1NC

1
(Jeffrey S. Lantis is Professor in the Department of Political Science and Chair of the
International Relations Program at The College of Wooster, “The State of the Active Teaching and
Learning Literature”, http://www.isacompss.com/info/samples/thestateoftheactiveteachingandlearningliterature_sample.pd
f)
Simulations, games, and role-play represent
a third important set of active teaching and learning approaches
. Educational objectives include deepening conceptual understandings of
a particular phenomenon, sets of interactions, or socio-political processes by using student interaction to bring abstract concepts to life
.
They provide students with a real or imaginary environment within which to act out a given situation
(Crookall 1995; Kaarbo and Lantis 1997; Kaufman 1998; Jefferson 1999; Flynn 2000; Newmann and Twigg 2000; Thomas 2002;
Shellman and Turan 2003; Hobbs and Moreno 2004; Wheeler 2006; Kanner 2007; Raymond and Sorensen 2008). The aim is to enable students to actively experience, rather than read or hear about, the “constraints and motivations for action (or inaction) experienced by real players
” (Smith and Boyer 1996:691), or to think about what they might do in a particular situation
that the instructor has dramatized for them. As Sutcliffe (2002:3) emphasizes,
“Remote theoretical concepts can be given life by placing them in a situation with which students are familiar.”
Such exercises capitalize on the strengths of active learning techniques: creating memorable experiential learning events that tap into multiple senses and emotions by utilizing visual and verbal stimuli. Early examples of simulations scholarship include works by Harold Guetzkow and colleagues, who created the Inter-Nation Simulation (INS) in the 1950s. This work sparked wider interest in political simulations as teaching and research tools
. By the 1980s, scholars had accumulated a number of sophisticated simulations of international politics, with names like “Crisis,” “Grand Strategy,”
“ICONS,” and “SALT III.” More recent literature on simulations stresses opportunities to reflect dynamics faced in the real world by individual decision makers
, by small groups like the US National Security Council, or
even global summits organized around international issues, and provides for a focus on contemporary global problems
(Lantis et al. 2000; Boyer 2000). Some of the most popular simulations involve modeling international organizations, in particular United Nations and European Union simulations (Van Dyke et al. 2000; McIntosh 2001; Dunn 2002; Zeff 2003; Switky 2004;
Chasek 2005).
Simulations may be employed in one class meeting, through one week, or even over an entire semester.
Alternatively, they may be designed to take place outside of the classroom in
local, national, or international

competitions
. The scholarship on the use of games in international studies sets these approaches apart slightly from simulations.
For example, Van Ments (1989:14) argues that games are structured systems of competitive play with specific defined endpoints or solutions that incorporate
the material to be learnt. They
are similar to simulations, but contain specific structures or rules that dictate what it means to “win” the simulated interactions. Games place the participants in positions to make choices that
10 affect outcomes
, but do not require that they take on the persona of a real world actor. Examples range from interactive prisoner dilemma exercises to the use of board games in international studies classes (Hart and Simon 1988; Marks 1998; Brauer and Delemeester 2001; Ender 2004; Asal 2005;
Ehrhardt 2008) A final subset of this type of approach is the role-play.
Like simulations, roleplay places students within a structured environment and asks them to take on a specific role
. Role-plays differ from simulations in that rather than having their actions prescribed by a set of well-defined preferences or objectives, role-plays provide more leeway for students to think about how they might act when placed in the position of their slightly less well-defined persona
(Sutcliffe 2002). Role-play allows students to create their own interpretation of the roles because of role-play’s less “goal oriented” focus.
The primary aim of
the role-play is to dramatize for the students the relative positions of the actors involved and
/or the challenges facing them
(Andrianoff and Levine 2002). This dramatization can be very simple (such as roleplaying a two-person conversation) or complex (such as role-playing numerous actors interconnected within a network).
The reality of the scenario and its proximity to a student’s personal experience is
also flexible
. While few examples of effective roleplay that are clearly distinguished from simulations or games have been published, some recent work has laid out
some very useful role-play exercises with clear procedures for use in the international studies classroom
(Syler et al. 1997; Alden 1999; Johnston 2003; Krain and Shadle 2006;
Williams 2006; Belloni 2008). Taken as a whole, the applications and procedures for simulations, games, and role-play are well detailed in the active teaching and learning literature.
Experts recommend a set of core considerations that should be taken into account when designing effective simulations
(Winham 1991; Smith and Boyer 1996; Lantis 1998; Shaw
2004; 2006; Asal and Blake 2006; Ellington et al. 2006). These include building the simulation design around specific educational objectives, carefully selecting the
situation or topic to be addressed, establishing the needed roles to be played by both students and instructor, providing clear rules, specific instructions and background material, and having debriefing and assessment plans in place
in advance. There are also an increasing number of simulation designs published and disseminated in the discipline, whose procedures can be adopted (or adapted for use) depending upon an instructor’s educational objectives (Beriker and Druckman 1996; Lantis 1996; 1998;
Lowry 1999; Boyer 2000; Kille 2002; Shaw 2004; Switky and Aviles 2007; Tessman 2007; Kelle 2008). Finally, there is growing attention in this literature to assessment. Scholars have found that these methods are particularly effective in bridging the gap between academic knowledge and everyday life
.
Such exercises also lead to enhanced student interest in the topic, the development of empathy, and acquisition and retention of knowledge
.
(David Chandler is Professor of International Relations at the University of Westminster,
“Questioning Global Political Activism”, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, pp. 81-
2)
Today more and more people are ‘doing politics’ in their academic work. This is the reason for the boom in International Relations (IR) study and the attraction of other social sciences to the global sphere. I would argue that the attraction of IR for many people has not been IR theory but the desire to practise global ethics
.
The boom in the IR discipline has coincided with a rejection of Realist theoretical frameworks of power and interests
and the sovereignty/anarchy problematic.
However
, I would argue that this rejection has not been a product of theoretical engagement with Realism but an ethical act of rejection of Realism’s ontological focus
. It seems that our ideas and our theories say much more about us than the world we live in
. Normative theorists and
Constructivists tend to support the global ethical turn arguing that we should not be as concerned with ‘what is’ as with the potential for

the emergence of a global ethical community. Constructivists, in particular, focus upon the ethical language which political elites espouse rather than the practices of power. But the most dangerous trends in the discipline today are those frameworks which have taken up Critical Theory and argue that focusing on the world as it exists is conservative problem-solving while the task for critical theorists is to focus on emancipatory alternative forms of
living or of thinking about the world
.
Critical thought then becomes a process of wishful thinking rather than one of engagement
, with its advocates arguing that we need to focus on clarifying our own ethical frameworks
and biases and positionality, before thinking about or teaching on world affairs. This becomes ‘me-search’ rather than research.
We have moved a long way from Hedley Bull’s
(1995) perspective that, for academic research to be truly radical, we had to put our values to the side to follow where the question or inquiry might lead.
The inward-looking and narcissistic trends in academia, where we are more concerned with our reflectivity
– the awareness of our own ethics and values – than with engaging with the world
, was brought home to me when I asked my IR students which theoretical frameworks they agreed with
most.
They mostly replied Critical Theory and Constructivism
.
This
is despite the fact that the students thought that states operated on the basis of power and self-interest in a world of anarchy
.
Their theoretical preferences were based more on what their choices said about them as ethical individuals, than about how theory might be used to understand and engage with the world
. Conclusion I have attempted to argue that there is a lot at stake in the radical understanding of engagement in global politics
.
Politics has become a religious activity
, an activity which is no longer socially mediated
; it is less and less an activity based on social engagement and the testing of ideas in
public debate or
in the academy
. Doing politics today, whether in radical activism, government policy-making or in academia, seems to bring people into a one-to-one relationship with global issues in the same way religious people have a one-to-one relationship with their God.
Politics is increasingly like religion because when we look for meaning we find it inside ourselves rather than in the external consequences of our ‘political’ acts
.
What matters is the conviction or the act in itself: its connection to the global sphere is one that we increasingly
tend to provide idealistically
.
Another way of expressing this limited sense of our subjectivity is
in the popularity of globalisation theory – the idea that instrumentality is no longer possible
today because the world is such a complex and interconnected place and therefore there is no way of knowing the consequences of our actions
.
The more we engage in the new politics where there is an unmediated relationship between us as individuals and global issues, the less we engage instrumentally with the outside world, and the less we engage
with our peers and colleagues at the level of political or intellectual debate and organisation.
(Chantal Mouffe is Professor of Political Theory at the Centre for the Study of
Democracy, University of Westminster, “The Importance of Engaging the State”, What is Radical Politics
Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, pp. 233-7)
In both Hardt and Negri, and Virno, there is
therefore emphasis upon ‘critique as withdrawal’
. They all call for the development of a non-state public sphere. They call for self-organisation, experimentation, non-representative and extra-parliamentary politics.
They see
forms of traditional representative politics as inherently oppressive
.
So they do not seek to engage with them, in order to challenge them. They seek to get rid of them
altogether. This disengagement is, for such influential personalities in radical politics today, the key to every political position in the world. The Multitude must recognise imperial sovereignty itself as the enemy and discover adequate means of subverting its power. Whereas in the disciplinary era I spoke about earlier, sabotage was the fundamental form of political resistance, these authors claim that, today, it should be desertion. It is indeed through desertion, through the evacuation of the places of power, that they think that battles against Empire might be won. Desertion and exodus are, for these important thinkers, a powerful form of class struggle against imperial postmodernity.

According to Hardt and Negri, and Virno, radical politics in the past was dominated by the notion of ‘the people’. This was, according to them, a unity, acting with one will. And this unity is linked to the existence of the state. The Multitude, on the contrary, shuns political unity. It is not representable because it is an active self-organising agent that can never achieve the status of a juridical personage. It can never converge in a general will, because the present globalisation of capital and workers’ struggles will not permit this. It is anti-state and anti-popular. Hardt and Negri claim that the Multitude cannot be conceived any more in terms of a sovereign authority that is representative of the people. They therefore argue that new forms of politics, which are non-representative, are needed.
They advocate a withdrawal from existing institutions. This
is something which characterises much of radical politics today. The emphasis is not upon challenging the state. Radical politics today is
often characterised by a
mood, a sense and a feeling, that the state itself is inherently the problem
.
Critique as engagement
I will now turn to presenting the way I envisage the form of social criticism best suited to radical politics today
. I agree with Hardt and Negri that it is important to understand the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. But I consider that the dynamics of this transition is better apprehended within the framework of the approach outlined in the book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001). What I want to stress is that many factors have contributed to this transition from Fordism to post-Fordism, and that it is necessary to recognise its complex nature. My problem with
Hardt and Negri’s view is that, by putting so much emphasis on the workers’ struggles, they tend to see this transition as if it was driven by one single logic: the workers’ resistance to the forces of capitalism in the post-Fordist era. They put too much emphasis upon immaterial labour. In their view, capitalism can only be reactive and they refuse to accept the creative role played both by capital and by labour. To put it another way, they deny the positive role of political struggle
. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a
Radical Democratic Politics we use the word ‘hegemony’ to describe the way in which meaning is given to institutions or practices
: for example, the way in which a given institution or practice is defined as
‘oppressive to women’, ‘racist’ or ‘environmentally destructive’.
We also point out that every hegemonic order is therefore susceptible to being challenged by counter-hegemonic practices – feminist, antiracist, environmentalist
, for example.
This is illustrated by
the plethora of new social movements which presently exist in radical politics today (Christian, anti-war, counter-globalisation, Muslim, and so on).
Clearly not all
of these are workers’ struggles
. In their various ways they have nevertheless attempted to influence and have influenced a new hegemonic order.
This means that when we talk about ‘the political’, we do not lose sight of the ever present possibility of heterogeneity and antagonism within society
. There are many different ways of being antagonistic to a dominant order in a heterogeneous society – it need not only refer to the workers’ struggles. I submit that it is necessary to introduce this hegemonic dimension when one envisages the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism
. This means abandoning the view that a single logic (workers’ struggles) is at work in the evolution of the work process; as well as acknowledging the pro-active role played by capital. In order to do this we can find interesting insights in the work of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello who, in their book The New Spirit of Capitalism (2005), bring to light the way in which capitalists manage to use the demands for autonomy of the new movements that developed in the 1960s, harnessing them in the development of the post-Fordist networked economy and transforming them into new forms of control.
They use the term ‘artistic critique’ to refer to
how the strategies of the counter-culture (the search for authenticity, the ideal of selfmanagement and the anti-hierarchical exigency
) were used to promote the conditions required by the new mode of capitalist regulation
, replacing the disciplinary framework characteristic of the Fordist period. From my point of view, what is interesting in this approach is that it shows how an important dimension of the transition from Fordism to post-
Fordism involves rearticulating existing discourses and practices in new ways. It allows us to visualise the transition from Fordism to post-
Fordism in terms of a hegemonic intervention. To be sure, Boltanski and Chiapello never use this vocabulary, but their analysis is a clear example of what Gramsci called ‘hegemony through neutralisation’ or ‘passive revolution’. This refers to a situation where demands which challenge the hegemonic order are recuperated by the existing system, which is achieved by satisfying them in a way that neutralises their subversive potential
.
When we apprehend the transition from Fordism to post- Fordism within such a framework, we
can understand it as a hegemonic move by capital to re-establish its leading role and restore its challenged legitimacy.
We did not witness a revolution
, in Marx’s sense of the term. Rather, there have been many different interventions, challenging dominant hegemonic practices.
It is clear that, once we envisage social reality in terms of ‘hegemonic’ and
‘counter-hegemonic’ practices, radical politics is not about withdrawing
completely from existing

institutions
.
Rather, we have no other choice but to engage with hegemonic practices, in order to challenge them
. This is crucial; otherwise we will be faced with a chaotic situation. Moreover, if we do not engage with and challenge the existing order, if we instead choose to simply escape the state
completely, we leave the door open for others to take control of systems of authority and regulation
. Indeed there are many historical (and not so historical) examples of this.
When the Left shows little interest, Right-wing and authoritarian groups are only too happy to take over the state
. The strategy of exodus could be seen as the reformulation of the idea of communism, as it was found in Marx. There are many points in common between the two perspectives. To be sure, for Hardt and Negri it is no longer the proletariat, but the Multitude which is the privileged political subject. But in both cases the state is seen as a monolithic apparatus of domination that cannot be transformed. It has to ‘wither away’
in order to leave room for a reconciled society beyond law, power and sovereignty.
In reality
, as I’ve already noted, others are often perfectly willing to take control
. If my approach – supporting new social movements and counterhegemonic practices – has been called ‘post-Marxist’ by many, it is precisely because I have challenged the very possibility of such a reconciled society.
To acknowledge the ever present possibility of antagonism to the existing order implies recognising that heterogeneity cannot be eliminated.
As far as politics is concerned, this means the need to envisage it in terms of a hegemonic struggle
between conflicting hegemonic projects attempting to incarnate the universal and to define the symbolic parameters of social life
.
A successful hegemony fixes the meaning of institutions and social practices and defines the ‘common sense’ through which a given conception of reality is established
.
However, such a result is always contingent
, precarious and susceptible to being challenged by counter-hegemonic interventions. Politics always takes place in a field criss-crossed by antagonisms
.
A properly political intervention is always one that engages with a certain aspect of the existing hegemony
.
It can never be merely oppositional or conceived as desertion, because it aims to challenge the existing order
, so that it may reidentify and feel more comfortable with that order.
Another important aspect of
a hegemonic politics lies in establishing linkages between various demands
( such as environmentalists, feminists, anti-racist groups
), so as to transform them into claims that will challenge the existing structure of power relations. This is a further reason why critique involves engagement, rather than disengagement
. It is clear that the different demands that exist in our societies are often in conflict
with each other.
This is why they need to be articulated politically, which obviously involves the creation of a collective will, a ‘we’
. This, in turn, requires the determination of a ‘them’. This obvious and simple point is missed by the various advocates of the Multitude. For they seem to believe that the Multitude possesses a natural unity which does not need political articulation. Hardt and Negri see ‘the People’ as homogeneous and expressed in a unitary general will, rather than divided by different political conflicts.
Counter-hegemonic practices
, by contrast, do not eliminate differences.
Rather, they are
what could be called an ‘ensemble of differences’, all coming together
, only at a given moment, against a common adversary
. Such as when different groups from many backgrounds come together to protest against a war perpetuated by a state, or when environmentalists, feminists, anti-racists and others come together to challenge dominant models of development and progress.
In these cases, the adversary cannot be defined in broad general terms like
‘Empire’, or for that matter
‘Capitalism’
.
It is instead contingent upon the
particular circumstances
in question
– the specific states
, international institutions or governmental practices that are to be challenged
. Put another way, the construction of political demands is dependent upon the specific relations of power that need to be targeted and transformed
, in order to create the conditions for a new hegemony.
This is clearly not an exodus from politics. It is not ‘critique as withdrawal’, but ‘critique as engagement’. It is a ‘war of position’ that needs to be launched
, often across a range of sites, involving the coming together of a range of interests. This can only be done by establishing links between social movements, political parties and
trade unions, for example. The aim is to create a common bond and collective will, engaging with a wide range of
sites, and often institutions, with the aim of transforming them
.
This
, in my view,
is how we should conceive the nature of radical politics.

[Andrea, Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at UC Riverside, and is the author
Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, and Native Americans and the Christian Right:
The Gendered Politics of Unlikely Alliances, “The Moral Limits of the Law: Settler Colonialism and the
Anti-Violence Movement,” Settler Colonial Studies 2:2, 69-88}
CONCLUSION In the debates prevalent within Native sovereignty and racial justice movements
, we are
often presented with two seemingly orthogonal positions
– long-term revolutionary
extra-legal movements or shortterm reformist legalist strategies
.
Short-term legal strategies are accused of investing activists within a white supremacist
and settler colonial system that is incapable of significant change
. Meanwhile, revolutionaries are accused of sacrificing the immediate needs of vulnerable populations for the sake of an endlessly deferred revolution.
The reality of
gender violence in Native communities highlights the untenability of these positions
. Native women’s lives are at stake now
– they cannot wait for
the revolution to achieve some sort of safety.
At the same time
, the short-term strategies
often adopted to address gender violence have often increased violence
in Native women’s lives by buttressing the prison industrial complex and its violent logics.
While this reformist versus revolutionary dichotomy suggests two radically different positions
, in reality they share a common assumption
: that the only way to pursue legal reform is to fight for laws that
that reinforce the appropriate moral statement
(for instance, that the only way to address violence against Native women is through the law and to make this violence a ‘crime’).
Because the US legal system is
inherently immoral and colonial
, however, attempts to moralise the law generally fail
.
It is not surprising
that the response to these failures is to simply give up on pursuing legal strategies.
However
, the works of
Derrick
Bell
, Christopher
Leslie
, and
Sarah
Deer
, while working in completely different areas of the law, point to a different approach. We can challenge the assumption that the law will reflect our morals and instead seek to use the law for its strategic effects .
In doing so, we might advocate for laws that might in fact contradict some of our morals because we recognize
that the law cannot mirror our morals anyway
.
We might then be free to engage in a relationship with the law which would free us to change our strategies as we assess its strategic effects.
At the same time, by divesting from the morality of the law
, we then will also simultaneously be free to invest in building our own forms of community accountability and justice outside the legal system. Our extra-legal strategies would go beyond ceremonial
civil disobedience tactics designed to shame a system that is not capable of shame.
Rather, we might focus on actually building the political power to create an alternative system to the heteropatriarchal, white supremacist, settler colonial state
.

2
, Professor and Division Head in Social Studies, Political Science, Philosophy at the Liebowitz
Center for International Studies at Bard College at Simon’s Rock,
[Asma, Liberalism and Human Suffering: Materialist Reflections on Politics, Ethics, and Aesthetics,
London: Palgrave Macmillan, pg. Pg. 125- 129, RSR]
Following Chapter 4’s discussion, labor as value implies that labor not only creates commodities but also becomes a commodity
. Thus, labor as a commodity also takes a fetish character
.
The worker, whose worth is reducible to the value of his labor, becomes a commodity.
In turn, the worker performs not only as a commodity but also as the guardian of a commodity
.
This provides clues for thinking of victims who are deemed reducible to their injuries without recognition of the fact that their own work involves, beyond the suffering that is being represented, enacting their assigned fetish character and negotiating the fetish character of the injuries they carry
. What Marx has to say about the actions of commodities, and of those who bear them on their way to the marketplace, may help us reconstruct the script—for the injuries and for the victims who bear them—performed in seeking and delivering liberal justice. This would also allow a gesture to the elements of acting and representing that surpass the script’s injunctions. Marx opens up the interpretive possibilities thus:
Commodities cannot themselves go to the market and perform exchanges in their own right
. We must, therefore, have recourse to their guardians, who are possessors of commodities. . . .
In order that these objects may enter into relation with each other as commodities, their guardians must place themselves in relation to one another as persons whose will resides in those objects, and must behave in such a way that each does not appropriate the commodity of the other, and alienate his own, except through an act to which both parties consent. . .
. Here the persons exist for one another merely as representatives, and hence owners, of commodities
. . . . The characters who appear on the economic stage are merely personifications of economic relations; it is as the bearers of these economic relations that they come into contact with each other.
8 The cognate of this process, in liberalism, features victims as possessors and personifications of injuries that are themselves the products of the relations and processes of representation that comprise the labor of suffering
. The relations implied by the fetishism of injuries ensure that the possession takes the form of personification. In other words, the bearer of an injury absorbs into her personification the relations that injury as value and commodity signifies
.
Her performance in the market of liberal justice is in line with the precepts of injury as commodity.
Personified in the victim, the injuries act out in the market for liberal justice
. Marx goes on to say, In their difficulties our commodity owners think like
Faust: “Im Anfang war die Tat.” [“In the beginning was the deed.”–Goethe, Faust.] They have therefore already acted and transacted before thinking. The natural laws of the commodity have manifested themselves in the natural instinct of the owners of commodities. They can only bring their commodities into relation as values, and therefore as commodities, by bringing them into an opposing relation with some one other commodity as the universal equivalent. . . .
Through the agency of the social process it becomes the specific social function of the commodity which has been set apart to be the universal equivalent. It thus becomes— money
. “Illi unum consilium habent et virtutem et potestatem suam bestiae tradunt. Et ne quis possit emere aut vendere, nisi qui habet characterem aut nomen bestiae aut numerum nominis ejus.” [“These have one mind, and shall give their power and strength unto the beast.”

Revelations, 17:13; “And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.”
Revelations, 13:17.] (Apocalypse.)9 Marx suggests that the fetish character is impressed upon, especially when he says that relations between men “take the form” of a relation between things. This “appearing as” and “form taking” happen together in the acting that is underway.
So when we represent others or ourselves as victims with certain capacities and desires, suffering takes the form of injury, injuries appear as our suffering, and social relations take the form of relations between injuries
. Here, all representation tries to approximate an acting as, forgetting and even obliterating the relation that may enable an acting for.
This is what Marx means when he says that commodities, as fetishes, have “absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom
.”10 In fetishism, appearance and form-taking converge, removing the space between the material and its form, and resulting in the process that makes one into the other.
Seeing victims as personified injuries within liberalism takes us back to ascetic theater and to the actors of Rawls’s injury play, bringing up an interesting aspect of the acting as
.
These actors are representations of actual beings and of their actual or potential injuries, reducible to the abstract equality posited not only by the injury-form and its fetishism but also by the veil’s impartiality
. In Rawls, the actors are personifications of “injury as value” without being victims
.
Injury becomes radically generalized, universalized, and abstract because the performance has left the body of the sufferer
. It is as if Rawls has paid his dues to production in convoking the original position and overloading it with these productive, representational tasks so that his idealized society has no memory of the production at all. And when we come to the market for justice, we no longer know if we had a suffering to speak for.
Recalling from
Chapter 4 the kinds of subsumption that persist between labor and suffering in capitalism and liberalism, Rawls can be seen as taking the next step from brokering our injuries to rendering them currency, or something more like futures speculations, like never before, completely skipping the labor and the suffering as mediators of this value to some degree
. This resonates with the move of financialization, endemic to neoliberalism, as it retires the labor theory of value altogether and recasts its fidelity to classical liberals.11 Given Rawls’s strictures on voice, memory, language, and embodiment that enter the original position, one wonders whether any knowledge or personality at all can be had by individuals in the original position.12
This dubious less-than-humanness of actors in the original position recalls the in-between, part perceptible, part imperceptible nature of commodities as fetishes.
Fetishes know themselves through repetitive acts—in this case, their role-plays. The images they see across the veil are their own but are never recognized as such , since neither they nor others know or remember who they are (rather, they know, remember, and replay the dictates of their congealed ethos).
Recognition here requires an imposed similitude, a making of the other in and through one’s own image
; the images are then enlisted in the ascetic theater as lost souls, made available to the senses of the fetishes in the original position
.
The impact of the literalization of pain, the annihilation of poetry and metaphor in the original position, and the bracketed memories of those who make it inside the original position, must be seen in light of how this enactment disables and enables other enactments and other roles played
. That these fetishes are life forms that act in conformance with the requirements of the ascetic theater of liberal politics recalls Nietzsche’s notion of ascetic morality and its manifestation of “life against life.
” The Primary Function of Ascetic Morality. It will be immediately obvious that such a selfcontradiction as the ascetic appears to represent— life against life—is, physiologically, a simple absurdity
. It can only be apparent. . .
. Let us replace the usual interpretation of asceticism with a brief formulation of the facts of the matter: the ascetic ideal springs from the protective instinct of a degenerating life which tries by all means to sustain itself and to fight for its existence . . . life wrestles in it and through it with death and against death; the ascetic ideal is an artifice for the preservation of life
.13 As discussed in Chapter 2, there is a fundamental connection between an ascetic ideal and the form of injury, for there would be no ascetic ideal without ascertaining injury and

injurer.
The ideal, here like a fetish, is nourished by a resuffering, ressentiment, of the injury by the sufferers.
It is kept alive by a redirection of the life that the ressentiment entails, by a searing into memory that freezes the meaning of the act that injured.
Precisely so, ascetic ideals and fetishes seem to be very similar—in their paradoxes of life, memory, and suffering. They are kept alive by memory but are amnesiac about their sources and origins; they are kept alive by imposing a stasis on the life of the sufferer as their resuffering shortchanges the ability to suffer life in general
. Here, Nietzsche gives us further (performance) notes for the fetish character, and the life it furnishes and is furnished by, as it plays out in liberal ascetic theater:
How regularly and universally the ascetic priest appears in almost every age; belongs to no one race, prospers everywhere, emerges from every class of society
. . . . An ascetic life is a self-contradiction: here rules ressentiment without equal, that of an insatiable instinct and power-will that wants to become master not over something in life but over life itself, over its most profound, powerful and basic conditions; here an attempt is made to employ force to block up the wells of force; here physiological well-being itself is viewed askance. . . . We stand before a discord that wants to be discordant, that enjoys life itself in this suffering and even grows more self-confident and triumphant the more its own presupposition, its physiological capacity for life, decreases.
“
Triumph in the ultimate agony”: the ascetic ideal has always fought under this hyperbolic sign; in this enigma of seduction, in this image of torment and delight, it recognized its brightest light, its salvation, its ultimate victory
.14
-Knowledge of the other must be refused – knowing allows conquering.
-Intellectuals will speak for the other and reinterpret the other – academy bad.
-Pain narratives fix pain into identity – prevent movements beyond it.
-Desire centered frameworks understand pain exist but do not center it – focus on future and past.
[Eve (Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations and Coordinator of Native American Studies at the
State University of New York at New Paltz. Earned her Ph.D.in Urban Education at The Graduate Center,
The City University of New York in 2008) and K Wayne (Ph.D., 2004, Social and Cultural Studies,
University of California, Berkeley), “R-Words: Refusing Research, pg. 225-231, RSR]
Under coloniality, Descartes’ formulation, cognito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”) transforms into ego conquiro (“ I conquer, therefore I am ”; Dussel, 1985; Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Ndlvou-Gatsheni,
2011).
Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2009) expounds on this relationship of the conqueror’s sense-of-self to his knowledge-of-others (“I know her, therefore I am me”).
Knowledge of self/Others became the philosophical justification for the acquisition of bodies and territories, and the rule over them. Thus the right to conquer is intimately connected to the right to know (“ I know, therefore I conquer, therefore I am ”).
Maldonado- Torres (2009) explains that for Levi
Strauss, the self/Other knowledge paradigm is the methodological rule for the birth of ethnology as a science (pp. 3–4). Settler colonial knowledge is premised on frontiers; conquest, then, is an exercise of the felt entitlement to transgress these limits.
Refusal, and

stances of refusal in research, are attempts to place limits on conquest and the colonization of knowledge by marking what is off limits, what is not up for grabs or discussion, what is sacred, and what can’t be known
. To speak of limits in such a way makes some liberal thinkers uncomfortable, and may, to them, seem dangerous.
When access to information, to knowledge, to the intellectual commons is controlled by the people who generate that information [participants in a research study], it can be seen as a violation of shared standards of justice and truth.
(Simpson, 2007, p. 74)
By forwarding a framework of refusal within
(and to) research in this chapter, we are not simply prescribing limits to social science research. We are making visible invisibilized limits, containments, and seizures that research already stakes out
.
One major colonial task of social science research that has emerged is to pose as voicebox, ventriloquist, interpreter of subaltern voice
. Gayatri Spivak’s important monograph, Can the Subaltern Speak? (2010), is a foundational text in postcolonial studies, prompting a variety of scholarly responses, spin-offs, and counterquestions, including does the subaltern speak? Can the colonizer/settler listen? Can the subaltern be heard? Can the subaltern act?
In our view, Spivak’s question in the monograph, said more transparently, is can the subaltern speak in/ to the academy?
Our reading of the essay prompts our own duet of questions, which we move in and out of in this essay: What does the academy do? What does social science research do? Though one might approach these questions empirically, we emphasize the usefulness of engaging these questions pedagogically; that is, posing the question not just to determine the answer, but because the rich conversations that will lead to an answer are meaningful. The question—What does or can research do?—is not a cynical question, but one that tries to understand more about research as a human activity.
The question is similar to questions we might ask of other human activities, such as, why do we work? Why do we dance? Why do we do ceremony? At first, the responses might be very pragmatic, but they give way to more philosophical reflections.
Returning to Spivak’s question, in Can the Subaltern Speak? Spivak casts Foucault and Deleuze as “hegemonic radicals”
(2010, p. 23) who unwittingly align themselves with bourgeois sociologists who fill the place of ideology with a continuistic “unconscious” or a parasubjective “culture” . . . . In the name of desire, they tacitly reintroduce the undivided subject into the discourse of power . . . (pp. 26–27)
Observing
Foucault and Deleuze’s almost romantic admiration for the “reality” of the factory, the school, the barracks, the prison, the police station, and their insistence that the masses know these (more) real realities perfectly well, far better than intellectuals, and “certainly say it very well,”
(Deleuze, as cited in Spivak, 2010, p. 27), Spivak delivers this analysis: “
The ventriloquism of the speaking subaltern is the left intellectual’s stock-in-trade
” (2010, p. 27).
Spivak critiques the position of the intellectual who is invested in the ventriloquism of the speaking subaltern for the banality of what serves as evidence of such “speech,” and for the ways in which intellectuals take opportunity to conflate the work and struggle of the subaltern with the work of the intellectual, which only serves to make more significant/authentic their own work
(p. 29). All of it is part of a scheme of self-aggrandizing. Rosalind Morris, reading Spivak, criticizes nostalgia in the academy that “bears a secret valorization and hypostatization of subalternity as an identity—to be recalled, renarrated, reclaimed, and revalidated” (2010, p. 8).
Subalternity is less an identity than what we might call a predicament, but this is true in a very odd sense. For, in Spivak’s definition, it is the structured place from which the capacity to access power is radically obstructed. To the extent than anyone escapes the muting of subalternity, she ceases being a subaltern. Spivak says this is to be desired.
And who could disagree? There is neither authenticity nor virtue in the position of the oppressed. There is simply (or not so simply) oppression. Even so, we are moved to wonder, in this context, what burden this places on the memory work in the aftermath of education. What kind of representation becomes available to the one who, having partially escaped the silence of subalternity, is nonetheless possessed by the consciousness of having been obstructed, contained, or simply misread for so much of her life? (Morris, 2010, p. 8) We take this burden of speaking in/to the academy, while being misrecognized as the speaking subaltern or being required to ventriloquate for the subaltern, as a starting dilemma for the work of representation for decolonizing researchers.
It is our sense that there is much value in working to subvert and avert the carrying out of social science research under assumptions of subalternity and authenticity, and to refuse to be a purveyor of voices constructed as such.
This is the place from which we begin this essay, inside the knowledge that in the same ways that we can observe that the colonizer is constituted by the production of the Other, and
Whiteness is constituted by the production of Blackness (Fanon, 1968; Said, 1978), the work of research and the

researcher are constituted by the production and representation of the subaltern subject
. Further, as we explore in Axiom I, representation of the subject who has “partially escaped the silence of subalternity” (Morris, 2010, p. 8) takes the shape of a pain narrative. Elsewhere,
Eve (Tuck, 2009, 2010) has argued that educational research and much of social science research has been concerned with documenting damage, or empirically substantiating the oppression and pain of Native communities, urban communities, and other disenfranchised communities
. Damage-centered researchers may operate, even benevolently, within a theory of change in which harm must be recorded or proven in order to convince an outside adjudicator that reparations are deserved. These reparations presumably take the form of additional resources, settlements, affirmative actions, and other material, political, and sovereign adjustments.
Eve has described this theory of change1 as both colonial and flawed , because it relies upon Western notions of power as scarce and concentrated, and because it requires disenfranchised communities to position themselves as both singularly defective and powerless to make change (2010)
. Finally,
Eve has observed that “won” reparations rarely become reality , and that in many cases, communities are left with a narrative that tells them that they are broken
. Similarly, at the center of the analysis in this chapter is a concern with the fixation social science research has exhibited in eliciting pain stories from communities that are not White, not wealthy, and not straight.
Academe’s demonstrated fascination with telling and retelling narratives of pain is troubling, both for its voyeurism and for its consumptive implacability
. Imagining “itself to be a voice, and in some disciplinary iterations, the voice of the colonised” (Simpson, 2007, p. 67, emphasis in the original) is not just a rare historical occurrence in anthropology and related fields.
We observe that much of the work of the academy is to reproduce stories of oppression in its own voice
. At first, this may read as an intolerant condemnation of the academy, one that refuses to forgive past blunders and see how things have changed in recent decades. However, it is our view that while many individual scholars have chosen to pursue other lines of inquiry than the pain narratives typical of their disciplines, novice researchers emerge from doctoral programs eager to launch pain-based inquiry projects because they believe that such approaches embody what it means to do social science.
The collection of pain narratives and the theories of change that champion the value of such narratives are so prevalent in the social sciences that one might surmise that they are indeed what the academy is about
. In her examination of the symbolic violence of the academy, bell hooks
(1990) portrays the core message from the academy to those on the margins as thus: No need to hear your voice when I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself. No need to hear your voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine , my own
. Re-writing you I write myself anew.
I am still author, authority
.
I am still colonizer the speaking subject and you are now at the center of my talk
. (p. 343) Hooks’s words resonate with our observation of how much of social science research is concerned with providing recognition to the presumed voiceless, a recognition that is enamored with knowing through pain. Further
, this passage describes the ways in which the researcher’s voice is constituted by, legitimated by, animated by the voices on the margins.
The researcher-self is made anew by telling back the story of the marginalized/subaltern subject. Hooks works to untangle the almost imperceptible differences between forces that silence and forces that seemingly liberate by inviting those on the margins to speak, to tell their stories.
Yet the forces that invite those on the margins to speak also say, “ Do not speak in a voice of resistance . Only speak from that space in the margin that is a sign of deprivation, a wound, an unfulfilled longing. Only speak your pain
” (hooks, 1990, p. 343). The costs of a politics of recognition that is rooted in naming pain have been critiqued by recent decolonizing and feminist scholars (Hartman, 1997, 2007; Tuck, 2009).
In Scenes of
Subjection, Sadiya Hartman (1997) discusses how recognizing the personhood of slaves enhanced the power of the Southern slaveowning class.
Supplicating narratives of former slaves were deployed effectively by abolitionists, mainly White, well-to-do, Northern women, to generate portraits of abuse

that ergo recognize slaves as human (Hartman, 2007). In response, new laws afforded minimal standards of existence, “ making personhood coterminous with injury
” (Hartman, 1997, p. 93), while simultaneously authorizing necessary violence to suppress slave agency
.
The slave emerges as a legal person only when seen as criminal or “a violated body in need of limited forms of protection”
(p. 55).
Recognition “humanizes” the slave, but is predicated upon her or his abjection
.
You are in pain, therefore you are.
“[T]he recognition of humanity require[s] the event of excessive violence, cruelty beyond the limits of the socially tolerable, in order to acknowledge and protect the slave’s person” (p. 55). Furthermore, Hartman describes how slave-as-victim as human accordingly establishes slave-as-agent as criminal.
Applying Hartman’s analysis, we note how the agency of Margaret
Garner or Nat Turner can only be viewed as outsider violence that humane society must reject while simultaneously upholding the legitimated violence of the state to punish such outsider violence
.
Hartman asks, “Is it possible that such recognition effectively forecloses agency as the object of punishment . . . Or is this limited conferral of humanity merely a reinscription of subjugation and pained existence?” (p. 55). As numerous scholars have denoted, many social science disciplines emerged from the need to provide justifications for social hierarchies undergirded by White supremacy and manifest destiny (see also Gould, 1981; Selden, 1999; Tuck & Guishard, forthcoming). Wolfe (1999) has explored how the contoured logic of settler colonialism (p. 5) can be mapped onto the microactivities of anthropology; Guthrie (1976) traces the roots of psychology to the need to “scientifically” prove the supremacy of the White mind.
The origins of many social science disciplines in maintaining logics of domination, while sometimes addressed in graduate schools, are regularly thought to be just errant or inauspicious beginnings—much like the ways in which the genocide of Indigenous peoples that afforded the founding of the Unites States has been reduced to an unfortunate byproduct of the birthing of a new and great nation
. Such amnesia is required in settler colonial societies, argues Lorenzo Veracini, because settler colonialism is “characterized by a persistent drive to supersede the conditions of its operation,” (2011, p. 3); that is, to make itself invisible, natural, without origin (and without end), and inevitable.
Social science disciplines have inherited the persistent drive to supersede the conditions of their operations from settler colonial logic, and it is this drive, a kind of unquestioning push forward, and not the origins of the disciplines that we attend to now
. We are struck by the pervasive silence on questions regarding the contemporary rationale(s) for social science research.
Though a variety of ethical and procedural protocols require researchers to compose statements regarding the objectives or purposes of a particular project, such protocols do not prompt reflection upon the underlying beliefs about knowledge and change that too often go unexplored or unacknowledged.
The rationale for conducting social science research that collects pain narratives seems to be self-evident for many scholars, but when looked at more closely, the rationales may be unconsidered, and somewhat flimsy. Like a maritime archaeological site, such rationales might be best examined in situ, for fear of deterioration if extracted.
Why do researchers collect pain narratives? Why does the academy want them? An initial and partial answer is because settler colonial ideology believes that, in fiction author Sherril
Jaffe’s words, “scars make your body more interesting,” (1996, p. 58).
Jaffe’s work of short, short of fiction bearing that sentiment as title captures the exquisite crossing of wounds and curiosity and pleasure.
Settler colonial ideology, constituted by its conscription of others, holds the wounded body as more engrossing than the body that is not wounded
(though the person with a wounded body does not politically or materially benefit for being more engrossing). In settler colonial logic, pain is more compelling than privilege
, scars more enthralling than the body unmarked by experience. In settler colonial ideology, pain is evidence of authenticity, of the verifiability of a lived life
. Academe, formed and informed by settler colonial ideology, has developed the same palate for pain. Emerging and established social science researchers set out to document the problems faced by communities, and often in doing so, recirculate common tropes of dysfunction, abuse, and neglect.
Scholars of qualitative research Alecia Youngblood Jackson and Lisa Mazzei (2009) have critically excavated the privileging of voice in qualitative research, because voice is championed as “true and real,” and “almost a mirror of the soul, the essence of self,” (p. 1).
The authors interpret the drive to “make voices heard and understood, bringing meaning and self to consciousness and creating transcendental, universal truths” as gestures that reveal the primacy of voice in conventional qualitative research (p. 1). We contend that much of what counts as voice and makes voice count is pain. In an example drawn from outside of social science research, in Wayne’s work as a writing instructor with Southeast Asian

refugee students, he learned from them that much of the writing they were encouraged to do followed a rarefied narrative pattern of refugee-as-victim. As it were, youth and young adults learn these narratives in schools, in which time and again refugee-victim stories are solicited by wellintentioned ESL teachers who argue that such narratives are poetic, powerful, and represent the
“authentic voice” of the student
. Similarly, Robin Kelley (1997), speaking about the Black experience in Harlem in the 1960s, describes White liberal teachers as “foot soldiers in the new ethnographic army” (p. 20), soliciting stories from their students about pain in their lives and unwittingly reducing their students to “cardboard typologies who fit neatly into their own definition of the ‘underclass’” (p. 17).
Such examples of teachers’ solicitations of youth narratives of pain confirm the deep relationship between writing or talking about wounds, and perceptions of authenticity of voice
. Craig Gingrich-Philbrook
(2005) articulates a related critique of autoethnography, positioning himself as a “narrator who appreciates autoethnography, at least as compared to its positivist alternatives, but one who simultaneously distrusts autoethnography’s pursuit of legitimacy in the form of the patriarch’s blessing and family values” (p. 298). Gingrich-Philbrook locates his concern in what autoethnography/ers are willing to do to secure academic legitimacy (p. 300): “My fears come down to the consequences of how badly autoethnography wants Daddy’s approval” (p. 310). By this Gingrich-Philbrook means that much of autoethnography has fixated on “attempting to justify the presence of the self in writing to the patriarchal council of self-satisfied social scientists” (p. 311). Though Gingrich-Philbrook does not go into detail about how precisely the
“presence of the self” is justified via the performativity of subjugated knowledges (what we are calling pain narratives), he insists that autoethnography is distracted by trying to satisfy Daddy’s penchant for accounts of oppression. In my own autobiographical performance projects, I identify this chiasmatic shift in the possibility that all those performances I did about getting bashed only provided knowledge of subjugation, serving almost as an advertisement for power: ‘‘Don’t let this happen to you. Stay in the closet.’’ In large part motivated by
Elizabeth Bell’s writings about performance and pleasure, I decided to write more about the gratifications of same-sex relationships, to depict intimacy and desire, the kinds of subjugated knowledges we don’t get to see on the after school specials and movies of the week that parade queer bruises and broken bones but shy away from the queer kiss. (p. 312)
Participatory action research and other research approaches that involve participants in constructing the design and collection of voice (as data) are not immune to the fetish for pain narratives. It is a misconception that by simply building participation into a project—by increasing the number of people who collaborate in collecting data— ethical issues of representation, voice, consumption, and voyeurism are resolved. There are countless examples of research in which community or youth participants have made their own stories of loss and pain the objects of their inquiry (see also Tuck & Guishard, forthcoming). Alongside analyses of pain and damage-centered research, Eve (Tuck 2009, 2010) has theorized desire-based research as not the antonym but rather the antidote for damage-focused narratives .
Pain narratives are always incomplete. They bemoan the food deserts, but forget to see the food innovations; they lament the concrete jungles and miss the roses and the tobacco from concrete.
Desirecentered research does not deny the experience of tragedy, trauma, and pain, but positions the knowing derived from such experiences as wise
. This is not about seeing the bright side of hard times, or even believing that everything happens for a reason.
Utilizing a desire-based framework is about working inside a more complex and dynamic understanding of what one, or a community, comes to know in (a) lived life
.
Logics of pain focus on events, sometimes hiding structure, always adhering to a teleological trajectory of pain, brokenness, repair, or irreparability—from unbroken, to broken, and then to unbroken again
.
Logics of pain require time to be organized as linear and rigid, in which the pained body (or community or people) is set back or delayed on some kind of path of humanization , and now must catch up (but never can) to the settler/unpained/abled body (or community or people or society or philosophy or knowledge system). I n this way, the logics of pain has superseded the now outmoded racism of an explicit racial hierarchy with a much more politically tolerable racism of a developmental hierarchy.2 Under a developmental hierarchy, in which some were undeterred by pain and oppression, and others were waylaid by their victimry and subalternity, damagecentered research reifies a settler temporality and helps suppress other understandings of time
. Desire-based frameworks, by contrast, look to the past and the future to situate analyses. Desire is about longing, about a present that is enriched by both the past and the future; it is integral to our humanness
. It is not only the painful elements of social and psychic realities, but also the textured acumen and hope. (Tuck, 2010, p. 644) In this way, desire is time-warping
. The logics of desire is asynchronous just as it is distemporal, living in the gaps between the ticking machinery of disciplinary institutions. To be clear, again, we are not

making an argument against the existence of pain, or for the erasure of memory, experience, and wisdom that comes with suffering. Rather, we see the collecting of narratives of pain by social scientists to already be a double erasure, whereby pain is documented in order to be erased, often by eradicating the communities that are supposedly injured and supplanting them with hopeful stories of progress into a better, Whiter, world. Vizenor talks about such “the consumer notion of a ‘hopeful book,’” and we would add hopeful or feel-good research, as “a denial of tragic wisdom” bent on imagining “a social science paradise of tribal victims” (1993, p. 14).
Desire interrupts this metanarrative of damaged communities and White progress.
(anonymous graduate student in philosophy, “The University, Social
Death and the Inside Joke,” http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20100220181610620)
Universities may serve as progressive sites of inquiry in some cases, yet this does not detract from the great deal of military and corporate research , economic planning and, perhaps most importantly, social conditioning occurring within their walls
. Furthermore, they serve as intense machines for the concentration of privilege ; each university is increasingly staffed by overworked professors and adjuncts
, poorly treated maintenance and service staff. This remains only the top of the pyramid, since a hyper educated, stable society along Western lines can only exist by the intense exploitation of labor and resources in the third world
.
Students are taught to be oblivious to this fact; liberal seminars only serve to obfuscate the fact that they are themselves complicit in the death and destruction waged on a daily basis
. They sing the college fight song and wear hooded sweatshirts (in the case of hip liberal arts colleges, flannel serves the same purpose). As the
Berkeley rebels observe, “
Social death is our banal acceptance of an institution’s meaning for our own lack of meaning
.”[43] Our conception of the social is as the death of everything sociality entails; it is the failure of communication, the refusal of empathy, the abandonment of autonomy
. Baudrillard writes that “
The cemetery no longer exists because modern cities have entirely taken over their function : they are ghost towns, cities of death
. If the great operational metropolis is the final form of an entire culture, then, quite simply, ours is a culture of death
.”[44]
By attempting to excel in a university setting, we are resigning ourselves to enrolling in
what Mark Yudoff so proudly calls a cemetery, a necropolis to rival no other
.
¶ Yet herein lies the punch line. We are studying in the cemeteries of a nation which has a cultural fetish for things that refuse to stay dead; an absolute fixation with zombies .
So perhaps the goal should not be to go “Beyond Zombie
Politics” at all. Writes Baudrillard: “
The event itself is counter-offensive and comes from a strange source: in every system at its apex, at its point of perfection, it reintroduces negativity and death
.”[45]
The
University, by totalizing itself and perfecting its critiques, has spontaneously generated its own antithesis . Some element of sociality refuses to stay within the discourse of the social, the dead; it becomes undead, radically potent.
According to Steven Shaviro’s The Cinematic Body, “ zombies mark the dead end or zero degree of capitalism’s logic of endless consumption and ever expanding accumulation , precisely because they embody this logic so literally and to such excess
.”[46] In that sense, they are almost identical to the mass, the silent majorities that Baudrillard describe as the ideal form of resistance

to the socia l: “they know that there is no liberation, and that a system is abolished only by pushing it into hyperlogic , by forcing it into excessive practice which is equivalent to a brutal amortization
.”[47] ¶ ¶
Zombies do not constitute a threat at first, they shamble about their environments in an almost comic manner and are easily dispatched by a shotgun blast to the face. Similarly, students emerge from the university in which they have been buried, engaging in random acts of symbolic hyperconsumption and overproduction
; perhaps an overly enthusiastic usage of a classroom or cafeteria here and there, or a particularly moving piece of theatrical composition that is easily suppressed. “Disaster is consumed as cheesy spectacle, complete with incompetent reporting, useless information bulletins, and inane attempts at commentary:”[48]
Shaviro is talking about Night of the Living Dead, but he might as well be referring to the press coverage of the first California occupations.
¶
Other students respond with horror to the encroachment of dissidents: “the living characters are concerned less about the prospect of being killed than they are about being swept away by mimesis – of returning to existence, after death, transformed into zombies themselves.”[49]
Liberal student activists fear the incursions the most, as they are in many ways the most invested in the fate of the contemporary university
; in many ways their role is similar to that of the survivalists in Night of the Living Dead, or the military officers in Day. Beyond Zombie Politics claims that defenders of the UC system are promoting a “Zombie Politics”; yet this is difficult to fathom. For they are insistent on saving the University, on staying ‘alive’ , even when their version of life has been stripped of all that makes life worth living , when it is as good as social death
.
Shaviro notes that in many scenes in zombie films, our conceptions of protagonist and antagonist are reversed; in many scenes, human survivors act so repugnantly that we celebrate their infection or demise
.[50] ¶ In reality, “
Zombie Politics are something to be championed, because they are the politics of a multitude
, an inclusive mass of political subjects, seeking to consume brains
. Yet brains must be seen as a metaphor for what Marx calls “the
General Intellect
”; in his Fragment on Machines, he describes it as “ the power of knowledge, objectified
.”[51] Students and faculty have been alienated from their labor, and, angry and zombie-like, they seek to destroy the means of their alienation. Yet, for
Shaviro, “the hardest thing to acknowledge is that the living dead are not radically Other so much as they serve to awaken a passion for otherness and for vertiginous disidentification that is already latent within our own selves
.”[52] In other words, we have a widespread problem with aspiring to be this other, this powerless mass. We seek a clear protagonist, we cannot avoid associating with those we perceive as ‘still alive’. Yet for Baudrillard, this constitutes a fundamental flaw:
¶
" at the very core of the 'rationality' of our culture
, however, is an exclusion that precedes every other, more radical than the exclusion of madmen, children or inferior races, an exclusion preceding all these and serving as their model: the exclusion of the dead and of death
."[53] ¶ ¶ In Forget Foucault, we learn the sad reality about biopower: that power itself is fundamentally based on the separation and alienation of death from the reality of our existence
. If we are to continue to use this conception, we risk failing to see that our very lives have been turned into a mechanism for perpetuation of social death: the banal simulation of existence
. Whereas socialized death is a starting point for Foucault, in Baudrillard and in recent actions from California, we see a return to a reevaluation of society and of death; a possible return to zombie politics. Baudrillard distinguishes himself as a connoisseur of graffiti; in
Forget Foucault, he quotes a piece that said “When Jesus arose from the dead, he became a zombie.”[54]
Perhaps the reevaluation of zombie politics will serve as the messianic shift that blasts open the gates of hell, the cemeteryuniversity
. According to the Berkeley kids, “when we move without return to their tired meaning, to their tired configurations of the material, we are engaging in war.”[55] Baudrillard’s words about semiotic insurrectionaries
might suffice:
¶ ¶
"They blasted their way out
however, so as to burst into reality like a scream, an interjection, an anti-discourse, as the waste of all syntatic, poetic and political development, as the smallest radical element that cannot be

caught by any organized discourse
. Invincible due to their own poverty, they resist every interpretation and every connotation, no longer denoting anyone or anything
."[56]
-Social science research accumulates and absorbs other knowledge systems.
-Turns into confessional politics whereby we absorb the colonized into multiculturalism
-Focusing on historical possibilities limits future possibilities
-Desire politics allows the impossible to become possible.
[Eve (Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations and Coordinator of Native American Studies at the
State University of New York at New Paltz. Earned her Ph.D.in Urban Education at The Graduate Center,
The City University of New York in 2008) and K Wayne (Ph.D., 2004, Social and Cultural Studies,
University of California, Berkeley), “R-Words: Refusing Research, pg. 232-235, RSR]
One might ask what is meant by the academy, and by the academy being undeserving or unworthy of some stories or forms of knowledge. For some, the academy refers to institutions of research and higher education, and the individuals that inhabit them. For others, the term applies to the relationships between institutions of research and higher education, the nation-state, private and governmental funders, and all involved individuals.
When we invoke the academy, or academe, we are invoking a community of practice that is focused upon the propagation and promulgation of (settler colonial) knowledge
. Thus, when we say that there are some forms of knowledge that the academy does not deserve, it is because we have observed the academy as a community of practice that, as a whole
: Stockpiles examples of injustice, yet will not make explicit a commitment to social justice Produces knowledge shaped by the imperatives of the nation-state, while claiming neutrality and universality in knowledge production
Accumulates intellectual and financial capital, while informants give a part of themselves away
Absorbs or repudiates competing knowledge systems, while claiming limitless horizons
Like the previous axiom’s question—Why collect narratives of pain?—we ask nonrhetorically, what knowledges does the academy deserve? Beyond narratives of pain, there may be language, experiences, and wisdoms better left alone by social science. Paula Gunn Allen (1998) notes that for many Indigenous peoples, “a person is expected to know no more than is necessary, sufficient and congruent with their spiritual and social place
” (p. 56). To apply this idea to the production of social science research, we might think of this as a differentiation between what is made public and what is kept sacred.
Not everything, or even most things, uncovered in a research process need to be reported in academic journals or settings
. Contrasting
Indigenous relationships to knowledge with settler relationships to knowledge, Gunn Allen remarks,
In the white world, information is to be saved and analyzed at all costs. It is not seen as residing in the minds and molecules of human beings, but as—dare I say it?— transcendent
. Civilization and its attendant virtues of freedom and primacy depend on the accessibility of millions of megabytes of data; no matter that the data has lost its meaning by virtue of loss of its human context . . . the white world has a different set of values [from the Indigenous world], one which requires learning all and telling all in the interests of knowledge, objectivity, and freedom.
This ethos and its obverse—a nearly neurotic distress in the presence of secrets and mystery—underlie much of modern American culture
(p. 59) As social science researchers, there are stories that are entrusted to us, stories that are told to us because research is a human activity, and we make meaningful relationships with participants in our work. At times we come to individuals and communities with promises of proper procedure and confidentiality-anonymity in hand, and are told, “Oh, we’re not worried about that; we trust you!” Or, “You don’t need to tell us all that; we know you will do the right thing by us.”
Doing social science research is intimate work, worked that is strained by a tension between informants’ expectations that something useful or helpful will come from the

divulging of (deep) secrets, and the academy’s voracious hunger for the secrets
.
This is not just a question of getting permission
to tell a story through a signature on an IRB-approved participant consent form. Permission is an individualizing discourse—it situates collective wisdom as individual property to be signed away. Tissue samples, blood draws, and cheek swabs are not only our own; the DNA contained in them is shared by our relatives, our ancestors, our future generations (most evident when blood samples are misused as bounty for biopiracy.) This is equally true of stories. Furthermore, power is protected by such a collapse of ethics into litigation-proof relationships between individual and research institution. Power, which deserves the most careful scrutiny, will never sign such a permission slip
.3 There are also stories that we overhear, because when our research is going well, we are really in peoples’ lives. Though it is tempting, and though it would be easy to do so, these stories are not simply y/ours to take. In our work, we come across stories, vignettes, moments, turns of phrase, pauses, that would humiliate participants to share, or are too sensationalist to publish. Novice researchers in doctoral and master’s programs are often encouraged to do research on what or who is most available to them.
People who are underrepresented in the academy by social location—race or ethnicity, indigeneity, class, gender, sexuality, or ability—frequently experience a pressure to become the n/ Native informant, and might begin to suspect that some members of the academy perceive them as a route of easy access to communities that have so far largely eluded researchers
.
Doctoral programs, dissertations, and the master’s thesis process tacitly encourage novice researchers to reach for low-hanging fruit. These are stories MARK and data that require little effort—and what we know from years and years of academic colonialism is that it is easy to do research on people in pain
.
That kind of voyeurism practically writes itself
. “Just get the dissertation or thesis finished,” novice researchers are told. The theorem of lowhanging fruit stands for pretenured faculty too: “Just publish, just produce; research in the way you want to after tenure, later.” This is how the academy reproduces its own irrepressible irresponsibility. Adding to the complexity, many of us also bring to our work in the academy our family and community legacies of having been researched
. As the researched, we carry stories from grandmothers’ laps and breaths, from below deck, from on the run, from inside closets, from exclaves. We carry the proof of oppression on our backs, under our fingernails; and we carry the proof of our survivance (Vizenor, 2008) in our photo boxes, our calluses, our wombs, our dreams.
These stories, too, are not always ours to give away, though they are sometimes the very us of us. It needs to be said that we are not arguing for silence
.
Stories are meant to be passed along appropriately, especially among loved ones, but not all of them as social science research
. Although such knowledge is often a source of wisdom that informs the perspectives in our writing, we do not intend to share them as social science research.
It is enough that we know them
. Kahnawake scholar Audra Simpson asks the following questions of her own ethnographic work with members of her nation: “Can I do this and still come home; what am I revealing here and why? Where will this get us? Who benefits from this and why?” (2007, p. 78).
These questions force researchers to contend with the strategies of producing legitimated knowledge based on the colonization of knowledge. Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars of Native education have queried the dangers of appropriation of Native knowledge by mainstream research and pedagogical institutions
(e.g., Castagno & Brayboy, 2008; Lomawaima & McCarty, 2006;
Richardson, 2011). Lomawaima and McCarty (2006) describe the “safety zone” as ways in which Indigenous knowledges are included into even overtly anti- Indian spaces such as boarding schools designed to assimilate Native children.
Indigenous knowledge is made harmless to settler colonial pedagogies by relegating it to the safety zone of the margins. Troy
Richardson extends this analysis by discussing “inclusion as enclosure” (2011, p.332), the encircling of
Native education as part of a well-intentioned multiculturalist agenda
. Such gestures, he contends, reduce the
Indigenous curriculum to a supplement to a standard curriculum. Moreover, some narratives die a little when contained within the metanarrative of social science. Richardson (2011) theorizes Gerald Vizenor’s concept of trickster knowledge and the play of shadows to articulate a “shadow curriculum” that exceeds the material objects of reference—where much meaning is made in silence surrounding the words, where memories are not simply reflections of a referent experience but dynamic in themselves. “The shadow is the silence that inherits the words; shadows are the motions that mean the silence” (Vizenor, 1993, p.7). Extending Richardson’s analysis of Vizenor’s work, beneath the intent gaze of the social scientific lens, shadow stories lose their silences, their play of meaning.
The stories extracted from the shadows by social science research frequently become relics of cultural anthropological descriptions

of “ tradition” and difference from occidental cultures.
Vizenor observes these to be the “denials of tribal wisdom in the literature of dominance, and the morass of social science theories” (Vizenor, 1993, p. 8). Said another way, the academy as an apparatus of settler colonial knowledge already domesticates, denies, and dominates other forms of knowledge
. It too refuses. It sets limits, but disguises itself as limitless. Frederic Jameson (1981) writes,
“[H]istory is what hurts.
It is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis
” (p. 102). For
Jameson, history is a master narrative of inevitability, the logic of teleos and totality: All events are interconnected and all lead toward the same horizon of progress.
The relentlessness of the master narrative is what hurts people who find themselves on the outside or the underside of that narrative
.
History as master narrative appropriates the voices, stories, and histories of all Others, thus limiting their representational possibilities, their expression as epistemological paradigms in themselves
.
Academic knowledge is particular and privileged, yet disguises itself as universal and common; it is settler colonial; it already refuses desire; it sets limits to potentially dangerous Other knowledges; it does so through erasure, but importantly also through inclusion, and its own imperceptibility. Jameson’s observation also positions desire as a counterlogic to the history that hurts
.
Desire invites the ghosts that history wants exorcised, and compels us to imagine the possible in what was written as impossible ; desire is haunted. Read this way, desire
expands personal as well as collective praxis .

2NC

K
[Gaytari, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture ed.
Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, pp. 271-316]
When Foucault considers the pervasive heterogeneity of power, he does not ignore the immense institutional heterogeneity that Althusser here attempts to schematize. Similarly, in speaking of alliances and systems of signs, the state and war-machines (mille plateaux), Deleuze and
Guattari are opening up that very field.
Foucault cannot, however, admit that a developed theory of ideology recognizes its own material production in institutionality, as well as in the "effective instruments for the formation and accumulation of knowledge"
(PK, 102).
Because these philosophers seem obliged to reject all arguments naming the concept of ideology as only schematic rather than textual, they are equally obliged to produce a mechanically schematic opposition between interest and desire
.
Thus they align themselves with bourgeois sociologists who fill the place of ideology with a continuistic
"unconscious" or a parasubjective "culture."
The mechanical relation between desire and interest is clear in such sentences as: "We never desire against our interests, because interest always follows and finds itself where desire has placed it" (FD, 215). An undifferentiated desire is the agent, and power slips in to create the effects of desire: "power ... produces positive effects at the level of desireand also at the level of knowledge" (PK, 59).
This parasubjective matrix, cross-hatched with heterogeneity, ushers in the unnamed Subject, at least for those intellectual workers influenced by the new hegemony
of desire. The race for "the last instance" is now between economics and power. Because desire is tacitly defined on an orthodox model, it is unitarily opposed to "being deceived." Ideology as "false consciousness" (being deceived) has been called into question by Althusser. Even
Reich implied notions of collective will rather than a dichotomy of deception and undeceived desire: "We must accept the scream of Reich: no, the masses were not deceived; at a particular moment, they actually desired a fascist regime" (FD, 215). These philosophers will not entertain the thought of constitutive contradiction--that is where they admittedly part company from the Left. In the name of desire, they reintroduce the undivided subject into the discourse of power
.
Foucault often seems to conflate
"individual" and "subject";
10 and the impact on his own metaphors is perhaps intensified in his followers. Because of the power of the word "power,"
Foucault admits to using the "metaphor of the point which progressively irradiates its surroundings."
Such slips become the rule rather than the exception in less careful hands.
And that radiating point, animating an effectively heliocentric discourse, fills the empty place of the agent with the historical sun of theory, the Subject of Europe
. I I
Foucault articulates another corollary of the disavowal of the role of ideology in reproducing the social relations of production: an unquestioned valorization of the oppressed as subject, the "object being,"
as Deleuze admiringly remarks, "to establish conditions where the prisoners themselves would be able to speak." Foucault adds that "the masses know perfectly well, clearly" -once again the thematics of being undeceived-"they know far better than [the intellectual] and they certainly say it very well" (FD, 206, 207).
What happens to the critique of the sovereign subject in these pronouncements? The limits of this representationalist realism are reached
274 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak with Deleuze: "Reality is what actually
happens in a factory, in a school, in barracks, in a prison, in a police station" (FD, 212).
This foreclosing of the necessity of the difficult task of counterhegemonic ideological production has not been salutary. It has helped positivist empiricismthe justifying foundation of advanced capitalist neocolonialism-to define its own arena as "concrete experience," "what actually happens." Indeed, the concrete experience that is the guarantor of the political appeal of prisoners, soldiers, and schoolchildren is disclosed through the concrete experience of the intellectual, the one who diagnoses the episteme. 12 Neither Deleuze nor Foucault seems aware that the intellectual within socialized capital, brandishing concrete experience, can help consolidate the international division of labor. The unrecognized contradiction within a position that valorizes the concrete experience of the oppressed, while being so uncritical about the historical role of the intellectual, is maintained by a verbal slippage
. Thus Deleuze makes this remarkable pronouncement: "A theory is

like a box of tools. Nothing to do with the signifier" (FD, 208).
Considering that the verbalism of the theoretical world and its access to any world defined against it as "practical" is irreducible, such a declaration helps only the intellectual anxious to prove that intellectual labor is just like manual labor
. It is when signifiers are left to look after themselves that verbal slippages happen. The signifier "representation" is a case in point. In the same dismissive tone that severs theory's link to the signifier, Deleuze declares, "There is no more representation; there's nothing but action"-"action of theory and action of practice which relate to each other as relays and form networks" (FD, 206-7). Yet an important point is being made here: the production of theory is also a practice; the opposition between abstract "pure" theory and concrete "applied" practice is too quick and easy.13 If this is, indeed, Deleuze's argument, his articulation of it is problematic. Two senses of representation are being run together: representation as
"speaking for," as in politics, and representation as "re-presentation," as in art or philosophy. Since theory is also only "action," the theoretician does not represent (speak for) the oppressed group. Indeed, the subject is not seen as a representative consciousness (one re-presenting reality adequately). These two senses of representation-within state formation and the law, on the one hand, and in subject-predication, on the otherare related but irreducibly discontinuous. To cover over the discontinuity with an analogy that is presented as a proof reflects again a paradoxical subject privileging. 14 Because "the person who speaks and acts ... is always a multiplicity," no "theorizing intellectual ... [or] party or ... union" can represent "those who act and struggle" (FD, 206). Are those who act and struggle mute, as opposed to those who act and speak (FD, 206)? These immense problems are buried in the differences between the "same" words: consciousness and conscience (both conscience in French), representation and re-presentation.
The critique of ideological subject-constitution within state formations and systems of political economy can now be effaced, as can the active theoretical practice of the "transformation of consciousness." The banality of leftist intellectuals' lists of selfknowing, politically canny subalterns stands revealed; representing them, the intellectuals represent themselves as transparent
.
(Alger Hiss Professor of Social Studies at Bard College, awarded Fellowship at the John
Guggenheim Foundation, Joel, The Enemy of Nature, pages 123-124)
If, however, we ask the question of efficacy, that is, which split sets the others into motion, then priority would have to be given to class, for the plain reason that class relations entail the state as an instrument of enforcement and control, and it is the state that shapes and organizes the splits that appear in human ecosystems
. Thus class is both logically and historically distinct from other forms of exclusion
(hence we should not talk of 'classism' to go along with 'sexism' and
'racism,' and `species-ism'). This is, first of all, because class is an essentially man-made category
, without root in even a mystified biology.
We cannot imagine a human world without gender distinctions – although we can imagine a world without domination by gender. But a world without class is eminently imaginable
– indeed, such was the human world for the great majority of our species' time on earth, during all of which considerable fuss was made over gender. Historically, the difference arises because
'class' signifies one side of a larger figure that includes a state apparatus whose conquests and regulations create races and shape gender relations. Thus there will be no true resolution of racism so long as class society stands
, inasmuch as a racially oppressed society implies the activities of a class-defending state.'° N or can gender inequality be enacted away so long as class society, with its state, demands the super-exploitation of woman's labour. Class society continually generates gender, racial, ethnic oppressions and the like
, which take on a life of their own, as well as profoundly affecting the concrete relations of class itself. It follows that class politics must be fought out in terms of all the active forms of social splitting. It is the management of these divisions that keeps state society functional. Thus though each person in a class society is reduced from what s/he can become, the varied reductions can be combined into the great stratified regimes of history — this one becoming a fierce warrior, that one a routine-loving clerk, another a submissive seamstress, and so on, until we reach today's personifications of capital and captains of industry. Yet no matter how functional a class society, the profundity of its ecological violence ensures a basic antagonism which drives history onward. History is the history of class society
— because no matter how modified, so powerful a schism is bound to work itself through to the surface, provoke resistance (`class struggle'), and lead to the succession of powers. The relation of class can be mystified without end — only consider the extent to which religion exists for just this purpose, or watch a show glorifying the police on television — yet so long as we have any respect for human nature, we must recognize that so fundamental an antagonism as would steal the vital force of one person for the enrichment of another cannot be conjured away.

(Piya Chatterjee, PhD, associate professor of women’s studies at UC
Riverside, Sunaina Maira, professor of Asian American studies at UC Davis, 2014, “The Imperial
University: Race, War, and the Nation State,” pp 6-7) gz
This edited volume offers reports from the trenches of a war on scholarly dissent
that has raged for two or three decades now and has intensified since 9/11
, analyzed by some of the very scholars who have been targeted or have directly engaged in these battles.
The stakes here are high. These dissenting scholars and the knowledges they produce are constructed by right-wing critics as a threat to U.S. power and global hegemony , as has been the case in earlier moments in U.S. history, particularly during the Cold War
. Much discussion of incidents where academics have been denied tenure or publicly attacked for their critique of U.S. foreign or domestic policies, as in earlier moments, has centered on the important question of academic freedom. However, the chapters in this book break new ground by demonstrating that what is really at work in these attacks are the logics of racism, warfare, and nationalism that undergird
U.S. imperialism and also the architecture of the U.S. academy
. Our argument here is that these logics shape a systemic structure of repression of academic knowledge that counters the imperial, nation-building project.
The premise of this book is that the U.S. academy is an “imperial university.” As in all imperial and colonial nations, intellectuals and scholarship play an important role—directly or indirectly, willingly or unwittingly—in legitimizing American exceptionalism and rationalizing U.S. expansionism and repression, domestically and globally
. The title of this book, then, is not a rhetorical flourish but offers a concept that is grounded in the particular imperial formation of the United States, one that is in many ways ambiguous and shape-shifting. 3 It is important to note that
U.S. imperialism is characterized by deterritorialized, flexible, and covert practices of subjugation and violence and as such does not resemble historical forms of European colonialism that depended on territorial colonialism
.4
As a settler-colonial nation , it has over time developed various strategies of control that include proxy wars, secret interventions, and client regimes aimed at maintaining its political, economic, and military dominance around the globe, as well as cultural interventions and “soft power.”The chapters here help to illuminate and historicize the role of the
U.S. university in legitimizing notions of Manifest Destiny and foundational mythologies of settler colonialism and exceptional democracy
as well as the attempts by scholars and students to challenge and subvert them. This book demonstrates the ways in which the academy’s role in supporting state policies is crucial , even—and
especially—as a presumably liberal institution
. Indeed, it is precisely the support of a liberal class that is always critical for the maintenance of “ benevolent empire
.”5
As U.S. military and overseas interventions are increasingly framed as humanitarian wars —to save oppressed others and rescue victimized women—it is liberal ideologies of gender, sexuality, religion, pluralism, and democracy that are key to uphold
.6 The university is a key battleground in these culture wars and in producing as well as contesting knowledges about the state of the nation. We argue that the state of permanent war that is core to U.S. imperialism and racial statecraft has three fronts: military, cultural, and academic
. Our conceptualization of the imperial university links these fronts of war, for the academic battleground is part of the culture wars that emerge in a militarized nation, one that is always presumably under threat, externally or internally. Debates about national identity

and national culture shape the battles over academic freedom and the role of the university in defining the racial boundaries of the nation and its “proper” subjects and “proper” politics.
Furthermore, pedagogies of nationhood, race, gender, sexuality, class, and culture within the imperial nation are fundamentally intertwined with the interests of neoliberal capital and the possibilities of economic dominance
.
-Social science research accumulates and absorbs other knowledge systems.
-Turns into confessional politics whereby we absorb the colonized into multiculturalism
-Focusing on historical possibilities limits future possibilities
-Desire politics allows the impossible to become possible.
[Eve (Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations and Coordinator of Native American Studies at the
State University of New York at New Paltz. Earned her Ph.D.in Urban Education at The Graduate Center,
The City University of New York in 2008) and K Wayne (Ph.D., 2004, Social and Cultural Studies,
University of California, Berkeley), “R-Words: Refusing Research, pg. 232-235, RSR] though they are sometimes the very us of us. It needs to be said that we are not arguing for silence
.
Stories are meant to be passed along appropriately, especially among loved ones, but not all of them as social science research
. Although such knowledge is often a source of wisdom that informs the perspectives in our writing, we do not intend to share them as social science research.
It is enough that we know them
. Kahnawake scholar Audra Simpson asks the following questions of her own ethnographic work with members of her nation: “Can I do this and still come home; what am I revealing here and why? Where will this get us? Who benefits from this and why?” (2007, p. 78).
These questions force researchers to contend with the strategies of producing legitimated knowledge based on the colonization of knowledge. Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars of Native education have queried the dangers of appropriation of Native knowledge by mainstream research and pedagogical institutions
(e.g., Castagno &
Brayboy, 2008; Lomawaima & McCarty, 2006; Richardson, 2011). Lomawaima and McCarty (2006) describe the “safety zone” as ways in which
Indigenous knowledges are included into even overtly anti- Indian spaces such as boarding schools designed to assimilate Native children.
Indigenous knowledge is made harmless to settler colonial pedagogies by relegating it to the safety zone of the margins. Troy Richardson extends this analysis by discussing “inclusion as enclosure”
(2011, p.332), the encircling of Native education as part of a well-intentioned multiculturalist agenda
.
Such gestures, he contends, reduce the Indigenous curriculum to a supplement to a standard curriculum. Moreover, some narratives die a little when contained within the metanarrative of social science. Richardson (2011) theorizes Gerald Vizenor’s concept of trickster knowledge and the play of shadows to articulate a “shadow curriculum” that exceeds the material objects of reference—where much meaning is made in silence surrounding the words, where memories are not simply reflections of a referent experience but dynamic in themselves. “The shadow is the silence that inherits the words; shadows are the motions that mean the silence” (Vizenor, 1993, p.7). Extending Richardson’s analysis of
Vizenor’s work, beneath the intent gaze of the social scientific lens, shadow stories lose their silences, their play of meaning.
The stories extracted from the shadows by social science research frequently become relics of cultural anthropological descriptions of “ tradition” and difference from occidental cultures.
Vizenor observes these to be the “denials of tribal wisdom in the literature of dominance, and the morass of social science theories” (Vizenor, 1993, p. 8). Said another way, the academy as an apparatus of settler colonial knowledge already domesticates, denies, and dominates other forms of knowledge
. It too refuses. It sets limits, but disguises itself as limitless. Frederic Jameson (1981)

writes,
“[H]istory is what hurts. It is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis
” (p. 102). For Jameson, history is a master narrative of inevitability, the logic of teleos and totality: All events are interconnected and all lead toward the same horizon of progress.
The relentlessness of the master narrative is what hurts people who find themselves on the outside or the underside of that narrative
.
History as master narrative appropriates the voices, stories, and histories of all Others, thus limiting their representational possibilities, their expression as epistemological paradigms in themselves
.
Academic knowledge is particular and privileged, yet disguises itself as universal and common; it is settler colonial; it already refuses desire; it sets limits to potentially dangerous Other knowledges; it does so through erasure, but importantly also through inclusion, and its own imperceptibility. Jameson’s observation also positions desire as a counterlogic to the history that hurts
.
Desire invites the ghosts that history wants exorcised, and compels us to imagine the possible in what was written as
impossible ; desire is haunted. Read this way, desire expands personal as well as collective praxis .
-First, refusal demaracates knowledge that cannot/should not be known within the academy.
-Second, limits intelligibility of knowledge.
-Third, refuses the logic of settler colonialism.
-Opens up alternative subjects not confined by the present – theorizes with natives.
[Eve (Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations and Coordinator of Native American Studies at the
State University of New York at New Paltz. Earned her Ph.D.in Urban Education at The Graduate Center,
The City University of New York in 2008) and K Wayne (Ph.D., 2004, Social and Cultural Studies,
University of California, Berkeley), “R-Words: Refusing Research”, pg. 238-243, RSR]
Simpson’s (2007) article is in many ways a director’s-cut commentary on her ethnography on Mohawk nationhood and citizenship, and is a layered example of refusal centered in the Kahnawake Nation, within which she herself is a member.
Simpson opens her article with a critique of the need to know as deeply connected to a need to conquer, a need to govern
. In light of this, how Canada “knows” who is and isn’t
Indigenous is imbricated with law
. The Indian Act, a specific body of law that recognises Indians in a wardship status in Canada, created the categories of person and rights that served to sever Indian women from their communities upon marriage to white men.
It did the reverse to Indian men—white women gained Indian status upon their marriage into an Indian community. (p. 75) In 1984, Bill C-31 amended the act to add Indian women and their descendants back into the federal registry of Indians in Canada, leaving it up to individual nations to determine whether to reinstate them in their local registries.
The politics of membership generated a series of massive predicaments for people who had assimilated versions of the law for the past 150 years and found ways to resist it all the same
. Kahnawake’s own blood quantum membership code, developed in defiance of Canadian regulations for political recognition, was “contested and defended by, it seemed, everyone within the community and sometimes all at once” (p. 73). The question of who is and isn’t Mohawk is not only politically contentious but one that is implicated within the very logic of settler colonial knowledge.
Instead of surfacing the personal predicaments of “cousins and friends and enemies that comprise my version of Kahnawake” (p. 74),
Simpson turns her ethnography toward the ways in which Kahnawake participants incorporated, dismissed, thwarted, and traversed notions of membership, especially via constructions of citizenship

that intentionally drew upon logics found outside settler colonialism . There are three concurrent dimensions of refusal in Simpson’s analysis
—in Simpson’s words, her ethnography “pivoted upon refusal(s)” (p. 73).
The first dimension is engaged by the interviewee, who refuses to disclose further details: “I don’t know what you know, or what others know . . . no-one seems to know.” The second dimension is enacted by Simpson herself, who refuses to write on the personal pain and internal politics of citizenship
.
“ No one seems to know ” was laced through much of my informant’s discussion of C-31
, and of his own predicament—which I knew he spoke of indirectly, because I knew his predicament
. And I also knew everyone knew, because everyone knows everyone’s “predicament.”
This was the collective “limit”—that of knowledge and thus who we could or would not claim. So it was very interesting to me that he would tell me that “he did not know” and “no one seems to know”—to me these utterances meant, “I know you know, and you know that I know I know . . . so let’s just not get into this.” Or, “let’s just not say.” So I did not say, and so I did not “get into it” with him, and I won’t get into it with my readers. What I am quiet about is his predicament and my predicament and the actual stuff (the math, the clans, the mess, the misrecognitions, the confusion and the clarity)—the calculus of our predicaments. (p. 77)
The interviewee performs refusal by speaking in pointedly chosen phrases to indicate a shared/common knowledge, but also an unwillingness to say more , to demarcate the limits of what might be made public , or explicit
.
The second dimension of refusal is in the researcher’s
(Simpson’s) accounting of the exchange, in which she installs limits on the intelligibility of what was at work, what was said and not said, for her readers
. Simpson tells us, “In listening and shutting off the tape recorder, in situating each subject within their own shifting historical context of the present, these refusals speak volumes, because they tell us when to stop,” (p. 78). In short, researcher and researched refuse to fulfill the ethnographic want for a speaking subaltern
.
Both of these refusals reflect and constitute a third dimension—a more general anticoloniality and insistence of sovereignty by the Kahnawake Nation—and for many, a refusal to engage the logic of settler colonialism at all.
For the purposes of our discussion, the most important insight to draw from
Simpson’s article is her emphasis that refusals are not subtractive, but are theoretically generative
(p. 78), expansive.
Refusal is not just a “no,” but a redirection to ideas otherwise unacknowledged or unquestioned.
Unlike a settler colonial configuration of knowledge that is petulantly exasperated and resentful of limits, a methodology of refusal regards limits on knowledge as productive , as indeed a good thing.
To explore how refusal and the installation of limits on settler colonial knowledge might be productive, we make a brief detour to the Erased Lynching series (2002–2011) by Los Angeles–based artist Ken Gonzales-Day (see Figure 12.1). Gonzales-Day researched lynching in California and the Southwest and found that the majority of lynch victims were Latinos, American Indians, and Asians.
Like lynchings in the South, lynchings in California were events of public spectacle, often attended by hundreds, sometimes thousands of festive onlookers.
At the lynchings, professional photographers took hours to set up portable studios similar to those used at carnivals; they sold their images frequently as postcards, mementos of public torture and execution to be circulated by U.S. post throughout the nation and the world. Lynching, we must be reminded, was extralegal, yet nearly always required the complicity of law enforcement—either by marshals or sheriffs in the act itself, or by judges and courts in not bothering to prosecute the lynch mob afterward
. The photographs immortalize the murder beyond the time and place of the lynching, and in their proliferation, expand a single murder to the general murderability of the non-White body.
In this respect, the image of the hanged, mutilated body itself serves a critical function in the maintenance of White supremacy and the spread of racial

terror beyond the lynching
. The spectacle of the lynching is the medium of terror. The Erased Lynching series yields another context in which we might consider what a social scientist’s refusal stance might comprise. Though indeed centering on the erasure of the former object, refusal need not be thought of as a subtractive methodology.
Refusal prompts analysis of the festive spectators regularly backgrounded in favor of wounded bodies, strange fruit, interesting scars
. Refusal shifts the gaze from the violated body to the violating instruments—in this case, the lynch mob, which does not disappear when the lynching is over, but continues to live, accumulating land and wealth through the extermination and subordination of the Other. Thus, refusal helps move us from thinking of violence as an event and toward an analysis of it as a structure
. Gonzales-Day might have decided to reproduce and redistribute the images as postcards, which, by way of showing up in mundane spaces, might have effectively inspired reflection on the spectacle of violence and media of terror. However, in removing the body and the ropes, he installed limits on what the audience can access, and redirected our gaze to the bodies of those who were there to see a murder take place, and to the empty space beneath the branches.
Gonzales-Day introduced a new representational territory, one that refuses to play by the rules of the settler colonial gaze, and one that refuses to satisfy the morbid curiosity derived from settler colonialism’s preoccupation with pain. Refusals are needed for narratives and images arising in social science research that rehumiliate when circulated, but also when, in Simpson’s words, “the representation would bite all of us and compromise the representational territory that we have gained for ourselves in the past 100 years
” (p. 78). As researcher-narrator, Simpson tells us, “I reached my own limit when the data would not contribute to our sovereignty or complicate the deeply simplified, atrophied representations of Iroquois and other Indigenous peoples that they have been mired within anthropologically” (p. 78). Here Simpson makes clear the ways in which research is not the intervention that is needed—that is, the interventions of furthering sovereignty or countering misrepresentations of Native people as anthropological objects. Considering Erased Lynchings dialogically with On Ethnographic Refusal, we can see how refusal is not a prohibition but a generative form. First, refusal turns the gaze back upon power, specifically the colonial modalities of knowing persons as bodies to be differentially counted, violated, saved, and put to work. It makes transparent the metanarrative of knowledge production—its spectatorship for pain and its preoccupation for documenting and ruling over racial difference
. Thus, refusal to be made meaningful first and foremost is grounded in a critique of settler colonialism, its construction of Whiteness, and its regimes of representation. Second, refusal generates, expands, champions representational territories that colonial knowledge endeavors to settle, enclose, domesticate.
Simpson complicates the portrayals of Iroquois, without resorting to reportrayals of anthropological Indians.
Gonzales-Day portrays the violations without reportraying the victimizations
. Third, refusal is a critical intervention into research and its circular self-defining ethics
. The ethical justification for research is defensive and self-encircling—its apparent self-criticism serves to expand its own rights to know, and to defend its violations in the name of “good science.”
Refusal challenges the individualizing discourse of IRB consent and “good science” by highlighting the problems of collective harm, of representational harm, and of knowledge colonization
. Fourth, refusal itself could be developed into both method and theory
. Simpson presents refusal on the part of the researcher as a type of calculus ethnography. Gonzales-
Day deploys refusal as a mode of representation. Simpson theorizes refusal by the Kahnawake Nation as anticolonial, and rooted in the desire for possibilities outside of colonial logics, not as a reactive stance.
This final point about refusal connects our conversation back to desire as a counterlogic to settler colonial knowledge
.
Desire is compellingly depicted in Simpson’s description of a moment in an interview, in which the alternative logics about a “feeling citizenship” are referenced.
The interviewee states, Citizenship is, as I said, you live there, you grew up there, that is the life that you know—that is who you are. Membership is more of a legislative enactment designed to keep people from obtaining the various benefits that Aboriginals can receive. (p. 76)
Simpson describes this counterlogic as “the logic of the present,” one that is witnessed, lived, suffered through, and enjoyed
(p. 76). Out of the predicaments, it innovates “tolerance and exceptions and affections” (p. 76). Simpson writes (regarding the Indian Act, or blood quantum), “‘
Feeling citizenships’ . . . are structured in the present space of intra-community recognition, affection and care, outside of the logics of colonial and imperial rule
” (p. 76). Simpson’s logic of the present dovetails with our discussion on the logics of desire.
Collectively, Kahnawake refusals decenter damage narratives; they unsettle the settler colonial logics of blood and rights; they center desire. By theorizing through desire, Simpson thus theorizes with and as Kahnawake Mohawk. It is important to point out that Simpson does not deploy her tribal identity as a badge of authentic voice, but rather highlights the ethical predicaments that result from speaking as oneself, as

simultaneously part of a collective with internal disputes, vis-à-vis negotiations of various settler colonial logics.
Simpson thoughtfully differentiates between the Native researcher philosophically as a kind of privileged position of authenticity, and the Native researcher realistically as one who is beholden to multiple ethical considerations
. What is tricky about this position is not only theorizing with, rather than theorizing about, but also theorizing as. To theorize with and as at the same time is a difficult yet fecund positionality—one that rubs against the ethnographic limit at the outset.
Theorizing with (and in some of our cases, as) repositions Indigenous people and otherwise researched Others as intellectual subjects rather than anthropological subjects . Thus desire is an
“epistemological shift,” not just a methodological shift
(Tuck, 2009, p. 419).

1NR

FW
Dana
—prof of political science, Amherst, Beyond Good and Evil: Arendt, Nietzsche, and the
Aestheticization of Political Action, Political Theory, Vol. 20, No. 2 (May, 1992), pp. 274-308
The representative thinking made possible by disinterested judgment is Arendt‘s Kantian version of Nietzsche's perspectival objectivity, the objectivity born of using “more" and “differ-em" eyes to judge/interpret a thing.”
There is
, however, a n obvious and crucial difference between perspectives represented through the free play of imagination and the
“perspective seeing" that Nietzsche describes. For Nietzsche, the ability to view the world aesthetically presupposes liberation from any residual sense that the link between signifier and signified is in any way nonarbitrary. Having “more” and “different
” eyes
simply means the ability to relativize all accepted meanings, to dissolve their
apparent solidity in the free play of signifiers
.135
In
Kant and
Arendt
, on the other hand, the free play of the imagination, the capacity for representative thought
, has the effect of focusing the judging agent's attention on the publicly available aspects of the representation
.'‘‘‘’
The representative nature of judgment enables the transcendence of "individual limitations" and “subjective private conditions,” thereby
freeing us for the purely public aspect of the phenomenon
.
The difference
between genealogical "objectivity" and representative judgment, between the kind of aesthetic distance endorsed by Nietzsche and [hat endorsed by Kant and Arcndt, is summed up by the contrast between Nietzsche’s trope of
“seeing things from another planet" and the
Kantian]
Arendtian appeal to “common sense,” t he sensus communis.m
Nietzschean aestheticism, in the form of perspectivism
, has the effect of either placing one beyond any community of interpretation
(the genealogical standpoint) or denying that a viable
“background consensus" exists, thereby robbing the public realm of its fundamental epistemological precondition
.
There can be no arena of common discourse , no genuinely public space
, whcn the “death of
God” leads to the advent of Weber's “waning gods."Us
Lyotard
expresses a similar thought when he links the discovery of an irreducible plurality of incommensurable language games to the decline of the legitimizing metanarratives of modernity . in such a situation, judgment and interpretation are inevitably aestheticized
: we are left
, in Nietzsche's phrase, with the "yay and nay of the palate.
""° For Kant, the significance and implications of aesthetic distance are quite opposite. As noted previously, he is struck by the public character of the beautiful, despite the nonobjective quality of aesthetic t’ntpel'ience.“I
The impartiality of detached aesthetic judgment, while not pretending to truth , guarantees that the object or ground of aesthetic satisfaction will be communicable.
This in turn reveals a quality of taste as judgment
, which is obscured by Nietzsche, and our own subjectivist notion of taste.
Taste judgments of the disinterested sort are characterized by a peculiar claim: the pure judgment of taste "requires the agreement of everyone, and he who describes anything as beautiful claims that everyone ought to give approval to the object in question and describe it as beautiful?”
The communicability of taste judgments
leads Kant to posit the existence of a common sense
, a common “feeling for the world." Indeed, Kant describes taste itself as “a kind of sensus communism“
The aesthetic distance achieved by representative thought thus points to the “grounding” of judging insight in common sense
, a point that Arendt emphasizes. "
Common sense
,” she writes, “ discloses to us the nature of the world insofar as it is a common world; we owe to it the fact that our strictly
private and " subjective
" five senses and their sensory data can adjust themselves to a nonsubjective and “objective” world

which we have in common and share with others
.“'“ The significance of Kanl’s theory oftaslejudgmcm for politics is that it shows how a nonfoundationalist theory of judgment can in fact serve to strengthen rather than undermine our sense of a shared world of appearances.
Kant's analysis of taste judgment reveals how, in Arendt's words, “judging is one, if not the most, important activity in which this sharing-the-world-with-others comes to pass?"5 It does so by highlighting the public-directed claim implicit in all pure judgments of taste, by showing how the expression of approval or disapproval, satisfaction or dissatisfaction appeals to the common sense of one‘s judging peers. In matters of taste, one “expects agreement from everybody else.”"" Oriented toward agreement, relying on common sense, taste judgment emerges, contra Nietmhe, as the activity through which the public world presences itself as appearance, as the activity through which a community “decides how this world, independently of its utility and all our vital interests in it, is to look and sound, what we will see and what men will hear in
Kant‘s theory of judgment thus opens a space between the false objectivism of Plato
(political judgment as a kind of episteme, as determinative judgment) and the subjectivism that accompanies Nietzsche’s endorsement of perspectival valuation
.
Taste judgments
are valid, but their “specific validity“ is to be understood precisely in opposition to the "objective universal validity" that marks cognitive or practical judgments in the Kantian sense. As Arendt says, “its claims to validity can never extend further than the others in whose place the judging person has put himself
for his considerations?“ Taste judgments are crucially dependent on perspective, the "it appears to me," on “the simple fact that each person occupies a place of his own from which he looks upon and judges the world.”"°
Nevertheless, they constantly return us to a world of appearances “common to all its inhabitants. “Kant’s notion of taste judgment provides the perfect model for political judgment
, in
Arendt’s opinion, because it preserves appearance and perspective without abolishing the world.
We can sum up the achievement of Kant’s theory of judgment by saying that it removes
the spectre of the subjectivism of perspectivism of taste, yet without recourse to objective
or cognitive grounds of validation
. Lacking an objective principle, taste judgments are
necessarily difficult
, and
where their validity is questioned, it can be redeemed only by persuasive means
. As Arendt says in “The Crisis in Culture”: taste judgments (unlike demonstrable facts or truths demonstrated by argument) “share with political opinions that they are persuasive; the judging person — as Kant says quite beautifully -can only ‘woo the consent of everyone else’ in the hope of coming to an agreement with him eventually.”"°
Taste judgments are,
in a word, redeemed deliberatively . Kant's conception of aesthetic judgment—departing from the exchange of viewpoints necessary for representative thinking and culminating in the persuasive exchange that accompanies the rendering of each judgment
— is
thus, for Arendt, political through and through
.‘51
It requires an ongoing process of exchange and deliberation
, one "without criteria," as Lyotard would say)“ This is yet another reason why
Kantian taste judgment is the appropriate model for
Arendt’s account
of political judgment, the “receptive side” of virtuoso action. It reasserts the intersubjective nature of
both appearances and judgment while severing the links between the common or public and the universal
.
Our capacity for judgment rests on our feeling for the world
, and this requires neither a transcendental ground
for appearances nor universally valid criteria of argumentative rationality
.
Practical questions
emphatically do not admit of truth
.‘”
Yet political judgment seen as a kind of taste judgment
nevertheless helps to tame the agon by reintroducing the connection between plurality and deliberation , by showing how the activity of judgment can
, potentially, reveal to an audience what they have in common in the process of articulating their differences
.
And what they have in common
, contra Aristotle and contemporary oommunitarians, are not purposes per se but the world.
Debate, not consensus, constitutes the essence of political life
, according to Arcndtf" The conception of taste judgment
proposed by Kant reopens the space of deliberation threatened by an overly agonistic aestheticization of action but in such a way that consensus and agreement are not the Isles of action

and judgment but, at best. a kind of regulative ideal.
The turn to
Kant
thus enables Arendt to avoid the antipolitical tendencies encountered in the actor-centered version of agonistic action
.
The meaning creative capacity of nonsovereign action becomes importantly dependent on the audience
, conceived as a group of deliberating agents exercising their capacity for judgment
. The judgment of appearances or the meaning of action is seen by Arcndt as predicated on a twofold “death of the author”: the actor does not create meaning as the artist does a work1 nor can the audience redeem the meaning of action through judgment unless the individuals who constitute it are able to forget themselves. This is not to say that Arendt’s conception of political action and judgment extinguishes the self; rather, it is to say that self-coherence is achieved through a process of self-disclosure that is importantly decentered for both actor and judge, for the judging spectator is also engaged in the "sharing of words and deeds” in his capacity as a deliberating agent. As Arendt reminds us, “By his manner of judging, the person discloses to an extent also himself, what kind of person he is, and this disclosure, which is involuntary, gains in validity to the degree that it has liberated itself from merely individual idiosyncrasiesm’ The agon is tamed, then, not by retreating from the aestheticization of action but by following its anti-Platonic impulse through to the end.
The
"completion" of the theory
of action by a Kantinspired theory of judgment retains the focus on action as something heroic
or extraordinary, as beyond good and evil. It does so, however, by shifting the emphasis from world- and self-creation to the world-illuminating power of
“great" words
and deeds, to [he beauty of such action. As a public phenomenon, the beautiful can only be confirmed in its being by an audience animated by a care for the world. The difference between Arendt’s aesthcticization of politics and Nietzsche's aestheticizatjon of life is nowhere clearer than in the connection that Arendt draws between greatness and beauty in "The Crisis in Culture": Generally speaking, culture indicates that the public realm, which is rendered politically secure by men ofaction, offers its space of display to those things whose essence it is to appear and to be beautiful. In other words. culture indicates that an and politics. their conflicts and tensions notwithstanding. are interrelated and even mutually dependent. Seen against the blckground of political experiences and of activities which, if left to themselves, come and go without leaving any trace in the world, beauty is the manifestation ofimpcrishability. The fleeting greatness of word and deed can endure to the extent that beauty is bestowed upon it Mthout the beauty, that is, the radiant glory in which potential immortality is made manifest in the human world, all human life would be futile and no greatness could endure. Arendtian aestheticism, an aestheticism predicated on a love of the world and which admires great action because it possesses a beauty that illuminates the world, is critically different from Nietzschean aestheticism, the aestheticism of the artist
. A persistent theme in Arendt's writing, one parallel to her emphasis on the tension between philosophy and politics, concerns the conflict between art and politics.157
This conflict does not emerge out of the phenomenology of art versus
that of political action
; as we have seen, Arendt thinks both are importantly similar
.
Rather, the conflict centers on the mentality of the artist versus that of the political actor. The artist
is, according to Arendt, a species of homo faber, who characteristically views the world in terms of means and ends
.
He is unable to conceive praxis independently
of poiesis: the work always retains priority over the activity itself
.
The result is that performance is denigrated, action misconceived
. Nietzsche, of course, has even less use for homo faber than Arendt, who takes pains to voice her criticism not against making as such but against the universalization ol'a particular attitude. Nevertheless, if we take an
Arendtian perspective, it is clear that N ictzsche, the artist-philosopher, must be counted among those who “fall into the common error of regarding the state or govemmenl as a work of art,” as an expression of a form-giving will to power)” The Republic stands as the initiator of the state as “collective masterpiece," as artwork, trope. The fact that Plato launched this metaphor in terms of what Lacoue-Labarthe calls a
“mimetology,” while Nietzsche repudiates again and again all metaphors of correspondence or adequation, does not alter their fundamental agreement: both regard action not as essentially performance but as making.I59 Poiesis has a radically different connounion for Nietzsche, to be sure, but the activity of self-fashioning and self-overcoming does not overturn the Platonic paradigm so much as bring it to closure.
Nietzsche may explode the notion of telos in its classical sense, but the model of the work retains its significance. Thus despite the importance of his anti-Platonism to the project of dcconstructing the tradition’s model of action, his contribution to the thinking of plurality and difference in apolitical way is subject to a crucial limitation.
Thought
essentially in terms of an “aesthetics of existence,"
in terms of a project of self-fashioning freed from any telos, the positively valorized notion of difference
proposed by Nietzsche remains poetic
. Like the activity of the artist
, it “must be isolated from the public
, must be sheltered and concealed from it“ if it is to achieve adequate expression
.“J
The poetic, ultimately anti theatrical framework
assumed by Nietzsche prohibits the Arendtian thought that under certain very specific conditions , it is precisely the public realm which is constituted by plurality and which enables the fullest, most articulated expression of

difference . CONCLUSION Arendt resists the Habermasian temptation to seek quasi-transcendental standards of agreement
in a “polytheistic" disillusioned age However, it is important to realize that her appeal to a Kantian notion of taste and the sensus communis is not tantamount to an endorsement of the Aristotelian view of political community and judgment (her comments linking tastejudgments to phroncsis notwithstanding).'°‘ Arendt’s Kantian, aeslheticizing turn has, unsurprisingly, confused commentators, who note the highly attenuated character of community and the depoliticizcd notion of judgment in Kant.‘M Arendt chooses
Kantian formalism over Aristotelian concretencss because, while she wants to focus on the shared world of appearance that is the public realm, she has no desire whatever to frame “what we have in common” in terms of purposes or ends. In this regard, the problem with the Aristotelian notion of koinoru'a, as defined in book 3 of the Politics, is that it creates not a stage fot action but a vehicle for teleological fulfillment."u
Arendt’s appeal to the sensus oommunis self-consciously avoids the overly substantive, local character of koinonia or Sittlichlteit. At the same time, it denies the false universalism of moralitat.
Arendt‘s theory of judgment points not to the determinancy of phronesis, with its emphasis on context
and local practices, but to "the free reflexive discovery of rules in
light of indeterminate, transcendent ideas of community ”
The critique of Aristotelian/oommunitarian thinking is also applicable to the kind of postmodern relativism that we find in a thinker like Lyotard. Like Arendt, Lyotard's conception of judgment is a curious mixture of Nietzschean, Aristotelian, and Kantian elements)” However, the postmodern " incredulity towards metanarratives
” serves not only to deny the possibility of any overarching metadiscourse that might render diverse language games commensurable but to deny the possibility of a public space of discourse
, at least insofar as this space claims, implicitly, to synthesize perspectives and distance interests
.
For Lyotard, discourse is essentially
fragmented
: “All we can do is gaze in wonderment at the diversity of discursive species, just as we do at the diversity of plant or animal speities."166 It is also incducibly interested: “to speak is to fight, in the general sense of playing, and speech acts fall within the domain of a general agonistic:s."'67 Given these assumptions, it is not surprising that Lyotard feels that Kant has left our ability to judge "hanging,” as it were, and turns to the will to power as an explanation of this faculty.“8
What we find in Lyotard is the false
Nietzschean dichotomy between a universal
, metaphysically grounded metadiscourse and a fragmented, postmetaphysical discursive realm in which “public” discourse
/ judgment reflects either local habit or the agonistic ability to create new moves, impose new interpretations , generate new criteria
— all in the name of the will to power
.“ Arendt's appeal to taste judgment and a shared feeling
for the world may be immensely problematic, but it does serve to underline the falseness of this dichotomy
. One may grant that
Arendl's aesthcticism avoids the trope of the fiction du polin'que, universalism, and postmodern pluralism. yet still feel that her “solution" is of dubious relevance to our situation. True, there is a distance and alienation built into the Kantian idea of a community of taste that may make the Arendtian response to Enlightenment universalism more palatable to a postmodern sensibility than the oven Aristotelianism of a Maclntyre or a Gadamer. Nevertheless, the “withering away of common sense" in
the modern and postmodern ages
would appear to relegate Arendt's modification of Nietzschean aestheticism t0 the status of a rearguard action . The fragmentation of contemporary life renders the idea of a “common fooling for the world" more paradoxical
, and
possibly less viable, than a recovery of ethos or the legislation of a proceduralist rationality.
"Hie simple answer to this objection is mat Arendt completely agrees. Her work stands not only as a comprehensive rethinking of the nature and meaning of political action but as an extended mediation on how the energies of modernity have worked to dissipate our feeling for the world, to alienate us from the worlti The last part of The Human Condition equates modernity with world alienation: the reduction of Being to process, the subjeclification of the real, and finally, the triumph of a laboring mentality all work to alienate man not from himself but from the world."’° “Worldliness,” presupposed by the sensus communis, is not a distinguishing characteristic of the animal laboranst Similarly,
Arendt would
entirely agree with the postmodernist who questions the possibility of circumscribing a particular realm of phenomena in a world where boundaries are increasingly blurred
. in her analysis of "the rise of the social” in the modern age, Arcndt identifies this blurring as the central movement of modernity."l
Her work departs from the
strongest possible conviction that our reality is one in which stable boundaries
and distinctions have been dissolved and rendered
virtually impossible
.
The postmodernist will object that Arendtian aestheticism
. unlike Nietzsche's, mourns the loss of the world as
an articulated, bounded whole
.
Nietzschean aestheticism is an affirmation of the Dionysian capacity to destroy fixed identities
, to dissolve
Apollonian

slampings into flux
.
Postmodern theory affirms this aestheticism, exaggerating the immanent tendencies of
postmodern reality in the pursuit of an active
(i.e., creative) nihilism
: it has no time for guilty nostalgia.
Arendtian aestheticism, in contrast, stakes its hopes entirely on the rethematization of certain ontological dimensions of human experience (action, the public world, and self
), which this blurring obscures, denatures, and makes increasingly difficult to articulate. The fetishistic quality of her distinction making
, her
Kantian finickincss in delimiting the political
: these attest to a deeply rooted desire to preserve the possibility of meaning created by political action and redeemed by political
judgment.
Andrea
, Ph.D., co-founder of Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, UC Riverside Associate
Professor,
, Building Unlikely Alliances: An Interview with Andrea Smith
uppingtheanti.org/journal/article/10-building-unlikely-alliances-an-interview-with-andrea-smith/
You’ve said that you saw the Obama election as a moment for social movements to build themselves.
What are your thoughts about electoral politics and the role of the state
in terms of the question of power
?
Until you have an alternative system, then there is no “outside” of the current system . I don’t think there is a pure place in which to work, so you can work in many places
, including inside the state
. I think there is no reason not to engage in electoral politics or any other thing.
But it would
probably be
a lot more effective if, while we are doing that , we are also building alternatives
.
If we build the alternatives, we have movements to hold us accountable when we work within the system and we also have more negotiating power.
It can actually be helpful.
In terms of,
say, state repression, if we have some critical people within the state then we might be able to do something about it. We might think about them as a way to relieve some of the pressure while trying to build the alternatives
.
I don’t think it is un-strategic
to think about it like that. I am just not the kind of person who ever says, “never do ‘x’.” You always have to be open-minded and creative.
It may not work out. You may get co-opted
or something bad might happen.
But if we really knew the correct way to do something we would have done it by now
.
– Professor of IR @ University of Sydney –
(Colin, Agents, Structures and International Relations: Politics as Ontology, pgs. 48-50
One important aspect of this relational ontology is that these relations constitute our identity as social actors
.
According to this
relational model
of societies, one is what one is, by virtue of the relations within which one is embedded
. A worker is only a worker by virtue of his/her relationship to his/her employer and vice versa. ‘Our social being is constituted by relations and our social acts presuppose them.’
At any particular moment in time an individual may be implicated in

all manner of relations, each exerting its own peculiar causal effects
.
This ‘lattice-work’
of relations constitutes the structure of particular societies and endures despite changes in the individuals occupying them
. Thus, the relations
, the structures, are ontologically distinct from the individuals who enter into them
. At a minimum, the social sciences are concerned with two distinct, although mutually interdependent, strata. There is an ontological difference between people and structures: ‘ people are not relations, societies are not conscious agents
’.
Any attempt to explain one in terms of the other should be rejected.
If there is an ontological difference between society and people
, however, we need to elaborate on the relationship between them. Bhaskar argues that we need
a system of mediating concepts, encompassing both aspects of the duality of praxis into which active subjects must fit in order to reproduce it: that is, a system of concepts designating the ‘point of contact’ between human agency and social structures
.
This is known as a ‘positioned practice’ system
. In many respects, the idea of ‘positioned practice’ is very similar to Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus.
Bourdieu
is primarily concerned with what individuals do in their daily lives. He is keen to refute the idea that social activity can be understood solely in terms of individual decision-making
, or as determined by surpaindividual objective structures. Bourdieu’s notion of the habitus can be viewed as a bridge-building exercise across the explanatory gap between two extremes. Importantly, the notion of a habitus can only be understood in relation to
the concept of a
‘social field’
. According to Bourdieu, a social field is ‘a network
, or a configuration, of objective relations between positions objectively defined’
.
A social field
, then, refers to a structured system of social positions occupied by individuals and/or institutions – the nature of which defines the situation for their occupants
. This is a social field whose form is constituted in terms of the relations which define it as a field of a certain type. A habitus
(positioned practices) is a mediating link between individuals’ subjective worlds and the socio-cultural world into which they are born and which they share with others.
The power of the habitus derives from the thoughtlessness of habit
and habituation, rather than consciously learned rules
.
The habitus is imprinted
and encoded in a socializing process that commences during early childhood
.
It is inculcated more by experience than by explicit teaching
.
Socially competent performances are produced as a matter of routine, without explicit reference to a body of codified knowledge
, and without the actors necessarily knowing what they are doing (in the sense of being able adequately to explain what they are doing). As such, the habitus can be seen as the site of ‘internalization of reality and the externalization of internality.’
Thus social practices are produced
in, and by, the encounter between
: (1) the habitus and its dispositions; (2) the constraints and demands of the socio-cultural field to which the habitus is appropriate or within
; and (3) the dispositions of the individual agents located within both the socio-cultural field and the habitus. When placed within Bhaskar’s stratified complex social ontology the model we have is as depicted in Figure 1. The explanation of practices will require all three levels.
Society
, as field of relations, exists prior to, and is independent of, individual and collective understandings at any particular moment in time
; that is, social action requires the conditions for action. Likewise, given that behavior is seemingly
recurrent, patterned, ordered, institutionalised, and displays a degree of stability over time, there must be sets of relations
and rules that govern it
.
Contrary to individualist theory, these relations
, rules and roles are not dependent upon either knowledge of them by particular individuals, or the existence of actions by particular individuals
; that is, their explanation cannot be reduced to consciousness
or to the attributes of individuals
. These emergent social forms must possess emergent powers. This leads on to arguments for the reality of society based on a causal criterion.
Society, as opposed to the individuals that constitute it, is
, as Foucault has put it,
‘a complex
and independent reality that has its own laws
and mechanisms of reaction, its regulations as well as its possibility of disturbance
. This new reality is society…It becomes necessary to reflect upon it, upon its specific characteristics, its constants and its variables’.