1NC
Our argument: the 1AC operates within grids of intelligibility, affixing the
body to a state of gridlocked, identarian stasis that cannot account for the
movement of energy and matter
---performance fails if it operates within grid of intelligible
---2NC gridlock DA – catching the body in a “structural freeze-frame”
---perm is multiplying a number by zero – if a number is our attempt at movement and zero
represents the lack of movement in their positional FW
Massumi 02. Brian Massumi, professor of communications at the University of Montreal,
Parables For the Virtual, pg. 2
"The Body." What is it to The Subject? Not the qualities of its moving experience. But, rather, in
keeping with the extrinsic approach, its positioning . Ideological accounts of subject formation
emphasize systemic structurings . The focus on the systemic had to be brought back down to
earth in order to be able to integrate into the account the local cultural differences and the
practices of resistance they may harbor. The concept of "positionality" was widely developed
for this purpose. Signifying subject formation according to the dominant structure was often
thought of in terms of "coding." Coding in turn came to be thought of in terms of positioning
on a grid. The grid was conceived as an oppositional framework of culturally constructed
significations : male versus female , black versus white , gay versus straight , and so on. A
body corresponded to a "site" on the grid defined by an overlapping of one term from each
pair. The body came to be defined by its pinning to the grid . Proponents of this model often
cited its ability to link body-sites into a "geography" or culture that tempered the universalizing
tendencies or ideology.
The sites, it is true, are multiple. But aren't they still combinatorial permutations on an
overarching definitional framework? Aren't the possibilities for the entire gamut of cultural
emplacements, including the "subversive" ones , precoded into the ideological master
structure ? Is the body as linked to a particular subject position anything more than a local
embodiment of ideology ? Where has the potential for change gone ? How does a body
perform its way out of a definitional framework that is not only responsible for its very
"construction," but seems to prescript every possible signifying and countersignifying move
as a selection from a repertoire or possible permutations on a limited set of predetermined
terms?
How can the grid itself change ? How can what the system has
pinpointedly determined flip over into a determining role capable of acting on the systemic
level? The aim of the positionality model was to open a window on local resistance in the name
of change. But the problem of change returned with a vengeance . Because every bodysubject was so determinately local , it was boxed into its site on the culture map.
Gridlock .
The idea of positionality begins by subtracting movement from the picture . This catches the
body in cultural freeze-frame . The point or explanatory departure is a pinpointing , a zeropoint of stasis. When positioning of any kind comes a determining first, movement comes a
problematic second. After all is signified and sited , there is the nagging problem of how to
add movement back into the picture. But adding movement to stasis is about as easy as
multiplying a number by zero and getting a positive product. Of course, a body occupying one
position on the grid might succeed in making a move to occupy another position. In fact, certain
normative progressions, such as that from child to adult, are coded in. But this doesn't change
the fact that what defines the body is not the movement itself, only its beginning and
endpoints . Movement is entirely subordinated to the positions it connects . These are
predefined. Adding movement like this adds nothing at all. You just get two successive states:
multiples of zero.
The very notion of movement as qualitative transformation is lacking. There is
"displacement," but no transformation ; it is as if the body simply leaps from one definition to
the next. Since the positional model's definitional framework is punctual , it simply can't
attribute a reality to the interval , whose crossing is a continuity (or nothing). The space of
the crossing, the gaps between positions on the grid, falls into a theoretical no-body's land .
Also lacking is the notion that if there is qualitative movement of the body, it as directly
concerns sensings as significations . Add to this the fact that matter , bodily or otherwise,
never figures into the account as such. Even though many of the approaches in question
characterize themselves as materialisms, matter can only enter in indirectly: as mediated.
Matter, movement, body, sensation. Multiple mediated miss .
Thinking blackness through ontology and structuralism locks it within predetermined grids of intelligibility – only an approach that emphasized the
formed nature of identity through assemblage theory can map a line of
escape
Koerner 11. Michelle Koerner, professor of women’s studies at Duke, “Lines of Escape: Gilles
Deleuze’s Encounter with George Jackson,” Genre, Vol. 44, No. 2 Summer 2011 pg. 161-64
The force of Jackson’s line in Deleuze’s books—considered as an insinuation of blackness in
the sense discussed above—is intensified when we consider the historical circumstances that
drew Soledad Brother into Deleuze and his col- laborators’ orbit (the links between prison
struggle in France and in the United States, the GIP’s interest in Jackson, Genet’s involvement in
the publication and translation of Soledad Brother). And this force becomes even stronger when
we consider the deeper trajectories of black resistance it carries. It is here, however, with
respect to the question of history and of blackness’s relation to history, that a serious problem
asserts itself. Each time Jackson’s name appears in Deleuze’s work it is without introduction,
explanation, or elaboration, as though the line were ripped entirely from historical
considerations. There is a temptation to dismiss this use of Soledad Brother as an ahistorical
appropriation of Jackson’s thought by a European theorist or, worse, a decontextualization that
effectively obscures the intolerable social conditions out of which Jackson’s letters were
produced. But to do so would perhaps miss the way blackness claims an unruly place in
philosophy and philosophies of history.
In “The Case of Blackness” Moten (2008b: 187) perceptively remarks, “What is inadequate to
blackness is already given ontologies .” What if we were to think of blackness as a name for
an ontology of becoming ? How might such a thinking transform our understanding of the
relation of blackness to history and its specific capacity to “think [its] way out of the exclusionary
constructions” of history and the thinking of history (Moten 2008a: 1744)? Existing ontologies
tend to reduce blackness to a historical condition, a “lived experience,” and in doing so
effectively eradicate its unruly character as a transformative force. Deleuze and Guattari, I
think, offer a compelling way to think of this unruliness when they write, “What History grasps
of the event is its effectuation in states of affairs or in lived experience , but the event in its
becoming , in its specific consistency , in its self- positing as concept, escapes History ”
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 110). To bring this relation between blackness and becoming
further into the open—toward an affirmation of the unexpected insinuation of blackness
signaled by the use of Jackson’s line as an “event in its becoming”—a few more words need be
said about Deleuze’s method.
The use of Jackson’s writing is just one instance of a procedure that we find repeated
throughout Capitalism and Schizophrenia, where we constantly encoun- ter unexpected
injections of quotations, names, and ideas lifted from other texts, lines that appear all of sudden
as though propelled by their own force. One might say they are deployed rather than
explained or interpreted ; as such, they produce textual events that readers may choose to
ignore or pick up and run with . Many names are proposed for this method—“schizoanalysis,
micropolitics, pragmat- ics, diagrammatism, rhizomatics, cartography” (Deleuze and Parnet
[1977] 2006: 94)—but the crucial issue is to affirm an experimental practice that opposes itself
to the interpretation of texts , proposing instead that we think of a book as “a little machine”
and ask “ what it functions with , in connection with what other things does it or does it not
transmit intensities?” (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987: 4).8 Studying how Soledad Brother
functions in Deleuze’s books, connect- ing Jackson’s line to questions and historical issues that
are not always explicitly addressed in those books, involves one in this action. And further, it
opens new lines where the intensities transmitted in Jackson’s book make a claim on our own
practice.
This method can be seen as an effort to disrupt the hierarchical opposition between theory and
practice and to challenge some of the major assumptions of Western Marxism. In an interview
with Antonio Negri in the 1990s, Deleuze (1997: 171) clarifies that he and Guattari have
“remained Marxists” in their concern to analyze the ways capitalism has developed but that
their political philosophy makes three crucial distinctions with respect to more traditional
theoretical approaches: first, a thinking of “war machines” as opposed to state theory; second, a
“consideration of minorities rather than classes”; and finally, the study of social “lines of flight”
rather than the interpretation and critique of social contradictions. Each of these distinctions, as
we will see, resonates with Jackson’s political philosophy , but as the passage from AntiOedipus demonstrates, the concept of the “line of flight” emerges directly in connection to
Deleuze and Guattari’s encounter with Soledad Brother.
The concept affirms those social constructions that would neither be determined by
preexisting structures nor caught in a dialectical contradiction. It names a force that is
radically autonomous from existing ontologies, structures, and historical accounts. It is above
all for this reason that Deleuze and Guattari insist that society be thought of not as a “structure”
but as a “machine,” because such a concept enables the thinking of the movements, energies,
and intensities (i.e., the lines of flight) that such machines transmit. The thinking of machines
forces us not only to consider the social and historical labor involved in producing soci- ety but
also the ongoing potentials of constructing new types of assemblages (agencement).
One of the key adversaries of this machinic approach is “interpretation” and more specifically
structuralist interpretations of society in terms of contradictions. According to Deleuze and
Guattari ([1980] 1987: 293), structuralism persisted in the “submission of the line to the point”
and as a result produced a theory of subjectivity, and also an account of language and the
unconscious, that could not think in terms of movement and construction. Defining lines only
in relation to finite points ( the subject, the signifier ) produces a calculable grid , a structure
that then appears as the hidden intelligibility of the system and of society generally . Louis
Althusser’s account of the “ideological State apparatus” as the determining structure of
subjectivity is perhaps the extreme expression of this gridlocked position (an example we will
come back to in a later section). Opposed to this theoretical approach, diagrammatism (to
invoke one of the terms given for this method) maps vectors that generate an open space and
the potentials for giving consistency to the latter.9 In other words, rather than tracing the
hidden structures of an intolerable system, Deleuze and Guattari’s method aims to map the
ways out of it.
1AC Sharpe evidence invocation of the notion of a “human consciousness”
turns their queer theory arguments – it reifies the coherence of the human
as animate rather than queering the notion of the human as such
Chen 12. Mel Y. Chen, professor of linguistics and women’s studies at UC Berkeley,
Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, Duke U Press, pg. 10
Furthermore, political interest stokes public alarm toward “toxins.” We must therefore
understand the ways in which toxicity has been so enthusiastically taken up
during times of economic instability and panic about transnational flow .
Animacies demonstrates that interests in toxicity are particularly (if sometimes
stealthily ) raced and queered . Indeed, toxins participate vividly in the racial
mattering of locations , human and nonhuman bodies , living and inert
entities , and events such as disease threats . This book aims to offer ways of
mapping and diagnosing the mutual imbrications of race, sexuality, ability,
environ¬ment, and sovereign concern.
In addition, animal and science studies have offered tools through which we can rethink
the significance of molecular, cellular, animal, vegetable, or nonhuman life.22 Animacies
not only takes into account the broadening field of nonhuman life as a proper
object , but even more sensitively, the animateness or inanimateness of entities
that are considered either “ live ” or “ dead .” Considering differential animacies
becomes a particularly critical matter when “ life” versus “death ” binary
oppositions fail to capture the affectively embodied ways that racializations of
specific groups are differentially rendered. Sianne Ngai explores the affective meanings
of the term animatedness, focusing on its manifestation as a property of Asianness and
of blackness: “the affective state of being ‘animated’ seems to imply the most
basic or minimal of all affective conditions: that of being, in one way or another,
‘moved.’ But, as we press harder on the affective meanings of animatedness, we shall see
how the seemingly neutral state of ‘being moved’ becomes twisted into the image of the
overemotional racialized subject.”23 Animacy has consequences for both ablebodiedness and ability, especially since a consideration of “inanimate life” imbues the
discourses around environmental illness and toxicity. For instance, the constant
interabsorption of animate and inanimate bodies in the case of airborne pollution
must account for the physical nonintegrity of individual bodies and the merging of
forms of “ life” and “nonlife .” This book seeks to trouble this binary of life and
nonlife as it offers a different way to conceive of relationality and
intersubjective exchange .
I detail an animacy that is in indirect conversation with historical vitalisms as well as
Bennett’s “vital materiality.”24 Yet this book focuses critically on an interest in the
animal that hides in animacy, particularly in the interest of its attachment to things
like sex , race , class , and dirt . That is, my purpose is not to reinvest certain
materialities with life , but to remap live and dead zones away from those
very terms , leveraging animacy toward a consideration of affect in its queered
and raced formations. Throughout the book, my core sense of “queer” refers, as might
be expected, to exceptions to the conventional ordering of sex , reproduction ,
and intimacy , though it at times also refers to animacy’s veering-away from
dominant ontologies and the normativities they promulgate. That is, I suggest
that queering is immanent to animate transgressions , violating proper
intimacies (including between humans and nonhuman things).
For the purposes of this book, I define affect without necessary restriction, that is, I
include the notion that affect is something not necessarily corporeal and that it
potentially engages many bodies at once , rather than (only) being contained as
an emotion within a single body. Affect inheres in the capacity to affect and be affected.
Yet I am also interested in the relatively subjective, individually held “emotion” or
“feeling.” While I prioritize the former, I also attend to the latter (with cautions about its
true possessibility) precisely because, in the case of environmental illness or multiple
chemical sensitivity, the entry of an exterior object not only influences the further
affectivity of an intoxicated human body, but “emotions” that body: it lends it particular
emotions or feelings as against others. I take my cue from Sara Ahmed’s notion of
“affective economies,” in which specific emo¬tions play roles in binding subjects and
objects. She writes, “emotions involve subjects and objects, but without residing
positively within them. Indeed, emotions may seem like a force of residence as an
effect of a certain history, a history that may operate by concealing its own traces.”25 The
traces I examine in this book are those of animate hierarchies. If affect includes
affectivity — how one body affects another— then affect , in this book, becomes a
study of the governmentality of animate hierarchies , an examination of how
acts seem to operate with, or against , the order of things (to appropriate
Foucault’s phrasing for different purposes).26
Queer theory, building upon feminism’s critique of gender difference, has been at the
forefront of recalibrating many categories of difference , and it has further
rewritten how we understand affect, especially with regard to trauma, death, mourning,
shame, loss, impossibility, and intimacy (not least because of the impact of the hiv/ aids
crisis); key thinkers here include Ann Cvetkovich, Lauren Ber- lant, Heather Love, and
Lee Edelman, among others.27 As will be dem¬onstrated, these are all terms that
intersect in productive ways with animacy.
Independently, the 1AC’s spectacle of pain legitimizes the sentimental
politics that affectively undergird neoliberal governance
Strick 14 [Simon, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for Literary and Cultural
Research Berlin, American Dolorologies, 2014, p. 132-6]
The concluding argument concerns late modern figurations of the body in pain.
Spectacles of pain have proliferated in many forms in the contemporary American
public sphere—if indeed pain hasn't become its primary and all-pervading
obsession. Confessional TV shows exchange narratives of personal trauma and hurt for
public intelligibility; cinematic spectacles of suffering, from The Passion of the Christ (2004) to tortureporn favorite Hostel (2005), exhibit the body in pain for profit, thrill, and public outrage; news reports narrate
national-scale catastrophes through individual testimonials of pain; reality game shows such as Survivor
measure their contestants' bodily pain capacities against their resistance to (or aggressiveness in) traumatizing and
abusive group dynamics. There is also a proliferation of political discourse disclosing the
injuries caused by contemporary forms of governing: public movements raise consciousness for
excluded and abjected forms of living, feeling, and aching in Western democracies; critical discourses
continue to shed light on the structural violence of regimes of power; the interventions
of identitarian
movements and groups successfully expand public recognition of social and
political injury, changing the scope of intelligibility in the process.¶ These diverse affective
phenomena are not always readily distinguishable in neoliberal regimes. Scholars such as
Wendy Brown
or Sara Ahmed have pointed out the coopting of identitarian politics in
contemporary governmental regimes . These critical voices urge "[c]aution . . .
against the assumption that 'speaking out' and 'making visible' within so-called radical politics
can be separated from the conventions of self-expression in neoliberal forms of governance"
(Ahmed and Stacey 2001, 4). Bill Clinton's infamous tagline "I feel your pain" or Barack Obama's ongoing
focus on a " politics of empathy "1 are only the presidential cases in point for an ongoing politics of pain
that links recognition
of suffering to democratic progress. Academic debates have
matched this capitalization on pain and compassion as necessary ingredients to
the development of politics , ethics , or community making , such as in Rosi Braidotti's call
for the unification of feminist, gay, lesbian, and transgender identity politics under the label of a "community of the
suffering."2 The various diagnoses of America as "wound culture" (Seltzer 1998) or "trauma culture"
(Kaplan 2005), in this view, describe
a highly disparate, tension-laden, and ambivalent field of
affective discourse , rather than a unified or unifying fixation on pain in contemporary
Western societies.¶ Lauren Berlant has argued that these politics of affect dictate the
continuous envelopment of the political in sentimental rhetoric . Sentimentalism
holds up the promise that subjectivity is granted in the recognition of pain and that democracy
is realized as the participation in an ideal of common suffering and compassion. Sentimental discourses "locate
the human in a universal capacity to suffer and romantic conventions of individual historical acts of
compassion and transcendence. [They] imagine a nonhierarchical social world that is . . . 'at heart'
democratic because good intentions and love flourish in it" (2008, 6). Sentimental rhetoric
produces a public sphere assembled around pain bonded by feeling with what is
unspeakable : a commonality of passionate and compassionate bodily subjects, or a
"fantasy of generality through emotional likeness in the domain of pain" (Berlant 2008, 6).¶ These
arguments suggest a fundamental link between the sentimental evocation of pain and the discourses imagined as "at heart
democratic." Indeed, the emancipatory project of democracy relies on articulations of pain, the
recognition of those suffering,
and a unified politics as remedy of this suffering. This is certainly true for
American culture and its foundational ideas of promise and exceptionalism. The cultural sites I
have pointed to participate in this evocation of a public sphere , where oppressive hurtings and
social injuries are "counted in" toward a better politics of integration, understanding,
and recognition. The sentimental linkage of emancipation through the circulation of pain and
compassion as politics indicates a larger genealogy that dominates American culture and that this
book has tried to elucidate. This genealogy was traced back to America's emancipatory foundation as
a nation freed from colonial injury, and informed by a national history of successful
incorporations of marginalized subjects into the national project (suffrage, abolitionism).
American dolorologies has related this discourse to an apparatus of cultural technologies
such as compassion, testimony to oppression, and articulations of affect and pain, and the
materializations of race and gender they covertly enact. My analysis concurs with Berlant's
observation that the various claims to pain as identity disarticulate their marginalizing effects in a rhetoric of
universalization:¶ In the liberal tradition of the United States [testimony of pain] is not simply a mode of particularizing
and puncturing self-description by minorities, but a rhetoric of universality located, not in abstract categories, but in what
was thought to be, simultaneously, particular and universal experience. Indeed, it would not be exaggerating to say that
sentimentality has long been a popular rhetorical means by which pain is advanced, in
the United States, as the true core of personhood and citizenship. (2000, 34)¶ This connection of pain, nation,
and subjectivity has, on the one hand, led to the public sphere becoming more and more a site of
intimate "affect" exchange . This transformation is visible in the proliferation of
mediatized forms of confession, testimony, and other articulations of traumatized selfhood,
such as reality TV or the culture of therapeutic discourse. These governmental forms of achieving public subjectivity
through speaking pain imitate and appropriate the critical formulations of differential experience from identitarian
movements, at times becoming indistinguishable from them: "We can also see a . . . collusion between
liberal, capitalist forms of mass entertainment and individualist therapies, and the
feminist importance of the personal" (Ahmed 2000, 12). The achievement of public visibility through the
articulation of trauma and pain is furthermore supplemented by mainstream political
discourse becoming compassionate and revolving primarily around the recognition
of bodies in pain .3¶
The impact to our argument is the revolutionary line of flight of the 1AC
becoming a line of death – this is the moment in which revolutionary
movements turn inward and destroy themselves, the passion for complete
abolition as they demand total ontological stability.
Koerner 11. Michelle Koerner, professor of women’s studies at Duke, “Lines of Escape:
Gilles Deleuze’s Encounter with George Jackson,” Genre, Vol. 44, No. 2 Summer 2011 pg.
164
Writing
On the first page of the provocatively titled essay “On the Superiority of Anglo- American
Literature,” Jackson’s line is once again deployed, but here it is in reference to the idea
that the “ highest aim of literature ” is to escape (Deleuze and Parnet [1977] 2006:
26). An interesting convergence occurs here between political and aesthetic
practices , suggesting an indiscernibility between the two insofar as both effectuate
becomings. Genet had already made a similar point in describing Soledad Brother as a
“poem of love and combat,” but deploying Jackson with respect to the question of
literature as such, this essay invites us to rethink a more profound relation between
blackness and writing.
At some distance from traditional Marxist theory, Deleuze and Parnet insist we reject
any account of literature as an “imaginary representation” of real conditions
(literature as ideology) in order to consider writing as a production at the level of real
conditions.10 Writing, which is to say the unleashing of the creative force of
becoming in language (a line of flight), is not finally reducible to already existing
historical conditions , because such an act involves the production of new
conditions . Literature, as they underscore, is driven by a desire to liberate what
existing conditions seek to govern, block, capture; as such, it asserts a force in the world
that existing conditions would otherwise reduce to nonexistence.
Such formulations enable a radical assertion: Soledad Brother, insofar as Jackson’s
letters defy the prison system and the arrangement of a social order defined by the
criminalization and capture of blackness, escapes what would otherwise be thought of
as the historical conditions of its production . Jackson’s writing gains its real
force by a total refusal to adjust to existing conditions of capture, enslavement, and
incarceration. And it does so concretely by rejecting the subjectivity produced by
the structures of what Genet, in his introduction to the letters, called the “enemy’s
language” (Jackson [1970] 1994: 336). Jackson (ibid.: 190, 305) himself underscores
this dimension of the letters several times, remarking, “I work on words,” and more
precisely describing an operation by which the intensities of black resistance come
to be expressed in writing: “We can connect the two, feeling and writing, just drop the
syntax” (ibid.: 331). The specific feeling invoked here is linked first to Jackson’s total
rejection of the terms of captive society—“the feeling of capture . . . this slave can never
adjust to it” (ibid.: 40) — but it further affirms a connection to the “uncounted
generations” of enslaved black labor: “I feel all they ever felt, but double” (ibid.: 233). In
dropping the syntax, Jackson describes a method for rearticulating the
relationship between the historical experience of capture (and the multiplicity of
feeling carried across the passage) and the feeling of that experience.
In his introduction to Soledad Brother, Genet focuses almost entirely on how Jackson’s
use of language could be understood as a “weapon” precisely because Jackson’s
lines were shot through with such violent hatred of the “words and syntax of his
enemy” that he “has only one recourse: to accept this language but to corrupt it so
skillfully the whites will be caught in his trap” (ibid.: 336).11 In corrupting the
“words and syntax” of domination, one directly attacks the “conditions that
destroy life,” because language is here considered a mechanism by which one’s
thought, agency, relations, and subjectivity are “caught” by Power. As can be seen, this
idea is not one that Genet imports into Soledad Brother. Rather, these are ideas that
Jackson himself has already emphasized. Jackson’s “minor use” of a standard, major
language thus contributes to Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of literature. This is
to say that, while commonly associated with Franz Kafka, the very notion of “minor
literature” is also linked to the encounter between black radicalism and French
philosophy in the early 1970s.
The connection forged between writing and feeling in Jackson’s letters sug- gests that the
production of resistant subjectivities always involves a dismantling of the dominant
order of language. To “drop the syntax” names a strategy for forcibly rearranging
existing relations. But such a strategy also implies that one releases something else,
specifically the affective force of what resists those relations. Writing here becomes the
“active discharge of emotion , the counterattack ” (Deleuze and Guattari [1980]
1987: 400). Or put differently, writing becomes a weapon .12
When Deleuze (1997: 143) states that “in the act of writing there’s an attempt to make life
something more than personal, of freeing life wherever it’s imprisoned,” he seems to
refer to something exceedingly abstract, but Jackson’s letters concretely assert writing as
a freeing of life—of blackness—from the terms of racist imprisonment. As we will see,
Jackson twists and pulls on the joints of language itself , quite literally seizing on
the standard syntax until it breaks. In doing so, what Jackson describes as his
“completely informal” style makes language an open field shot-through with
fugitive uses (Jackson [1970] 1994: 208). Writing becomes an expression of
thought on the run , a way of mapping escape routes and counterattacks that
cannot be adequately understood in terms of structure or an understanding of language
as an invariable system.
But escaping the existing dominant social order on “lines of flight” — given the volatile
intensities they assert in the world — carries a real danger . In A Thousand Plateaus
Deleuze and Guattari ([1980] 1987: 229) note the risk of “the line of flight crossing the
wall, getting out of the black holes, but instead of connecting with other lines and
each time augmenting its valence, turns to destruction , abolition pure and simple,
the passion of abolition .” Here, a restricted concept of abolition , understood
simply as the destruction of the existing social order , runs the risk of transforming
the “line of flight” into a line of death . For this reason the issue of escape must not
stop at negation “pure and simple” but become one of construction and the
affirmation of life . And it is for this reason that the effort to connect “lines of flight”
and to compose consistencies across these lines becomes a matter of politics: an
affirmation of a politics of reconstruction as the immanent condition of abolition.
Jackson ([1970] 1994: 328) wrote from prison: “ Don’t
mistake this as a
message from George to Fay. It’s a message from the
hunted running blacks to those people of this society
who profess to want to change the conditions that
destroy life .” A collective imperative determines the reading of these letters—
namely, the necessity to put them in connection with other lines. The circulation of these
letters in France during the 1970s offers a compelling example of how Jackson’s message
insinuated itself into what would seem an unlikely arrangement of French philosophy in
the 1970s. Yet it is precisely in understanding that moment in French thought as an
effort to “change conditions that destroy life” that we gain a sense of how
Jackson’s book arrives at its expressly stated destination. In making the connection
between Jackson’s line and the lines of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and his
coauthors can be said to have gotten the message.
An approach based on non-dialectical assemblage theory may manifest as
politically similar to the AFF, but this theoretical move is necessary to
disfigure the coherency of Man as such – acceptance of judicial definitions
of the human that simply flip the dialectic sacrifice the radical position for
comprehension so we affirm habeas viscus, a radically materialist
understanding of the flesh and its capacity for becoming and flux in the here
and now
Weheliye 14. Alexander G. Weheliye, professor of African American studies at Northwestern
University, Habeas Viscus, pg. 135
Because black cultures have frequently not had access to Man’s language , world ,
future , or humanity , black studies has developed a set of assemblages through
which to perceive and understand a world in which subjection is but one path
to humanity , neither its exception nor its idealized sole feature. Yet black studies, if it is to
remain critical and oppositional , cannot fall prey to juridical humanity and
its concomitant pitfalls , since this only affects change in the domain of the
map but not the territory . In order to do so, the hieroglyphics of the flesh should
not be conceptualized as just exceptional or radically particular , since this
habitually leads to the comparative tabulation of different systems of
oppression that then serve as the basis for defining personhood as
possession . As Frantz Fanon states: “All forms of exploitation are identical, since they
apply to the same ‘object’: man.”28 Accordingly, humans are exploited as part of
the Homo sapiens species for the benefit of other humans , which at the same
time yields a surplus version of the human: Man . Man represents the western
configuration of the human as synonymous with the heteromasculine ,
white , propertied , and liberal subject that renders all those who do not
conform to these characteristics as exploitable nonhumans , literal legal
nobodies . If we are to affect significant systemic changes , then we must locate
at least some of the struggles for justice in the region of humanity as a
relational ontological totality (an object of knowledge ) that cannot be
reduced to either the universal or particular . According to Wynter, this process
requires us to recognize the “emancipation from the psychic dictates of our present... genre of
being human and therefore from ‘the unbearable wrongness of being,’ of desetre, which it
imposes upon ... all non-white peoples, as an imperative function of its enactment as such a
mode of beingf] this emancipation had been effected at the level of the map rather than at the
level of the territory.”29 The level of the map encompasses the nominal inclusion
of nonwhite subjects in the false universality of western humanity in the wake
of radical movements of the 1960s, while the territory Wynter invokes in this context,
and in all of her work, is the figure of Man as a racializing assemblage .
Wielding this very particular and historically malleable classification is not an
uncritical reiteration of the humanist episteme or an insistence on the
exceptional particularity of black humanity . Rather, Afro-diasporic cultures
provide singular , mutable , and contingent figurations of the human, and thus do not
represent mere bids for inclusion in or critiques of the shortcomings of western liberal
humanism. The problematic of humanity however, needs to be highlighted as
one of the prime objects of knowledge of black studies, since not doing so will
sustain the structures , discourses , and institutions that detain black life and
thought within the strictures of particularity so as to facilitate the violent
conflation of Man and the human . Otherwise, the general theory of how humanity
has been lived , conceptualized , shrieked , hungered into being , and
imagined by those subjects violently barred from this domain and touched by the
hieroglyphics of the flesh will sink back into the deafening ocean of
prelinguistic particularity . This, in turn, will also render apparent that black studies,
especially as it is imagined by thinkers such as Spillers and Wynter, is engaged in
engendering forms of the human vital to understanding not only black
cultures but past , present , and future humanities . As a demonic island , black
studies lifts the fog that shrouds the laws of comparison , particularity , and
exception to reveal an aquatic outlook “far away from the continent of
man .”30
The poetics and politics that I have been discussing under the heading of habeas viscus or the
flesh are concerned not with inclusion in reigning precincts of the status quo but, in Cedric
Robinson’s apt phrasing, “the continuing development of a collective
consciousness informed by the historical struggles for liberation and motivated
by the shared sense of obligation to preserve [and I would add also to reimagine ] the
collective being , the ontological totality .”31 Though the laws of Man place the flesh
outside the ferocious and ravenous perimeters of the legal body, habeas viscus defies
domestication both on the basis of particularized personhood as a result of
suffering , as in human rights discourse , and on the grounds of the universalized
version of western Man . Rather, habeas viscus points to the terrain of
humanity as a relational assemblage exterior to the jurisdiction of law given
that the law can bequeath or rescind ownership of the body so that it becomes the
property of proper persons but does not possess the authority to nullify the politics and poetics
of the flesh found in the traditions of the oppressed. As a way of conceptualizing politics, then,
habeas viscus diverges from the discourses and institutions that yoke the flesh
to political violence in the modus of deviance . Instead, it translates the
hieroglyphics of the flesh into a potentiality in any and all things, an originating
leap in the imagining of future anterior freedoms and new genres of
humanity .
To envisage habeas viscus as a forceful assemblage of humanity entails le aving behind the
world of Man and some of its attendant humanist pieties . As opposed to
depositing the flesh outside politics , the normal , the human , and so on, we
need a better understanding of its varied workings in order to disrobe the
cloak of Man , which gives the human a long-overdue extreme makeover ; or, in the
words of Sylvia Wynter, “the struggle of our new millennium will be one between the
ongoing imperative of securing the well-being of our present ethnoclass (i.e.
western bourgeois) conception of the human , Man , which overrepresents itself
as if it were the human itself, and that of securing the well-being, and therefore the full
cognitive and behavioral autonomy of the human species itself/ourselves .”32
Claiming and dwelling in the monstrosity of the flesh present some of the
weapons in the guerrilla warfare to “ secure the hill cognitive and
behavioral autonomy of the human species ,” since these liberate from captivity
assemblages of life , thought , and politics from the tradition of the oppressed and,
as a result, disfigure the centrality of Man as the sign for the human . As an
assemblage of humanity , habeas viscus animates the elsewheres of Man and
emancipates the true potentiality that rests in those subjects who live behind the veil
of the permanent state of exception: freedom; assemblages of freedom that sway to
the temporality of new syncopated beginnings for the human beyond the
world and continent of Man .