1AC – Cal RR
1AC – Militant Preservation
1AC – Militant Preservation v3
The story of the US criminal justice system is a story of debt relations – the economic
logic and form of empire that allows the US to transform its position as the world’s
greatest debtor into one of colonial conquest and antiblack violence.
Wamsley 18 (Dillon, PhD student in political science at York University, “Neoliberalism, mass
incarceration, and the US debt–criminal justice complex”, Critical Social Policy, Volume 39, Issue 2, pages
248-267, May 28) arnav
This article utilizes the conceptual framework of disciplinary neoliberalism to help explain the political, economic, and ideological restructuring
that has taken place in the US over the past 40 years (Gill, 1995, 2003, 2008). Incorporating the centrality of race into this framework, this
article builds on the work of several theorists who conceptualize race and class as impossible to disarticulate under capitalism (Bannerji, 2005:
151), in which race is often the ‘modality through which class is “lived”’ (Hall et al., 1978: 374). Charting the intersections
of race, class, debt, and criminalization in the US, this article contributes to a growing body of literature examining the interrelation of socioeconomic and carceral policies in the US (Gilmore, 1999, 2007; Davis, 2003; Western, 2006; Wacquant, 2009, 2012; Lebaron and Roberts, 2012;
the modern debt–criminal justice complex illustrates the numerous ways in which
carceral and economic policies mutually reinforce market discipline in the US. I maintain that the current
intersections between debt and the criminal justice system in the US are rooted in an historical process
of economic restructuring by the US state. Following a brief analysis of the origins of the carceral state and disciplinary
Camp, 2016). I argue that
neoliberalism, I analyze ‘workfare’ and the marketization of poverty in the US (Peck, 2001; Wacquant, 2009, 2012; Gustafson, 2011). Drawing
on critical theorists’ work on the structural imperatives of debt and its racialized nature throughout the neoliberal period (Moten and Harney,
2010; Mahmud, 2012; Chakravartty and da Silva, 2013; Soederberg, 2013, 2014; Roberts, 2014, 2017), I then analyze legislative reforms and
data related to bankruptcy in the US within the broader emergence of consumer debt. I conclude by examining the expanding scope of the
debt–criminal justice complex, which continues to ensnare the racially and economically marginalized underclasses of the US social system.
The origins of the carceral state and the rise of disciplinary neoliberalism in the US
Debt and imprisonment have long been entwined in the US. Imported from Britain into the US colonies, debtors’ prisons
were commonplace throughout the 18th and into the 19th centuries (Peebles, 2013). As debt proliferated with the ascendance of capitalist
relations of exchange in the early 19th century, the prison’s capacity to harbor debtors from creditors became seen as a threat to the collection
of debt (Peebles, 2013). Abolished at the federal level in 1833, the eradication of debtors’ prisons in the US, as Roberts (2014: 676) suggests,
was part of a reconfiguration of class relations to enshrine limited liability for expanding enterprises, while creating ‘new, more efficient, means
for creditors to compel repayment’ from debtors.
Despite the legal cessation of debtors’ prisons, relations of debt
and criminalization continued to play central roles in the configuration of Black lives and labour. Following
the Civil War and the formal abolition of slavery, the criminal justice system was the primary site through which the
convict lease system emerged, channeling tens of thousands of indigent former slaves into forced labour
camps (Blackmon, 2008). The passage of Black Codes throughout several southern states during this period coerced many former slaves into
relations of debt peonage, in which they often worked indefinitely for an employer who agreed to pay off their accumulated criminal justice
debt (Blackmon, 2008). The widespread exploitation of forced Black labour – facilitated by judicial processes from the mid-19th to the early
20th century – was, as Angela Davis (2003: 33) asserts, ‘in very literal ways the continuation of a slave system’. While much has changed since
the convict lease system was abolished, class
relations, debt, and institutional racism remain central features of the
modern US criminal justice system.
Many accounts of the contemporary mass incarceration system in the US trace its ideological and legislative origins from the racially charged
‘tough-oncrime’ politics of the 1960s, to the War on Drugs agenda intensified under the Reagan administration (Beckett, 1997; Mauer, 1999;
Alexander, 2012). Recent scholarship has expanded the scope of the US criminal justice system. Authors have highlighted the school-to-prison
pipeline in African American communities (Annamma, 2015), the regimes of counterinsurgency and containment in the early Cold War period
to the 1960s uprisings (Camp, 2016), post-war racial liberalism (Murakawa, 2014), the expansion of domestic social programs in the 1960s
(Hinton, 2016), and the crises of Keynesianism and surplus accumulation (Gilmore, 1999, 2007) in laying the foundations of the modern carceral
state.
Acknowledging the disparate socio-economic and political origins of the mass incarceration system, I seek to chart the interrelation of carceral
expansionism and neoliberal economic restructuring within the US. I focus in large part on the 1980s and 1990s because of the seismic
transformations in global capitalism, the consolidation of the neoliberal project, and the marked expansion of the prison population in the US
during this period. Rather
than recounting the legislative history of criminal justice policies, I seek to broaden
the vista of scholarship on the origins of the criminal justice system, situating it within the economic reforms that have
taken place since the late 1970s in the US. Disciplinary neoliberalism is used as a conceptual framework to situate
these reforms within the transformations of global capitalism over the past 40 years.
Following an historic slowdown in capital accumulation in the early 1970s, neoliberalism emerged in the West in full force under the far-right
administrations of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (Glyn, 2007). Neoliberalism is loosely defined here as a variegated set of ideas,
policies, and practices materializing in large part after the crises of capital in the 1970s as part of a political project to restore capitalist
profitability, which constitutes the politico-economic order of current capitalist systems.1 Within this period, disciplinary
neoliberalism describes on a systemic level the ways in which pressures to adhere to market logic and
reconfigure relations of production and social reproduction along liberal capitalist lines have been
exerted on different jurisdictions and states, and implemented within various institutional
configurations over the past 40 years (Gill, 1995, 1997; Gill and Bakker, 2003). As numerous theorists have argued (Gill, 1995; Gill and
Bakker, 2003; Roberts, 2017), disciplinary neoliberal policies are geared toward securing property rights, consolidating investor interests,
liberalizing markets, stabilizing prices, creating obedient work forces, and solidifying the ideological and regulatory supremacy of the market.
Such policies have been implemented unevenly across different regimes through numerous economic,
political, and legal institutions, expanding the structural power of capital globally and enforcing market
discipline for the poor (Gill, 2003; Roberts, 2014). Applying this framework to the US, this article examines the marketization of
social support systems and debt and bankruptcy infrastructure alongside the emergence of the mass
incarceration system since the 1980s.
The US imprisons more of its citizens than any other country, possessing less than 5% of the world’s population and incarcerating almost 25% of
the world’s prisoners. The Sentencing Project notes that, as of 2016, over 2.2 million people in the US were held in prisons or jails, with close to
7 million under supervision of the criminal justice system including those on probation and parole – a 500% increase over the past 40 years (The
Sentencing Project, 2016). The
criminal justice system overwhelmingly targets racialized and particularly African
American populations in the US, with systemic racial bias permeating all levels of the criminal justice process from detention to
sentencing (Mauer, 2011; The Sentencing Project, 2016: 46; The Sentencing Project, 2017), leading some commentators to designate the
carceral system as one of racial control (Alexander, 2012). Relatedly, as recent data have shown, the carceral state is largely about the ‘systemic
management of the lower classes’, primarily affecting working-class communities (Lewis, 2018). As a 2016 report on the economic effects of
incarceration revealed, real preincarceration annual earnings of prisoners ranged from $3,000 to $28,000, illustrating the extent to which
prisons warehouse those living below the poverty line (Council of Economic Advisors, 2016: 46). Given the racialized composition of the
working class (Lewis, 2018), this article argues that race
and class ought to be conceptualized as co-constitutive within
the US carceral system. The US criminal justice apparatus, which targets the economically
disenfranchised and racially oppressed populations in the US, is thus conceptualized, as Angela Davis (2003: 16)
writes, as a ‘black hole into which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited’. The expansion of the
criminal justice system occurred alongside numerous transformations in US society, notably economic restructuring during the neoliberal
period (Wacquant, 2009: 43). Perhaps no
other social issue elucidates the intersection of economic restructuring
and carceral expansionism more clearly than the current nexus between debt and imprisonment, which is
rooted in US state policies enacted over the past 40 years.
Only a analytic structured around debt can effectively challenge the system.
Wamsley 18 (Dillon, PhD student in political science at York University, “Neoliberalism, mass
incarceration, and the US debt–criminal justice complex”, Critical Social Policy, Volume 39, Issue 2, pages
248-267, May 28) arnav
In this article, through the lens of debt-related imprisonment, I sought to unpack the
interplay of race, class, debt, and
criminalization within the US social order. Noting the centrality of institutional racism within the broader politico-economic
project of neoliberalism, I argued that the US criminal justice system is closely connected to several structural economic reforms initiated by the
state. More specifically, I asserted that the
contemporary relation between debt and imprisonment in the US is
rooted in the historical destabilization of the welfare system, bankruptcy reform, and an unprecedented
expansion of the penal state. Taken together, I have sought to establish how these interrelated transformations displaced
marginalized populations relying on social assistance, contributing to expanding consumer indebtedness, the growing power of creditors and
financial institutions, and the
materialization of the nexus between debt and the criminal justice system.
Debt remains widespread across the US population, with revolving consumer debt rising from US $845 billion in 2012 to just under US $970
billion in 2016 (United States Federal Reserve Board, 2017). While systemic data are sparse, recent reports indicate that the number of people
currently warehoused in local jails and state prisons across the US – simply because of their inability to pay debt – is growing. The mutually
reinforcing logic of debt and imprisonment continues to configure the realities of everyday life for growing
numbers of low-income Americans, particularly in racialized communities. While data generated by non-profit organizations and legal
scholars have been invaluable in exposing the scope of debt and imprisonment in the US, this literature largely prescribes cosmetic legal
reforms that fail to acknowledge the systemic change needed to address this deeply rooted social phenomenon. It
is only by recognizing the structural imperatives of debt, the exploitative social relations of capitalism more broadly, and
the related disciplinary functions of the mass incarceration system that the debt–criminal justice
complex in the US – symptomatic of a deeply repressive social system – can be challenged, resisted, and
overturned.
Constant and ongoing rebellion and insurgency remains prior to what emerges as
“identity,” “individual,” and “institution,” because to claim identity, individual, or
institution is already to speak within the tools of the deputized. This is the general
antagonism. This is the social wealth the police attempt to separate. Insurgency is
prior to the metaphysical foundations of the police. The frame of visualization proffers
critique and policy on the level of individuation—the police fail to see this individual,
the criminal justice system should recognize personhood. This spectrum of visuality
thru individuation is a move of the state. Police are just policy by another name. The
question becomes, how do we want something other than that?
Harney and Moten, 20 – Stefano Harney, Fred Moten ("Wildcat The Totality" - Fred Moten And
Stefano Harney Revisit The Undercommons In A Time Of Pandemic And Rebellion (Part 1), 14:00-26:00,
MILLENNIALS ARE KILLING CAPITALISM, https://millennialsarekillingcapitalism.libsyn.com/wildcat-thetotality-fred-moten-and-stefano-harney-revisit-the-undercommons-in-a-time-of-pandemic-andrebellion-part-1)//BL *transcription errors are my mistake
STEFANO HARNEY: Okay well, I guess this is definitely a two man operation because you are right that general antagonism does run through
and its never totally defined so I think maybe both of us could give it a shot, because I don’t feel like I can give you something completely
comprehensive about it but what I can say one
reason for that is that the concept of general antagonism is that
there is a constant and ongoing rebellion and insurgency against identity which is primary. A thing rebels
from itself, a situation becomes dissenting from itself, etcetera, etcetera. And so because of that, what
you have is the possibility to see that something like the individual, or something like the stable thing or
concept or regulation or institution steps in to try to quell an insurgency, to try to still and get what it
wants from this general antagonism, but it breaks out again and again all the time. So it runs under our work in a
sense without necessarily being like a political theory, it runs under the work as a way to begin the approach of
anything to say insurgency is primary. Rebellion comes first. We don’t rebel against the police because
there’s police. The police come after us if we show ourselves as that primary antagonism. Now, and that’s
where all of the interesting stuff starts to comes in. Because what does it mean to show ourselves? What it doesn’t
mean is that someone who is an individual is walking along and gets killed by the cops. That’s what we
see once we’ve moved into the frame of visualization, visual ability as our friend Denise calls it. There is
something that calls those cops before that person. There is something more and beyond that person.
There is this general antagonism which blurs the distinction of any individual person, which smudges the
distance between one and another. And you can see the territory we are in here right? We are in precisely the
territory of oh, you couldn’t tell this good man from this not so good man, from this individual who has
this family. That’s the critique, right of the police, that’s the critique of why burn that building down, you
failed to see the individual. But that’s because you are actually the maker of the individual, as a cop, you
are the one who produces that because you are encountering a general insurgency. Let’s think about it. The
police are there to separate us from our social wealth. There has been no population that has been
more separated from social wealth than black people in the United States. And yet it is the most obvious
failure of the police to actually make this stick. To have to keep coming back again and again because
they’ve failed actually to separate that insurgency from black people. And no matter how many
individuals they keep pulling out and brutally murdering they will continually fail in that task. That’s why
for me it is so important to move away from this visuality which is then used to both say a name and to
center a personhood and the individuality of them, it’s not because I don’t love them or cry because of
it. It’s because I understand that’s the move of the state. That’s the move of the state and that’s why
any kind of movement from that visuality, we need to see it, etcetera, all the way over to this like sort of
earth sat strategy of becoming obscure as a way to avoid that, it’s all part of this spectrum of visuality of
individuation. And again and again the police come back because what they encounter is a not either a
visual that they can identify or an obscurity that confuses them but an ongoing opacity, what Fred calls a
blur. This smudge, this rub, this indistinction. This willingness, this rebellion against emerging as the
individual. It’s what preserves the social wealth of people. It’s what the police come after again and again and what,
despite their endless brutality, they never manage to separate from people. So what the general antagonism helps us do is to think about
different situations I think.
And when they come back again and again, they comeback hard and they come back with
absolute brutality and absolute vengeance. And when they come back they come back “totally
mobilized.” And this is why, you know, we ain’t, who are we, we’re not going to sit here and argue
against defunding the police? We’re just going to say once you defund the police then you got to take
care of policy more generally. Cuz policy kills more black people than the police do. That’s one way to put it.
The other way to put it is that police are just policy by another name, at its most brutal, at its most
logically inconsistent, at its most blatant. So as we have said, look, when it comes to black folks, between policy
and the police, they going to kill us all. No that’s not right. They going to kill everyone of us. I don’t know a
black person who has never not died of anti-blackness. And I don’t know any black people now who
won’t die of anti-blackness. That’s what’s killing my ass. Its going to kill my kids. And I know that already.
FRED MOTEN:
And the fact I can’t do nothing about that is obviously a source of, you know pain, pain is not- I don’t know what the word would be to describe
how one feels about that. But
when Stefano was saying that they are unsuccessful in their attempts to regulate
and continue to steal our social wealth, what he’s saying is even though they kill each one of us, they
can’t kill us all. And that distinction between all and everyone is crucial. Because that’s the distinction
that allows us to see how it is that insurgency is not only an insurgency that is before and against the
police, but insurgency is even against ontology, it’s before that too. It’s before the metaphysical
foundations of the police. It’s before the terms of order that establish this interplay of policy and
police. In a way that obviously, our teacher Cedric Robinson understood many many many years ago. And were just trying to catch up with
him now so to speak. The other part of it is, we were reading certain stuff when that phrase came into our writing. That phrase general
antagonism is a function of what we were reading, we were reading certain books, we were reading Ruthie Gilmore and Avery Gordon, and
folks you mentioned, Cedric Robinson and Saidiya Hartman.
And maybe most fundamentally who we were reading at that moment was Frank Wilderson, and we
were reading through the distinction that he makes between antagonism and conflict. Its been interesting to
think about this in the last few days because recently an interview was published in a book called Otherwise Worlds, literally in the last few
weeks, an interview between Frank Wilderson and a scholar Tiffany Lethabo King. And
one of things Wilderson says is that the
nature of the dishonor let’s say, and the constraint so to speak, of whatever you want to call it, Black life
in social death is such that afropessimism as a theory can’t even be kept and protected for black life.
Even afropessimism gets taken. And in a way I would say, first of all I think he’s right, and in a certain sense I would say that we’d
have to plead guilty in the sense of saying we took that notion of the antagonism from afropessimism because we saw that it’s a general
condition. It’s a general condition. One way to put it to me, we were talking about it earlier today, I think Stefano might… The last great theorist
of the subject, kinda after Althusser writes about the three great fatherless children of modernity…Marx Nietzsche Freud. And then you get
from those guys you get Heidegger, Satre… And whatever, post structuralism…Derrida and Foucault… And you know. What
if it turns out
that the great last theorist of the subject is Frank Wilderson. And what’s interesting is that the way he
allows us to understand the deprivation that is visited upon in the would be black subject, lets us
understand the limitations and deprivations that are visited upon subjectivity in general. And then the
question becomes, what can we do with that? The question becomes, well, is it possible to want
something other than that. And that’s a question which is not an empty question without an answer.
Because for us at least, the history of black social life is a history of a huge monumental series of lessons
of how to want something other than that.
Only the aff’s usage of bad debt as an analytic can generate sociality necessary to
confront the system.
Moten and Harney 10 [Fred Moten, Prof. English @ Duke, and Stefano Harney, Prof. Strategic
Management Education @ Singapore Management University, 2010, “Debt and Study,” e-flux,
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/debt-and-study/]
They say we have too much debt. We need better credit, more credit, less spending. They offer us credit
repair, credit counseling, microcredit, personal financial planning. They promise to match credit and debt again, debt and credit. But
our debts stay bad. We keep buying another song, another round. It is not credit that we seek, nor even debt, but bad
debt—which is to say real debt, the debt that cannot be repaid, the debt at a distance, the debt without creditor,
the black debt, the queer debt, the criminal debt. Excessive debt, incalculable debt, debt for no reason, debt broken from credit, debt as its own
principle. Credit is a means of privatization and debt a means of socialization. So long as debt and credit are
paired in the monogamous violence of the home, the pension, the government, or the university, debt
can only feed credit, debt can only desire credit. And credit can only expand by means of debt. But
debt is social and credit is asocial. Debt is mutual. Credit runs only one way. Debt runs in every direction,
scattering, escaping, seeking refuge. The debtor seeks refuge among other debtors, acquires debt from
them, offers debt to them. The place of refuge is the place to which you can only owe more, because
there is no creditor, no payment possible. This refuge, this place of bad debt, is what we would call the
fugitive public. Running through the public and the private, the state and the economy, the fugitive
public can be identified by its bad debt—but only by its debtors. To creditors, it is just a place where
something is wrong, though that something—the invaluable thing that has no value—is desired.
Creditors seek to demolish that place, that project, in order to save those who live there from
themselves and from their lives. They research it, gather information on it, try to calculate it. They
want to save it. They want to break its concentration and store the fragments in the bank. All of a sudden, the
thing credit cannot know—the fugitive thing for which it gets no credit—is inescapable. Once you start to see bad debt, you start to see it
everywhere, hear it everywhere, feel it everywhere. This is the real crisis for credit, its real crisis of accumulation.
Now debt begins to accumulate without it. That’s what makes it so bad. We saw it yesterday in the way
someone stepped, in the hips, a smile, the way the hand moved. We heard it in a break, a cut, a lilt, the way the
words leapt. We felt it in the way someone saves the best part just for you, and then it’s gone, given, a
debt. They don’t want nothing. You got to accept it, you got to accept that. You’re in debt but you can’t give credit
because they won’t hold it. Then the phone rings. It’s the creditors. Credit keeps track. Debt forgets. You’re
not home, you’re not you, you moved without leaving a forwarding address called refuge. The student is not home, out of time, out of place, without credit, in bad debt. The student
is a bad debtor threatened with credit. The student runs from credit. Credit pursues the student,
offering to match credit for debt until enough debts and enough credits have piled up. But the student
has a habit, a bad habit. She studies. She studies but she does not learn. If she learned, they could measure her progress, confirm her attributes, give her credit. But the
student keeps studying, keeps planning to study, keeps running to study, keeps studying a plan, keeps building a debt. The student does not intend to pay.
Thus, we affirm militant preservation through planned failure as an enactment of
substantial criminal justice reform in policing and sentencing by decriminalizing the
neoliberal debt relation.
“How do we live and plan for a day that will never come.” The 1AC is a method of
planned failure – “a poetics that alights both page and pavement,” the world is broken
and it’s easy to feel utterly lost in self-hatred and nihilism, rather than endorse a
transcendence of criminal justice reform that appeases policymakers, our method is
an autonomous insurgency against a world structured by anti-black racism,
colonialism, and manufactured consent that counters logistics in the “loophole
between hope and resignation”.
Hunt 12/20 – Assistant Professor of African American Studies at University of Illinois, PhD, Columbia, MA, Cal-Berkeley [Irvin, “Planned
Failure: George Schuyler, Ella Baker, and the Young Negroes' Cooperative League,” American Quarterly, Volume 72, Number 4, December 2020,
pp. 853-879, (Article), DKP]
To proffer an answer, I deploy a concept I call planned
failure, the performative codification of strategic anarchy.
Planned failure designates the intended demise of the original plan. It assumes that to maintain the structure of a
movement’s organization, which is made up of not only social arrangements but also the constitution of its political subjects, is necessarily to
reinforce the very problems one sought to escape: the distribution of property according to hierarchies of class, race, and gender. In the
context of cooperatives, planned failure begins with the insight that, as Karl Marx wrote, “the cooperative factories run by workers themselves
are, within the old form, the first examples of the emergence of a new form, even though they naturally reproduce in all cases, in their present
organization, all the defects of the existing system, and must reproduce them.”20 This
alternative political practice does not
seek to transcend these defects so much as disassemble them until they cease to cohere. In planned
failure, freedom and its foils, possibilities and their hindrances, are tensed, present tensed, into a
seriality of ecstatic, choregraphed, gestures.
As an echolalia of subtleties, planned
failure is too gestural to be regarded as open dialogue, organized chaos, or
a commitment to contingent action, the last still constituting the veritable lodestar of democratic
politics and radical socialist strategy.21 Nor should it be conflated with the capitalist imperative of planned
obsolescence and reinvention. Its plunge into the present not only rebuffs the “re” in the idea of
reinvention. It rebuffs invention. If anything, its aim is to hear out and sound out the very mother of invention: necessity. Consider
it the necessity of countering an always exclusive progressive line of history. Consider it the wild undercurrent of what Baker
called “‘group-centered leadership,’” a horizontality of social arrangements that would be practiced by a long series of
black and brown insurgencies, from the autonomous movements in Argentina after the 2001 recession to
Black Lives Matter after the death of Michael Brown.22
Planned failure inverts the perspective of policymakers ventriloquized by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney in
The Undercommons. Policymakers, they say, are fixed on being fixed, yet always in “need [of] hope,” capital’s
cynosure. These policycrats “keep making plans and plans fail as a matter of policy. Plans must fail
because planners must fail.”23 Those who devise the failure of their own plans inhabit that failure. Sure, this desire for
institutional collapse, for a serial construction and deconstruction, for splintered and rhizomic forms of power over
constituted and centralized ones, for the always-irregular, makes for a counterintuitive activism, but its affects are
ecstasies.
Planned failure is an ecstatic makeup (and breakup), a mode of being out of body while never more in it. If
ec-static means to literally be outside oneself, beside oneself, by way of some passionate feeling, then, to echo Judith Butler, it can also mean a
people living utterly “beside themselves” with “rage,” “grief,” and, let us add, glee.24 To
be beside oneself renders planned
failure too counterintuitive for the recent reappraisals of social movement failure. Deeper than a readiness to
alter one’s plans according to an evolving historical landscape, planned failure is a frenzy, being out of one’s wits with fear and
delight. It lacks the rationality that undergirds what, for instance, Vaughn Rasberry has called “the right to fail,” the right “to preserve the
experimental spirit and the assumption of failure as a precondition of new knowledge.”25
Planned failure is preset self-negation, an ungovernable generativity encoded in and against the initial
form. On its deepest level, planned failure names the synchronized operation, the co-operation, of two affective drives: a
love for the world and thus a desire for its preservation, and the sense that the world must come to end for the
world to have a chance, for property to be dismantled and for shared freedom to be born.
What gives this form of political engagement the salience that progress has lost in cultural studies today is that it
actively escapes the erroneous opposition between optimism and pessimism, between believing in
some possibility of redress (from reparation to relief) or inhabiting the melancholy of its permanent loss. A
lifeline of scholars ever more mindful of an “abiding negativity” in minoritized lives, mindful, too, of our slave ships and our fugitivities, of “the
ways the hold cannot and does not hold even as the hold remains,” has been asking a tart question: how do we
live and plan for a day that will never come?26 Schuyler and Baker ask another: how do we live and plan for a day that must
not, a day opposed to and unforeseeable by that life and plan? This is a day incompatible with the structures of hope or
despair. For above all, planned failure is a metacritical commentary on the study of black activism, whose
outcomes have led many of us down Escher-stairs of despair. By reversing the terms through which we have come to
understand black social movements as failed plans, planned failure unsettles prevailing conceptions of
what it means to succeed at anticapitalist resistance and the metrics of measurements commonly
employed to assess that success. Planned failure characterizes a broad logic of comic—even ecstatic—political activism in Schuyler
and Baker’s collaboration, their poetics that alight both page and pavement.
CONTINUED
To think of activism through the structure of the ecstatics is not to deny or displace the day-to-day slog
of organizing a social movement. That would overlook the YNCL’s meticulous balance sheets, the weekly printing and dissemination
of “nearly 25,000 pieces” of educational documents, graphs, and statistics of total black capital, the news releases “to some fifty Negro . . .
newspapers”; it would overlook Schuyler and Baker’s lecture tours in “about fifteen cities,” the research to compose the “bibliographies” sent
to members and to figure out where in each of the “twenty” member states and “nine” council cities they could “purchase books on the
subject”; it would overlook the preparation and arrangement of meetings, forums, and conferences, not to mention the decisions of where and
when to spend the marginal monies; but it would also overlook that there’s an ecstatics here, too.107 An
ecstatic movement of the
social in its quotidian slog compels us to reevaluate a common explanation for social movement failure:
burnout, exhaustion. This was one of the primary suspects Du Bois had pointed to in his 1907 study Economic Co-Operation among
American Negroes. Likewise, Beatrice Potter’s renowned Co-Operative Movement in Great Britain (1893), which was listed on the first reading
list dispensed to league members, claimed that “physical nausea and mental exhaustion” is caused by cutthroat materialist greed and justifies
making abstemiousness, restraint, ironically “compulsory,” not self-willed.108 If thrift were not mandated, Potter argued, movement
builders would remain too attached to their consumer fantasies and in the process lose the energy to
continue building the movement. Baker and Schuyler unsettled this assumption by finding ecstasy in the
slog.
Across the humanities and social sciences, the
prevailing interpretation of political action has been that the players
are tragic, that tragedy best elucidates the nature of their demise. Baker and Schuyler invite a reconsideration of how
we assign grades, let alone legibility, to social movement formations and their development. “History is what hurts,” writes Fredric
Jameson, because it “refuses desire.”109 It is the scar people show to recall their “determinate failure,” which leaves, he claims, only
the future as the gauze. We would succeed, suggests Jameson, but for the “‘ruses’ [that] turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt
intention.”110 But not when you intend them, not when you want them.
In the quotidian zones of forced error, “this loophole between hope and resignation,” this rupture in
being and historical time is always already our revolutionary habitat.111 Schuyler and Baker’s cooperative practice
compels a shift of perspective from unfulfilled demands to unexpected satisfactions. Now whatever happens is not only what was never
anticipated, but is ever more than that: “Not only do we (or the comic characters) not get what we asked for, on top of it (and not instead of it)
we get something we haven’t even asked for at all.”112 In
the hole of a perpetual hold, the point is not to feel better
but to get better at feeling. Soon, Baker would be racing farther to the left; Schuyler, to the right, one failure he did not plan and
would never explain. But for a time, we can say, all the planned failures of the cooperative movement, all twenty-five
thousand graphs and statistical summations of existing black capital, which metaphorically compiled black buying power in a
single place, all the ecstasies, were so many ways to visualize that the future is already here.
The trading of Black flesh marks the birth of modern logistics. The first global
movement of commodities required algorithmic regulation and arrangement of bodies
and movement so as to secure financialization that we witness today in criminal
justice policy. Logistics has never been merely about the movement of goods, but
about the control of the flow of movement and touch itself. The nation-state serves
here not as an external actor who can check capitalism’s excess, but rather an
arrangement of governmentality that ensures the enclosure of the form of radical
touch that would threaten logistics. The world is inseparable from logistics – the code
of modernity, the move to sociopathic demands, the era of code-sanctioned killing of
black and brown bodies.
Harney et. al. 18 – Stefano Harney, professor at Singapore Management University, Niccolò Cuppini and Mattia
Frapporti, Department Member of Independent Researcher & Department Member of Universitá di Bologna, “Logistics
Genealogies: a dialogue with Stefano Harney”, September 2018, http://www.intotheblackbox.com/articoli/logisticsgenealogies-a-dialogue-with-stefano-harney/, DOA: 11/15/2019)//shreyas
Answer 1: Modern
logistics is a commercial logistics, with all the multiple sources that feed what Cedric
Robinson calls racial capitalism. And it’s a capitalist science. Even today’s military logistics is most commonly
outsourced to commercial firms, who make huge profits off the logistics of contemporary permanent
war. As a commercial logistics, as a capitalist science, it can be traced directly and emphatically to the Atlantic slave trade.
The Atlantic slave trade was the birth of modern logistics, as it was also the birth of a new kind of war
on the human species, and of racial capitalism, which amounts to saying the same thing. This trade
entailed the first global movement of mass commodities, voluminous and grotesque. Moreover these humans were
also perishable and volatile commodities that could ‘go missing’ and were hard ‘to extract’ requiring cdeomplex, even diabolical, logistical technologies, supported
by finance, insurance, law, and of course state and extra state violence. Ian Baucom locates the origins of modern insurance in the Atlantic slave trade in his
important work Spectres of the Altantic. We know from Sergio Bologna how much
contemporary finance and logistics are
entwined in today’s over-leveraged global shipping industry, but this was true of the Atlantic slave
trade too, where speculative finance was already at work. The story of the Zong slave ship is central to
Baucom’s account, and is also beautifully, unbearably rendered by M. NorbeSe Philip in her book-length poem Zong!, capturing what the birth of modern logistics
did to any possible project of the human by bringing finance and logistics together in a devilish alliance over the commodity that really ‘could speak,’ the ‘thing’ that
talks or is somehow in-touch, neither subject nor proper object, a massive, subterranean, ethereal, undercommon threat to the individuation of modern ‘Man’
emerging at the same time. But the
Atlantic slave trade was also the birth of modern logistics because modern
logistics is not just about how to transport large amounts of commodities or information or energy, nor even how to move these efficiently, but also
about the sociopathic demand for access: topographical, jurisdictional, but as importantly bodily and
social access. The nearly complete access that was imposed upon the African enslaved, upon the African
continent, and upon the lands and indigenous peoples settled for plantations, this kind of access
remains the ambition of logistics today, and it is for this reason that the slave trade remains so
contemporary, that abolition as Jared Sexton rightly says is yet to come. And we might add this abolition requires the abolishment of
logistics which in its flows created a people without standing anywhere. We act in abolition not for a ground to stand on
but for groundations beyond standing. Modern logistics, with its warehousing and its containers is as much about
controlling the flow as ensuring the flow, as much about the interface of movement of commodities and
financialisation of commodities as it is about just getting goods somewhere. That interface is an
opportunity for speculation and today the line itself, the supply line and the assembly line, their speed,
efficiency and metrics are source of massive financial speculation. This is also the horrific legacy of the Atlantic slave trade, the
containerisation of people, of the sociopathic access demanded to labour and sex, and the storage, in forts, in the hold. And even more murderously, the
elimination of goods, of cargo, when the price falls, or considerations of finance as in the incident of the
slave ship the Zong, in which 133 enslaved persons were thrown overboard for insurance purposes
during a logistical operation. In short, this aggregated access allowed for the most evil calculations about the perishability of goods, the planned
obsolesence of products, and the cost of replacement, in a word financial speculation on the supply line that was in
the case of the African enslaved in the Atlantic trade often indistinguishable from the assembly line. Marx
said the first thing the worker makes is himself. The slave was worker on the line and at the same time the supply
coming off the line and into the line. The same concerns with speculation on the line, the line as a modulation of investment and exploitation
of labour are still found today at Walmart or Starbuck’s, not so far from their origins, at least for the most part. As Susan Zieger reminds us in her study of ‘Box’
Brown and logistics – he was the slave who mailed himself in a box to ‘freedom’ from the slave-plantation South to the slave-dependent North in the United States
– logistics incorporates loss in its logics. As Fred Moten and I say logistics
tracks us because it assumes fugitivity. Indeed what is called
surveillance might also be called preemptive logistics . It is possible that all we know of surveillance studies, including its
most incisive work in black surveillance like Simone Browne’s, could also go under the name preemptive
logistics, even predictive logistics, the anticipation not of resistance but of a kind of impenetrability even
in the give. In other words, our entangled, indeterminate, undercommon, rub-up of curvy lines, kinks, loops,
and crooked lines summon logistics. It reacts to our sumptuous tangle. Our entanglement requires them to draw up
contingency plans which are plans to make our indeterminacy mere contingency, to account for what
goes missing. Logistics is the science of loss, the science of their lost means, which is to say it will
always be the white science and the science of being white. Logistics is the science of their loss, not
ours, though we, and those closest to blackness in particular, suffer horrific losses from their loss.
The way that we discuss the resolution matters – logistics has infiltrated every level of
social production and it seeks to make debate rounds into nodes in the production
line of policymaking and research. As ubiquitous as this system is – it is always
vulnerable to the system glitch – neural firings that were never supposed to happen
Beller 2017 (Jonathan Beller – director of the Graduate Program in Media Studies, Pratt Institute, and
the author of The Cinematic Mode of Production (2006) and The Message is Murder: Substrates of
Computational Capital (2017). “The Fourth Determination”, e-flux Journal #85 – October 2017 – ERW)
Analogous to the land- and water-based commons that was planet earth, the
cognitive-linguistic, the visual-poetic, and the imagination
have undergone massive colonial expropriations, following immediately upon their separation and
“liberation” from traditional ties to the body, and have entered directly into capitalist servitude. Bernard
Stiegler refers to this phenomenon of cognitive collapse and short-termist thinking, organized by what he refers to as mnemotechnologies
(technologies of memory that include print, cinema, and computation), as the
“proletarianization of the senses.” This follows
and unspeakable
violation of designated bodies by the slave trade. These aggressive and oftentimes annihilating encroachments
on corporality, the senses, and the linguistic commons, achieved by cybernetic means, are mediological and technical
phenomena as much as they are sociopolitical ones. Put another way, the mediological and the technical have
been sociopolitical all along—to such an extent that with the level of technical saturation present
today, “the political” has been lost. The “loss of the political” is an acknowledgement of the
subsumption of policies and programs by capitalized financial calculus that chains representation to the
process of accumulation. What indeed can “political” mean in a world increasingly characterized by
algorithmic governance and platform sovereignty, that is, where capitalist power is increasingly automated,
and discursive and affective labor is posited as a mere subroutine of capitalized computational processes—as
engines of value creation? What of the political when “politics” has become a subroutine of computational
capital and its discourses and actions are a modality of value extraction? It is an old lesson but it still applies (and we
upon and overlaps with the proletarianization of the masses by the long industrial revolution and the capture
can see it from Israel to Burma): if subalterns use the same media and therefore modes of value extraction as oppressors in their struggles, then
politics is simply a war over who will get the spoils of exploitation. The
expropriation of the cognitive-linguistic by capital
reduces discursive production—including the discourse of politics—to the subroutine of an abstract machine. This
“machine,” though abstract, is nonetheless functional and material—we recognize it as the increasingly ubiquitous,
increasingly networked computer or discrete state machine, but we must not see it as mere technology. The universal Turing
machine, which when unified posits what I call the World Computer (“the invisible hand” codified as AI), has become the
preeminent form of fixed capital. Machinic enslavement, whether to the assembly line, to the “media,” or to the computer,
is indeed enslavement by other means, though we must insist that many of the “older” methods of extraordinary servitude
stubbornly persist and the pain, like the profit, remains unevenly distributed. Following a backlash, in August 2017 the popular “FaceApp”
removed a series of racially themed filters it had issued. The app had allowed digital blackface, yellowface, brownface, and a Caucasian setting
to be added to selfies. Inequality,
now sedimented into institutions and machines as materialized abstractions and
designed into apparatuses, operationalizes historically variegated injustice, to produce and reproduce a planetary
culture that at bottom is founded upon racism, gender inequality, national and cultural codifications,
modern slavery, and a near total dispossession for billions. Machines, too, must be understood as racial
formations. Given the data-logical nature of financialized systems underpinning “cultural” expression and iterated in and as machines, it is
no surprise that Facebook’s machine-learning algorithm “Deep Face” imaged the minimally recognizable human face as that of a white man.
Converting social life and social history into digital information and digital machines facilitates the as yet un-transcendable
program of quantification that runs parallel to social-historical processes of social differentiation for the
purpose of accumulation. The social emerges not as an abstract idea, but as a concrete substrate of computation.
Sociality is posited then programmed as a series of leveraged accumulation strategies operating above or
below or explicitly in and through everyday consciousness. Public faces are forms of data visualization and, circulating as images,
are both programs and programmable. Bodies become “necessary media” of machinic digital operations that require from us (us bodies)
attention, cognition, neuro-power, virtuosity, and sheer survival. As the auto-enthnography that is critical theory in the West might indicate,
the remainders—interiorities and isles of awareness that fall away from informatic throughput—are in large part melancholic, cynical,
disaffected, and abject laments. The rise of actually existing digitality thus appears as inseparable from the development and intensification of
capitalism, that is, of media technologies as media of capital, which is also to say as media for the leveraging of agency and representation, such
that decisions are made hierarchically and systemically while many aspects of life become almost unrepresentable and thus also unknown and
unknowable. The ordinary taxonomies of social history continue to index zones and inflection points of this total and in certain definitive
respects totalitarian process of digital enclosure. Our
situation is effectively one of platform totalitarianism in which
(the social) metabolism itself is captured by a leveraged exchange with capital and our media and
machines are not only social relations but racial formations. This leveraged exchange of metabolism for forms of currency
at rates set by platform capitalism is managed by ambient and ubiquitous computation, an electro-mechanical network that is composed
primarily of fixed capital. The
skeins of accumulation by means of informatic uptake lay closely upon body,
mind, and time, and what value is extracted are the products of these. Thought and feeling are
rendered quantifiable, computable, and indeed programmable. However, it is always a mistake to
imagine that the impact of technology flows only in one direction: technical form emerges in a
dialectics of domination and struggle. The global, technical evolution in the scale and granularity of the metabolic capture of
what was once called labor power and social cooperation—a capture that fragments and cellularizes populations as well as bodies,
minds, and neural networks—is not without its emancipatory potentials, as a Benjamin or a Brecht might remind us
were they alive today. “The bad new things” are built out of and in response to new forms of struggle, and as
Antonio Negri has always emphasized, the innovations of capitalist techné come from below, from the ways that
the oppressed outflank domination and persist in living. A survey machine for customer feedback on the "immigration
experience"—as long as the feedback is expressed in the form of smiley or frowny emojis. Towards a Reclamation of Value How then to
investigate the capture and neutralization of the political domain and its uncountable longings by media-interfaced Computational Capitalism?
How to transform and reprogram the failing powers of analysis, sensibility, and action such that they may function beyond the horizon of
capitalist control? Four main hypothesis can guide us: 1) Computational Capitalism is an ambient financial calculus of value extraction working
through any and all media. 2) Computational
Capitalism is a development of Racial Capitalism and is thus also
Computational Colonialism: vectors of race, gender, nation, sexuality, and other forms of social
difference have been configured by and as strategies of value extraction and, like “structural racism,”
have been sedimented into the operating systems and machine architectures of our machines. 3) The
specter of revolution is everywhere visible if one knows how to see it. 4) For the first time in history a thoroughgoing revolution is possible that
does not replicate the failed strategies of the radical break so tragically characteristic of twentieth-century revolutionary movements, but
instead works to decolonize computation by transforming the money-form from within. I take it as axiomatic that the items telegraphically
listed in the previous paragraph have become inseparable. What we thought of simply as computation is in fact computational
capital—a supple and adaptive machine-mediated calculus on the social metabolism, one that can be gleaned
through a deeper reflection on the notion of convergence. To illustrate aspects of convergence, we note that racialization and
nationalization, along with regimes of gender, sexuality, borders, and incarceration, are part and
parcel of the overall process of corporeal inscription, codification, and programmatic control endemic
to digitization. Niche marketing and profiling are but two of the ways in which our bodies and practices
are coded for capitalist and state-capitalist processing. One could add here the attempted subsumption of
entire demographics under codifications indexed by “thug” and “terrorist.” Historical codes, including but not
limited to race, gender, nation, class, and sexuality, are inscribed on our bodies, read, written, and rewritten by informatic machines. This
functionalization of social difference (representational, biometric), to say nothing of the branding and scarring of bodies that is
both past and present at so many levels, serves both as a means and a medium of capitalization and value
extraction and as a necessary substrate to the development of computation. Within and at the scenes of
inscription, the code works us and we work the code—again with historically overdetermined statistical variance. This is
how it is at both the micro and the macro levels of struggle and organization. IBM’s role in the Holocaust, to give
but one example, must also be understood as the Holocaust’s role in IBM and in the development of Hollerith punch cards and computational
architectures, including search engines. Sociality and global lifetimes themselves have become the conditions of possibility for what, writ large,
is the totalitarian emergence of the World Computer. That
is why no existing political discourse can approach this
horizon because current concepts and the activities of thought itself are fully circumscribed by it—
ideas themselves have become operators (media) fully functionalized by and in the matrix of
information. Understanding the transformation of semiotic process by information functioning as a form of capital, we can take the
general formula for capital M-C-M’ (where M is money, C is commodity and, M’ is a greater quantity of money) and rewrite it as M-I-C-I’-M’,
where I is image and C is code. The commodity as a distributed social relation has, with computation, become both produced and distributed in
nonlinear networked operations that, unlike the assembly line, depend upon digital forms of attention, cognition, images, and codes for full
valorization. This dependence on transformed conditions of labor germane to the social factory is (now) true even of older forms of production
(e.g., automobiles) inasmuch as they are also networked in the world of information, advertising, Instagram, and the like. The valuation of a
commodity requires a calculus of the image that modifies code, as does any interaction that transfers rights and value to said commodity (what
used to be called sales). Production, circulation, valuation are all mediated by image and code, and that mediation occurs on a global scale. As
the Anthropocene and its derivative concepts might testify, little
or nothing remains untouched by this process of
computational capital that penetrates down to the level of atoms. Here I want to propose further that this formula can
be further modified to read M-I-M’, where I is information. To put this modification simply, money becomes more money through the
movement of discrete state machines, the motor force of which is ultimately the bios (what was once thought of as the human life-world)
struggling to survive its informatic capture. Labor becomes informatic labor and, as I endeavor to show in The Message is Murder, M-I-M’
means less that the commodity is one form of information, and more that the
domain of intelligibility known as
“information” directly emerges in the footprint of the value-form. Data visualization by computational
processes screen-interfaced with the bios is a fundamental condition of the current regime of accumulation sometimes called
post-Fordism. In generating M’ from M, it also effects what Paolo Virno calls “the communism of capital.” The programmable image as a
worksite transforms and colonizes nearly all mental, sensual, and neuronal process while submitting
them to interoperable regimes of background monetization. This financialization of everyday life,
where everyone is forced to continuously throughput information in order to manage volatility and risk,
facilitates a machinic enslavement profoundly enabled by and integrated with inherited forms of
oppression. Navigating the matrix of capital-information is not an option, it is a matter of survival. Somewhere along the way, “consumer
society” and “conspicuous consumption” became a semiotic game of survival. In the dominant order, these encodings are among the terms of
wealth and power and only those who strive to organize in accord with a different order (or disorder) altogether have more than an inkling that
there are better ways to be. We
are dealing with the failure of revolutions, the overcoding of bodies and
practices, and the absorption of political energy by strategies of accumulation. Computational capital
names the integration of discrete state machines with fixed capital and sociality such that Marx’s “vast
automaton” has become a global financialized socio-cybernetic system. “Politics” has been
operationally reduced to a mere subroutine in the encroachment of this computationally integrated
system on planetary life, and as Harney and Moten have pointedly underscored, “politics” and “policy” are today
always on the side of the state—and the state is a state of capital.
The role of the ballot is to abolish the white debate community – white spaces are a
contradiction seeking to organize without embracing what they disown. Meaningful
cross-racial affinity can only be found in moments of revolutionary violence and selfdefense.
Harney 17 (Stefano Harney is a professor of Business Management at Singapore Management
University. He co-wrote The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study with Fred Moten.
“Stefano Harney Part 2 Interview by Michael Schapira & Jesse Montgomery,” Full Stop, August 10, 2017
//tjb)
I just finished a terrific book called Dixie Be Damned by Neal
Shirley and Saralee Stafford. They write about insurrections in the South from the dismal swamp in the
18th century to a 1975 uprising in a North Carolina women’s prison. It’s stirring stuff and then in a really sound, clear-hearted concluding chapter they
surprised me. They said our enemies have been saved not by fascism but by democracy. It should not have surprised me, given that we were just
It’s also good timing that you wrote to me about this comment I made to you in an earlier conversation because
speaking about Du Bois and democratic despotism, but it did. They are right. And I think it is in this sense that a better university would be worse for us, has been worse for us, in a paradoxical way. Some ask, ‘Is another university
possible?’ Well, that implies this one is possible but more than that it suggests another university would be better for us. I don’t know about that. This is not to say I do not find work like that of Marc Bousquet and Chris Newfield
there is something at stake in Shirley and Stafford’s book and I want to talk with you
about it because I think it connects to your question about how the Undercommons book has
been read and used. The authors quote Frank Wilderson on the way blackness can never be
disimbricated from the violence of slavery. Then they say: ‘Those who would risk extending solidarity
indispensable. I do. But
across racial boundaries would find themselves the recipient of exemplary violence in order to instill
fear of constant consequence for this treason. Ever after, meaningful cross-racial affinity can only be
found in moments of revolutionary violence.” (Italics in the original.)Now this is an historical observation on their part, but to some extent it is also programmatic for the
I’m not a pacifist. I’m for self-defense, and that
can be violent. But do words like solidarity, affinity, to say nothing of the unlovely term allyship,
accidentally preserve something we want to abolish? And I feel bad using Shirley and Stafford to make this point because theirs is such a good book, but maybe
that’s why I feel compelled to say, ‘even here’ this question comes up. What I mean is who is this someone in solidarity with
blackness, who is this ally of blackness, who is this someone with affinity to black struggle? I think this
means that this someone has his or her own struggles and is indicating that now she or he wants to join
not in common struggles, but in the struggles of blackness. Because in a sense you have to have your
own thing to be an ally or to be in solidarity. Ok, but what are your own struggles from which you would
be offering solidarity, allyship, affinity? Are you organizing in the white community, is that it? I think
that is the implication, that you have been working in white communities, and/or on the environment, or feminist issues, etc. But the problem is, there’s no such thing as a
white community. A white community is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron. You can’t organize an
oxymoron. The only thing you can do with a white community is work to abolish it. Moreover at that point
of abolition we may be able to say there is no such thing as a community, that a community is an
oxymoron. You can’t commune and have a community. Communing is anti-community. It’s
undercommon. Maybe the only kind of community that is possible is the maroon community, because it is by definition not a community, and when in some historical instances (of necessity even) it became
authors. As an observation, well, they have just convinced me of its validity in the last 250 pages, and as program, well,
one, it took on the same murderous qualities of any community. Okay, so then the question arising, if you do abolish the white community, what of the people who were marked as white, and in many cases who dwelt in the
This is to
say, people who present as white are not allies, or in solidarity, or showing affinity, because they have
nothing of their own, no place from which to show this, no resource to bring, unless and until they
embrace the one thing of their own they disown. The thing that can’t be owned born(e) of the owned,
blackness. Now white people aren’t coming with much blackness, by definition. And this is why the underlying
humility motivating terms like ally, solidarity, and affinity is not misplaced, if that is indeed what underlies their use in practice. In any case,
whiteness is either absence or violence, and in either case, not much to offer as an ally. But on the
other hand white people have a big role to play in the revolutionary violence.
supremacy of whiteness, what becomes of them? Well, in the practice of abolition they will move closer to the only thing they ever had that was about life and not death, about love and not hate, blackness.
Logistics has infiltrated debate – means uniqueness flips our way for a predictable
model of debate – refuses their universalized stasis
Kelsie 19 – Amber Kelsie, University of Pittsburgh, Communication and Rhetoric, Graduate Student,
“Blackened Debate at the End of the Word”, Philosophy & Rhetoric, Volume 52, Number 1, 2019, pp. 6370 (Article), Penn State University Press)//Shreyas
We are haunted by the specter of civil war. Liberal and conservative politicians and commentators
openly express anxiety about the possibility of outright hostilities and the “unravelling [of ] our national
fabric” (Gambino 2017). Increasing polarization, identity politics that destroys persuasion, an atmosphere of conspiracy regarding the deep
state or foreign puppet masters, apparent disenchantment with institutions, general mistrust in electoral politics, a gridlocked and weak
congress, and open skirmishes between white nationalist and antifascists are put forth as signs of the end times (see, e.g., Blight 2017; Wright
2017; DeGroot 2018; Smith 2018). The
looming crisis of the end of politics that everywhere drives the nostalgic
desire for a return to a normalcy and civility invites us to rethink debate and to pose a different
question that does not seek to redeem a past that never was and continues to come at too high a cost
for the wretched of the earth. Rather than “make debate great again,” I’d like to sit with the vertigo so
as to consider debate’s (im)possible outside. Such a quest for a horizon that is before-after-immanent to
the End (of politics or history or the world) will require that we rethink the spatiotemporal coordinates
of the entire liberal project that secures the parameters of debate as the dialectical and agonistic
contestation of the possible. My central interlocutor here will be blackness: that (non-)ontological constitutive outside of the
modern grammar that is relegated to the realm of absolute necessity, negativity, incapacity, and pathology that subtends the political and the
rhetorical. As that which is always already outside the World/History, blackness provides an anoriginary nonplace from which to think crisis and
a politics of actualizing the impossible. Imminent civil war is an interesting but unsurprising anxiety; it is unsurprising because the U.S. Civil War
informs so much of the popular narrative of the United States and its ethical position that confirms the progressive nature of time, and because
liberal sovereignty was always a war waged against civil war.1 And it is interesting because the
Greeks referred to civil war as
“stasis.” Today standing, state, and stability are also meanings of stasis, as it emerges from histemi. Stasis then doubles both as
sovereignty and as sovereignty’s undoing and evokes a constant permanence of war even in peace.
Stasis in rhetorical studies takes on the meaning of “issue” and serves as a hermeneutic for coming to
consensus on the point of contention from which debate proceeds. Stasis here also means standing in the sense that
there is some “ground” in the form of prior consensus on the nature of the disagreement.2 The somewhat paradoxical relationship between
consensus and dissensus found in stasis speaks to a kind of disavowal of ungroundedness that precedes even the point from which to begin
speaking. Must
one have a presupposed potentiality for a common ground to be able to proceed in
argument? Refusing this disavowal of groundlessness as it emerges in contemporary figurations of
agonistic debate might enable us to more accurately think of rhetoric in its modern inflection as the
presupposition of a ground as a war against its own void via antiblackness. The inversion of Clausewitz’s proposition
is salient: rhetoric is the continuation of war by other means; rhetoric as a mode of war in an effort to ontologize itself against its groundless
outside.3 The (im)possible is always at stake in debate since rhetoric regards the contingent as its necessary presupposition. According to Dilip
Gaonkar, this “key, but largely unnoticed, assumption in contemporary rhetorical theory” finds its basis in Aristotle’s response to Plato’s charge
of the unspecifiability of rhetoric (2004, 5). Instead of freeing us to reflect explicitly on the nature of contingency, Aristotle’s domestication of
rhetoric by placing rhetoric within the domain of the “contingent, yet probable” has prompted most rhetorical scholars to forgo consideration
of contingency in favor of the thematic of probability: doxa, constraints, norms, ideology. Contingency in these schemas tends to be considered
as a property ascribed to statements, propositions, and rhetorical acts—to the ontic world that constitutes the context of the rhetor—rather
than as a mode of the subject or the singular encounter that constitutes a rhetorical situation. The
possibility of rhetorical
dialectic, that exigency that provides the opportunity for agonistic argument that can be sublated into
judgment, animates historical progress and places debate as the ground for civic life. In the liberal
understanding of contemporary debate, contingency takes on an interior spatial dimension as the possible content through a disavowal of the
contingency of debate’s outside that is rendered impossible. To
say that debate is impossible is then to beckon to war on
the horizon. It is to recognize the state of emergency as the end of the state of debate.
Prefer revision over the self-improvement of logistics
Moten and Harney 15 (Fred Moten, Professor of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts
at NYU, PhD from UC Berkeley, Stefano Harney, Professor of Strategic Management Education at
Singapore Management University, co-founder of the School for Study, PhD from the University of
Cambridge, September 2015, “Mikey the Rebelator,” Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing
Arts Volume 20 Issue 4) gz
Nahum Chandler reminds us of a term W. E. B. DuBois invented and employed; ‘democratic
despotism’8. When the consultant cannot demonstrate access, and therefore the algorithm cannot demonstrate
improvement, the consultant calls for policy as once (and still) the citizen calls for heteropatriachal
nationalism or the settler for racist manifest destiny. Policy is past all that, even though all that’s not past. Policy
comes in to diagnose what’s blocking access, and what’s blocking access are ‘those people’. What’s
wrong with those people in Detroit who want water, in British Columbia who want land, in Manila who
want some place to stay? Policy says there is something wrong with those people that makes it so that
the consultant can’t get access. But it is the other way around. The consultant is denied access – those
people deny him access – because they embrace the general access-in-antagonism that he denies. And
so policy must be called. Self-defence becomes the disease. Love becomes the problem because love is
the problem, the self-defence of the accessible. But, hey, maybe governance can help, which is to say
maybe those practising self-defence may be willing to self-diagnose, self-reflect, self-improve! One way
or another policy will proscribe, or policy will get posed – as democracy, as democratic despotism, where
everyone is given the chance to say there is something wrong with those people. Democratic
despotism is the imposition of policy and its violent possibilities and impossibilities on the wrong(ed).
Because the thing is, the consultant’s not wrong, the algorithm of work is not malfunctioning, the policy
hustler is not misdiagnosing. We’re wrong, which is why we’re wronged. We are incomplete. Moreover,
they got the very idea of incompleteness from us! Another word for incompleteness is study, or more
precisely, revision. The consultant gets this revision from us, from study, from our sumptuous revisions
of one another out of existence, as existence. Study happens and it don’t stop. In study, we are engaged
consciously and unconsciously. We revise, and then again. This is not just about distinguishing
improvement as capitalist efficiency. That is too easy to dismiss. It is about improvement itself, the timeconcept, the moral imperative, the aesthetic judgement, which is to say capitalist improvement
founded in and on black flesh, its female informality. Revision has no end and no connection to
improvement, never mind efficiency. So the consultant does and undoes institutions but can’t access
instituted life, can’t open black life, can’t uncover queer life, can’t expose feminist planning around
the ‘kitchen table’ as Barbara and Beverly Smith called it and Tiziana Terranova calls to it again, all
noting certain paradoxes of freedom and sequestration in little general intellects of surreal life.9 He can’t
access open secrets, can’t incomplete what is already incomplete, can’t deform what is always
informal already and yet; they can’t believe and this leads to the state emergency that goes under such
names as resilience and preparedness. When democratic despotism fails, simple despotism in the name
of democracy must be imposed. Resilience is the name for the violent destruction of things that won’t
give, won’t return to form, won’t bend when access is demanded, won’t be flexible and (com)pliant.
Stopping when you are told to stop and moving along when you are told to move along demonstrates
resilience and composure; but broken, breaking, dissed assembly demonstrates itself openly, secretly,
dissembling in captured but inaccessible glance, for us, to us, as incomplete and much more than
complete. Its daimonic performance can’t be individuated and won’t be performed.
Against the pragmatic urgings of democratic despotism, voting affirmative situates
study within a blockage that cannot be revised as a means of unraveling the
prominence of logistical sovereignty.
Melamed 16 (Jodi Melamed, Associate professor of Africana and English Studies at Marquette
University, “Proceduralism, Predisposing, Poesis: Forms of Institutionality, In the Making”, English
Faculty Research and Publications, 4/1/2016)//Shreyas
For our purposes, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black
Study, a performative event repeated with each reading, can be seen to work for a rupture of
neoliberalized and liberal modes of institutionality. It works to undo and estrange their constitutive and
constituting logics, their modes of individualizing, rationalizing, politicizing, critiquing, and formalizing
social being into dominant ‘institutions’ and their ‘will to fix’ (apprehension of) the conditions of the
material and the real. From the matrix of meaning the Undercommons creates, liberal and neoliberal
modes of institutionality come into focus as continuous within a developing genealogy of unfreedom
and truncations of social life, whose strategies include racial capitalist, settler colonial, and liberal
democratic logics and practices alike. One description of the university’s institutionality captures this
perfectly: “The University Is the Site of the Social Reproduction of Conquest Denial.”26 Another
description makes it clear that the university institutionalizes the same violence as the prison: “The
university, then, is not the opposite of the prison, since they are both involved, in their way, with the
reduction and command of the social individual.”27 Thus for Moten and Harney, neo/liberal
institutionality, generally considered, abhors social being outside its forms. Thus sociality itself (along
the lines of what they call “consent not to be one”) is resistance. 28 The performance of The
Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study is structured around the play of two categories of
terms: 1) terms that distill the specific violences of neo/liberal modes of institutionality, which reduce
and harm human capacities of sociality and continuously refresh the coloniality and raciality of
institutional forms, and 2) terms that help us think and organize desire for forms of social being that are
illiberally collective, unoccupied by professionalism, sociopoetical, in-the-making, and shared beyond
the logics of democratic capitalist humanist Enlightenment traditions or critical moves that fall under the
category of legitimation-by-reversal (i.e., the commons as reverse legitimation of privatization,
redistribution as the reverse legitimation of dispossession, the critical professional as the reverse
legitimation of the university as site of the social reproduction of conquest denial). While some of the
terms in the first category incline towards a critique of liberal institutionality (‘politics’ and ‘critique’),
many of them catch hold of a neoliberalization of institutionality, including ‘policy’ and ‘logistics.’ For
Moten and Harney, capital today “wants control of the means [of social reproduction…]by gaining
access to and directly controlling the informal experiment with the social reproduction of life itself.”29
In neoliberal times, this requires the use of directly political forms in addition to economic compulsion.
‘Policy’ is a name for the form political control and command takes. It is a deputized, dispersed form of
command which controls social reproduction by diagnosing ‘incorrectness’ for those it represents to be
in need of improvement, of change, of policy. Moten and Harney counterpose ‘planning’ to ‘policy.’
“Planning is self-sufficiency at the social level, and it reproduces in its experiment not just what it needs,
life, but what it wants, life in difference, in the play of the general antagonism.”30 It begins with
“militant preservation” in the face of ‘policy’.31 To escape the proceduralism of ‘policy,’ Moten and
Harney offer the sociopoesis of the statement, “There’s nothing wrong with us.”32 Similarly, ‘logistics’ is
a name for the “capitalist science” of the moment, which “wants to dispense with the subject
altogether,” to containerize “bodies, objects, affects, information” for circulation as capital, “as if it
could reign sovereign over the informal, the concrete and generative indeterminacy of material life.”33
To “logistics” Harney and Moten counterpose “hapticality, or love,” “the capacity to feel through others,
for others to feel through you, for you to feel them feeling you,” a capacity attached in sociopoetic
imagination to the bodies of people captured in the hold of slave ships (the first form of logistical
transportation).34 The Undercommons, in this way, repeatedly performs the defeat of neoliberal
proceduralism by the sociopoetical imagination, asserting “the necessarily failed administrative
accounting of the incalculable.”35 In these performances, the concept of the ‘undercommons’ holds a
special weight of desire and meaning, circulating as a term for “the nonplace of abolition,” a beneath
and beyond of the university inhabited by maroons, castaways, and fugitives, and an “appositionality”
of “being together in homelessness.”36 How do the streams of meaning performatively attached to ‘the
undercommons’ as a tool for sociopoesis frame or interact with the concept of ‘institutionality,’ as we’ve
been discussing it here? In the interview that makes up the last chapter of text, in answer to a question
about the relationship between the university and the undercommons, Harney states, I don’t see the
undercommons as having any necessary relationship to the university…. [T]he undercommons is a kind
of comportment or on-going experiment with and as the general antagonism, a kind of way of being
with others[. I]t’s almost impossible that it could be matched up with particular forms of institutional
life. It would obviously be cut through in different kinds of ways and in different spaces and times.”37 As
a “kind of comportment,” a way of being and doing, the undercommons is not in contradiction with
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s dictum that there is no such thing as “a noninstitutional environment.”38
Rather, it’s a kind of practice that cannot be encompassed by “institutional life.” It may be thought of as
the placeholder for a vision of sociality without institutionality, or perhaps the sociality that happens all
the time beyond and below the incorporative maneuvers of dominant institutions. On the othe hand,
the ‘undercommons’ might be thought of in relation to institutionality as an excessive and ruptural
sociality, a sociopoesis which demands that the active social content institutionality congeals returns to
fluidity through a generative unthinking of the “hard materiality of the unreal.”39 My suggestion for
thinking about pedagogy is to advocate for thinking and teaching that renews our sense of institutions
as sites where the form and appearance of social being and collectivity is determined through social
action and contest, even as we problematize institutions as always explicitly incorporative, as
constituted out of the durable predispositions of adaptive hegemonies. Inspired by Ferguson and Harney
and Moten, my call is perhaps to work for a disruptive institutionality, to work with the paradox of
institutionality—which pits congealed social process against lived presence—to plan for what Audre
Lorde called “a new and more possible meeting,” for a broader sense of collective social being than
neo/liberal forms of institutional power let us imagine and practice.40 Infused with the disruptive
potential of illiberal discourses of collectivity, “institutionality” can be made to line up anti-intuitively
with critical rubrics that empower us to try to inhabit social being otherwise (undercommons, abolition,
fugitivity), while reminding us that “radical change requires structure.”41