MICHIGAN AP R2 NEG V
FULLERTON DG
1NC
1NC
Their conception of identity presumes an intersection of positions from which to
demand accountability—this rendering of the social field reproduces disciplinary
power and locks us into the grid of positionality, preventing change
Puar 7. Jasbir Puar, professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University, Duke
University Press: Durham, NC and London, UK, pg. 211
There is no entity, no identity, no queer subject or subject to queer, rather queerness
coming forth at us from all directions, screaming its defiance, suggesting a move from
intersectionality to assemblage, an affective conglomeration that recognizes other
contingencies of belonging (melding, fusing, viscosity, bouncing) that might not fall so easily into what is
sometimes denoted as reactive community formations-identity politics-by control
theorists. The assemblage, a series of dispersed but mutually implicated and messy networks,
draws together enunciation and dissolution, causality and effect, organic and nonorganic forces.
For Deleuze and Guattari, assemblages are collections of multiplicities:
There is no unity to serve as a pivot in the object, or to divide in the subject. There is not even the unity to abort in
the object, or "return" in the subject. A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only
determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the
multiplicity changing in nature (the laws of combination therefore increase as the multiplicity grows ).... An assemblage
is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections.
There are no points or positions.... There are only lines.21
As opposed to an intersectional model of identity, which presumes that components-race,
class, gender, sexuality, nation, age, religion-are separable analytics and can thus be
disassembled, an assemblage is more attuned to interwoven forces that merge and dissipate
time, space, and body against linearity, coherency, and permanency.22 Intersectionality demands
the knowing, naming, and thus stabilizing of identity across space and time, relying on the
logic of equivalence and analogy between various axes of identity and generating narratives of
progress that deny the fictive and performative aspects of identification: you become an identity,
yes, but also timelessness works to consolidate the fiction of a seamless stable identity in every
space. Furthermore, the study of intersectional identities often involves taking imbricated
identities apart one by one to see how they influence each other, a process that betrays the
founding impulse of intersectionality, that identities cannot so easily be cleaved. We can think of
intersectionality as a hermeneutic of positionality that seeks to account for locality, specificity, placement, junctions. As a tool
of diversity management and a mantra of liberal multiculturalism, intersectionality
colludes with the disciplinary apparatus of the state- census, demography, racial
profiling, surveillance- in that "difference" is encased within a structural container that simply
wishes the messiness of identity into a formulaic grid, producing analogies in its wake and
engendering what Massumi names "gridlock": a "box[ing] into its site on the culture map." He
elaborates:
The idea of positionality begins by subtracting movement from the picture. This catches the
body in cultural freeze-frame. The point of explanatory departure is a pin-pointing, a zero point
of stasis. When positioning of any kind comes a determining first, movement comes a
problematic second.... Of course, a body occupying one position on the grid might succeed in
making a move to occupy another position.... But this doesn't change the fact that what defines the body is
not the movement itself, only its beginnings and endpoints.... There is "displacement," but no
transformation; it is as if the body simply leaps from one definition to the next. ... "The space of
the crossing, the gaps between positions on the grid, falls into a theoretical no-man's land."B
Many feminists, new social movement theorists, critical race theorists, and queer studies
scholars have argued that social change can occur only through the precise accountability to
and for position/ing. But identity is unearthed by Massumi as the complexity of process sacrificed
for the "surety" of product. In the stillness of position, bodies actually lose their capacity for
movement, for flow, for (social) change. Highlighting the "paradoxes of passage and position,"
Massumi makes the case for identity appearing as such only in retrospect: a "retrospective
ordering" that can only be "working backwards from the movement's end." Again from Massumi:
"Gender, race and sexual orientation also emerge and back-form their reality, ... Grids happen. So
social and cultural determinations feed back into the process from which they
arose. Indeterminacy and determination, change and freeze-framing, go together."24
Vote neg even if the 1AC is true. Their claims are part of a will to truth that fixes
subjects in place and enables the logic of the war on terror. Assemblages are a
prior question because they constitute the field of emergence for subjectivities.
Puar 7. Jasbir, professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University, Duke University
Press: Durham, NC and London, UK, pg. 214
Linked to this is what Massumi calls "ontogenetic difference" or "ontogenetic priority," a concept
that rescripts temporality exterior to the sheer administrative units that are mobilized to capture
the otherwise unruly processes of a body:
To say that passage and indeterminancy "come first" or "are primary" is more a statement of
ontological priority than the assertion of a time sequence. They have ontological privilege in the
sense that they constitute the field of emergence, while positionings are what emerge. The
trick is to express that priority in a way that respects the inseparability and
contemporaneousness of the disjunct dimensions: their ontogenetic difference.
And later: "The field of emergence is not pre-social. It is open-endedly social. ... One of the things
that the dimension of change is ontogenetically 'prior to' is thus the very distinction between
individual and the collective, as well as any given model of their interaction. That interaction is precisely what takes
form."' The given models of interaction would be these bifurcated distinctions between the body and the social (its signification)
such that the distinctions disappear. Massumi's move from ontology (being, becoming) to ontogenesis is also relevant to how he
discusses affect and cognition and the processes of the body: "Feedback and feed forward, or recursivity, in
addition to converting distance into intensity, folds the dimensions of time into each other. The
field of emergence of experience has to be thought of as a space-time continuum, as an
ontogenetic dimension prior to the separating-out of space and time. Linear time, like positiongridded space, would be emergent qualities of the event of the world's self- relating. " 2 7
This ontogenetic dimension that is "prior" but not "pre" claims its priorness not through
temporality but through its ontological status as that which produces fields of emergence; the
prior and the emergence are nevertheless "contemporaneous." "Ontological priority" is a temporality and a
spatialization that has yet to be imagined, a property more than a bounded- ness by space and time. The ontogenetic dimension that
articulates or occupies multiple temporalities of vectors and planes is also that which enables an emergent bifurcation of time and
space.
Identity is one of affect, a capture that proposes what one is by masking its retrospective
ordering and thus its ontogenetic dimension- what one was- through the guise of an illusory
futurity: what one is and will continue to be. However, this is anything but a relay between
stasis and flux; position is but one derivative of systems in constant motion, lined with erratic
trajectories and unruly projectiles. If the ontogenetic dimensions of affect render affect as prior
to representation-prior to race, class, gender, sex, nation, even as these categories might be the
most pertinent mapping of or reference back to affect itself-how might identity-as-retrospectiveordering amplify rather than inhibit praxes of political organizing? If we transfer our energy, our
turbulence, our momentum from the defense of the integrity of identity and submit instead to this affective
ideation of identity, what kinds of political strategies, of "politics of the open end,""
might we unabashedly stumble upon? Rather than rehashing the pros and cons of identity
politics, can we think instead of affective politics?
Displacing queerness as an identity or modality that is visibly, audibly, legibly, or tangibly evidentthe seemingly queer body in a "cultural freeze-frame" of sorts-assemblages allow us to attune to
movements, intensities, emotions, energies, affectivities, and textures as they inhabit events,
spatiality, and corporealities. Intersectionality privileges naming, visuality, epistemology, representation,
and meaning, while assemblage underscores feeling, tactility, ontology, affect, and information. Further,
in the sway from disciplinary societies (where the panoptic "functioned primarily in terms of
positions, fixed points, and identities") to control societies, the diagram of control, Michael Hardt
writes, is "oriented toward mobility and anonymity. . . . The flexible and mobile performances of
contingent identities, and thus its assemblages or institutions are elaborated primarily through
repetition and the production of simulacra. "29 Assemblages are thus crucial conceptual
tools that allow us to acknowledge and comprehend power beyond disciplinary regulatory
models, where "particles, and not parts, recombine, where forces, and not categories, clash. "30
Most important, given the heightened death machine aspect of nationalism in our contemporary political terrain-a heightened
sensorial and anatomical domination indispensable to Mbembe's necropolitics-assemblages work against narratives
of U.S. exceptionalism that secure empire, challenging the fixity of racial and sexual taxonomies
that inform practices of state surveillance and control and befuddling the "us versus them"
of the war on terror. (On a more cynical note, the recent work of Eyal Weizman on the use of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze,
Felix Guattari, and Guy Debord by the Israeli Defense Forces demonstrates that we cannot afford to ignore concepts such as war
machines and machinic assemblages, as they are already heavily cultivated as instructive tactics in military strategy.) For while
intersectionality and its underpinnings- an unrelenting epistemological will to
truth- presupposes identity and thus disavows futurity, or, perhaps more accurately, prematurely
anticipates and thus fixes a permanence to forever, assemblage, in its debt to ontology and its espousal
of what cannot be known, seen, or heard, or has yet to be known, seen, or heard, allows for
becoming beyond or without being.32
Thinking anti-blackness through ontology and structuralism locks it within grids
of intelligibility – only an approach that emphasizes formation of identity through
assemblage can map lines 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
Anti-Oedipus 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.
Our infusion of Native studies with queer theory’s critique of subjectivity is key to
prevent isolationism and entrapment
Smith 10. Andrea Smith, feminist and American Indian activist, professor of media and
cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside, “Queer Studies and Native Studies,”
GLQ 16:1, pg. 42, muse
Queer theory and Native studies often do not intersect because Native studies is generally
ethnographically entrapped within the project of studying Natives. In her groundbreaking work
Toward a Global Idea of Race, Denise Ferreira da Silva argues that the Western subject is
fundamentally constituted through race.4 Through her exhaustive account of Enlightenment
theory, Silva demonstrates that the post-Enlightenment version of the subject as selfdetermined exists by situating itself against “affectable others” who are subject to natural
conditions as well as to the self-determined power of the Western subject. The central anxiety
with which the Western subject struggles is that it is, in fact, not self-determining. The
Western subject differentiates itself from conditions of “affectability” by separating from
affectable others — this separation being a fundamentally racial one. The Western subject is
universal, while the racialized subject is particular, but aspires to be universal.
Silva’s critique suggests that Native studies often does not question the logics of Western
philosophy that are premised on the self-determined subject’s aspirations to achieve
universality. Consequently, Native studies often rests on a Native subject awaiting
humanity. In other words, if people simply understood Native peoples better, Natives
would then become fully human—they would be free and self-determining. Unfortunately,
the project of aspiring to “humanity” is always already a racial project; it is a project that aspires
to a universality and self-determination that can exist only over and against the
particularity and affectability of “the other.” Native studies thus becomes trapped in
ethnographic multiculturalism, what Silva describes as a “neoliberal multicultural”
representa- tion that “includes never-before-heard languages that speak of never-before-heard
things that actualize a never-before-known consciousness.”5 This representation, which
attempts to demonstrate Native peoples’ worthiness of being universal subjects, actually rests on
the logic that Native peoples are equivalent to nature itself, things to be discovered that
have an essential truth or essence. In other words, the very quest for full subjecthood implicit in
the ethnographic project to tell our “truth” is already premised on a logic that requires us to be
objects to be discovered. Furthermore, within this colonial logic, Native particularity cannot
achieve universal humanity without becoming “inauthentic” because Nativeness is already
fundamentally constructed as the “other” of Western subjectivity. To use Silva’s phrase,
ethnographic entrapment inevitably positions Native peoples at the “horizon of
death.”6
As a strategy for addressing ethnographic entrapment, many indigenous scholars such as
Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Sandy Grande, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, while diverse in their concerns
and methodologies, have all called for the develop- ment of a field of Native/Indigenous studies
that is distinct because of its meth- odologies and theoretical frameworks and not just because of
its object of study.7 Their scholarly contributions call into question the assumption that Native
studies should be equated with its object of study—Native peoples. Rather, their work suggests
that Native studies could potentially have diverse objects of study that might be approached
through distinct methodologies and theoretical formations that are necessarily interdisciplinary
in nature. Robert Warrior has called such intellectual projects an exercise in “intellectual
sovereignty.”8 Warrior understands Native studies as a field with its own integrity that can be
informed by traditional disciplines, but is not simply a multicultural add-on to them. As I
discuss below, this reformulation of Native studies does not entail rejecting identity
concerns, but expands its scope of inquiry by positioning Native peoples as producers of
theory and not simply as objects of analysis.
Warrior points out that intellectual sovereignty is not to be equated with intellectual
isolationism. Many sectors of Native studies have often rejected engagement with other
fields of inquiry such as ethnic studies and postcolonial studies, by highlighting the tension
between Native studies and other fields.9 At countless Native studies conferences, I have heard
Native studies scholars opine that they should not have to read Michel Foucault, Karl Marx, or
Jacques Derrida because “they are not Indian.” Unfortunately, as Rey Chow so
compellingly points out, ethnic studies and, by the same logic, Native studies often confine
themselves and are confined to the realm of ethnic or cultural representation rather
than positioning themselves as intellectual projects that can shape scholarly discourse as
a whole.10 Because Native studies scholars have often rooted their scholarship in a commitment
to social and political justice for Native nations, it becomes all the more important for Native
studies to develop its own intellectual project in conversation with rather than in
isolation from potential partners. Alliances are necessary if Native scholars and activists
are to build sufficient political power to enable the social transformation needed to ensure the
survival of indigenous nations. A critical Native studies must interrogate the strictures
within which Native studies and ethnic studies find themselves.11 Native studies can be part of a
growing conversation of scholars engaged in diverse intellectual projects that do not dismiss
identity but structure inquiry around the logics of race, colonialism, capitalism, gender, and
sexuality. Native studies must be part of this conversation because the logics of settler
colonialism structure all of society, not just those who are indigenous.
Queer theory provides a helpful starting point for enabling Native studies to escape
its position of ethnographic entrapment within the academy. As Warner contends: “Nervous
over the prospect of a well-sanctioned and compartmentalized academic version of ‘lesbian and
gay studies,’ people want to make theory queer, not just have theory about queers. For both
academics and activists, ‘queer’ gets a critical edge by defining itself against the normal
rather than the heterosexual, and normal includes normal business in the academy.”12
A queering of Native studies might mean that it would move beyond studying Native
communities through the lens of religious studies, anthropology, history, or other normalizing
disciplines. Native studies would also provide the framework for interrogating and analyzing
both normalizing logics within disciplinary formations as well as academic institutions
themselves.
Thus Native studies can be informed by queer theory’s turn toward subjectless
critique.13 As the coeditors of the Social Text special issue “What’s Queer about Queer Studies
Now?” state: “What might be called the ‘subjectless’ critique of queer studies disallows
any positing of a proper subject of or object for the field by insisting that queer has no
fixed political referent. . . . A subjectless critique establishes . . . a focus on a ‘wide field of
normalization’ as the site of social violence.”14 A subjectless critique can help Native
studies (as well as ethnic studies) escape the ethnographic entrapment by which Native
peoples are rendered simply as objects of intellectual study and instead can foreground
settler colonialism as a key logic that governs the United States today. A subjectless critique
helps demonstrate that Native studies is an intellectual project that has broad applicability
not only for Native peoples but for everyone. It also requires us to challenge the
normalizing logics of academia rather than simply articulate a politics of indigenous
inclusion within the colonial academy.
A better focus than embodiment or experience is assemblages of matter—the
alternative of incorporeal materialism presses the question of matter’s
potentiality. We are a phase shift of the 1AC’s question of being into one of
becoming.
Massumi 02. Brian Massumi, professor of communications at the University of Montreal,
Parables For the Virtual, pg. 2
If at any point I thought of this refreshing in terms of regaining a "concreteness" of experience, I
was quickly disabused of the notion. Take movement. When a body is in motion, it does not
coincide with itself. It coincides with its own transition: its own variation. The range of variations it can
be implicated in is not present in any given movement, much less in any position it passes through. In motion, a body is in
an immediate, unfolding relation to its own nonpresent potential to vary. That relation, to borrow a
phrase from Gilles Deleuze, is real but abstract. The positional grid was abstract, despite the fact
that it was meant to bring cultural theory back down to the local level, since it involved an
overarching definitional grid whose determinations preexisted the bodies they constructed or to
which they were applied. The abstract of Deleuze's real-but-abstract is very different from this. It
doesn't preexist and has nothing fundamentally to do with mediation. If ideology must be understood as mediating, then this
real-abstract is not ideological. (Chapters 2, 3, and 9 tackle the description of nonideological mechanisms of power.)
Here, abstract means: never present in position, only ever in passing. This is an abstractness pertaining to
the transitional immediacy of a real relation-that of a body to its own indeterminacy (its openness to an elsewhere and otherwise
than it is, in any here and now).
The charge of indeterminacy carried by a body is inseparable from it. It strictly coincides with it, to the
extent that the body is in passage or in process (to the extent that it is dynamic and alive). But the
charge is not itself
corporeal. Far from regaining a concreteness, to think the body in movement thus means
accepting the paradox that there is an incorporeal dimension of the body. Of it, but not it.
Real, material, but incorporeal. Inseparable, coincident, but disjunct. If this is "concrete," the project
originally set out on will take some severe twists.
One way of starting to get a grasp on the real-material-but-incorporeal
is to say it is to the body, as a
energy is to matter. Energy and matter are mutually convertible modes of the
same reality. This would make the incorporeal something like a phase-shift of the body in the
usual sense, but not one that comes after it in time. It would be a conversion or unfolding of the body
contemporary to its every move. Always accompanying. Fellow-traveling dimension of the same reality.
This self-disjunctive coinciding sinks an ontological difference into the heart of the body. The
positioned thing, as
body's potential to vary belongs to the same reality as the body as variety (positioned thing) but partakes of it in a different mode.
Integrating movement slips us directly into what Michel Foucault called incorporeal
materialism.1 This movement-slip gives new urgency to questions of ontology, of ontological
difference, inextricably linked to concepts of potential and process and, by extension, event-in a
way that bumps "being" straight into becoming. Paraphrasing Deleuze again, the problem
with the dominant models in cultural and literary theory is not that they are too abstract to
grasp the concreteness of the real. The problem is that they are not abstract enough to grasp
the real incorporeality of the concrete.
White male supremacy functions not through exclusion, but an abstract machine
of faciality. Dialectical and phenomenological approaches fail because theorizing
one’s position in relation to the dominant face is always an implicit concession to
power
Saldanha 07. Arun Saldanha, professor of geography at the University of Minnesota,
Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race, University of Minnesota Press:
Minneapolis, MN, pg. 194
My disagreement is not with Fanon’s and Martín Alcoff’s insistence on embodiment and
emotion, but with their reliance on a Hegelian notion of recognition to explain encounter.
Because of this they tend to treat white and nonwhite not only as a dyad, but as almost naturally
opposed entities. There is, then, little attention paid to the complicated processes whereby some
racial formations become dominant, that is, how racial formations emerge from material
conditions and collective interactions, which greatly exceed the spatiality of self versus other .
Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of faciality is not based on an intersubjective dialectics enlarged to worldhistorical scope. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari strongly distance themselves from phenomenology and psychoanalysis. First of
all, for them, it isn’t consciousness but an abstract machine of faciality that arranges bodies
into relations of power. And second, faciality constantly invents new faces to capture deviant bodies,
multiplying possible positions far beyond any binaries such as black/white (though
binarization can be an important effect). That is precisely its strength. There are thousands of encounters, thousands
of trains. Deleuze and Guattari believe faciality’s imperialism arose with institutional Christianity. Being imposed in lands populated
by different phenotypes, faciality became a matter of imperialist racialization. That faciality originated in Renaissance humanism
and depictions of Jesus seems a plausible if one-sided interpretation. It is less relevant than Deleuze and Guattari’s unusual theory
of contemporary racism: If the face is in fact Christ, in other words, your average ordinary White Man, then
the first deviances, the first divergence-types, are racial: yellow man, black man, men in the
second or third category. They are also inscribed on the [white] wall [of signification], distributed by the [black] hole [of
subjectivity]. They must be Christianized, in other words, facialized. European racism as the white
man’s claim has never operated by exclusion, or by the designation of someone as Other: it is
instead in primitive societies that the stranger is grasped as an “other.” Racism operates by the
determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man face, which endeavors to
integrate nonconforming traits into increasingly eccentric and backward waves, sometimes
tolerating them at given places under given conditions, in a given ghetto, sometimes erasing
them from the wall, which never abides alterity (it’s a Jew, it’s an Arab, it’s a Negro, it’s a lunatic
. . .). From the viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior, there are no people on the outside. There
are only people who should be like us and whose crime it is not to be. 5 For Anjuna’s psytrance parties, there were “no people on the outside.” Locals, domestic tourists, charter tourists, and beggars would join the white
Goa freaks on the dance floor, sometimes even in Nine Bar. In fact, as with the United Colors of Benetton, it will be remembered that
the rhetoric of PLUR demonstrated faciality’s inclusiveness— the parties were supposed to be open to all. But immediately, the
faciality machine would place all bodies in relation to the Goa freak standard, both spatiotemporally and subjectively, measuring
their acceptability through increasingly meticulous signs: sociochemical monitoring, scene savviness, chillum circles, sexual
attractiveness. Many nonfreaks felt uneasy being pigeonholed like this— especially domestic tourists, who would retreat to the
darker corners. The result was viscosity, bodies temporarily becoming impenetrable— more or less. It would seem to me
that to understand the intricate hierarchies of racism, a framework that allows for gradual and
multidimensional deviances is preferable to a dialectical model. Faciality also explains
why after colonialism, with television and tourism, there is scarcely place left for any “dark
others.” Everyone is included; everyone is facialized. At the same time, Euro-American ways of life
continue to spread, and White Man (Elvis Presley, Sylvester Stallone, David Beckham) remains
the global standard against which all other faces are forced to compete. What this account of
racism has in common with the Fanonian is that whiteness is the norm, even in our “post”colonial era. Where it differs, however, is that deviance is based not on lack of recognition or
negation or annihilation of the other, but on subtle machinic differentiations and
territorializations. The virtual structures behind racial formations don’t look like formal
logic (a/not-a); they continually differentiate as actual bodies interact and aggregate. Racism,
then, can’t be countered with a Hegelian sublation into the universal.
Accepting the ontological primacy of imposed identity categories leads to
exclusionary policing and self-effacement
Orr 13—Victoria
(Steven, “Identity and Authoritarianism: The Boundaries of a Boundless Selfhood”, http://www.bcpsa.ca/wpcontent/uploads/2013/04/Orr1.pdf, dml)
The contemporary subject is a being implicated in a variety of overlapping and contradictory
identities that all fail to adequately represent the character of the individual subject because of
the unnavigable distance between the distinct individual and the ideal that is imposed upon
them, yet these approximations are not entirely false either. Identity claims represent a desire to remain
intact, to stay whole and formed, but have left us without the possibility for a plurality of selves.
It is necessarily the case that an identity categorization will not fully speak to the subject of focus: this
can most obviously be understood with personality traits such as kind or relaxed that are, at best,
approximations of a particular moment, but insufficiently general to possibly describe the whole
sum of a being. A variety of contemporary theorists and philosophers have explored the notion of boundlessness—Arthur
Kroker uses the term “body drift” to describe the way that we transition “through many different specular performances of the
body”; Patricia Hill Collins uses intersectionality to describe the theory that "oppression cannot be reduced to one
fundamental type, and that oppressions work together in producing injustice”; and Wendy Brown
explores the paradoxical nature of identity wherein “the first imaginings of freedom are always constrained by
and potentially even require the very structure of oppression that freedom emerges
to oppose”—and each advocates for understanding the ambiguous boundaries of identity so as to better explain the unique and
distinct nature of individual subjects (Kroker 1; Collins 18; Brown 7). These thinkers showcase the conflict between authoritarian
and normative regimes of identity that we accept and the possibility for plurality that all subjects are capable of.
One cannot make a totality out of an infinity, and the task of defining identity is always an
attempt to make rigid the boundless possibilities that lay before human beings.
Categorization is invariably an exclusionary process wherein we establish what we are by
establishing what we are not. These boundaries are convenient acts of generalization that allow for
comparisons between an absolute form and a specific subject. This relational understanding of
the self transforms all subjects into deviations from established forms—or the norm—of
these concepts. Such understandings of the self entrench a sense of inferiority in contrast
to an unattainable ideal, distancing our selves from and removing identity ambiguities. These
identity constructions are always projects of self-harm, where we seek to become the
category in which we are placed (or place our selves in) at the expense of that which we are. Human
beings are complex, messy, and drifting; tidiness is not within our nature. When we attempt
such cleanliness it is a method of willing our selves out of existence; rather than existing
within the contradictions of our identity we accept the imposition of others. This
conception of selfhood is more akin to the tenets of totalitarianism than the liberal subject;
it is closer to an authoritarian regime of identity than the principles of civil rights and the freedoms of speech,
expression, and belief. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, political philosopher Hannah Arendt traces the way that
“heterogeneous uniformity is one of the primary conditions for totalitarianism” (Arendt, Origins 332).
When we insist upon rigid identity boundaries we demonstrate that we would rather be
dominated than self-determining, that despite the Western insistence on democratic states we are rooted in a
totalitarian conception of selfhood.1 We would rather be simple than ourselves.
Different phenotypes and power relations are inevitable, but need not be
correlated. The only role for the neg that avoids micro-fascism is one that refuses
the intractable logic of identitarian categories. The global faciality machine grants
unequal access to becoming-otherwise, but the propensity to “freak” itself can be
turned like a gun to its head, utilizing white bodies to undo the naturalized link
between whiteness and the privileged human face
--post/anti-humanism recapitulates logic of humanism, must use lines of flight to frustrate the faciality machine by proliferating
race
--cosmopolitanism NB
Saldanha 7. Arun Saldanha, professor of geography at the University of Minnesota,
Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race, University of Minnesota Press:
Minneapolis, MN, pg. 198
“In
no real sense did the hippies become Indians or poor blacks, or prostitutes or tramps— or
only in a guilty disingenuous sense— but they found their own significance in what they took
these groups to be: a significance to be understood against the dominant society and with
respect to their own special awareness,” says the ethnographer Paul Willis. 11 Seeing blacks, Mexicans, and Indians as
more authentic, because relatively untouched by mainstream white modernity, the counterculture transformed white
modernity by appropriating some of that authenticity. But it is that very appropriation that
betrays white privilege and that spawns new tropes of subcultural (and potentially racist)
snobbism. A creative movement turning in on itself, becoming paranoid and reactionary, is
what Guattari called “microfascism.” Psychedelics clearly turned microfascistic in Anjuna,
accompanied as it was by arrogance, segregation, noise pollution, corruption, exploitation, and
psychosis. If whiteness is defined by its lines of flight, microfascism becomes as interesting to
the study of whiteness as Nazism. Psychedelics— travel, music, drugs— is whiteness accelerating,
whiteness stuttering: either a deeper entrenchment into economic and cultural exploitation, or a shedding of privilege, at
least here and now. On the whole, the Goa freaks of Anjuna do not follow the lines of flight of whiteness to critique their own
position as whites. In this sense, they were hardly “freaking” the racial assemblage. Recall the proposition of Rachel Adams and
Leslie Fiedler of appropriating freak as a critical category: [F]reaks cannot be neatly aligned with any
particular identity or ideological position. Rather, freak is typically used to connote the absence
of any known category of identity....I am drawn to freak because, like queer, it is a concept that
refuses the logic of identity politics, and the irreconcilable problems of inclusion and
exclusion that necessarily accompany identitarian categories. 12 A true freaking of
whiteness would grasp its lines of flight not for fascism but for a future where paler-skinned
bodies have no privileged access to economic and cultural capital and to happiness. Freaking
whiteness is problem-based, coalition-led, and self-critical; it would try to understand what
biophysical and technological forces subtend it (computers, HIV, floods, radiation). Humanism
and cosmopolitanism are severely limited if the struggle against racism is defined only in
human terms.
So: race should not be abandoned or abolished, but proliferated. Race’s energies are then
directed at multiplying racial differences, so as to render them joyfully cacophonic.
What is needed is an affirmation of race’s virtuality. When racial formations crumble and
mingle like this, the dominance of whiteness in the global racial assemblage is undermined as
the faciality machine finds it increasingly difficult to take hold of bodies. It is not that everyone
becomes completely Brownian (or brown!), completely similar, or completely unique. It is just that
white supremacism slowly becomes obsolete as other racial formations start harboring the
same creativity as whites do now, linking all sorts of phenotypes with all sorts of wealth and
all sorts of ways of life (sedentary, touristic, ascetic). When no racial formation is the standard,
race acquires a very different meaning: The race-tribe exists only at the level of an oppressed
race, and in the name of the oppression it suffers; there is no race but inferior, minoritarian;
there is no dominant race; a race is defined not by its purity but rather by the impurity
conferred upon it by a system of domination. Bastard and mixed-blood are the true names of
race. 13 When no racial formation is clearly hegemonic, perhaps there will be no need anymore for the term
“race.” Although there will always be phenotypical variation and relations of power, perhaps
sometime in the future they won’t be correlated at all. Unlikely, but possible. Until then, however, there
seems little point in trying to stop talking about race, as antiracists such as Paul Gilroy suggest we do. 14 Race
is creative, and we can heed its creativities against itself. Challenging the global faciality
machine encompasses the transformation not just of prejudice, tabloid journalism, and Unesco, but of the
pharmaceutical industry, farm subsidies, seismology, the arms trade, income tax policy, and the International
Monetary Fund. In contrast to what many antiracists and advocates of political correctness prescribe, the sites where the
most urgent battles are to be fought are not culture and language, but trade and health . Freaking
whiteness is no easy task. A good start for social scientists, however, is to acknowledge the
persistent materiality of race. It is important that the real barriers to mobility and imagination
that exist in different places be taken into account. Cosmopolitanism has to be invented, not
imposed. Taking responsibility and activism will only follow from both understanding and
feeling the intensive differences that exist between many different kinds of bodies: between a
Jew and a black soldier, between a woman in the Sahel and a woman on Wall Street, between a
Peruvian peasant and a Chinese journalist.
Precarity is not a discrete identity but rather the shared condition of living matter,
subject as it is to unequal distribution. Foregrounding it is key to dispel the
existential individualism of the 1AC, which cloaks the functioning of power and
plays into reactionary forces
--K of posthumanism that isn’t tied to liberal humanist alts
--aff makes precariousness into an identity, preventing any shared conception of ethics
--AT: start with anti-human/slave – must start with shared precarity, nothing founds us outside struggle to establish bonds
Butler 12. Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and
Comparative Literature and the codirector of the Program of Critical Theory at the University of
California, Berkeley, Precarity Talk A Virtual Roundtable with Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler,
Bojana Cvejic,; Isabell Lorey, Jasbir Puar, and Ana Vujanovic; edited by Jasbir Puar, TDR: The
Drama Review 56:4 (T216) Winter 2012, pg. 169
I think it may be important to keep active the relationship between the various meanings of
the
precarious that both Isabell and Jasbir have laid out: (1) precariousness, a function of our social
vulnerability and exposure that is always given some political form, and precarity as
differentially distributed, and so one important dimension of the unequal distribution of
conditions required for continued life; but also (2) precaritization as an ongoing process, so that
we do not reduce the power of precarious to single acts or single events. Precaritization allows us
to think about the slow death that happens to targeted or neglected populations over time
and space. And it is surely a form of power without a subject, which is to say that there is no
one center that propels its direction and destruction. If we only stayed with “precaritization,” I am not sure that we
could account for the structure of feeling that Lauren has brought up. And if we decided to rally under the name of
“the precarious” we might be making a social and political condition into an identity, and so
cloaking some way that that form of power actually works. So maybe precarious is what we
feel, or would rather not feel, and its analysis has to be linked to the impetus to become
impermeable, as so often happens within zones of military nationalism and rhetorics of
security and self-defense. But it seems also important to call “precarious” the bonds that support
life, those that should be structured by the condition of mutual need and exposure that should
bring us to forms of political organization that sustain living beings on terms of equality. It is not
just that a single person is precarious by virtue of being a body in the world. Although that is surely
true, since accidents happen and some of us are then snuffed out or injured irreversibly. What
seems more important than that form of existential individualism is the idea that a “bond”
is flawed or frayed, or that it is lost or irrecoverable. And we see this very prominently when, for
instance, Tea Party politicians revel in the idea that those individuals who have failed to “take
responsibility” for their own health care may well face death and disease as a result. In other words,
at such moments, a social bond has been cut or destroyed in a way that seeks to deny a shared
precariousness and the very particular ethos and politics that ideally should follow from that
— one that underscores global interdependence and objects to the radically unequal distribution
of precarity (and grievability).
So I want to caution against an existential reading and insist that what is at stake is a way
of rethinking social relationality. We
can make the broad existential claim, namely, that everyone is precarious, and this follows from
our social existence as bodily beings who depend upon one another for shelter and sustenance
and who, therefore, are at risk of statelessness, homelessness, and destitution under unjust and
unequal political conditions. As much as I am making such a claim, I am also making another,
namely, that our precarity is to a large extent dependent upon the organization of economic and
social relationships, the presence or absence of sustaining infrastructures and social and
political institutions. In this sense, precarity is indissociable from that dimension of
politics that addresses the organization and protection of bodily needs. Precarity exposes our
sociality, the fragile and necessary dimensions of our interdependency.
Whether explicitly stated or not, every political effort to manage populations involves a tactical
distribution of precarity, more often than not articulated through an unequal distribution of
precarity, one that depends upon dominant norms regarding whose life is grievable and worth
protecting, and whose life is ungrievable, or marginally or episodically grievable — a life that
is, in that sense, already lost in part or in whole, and thus less worthy of protection and
sustenance. In my own view, then, we have to start from this shared condition of precarity (not as
existential fact, but as a social condition of political life) in order to refute those normative
operations, pervasively racist, that decide in advance who counts as human and who does not.
My point is not to rehabilitate humanism, but rather to struggle for a conception of ethical
obligation that is grounded in precarity. No one escapes the precarious dimension of social life
— it is, we might say, our common non-foundation. Nothing “founds” us outside of a struggle
to establish bonds that sustain us.
Polemical opposition fails to decenter the human—upending the grid of
recognizability requires a radical ethics of interdependence which gives meaning
to new modalities of life
--beginning politics from the point of the non-human or anti-human is ultimately a humanist capitulation
--anthro NB about whether we define our politics based on binaristic oppositions
--no basis on which to formulate a shared ethics in their FW
Butler 12. Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and
Comparative Literature and the codirector of the Program of Critical Theory at the University of
California, Berkeley, Precarity Talk A Virtual Roundtable with Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler,
Bojana Cvejic,; Isabell Lorey, Jasbir Puar, and Ana Vujanovic; edited by Jasbir Puar, TDR: The
Drama Review 56:4 (T216) Winter 2012, pg. 173
I thought to take up this question of the human since references to precarity sometimes rely
on ideals of humanization and sometimes actually decenter the human itself. It is always
possible to say that the affective register where precarity dwells is something like
dehumanization. And yet, we know that such a word relies on a human/animal distinction that
cannot and should not be sustained. Indeed, if we call for humanization and struggle against
“bestialization” then we affirm that the bestial is separate from and subordinate to the human,
something that clearly breaks our broader commitments to rethinking the networks of life. On
the one hand, I want to be able to say that the “human” operates differentially, as Fanon clearly thought it
did ([1952]
2008; [1961] 2005), such that some are humanized and others are not, and that this inequality must be
opposed. But the critical task is to find a way to oppose that inequality without embracing
anthropocentrism. So we have to rethink the human in light of precarity, showing that
there is no human without those networks of life
within which human life is but one sort of life. Otherwise, we end up breaking off the human
from all of its sustaining conditions (and in that way become complicit with the process of
precaritization itself ). So the point is not to develop a conception of the human that would include
every possible person first because such conceptions come to operate as exclusionary norms,
and they are based on this breaking off of the human from its own material need, and the
broader fields of life in which that need is implicated.
To think critically, usefully, about how the norm of the human is constructed and maintained
requires that we take up a position outside of its terms, not as the nonhuman or even the antihuman, but rather precisely through thinking forms of sociality and interdependence, no matter
how difficult, that are irreducible to uniquely human forms of life and so cannot be
adequately addressed by any definition of human nature or the human individual. To speak
about what is living in human life is already to admit that human ways of living are bound up
with nonhuman modes of life. Indeed, the connection with nonhuman life is indispensable to what
we call human life. In Hegelian terms, if the human cannot be the human without the inhuman, then the inhuman is not only essential to the
human, but is therefore the essence of the human. The point is not to simply invert the relations, but rather to gather
and hold this merely apparent paradox together in a new thought of “human life” in which its
component parts, “human” and “life,” never fully coincide with one another. In other words, if we have
to hold onto this term “human life” in order to describe and oppose those situations in which “human life” is jeopardized, it will have to be done in such
a way that the very conjunction — human life — will on occasion seek to hold together two terms that repel one another, or that work in divergent
directions. Human
life is never the entirety of life, and life can never fully define the human — so
whatever we might want to call human life will inevitably consist of a negotiation with this
tension. Perhaps the human is the name we give to this very negotiation.
What seems to follow is this: while it is important to ask, Whose life qualifies as a human life?,
we have also to ask the inverse question: What of human life is inevitably nonhuman? If there
is a human life that does not qualify as human, that has to be marked and opposed, then the
question becomes: Through what modes of sociality is that opposition articulated? And
how do
those modes of oppositional sociality redefine and resituate the human in light of ani- mal and organic networks of life? There
has to be a way to find and forge a set of bonds that can produce alliances over and against this
grid of power that differentially allocates recognizability and uses the “human” as a term
through which to institute inequality and unrecognizability. The beginning of such alliances
can be found in ethical formulations such as these: even if my life is not destroyed in war,
something of my life is destroyed in war when other lives are destroyed in war, and when living
processes and organisms are also destroyed in war. Since the existence of other lives, understood as any mode of life that
exceeds me, is a condition of who I am, my life can make no exclusive claim on life (“I am not the only living thing”). At the
same time, my own life is not every other life, and cannot be (“My life is not the same as other lives”). In other words, to be alive is already
to be connected with, dependent upon, what is living not only before and beyond myself, but
before and beyond my humanness. No self and no human can live without this connection to a
biological network of life that exceeds and includes the domain of the human animal. This is why
in opposing war, for example, one not only opposes the destruction of other human lives, but
also the poisoning of the environment and the assault on living beings and a living world.
2NC
KOETZEE
If it’s not about us, they sure seem pretty pre-occupied with us
Kotzee, 10 – Department of Social Policy and Education, Birkbeck College, University of
London (Ben, “Poisoning the Well and Epistemic Privilege,” Argumentation, SpringerLink)
In his paper “Poisoning the Well” (2006), Walton seeks to establish that the fallacy of poisoning the well is not a species
of argumentum ad hominem as is commonly supposed, but can be a fallacy in its own right. Walton cites four instances of the
poisoning the well in action and shows how the traditional analysis of the poisoning the well (see, for instance, Copi and Cohen 1998:
169 and Walton 1998) leaves features of this attack poorly explained. Rather than being an illegitimate attack on
the person making the argument, Walton (2006) attempts to show why the poisoning the well is at once more
subtle and dangerous: the poisoning the well is not a purely personal attack so much as a dialectical tactic to silence an
opponent or prevent his views from being considered seriously. In this paper, a further example of the poisoning
the well is outlined and a question is asked of Walton’s analysis. While in broad agreement with Walton’s approach, it is argued that
a full explanation of the fallacy must take into account a body of approaches to do with the politics of identity
according to which privileged social groups have a systematically distorted view on reality that will affect
how they argue about social issues like race or gender. Starting from Walton’s view that the poisoning the well is a form of silencing,
this paper seeks to defend and expand Walton’s analysis by establishing when making the social background of one’s opponent
relevant to a debate is legitimate and when it is not. Pertinently, it is held that facts regarding someone’s gender or
race can never in itself be a good ground to shift a debate’s focus in this way. 2 Walton on Poisoning the Well
2.1 The Traditional View According to Walton (2006: 288), the fallacy of poisoning the well is traditionally thought to be a sub-type
of the bias form of the argumentum ad hominem (making the poisoning the well a sub-sub-type of the argumentum ad hominem on
the traditional view.)1 In advancing the bias form of the argumentum ad hominem, the person employing it implies
that his opponent draws his conclusions motivated not by genuine enquiry about a certain issue, but by
self-interested advocacy and that the conclusions therefore should not be trusted. Whereas in an ordinary accusation of bias
it is implied that someone has an interest in some discreet matter, in the poisoning the well sub-type of the bias attack, it is implied
that someone is permanently or globally biased because of some fact regarding his social background. Take this (classic) example:
The Cardinal Newman Argument Charles Kingsley, attacking the famous Catholic intellectual John Henry Cardinal Newman, argued
thus: Cardinal Newman’s claims were not to be trusted because, as a Roman Catholic Priest, (Kingsley alleged) Newman’s first
loyalty was not to the truth. (Copi and Cohen 1998: 169; Walton 2006: 275) What is wrong with Kingsley’s attack according to
traditional fallacy theory is much the same as is wrong with ad hominem attacks generally: poisoning the well is fallacious, because
casting aspersions on the arguer—while potentially effective in persuading an audience—is beside
the point as far as the likely truth of the victim’s conclusion is concerned. According to Walton’s new
analysis of the poisoning the well, however, what is the matter is something else. What is wrong with the poisoning the well is not
that it is a personal attack, but that it is an illegitimate tactic deployed to silence an opponent or prevent his views being taken
seriously in the first place. In offering this—new—analysis of poisoning the well, Walton not only turns accepted fallacy theory on its
head, but also amends his own previously held views (see, for instance, Walton 1998) on the poisoning the well. In arguing that the
dialectical analysis of the poisoning the well is to be preferred, Walton (2006: 275–82) cites a number of examples of poisoning the
well attacks in action. The Abortion Argument An argument advanced by a woman during a debate on abortion in the Canadian
House of Commons in 1979: I wish it were possible for men to get really emotionally involved in this question. It is really impossible
for the man, for whom it is impossible to be in this situation, to really see it from the woman’s point of view. That is why I am
concerned that there are not more women in this House available to speak about this from the woman’s point of view. The Black
Alienation Argument An argument advanced by a black man against a white critic during a
debate on black alienation: You’re not a black man, so anything you have to say on the subject of
black alienation is of no interest to me. You just can’t know what you’re talking about. The
Armoured Vehicles Argument An argument advanced on a message board on the world wide web regarding an academic’s views
about the use of light armoured vehicles in Iraq: Just read his piece on LAVs in Iraq and… I wonder why we care what he thinks on
topics of this nature. Reading his bio I saw nothing about him serving in the military. Yes, he’s a smart guy, and has some alphabet
soup after his name these days, but really, what does he know about the proper uses of LAVs? I don’t see where he served as a
tank/track commander or served period. Why are we wasting time listening to someone who doesn’t seem to have been there and
done that? He wrote a book on Maneuver Warfare? Where did he learn how to maneuver? The Gulf War Argument An argument in
the Netherlands in 1990: A retired Major General argues in front of his relatives that the Dutch government must give more
substantial support for the Allied efforts in the Gulf Area. “We ought to send ground forces,” so he claims. His grandson retorts: “It’s
all very well for you to talk, Grandpa! You don’t have to go there.” Using these four examples, Walton shows why the poisoning the
well is not a species of ad hominem argument. To be an ad hominem argument, the argument must be an attack on an arguer’s
character (Walton 2006: 288). However, in the examples that Walton highlights, there is no personal attack on an individual’s
character. Take the abortion and black alienation arguments: there the attack is not directed against a specific man
or against a specific white
person, rather the attack is against men and white people as such or, at best,
against a certain person as representative of the groups “men” and “white people”. This is most clear in the Gulf War argument: in
that argument it is not that the grandson asserts his grandfather is of bad character at all—personal badness aside, the grandfather is
just in no position to comment on sending Dutch troops to war, according to his grandson. For Walton, the intention in the
poisoning the well cases is not so much to discredit a person’s argument by casting aspersions on his character, but to suggest that
for the person in question to enter into a discussion regarding the issue in question is illegitimate. Walton holds that this “diffusion
effect” is an essential characteristic of the poisoning the well and describes the dialectical situation like this:
LOREY (PRECARITY)
We will also win this as alt solvency—precariousness isn’t a whitewashing
universal sameness but rather a plane of immanence on which to ground radical
democratic politics
---AT: precarity is a new thing to white people only
---UQ – new democratic movements coming now based on precarity – shutting down dialogue about this forces the debate
community out of that discussion
Lorey 12. Isabell Lorey, visiting professor of political science at the University of
Basel/Switzerland, Precarity Talk A Virtual Roundtable with Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler,
Bojana Cvejic,; Isabell Lorey, Jasbir Puar, and Ana Vujanovic; edited by Jasbir Puar, TDR: The
Drama Review 56:4 (T216) Winter 2012, pg. 169
The notion of precariousness Judith uses is not a notion of existential sameness or equality. On
the contrary, because there is only social precariousness it is a notion of relational difference in
interdependency with others. If we say, “we are all precarious,” then the precariousness that is
shared with others is always something that separates us from others, and at the same time it is
something we have in common with them. We are different in our common precariousness. Not
every precarious body is the same, but it is always relational to others because it is precarious,
vulnerable, and mortal. The ambivalence between the relational difference and the possibilities
of what is in common in difference can be a starting point for political arguments. The common
is nothing we can come back to, it has to be assembled and enabled in political action.
The situations in which we act politically are always structured through various forms of precarity.
For many people it is not possible any more to protect oneself and precarize the other at the
same time. Precarization has become “democratized.” Now those who should be the white
middle class experience precarity as if it is new. It is no longer located at the “margins,” related to the
nonhegemonic. That precarization has grown to the “center” is the condition for governing through
insecurities. This process of normalization of precariousness doesn’t at all mean equality in
insecurity; inequalities are not abolished. The logic of neoliberalism thrives on inequality, because it
plays with hierarchized differences and governs on this basis. Yet the focus of this logic of
governing is not mainly on the regulation of fixed identitary differences. With a minimization of social
benefit the government of insecurity primarily regulates absolute poverty, which could tend to prevent individuals from playing the
game of competition.
In the process of normalization in neoliberalism, precarity and precarization become a matter of
interest for a lot of people, even the white middle class, as we can see in the Occupy movement.
That is one of the reasons why the slogan “the 99%” makes sense. Not because there are really
99% involved in the protest, but because nearly everyone is or could be affected.
It is very interesting that when precarization becomes “democratized” new forms of democracy
are practiced, as we can see in the Occupy movement’s camps and assemblies. There are
a lot of
practices, such as the hand signals in the assemblies, that were developed in the Social Fora, or the rejection of representation, which
are well known (not only) from leftist move- ments of the past 20 years. Yet the current protests of those who align
themselves with and as the precarious go far beyond the leftist social-critical spectrum. And what
was already becoming evident in the EuroMayDay movement is that it is not by chance that the precarious of postFordism reject political representation. In this rejection, continuities can be found with past struggles
and movements, but what I find to be emerging that is significantly new is the overwhelming
and unequivocally positive reference to democracy.
The ways of organizing and living together in the camps, of talking together in the assemblies,
are aspects of a new form of democracy. When there is no foreseeable future, it makes no sense
to immediately offer reformist concepts or to have a small catalogue of demands to legitimize the
protests in a hegemonic logic of what counts as political action.
The temporality of the protests of the precarious is located in the present; it is a presentist
democracy. “Presentist” refers to a present becoming, to an extended, intensive present. Presentist
democracy is currently the opposite of representative democracy and is for example practiced in the moment
of the assembly. This
actively becoming presentist is not a nonpolitical form of living. It is a mode of political
subjectivation of all who want to participate in it.
The assembled precarious exchange ideas, talk together about common concerns in the context of the present politicaleconomic situation, and enter into a process in which aspects begin to crystallize. They not only have in
common all their differences due to the governmentality of insecurity, but also share ideas of
how a “better society” could be built. They try to realize the approach of openness to everybody, but also of equality. It
is remarkable that those most extremely confronted with contingency, the precarious, choose
democracy as the practice of the radical contingency of equals, inventing the possibilities of
the future in the assemblies together. And of course, no relations of domination are easily
dissipated simply through assembling with others in a public place.
These presentist democratic practices based on contingency and precarious bodies show
that there is not a
singular “we” founded in common precariousness but a contingent coming together that
invents and practices forms of solidarity that could be a first step toward organizing and
instituting “bonds that sustain us” ( Judith) — without (re)distributing new forms of precariousness
in precarity and without protecting only some and not protecting others. Precariousness not only
includes humans, but it also exceeds humanity and is relatable to everything that acts.
ASSEMBLAGES KEY (SALDANHA)
We say that queer times demand queerer modalities of thought. Resistant identity
paradigms have reached a point of melancholy and fatigue over the subject,
endlessly pinpointing binaries that play into technologies of surveillance and
control, both internal and external. This is why Puar and Saldanha talk about the
assemblage as an alternate theoretical frame: there is no stable subject to endow
with rights and responsibilities, only contingent bonds of organic matter with
resonances and intensities. The question isn’t, “should we affirm this or that
subject,” but “what can we reveal by moving beyond the identitarian paradigm of
the subject?”
---Other strategies fail given the power of the new era of societies of control
---K of the way intersectional analyses can only reify the subject rather than questioning how bodies are formed in the first place
Puar 7. Jasbir, professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University, Duke University
Press: Durham, NC and London, UK, pg. 204
These are queer times indeed, temporal assemblages hooked into an array of enduring
modernist paradigms (civilizing teleologies, Orientalisms, xenophobia, militarization, border
anxieties) and postmodern eruptions (suicide bombers, biometric surveillance strategies,
emergent corporealities, counterterrorism in overdrive). With its emphasis on bodies, desires, pleasures,
tactility, rhythms, echoes, textures, deaths, morbidity, torture, pain, sensation, and punishment, our necropolitical
present-future deems it imperative to rearticulate what queer theory and studies of sexuality
have to say about the metatheories and the realpolitik of empire, often understood, as Joan Scott observes,
as “the real business of politics.” Queer times require even queerer modalities of
thought, analysis, creativity, and expression in order to elaborate upon nationalist, patriotic,
and terrorist formations and their imbricated forms of racialized perverse sexualities and gender
dysphorias.
Throughout this book I allude to queer praxes of futurity that insistently disentangle the relations between representation and
affect, and propose queerness not as an identity nor anti-identity, but an assemblage that is spatially and
temporally contingent. The limitations of the intersectional identitarian models emerge
progressively—however queer they may be—as I work through the concepts of affect, tactility,
and ontology. While dismantling the representational mandates of visibility identity
politics that feed narratives of sexual exceptionalism, affective analyses can approach
queernesses that are unknown or not cogently knowable, that are in the midst of becoming, that
do not immediately and visibly signal themselves as insurgent, oppositional, or transcendent. This
shift forces us to ask not only what terrorist corporealities mean or signify, but more insistently, what do they do? In this conclusion,
I review these tensions between affect and representation, identity and assemblage, posing the problematics of nationalist and
terrorist formations as central challenges to transnational queer cultural and feminist studies.
I propose the assemblage as a pertinent political and theoretical frame within societies of
control. I rearticulate terrorist bodies, in particular the suicide bomber, as an assemblage that
resists queerness-as-sexual-identity (or anti-identity)—in other words, intersectional and
identitarian paradigms—in favor of spatial, temporal, and corporeal convergences, implosions,
and rearrangements. Queerness as an assemblage moves away from excavation work,
deprivileges a binary opposition between queer and not-queer subjects, and, instead of
retaining queerness exclusively as dissenting, resistant, and alternative (all of which queerness
importantly is and does), it underscores contingency and complicity with dominant formations. This
foregrounding of assemblage enables attention to ontology in tandem with epistemology, affect
in conjunction with representational economies within which bodies interpenetrate, swirl
together, and transmit affects and effects to each other.
It also aids in circumventing the fatigued “temporal differencing” of resistant identity paradigms
of the Other that Chow problematizes. Invariably, Chow argues, poststructuralist self-referentiality
produces alienating temporalities of “non-coincidence.” Mystification exoticizes the Other
through a referential inward-turning “temporality as self destruction” that refuses continuity
between the self and other, producing difference as a complete disjuncture that cannot exist
within the same temporal planes as the Self. Concomitantly, futurization occurs where “temporality as
allochronism” produces the Other as the “perpetual promise” that is realizable, but only with a lag time, not in the present. Both
Hansen and Chow hint at the ends of identity. Chow suggests that attending to the
specificity of others has ironically become a universalizing project, whereas Hansen
implies that othering itself is no longer driven by the Hegelian self-other process of
interpellation. While the language of “misrecognition” problematically harks to an older Marxian model of false consciousness,
Hansen avers that taking up the position of the other only capitulates to state and capitalist
modes of domination and surveillance.
Affect, Race, and Sex
Representational analyses, identity politics, and the focus on rights-bearing subjects are
currently being complemented with thinking on affect and on population formation that
recognizes those who are living not only through their relation to subjecthood, but are coming
under control as part of one or many populations, not individuals, but “dividuals.” Norma Alarcon
intimated as much in her brilliant 1990 essay “The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American
Feminism.” In this essay she asks, “Do we have to make a subject of the whole world?” suggesting that the
modern subject is exhausted, or rather that we have exhausted the modern subject. We have
multiplied it to accommodate all sorts of differences (i.e., a politics of inclusion), intersected it
with every variable of identity imaginable, split it to account for the unknown realms of the
subconscious, infused it with great individual rights (the rights-bearing subject). Foucault’s own
provocations include the claim that sexuality is an intersection, rather than an interpellative identity, of
the body and the population. We an read both of these pronouncements as attempts to highlight what Rey Chow calls
“categorical miscegenation”: that race and class are for the most part not only indistinguishable and
undifferentiable from each other, but are a series of temporal and spatial contingencies that
retain a stubborn aversion to being read. While Foucault’s formation hails the feminist heuristic of “intersectionality,”
unlike intersectional theorizing which foregrounds separate analytics of identity that
perform the holistic subjects’ inseparableness, the entities that intersect are the body (not the
subject, let us remember) and population. My own reliance upon calls to intersectional approaches not withstanding,
the limitations of feminist and queer (and queer of color) theories of intersectionality are
indebted in one sense to the taken-for-granted presence of the subject and its
permutations of content and form, rather than an investigation of the predominance of
subjecthood itself. Thus, despite the anti-identitarian critique that queer theory launches
(i.e., queerness is an approach, not an identity or wedded to identity), the queer subject, a subject that
is against identity, transgressive rather than (gay or lesbian) liberatory, nevertheless surfaces as
an object in need of excavation, elaboration or specularization.
THEORY KEY (BOWMAN)
Here’s our theory good net benefit. Aversion to meta-narratives is itself a metanarrative, and a potentially Maoist one at that.
Bowman 10. Paul Bowman, professor of cultural studies at Cardiff University, “Reading Rey
Chow,” Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 13, No. 3, pg. 248
Thus, Chow recasts the investments and orientations of cultural studies, poststructuralism, and other politicized ‘suffix-studies’ subjects in terms of the
unacknowledged but constitutive ‘Chinese prejudice’, first identified by Spivak. According to Chow, ‘China’ has a multiple status in Western discourses,
including cultural studies. As well as representing, for so long, the Other of capitalism, of freedom, of democracy, and so on, ‘China’ has also offered
‘radical thought’ in the West a promissory image of alterity, revolution, difference, alternativeness, and hence resistance as such. And, as Chow also
observes, one of the most enduring metanarratives that has long organized cultural studies and cultural theory (plus much more besides) is the
discourse of ‘resistance’. ‘If
there is a metanarrative that continues to thrive in these times of
metanarrative bashing’, argues Chow, ‘it is that of ‘‘resistance’’’: ‘Seldom do we attend a conference
or turn to an article in an academic journal of the humanities or the social sciences without
encountering some call for ‘‘resistance’’ to some such metanarrativized power as ‘‘global
capitalism’’, ‘‘Western imperialism’’, ‘‘patriarchy’’, ‘‘compulsory heterosexuality’’, and so
forth’.41
The discourses of cultural theory and cultural studies more widely do seem to be structured by keywords or (worse) buzzwords like ‘resistance’,
‘struggle’, ‘difference’, ‘hybridity’ and ‘multiculturalism’. And many have interpreted this as evidence that such putatively ‘radical’ work is, basically,
nothing more than fashionable nonsense. But, rather than writing it off, Chow proposes that one
of the key problems with the
notion of resistance resides in the consequences of its rhetorical construction. She argues that the
popular rhetoric of resistance is itself implicitly organized and underwritten by a
subject/object divide in which ‘we’ speak against that which oppresses (capital, patriarchy,
the West, etc.) and for (or ‘in the name of’) the oppressed other. Thus, ‘we’ rhetorically position
ourselves as somehow ‘with’ the oppressed and ‘against’ the oppressors, even when ‘we’ are
more often than not much more obviously at some distance from sites and scenes of
oppression.42
Of course, the aim of ‘speaking out’ and publicizing the plight of the oppressed may be regarded as responsibility itself. It is certainly the
case that a dominant interpretation of what academic-political responsibility is boils down to the
idea that to be responsible we should speak out. Yet it is nevertheless equally the case that, unless
the distances, relations, aporias and irrelations are acknowledged and interrogated, there is a
strong possibility that ‘our’ discourse will become what Chow calls a version of Maoism. She
explains:
Although the excessive admiration of the 1970s has since been replaced by an oftentimes equally excessive denigration of China, the
Maoist is
very much alive among us, and her significance goes far beyond the China and East Asian fields.
Typically, the Maoist is a cultural critic who lives in a capitalist society but who is fed up with
capitalism – a cultural critic, in other words, who wants a social order opposed to the one that is
supporting her own undertaking. The Maoist is thus a supreme example of the way desire
works: What she wants is always located in the other, resulting in an identification with and
valorization of that which she is not/ does not have. Since what is valorized is often the other’s
deprivation – ‘having’ poverty or ‘having’ nothing – the Maoist’s strategy becomes in the main a
rhetorical renunciation of the material power that enables her rhetoric.43
In other words, such rhetoric claims a ‘position of powerlessness’ in order to claim a particular
form of ‘moral power’:44 a heady conceptual and rhetorical mix that can be seen to underpin an awful lot of academic work today.
Derrida regularly referred to this position as ‘clear-consciencism’: namely, the belief that speaking out, speaking for, speaking against, etc. equals Being
Responsible. However, quite
apart from tub-thumping and mantra-reciting, Derrida believed in the
promise of the ‘most classical of protocols’ of questioning and critical vigilance as ways to avoid
the greater violence of essentialist fundamentalisms. Of course, Derrida’s attempts to draw such questions as how to
interpret ‘responsibility’, how to establish who ‘we’ are, in what relations ‘we’ exist, and what our responsibilities might be, into the crisis of
undecidability were equally regularly regarded as an advocation of theoretical obscurantism and irresponsibility. This charge was – and remains – the
most typical type of ‘resistance’ to deconstruction. Despite the clarity and urgency of Derrida’s reasons for subjecting all presumed certainties to the
harrowing ordeal of undecidability, the resistance to deconstruction surely boils down to a distaste for the complexity of Derrida’s ensuing close
readings/rewritings of texts.45
Such resistance to deconstruction is familiar. It is often couched as a resistance to theory
made in the name of a resistance to ‘disengagement’; a resistance to ‘theory’ for the sake of
‘keeping it real’. Such a rationale for the rejection of deconstruction (or indeed ‘Theory’ as such)
is widespread. But when ‘keeping it real’ relies upon a refusal to interrogate the ethical and
political implications of one’s own rhetorical and conceptual coordinates – one’s own ‘key
terms’ – the price is too high. Chow points to some of the ways and places that this high price is paid, and reflects on the palpable
consequences of it. For instance, in politicized contexts such as postcolonial cultural studies, there are times when
‘deconstruction’ and ‘theory’ are classified (reductively) as being ‘Western’, and therefore
as being just another cog in the Western hegemonic (colonial, imperial) apparatus. As she puts it,
in studies of non-Western cultural others, organized by postcolonial anti-imperialism, all things
putatively ‘Western’ easily become suspect. Thus, ‘the general criticism of Western
imperialism’ can lead to the rejection of ‘Western’ approaches, at the same time as ‘the study of
non- Western cultures easily assumes a kind of moral superiority, since such cultures are often
also those that have been colonized and ideologically dominated by the West’.46 In other words,
‘theory’ – ‘for all its fundamental questioning of Western logocentrism’ – is too hastily ‘lumped
together with everything ‘‘Western’’ and facilely rejected as a non-necessity’.47 Unfortunately, therefore:
In the name of studying the West’s ‘others’, then, the critique of cultural politics that is an inherent
part of both poststructural theory and cultural studies is pushed aside, and ‘culture’ returns to a
coherent, idealist essence that is outside language and outside mediation. Pursued in a morally
complacent, antitheoretical mode, ‘culture’ now functions as a shield that hides the positivism,
essentialism, and nativism – and with them the continual acts of hierarchization, subordination,
and marginalization – that have persistently accompanied the pedagogical practices of area
studies; ‘cultural studies’ now becomes a means of legitimizing continual conceptual and
methodological irresponsibility in the name of cultural otherness.48
What is at stake here is the surely significant fact that even the honest and principled or declared aim of studying others can actually amount to a
positive working for the very forces one avowedly opposes or seeks to resist. Chow clarifies this in terms of considering the uncanny proximity but
absolute difference between cultural studies and area studies. For, area
studies is a disciplinary field which ‘has long
been producing ‘‘specialists’’ who report to North American political and civil arenas about
‘‘other’’ civilizations, ‘‘other’’ regimes, ‘‘other’’ ways of life, and so forth’.49 However, quite unlike cultural
studies and postcolonial studies’ declared aims and affiliative interests in alterity and ‘other cultures’, within area studies ‘others’
(‘defined by way of particular geographical areas and nation states, such as South Asia, the Middle East, East Asia, Latin America, and countries of
are studied as if potential threats, challenges and – hence – ultimately ‘information target
fields’.50
Africa’)
Thus, says Chow, there is ‘a major difference’ between cultural studies and area studies – and indeed between cultural studies and ‘normal’ academic
disciplines per se.51 This
difference boils down to a paradigmatic decision – itself an act or effort of
resistance. This is the resistance to ‘proper’ disciplinarity; the resistance to becoming ‘normal’ or
‘normalized’, wherever it might equal allowing power inequalities, untranslatables and
heterogeneities to evaporate in the production of universalistic ‘objective’ knowledge. This is why
Chow’s attitude is always that:
In the classroom [...] students
should not be told simply to reject ‘metadiscourses’ in the belief that
by turning to the ‘other’ cultures – by turning to ‘culture’ as the ‘other’ of metadiscourses – they
would be able to overturn existing boundaries of knowledge production that, in fact,
continue to define and dictate their own discourses. Questions of authority, and with
them hegemony, representation, and right, can be dealt with adequately only if we insist on the
careful analyses of texts, on responsibly engaged rather than facilely dismissive judgments, and
on deconstructing the ideological assumptions in discourses of ‘opposition’ and ‘resistance’ as
well as in discourses of mainstream power. Most of all, as a form of exercise in ‘cultural literacy’, we need to continue to
train our students to read – to read arguments on their own terms rather than discarding
them perfunctorily and prematurely – not in order to find out about authors’ original intent
but in order to ask, ‘Under what circumstances would such an argument – no matter how
preposterous – make sense? With what assumptions does it produce meanings? In what ways and to
what extent does it legitimize certain kinds of cultures while subordinating or outlawing
others?’ Such are the questions of power and domination as they relate, ever asymmetrically,
to the dissemination of knowledge. Old-fashioned questions of pedagogy as they are, they nonetheless
demand frequent reiteration in order for cultural studies to retain its critical and political
impetus in the current intellectual climate.52
1NR
FRAMEWORK
That’s external offense for us, but we don’t even need it to win that we’re a prior
question. The 1AC itself might be correct, but they give you inadequate conceptual
tools
Massumi 02. Brian Massumi, professor of communications at the University of Montreal,
Parables For the Virtual, pg. 8
Another way of putting it is that positionality is an emergent quality of movement. The
distinction between stasis and motion that replaces the opposition between literal and figurative
from this perspective is not a logical binarism. It follows the modes by which realities pass into
each other. "Passing into" is not a binarism. "Emerging" is not a binarism. They are dynamic
unities. The kinds o f distinction suggested here pertain to continuities under qualitative transformation. They are directly
processual (and derivatively signifying and codifying). They can only be approached by a logic that is abstract
enough to grasp the self-disjunctive coincidence of a thing's immediacy to its own variation: to follow how concepts of dynamic unity
and unmediated heterogeneity reciprocally presuppose each other. The concept of field, to mention but one, is a
useful logical tool for expressing continuity of self-relation and heterogeneity in the same breath
(chapters 3 and 6). Embarrassingly for the humanities, the handiest concepts in this connection are almost
without exception products of mathematics or the sciences.
(5) It is not enough for process concepts of this kind to be ontological. They must be
ontogenetic: they must be equal to emergence.
(6) If passage is primary in relation to position, processual indeterminacy is primary in relation
to social determination (chapters 2, 4, 9). Social and cultural determinations on the model of
positionality are also secondary and derived. Gender, race, and sexual orientation also
emerge and back-form their reality. Passage precedes construction. But construction does
effectively back-form its reality. Grids happen. So social and cultural determinations feed back into the process
from which they arose. Indeterminacy and determination, change and freeze-framing, go together. They
are inseparable and always actually coincide while remaining disjunctive in their modes of reality. To say that passage
and indeterminacy "come first" or "are primary" is more a statement of
ontological priority than the assertion of a time sequence. They have ontological
privilege in the sense that they constitute the field of the emergence, while positionings
are what emerge. The trick is to express that priority in a way that respects the inseparability
and contemporaneousness of the disjunct dimensions: their ontogenetic difference. The work of
Gilbert Simondon is exemplary in this regard.
(7) As Simondon reminds us, it is important to keep in mind that there
is a contemporaneous difference between
social determination and sociality.6 The approach suggested here does not accept any categorical
separation between the social and the presocial, between culture and some kind of "raw" nature or
experience (chapters 1,8,9). The idea is that there is an ontogenesis or becoming of culture and the
social (bracketing for present purposes the difference between them), of which determinate
forms of culture and sociability are the result. The challenge is to think that process of
formation, and for that you need the notion of a taking-form, an inform on the way to being
determinately this or that. The field of emergence is not presocial. It is open-endedly social. It is social in a
manner "prior to" the separating out of individuals and the identifiable groupings that they end up boxing themselves into (positions
in gridlock). A sociality without determinate borders: "pure" sociality. One of the things that the
dimension of emergence is ontogenetically "prior to" is thus the very distinction between the
individual and the collective, as well as any given model of their interaction. That interaction is
precisely what takes form. That is what is socially determined-and renegotiated by each and
every cultural act. Assume it, and you beg the whole question (chapter 3). Not assuming it,
however, entails finding a concept for interaction-in-the-making. The term adopted here is
relation (chapters 1,3, 9).
Freaking whiteness through a theory of machinic assemblages is a distinct strategy
that’s a prereq to making sense of the 1AC itself.
Saldanha 07. Arun Saldanha, professor of geography at the University of Minnesota,
Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race, University of Minnesota Press:
Minneapolis, MN, pg. 200
The multiplication of race I’m proposing should be distinguished from other antiracist
strategies. It is neither antiwhite, nor pro-Indian, nor a simple celebration of hybridity, nor
multicultural or universalist. Machinic antiracism isn’t antiwhite because it is aware that the
freaky creativities of the white racial formation can be used against white supremacy. It doesn’t
take sides in racial politics at all (for Indians, for minorities, for the poor, against the rich) but asks what needs to
happen for there to be sides at all. Machinism is wary of any identity politics as this tends to
hide internal fissures of the identity it seeks to defend. In my case, the resistance against cultural
imperialism in defense of some Goan identity has often been severely limited by a strong Catholic, nostalgic and middle-class bias, as well as
homophobia and conservative moralism. 15 Machinism
also avoids the easy reverence for travel and bricolage
found in postmodernism and a lot of cultural studies. Mobility and hybridization can be good or bad. A
lack of cosmopolitanism cannot be held against anyone but must be explained. Hailing the transracial inventiveness in consumer tactics hardly erodes
the international division of labor, advertising, and the military-industrial complex that support racial clustering in the first place. Finally,
machinism does not imply multiculturalism or liberal universalism, because hoping for
horizontal equality (“color blindness”) and mere tolerance of the other leaves out of analysis
the privileged location of whites from which equality and tolerance are bound to be defined.
Importantly, though, these common antiracist practices aren’t without their relevance. They just need to
be seen as limited in their effectivity and potentially even reinforcing the intricate system of
whiteness they want to attack.
This debate comes down to a choice between their polemical model of contestation
and our provisional dialogic model. We are exercising our basic right as the neg to
question 1ac assumptions and point out deficiencies. Any other requirement
creates an impossible standard for the neg and destroys any value to voting aff
Foucault, ’84 (Michel, “Polemics, Politics and Problematizations” Interview by Paul
Rabinow, http://foucault.info/foucault/interview.html) gender modified
I like discussions, and when I am asked questions, I try to answer them. It’s true that I don’t like to get involved in polemics. If I
open a book and see that the author is accusing an adversary of “infantile leftism” I shut it again right away. That’s not my way of
doing things; I don’t belong to the world of people who do things that way. I insist on this difference as something essential: a whole
morality is at stake, the one that concerns the search for truth and the relation to the other. In the serious play of questions and
answers, in the work of reciprocal elucidation, the rights of each person are in some sense
immanent in the discussion. They depend only on the dialogue situation. The person asking
the questions is merely exercising the right that has been given him: to remain unconvinced,
to perceive a contradiction, to require more information, to emphasize different postulates, to
point out faulty reasoning, and so on. As for the person answering the questions, he too exercises a
right that does not go beyond the discussion itself; by the logic of his own discourse, he is tied to what [s]he has said
earlier, and by the acceptance of dialogue he is tied to the questioning of other. Questions and
answers depend on a game—a game that is at once pleasant and difficult—in which each of
the two partners takes pains to use only the rights given him by the other and by the accepted
form of dialogue. The polemicist, on the other hand, proceeds encased in privileges that he
possesses in advance and will never agree to question. On principle, he possesses rights authorizing
him to wage war and making that struggle a just undertaking; the person [s]he confronts is not a
partner in search for the truth but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is armful, and
whose very existence constitutes a threat. For him, then the game consists not of recognizing
this person as a subject having the right to speak but of abolishing him as interlocutor, from any
possible dialogue; and his final objective will be not to come as close as possible to a difficult truth
but to bring about the triumph of the just cause he has been manifestly upholding from the
beginning. The polemicist relies on a legitimacy that his adversary is by definition denied. Perhaps, someday, a long history
will have to be written of polemics, polemics as a parasitic figure on discussion and an
obstacle to the search for the truth. Very schematically, it seems to me that today we can recognize the presence
in polemics of three models: the religious model, the judiciary model, and the political model. As in heresiology, polemics sets
itself the task of determining the intangible point of dogma, the fundamental and necessary
principle that the adversary has neglected, ignored or transgressed; and it denounces this
negligence as a moral failing; at the root of the error, it finds passion, desire, interest, a whole series of weaknesses
and inadmissible attachments that establish it as culpable. As in judiciary practice, polemics allows for no possibility of
an equal discussion: it examines a case; it isn’t dealing with an interlocutor, it is processing a suspect; it collects the proofs of
his guilt, designates the infraction he has committed, and pronounces the verdict and sentences him. In any case, what we have
here is not on the order of a shared investigation; the polemicist tells the truth in the form of his
judgment and by virtue of the authority [s]he has conferred on himself. But it is the political model
that is the most powerful today. Polemics defines alliances, recruits partisans, unites interests or opinions, represents a
party; it establishes the other as an enemy, an upholder of opposed interests against which one
must fight until the moment this enemy is defeated and either surrenders or disappears. Of
course, the reactivation, in polemics, of these political, judiciary, or religious practices is nothing more
than theater. One gesticulates: anathemas, excommunications, condemnations, battles, victories, and
defeats are no more than ways of speaking, after all. And yet, in the order of discourse, they are
also ways of acting which are not without consequence. There are the sterilizing effects. Has
anyone ever seen a new idea come out of a polemic? And how could it be otherwise, given that
here the interlocutors are incited not to advance, not to take more and more risks in what they say, but to
fall back continually on the rights that they claim, on their legitimacy, which they must
defend, and on the affirmation of their innocence? There is something even more serious here: in this comedy, one
mimics war, battles, annihilations, or unconditional surrenders, putting forward as much of one’s killer
instinct as possible. But it is really dangerous to make anyone believe that [s]he can gain access
to the truth by such paths and thus to validate, even if in a merely symbolic form, the real
political practices that could be warranted by it. Let us imagine, for a moment, that a magic wand is waved and one
of the two adversaries in a polemic is given the ability to exercise all the power he likes over the other. One doesn’t even have to
imagine it: one has only to look at what happened during the debate in the USSR over linguistics or
genetics not long ago. Were these merely aberrant deviations from what was supposed to be the correct discussion? Not at all—they
were the real consequences of a polemic attitude whose effects ordinarily remain suspended.
WHITENESS (ORCHESRATED PULSE)
Experience is a red herring. Identity doesn’t guarantee radical interests, and
privilege doesn’t necessarily make us clueless. Focus on the substantive political
issue is a prereq to their criticism.
Orchestrated Pulse 2014 – leftist magazine based in DC (3/6, “My Skinfolk Ain’t All Kinfolk:
The Left’s Problem with Identity Politics”,
http://www.orchestratedpulse.com/2014/03/problem-identity-politics/)
Imperial America, murderous America, the America that abused and robbed countries like Bolivia —that America was me. I too was a settler; my Black feet were stained red with
blood as I stood on stolen indigenous land. I too benefitted from colonialism, capitalism, and the other facets of White supremacy. I could no longer simply point the finger at
My marginalized identity didn’t absolve me. I began to think systemically. I had to actually develop a
multidimensional worldview and take political stances that drew on more than my lived
experiences. When I returned to the United States and became involved in leftist politics, I soon realized that the political scene was, unfortunately, still stuck on
White people.
personal identity.
WHAT IS IDENTITY POLITICS?
In this age of (misinterpreted) intersectionality, our politics tend to rely on the body. When we
deal with race, White people embody White supremacy and privilege, while non-Whites are the corporal
manifestation of resistance. We obsess over White privilege and how we can get more people of color involved
in our spaces and projects, but does White supremacy really disappear when there are no White
people in the room?
Some people look at these flaws and call for an end to “identity politics”, but I think that’s a mistake. At its most basic level, identity politics merely means political activity that
In a certain sense, all politics are identity politics. However, it’s one
thing to intentionally form a group around articulated interests; it’s another matter entirely when group
membership is socially imposed.
Personal identities are socially defined through a combination of systemic rewards/marginalization plus actual and/or potential violence. We can’t build
politics from that foundation because these socially imposed identities don’t necessarily tell us
anything about someone’s political interests. Successful identity politics requires shared
interests, not shared personal identities.
I’m not here to tell you that personal identity doesn’t matter; we rightfully point out that systemic power shapes people’s lives. Simply put, my message is that
personal identity is not the only thing that matters. We spend so much energy labeling people—
privileged/marginalized, oppressor/oppressed—that we often neglect to build spaces that antagonize the systems that
cause our collective trauma.
caters to the interests of a particular social group.
All You Blacks Want All the Same Things
We assume that if a person is systemically marginalized, then they must have a vested interest in dismantling that system. Yet, that’s not always the case.
Take Orville Lloyd Douglas, who last summer wrote an article in the Guardian in which he admitted that he hates being Black.
I can honestly say I hate being a black male… I just don’t fit into a neat category of the stereotypical views people have of black men. I hate rap music, I hate most
sports, and I like listening to rock music… I have nothing in common with the archetypes about the black male… I resent being compared to young black males (or
young people of any race) who are lazy, not disciplined, or delinquent. Orville Lloyd Douglas, Why I Hate Being a Black Man
membership in a marginalized group is no guarantee that a person can
understand and effectively combat systemic oppression. Yet, we seem to treat all marginalized
voices as equal, as if they are all insightful, as if there is no diversity of thought, as if—in the case of race– “All you Blacks want all the same things”.
Shared identity does not equal shared interests. John Ridley, the Oscar-winning screenplay writer of 12 Years a Slave, is a good
As we can see from Douglas’ cry for help,
example. He’s written screenplays based on Jimi Hendrix, the L.A. riots, and other poignant moments and icons within Black history. He wants to see more Black people in
Hollywood and he
franchises.
has a long history of successfully incorporating Black and Brown characters into comic book stories and
However, in 2006, Ridley made waves with an essay in which he castigated Black people who did not live up to his
standards; saying, “It’s time for ascended blacks to wish niggers good luck.”
So I say this: It’s time for ascended blacks to wish niggers good luck. Just as whites may be concerned with the good of all citizens but don’t travel their days
worrying specifically about the well-being of hillbillies from Appalachia, we need to send niggers on their way. We need to start extolling the most virtuous of
ourselves. It is time to celebrate the New Black Americans—those who have sealed the Deal, who aren’t beholden to liberal indulgence any more than they are to
the disdain of the hard Right. It is time to praise blacks who are merely undeniable in their individuality and exemplary in their levels of achievement. The
Manifesto of Ascendancy for the Modern American Nigger
While Ridley and I share cultural affinity, and we both want to see Black people doing well, shared cultural
affinity and common identity are not enough– which recent history makes abundantly clear. Barack Obama continues to
deport record numbers of Brown immigrants here at home, while mercilessly bombing Brown folks abroad. Don
Lemon, speaking in support of Bill O’Reilly, said that racism would be lessened if Black people pulled up their pants and stopped littering. Last fall, 40% of
Black U.S. Americans supported airstrikes against Syria.
My skinfolk ain’t all kinfolk, and the Left needs to catch up.
NO MORE ALLIES
John Ridley, Barack Obama, myself, and Don Lemon are all Black males. We also have conflicting political positions and interests, but how can we decide which paths are valid if
we only pay attention to personal identity?
Instead of learning to recognize how the overarching systems maintain their power and then attacking
those tools, we spend our energy finding an “other” to embody the systemic
marginalization and legitimize our spaces and ideals. In some interracial spaces I feel like nothing more than an
interchangeable token whose only purpose is to legitimize the politics of my White peers. If not me, then some other Black person would fill the slot.
We use these “others” as authorities on various issues, and we use concepts like “privilege” to
ensure that people stay in their lanes. People of color are the authorities on race, while LGBTQ
people are the authorities on gender and sexuality, and so forth and so on. Yet, experience is not
the same as expertise, and privilege doesn’t automatically make you clueless. As I’ve
discussed, these groups are not oriented around a singular set of political ideals and practices. Furthermore, as we see in Andrea Smith’s work, there are often
competing interests within these groups. We mistake essentialism for intersectionality as we
look for the ideal subjects to embody the various forms of oppression; true intersectionality is a description of systemic
power, not a call for diversity.
If we don’t develop any substantive analysis of systemic power, then it’s impossible to
know what our interests are, and aligning with one another according to shared interests is out
of the question. In this climate all that remains is the ally, which requires no real knowledge or political effort, only the willingness to appear supportive of an
“other”. We can’t build power that way.
organizers in Durham, North Carolina found
that the Left’s emphasis on personal identity and allyship was a major reason why their efforts
collapsed. They proposed that we adopt the practice of forming alliances rather than
identifying allies. (h/t NinjaBikeSlut)
After having gathered to oppose organized White supremacy at the University of North Carolina, a group of
Much of the discourse around being an ally seems to presume a relationship of one-sided support, with one person or group following another’s leadership. While
In an alliance, the two
parties support each other while maintaining their own self-determination and autonomy, and are bound together not by
the relationship of leader and follower but by a shared goal. In other words, one cannot actually be the ally of a group
or individual with whom one has no political affinity – and this means that one cannot be an ally to an entire demographic
group, like people of color, who do not share a singular cohesive political or personal desire. The Divorce of Thought From
there are certainly times where this makes sense, it is misleading to use the term ally to describe this relationship.
Deed
While it’s vital for me to learn the politics and history of marginalized experiences that differ from my own, listen to their voices, and respect their spaces and contributions — it’s
Since we know that
oppression is systemic and multidimensional, then I’m going to have to step outside of personal
experience and begin to develop political ideals and practices that actually antagonize those
systems. I have to understand and articulate my interests, which will allow me to operate
from a position of strength and form political alliances that advance those interests– interests
which speak to issues beyond just my own immediate experience.
Ultimately, I want to attack power, not people. In order to get there, the Left needs more identity politics, not less.
also important for me to understand the ways in which these same systems have shaped my own identity/history as well.
AT: NO ETHICAL POSITION
This is the reductive logic that boys are intrinsically settlers due to biology—the
question is how he uses it
Saldanha 10. Arun Saldanha, professor of geography at the University of Minnesota,
Environment and Planning A 2010, volume 42, pg. 2417
Guattari does not disagree with Lacanian psychoanalysis and feminism that heterosexist society
meddles with the upbringing and molding of vulnerable bodies, but he theorizes the
processes differently, understanding the unconscious as already machinic instead of waiting
for the social to transform it. What a boy can do should not be defined as patriarchal (or patricidal)
unless other determinations are taken into account than his little penis. Updating Freud's critique of the
Judeo-Christian and bourgeois family, the Guattarian concept of the machinic unconscious is required for
qualifying the Spinozist concept of affect. This critical edge tends to be somewhat lost if the
nonorganic and the unspeakability of relationality are foregrounded as essential to the
theorizations of affect. Human affects inevitably implicate (enfold) configurations of gender,
age, class, and race, mostly unconsciously, but possibly consciously. For the machinic
unconscious implies that there is also a machinic consciousness, from which intentional rearrangements of
social configurations can emerge.
With an understanding of the machinic unconscious nature of affect we are better equipped
to tackle the tendency toward representationalism legible in Fanon. If subjectivity and the expression of it
through language are not ontologically separable from the bodies that sustain it, attention has to turn to those
corporeal interminglings (which sometimes result in emotions, thoughts, words) that keep the
discrimination on the basis of skin color in place. It is therefore not that intentions and
discourse are irrelevant, but they are to be analyzed while emerging from and acting amid the
play of material forces. The epidermal schema is effective insofar as it is abstract, a real
possibility in every encounter between a dark and a light body after, say, the 18th century; here I
agree with Fanon. But abstraction requires, not shuts away, the materiality of skin and flesh. Race is
the very process of the constitution as feeling and living body subjects within racist systems. The
ontological site of the epidermal schema is analogous to that of affect: not a split between body
and mind, between skin and consciousness, but a parallel, actual-virtual transformation of both.
Antiracist politics cannot therefore focus on language, identity, or paintings alone, but has to
negotiate their more obscure moorings in the planes of affect and the global economy.