological is itself inextricable from the
ascriptions of race. As George Ciccariello-Maher has argued: In his critique of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, Fanon … reveal[s] what lies beneath
the ostensible universality of Ground, diagnosing a sub-ontological realm, a ‘zone of nonbeing’ to which certain subjects are condemned (as in the
damnés of Fanon’s last book). This is the realm of sub-terranean beings … who are struggling to even gain steady footing for the climb ahead. The predialectical struggle to gain that footing would not be an easy one …56
Settler colonialism, anti-blackness, and predatory capitalism mutually reinforce one another,
precluding ecological change and reproducing global violence
Rosenberg 14 [Jordana, Associate Professor of English, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, “The
Molecularization of Sexuality: On Some Primitivisms of the Present,” Theory & Event, Volume 17, Issue 2,
2014]
The annihilation of space through revolutions in time must be understood, then, not only in terms of the “leap” of
capital into finance, but also in relation to the intensification of forms of imperial violence. I’m not going to expand on
the economics of this further here. In fact, my main point is straightforwardly political, and has to do with the ways in which the Middle
East broadly, but Palestine in particular have come to bear a very particular weight in the globalization of
finance capital and the securing of dollar hegemony through military means. As I indicated above, there is, simply put, a
deepening of settler colonial dynamics as a key component of global finance capital . As Adam Hanieh
explains, “During the 1950s, Israel’s main external support had come from Britain and France.”75 1967 and then 1973 changed
this decisively, as the US became the main backer of the Israeli state’s settler colonial project of
dispossession and “economic subjugation .”76 “The key element to U.S. control” in the Middle East – and
this means not only the ability to produce lockdowns, but also the ability to produce profit-rendering chaos – is, as Hanieh has argued, the
“embrace of Israel, which, with its origins as a settler-colonial state, was organically tied to external support for
its continued viability” (Capitalism and Class, 213). This is hardly an exhaustive review of the current dynamics of global finance and settler
colonialism, but the point I wish to make is simply that there are multiple foundational ways in which
financialization and settler colonialism are tied together .77 The linkage that I hope to have made clear is this: the
relationship between settler-forms and financialization describes a kind of primitive accumulation for the
present. In much the same way that, for Marx, finance represents a crucial “lever” of primitive accumulation, I think we could say that finance and
settler colonialism together constitute the levers of the present form of primitive accumulation. I say “primitive
accumulation,” rather than simply “capital accumulation,” as a way of marking – along with Harvey, Luxemburg, and indeed Deleuze and
Guattari–not only the ongoing violent character of capital’s self-perpetuation, but the kinds of transitions internal
to the capitalist mode of production (in this case from an industrial capitalist system to one in which finance is predominant), and the
narrative forms that accompany those transitions as well.78 Following Marx, then, we might attempt a dual focus: on not only the
specific forms of dispossession particular to primitive accumulation, but the origin narratives that mask those dispossessions.79 c) Spatio-Temporality
and Settler Colonialism Before we close this section, I want to make note of the ways in which primitive accumulation has received a fair amount of
attention within the Humanities following David Harvey’s update to Rosa Luxemburg in the articulation of capital accumulation as grounded in
processes of “accumulation by dispossession.” There has been some debate within settler colonial studies about this updating of the concept of primitive
accumulation. Glen Coulthard has recently urged a focus on the spatial logic of dispossession inherent in primitive accumulation, against what he argues
is the traditional understanding of primitive accumulation as the putting into place of a temporal logic: the wage-form, with its exploitation of the
worker’s time.80 I want to think here about Coulthard’s intervention into political-economic accounts that occlude the spatial dynamics of settler
dispossessions, and consider this work in relation to Brenna Bhandar’s recent investigations of the temporality of settler colonialism.81 For Bhandar,
settler colonialism puts into place a property-logic that is significantly different from feudal use-based
conceptions of land. In some contrast to pre-capitalist formations, settler colonialism constitutes the leading edge of
capitalist forms of speculative possession. If at one point, property ownership was demonstrated in use
(alternately, “occupation”), capitalist expropriation depends on “expectation of use.” Or, speculation: ““Whereas possession
and use once justified ownership, the commoditization of land witnessed a shift in the conceptual
underpinnings of ownership itself. While Locke had reconceived of land ownership, as based not on hereditary titles and inheritance
(birthright), but on labor, Jeremy Bentham emphasizes expectation and security as the key justifications for private property ownership. In the work of
Bentham, we see an abstract notion of ownership not based on physical possession, occupation, or even use, but the concept of ownership as a relation,
based on an expectation of being able to use the property as one wishes. Primary to the property relation is law, which secures the property relation, or
guards and protects the expectation.”82 Speculation – the expectation of use – requires the imposition of terrus nullius, or what
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Bhandar describes as a
“wasteland rationale”: the legal codification of land as unpopulated to justify the
speculative possession that ensues . The force of Bhandar’s argument here is to show that forms of speculative possession legitimate
not only settler expropriations, but the property form more broadly. The dynamics of speculation are not confined to either
financialization or the settler-form. Neither are the specifics of capitalist possession simply a bureaucratic carapace. Rather, they put in motion a range of
affects (e.g., of expectation) that are inextricable from the property-form and from racialization more broadly. This feeling of expectation
“comes to be materialized, or … to have an actual life, in how we are constituted as subjects ” (12). “Possession
… as a feeling … become[s] the sine qua non of ownership” (12). “Emergent forms of property ownership,” Bhandar argues, along with
the affective effects of property, “were constituted with racial ontologies of settler and native, master
and slave. This is as evident in the burgeoning realm of finance capital and its relationship to the slave trade
as it is with regard to transformations in how the ownership of land is conceptualized in the colonial settler
context.” Ontology itself, then, has a history . Its history is in many ways crystallized in the legal forms that remain
with us still, and in the affective, economic, and political dimensions of racialization and settler
colonialism . Put another way: “the relationship between being and having, or ontology and property ownership
animates modern theories of citizenship and law” (3). Ontology cannot be thought outside of the spatial
dispossessions to which Coulthard draws our attention. Nor can it be thought outside of the temporal character that
Bhandar demonstrates as encoded in property relations. Bhandar and Coulthard together direct us toward an
understanding of Marx’s annihilation of space by time as a racialized, spatial, settler expropriation that
simultaneously deploys – indeed, weaponizes – temporality as a form of speculation. This spatio-temporal type
of dispossession sets into place the property form and racial ontologies at once . It is at the heart of
the “ontological illusions” that course through our social world, and it is at the heart, as well, of the forms of
primitive accumulation that set in place the state-form and the ascriptions of citizenship. Thinking alongside Bhandar
and Coulthard, we see more clearly now the ways in which “ so-called primitive accumulation ” – the narrative logics and conceptual
forms that accompany transitional phases of capitalism – take the form of an origin-brink figuration: the removing, or
wrenching of temporality from spatiality and from history.83 This figural annihilation of space by time, this
origin narrative – one that gets reiterated in the ontological turn – brings together the temporal accelerations of
financialization with the speculative settler-forms and speculation as a form of possession and racialized selfpossession that together mark a contemporary moment of primitive accumulation. In closing this section, I want to return
to the question of wasteland rationale to make a somewhat speculative suggestion of my own: that we understand the discourse of
molecularization as a kind of abstract dispossession – or making-waste of the body – that is the condition of a fantasized
speculative self-possession. In both Thacker and Preciado’s citations throughout, that is to say, we see a two-fold movement: the
assertion of the body as the new ground of resource extraction and laying-waste of capitalism; and a speculative
re-possession of that body (the hailing of the molecular as the future of political agency) on the condition of that body’s
dispossession. What I have described as the ancestral future-casting of molecular agency, in other words, follows the abstract logic of the property
form Bhandar lays out: when the social, historical contexts are elided from of our understanding of what embodiment is – of what molecules “are” or
appear to be – then those molecules become the occasion for an anticipation, an affect of possession and agency that recalls the
abstractions (and, indeed, the racial ontologies ) at the heart of the property-form .84
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2ac psychoanalysis
Grounding politics in underlying tension and conflict ultimately prevents political engagement
because ontological negativity is a pretty bad motivator, especially for the dispossessed – our
model of deliberation doesn’t prevent reaching a temporary consensus or making cool
decisions, but theirs results in the joy-killing apathy of bureaucrats
Bignall 10 [Simone Bignall, University of New South Wales, “Desire, Apathy, and Activism,” Deleuze Studies
Volume 4: 2010 supplement: 7–27] //khirn
The principle of joyful interaction is clearly not an essentialist, standalone or cover-all principle for political society.
Starting with the positive and abstract principle of mutuality does not mean that concrete institutions
of common practice (such as those fostering democracy) and emergent principles of political protection (such as rights) are not needed
to safeguard bodies from destruction by bodies who care less about cultivating mutual joy than they do about maximising their own
pleasure or power. But starting with the notion of affirmative mutuality as a basis for thinking about active processes of
self and social formation does avoid the problem that constitutive negativity leads to political inactivity as
much as it does to activism. It also places a different primary emphasis on political society – away from a
politics of restraint stemming from a subterranean ontological conflict, and towards a politics
of complex recognition and sympathy. Here, mutuality is presented as a preferred (but not ‘given’) norm of
political conduct and critical conflict becomes necessary when efforts to find mutual consensus fail, or when joyful practice
is routinely crushed by forms of political domination. Similarly, the negativities of hostility, shame and boredom are not ontologically
given, but more like errors of practice to be avoided and guarded against. The notion that complex bodies can agree to meet ‘bit by bit’
in sympathetic ways and to avoid meeting in ways that diminish them suggests that Deleuzian philosophy offers some scope for a politics of consensus,
supplementing the anarchic dissensus that Critchley privileges. However, consensus will never be final and complete, but is
emergent, contextual and temporary, institutionally limited to recognised sites of part-commonality that enable complex bodies to form the
sympathetic engagements leading to increased complexity and joy (cf. Tully 1995; Connolly 2008). Here, acknowledgement of dissent is
intrinsic to the development of consensual group activity. Sympathetic disagreement involves understanding
those aspects of complex bodily interaction that cannot currently combine well, and resisting the attempt to
impose upon and homogenise disparate bodies under a coercive unity that betrays the differences between
them. Formally identifying and recognising standard areas of disagreement is therefore also an important task
of political society. Indeed, we might fruitfully rethink negative ‘rights’ in this way: not as eternal and inalienable principles of sovereign integrity
flowing from fixed human characteristics, but as a meta-stable discourse about principles of political restraint that regulate human interaction. Such
discourse would be constructed with respect to current understandings about the difference and dissensus that evidences the limits of consensual
engagement. Even so, although limited and partial, finding productive consensus should be the primary aim of interacting orders, because (genuine)
consensus is joyful and so is normatively preferred. Although this is an undeveloped aspect of his own work, Deleuze’s philosophy arguably provides us
with an attractive basis for rethinking rights and democratic engagement in a milieu of multicultural difference (see Patton 2010; Lefebvre 2008).
A
starting point of given negativity – strife, conflict, lack – prompts the model of the divided self that has
likely to
compromise the quality of the social engagement that is possible. I have argued against the negative as a motivational
force. A more effective starting point for activism is found by looking for examples of positive mutuality
in encounters. This approach does not deny that most societies are predominantly characterised by conflict,
inequality, war, trauma, alienation and exploitation. However, within this majoritarian state of violence and hostility, there also
exist minor modes of positive social engagement, acts of respectful recognition, and exemplary practices of
genuine care that join participating orders in the experience of mutual understanding and appreciation at
particular sites of their relationship. Starting with these moments of ‘felt adequacy’ assists political communities in understanding how they
held such persuasive sway in modern critical thought and persists in many strains of postmodern thought, but which to me seems
can combine well in partial and selective ways; from the positive experience of mutual accord, they can start to identify new sites of combination that
work well as the location of new forms of complex political union. This developing understanding is rewarded by the gradual
emergence of an active understanding about ‘good’ forms of engagement, which may then guide the
institutionalisation of preferred forms of complex national and international community. Starting with the
experience of shared joy , rather than lack and division, provides selves with an unmediated interest in the quality
of their relations with others, and, by extension, an interest in fostering the kinds of political community that are
able to support diverse encounters, leading to forms of increased commonality and complexity.
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When desire is not mediated by negativity , we might even speculate that, severed from the conditions of its
profound apathy could cease to emerge and take hold as a systemic problem of political
disenchantment .
generation,
Lacanian psychoanalysis freezes becoming and reinforces sexism
Braidotti 2k [Rosi, Philosopher and Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University as well as
director of the Centre for the Humanities in Utrecht, Chapter 8, “Teratologies”, Deleuze and Feminism, ed. Ian
Buchanan and Claire Colebrook, Edinburgh University Press, 2000, p. 161-2] //khirn
Deleuze goes much further in rejecting the Lacanian conceptual scheme of the unconscious altogether.
Dismissing the metaphysics of the self, Deleuze redefines the unconscious as a productive, forwardpropelling force of flows or intensities . This rests to a large degree on Deleuze’s philosophy of time: his
Bergsonian reading of a continuous present can be opposed to the tyranny of the past in the
psychoanalytic reading of memory, repetition or the process of repression and retrieval of the
repressed material. Deleuze’s ‘minoritarian’ definition of memory as a nomadic or
deterritorialising force runs against the established definitions of memory as a centralised data bank
of frozen information. As a vector of deterritorialisation, memory for Deleuze destabilises identity by stringing together virtual
possibilities. Re-membering in this mode requires careful lay-outs of empowering conditions which allow for the
actualisation to take place. Like a choreography of flows or intensities that require adequate framing in order to compose into a form,
memories require empathy and cohesion between the constitutive elements . It is like a constant
reshuffling that yearns for the moment of sustainable balance or expression, before they dissolve again and
move on. And on it goes, never equal to itself, but close enough not to lose sight of the structure altogether. As I
have argued elsewhere (Braidotti 1994b), in the short term Deleuze’s radical reconceptualisation erodes the foundations of a
specific feminist epistemology and of a theory of feminine subjectivity insofar as it rejects the
masculine/feminine dichotomy altogether.
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2ac race/anti-blackness
Not all fluidity is necessarily whiteness; fluid mobility is inevitable in some contexts for many
people, and it can be used to conceal whiteness or to weaponize privilege against it: context
determines what. In short, they need to win that other links outweigh the transformative
potential of our method for them to win that our 1ac is a fluid method that reinscribes
whiteness
Beasley 10 [Chris, “The Elephant in the Room: Heterosexuality in Critical Gender/Sexuality Studies,” NORA Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, Volume 18, Issue 3, 2010]
Rather than conceiving heterosexuality as simply to be conflated with the heteronormative, as a closed system, it is
useful to consider the Deleuzian account of “becoming”—the notion of an open-ended system (Deleuze & Guattari
1980/1987: 6–12; see also Chia 1996: 34–35). Such a conception does not necessarily ignore the constraining normalization
of heterosexuality in which corporeal identities and practices are situated as dualistic forms of inherent
immoveable “being”, but nevertheless refuses to accept that this is all there is. The anti-juridical thought with which
Deleuze is associated enables attention to the transgressive micro-political which arises out of a disavowal of set binary positions as the
only actuality. Instead such an approach proposes an incessant dynamic mobility which—though blocked and contained—
remains incompletely closed, unfinished and unpredictable (Deleuze & Parnet 1987: 133; Eveline 2005: 644). If heterosexual intercorporeality is understood in this Deleuzian sense of a terrain of “becoming”, rather than a matter of primordial “being”, it is also possible to claim for it
an expansive productivity that cannot be reduced to the heteronormative. It can be countenanced as capable of “deterritorialization”, of breaks and
spaces, as well as micro-practices which move away from set binary meanings/identities towards more dynamic, diffused, and heterogeneous
possibilities (Deleuze & Guattari 1972/2004). Deterritorialization does not inevitably equate to the dissolution of
hetero/homo and gender binaries (though this might indeed be a direction) and thus does not propose heterosexuality's productivity as a synonym for
erasure of its specificity. Rather such an approach enables heterosexuality to be reconceived as a field of potential
transgression. The intention of such a rethinking is bring to the fore a positive optimistic micro-politics and
destabilize socio-political determinism . Nevertheless, to my mind this is not sufficient to a consideration of transgression in
relation to the mainstream, to heterosexuality. Deleuze, along with Foucault and queer theorists like Bersani, turns our attention to a
positive fluidity, mobility, and multiplicity. However, this unremitting attention to a propulsive social creativity, to “flows of becoming
which have infinite possibilities” (Jenkins 2009: xi, emphasis added) may involve a privileged disembodiment side-stepping
racialized/ethnic/cultural location in bodily and geographic terms (Beasley 2005: 168–174). The Deleuzian emphasis on the open-ended quality
of sociality, on “becoming” rather than “being”, offers a significant step forward for analyses of heterosexuality and heterosex, in so far as they have
become encased in negative characterization as exemplary normalization. Nevertheless, such an open-ended emphasis can amount to a strategy not
simply of de-essentializing but of dematerialization, which places in the shadows asymmetric constraints in existing social relations but also the
constraints of visceral physicality and embodied interconnection. Sexuality and heterosex demand an account of pleasure and transgression which
tenaciously holds on to the sensuous fleshliness of sociality, to both the creativity and the limits of “social flesh” (Beasley & Bacchi
2007). Secondly, fluidity/multiplicity in sexual practices is
not necessarily transgressive. Endless fluidity/multiplicity perhaps
in the sphere of the heterosexual mainstream such
productivity might after all largely maintain and extend the hegemony of the heteronormative. For heterosexual
transgression to have any substantive meaning at all, an advocacy of fluidity must be moderated by a stance
which challenges the heteronormative (Beasley forthcoming). However, despite some caveats, what is useful about the work
of writers like Deleuze is that heterosexuality can no longer be cast in such approaches as an immoveable elephant
from which nothing pleasurable or positive can be gained and which is therefore best ignored by critical commentators. The refusal to inculcate
socio-political determinism enables a rejection of simplistic accounts of sexual modes, a rejection of notions
that queer/minority sexualities are somehow politically pure and synonymous with transgression or that
heterosexuality is unremittingly oppressive and transgressive heterosexuality an oxymoron. In destabilizing reductive
assumptions about the political possibilities of sexualities we can then consider the potential myriad of fissures in the
socially normative and hence develop evidence to question both its seeming strangle-hold and naturalized status. All the same there
can be deemed transgressive in relation to minority sexualities, but
remain significant uncertainties about what counts as transgressive and socially subversive, and what counts when heterosexuality is the site. What is the
difference between the merely unusual and the transgressive in this instance? This is a problem for discussions about social life and about sexualities per
se but is particularly an issue when analysing heterosexuality. I would assert that transgression cannot be understood as only
available at the social margins. Instead, transgression may be seen as intrinsic within dominant practices like
heterosexuality (rather than necessarily always external to them). But what then might transgression in the realm of the dominant look like
(Beasley 2011 forthcoming); how might a transgressive heterosexuality be conceptualized? It would seem that considering the question of a
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pleasurable transgressive heterosexuality, and what it might involve, complicates our understandings of self and social
change and thus opens up hopeful, if not infinite, possibilities.
The 1ac’s spectacle of pain legitimizes the sentimental politics that affectively undergird
neoliberal governance
Strick 14 [Simon, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for Literary and Cultural Research Berlin, American
Dolorologies, 2014, p. 132-6]
The concluding argument concerns late modern figurations of the body in pain. Spectacles of pain have
proliferated in many forms in the contemporary American public sphere—if indeed pain hasn't become its
primary and all-pervading obsession. Confessional TV shows exchange narratives of personal trauma and
hurt for public intelligibility; cinematic spectacles of suffering, from The Passion of the Christ (2004) to torture-porn favorite Hostel
(2005), exhibit the body in pain for profit, thrill, and public outrage; news reports narrate national-scale catastrophes through
individual testimonials of pain; reality game shows such as Survivor measure their contestants' bodily pain capacities against their resistance to (or
aggressiveness in) traumatizing and abusive group dynamics. There is also a proliferation of political discourse disclosing the
injuries caused by contemporary forms of governing: public movements raise consciousness for excluded and abjected forms of
living, feeling, and aching in Western democracies; critical discourses continue to shed light on the structural
violence of regimes of power; the interventions of identitarian movements and groups successfully expand public
recognition of social and political injury, changing the scope of intelligibility in the process. These diverse
affective phenomena are not always readily distinguishable in neoliberal regimes. Scholars such as Wendy Brown
or Sara Ahmed have pointed out the coopting of identitarian politics in contemporary governmental
regimes . These critical voices urge "[c]aution . . . against the assumption that 'speaking out' and 'making visible'
within so-called radical politics can be separated from the conventions of self-expression in neoliberal forms of
governance" (Ahmed and Stacey 2001, 4). Bill Clinton's infamous tagline "I feel your pain" or Barack Obama's ongoing focus on a
"politics of empathy"1 are only the presidential cases in point for an ongoing politics of pain that links recognition of suffering to
democratic progress. Academic debates have matched this capitalization on pain and compassion as
necessary ingredients to the development of politics, ethics, or community making , such as in Rosi
Braidotti's call for the unification of feminist, gay, lesbian, and transgender identity politics under the label of a "community of the suffering."2 The
various diagnoses of America as "wound culture" (Seltzer 1998) or "trauma culture" (Kaplan 2005), in this view, describe a highly
disparate, tension-laden, and ambivalent field of affective discourse , rather than a unified or unifying fixation on
pain in contemporary Western societies. Lauren Berlant has argued that these politics of affect dictate the
continuous envelopment of the political in sentimental rhetoric . Sentimentalism holds up the promise
that subjectivity is granted in the recognition of pain and that democracy is realized as the participation in an ideal of common
suffering and compassion. Sentimental discourses "locate the human in a universal capacity to suffer and romantic
conventions of individual historical acts of compassion and transcendence. [They] imagine a nonhierarchical social world that is . . .
'at heart' democratic because good intentions and love flourish in it" (2008, 6). Sentimental rhetoric produces a
public sphere assembled around pain bonded by feeling with what is unspeakable: a commonality of
passionate and compassionate bodily subjects, or a "fantasy of generality through emotional likeness in the domain
of pain" (Berlant 2008, 6). These arguments suggest a fundamental link between the sentimental evocation of pain and the discourses imagined as "at
heart democratic." Indeed, the emancipatory project of democracy relies on articulations of pain, the recognition of those
suffering, and a unified politics as remedy of this suffering. This is certainly true for American culture and its
foundational ideas of promise and exceptionalism. The cultural sites I have pointed to participate in this evocation of a public
sphere , where oppressive hurtings and social injuries are "counted in" toward a better politics of integration,
understanding, and recognition. The sentimental linkage of emancipation through the circulation of pain and compassion as
politics indicates a larger genealogy that dominates American culture and that this book has tried to elucidate. This genealogy was
traced back to America's emancipatory foundation as a nation freed from colonial injury, and informed by a
national history of successful incorporations of marginalized subjects into the national project (suffrage,
abolitionism). American dolorologies has related this discourse to an apparatus of cultural technologies such as
compassion, testimony to oppression, and articulations of affect and pain, and the materializations of race and gender they
covertly enact. My analysis concurs with Berlant's observation that the various claims to pain as identity disarticulate their marginalizing effects in a
rhetoric of universalization: In the liberal tradition of the United States [testimony of pain] is not simply a mode of particularizing and puncturing selfdescription by minorities, but a rhetoric of universality located, not in abstract categories, but in what was thought to be, simultaneously, particular and
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sentimentality has long been a popular rhetorical means
by which pain is advanced, in the United States, as the true core of personhood and citizenship. (2000, 34) This connection of pain,
nation, and subjectivity has, on the one hand, led to the public sphere becoming more and more a site of intimate
"affect" exchange . This transformation is visible in the proliferation of mediatized forms of confession,
testimony, and other articulations of traumatized selfhood, such as reality TV or the culture of therapeutic discourse. These
universal experience. Indeed, it would not be exaggerating to say that
governmental forms of achieving public subjectivity through speaking pain imitate and appropriate the critical formulations of differential experience
from identitarian movements, at times becoming indistinguishable from them: "We
can also see a . . . collusion between liberal,
capitalist forms of mass entertainment and individualist therapies, and the feminist importance of the
personal" (Ahmed 2000, 12). The achievement of public visibility through the articulation of trauma and pain is furthermore
supplemented by mainstream political discourse becoming compassionate and revolving primarily around
the recognition of bodies in pain .3
Inventing new relational modes of being requires a commitment to an experimental education
that renders possible the affective flourishing of genuine curiosity – anything less reinforces
identitarian fragmentation in which our fantasies of the good-life become imagining others
have it poorly, which reinforces violent and apolitical social structures
Berlant and Helms 12 [Gesa Helms, Marina Vishmidt, Lauren Berlant, Professor of English at the
University of Chicago, “Affect & the Politics of Austerity: An interview exchange with Lauren Berlant,” Variant
43, Spring 2012]
Can we bear to reinvent “new relational modes” across the incommensurate scenes of work-natureintimate stranger, and not just among lovers? Can we bear to see the good of education neither as citizenbuilding toward monoculture (even “in difference”) nor as engineering vocational allegories of self-worth,
but a space for the kinds of creativity and improvised interest that cultivate in people a curiosity
about living (how it’s been and how it might be) that’s genuine and genuinely experimental and not, as you say, aspiring to an
unbreachable rational space ? If we are educated in experimentality and curiosity, alterity’s comic mode of
recognition-in-bafflement, then we diminish our fear of the stranger and of the stranger in
ourselves, the place where we don’t make any more sense than the world does, in all of our tenderness and
aggression. We would refuse to do the speculative work of policing and foreclosing each other
that lets the state and capital off the hook for exhausting workers and pressuring communities to clean up their act, not be
inconvenient, and to be sorry they tried to live well. To make possible the time and space for flourishing affective
infrastructures , of grace and graciousness, such as those I’ve described could make happiness and social optimism
possible not as prophylactic fantasy or credit psychosis but in ordinary existence. All of the hustling that goes on amongst the working and
non-working poor and the generally stressed has to do with the desire to coast a little instead of work and police ourselves to death. But right now
there’s not a lot of easy coasting going around outside of the zones of disinhibition that provide episodes of
relief from the daily exhaustion, and people seem to think that if they’re policed, if they’re always
auditioning for citizenship and social membership, so too should others be forced to live near
the edge of the cliff and earn standing, the right to stand . Welfare used to be called ‘relief’. ‘Relief’ must have said much
more than it was bearable to say about the capitalist stress position.
Rerouting our affective orientation is a prerequisite to producing political change – widespread
reorientation of our collective imaginaries in which we rethink our investments in inequality
are crucial – the aff’s particularism means people fight for better versions of the good life for
themselves, not everyone
Berlant and Helms 12 [Gesa Helms, Marina Vishmidt, Lauren Berlant, Professor of English at the
University of Chicago, “Affect & the Politics of Austerity: An interview exchange with Lauren Berlant,” Variant
43, Spring 2012]
how can we reroute shame for making a better social world. Is turning a “shame on you” back
on the state effective for organizing not only social justice but an image of a better state , better labor relations, better
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sociality amongst strangers whose class and collective interest is really not the same, really not ambitious to produce the same
better good life? Partly I’m a pragmatist: whatever works to interfere with the reproduction of mass injustice, in this case, the projection of the burden for
revamping the cushion and the net onto the people who need the cushion and the net, while the wealthy hoard more of that for themselves. But
I
still think the battle to be thought through and won is at the level of the imaginary: to confront
how powerfully exceptional the neoliberal and democratic economic bubbles of the last 60 years are, how
expensive individualism is, how the idea of a mortgaged future needs to be confronted in its stark realities,
how entirely different models of collective dependence need to be forged in relation to the reproduction of life
because there is no money and the poverty is both material and imaginary. I don’t think it’s about
converting shame, therefore, into pride or anything. I think it requires a hard confrontation with and a very
difficult process of changing what the reproduction of life means in both pragmatic and phantasmatic terms.
What this means will vary, but its impact on the political and on the social relations of labour will be
astonishing , because it has to happen: there will be politics , and there will be sacrifice, and there will be a
chaos of wants responded to badly and with a bigger burden on the already vulnerable unless they
converge to rethink their own investments in inequality and xenophobia, the ready-to-hand fear formations. In
Slow Death6 I argue that the long process of delegating worse life and earlier death to the poor and hyperexploited is now becoming general through the population , such that mental health and physical health
are at war (as seen in the amount of alcoholism and obesity rampant wherever a commodity culture reigns as the
collective scene for forging pleasure in a now beyond which there is no future) and that mental health is winning (if what we mean is
affective, appetitive relief from exhausted sovereignty). Can people bear to fight themselves for better versions of the
good life for everyone? Or are we now spiralling down the rabbit hole of liberal culture, where
people will only dig in and fight for the right to their individual pleasure ?
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2ac word pic (generic)
Out of habit, only out of habit.
Deleuze and Guattari 80. A Thousand Plateaus, pg. 3
The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.
Here we have made use of everything that came within range, what was closest as well as farthest away. We
have assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition. Why have we kept our own names? Out of
habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible,
not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think. Also because it's nice to talk like everybody else, to
say the sun rises, when everybody knows it's only a manner of speaking. To reach, not the point where one no
longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer
ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied.
Language acquires power through iteration, but the constitutive failure of communication
means that resignification is possible – seeking to abandon terms entirely holds us hostage to
an elite hermeneutic
Lloyd 7 (Moya Lloyd, Senior Lecturer of Politics, International Relations and European Studies,
Loughborough University, “Radical Democratic Activism and the Politics of Resignification”, Constellations
Volume 14, Issue 1, pages 129–146, March 2007 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8675.2007.00426.x)
Derrida claims that for
communication to take place all signs must be repeatable or iterable. This means “general iterability” is the
condition for utterance itself. A performative can only succeed, therefore, to the extent that it repeats what Derrida – in a
passage frequently quoted by Butler – calls “a ‘coded’ or iterable statement.”3 In this regard, language is always citational. It is, for
Derrida, precisely the repeatability of language, based on the presence of reiterable conventions, therefore, that allows utterances to succeed
and that renders speech intelligible. Utterances, in this sense, do not originate with the subject and intention is thus not the determining ground of communication; they are merely “derivative citations”
(to borrow from Amy Allen) and nothing more.4 Although speech is determined by convention (the repetition of these coded statements),
those conventions only ever partially condition the usage of specific terms. The reason for this, according to
Derrida, is that language is subject to a universal propensity to be deployed in novel and unforeseeable ways.
Every sign “can be cited,” and consequently “it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion.”5 Deviations in usage thus have the potential to alter meaning. All signs can be made to resignify
in different ways. It is these breaks with context that suggest to Derrida that failure is , as Butler puts it, “proper to
the speech act itself” (150). Such “risk” is, as such, a formal or abstract feature of language per se, inherent
within the citational structure of language itself. Crucially, as we will see, it is in this propensity for language to
break with existing contexts and to be used in new and unforeseen ways that Butler discerns the potential to
thwart the performative power of assaultive speech. It is here that the possibility of linguistic countersignification resides. It might appear that the idea that terms can be used in innovative ways by speakers
suggests a view of the speaker as sovereign over its speech; it does not. For speakers cannot guarantee that
these novel deployments will be interpreted or received by others in the way(s) intended or that such utterances will achieve the effects they
are supposed to achieve. They are always, in other words, open to failure. Two points are worth making at this juncture. First, as noted, signs are imbricated
within conventions governing their usage. Butler translates this to mean that the “moment” of any utterance is
always already a moment of “condensed historicity” (3). All performatives, that is, whether illocutionary or perlocutionary, accumulate
their force through their repetition or re-citation.6 And so it is with assaultive speech. Wounding words have this historicity. That is, they have a “history which has become internal to a
In order to construct her argument, Butler turns to Derrida's essay “Signature Event Context,” where he develops his deconstructive reading of J.L. Austin's speech-act theory. Here
name, has come to constitute the contemporary meaning of a name: the sedimentation of its usages as they have become a part of the very name, a sedimentation, a repetition that congeals, that gives the name its force” (36). When that name is
Hate-speech thus only works as hate-speech because it cites itself. It is only because
“we already know its force from its prior instances” that “we know it to be so offensive now” (80). For hatespeech to continue to harm it requires repetition. Second, the fact that the historicity intrinsic to a name is
occluded has a particular effect: it creates the misleading impression that the speaker of race-hatred is entirely
responsible for that speech; that he or she is its sovereign author and originator, when for Butler the case is quite different. The speaker of
hate-speech is just as subjectified through the racist utterances they utter as those that are subordinated by
deployed, that historicity (conventionality) is invoked.
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injurious naming. It is, for Butler, the recitation of racist conventions of speech that produce their speaker as
‘racist’ and their interlocutor as ‘raced’ or ‘racially’ subordinate. It is the fact that conventions have become sedimented that gives force to
harmful speech, and that demonstrates the existence in the communicative realm of racism and racists (or other
discriminatory forms and their subjects).7 All subjects, on this count, are non-sovereign, linguistically vulnerable but also, as will
become apparent, paradoxically empowered. A crucial part of Butler's account of subversive resignification
centres on the capacity of all speech for decontextualization. As I have just noted, the force of the performative for Derrida
resides in its iterability, since it is this that enables it to “break with a prior context” and to “assume new
contexts,” suggesting it is “bound to no context in particular” (147). Performatives can thus signify in a multitude of
perpetually revisable contexts and it is this that allows for agential change. During the course of her discussion of hate-speech, Butler explicitly differentiates
herself from critical race theorists such as Richard Delgado on precisely the question of the instability of meaning. According to Delgado, “Words such as ‘nigger’ and ‘spik’ are badges of degradation even when they are used between friends.
These words have no other connotation.”8 For Butler, however, this is erroneous. Delgado, she contends, fails to take into account the kinds of “redoubling of injurious speech” that inevitably occur due to the iterable structure of language. From
by
actively endeavouring to censor such speech, activists and politicians are ironically confirming
the citationality of the sign and reinvigorating the very discourses they seek to repudiate . The point is that
because assaultive speech does not necessarily produce harmful effects (that is, it may fail), the opportunities
for “appropriating, reversing and recontextualizing such utterances become possible” (39). In other words,
hate-speech can be turned against its tainted past; it can be resignified. Its interlocutors can ‘talk back’; they
can resist. Importantly, it is not only hate-speech that is amenable to this kind of resignification. Drawing on the work of Paul Gilroy, Butler also notes how the terms of modernity, such as
rights, justice, and equality, have been expropriated and made to resignify more inclusively. All terms, it
appears for Butler, are thus available for resignification, hence the place of resignification in her non-voluntarist account of agency.
political satire to rap music, from the kind of politico-legal critique in which Delgado is engaged to the many attempts to legislate against or to prosecute such speech, assaultive words are re-staged and their uses proliferate. Indeed,
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