Police not policing
Generic Links
The 1AC fails at critiquing the police state, the problem of the constitution and the
fourth amendment. Reject their analysis as inadequate
Sexton 2007[Jared Sexton Warfare in the American Homeland Racial Profiling and the Societies of
Control –Jared Sexton Duke University Press Durham and London 2007]DDI15///
In the contemporary United States, the police operate as the unaccountable arbiters of
lethal violence, the agents of a domestic militarism that underwrites all expansionism and
interventionism. They are, as a rule, afforded impunity in their discretion to use what we continue to
euphemize as 'excessive force," which really means any manner of brutalization whatsoever,
including so-called unjustified shootings. In each case, the police enjoy a virtual immunity from
prosecution and rarely experience even interruptions in salary. This free rein is not only practical, however—the
effect of negligent judicial oversight or disorganized civilian review boards—it is also codified as what
the legal scholar Janet Koven Levit terms "constitutional carte blanche." There is simply no legal recourse against the
violence and violation of the police; police departments are, according to a recent Human Rights
Watch report, agencies "shielded from justice." 5 At this point of extremity, the power of life and death rests
clearly in their hands, granted by omcial decree. Before the police , we do not live under constitutional (or
other) protection of any sort. We are, in short, "naked before the state." 6
Under such conditions, it should surprise no one that "racial profiling" as an institutionalized practice
of the agencies of the police is not only possible or pervasive but entirely legal. There is nothing hyperbolic
about my argument here. Reading the legal scholarship on racial profiling, one gets a distinct sense of vertigo. What one finds there is
an infinite regress around the standards of "probable cause" set forth in the Fourth Amendment
protection against "unreasonable searches and seizures." A number of scholars have amply demonstrated how, for
instance, the recent cases of Illinois v. Wardlow (2000) and United States v. Whren (1996) effectively
circumvented the standard of "reasonable suspicion" that previously governed the conditions under which the police might stop and frisk
pedestrians or motorists during routine tramc stops! That earlier standard of reasonable suspicion was established in
Terry v. Ohio (1968),
the case from which the well-known "Terry stop" takes its name. However, on even cursory examination, one sees that
Terry itself instituted a loophole around the Fourth Amendment definition of probable cause, all of which enabled the police greatly during its
war on drugs, as Reagan declared it in 1982.8 We
might lament this persistent whittling away of the standards of
suspicion, yet if we look closely at the doctrinal history of Fourth Amendment protections, we find
again that probable cause itself reduces down to an equally vague and problematic standard of
protection. As H. Richard Uviller remarks in Virtual Justice:
Probable cause is not a very apt term; it has little to do with probability and nothing
whatever with causality. But it is the term chosen by the Framers to describe the degree of
suspicion requisite for the government to move into the citizen's private spaces. It means "damn
good reason to believe," that's all. Not certainty beyond a reasonable doubt, not even more likely than
not. But (just) more than a hunch or (mere) suspicion. That's the best we can do to define
it?
Of course, the Fourth Amendment was intended to preclude the use of the 'general warrant" or "writ of assistance" carried by British
colonial officers before the Revolution, which sanctioned the search and seizure of anything and everything in the home or on the person of a
given "suspect."
In other words, the parameters of search and seizure were at the discretion of the
colonial police and not subject to any judicial review. It is safe to say that the police today have
regained the general warrant, such that under present circumstances "we all become susceptible to
the arbitrary whims and unsupported hunches of police officers." 10 The pretexts available to stop and frisk any
pedestrian or motorist they so choose are as numerous as they are unavoidable. In a motor vehicle, any infraction of the
traffic code, however minor, can lead to full-scale search and arrest. Given that "no one can drive for even a few
blocks without committing a minor violation," one is imminently open to police encounter on the streets and highways. Simply walking
away from the police is now grounds for a stop and frisk, despite the supposed constitutional right
to do so. Standing still is also grounds for a stop, either in particular designated "high-crime areas"
or in any setting in which the police judge your presence "incongruous."
The body the 1AC discusses suffers the state repression when s/he performs or acts
out politically, we can call this form of violence subjective vertigo but the black
suffers gratuitus violence, in the words of Jared Sexton “It has only required the
presence — within the polity, economy, culture, and society — of a so-called
problem people, dwelling as the absence of human presence.” This –Objective
Vertigo serves as the stage to which subjective vertigo is experienced
Wilderson 2011[The Vengeance of Vertigo: Aphasia and Abjection in the Political Trials of Black
Insurgents Frank B. Wilderson, III University of California, Irvine (African American Studies/Drama
Department InTensions Journal] DDI15///
[3] Subjective vertigo is vertigo of the event. But the sensation that one is not simply spinning
in an otherwise stable environment, that one’s environment is perpetually unhinged stems from a
relationship to violence that cannot be analogized. This is called objective vertigo, a life constituted by
disorientation rather than a life interrupted by disorientation. This is structural as opposed to performative violence.
Black subjectivity is a crossroads where vertigoes meet, the intersection of performative and
structural violence.
[4] Elsewhere I have argued that the Black is a sentient being though not a Human being. The Black’s and the Human’s
disparate relationship to violence is at the heart of this failure of incorporation and analogy. The
Human suffers contingent violence, violence that kicks in when s/he resists (or is perceived to resist)
the disciplinary discourse of capital and/or Oedipus. But Black peoples’ subsumption by violence is a paradigmatic
necessity, not just a performative contingency. To be constituted by and disciplined by violence, to
be gripped simultaneously by subjective and objective vertigo, is indicative of a political ontology
which is radically different from the political ontology of a sentient being who is constituted by
discourse and disciplined by violence when s/he breaks with the ruling discursive codes.vi When we
begin to assess revolutionary armed struggle in this comparative context, we find that Human
revolutionaries (workers, women, gays and lesbians , post-colonial subjects) suffer subjective
vertigo when they meet the state’s disciplinary violence with the revolutionary violence of the
subaltern; but they are spared objective vertigo. This is because the most disorienting aspects of their lives are induced by
the struggles that arise from intra-Human conflicts over competing conceptual frameworks and disputed cognitive maps, such as the American
Indian Movement’s demand for the return of Turtle Island vs. the U.S.’s desire to maintain territorial integrity, or the Fuerzas Armadas de
Liberación Nacional’s (FALN) demand for Puerto Rican independence vs. the U.S.’s desire to maintain Puerto Rico as a territory. But
for
the Black, as for the slave, there are no cognitive maps, no conceptual frameworks of suffering and
dispossession which are analogic with the myriad maps and frameworks which explain the
dispossession of Human subalterns.
[5] The structural, or paradigmatic, violence that subsumes Black insurgents’ cognitive maps
and conceptual frameworks, subsumes my scholarly efforts as well. As a Black scholar, I am tasked with making
sense of this violence without being overwhelmed and disoriented by it. In other words, the writing must somehow be indexical of that which
exceeds narration, while being ever mindful of the incomprehension the writing would foster, the failure, that is, of interpretation were the indices
to actually escape the narrative. The
stakes of this dilemma are almost as high for the Black scholar facing
his/her reader as they are for the Black insurgent facing the police and the courts. For the scholarly
act of embracing members of the Black Liberation Army as beings worthy of empathic critique is
terrifying. One’s writing proceeds with fits and starts which have little to do with the problems of
building the thesis or finding the methodology to make the case. As I write, I am more aware of the rage and anger
of my reader-ideal (an angry mob as readers) than I am of my own interventions and strategies for assembling my
argument. Vertigo seizes me with a rash of condemnations that emanate from within me and swirl
around me. I am speaking to me but not through me, yet there seems to be no other way to speak. I
am speaking through the voice and gaze of a mob of, let’s just say it, White Americans; and my
efforts to marshal a mob of Black people, to conjure the Black Liberation Army smack of
compensatory gestures. It is not that the BLA doesn’t come to my aid, that they don’t push back, but neither I nor my insurgent allies
can make the case that we are worthy of our suffering and justified in our actions and not terrorists and apologists for terror who should be locked
away forever. How can we be worthy of our suffering without being worthy of ourselves? I press on, even though the vertigo that seizes me is so
overwhelming that its precise nature—subjective, stemming from within me, or objective, catalyzed by my context, the raging throng—cannot be
I have no reference points apart from the mob that gives no quarter. If I write “freedom
fighter,” from within my ear they scream “terrorist”! If I say “prisoner of war,” they chant “cop
killer”! Their denunciations are sustained only by assertion, but they ring truer than my
painstaking exegesis. No firewall protects me from them; no liberated psychic zone offers me sanctuary. I want to stop and turn myself
determined.
in.
Engage the State
The emancipatory logic of the 1AC refolds us into the category of humanism which
is inaccessible to the unthought
Hartman 2003[The Position of the Unthought An interview with Saidiya V Hartman Conducted by
Frank Wilderson Qui Parle, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Spring/Summer 2003)] DDI15///
Saidiya V Hartman - Well! That's a lot, and a number of things come to mind. I think for me the book is about the problem
of crafting a narrative for the slave as subject, and in terms of positionality, asking, "Who does that narrative
enable?" That's where the whole issue of empathic identification is central for me. Because it just seems that every attempt to
emplot the slave in a narrative ultimately resulted in his or her obliteration, regardless of whether it
was a leftist narrative of political agency - the slave stepping into someone else's shoes and then
becoming a political agent - or whether it was about being able to unveil the slave's humanity by actually finding
oneself in that position.
In many ways, what I was trying to do as a cultural historian was to narrate a certain
impossibility, to illuminate those practices that speak to the limits of most available narratives to
explain the position of the enslaved. On one hand, the slave is the foundation of the national order,
and, on the other, the slave occupies the position of the unthought . So what does it mean to try to
bring that position into view without making it a locus of positive value, or without trying to fill in the void? So
much of our political vocabulary/imaginary/desires have been implicitly integrationist even when we
imagine our claims are more radical . This goes to the second part of the book -that ultimately the metanarrative
thrust is always towards an integration into the national project, and particularly when that project
is in crisis, black people are called upon to affirm it.
So certainly it's about more than the desire for inclusion with in the limited set of
possibilities that the national project provides. What then does this language - the given language of freedom enable? And once you realize its limits and begin to see its inexorable investment in certain notions
of the subject and subjection, then that language of freedom no longer becomes that which res cues
the slave from his or her former condition, but the site of the re-elaboration of that condition, rather than its transformation.
F.W - This is one of the reasons why your book has been called "pessimistic" by Anita
Patterson.3 But it's interesting that she doesn't say what I said when we first started talking, that
it's enabling. I'm assuming that she's white - I don't know, but it certainly sounds like it.
S.VH. - But I think there's a certain integrationist rights agenda that subjects who are
variously positioned on the color line can take up. And that project is something I consider obscene:
the attempt to make the narrative of defeat into an opportunity for celebration, the desire to look at
the ravages and the brutality of the last few centuries, but to still find a way to feel good about
ourselves. That's not my project at all, though I think it's actually the project of a number of
people. Unfortunately, the kind of social revisionist history undertaken by many leftists in the 1
970s, who were trying to locate the agency of dominated groups, resulted in celebratory narratives
of the oppressed.4 Ultimately, it bled into this celebration, as if there was a space you could carve
out of the terrorizing state apparatus in order to exist outside its clutches and forge some
autonomy. My project is a different one. And in particular, one of my hidden polemics in the book was
an argument against the notion of hegemony, and how that notion has been taken up in the context of
looking at the status of the slave.
Western Philosophy
Western philosophy cannot evaluate or theorize blackness –it is because the black is
not mere metaphysical but biological, the black object is over-determined by its
blackness and is open to racialized violence because of it. Anti-Asianess, antiLatinoness cannot exist if it did not contain the seeds of anti-blackness
Sexton 10
Jared Sexton ‘The Curtain of the Sky’: An Introduction 2010 Critical Sociology DDI15///
In Chapter Five of Black Skin, Fanon writes, for instance, that ‘the anti-Semite is inevitably a
negrophobe,’ but not that the negrophobe is inevitably an anti-Semite (Fanon 2008: 101). The
unidirectional nature of this link would seem to be a corollary of the hierarchical discrepancy in
racist culture between the Jew and the black in the field of vision. Whereas the ‘Jewishness of the
Jew … can go unnoticed’ and his ‘acts and behaviors are the determining factor’, the black is ‘not
given a second chance’ because she is, in the famous formulation, ‘overdetermined from
without…slave not to the “idea” others have of [her], but to [her] appearance’ (Fanon 2008: 95). The
hyper-visibility of the black is an effect of the sheer corporeality attributed to the black in the racist
imagination, the over-presence of her ‘tangible personality’ or ‘actual being’. Fanon writes: ‘ The
Negro symbolizes the biological’ (Fanon 2008: 144), where the projective evacuation of biological
existence from certain Western philosophical conceptions of intelligence denigrates the body as a
permanent threat to the continuity of reason. More precisely, the biological threat is sexual in nature
and it is the unmitigated sexualization of blackness, the reduction of the black to sexual being – to
the flesh of genitalia, in fact – and the resulting blackening of sex and sexuality, that characterizes
negrophobia. Perhaps it goes without saying that this reduction of the body to flesh links the
libidinal economy of sexual fetishism to the political economy of commodity fetishism in the most
acute way. This suggests that while it is impossible to be anti-Semitic (persecuting Jewishness as the corporate
presence of cunning or sinister intelligence, leading to the loss of propertyor political power) without also being
anti-black (persecuting blackness as the embodied antithesis of intelligence, a consuming violence leading to
madness and the loss of bodily integrity), it is quite possible to be anti-black without also being anti-
Semitic; or, perhaps more relevant to racial formation in the USA, without also being anti-Indian
or anti-Asian. In other words, one can reject without contradiction the thesis that it is best to be
white and Christian – the postulate of white superiority, and even pursue the re-signification of a
historically disparaged Jewishness, Indianness, Asianness, etc., while endorsing, in whole or in part,
the thesis that it is nonetheless worst to be black – the postulate of black inferiority. For Lewis R. Gordon,
whose black existential philosophy has reframed Fanon’s thought in Anglophone academic cirles since Homi K.
Bhabha’s landmark introduction to the 1986 Pluto Press edition of Black Skin,White Masks: ‘there is no way to
reject the thesis that there is something wrong with being black beyond the willingness to “be” black – not in
terms of convenient fads of playing blackness, but by paying the social costs of anti-blackness on a
global scale’ (Gordon 1997: 67). What are these social costs and what might it mean to pay them, if they
represent the price of being ethical in an anti-black world? anti-black world. In point of fact, to speak of
‘black inferiority’ in this schema is euphemistic. Fanon diagnoses in the lived experience of the black not
a feeling of inferiority, but rather ‘a feeling of not existing’ (Fanon 2008: 118). Fanon’s existential
phenomenology of non-existence not only extends and, in a sense, radicalizes the Du Boisian
concept of ‘double consciousness’, first described in the latter’s 1897 Atlantic Monthly article,
‘Strivings of the Negro People’, as the ‘strange experience’ of ‘being a problem’: not causing a
problem with one’s act or even posing a problem with one’s demand, but being a problem in one’s very existence.
Fanon’s thought also embeds a deeper meditation on the ontology of race, an ontology that, because
the product of maneuvers of powers real and symbolic, is a properly political ontology
Capitalism
Marxism doesn’t come to grips with the specificity of anti-black violence which can
be understood as a libidinal desire of whiteness to further subjugate blackness. It
was not in the capitalist interest to make the slave a property of enjoyment, rape, or
even lynch the black body
Sexton 2006(Jared Sexton Race, Nation, and Empire in a Blackened World Chair of the African
American Studies Department at the University of California –Irvine, Ph.D. From the University of
California –Berkley Radical History Review Issue 95 (Spring 2006)) DDI15///
In the United States, homegrown white supremacists, and the lion’s share of their more
moderate neighbors, have long considered black people to be weapons of mass destruction. Racial
profiling, the hallmark of Homeland Security’s dreadful encroachments, cut its fearsome teeth several years
prior to the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act. Prior, as well, to the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) “Driving while Black” campaign
in the late 1990s; prior
to the launch of President Ronald Reagan’s infamous war on drugs in the early
1980s, and even to President Richard Nixon’s earlier consolidation of the first truly nationwide
police apparatus in the late 1960s. In fact, the genealogy of this nefarious police practice is properly
charted beyond the twentieth century, reaching back, with stunningly little modification, to the
ethos of the colonial slave patrols of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Given this
line of descent, it is not unreasonable to say that racial profiling is the sine qua non of modern policing.
In the consternated deliberations of national security, official and unofficial, from the founding of the
republic to the trumpeting of the new world order, the social control and crisis management of the
black population has always figured centrally, even or perhaps especially when matters of
emancipation or racial equality have by no means enjoyed the focus of debate. Across the sweep of
U.S. history, policing the color line has required no credible threat of invasion, no evidence of
insurrectionary design, no proven stockpile of illicit chemical agents or radioactive material, no
particular breach of domestic or international law, no sensational moral or ethical transgression
(though all of these items, real or imagined, have factored in the relevant discourses, public and private).
It has only required the
presence — within the polity, economy, culture, and society — of a so-called problem people,
dwelling as the absence of human presence.
We can note further that the institution of transatlantic racial slavery — whose political and
economic relations constitute, present tense, the social fabric of Western modernity in general, of
the Americas in particular, and of the United States most acutely — cannot be explained (away) by
the acquisition of fixed capital, the minimization of variable capital, or the maximization of profits,
much less by the dictates of gunboat diplomacy, the expansion of strategic overseas military
installations, or the idiosyncrasies of the White House. It may seem so at times, but only insofar as
contemporary observers, or our historical counterparts, fundamentally misrecognize the nature of
racial slavery: as a brutal regime of labor exploitation; as the atrocious adjunct to land conquest
and the extermination, containment, and/or forced assimilation of indigenous peoples; or as an endeavor
functional to, rather than in excess of and at times at odds with, the advent and maturation of Eurocentric capitalism.
Of course, all of these procedures have been important to the history of racial slavery (and vice
versa), but none is essential to its origins, its development and, above all, its pernicious afterlife.1
Rather, enslavement — the inaugural enterprise for the age of Europe, the precondition for the American century and its coveted sequel — is
enabled by and dependent on the most basic of operations: symbolic and material immobilization, the
absolute divestment of sovereignty at the site of the black body: its freedom of movement, its
conditions of labor, its physical and emotional sustenance, its social and sexual reproduction, its
political and cultural representation. Beyond its economic utility, this rendering of the black as the
object of dispossession par excellence — object of accumulation, prototypical commodity, captive
flesh — structures indelibly the historical proliferation of modern conceptions of sovereignty that now dominate
political and legal discourse globally and provide the crucial frames of intelligibility for both
imperialism and anti-imperialism, empire and its discontents. With blacks barred by definition
from the very notion of the sovereign (whatever their nominal legal status, wherever their tentative place of residence), those
not marked by the material and symbolic stigma of slavery have the exclusive and positive capacity
to debate about sovereignty: to trivialize its importance and rationalize its violation or to struggle in
its defense, to name and lament its loss, and wage war for its recovery.
Their Marxist approach fails insofar it mistakes the demands of the 99% for the
demand of the incalculable, the unimaginable, the slave demands for work to seize
while the worker demands for higher wages and equal footing under a socialist
paradigm that is only parasitic towards the black
Wilderson 2007(The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal Frank B. Wilderson III, Wilderson
is professor of African American Studies and Drama at the University of California Irvine. Ph.D. at the
University of California Berkley) DDI15///
By examining the strategy and structure of the black subject's absence in, and
incommensurability with, the key categories of Gramscian theory, we come face to face with three
unsettling consequences:
1. The black American subject imposes a radical incoherence on the assumptive logic of Gramscian
discourse and on today's coalition politics. In other words, she or he implies a scandal. 2. The black subject reveals the
inability of social movements grounded in Gramscian discourse to think of white supremacy (rather than
capitalism) as the base and thereby calls into question their claim to elaborate a comprehensive and
decisive antagonism. Stated another way, Gramscian discourse and coalition politics are indeed able to imagine the subject that
transforms itself into a mass of antagonistic identity formations—formations that can precipitate a crisis in wage slavery,
exploitation, and hegemony—but they are asleep at the wheel when asked to provide enabling
antagonisms toward unwaged slavery, despotism, and terror. 3. We begin to see how Marxism
suffers from a kind of conceptual anxiety . There is a desire for socialism on the other side of crisis,
a society that does away not with the category of worker but with the imposition that workers
suffer under the approach of variable capital. In other words, the mark of its conceptual anxiety is in its
desire to democratize work and thus help to keep in place and ensure the coherence of Reformation
and Enlightenment foundational values of productivity and progress. This scenario crowds out
other postrevolutionary possibilities—that is, idleness.
The scandal with which the black subject position "threatens" Gramscian and coalition discourse
is manifest in the black subject's incommensurability with, or disarticulation of, Gramscian categories: work,
progress, production, exploitation, hegemony, and historical self-awareness. Through what strategies does
the black subject destabilize—emerge as the unthought, and thus the scandal of—historical
materialism? How does the black subject function within the "American desiring machine" differently from the quintessential Gramscian
subaltern, the worker?
Capital was kick-started by the rape of the African continent, a phenomenon that is central
to neither Gramsci nor Marx . According to Lindon Barrett, something about the black body in and of itself
made it the repository of the violence that was the slave trade. It would have been far easier and far
more profitable to take the white underclass from along the riverbanks of England and western
Europe than to travel all the way to Africa for slaves.
The theoretical importance of emphasizing this in the early twenty-first century is twofold.
First, capital was kick-started by approaching a particular body (a black body) with direct
relations of force, not by approaching a white body with variable capital. Thus, one could say that
slavery is closer to capital's primal desire than is exploitation. It is a relation of terror as opposed to a
relation of hegemony. Second, today, late capital is imposing a renaissance of this original desire, the
direct relation of force, the despotism of the unwaged relation. This renaissance of slavery—that is, the
reconfiguration of the prison-industrial complex—has once again as its structuring metaphor and
primary target the black body.
The value of reintroducing the unthought category of the slave by way of noting the absence
of the black subject lies in the black subject's potential for extending the demand placed on
state/capital formations because its reintroduction into the discourse expands the intensity of the
antagonism. In other words, the positionality of the slave makes a demand that is in excess of the
demand made by the positionality of the worker. The worker demands that productivity be fair and
democratic (Gramsci's new hegemony; Lenin's dictatorship of the proletariat—in a word, socialism). In
contrast, the slave demands that production stop, without recourse to its ultimate democratization.
Work is not an organic principle for the slave. The absence of black subjectivity from the crux of
radical discourse is symptomatic of the text's inability to cope with the possibility that the
generative subject of capitalism, the black body of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the
generative subject that resolves late capital's over-accumulation crisis, the black (incarcerated) body of
the twentieth century and twenty-first century, does not reify the basic categories that structure
conflict within civil society: the categories of work and exploitation.
Social Death Debate
Nothing in Social Death denes Social Life, all of their evidence assume a “Or”
dialectic between life and death which is to say Blacks are socially dead or social
alive –we’re a “and/both” to this dialectic where Black life lives underground, outer
space within the shadow of Black Social death
Sexton 2012[Jared Sexton Chair and Professor of African American Studies at the University of
California –Irvine, received his Ph.D. at the University of California –Berkley Ante-Anti-Blackness:
Afterthoughts 2012] DDI15///
However, before we adjudicate whether the authors of "Raw Life" or the dossier of articles that it introduces or, for that matter,
Fanon himself truly suffer from "an explicatory velocity that threatens to abolish the distance
between, which is also to say the nearness of" a whole range of conceptual pairs requiring a finer
attunement to "their difference and its modalities" (Moten 2008: 182); I think it paramount to adjudicate whether the
fact that "blackness has been associated with a certain sense of decay" is, in the first instance,
something that we ought to strain against as it strains against us. And even if, in the last instance, we
decide to stay the course, need we mobilize a philosophy of life in order to do so? To interrogate "the racial discourses of life
philosophy" is to demonstrate that the question of life cannot be pried apart from that thorniest of
problems: "the problem of the Negro as a problem for thought," that dubious and doubtless "fact of blackness," or what I will call, in yet
another register, the social life of social death. [15] This is as much an inquiry about the nature of nature
as it is about the politics of nature and the nature of politics; in other words, it is meta-political no
less than it is meta-physical. The question that remains is whether a politics that affirms (social)
life can avoid the thanatological dead end if it does not will its own (social) death. David Marriott
might call this, with Fanon, "the need to affirm affirmation through negation...not as a moral
imperative...but as a psychopolitical necessity" (Marriott 2007: 273 fn. 9). [16]
As noted, Patterson first developed the concept in question for an academic audience in his
encyclopedic 1982 survey, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, and surprisingly little elaboration followed in the wake of
his intellectual contribution and the minor controversy it spurred. That debate, played out in the pages of book reviews and, sometime thereafter,
in passing references to the earlier work in scholarly articles and books,
generally invoked a caricature of the concept as
already debunked. Not that there isn't much in Patterson to worry about, especially if one were
interested to examine how aspects of the neoliberalism he would eventually come to embrace are
embedded in prototypical form in his magnum opus and in earlier writings from before the commencement of the Reagan/Bush era
proper. Consider, on this score, comments by V.P. Franklin (at this writing President’s Chair and Distinguished Professor
of History and Education at the University of California, Riverside) in his review for the Journal of Negro History:
The large gap in our knowledge of global slavery "from the perspective of the dominated"
still needs to be filled. Orlando Patterson's Slavery and Social Death provides us with a
great deal of information on the legal status of slaves and freedpeople from ancient times to
the present, but his lack of knowledge of ancient and modern languages and his dependence
upon secondary sources limits the value of the work for researchers who have moved
beyond "the World the Slaveholders Made" to an analysis of what it was like "To Be A Slave." And his inadequate and outdated
discussion of slave life and culture in this country makes the work of questionable value to historians and
social scientists interested in the Afro-American experience in the United States (Franklin 1983:
215-6).
The negative estimation is two-fold: on the one hand, Patterson is unable and uninterested
in writing history from the perspective of the dominated (which is a way of saying that he is unable and uninterested in
writing history for the dominated); on the other, Patterson nonetheless takes the liberty of speaking about the
dominated and the result is travesty. Franklin draws up a review article Patterson penned for the pages of The New Republic,
while at work on the study that would become Slavery and Social Death, in order to establish in Patterson an acute condescension toward the
career of the African American in the United States that may suggest something about the conceptual framework more generally. In registering
profound disagreement with one of the principal arguments of Eugene Genovese's Bancroft Award-winning 1974 study, Roll, Jordan, Roll,
cultural system" as a "limited creed – indulgently pedestrian and
immediate in its concerns, lacking in prophetic idealism, a total betrayal of the profound
eschatology and heroic ideals of their African ancestors" (quoted in ibid: 215). Patterson goes on: "It was
not a heritage to be passed on. Like their moral compromises, this was a social adaptation with no potential for change, a total
adjustment to the demands of plantation life and the authoritarian dictates of the masters" (ibid). And the fatal blow: "A people, to
deserve the respect of their descendents, must do more than merely survive spiritually and
physically. There is no intrinsic value in survival, no virtue in the reflexes of the cornered rat" (ibid). Though I've been called worse, one can
Patterson denounces the "Afro-American
understand with little effort why an eminent scholar writing in the Journal of Negro History (Franklin, incidentally, is now Editor of the renamed
Journal of African American History) might
chafe against the suggestion that the masthead of said academic
venue contained an oxymoron. We will call Patterson's verdict here an instance of the universal tendency to debasement in the
sphere of analysis, insofar as that analysis posits the presupposition of its object. One might think, with Franklin, that a shift in perspective from
slaveholder to slave slips the knot of the hermeneutic circle. But
the question of the constitution of the system (or
whole), Chandler reminds us above, is also the question of the constitution of those subjects or objects
(or parts) whose functional distribution plots the operations of the system.
Whereas Patterson's detractors take to task his historical sociology for its inability and unwillingness to fully countenance the agency
of the perspective and self-predicating activity of the slave, his supporters (or those engaging his work through generous critique) do not fail to
remark, even if they rarely highlight, that what is most stunning is the fact that the concept of social death cannot be generalized. It is indexed to
slavery and it does not travel. That is, there are problems in the formulation of the relation of power from which slavery arises and there are
problems in the formulation of the relation of this relation of power to other relations of power. This split reading was evident immediately, as
indicated in a contemporaneous review by Ross K. Baker. Baker
observes, against the neoconservative backlash politics of
"angry white males" and the ascendance of another racialized immigration discourse alternating,
post-civil rights, between model minority and barbarians at the gate: "The mere fact of slavery
makes black Americans different. No amount of tortured logic could permit the analogy to be
drawn between a former slave population and an immigrant population, no matter how low-flung
the latter group. Indeed, had the Great Society programs persisted at their highest levels until today, it is doubtful that the mass of
American blacks would be measurably better off than they are now" (Baker 1983: 21). Baker's refusal of analogy in the wake
of his reading of Patterson is pegged to a certain realization "brought home," as he puts it, "by the
daunting force of Patterson's description of the bleak totality of the slave experience" (ibid). I want to
hold onto this perhaps unwitting distinction that Baker draws between the mere fact of slavery, on the one hand, and the daunting force of
description of the slave experience, on the other. In this distinction, Baker
echoes both the problem identified by Moten
in his reading of my co-authored piece as a certain conflation of the fact of blackness with the lived
experience of the black (Moten 2008: 179) and the problem identified by Hartman as a certain conflation
of witness and spectator before the scenes of subjection at the heart of slavery (Hartman 1997: 4). I concede
that Moten's delineation is precise (though its pertinence is in doubt) and that it encourages a more sophisticated theoretical practice, but
Hartman's conclusion, it seems to me, is also accurate in a sort of non-contradictory coincidence or overlap with Moten that situates black studies
in a relation field that is still generally under-theorized. Rather
than approaching (the theorization of) social death
and (the theorization of) social life as an "either/or" proposition, then, why not attempt to think them
as a matter of "both/and"? Why not articulate them through the supplementary logic of the
copula? In fact, there might be a more radical rethinking available yet.
There are no feelings powerful enough to alter the structural relation between the
living and the dead, not if feelings are pressed into the service of a project which
seeks to bring the dead to life. But one can imagine feelings powerful enough¶ to
bring the living to death
Sexton 2011 (The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism -Jared Sexton:
Prof of African American studies at University of California Irvine) DDI15///
[23] Elsewhere, in a discussion of Du Bois on the study of black folk, Gordon restates an existential phenomenological conception of the
antiblack world developed across his first several books: “Blacks here suffer the phobogenic reality posed by the spirit of racial seriousness. In
effect, they more than symbolize or signify various social pathologies—they become them. In our antiblack world, blacks are pathology” (Gordon
2000: 87). This conception would seem to support Moten’s contention that even much radical black studies scholarship sustains the association of
blackness with a certain sense of decay and thereby fortifies and extends the interlocutory life of widely accepted political common sense. In fact,
it would seem that Gordon deepens the already problematic association to the level of identity. And
yet, this is precisely what
Gordon argues is the value and insight of Fanon: he fully accepts the definition of himself as
pathological as it is imposed by a world that knows itself through that imposition, rather than
remaining in a reactive stance that insists on the (temporal, moral, etc.) heterogeneity between a
self and an imago originating in culture. Though it may appear counterintuitive, or rather because
it is counterintuitive, this acceptance or affirmation is active; it is a willing or willingness, in other
words, to pay whatever social costs accrue to being black, to inhabiting blackness, to living a black
social life under the shadow of social death. This is not an accommodation to the dictates of the
antiblack world. The affirmation of blackness, which is to say an affirmation of pathological being,
is a refusal to distance oneself from blackness in a valorization of minor differences that bring one
closer to health, to life, or to sociality. Fanon writes in the first chapter of Black Skin, White Masks, “The Black Man and
Language”: “A Senegalese who learns Creole to pass for Antillean is a case of alienation. The Antilleans who make a mockery out of him are
lacking in judgment” (Fanon 2008: 21). In a world structured by the twin axioms of white superiority and black inferiority, of white existence and
black nonexistence, a world structured by a negative categorical imperative— “above all, don’t be black” (Gordon 1997: 63)—in
this
world, the zero degree of transformation is the turn toward blackness, a turn toward the shame, as it
were, that “resides in the idea that ‘I am thought of as less than human’” (Nyong’o 2002: 389).xiv In this we might create a
transvaluation of pathology itself, something like an embrace of pathology without pathos. [24] To
speak of black social life and black social death, black social life against black social death, black
social life as black social death, black social life in black social death—all of this is to find oneself in
the midst of an argument that is also a profound agreement, an agreement that takes shape in
(between) meconnaissance and (dis)belief. Black optimism is not the negation of the negation that is
afro-pessimism, just as black social life does not negate black social death by inhabiting it and
vitalizing it. A living death is as much a death as it is a living. Nothing in afro-pessimism suggests
that there is no black (social) life, only that black life is not social life in the universe formed by the
codes of state and civil society, of citizen and subject, of nation and culture, of people and place, of
history and heritage, of all the things that colonial society has in common with the colonized, of all
that capital has in common with labor—the modern world system. Black life is not lived in the
world that the world lives in, but it is lived underground, in outer space. This is agreed. That is to
say, what Moten asserts against afropessimism is a point already affirmed by afro-pessimism, is, in
fact, one of the most polemical dimensions of afro-pessimism as a project: namely, that black life is
not social, or rather that black life is lived in social death. Double emphasis, on lived and on death. That’s the whole
point of the enterprise at some level. It is all about the implications of this agreed- upon point where arguments (should) begin, but they cannot
(yet) proceed.
Their claims bout non-black groups being socially dead is void of any warrents and
skews black positionality –Nothing in the positionality of _____ mean their open to
gratutius violence, general dishonor or natal alientation. Civil Society is not
premised upon the devastation of this group of people nor are they effected
Sexton 2010[Jared Sexton –The Curtain of the Sky': An Introduction. The University of California –
Irvine Ph.D. UCB] DDI15///
That is to say, in the debate about the colonial policy of assimilation and its discontents , a debate
in which Mannoni and Fanon intervene respectively, it is slavery and the particular freedom
struggle it engenders that mark the critical difference. Slavery: that which reduces ‘colonial peoples
to a molten state’ uniquely enabling the metropolitan power ‘to pour them into a new mould’, a
process in which ‘the personality of the native is first destroyed through uprooting, enslavement,
and the collapse of the social structure’ (Mannoni 1990: 27). For Mannoni, ‘assimilation is only
practicable where an individual has been isolated from his group, wrenched from his environment
and transplanted elsewhere’ (Mannoni 1990: 27, emphasis added). Fanon’s historical materialist redaction of Mannoni’s
psychology of the colonial relation is to refuse the latter’s projection of the ‘affective disorders’ produced by
colonization into a pre-colonial cultural eternity. Not so much, perhaps, because such projection would
have the Malagasy desire her own colonizer (like the Inca who Mannoni suggests desires her own conquistador in an earlier
historical period), but because the contradictions of colonization might provide an even more problematic
recommendation for ‘the introduction of slavery’ (Mannoni 1990: 27).
To suffer the loss of political sovereignty, the exploitation of labor, the dispossession of land and resources is deplorable; yet,
we
might say in this light that to suffer colonization is unenviable unless one is enslaved. One may not be
free, but one is at least not enslaved. More simply, we might say of the colonized: you may lose your
motherland, but you will not ‘lose your mother’ (Hartman 2007). The latter condition, the ‘social death’
under which kinship is denied entirely by the force of law, is reserved for the ‘natal alienation’ and
‘genealogical isolation’ characterizing slavery. Here is Orlando Patterson, from his encyclopedic 1982 Slavery and Social
Death:
I prefer the term ‘natal alienation’ because
it goes directly to the heart of what is critical in the slave’s
forced alienation, the loss of ties of birth in both ascending and descending generations. It also
has the important nuance of a loss of native status, of deracination. It was this alienation of the slave from all
formal, legally enforceable ties of ‘blood,’ and from any attachment to groups or localities
other than those chosen for him [sic] by the master, that gave the relation of slavery its
peculiar value to the master. The slave was the ultimate human tool, as imprintable and as disposable as the master
wished. And this was true, at least in theory, of all slaves, no matter how elevated. (Patterson 1982: 7–8)
True even if elevated by the income and formal education of the mythic American middle class, the
celebrity of a Hollywood icon, or the political position of the so-called Leader of the Free World.4
The alienation and isolation of the slave is not only vertical, canceling ties to past and future generations and rendering
thereby the notion of ‘descendants of slaves’ as a strict oxymoron. It is also a horizontal prohibition, canceling ties to the
slave’s contemporaries as well. Reduced to a tool, the deracination of the slave, as Mannoni and Fanon each note in their turn, is
total, more fundamental even than the displacement of the colonized, whose status obtains in a network of persecuted
human relations rather than in a collection or dispersal of a class of things. Crucially, this total deracination is
strictly correlative to the ‘absolute submission mandated by [slave] law’ discussed rigorously in Saidiya Hartman’s 1997 Scenes of Subjection:
the slave estate is the most perfect example of the space of purely formal obedience defining the jurisdictional field of sovereignty (Agamben
2000). Because
the forced submission of the slave is absolute, any signs whatsoever of ‘reasoning …
intent and rationality’ are recognized ‘solely in the context of criminal liability’. That is, ‘the slave’s will
[is] acknowledged only as it [is] prohibited or punished’ (Hartman 1997: 82, emphasis added). A criminal will, a criminal
reasoning, a criminal intent, a criminal rationality: with these erstwhile human capacities
construed as indices of culpability before the law, even the potentiality of slave resistance is
rendered illegitimate and illegible a priori.
The disqualification of black resistance by the logic of racial slavery is not unrelated to the
longstanding cross-racial phenomenon in which the white bourgeois and proletarian revolutions on
both sides of the Atlantic can allegorize themselves as revolts against slavery, while the hemispheric black
struggle against actually existing slavery cannot authorize itself literally in those same terms. The
latter must code itself as the apotheosis of the French and American revolutions (with their themes of JudeoChristian deliverance) or, later, the Russian and Chinese revolutions (with their themes of secular messianic transformation)
or, later still, the broad anti-colonial movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America of the mid-20th
century (with their themes of indigenous reclamation and renaissance).5 One of the defining
features of contemporary political and intellectual culture remains this metaphoric transfer that
appropriates black suffering as the template for non-black grievances, while it misrecognizes the
singularity of black struggles against racial slavery and what Loïc Wacquant calls its ‘functional
surrogates’ or what Hartman terms its ‘afterlife’. Put differently, ‘ the occult presence of racial slavery’
continues to haunt our political imagination : ‘nowhere, but nevertheless everywhere, a dead time which never arrives and
does not stop arriving’ (Marriott 2007: xxi). Hartman’s notion of slavery’s afterlife and Wacquant’s theorization of slavery’s functional
surrogates are two productive recent attempts to name the interminable terror of slavery, but we are still very much within the crisis of language –
of thinking and feeling, seeing and hearing – that slavery provokes. Both scholars challenge the optimistic idea of a residual ‘legacy’ of slavery,
precisely because it requires the untenable demarcation of an historic end in Emancipation. The
relations of slavery live on,
Hartman might say, after the death knell of formal abolition, mutating into ‘the burdened
individuality of freedom’. The functions of the chattel system are largely maintained, Wacquant might say,
despite the efforts of Reconstruction, preserved in surrogate institutional form under Jim Crow, the
ghetto, and the prison. Slavery lives on, it survives, despite the grand attempts on its institutional
life forged by the international movements against slavery, segregation and mass imprisonment
(Davis 2003).
Prisons abolitionism
Coalitional strategies even the most radical Prison Abolitionism serve to reify
antiblackness and secure the positions of Junior Partners within civil society in
short, their rhetorical structures and political desire are underwritten by a
supplemental antiblackness
Wilderson 2007(The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal Frank B. Wilderson III, Wilderson
is professor of African American Studies and Drama at the University of California Irvine. Ph.D. at the
University of California Berkley) DDI15///
There is something organic to black positionality that makes it essential to the destruction
of civil society. There is nothing willful or speculative in this statement, for one could just as well state the claim the other way around:
There is something organic to civil society that makes it essential to the destruction of the black
body. Blackness is a positionality of "absolute dereliction" (Frantz Fanon), abandonment, in the face of civil
society and therefore cannot establish itself, or be established, through hegemonic interventions.
Blackness cannot become one of civil society's many junior partners: black citizenship and black civic obligation
are oxymorons.
In light of this, coalitions and social movements—even radical social movements such as the
prison abolition movement, bound up in the solicitation of hegemony so as to fortify and extend the
interlocutory life of civil society— ultimately accommodate only the satiable demands and finite
antagonisms of civil society's junior partners (i.e., immigrants, white women, and the working class), but foreclose on
the insatiable demands and endless antagonisms of the prison slave and the prison slave-in-waiting.
In short, whereas such coalitions and social movements cannot be called the outright handmaidens of white supremacy,
their rhetorical structures and political desire are underwritten by a supplemental antiblackness.
Assata Shakur's comments in her autobiography vacillate between being interesting and
insightful and painfully programmatic and "responsible." The expository method of conveyance accounts
for this air of responsibility. However, toward the end of the book, she accounts for coalition work by
way of extended narrative as opposed to exposition. We accompany her on one of Zayd Shakur's
many Panther projects with outside groups, work "dealing with white support groups who were
involved in raising bail for the Panther 21 members in jail." 2 With no more than three words, her
recollection becomes matter of fact and unfiltered. She writes, "I hated it."
At the time, I felt that anything below 110th street was another country. All my activities were
centered in Harlem and I almost never left it. Doing defense committee work was definitely not
up my alley I hated standing around while all these white people asked me to explain myself,
my existence. I became a master of the one-liner?
Assata's hatred of this work is bound up in her anticipation, fully realized, of all the zonal
violations to come when a white woman asks her whether Zayd is her "panther ... you know, is he
your black cat?" and then runs her fingers through her hair to cop a kinky feel. Her narrative
anticipates these violations-to-come at the level of the street, as well as at the level of the body.
Here is the moment in her life as a prison slave-in-waiting, which is to say, a moment as an
ordinary black person, when she finds herself among "friends" abolitionists, at least partners in
purpose, and yet she feels it necessary to adopt the same muscular constriction, the same coiled anticipation, the same combative "one-liners"
that she will need to adopt just one year later to steel herself against the encroachment of prison guards. The verisimilitude between
Assata's well-known police encounters and her experiences in civil society's most nurturing nook,
the radical coalition, raises disturbing questions about political desire, black positionality, and
hegemony as a modality of struggle.
Our approach is a better challenge to nativity which is the key fracture in the
biopolitical order
Sexton 2010 [Jared, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Associate Professor of Film
and Media Studies and one third of The Trifecta of Tough, “People-of-Color-Blindness: Notes on the
Afterlife of Slavery,” Social Text, Vol. 28, No. 2] DDI15///
Agamben is correct to identify the permanent crisis of the political system of the modern nationstate with “the original biopolitical fracture” of the third term of its conceptual trinity: birth.44 The malfunction of
“the traditional mechanisms that used to regulate” the transformation of “birth into nation,” the failure of the inscription of nativity upon which is founded the
“functional nexus between a determinate localization (territory) and a determinate order (state)” is remedied, as it were, by the state’s increasingly direct “management
The camp — “a space in which, for all intents and purposes, the normal rule of
law is suspended and in which the fact that atrocities may or may not be committed does not depend on
the law but rather on the civility and ethical sense of the police” — reinscribes naked life in the order of
the nation-state by force.46 The violence of this reinscription is meant both to arrest and remove the “people of the excluded” (the “minority” slated for
of the biological life of the nation.”45
indefinite isolation, expulsion, elimination, etc., even when in the numerical majority) and to ensure the properly political existence of the remainder of the population,
the People as an “integral body politic” (the “majority” whose integrity is nonetheless reduced to a remainder by virtue of their constitutive exclusion from the space
of the camp, even when in the numerical minority).47
Agamben is incorrect to date the onset of this crisis and the advent of the paradigm of the camp
in Europe of the interwar years, that is, the rise of martial law in the first half of the
twentieth century.48 The general failure of the inscription of nativity in the order of the nation-state and the
state’s management of the biological life of the nation is predated and prepared by the strict prohibition of
nativity under the regime of racial slavery and the state’s management of the biological life of the
enslaved throughout the Atlantic world, most pointedly through the sexual regulation of race in the
British North American colonies and the United States.49 And the racial circumscription of political life
(bios) under slavery predates and prepares the rise of the modern democratic state, providing the central
counterpoint and condition of possibility for the symbolic and material articulation of its form and
function.50 If in Agamben’s analysis the inscription of nativity in Euro-America is disquieted in the
twentieth century by postcolonial immigration, the native-born black population in the United States —
known in the historic instance as “the descendants of slaves” — suffers the status of being neither the
native nor the foreigner, neither the colonizer nor the colonized.51 The nativity of the slave is not
inscribed elsewhere in some other (even subordinated) jurisdiction, but rather nowhere at all. The nativity of the
slave is foreclosed, undermining from within the potential for citizenship, but also opening the possibility
of a truly nonoriginal origin, a political existence that signifies “the presence of an absence that discloses
the absence inherent in all presence and every present.”52 Agamben overestimates the extent to which the
question of nativity is displaced by the figure of the refugee. It is perhaps better to say that it is disturbed by the presence of
strangers in a strange land. More simply, we might say to the refugee that you may lose your motherland, but you will
not “lose your mother.”53 The latter condition, the “social death” in which one is denied kinship
with the “new laws on citizenship and on the denationalization of citizens ”
entirely by the force of law, is reserved for the “natal alienation” and “genealogical isolation”
characterizing slavery . Here is Orlando Patterson, from his encyclopedic 1982 study:
I prefer the term “natal alienation” because it goes directly to the heart of what is critical in the slave’s forced alienation, the loss of
ties of birth in both ascending and descending generations. It also has the important nuance of a loss of native status, of deracination. It
was this alienation of the slave from all formal, legally enforceable ties of “blood,” and from any attachment to groups or localities
other than those chosen for him by the master, that gave the relation of slavery its peculiar value to the master. The slave was the
ultimate human tool, as imprintable and as disposable as the master wished. And this was true, at least in theory, of all slaves, no
matter how elevated.54
True, even if one attains the income and educational levels of the mythic American middle class, the celebrity of a Hollywood icon, or
the political position of the so-called leader of the free world. The alienation and isolation of the slave is not just vertical,
canceling out ties to past and future generations (“the descendants of slaves” now understood as a strict oxymoron). It is also
horizontal, canceling out ties to the slave’s contemporaries as well. The deracination of the slave, reduced
to a tool, is total, more fundamental than the displacement of the refugee, whose status obtains in a
network of persecuted human relations in exile rather than in a collection or dispersal of a class of things.
Crucially, deracination is strictly correlative to the “absolute submission mandated by law” discussed by Hartman above, the most perfect
example of the space of purely formal obedience defining the jurisdictional field of sovereignty. Because
the forced submission of
the slave is absolute, any signs whatsoever of “reasoning . . . intent and rationality” are recognized
“solely in the context of criminal liability.” That is, “the slave’s will [is] acknowledged only as it [is] prohibited or
punished.”55 A criminal will, a criminal reasoning, a criminal intent, a criminal rationality: with these
erstwhile human capacities construed as indices of culpability before the law, even the potentiality
of slave resistance is rendered illegitimate and illegible a priori. Again, this is true not only for the slave’s resistance
to submission to this or that slaveholder but to the whole of the free population, what I called earlier the unequally arrayed category of
nonblackness.
<TAG THIS>
Sexton 2010 [Jared, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Associate Professor of Film
and Media Studies and one third of The Trifecta of Tough, “People-of-Color-Blindness: Notes on the
Afterlife of Slavery,” Social Text, Vol. 28, No. 2] DDI15///
What is this fiction? It is not only the presumed identity between the human (zoe¯ ) and the
citizen (bios) — the conceptual fissure that makes possible the modern production of bare life —
and that between nativity and nationality — the conceptual distinction that makes possible the
reciprocal naturalization of propagation and property in the name of race. It is also the conflation of
the ruler (or ruling class) with sovereignty itself, the tautological claim that the law (logos) is
ontologically prior to the establishment of its jurisdictional field, a space defined by relations of purely
formal obedience. The state of exception would seem to betray the mystical foundation of authority
because the sovereign power operates in suspension of positive law, enforcing the law paradoxically
insofar as it is inapplicable at the time and place of its enforcement. However, the dynamic stability
of that foundation — the space of obedience — is demonstrated by the terrible fact that the state of
exception has been materialized repeatedly within a whole array of political formations across the
preceding century and in the particular form of the camp. With the birth of the camp, the exception
becomes the rule, consolidating a field of obedience in extremis — in place of rule by law, a paradigm of
governance by the administration of the absence of order.5
However, if for Agamben the camp is “the new biopolitical nomos of the planet,” its
novelty does not escape a certain conceptual belatedness with respect to those “repressed
topographies of cruelty” that Achille Mbembe has identified in the formulation of “necropolitics.”6
On my reading, the formulation of necropolitics is enabled by attending to the political and economic
conditions of the African diaspora in the historic instance — both acknowledging the form and
function of racial slavery for “any historical account of the rise of modern terror” and addressing
the ways that “the political economy of statehood [particularly in Africa] has dramatically changed
over the last quarter of the twentieth century” in connection with “the wars of the globalization
era.”7 Necropolitics is important for the historicist project of provincializing Agamben’s paradigmatic
analysis, especially as it articulates the logic of race as something far more global than a conflict
internal to Europe (or even Eurasia). Indeed, Mbembe initially describes racial slavery in the Atlantic
world as “one of the first instances of biopolitical experimentation” and goes on to discuss it, following
the work of Saidiya Hartman, as an exemplary manifestation of the state of exception in “the very
structure of the plantation system and its aftermath.”8
Mbembe abandons too quickly this meditation on the peculiar institution in pursuit of the
proper focus of his theoretical project: the formation of colonial sovereignty. In the process, he loses
track of the fact, set forth in the opening pages of Hartman’s study, that the crucial aspects of “the
peculiar terror formation” that Mbembe attributes to the emergence of colonial rule are already
institutionalized, perhaps more fundamentally, in and as the political-juridical structure of
slavery.9 More specifically, it is the legal and political status of the captive female that is
paradigmatic for the “(re)production of enslavement,” in which “the normativity of sexual
violence [i.e., the virtual absence of prohibitions or limitations in the determination of socially
tolerable and necessary violence] establishes an inextricable link between racial formation and
sexual subjection. ”10 This is why for Hartman resistance is figured through the black female’s
sexual self-defense, as exemplified by the 1855 circuit court case State of Missouri v. Celia, a Slave, in
which the defendant was sentenced to death by hanging on the charge of murder for responding with
deadly force to the sexual assault and attempted rape by a white male slaveholder.
Agamben
Our approach is a better challenge to nativity which is the key fracture in the
biopolitical order
Sexton 2010 [Jared, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Associate Professor of Film
and Media Studies and one third of The Trifecta of Tough, “People-of-Color-Blindness: Notes on the
Afterlife of Slavery,” Social Text, Vol. 28, No. 2] DDI15///
Agamben is correct to identify the permanent crisis of the political system of the modern nationstate with “the original biopolitical fracture” of the third term of its conceptual trinity: birth .44 The malfunction of
“the traditional mechanisms that used to regulate” the transformation of “birth into nation,” the failure of the inscription of nativity upon which is founded the
“functional nexus between a determinate localization (territory) and a determinate order (state)” is remedied, as it were, by the state’s increasingly direct “management
The camp — “a space in which, for all intents and purposes, the normal rule of
law is suspended and in which the fact that atrocities may or may not be committed does not depend on
the law but rather on the civility and ethical sense of the police” — reinscribes naked life in the order of
the nation-state by force.46 The violence of this reinscription is meant both to arrest and remove the “people of the excluded” (the “minority” slated for
of the biological life of the nation.”45
indefinite isolation, expulsion, elimination, etc., even when in the numerical majority) and to ensure the properly political existence of the remainder of the population,
the People as an “integral body politic” (the “majority” whose integrity is nonetheless reduced to a remainder by virtue of their constitutive exclusion from the space
of the camp, even when in the numerical minority).47
Agamben is incorrect to date the onset of this crisis and the advent of the paradigm of the camp
in Europe of the interwar years, that is, the rise of martial law in the first half of the
twentieth century.48 The general failure of the inscription of nativity in the order of the nation-state and the
state’s management of the biological life of the nation is predated and prepared by the strict prohibition of
nativity under the regime of racial slavery and the state’s management of the biological life of the
enslaved throughout the Atlantic world, most pointedly through the sexual regulation of race in the
British North American colonies and the United States.49 And the racial circumscription of political life
(bios) under slavery predates and prepares the rise of the modern democratic state, providing the central
counterpoint and condition of possibility for the symbolic and material articulation of its form and
function.50 If in Agamben’s analysis the inscription of nativity in Euro-America is disquieted in the
twentieth century by postcolonial immigration, the native-born black population in the United States —
known in the historic instance as “the descendants of slaves” — suffers the status of being neither the
native nor the foreigner, neither the colonizer nor the colonized.51 The nativity of the slave is not
inscribed elsewhere in some other (even subordinated) jurisdiction, but rather nowhere at all. The nativity of the
slave is foreclosed, undermining from within the potential for citizenship, but also opening the possibility
of a truly nonoriginal origin, a political existence that signifies “the presence of an absence that discloses
the absence inherent in all presence and every present.”52 Agamben overestimates the extent to which the
question of nativity is displaced by the figure of the refugee. It is perhaps better to say that it is disturbed by the presence of
strangers in a strange land. More simply, we might say to the refugee that you may lose your motherland, but you will
not “lose your mother.”53 The latter condition, the “social death” in which one is denied kinship
with the “new laws on citizenship and on the denationalization of citizens ”
entirely by the force of law, is reserved for the “natal alienation” and “genealogical isolation”
characterizing slavery . Here is Orlando Patterson, from his encyclopedic 1982 study:
I prefer the term “natal alienation” because it goes directly to the heart of what is critical in the slave’s forced alienation, the loss of
ties of birth in both ascending and descending generations. It also has the important nuance of a loss of native status, of deracination. It
was this alienation of the slave from all formal, legally enforceable ties of “blood,” and from any attachment to groups or localities
other than those chosen for him by the master, that gave the relation of slavery its peculiar value to the master. The slave was the
ultimate human tool, as imprintable and as disposable as the master wished. And this was true, at least in theory, of all slaves, no
matter how elevated.54
True, even if one attains the income and educational levels of the mythic American middle class, the celebrity of a Hollywood icon, or
the political position of the so-called leader of the free world. The alienation and isolation of the slave is not just vertical,
canceling out ties to past and future generations (“the descendants of slaves” now understood as a strict oxymoron). It is also
horizontal, canceling out ties to the slave’s contemporaries as well. The deracination of the slave, reduced
to a tool, is total, more fundamental than the displacement of the refugee, whose status obtains in a
network of persecuted human relations in exile rather than in a collection or dispersal of a class of things .
Crucially, deracination is strictly correlative to the “absolute submission mandated by law” discussed by Hartman above, the most perfect
example of the space of purely formal obedience defining the jurisdictional field of sovereignty. Because
the forced submission of
the slave is absolute, any signs whatsoever of “reasoning . . . intent and rationality” are recognized
“solely in the context of criminal liability.” That is, “the slave’s will [is] acknowledged only as it [is] prohibited or
punished.”55 A criminal will, a criminal reasoning, a criminal intent, a criminal rationality: with these
erstwhile human capacities construed as indices of culpability before the law, even the potentiality
of slave resistance is rendered illegitimate and illegible a priori. Again, this is true not only for the slave’s resistance
to submission to this or that slaveholder but to the whole of the free population, what I called earlier the unequally arrayed category of
nonblackness.
<TAG THIS>
Sexton 2010 [Jared, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Associate Professor of Film
and Media Studies and one third of The Trifecta of Tough, “People-of-Color-Blindness: Notes on the
Afterlife of Slavery,” Social Text, Vol. 28, No. 2] DDI15///
What is this fiction? It is not only the presumed identity between the human (zoe¯ ) and the
citizen (bios) — the conceptual fissure that makes possible the modern production of bare life —
and that between nativity and nationality — the conceptual distinction that makes possible the
reciprocal naturalization of propagation and property in the name of race. It is also the conflation of
the ruler (or ruling class) with sovereignty itself, the tautological claim that the law (logos) is
ontologically prior to the establishment of its jurisdictional field, a space defined by relations of purely
formal obedience. The state of exception would seem to betray the mystical foundation of authority
because the sovereign power operates in suspension of positive law, enforcing the law paradoxically
insofar as it is inapplicable at the time and place of its enforcement. However, the dynamic stability
of that foundation — the space of obedience — is demonstrated by the terrible fact that the state of
exception has been materialized repeatedly within a whole array of political formations across the
preceding century and in the particular form of the camp. With the birth of the camp, the exception
becomes the rule, consolidating a field of obedience in extremis — in place of rule by law, a paradigm of
governance by the administration of the absence of order.5
However, if for Agamben the camp is “the new biopolitical nomos of the planet,” its
novelty does not escape a certain conceptual belatedness with respect to those “repressed
topographies of cruelty” that Achille Mbembe has identified in the formulation of “necropolitics.”6
On my reading, the formulation of necropolitics is enabled by attending to the political and economic
conditions of the African diaspora in the historic instance — both acknowledging the form and
function of racial slavery for “any historical account of the rise of modern terror” and addressing
the ways that “the political economy of statehood [particularly in Africa] has dramatically changed
over the last quarter of the twentieth century” in connection with “the wars of the globalization
era.”7 Necropolitics is important for the historicist project of provincializing Agamben’s paradigmatic
analysis, especially as it articulates the logic of race as something far more global than a conflict
internal to Europe (or even Eurasia). Indeed, Mbembe initially describes racial slavery in the Atlantic
world as “one of the first instances of biopolitical experimentation” and goes on to discuss it, following
the work of Saidiya Hartman, as an exemplary manifestation of the state of exception in “the very
structure of the plantation system and its aftermath.”8
Mbembe abandons too quickly this meditation on the peculiar institution in pursuit of the
proper focus of his theoretical project: the formation of colonial sovereignty. In the process, he loses
track of the fact, set forth in the opening pages of Hartman’s study, that the crucial aspects of “the
peculiar terror formation” that Mbembe attributes to the emergence of colonial rule are already
institutionalized, perhaps more fundamentally, in and as the political-juridical structure of
slavery.9 More specifically, it is the legal and political status of the captive female that is
paradigmatic for the “(re)production of enslavement,” in which “the normativity of sexual
violence [i.e., the virtual absence of prohibitions or limitations in the determination of socially
tolerable and necessary violence] establishes an inextricable link between racial formation and
sexual subjection. ”10 This is why for Hartman resistance is figured through the black female’s
sexual self-defense, as exemplified by the 1855 circuit court case State of Missouri v. Celia, a Slave, in
which the defendant was sentenced to death by hanging on the charge of murder for responding with
deadly force to the sexual assault and attempted rape by a white male slaveholder.
Alternative/Permutation
Vote Negative in favor of an unflinching paradigmatic analysis that forefronts a
discussion of criminality in the context of this years resolution. Blackness as the
praxis for our demands makes civil society lose coherence. The demand of the 1AC
is the only ethical demand
Wilderson 2007(The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal Frank B. Wilderson III, Wilderson
is professor of African American Studies and Drama at the University of California Irvine. Ph.D. at the
University of California Berkley) DDI15///
Fanon writes, "Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is,
obviously, a program of complete disorder. If we take him at his word, then we must accept that no other body functions in
the Imaginary, the Symbolic, or the Real so completely as a repository of complete disorder as the black body.
Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Real, for in its magnetizing of bullets
the black body functions as the map of gratuitous violence through which civil society is possible—
namely, those bodies for which violence is, or can be, contingent. Blackness is the site of absolute
dereliction at the level of the Symbolic, for in America generates no categories for the chromosome
of history and no data for the categories of immigration or sovereignty. It is an experience without analog—a
past without a heritage. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Imaginary, for
"whoever says 'rape' says Black" (Fanon), whoever says " prison " says black (Sexton), and whoever
says " AIDS " says black—the "Negro is a phobogenic object." 13
Indeed, it means all those things: a phobogenic object, a past without a heritage, the map of
gratuitous violence, and a program of complete disorder. Whereas this realization is, and should be,
cause for alarm, it should not be cause for lament or, worse, disavowal—not at least, for a true
revolutionary or for a truly revolutionary movement such as prison abolition. If a social movement
is to be neither social-democratic nor Marxist in terms of structure of political desire, then it should
grasp the invitation to assume the positionality of subjects of social death. If we are to be honest
with ourselves, we must admit that the "Negro" has been inviting whites, as well as civil society's
junior partners, to the dance of social death for hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn the steps. They
have been, and remain today—even in the most antiracist movements, such as the prison abolition
movement—invested elsewhere. This is not to say that all oppositional political desire today is prowhite, but it is usually antiblack, meaning that it will not dance with death.
Black liberation, as a prospect, makes radicalism more dangerous to the United States. This is
not because it raises the specter of an alternative polity (such as socialism or community control of existing
resources), but because its condition of possibility and gesture of resistance function as a negative
dialectic : a politics of refusal and a refusal to affirm, a 'program of complete disorder." One must
embrace its disorder, its incoherence, and allow oneself to be elaborated by it if, indeed, one's politics are to
be underwritten by a desire to take down this country. If this is not the desire that underwrites one's politics, then
through what strategy of legitimation is the word "prison" being linked to the word "abolition"?
What are this movement's lines of political accountability?
There is nothing foreign, frightening, or even unpracticed about the embrace of disorder
and incoherence. The desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by disorder and incoherence is not anathema in and of itself. No one, for
example, has ever been known to say, "Gee-whiz, if only my orgasms would end a little sooner, or maybe not come at all." Yet few so-called
radicals desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by the disorder and incoherence of blackness—and the state of political movements in the United
States today is marked by this very Negrophobogenisis: "Gee-whiz, if only black rage could be more coherent, or maybe not come at all."
Perhaps there is something more terrifying about the joy of black than there is in the joy of sex
(unless one is talking sex with a Negro). Perhaps coalitions today prefer to remain in-orgasmic in the face of
civil society—with hegemony as a handy prophylactic, just in case. If through this stasis or paralysis they try to do
the work of prison abolition, the work will fail, for it is always work from a position of coherence (i.e., the worker)
on behalf of a position of incoherence of the black subject, or prison slave. In this way, social formations
on the left remain blind to the contradictions of coalitions between workers and slaves. They remain
coalitions operating within the logic of civil society and function less as revolutionary promises than as crowding out scenarios of black
antagonisms, simply feeding our frustration.
Whereas the positionality of the worker (whether a factory worker demanding a monetary
wage, an immigrant, or a white woman demanding a social wage) gestures toward the
reconfiguration of civil society, the positionality of the black subject (whether a prison slave or a
prison slave-in-waiting) gestures toward the disconfiguration of civil society. From the coherence of
civil society, the black subject beckons with the incoherence of civil war, a war that reclaims
blackness not as a positive value but as a politically enabling site, to quote Fanon, of "absolute
dereliction." It is a "scandal" that rends civil society asunder. Civil war, then, becomes the
unthought, but never forgotten, understudy of hegemony. It is a black specter waiting in the wings,
an endless antagonism that cannot be satisfied (via reform or reparation) but that must,
nonetheless, be pursued to the death.
They did not perform the black thought by the two black debaters in this room but
the perm ballot would reward them for our political thought –this becomes a
technology of anti-blackness
Hartman 2003[The Position of the Unthought An interview with Saidiya V Hartman Conducted
by Frank Wilderson Qui Parle, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Spring/Summer 2003)] DDI15///
That's what I was working with there, that impossibility or tension between Jacobs as an agent
versus the objective conditions in which she finds herself. This is something you talk about in your work as well, this
existence in the space of death, where negation is the captive's central possibility for action , whether we think of that as a
radical refusal of the terms of the social order or these acts that are sometimes called suicide or selfdestruction, but which are really an embrace of death. Ultimately it's about the paradox of agency for those who are in
these extreme circumstances. And basically, there are very few political narratives that can account for that.
F.W -And we have to ask why. In my own work, obviously I'm not saying that in this space of
negation, which is blackness, there is no life. We have tremendous life. But this life is not analogous
to those touchstones of cohesion that hold civil society together. In fact, the trajectory of our life (within our
terrain of civil death) is bound up in claiming - sometimes individually, sometimes collectively - the violence which Fanon writes about
in The Wretched of the Earth, that trajectory which, as he says, is "a splinter to the heart of the world"9 and "puts the settler out of the picture."10
So, it doesn't help us politically or psychologically to try to find ways in which how we live is analogous to how white
positionality
lives, because, as I think your book suggests, whites gain their coherence by knowing what they are
not. There is tremendous diversity on the side of whiteness and tremendous conflict between white men and white women, between Jews and
gentiles, and between classes, but that conflict, even in its articulation, has a certain solidarity. And I think
that solidarity comes from a near or far relation to the black body or bodies. We give the nation its
coherence because we're its underbelly.1
S.V.H. - That's what's so interesting for me about Achille Mbembe's work, the way he thinks about the position of the
formerly colonized subject along the lines of the slave as an essential way of defining the
predicament. Essentially, he says, the slave is the object to whom anything can be done, whose life can be squandered with impunity.12
F.W. - And he's suggesting that what it means to be a slave is to be subject to a kind of complete appropriation, what you call "property of
enjoyment." Your book illustrates the "myriad and nefarious uses of slave property" and then demonstrates how "there
was no relation
to blackness outside the terms of this use of, entitlement to, and occupation of the captive body, for
even the status of free blacks was shaped and compromised by the existence of slavery" (S, 24). So. Not only are formally enslaved
blacks proper ty, but so are formally free blacks. One could say that the possibility of becoming property is one of the
essential elements that draws the line between blackness and whiteness. But what's most intriguing about your argument is the
way in which you demonstrate how not only is the slave's performance (dance, music, etc.) the property of white
enjoyment, but so is - and this is really key - the slave's own enjoyment of his/her performance: that
too belongs to white people.13
S.V.H. - Right. You know, as I was writing Scenes of Subjection, there was a whole spate of books on
nineteenth-century culture and on minstrelsy in particular. And there was a certain sense in which the ability to
occupy blackness was considered transgressive or as a way of refashioning whiteness, and there were all these radical claims that were being
made for it.14 And I thought, "Oh, no, this is just an extension of the master's prerogative." It
doesn't matter whether you do
good or you do bad, the crux is that you can choose to do what you wish with the black body. That's
why thinking about the dynamics of enjoyment in terms of the material relations of slavery was so
key for me.
Analytical Framework
Our education is best to understand the ontological and epistemic conditions of the
Prison and Middle Passage. Rejecting our huristics furthers the institution of TransAtlantic slave trade
Rodriguez 2007 [Dylan Rodriguez Forced Passages Chapter Two of Warfare in the American
Homeland, edi. By Joy James (2007) Rodriguez is an associate professor in the Department of Ethnic
Studies at the University of California –Riverside] DDI15///
The contemporary regime of the prison encompasses the weaponry of an institutionalized
dehumanization. It also, and necessarily, generates a material rendition of the non- and subhuman that structurally antagonizes and de-centers the immediate capacity of the imprisoned
subject to simply self-identify. Publishing in 1990 under the anonymous byline "A Federal Prisoner,' one imprisoned writer offered
a schematic view of this complex process, which is guided by the logic of a totalizing disempowerment and social
disaffection:
The first thing a convict feels when he receives an inconceivably long sentence is shock. The shock usually wears off after about two
years, when all his appeals have been denied. He then enters a period of self-hatred because of what he's done to himself and his
family. If
he survives that emotion—and some don't—he begins to swim the rapids of rage,
frustration and alienation. When he passes through the rapids, he finds himself in the calm waters of impotence, futility
and resignation. It's not a life one can look forward to living. The future is totally devoid of 12
The structured violence of self-alienation, which drastically compounds the effect of formal
social alienation, is at the heart of the regime's punitive-carceral logic. Yet it is precisely because
the reproduction of the regime relies on its own incapacity to decisively "dehumanize" its captives
en masse
(hence, the persistence of institutional measures that pivot on the presumption and projection of the "inmate's" embodiment of
disobedience, resistance, and insurrection) that it
generates a philosophy of the captive body that precedes the logic
of enslavement. Thus, the regime's logic of power reaches into the arsenal of a historical apparatus
that was an essential element of the global formation of racial chattel slavery while simultaneously
structuring its own particular technology of violence and bodily domination. What, then, is the
materiality of the archetypal imprisoned body (and subject) through which the contemporary
prison regime has proliferated its diverse and hierarchically organized apparatuses of racialized
and gendered violence, most especially its technologies of immobilization and bodily disintegration.
I am arguing that a radical genealogy of the prison regime must engage in historical
conversation with the massive human departure of the transatlantic Middle Passage, an apparatus and
regime of capture and forced movement that outlined its own epochal conception of the non- and
subhuman, the prototyping of normative black punishment in a white new world,
and
the blue-
printing of the abject (and durably captive) black presence under the rule of Euro-American modernity.
The Middle Passage foreshadows the prison as it routes and enacts chattel slavery, constituting
both a passage into the temporality and geography of enslavement (crystallized by Patterson's conception of
slavery as "natal alienation" and "social death" 13) and a condition of existence unto itself —in particular, a spatially specified
pedagogical production of black slave ontology.
I am especially concerned with the capacity of historically situated white-supremacist regimes to
prototype novel technologies of violence and domination on black bodies—articulating in this instance through
what Eric Williams considers the overarching "economic" logic of a transcontinental trafficking in enslaved
Africans —which in turn may yield technologies of power that become available to, and constitutive
of, larger social and carceral formations, even centuries later. Thus , while the contemporary prison
regime captures and immobilizes the descendants of slaves and non-slaves alike , I consider its
technology of violence to be inseparable from a genealogy of transatlantic black/African captivity
and punishment.
While the human volume of the Middle Passage has been a subject of empirical and methodological
debate since the publication of Philip Curtin's The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (1969), a loose consensus among historians has been
attained since the 1999 release of the Cambridge University Press Trans- Atlantic Slave Trade database. David Eltis, drawing from a rigorous
review of previous literature and elaborating from the Cambridge University data set, suggests a figure of about 11 million "exports of slaves
from Africa" between the years 1519 and 1867.15 Eltis, Curtin, Herbert S. Klein, Paul Lovejoy, David Richardson, Joseph Inikori, Stanley
Engerman, and
others have further estimated that between 12 percent and 20 percent of the enslaved
perished during the transatlantic transfer, with a total of between 10 million and 15 million of the
enslaved eventually reaching the Americas. It is important to note, for the genealogical relation I am examining here, that
the vast majority of the seaborne deaths were the result of conditions endemic to the abhorrent
living conditions of the slave vessels (the effects of contractible disease and malnutrition, for example, were exacerbated by the
conditions of mass incarceration). Many others committed suicide and infanticide in an attempt to defeat the logic of their gendered biological
expropriation and bodily commodification, while unknown numbers were killed in the process of attempting to overthrow their captors.
scale of biological death during the Middle Passage was astronomical and clearly genocidal.
The