Deleuze
Alt Fails
No possibility for emancipation with D&G’s Rhizomatic politics – it can never create change because it
has no strategy
The Symptom 6 (Online Journal for Lacan.com. “The Future of Another Illusion: Theory and Zizek’s Organ’s Without Bodies”.
Ebsco Publishing 2006.)
Deleuze and Guattari can only express a desire to get outside their aborescent, machinic model to achieve the space for
philosophy - aesthetics (beautiful), ethics (loving), and politics (political). Their desire to sweep the slate clean is vastly symptomatic of ahistorical
"space-clearing" announcements of postmodern philosophy, like Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition. Historically speaking, these treatises read as last gasps
for air in the suffocating squeeze of an immanently spreading capitalism, desperate cries to will something oppositional into existence. One
cannot, however, promote expansive growth while theoretically chopping at the trunk to fell the institutional tree, just as one cannot change the world through
shopping, as Naomi Klein has rightfully pointed out. One reason why Deleuzoguattarian writing is so difficult to read is because it shifts out of the overdetermined
Becoming versus Being mode at abrupt times to signal levels of more complexity. For instance, in "Treatise on Nomadology - The War Machine," they write "...if
the State always finds it necessary to repress the nomad and minor sciences...it does so not because the content of these sciences is
inexact or imperfect... but because they imply a division of labor opposed to the norms of the State" (368). The introduction of labor and the
implication that people do the work of science complicates the argument. It introduces agency into the equation, but this variable cannot be worked out in
their model. We find ourselves in a theoretical deadlock with our preeminent postmodern theorists. Deleuze and Guattari and Foucault can
effectively describe our current condition in the academy; their models can even anticipate structural changes that show how their own work enters its classrooms.
However, they offer us little in the way of prescribing change due to the fact that subjectivity remains a theoretical blind spot
in
their thinking.
The aff fails—doing the alternative alone ensures its failure. Treating the nomad as a complete outsider
of the state is impossible
Mann 95 (Professor of English at Pomona, Paul, “Stupid Undergrounds,” PostModern Culture 5:3, Project MUSE)
Intellectual economics guarantees that even the most powerful and challenging work cannot protect itself from the order of
fashion.Becoming-fashion, becoming-commodity, becoming-ruin. Such instant, indeed retroactive ruins, are the virtual landscape of
the stupid underground. The exits and lines of flight pursued by Deleuze and Guattari are being shut down and rerouted by the very
people who would take them most seriously. By now, any given work from the stupid underground's critical apparatus is liable to be
tricked out with smooth spaces, war-machines, n - 1s, planes of consistency, plateaus and deterritorializations, strewn about like
tattoos on the stupid body without organs. The nomad isalready succumbing to the rousseauism and orientalism that were always
invested in his figure; whatever Deleuze and Guattari intended for him, he is reduced to being a romantic outlaw, to a position
opposite the State, in the sort of dialectical operation Deleuze most despised. And the rhizome is becoming just another stupid
subterranean figure. It is perhaps true that Deleuze and Guattari did not adequately protect their thought from this dialectical
reconfiguration (one is reminded of Breton's indictment against Rimbaud for not having prevented, in advance, Claudel's recuperation
of him as a proper Catholic), but no vigilance would have sufficed in any case. The work of Deleuze and Guattari is evidence that, in
real time, virtual models and maps close off the very exits they indicate. The problem is in part that rhizomes, lines of flight, smooth
spaces, BwOs, etc., are at one and the same timetheoretical-political devices of the highest critical order and merely fantasmatic,
delirious, narcissistic models for writing, and thus perhaps an instance of the all-too-proper blurring of the distinction between
criticism and fantasy. In Deleuze-speak, the stupid underground would be mapped not as a margin surrounding a fixed point, not as a
fixed site determined strictly by its relation or opposition to some more or less hegemonic formation, but as an intensive, ndimensional intersection of rhizomatic plateaus. Nomadology and rhizomatics conceive such a "space" (if one only had the proverbial
nickel for every time that word is used as a critical metaphor, without the slightest reflection on what might be involved in rendering
the conceptual in spatial terms) as a liquid, colloidal suspension, often retrievable by one or another techno-metaphorical zoning (e.g.,
"cyberspace"). What is at stake, however, is not only the topological verisimilitude of the model but the fantastic possibility of
nonlinear passage, of multiple simultaneous accesses and exits, of infinite fractal lines occupying finite social space. In the strictest
sense, stupid philosophy.Nomad thought is prosthetic, the experience of virtual exhilaration in modalities already mapped and
dominated by nomad, rhizomatic capital(the political philosophy of the stupid underground: capital is more radical than any of its
critiques, but one can always pretend otherwise). It is this very fantasy, this very narcissistic wish to see oneself projected past the
frontier into new spaces, that abandons one to this economy, that seals these spaces within an order of critical fantasy that has long
since been overdeveloped, entirely reterritorialized in advance. To pursue nomadology or rhizomatics as such is already to have lost
the game. Nothing is more crucial to philosophy than escaping the dialectic and no project is more hopeless; the stupid-critical
underground is the curved space in which this opposition turns back on itself.
Deleuze's refusal to engage material circumstance in favor of abstraction ensure its political failure
Hallward 6 (Peter Hallward, Professor in the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University,
London, 06, Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation, p. 7)
To insist in this way on the logic of creation as the primary if not exclusive focus of Deleuze’s work is undeniably to simplify aspects
of his thought. My goal in this hook is not to engage in the detailed analysis of particular sequences or problems in Deleuze’s texts,
but to characterise the dominant movement of his philosophy as a whole. For the sake of clarity and economy this characterization
will pay little attention to the complex¬ities of context or the occasional inconsistencies that must accompany the development of so
large and wide-ranging a body of work. Despite these shortcomings, I think it’s fair to say that this approach remains broadly in line
with Deleuze’s own way of reading other philosophers. Like Leibniz or Bergson, Deleuze assumes that every philosopher is animated
by just one fundamental problem, and that to read a work of philosophy ‘does not consist in concluding from the idea of a preceding
condition the idea of the follow¬ing condition, but in grasping the effort or tendency by which the following condition itself ensues
from the preceding “by means of a natural force”’)7 Every ‘philosophy’s power is measured by the concepts it creates’, ‘concepts that
impose a new set of divi¬sions on things and actions’. On the basis of the concepts they create, philosophers ‘subordinate and submit
things to a question in such a way that, in this forced and con¬strained submission, things reveal to us an essence, a nature. The main
virtue of the question to which Deleuze’s project will itself be submitted in the following pages may be to reveal in a somewhat
unexpected way the degree to which his work, far from engaging in a description or transformation of the world, instead seeks
to escape it. The Deleuze that has long fascinated and troubled me is neither a worldly nor even a ‘relational’ thinker. If (after Marx
and Darwin) materialism involves accept¬ance of the fact that actual or worldly processes inflect the course of both natural and
human history then Deleuze may not be a materialist thinker either. As Deleuze presents it, the destiny of thought will not be
fundamentally affected by the mediation of society, history or the world; although Delenze equates being with the activity of
creation, he orients this activity towards a contemplative and immaterial abstraction. More than a hundred and fifty years after
Marx urged us to change rather than contemplate the world, Deleuze, like so many of his philosophical contemporaries,
effectively recom¬mends instead that we settle for the alternative choice. The real preoccupation of this book concerns the value
of this advice.
Their political strategy fails
Garo 8 (Isabelle, French philosopher, “Molecular Revolutions: The Paradox of Politics in the Work of Gilles Deleuze,” Deleuze
and Politicspg 71,)
The political dimension of Deleuze’s work is, therefore, real. But that does not mean that political analysis or even a political
perspective can be found in a strictly defined way in his work. And the paradoxical feeling that his thought does have a specifically
political contemporary relevance perhaps stems from the fact that what was in the process of disappearing when he wrote his work is,
precisely, in the process of re-emerging today: in both cases a figure becomes blurred and persists at the same time, the very idea of
politics dissolves and is redefined, as that which never ceases to haunt philosophy and also to escape it.
Misunderstands Desire
Deluzian concepts of desire are flawed and fail
Zizek 5 (Zizek, Slavoj. “Objet a as Inherent Limit to Capitalism: on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.” Lacan.com. 2005)
So the critics of Communism were in a way right when they claimed that the Marxian Communism is an impossible fantasy - what they did not perceive is that the
Marxiam Communism, this notion of a society of pure unleashed productivity outside the frame of Capital, was a fantasy inherent to
capitalism itself, the capitalist inherent transgression at its purest, a strictly ideological fantasy of maintaining the thrust to
productivity generated by capitalism, while getting rid of the "obstacles" and antagonisms that were - as the sad experience of the "really
existing capitalism" demonstrates - the only possible framework of the effective material existence of a society of permanent self-enhancing productivity. So where,
precisely, did Marx go wrong with regard to the surplus-value? One is tempted to search for an answer in the key Lacanian distinction between the object of desire and
the surplus-enjoyment as its cause. Recall the curl of the blond hair, this fatal detail of Madeleine in Hitchcock's Vertigo. When, in the love scene in the barn towards
the end of the film, Scottie passionately embraces Judy refashioned into the dead Madeleine, during their famous 360-degree kiss, he stops kissing her and withdraws
just long enough to steal a look at her newly blond hair, as if to reassure himself that the particular feature which makes her into the object of desire is still there... So
there is always a gap between the object of desire itself and its cause, the mediating feature or element that makes this object desirable. And, back to Marx: what if his
mistake was also to assume that the object of desire (the unconstrained expanding productivity) would remain even when deprived of the cause that propels it (the
surplus-value)? The same holds even more for Deleuze, since he develops his theory of desire in direct opposition to the Lacanian one. Deleuze asserts the
priority of desire over its objects: desire is a positive productive force which exceeds its objects, a living flow proliferating through the
multitude of objects, penetrating them and passing through them, in no need of any fundamental lack or "castration" that would serve as its
foundation. For Lacan, however, desire has to be sustained by an object-cause: not some primordial incestuous Lost Object on which desire remains
forever transfixed and whose unsatisfying substitutes all other objects are, but a purely formal object which causes us to desire objects that we encounter in reality.
This object-cause of desire is thus not transcendent, the inaccessible excess forever eluding our grasp, but behind the subject's back,
something that from within directs desiring. And, as is the case with Marx, it is Deleuze's failure to take into account this object-cause
that sustains the illusory vision of unconstrained productivity of desire - or, in the case of Hardt and Negri, the illusory vision of multitude
ruling itself, no longer constrained by any totalizing One. We can observe here the catastrophic political consequences of the failure
to develop what may appear a purely academic, "philosophical," notional distinction.
Error Replication DA
The aff recreates what it tries to solve
Diken and Laustsen 01 (Bülent, lecturer in Sociology at Lancaster University, and CarstenBaggeLaustsen, Ph.D. student at the
University of Copenhagen, Department of Political Sciences, “Enjoy your fight!” – “Fight Club” as a symptom of the Network
Society, http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/papers/diken-laustsen-enjoy-your-fight.pdf)
The first danger is that a line of flight can become re-stratified: in the fear of complete destratification, rigid segmentation and segregation may
seem attractive. Whenever a line of flight is stopped by anorganization, institution, interpretation, a black hole, etc., a “reterritorialization” takes place.
In spite of the fact that Fight Club makes a mockery of an “illusion of safety” in the beginning, its line of flight is followed by reterritorialization. It evolves into
a project, Project Mayhem. Becoming a “bureaucracy of anarchy” (Palahniuk 1997: 119), Project Mayhem is the point at which Fight Club
reterritorializes as “the paranoid position of the mass subject , with all the identifications of the individual with the group, the group with the leader, and
the leader with the group” (Deleuze&Guattari 1987: 34). In comparison with Fight Club, Project Mayhem is centralised around Jack/Tyler who gives the multiplicity
of lines of escape a resonance. Methods change too: “We have to show these men and women freedom by enslaving them, and show them courage by
frightening them” (Ibid. 149). The new rules are: “you don’t ask questions”; “you have to trust Tyler”, and so on (Ibid. 125). Fight Club was a gang, Project Mayhem is
more like an army. Fight Club produces a microcosm of the affections of the rigid: it deterritorializes, massifies, but only in order to stop
deterritorialization, to invent new territorializations. The second dangerof the line of flight, which is less obvious but more interesting is “clarity”. Clarity
ariseswhen one attains a perception of the molecular texture of the “social”, when the holesin it are revealed. What used to be compact and whole
seems now to be leaking, a texture that enables de-differentiations, overlappings, migrations, hybridizations. Clarity emerges with the
transformation of Fight Club into Project Mayhem. “Everything is nothing, and it’s cool to be enlightened” (Palahniuk 1997: 64). Clarity is also the reason
why Fight Club fascinates its members. In this sense, Fight Club does not only reproduce the dangers of the rigid in a miniature scale; it is microfascism.
“Instead of the great paranoid fear, we are trapped in a thousand little monomanias, self-evident truths, and clarities that gush from every black hole
and no longer form a system, but are only rumble and buzz, blinding lights giving any and everybody the mission of self-appointed judge, dispenser of the justice,
policeman, neighbourhood SS man” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 228). Interestingly, whereas the movie clearly makes a self-reflexive mockery of Project Mayhem in
the context of the first danger (macrofascism), the aspects of Fight Club that do not resonate in Project Mayhem (that is, its microfascist aspects) escape its ironic
perspective. It seems as if the movie assumes that power predominantly pertains to molar lines. But lines of flight are not exempted from power
relations, and there is a microfascism in Fight Club that cannot be confined to Project Mayhem . It is in this context remarkable that Fight
Club operates as a deterritorialized line of flight, as a war machine that is violently opposed to the state ; its members are not merely the
Oedipalized paranoiacs of the capitalist state order. Its microfascism can be understood best as a transgressive delirium. “ What makes fascism dangerous is
itsmolecular or micropolitical power, for it is a mass movement”, a proliferation of molecular interactions, “skipping from point to point, before beginning to
resonate together in the National Socialist State” (Deleuze&Guattari 1987: 214-5). If Project Mayhem is the ridiculous Nazi-type organization with
unreflexive skinheads who just repeat Tyler’s orders, Fight Club is the molecular face of fascism. The third danger: a line of flight can lose its
creative potentials and become a line of death. This is precisely what happens in Fight Club: “the line of flight crossing the wall, getting out of
the black holes, but instead of connecting with other lines and each time augmenting its valence, turning to destruction, abolition pure and simple, the passion for
abolition” (1987: 229). In fact, fascism is the result of an intense line of flight that becomes a line of death, wanting self-destruction and
“death through the death of others” (Ibid. 230). A line of flight that desires its own repression. The point at which escape becomes a line of death is the
point at which war(destruction) becomes the main object of the war machinerather than its supplement. Fight Club, transforming into Project
Mayhem, becomes an instrument of pure destruction and violence, of complete destratification, a war machine that has war as its object. In other words,
the regression to the undifferentiated or complete disorganization is asdangereous as transcendence and organization. Tyler , the alluring
and charismatic, the freewheeling pervert of Fight Club, is as dangerous as society. If there are two dangers, the strata and complete
destratification, suicide, Fight Club fights only the first. Therefore a relevant question, never asked by microfascists, is whether it is not
“necessary to retain a minimum of strata, a minimum of forms and functions, a minimal subject from which to extract materials, affects, and assemblages”
(Deleuze&Guattari 1987: 270). The test of desire is not denouncing false desires but distinguishing between that which pertains to the strata ,
complete destratification, and that which pertains to line of flight, a test, which Fight Club doesnot pass (Ibid. 165). Let’s qualify this point by
investigating the way the logic of the cut works in the film.
They reinscribe the binary distinctions they critique - turns the case creating new stratifications
Locke 11 (T Austin Locke, writer for plurality press, 2011 "The Romanticism of Deleuze and Guattari http://pluralitypress.info/taustinlocke/the-romanticism-of-deleuze-and-guattari/)
Further to this observation it may be considered that the mode of thought developed by Deleuze and Guattari is in fact a
romanticised, creative and poetic form of structuralism. Whilst their ontology may not simply invert the nature-culture dichotomy,
it does constitute a new system of understanding, a mode of thought imposed upon reality. It can even be suggested that the
conceptual framework laid down by Deleuze and Guattari is infact based upon alternate dichotomies or binary distinctions;
re/deterritorialization, “the ontological opposition between being and becoming” (Žižek 2004:9) or “the Virtual and the
Actual” (ibid: 4) could be cited as a demonstration of a mode of thought based upon dualities. ¶ Whilst there are two complementary
concepts throughout the works of Deleuze and Guattari, they do not constitute binary oppositions, at least in the structuralist
sense. Structuralism and post-structuralism are both products of a certain strain of philosophy, a particular history of thought; they
were formed from “the Western episteme” (Foucault 2002: 401), although one may locate many alternate influences such as Taoism.
Deleuze and Guattari, like Lévi-Strauss and Aristotle before them, are seeking to understand reality, existence, the basis of human
activity, the formation of knowledge. Despite these similarities, these concepts constructed, there remain some major differences
between the structuralist and post-structuralist perspectives, when these differences are highlighted it can be shown that Deleuze and
Guattari should not be considered romantics in the romanticist sense, but they can perhaps be considered creative romantics. ¶
Structuralism creates an arborescent schema, singularities are placed within a systemic organization whereby the differential
relations and functions of each are defined on the basis of their relation to one another. The difference of a point within the
schema holds meaning only in relation to another; the cooked opposes the raw (Lévi-Strauss 1983), nature opposes culture,
male opposes female. Further, beyond general categories, each singularity becomes defined in relation to its arborescent
organisation to other singularities or general categories; “Structure is defined… by the nature of certain atomic elements which
claim to account both for the formation of wholes and for the variation of their parts” (Deleuze 2004: 173). This order effectively
creates a grid of similarity and difference upon which each point may be plotted, the cooked is defined as the negation of the
raw, its meaning only holds in relation to another point within the schema. Each point within the structure is defined on its
difference, or similarity, to another point; similarity and difference fall in on one another becoming the same notion. Similarity is
merely defined as a lack of difference and difference as a lack of similarity. ¶ The relationship between singularities and multiplicities
are considered in terms of a Hegelian, Platonic or Peripatetic separation between the general and the particular. The ‘free-market’
becomes a general structure from which the individual free-markets are born. Such a separation develops a totality; it implies there is
a structurally definable ideal type from which other free markets are derived. The particular is only definable in relation to the
general, each individual instance possess characteristics of a universal general category. To take a minor example: a cat is defined
first as an animal, it possesses characteristics of the general category animal, some but not all; next it is defined as a vertebrate, again
it possesses certain characteristics of an ideal type, further it is defined as a mammal again possessing certain characteristics of the
category mammal, this identification goes on until it is identified as a particular breed. Such means of classification again is based on
a grid of difference and similarity defined by general categories. In short, structuralism only provides relational definitions
obtained from a particular plane of immanence; difference and similarity are one and the same in structuralism, particular
singularities and multiplicities become defined in relation to general essences which are in turn structurally constituted. Within
the structuralist plane of immanence points within the arborescent organisation only have meaning through relation to one another or
to an immutable universal category.
Pragmatism Good
Politics should be an engagement with the pragmatic and historical - means you hold them to a high
standard on their psychoanalytic claims
Miller 03 (Christopher L. Miller, Yale University, 2003 "We Shouldn't Judge Deleuze and Guattari": A Response to Eugene
Holland Research in African Literatures, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Autumn,), pp. 129-141 http://www.jstor.org/stable/3821254)
Holland is unwilling to avow?he is in fact in headlong flight away from?the central contradiction of nomadology and of the Deleuze movement as a whole. On the one
hand Deleuzians claim to have left human- ism and anthropocentrism entirelybehind. As Holland put it in an earlier article: in A Thousand Plateaus, "the last traces of
humanism and anthropocentrism have disappeared" (HD 59; emphasis added). On the other hand, readers can see the indelible imprint of
anthropocentrism and humanism on Deleuze and Guattari's own work. As I will argue below, Deleuzians sometimes contradict
their own claim of complete detachment from the real and the actual.¶ The claim to have left the real, humanism, and anthropocentrism
behind is precisely what I called into question in my essay; it is a claim that (still) does not bear much examination. Holland now wants to hide what he¶ actually
promoted in his earlier work on A Thousand Plateaus: what he called the "remarkable contributions" of that book to a variety of fields including ¶ "comparative
anthropology" (H2 64). That statement is meaningless as anything less than an endorsement of the value of the representational, -¶ referential (or supposedly pseudo representational, pseudo -referential) state ments made in A Thousand Plateaus about nomads, Africans, Asians, women, ¶ sorcerers, and yes, Guinea and New Guinea.
Absent some (implausible)¶ redefinition of comparative anthropology as "non-referential," which Hol?¶ land has not proposed, that unguarded statement gives the
show away. As I¶ said in my essay, Deleuze and Guattari in fact could have abandoned the real ¶ and the representational, but they chose not to. They insisted on
"contact¶ with the real"?in what I call their referential tease. So they went to the¶ library in order to populate their works with nomads, "Negres," Indians, ¶ Chinese,
leopard-men, women, and wolves?"primitives" in their estima- tion, things they love! That choice has consequences which Holland does¶ not want to face. But to
ignore those consequences, which were the subject of my essay, would be wrong. Mokhtar Ghambou's new work, which I will discuss below, makes this clear in a
broader frame.¶ It is in the name of philosophy that Holland frames his defense of¶ A Thousand Plateaus: Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy is "the very process¶ of
creative concept-construction" (H 164); therefore "we shouldn't judge Deleuze and Guattari on the 'accuracy' of their concept of nomads" (H¶ 164) .7Philosophy, in this
view, is creative and non- or self-referential; Hol?¶ land quotes Deleuze's What is PhilosophyV."[T]he [philosophical] concept [...] has no reference; itisselfreferentiaVH*olland himself states: "The pur?¶ pose of philosophy is not to represent the world [...]" (H163). Philosophy is the very means by which the virtual is
created and the real, the actual, and¶ the referential are left behind. Science, on the other hand, is referential. Holland writes: "Deleuze and Guattari are categorical:
'Nowhere do we claim for our concepts the title of science [. . .]'" (H 163). ¶ But the problem is more complicated than a simple opposition
between philosophy and science. If this binary opposition were the full extent of Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy?even
from their own standpoint, even from the standpoint of Deleuze's philosophy as a whole, philosophy would simply be
transcendental, having no connection to the real world. But that is clearly not what Deleuze and Guattari (and Holland) claim.
No, they want it both ways: for example, "To propose a 'pure idea' of nomads mixed with 'actual' information" (M 198). The Deleuzian framework
stipulates a condition of some-detachment between the virtual and the real. This can be seen in Deleuze and Guattari's works, in Holland's
essay, and in works by other Deleuzians. Holland, for example, states that concepts (which are virtual, philosophical) are derived from" the real and the historical, but
through a process other than representation (H 164). There are, Hol? land writes, "numerous points of 'contact with the real'" (H 164) .9 Paul Patton, in his book
Deleuze and thePolitical, initially asserts that Deleuze and Guattari's "work"?without qualification, their entire oeuvre "is couched entirelyinnon-subjectivist terms and
efers only to abstract lines, movements and processes of various kinds" (3); yet several pages later he partially reat- taches their work to reality: "The idea that
philosophy creates concepts that are inseparable from a form of lifeand mode of activity points to a constant dimension of Deleuze's conception of thought and
philosophy. It implies that the test of these concepts is ultimately pragmatic: in the end, their value is determined by the uses to
which they can be put, outside as well as within philosophy"10 So, in the Deleuzian universe, the "derivation" of the
philosophical and the virtual from the real and the historical, and the continuation of contact between the two, will come
and go. Now you see it, now you don't.11
Queer Ecology/Queer Theory
General
Alt Fails
Queer theory is an inaccessible discipline excluding the everyday queer body.
Smith 2008 (Ralph, professor of Department of Communication Missouri State University, Queer Theory, Gay Movements, and
Political Communication)
In the view of some critics, queer theory has produced a series of adverse effects on gay politics, redirecting attention from the materiality of actual social conditions to
language, from the disruption of bodies through violence to the disruption of homophobic performance. The claim is made that interest is drawn away from perennial
questions in gay politics which truly matter, e.g., assimilation v. minority group, insider politics v. confrontation, and contention over issue selection, to questions
which have only rarely been asked. More specifically, queer theory erases gay identity, thereby weakening social justice and civil rights movements, creating a sense of
futility about achieving amelioration of conditions for sexual minorities and strengthening the sense of division already endemic among gay advocates. In the view
of some critics, queer theory enhances misunderstanding between the ivory tower and the street, between academics, who
should be among the spokespersons for gay interests, and gay activists and their constituencies. Queer theory is also faulted for failing to
recognize that politics is a part of culture, even popular culture, just as much as performance art and sit-coms. Finally, by its emphasis on individualism and on the
creation of self through consumption practices, queer theory drains the pool of those who might become committed to achieving a common good.¶ Among the ways in
which queer theory could be amended and extended to make it more useful for communication of political issues and programs is greater concern with the material
world and with a politics which entails real causes and risks. This would involve recognition that diversity includes uneven progress ( by geographical location and
local culture) in consciousnesses, audiences, and issues. Such a move would emphasize the necessity for adapting messages to individuals who are barely modern, let
alone postmodern. More attention might be paid to close scrutiny of an historical record which, in its specifics, could reveal an empowering historical and cultural
continuity in gay/lesbian communities.¶ Modification of approach should also include attending to gay political identity as a counterpart to attacking homophobic
regimes of regulation, concentrating on building project identities no less than identities of resistance. Because of the work of queer theorists, such an identity may well
be more inclusive, i.e., less well patrolled in order to maintain impermeable boundaries. Queer politics, at its best, would be intersectional in the sense that it organizes
around multiple identities.¶ There is strong need to translate central ideas of queer theory into a language which can be understood
by intelligent and experienced people outside the academy who have not enjoyed years of leisure to study Lacan and Foucault.
Such translative efforts might well be useful substitutes for yet more obscure expositions of works already impenetrable.
Underlying such efforts to reach beyond the characteristic subject matter and style of queer theory might be a reduction of
the high level of dogmatism which now characterizes all sides in the debate over queer theory.
Queer thought accomplishes nothing. It spends its whole time name-dropping and examining ad nausea
the minutia of grammar it cannot produce true change for the very material suffering of Gay, Lesbian,
Bisexual and Transgender bodies in the world.
Smith 2008 (Ralph, professor of Department of Communication Missouri State University, Queer Theory, Gay Movements, and
Political Communication)
Because of its recent academic high profile, queer theory has been subjected to extensive criticism. Included in these criticisms is that queer
theorists, in their
radical nominalism, ignore the material world of actual persons and relationships, preferring instead to focus on grammatical
and semantic analysis of texts and on conditions of reception-consumption, thereby drawing attention away from economic
inequity and actual relations of exploitation. Critics charge, moreover, that, despite or because of its historicism, queer theory
transforms changes in fashion into major shifts in epistemology, thereby obscuring continuity in human experience across
time and cultures, thus denying gay men and lesbians the benefit of a history and a universality arguably well grounded in
reality. Further, by ignoring politics for other aspects of culture, queer theorists may elevate cross-dressing heavy metal
performances, for example, to the same importance as Supreme Court decisions. Queer theory is also criticized for avoiding the reality of
core identities by transforming them into mere subjectivities, thereby departing from human experience and intuition.¶ Presentation of queer theory, so
another indictment runs, is incestuous in citation, dogmatic in thought, and impenetrable in style and vocabulary. Canonical
texts of queer studies by Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, Butler, and Sedgwick are repetitively redescribed with increasing
obscurity not required for works already remarkably obscure. Major lacunae in thought are papered over by repetitive
assertion of formulary phrases advanced as dogma. Incredibly convoluted sentences are often studded with recondite words,
neologisms, and familiar words used unfamiliarly.
Queer theory fails to escape the heteronormative nation-state
Smith 2010, teaches in media and cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside
Andrea; teaches in media and cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside. Queer Theory and Native Studies 16.1-2
The question arises, then, why is settler colonialism so seriously undertheorized in queer studies, even within queer of color critique? One possibility may be that [End
Page 58] queer studies has not considered the possibility of alternative forms of nationalism that are not structured by nation-states. To be fair, queer theory does offer
strong critiques of the heteronormativity of the nation-state as well as the heteronormativity of the citizen, particularly the U.S. citizen. Puar's and Gopinath's work
demonstrates how the noncitizen, particularly in the figure of the refugee or the immigrant, queers the state's heteronormativity . Berlant also
looks at how queer activist groups within the United States attempt to reconfigure citizenship within the current nation-state and even to
question the "censoring imaginary of the state." 66 Muñoz similarly gestures to "beyond" the current political system when he says, "Our charge as
spectators and actors is to continue disidentifying with this world until we achieve new ones." 67 Thus, queer theorists seem to exhibit some desire to think beyond the
nation-state. At the same time, queer theory seems to lapse back into presuming the givenness of the nation-state in general, and the
United States in particular. For instance, Berlant contends: "It must be emphasized . . . that disidentification with U.S. nationality is not, at
this moment, even a theoretical option for queer citizens. . . . We are compelled, then, to read America's lips. What can we do to force
the officially constituted nation to speak a new political tongue?" 68 This statement curiously occludes the struggles of many
indigenous peoples who have articulated themselves as belonging to sovereign nations rather than as being U.S. citizens. The reason for
this occlusion can be found in another statement: Berlant contends that Native peoples "have long experienced simultaneously the wish to be full citizens and the
violence of their partial citizenship."69 She collapses Native peoples into the category of racial minority rather than recognize them as colonized peoples struggling
against a settler state.
A2: Root Cause
There is no scientific basis for queerness within nature
Garrard Professor of English @ Bath Spa University 2010 (Greg, “How Queer is Green” , Configurations, Volume 18, Numbers 1-2, Winter 2010, pp. 7396 DS)
Encouraging though it is that leading humanities scholars are ¶ beginning to engage with contemporary science, it must be said ¶ that cultural
critics have not
been well prepared by four decades ¶ of theoretical argument to interpret biological results fairly, care-fully, and accurately.
There are already in the “new materialism”¶ 30¶ and queer ecology signs of the priority of argument over evidence ¶ and the
habit of discounting or simply ignoring alternative hypoth-eses, which have characterized the biophobic strands of theoretical inquiry heretofore and deepened the lamentable abyss between the two cultures.¶ 31¶ So whereas Roughgarden’s Evolution’s Rainbow¶ (which is exceptionally
tendentious by scientific standards) gives ¶ some sound evidence for her attack on Darwinian sexual selection ¶ and admits the force of its central argument, Judith
Halberstam’s ¶ critique of the popular (and powerfully heteronormative) film March ¶ of the Penguinshas this to say about the representation of nonrepro-ductive
birds:¶ [They] are not merely extras in the drama of hetero-reproduction: in fact, the ¶ homo or non-repro queer penguins are totally necessary to the temporary reproductive unit! They provide warmth in the huddle, probably extra food, and ¶ they do not leave for warmer climes but they accept a part in the penguin col-lective in
order to enable reproduction and to survive. Survival, indeed, in this ¶ penguin world, has little to do with fitness and everything to do with collec-tive will. . . . The
long march of the penguins then is neither proof of hetero-sexuality in nature, the reproductive imperative nor evidence of intelligent ¶ design. It is, in fact, a resolutely
animal narrative about cooperation, affiliation ¶ and the anachronism of the homo-hetero divide.¶ 32¶ It would not, in fact, run counter to ordinary
Darwinian reason-ing for penguins to cooperate, although one would expect it to oc-cur either if they were closely genetically
related or a highly social ¶ species with sanctions for noncooperators.¶ 33¶ But such reasoning ¶ would have to provide evidence
for selfless “providing” of warmth ¶ and “acceptance” of a nonreproductive role. No biologist would ¶ see penguin survival as
evidence of intelligent design anyway, nor, ¶ conversely, would they be able to make any sense of the claim that ¶ heterosexuality in nature or the
reproductive imperative stood in ¶ any need of proof whatsoever. There seem to be, as exhibit B (rocky ¶ mountain sheep) suggests above, numerous examples of
homosexu-ality in animals (though gay sheep are not uncontroversial among ¶ biologists), but penguins may not exhibit it in the wild, nor does ¶
Halberstam bother to provide a citation to back up her remarkable ¶ equation of “nonreproductive” and “homo” penguins.
Enviro DA
Queer Ecology threatens the premise of both conservation politics and biodiversity and destroys the
meaning of anthropogenic extinction
Garrard Professor of English @ Bath Spa University 2010 (Greg, “How Queer is Green” , Configurations, Volume 18, Numbers 1-2, Winter 2010, pp. 7396 DS)
The most serious problem, though, is that queer
ecology is con-spicuously threatening to conservation politics. In the United ¶ States, the
species is, rightly, the taxonomic level protected by the ¶ Endangered Species Act, which is why there have been both com-plex scientific and
legal arguments in particular cases and vitupera-tive criticism of the act from the American Right. As Sterelny and ¶ Griffiths observe, “species have a very
important role in biology ¶ as ‘score-keeping devices,’ as indices of the effects of evolutionary ¶ and ecological processes.”¶ 65¶
The notion of biodiversity would lose ¶ all its considerable rhetorical force, as would the very meaning of ¶ an anthropogenic
“extinction event,” were the queer subversion of ¶ the species concept to gain currency, while the figure of interspecies ¶ geniality that
Morton proposes, the amorphous Levinasian ethical ¶ construct “the strange stranger,” would probably not stand up to ¶ cross-examination by oil and logging company
lawyers. ¶ Where clear conflicts occur, the queer commitment to transgres-sion seems to outweigh concerns about conservation, as, for
exam-ple, in the case of intersex animals thought to be affected by estro-genic pollution. Roughgarden states that “[a]lthough a recent report ¶ on intersexes among
cetaceans raises the spectre of pollution caus-ing genital deformity, the early reports on intersexes predate danger-ous levels of pollution. Perhaps cetaceans are on their
evolutionary ¶ way to the state that hermaphrodite fish have already attained.
Deconstructing the Nature/Human divide prevents us from defending the enviro
Nordhaus and Shellenberger 2004 (Michael, cofounder of Breakthrough Institute. and Ted, cofounder of Breakthrough
Institute., The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World, 2004; pg. 12-13)
Not everyone agrees. “We need to remember that we’re the environmental movement and that our job is to protect the
environment,” said the Sierra Club’s Global Warming Director, Dan Becker. “If we stray from that, we risk losing our focus, and there’s no
one else to protect the environment if we don’t do it. We’re not a union or the Labor Department. Our job is to protect the environment, not to create
an industrial policy for the United States. That doesn’t mean we don’t care about protecting workers.” Most environmentalists don’t think of “the
environment” as a mental category at all — they think of it as a real “thing” to be protected and defended. They think of
themselves, literally, as representatives and defenders of this thing. Environmentalists do their work as though these are literal rather than
figurative truths. They tend to see language in general as representative rather than constitutive of reality. This is typical of liberals who are, at their core, children of
the enlightenment who believe that they arrived at their identity and politics through a rational and considered process. They expect others in politics should do the
same and are constantly surprised and disappointed when they don’t. The effect of this orientation is a certain literal-sclerosis2 — the belief that social change happens
only when people speak a literal “truth to power.” Literal-sclerosis can be seen in the assumption that to win action on global warming one must talk about global
warming instead of, say, the economy, industrial policy, or health care. “If you want people to act on global warming ” stressed Becker, “you need to
convince them that action is needed on global warming and not on some ulterior goal.”
Gay Rights DA
Queer Ecology only hurts Gay Politics by ignoring the main issues at hand.
Smith 2008 (Ralph, professor of Department of Communication Missouri State University, Queer Theory, Gay Movements, and
Political Communication)
In the view of some critics, queer theory has produced a series of adverse effects on gay politics, redirecting attention from the
materiality of actual social conditions to language, from the disruption of bodies through violence to the disruption of
homophobic performance. The claim is made that interest is drawn away from perennial questions in gay politics which truly
matter, e.g., assimilation v. minority group, insider politics v. confrontation, and contention over issue selection , to questions which
have only rarely been asked. More specifically, queer theory erases gay identity, thereby weakening social justice and civil rights
movements, creating a sense of futility about achieving amelioration of conditions for sexual minorities and strengthening the
sense of division already endemic among gay advocates. In the view of some critics, queer theory enhances misunderstanding
between the ivory tower and the street, between academics, who should be among the spokespersons for gay interests, and gay
activists and their constituencies. Queer theory is also faulted for failing to recognize that politics is a part of culture, even popular culture, just as much as
performance art and sit-coms. Finally, by its emphasis on individualism and on the creation of self through consumption practices, queer theory drains the pool of those
who might become committed to achieving a common good.
Queering is disadvantageous to queers. Queering thrives on blurring boundaries and being
unpredictable while challenging cultural norms. In terms of a relationship it would make many people
insecure. It would also disadvantage them socially.
Elia, Professor @ San Francisco University, 2003. (John, Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 45, no. 2/3/4, pp. 80-81)
At a very practical level, it could be extraordinarily difficult, if not downright disadvantageous, to be in a queer
relationship. Queer thrives on blurring boundaries, being uncontained and unpredictable, and, at the same time,
challenging dominant cultural norms regarding romantic and sexual relationships. This is quite a challenge. Another thing
to consider is that a queer relationship would necessarily lack the “security” and “anchor” that are features of so many
relationships. For some individuals, such a relationship construction would constantly keep them “on edge” and insecure.
Such a radical departure from the usual, mainstream relationship construction could potentially disadvantage queers
socially in terms of reputation, job security, custody rights of children, material benefits that are usually afforded to those
in normalized relationships, and so on.
Queer theory is an inaccessible discipline excluding the everyday queer body.
Smith 2008 (Ralph, professor of Department of Communication Missouri State University, Queer Theory, Gay Movements, and
Political Communication)
In the view of some critics, queer theory has produced a series of adverse effects on gay politics, redirecting attention from the materiality of actual social conditions to
language, from the disruption of bodies through violence to the disruption of homophobic performance. The claim is made that interest is drawn away from perennial
questions in gay politics which truly matter, e.g., assimilation v. minority group, insider politics v. confrontation, and contention over issue selection, to questions
which have only rarely been asked. More specifically, queer theory erases gay identity, thereby weakening social justice and civil rights movements, creating a sense of
futility about achieving amelioration of conditions for sexual minorities and strengthening the sense of division already endemic among gay advocates. In the view
of some critics, queer theory enhances misunderstanding between the ivory tower and the street, between academics, who
should be among the spokespersons for gay interests, and gay activists and their constituencies. Queer theory is also faulted for failing to
recognize that politics is a part of culture, even popular culture, just as much as performance art and sit-coms. Finally, by its emphasis on individualism and on the
creation of self through consumption practices, queer theory drains the pool of those who might become committed to achieving a common good.¶ Among the ways in
which queer theory could be amended and extended to make it more useful for communication of political issues and programs is greater concern with the material
world and with a politics which entails real causes and risks. This would involve recognition that diversity includes uneven progress ( by geographical location and
local culture) in consciousnesses, audiences, and issues. Such a move would emphasize the necessity for adapting messages to individuals who are barely modern, let
alone postmodern. More attention might be paid to close scrutiny of an historical record which, in its specifics, could reveal an empowering historical and cultural
continuity in gay/lesbian communities.¶ Modification of approach should also include attending to gay political identity as a counterpart to attacking homophobic
regimes of regulation, concentrating on building project identities no less than identities of resistance. Because of the work of queer theorists, such an identity may well
be more inclusive, i.e., less well patrolled in order to maintain impermeable boundaries. Queer politics, at its best, would be intersectional in the sense that it organizes
around multiple identities.¶ There is strong need to translate central ideas of queer theory into a language which can be understood
by intelligent and experienced people outside the academy who have not enjoyed years of leisure to study Lacan and Foucault.
Such translative efforts might well be useful substitutes for yet more obscure expositions of works already impenetrable.
Underlying such efforts to reach beyond the characteristic subject matter and style of queer theory might be a reduction of
the high level of dogmatism which now characterizes all sides in the debate over queer theory.
Racism DA
Queer Ecology is a racist movement. Until it involves the non-white queer body it will never be effective.
Gaard 2011 (Greta, professor of English at University of Wisconsin-River Falls and a community faculty member in Women's
Studies at Metropolitan State University, Twin Cities, Green, Pink, and Lavender: Banishing Ecophobia through Queer Ecologies,
Ethics & the Environment, Volume 16, Number 2, Fall 2011, pp. 115-126)
Among them, perhaps one of the most important questions is how¶ ecoqueer theory will develop once it moves beyond this initial collective¶ articulation from
primarily Anglo-American scholars. As Andil Gosine’s¶ essay pointedly asks, “is the production of ‘queer ecology’ a decidedly
Euroamerican¶ project?” and “is the privileging of Euroamerican stories of environmentalism—¶ even for the purpose of
critical examination—complicit¶ with the agendas of empire, and American imperialism in particular?” ¶ (166). Instead of
separating “the queer subject from the racialized-as-nonwhite¶ subject” and effectively “disappearing the non-white queer,”
as well¶ as the diasporic subject, Gosine suggests “a special focus on the constitution ¶ of the non-white queer subject...[as] a
more insightful project of¶ queer ecology” (167). As the first book-length volume to establish the¶ intersections of queer theory and environmentalisms at
such depth, the¶ publication of Queer Ecologies has decisively created a rich field for further¶ research. May the Lesbian Rangers be our guides!
Queer theory alone is reinstates a white supremacist settler colonialism.
Smith 10 (Andrea Smith, Andrea Smith is a co-founder of INCITE! and is a feminist and anti-violence activist, specifically
focusing on Native American women, writing in Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, “Queer Theory and Native Studies The
Heteronormativity of Settler Colonialism” GLQ 16:1–2, pp 42-68, DOI 10.1215/10642684-2009-0122) sbb
At the same time, Native studies can build on queer of color critique’s engagement with subjectless critique . In the move to
“postidentity,” queer theory often reinstantiates a white supremacist , settler colonialism by appropriating colonized
indigenous peoples as foils for the emergence of postcolonial, postmodern, diasporic, and queer subjects . Thus, in making these
intellectual projects intersect, perhaps we can speak more of an “identity plus” politics . That is, we may need a politic that marks all
identities and their relationship to the fields of power in which they are imbricated. As Butler states: “If the notion of the subject, for instance, is no longer given, no
longer presumed, that does not mean that it has no meaning for us, that it ought no longer to be uttered. On the contrary, it means only that the term is not simply a
building block on which we rely, an uninterrogated premise for political argument. On the contrary, the term has become an object of theoretical attention, something
for which we are compelled to give an account.”79 With respect to Native studies, even queer of color critique does not necessarily mark how
identities are shaped by settler colonialism. Thus, as Chris Finley notes, a conversation between Native studies and queer theory is
important not just because Native peoples “are sexy” (although that is certainly true) but because the logics of settler colonialism and
decolonization must be queered in order properly to speak to the genocidal present that not only continues to disappear
indigenous peoples but reinforces the structures of white supremacy, settler colonialism, and heteropatriarchy that affect all
peoples.
Within queer communities, affluent white gays and lesbians have been dominant in relation to GLBT
people of color and experience greater social privileges outside of the gay community.
Ryan 07, PhD, University of Florida, Maura, "Queer Internal Colonialism: Aiding Conquest Through Borderless Discourse" Paper
presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, TBA, New York, New York City Online <PDF>. 201006-04 from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p183033_index.html
In a queer context, the first criteria might be rephrased to say that queer
internal colonialism includes a voluntary relationship between the
dominant and subordinate group via entrance into the queer community, but where the dominant group members assert
themselves as the representatives of the community and where subordinate group members cannot successfully make
their needs visible to dominant group members or members outside the group. The second criteria might be paralleled to
the white queer erasure, if not the destruction, of the specific needs of queer people of color. Finally, racism, both in overt and
covert manifestations, is woefully present in the queer community. Certainly, for white queer people to be a “dominant group,” they would
need to be a group that enjoyed the rights of full citizenship participation, which they do not. However, within gay
enclaves, gay and lesbian organizations, and national positioning of GLBT rights issues, affluent white gays and lesbians
have been dominant in relation to GLBT people of color and experience greater social privileges outside of the gay
community. Because of external forces of institutionalized discrimination outside the gay community, white gays are able
to marginalize queers of color within gay communities and through a racist discourse that attempts to legitimize affluent
white gays as normal citizens, it reifies the larger U.S. internal colonialism of people of color in a more general fashion.
Social Justice DA
Queer theory hurts social justice politics
Smith 2008 (Ralph, professor of Department of Communication Missouri State University, Queer Theory, Gay Movements, and
Political Communication)
In the view of some critics, queer theory has produced a series of adverse effects on gay politics, redirecting attention from the
materiality of actual social conditions to language, from the disruption of bodies through violence to the disruption of
homophobic performance. The claim is made that interest is drawn away from perennial questions in gay politics which truly
matter, e.g., assimilation v. minority group, insider politics v. confrontation, and contention over issue selection , to questions which
have only rarely been asked. More specifically, queer theory erases gay identity, thereby weakening social justice and civil rights
movements, creating a sense of futility about achieving amelioration of conditions for sexual minorities and strengthening the
sense of division already endemic among gay advocates. In the view of some critics, queer theory enhances misunderstanding
between the ivory tower and the street, between academics, who should be among the spokespersons for gay interests, and gay
activists and their constituencies. Queer theory is also faulted for failing to recognize that politics is a part of culture, even popular culture, just as much as
performance art and sit-coms. Finally, by its emphasis on individualism and on the creation of self through consumption practices, queer theory drains the pool of those
who might become committed to achieving a common good.
Aff Only
Perm (Prag)
A strategy combining environmental pragmatism and cultural and moral criticism is the most effective
approach
Jenkins 11 assistant professor of social ethics @ Yale 2011 (Willis. “Environmental Pragmatism, Adaptive Management, and
Cultural Reform” , Ethics & the Environment, Volume 16, Number 1, Spring 2011, pp. 51-74 DS)
Environmental pragmatists tend to disdain cosmological approaches ¶ because they seem to abstract from actual problems and tend to ignore ¶
marginal protest communities because they seem to impede agreement on ¶ policy directions. Pragmatists acknowledge cosmological theories as part ¶ of moral culture,
but criticize the theorists cultivating and enacting them. ¶ While agreeing that some of the pragmatist criticism is warranted, I argue ¶ that a pragmatic strategy
needs the inventive work of moral innovators in ¶ order to address the sort of sustainability problems that outstrip current ¶
cultural competencies. ¶ For addressing sustainability problems, a pragmatic strategy may at ¶ times rely on agents pursuing
cosmological strategies because it needs the ¶ facility for cultural reform that a cosmological strategy cultivates as its objective. Complex eco-social threats such as climate change or biodiversity ¶ loss become intelligible problems susceptible of
management only through ¶ new cultural ideas capable of interpreting them. Cosmological strategies ¶ center around ideological inventions
that summon cultures to reinterpret ¶ their context and their problems. Their work makes a pragmatic strat-egy possible for the “wicked
problems” that would otherwise frustrate ¶ adaptive management frameworks constrained to the moral mainstream ¶ of
available cultural values. For the most important and complex ecologi-cal problems, therefore, a pragmatic ethic of adaptive management must
¶ incorporate facilities of a cosmological ethic of cultural reform. If it can, ¶ a pragmatic strategy could then argue that
environmental ethics should ¶ begin from problem-solving efforts, not only when the problems have ob-vious policy solutions
to which ethics might rally shared moral resources, ¶ but also when they do not, thereby challenging moral cultures to invent ¶
new possibilities of understanding and acting.
Solving problems within nature generates a better relation to nature and culture
Jenkins assistant professor of social ethics @ Yale 2011 (Willis. “Environmental Pragmatism, Adaptive Management, and Cultural
Reform” , Ethics & the Environment, Volume 16, Number 1, Spring 2011, pp.
51-74 DS)
The pragmatists offer a third, more interesting way of answering criti-cism that their strategy cannot generate ethical reform:
sometimes they ¶ suggest that the exercise of solving problems itself generates better rela-tions of nature and culture. Perhaps
the exercise of confronting problems ¶ cultivates environmental responsibility. Norton provides the most robust ¶ account of this
claim by presenting adaptive management as a process ¶ that generates both the descriptions and values needed to continue resolv-ing
problems: “the epistemology of adaptive management thus provides ¶ for gradual progress and improvement of both our
belief system and our ¶ preferences and values, by using experience to triangulate between tem-porarily accepted beliefs and
values” (2005, 151). Perhaps the political ¶ process of managing ecological problems can also function as a process ¶ of social
learning, wherein agents come to more reliably understand how ¶ humans do and should participate in ecological systems. If
so, then the ¶ process of confronting ecological problems can generate the cultural re-form needed for eventually successful
resolutions. .
Perm (Coalitions)
There is potential in the discourse of Nature which should not be simply abandoned. The perm can be an
opportunity for coalition building
Hogan.2010. Chair: Women's Studies Program Professor, English PhD: Rutgers University, New Brunswick.Katie.2010.Undoing
Nature: Coalition Building as Queer Environmentalism. Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire. Edited by MortimerSandilands and Erikson. Pp 230-253.SC
Queer ecocritique shares in these scholars’ determined skepticism about discourses of nature and environmentalism, not because
queers are innately urban and “hate” nature or environmentalism, or because nature and environmentalism are “naturally” oppressive to queers, but because queer
theories are designed to challenge the assumption that nature and the natural are neutral, independent categories exempt from critical challenge. Queer ecocritique takes
the alleged “against nature-ness” of queers as the focus of its work. Whether formally recognized or not, a queer ecocritique is a powerful contribution to ecocriticism
and environmental justice theory and activism; it keeps the focus on how the seemingly innocent realm of nature and ecological protection is potentially rife with
ideology and violence. Queer ecocriticism relentlessly uncovers nature as, to quote again from Quigley, “a weapon of oppression,” thus
offering a critical practice from which to build theoretical partnerships and multi- issue political actions (1999, 202). Quigley
sees this oppressive aspect right alongside an activist potential too when he writes that nature is also “a place to gather
strength against the forces of domination” (201–202). In other words, nature is an opportunity to build theoretical overlaps and an
opportunity for activist coalitions among seemingly disparate groups and communities.
Perm (Affirm Queerness)
Queering means breaking down the binary frames of reference and moving beyond the either/or stance
that competition creates. Combine the Kritik with the affirmative to create realistic change while
affirming queerness.
Ronald 04, (Lee, MA in Gender Studies from the University of Leeds “ Reading as Act of Queer Love: The Role of Intimacy in
the “Readerly” Contract” Journal of International Women’s Studies, 5.2,)
Although it may be useful to debate the notion of a queer reader and the problems inherent in this identification, I wish to instead to concentrate upon the
possibility of using ‘queering’ itself as an active strategy for rethinking and reordering readerly possibility; here, it becomes an activity that allows us
to rethink binary frames of reference. I propose that this strategy manifests mainly through the reader/text encounter where
re-imagining this encounter is one method of moving beyond an oppositional either/or stance. Through the activity of
‘queering’, the reader/text encounter could be reinvented, made strange and its conventional framework undermined. By
this I mean by concentrating upon reconfiguration of the oppositional stance, reader/text, re-imagining it as a different sort
of relationship, one less competitive and tense, instead more inclusive and mutual. Here, a queer charge may also be detected in an
awareness of how confidently we label what an encounter between may involve. Such a concentration upon the relationship (or rather the
relationship potential) of reader/text, and its openness to being ‘queered’ also operates to foreground the nature of desire in all
textual liaisons. Simultaneously, rethinking relationships “between” may also lead us to emphasise the position and possibility of the “other”. Perhaps it is
this queer approach that may most effectively be mined for a new readerly discourse regarding difference?
Afro-Pessimism
General Defense
State Good/Redeemable
State institutions inevitable – our education is valuable teaches us to direct that opposition to those levers
of power
Lawrence Grossburg, University of Illinois, We Gotta Get Outta This Place, 1992, p. 391-393
The Left needs institutions which can operate within the systems of governance, understanding that such institutions are
the mediating structures by which power is actively realized. It is often by directing opposition against specific institutions
that power can be challenged. The Left has assumed from some time now that, since it has so little access to the apparatuses of
agency, its only alternative is to seek a public voice in the media through tactical protests. The Left does in fact need more
visibility, but it also needs greater access to the entire range of apparatuses of decision making and power. Otherwise, the
Left has nothing but its own self-righteousness. It is not individuals who have produced starvation and the other social
disgraces of our world, although it is individuals who must take responsibility for eliminating them. But to do so, they must
act within organizations, and within the system of organizations which in fact have the capacity (as well as the moral
responsibility) to fight them. Without such organizations, the only models of political commitment are self-interest and charity.
Charity suggests that we act on behalf of others who cannot act on their own behalf. But we are all precariously caught in the
circuits of global capitalism, and everyone’s position is increasingly precarious and uncertain. It will not take much to change the
position of any individual in the United States, as the experience of many of the homeless, the elderly and the “fallen” middle
class demonstrates. Nor are there any guarantees about the future of any single nation. We can imagine ourselves involved in a
politics where acting for another is always acting for oneself as well, a politics in which everyone struggles with the resources
they have to make their lives (and the world) better, since the two are so intimately tied together! For example, we need to think of
affirmation action as in everyone’s best interests, because of the possibilities it opens. We need to think with what Axelos has
described as a “planetary thought” which “would be a coherent thought—but not a rationalizing and ‘rationalist’ inflection; it
would be a fragmentary thought of the open totality—for what we can grasp are fragments unveiled on the horizon of the totality.
Such a politics will not begin by distinguishing between the local and the global (and certainly not by valorizing one over the
other) for the ways in which the former are incorporated into the latter preclude the luxury of such choices. Resistance is always
a local struggle, even when (as in parts of the ecology movement) it is imagined to connect into its global structures of
articulation: Think globally, act locally. Opposition is predicated precisely on locating the points of articulation between them,
the points at which the global becomes local, and the local opens up onto the global. Since the meaning of these terms has to be
understood in the context of any particular struggle, one is always acting both globally and locally: Think globally, act
appropriately! Fight locally because that is the scene of action, but aim for the global because that is the scene of agency. “Local
struggles directly target national and international axioms, at the precise point of their insertion into the field of immanence. This
requires the imagination and construction of forms of unity, commonality and social agency which do not deny differences.
Without such commonality, politics is too easily reduced to a question of individual rights (i.e., in the terms of classical utility
theory); difference ends up “trumping” politics, bringing it to an end. The struggle against the disciplined mobilization of
everyday life can only be built on affective commonalities, a shared “responsible yearning: a yearning out towards something
more and something better than this and this place now.” The Left, after all, is defined by its common commitment to principles of
justice, equality and democracy (although these might conflict) in economic, political and cultural life. It is based on the hope,
perhaps even the illusion, that such things are possible. The construction of an affective commonality attempts to mobilize
people in a common struggle, despite the fact that they have no common identity or character, recognizing that they are
the only force capable of providing a new historical and oppositional agency. It strives to organize minorities into a new
majority.
Reformism works and won’t entrench oppression. The State can solve and their pessimism’s too
extreme.
Omi et al 13 (Michael Omi is an American sociologist. Professor Omi is best known for developing the theory of racial formation along with Howard Winant.
Omi serves on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. Howard winant co-authored this piece. Resistance is futile?: a response to Feagin and Elias, Ethnic
and Racial Studies Volume 36, Issue 6, p. 961-973, 2013 Special Issue: Symposium - Rethinking Racial Formation Theory)
In Feagin and Elias's account, white racist rule in the USA appears unalterable and permanent . There is little sense that the ‘white racial
frame’ evoked by systemic racism theory changes in significant ways over historical time. They dismiss important rearrangements and reforms as merely ‘a distraction
from more ingrained structural oppressions and deep lying inequalities that continue to define US society’ (Feagin and Elias 2012, p.
21). Feagin and Elias use a concept they call ‘surface flexibility’ to argue that white elites frame racial realities in ways that suggest change, but are
merely engineered to reinforce the underlying structure of racial oppression. Feagin and Elias say the phrase ‘racial democracy’ is an oxymoron – a
word defined in the dictionary as a figure of speech that combines contradictory terms. If they mean the USA is a contradictory and incomplete democracy in respect to race and racism issues,
we agree. If they mean that people of colour have no democratic rights or political power in the USA, we disagree. The
USA is a racially despotic country in many ways, but in our view it
is also in many respects a racial democracy, capable of being influenced towards more or less inclusive and redistributive economic
policies, social policies, or for that matter, imperial policies. What is distinctive about our own epoch in the USA (post-Second World War to the present) with
respect to race and racism? Over the past decades there has been a steady drumbeat of efforts to contain and neutralize civil rights, to restrict racial democracy, and to maintain or even increase
racial inequality. Racial disparities in different institutional sites – employment, health, education – persist and in many cases have increased. Indeed, the post-2008 period has seen a dramatic
increase in racial inequality. The subprime home mortgage crisis, for example, was a major racial event. Black and brown people were disproportionately affected by predatory lending
practices; many lost their homes as a result; race-based wealth disparities widened tremendously. It would be easy to conclude, as Feagin and Elias do, that white racial dominance has been
continuous and unchanging throughout US history. But such a perspective misses the dramatic twists and turns in racial politics that have occurred since the Second World War and the civil
rights era. Feagin and Elias claim that we overly inflate the significance of the changes wrought by the civil rights movement, and that we ‘overlook the serious reversals of racial justice and
persistence of huge racial inequalities’ (Feagin and Elias 2012, p. 21) that followed in its wake. We do not. In Racial Formation we wrote about ‘racial reaction’ in a chapter of that name, and
elsewhere in the book as well. Feagin and Elias devote little attention to our arguments there; perhaps because they are in substantial agreement with us. While we argue that the right wing
was able to ‘rearticulate’ race and racism issues to roll back some of the gains of the civil rights movement, we also believe that there are limits to what the right could achieve in the post-civil
rights political landscape. So we agree that the present prospects for racial justice are demoralizing at best. But we do not think that is the whole story. US
racial conditions have
changed over the post-Second World War period, in ways that Feagin and Elias tend to downplay or neglect. Some of the major reforms of the 1960s
have proved irreversible; they have set powerful democratic forces in motion . These racial (trans)formations were the results of
unprecedented political mobilizations, led by the black movement, but not confined to blacks alone. Consider the desegregation
of the armed forces, as well as key civil rights movement victories of the 1960s: the Voting Rights Act, the Immigration and Naturalization Act (Hart- Celler),
as well as important court decisions like Loving v. Virginia that declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional. While we have the
greatest respect for the late Derrick Bell, we do not believe that his ‘interest convergence hypothesis’ effectively explains all
these developments. How does Lyndon Johnson's famous (and possibly apocryphal) lament upon signing the Civil Rights Act on 2 July 1964 – ‘We have lost the South for a
generation’ – count as ‘convergence’? The US racial regime has been transformed in significant ways. As Antonio Gramsci argues, hegemony proceeds through the incorporation of
opposition (Gramsci 1971, p. 182). The civil rights reforms can be seen as a classic example of this process; here the US racial regime – under movement pressure – was exercising its
hegemony. But Gramsci insists that such reforms – which he calls ‘passive revolutions’ – cannot be merely symbolic if they are to be effective: oppositions must win real gains in the process.
we are in the realm of politics, not absolute rule. So yes, we think there were important if partial victories that shifted the
racial state and transformed the significance of race in everyday life . And yes, we think that further victories can take place both on
the broad terrain of the state and on the more immediate level of social interaction: in daily interaction, in the human psyche and across civil society. Indeed we have argued
that in many ways the most important accomplishment of the anti-racist movement of the 1960s in the USA was the politicization of the social. In the USA and indeed around
Once again,
the globe, race-based movements demanded not only the inclusion of racially defined ‘others’ and the democratization of structurally racist societies, but also the recognition and validation by
both the state and civil society of racially-defined experience and identity. These demands broadened and deepened democracy itself . They facilitated not only the
democratic gains made in the USA by the black movement and its allies, but also the political advances towards equality, social justice and inclusion accomplished by other ‘new social
movements’: second-wave feminism, gay liberation, and the environmentalist and anti-war movements among others. By no means do we think that the post-war movement upsurge was an
unmitigated success. Far from it: all the new social movements were subject to the same ‘rearticulation’ (Laclau and Mouffe 2001, p. xii) that produced the racial ideology of ‘colourblindness’
and its variants; indeed all these movements confronted their mirror images in the mobilizations that arose from the political right to counter them. Yet even their incorporation and
phenomena of the past few decades, even the need to develop the highly
contradictory ideology of ‘colourblindness’, reveal the transformative character of the ‘politicization of the social’. While it is not
possible here to explore so extensive a subject, it is worth noting that it was the long-delayed eruption of racial subjectivity and self-awareness into the
mainstream political arena that set off this transformation, shaping both the democratic and anti-democratic social
movements that are evident in US politics today.
containment, even their confrontations with the various ‘backlash’
Their critique of the state ignores worse forms of imperialism and the catastrophic effects of collapse of
the state system for oppressed groups
Pasha ’96 [Mustapha Kamal, Professor and Chair of the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Aberdeen, “Security as
Hegemony”, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 21, No. 3 (July-Sept. 1996), pp. 283-302, JSTOR]
An attack on the postcolonial state as the author of violence73 and its drive to produce a modern citizenry may seem cathartic, without
producing the semblance of an alternative vision of a new political community or fresh forms of life among existing political communi- ties.
Central to this critique is an assault on the state and other modern institutions said to disrupt some putatively natural flow of history. Tradition, on
this logic, is uprooted to make room for grafted social forms; modernity gives birth to an intolerant and insolent Leviathan, a repository of
violence and instrumental rationality's finest speci- men. Civil society - a realm of humaneness, vitality, creativity, and harmony - is superseded, then torn asunder
through the tyranny of state-building. The attack on the institution of the state appears to substitute teleology for ontology. In the Third World
context, especially, the rise of the modern state has been coterminous with the negation of past histories, cultures, identities, and above all with violence. The stubborn
quest to construct the state as the fount of modernity has subverted extant communities and alternative forms of social orga- nization. The more durable consequence of
this project is in the realm of the political imaginary: the constrictions it has afforded; the denials of alternative futures. The postcolonial state, however, has
also grown to become more heterodox - to become more than simply modernity's reckless agent against hapless nativism. The
state is also seen as an expression of greater capacities against want, hunger, and injustice; as an escape from the arbitrariness
of communities established on narrower rules of inclusion/exclusion; as identity removed somewhat from capri- cious attachments. No doubt,
the modern state has undermined tra- ditional values of tolerance and pluralism, subjecting indigenous so- ciety to Western-centered rationality. But
tradition can also conceal particularism and oppression of another kind. Even the most elastic interpretation of universality cannot find virtue in
attachments re- furbished by hatred, exclusivity, or religious bigotry. A negation of the state is no guarantee that a bridge to universality can be
built. Perhaps the task is to rethink modernity, not to seek refuge in a blind celebration of tradition. Outside, the state continues to inflict a self-producing "security
dilemma"; inside, it has stunted the emergence of more humane forms of political expres- sion. But there are always sites of resistance that can be
recovered and sustained. A rejection of the state as a superfluous leftover of modernity that continues to straitjacket the South Asian
imagination must be linked to the project of creating an ethical and humane order based on a restructuring of the state system that privileges the mighty and the rich
over the weak and the poor.74 Recognizing the constrictions of the modern Third World state, a reconstruction of state-society re- lations inside the
state appears to be a more fruitful avenue than wishing the state away, only to be swallowed by Western-centered
globalization and its powerful institutions. A recognition of the patent failure of other institutions either to deliver the social good or to procure more just
distributional rewards in the global political economy may provide a sobering reassessment of the role of the state. An appreciation of the scale of human
tragedy accompanying the collapse of the state in many local contexts may also provide im- portant points of entry into
rethinking the one-sided onslaught on the state. Nowhere are these costs borne more heavily than in the postcolonial , so-called
Third World, where time-space compression has rendered societal processes more savage and less capable of ad- justing to rhythms dictated by globalization
State action to end structures that perpetuate injustice are critical to end white supremacy – individual
action and dialogue is insufficient
Jensen, Texas University Journalism Professor, Nowar Collective Founder, 200 5
[Robert, The Heart of Whiteness, p.78-87]
I'm all for diversity and its institutional manifestation, multiculturalism. But we should be concerned about the way in which talk of diversity and multiculturalism
has proceeded. After more than a decade of university teaching and political work, it is clear to me that a certain kind of diversity-talk actually can impede
our understanding of oppression by encouraging us to focus on the cultural and individual, rather than on the political
and structural. Instead of focusing on diversity, we should focus on power. The fundamental frame for pursuing analyses of issues around
race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class should be not cultural but political, not individual but structural. Instead of talking about
diversity in race, class, gender, and sexual orientation, we should critique white supremacy, economic inequality in capitalism, patriarchy, and heterosexism. We
should talk about systems and structures of power, about ideologies of domination and subordination—and about the injuries done to those in subordinate groups,
and the benefits and privileges that accrue to those in dominant groups. Here's an example of what I mean: A professor colleague, a middle-aged heterosexual
white man, once told me that he thought his contribution to the world—his way of aiding progressive causes around diversity issues—came by expanding his own
understanding of difference and then working to be the best person he could he. He said he felt no obligation to get involved in the larger world outside his world
of family and friends, work and church. In the worlds in which he found himself personal and professional, he said he tried to be kind and caring to all, working to
understand and celebrate difference and diversity. There are two obvious problems with his formulation, one concerning him as an individual and one concerning
the larger world. First, without a connection to a political struggle, it is difficult for anyone to grow morally and politically . My
own experience has taught me that it is when I am engaged in political activity with people across identity lines that I learn the most. It is in those spaces and those
relationships that my own hidden prejudices and unexamined fears emerge, in situations in which comrades whom I trust call hold me accountable. Without that
kind of engagement, I rarely get to levels of honesty with people that can propel me forward. The colleague in question saw himself as being, as the cliché goes, a
sensitive new age guy, but from other sources I know that he continued to behave in sexist ways in the classroom. Because he had no connection to a feminist
movement—or any other liberatory movement where women might observe his behavior and he in a position to hold him accountable— there was no systematic
way for him to correct his sexist habits. His self-image as a liberated man was possible only because he made sure he wasn't in spaces where women could easily
challenge him. The second problem is that if everyone with privilege — especially the levels of privilege this man had—decided that all they were
obligated to do in the world was to be nice to the people around them and celebrate diversity, it is difficult to imagine progressive
social change ever taking place. Yes, we all must change at the micro level, in our personal relationships, if the struggle for justice is to move
forward. But struggle in the personal arena is not enough; it is a necessary but not sufficient criterion for change. Lots of
white people could make significant progress toward eliminating all vestiges of racism in our own psyches —which would be a
good thing—without
it having any tangible effect on the systems and structures of power in which white supremacy is
manifested. It would not change the ways in which we benefit from being white in that system. It doesn't mean we
shouldn't "work on" ourselves, only that working on ourselves is not enough. It is possible to not be racist (in the individual
sense of not perpetrating overtly racist acts) and yet at the same time fail to be antiracist (in the political sense of resisting a racist
system). Being not-racist is not enough. To he a fully moral person, one must find some way to be antiracist as we Because white people benefit from living in a
white-supremacist society, there is an added obligation for us to struggle against the injustice of that system. The same argument holds in other realms as well.
Men can be successful at not being sexist (in the sense of treating women as equals and refraining from sexist behaviors) but fail at being antisexist if we do
nothing to acknowledge the misogynistic sys- tern in which we live and try to intervene where possible to change that system. The same can be said about straight
people who are relatively free of antigay prejudice but do nothing to challenge heterosexism, or about economically privileged people who do nothing to confront
the injustice of the economic system, or about U.S. citizens who don't seek to exploit people from other places but do nothing to confront the violence of the U.S.
empire abroad. We need a political and structural, rather than a cultural and individual, framework. Of course we should not
ignore differences in cultural practices, and individuals should work to change themselves. But celebrating cultural differences
and focusing on one's own behavior are inadequate to the task in front of us. I have been clearer on that since September 11, 2001
after which George W. Bush kept repeating "Islam is a religion of peace," reminding Americans that as we march off on wars of domination we should respect the
religion of the people we are killing. Across the United States after 9/11, people were saying, "I have to learn more about Islam." My response was, 'Yes but you
also have to learn more about American foreign policy and militarism?' Religious and cultural differences can be extremely important in understanding political
struggles, but those differences do not by themselves explain politics. Too many non- Muslim Americans were too quick to believe that they could understand the
U.S. attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq by reading a book about Islam. It is an improvement when an insular people become curious about something outside their
own experience. But when politicians can so easily invoke diversity and multiculturalism in the service of the empire, something has gone dangerously off the
rails. It is strange enough when an antifeminist administration can make the claim that its invasion of Afghanistan was motivated in part by a feminist desire to free
the women of that country, but even stranger when some segments of the feminist movement celebrated the invasion and, hence, participated in the celebration of
militarism. When feminism can be a cover for a war of empire, we're in trouble. Let me return to the title of his chapter and, once again, make sure I am clear
about its meaning. I grew up in North Dakota, a very homogeneous world— very white, very middle class, very insular. Since then I have been lucky to live in
more diverse places, where 1 have made friends who don't look exactly like me. I have learned, and continue to learn, a lot about other people and other cultures. I
continue to learn not to make the assumption that everyone else sees the world as I do, or wants the same things I do, or interprets my words and actions the same
way I do. These are lessons I was glad to learn, and struggle to relearn almost daily. Diversity is a good thing, and learning how to deal with diversity is a good
thing, too. The project of helping people achieve what is sometimes called 'cultural competence—especially those of us who provide services to a diverse
population, such as teachers or health-care workers—is important. But diversity training and cultural competence, while valuable in their own right for their own
purposes, are not the same thing as political resistance to unjust systems and structures of power. Diversity and cultural awareness are necessary to progressive
social change but not sufficient to achieve it. If we allow diversity to become the mantra for issues around white supremacy and white privilege) we are in for
trouble. One of the things 1 fear most about using diversity as the framework is how easy it is for some of the less pleasant truths about this society and its
affluence to drop out of our conversations. Diversity is fine, so long as it doesn't seriously challenge the desires of the dominant society. Diversity is fine, so long
as the distribution of power and wealth remains relatively constant. Diversity is fine, so long as it stays in a cultural box. How do we dismantle white
supremacy? So, if it's about politics not culture, it's reasonable to expect something beyond vague exhortations and be more specific about what kind of
politics I'm talking about. What is my plan? What are my solutions? I will resist the temptation to offer a list of anions needed, not only because I don't feel
qualified to proclaim them but also because solutions are always contextual; they depend on the specific problems we face in the world in a giver time and place.
There is no easy template for putting together a successful pro gram for changing unjust policies or systems. From the past we can reasonably observe that all
successful movements for justice include public education and organizing— helping people develop an analysis and then creating channels for action based on that
analysis. Beyond that, there arc specific lessons from specific movements that can be applied to specific situations, but to talk generally about what people should
be doing is difficult. I have no blueprint for people to follow and no priority list of issues we white people should commit to. We live in a society in crisis on
multiple fronts—political, economic, cultural, and ecological. There's no shortage of issues for those concerned with racial justice, and justice more broadly, to
take up. Some of those struggles are aimed directly at white supremacy, such as campaigns against racism in law enforcement and the police brutality that follows
from that racism. Some in the black community have taken up the project of reparations for the descendants of African slaves. There are organizations engaged in
such work; anyone can join them. Beyond those kinds of activities, in any social justice movement there are ways white people can challenge white
supremacy. Members of environmental organizations can press to make sure that issues of environmental racism way in which poor communities that typically
are non-white so often become dumping grounds for toxic waste on the agenda for their group. Labor organizers can work to make sure that unions, many of
which have a racist history, are open in meaningful ways to non-white workers. People concerned with the state of public education can put high on their groups'
list of priorities the struggle to equalize resources for all students and end de f educational apartheid. So, there are times when white people can find a place in
organizations run by non-white people, fitting ourselves into the agendas that they have set. We can lend our energies and resources to the
campaigns of others. We can leverage our privileges and resources to the benefit of such projects. We also can make sure
racial-justice politics are on the agenda in predominantly white groups. We can seek ways to connect across racial lines in a society that for
many of us is still largely segregated in housing and social patterns. We can look for ways in the all- white settings many of us find ourselves in to keep race
visible, knowing that in such settings it is easy to forget about where and how to use our energies and resources arc always complex. For example, at various times
I have participated in efforts to defend affirmative action, not because I think affirmative action is the solution to the problem of white supremacy at the University
of Texas or in the United States, but because it was an issue on which many non-white people had decided to focus, it opened a space in which one could talk
about racism, and there was a way for me to contribute as a member of the university community. As events in the world have unfolded since 9/11, my focus
increasingly has shifted to the complexity of race in antiwar and antiempire activism, which always has an anti- racist component given the way in which U.S.
wars and economic policies target and disadvantage non-white people around the world. I also have for a number of years worked in the feminist antipornography
movement, which includes an analysis not only of the misogyny of mass-marketed pornography but also the blatant white supremacy of some pornographic genres
that draw on ugly racist stereotypes. If I were to attempt any statement about solutions, it is that progressive social change requires one to go
forward with passion and a sense of commitment in what one is fighting for, while at the same time being realistic about just
how much one really understands a complex world. Those two things often are in conflict. To find the courage and energy it takes to stand against
power, one has to believe deeply in the cause. There are few traditional rewards of status or material wealth to be gained in movements for progressive social
change, and the more rad ical the movement, the fewer the rewards. So, the motivation for most people is passion and a belief that we are right. But at the same
time, we have to retain an understanding that while we may he right in some sense about the quest for justice, our speciflc analysis at any given moment may be
slightly off, or maybe even drastically wrong. If we are not open to influences that can help us see that, if we do not hold onto intellectual and moral humility, we
are more likely to make mistakes, possibly quite serious mistakes, at some point. This is especially true u people in the more privileged sectors of society. This is
especially true of white people in the United States. It certainly has been true in my life.
No Social Death
No social death – history proves
Vincent Brown, Prof. of History and African and African-American Studies @ Harvard Univ., December 2009, "Social Death and
Political Life in the Study of Slavery," American Historical Review, p. 1231-1249
THE PREMISE OF ORLANDO PATTERSON’S MAJOR WORK, that enslaved Africans were natally alienated and culturally
isolated, was challenged even before he published his influential thesis, primarily by scholars concerned with “survivals” or
“retentions” of African culture and by historians of slave resistance. In the early to mid-twentieth century, when Robert Park’s view
of “the Negro” predominated among scholars, it was generally assumed that the slave trade and slavery had denuded black people of
any ancestral heritage from Africa. The historians Carter G. Woodson and W. E. B. Du Bois and the anthropologist Melville J.
Herskovits argued the opposite. Their research supported the conclusion that while enslaved Africans could not have brought
intact social, political, and religious institutions with them to the Americas, they did maintain significant aspects of their
cultural backgrounds.32 Herskovits ex- amined “Africanisms”—any practices that seemed to be identifiably African—as useful
symbols of cultural survival that would help him to analyze change and continuity in African American culture.33 He engaged in one
of his most heated scholarly disputes with the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, a student of Park’s, who empha- sized the damage
wrought by slavery on black families and folkways.34 More recently, a number of scholars have built on Herskovits’s line of thought,
enhancing our understanding of African history during the era of the slave trade. Their studies have evolved productively from
assertions about general cultural heritage into more precise demonstrations of the continuity of worldviews, categories of
belonging, and social practices from Africa to America. For these scholars, the preservation of distinctive cultural forms has
served as an index both of a resilient social personhood, or identity, and of resistance to slavery itself. 35 Scholars of slave
resistance have never had much use for the concept of social death. The early efforts of writers such as Herbert Aptheker aimed to
derail the popular notion that American slavery had been a civilizing institution threatened by “slave crime.”36 Soon after, studies of
slave revolts and conspiracies advocated the idea that resistance demonstrated the basic humanity and intractable will of the
enslaved—indeed, they often equated acts of will with humanity itself. As these writ- ers turned toward more detailed analyses of the
causes, strategies, and tactics of slave revolts in the context of the social relations of slavery, they had trouble squaring abstract
characterizations of “the slave” with what they were learning about the en- slaved.37 Michael Craton, who authored Testing the
Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies, was an early critic of Slavery and Social Death, protesting that what was
known about chattel bondage in the Americas did not confirm Patterson’s definition of slavery. “If slaves were in fact ‘generally
dishonored,’ ” Craton asked, “how does he explain the degrees of rank found among all groups of slaves—that is, the scale of
‘reputation’ and authority accorded, or at least acknowledged, by slave and master alike?” How could they have formed the fragile
families documented by social historians if they had been “natally alienated” by definition? Finally, and per- haps most tellingly,
if slaves had been uniformly subjected to “permanent violent domination,” they could not have revolted as often as they did or
shown the “varied manifestations of their resistance” that so frustrated masters and compromised their power, sometimes
“fatally.”38 The dynamics of social control and slave resistance falsified Patterson’s description of slavery even as the tenacity
of African culture showed that enslaved men, women, and children had arrived in the Americas bearing much more than their
“tropical temperament.” The cultural continuity and resistance schools of thought come together pow- erfully in an important book by
Walter C. Rucker, The River Flows On: Black Re- sistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in Early America. In Rucker’s analysis
of slave revolts, conspiracies, and daily recalcitrance, African concepts, values, and cul- tural metaphors play the central role. Unlike
Smallwood and Hartman, for whom “the rupture was the story” of slavery, Rucker aims to reveal the “perseverance of African
culture even among second, third, and fourth generation creoles.”39 He looks again at some familiar events in North America—
New York City’s 1712 Coromantee revolt and 1741 conspiracy, the 1739 Stono rebellion in South Carolina, as well as the plots,
schemes, and insurgencies of Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner—deftly teasing out the African origins of many of the
attitudes and actions of the black rebels. Rucker outlines how the transformation of a “shared cultural heritage” that shaped
collective action against slavery corresponded to the “various steps Africans made in the process of becoming ‘African
American’ in culture, orientation, and identity.”40
Social Death Wrong
Peterson 2007 (Christopher, Professor of Some Repute, Kindred Specters p. 7-8)
The political question then becomes: how does one resist the reduction of one's existence to the liminal status of social death? In Antigone's
Claim: Kinship Behueen Life and Death, Judith Butler provides a familiar answer to this question in a discussion that considers how the transgressions of Sophocles'
eponymous heroine deprive her of the "ontological certainty" reserved for those who fall within the norms of kinship (78). Situating Antigone's ontological deprivation
in the realm of contemporary politics, Butler argues that the socially dead "remain on the far side of being, as what does not quite
qualify as that which is and can be."19 in another context, Butler describes her work, in part, as an effort to "endow ontology to precisely that which has
been systematically deprived of the privilege of ontology. For Butler, social death correlates directly to a form of ontological deprivation. Although Butler
seeks to displace kinship from the biological model in order to imagine a vast array of social arrangements, this
reorganization of kinship remains no less ontological. Critiquing the abjection of the socially dead, Butler fails to question the
ontological certainty of the "socially alive." What makes the ontology of the socially alive any more secure than that of the socially dead? Are not the
socially alive themselves specters? While the conflation of social life with a presumptive heterosexual ontology may indeed condition
the production of the socially dead, that says nothing of how the fiction of the former might itself be exposed and stripped of
its ontological conceit. That the kinship relations of the so-called socially alive are also negotiated "between life and death" is a possibility that eludes Butler's
reading of Antigone, and has important implications for her effort to rethink kinship beyond the structure of the normative family. For if the assumption of
self-presence begins by disavowing the death that haunts any life, then the production of the socially dead describes the
process by which the hauntological condition of the socially alive is disavowed and projected onto those who transgress the
norms of kinship.
Social Death is an incomplete and unproductive frame for academic discussion
Daniel E. Rossi-Keen ( Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Stetson University in
DeLand, Florida) Review Essay: The Life-Giving Gift of Acknowledgment (A Philosophical and Rhetorical Inquiry). By Michael J.
Hyde. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2006; pp.
xviii + 336. $34.95 paper. Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Volume 11, Number 4, Winter 2008,
pp. 659-677 (Review) – obtained via Project Muse
Emphasis on philosophy abounds in the first half of the book. This is especially so in Hyde's treatment of the relationship between acknowledgment and the origins of
existence (chapter 2), his examination of the reciprocity of acknowledgment and conscience (chapter 3), his consideration of how acknowledgment transforms space
and time into common dwelling places (chapter 4), his explanation of the generation of a "home" by way of such rhetorical acts of acknowledgment (chapter 5), and his
suggestion that acknowledgment functions as a caress (chapters 6 and 7). Though certainly not lacking [End Page 664] philosophical depth, the remaining chapters of
the text are a bit more readily accessible to the nonspecialist. Herein, Hyde explores the relationship between acknowledgment and teaching
(chapter 8), social death (chapter 9), and computer mediated culture (chapter 10). The book closes with an examination of the rhetoric surrounding the terrorist
attacks of 9/11 (chapter 11), explaining how the rhetor may function in society as a hero. In the process of weaving together such seemingly disparate cases, Hyde
gestures toward numerous resources for considering the role of rhetoric in guiding, shaping, and challenging prevailing enactments of public life. In fact, one of the
most exciting features of this book is that it lends itself to so many extensions and applications. Within this text exists a philosophy of rhetoric, an
ethic of human action, an anthropology, a statement both of humankind's origin and of its telos, a critique of contemporary
culture, and much more. For this reason, Hyde's writing defies either simple categorization or casual reading. And this is, I think, precisely the strength and intent of
the text. The text itself acts as what Hyde (2001) labels a "rhetorical interruption" (77–78), a call to stop and reckon with the state of the world as we currently perceive
it. As such, The Life-Giving Gift of Acknowledgment does not always proceed in traditional ways, and some readers may therefore find themselves wanting more
careful treatments of themes raised throughout the text. The rhetorician, for example, may wish for a more focused, traditional, and systematic treatment of the
relationship between rhetoric and acknowledgment. The philosopher might hope for a more sustained analysis of Heidegger and Levinas. The scientist may call
for further examination of the role of acknowledgment in the origins of existence. The theologian may be somewhat disappointed by Hyde's
suggestive employment of religious themes. And the student of public affairs may wish for a more explicit statement of the implications of
Hyde's work for communal human existence. In one sense, each of these disciplinarians would be justified in wanting more from
Hyde's text, for Hyde admittedly leaves much unsaid and unexplored. In another sense, however, it is precisely this kind of narrowness that The
Life-Giving Gift of Acknowledgment sets out to avoid. What Hyde has produced is an interdisciplinary treatment of the role of acknowledgment in varied aspects of
human existence, and he justifiably demands that the reader do much of his or her own work in expanding and applying this theoretical construct.
Not Ontological
Blackness is not an ontological position, it can be changed.
Hudson 13 (Peter, Political Studies Department, University of the Witwatersrand , Johannesburg , South Africa, has been on the
editorial board of the Africa Perspective: The South African Journal of Sociology and Theoria: A Journal of Political and Social
Theory and Transformation, and is a member of the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism The state and the colonial
unconscious, Social Dynamics: A journal of African studies, 2013)
Thus the self-same/other distinction is necessary for the possibility of identity itself. There
always has to exist an outside, which is also inside, to the
extent it is designated as the impossibility from which the possibility of the existence of the subject derives its rule (Badiou 2009,
220). But although the excluded place which isn’t excluded insofar as it is necessary for the very possibility of inclusion and
identity may be universal (may be considered “ontological”), its content (what fills it) – as well as the mode of this filling and its
reproduction – are contingent. In other words, the meaning of the signifier of exclusion is not determined once and for all: the place of
the place of exclusion, of death is itself over-determined, i.e. the very framework for deciding the other and the same,
exclusion and inclusion, is nowhere engraved in ontological stone but is political and never terminally settled. Put differently, the
“curvature of intersubjective space” (Critchley 2007, 61) and thus, the specific modes of the “othering” of “otherness” are nowhere decided
in advance (as a certain ontological fatalism might have it) (see Wilderson 2008). The social does not have to be divided into
white and black, and the meaning of these signifiers is never necessary – because they are signifiers. To be sure, colonialism institutes an
ontological division, in that whites exist in a way barred to blacks – who are not. But this ontological relation is really on the side of the ontic – that is, of all
contingently constructed identities , rather than the ontology of the social which refers to the ultimate unfixity, the
indeterminacy or lack of the social. In this sense, then, the white man doesn’t exist, the black man doesn’t exist (Fanon 1968, 165); and neither does the
colonial symbolic itself, including its most intimate structuring relations – division is constitutive of the social, not the colonial division.
“Whiteness” may well be very deeply sediment in modernity itself, but respect for the “ontological difference” (see Heidegger 1962, 26; Watts 2011, 279) shows up its
ontological status as ontic. It may be so deeply sedimented that it becomes difficult even to identify the very possibility of the
separation of whiteness from the very possibility of order, but from this it does not follow that the “void” of “black being”
functions as the ultimate substance, the transcendental signified on which all possible forms of sociality are said to rest. What
gets lost here, then, is the specificity of colonialism, of its constitutive axis, its “ontological” differential. A crucial feature of the colonial symbolic
is that the real is not screened off by the imaginary in the way it is under capitalism. At the place of the colonised, the symbolic and the imaginary give
way because non-identity (the real of the social) is immediately inscribed in the “lived experience” (vécu) of the colonised subject. The
colonised is “traversing the fantasy” (Zizek 2006a, 40–60) all the time; the void of the verb “to be” is the very content of his interpellation. The colonised is, in
other words, the subject of anxiety for whom the symbolic and the imaginary never work , who is left stranded by his very interpellation.4
“Fixed” into “non-fixity,” he is eternally suspended between “element” and “moment” 5 – he is where the colonial symbolic
falters in the production of meaning and is thus the point of entry of the real into the texture itself of colonialism . Be this as it may,
whiteness and blackness are (sustained by) determinate and contingent practices of signification; the “structuring relation” of
a knot of significations which, no matter how tight, can always be undone. Anti-colonial – i.e., anti“white” – modes of struggle are not (just) “psychic” 6 but involve the “reactivation” (or “de-sedimentation”)7 of colonial objectivity itself. No
colonialism thus itself comprises
matter how sedimented (or global), colonial objectivity is not ontologically immune to antagonism. Differentiality, as Zizek insists (see Zizek 2012, chapter 11, 771
n48), immanently entails antagonism in that differentiality both makes possible the existence of any identity whatsoever and at the same time – because it is the
presence of one object in another – undermines any identity ever being (fully) itself. Each element in a differential relation is the condition of possibility and the
condition of impossibility of each other. It is this dimension of antagonism that the Master Signifier covers over transforming its outside (Other) into an element of
itself, reducing it to a condition of its possibility.8 All symbolisation produces an ineradicable excess over itself, something it can’t totalise
or make sense of, where its production of meaning falters. This is its internal limit point, its real:9 an errant “object” that has no place of its own,
isn’t recognised in the categories of the system but is produced by it – its “part of no part” or “object small a.” 10 Correlative to this
object “a” is the subject “stricto sensu” – i.e., as the empty subject of the signifier without an identity that pins it down.11 That is the subject of antagonism
in confrontation with the real of the social, as distinct from “subject” position based on a determinate identity .
Black positionality and civil society aren’t always already defined by antagonism. The idea that civil
society is corrupt ignores black agency throughout history. Southern teachers in the 1940s onward were
able to exercise their agency and mobilize many important gains
Malczewski 11 (Joan Malczewski is Assistant Professor of History and Social Studies in the Department of Humanities and the
Social Sciences in the Professions at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, New York University.
Journal of Policy History Volume 23, Number 3, 2011)
While progress was significantly slower in the Deep South, the Jeanes teachers there still promoted centralization and networks that
could open opportunities for participation in policy development. A state network of Georgia Jeanes teachers issued monthly reports
in order to share accomplishments and news with other teachers across the state, but also with the state division and with
philanthropic agents, and the teacher in Dooley reported that a district teachers’ association meeting was held with representatives
from seven counties present. 115 In 1935, Helen Whiting was appointed the Georgia State Supervisor of Colored Elementary Schools
in the Division of Negro Education, and began to administer reading achievement tests throughout the state by the end of her fi rst
year. 116 She issued regular “itinerary reports” about her work in the fi eld, including suggestions to teachers that would promote
centralization, such as adopting the State Reading Program in counties and seeking assistance from the county supervisor. 117 Th e
Georgia state agent, refl ecting upon a decade of progress, noted that “the State Agents for Negro Schools, unlike the other state
school supervisors, are free to move in and out among both white and Negro groups without considering the political implications of
every step taken . . . the counties in Georgia now provide secondary schools for Negroes at public expense . . . , [which] has been
accomplished by visiting the various counties and outlining a program with the stimulus of state and philanthropic funds.” 118 Much
credit has been given to the black churches in the South for their role in community organizing, and where the church was
administratively part of a broader national or state organization, it could have a profound role in connecting the community outward.
However, the schools also had this ability through their connection to northern philanthropists, state and local political systems, and,
as an institution that was largely ignored, as a site for mobilization. Teachers there were able to encourage institutional innovation at
the local level. As society became more interdependent, this was a crucial link to the social and political structure that
disenfranchisement kept out of reach, and an important institutional site for participating in the development of policy. Jackson Davis,
acting as fi eld agent for the GEB, was asked to describe the accomplishments of the Jeanes teachers. “Th ey succeeded in organizing
the people into school community associations and bringing to bear the united sentiment of the community in favor of better school
buildings, longer terms and more practical work in the schools by introducing simple industries. . . . Th e schools lost their isolation.”
119 Public-private collaboration was essential to education development in the South and ultimately resulted in a stronger centralized
school system. The concept of “agency” can be defi ned along a continuum that includes anything from subtle forms of resistance to
group insurgency. 120 However, black teachers were able to engage with collaborative relationships, and in doing so exercised
agency more broadly defi ned, helped to establish centralized administrative capacity in the lower tiers of government, and
undermined the strength of sectional interests. It is not possible truly to understand black agency in the South without understanding
the institutional venues in which it operated. Schooling helped to make political opportunity structures more permeable. In addition to
people like Annie Holland and Helen Whiting, public-private collaboration and centralization also provided venues for blacks like W.
T. B. Williams, who served as a fi eld agent for the Jeanes Fund, and Hollis Frissel as principal of the Tuskegee Institute, to have
signifi cant infl uence on policy decision that aff ected rural communities. Th e actions of individual reformers were important, but it
is essential also to understand the broader dynamic of interest groups and institutions that challenged the political structure. Schooling
provided an institutional venue for rural blacks to mobilize, and it should be placed more centrally in the reform dynamic as an early
institutional site for the mobilization of blacks. Rural black reformers recognized the value of promoting an education system not just
as an end in itself, especially given the value placed on it as the antithesis to slavery, but also as a means to create avenues for greater
participation in the political and social structure. Th ey participated in the expansion of government at the local level through their eff
orts to create organizational capacity, and promoted voluntary organizations that created a common culture within and beyond local
communities and broadened frames of support for their own agenda. 121 In this regard, both conceptually and institutionally,
“education” became the central meeting point for reformers, and the place in which organizational forms, parallel structures, and new
identities were created ultimately to overcome southern opposition to educational advancement. Both of these ideals converged in the
form of schooling, which became a unifying organizational venue. Local school-based organizations became central to the creation of
a more bureaucratic state by facilitating the institutionalism of reforms at the local level and providing links to policy initiatives that
emerged from philanthropists and their agents outside the community. It would be overstating it to make the claim that the black
community mobilized between 1909 and 1935 as an organized interest group in the South, or to claim that it had a formally defi ned
role in policy development. However, education reformers were able to mobilize the community through schooling in a more
organized manner than has been recognized. Schools helped to promote expanding political opportunities, organizational strength,
and shared cognitions in the community. 122 Th e black community, especially through the work of the Jeanes teachers, was able to
utilize the organizational repertoires of schooling to connect local institutions to the political structures outside rural communities,
creating political innovation and promoting reform. Southern blacks did indeed have an instrument for constructing new collective
identities; schooling served as a link to alternative models of political organization and participation far earlier than what has typically
been attributed to the community. Th rough schools, teachers were able to exploit and even initiate the public-private collaborations
that developed between philanthropists and state and local governments in order to institutionalize reforms, especially through state
centralization. Th e insurgency that developed in later decades is indebted to the organizational structures and community
mobilization that occurred through schooling.
A2: Root Cause
Whiteness not the root cause – nationality, ethnicity, religion and class all propagate hierarchy
-focus on race alone prevents an adequate social response because white identities are contingent, negotiated and multi-lithic
Niemonen 10 – Professor of Sociology @ USD (Jack Niemonen, Professor of Sociology @ South Dakota, “Public Sociology or
Partisan Sociology? The Curious Case of Whiteness Studies,” The American Sociologist, Springer Link)
Despite recognition that racial classification systems are not constant, proponents of whiteness studies treat whites as if they
were an immutable, bounded, and cohesive category (Bonnett 2003; Eichstedt 2001; Gabriel 2000; Giroux 1997; Hartigan 1997; Keating 1995;
Kincheloe 1999; Kolchin 2002; Levine-Rasky 2000; McCarthy 2003; Pugliese 2002; Sidorkin 1999; Yans 2006). They posit a generic white subject, both
privileged and unaware of the extent of that privilege. However, even if whites coalesce at certain historical junctures, we cannot conclude
that the category “white” is an entity that will continue indefinitely in the absence of antiracist initiatives (McDermott and Sampson
2005; Yans 2006; cf. Niemonen 2007). Reification has the unintended consequence of neglecting how the construction of racial identities is a
negotiated, indeed manipulative, process (Bonnett 1998; Rockquemore 2002). In doing so, proponents of whiteness studies understate the
contradictions, inconsistencies, and ambivalences within white and nonwhite identities. They assume before the fact that whites regard
whiteness rather than nationality, ethnicity, religion, or class as the main factor that separates the civilized from the uncivilized. And, they oversimplify the
challenges that nonwhites face by implying that their problems are largely race-related and hence attributable to racism
(Croteau et al. 2002; Hartigan 2002; Kolchin 2002; Mansfield and Kehoe 1994; Warren and Twine 1997). Emphasizing the unifying interest in, and reproduction of,
dominance minimizes how the boundaries of racial categories are negotiated, reinforced, or challenged in daily life (Alcoff 1998; Bash 2006; Perera 1999). Largely
ignored are the complicated interactions between race, class, and sex, and the struggles of many whites to acquire privileges in
a class-stratified society, especially economic security and some degree of self-autonomy (Bonnett 1997; Eichstedt 2001; Hartigan 1997,
2000b; Hubbard 2005; Kolchin 2002; Lee 1999; Winders 2003). Reifying the concept of race fails to capture the processes through which it acquires meaning, confers
status, or exerts a “structuring effect” (Bash 2006; Lewis 2004).
Whiteness cant be the root cause- history of other races justifying violence based on racialization
Spickard 2009 Paul Spickard, Graduated Harvard, Ph.D in History from UC Berkeley, professor of history at UC Santa Barbara,
review of “Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism”, in American Studies, vol 5 num 1/2, MUSE
For Sexton (as for the Spencers and Gordon) race is about Blackness, in the United States and around the world. That is silly, for
there are other racialized relationships. In the U.S., native peoples were racialized by European intruders in all the ways that
Africans were, and more: they were nearly extinguished. To take just one example from many around the world, Han Chinese have
racialized Tibetans historically in all the ways (including slavery) that Whites have racialized Blacks and Indians in the United
States. So there is a problem with Sexton's concept of race as Blackness. There is also a problem with his insistence on
monoraciality. For Sexton and the others, one cannot be mixed or multiple; one must choose ever and only to be Black. I don't have a
problem with that as a political choice, but to insist that it is the only possibility flies in the face of a great deal of human
experience, and it ignores the history of how modern racial ideas emerged. Sexton does point out, as do many writers, the flawed
tendencies in multiracial advocacy mentioned in the second paragraph above. But he imputes them to the whole movement and to the
subject of study, and that is not a fair assessment.
General Offense
Agency DA
The invocation of social death as ontologically inevitable inscribes a pessimism towards politics which
makes agency impossible and oversimplifies the history of resistance
Vincent Brown, Prof. of History and African and African-American Studies @ Harvard Univ., December 2009, "Social Death and
Political Life in the Study of Slavery," American Historical Review, p. 1231-1249 Specters of the Atlantic is a compellingly
sophisticated study of the relation be- tween the epistemologies underwriting both modern slavery and modern capitalism, but the
book’s discussion of the politics of anti-slavery is fundamentally incomplete. While Baucom brilliantly traces the development of
“melancholy realism” as an op- positional discourse that ran counter to the logic of slavery and finance capital, he has very little to
say about the enslaved themselves. Social death, so well suited to the tragic perspective, stands in for the experience of
enslavement. While this heightens the reader’s sense of the way Atlantic slavery haunts the present, Baucom largely fails to
acknowledge that the enslaved performed melancholy acts of accounting not unlike those that he shows to be a fundamental
component of abolitionist and human rights discourses, or that those acts could be a basic element of slaves’ oppositional activities.
In many ways, the effectiveness of his text depends upon the silence of slaves—it is easier to describe the continuity of
structures of power when one down- plays countervailing forces such as the political activity of the weak. So Baucom’s deep
insights into the structural features of Atlantic slave trading and its afterlife come with a cost. Without engagement with the politics of
the enslaved, slavery’s history serves as an effective charge leveled against modernity and capitalism, but not as an uneven and
evolving process of human interaction, and certainly not as a locus of conflict in which the enslaved sometimes won small but
important victories.11 Specters of the Atlantic is self-consciously a work of theory (despite Baucom’s prodigious archival research),
and social death may be largely unproblematic as a matter of theory, or even law. In these arenas, as David Brion Davis has argued,
“the slave has no legitimate, independent being, no place in the cosmos except as an instrument of her or his master’s will.”12 But the
concept often becomes a general description of actual social life in slavery. Vincent Carretta, for example, in his au- thoritative
biography of the abolitionist writer and former slave Olaudah Equiano, agrees with Patterson that because enslaved Africans and their
descendants were “stripped of their personal identities and history, [they] were forced to suffer what has been aptly called ‘social
death.’ ” The self-fashioning enabled by writing and print “allowed Equiano to resurrect himself publicly” from the condition that had
been imposed by his enslavement.13 The living conditions of slavery in eighteenth-century Jamaica, one slave society with which
Equiano had experience, are described in rich detail in Trevor Burnard’s unflinching examination of the career of Thomas Thistlewood, an English migrant who became an overseer and landholder in Jamaica, and who kept a diary there from 1750 to 1786.
Through Thistlewood’s descriptions of his life among slaves, Burnard glimpses a “world of uncertainty,” where the enslaved were
always vulnerable to repeated depredations that actually led to “significant slave dehumanization as masters sought, with considerable
success, to obliterate slaves’ personal histories.” Burnard consequently concurs with Patterson: “slavery completely stripped slaves of
their cultural heritage, brutalized them, and rendered ordinary life and normal relationships extremely difficult.”14 This was slavery,
after all, and much more than a transfer of migrants from Africa to America.15 Yet one wonders, after reading Burnard’s
indispensable account, how slaves in Jamaica or- ganized some of British America’s greatest political events during Thistlewood’s
time and after, including the Coromantee Wars of the 1760s, the 1776 Hanover conspiracy, and the Baptist War of 1831–1832. Surely
they must have found some way to turn the “disorganization, instability, and chaos” of slavery into collective forms of belonging and
striving, making connections when confronted with alien- ation and finding dignity in the face of dishonor. Rather than
pathologizing slaves by allowing the condition of social death to stand for the experience of life in slavery, then, it might be
more helpful to focus on what the enslaved actually made of their situation. Among the most insightful texts to explore the
experiential meaning of Afro- Atlantic slavery (for both the slaves and their descendants) are two recent books by Saidiya Hartman
and Stephanie Smallwood. Rather than eschewing the concept of social death, as might be expected from writing that begins by
considering the per- spective of the enslaved, these two authors use the idea in penetrating ways. Hart- man’s Lose Your Mother: A
Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route and Smallwood’s Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
extend social death beyond a general description of slavery as a condition and imagine it as an experience of self. Here both
the promise and the problem with the concept are most fully apparent.16 Both authors seek a deeper understanding of the
experience of enslavement and its consequences for the past, present, and future of black life than we generally find in histories
of slavery. In Hartman’s account especially, slavery is not only an object of study, but also the focus of a personal memoir. She
travels along a slave route in Ghana, from its coastal forts to the backcountry hinterlands, symbolically reversing the first stage of the
trek now commonly called the Middle Passage. In searching prose, she meditates on the history of slavery in Africa to explore the
precarious nature of belonging to the social category “African American.” Rendering her re- markable facility with social theory
in elegant and affective terms, Hartman asks the question that nags all identities, but especially those forged by the descendants of
slaves: What identifications, imagined affinities, mythical narratives, and acts of re- membering and forgetting hold the category
together? Confronting her own alienation from any story that would yield a knowable genealogy or a comfortable identity, Hartman
wrestles with what it means to be a stranger in one’s putative motherland, to be denied country, kin, and identity, and to forget one’s
past—to be an orphan.17 Ultimately, as the title suggests, Lose Your Mother is an injunction to accept dis- possession as the basis of
black self-definition. Such a judgment is warranted, in Hartman’s account, by the implications of social death both for the experience
of enslavement and for slavery’s afterlife in the present. As Patterson delineated in sociological terms the death of social personhood
and the reincorporation of individuals into slavery, Hartman sets out on a personal quest to “retrace the process by which lives were
destroyed and slaves born.”18 When she contends with what it meant to be a slave, she frequently invokes Patterson’s idiom:
“Seized from home, sold in the market, and severed from kin, the slave was for all intents and purposes dead, no less so than
had he been killed in combat. No less so than had she never belonged to the world.” By making men, women, and children into
commodities, enslavement destroyed lineages, tethering people to own- ers rather than families, and in this way it “annulled lives,
transforming men and women into dead matter, and then resuscitated them for servitude.” Admittedly, the enslaved “lived and
breathed, but they were dead in the social world of men.”19 As it turns out, this kind of alienation is also part of what it presently
means to be African American. “The transience of the slave’s existence,” for example, still leaves its traces in how black people
imagine and speak of home: We never tire of dreaming of a place that we can call home, a place better than here, wherever here might
be . . . We stay there, but we don’t live there . . . Staying is living in a country without exercising any claims on its resources. It is the
perilous condition of existing in a world in which you have no investments. It is having never resided in a place that you can say is
yours. It is being “of the house” but not having a stake in it. Staying implies transient quarters, a makeshift domicile, a temporary
shelter, but no attachment or affiliation. This sense of not belonging and of being an extraneous element is at the heart of slavery.20
“We may have forgotten our country,” Hartman writes, “but we haven’t forgotten our dispossession.”21 Like Baucom, Hartman sees
the history of slavery as a constituent part of a tragic present. Atlantic slavery continues to be manifested in black people’s
skewed life chances, poor education and health, and high rates of incarceration, poverty, and premature death. Disregarding
the commonplace temporalities of professional historians, whose literary conventions are generally predicated on a formal
distinction between past, present, and future, Hartman addresses slavery as a problem that spans all three. The afterlife of
slavery inhabits the nature of belonging, which in turn guides the “freedom dreams” that shape prospects for change. “If slavery
persists as an issue in the political life of black America,” she writes, “it is not because of an antiquated obsession with bygone days
or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political
arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago.”22 A professor of English and comparative literature, Hartman is in many respects in a
better position than most historians to understand events such as the funeral aboard the Hudibras. This is because for all of her evident
erudition, her scholarship is harnessed not so much to a performance of mastery over the facts of what hap- pened, which might
substitute precision for understanding, as to an act of mourning, even yearning. She writes with a depth of introspection and personal
anguish that is transgressive of professional boundaries but absolutely appropriate to the task. Reading Hartman, one wonders how a
historian could ever write dispassionately about slavery without feeling complicit and ashamed. For dispassionate
accounting—exemplified by the ledgers of slave traders—has been a great weapon of the powerful, an episteme that made the
grossest violations of personhood acceptable, even necessary. This is the kind of bookkeeping that bore fruit upon the Zong. “It
made it easier for a trader to countenance yet another dead black body or for a captain to dump a shipload of captives into the sea in
order to collect the insurance, since it wasn’t possible to kill cargo or to murder a thing already denied life. Death was simply part of
the workings of the trade.” The archive of slavery, then, is “a mortuary.” Not content to total up the body count, Hartman offers elegy,
echoing in her own way the lamentations of the women aboard the Hudibras. Like them, she is concerned with the dead and what they
mean to the living. “I was desperate to reclaim the dead,” she writes, “to reckon with the lives undone and obliterated in the making
of human commodities.”23 It is this mournful quality of Lose Your Mother that elevates it above so many histories of slavery, but the
same sense of lament seems to require that Hartman overlook small but significant political victories like the one described by
Butter- worth. Even as Hartman seems to agree with Paul Gilroy on the “value of seeing the consciousness of the slave as involving
an extended act of mourning,” she remains so focused on her own commemorations that her text makes little space for a
consideration of how the enslaved struggled with alienation and the fragility of belonging, or of the mourning rites they used to
confront their condition.24 All of the ques- tions she raises about the meaning of slavery in the present—both highly personal and
insistently political—might as well be asked about the meaning of slavery to slaves themselves, that is, if one begins by closely
examining their social and political lives rather than assuming their lack of social being. Here Hartman is undone by her reliance on
Orlando Patterson’s totalizing definition of slavery. She asserts that “no solace can be found in the death of the slave, no higher
ground can be located, no perspective can be found from which death serves a greater good or becomes any- thing other than what it
is.”25 If she is correct, the events on the Hudibras were of negligible importance. And indeed, Hartman’s understandable emphasis
on the personal damage wrought by slavery encourages her to disavow two generations of social history that have
demonstrated slaves’ remarkable capacity to forge fragile com- munities, preserve cultural inheritance, and resist the
predations of slaveholders. This in turn precludes her from describing the ways that violence, dislocation, and death actually
generate culture, politics, and consequential action by the enslaved.26 This limitation is particularly evident in a stunning chapter that
Hartman calls “The Dead Book.” Here she creatively reimagines the events that occurred on the voyage of the slave ship Recovery,
bound, like the Hudibras, from the Bight of Biafra to Grenada, when Captain John Kimber hung an enslaved girl naked from the
mizzen stay and beat her, ultimately to her death, for being “sulky”: she was sick and could not dance when so ordered. As Hartman
notes, the event would have been unre- markable had not Captain Kimber been tried for murder on the testimony of the ship’s
surgeon, a brief transcript of the trial been published, and the woman’s death been offered up as allegory by the abolitionist William
Wilberforce and the graphic satirist Isaac Cruikshank. Hartman re-creates the murder and the surge of words it inspired, representing
the perspectives of the captain, the surgeon, and the aboli tionist, for each of whom the girl was a cipher “outfitted in a different
guise,” and then she puts herself in the position of the victim, substituting her own voice for the unknowable thoughts of the girl.
Imagining the experience as her own and wistfully representing her demise as a suicide—a final act of agency—Hartman hopes, by
this bold device, to save the girl from oblivion. Or perhaps her hope is to prove the impossibility of ever doing so, because by failing,
she concedes that the girl cannot be put to rest. It is a compelling move, but there is something missing. Hartman discerns a
convincing subject position for all of the participants in the events sur- rounding the death of the girl, except for the other slaves who
watched the woman die and carried the memory with them to the Americas, presumably to tell others, plausibly even survivors of the
Hudibras, who must have drawn from such stories a basic perspective on the history of the Atlantic world. For the enslaved
spectators, Hartman imagines only a fatalistic detachment: “The women were assembled a few feet away, but it might well have been
a thousand. They held back from the girl, steering clear of her bad luck, pestilence, and recklessness. Some said she had lost her mind.
What could they do, anyway? The women danced and sang as she lay dying.” Hartman ends her odyssey among the Gwolu,
descendants of peoples who fled the slave raids and who, as communities of refugees, shared her sense of dispos- session.
“Newcomers were welcome. It didn’t matter that they weren’t kin because genealogy didn’t matter”; rather, “building community
did.” Lose Your Mother con- cludes with a moving description of a particular one of their songs, a lament for those who were lost,
which resonated deeply with her sense of slavery’s meaning in the present. And yet Hartman has more difficulty hearing similar cries
intoned in the past by slaves who managed to find themselves.27 Saltwater Slavery has much in common with Lose Your Mother.
Smallwood’s study of the slave trade from the Gold Coast to the British Americas in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries likewise redeems the experience of the people traded like so many bolts of cloth, “who were represented merely as ciphers
in the political arithmetic,” and therefore “feature in the documentary record not as subjects of a social history but as objects or
quantities.”28 Each text offers a penetrating analysis of the market logic that turned people into goods. Both books work with the
concept of social death. However, Smallwood examines the problem of social death for the enslaved even more closely than Hartman
does.29 Like Hartman, Smallwood sees social death as a by-product of commodification. “If in the regime of the market Africans’
most socially relevant feature was their exchangeability,” she argues, “for Africans as immigrants the most socially relevant feature
was their isolation, their desperate need to restore some measure of social life to counterbalance the alienation engendered by their
social death.” But Small- wood’s approach is different in a subtle way. Whereas for Hartman, as for others, social death is an
accomplished state of being, Smallwood veers between a notion of social death as an actual condition produced by violent
dislocation and social death as a compelling threat. On the one hand, she argues, captivity on the Atlantic littoral was a social
death. Exchangeable persons “inhabited a new category of mar- ginalization, one not of extreme alienation within the community, but
rather of ab- solute exclusion from any community.” She seems to accept the idea of enslaved commodities as finished products
for whom there could be no socially relevant relationships: “the slave cargo constituted the antithesis of community.” Yet
elsewhere she contends that captives were only “menaced” with social death. “At every point along the passage from African to New
World markets,” she writes, “we find a stark contest between slave traders and slaves, between the traders’ will to commodify people
and the captives’ will to remain fully recognizable as human subjects.”30 Here, I think, Smallwood captures the truth of the idea:
social death was a receding ho- rizon—the farther slaveholders moved toward the goal of complete mastery, the more they found that
struggles with their human property would continue, even into the most elemental realms: birth, hunger, health, fellowship, sex,
death, and time. If social death did not define the slaves’ condition, it did frame their vision of apocalypse. In a harrowing chapter on
the meaning of death (that is, physical death) during the Atlantic passage, Smallwood is clear that the captives could have no frame of
reference for the experience aboard the slave ships, but she also shows how des- perate they were to make one. If they could not
reassemble some meaningful way to map their social worlds, “slaves could foresee only further descent into an endless purgatory.”
The women aboard the Hudibras were not in fact the living dead; they were the mothers of gasping new societies. Their view
of the danger that confronted them made their mourning rites vitally important, putting these at the center of the women’s
emerging lives as slaves—and as a result at the heart of the struggles that would define them. As Smallwood argues, this was
first and foremost a battle over their presence in time, to define their place among ancestors, kin, friends, and future progeny. “The
connection Africans needed was a narrative continuity between past and present—an epistemological means of connecting the dots
between there and here, then and now, to craft a coherent story out of incoherent experience.” That is precisely what the women on
the Hudibras fought to accomplish.31
Wildersons argument denies Black agency and fails to come up with effective solutions
Saër Maty Ba (Professor of Film – University of Portsmouth and Co-Editor – The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration) “The
US Decentred: From Black Social Death to Cultural Transformation” September 2011 , Cultural Studies Review, 17(2), , p. 385387)
A few pages into Red, White and Black, I feared that it would just be a matter of time before Wilderson’s black‐as‐social‐death idea and
multiple attacks on issues and scholars he disagrees with run (him) into (theoretical) trouble. This happens in chapter two, ‘The Narcissistic Slave’, where
he critiques black film theorists and books. For example, Wilderson declares that Gladstone Yearwood’s Black Film as Signifying Practice (2000) ‘betrays a kind of
conceptual anxiety with respect to the historical object of study— ... it clings, anxiously, to the film‐as‐text‐as‐legitimateobject of Black cinema.’ (62) He then quotes
from Yearwood’s book to highlight ‘just how vague the aesthetic foundation of Yearwood’s attempt to construct a canon can be’. (63) And yet Wilderson’s
highlighting is problematic because it overlooks the ‘Diaspora’ or ‘African Diaspora’, a key component in Yearwood’s thesis
that, crucially, neither navel‐gazes (that is, at the US or black America) nor pretends to properly engage with black film. Furthermore,
Wilderson separates the different waves of black film theory and approaches them, only, in terms of how a most recent one might challenge its precedent. Again, his
approach is problematic because it does not mention or emphasise the inter‐connectivity of/in black film theory . As a case in point,
Wilderson does not link Tommy Lott’s mobilisation of Third Cinema for black film theory to Yearwood’s idea of African Diaspora. (64) Additionally, of course,
Wilderson seems unaware that Third Cinema itself has been fundamentally questioned since Lott’s 1990s’ theory of black film was
formulated. Yet another consequence of ignoring the African Diaspora is that it exposes Wilderson’s corpus of films as unable to
carry the weight of the transnational argument he attempts to advance . Here, beyond the US‐centricity or ‘social and political specificity of
[his] filmography’, (95) I am talking about Wilderson’s choice of films. For example, Antwone Fisher (dir. Denzel Washington, 2002) is attacked unfairly for failing to
acknowledge ‘a grid of captivity across spatial dimensions of the Black “body”, the Black “home”, and the Black “community”’ (111) while films like Alan and Albert
Hughes’s Menace II Society (1993), overlooked, do acknowledge the same grid and, additionally, problematise Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention Act
(STEP) policing. The above examples expose the fact of Wilderson’s dubious and questionable conclusions on black film. Red,
White and Black is particularly undermined by Wilderson’s propensity for exaggeration and blinkeredness . In chapter nine,
‘“Savage” Negrophobia’, he writes: The philosophical anxiety of Skins is all too aware that through the Middle Passage, African culture became Black ‘style’ ...
Blackness can be placed and displaced with limitless frequency and across untold territories, by whoever so chooses. Most important, there is nothing real Black people
can do to either check or direct this process ... Anyone can say ‘nigger’ because anyone can be a ‘nigger’. (235)7 Similarly, in chapter ten, ‘A Crisis in the Commons’,
Wilderson addresses the issue of ‘Black time’. Black is irredeemable, he argues, because, at no time in history had it been deemed, or
deemed through the right historical moment and place. In other words, the black moment and place are not right because they are
‘the ship hold of the Middle Passage’: ‘the most coherent temporality ever deemed as Black time’ but also ‘the “moment” of
no time at all on the map of no place at all’ . (279) Not only does Pinho’s more mature analysis expose this point as preposterous (see below), I also
wonder what Wilderson makes of the countless historians’ and sociologists’ works on slave ships, shipboard insurrections and/during the Middle Passage,8 or of
groundbreaking jazz‐studies books on cross‐cultural dialogue like The Other Side of Nowhere (2004). Nowhere has another side, but once Wilderson theorises blacks
as socially and ontologically dead while dismissing jazz as ‘belonging nowhere and to no one, simply there for the taking’, (225) there seems to be no way back. It is
therefore hardly surprising that Wilderson ducks the need to provide a solution or alternative to both his sustained bashing of
blacks and anti‐ Blackness.9 Last but not least, Red, White and Black ends like a badly plugged announcement of a bad Hollywood film’s badly planned
sequel: ‘How does one deconstruct life? Who would benefit from such an undertaking? The coffle approaches with its answers in tow.’ (340)
Black/White Binary DA
Focusing on disrupting whiteness generates a black/white binary – that re-inscribes oppression
Harris 6 (Cheryl – Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law; Faculty Director, Critical Race Studies Program. B.A., Wellesley
College; J.D., Northwestern University, “Review Essay: Whitewashing Race: Scapegoating Culture”, 2006, 94 Calif. L. Rev. 907,
lexis)
I The Project A. About Method: Revisiting the Black/White Binary At the outset, Whitewashing Race makes a critical methodological
choice to focus almost exclusively on racial subordination as reflected by dichotomous constructions of Blackness and
Whiteness , a binary that has been called the Black/White paradigm . Legal scholars have critiqued this racial frame as one
that tends to view racial subordination solely through the experience of Blacks , and consequently obscures the ways in which
subordination is experienced differently across racial groups. Clearly racial formation - the processes by which racial categories come into being
and are maintained n24 - varies across time, geography, and peoples. As the authors of Whitewashing Race openly acknowledge, in the United States "the color of race
and racism has never been monochromatic," particularly as the contemporary racial landscape is complicated by changing racial demographics in which the Black
population is decreasing and interracial couplings produce contested racial identities outside familiar categories (x). Nonetheless, the authors choose to articulate their
critique of colorblindness through an analysis of Black/White inequality (x-xi). They justify this "Black and White" frame on two primary grounds (x). They first
contend that their project responds to conservative racial politics that are largely articulated in Black and White terms. They note that Latinos and Asians, for example,
appear in the dominant racial discourse primarily as disciplinary examples invoked in opposition to, and in condemnation of, Blacks (x). For example, Latinos,
particularly immigrant workers, are lauded for their quiescence and hard work, in contrast to Black workers who are viewed as contentious and unmotivated. Asians
are said to exhibit both a salutary work ethic and greater intellectual capabilities than Blacks. n25 Asian and Latino racial identities, while still subject to highly
negative stereotypes, are nevertheless invoked to reinforce the story of Blacks' failure to assimilate. Asian and Latino racial experiences, then, are not engaged on their
own terms, but are primarily mechanisms to reinforce Black inferiority and, by logical extension, the fact of White superiority. However, that the prevailing
view of race is grounded in Black and White does not necessarily legitimate the authors' choice, particularly [*916] where, as
here, the crabbed, dominant conception of race is precisely what is being contested . The authors therefore offer a second, more substantive
rationale for working through the Black/White paradigm: The Black/White binary persists as a feature of everyday life and is crucial to the commonsense
understanding of racism... . Whiteness in the United States has never been simply a matter of skin color. Being White is also a measure, as Lani Guinier and Gerald
Torres put it, "of one's social distance from Blackness." In other words, Whiteness in America has been ideologically constructed mostly to mean "not Black." The
increasing numbers of Asians and Latinos in the United States and the development of a Black middle class have not changed this ideological construction of
Whiteness... . [The] dichotomy [is] not between Black and White, but between Black and non Black (x-xi). n26 By explicitly focusing on Black/White inequality, the
authors implicitly challenge the critique that the Black/White paradigm is a faulty description of racial hierarchies in the United States. n27 Their approach accepts that
the Black/White paradigm may not accurately reflect racial demographics, because, in part, it does not seek to do so. Instead, it describes racial power. n28
Within
the Black/White binary that undergirds prevailing social relations, "Black" and "White" signify ideological concepts and do not operate
as phenotypic markers, nor even as racial categories in the sense of creating socially constructed communities. Rather, Black and White are
relationally constructed. Whiteness is the position of relative privilege marked by the distance from Blackness; Blackness, on the other hand, is a legal
and social construction of disadvantage and subordination marked by the distance from White privilege . n29 [*917] This is not to
say that "Yellow," "Red," and "Brown," are not also oppositionally positioned vis-a-vis Whiteness. Rather the point is that "Yellow," "Red," and
"Brown," are often explicitly situated within the racial frames of "Black" and "White ." Indeed, "Black" or "colored" have historically
functioned within the law to include Chinese and Japanese immigrants, and others who have struggled to escape the chains of Blackness. n30 At the same time,
"White" has expanded and contracted to both include and exclude Mexicans n31 and Arabs. n32 The real binary, then, is Black/not Black. n33 Thus, by focusing on
Black/White inequality, Whitewashing Race does not uncritically affirm the Black/White paradigm that excludes or marginalizes the experiences of other racially
subordinated groups, but instead self-consciously chooses to frame its analysis within this dominant view. That said, it becomes important to situate this work, and
indeed to situate any work that focuses on a binary racial comparison, in the context [*918] of its role in the racial dialogue. n34 Not all projects warrant condemnation
for choosing to employ a Black/White analytic framework. On the other hand, it does not follow that any project that focuses on Black/White relations is immune from
the criticism that this binary obscures rather than reveals current racial dynamics. How then do we tell the difference? In part, the answer must begin with an analysis of
the purpose for which the comparison is being deployed. Here the project is to attack colorblindness, a reductionist view of race and racism that is intimately linked to
asserting a relationship between racial inequality and social pathology, of which Black people are the paradigm case. n35 While racial subordination impacts all
persons, and particularly all persons of color, the point the authors make is that, given the strength of the Black/not Black paradigm, it is crucial to focus on Blackness,
precisely because it is materially and phenomenologically defined relative to White advantage. That said, the success of the bigger project - to expose the
myth of colorblindness - depends upon engagement with other analyses of the experiences of Asians, Latinos, and indigenous
peoples. To further expose the myth the authors seek to dislodge, these analyses should not only identify important commonalities and
differences between groups, but should also clarify why everyone has a stake in eliminating racism . n36 Mapping the interlocking
ways in which racial subordination functions both within and among groups remains central to shifting the national discourse about race and racism.
The inevitable result is extermination – the process of otherization necessitates global destruction
Stein 7 (Howard, PhD and Full Professor in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine – University of Oklahoma Health
Sciences Center, Journal of Organizational Psychodynamics, Spring, (1)1)
Despite the fact that the federal government had been abundantly warned about the precarious condition of the levees, federal officials insisted on
their innocence, ignorance, and goodness, while vilifying the New Orleans government and the Louisiana government for a delayed and
incompetent response to the disaster. “Mother” Nature, too, became labeled as the unpredictable enemy. In this national scenario, as in
organizational life, leaders often resort to psychological splitting between us/them, good/bad, and count on frightened loyalty from
followers. Allcorn writes of the critical role of corporate ideology in establishing this either/or process: Ideology aimed at destroying all
opposing views to maintain the certainty of its [that is, the reified organization’s] righteousness and correctness, is a sign of simplicity triumphing
over complexity and the regressive withdrawal into a primitive state of oneness and homogeneity. (2006) Through ideology, leaders
psychologically “bind” workers to the organization, whereby all opposing views are rejected and doubt is eliminated. For psychoanalyst Christopher
Bollas, in the fascist state of mind, “The mind ceases to be complex, achieving a simplicity held together initially by bindings around the
signs of ideology” (1992, p. 201). Followers are recruited and subsequently “bound” to the ideology by the promise of alleviating intense anxiety and radically
splitting the perceptual world into “good” people (us, insiders) and “bad” people (them, others). Organizational leaders’ appeal to grave danger and their offer of a
magical solution, is illustrated by the following story from Seth Allcorn: I recall hearing of a meeting in a large teaching hospital that was called to formally announce
that downsizing was about to ensue with the help of a notorious downsizing consulting group. The hospital CEO was speaking to all of upper and middle management,
approximately 150 people. He explained the downsizing process this way. “You are standing on a train station platform. You have three choices. You can get on the
train that is going where I want to go. You can wait just a little bit before deciding what you want to do. Or, you can get on the second train that is leaving the
hospital.” Since I studied downsizing in depth as a researcher…I can bear witness to the fact that the metaphorical trains both lead to a man-made hell on earth. (1998,
p. xii) 10 As I have described elsewhere (Stein, 1998; 2001), Nazi Holocaust-era trains are a widespread metaphor used by leaders, victims, and survivors to describe
the harrowing experience of downsizing, reductions in force, rightsizing, and other forms of “managed social change.” The CEO offers Captain Ahab’s choice: follow
me and you live; don’t follow me and you’re dead. The irony, of course, is that to follow Ahab is to doom oneself to death. Firm belief in the totalitarian ideology and
the cause that it champions becomes more vital than life itself. Before continuing, let me say a few words about the psychodynamics of what is “total” in the ideology
and practice of totalitarianism. The work of a number of psychoanalytic writers converges to help us understand the psychodynamics of organizational and political
totalitarianism, and hence the appeal of its ideology and its ability to mobilize people in its service. In his pioneering work on the adolescent quality of
the either/or, inside/outside thinking that characterizes totalitarian ideologies, Erik Erikson distinguished between exclusivistic
“totalistic” thinking and inclusivistic “wholism” in identity formation (1968, pp. 74–90). In “totalistic” thinking, an ideology is created and
embraced that radically simplifies the world, repudiates if not destroys all opposing views, and is intolerant of all doubt. Erikson
described the universal process of dividing the world into what he called “pseudospecies” (pp. 41–42), by which all peoples to some
degree describe themselves as THE human beings, and others as lesser and lower life forms. That is, there is a split in affect such that
affiliative “good” feelings are associated with one’s own group, and disaffiliative “bad” feelings are associated with Others. “Inside” is idealized
and “outside” is demonized. The Others “were at least useful as a screen of projection for the negative identities which were the necessary, if
most uncomfortable, counterpart of the positive ones” (p. 41). Erikson continues: “The pseudospecies…is one of the more sinister aspects of all
group identity” (p. 42). This process becomes exaggerated and ossified in times of crisis, anxiety, and massive large group regression, as Vamik
Volkan (1997; 2002) and Howard Stein (2004) have described. Under such circumstances, people come to rely on emergency psychological
measures to protect themselves. What George Devereux (1955) called “catastrophic” thinking tends to seize the group, and the reduction of
(psychotic) anxiety becomes the central obsession of the group and its leaders. Great effort is mobilized to revitalize the loss- and deathobsessed group (see La Barre, 1972). Under these simultaneously inner and outer circumstances, people come to re-experience annihilation anxiety,
against which they defend themselves by the use of some of the earliest developmental defense mechanisms such as splitting, massive projective
identification, and externalization. Identity rigidity replaces continuous identity development. “Total immersion in a synthetic identity” goes hand
in glove with “a totally stereotyped enemy of the new identity” (Erikson, 1968, p. 89). Erikson continues: The fear of loss of identity which
fosters such indoctrination contributes significantly to that mixture of righteousness and criminality which , under totalitarian conditions,
becomes available for organized terror and for the establishment of major industries of extermination. (ibid.)
Calcification DA
Their understanding of anti-blackness is a calcified ideology that’s lost the ability to be self-reflexive
about racial progress in society---voting for the other team only re-enforces a self-fulfilling narrative and
re-enforces their investment in disenfranchisement
Johnson 8—Chaired Professor for Excellence in English at the University of Washington. Author of the National Book Awardwinning novel Middle Passage and many other works. (Charles, The End of the Black American Narrative, American Scholar,
77(3):32-42) Yet, despite being an antique, the old black American narrative of pervasive victimization persists, denying the overwhelming evidence of
change since the time of my parents and grandparents, refusing to die as doggedly as the Ptolemaic vision before Copernicus or the notion of
phlogiston in the 19th century, or the deductive reasoning of the medieval schoolmen.
It has become ahistorical . For a time it served us well and powerfully, yes, reminding each generation of black
Americans of the historic obligations and duties and dangers they inherited and faced,
but the problem with any story or idea or interpretation is that it can soon fail to fit
the facts and becomes an ideology , even kitsch. This point is expressed eloquently by Susan Griffin in her 1982 essay "The Way of all Ideology," where she says, "When a theory is transformed into
an
ideology, it begins to destroy the self and self-knowledge.… No one can tell it anything new. It is annoyed by any detail which
does not fit its worldview .… Begun as a way to restore one's sense of really, now it attempts to discipline real people, to
remake natural beings after its own image ." In his superb book In My Father's House, philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah writes, "There is nothing in the world that can do all we ask race
to do for us." We can easily amend or revise this insight and apply it to the pre-21st-century black American narrative, which can do very little of the things we need for it to do today. But this is an enduring human problem,
isn't it? As phenomenologist Edmund Husserl revealed a hundred years ago, we almost always perceive and understand the new in terms of the old--on more precisely, we experience events through our ideas, and frequently
While a story or model may disclose
a particular meaning for an experience , it also forces into the background or conceals other possible meanings . Think of this in light of
novelist Ralph Ellison's brilliant notion of "invisibility," where--in his classic Invisible Man--the characters encountered by his nameless protagonist all impose their ideologies
(explanations and ideas) on the chaos of experience, on the mysterious, untamed life that forever chums beneath widely
those are ideas that bring us comfort, ideas received from our parents, teachers, the schools we attend, and the enveloping culture, rather than original ones of our own.
accepted interpretations and explanations of "history" and "culture,"
which in our social world, for Ellison, are the seen. I know, personally, there is value in this
the most intriguing,
material for stories can often be found in the margins of the codified and often repeated narrative about slavery. In this case, I
dramatized a delicious anecdote about what happened to Martha and her slaves right after the death of George. What I am saying is that "official" stories and explanations and endlessly repeated
interpretations of black American life over decades can short-circuit direct perception of the specific phenomenon before us . The
idea of something--an intellectual construct--is often more appealing and perfect (in a Platonic sense) than the thing itself, which
always remains mysterious and ambiguous and mess)', by which I mean that its sense is open-ended, never fixed , it is always wise, I believe, to
see all our propositions (and stories) as provisional, partial, incomplete, and subject to revision on the basis of new evidence, which we can be sure is just around
the corner. Nevertheless, we have heavily and often uncritically invested for most of our lives in the pre-21st-century black American narrative . In fact,
some of us depend upon it for our livelihood, so it is not easy to let go, or to revise this story. Last October, Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan spoke for two
and a half hours at the Atlanta Civic Center. He and his mentor, black separatist Elijah Muhammad, provided black Americans with what is probably the most extreme, Manichean, and mythological version of the
black American narrative, one that was anti-integrationist. In this incomplete and misleading rendition of the black American story, the races are locked in eternal
Ellisonian idea because in the historical fictions I've been privileged to publish, like "Martha's Dilemma" in my second collection, Soulcatcher and Other Stories, I discovered that
ambiguous, and revealing
struggle . As a story, this narrative falls because it is conceived as melodrama, a form of storytelling in which the characters are flat, lack complexity,, are either all
good or all bad, and the plot involves malicious villains and violent actions . Back in the 1930s when Elijah Muhammad shaped his myth of Yacub, which explained the origins of the
white race as "devils," he sacrificed the credibility of both character and plot for the most simplistic kind of dramatic narrative. Farrakhan covered many subjects that day last October, but what I found most interesting is that he said successful black
people like Oprah Winfrey, Senator Obama, Colin Powell, and Condoleeza Rice give black Americans a false impression of progress. In other words, their highly
visible successes do not change the old narrative of group victimization. Minister Farrakhan seems unwilling to accept their success as evidence that the lives of black
Americans have improved . He seems unwilling to accept the inevitability of change. He was quoted in the press as saying, "A life of ease sometimes makes you forget the
affirmative action that created a new middle class, he added, "It's becoming a plantation again, but you can't fight that because you want
to keep your little job." I beg to differ with Farrakhan, with his misuse of language, his loose, imprecise diction, because we obviously do not live on
struggle." And despite the battles for "
plantations , And wasn't job opportunity, one of the explicit goals of" the black American narrative? Farrakhan's entire life has been an investment in a story that
changed as he was chasing it. So we can understand his fierce, personal, and even tragic attachment to dusty, antebellum concepts
when looking at the uncharted phenomena in the early 21st century that outstrip his concepts and language. However, it is precisely
because Farrakhan cannot progress beyond an oversimplified caricature of a story line for racial phenomena that the suddenly notorious Rev. Jeremiah Wright praises him, saying "His depth of analysis… when it comes to
the racial ills of this nation is astounding and eye-opening," and, "He brings a perspective that is helpful and honest." Recently Wright called the Nation of Islam leader, "one of the most important voices in the 20th and 21st
I do not doubt that Wright and Farrakhan are men who have experienced the evil of racism and want to see the conditions of our people
improve, or that both have records of community service. But it is the emotional attachment to a dated narrative, one leavened with the 1960s-era liberation theology of
James Cone, that predictably leads Wright to proclaim that the U.S. government created the AIDS virus to destroy blacks (he invokes the old and proven,
centur[ies]."
the ghastly Tuskegee syphilis experiment, in an effort to understand a new affliction devastating black people, and thus commits the logical fallacy, known as misuse of analogy); that Jesus was "a black man"; and that the
brains of blacks and whites operate differently. The former pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago has made these paranoid and irresponsible statements publicly again and again without offering the slightest
shred of evidence for these claims. "A bunch of rants that aren't grounded in truth" was how Barack Obama described his former minister's incendiary oratory, which is clearly antithetical not only to the postracial spirit of
the Illinois senator's own speeches but also to his very racially and geographically mixed background. For in the realm of ideological thinking, especially from the pulpit, feeling and faith trump fact, and passion (as well as
beliefs based on scripture) replaces fidelity to the empirical and painstaking logical demonstration. Furthermore, such obsolete stories can also lead to serious mistakes in scholarship. I'm thinking now of Henry Louis Gates Jr., who in 1988 directed
the publication of Oxford University Press's 40-volume Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers. In his foreword, Gates praised the lost works of these black women writers as being the literary ancestors of Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison,
and Alice Walker. Furthermore, he said it was the discovery of a particular lost black novel, called Four Girls at Cottage City, published in 1895 by Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins, that inspired him to direct this Schomburg series in the first place so, he said, "I can
read them myself." Okay, so far so good. But in 2005, Holly Jackson, then a doctoral student of English at Brandeis University, was given the academically' pedestrian, grunt-work assignment of writing an entry about Kelley-Hawkins for the African American
National Biography. At the time very little was known about Kelley-Hawkins. After checking birth records in the Massachusetts Vital Records, and other documents, Jackson realized that Kelley-Hawkins was not black--as five decades of scholars had assumed but
white. Yet all the evidence to suggest her whiteness was clearly present in the books she wrote. Something that had always puzzled scholars, Jackson said, was "the apparent whiteness of her characters, who are repeatedly described with blue eyes and skin as white as
'pure' or 'driven' snow." Even more fantastic are the theories that literary scholars came up with to explain why Kelley-Hawkins, supposedly a black woman, made no references to race or blackness in her two novels written in the 1890s. Jackson says, "Scholars have
explained this away by arguing that the abundance of white signifiers is actually politically radical, with some even going so far as to argue that this extremely white world depicts a kind of post-racial utopia," a modem world where, according to critic Carla L.
Peterson, "racial difference no longer existed." Obviously, all these explanations are hogwash. Fifty years of scholarship based on these mistakes--articles, dissertations, courses in African American women's writing that include the work of Kelley-Hawkins--turns out
to be an illusion created by the blinding intentionality of those who wrote about this white author based on a tangled knot of beliefs and prejudices, their concept of her completely distorting the facts. Once Gates learned of this research by Jackson and also
investigations by Katherine Flynn, a genealogist, he immediately went into the mode of damage control. He told a reporter that the work of Kelley-Hawkins would at least be removed from future editions of the Schomburg series, and he downplayed the significance of
these discoveries by Jackson and Flynn. But Jackson, being a true scholar, would not allow this intellectual scandal to be swept under the rug. Of this "enormous historical misconception," she said, "there is so much at stake here, because of all the writing that has been
done based on a false assumption about race." She asks us to wonder, "How have her [Kelley-Hawkins's] overwhelmingly 'white' texts successfully passed as black for so long in the absence of any corroborating historical data? How does this discovery change our
understanding of African American literary history?" Finally, she said, "We have stretched our understanding of how black women have written in America to incorporate texts that do not fit." I've gone into great detail about the Kelley-Hawkins story
the stories we tell ourselves can blind us to the obvious, leading us to see in
matters of race only what we want to see based on our desires and political agendas. When we confront phenomena of any
because it is a cautionary tale for scholars and an example of how our theories, our explanatory models, and
kind, we are wise if we assume the position phenomenologist Herbert Spiegelberg called epistemological humility , which is a healthy skepticism about what we think
we already know. When constructing our narratives, it would also help if we remember a famous and often-quoted statement by C. S. Lewis on the characteristics of the
human mind: "Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions
so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them--never become conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such
an apparatus let through?" How much, indeed. But if the old black American narrative has outlived its usefulness as a tool of interpretation, then what should we do?
The answer, I think, is obvious. In the 21st century, we need new and better stories , new concepts, and new vocabularies and grammar based not on
the past but on the dangerous, exciting, and unexplored present, with the understanding that each is, at best, a provisional reading
of reality , a single phenomenological profile that one day is likely to be revised , if not completely overturned. These will be narratives that
do not claim to be absolute truth, but instead more humbly present themselves as a very tentative thesis that must be tested every day in the
depths of our own experience and by all the reliable evidence we have available, as limited as that might be. For as Bertrand Russell told us, what we know is always
"vanishingly small." These will be narratives of individuals, not groups. And is this not exactly what Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of when he hoped a day would come when
men and women were judged not by the color of their skin, but instead by their individual deeds and actions, and the content of their character?
Exceptionalism DA
Foregrounding of whiteness reinforces US exceptionalism, undermining solvency – their localization to
intra-debate community issues is an exclamation mark
Carey 2009 (Jane Carey, Postcolonialism Researcher, Monach U, Leigh Boucher, School of Modern History & PLS, Marquarie U,
and Katherine Ellinghaus (School of Hist Studies, Monach U), Re-Orienting Whiteness (B) 2009)
(p3-4) Arneson was not alone, as the flurry of similarly dissatisfied reviews indicated." Although not as scathing, Peter Kolchin, for
example, also expressed uneasiness at the "elusive, undefined nature of whiteness," the lack of "historical grounding" of many
contemporary studies, and the "over-reliance on whiteness in explaining the American past." 2° In assigning such overarching
explanatory power to whiteness, he suggested, the field is prone to overstatement and overgeneralization, coming close to
"portraying race as a ubiquitous and unchanging transhistorical force rather than a shifting and contingent 'construction.'" 21
Kolchin also briefly observed that one of the "most striking features" of whiteness studies is the "assumption—sometimes
asserted and sometimes unspoken—that the racism they describe is uniquely American and that American whiteness can be
understood in isolation." 22 The most influential U.S. scholarship, particularly that by labor historians, locates the creation of white
identity entirely within historical circumstances quite specific to the United States, namely black chattel slavery and, later, mass
immigration. 23 While this narrow national focus has not emerged as a prominent concern within existing critiques of the field, we
argue that it is in fact of central importance. Much historical work on whiteness is even more narrowly positioned. As John Munro
has outlined, it largely represents another in the series of U.S. labor history projects that have sought to answer the question
Werner Sombart posed in 1906, "Why is there no socialism in the United States?," and is primarily concerned with finding "a usable
past upon which an anti-capitalist and antiracist future can be envisioned." 24 This in part explains why it has largely ignored wider
scholarship that does not share these, very particular, interests, and why many objections to whiteness studies have simply joined
the long history of attempts to assert the primacy of class over race. 25 Despite pretensions to an almost universal applicability,
distinct U.S. academic debates, as well as specific political projects and disavowals (particularly of the settler-colonial underpinnings
of the United States), silently orient the field. In many ways, debates about whiteness have primarily reflected a turf war over
leadership in the field of labor history in the United States. The issues at stake are far too important to allow them to be
subsumed within such parochial concerns.
International DA
Wilderson’s myopic focus on U.S. politics dooms his critique for combating international discrimination
Ba 2011 (Saer Maty, “The U.S. Decentered..” in Cultural Studies Review 17.2)
Pinho’s above suggestions can be, but are not easily, achieved. At the time of (her) writing it was no longer a question of if, but one of how, to see the fusion of black
culture with baianidade/Bahian culture. Aware of this issue, she suggests that we step out of ‘Manichean and superficial’ Afrocentrism so as
to see the largely ‘artificial’ character of classifications ‘black culture’ and ‘Bahian culture’ and to take into account ‘the
agency of cultural producers’. (198–9) Accordingly, I find stimulating Pinho’s courage to declare that to objectify identities does not necessarily create
estrangement; without objectification cultures cannot expand and reproduce, (209) and cultural transformation needs to be promoted. In turn, to transform
culture demands a re‐thinking of what equality means because: Equal should not be understood as same ... To see equality as
sameness is like viewing racelessness as whiteness. It is a formulation that allows ‘white’ to be the neutral standard from
which black differs; or ‘man’ to be the neutral standard against which women are compared. (220–1) Put simply, I welcome the above
statement and Pinho’s overall thesis. I wish Wilderson paid attention to books like Pinho’s, Cedric J. Robinson’s Black Marxism (1983) or W.E.B. DuBois’s Black
Reconstruction in America (1935), and to the ideas of Kwame A. Appiah, Cornel West, Marc Reed, Simone de Beauvoir, Eric Robert Taylor, to name but a few. Had
Wilderson done so, his book could have been balanced. Red, White and Black is of almost no use to film studies scholars. I find it additionally
useless because I believe that the USA is not the world’s centre, and that US antagonisms, related to cinema or not, are
always‐already multiply outer‐ national.
Whiteness studies fail – US model focus – they aggravate the problem by trying to sidestep our literature
bases
Carey (Postcolonialism Researcher, Monach U), Leigh Boucher (School of Modern History & PLS, Marquarie U), and
Katherine Ellinghaus (School of Hist Studies, Monach U), Re-Orienting Whiteness (B) 2009
Jane
(p2) This is not to say that this collection is united by an unfaltering commitment to whiteness studies. It is equally shaped by a
uneasiness with the field tendencies toward ahistoricity, reification, and universalization; its ill-defined analytic vocabulary; and
especially its potential simply to reinscribe white people at the center of historical narratives. And we are acutely aware that, since its
emergence, the field has proven "a lightning rod for critics.' I licked, alongside its rapid growth, the apparently deserved death of
the field has been simultaneously announced as the latest headstone in a graveyard of academic fads. 7 A key development that
argues these dismissive predictions, however, is the degree to which the terms "white" and "whiteness" have already been
adopted by historians, particularly those writing about European colonialism. These categories have recently been inserted alongside
class, gender, and various "others."' This book functions in some ways simply to highlight the significance of this quite startling
analytic uptake. But it also registers a profound discomfort with the ways that whiteness has snuck through the backdoor into
the historian's toolkit, often with little definition or explanation. Its meanings are often taken for granted, as if they were selfevident. The nuanced, historically grounded, and theoretically broad-ranging approaches in this collection suggest a number of ways
forward for scholars. As Matt Wray has recently observed, "whiteness studies has left childhood and is now enduring adolescence. It's
having its identity crisis right on time." 9 The time is ripe for a major reassessment of the field. In approaching this task, we wish to
foreground the limitations that have resulted from the U.S.-centered nature of most whiteness scholarship. This is clearly
problematic for a field that makes broad, even universal, claims to explaining the operations of "race." Whiteness, obviously, has
had far wider geographic purchase. We seek to decenter the United States in the area of whiteness studies, and in some ways to
recognize that it was never central to begin with. So too, the isolationist tendencies of U.S. whiteness scholarship have produced
its lack of engagement with work on race in other contexts, particularly the analytic frames that have emerged through attempts to
theorize European colonialism. We contend that this nationally and theoretically limited approach represents in fact the major
weakness of the field." In other words, whiteness needs to be reconciled with the major intellectual currents that have shaped
research on race outside the United States.
Ontological Blackness DA
The theory of ontological blackness enforces a rigid and suffocating identity on the heterogeneity of
black experiences, leading to political paralysis and re-entrenching white power.
Pinn 2004 (Anthony, Anthony B. Pinn is an American professor and writer whose work focuses on liberation theology, Black religion, and Black humanism.
Pinn is the Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor of Humanities and Professor of Religious Studies at Rice University, “‘‘Black Is, Black Ain’t’’: Victor Anderson, African
American Theological Thought, and Identity,” Dialog: A Journal of Theology, Volume 43, Number 1 . Spring 2004)
This connection between ontological blackness and religion is natural because: ‘‘ontological blackness signifies the totality of black existence , a
binding together of black life and experience. In its root, religio, religion denotes tying together, fastening behind, and binding together. Ontological blackness renders
black life and experience a totality.’’13 According to Anderson, Black theological discussions are entangled in ontological blackness. And accordingly, discussions
of black life revolve around a theological understanding of Black experience limited to suffering and survival in a racist
system. The goal of this theology is to find the ‘‘meaning of black faith’’ in the merger of black cultural consciousness, icons of genius, and post-World War II Black
defiance. An admirable goal to be sure, but here is the rub: Black theologians speak, according to Anderson, in opposition to ontological whiteness when they are
actually dependent upon whiteness for the legitimacy of their agenda. Furthermore, ontological blackness’s strong ties to suffering and survival
result in blackness being dependent on suffering, and as a result social transformation brings into question what it means to be black and religious.
Liberative outcomes ultimately force an identity crisis, a crisis of legitimation and utility. In Anderson’s words: Talk about liberation becomes hard to
justify where freedom appears as nothing more than defiant self-assertion of a revolutionary racial consciousness that
requires for its legitimacy the opposition of white racism. Where there exists no possibility of transcending the blackness that whiteness created,
African American theologies of liberation must be seen not only as crisis theologies; they remain theologies in a crisis of legitimation.14 This conversation becomes
more ‘‘refined’’ as new cultural resources are unpacked and various religious alternatives acknowledged. Yet the bottom line remains racialization of issues and
agendas, life and love. Falsehood is perpetuated through the ‘‘hermeneutic of return,’’ by which ontological blackness is the
paradigm of Black existence and thereby sets the agenda of Black liberation within the ‘‘postrevolutionary context’’ of
present day USA. One ever finds the traces of the Black aesthetic which pushes for a dwarfed understanding of Black life and
a sacrifice of individuality for the sake of a unified Black ‘faith’. Yet differing experiences of racial oppression (the stuff of
ontological blackness) combined with varying experiences of class, gender and sexual oppression call into question the value
of their racialized formulations. Implicit in all of this is a crisis of faith, an unwillingness to address both the glory and guts of
Black existence—nihilistic tendencies that, unless held in tension with claims of transcendence, have the potential to overwhelm and to
suffocate. At the heart of this dilemma is friction between ontological blackness and ‘‘contemporary postmodern black life’’ —
issues, for example related to ‘‘selecting marriage partners, exercising freedom of movement, acting on gay and lesbian preferences, or choosing political parties.’’15
How does one foster balance while embracing difference as positive? Anderson looks to Nietzsche. European genius, complete with its heroic
epic, met its match in the aesthetic categories of tragedy and the grotesque genius revived and espoused by Friedreich Nietzsche. The grotesque genius served as an
effective counter-discourse by embracing both the ‘light’ and ‘dark’ aspects of life, and holding in tension oppositional sensations—pleasure and pain, freedom and
oppression.16 Utilizing Nietzsche’s work, Anderson ask: ‘‘what should African American cultural and religious criticism look like when they are no longer romantic in
inspiration and the cult of heroic genius is displaced by the grotesquery—full range of expression, actions, attitudes, behaviors everything found in African American
life—of contemporary black expressive culture and public life?’’17 Applied to African Americans, the grotesque embodies the full range of
African American life—all expressions, actions, attitudes, and behavior. With a hermeneutic of the grotesque as the foci,
religio-cultural criticism is free from the totalizing nature of racial apologetics and the classical Black aesthetic. By extension,
Black theology is able to address both issues of survival (Anderson sees their importance.) and the larger goal of cultural fulfillment, Anderson’s version of liberation.
That is to say, placing ‘‘blackness’’ along side other indicators of identity allows African Americans to define themselves in a
plethora of ways while maintaining their community status. This encourages African Americans to see themselves as they
are— complex and diversified—no longer needing to surrender personal interests for the sake of monolithic collective status .
Pessimism Bad
**Pessimism towards progressivism inverts the error and makes racism worse
Jones 1999 (Richard Wyn Jones is at Cardiff University, where he is currently a Professor of Politics. Professor Wyn Jones is the
former Director of the Institute of Welsh Politics and professor in critical security studies at Aberystwyth University. Security,
Strategy, and Critical Theory – 1999. Columbia International Affairs Online, September 1999)
An even more troubling feature of Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis is the downplaying of individual responsibility that is implicit in their argument. If Auschwitz is
the inevitable outcome of enlightenment, and if instrumental rationality is too powerful to resist, then can we expect an individual Nazi to act in a different fashion? In
the hermetic society the individual is a mere cipher, and if this is the case, can any individual really be blamed for his or her
behavior? These questions highlight an ethical lacuna at the heart of Dialectic of Enlightenment. Despite the obvious intentions of the authors, their
analysis generates a logic that renders them unable to differentiate meaningfully between different actions in the political
realm. If “nothing complicitous with this world can have any truth,” then surely everything that exists in the real world must be judged equally untrue or false. But if
this is so, how are we to evaluate efforts at securing change in contemporary society? Let us consider the ending of apartheid in South Africa. Although the
citizens of that country cannot be adjudged to be free after the overthrow of the apartheid system, surely they are freer .
Although the establishment of liberal democracy there offers no panacea, it is a better system than the totalitarian one that it has
replaced. But although Adorno and Horkheimer as individuals would almost certainly have rejoiced in the downfall of the apartheid system, as theoreticians they
seem to be unable to provide us with any grounds for favoring one particular set of social institutions over another. Here we have a bizarre inversion of the relativism
to which contemporary poststructuralist approaches are prone. By arguing that there are no grounds to choose between different accounts of
reality, poststructuralists are inevitably forced to accept that all accounts of a given reality are true. They can make no
judgment on these claims that is not arbitrary (Norris 1992; Hunter and Wyn Jones 1995). Similarly, by arguing that everything in the
world is equally false, Adorno and Horkheimer can make no judgment as to why we might prefer some forms of behavior and some
set of practices over others. Here the impasse into which the analysis of Dialectic of Enlightenment leads its authors stands in bold relief. The
determinism and reductionism of their argument is ultimately paralyzing. It was, of course, Antonio Gramsci who popularized the injunction
that all those intent on changing society should attempt to face the world with a combination of “pessimism of the intellect”
and “optimism of the will .” This position has much to commend it given the propensity of radicals to view society with rose–tinted glasses. However, the
limitations of this position are nowhere better illustrated than in Dialectic of Enlightenment, in which the pessimism is so thoroughgoing that it becomes
absolutely debilitating. Any attempt to challenge the status quo already stands condemned as futile. The logical outcome of
this attitude is resignation and passivity. Adorno attempted to make a virtue of the detached attitude that he and Horkheimer adopted toward the political
struggles of their own age by claiming: “If one is concerned to achieve what might be possible with human beings, it is extremely difficult to remain friendly towards
real people.” However, considering that it is only “real people” who can bring about a better society, Adorno’s “complex form of misanthropy” ultimately leads only to
quiescence (Wiggershaus 1994: 268). Thus, despite the clear similarities in the influences and interests of the founding fathers of critical theory and Gramsci, the
resignatory passivity of the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment led them to a position on political practice far more akin to that of Oswald Spengler or Arthur
Schopenhauer than to that adopted by the Sardinian Marxist Gramsci, even as he languished in a fascist prison. In view of the traditional Marxist emphasis on the unity
of theory and practice, it is hardly surprising that Adorno and Horkheimer’s rejection of any attempt to orient their work toward political activity led to bitter criticism
from other radical intellectuals. Perhaps the most famous such condemnation was that of Lukács, who acidly commented that the members of the Frankfurt School had
taken up residence in the “Grand Hotel Abyss.” The inhabitants of this institution enjoyed all the comforts of the bourgeois lifestyle while fatalistically surveying the
wreckage of life beyond its doors. Whereas Lukács’s own apologias for Stalinism point to the dangers of subordinating theoretical activity to the exigencies of day–to–
day practical politics, Adorno and Horkheimer sunder theory and political practice completely, impoverishing the theoretical activity itself. Their stance leads to
an aridity and scholasticism ill suited to any social theory that aspires to real–world relevance. Furthermore, the critical
theorist’s position on political practice is based on an underestimation of the potential for progressive change that exists even
in the most administered societies. It is instructive to contrast the attitude of Adorno and Horkheimer with that of Raymond Williams, who delivers the
following broadside against “high culture Marxists” such as the members of the Frankfurt School: When the Marxists say that we live in a dying culture, and that the
masses are ignorant, I have to ask them... where on earth they have lived. A dying culture, and ignorant masses, are not what I have known and see. (R. Williams 1989:
8) As I will discuss in Chapter 6, the evidence suggests that Williams is closer to the truth. People acting both individually and collectively, through
social movements and state institutions, can actually influence the world around them in a progressive direction. Adorno and
Horkheimer’s pessimism is unwarranted.
Structural antagonism destroys progressivism and re-entrenches racism—we can acknowledge every
problem with the status quo, but adopt a pragmatic orientation towards solutions
Clark, professor of law – Catholic University, ’95 (Leroy D., 73 Denv. U.L. Rev. 23)
A Final Word Despite Professor Bell's
prophecy of doom, I believe he would like to have his analysis proven wrong. However, he desperately leans on a
tactic from the past--laying out the disabilities of the black condition and accusing whites of not having the moral strength to
act fairly. That is the ultimate theme in both of his books and in much of his law review writing. That tactic not only lacks full force against
today's complex society, it also becomes, for many whites, an exaggerated claim that racism is the sole cause of black
misfortunes. n146 Many whites may feel about the black condition what many of us may have felt about the homeless: dismayed, but having no
clear answer as to how the problem is to be solved, and feeling individually powerless if the resolution calls for massive
resources that we, personally, lack. Professor Bell's two books may confirm this sense of powerlessness in whites with a limited background in this subject,
because Professor Bell does not offer a single programmatic approach toward changing the circumstance of blacks. He presents only startling,
unanalyzed prophecies of doom, which will easily garner attention from a controversy-hungry media. n147 It is much harder to exercise imagination to create
viable strategies for change. n148 Professor Bell sensed the despair that the average--especially average black--reader would experience, so he put forth rhetoric urging
an "unremitting struggle that leaves no room for giving up." n149 His contention is ultimately hollow, given the total sweep of his work. At some point it
becomes dysfunctional to refuse giving any credit to the very positive abatements of racism that occurred with white support, and on
occasion, white leadership. Racism thrives in an atmosphere of insecurity, apprehension about the future, and inter-group
resentments. Unrelenting, unqualified accusations only add to that negative atmosphere. Empathetic and more generous responses
are possible in an atmosphere of support, security, and a sense that advancement is possible; the greatest progress of blacks occurred during the 1960s
and early 1970s when the economy was expanding. Professor Bell's "analysis" is really only accusation and "harassing white folks," and is undermining and
destructive. There is no love--except for his own group--and there is a constricted reach for an understanding of whites. There is only rage and perplexity. No bridges
are built--only righteousness is being sold. A people, black or white, are capable only to the extent they believe they are. Neither I, nor Professor Bell, have a crystal
ball, but I do know that creativity and a drive for change are very much linked to a belief that they are needed, and to a belief that they can make a difference. The
future will be shaped by past conditions and the actions of those over whom we have no control. Yet it is not fixed; it will also be shaped by the
attitudes and energy with which we face the future. Writing about race is to engage in a power struggle. It is a non-neutral
political act, and one must take responsibility for its consequences. Telling whites that they are irremediably racist is not mere
" information ";
it is a force that helps create the future it predicts. If whites believe the message, feelings of futility could overwhelm
any further efforts to seek change. I am encouraged, however, that the motto of the most articulate black spokesperson alive today, Jesse Jackson, is, "Keep
hope alive!" and that much of the strength of Martin Luther King, Jr. was his capacity to "dream" us toward a better place.
Aff Only
Perm Solves
Pragmatism is best – you must always try to improve your position. That’s key to reasonable
hopefulness. We can intellectually endorse a pessimistic view of humanity and still be progressive.
Glaude, 2007 (Eddie S. Jr., Professor of African American Studies and Religion @ Princeton, In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism
and the Politics of Black America Pg. 31-33)
Classical pragmatists like Dewey reject the pessimistic conclusions drawn from the recognition of our precarious position in the
world. 41 Dewey, for example, would readily agree with Schopenhauer that suffering is a constitutive feature of the world of
action, but would insist that it points to only one side of the “double connection” of experience . Of course experience involves
suffering. It is “primarily a process of undergoing: a process of standing something; of suffering and passion, of affection, in the literal sense of these terms.” 42
But the process of undergoing is never merely passive: experience is not simply a matter of receptivity . We are also agents—
reacting, experimenting, concerned with influencing the direction of our encounters in such a way that they will benefit and not harm. These actions involve us
in peril: conflicts of ends will occur and, more than likely, new sorts of problems will arise as old ones are resolved. But this is
not necessarily a bad thing. It is part of what it means to be an organism interacting with its environment . Dewey would agree with
Schopenhauer: our world is one in which suffering is inescapable. But, where Schopenhauer would conclude from this fact that it
would have been better not to have been born, Dewey, like Emerson and James, responds with meliorism. Meliorism is the belief that
our circumstances at a given moment, be they comparatively good or bad, can be improved . Such a view commends intelligent
action in the sense that it encourages us to inquire into the amelioration of problems, individual and social, and the
obstructions to their resolution. Such a view doesn’t commit Dewey to a form of optimism. In fact, he explicitly rejects an optimistic orientation. In his
words, meliorism “arouses confidence and a reasonable hopefulness as optimism does not . For the latter, in declaring that good is already
realized in ultimate reality, tends to make us gloss over the evils that concretely exist.” 43 For Dewey, optimism— with its view that our world is the best possible
world—“co-operates with pessimism . . . in benumbing sympathetic insight and intelligent effort in reform.” Moreover, “it beckons men away from the world of
relativity and change into the calm of the absolute and eternal.” 44 Here Dewey echoes William James. James wrote that “ meliorism treats salvation as
neither necessary nor impossible. It treats it as a possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability the more
numerous the actual conditions of salvation become .” 45 To put the point in Deweyan language, we can indeed reconstruct our
experiences for the better— can secure and stabilize some of the goods within them— once we have grasped, through critical
intelligence, the conditions that make for those experiences. But our efforts are not guaranteed. The world of action is a world of change, “a
precarious and perilous place,” which, when it is all said and done, retains its hazardous character, in spite of our intelligent efforts. The dangers may be modestly
modified but hardly eliminated. 46 As Dewey writes in Experience and Nature: While philosophy has its source not in any special impulse or staked-off section of
experience, but in the entire human predicament, this human situation falls wholly within nature. It reflects the traits of nature; it gives indisputable evidence that in
nature itself qualities and relations, individualities and uniformities, finalities and efficacies, contingencies and necessities are inextricably bound. The harsh conflicts
and happy coincidences of this interpenetration make experience what it consciously is; their manifest apparition creates doubt, forces inquiry, exacts choices, and
imposes liability for the choices made. 47 We can never claim that intelligence will secure our lives once and for all or “save us from ruin or destruction.” The
strangeness and unexpected aspects of nature will continuously interrupt, irritate, and exact choices from us. To think otherwise would be to turn our attention away
from the facts of experience and suggest an unreasonable hopefulness that would lead away from the task of reconstruction. 48 To be sure, our conditions of
living require “a certain intellectual pessimism, in the sense of a steadfast willingness to uncover sore points, to acknowledge
and search for abuses, to note how presumed good often serves as a cloak for actual bad .” 49 Ours is indeed a life of suffering.
But suffering is only a part of our experiences. We must always be mindful of our capacity to act on our world. If those efforts
are frustrated (as perhaps they will be) or if they lead to other more complicated, nuanced problems (as they most assuredly will) such is the nature of our efforts
to secure our world amid change. They are provisional and sometimes fail. But this fact should not lead us to turn our backs on this world or to
believe that nonexistence is better than existence. Responses like these reflect a desire for certainty and ultimate guarantees. Despite our best efforts,
neither is possible nor, if we truly care about this world, desirable. Oliver Wendell Holmes states the position best, and Dewey quotes him at length in Experience and
Nature: If we believe we came out of the universe, not it out of us, we must admit that we do not know what we are talking about when we speak of brute matter. We
do know that a certain complex of energies can wag its tail and another can make syllogisms. These are among the powers of the unknown, and if, as may be, it has
still greater powers that we cannot understand . . . why should we not be content? Why should we employ the energy that is furnished to us by the cosmos to defy it and
to shake our fist at the sky? It seems silly. . . . That the universe has in it more than we understand, that the private soldiers have not been told the plan of campaign, or
even that there is one . . . has no bearing on our conduct. We still shall fight— all of us because we want to live, some, at least, because we
want to realize our spontaneity and prove our powers, for the joy of it, and we may leave to the unknown the supposed final
valuation of that which in any event has value to us. It is enough for us that the universe has produced us and has within it, as
less than it, all that we believe and love. 50 This is where Dewey’s philosophy of action begins and why I believe it presupposes a view of tragedy.
Because once we stop pondering God’s intent or seeking to disclose that which purportedly lies behind the world of appearance, we are confronted with the tragic
choices of fragile human beings seeking a bit of security in the here and now, and hoping, reasonably, for a better future for their children. His is a philosophy that
begins with human agency and historical/natural limitations, accenting the fact that all we hold dear lies in this world, and that, with intelligence and a bit of luck,
that’s all we need to flourish.
Only the perm solves – theory must be combined with pratical political action. Failure to engage
undermines social progress and allows conservatives to win out.
Wing 2003 (Adrien Katherine Wing, Bessie Dutton Murray Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Iowa College of
Law, Louisiana Law Review, Spring, 2003, 63 La. L. Rev. 717)
Another tenet that Critical Race Theorists espouse involves the necessity to engage in praxis, the combining of the-ory and
practice . n153 According to Eric Yamamoto, "critical race praxis focuses on developing and then translating critical
theoretical insights about race, culture, and law into operational ideas and language for antisubordination prac-tice and, in
turn, rethinking theory in light of new practice experience." n154 Sumi Cho and Robert Westley have [*736] called for
synergism, an "interaction of agents or conditions that produces a combined effect that is greater than the sum of the
individual effects. We envision a mode of synergistic movement theorizing that contains both sub-stantive and
methodological commitments . . . Such a project is necessarily collaborative , requiring information and insights gleaned
from movements in order to formulate discursive strategies that must ultimately be tested in the context of actual struggle."
n155 My own explanation for the need for praxis is based upon the historical realities of many minorities. "Since many of us come from disenfranchised communities of color, we feel compelled to 'look to the bottom,'
n156 to involve our-selves in the development of solutions to our people's problems. We can not afford to adopt the classic, detached, ivory tower model of
scholarship when so many are suffering, sometimes in our own extended families. We do not believe in praxis instead of theory, but that both
are essential to our people's literal and figurative future." n157 Praxis can take many forms ranging from counseling a client, filing a brief, making a speech, doing op-ed pieces,
writing popular press books, appearing on talk shows, serving on boards, testifying before Congress, support-ing/attacking federal judicial nominees, or working officially or pro bono with various public interest,
governmental, or international organizations. Some CRT adherents do engage in praxis. For example, RobertWilliams represents Indian tribes around the world. n158 Gerald Lopez calls for community centered rebellious
lawyering, n159 and Luke Cole places legal tactics within a broader political strategy. n160 Acknowledging the difficulties academics naturally face into linking theory with prac-tice, John Calmore states that CRT's primary
impact on practice is seed planting among students. n161 Yamamoto has developed four guideposts for critical race praxis inquiry: conceptual, performative, material, and reflexive. n162 After [*737] framing and
exploring the conceptual issues involved, he asserts that one can design or perform appropriate actions. You can then assess if there was any material change, and then reintegrate that experience back into the theory of
practice. n163 In my own career, I have unknowingly used Yamamoto's framework. Because I am the mother of five African American sons, I am critically interested in the treatment of Black men in the criminal justice
system. In the early 90s, my interest manifested itself in exploring issues related to gangs. I studied conceptual issues related to gang theory, particularly as affecting ethnic minority males. I determined that I needed to get
beyond theories developed predominantly by white male social science academics in ivory towers to understand the reality of Black gang life, and then design culturally appropriate strategies. My research led me to Los
Angeles former gang members, who were dealing directly with preventive and rehabili-tative solutions to the gang problem. Through them, I discovered Amer-I-Can, a self-esteem curriculum started by Hall of Fame former
football player, actor, and activist Jim Brown. After studying the program's effectiveness, I became involved as a national consultant. I went through facilitator training to teach the curriculum; brought former gang members
to interact with law students in Iowa; took law students from Iowa to Los Angeles to meet with gang members there; arranged for Jim Brown to visit Iowa and other states; sold the curriculum for use and supervised
programs in Des Moines, Iowa and New Orleans; wrote Congressional testimony on preventive and rehabilitative approaches to the gang problem; drafted a former gang member's autobiography; made numerous speeches;
and served on the Iowa gubernato-rial commission on African Americans in the prison population. I ended up engaging with various other actors on the gang issue, including scholars, gang members, ex-convicts,
Congresspersons, state representatives and staffers, execu-tive branch policy makers, cultural and religious community activists, federal and state law enforcement, including then Attorney General Janet Reno and then FBI
director Louis Freeh, not-for-profit service providers like the YMCA, poten-tial corporate contributors, professional athletes, entertainers, etc. Assessing my several years of experiences, I realized that I had not sufficiently
explored the roles of women with respect to gangs, whereas my other scholarly interests were examined culturally relevant feminisms. n164 So I did additional research into gang theories related to women, pre-sented some
speeches and panel [*738] presentations, and wrote a scholarly article. n165 Needless to say, these ac-tivities were highly educational for my students, personally and professionally transformative for me and even my
entire family, but also very time consuming, and with relatively little scholarly output to show for it. My plans to publish an entire book on gangs have been sidetracked by other matters, including the passe nature of the
, praxis remains an aspirational
gang subject in the na-tional spotlight. I remain interested, but not as actively involved personally or on a scholarly level in the area. In my view, unfortunately
element for many CRT theorists, who may limit their discussions about solutions to racism to ivory tower academic
conferences and highly footnoted law review articles that are not even physically or pedagogically accessible to other social
science academics, much less the adult college edu-cated public. Many if not most tenure track professors are hired for their potential scholarly abilities and must devote
several intense years to demonstrating those abilities sufficiently to get tenure through the writing of law review articles. It would not be surprising that most of them would not be suited to engage in praxis, especially pretenure. Many schol-ars may have never had any interest in praxis, pre- or post tenure, and openly welcomed the retreat from practice that professing represented. Some teachers who initially had an interest in praxis, may
have lost that interest in the grueling process to get tenure. Some realize that post tenure raises are based on scholarly productivity, i.e. more articles and books, and not on other activities. Many lawyers primarily interested
in practice would not want to deflect their focus by "wasting" many years writing theoretical articles, so they would not even be attracted to teaching. My comments here do not relate to clinical faculty who may be more
, it is evident that too many progressive
theoreticians of all colors have remained unconnected to praxis , while the political right has been able to marry its
likely to engage in praxis as they remain practitioners, training students to handle real world lawyering, and even social justice issues. Ironically
neoconservative race theory with its political lawyering. n166 Groups like the Federalist Society in law [*739] schools are integrally linked with conservative professors,
Most critical race theorists have not been able to effectively connect to similarly
embattled progressive groups. As one commentator stated, "it's nice to know racism is socially constructed, but it doesn't
lawyers, judges, think tanks, and ascendant Republican party policy.
help hail a cab at night ."
Wilderson Agrees
Wilderson agrees with us—his scholarship isn’t intended to preclude goal-oriented political change
Wilderson 10 (Frank b. Wilderson III, Prof at UC Irvine, speaking on a panel on literary activism at the National Black Writers
Conference, March 26, 2010, "Panel on Literary Activism", transcribed from the video available at http://www.cspanvideo.org/program/id/222448, begins at roughly 49:10)
Typically what I mean when I ask myself whether or not people will like or accept my reading, what I'm really trying to say to myself
whether or not people will like or accept me and this is a difficult thing to overcome especially for a black writer because we are not
just black writers, we are black people and as black people we live every day of our lives in an anti-black world. A world that
defines itself in a very fundamental ways in constant distinction from us, we live everyday of our lives in a context of daily
rejection so its understandable that we as black writers might strive for acceptance and appreciation through our writing, as I
said this gets us tangled up in the result. The lessons we have to learn as writers resonate with what I want to say about literature and
political struggle. I am a political writer which is to say my writing is self consciously about radical change but when I have
worked as an activist in political movements, my labor has been intentional and goal oriented. For example, I organized, with a
purpose to say free Mumia Abu Jamal, to free all political prisoners, or to abolish the prison industrial complex here in the
United States or in South Africa, I have worked to abolish apartheid and unsuccessfully set up a socialist state whereas I want
my poetry and my fiction, my creative non fiction and my theoretical writing to resonate with and to impact and impacted by those
tangible identifiable results , I think that something really debilitating will happen to the writing, that it the writing will be hobbled
if and when I become clear in the ways that which I want my writing to have an impact on political struggle what I am trying
to say when I say that I want to be unclear is I don't want to clarify, I do not want to clarify the impact that my work will have
or should have on political struggle, is that the relationship of literature to struggle is not one of causality but one of
accompaniment , when I write I want to hold my political beliefs and my political agenda loosely. I want to look at my political life
the way I might look at a solar eclipse which is to say look indirectly, look arie, in this way I might be able to liberate my
imagination and go to places in the writing that I and other black people go to all the time the places that are too dangerous to go
to and too dangerous to speak about when one is trying to organize people to take risk or when a political organization is
presetting a list of demands, I said at the beginning this is an anti-black world. Its anti black in places I hate like apartheid South
Africa and apartheid America and it’s anti-black in the places I don't hate such as Cuba, I've been involved with some really radical
political movements but none of them have called for an end of the world but if I can get away from the result of my writing,
if I can think of my writing as something that accompanies political struggle as opposed to something that will cause political
struggle then maybe just maybe I will be able to explore forbidden territory, the unspoken demands that the world come to an end,
the thing that I can’t say when I am trying to organize maybe I can harness the energy of the political movement to make
breakthroughs in the imagination that the movement can't always accommodate, if its to maintain its organizational capacity.
Eco-Feminism
General
Alt Fails
The alternative is classist and racist—only direct action can overcome the material disenfranchisement
of the feminine
Spretnak 89 (Charles Toward an Ecofeminist Spirituality:Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism; New Society
Publishers)
To what extent should ecofeminists patiently and politely midwife others to deeper levels of consciousness? Is analysis always useful, or is intellectual inquiry an
armchair, middle class privilege and substitution for grassroots action? These questions were provoked by a passage in Anne Cameron's essay in which she relates a
telephone conversation she had with a middle class white woman she met at an environmental fes tival. The woman wanted to "get involved in some environmental
issues" and to spend a few days or a week with Cameron to "discuss various options." With undisguised scorn, Cameron scolded the woman "to stop
wasting her time and mine. To stop dithering and get involved." Cameron suggested some worthwhile activities, but was
impatient and irritated with "endless discussion" in lieu of "immediate action." Most of us were appalled by Cameron's condescending and
judgmental behavior toward the woman. Cameron demonstrated little understanding of or respect for the process of attaining consciousness. As Amilcar Cabral, the
African freedom fighter, once said "Nobody is born a revolutionary." Influenced by Charlene Spretnak's essay, one woman felt that it is not so important where one is
on the continuum, but rather that one is on it. Cameron admitted that the woman was "offended" and "hurt." Why would she alienate a potential ally? In failing to
walk her talk, Cameron treated the woman with a disdain generally exhibited by those in power. When is "righteous rage" appropriate and when is it
counterproductive? Severalwomen empathized with Cameron's attitude toward indecisive do-gooders who can't seem to get activated
when to someone like Cameron the tasks are "absolutely obvious." One woman suggested that Cameron's frustration may be due to the burden of
psychic pain many of us carry as a result of our deep cognizance of the endangered state of our species and the planet. Often overfunctioning, we sometimes project
animosity onto all those who are underfunctioning, psychically or otherwise. Perhaps we can take our cue from Mary Daly who writes of a New Cognitive Minority of
women who can "bear the memories, learn from them, and open the way for change." We concluded that Cameron's anger seemed largely directed
at middle class (white) privilege. While many working class people and/or people of color are struggling simply to survive
"primary emergencies," the middle class, she accuses, meditates on problems ad infinitum.She has a point. It was acknowledged
that if environmental and ecofeminist values are to remain/become relevant to liberation struggles, direct action is imperative.
Women felt that the thinking and the doing should receive equal priority. Ecofeminist activist Connie Salamone further advocates
"commonness," her expression to describe a down-to-Gaia approach to address ecological concerns in ways that "my mother could
understand."
Error Replications DA
Alt fails – reverses the error and can’t build transformational theory
Caprioli 4 (Mary, Professor of Political Science – University of Tennessee, “Feminist IR Theory and Quantitative Methodology: A
Critical Analysis”, International Studies Review, 42(1), March, http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/00208833.00076)
If researchers cannot add gender to an analysis, then they must necessarily use a purely female-centered analysis, even though
the utility of using a purely female centered analysis seems equally biased. Such research would merely be gendercentric based
on women rather than men, and it would thereby provide an equally biased account of international relations as those that are
male-centric. Although one might speculate that having research done from the two opposing worldviews might more fully explain
international relations, surely an integrated approach would offer a more comprehensive analysis of world affairs. Beyond a
female-centric analysis, some scholars (for example, Carver 2002) argue that feminist research must offer a critique of gender as a set
of power relations. Gender categories, however, do exist and have very real implications for individuals, social relations, and
international affairs. Critiquing the social construction of gender is important, but it fails to provide new theories of international
relations or to address the implications of gender for what happens in the world.
Essentialism DA
Conflating sexual difference and patriarchy ontologizes sexual difference, obscuring women’s
complicity in gender violence
Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, 2005. PhD Interdisciplinary Women and Gender Studies, “Beyond Determinism: The Phenomenology of
African Female Existence,” <http://www.feministafrica.org/fa%202/02-2003/bibi.html>]
Despite the contributions to understanding oppressive power relations made by theorists who focus emphatically on patriarchal
dominance, there are problems with some of their underlying assumptions. By equating sexual difference with male domination,
some of these writers collapse two distinct categories into one. According to Iris Young, we need to make a distinction between
sexual differentiation, as "a phenomenon of individual psychology and experience, as well as of cultural categorisation", and male
domination, as "structural relations of genders and institutional forms that determine those structures" (1997: 26). Male domination
may require sexual difference; however, sexual difference does not in itself lead to male domination. By collapsing this
distinction, there is a danger of ontologising male power, and assuming that human relationships are inevitably moulded by
tyrannical power relations. Moreover, equating sexual difference with male dominance can also obscure the ways in which
both men and women help to reproduce and maintain oppressive gendered institutions. As Young astutely notes, "most
institutions relevant to the theory of male domination are productions of interactions between men and women" (1997: 32). As
a case in point, we only have to think of the pernicious institution of female genital mutilation, which is both defended and practised
by many women.
This essentialism of sexual identity makes true resistance to patriarchy impossible
Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, 2005 ,PhD Interdisciplinary Women and Gender Studies, “Beyond Determinism: The Phenomenology of
African Female Existence,” <http://www.feministafrica.org/fa%202/02-2003/bibi.html>]
An emphasis on crushing patriarchal dominance can also lead us to ignore women's power and active roles within particular
systems of social organisation. For example, Llewellyn Hendrix and Zakir Hossain (1988) suggest that writers such as OgundipeLeslie can make their claims about women's inevitable economic and political disempowerment within their husbands' lineages only
by drawing examples from patrilineal societies. In matrilineal or bilineal societies, women have more complex subject positions, as
their productive and reproductive capacity is geared towards their natal clans, despite the fact that they are married to outsiders.
Careful investigation could uncover the scope that women in these societies have for negotiating individual economic and political
freedoms in relation to different families or lineages. Nevertheless, theorists such as Afonja (1990) claim that matrilineal systems
provide little more than organising principles for connecting men across generations and space; any apparent power or authority
women may have within matrilineal systems is merely symbolic and tangential to the formal power of men. If we assume that
women are automatically victims and men victimisers, we fall into the trap of confirming the very systems we set out to critique.
We fail to acknowledge how social agents can challenge their ascribed positions and identities in complex ways, and indirectly,
we help to reify or totalise oppressive institutions and relationships. Rather than viewing patriarchy as a fixed and monolithic
system, it would be more helpful to show how patriarchy is constantly contested and reconstituted. As Christine Battersby (1998)
suggests, patriarchy should be viewed as a dissipative system, with no central organising principle or dominant logic. Viewing
patriarchy in this way allows us to appreciate how institutional power structures restrict and limit women's capacity for action and
agency without wholly constraining or determining this capacity. By conceptualising patriarchy as a changing and unstable system
of power, we can move towards an account of African gendered experience that does not assume fixed positions in inevitable
hierarchies, but stresses transformation and productive forms of contesta
Coalescing politics around the identity of “women” occludes difference and erases the other
Sandlands 97 (Catriona Sandilands, Professor of Environmental Studies @ York, Mother Earth, The Cyborg, and The Queer:
Ecofeminism and (More) Questions of Identity, NWSA Journal, 1997)
These questions are neither flippant nor academic For feminism, the reliance on the category "women" signals a problematic
support for a gendered solidity that is the product of power-laden discursive "Othering" and often smacks of a blindness
to the process of social construction." The solidity of the identity "women"—even, or perhaps especially, if pluralized—
functions politically by concealing the mode of its construction. Given that in patriarchal discourse the construction is the
site of the problem, then that solidity must be rejected.
Ecofeminist identity politics leads to error replication and exclusion
Sandilands 99 (Catriona, Assistant professor of Environmental Studies @ NYU, “The Good-Natured Feminist” p. 5)
In ecofeminism, the fact of being a women is understood to lie at the base of one’s experience of ecological degradation of one’s
interests in ecological protection, and reconstruction, an of one’s “special” ecological consciousness. Whether the important
elements of that “being” are seen to reside in biological, social, ascribed, or imposed factors is immaterial to my argument, the
crucial thing is that identity, similarity, and belonging to a specific group are the primary foci of political speech and
the basis of political legitimacy, and that the achievement of the freedom to express identity without oppression
is a key political goal (as opposed to, say, a focus on individuality and a desire to put specific identity aside to
achieve a common good, an equally problematic but nonetheless different political logic). While an obvious
result of identity politics is an exclusionary logic—“you can’t speak about this because you do not belong to the
group”—there are other deeper problems with the model. For example, Identities are inevitably partial, and
the relevant social categories on which identity politics are based can go only so far to describe a person, the
reduction of any self to a list of categories replicates many of the problems that identity politics set out to
address, including the socially experienced limits of the identity categories themselves. I will outline what I consider
the logic and limits of identity politics later, what said at the outset is that ecofeminists in basing their political specificity
on an identitarian women’s experience of nature or environmental degradation or on a specifically women’s set
of issues or principles or metaphors, assume a correspondence among ontology, epistemology , and politics—an
identity politics—that reduces the relations between feminism and ecology to a highly problematic group
experience for women and nature.
Women DA
Ecofeminism marginalizes women by embracing patriarchal essentialisms.
Biehl 91 (Janet: Social ecology activist and the author of Rethinking Eco-feminist Politics. “Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics,” p. 3-4)
Although most political movements might feel the need to sort out these differences and their theorists might argue for and against them, producing a healthy
debate, ecofeminists rarely confront each other en the differences in these writings. Ecofeminists who even acknowledge the existence of serious contradictions
tend, in fact, to pride themselves on the contradictions in their works as a healthy sign of "diversity"-presumably in contrast to "dogmatic," fairly consistent, and
presumably "male" or "masculine" theories. But dogmatism is clearly not the same thing as coherence, clarity, and at least a minimum level of consistency.
Ecofeminism, far from being healthily diverse, is so blatantly self-contradictory as to be incoherent. As one might expect, at least one ecofeminist even rejects the
very-notion of coherence itself, arguing that coherence is "totalizing" and by inference oppressive. Moreover, because ecofeminists rarely debate each other, it is
nearly impossible to glean from their writings the extent to which they agree or disagree with each other. The reader of this book should be wary of attributing the
views of anyone ecofeminist, as they are presented here, to all other ecofeminists. But ecofeminists'
apparent aversion to sorting out the
differences among themselves leaves the critical observer no choice but to generalize.The self-contradictory nature of
ecofeminism raises further problems as well. Some ecofeminists literally celebrate the identification of women with
nature as an ontological reality. They therebyspeciously biologizethe personality traits that patricentric society assigns
to women.The implication of this position is to confine women to the same regressive social definitions from which
feminists have fought long and hard to emancipate women. Other ecofeminists reject such biologizations and rightly consider what are
virtually sociobiological definitions of women as regressive for women. But some of the same ecofeminists who reject these definitions nonetheless favor using them
to build a movement.
Ecofeminism won’t solve- it devalues women and will not be accepted by a larger public
Bretherton 2001 (Charlotte MA in Latin American Studies “ECOCENTRIC IDENTITY AND TRANSFORMATORY
POLITICS,” The International Journal of Peace Studies, Volume 6, Number 2, Autumn/Winter 2001)
The implications of ecofeminist ideas for human identity are numerous. For women, particularly those (primarily Western) women who have become alienated
from the natural world, there is a need to rediscover their "natural" ecocentric/ecofeminine identification. Ecofeminism thus posits,
for women, an
essentialist ecocentric identity. This would involve not a loss or negation of the self but an opportunity to experience the fulfilment of recovering
one's true maternal nature and to embrace the responsibilities associated with identification as a saviour of the planet. To some extent women have appeared to
take up these responsibilities. In many parts of the world they have undoubtedly contributed significantly to environmental activism. Moreover, a number of
women's environmental organisations have espoused overtly ecofeminist principles (Bretherton 1996). Indeed, Mies and Shiva (1993, p.3) claim, from their
conversations with women's groups in many parts of the world, "women, worldwide, felt the same anger and anxiety, and the same sense of responsibility to
preserve the bases of life, and to end its destruction." However, this
raises the danger that women, who are everywhere the least
powerful members of society, might be expected to assume disproportionate responsibility for cleaning up
men's messes. Rather, an ecocentric identification demands that the "feminine" qualities of cooperation and nurturance be valued and embraced by all
members of societies. It demands, too, that the "masculine" qualities of competition and dominance be devalued and
rejected. Consequently, it must be concluded that, in many societies, the adoption of an ecocentric identity would involve, for men, a change of consciousness
very much more fundamental than that required of women. While the major focus of an ecofeminine identity is positive identification with the natural world,
there are implicitly elements of an identity defined negatively against the alien other of unreconstructed
"masculine" man. Because of its implied exclusivity, which reflects a tendency towards maternalist essentialism, ecofeminism is unlikely to
provide the basis for a universal ecocentric identity. Ecofeminism is important, nevertheless. It provides a trenchant critique of those
cultural norms and values which support the power structures of contemporary societies and which have facilitated the development of a dangerously
dysfunctional relationship between human collectivities and the ecosystems of which they are a part. In focusing very specifically upon this latter issue,
bioregionalists would be well advised to incorporate feminist insights concerning the origin, and persistence, of gendered structures of power (Plumwood 1994;
Bretherton 1998).
General EcoFem Bad
Tons of DAs to the ecofeminist movement
-disempowerment because fail to challenge institutions
-not intersectional
-causes Hobbesian anarchism that reentrenches patriarchy
-causes population growth that furthers domination
Lewis 94 (Professor of Environmental Studies, Martin, Assistant Professor in the School of Environment and the Center for
International Studies @ Duke, Green Delusions, pg. 35-36)
In more pragmatic ways as well, radical eco-feminism and, to a lesser extent, marxist eco-feminism have profoundly antifeminist
implications in practice. The former movement advises women to turn away from existing means of wielding public power.
Since large-scale institutions are, by definition, irredeemably patriarchal and exploitative, women are called away from
existing positions of public power (Plant 1989:187). Instead, all feminists (men as well as women) are enjoined to retreat into
separatist, autonomous communities. Marxist eco-feminists do not demand such hermetic exclusion, but their philosophy too calls
ultimately for struggle against rather than participation within capitalist society. Since institutional science, corporations, and
large public institutions are, despite radicals’ fondest hopes, well entrenched, such withdrawal risks disempowering
women still further. A refusal to seek positions in such imperfect institutions as presently exist would relegate women to
the role of sideline critics, undermining their opportunity to be participants—and indeed leaders—in the ongoing
restructuring of society. In its effort to avoid the appearance of cultural imperialism, radical eco-feminism also flirts with an
ethical relativism that could conceivably undermine the feminist agenda at the global scale. To posit that "[wjhat
counts as sexism, racism, or classism may vary cross-culturally" (K. Warren r990:139) is to ignore a huge array of
deeply sexist practices existing in numerous non-Western cultures. Finally, the successful realization of the radical
eco-feminist dream would threaten women in a very immediate sense. In the anarchic world they envision,
men—who are certainly more physically powerful than women and appear to be more inclined toward violence as well—could
easily arrogate power at the local level and devise neo-patriarchies. Anarchists argue that humankind's
inherent good would prevent this—a view accessible only to those wearing the deepest of psychological
blinders. As will be shown in chapter three, many primal societies, contrary to eco-romantic fantasies, were unabashedly
patriarchal.
Caring DA
TURN--Associating women with care dangerously limits the ethico-political possibilities for women
MacGregor 4 (Sherilyn MacGregor is a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Environment, Philosophy and Public Policy at
Lancaster University, UK. “From Care to Citizenship Calling Ecofeminism Back To Politics,” Ethics & the Environment 9.1 (2004)
56-84)
One of the themes in contemporary ecofeminist literature is that women's care-related perspectives on human-nature
relations should be adopted as a generalized normative stance, a form of ecological civic virtue or "a universal
public caring" (Salleh 1997). This argument is supported by those ecofeminist theorists who portray caring
relationships as models for sustainable living and as important sources of political empowerment for women in
the larger social sphere. The women who appear in the narratives that inform ecofeminist alternative visions are variously
referred to as grassroots women, housewife activists and "re/sisters" (Salleh 1997)) who work voluntarily to sustain life and to
fight against the powers that put that life in jeopardy. The vision that their experiences inspire consists of an integration
of diverse political struggles into one overarching movement for survival that is grounded in everyday material practices
at the local level. So grounded, it is a vision that is fundamentally different from right-wing ideologies that embrace global
capitalism as well as from the philosophies of postmodernism that are said to privilege discourse and discourage activism. While
there are important aspects to ecofeminist valuations of women's caring—particularly in light of the way non-feminist ecopolitical
discourse ignores the work of care—I argue that there are also political risks in celebrating women's association with
caring (both as an ethic and a practice) and in reducing women's ethico-political life to care. In view of these risks,
to be discussed herein, I think a degree of skepticism is in order. I question whether care is a wise choice of metaphor
around which to create a feminist political project for social and ecological change. How can societal expectations
that women be caring or the exploitation of women's unpaid caring labor under capitalism be challenged at the same time that the
specificity of women's caring stance towards the environment is held up as an answer to the ecological crisis? What does it mean,
moreover, for women to enter the realm of the political through a window of care and maternal virtue? How is this feminist? And
how, if at all, is it political? It is my position that ecofeminists should see caring through less-than-rosy-glasses, as a paradoxical
set of practices, feelings, and moral orientations that are embedded in particular relations and contexts and socially constructed as
both feminine and private. Revaluing care in the way many ecofeminists seem to do results in an affirmation of
gender roles that are [End Page 57] rooted in the patriarchal dualisms that all feminisms, on my definition at least,
must aim persistently to resist and disrupt. I support my position by drawing on the work of some of the feminist
philosophers, political economists, and political theorists who have argued that the positive identification of women with
caring ought to be treated cautiously for it obscures some of the negative implications of feminized care and narrows
our understanding of women as political actors. In the first part of the discussion, I cast doubt on ecofeminist ideas about
the "feminine principle" by highlighting some of the critiques of care ethics made by feminist moral philosophers. I then subject
ecofeminist celebrations of caring labor to questions raised by feminist political economists about its exploitation in globalizing
capitalist societies. I also question whether claims that women are empowered through their care-inspired eco-activism have been
accompanied by a sufficient consideration of feminist political transformation. That discussion leads into the final part of the
paper where I look to feminist theorists of citizenship to develop the argument that ecofeminists would be better served by using
the language of citizenship instead of the language of care to understand and theorize women's engagement in ecopolitics.
Equating women with care is morally unacceptable—this notion ensures exploitation women and is
fundamentally oppressive
MacGregor 4 (Sherilyn MacGregor is a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Environment, Philosophy and Public Policy at
Lancaster University, UK. “From Care to Citizenship Calling Ecofeminism Back To Politics,” Ethics & the Environment 9.1 (2004)
56-84)
However, there are important questions to be raised about the implications of care metaphors and, specifically, care
ethics for ecofeminist politics. The first is whether invoking an inevitably and/or intentionally feminized ethic of care is an
advisable strategy for problematizing eco-political and social relationships. Can it lead to a destabilization of gender codes? What are
the risks in an approach that celebrates women's caring as a public virtue? In response to these questions, it is instructive to take note
of a current in feminist philosophy that has combined arguments for valuing the capacity to care with arguments that problematize
and politicize women's caring, to show that caring is not an unqualified good. Some feminist philosophers maintain that care ethics is
a double-edged sword for feminism. While some believe that an ethics of care can offer a way to assert a positive face of feminism
(perhaps one more inspirational than a feminism which dwells upon women's exploitation under patriarchy), an uncritical emphasis
on women's care-related morality can also affirm harmful assumptions about gender and reify exclusionary notions about the nature
of care and, indeed, of carers. Peta Bowden explains the tension nicely: "Condemnation of caring runs the danger of silencing all
those who recognize its ethical possibilities, and risks capitulating to dominant modes of ethics that characteristically exclude
consideration of women's ethical lives. On the other hand, romantic idealization is also a danger" (1997, 18-19) [End Page 61] Since
the 1980s, when care ethics was in its heyday, questions have been asked about the validity and implications of care perspectives for
feminism. There is resistance in feminist philosophy to the "strategy of reversal" that has been deployed by cultural feminists who
choose to see "women's ways of knowing," "maternal thinking" or "feminine ethics" as superior to men's ways of knowing and
masculine ethics and as an ethic that can transform the world. Lorraine Code points out, for example, that "it is by no means
clear that a new monolith, drawn from hitherto devalued practices, can or should be erected in the place of one that is
crumbling" (1995, 111). An important lesson for ecofeminists here is that listening to and validating women's voices and
those of other marginalized subjects is important but does not inevitably lead to epistemic privilege (Davion 1994). Not only
is the idea that women may have greater access to "the truth" questionable on empirical grounds, it is also too risky a
position to put forth in the context of a masculinist and misogynist culture that both creates and exploits women's
capacity to care. Thinking about this point in the context of ecofeminist rhetoric Code writes: Women may indeed
have the capacity to save the world, in consequence, perhaps, of their cultural-historical relegation to a domain 'closer to nature'
than men, whatever that means. Yet claims that such a capacity is uniquely, essentially theirs have consistently served
as premises of arguments to show that women should be the moral guardians both of 'humanity' and of nature.
Such injunctions assign women responsibilities that are fundamentally oppressive, while excluding them from
recognition as cognitive agents and creators of social meaning, precisely because of their alleged closeness to
nature. An ecofeminism developed in this direction would be morally-politically unacceptable.
Embracing care exploits women and creates anxiety, pain and suffering for the carer
MacGregor 4 (Sherilyn MacGregor is a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Environment, Philosophy and Public Policy at
Lancaster University, UK. “From Care to Citizenship Calling Ecofeminism Back To Politics,” Ethics & the Environment 9.1 (2004)
56-84)
Peta Bowden contends that it is necessary for feminists to acknowledge negative aspects to caring as well as positive
ones. She calls them dark sides and light sides of caring: the tendency to see the perspectives and concerns arising from
maternal and other practices of caring simply in a positive light glosses the dark side of these practices: the frustrating,
demeaning, and isolating dimensions of their routines. 'Care' has a lengthy history in the (English-speaking) west
as a burden, a bed of trouble, anxiety, suffering and pain; care ethicists ignore this history, and the dismal actuality
of many contemporary practices of caring, at great risk. (1997, 9) Highlighting the relevance of this insight for ecofeminism, Chris
Cuomo (1998, 129) writes: "put simply, caring can be damaging to the carer if she neglects other responsibilities,
including those she has to herself, by caring for another."5 Certainly self-sacrifice, exploitation, and loss of autonomy and
leisure time are among the more negative aspects of women's caring. So is the inability to withhold care or to say
"no" that comes with an internalized duty to maintain relationships. It is important to look at why women tend to have
little choice but to be caring.6 Feminist critiques of [End Page 63] violence against women often include the claim that women
need to develop a greater sense of autonomy and separation. (Intimacy and abuse sometimes go hand in hand.) Such negative
aspects provide reasons to treat with greater scepticism any desire to focus solely on the lighter side of women's
caring and life-affirming values. In recognition of this point, perhaps it is necessary to consider striking a balance between an
ethic of care and an ethic of justice.7
A2: Intentions Good
Good intentions are irrelevant—invocation of a rhetoric of care constrains women’s agency and leads to
dangerous politics
MacGregor 4 (Sherilyn MacGregor is a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Environment, Philosophy and Public Policy at
Lancaster University, UK. “From Care to Citizenship Calling Ecofeminism Back To Politics,” Ethics & the Environment 9.1 (2004)
56-84)
So Tronto and Curtin wish to extend care beyond the private sphere [End Page 75] as long as it can be a politicized and degendered notion of care. To be sure, one can think of examples where caring practices are public and political, and
some that are not strictly feminized even though they are still gendered.16 Nevertheless, I tend to agree with those who see
the care-politics connection as too closely and unavoidably associated with maternalism to be a good strategy
for feminist politics. They see maternalist justifications of women's citizenship through arguments about care
as fundamentally constraining of women's political agency and contrary to politics. Dietz (1985) argues, for
example, that the ethics of care are inappropriate as bases for political practice because they are inextricably
linked to personal relationships rather than more abstract relations of citizenship.17 Other critics warn that politics
rooted in caring can very easily become exclusionary and parochial, where care-giving is extended only to particular,
well-known others who are deemed worthy of care. Kathleen B. Jones (1993) finds maternalism a "dangerous rhetoric"
and so asks, "how far can we extend these moral categories, derived from intimate relations, into the arena of political discourse
and public action?" (quoted in Squires 1999, 156). It may also be that the need to protect and care for a particular other
(say a child) can lead to actions that are harmful to generalized others. This possibility is extremely relevant to
questions of ecological politics. For example, women "earth-carers" in one community could oppose a toxic waste
incinerator out of fear for the health of their children, and at the same time fail to "care" that their opposition
might lead to its displacement onto another community (as tends to happen in NIMBY-type struggles).
A2: Root Cause
They are fundamentally wrong—gendered binaries don’t organize the world
Hooper 1 (Charlotte, University of Bristol research associate in politics, Manly States: Masculinities, International Relations, and
Gender Politics pp 45-46)
Spike Peterson and Anne Sisson Runyan (1993), in their discussion of gendered dichotomies, appear to drop Lacanian psychoanalytic discourse as an explanation for
gendered dichotomies in favor of a more straightforward- ly political account.14Gendered dichotomies, rather than uniformly con- structing gendered social relations
through universal psychoanalytic mecha- nisms, are seen more ambiguously, as playing a dual role. Where gendered dichotomies are used as an organizing principle
of social life (such as in the gendered division of labor) they help to construct gender differences and in- equalities and thus are constitutive of social reality, but in
positing a grid of polar opposites, they also serve to obscure more complex relationships, commonalties, overlaps, and intermediate positions (Peterson and Runyan
1993, 24–25). Elaborating on this view, it can be argued that gendered dichotomies are in part ideological tools that mystify, masking more complex social realities
and reinforcing stereotypes. On one level, they do help to produce real gen- der differences and inequalities, when they are used as organizing principles that have
practical effects commensurate with the extent that they become embedded in institutional practices, and through these, human bodies. They constitute one dimension
in the triangular nexus out of which gender identities and the gender order are produced. But at the same time, institutional practices are not always
completely or unambiguously informed bysuchdichotomies, which may then operate to obscure more complex relationships. It is a
mistake to see the language of gendered dichotomies as a unified and totalizing discourse that dictates every aspect of social
practiceto the extent that we are coherently produced as subjects in its dualistic image. As well as the disruptions and discontinuities
engendered by the intersections and interjections of other discourses (race, class, sexuality, and soon) there is always room for
evasion, reversal, resistance, and dissonance between rhetoric, practice, and embodiment, as well as reproduction of thesymbolic
order, as identities are negotiated in relation to all three dimensions, in a variety of complex and changing circumstances. On the
otherhand, the symbolic gender order does inform practice, and our subjectivities are produced in relation to it, so to dismiss it as performing only an ideological or
propagandistic role is also too simplistic.
No impact
Goldstein 1 (Joshua S., Professor of International Relations at American University, 2001 War and Gender: How Gender Shapes
the War System and Vice Versa, pp.411-412)
I began this book hoping to contribute in some way to a deeper understanding of war – an understanding that would improve the chances of someday achieving real
peace, by deleting war from our human repertoire. In following the thread of genderrunning through war, I found the deeper understanding I had
hoped for – a multidisciplinary and multilevel engagement with the subject. Yet I became somewhat more pessimistic about how quickly or easily war
may end. The war system emerges, from the evidence in this book, as relatively ubiquitous and robust. Efforts to change this system must overcome several
dilemmas mentioned in this book. First, peace activists face a dilemma in thinking about causes of war and working for peace. Many peace scholars and activists
support the approach, “if you want peace, work for justice .” Then, if one believes that sexism contributes to war, one can work for gender justice
specifically (perhaps among others) in order to pursue peace. This approach brings strategic allies to the peace movement (women, labor, minorities), but rests on
the assumption that injusticescause war. The evidence in this book suggests that causality runsat least asstrongly the other way. War is not a
product of capitalism, imperialism, gender, innate aggression, or any other single cause, although all of these influence wars’ outbreaks and outcomes. Rather,
war has in part fueled and sustained these and other injustices. So, “if you want peace, work for peace .” Indeed, if you want justice
(gender and others), work for peace. Causalitydoes not run just upward through the levels of analysis, from types of individuals,
societies, and governments up to war. Itruns downward too. Enloe suggests that changes in attitudes towards war and the military may be the most
important way to “reverse women’s oppression.” The dilemma is that peace work focused on justice brings to the peace movement energy, allies, and moral
grounding, yet, in light of this book’s evidence, the emphasis on injustice as the main cause of war seems to be empirically inadequate.
Patriarchy’s not the root cause
Bell, senior lecturer – Department of Politics and International Studies @ Cambridge University, ‘6
(Duncan, “Beware of false prophets: biology, human nature and the future of International Relations theory,” International Affairs 82,
3 p. 493–510)
Writing in Foreign Aff airs in 1998, Francis Fukuyama, tireless promulgator of the ‘end of history’ and now a member of the
President’s Council on Bioethics, employed EP reasoning to argue for the central role in world politics of ‘masculine values’,
which are ‘rooted in biology’. His argument starts with the claim that male and female chimps display asymmetric behaviour, with
the males far more prone to violence and domination. ‘Female chimps have relationships; male chimps practice realpolitik.’
Moreover, the ‘line from chimp to modern man is continuous’ and this has signifi cant consequences for international politics.46 He
argues that the world can be divided into two spheres, an increasingly peaceful and cooperative ‘feminized’ zone, centred on
the advanced democracies, andthe brutal world outside this insulated space, where the stark realities of power politics remain
largely masculine. This bifurcation heralds dangers, as ‘masculine policies’ are essential in dealing with a masculine world: ‘In
anything but a totally feminized world, feminized policies could be a liability.’ Fukuyama concludes the essay with the assertion that
the form of politics best suited to human nature is—surprise, surprise—free-market capitalist democracy, and that other political
forms, especially those promoted by feminists and socialists, do not correspond with our biological inheritance. 47 Once again the
authority of science is invoked in order to naturalize a particular political objective.This is a pattern that has been repeated
across the history of modern biology and remains potent to this day.48 It is worth noting in brief that Fukuyama’s argument is
badly flawed even in its own terms. As anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson states, Fukuyama’s claims about the animal world
display ‘a breathtaking leap over a mountain of contrary evidence’.49 Furthermore, Joshua Goldstein concludes in the most
detailed analysis of the data on war and genderthat although biological differences do play a minor role,focusing so heavily on
them is profoundly misleading.50 The simplistic claims, crude stereotyping and casual use of evidence that characterize
Fukuyama’s essay unfortunately recur throughout the growing literature on the biology of international politics.
A2: Plumwood
Plumwood mistheorizes the nature of power and human relations—her focus on rationalism functions to
entrench dominant modes of thought, precluding its liberatory potential
Birkeland 95 (Janis Birkeland U. of Canberra “DISENGENDERING ECOFEMINISM” Trumpeter, 1995,
http://trumpeter.athabascau.ca/index.php/trumpet/article/viewFile/302/451)
Most ecofeminists identify the concept of ‘gender’ (the social construction of sex)as the conceptual glue between the above interlocking sets of dualisms, and the
term ‘patriarchy’ to refer to their systemic expression in social and institutional structures. Such terms have been received by many as highly provocative or even
confrontational, because these subjects are still taboo (taboos being things that generally support power relations). Plumwood instead chooses
to
substitute the term ‘mastery’ for patriarchal consciousness, and the ‘master-slave’ dualism for dominance relationships as overarching
concepts in her deconstruction of Western thought. Rather than use gender as a metaphorical icon of value, therefore, she reduces it to the male/female dichotomy,
relegating the concept to just another means by which people are categorised, much in the way that race and class have been used to marginalize people.
Ecofeminist theory, when framed this way, loses its shock effect - which is ar-guably a good thing. The disengendered terminology makes the paradigm more
palatable and academically kosher. While this
de-politicised version may broad-en its appeal, however, it may simultaneously narrow its true
reinvent the mind/body dualism upon which Plumwood focuses
and which is notably absent from most ecofeminist literature. In this work, therefore, the biological dimension of hu-man psychology and
behaviour (and which we share with other animals) is split off from the cerebral and disgarded. Plumwood
challenges the limitations of Western rationalism with a rationalism of the same order, which presents no difficulty, but
transformative potential. Further, this disengendered typology may
risks losing a key ecofeminist insight in the process. After all, the pervasiveness of mastery or dominance and the use by the master of dualistic thinking in
manipulating the populace is not a new idea to those involved in social justice movements; and certainly institutionalised forms of slavery are at least publicly
disapproved of, even when practiced enthusiastically. The virtues of equality and freedom from tyranny have long been taught in such ubiquitous sites as the pulpit
- yet these exhortations have done little to reduce hierarchical social relations. Why would they work now? It is the - until recently invisible- omnipresence of
gender within these hierarchical dualisms that creates the potential for new insights and the basis for a new human identity and social transformation. In the desire
to displace gender as a pivotal element in her theory, Plumwood
appears to overlook the central role of both sex and gender in
the motivations behind the seeking and abusing power. For example, in Plumwood’s extensive deconstruction of the
master-slave relationship, the power drive on the part of the master is presumed but not theorised. Power and
dominance are not really defined; they just present themselves as something that pervades human
relationships. Perhaps this is because power cannot be adequately deconstructed in a gender-blind and a-sexual
analysis? Surely humans have many biological and instinctual behaviour patterns related to sex and reproduction that they share with a mix of other animals,
though we are not as yet able to disentangle these phenomena. In Plumwood’s theory, however, the human appears connected to
nature on the cerebral plane only, either by experiencing nature existentially or by understanding nature intellec-tually. In her disengendered
theory, the human is a creature without sex drivesor personal insecurities, moved only by cerebral constructs and sensory experience. But is this not a denial of the nature within? I for one find it hard to believe that the power drive we witness daily does not predate the
introduction of rational logic in ancient Greece, as is implied. It seems unlikely that power relations originated in modes of reason
or that they can be extirpated by new conceptualisations alone. This begs the question as to the strategic impact of a disengendered
ecofem-inism. Can people be motivated to abandon relations of personal power, and the value systems that legitimise them, because new cerebral constructs are presented which should be preferred by rational people? Ironically, Plumwood’s
model of the human is, in this respect, not that unlike the
rational information processor of traditional management and decision theory who makes optimal choices based on objective analyses.
Have not many malestream green theorists already articulated the view that the remedy to dominance relations
or mastery is a new way of perceiving reality? It may indeed be a necessary condition, but it is not sufficient. Rational arguments and
intellectual frameworks are important, but if we want to motivate people to take on board these new insights, we need to recognize the human as a
complex blending of emotional needs as well as ideologies. In a power-based society, or ‘patriarchy’, many people feel they can only
ensure the provision of personal needs (such as sex, love and belonging) through material accumulation and the display of wealth. Until we face the problem of
hyper-masculine identification in the self and the culture, I suspect that there
will be no fundamental social change.
Aff Only
Perm Solves
Our methodology is the only way to combine theory with practice—the aff’s method must be combined
with the alt.
Warren and Cheney 91 (Karen J., Professor of Philosophy at Macalester College, and Jim, Professor Emeritus at the University
of Wisconsin-Waukesha, "Ecological Feminism and Ecosystem Ecology", Hypatia, Vol. 6, No. 1 , Ecological Feminism, Spring, pp. 179197)
Ecofeminism welcomes appropriate ecological science and technology. Environmental problems demand scientific and
technological responses as part of the solution. These "data" represent a piece of the ecological pie. What ecofeminists
insist on is that the perspectives of women and indigenous peoples with regard to the natural environment also be
recognized as relevant " data." As a feminism, ecofeminism insists that relevant "data" about the historical and interconnected twin exploitations of
women (and other oppressed peoples) and nature be included in solutions to environmental problems; as an ecological feminism, ecofeminism insists upon
the inclusion of appropriate insights and "data" of scientific ecology. What ecological feminism opposes is the practice
of one without the other.
Pragmatism Good
The alternative misidentifies consumption problems – lets government and MNCs off the hook
Scott 7 – (Austin Scott, Professor @ Florida, Austin E. Scott, University of Florida, Concerning Consumption: The Ecofeminist
Reply to Citizens as Consumers, 2007 WPSA Annual Meeting, Las Vegas NV,
http://www.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/1/7/6/1/1/pages176113/p176113-1.php)
The above discussion is not meant to dismiss all citizen responsibility when it comes to environmental issues. If individuals
believed nothing was their fault, it could lead to a nihilistic view of ameliorating the environment. My intent is to draw
attention to the overwhelming tendency to cast responsibility for the environment through individualized
consumer acts. What is problematic from an ecofeminist account is when women are unfairly made out to be the saviors of the
environment through consumption. Placing the principle and value of environmentalism onto the backs of women
simultaneously alleviates the influences that government, corporations, and patriarchy has in our environmental
struggle. More generally, any attempt to couch “earthcare” in consumption terms is usually done so at the expense
of structural and systemic political change. Nurturing citizen responsibility is acceptable as long as it does not neglect the
importance of addressing the dominant patriarchal culture that benefits from keeping political transformation out. 45 John Barry
argues that the sphere of consumption could be a place where one can practice ecological virtue; the goal is to cultivate mindful,
not mindless, consumption. 46 After all, he maintains, “one of the most powerful and radical political acts an individual or group
can do in modern, consumption-oriented societies is to refuse to consume.” 47 I think this is an important point to consider from
an ecofeminist viewpoint. Women, as the principal domestic consumers, cannot simply refuse to consume since
they are responsible for much of their family’s needs. They must consider the needs, even wants, of other individuals and
consume accordingly. A flat-out refusal to consume is a radical act, absolutely, but lacks viability. Furthermore, if we
consider Kasser’s contention that some consuming activity is akin to addiction, quitting consumption is much more
complicated than Barry acknowledges.
General Enviro K
Useful Stuff
Government Action Key - Anarchism Fails - 1AC Slaver
Government action is necessary. Alternatives like anarchy, localism, spirituality, and eco-centrism will
get squashed and worsen current destruction.
Taylor 2000 (Bron, Professor of Religion & Social Ethics, Director of Environmental Studies, University of WisconsinOshkosh,
BENEATH THE SURFACE: CRITICAL ESSAYS IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF DEEP ECOLOGY, P. 282-284)
A more trenchant problem is how bioregionalists (and the anarchists who influenced their most influential theorists) often assume that people are
naturally predisposed (unless corrupted by life in unnatural, hierarchical, centralized, industrial societies) to cooperative behavior. This debatable
assumption appears to depend more on radical environmental faith, a kind of Paul Shepard-style mythologizing, than on ecology or
anthropology. Unfortunately for bioregionai theory, evolutionary biology shows that not only cooperation promotes species
survival: so also, at times, does aggressive competitiveness. Based on its unduly rosy view of the potential for human altruism
it is doubtful that bioregionalism can offer sufficient structural constraints on the exercise of power by selfish and wellentrenched elites, it should be obvious, for example, that nation-state governments will not voluntarily cede authority . Any political
reorganization along bioregionai lines would likely require "widespread violence and dislocation" Few bioregionalists seem to recognize
this likelihood, or how devastating to nature such a transitional struggle would probably be . Moreover, making an important but often
overlooked point about political power, political theorist Daniel Deudney warns: The sizes of the bioregionally based states would vary greatly because bioregions vary
greatly. This would mean that some states would be much more powerful than other [and] it is not inevitable that balances of power would emerge to constrain the
possible imperial pretensions of the larger and stronger states. Andrew Bard Schmookler, in his critique of Utopian anarchism, has raise kindred concern. In The
Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution, he criticized anarchists (and their relatively moderate bioregionai progeny) for ignoring a specific
problem of power. He asked: How
Can good people prevent being dominated by a ruthless few. and what will prevent hierarchies
from emerging if decentralized political self-rule is ever achieved? One does not have to believe all people are bad to recognize
that not all people will be good, he argued; and unless bad people all become good, there is no solution to violence other than
some kind of government to restrain the evil few. Schmookler elsewhere noted that those who exploit nature gather more power to
themselves. How, then, can we restrain such power? There must be a government able to control the free exercise of power, Schmookler
concluded. Once when debating Green anarchists and bioregionalists in a radical environmental journal, Schmookler agreed that political decentralization is a good
idea. But if we move in this direction, he warned, "There should be at the same time a world order sufficient [to thwart] would-be conquerors." Moreover, "Since the
biosphere is a globally interdependent web, that world order should be able to constrain any of the actors from fouling the earth. This
requires laws and
means of enforcement." Schmookler concluded, "Government is a paradox, but there is no escaping it. This is because power is a
paradox: our emergence out of the natural order makes power an inevitable problem for human affairs, and only power can
control power." Bioregionalism generally fails to grapple adequately with the problem of power. Consequently, it has little "answer to specifically global
environmental problems," such as atmospheric depletion and the disruption of ocean ecosystems by pollution and overfishing. Political scientist Paul Wapner argues
that this is because bioregionalism assumes "that all global threats stem from local instances of environmental abuse and that by confronting them at the local level they
will disappear." Nor
does bioregionalism have much of a response to the "globalization" of corporate capitalism and consumerist
market society, apart from advocating local resistance or long-odds campaigns to revoke the corporate charters of the worst environmental offenders.
These efforts do little to hinder the inertia of this process. And little is ever said about how to restrain the voracious appetite of a global-corporateconsumer culture for the resources in every corner of the planet. Even for the devout, promoting deep ecological spirituality and ecocentric
values seems pitifully inadequate in the face of such forces. Perhaps it is because they have little if any theory of social change , and
thus cannot really envision a path toward a sustainable society, that many bioregionai deep ecologists revert to apocalyptic scenarios. Many of them see the
collapse of ecosystems and industrial civilization as the only possible means toward the envisioned changes . Others decide that
political activism is hopeless, and prioritize instead spiritual strategies for evoking deep ecological spirituality, hoping, selfconsciously, for a miracle. Certainly the resistance of civil society to globalization and its destructive inertia JS honorable and important, eyen a part of a
wider sustainability strategy. But there will be no victories over globalization and corporate capitalism and no significant progress
toward sustainability. without new forms of international, enforceable, global environmental governance. Indeed, without new restraints on
power both within nations and internationally, the most beautiful bioregional experiments and models will be overwhelmed and futile.
State Reforms Good (Environment Specific)
Only state actions can restrain anti-environmental forces
Rainbow '93 (Stephen, IR Lecturer, International Pacific College, New Zealand, GREEN POLITICS, p. 62-63)
Inevitably. given current institutional arrangements, it will be the Sate which makes these public policy choices. This
perspective accepts the view of the State, as a potentially neutral arbiter, but also, in the right hands, as a vehicle for essential reforms. This is
not to deny the degree to which the State is dependent^ op capital accumulation , or other obstacles to reform. But there are simply no
other extant institutions which can replace the role of the State in the move towards achieving a sustainable society . Even though
'the democratic logic is still to a great extent limited by, and subordinated to, the logic of industrialisation and capitalism* (Heller and Feher, 1988:15), only the State
has the potential to create a framework of sustainable development within which capital can operate. No amount of popular mobilization or active
citizenry can deliver the long-term fiscal and legislative framework within which sustainability might be achieved although popular
movements will be crucial to promoting and legitimizing such policies.
Their alternative fails without state action
Rainbow '93 (Stephen, IR Lecturer, International Pacific College, New Zealand, GREEN POLITICS, p. 63)
Those adversely affected by the modifications of the market (such as those demanded by transition to a sustainable society), although they may be a , minority of the
population, often have 'disproportionate influence on public policy': "The question, then, is whether the industrial democracies will be able to
overcome political constraints on bending the market system toward long-term sustainability' (Ruckelshaus, 1990:130-1). The power
and will of the State will be central to the accomplishment of this task. Greenpeace and other grassroots organizations will continue
to have a vital role to play in raising issues which demand attention on the sustainability agenda , but it is difficult to envisage any institution
other than the state actually putting in place the necessary policies to address those issues. Similarly. many businesses are now taking
responsibility for putting in place corporate environmental policies, and taking practical steps through energy saving, recycling, etc. But these kinds of desirable
practices will only become widespread when the State begins to lead the way in terms of making sustainability a central goal
to which all sectors of the community must respond. Only once such a framework is in place will the economic disincentive for
the majority of businesses to pursue sustainable activities be removed.
Only the state has the centralized power necessary to counterbalance industries
de Geus '96 (Marius, Teaches political theory and legal theory at the University of Leiden, DEMOCRACY AND GREEN POLITICAL THOUGHT, p. 191)
A second reason to consider the state as an organization of vital importance in order to tackles environmental problems is that industry forms a very strong ce
voluntarily decide to decrease current levels of pollution. Only a robust centre of power “the state” will be able to resist the influence of organized trade and i
profits and long term survival in a strongly competitive market economy, not protection of the environment. The power of enterprises, especially that of multi-nation
energetic state organization for a strong supra-national organization that will take into account the interests of others, like those of individual citizens and future generation
Only governmental/state action can solve environmental issues
Rainbow '93(Stephen, IR Lecturer, International Pacific College, New Zealand, GREEN POLITICS, p. 78)
The State will be fundamental to the achievement of green reform, for it remains one of the few institutions to match die power of
private capital, and has substantial powers in determining national goals and Priorities. The nation state retains the power to enforce
regulations and to implement economic packages designed to encourage particular types of behavior deemed desirable by society. A stronger role for the
State is not incompatible with pluralism the State has the potential to create a decision-making environment which will encourage
sustainable development, without repression, .or conventional control mechanisms such as the ownership of key resources. No other body currently
has this power to delineate the frameworks within which future development must occur. There is a need for analogous institutions on a global level, with
administrative bodies based on regions and localities playing a crucial complementary role. The role of the city in the achievement of the sustainable society is vital
and must not be overlooked, in spite of green ambivalence towards the urban conurbation which is the home of the majority of people in modem societies.
State reforms are necessary in this instance
Rainbow '93 (Stephen, IR Lecturer, International Pacific College, New Zealand, GREEN POLITICS, p. 61)
Sustainability demands not just the kind of financial and legislative frameworks suggested in the previous chapter, but also new forms of administration. Green
politics must propose and promote not only appropriate policies but also institutions designed to advance sustainable development ' to
address the environmental crisis: administration cannot imply be abolished the historical possibility is for a form of administration more
adequate to the environmental problems which are emerging as we move into the aftermath of industrialisation' (Paehlke and Torgerson, 1990: 291). The reform of
existing policies will be an important first task. It will be crucial'... to reform the public -policies that actively if unintentionally
encourage deforestation, desertification, destruction of habitat and species.'-and decline of air and water quality' (MacNeill, 1990:
114). Policies such as taxation incentives to encourage die conversn of native forest to farmland—implemented in New Zealand in the past-should be the first to go.
Criticism alone fails - green politics prove that state action is needed
Rainbow '93 (Stephen, IR Lecturer, International Pacific College, New Zealand, GREEN POLITICS, p. 56/90-91
Simply being critical of existing political processes and institutions is , however, not a sufficient basis upon which to build a
coherent green programme. What is needed is a clear idea of goals and ^credible) strategy for achieving them. To be successful,
these policy initiatives require that the greens seek to influence public policy at all levels, which inevitably involves the exercise
of political power. Yet there it a squearnishness about political power among many greens , as former International Secretary of the Greens, Sara Parkin (1989:
25), states,'... odd for a political movement which proposes the most. radical redistribution of wealth ever contemplated—sharing it not merely between classes but
between continents and with future generations'. The exercise of political power is inevitable, the challenge is for it to be used to achieve
green ends. What is true within green parries is also true for die broader political environment: 'If the movement continues to deliberately not select
who shall exercise power, it docs not thereby abolish power. All it does >s to abdicate the right to demand that those who exercise
power and influence will be responsible for it* (Landry a a., 1985:10). The experience of many greens in new social movements has been one of dealing with
unresponsive, conventional politicians and centralized parties. There is, therefore, a great deal of understandable cynicism within green politics about conventional
forms of political organization, as well as with traditional politicians. This cynical attitude towards political power is fuelled by writers like the Hungarian, George
Konrad, who. In his book Anti-Politics, argues that we must be wary of politicians "because in all politicians worm their salt there is present, albeit in a more sober
form, some of the dynamite that came out in Hitler with such savage brutality; if there were not, they would not have chosen the politician's trade' (Konrad, 1984: 95).
The late Petra Kelly used to quote Konrad and was influenced by him in her writings about political power which looked forward to 'abolishing power as we know it'
(Kelly, 1987: 69). Balms articulated similar sentiments, arguing that because of the power component running through the whole of history towards extreminism, 'it
may be that we can only survive in conditions tree of power* (Bahro, 1986:148). But the attainment of political power and Influence w essential to
achieving green goals. Electing competent people to public bodies and using the skills and resources of those institutions to advance green
objectives is vital. While this is possible at a local government level now in New Zealand, the likely introduction of electoral reform in 1996 should see greens
elected to Parliament for the first
Ecological Literacy DA
The failure of current educational institutions is at the root of the environmental crisis
Orr '92 (David, Professor of Environmental Studies @ Oberlin College, Ecological Literacy, p. x)
Nearly all discussions about the transition to a sustainable society have to do with what governments,
corporations and individuals must do. But one thing that these have in common are people who were educated in public
schools, colleges and universities. We may infer from mismanagement of the environment throughout the century that most emerged from their
tal education organization.
association with these various educational institutions as ecological illiterates, with little knowledge of how their subsequent actions would disrupt the earth. The
essays in Section 2 originate in the conviction that the ecological crisis represents, in large measure, a failure of education: Said differently,
education institutions represent a major and largely ignored leverage point to move towards sustainability
We need to change our actions, not our words - Their criticism, grounded in competition, leads us to
believe the two are the same, which deifies the current educational process
Orr '92 (David, Professor of Environmental Studies @ Oberlin College, Ecological Literacy, p. 91
Fourth, it follows that the way
education occurs is as important as its content. Students taght environmental awareness in a setting
that does not alter their relationship to basic life-support systems learn that is is sufficient to intellectualize , emote, or posture about
such things without having to live differently. Environmental education ought to change the way people live, not just how they
talk. This understanding of education is drawn from the writings of John Dewey, Alfred North Whitehead Jr, Glenn Gray, Paulo Friere, Ivan Illich, and Eliot
Wigginton. Learning in this view best occurs in reponse to real needs and the life situation of the learner. The radical distinctions typically drawn between teacher and
student, between the school and community, and those between areas of knowledge are dissolved. Real learning is participatory and experimental,
not just didactic. The flow can be two ways between teachers, who best function as facilitators, and students who are expected to be active agents in defining
what is learned and how.
Ecological Literacy - Extensions
Their criticism reinforces our ecologically illiterate society - we learn to win arguments and not to take
action
Orr ' 92 (David, Professor of Environmental Studies @ Oberlin College, Ecological Literacy, p. 104-5)
Third, students learn that practical incompetence is de rigueur, since they seldom are
required to solve problems that have consequences
except for their grade point average. They are not provided opportunities to implement their stated values in practical ways or
to acquire the skills that would let them do so at a later time. Nor are they asked to make anything, it being presumed that material and mental creativity are unrelated.
Homo faber and homo sapiens are two distinct species, the former being an inferior sort that subsisted between the Neanderthal era and the funding of Harvard. The
losses are not trivial: the satisfaction of good work and craftsmanship, the lessons of diligence and discipline, and the discovery of personal competence. After four
years of the higher learning, students have learned that it is all right to be incompetent and that practical competence is
decidedly inferior to the kind that helps to engineer leveraged buyouts and create tax breaks for people who do not need them. This is a loss if
incalculable proportions both to the personhood of the student and to the larger society. It is a loss to their intellectual powers and moral development that can
mature only by interaction with real problems. Its is a loss to the society burdened with a growing percentage of incompetent people, ignorant of why such competence
is important
Their approach to education teaches indifference to the immediate environment -We talk but don't act
Orr '92 (David, Professor of Environmental Studies ©Oberlin College, Ecological Literacy, p. 103
abstraction. The campus as land, buildings, and relationships is thought to have no pedagogic value , and for those intending to be residents
it need have none. It is supposed to be attractive and convenient, without also being useful and instructive. A "nice" campus is one whose lawns and landscape are wellmanicured and whose buildings are kept clean and in good repair by a poorly paid maintenance crew. From distant and unknown places the campus is automatically
supplied with food, water, electricity, toilet paper, and whatever else. Its waste and garbage are transported to other equally unknown places. And what learning occurs
on a nice campus? First, without anyone saying as much, students learn the lesson of indifference to the ecology of their immediate
place. Four years in a place called campus culminates in no great understanding of the place, or in the art of living responsibly in that or any other place. I think it
significant that students frequently refer to the outside world as the real world and do so without any feeling that this is not as
it should be. The artificiality of the campus is not unrelated to the mediocrity of the learned world of which Whitehead complained.
Students also learn indifference to the human ecology of the place and to certain kinds of people those who clean the urinals,
sweep the floors, haul out the garbage, and collect beer cans on Monday Morning
A2: Ecological Literacy
Altering our educational process is the key - we can't solve environmental issues with the form of education
that caused them
Orr '92 (David, Professor of Environmental Studies @ Oberlin College, Ecological Literacy, p. 83-4)
The crisis cannot be solved by the same kind of education that helped create the problems. Against the test of sustainability, our
ideas, theories, sciences, humanities, social sciences, pedagogy, and educational institutions have not measured up. Schools, colleges and
universities are part of the problem. What passes for the environmental education is still mostly regarded as a frill to be cut when budgets get tight.
Environmental education is done by teachers and faculty mostly on release time or on their own as an overload . Environmental concerns and the issues raised
by the challenge of sustainability are still blithely ignored in the mainstream of nearly all the disciplines represented in the catalogs
of our proudest institutions. From a casual sampling of the various professional journals, one would have little idea that humanity had any problems beyond
methodological esoterica
Current educational processes fail—without experiences students will be ecologically
illiterate and unable to enact change
Orr '92 (David, Professor of Environmental Studies ©Oberlin College, Ecological Literacy p. 85-6)
The failure to develop ecological literacy is a sin of omission and of commission. Not only are we failing to teach the basics about the earth
and how it works, but we are in fact teaching a large amount of stuff that is simply wrong. By failing to include ecological
perspectives in any number of subjects, students are taught that ecology is unimportant for history,
politics, economics, society and so forth. And through television they learn that the earth is theirs for the taking. The result
is a generation of ecological yahoos without a clue why the color of the water in the rivers is related to their food supply, or why
storms are becoming more severe as the planet warms. The same persons as adults will create businesses, vote, have families, and above all,
consume. If thev come to reflect on the discrepancy between the splendor of their private lives in a hotter,
more toxic and violent world as ecological illiterates they will have roughly the same success as one trying
to balance a checkbook without knowing arithematic
Can't promote ecological literacy in a debate round
Orr '92 (David, Professor of Environmental Studies @ Oberlin College, Ecological Literacy, p. 87)
Ecological literacy is difficult, second, because we have come to believe that education is solely an indoor activity. A good part of it,
of necessity, must be, but there is a price. William Morton wheeler once compared the naturalist with the professional biologist in these words: "[The naturalist] is
primarily an observer and fond of outdoor life, a collector, a classifier, a describer, deeply impressed by the overwhelming intricacy of natural phenomena and revelling
in their very complexity." The biologist, on the other hand, "is oriented toward and dominated by ideas, and rather terrified or oppressed by the intricate hurly-burly of
concrete, sensuous reality.... he is a denizen of the laboratory. His besetting sin is oversimplification and the tendency to undue isolation of the organisms he studies
from their natural environment.** Since Wheeler wrote, ecology has become increasingly specialized and, one suspects, remote from its subject matter. Ecology like
most learning worthy of the effort is an applied subject. Its’ goal is not just a comprehension of how the world works but in the
light of that knowledge, a life lived accordingly . The same is true of theology, sociology, political science and the most other subjects that grace the
conventional curriculum.
Their criticism may promote schooling, but not the learning key to ecological literacy
Orr '92 (David, Professor of Environmental Studies @ Oberlin College, Ecological Literacy, p. x-xi)
My primary concern in Part 2 is with the role education must play in the journey to a postmodern world. Education in the modern world was designed to
further the conquest of nature and the industrialization of the planet. It tended to produce unbalanced, underdimensioned people tailored to fit the modern
economy. Postmodern education must have a different agenda , one designed to heal, connect, liberate, empower, create, and celebrate. Postmodern
education must be life centered. For the sake of clarity some distinctions are in order. Schooling is what happens in school and colleges.
Training the inculcation of rote habit, is how one instructs an animal. Learning is what can happen throughout life for those willing to risk it.
Schooling should not be confused with learning. The difference is apparent in what appears at first to be the anomaly we have
all observed between the highly schooled and heavily degreed tool, and a person lacking intellectual pedigree who lies with
dignity, skill, intelligence, and magnanimity , qualities, that strictly speaking, cannot be taught or measured. Schooling may or may not increase
intelligence. For those so inclined, it can provide some of the tools helpful to subsequent learning. Real learning on the other hand, always increases
intelligence, by which I mean the ability to call things their right names
A2: Paradigm Shift
Philosophical concepts have zero effect on public perceptions of the environment- their discourse will not
be transformative
M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer, Professor of English at Texas A and M and Associate Director, Writing Programs Office, Landmark
Essays on Rhetoric and the Environment, 1998, p.213-214
To sum up, since
ecophilosophical discourse generally flies in the face of the prevailing social paradigm, and offers its ethical
insights and ecological panaceas in a language that is no accessible to lay publics, it appears to be null and void from the
beginning. In other words, environmental ethics appears to be incapable of moving a democratic majority to support policies
leading toward sustainability. From a traditional philosophical point of view, this situation is not a philosophical problem,
since emphasis is placed primarily on identifying basic principles and providing supporting arguments. From a rhetorical
point of view, however, it is, since effective philosophical discourse necessarily promotes societal transformation. K.M. Sayre, for
example, recently tweaked the beard of the lion in its own den, noting that “If norms encouraging conservation and proscribing pollution were actually in force in
industrial society, it would not be the result of ethical theory; and the fact that currently they are not in force is not alleviated by an amount of adroit ethical reasoning. “
Moreover, empirical studies of public opinion and voting behavior reveal an apparent paradox: more than two-thirds of adult
Americans consider themselves environmentalists eve while the noose of ecocrisis continue to tighten around their collective
necks. This paradox disappears, however, deHaven-Smith argues, once we realize that there is no empirically data to support the
hypothesis that the environmental movement involves any general “philosophical reorientation of public opinion …” On the
contrary, he continues, people become environmentalists not because of “environmental philosophy,” but rather because of local
issues adversely affecting or threatening to affect the quality of their own lives (water quality, siting of a nuclear power plant, waste, and so on).
The environmental movement, on this argument, is better conceptualized not as a mass public inspired by environmental ethics, but
as a number of so-called local issue publics addressing ecological dysfunctions.
A2: Cooptation
Fear of cooptation ensures the failure of their alternative
Lewis '92 (Martin, Professor, Duke University School of the Environment, GREEN DELUSIONS, p. 12)
At the same time, the
pernicious fear of compromise seriously diminishes the possibility of creating a broader
coalition for environmental action. Barry Commoner, for example, warns environmentalists that if they compromise with
corporations they may become “hostages” and eventually even assume “the ideology of their captors” (1990:177). The end result of this
kind if thinking to which we are painfully close in the United States is an ideological stalemate in which
opposes camps are increasingly unable even to communicate. In such political environment, the creation of
an ecologically sustainable society becomes little more than an impossible dream.
A2: Crisis Good
Crisis won't be transformative - we'll wait until it is already too late or our responses will
miserably fail
Orr '92 (David, Professor of Environmental Studies @ Oberlin College, Ecological Literacy, p. 61-2) believe that
our best prospect is for a global catastrophe large enough to get our attention, but small enough to recover
from. This prospect presumes that the causes of any such event would be correctly diagnosed, the proper
conclusions drawn, and wise actions result. But it is difficult to see this chain interrupted by the complexity
of events, political pressures, shot sightedness, nationalism, and irrationality . The problem aside, we cannot count
on having a catastrophe just the right size. More likely we will have to contend with processes that are not
sufficiently shocking until its too late to do anything about them. Frogs, I am told, will continue to sit calmly in water
brought slowly to a boil. Cumulative processes of climate change, soil erosion, deforestation, species
extinction, and acid rain are slowly bringing our water to a boil . Someone, somewhere, may be watching to see if we jump
in time
Turn - crisis risks eco-fascism and nuclear conflict
Zimmerman '95
(Michael, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tulane,
SOCIAL THEORY AND PRACTICE, Summer, p. First Search)
I wish to emphasize that even when presenting the views discussed above, Callicott had no sympathy for National Socialism, and that his current
views emphasize the moral standing of human individuals. My point in showing the proximity between his early views and those of National
Socialism is to stress the need for environmentalists to realize that In recent history, during a moment of social, political, and ecological "crisis,"
Nazi ideologues drew both on ecological science and on thinkers like Plato to justify their racist policies and murderous practices. Despite its
awful consequences. National Socialism remains an object of widespread fascination, a fact that should alert us to
the possibility that in "periods, of ecological stress and social breakdown, preachers of a green facism might once
again find a sympathetic audience. There can be no doubt that the messy, pragmatic, time-consuming, and unsatisfying
processes of democratic politics pale in comparison with the ecstatic promises of fascist leaders who appeal to
those who are repelled by the social disintegration and ecological destruction associated with the modernity,
and who yearn for an ethnically unified, prosperous, and beautiful society living in harmony with the laws of nature.
Arguably, some elements of those conservative political movements that espouse anti-immigrationalist attitudes are attracted to more of these
themes than are environmentalists, many of whom celebrate cultural diversity. Conservative (and Libertarian) support for individual rights,
including property rights, however, does stand in the way of facism’s collectivist impulse. Though no present in U.S. environmentalism, a type
of ecofacism might gain a future foothold if social, economic, political and ecological problems increase . To
develop non-ecofacist solutions to such problems, environmentalists must educate themselves about two different temptations. The first involves
romantically re-identifying with nature in a way that calls for organic recollectivization and retribalization. For peoples armed with
modern weapons a move in this direction would probably lead to unimaginable ecological and social disasters .
One motivation for becoming reabsorbed in natural rhythms is to free.